"Alice Brock, whose eatery in western Massachusetts was immortalized as the place where 'you can get anything you want' in Arlo Guthrie’s 1967 antiwar song 'Alice’s Restaurant'..."

"... died on Thursday in Wellfleet, Mass. — just a week before Thanksgiving, the holiday during which the rambling story at the center of the song takes place. She was 83.... Ms. Brock’s restaurant, the Back Room, does not feature much in the song itself....The song made Ms. Brock famous, too, even though by the time it appeared she had shut down her restaurant. It was an unwanted fame, she said, at least at first. 'I was very uncomfortable because public figures are not really treated with much respect,' she told WAMC Northeast Public Radio in 2014. 'They really aren’t. Once your name is in the paper, people feel that they can go, "Oh, are you Alice? Turn around," like they want to see my behind or something.... I resented it for a long time... But I’ve come to realize now that people are just delighted when they hear my name, so how can I complain?'"

From "Alice Brock, Restaurant Owner Made Famous by a Song, Dies at 83/Arlo Guthrie’s antiwar staple 'Alice’s Restaurant' was inspired by a Thanksgiving Day visit to her diner in western Massachusetts" (NYT).

"In 2016, on his way to California for a series of concerts, [Arlo] Guthrie had a stroke. Ms. Ladd flew to San Jose, into grateful arms."

"'He said, "I not only want you in my life, I need you in my life." To me, that was when we made a real commitment to each other.'... He had been performing the 18-minute monologue at Carnegie Hall every Thanksgiving for 49 years when he had another stroke days before the 50th anniversary show in 2019. This time, he was hospitalized. But he defied doctor’s orders and played anyway. 'Even if I died onstage, I was going to be there,' he said. A few days later, he woke up at his home in Sebastian, Fla., and had a third stroke. Ms. Ladd... nursed him through his recovery. By the end of the year, he was back on tour. Then came Covid.... Ms. Ladd and Mr. Guthrie were... quarantining in Massachusetts when Ms. Ladd had a stroke on Oct. 3, 2021.

"As 'Norwegian Wood' played faintly on a crappy stereo, Courtney led me down a short hallway to the bedroom."

"I got to the door and opened it to find Kurt lying in a little bed in a little room, his back against the wall, facing the doorway, his shocking blue eyes gazing at me through the subdued lighting. His bare feet stuck out past the bedsheets, and his toenails were painted a rosy hue. The smell of jasmine flowers wafted through the screen of the window above his head. To this day, whenever I smell jasmine I’m transported to that moment. 'Hi,' he said, and two things struck me instantly. The first was: oh, wow, I know this guy. He wasn’t some sort of rock-and-roll space alien—he was actually like a lot of the stoners I went to high school with. (I was kind of a stoner in high school myself.)... I asked Kurt what he was like as a kid, and he said something about being small for his age. I stood up, unfurled my wiry five-foot-six-inch frame, and said, in a theatrically manly voice, 'I don’t know what you’re talking about!' We exchanged smiles, and our bond grew from there. Somehow I got to talking about Arlo Guthrie’s 'The Motorcycle Song' and how I’d play it on the family record player and run around the house pretending I was a motorcycle. And Kurt said, 'I did that, too!'"

From "My Time with Kurt Cobain/Befriending a rock star isn’t necessarily as cool as you’d think—particularly when tragedy happens" by Michael Azerrad (The New Yorker).

Litter.

After writing the last post and creating a new tag "littering," I launched into the enterprise of adding the tag retrospectively, through the whole 15-year archive of this blog. Soon enough, I saw I was creating a parallel tag. There already was a tag "litter," so I had to work to get rid of the new tag.

I don't want my blog littered with duplicative tags. So the tag — the good old tag — is "litter."

I hadn't used it consistently, since I'd forgotten I had it. Just now, I added it to a few old things, including that post about Professor Amy Wax 2 days ago, which included The New Yorker's paraphrase of her saying "that white people litter less than people of color."

What Wax actually said was that French children "wouldn’t dream of creating a ruckus, just like they wouldn’t dream of littering." Then the New Yorker interviewer, Isaac Chotiner, prodded her with the question "So white French kids wouldn’t dream of littering, you mean?" She answered in an indirect way that reinforced her position that she's talking about culture:

Well, certainly, in Germany, I don’t think they would. I’ve seen them being upbraided on the street for doing that by other people. I just think there are differences in behavior that track culture, that track nationality. They’re not perfect. There’s a range. If you want to deny that they exist, you know.... [Laughs.]

She didn't agree with the absurd idea that the tendency to litter is inborn and race-based! I remember back in the 1950s, I saw litter all along the roadways where I lived (in Delaware, amongst white people). I felt really bad about it, and it seemed hopeless. But Americans decided to turn things around and we did. And look at England. The American humorist David Sedaris frequently writes about his public-service work picking up litter near his home in England.

From "Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls":

I find a half-empty box of doughnuts and imagine it flung from the dimpled hand of a dieter, wailing, “Get this away from me.” Perhaps the jumbo beer cans and empty bottles of booze are tossed for a similar reason. It’s about denial, I tell myself, or, no, it’s about anger, for isn’t every piece of litter a way of saying “fuck you”?

So click on the "litter" tag. There's some good stuff in there, including litter at the Wisconsin protests (and discussion of the folk belief that left wingers litter and right wingers leave a place cleaner than they found it), litter on Mount Everest, the old Arlo Guthrie song line "What were you arrested for?," the "Garden Spicer" project, and the concept of "hipster litter."

The etymology of "litter" is bed-related. "Lit" is the French word for bed. It's from a bed that you get to the sort of "litter" that you carry a person on...

... and the idea of a "litter" of animals. Picture the scraps of plant material that would be the animals' bed.

From there you get the plant "litter" — the bits of fallen leaves you can use as mulch or that might be involved in Finnish forest-raking. Once you see that, it's easy to see how "litter" became "Odds and ends, fragments and leavings lying about, rubbish; a state of confusion or untidiness; a disorderly accumulation of things lying about" (OED). That meaning emerged in the 18th century.

The verb "litter" begins with the idea of making a bed for an animal. By the 18th century, it could also mean "To cover as with litter, to strew with objects scattered in disorder." The oldest use with that meaning comes from Jonathan Swift in 1726:  "They found, The Room with Volumes litter'd round." Later, there's Charles Dickens, also talking about written material as litter: "A dingy room lined with books and littered with papers" ("A Tale of Two Cities, 1859). Indoor litter. Clutter. And, notably, books.

Today's digression got started with the discussion (in the previous post) of a comics artist depositing tiny scraps of writing around town. So I've cycled 'round to where I began. Literary litter. And oh, the scraps of writing I've strewn on this blog for 15 years! But there's no paper, no substance at all. Am I littering? Am I literary?

And no, "litter" and "literature" do not share an etymology. The "lit" in literature comes from a line that had another "t." The French is "littérature." It's not like the French "lit" for bed. Think of "letter."

Now, get moving...

"He said, 'What were you arrested for, kid?' And I said, 'Littering.'"

A line from an old song crosses my mind as I read this story in the Naperville Sun:

William V. Winnie, 67, of the 1100 block of Greensfield Drive, was charged Dec. 2 with obscenity, disorderly conduct and littering after he was arrested earlier this month in Pratt’s Wayne Woods near the village of Wayne, according to court and DuPage County Forest Preserve District police reports....

Police say they had received reports dating back to October from people who had noted seeing the underwear... near a bridge along the path in the preserve....

According to the report, Winnie said he would routinely find underwear hanging from the trees along the Prairie Path, which he would take home, place in the plastic bags and then leave them at the bridge. Winnie reported leaving 15 to 20 pairs over the previous year.

“He described his actions as an experiment and said he wanted to see where it would go,” the report said....

Sounds like an art project. He keeps finding underpants. Somebody else is hanging up underpants on various trees. He seems to be reframing the situation in a more orderly way, bagging the evidence and putting it all in the same place. I'm as concerned about littering as the next person, but does this old man really deserve to have his photo, name, and (approximate) address printed in the paper?

We're told that some of panties were "accompanied by salacious photos," but that Winnie said he didn't know how that got in the bag.

You may be thinking his explanation makes no sense: What "experiment"? Where could it "go"?

I don't get it. 

Like the Underpants Gnomes, he did Phase 1, Collect underpants. Unlike the gnomes — whose Phase 2 was just "?" — Winnie's Phase 2 was: Package and redistribute underpants. But that doesn't get you to Phase 3: Profit. Winnie had "?" as Phase 3, and the police answered the question. Get arrested for littering.

"Red Mascara, Whose Song ‘I’m From New Jersey’ Almost Became a State Anthem, Dies at 92."

"Born Joseph Rocco Mascari on July 7, 1922, Mr. Mascara changed his name in the 1950s in the hope that it would help his songwriting career..."

“I know that New Jersey’s made fun of,” Mr. Mascara says in a trailer for the documentary. “But you know, they made fun of Sinatra in the beginning, too. I just want to say to New Jersey, don’t give up. We’re going to make it. And I want to make you proud.”

ADDED: I love the way Mascara says — at the end of that 5-minute video — that after all these years with no state song, New Jersey should just realize that his song — which isn't very good! — is the best it's going to get.

Here's a list of the state songs, showing New Jersey as the only state with no state song. Some states have more than one — such as Wisconsin, with a song ("On, Wisconsin!") and a state ballad ("Oh Wisconsin, Land of My Dreams") and a state waltz ("The Wisconsin Waltz"). Tennessee has 10 state songs (putting the "ten" in "Tennessee"). Massachusetts has a state folk song, "Massachusetts" by Arlo Guthrie (which seems unfair to The Bee Gees).

I remember years ago there was some talk of making "Born to Run" the New Jersey state song. They're proud of Bruce Springsteen. But "suicide machines" followed closely by "suicide rap" is just so inappropriate! Me, I busted out of New Jersey in 1969. I didn't especially like it, but I wouldn't say it ripped the bones from my back.



ALSO: "The 22 Most New Jersey Songs Of All Time/Surprisingly, they’re not ALL by Bruce Springsteen." What if you had to pick one to be the NJ state song?

Draft dodgers.

Yesterday, in my hallway of the law school, we were talking about the connotations of "draft dodging." The subject came up in connection with calling President Bush a draft dodger for joining the National Guard. One thing you can say here, and I've said it myself, is that calling Bush a draft dodger for joining the National Guard offends all the many people who have served in the National Guard. Another thing one could say is that joining the Navy, as Kerry did, is "draft dodging," by the same token, because it is another option men chose in preference to being drafted. But I was saying yesterday that every young man I knew back in the Vietnam era sought to avoid the draft, and no one felt the slightest need to feel ashamed of doing so. How to dodge the draft was a frequent subject of conversation, back when I went to college at the University of Michigan in 1969, and I heard endless talk of things like getting letters from psychiatrists and getting one's weight below 120 and, as a last resort, moving to Canada. The chant of the time was "Hell, no, we won't go." Students who participated in ROTC were viewed as aliens: who were these people? Draft dodging was completely socially acceptable, encouraged, and applauded. The only criticism of draft dodging I ever heard in those days was that the least privileged members of society would fill the draft, because they were the least able to exploit the loopholes. The accepted answer to that criticism was that activists therefore should advise these persons on how to get in on the draft dodging action themselves. In any case, it was argued, it was crucial to keep up the resistance to the draft, to destroy it as a workable policy. (Suffice it to say, I'm not worried Bush has a secret plan to bring back the draft!) I think there are millions of men out there who know they enthusiastically resisted the draft and even looked down on anyone who didn't. I think it must be the younger folks who perceive it as a harsh criticism of Bush to call him a draft dodger. The truth is, he was the sort of person that the people I knew would have scoffed at because he did serve. But those of us who remember those days are pretty old, and serving in the military is viewed quite differently now. I asked my younger colleagues if they remembered the song "Alice's Restaurant," and I was actually surprised to find out they hadn't even heard of it. Here's a sample of the circa 1969 zeitgeist:

They got a building down New York City, it's called Whitehall Street, where you walk in, you get injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected. I went down to get my physical examination one day, and I walked in, I sat down, got good and drunk the night before, so I looked and felt my best when I went in that morning. `Cause I wanted to look like the all-American kid from New York City, man I wanted, I wanted to feel like the all-, I wanted to be the all American kid from New York, and I walked in, sat down, I was hung down, brung down, hung up, and all kinds o' mean nasty ugly things. And I walked in and sat down and they gave me a piece of paper, said, "Kid, see the psychiatrist, room 604." And I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL." And I started jumpin up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL," and he started jumpin up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL." And the sargent came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said, "You're our boy."

To get the full sense of how people thought about the draft back then, read the whole text of this immensely popular Arlo Guthrie song. No one was outraged by Arlo's paean to draft dodging. Arlo was an icon. Recasting Bush as a draft dodger and not a military guy would in those days, for the people I knew, have taken him out of the category of social outcast and made him one of us! UPDATE: An emailer sends a link to the well-loved "Girls Say Yes to Boys Who Say No" poster of the Vietnam era. ANOTHER UPDATE: Another emailer sends this link to a picture and some discussion of a proposed Canadian monument to American draft dodgers. Here's the FoxNews report about it. Quite apart from the politics of it all--that is one ugly monument! Who knew the Canadians turned out in the nude to welcome our dodgers with outstretched arms?