Unprintable Version

Urb Appeal (Sentences from Seneca)

I keep being struck by how contemporary the Romans sound. When I read Seneca, I think of the names read at the World Trade Center Memorial or the faces I would see in the London subway or looking harried, after work, at Waitroses grocery store on Friday night. Empires are charismatic; they push out, but they also pull in:

Look at the mass of people whom the buildings of huge Rome can scarcely hold: most of that crowd are deprived of their country. They have flocked together from their towns and colonies, in fact from the whole world, some brought by ambition, some by the obligation of public office, some by the duties of an envoy, some by self-indulgence seeking a place conveniently rich in vice, some by love of liberal studies, some by the public show; some have been attracted by friendship; some by their own energy which has found a wide field for displaying its qualities; some have come to sell their beauty; others, their eloquence.

Summertime Blues: Favorite Version of Gershwin’s Summertime

I was having dinner with a friend of mine–the same one who told me not to underestimate Fiona Apple–and he said that his favorite song through decades and across enthusiasms has been Gershwin’s “Summertime.” When I looked it up on itunes, I found a few dozen versions. Does anyone have any opinion on which is best? Jazz versions include Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Oscar Peterson, Herbie Hancock, and Stan Getz. Chocolate Thunder does a blue version; Peter Gabriel, a rock one. A version by Gianni Basso was “most relevant,” whatever that means.   

TO THE PERSON WHO SEARCHED FOR “BUMPER CROP DEFINITION” AND GOT MY POST ABOUT BUMPER STICKERS INSTEAD

Google can be dense. So your search didn’t yield the straightforward definition you sought.

The OED doesn’t define “bumper crop.” But its discussion of “bumper” notes that the word derives from the “notion of a ‘bumping’, i.e. large, ‘thumping’ glass." Its first definition of “bumper” is “a cup or glass of wine, etc., filled to the brim, esp. when drunk as a toast.”

It quotes Goldsmith: “1774 GOLDSM. Retal. 127 He cherish'd his friend, and he relish'd a bumper.”

The second, slang meaning is, “anything unusually large or abundant.”

The OED then indulges in my favorite “cf” ever: "(Cf. whopper, whacker, thumper, etc.)"

I do not have a second favorite “cf.” There has not been a bumper crop of them.

Photo Essay: Toronto's East End

Link: Toronto's East End. A great photo essay devoted to a part of Toronto visitors to either the actual or virtual city seldom see.

Best Recent Junk Mail Subject Line

Don't be inadquate anymore!

Have I Been Unfair To Lilith? Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine

A few years back, a friend of mine who knows his music–he plays blues guitar–suggested that I underestimated the Lilith Fair artists such as Fiona Apple. 

So when Apple appeared on David Letterman, I listened closely to “O Sailor” and what I heard made me order Extraordinary Machine.  I expected–and got– the talking, torchy blues I knew from the 90s videos, but what I didn’t expect was the jaunty syncopations and smart lyrics of the best musicals: 

I think he let me down
When he didn’t disappoint me

The effect of this collision of show tunes and blues is a set of songs with the expansiveness of a collaboration. (Apple wrote everything herself.)

You get genre-bending lines like this:

Oh you silly stupid past-time of mine
You were always good for a rhyme

And "O Sailor" proves again how the best hooks are templates for human yearning

Let's See What This Puppy Can Do

For a great picture of Al, click here.

PAGING MICROSOFT

Does anyone know how to paginate long works in Microsft Word? Specifically, if you don't want a page number to appear on the first page of a new chapter, is there any easy way to do that? I'm doing it the hard way–creating a new document for every  chapter and checking the box that says something like "no number on first page." But then if I make a change to one chapter, I then have to manually apply it to all the other chapters.  In WordPerfect, there was a "suppress number on this page" function that was really slick. Is there some similar Word function that I'm missing?

Feeling A Draft

Completed the post-MFA draft of the memoir. 195 pages. The previous draft was 165, and I cut some. Feel great, but also acutely aware of Valery's statement that you don't finish books, you abandon them.  Of course, the book isn't even fit to be abandoned, yet, just set aside. J's comment this week nudged me to write about a hundred words a night this week, even though I was extremely busy and that brought it home.

Easy?

When I transferred some tracks from the album Painted from Memory to my itunes, the database that automatically provides the artist, track name, and genre classified the lush, anguished songs as “easy listening.” That doesn’t seem fair.

Painted From Memory is twelve songs written by Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach and sung by Costello.  It is a brilliantly sweet and sour collaboration along the lines Lennon McCartney. And it contains wonderful, wistful lyrics such as: 

But do people living in Toledo
Know that their name doesn’t travel very well?
And does anyone living in a Ohio
Dream of that Spanish citadel?

In fact, back when George Harrison was still alive, I thought that if we were ever subjected to a Beatles reunion, Costello should take the place of John Lennon. Has Paul McCartney done any better post Beatles work than “Veronica,” his collaboration with Costello?