Today in History: August 31

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Judge Richard Owen found that George Harrison had subconsciously plagiarized the song “He’s So Fine” in composing his own hit song, “My Sweet Lord,” on this date 40 years ago.

Judge Owen, who was himself a composer and musician, wrote a decision full of empathy for the composer’s plight:
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Ad Vice

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Lies, damn lies, and ad sales: If one fact yields 20 further facts and you know them all, you are very smart.

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Our newspaper’s weekly circulation was a closely guarded exaggeration. The circulation manager knew the number, the editorial department knew it, and the advertising manager knew it. The newspaper’s circulation was about 2000 copies per week. And now you know it, too.

The pliability of the words “circulation,” “copies,” “newspaper,” and “week” was tested with each and every ad sales phone call. This is because if we told an advertiser the (correct) 2000-per-week number, that advertiser might have asked us to pay them for the honor of placing their ads in our publication; thus, our ad sales manager gave them a number ten times larger. More often than not, they were told that over 20,000 pairs of eyes “saw” any given issue of the newspaper. Actually, in a laudable effort at a specificity that would grant our numbers a sheen of legitimacy, they were given a figure of “21,000 readers.”
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Today in History: August 30

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Say ‘canal’ and there’s that final vowel
Towing silence with it, slowing time
To a walking pace, a path, a whitewashed gleam
Of dwellings at the skyline. World stands still.
The stunted concrete mocks the classical.
Water says, ‘My place here is in dream,
In quiet good standing. Like a sleeping stream,
Come rain or sullen shine I’m peaceable.’
Stretched to the horizon, placid ploughland,
The sky not truly bright or overcast:
I know that clay, the damp and dirt of it,
The coolth along the bank, the grassy zest
Of verges, the path not narrow but still straight
Where soul could mind itself or stray beyond.—Seamus Heaney, “Banks of a Canal”

Seamus Heaney died on this date in 2013. Ten days before his death, he submitted the above poem, “Banks of a Canal” to the National Gallery of Ireland for inclusion in an anthology, Lines of Vision: Irish Writers on Art.

Each writer selected a work from the National Gallery and wrote a piece; Heaney chose Banks of a Canal near Naples (circa 1872) by the French artist Gustave Caillebotte, which is the painting at the top. Heaney was 74 at his death; his poetry retained its music and power: “the grassy zest / Of verges, the path not narrow but still straight / Where soul could mind itself or stray beyond.”
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