“Frost” and Frost

I was teaching a poetry class and getting ready for our first meeting after a break, when it’s always a challenge to get back to the realities of a semester. I realized that I had forgotten to bring the two poems we were going to talk about, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” and Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I printed out a copy of each poem in my office and went off to teach.

“Good morning,” I said to my students. “Is it okay to call it that?” In other words, was it okay to call the first morning back in class a good one? My students seemed receptive to my humor. One student announced with some excitement that a student organization was selling ten-cent hamburgers at the entrance to our building. I explained that I had left the little notebook with our next assignment at home, and that right after class I’d go home and send an e-mail with the details of the assignment. “You shouldn’t have to do that,” one student said. No, it was okay, I explained: “I live just five minutes from campus. I’ll send it at about 12:05.”

And then I realized that our class had started at noon, not 11:00.

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All OCA teaching dream posts (Pinboard)

[This dream arrived a few nights ago: no influence from the repeated name in a post yesterday. There’s a certain dream-logic to the combination of “Frost” and Frost, but in the waking world, “Frost at Midnight” would be plenty for a fifty-minute class. See also Robert Lowell’s poem “Robert Frost,” which begins “Robert Frost at midnight, the audience gone / to vapor.” This is the twenty-eighth teaching dream I’ve had since retiring in 2015. In all but one, something has gone wrong.]

Arizona 1864

“Written to police the behavior of men, the code tells a larger story about power and control”: the historian Heather Cox Richardson looks at the 1864 Arizona criminal code.

Harts, Keen’s, WIsconsin

Kevin Hart of harvest.ink shared a photograph of a letterhead from his father’s correspondence. It was 1973, and Keen’s English Chop House still had its WIsconsin exchange name.

[Click for a larger view.]

Kevin’s father was a newspaperman and a member of Keen’s Pipe Club. When Kevin sent me a link to a page with Keen’s history, I realized that I’d read about the restaurant somewhere. And I could think of only one possibility.

[Harold H. Hart, Hart’s Guide to New York City (New York: Hart Publishing, 1964). Click for a larger view.]

There seems to be no family relation, but the synchronicity of Hart and Hart is not lost on me.

Keens has lost its apostrophe, and though the restaurant still serves mutton chops, it now calls itself a steakhouse. And though the restaurant has dropped the WIsconsin, the telephone number remains the same: 212-947-3636.

Thanks, Kevin, for letting me share this piece of history here.

Ammonia coke

In Jean Stafford’s novel The Mountain Lion (1947), a brothel owner asks a boy to go to the drugstore and get her “a package of Luckies and an ammonia coke.” Luckies still probably need no footnote, but what’s an ammonia [C]oke?

Here’s an explanation.

And here’s a well-known scene from The Best Years of Our Lives, in which a fascist falls onto a drugstore display case and the store manager calls for help: “Bring some aromatic spirits of ammonia, iodine, and bandages.”

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All OCA Jean Stafford posts (Pinboard)

[New York Review Books reissued The Mountain Lion in 2010. And just in case: Luckies are Lucky Strikes, cigarettes.]

Domestic comedy

[Upon returning from a partial — partial indeed — eclipse.]

“It’s dark in the house.”

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Butter No Parsnips

An excellent podcast series for those who like words and rabbit holes: Butter No Parsnips, with Emily Moyers and Kyle Imperatore. Virtually every episode begins with a word and moves to explorations of etymology, history, and culture. Unlike some language-focused podcasts that exude forced hilarity, this one feels like a conversation between learned friends who can genuinely crack each other up (and who wear their learning lightly). Highly recommended.

I started with an episode that’s an exception to the usual format: an interview with Bob McCalden, chairman of the Apostrophe Protection Society.

Wordle STARR

My Wordle starts with STARE, but twice in recent weeks my index finger has — oops — typed STARR instead. (No spoilers: that’s the April 4 Wordle to the left.) Starr is not to be found at the American Heritage Dictionary or Merriam-Webster. Nor is it to be found at dictionary.com or Wordnik. But starr is indeed a word, or several words, all arcane. (As well as the last name of a not-arcane drummer.) The Oxford English Dictionary has four entries. Here are short versions:

With reference to medieval England: a Jewish deed or bond, esp. one of release or acquittance of debt; a receipt given on payment of a debt.

As an Old English variant of star :

Any of the many celestial objects appearing as luminous points in the night sky; esp. any of those which do not noticeably change relative position.

As an archaic variant of stare :

With distinguishing word or words: any of various other birds resembling or related to the starling (or formerly thought to be so).

As a Scottish and English regional word, now rare :

Any of various coarse seaside grasses and sedges, esp. Ammophila arenaria (family Poaceae) and Carex arenaria (family Cyperaceae).

Pretty arcane, no? I’ve written to the Times to suggest that starr be removed from Wordle’s word-hoard.

By the way, that Wordle grid shows a trick I find helpful: adding a word with a known letter in two positions. Thus CYNIC and CIVIL, followed by CLIMB, which might have turned out to be CLIFF or CLIME — though it couldn’t have been CLIME if I’d typed STARE.

AP <3 M-W

For the 2024–2026 edition of The Associated Press Stylebook, the dictionary of choice will change from Webster’s New World College Dictionary to Merriam-Webster (Poynter).

I’m not sure what “Merriam-Webster” means here: Webster’s Third? The Collegiate? The online Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, based on the Collegiate but with significant updates? The online Unabridged, which requires a subscription? And why do I need to know?

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“The ’Clipse” redux

You don’t have to be in the path of totality to enjoy “The ’Clipse.” It’s a piece of Timmy and Lassie fiction that I wrote in 2017, after the last solar eclipse that passed through Illinois. “The ’Clipse” is both tongue-in-cheek and genuinely reverential, if that’s possible. I think it is.

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And four more pieces of Lassie fan-fiction
“The Poet” (with Robert Frost) : “Bon Appétit!” (with Julia Child) : “On the Road” (with Tod and Buz from Route 66) : “The Case of the Purloined Prairie” (with Perry Mason and friends)

BILLI RDS

[232–234 West 37th Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Back in the Garment District. When I first spotted those windows, I thought the ascended letter might be a B. Billi Bros., wholesale fabric distributors? After all, it’s the Garment District. Then I looked more closely.

Google Maps shows a fifth floor added to the building. In August 2022 the first floor housed two fabric companies, one or both now defunct. The second and third floors, which once housed Kay-Atkin Co. (buttons) and BILLI RDS, were available to rent: 929-434-7018.

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More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[Kay-Atkin: so spelled in the 1940 Manhattan telephone directory.]