“Dedicado à Você”

I heard this recording for the first time yesterday and was floored by its beauty: “Dedicado à Você,” sung by Zizi Possi. Music by Dominguinhos, lyrics by Nando Cordel. Dominguinhos is playing the accordion. I have the song on a compilation, Dominguinhos é de Todos (Universal Music). First released on the 1989 Possi LP Estrebucha Baby (Philips).

A related post
“Lamento Sertanejo”

Illinois, Illinois, Illinois

The New York Times reports what us locals know too well: Illinois is about to enter its third year without a budget.

A point that bears repeating: it’s a manufactured crisis. From the article:

“This impasse has been very cleverly designed to minimize the immediate obvious impact on middle-class families that don’t have a need for state-funded social services,” said Andrea Durbin, the chief executive of the Illinois Collaboration on Youth, an association for providers of youth and family services.

“The people who get impacted are the people who are sick, who need the support from the state to be safe and healthy and get back on their feet and become self-sufficient, or to live their final days in dignity,” Ms. Durbin said.

Add to that the people who work in or rely upon public higher education.

Related reading
All OCA Illinois budget crisis posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

Roscoe Mitchell at Mills Not fired. His colleagues aren’t as fortunate.

Pocket notebook sightings

[Laird Cregar as Inspector Ed Cornell, Victor Mature as Frankie Christopher, in I Wake Up Screaming (dir. H. Bruce Humberstone, 1941). Click either image for a larger view.]

Inspector Cornell’s pocket notebook is a multi-tool in disguise, used for note-taking and for storing a hair sample from an amused suspect.

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : Cat People : City Girl : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dragnet : Extras : Foreign Correspondent : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The Last Laugh : The Lodger : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : Route 66 : The Sopranos : Spellbound : State Fair : T-Men : Union Station : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window

[In the remake Vicki (dir. Harry Horner, 1953) Richard Boone’s Cornell is far more violent, but Cregar’s Cornell is far more frightening.]

Overheard

[The television was on for warmth.]

“I believe we have three hundred tins of ltalian sardines.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” and sardine posts (Pinboard)

A p@ge-ninety test

A page-ninety test, conducted while browsing in a bookstore:

From this starting point as a unit of measure in southern Europe, by the eighteenth century the @ symbol had entered English as mercantile shorthand for “at the rate of,” and by the later nineteenth century the symbol was known by the flatly descriptive appellation “commercial a.” Prospering in commercial circles, noted but not dwelled on by printers and typographers, and rarely warranting much interest from the general reader, the stolid @ symbol nevertheless came close to extinction in the face of two of the nineteenth century’s greatest innovations.

Keith Houston, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, & Other Typographical Marks (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013).

I liked the purposeful repetition: “by the eighteenth century,” “by the later nineteenth century.” I liked the phrase “flatly descriptive appellation.” I liked the parallelism — “prospering,” “noted but not dwelled on,” “rarely warranting” — and the amusing personification of the @ symbol as a “stolid” citizen, doing its work, minding its own business, and suddenly facing extinction. I liked the playful use of color, which runs through the book. And of course I wanted to keep reading: just what were the innovations that threatened this symbol’s life?

Reader, I bought it.

Related posts
Ford Madox Ford’s page-ninety test
My Salinger Year, a page-ninety test
Nature and music, a page-ninety test
A history of handwriting, a page-ninety test
A book about happiness, a page-ninety test
The Slow Professor, a page-forty-five test

[The innovations: the first commercially successful typewriter and Herman Hollerith’s Tabulator for punch cards. Each machine lacked the @ symbol.]

Used-book-store score

Elaine and I just finished what Stefan Zweig called “the large Balzac,” his full-length biography of Honoré de Balzac. Elaine has a 1946 hardcover copy that she treasures. I was reading the book as a PDF from archive.org. With one day to go in our reading, we stopped for frozen yogurt, checked out the new stuff at the used-book store next door, and found a copy of the 1946 edition, just $3.25. Score.

Related reading
All OCA Balzac and Zweig posts (Pinboard)

[Caution: the PDF is missing two pages.]

In search of fake Time

The Washington Post reports that at least four of Donald Trump’s golf courses have displayed a fake Time magazine cover featuring Donald Trump.

[Post title with apologies to M. Proust.]

Balzac, speculating

In 1847 Honoré de Balzac traveled to the Ukraine in pursuit of the wealthy, elusive Madame de Hanska:

As a composer transmutes an emotion or a mood into music, so Balzac made everything he saw into the basis of a financial calculation. He remained the incorrigible speculator. Before he had even arrived at Wierzchownia, while still travelling through the forests on the estate, he gazed at the magnificent trees with an eye to the profit that their owner might reap. His previous failures to make a large fortune at one stroke were forgotten and he immediately submitted to Count Mniszech a plan for exploiting the inexhaustible stocks of timber and turning them into cash. A railway was being built on the frontiers, and in a short time this would link Russia with France. With impatient pencil Balzac drew on a piece of paper a line connecting the forests of Wierzchownia with the sawmills of France:

There is a demand in France at the present moment for enormous quantities of oak to make railway sleepers, but we haven’t got the oak. I know that oak has almost doubled in price, both for building purposes and for cabinet-making.

Then he began to work out the profit and loss. The freight from Brody to Cracow would have to be considered. From Cracow the railway already ran as far as Paris, though with a number of interruptions, since the River Elbe had not yet been adequately bridged at Magdeburg or the Rhine at Cologne. The Ukrainian sleepers would therefore have to be ferried across these two rivers. “The transport of sixty thousand balks will be no trifling matter,” and it would add very considerably to the cost, but they would endeavour to interest bankers in the project and the directors of the French railway company might be persuaded to reduce their charges if it were proved to them that this would be to their own advantage. If they only made five francs profit on each balk, they would be hundreds of thousands of francs to the good even after deduction of all expenses. “It is worth while thinking the matter over.”

There is, perhaps, no need to record that this final offspring of Balzac’s speculative genius never got further than the stage of preliminary discussion.

Stefan Zweig, Balzac, trans. William and Dorothy Rose (London: Casell, 1947).

Related reading
All OCA Balzac and Zweig posts (Pinboard)

[Balk: “beam, rafter” (Merriam-Webster).]

Earl Greyer, correcter

The Republic of Tea makes an excellent Earl Grey tea, Earl Greyer. Its container includes this bit of text:

Goslan gives the account of sipping in the early nineteenth century with the master of Human Comedy: “As fine as tobacco from Ladakh, as yellow as Venetian gold, the tea responded, without doubt, to the praise with which Balzac perfumed it before letting you taste; but you had to submit a kind of initiation to enjoy the droit de degustation . . ."

Nearly two months ago I wrote a letter to the maker:

Dear Republic,

I am a great fan of your teas, particularly your Earl Greyer. But there are three changes you should make, not to your Earl Greyer but to its packaging:

1. The account of drinking tea with Balzac is by Léon Gozlan, not Goslan. If you’re using one of Jason Goodwin’s books on tea, both have the name wrong. The name can be easily verified online.

2. The excerpt from Gozlan’s account is missing a word: “you had to submit to.”

3. The French word dégustation should have its accent, as in Goodwin’s A Time for Tea. It’s part of a French phrase preserved in the English translation, droit de dégustation. The French can be checked in Google Books by searching for gozlan droit de dégustation.

With best wishes for accuracy and good tea,

I thought I’d receive a reply. Maybe even some tea. No reply. No tea. Just this post.

*

October 23, 2018: Last week I remembered my letter, checked a new canister of Earl Greyer in my cabinet, and found all three corrections. Who knew? I went to The Republic of Tea website, found a contact form, and left a comment saying that some acknowledgement of my letter would have been appropriate. I’m happy to know that The Republic agrees. Today I received a call from Kristina Richens, the company’s Minister of Commerce, who is sending some Earl Greyer my way. Thanks to The Republic of Tea for this generous response.

And to think that it’s all because of our household’s two-person reading club — and especially because of Elaine’s affection for Balzac. It was reading Stefan Zweig’s biography Balzac that prompted me to look up the story of Balzac serving tea.

Related reading
All OCA tea posts (Pinboard)

[Correcter, I know, is not a word. I realize now that Goodwin’s The Gunpowder Gardens: Travels through India and China in Search of Tea (1990) and A Time for Tea (2009) are one and the same. For me, reading the package is a habit that began with the breakfast cereals of childhood.]