Dr. Leddy, practicing

There’s an orthopedic surgeon out there somewhere who doesn’t know his own e-mail address. I’ve received everything from flight information to receipts for garden equipment, all genuine, all meant for him. Today in the mail:

Hi Dr. Leddy,

I did a little bit of research into your practice and identified a few opportunities to drive in more patients for ACL tear, sports medicine & knee replacement to the practice.

Yes, it’s a genuine e-mail, not from someone whose idea of driving in more patients involves hammers and dark alleys.

I’ve wasted time with e-mail and, when necessary, on the phone, trying to set things straight with different businesses. I even have a shortcut — notme — to generate a quick e-mail reply:

This is not me. My e-mail address has a period. Gmail ignores periods, so anything sent to [e-mail address with no period] comes to me. Here’s an article that explains what’s happening:

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-google-says-period-in-gmail-address-doesnt-matter-2018-2

But today I wrote

Please remove me from your mailings. I assure you that I’m not capable of replacing anyone's knee. :)

[“The practice”: LOL. Indeed, I would be practicing.]

The Histories (Old Black Joe)

The Histories (Old Black Joe) is a new 45 from Van Dyke Parks, released by the Chicago gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey.

Side A is an adaptation/arrangement of Stephen Foster’s “Old Black Joe,” written for The Histories (Old Black Joe), a 2020 installation by the artist David Hartt. Parks’s reimagining of Foster’s plaintive tune is an amazing piece of musique concrète, with orchestra, slide guitar, barking dogs, cracking whips, an antique voice singing fragments of Foster’s lyrics, and a bit of the Esso Trinidad Steel Band playing “Stars and Stripes Forever.” And there’s more. This production recalls Parks’s music for Datsun and Ice Capades, and it challenges his Song Cycle for sheer audacious invention.

Side B is an adaptation/arrangement of Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s “Souvenir de la Havane,” the third Gottschalk piece Parks has recorded. With strings, piano, accordion, and mandolin, it’s elegant music for a salon of the imagination.

It’s easy to imagine how Hartt found his way to Parks: a 2019 Hartt installation, The Histories (Le Mancenillier), included Gottschalk’s music. A gallery page about The Histories (Old Black Joe) makes clear Hartt’s interest in the relation of the Caribbean to “the broader Americas.” That relation runs through Parks’ music and was the stuff of his second album, Discover America.

The music on sides A and B dates from 1860, 1859, 2021, and the future. The recording, with sleeve art by Hartt, is available from Corbett vs. Demspey and Forced Exposure.

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[Parks produced the Esso Trinidad Steel Band’s eponymous 1971 album for Warner Bros.]

Long, short, short, long

Reading Proust (again), I know to expect long paragraphs. But yesterday’s reading, pages 308–333 in the Penguin Sodom and Gomorrah, still took me by surprise.

First paragraph: 308–318. Second pargraph: 318–319. Third paragraph: 319–321. Fourth paragraph: 321–333.

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Zippy Nighthawks

[Zippy, Claude Funston, Griffy, and a naïf in a baseball cap. Zippy, March 7, 2021. Click for a larger view.]

Bill Griffith recently had a week’s worth of Hopper homages, sans Nighthawks. But here it, or they, is, or are, in today’s Zippy.

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Recently updated

#Sedition3PTruck The Millers have made it into Vanity Fair.

Today’s Newsday Saturday

Today’s Newsday  Saturday crossword is by Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor. A good puzzle, though no Stumper.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

17-A, four letters, “Pixar’s owner of Woody and Buzz.” Aww. But maybe “Human companion of”?

23-A, three letters, “Start to squeak.” Clever.

29-A, three letters, “Without butter, say.” This takes me back to Deli King, Allston, Mass. Butter? No butter.

34-D, nine letters, “Loaf around a lunchroom.” This takes me back to my Brooklyn childhood.

36-A, fifteen letters, “Travel assistance at airports.” Nice to see this answer spanning the puzzle. But these things are so weird.

45-A, three letters, “Hammerstein female.” This takes me back to earlier fambly days.

46-D, six letters, “What often prevents a strike.” Not a CONTRAC.

50-A, eight letters, “Eyes-closed activity.” Tricky to get it right.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Camembert

The narrator has tried to set the elevator operator straight. But the operator still thinks cheese.

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2005).

The lift’s need for logic and clarity is one small source of comedy in the novel. There are many, many others.

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Soup’s on

  [Nancy and Nancy revised, July 19, 1955. Click either image for a noisier view.]

To the left, Nancy and Sluggo sup soup. To the right, Elaine and I do the same.

Yesterday’s Nancy was yesterday’s Nancy.

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National Grammar Day

I didn’t know until five minutes ago: it’s National Grammar Day.

A day without grammar are without day grammar a.

Grammars galore

“Can you believe just how crazed people were about English grammar in the 18th and 19th centuries?” From the Grolier Club, an off- and online exhibition from the collection of Bryan Garner, Taming the Tongue: In the Heyday of English Grammar (1711–1851).

Among the writers whose works are on display (with Garner’s commentary): Ann Fisher, the first grammarian to declare that the masculine pronoun includes the feminine; Rowland Jones, who believed that Welsh was the key to language before the incident at Babel; and Lindley Murray, who cautioned against ending a sentence with an adverb, a preposition, or “any inconsiderable word,” as I discovered when tracking down a source for the non-rule that one should not end a sentence with it.

Yes, I once had a student who had been taught that in high school. And another who had been taught that each paragraph should have an odd number of sentences, because odd numbers are pleasing. Can you believe it?