Ngram Viewer is back, and it’s taking (N.C.) names

It’s been a while since I last dumped a batch of North Caroliniana into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, that instantaneous measure of phrase frequency over the decades.

Caveat e-lector: This is data at its rawest — conclusions should be jumped to for entertainment purposes only.

Here goes:

— Duke lacrosse vs. Duke football and Duke basketball

— Grandfather Mountain vs. Cold Mountain

— Oprah Winfrey vs. Michael Jordan and Colin Powell

— Charlotte North Carolina vs. Raleigh North Carolina

— Southern fried chicken vs. Buffalo wings and Chicken McNuggets

The Great Migration, slammed into reverse

“Candace Wilkins, 27, of St. Albans [a middle-class neighborhood in Queens], who remains unemployed despite having a business degree, plans to move to Charlotte, N.C.

“She said her decision was prompted by an altercation with the police.

“In March 2010, witnesses say, Ms. Wilkins was thrown against a car by a white police officer after she tried to help a black neighbor who was being questioned. She was charged with resisting arrest and disorderly conduct….

“ ‘Life has gone full circle,’ said Ms. Wilkins, whose grandmother was born amid the cotton fields of North Carolina and moved to Queens in the 1950s.

“ ‘My grandmother’s generation left the South and came to the North to escape segregation and racism,’ she said. ‘Now, I am going back because New York has become like the old South in its racial attitudes.’ ”

— From “For New Life, Blacks in City Head to South” on today’s New York Times front page

Hyperbolic generalizations aside, reverse migration has been well documented in census data. How long before it inspires its own  “The Chickenbone Special” or “The Warmth of Other Suns”?

Reynolds Price: ‘Paradise Lost,’ connection found

“Reynolds Price was doodling on a paper placemat in a Harvard Square cafe on a spring morning in 1992 when he told me about the copy of ‘Paradise Lost’ he had bought for himself five years earlier after surviving extensive treatment for spinal cancer. Price… teaches a course on John Milton at Duke University, but stressed that the thin volume means considerably more to him than love of the great poet’s work.

” ‘Milton as in his early 40s, and I was in my early 50s when we both underwent a physically devastating illness, and in both our lives the experience led to some kind of mysterious renewal of good work,’ he explained. ‘Milton wrote his best books after he lost his sight. I have written 11 books since I had cancer, and it represents some of the very best work I have have ever done.

” ‘My copy of “Paradise Lost” once belonged to Deborah Milton Clarke, the daughter who took Milton’s dictation after he went blind. For me, it was like the apostolic succession. I was touching the hand that touched the hand that touched the Hand.’ ”

— From “A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes and the Eternal Passion for Books” by Nicholas A. Basbanes (1995)

Until his death Jan. 20 at age 77, Price continued to produce novels, essays, poems, plays and children’s books.

Duke today celebrates his life.

“Special Attention is Given to the Use of Electricity”

Glenwood Park Sanitarium postcard

Glenwood Park Sanitarium - back

From the Durwood Barbour Collection of North Carolina Postcards

“Special attention is given to the use of electricity. Twenty years’ experience has proven it invaluable in cases of nervous prostration, incipient paralysis, insomnia, the opium and whiskey habits and those nervous affections due to uterine or ovarian disorders.”

-Promotional copy for Glenwood Park Sanitarium

“In 1907, Telfair Sanitarium (later becoming Glenwood Park Sanitarium in 1918) was moved from Asheville, North Carolina to 1305 Glenwood Avenue, overlooking Glenwood Park (now Morris Farlow Park). This park was once privately owned, but was conveyed to the City to pay for the paving of Lexington Avenue. The sanitarium structure was razed around 1960 and a parking lot now occupies this site.”

Glenwood Neighborhood Plan, Greater Glenwood Neighborhood Association, 2008.

A tree grew (and grew) in Betty Smith’s garden

“[The ailanthus tree] rarely lives more than 50 years, so any chance of finding [Betty] Smith’s original tree still growing in Brooklyn was out of the question.
“But [Nancy] Pfeiffer told me about the ailanthus her mother planted in the walled-in garden behind her home in Chapel Hill, where Smith lived almost her entire life and where she is buried. Back in 1945, when 20th Century Fox came out with the movie version of Smith’s book (directed by her former Yale classmate Elia Kazan), someone had the clever idea to send ailanthus saplings out to critics….
“Pfeiffer is quite sure the tree [shown in an old photo of the Chapel Hill garden] is one of the saplings from that early publicity campaign. Later on, however, they had to take the tree down when it threatened to topple the garden wall.
“Betty Smith and her family took shoots from the aforementioned ailanthus and planted them around [their] cottage on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. In 1993, the cottage and an ailanthus from one of those shoots had to be moved back from the shore because of erosion. The tree continued to grow tall until the house was sold in 2002. Since then the house and tree have been… replaced by a large rental unit.”
— From “Seeds: One Man’s Serendipitous Journey to Find the Trees That Inspired Famous American Writers….” by Richard Horan (2011)

Link dump rebuffs takeover bid from AOL

— Eastern North Carolina: Birthplace of the front porch?

— From the Prelinger Archives, an earnestly hokey look at “Southern Highlanders.”

— If only Tony Bennett had left his heart in Wilmington….

— What a coincidence — Bigfoot’s eyes are the color of Zagnuts!

The Author’s Voice

A few remembrances of Reynolds Price have noted his deep, resonant voice. Those tributes struck a chord with me because my introduction to Reynolds Price came not through his published works, but, rather, through his voice. His essays on National Public Radio always caught my attention. In my bookish family, his name was a familiar one so I took note when the host announced an upcoming essay from Price. Then Price’s rich voice came booming out of the ether. Not surprisingly, his essays were well-crafted. But I was just as impressed by the stylings of his voice.

Digging through our Reynolds Price ephemera here at the North Carolina Collection, I came across an interview writer Daphne Athas, herself a master storyteller, conducted with Price in 1987 for WUNC radio’s monthly program guide Listen. Here’s an excerpt (the first quote is from Athas).

“You know you have a wonderful voice? Did you ever study music?”
“I was a famous local boy soprano in Asheboro and Warrenton. I was always singing solos in church and getting dollar bills thrust at me by local moneybags gents. When I was a senior in high school I had a lot of throat problems, constantly getting what I thought were throat infections. So I finally came to McPherson’s Hospital, in Durham, and Dr. Ferguson there said,’You don’t have throat infections at all. You’re speaking incorrectly like most Americans. You’re speaking with your throat muscles and not from your diaphragm.’ And he said,’Can you take singing lessons this summer?’ I said,’Oh sure,’ and so every morning of that summer of 1951 I drove over to Durham and took lessons with a very fine teacher called George Moore and gradually my voice deepened and I wound up with whatever voice I presently have….It’s sad that in America most people have been taught to ignore the voice as a means of narration and that most people do everything they can to be inaudible, to the point of stuffing their fist in their mouths. Some of our greatest poets like Robert Penn Warren–I’ve seen auditoriums empty themselves within ten minutes after Mr. Warren began his invariably inaudible reading. I was far more influenced by music than by writers. Everyone thinks that everyone born in the South is created by Faulkner. I never even liked Faulkner very much and still don’t. I’m far more influenced by baroque poetry, especially Milton. Baroque poetry and baroque music.”

One of the last times that I heard Reynolds Price’s voice was in 2002 at his induction into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. It was just as rich and booming as when I’d first heard it some 30 years before. And by then I’d also come to appreciate his literary voice.

Reynolds Price, Bill Clinton and Wesley Beavers

In 1998 Reynolds Price read from “Roxanna Slade,” his new novel, at a Borders in Charlotte.

Afterward, he recalled having visited the White House at the invitation of Bill Clinton. How big a fan was Clinton? Accompanying Price on the elevator, he shocked his guest by reciting the famous opening sentence of “A Long and Happy Life”:

“Just with his body and from inside like a snake, leaning that black motorcycle side to side, cutting in and out of the slow line of cars to get there first, staring due-north through goggles towards Mount Moriah and switching coon tails in everybody’s face was Wesley Beavers, and laid against his back like sleep, spraddle-legged on the sheepskin seat behind him was Rosacoke Mustian who was maybe his girl and who had given up looking into the wind and trying to nod at every sad car in the line, and when he even speeded up and passed the truck (lent for the afternoon my Mr. Isaac Alston and driven by Sammy his man, hauling one pine box and one black boy dressed in all he could borrow, set up in a ladder-back chair with flowers banked round him and a foot on the box to steady it) — when he even passed that, Rosacoke said once into his back ‘Don’t’ and rested in humiliation, not thinking but with her hands on his hips for dear life and her white blouse blown out behind her like a banner in defeat.”

First sentence, first novel.  How was that for starters?

Fitzgerald down and out in Hendersonville

“In Hendersonville…  Today I am in comparative affluence, but Monday and Tuesday I had two tins of potted meat, three oranges and a box of Uneedas and two cans of beer… and when I think of the thousand meals I’ve sent back untasted in the last two years. It was fun to be poor — especially if you haven’t enough liver power for an appetite. But the air is fine here, and I liked what I had — and there was nothing to do about it anyhow….

“But it was funny coming into the hotel and the very deferential clerk not knowing that I was not only thousands, nay tens of thousands in debt, but had less than 40 cents cash in the world and probably a deficit in the bank….

“The final irony was when a drunk man in the shop where I bought my can of ale said in voice obviously intended for me, ‘These city dudes from the East come down here with their millions. Why don’t they support us?’ ”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing in his diary, autumn 1936

Scott vs. Ernest over fame’s long haul