NBC Nightly News: it’s galling to hear Laura Jarrett call Michael Cohen “Cohen” and call Donald Trump “Mister Trump,” every damn time. Too much deference.
Tuesday, May 14, 2024
Alice Munro (1931-2024)
The writer Alice Munro has died at the age of ninety-two. From the New York Times obituary, about Munro’s response to an interviewer about being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature:
Still groggy when interviewed by the CBC, Ms. Munro admitted that she’d forgotten that the prize was to be awarded that day, calling it “a splendid thing to happen,” adding, “more than I can say.”Related reading
Struggling to control her emotions, she reflected on her success and what it might mean for literature. “My stories have gotten around quite remarkably for short stories,” she told the interviewer. “I would really hope that this would make people see the short story as an important art, not something you play around with until you got a novel written.”
All OCA Alice Munro posts (Pinboard)
Redbud and sky
[Click for larger leaves.]
The solar storm gave us a sky dark as night. Because it was night, and night is dark, even when seen via cameras, which are said to pick up more light. Our cameras picked up more dark. O dark dark dark, as the poet said.
Much more attractive is the sky seen through the leaves of our redbud tree.
Paul Berman on slogans
Paul Berman was a key figure in anti-war protests at Columbia University in 1968. He recalls chanting, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win!” Here he comments on slogans in use in contemporary protests. From an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Those slogans are horrifying. People will say that the chants are calls for the human rights of Palestinians. And people will say that in chanting those slogans that’s what they mean. But this is an example of bad faith.Berman blames professors, not students. An opinion piece published in The Washington Post explains why.
Bad faith is when you don’t like the truth so you lie about it. Then you lie about having lied about it. You might even convince yourself that in lying about lying you’re not lying. That’s bad faith. It’s a twisted consciousness. We’re seeing a mass movement for a twisted consciousness.
The real meaning of the “river to the sea” is that the state of Israel should not exist, that 50 percent of the world’s population of Jews should be rendered stateless. And the real meaning of “globalize the intifada” is that there should be a globalization of the events that introduced the word “intifada” to the world, namely the intifada of circa 2001, which was a mass movement to commit random acts of murderous terror. But people don’t want to acknowledge that. They get red in the face denying that’s the case. But they can’t explain why the students want to chant these things. The students want to chant these things, of course, because these slogans are transgressive. But no one wants to say what the transgression is because it’s too horrible. So we’re having a mass euphemism event: Horrible things are being advocated by people who deny that they’re advocating it.
Here, also from the Chronicle, is an article about a course at Johns Hopkins that moves beyond sloganeering: “Yes, Students Can Have a Reasoned Debate about Israel–Hamas.”
Related posts
Current events : A “Day of Resistance” toolkit : Nihilism in disguise
Monday, May 13, 2024
Witness for the prosecution
[As seen on MSNBC earlier today.]
I did not expect to see Fred Rogers testify as a witness for the prosecution in Donald Trump’s hush money campaign-finance violation trial today.
[That courtroom sketch is of course meant to depict Michael Cohen. Other eyes in the fambly see Neil Gorsuch and a fambly friend.]
FSRC: annual report
The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, has finished its ninth year. The club began after I retired from teaching, so the year runs from May to May. Here’s what Elaine and I have read, in alphabetical order by writer, and chronological order by work:
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Italo Calvino, Marcovaldo, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Invisible Cities, If on a winter’s night a traveler, Mr. Palomar
Anton Chekhov, The Prank: The Best of Young Chekhov
E.T.A. Hoffman, The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr
Helen Keller, The World I Live In
Katherine Mansfield, Stories
Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories, We Others: New and Selected Stories, Voices in the Night, Disruptions
Vladimir Nabokov, Despair
Jean Stafford, Boston Adventure, The Mountain Lion, Collected Short Stories
Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Children
United States of America v. Donald Trump (the Jack Smith indictment)
The FSRC is forging ahead with Chekhov’s Peasants and Other Stories (trans. Constance Garnett).
Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 2021, 2022, and 2023.
Reading or not in college
The Chronicle of Higher Education asks, “Is This the End of Reading?” Reading in college, that is. An excerpt:
Academics across the country are talking about the reading problems they are seeing among traditional-age students. Many, they say, don’t see the point in doing much work outside of class. Some struggle with reading endurance and weak vocabulary. A lack of faith in their own academic abilities leads some students to freeze and avoid doing the work altogether.The limited ability of many students to read and write about complex or lengthy texts is a sad and still largely unacknowledged fact of college life. I’ll quote myself, looking backwards as a retired professor of English:
And a significant number of those who do the work seem unable to analyze complex or lengthy texts. Their limited experience with reading also means they don’t have the context to understand certain arguments or points of view.
I wonder about the extent to which the dreary professorial practice of outlining the textbook on “the board” is not merely a matter of professorial laziness but a way to compensate, consciously or unconsciously, for students’ weaknesses as readers. And I wonder about the extent to which the decline of interest in the humanities might be explained at least in part by the difficulty so many college students have with the mechanics of reading. Figuring out the words is, for many college students, just plain hard — because they were never properly taught how.The most revealing bit in the Chronicle article: the story of an academic who wrote in 2019 about her decision to require less reading, because less is (somehow) more. How did that work out? As time went on, she found her students still struggling, or not doing the reading at all:
She has long followed the mantra “meet your students where they are.” But she says if she meets them any further down, she’ll feel like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.Related posts
All OCA reading in college posts (Pinboard)
Sunday, May 12, 2024
Car trouble, continued
[1694 Madison Avenue, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]
Last Sunday we had car trouble on Madison Avenue. I found a second photograph with the same trouble, seen from the other side of the avenue. The numbers that go with the photographs show this one, ending in 0017, coming first. (The other ends in 0022.) Thus we can imagine an adult or two looking on before walking away, leaving a man to struggle as two boys (his boys?) watch.
The buildings in this photograph, like the ones on the other side of the avenue, are now gone.
[Click either image for a larger view.]
In yet another tax photograph, the Wonder Bread truck makes a return appearance. (Thanks, Brian.)
Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)
Mother’s Day
[“Mother’s Day is the second busiest day of the year for Long Distance calling.” Life, May 12, 1967. Click for a larger view.]
Happy Mother’s Day to all.
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