Re: our improvising president

Earlier this week The New York Times reported that Donald Trump’s threat of “fire and fury” “was entirely improvised.” I fear that this characterization (which I quoted in a post, without comment) gives improvisation a bad name.

In a moment of crisis, improvisation may be urgently needed. I recall the WWII medic who used a pocket knife and fountain-pen cap to perform a tracheotomy. But a capable improviser doesn’t make it up from nothing: the medic of course would have been trained to perform a tracheotomy. Nor does a capable improvising musician just make it up: he or she creates in the moment from a lifetime’s experience as a listener and performer.

There is a marked difference between a resourceful, quick-thinking, practiced improviser and a would-be tough guy who flies by the seat of his pants. We should be careful not to equate improvisation with our president’s reckless bluster.

The aroma and the actuality

The laundry deliveryman will think twice about making a harmless observation when the private detective Albert Arnett (Walter Slezak) is around. Dialogue from Born to Kill (dir. Robert Wise, 1947):

“My, that coffee smells good. Ain’t it funny how coffee never tastes as good as it smells?”

“As you grow older, you’ll discover that life is very much like coffee: the aroma is always better than the actuality. May that be your thought for the day.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

Related reading
All OCA coffee posts (Pinboard)

Kafka coffee

Still on the balcony. Karl Rossmann has been speaking with a young man who is studying on a neighboring balcony. He works in a department store by day and studies at night.


Franz Kafka, Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared), trans. from the German by Michael Hoffman (New York: New Directions, 2002).

Earlier in Amerika Karl and his comrades wash down lunch with “a black liquid that burned in one’s throat.” I’m guessing that’s not coffee but Coca-Cola.

Also from Amerika
The Statue of Liberty : An American writing desk : A highway : A bridge : Companions : Under-porters and errand-boys : In one door, out the other : Sardines

All OCA coffee posts (Pinboard)

Dik Browne centennial

[Hi and Lois, August 11, 2017.]

Dik Browne (d. 1989) was born on August 11, 1917.

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Sardines FTW

Karl Rossmann and Robinson are confined to a balcony while Brunelda and Delamarche do whatever in their apartment. Karl has been sleeping in a deck chair; Robinson, on the balcony floor. Robinson is hungry, and he asks Karl to move. There’s something under the chair:


Franz Kafka, Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared), trans. from the German by Michael Hoffman (New York: New Directions, 2002).

Also from Amerika
The Statue of Liberty : An American writing desk : A highway : A bridge : Companions : Under-porters and errand-boys : In one door, out the other

All OCA sardines posts (Pinboard)

A three-headed beast

[Zippy, August 10, 2017.]

God encounters the three-headed beast of parody, satire, and ridicule, as found in the lost book of Walter Lantz, Carl Anderson, and Marjorie Henderson Buell. The perfect touch here would have been no speech-balloon pointer for Henry, who never speaks (though he does in the 1935 short Betty Boop with Henry, the Funniest Living American).

Yes, those look like “some rocks” in the background.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts : All OCA Henry and Zippy posts : All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Please imagine the links in the form of a Venn diagram.

[Why “Marge”? That was her pen name.]

Our improvising president

In The New York Times:

President Trump delivered his “fire and fury” threat to North Korea on Tuesday with arms folded, jaw set and eyes flitting on what appeared to be a single page of talking points set before him on the conference table at his New Jersey golf resort.

The piece of paper, as it turned out, was a fact sheet on the opioid crisis he had come to talk about, and his ominous warning to Pyongyang was entirely improvised, according to several people with direct knowledge of what unfolded. . .  .

Among those taken by surprise . . . was John F. Kelly, the retired four-star Marine general who has just taken over as White House chief of staff and has been with the president at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., for his working vacation.

I didn’t think there was much reason to expect that Kelly’s presence would temper Trump. I keep thinking of Maya Angelou’s famous observation: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

[The red is mine. Feel free to imagine an appropriate adverb between entirely and improvised, as I have.]

Connecticut and comic-strips

Cullen Murphy writes about life in Fairfield County, Connecticut, once home to countless cartoonists, comic-strip creators, and illustrators: “When Fairfield County Was the Comic-Strip Capital of the World” (Vanity Fair).

[Murphy is the son of John Cullen Murphy, who drew Prince Valiant from 1970 to 2004. Cullen Murphy began contributing stories to the strip in the mid-1970s and was the strip’s writer from 1979 to 2004.]

Page 273

[“New York, New York. ‘Morgue’ of the New York Times newspaper. Old and new dictionaries.” Photograph by Marjory Collins. September 1942. From the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Click for larger dictionaries.]

A photograph accompanying a New York Times article about the end of the newspaper’s copy desk led me to more photographs by Marjory Collins.

The top dictionary is a Webster’s Second, open to a page beginning with bird-nest. The illustrations: a king bird of paradise, a bird tick, and a biretta. You can check these details in an extra-large reproduction of the photograph. My 1954 Webster’s Second has the same illustrations in the same locations, on what must be the same page 273, bird-nest to birthmate. Still there! I feel like Holden Caulfield thinking about the Museum of Natural History.

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)

Eleanor Roosevelt on maturity

To be mature you have to realize what you value most. It is extraordinary to discover that comparatively few people reach this level of maturity. They seem never to have paused to consider what has value for them. They spend great effort and sometimes make great sacrifices for values that, fundamentally, meet no real needs of their own. Perhaps they have imbibed the values of their particular profession or job, of their community or their neighbors, of their parents or family. Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one’s own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.

Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1960).

This passage reminds me of the one thing I remember of what Alan Alda, the commencement speaker, said at my college graduation. And of something André Gregory’s character says in My Dinner with André (dir. Louis Malle, 1981):

“I mean, I don’t know about you, Wally, but I — I just had to put myself into a kind of training program to learn how to be a human being. I mean, how did I feel about anything? I didn’t know. What kind of things did I like? What kind of people did I really want to be with, you know? And the only way that I could think of to find out was to just cut out all the noise and stop performing all the time and just listen to what was inside me.”

Also from ER
Doing what you think you cannot do : Honoring the human race : Attention