The Heidi Overton window

I’m losing a good ninety minutes this morning watching what I put on for a minute before reading: a Senate confirmation hearing on C-SPAN 3 for Dr. Heidi Overton, the nominee to head the Food and Drug administration. She dodges question after question: Was the current occupant wrong when he said that acetaminophen causes autism? Was he wrong when he said that the MMR vaccine is lethal? Can he ever be wrong about something? (All real questions.)

She dodges and dodges, and dodges some more, and follows up every dodge with a thin smile.

I vote no.

A grudge against clocks

When Lucio Bordenave was fired from his job at a bank, his wife Diana, aka the missus, wanted him to work at a used-car showroom. He refused, and as it turned out, the place was being run by “a famous gang.” Lucio now supports his household, which includes doña Ceferina, an aged relative on his mother’s side, by repairing clocks and watches. But Diana isn’t crazy about that work.

Adolfo Bioy Casares, Asleep in the Sun, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine (New York: New York Review Books, 2004).

Lucio is a very patient man.

Related posts
Two passages from The Invention of Morel

EXchange name sighting

[Sheila Cabot (Lana Turner) takes a cab. From Portrait in Black (dir. Michael Gordon, 1960). Click for a larger view.]

TUxedo 5-1234 was indeed the number for San Francisco’s Yellow Cab Company. See also this post, with a 1951 movie appearance.

Related reading
All OCA Exchange name posts (Pinboard)

Le code, c’est lui

”I am the code,“ he said.

We are all living inside the theater of a madman’s mind.

Deciding that things are too hard

Michael Gorra, a recently retired Smith English professor. From The Chronicle of Higher Education :

I was teaching a Victorian novel class when “The End of the English Major,” that infamous article Nathan Heller wrote for The New Yorker, came out a few years ago. And I put the question to my students, “Is it too much to ask you to read Middlemarch ? Is it too hard?” I was really encouraged by their response, because they said, Yes, it’s hard, but we’re proud to be able to do it. They had a real sense of achievement, of having done something they hadn’t been certain they could do before they got to college.

Reading is like exercise. You have to go a little bit beyond what you’re comfortable with, a little bit more than you can really do, in order to get the benefit and to be able to do it easily later. You do get better, and it does get easier, but you have to set yourself an ambitious task. Deciding that things are too hard for students, I think, is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I once told students that when a job interviewer asked about a challenge they took on in college, they could say, “I once had this professor, and he assigned this huge novel, and it was over a thousand pages,” &c.

See also Natalie Wexler: “Lower Academic Standards Can Perpetuate Unfairness,” especially the section “Fish Can’t Climb Trees.”

Two related posts
On “meeting them where they are” : Parts and wholes (On reading entire books) : Teaching Bleak House

[The thousand-plus novel would have been Infinite Jest. It took a long time.]

School pictures

AI in the news: “Stanford Used A.I. to Swap Black Student for Hispanic Student in a Photo” (The New York Times, gift link).

What a typo can reveal

Women scientist is the wicker furniture of typos.

A related post
x is the y of z s (Fetterman edition)

Falling into a piano

[From Blues in the Night (dir. Anatole Litvak, 1941). Click for a larger view.]

Kay Grant (Betty Field), who’s been struggling to become a decent singer, falls through the keys of a dream piano. From one of several striking montage sequences in this movie.

Portrait in Black Blackwing

[From Portrait in Black (dir. Michael Gordon, 1960). Click for a much larger view.]

Shipping magnate Matthew S. Cabot (Lloyd Nolan) and his secretary, Miss Lee (Virgina Grey), in an opening scene. I expected Miss Lee to reappear later in the movie — she didn’t. And she took her Blackwing with her.

Related reading
All OCA Blackwing pencil posts (Pinboard)

Ten best TV shows?

The New York Times (gift links) is counting down what television people consider the 100 best shows of the twenty-first century. And readers are invited to pick their own ten best. My list would have to include Route 66 , Naked City , and The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, but the Times is asking about shows released after January 1, 2000. Which of course wasn’t really the start of the twenty-first century. But anyway.

If you vote, the Times puts your picks in a tidy list. These are mine, in no particular order. But if I had to put them in order, Breaking Bad would be first, as it is here.