Changing the subject

Rachel Maddow, on MSNOW a few minutes ago: “Why do you think he has just started a war with Iran?”

Her answers: It’s exciting. It’s all about him. And: “It’s the world’s greatest change of subject.”

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by “Anna Stiga,” Stan Again, Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor. I often find his Stumpers veddy, veddy difficult (I’m on a Fats Waller kick). Forty-eight minutes for this one. I started dumb: 27-A, three letters, “Cutting board brand” and 23-D, five letters, “Are around.” And then I wandered around. The toughest sector: the southwest, where 31-D, nine letters, “Tropical tree with purple flowers” finally broke things open. How did I see that tree?

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

2-D, five letters, “Wilt Chamberneezy.” Wut? Oh, okay.

6-D, four letters, “Contemporary of Ava, Rita, and Bette.” Of course.

9-D, three letters, “Manhattan must.” NYT?

14-D, nine letters, “Thomas Edison and Woodrow Wilson, heading south of Delaware.” A wonderfully strange clue.

17-A, nine letters, “Any Federal Reserve note.” Misleadingly specific.

31-A, seven letters, “Liquid sold by the liter.” I couldn’t get a grip on the first three letters until I got 31-D.

32-D, nine letters, “Loud lamentation.” Could it be? Yes, it could.

33-D, nine letters, “Honoree of a Postal Service 500th Anniversary stamp (1952).” I didn’t know the Postal Service had been around that long.

39-A, seven letters and 61-A, five letters, “Uncle’s kin.” Paired clues always delight me.

58-A, three letters, “What all BMWs must carry.” The clue has more of a point than I first realized.

59-D, four letters, “Despot in throne rooms.” Don’t bother me — I’m reading!

My favorite in this puzzle: 67-A, nine letters, “Reproduction redundancy.” You can say that again.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

“Not to be altered lightly”

Kenkō, Essays in Idleness, trans. Donald Keene (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

I trust that the relevance of this passage to the present moment is obvious.

Related reading
More excerpts from Essays in Idleness (Pinboard)

[From Keene’s notes: The Horikawa prime minister was Koga Mototomo (1232-97).]

Overheard

“I thought I was named for a plant.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

Famous pupils

Kate has observed that many pupils of famous teachers “not only fail to become famous, in fact, but eventually even go into a different line of work altogether.” But of course some do become famous.

David Markson, from Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988).

Pupil is such an odd word for a student. So odd that I had to look it up and write a post about it.

Related reading
All OCA David Markson posts (Pinboard)

Zippy Hopper

Bill Griffith channels Edward Hopper in today’s Zippy : “Quiet Zone.”

And when that link expires, here’s a lasting one from the strip’s site.

Hopper’s work appears a number of times in Zippy. You can do a strip search to see them all.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Lauren Chapin (1945–2026)

Lauren Chapin played Kathy Anderson, the youngest daughter on Father Knows Best. Her life offscreen was hard. The New York Times has an obituary.

I am an unapologetic fan of Father Knows Best, a show that deserves much more cultural credit than it’s usually given. (Yes, I’ve seen every episode.) Here’s just one post with some thoughts about the series: “Betty’s Graduation.” Proceed at your own risk.

Related reading
A dozen OCA Father Knows Best posts (Pinboard)

Another one down

From The New York Times (gift link):

Lawrence H. Summers, a Harvard University economist and the school’s former president, will resign from teaching at the end of the academic year, according to a Harvard spokesman.

And:

Martin A. Nowak, a [Harvard] professor of mathematics and of biology, who has a long documented history with Mr. Epstein, has been placed on administrative leave “pending further investigation by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.”

But when will anyone in this sordid mess face criminal charges?

[Odd that the URL for the article refers not to Lawrence but to Larry Summers.]

E.B. White and some pencil

[From Blue Moon (dir. Richard Linklater, 2025). Ethan Hawke as Lorenz Hart, Patrick Kennedy as E.B. White. Click for a larger view.]

There is no reason to think that E.B. White was sitting by himself in Sardi’s on March 31, 1943, the opening night of Oklahoma! Heck, E.B. and Katherine White moved to Brooklin, Maine in 1938. But White’s presence in the replica Sardi’s of Blue Moon affords Lorenz Hart a Somebody with whom to talk.

As the two talk, Hart tells a story of a mouse who keeps showing up in his nineteenth-floor apartment. He decides to call the mouse Stuart, with a u , he says. White listens, and then jots something in his notebook. There is, of course, no evidence that any such conversation was the germ of Stuart Little. White himself gave an account of the novel’s origin.


Yes, the pencil is a Blackwing or, more likely, a replica Blackwing. At least some people who know pencils regard the company that manufactures the replica as engaging in dubious, dishonest advertising and theft of intellectual property. E.B. White, who died long before the replica Blackwing was manufactured and who could never have written with it, is just one of the prominent persons the company has touted as a user of its product.

If you want a great (and far less expensive) wood pencil, there’s Faber-Castell, General, Mitsubishi, Musgrave, Staedtler, and Tombow. If you want a great movie, there’s Blue Moon.

Here’s a well-known photograph of E.B. White in the company of a dachshund and a Mongol pencil.

Related reading
All OCA Blackwing posts : E.B. White posts (Pinboard)

The hortatory subjunctive in the movies

Anne, a classics major, wrote a poem in which she imagined what it would be like if she and her professor were together in the Aeneid . Uh-oh. And a student looking to punish that professor because of a low grade saw the poem, took it as drawn from life, and reported it. From Leaves of Grass (dir. Tim Blake Nelson, 2009):

Anne: “So I was in the library, and Mark Loeb read it over my shoulder.”

Bill: “He sight-translated it?”

Anne: “He was really good. It had, like, five hortatory subjunctives.”

Tim Blake Nelson was a classics major. I wasn’t, but the hortatory subjunctive was the stuff of a memorable moment in my grad-student life: Hortatory subjunctive FTW.

[The subtitles have Lobe , but the name must be a joke on the Loeb Classical Library. I’ve spelled accordingly.]

To-do list

For Tuesday, February 24, 8:00–10:00 p.m. CST:

~ Check thread count on pillowcases with thread counter. Any threads missing?

~ Wonder why I bought that magnifying thread counter at Phil’s Stationery in 2016. Wait — this is why.

~ Spot check W2 and W3 for alphabetization errors.

~ Consider whether W2 and W3 are adequate shorthand to identify Merriam-Webster’s Second and Third Unabridgeds. Consider whether unabridgeds is an acceptable plural.

~ Check if the recycling goes out tomorrow.

~ Think about the semi-cute word binfluencer. In my neighborhood, I seem to be a binfluencer, especially given that our even-week recycling pickup schedule changes to odd weeks when a month spans five weeks. It’s crazy.

~ Does Merriam-Webster have binfluencer?

~ Magnets, how do they work?

~ Think about Rafael Musa’s clever Saturday Stumper clue: “Spot-checked?” Answer: DOGSAT.

~ Think about getting a dog. Drop that thought.

~ Check if it’s safe.

*

There’s now a report that the speech could be more than two hours long. Time to alphabetize the spices.

Related reading
Robert Reich, “Why I’m Not Watching the State of the Union” (The Guardian )

[The preantepenultimate (yes, really) item on this list is my abridged version of a celebrated lyric from Insane Clown Posse.]

A datebook sighting

[Behind Green Lights (dir. Otto Brower, 1946).]

The keeper of this datebook never expected that it would turn into a clue.

I’ve always liked two days to a page, ever since seeing a photograph of a Nabokov datebook with that design. The downside is that because a week has seven days, the days change position like members of a volleyball team.

Related reading
All OCA notebook sightings (Pinboard)

Both/and

Iran’s nuclear capability has been “totally obliterated.” But Iran is “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material.”

In reading and watching the news, I haven’t seen anyone make a necessary (painfully obvious) point: the coexistence of these contradictory claims ought to put us in mind of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

“How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”

“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”

Related reading
All OCA Orwell posts (Pinboard)

[Sources for the statements in the first paragraph: the current occupant and Steve Witkoff.]

Mental acuity

Strap in:

“Why, why would we do this? And they walk in, nobody even asks for, like, do you have an identification? Do you have an ID? Um, it’s so crazy. You know, the mayor of New York, and he’s a very nice person. I met him, but he’s, his ideology is not too good. But, eh, we’re having a massive snowstorm right now. And I’ve heard that he’s asked people to come out and help shovel the snow. Okay, so you get a shovel and you start shoveling, right? What the hell, you’re not gonna help too much, but you can help, and — hello, darling, how are you? No, a right behind you, look. My friend, right? Are you okay? Yes, you. Are you okay? Are you okay? Good. Good. Are your eyes okay? I gave her money to get her eyes fixed, a lot of money to get her eyes fixed. The doctor ripped me off, but that’s okay. And when do you go? Well, you get ’em done, it’s a pretty, it’s an operation, but it’s, it’s 100%, you know, it’s great. Good. Are you gonna — 20/20 vision. She’s almost blind, cataracts, she’s almost blind, and with one operation that will take a very short period of time — hope you have a good doctor, he’s an expensive, he’s an expensive doctor, top of the line, right? But you know what? You’re gonna have 20/20 vision, cause I notice you’re wearing glasses. I saw you yesterday on television wearing glasses, and I said, well, but anyway. But, eh, you know, speaking of your family, it would be a lot different right now except for the election. So I always say it’s too bad that happened,” &c.

Indeed, it is too bad that happened.

Transcribing this stuff (an Aaron Rupar clip from a ceremony for families of Americans killed by undocumented immigrants) is difficult. But I don’t think the crazy really comes through otherwise. Try to imagine any other president talking this way.

Related reading
All OCA mental acuity posts (Pinboard)

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, Netflix, TCM, YouTube.]

Behind Green Lights (dir. Otto Brower, 1946). A car rolls up to a police station, corpse at the wheel, and Lieutenant Sam Carson (William Gargan) gets an investigation going. One likely suspect comes into view (the daughter of a mayoral candidate), two more likely suspects come into view (the dead man’s estranged wife and her fiancé), and then, of course, the real killer is exposed. Some worthwhile atmospherics here in what looks like a genuinely shabby police station where Lt. Carson works through to the morning. But there’s also considerable dumbness when the cops overlook the ridiculously obvious. ★★ (YT)

*

Lucky (dir. John Carroll Lynch, 2017). Harry Dean Stanton, in his last movie, as Lucky, a WWII vet, never married, living on coffee, cigarettes, and Bloody Marias in a tiny southwestern town. The movie tracks his everyday doings — washing up, doing yoga, going to a café, a convenience store, a bar — and, late in the movie, there’s an extraordinary departure from the everyday at a fiesta: Lucky is full of surprises. Hanging over the movie is the question of how to live in the face of mortality, nothingness, ungatz, and there’s an answer offered. With Ed Begley Jr., James Darren (his last movie too), Beth Grant, and David Lynch. ★★★★ (N)

*

From the Criterion Channel feature Nordic Noir

Death Is a Caress (dir. Edith Carlmar, 1949). Criterion says it’s the first Norwegian noir and the first Norwegian film directed by a woman. The story, told in flashbacks, eerily prefigures that of Sunset Boulevard, released a year later: here, an older, affluent married woman, Sonja (Bjørg Riiser-Larsen), spots a young auto mechanic, Erik (Claus Wiese), and an affair begins. As in Sunset Boulevard, there’s another, younger, well-adjusted woman in the picture, Erik’s fiancée Marit (Eva Bergh). Conversations about free will and determinism add a Detour-like flavor to the narrative. ★★★★

Girl with Hyacinths (dir. Hasse Ekman, 1950). The girl is Dagmar Brink (Eva Henning), and her story unfolds in flashbacks as a writer-neighbor (Ulf Palme) follows clues to work out the reason for her suicide. Moody and mysterious, beginning with the opening shots of feet and legs as their owners speak. Anyone who’s read Heart of Darkness will understand the lie with which the movie ends. Criterion points out that Ingmar Bergman considered this Swedish movie a masterpiece. ★★★★

Two Minutes Too Late (dir. Torben Anton Svendsen, 1952). Grete (Grethe Thordahl) is a wife of three months, insecure, possessive, married to Max (Paul Reichardt), a man everyone thinks is God’s gift. Grete sits home alone; the telephone rings; there’s no one on the line. Suspicions multiply in this Danish noir, as Grete suspects her sister of an affair with Max, but when a woman is found dead in a bookshop, Max is just one of the suspects. The who of this Danish whodunit is easy to guess, but the twist at the movie’s end is not. ★★★★

Hidden in the Fog (dir. Lars-Eric Kjellgren, 1953). Meta noir, with Eva Henning playing a woman named Lora in a movie in which a smitten police inspector references Otto Preminger’s Laura. As the movie begins, Lora shoots her philandering husband and watches as a book falls from his hands. She runs from the house and wanders through Stockholm; the work of solving a murder begins; and Lora is not the only suspect. One final trope: a climactic scene with all parties gathered in a drawing room as the inspector reveals the killer. ★★★★

*

Leaves of Grass (dir. Tim Blake Nelson, 2009). Remarkable performances from Edward Norton as identical twins Bill and Brady Kincaid, the one a classics professor at Brown, the other a high-tech pot grower in Tulsa. Bill’s return to Tulsa after twelve years is fraught: he’s estranged from his druggie mother (Susan Sarandon), at odds with his brother, smitten with a poetry-writing high-school teacher (Keri Russell), and pressured to abet his brother’s criminal schemes. Lots of comedy, but the story moves toward increasingly unfathomable violence, along with a tangential subtext about anti-Semitism (Nelson, who wrote the screenplay, was born in Tulsa to Jewish parents). I’m adding a star because this only movie I know of that references the hortatory subjunctive (Nelson majored in classics at Brown). ★★★ (CC)

*

Song of My City (dir. David C. Roberts, 2025). A short film (too short) made of brief scenes (identified only in the closing credits) from films depicting 1970s New York City. It’s not Woody Allen’s Manhattan: it’s a city of cops and crime and bags of garbage lining the streets. You can almost smell the eau de New York, which I think of as a blend of urine, exhaust, garbage, and cigarette smoke. With music by Philip Glass, Gene Krupa, and The Velvet Underground. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Two Criterion Channel shorts

My Back Pages (dir. Nick Canfield and Paul Lovelace, 2024). A short movie that should be longer, it’s a glimpse into the (Manhattan?) apartment of Mitch Blank, a collector of all things Bob Dylan (even newspaper articles whose headlines reference Dylan songs), as Blank prepares to donate some portion of his collections to the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I wrote “apartment,“ not “life,” because the man and his motivations are left unexplored: when he began collecting, how collecting has affected his life and relationships, how he affords it (he even has an assistant), whether he plays an instrument or sings, whether he’s ever met Bob Dylan. Such basic questions! About all we learn is that Dylan’s music takes Blank to a place he likes to be (he calls the music “healing”) and that he feels a need to divest himself of some of his stuff: “Sometimes you have to take a shower.” ★★

Windy Day (dir. Faith Hubley and John Hubley, 1968). An Oscar-nominated short, and an abiding gift from the filmmakers to their children, with beautiful mid-century animation by Barrie Nelson. The voices of Emily Hubley and Georgia Hubley, the filmmakers’ young daughters, speak of big things — marriage, babies, death — as their animated selves romp through a semi-abstract world. For anyone who’s been a parent or a child, this movie should be a tonic. “I was a boy in my father and my mommy planted the seed.” ★★★★

[Also at YouTube.]

*

Blue Moon (dir. Richard Linklater, 2025). Ethan Hawke as Lorenz Hart on the most miserable night of his life, at the bar in Sardi’s, having ducked out of the boffo opening night of Oklahoma!, the musical written by his soon-to-be-former partner Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, and now awaiting their post-show arrival. Hart drinks and smokes, engages in fast repartee with the barman (Bobby Cannavale), gives the inexplicably present E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy) the beginnings of Stuart Little (utter fiction), awaits a beautiful college student he’s purportedly planning to seduce (Margaret Qualley), and speaks with Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and Hammerstein (Simon Delaney) at length, shamelessly flattering them even as he reveals his contempt for their new work and his desperate need to be back in the game. Hawke gives a brilliant (yes, Oscar) performance, and the complaints about the camera angles needed to make him look short are, to my mind, pointless. One of the saddest movies I’ve seen. ★★★★ (N)

*

Cover-Up (dir. Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, 2025). The life and work of Seymour Hersh, reluctant to talk about himself, zealous about protecting his sources, past and present, and relentless in his pursuit of dark truths. Poitras: “So why do you keep doing the work?” Hersh: “You can’t have a country that does that.” This documentary is something of a grand tour of state atrocities and criminality, from My Lai to Watergate to Abu Ghraib, and I started shaking when I realized that an anecdote I once heard a Vietnam vet tell (with crazed laughter) mirrors a detail from My Lai — a massacre that, as Hersh points out, was not unique. ★★★★ (N)

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)

Banjo Man

“In recognition of Black History Month, the Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive (IULMIA) is proud to highlight films from our collections that center Black communities, voices, and lived experiences”: From Blues to Banjo: Black Music in the IU Libraries Moving Image Archive.

This week: Banjo Man (dir. Joe Vinikow and Reuben Chodooh, 1977), “a rare portrait of John ‘Uncle Homer’ Walker, an 80-year-old Black Appalachian banjo player whose life and music challenge commonly held assumptions about the roots of old-time mountain music.” But it’s not yet available. I’ll add a link when the film comes online.

*

And here it is. Narrated by Taj Mahal.

[In 2026 it’s much better known that the banjo is an instrument with African roots and was long a major instrument in Black American music.]

Joseph Cornell’s house

[37-08 Utopia Parkway, Flushing, Queens, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I’ve read somewhere that Joseph Cornell was grateful to have met someone who had met Claude Debussy. I suppose I can say that I’m grateful to have met someone who had met Joseph Cornell. That would be John Ashbery, who corresponded with Cornell, spoke with him by telephone any number of times, and visited him once at home (no date given) in the company of another (unnamed) poet. From Ashbery’s foreword to Joseph Cornell’s Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993):

We sat for a long time in the kitchen, which was devoid of any of the treasures we had imagined the house to be full of, drinking Lipton’s tea and trying to do justice to the plate of leaden pastries on the table (Cornell explained that he preferred these “heavy-duty pastries,” as he called them, the old-style cafeteria kind, to the newer, fancier ones).

Cornell’s penchant for sweets and his habit (Depression-inspired?) of using a single teabag for multiple guests (and more than one round of tea) is attested by other visitors to Utopia Parkway.

Cornell, his brother Robert, and their mother Helen moved to the house on Utopia Parkway in 1929. Cornell spent the rest of his life there. The basement was his workspace. The garage housed additional materials for his art. (But look for the sign next to the front door: the garage was for rent when this photograph was taken.) The house stands.

More about no. 37-08 and its best-known occupant:

~ The art historian Phyllis Tuchman’s account of a visit to no. 37-08: “Enchanted Wanderer: A Writer Returns to a Lost Afternoon with Joseph Cornell” (Hauser & Wirth).

~ Eliza Barry Callahan’s account of trying to make it into no. 37-08, many years after Cornell’s death (The Paris Review).

~ Sarah Lea and Jasper Sharp’s account of “The House on Utopia Parkway” (Gagosian Quarterly ).

~ A Gagosian installation: The House on Utopia Parkway, Wes Anderson’s re-creation of Cornell’s basement workspace.

Related reading
A handful of Joseph Cornell posts : More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[I’m also grateful to have met John Ashbery.]

Sock It to ’Em, JB

[Click for a larger view.]

More like this, please.

Post title (once again) with thanks to Rex Garvin and the Mighty Cravers and the Specials.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

I started today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper by Rafael Musa in the upper left with 2-D, four letters, “Notation after ‘A new broom sweeps clean’” and 19-A, three letters, “Stain source.” Easy! And then the puzzle grew much more difficult. One “Hairy situation” (8-D, four letters) after another (61-A, five letters). And still more “Hairy situations” (48-D, four letters). Two longer answers that I filled in with no crosses helped hugely to open up the puzzle: 17-A, nine letters, “Infomercial order” and 28-D, ten letters, “Didn’t try very hard.”

Some other clue-and-answer pairs of note:

11-D, ten letters, “Out of it.” ELIMINATED? UNEMPLOYED? No, a more delightful answer.

15-D, eight letters, “Performers with horses.” Also delightful.

16-A, five letters, “Frost and Eliot contemporary.” Well, maybe. One might say that Samuel Beckett and Joan Blondell were contemporaries (both born in 1906), but to my mind, contemporary suggests someone who shares a particular cultural space. My first thought was POUND, who had a connection to both Frost and Eliot. Interesting: Google AI names Eliot and Frost as contemporaries of 16-A. But I’m not buying this answer.

30-A, eight letters, “Word from the French for ‘cure in brine.’” I did not know that.

33-D, eight letters, “More than one soft touch.” Nice.

42-A, five letters, “Battle of Hastings participant.” Obvious, right? Wrong.

My favorite in this puzzle: 46-A, six letters, “Spot-checked?”

*

One I overlooked: 14-A, nine letters, “Cross-sectional side piece.” Yow!

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Bye, tariffs

From The New York Times (gift link):

The Supreme Court ruled Friday that President Trump exceeded his authority when he imposed sweeping tariffs on imports from nearly every U.S. trading partner, a major setback for his administration’s second-term agenda.

The court’s 6-3 decision has significant implications for the U.S. economy, consumers and the president’s trade policy. The Trump administration had said that a loss at the Supreme Court could force the government to unwind trade deals with other countries and potentially pay hefty refunds to importers.

As my daughter would say, Holy moly!

There are other exclamations that come to mind as well.

Decoy Mongols

[From the Decoy episode “Around the World,” February 24, 1958. John Newton as Lieutenant Kendall, Frank Silvera (of Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss ) as Andrew Garcia.]

[From the Decoy episode “Reasonable Doubt,” March 10, 1958. Eugene Peterson as Lieutenant Franklin.]

[From the Decoy episode “Tin Pan Payoff,” June 9, 1958. Mike Kellin as songwriter Harry Keenan. Click any image for a larger view.]

Decoy was a short-lived television show, thirty-nine episodes, 1957–1958. We found it, or most of it, on YouTube. It is said to be the first television series about a policewoman — Patricia “Casey” Jones, played by Beverly Garland.

As the show’s title suggests, Jones did much though not all of her work undercover, posing as an art collector, a bar girl, a drug addict, a prison inmate, a model, a nurse, a secretary, a sideshow dancer. As with Naked City, exterior scenes were filmed on location, so we get to see New York City playgrounds, a housing project, Penn Station, Fordham University, the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village streets, and Washington Square Park (along with low-budget studio interiors). Many recognizable names show up in individual episodes: Ed Asner, Martin Balsam, Peter Falk, Diane Ladd, Lois Nettleton, Suzanne Pleshette, and others.

What I most appreciate about the show is the chance to see Beverly Garland as something other than Mrs. Steve Douglas of My Three Sons. Here she’s an unmarried woman with a revolver in her purse and virtually no private life, “effortlessly cool,” my daughter says. Decoy is worth watching.

Related reading
Decoy , all of it : Decoy at Fordham
All OCA Mongol posts (Pinboard)

[It’s my favorite pencil.]

A pretty penny?

“Installation is included? Heck, I paid a pretty penny for installation!”

When I see this commercial for Renewal by Andersen (which does not appear to be available online), I laugh. And heck, I wonder how long the expression “a pretty penny” might last now that the penny is defunct.

A related post
“Yap,” “skedaddle,” and “sheesh”

What a comment!

An anonymous reader left a comment tonight on a 2014 post titled Old Grote. What a comment! Read it and feel a little happier.

Also, you’ll then know what Old Grote means.

John Ashbery, John Yau, and the movies

John Yau, from “At the Movies with John Ashbery,” an excerpt from a work in progress (The Paris Review ). The subject is the first screening of Joseph Cornell’s film Rose Hobart :

According to John, halfway through the debut showing, with Cornell present, Salvador Dalí — in a fit of envy, and one of the few in the audience to grasp what Cornell had done — used his umbrella to knock over the projector, which Cornell was operating, as he stormed out, screaming: “My idea for a film is exactly that, and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made. I never wrote it down or told anyone, but it is as if you had stolen it!” Another source has Dalí yelling: “Joseph Cornell, you are a plagiarist of my unconscious mind!” Cornell, who was notoriously shy, was understandably distressed by this outlandish and inexcusable behavior, and stopped showing his films in public until the mid-sixties, when, with the encouragement of Jonas Mekas, he began showing them again.

If you have access to the Criterion Channel, you can see John Ashbery talk about movies in Michael Almereyda’s short film The Lonedale Operator . And anyone interested in Ashbery and the movies should seek out what he called the “muddled yet marvelous” Val Lewton production The Seventh Victim (dir. Mark Robson, 1943). Ashbery went so far as to write an essay about it. You can find it at archive.org. It’s so strange.

Related reading
All OCA Ashbery posts (Pinboard)

Thanks, Jim.

Recently updated

“Sheesh,” and “sheesh” again: Now with a novelty song from Art Carney.

Baseball players

Kate, our narrator, if she can be called a narrator, notes that one often gathers “information about subjects one had less than profound interest in”:

David Markson, from Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988).

Kate immediately corrects herself: “And Stan Usual, I perhaps meant.”

Related reading
All OCA David Markson posts (Pinboard)

“Sheesh,” and “sheesh” again

In The New York Times, Sam Corbin reports on “the strange resurgence of words like “yap” and “skedaddle”: “Why Kids Are Starting to Sound Like Their Grandparents” (gift link).

Corbin says that “we’re saying ‘sheesh’ again, apparently.” But for some of us, “sheesh” never went away. There are hundreds in these pages. I have it as a Pinboard tag to express exasperation with legacy media. My affection for the word must go back to The Honeymooners : as Ed Norton is wont to say, “Sheesh, what a grouch.”

I like Corbin’s suggestion to bring back “whence,” a word I like to use in writing for occasional comic flavor: Whence bebop ? But I think the far more versatile “sheesh” stands a better chance at a lasting comeback, if it can be said to need a comeback. And yes, “sheesh” is a minced oath.

*

February 19: I forgot about this one: from 1954, Art Carney sings “Sheesh, What a Grouch!”

*

February 20: Stan Carey at Sentence first has left a helpful comment that casts doubt on the Times writer’s use of the Google Ngram Viewer to show a surge in “sheesh” (the link behind the word apparently ).

[The only yapping in our household is via Molly Dodd’s tired feet: “These dogs are yappin’.”]

A workflow sample

I think it’s fun to show what the work of writing looks like. Here are two samples of the work that went into my post about Bill Griffith’s Photographic Memory .

When I’m writing anything of any length, particularly a review of a book or recording, I always begin by making notes in a notebook (here a Moleskine, 5″ × 8¼″), more notes than I’ll ever use. I then mark with a colored pencil everything I think I want to keep. And then I pull out a legal pad and write a very rough draft, always with a fountain pen (here a Kaweco), putting individual bits where I think they should go. And then I type in iA Writer, always revising along the way. And then I adjust small points here and there. And then I adjust small points here and there. And then I adjust small points here and there. And then I ask Elaine to read what I have. And then I heed her suggestions, virtually all of them (e.g., can not could, the United States not the States ). And then I adjust small points here and there.

[Page 1 of 5.]

[Page 1 of 2.]

I wrote a post like this one in 2021, How I write certain of my blog posts, and I’m not surprised to see that nothing in my workflow, as they call it, has changed. Though it is a different notebook, and a different legal pad, and a different fountain pen. But it’s still the same sloppy handwriting, because it was for my eyes only. Go ahead: just try to read it. I dare ya!

Related reading
Betty Sue Flowers on the madman, architect, carpenter, and judge (Writer’s roles)

Necessary reading

From the most recent installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American :

On February 13 and 14, President Donald J. Trump’s representatives filed three applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark his name for future use on an airport. As trademark lawyer Josh Gerben of Gerben IP noted, the application also covers merchandise branded “President Donald J. Trump International Airport,” “Donald J. Trump International Airport,” and “DJT,” including “clothing, handbags, luggage, jewelry, watches, and tie clips“

And the most recent installment of Margaret Sullivan’s American Crisis : “How to write a headline in the (lying) Trump era”

Jesse Jackson (1941–2026)

From the New York Times obituary (gift link):

“When we form a great quilt of unity and common ground, we’ll have the power to bring about health care and housing and jobs and education and hope to our nation. We, the people, can win.”

Robert Duvall and Frederick Wiseman

Here’s The New York Times obituary for Robert Duvall. And the one for Frederick Wiseman (gift links).

Bill Griffith’s Photographic Memory

Bill Griffith. Photographic Memory: William Henry Jackson and the American West. New York. Abrams ComicArts. 2025. 288 pp. $35.

I first saw a photograph by William Henry Jackson (1843–1942) when I was a teenager, but I didn’t know it was his: Jackson’s 1902 photograph Waiting for the Sunday Boat appeared, uncredited, on the cover of the 1972 Yazoo LP Blues from the Western States: 1927–1949. Yazoo used a color-tinted version of the photograph for the cover of the 2001 CD The Best of the Memphis Jug Band. Perhaps Jackson is credited there.

From early childhood Bill Griffith was aware of his great-grandfather’s accomplishments. Griffith — William Henry Jackson Griffith — was named for his great-grandfather and went through school, or at least through much of it, as the only kid in the class with four names. (And when he saw a Jackson photograph in his junior-high history textbook, he knew what he was seeing.) Griffith’s graphic biography tracks the life and work of a peripatetic photographer and painter who played a crucial role in shaping the idea of the American West.

In his early years in New York and Vermont, Jackson worked as a commercial illustrator and photograph retoucher. He served with the Union Army before leaving the northeast for life out west, where he became a prolific commercial photographer, taking thousands of pictures of sights along the Union Pacific railroad route, photographing indigenous peoples, and working with a mapping survey of Wyoming. He was the first person to photograph the geyser Old Faithful, and his documentation of a mythical landscape of “grottoes and geysers and boiling sulphur fountains” played a major role in establishing Yellowstone as the first national park in 1872. In 1874 Jackson took the first photographs of Colorado’s Mesa Verde, a site designated a national park in 1906. Among his other projects: documenting the 1893 Columbian Exposition, working as a photographer with a multi-year study of transportation systems around the world, and pioneering the color picture-postcard. And he found time to finish writing Time Exposure, an autobiography that he began before the Civil War and published in 1940.

Jackson is celebrated as a photographer whose work opened up the American West: he can be thought of as having served the cause of Manifest Destiny. Griffith shows great admiration for Jackson, but he is also ambivalent about the way Jackson’s photographs represent indigenous cultures in the United States and abroad, commodifying them as exotic curiosities for white eyes to gaze upon (a matter that gets, Griffith points out, short shrift in all but one biography of Jackson). As Griffith, depicted as usual in a vest and bolo tie, walks through an Egyptian landscape musing on these matters, his Uncle Al, Jackson’s grandson, appears in front of the Great Sphinx: “Hold it right there with this revisionist nonsense!” And Uncle Al heads out to talk to his local newspaper about “Grandpa’s pioneering spirit and his amazing adventures in the Wild West.” “Hey, someone has to keep the legend going!” says Griffith. Admiration and ambivalence are here in uneasy put peaceful coexistence.

Anyone who follows Zippy is familiar with Griffith’s artistry. It’s here in abundance: in the cover illustration, in the maps on the endpapers, in drawn versions of photographs, in panoramic landscapes, in the streetscapes through which the nonagenarian Jackson walks with Elwood P. Bonney, a collector of western memorabilia who had the good sense to document their many conversations. Like Griffith’s previous books — Invisible Ink, Nobody’s Fool, and Three Rocks — this one is marked by deep research, drawing upon archival materials and published scholarship. And there’s fun, with Griffith motifs appearing here and there: a diner, an Automat, a muffler man, an old comic-strip character (Mickey Dugan, the Yellow Kid), and a polka-dot-clad proto-Zippy in a 1904 Jackson photograph of Coney Island. The narrative closes not with Jackson’s death but with a final “surreal yet reality-based” scenario that joins Yellowstone and Yogi Bear’s Jellystone, followed by fifteen full-page reproductions of Jackson’s photographs, including Waiting for the Sunday Boat .

[William Henry Jackson, Waiting for the Sunday Boat. Florida. 1902. From the Library of Congress. Click for a larger view.]

Further reading
WHJ in Zippy : 1, 2, 3 (With Waiting for the Sunday Boat )
OCA posts about Invisible Ink , Nobody’s Fool , and Three Rocks

Yonder Come Day

“In recognition of Black History Month, the Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive (IULMIA) is proud to highlight films from our collections that center Black communities, voices, and lived experiences”: From Blues to Banjo: Black Music in the IU Libraries Moving Image Archive.

This week: Yonder Come Day (dir. Milton Fruchtman, 1975), “an intimate exploration of African American slave culture, tracing its Afro-American roots through song, memory, and oral tradition,” with the singer Bessie Jones.

Fats Waller’s house

[173-19 Sayres Avenue, St. Albans, Queens, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Thomas “Fats” Waller bought this house in 1938 and was followed by other prominent Black Americans moving to previously segregated territory. Ed Kirkeby’s Waller biography Ain’t Misbehavin’: The Story of Fats Waller (1966) mentions Count Basie, Earl Bostic, Roy Campanella, Mercer Ellington, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Jackie Robinson, Cootie Williams (of the Duke Ellington band), and Lester Young as St. Albans residents. I’ll add the bassist Milt Hinton. Here’s a postcard from Mona Hinton, Mrs. Hinton, to our kids, mailed from Bern, Switzerland, with a St. Albans return address (173-05 113th Avenue, now Milt Hinton Place). And here’s a New York Times article, featuring the Hintons, about Black jazz musicians in Queens. A Wikipedia article about St. Albans adds more recent residents of note.

I’ll let this 2020 article from the Queens Chronicle tell the story of the Waller house. The house is still standing, and looking good. Here’s a photograph, showing what’s clearly a historical marker at the front door.

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives : All OCA Fats Waller posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

A life hack for the bearded: Now with the results of a 1986 survey.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by David P. Williams, is both terrific and terrifically frustrating. The northwest corner? Why, this puzzle is doing itself. Elsewhere, far more difficulty. And there’s a confounding cross that left me one letter short of solving.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

3-D, fifteen letters, “Anger management candidate.” I’ve known one or two.

5-D, thirteen letters, “Insignificant.” I wrote in the answer with one cross, no hesitation. Yes, the puzzle was doing itself.

9-D, seven letters, “Fire-proofing.” I think the answer has to be understood as a noun.

15-A, four letters, “Inside plant.” See also “Inside plants,” 40-D and 45-D, five letters each.

17-A, fifteen letters, “A handful.” I wrote in the answer with no crosses, no hesitation. Yes, the puzzle was still doing itself.

19-D, thirteen letters, “Industrialists, often.” I’m glad I can spell well.

21-A, four letters, “She’s seen in nail salons.” Not MADGE.

25-D, five letters, “White house rotunda.” Not in danger of being torn down.

31-A, eleven letters, “Busy work.” I’m not sure that “busy work” means that.

48-A, six letters, “She’s next to her boyfriend on Hollywood Boulevard.” Ha.

52-A, three letters, “You, in informal phrases.” I can’t recall ever seeing this answer in a crossword.

53-A, fifteen letters, “Improper influencer.” Another fine long answer.

The problem spot for me: 51-D, four letters, “Word below some Treasurer’s signatures” and 57-A, four letters, “A thing of the past.” I have no idea what the first answer means. And the second clue appears to ask for a noun.

My favorite in this puzzle: 34-A, three letters, “Planet precursor,” because this tiny answer broke things open for me.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Valentine’s Day

[Heart amulet. From Egypt, 18th–19th Dynasty, ca. 1550–1186 BCE. 13/16″ × 3/4″. Gift of Helen Miller Gould, 1910. Metropolitan Museum of Art. From the online collection. Click for a larger view.]

Bot traffic

If you’re just “some blogger” and have noticed surprising surges in the number of visits recorded in your stats, the explanation is almost certainly bot traffic. Bots make me think of the questions that desperate earthlings ask about visitors from outer space: Why are they here? And what do they want from us?

An article from Wired offers some answers: “A Wave of Unexplained Bot Traffic Is Sweeping the Web.”

Statcounter is doing an admirable job of keeping visits from bots out of my stats. Most of my bot traffic has been coming from Singapore. Today it’s from Poland. Several weeks ago, it was from countries all over the globe. Was that a coordinated effort? Who knows. As long as the visits don’t get counted, I’m fine. (I hope.) If I were paying to host Orange Crate Art or trying to make money from advertising, I’d have a much greater problem with the bots.

Equidistant

David Markson, from Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988).

Also from this novel
Pascal and Nietzsche : “Poor practically the whole world” : Where is Penelope weaving? : Strange calligraphy

A life hack for the bearded

It’s either incredibly obvious or incredibly brilliant: shave before taking a shower. Then you can wash away whatever shaving cream remains when you shampoo your beard.

The standard advice for shaving one’s face is to do so after taking a shower to soften the whiskers. But I’ve never been convinced that shower-first results in any appreciable softening. And shave-first beats using a comb and running water after showering to remove shaving cream from the line where the beard ends and the bare skin of the neck begins.

To the bearded: is this suggestion as obvious as I fear it is, or as brilliant as I hope it is?

*

February 15: An assiduous reader alerted me to an August 1986 AP article, “Half of men shave after showering”:

[The Deseret News, August 22, 1986.]

Thanks, Brian.

Related reading
All OCA beard posts (Pinboard)

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

Leave your guess(es) in the comments. I’ll drop a hint if one is needed.

*

No need: the answer is now the comments.

Related reading
All OCA mystery actor posts (Pinboard)

[Garner’s Modern English Usage notes that “support for actress seems to be eroding.” I use actor.]

Strange calligraphy

David Markson, from Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988).

Also from this novel
Pascal and Nietzsche : “Poor practically the whole world” : Where is Penelope weaving?

A note to Pam Bondi

Pam,

The third season of The White Lotus is over and done. Parker Posey got the role of Victoria Ratliff. We regret to inform you that there are no further auditions scheduled at this time.

Regards, &c.

[Context: Bondi’s performance at a House Judiciary Committee hearing today.]

Where is Penelope weaving?

David Markson, from Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988).

Here’s Pintoricchio’s painting.

Also from this novel
Pascal and Nietzsche : “Poor practically the whole world”

A notebook sighting

[From Mank (dir. David Fincher, 2020). Click for a larger view.]

The Spiral Sight Saver Notebook, a stenographer’s notebook, is “a superior notebook with leaves that turn fast — and lie flat.” But that’s not all:

The Special Green-White paper in this “SIGHT SAVER” Note Book eliminates glare, saves the eyes, and makes it easier to take dictation and transcribe notes.

Good enough for the screenplay of Citizen Kane , good enough for anybody’s words.

Here’s a side-opening Spiral for sale right now.

Related reading
All OCA notebook sightings (Pinboard)

“Redescription often humiliates”

Making my way through Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (1989), I found myself startled by this passage:

[T]he best way to cause people long-lasting pain is to humiliate them by making the things that seemed most important to them look futile, obsolete, and powerless. Consider what happens when a child’s precious possessions — the little things around which he weaves fantasies that make him a little different from all other children — are redescribed as “trash,” and thrown away. Or consider what happens when these possessions are made to look ridiculous alongside the possessions of another, richer, child. Something like that presumably happens to a primitive culture when it is conquered by a more advanced one. The same sort of thing sometimes happens to nonintellectuals in the presence of intellectuals. All these are milder forms of what happened [in Nineteen Eighty-Four ] to Winston Smith when he was arrested: They broke his paperweight and punched Julia in the belly, thus initiating the process of making him describe himself in O’Brien’s terms rather than his own. The redescribing ironist, by threatening one’s final vocabulary, and thus one’s ability to make sense of oneself in one’s own terms rather than hers, suggests that one’s self and one’s world are futile, obsolete, powerless. Redescription often humiliates.

A little context:

Rorty defines the ironist as someone who fulfills these conditions:

(1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself.

“Final vocabulary” is Rorty’s term for a set of words that justify one’s actions, belief, and life. The ironist understands that her final vocabulary is contingent, subject to revision, that it has no claim to some ultimate truth about what is “out there.” Rorty says that ironism results from an “awareness of the power of redescription,” an awareness that one’s sense of things could very well be different. But, he adds, “most people do not want to be redescribed.”

The fleeting glimpse of humiliation and loss in childhood in the passage above appears eighty-nine pages into the book, with nothing remotely like it before or (at least thus far) after. I wonder if it might have been drawn from Rorty’s life. Here’s Rorty talking about his childhood.

Related reading
A handful of OCA Richard Rorty posts (Pinboard)

A pencil factory now holds deportees

From The Guardian : In 2013 Faber-Castell shut down its pencil factory in Costa Rica. In 2018 the company gave the factory to Costa Rica to use as a shelter for people fleeing Nicaragua. And now the building is used to hold people who have been deported from the United States.

The Guardian alerted Faber-Castell to the building’s new use. It’s not clear what the company will (or can?) do: “Faber-Castell did not answer questions about whether it intended to take any further action.”

Recently updated

ICE, close to home Bond paid and accepted.

Word of the day: engross

I’ve been meaning for some time to look up the verb engross. The word turns out to be full of surprises. In the Oxford English Dictionary , the earliest meanings (from 1304) have to do with handwriting:

To write in large letters; chiefly, and now almost exclusively, to write in a peculiar character appropriate to legal documents; hence, to write out or express in legal form.

A citation from Samuel Pepys’s Diary (1664–65): “The story of the several Archbishops of Canterbury, engrossed in vellum.”

A second set of meanings (from 1400) have to do with dealing with things “in the gross”:

To buy up wholesale; esp. to buy up the whole stock, or as much as possible, of (a commodity) for the purpose of “regrating” or retailing it at a monopoly price. Obsolete exc. Historical .

A third set of meanings (from 1561) have to do with rendering things “gross, dense, or bulky.” So let us move on, or back, to the second set of meanings. That’s where to find the engross that we know and find so engaging (from 1709):

To absorb or engage the whole attention or all the faculties of.

A lovely partial sentence from William Black’s novel The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton (1872) is among the citations: “He was entirely engrossed in attending to her wants.”

Yes, attend, bub, attend.

The three sets of meanings come into English in three ways, says the OED : from the Anglo-Norman engrosser , “to write in large letters”; from the French en gros , “in the lump, by wholesale”; and from the French engrosser , “to make big, thick, or gross”.

If you’re still reading, you must be engrossed by this post, as I was when writing it. But this post isn’t nearly as engrossing as Bad Bunny’s halftime show.

Samuel Charters’s The Blues

“In recognition of Black History Month, the Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive (IULMIA) is proud to highlight films from our collections that center Black communities, voices, and lived experiences”: From Blues to Banjo: Black Music in the IU Libraries Moving Image Archive.

This week: Samuel Charters’s short 1973 film The Blues, with J.D. Short, Pink Anderson and his son “Little Pink,” Furry Lewis, Baby Tate, Memphis Willie B., Gus Cannon, and Sleepy John Estes.

Recently updated

ICE, close to home: There’s an update to Meysam Ghodraty’s case.

SELF SELF SERVICE SERVICE

[3433 East Tremont Avenue, Bronx, New, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

East Tremont is a neighborhood in the West Bronx, undone by Robert Moses’s Cross Bronx Expressway. But Tremont Avenue stretches across the width of the borough. No. 3433 is on East Tremont Avenue, but it’s not of East Tremont. It’s all the way on the other side of the Bronx.

I chose this photograph for the odd repetition of the signage — SELF SELF SERVICE SERVICE, along with that Troy in the middle. Wikipedia reports that “by the 1950s about 80% of the grocery trade in America was on a self-service basis.” But notice how the prospect of self-service takes Edward G. Robinson’s Mr. Wilson by surprise in Orson Welles’s The Stranger (1946). “All your needs are on our shelves. Just look around, help yourselves,” says the drugstore proprietor, Mr. Potter (Billy House). He stays busy running the register, playing checkers, and listening to the radio. We even see Mr. Wilson behind the soda fountain drawing his own cup of coffee.

Nos. 3433 and 3435 still stand. Troy is now Nailology, a nail salon. Aronowitz’s variety store is now Frank Bee Stores, “selling costumes for kids & adults (including branded characters), plus makeup, wigs & props.” The Frank Bee awning (over no. 3437) makes a bold announcement: “First Place to Try for Anything.”

[Listings from the 1940 directory.]

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

“Ah yes, the three rocks”

[Nancy, February 6, 2026.]

Caroline Cash has begun channeling “some rocks.”

I wished I liked Cash’s reimagining of Nancy more than I do. Olivia Jaimes’s art had a flat utilitarian beauty appropriate to Ernie Bushmiller’s creation. Cash’s Nancy ? Not for nothing has it been called “dark Nancy .” For instance.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts : “some rocks” posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Matthew Sewell. For me, a half-hour’s worth of Stumper, difficult but do-able.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, six letters, “Hollywood power player?” Didn’t fool me.

3-D, fourteen letters, “Supporter of Notre Dame’s reconstruction.” Just wow. There’ll be a lot marked French flavor in this puzzle.

4-D, six letters, “1890s inventor out to ‘out-Eiffel Eiffel.’” Why do I know this?

7-D, fifteen letters, “They’re not particular.” More difficult than it might appear.

13-A, eight letters, “Work through, as baggage.” I was hung up on this clue, and didn’t see the relatively obvious 9-D, five letters, “Cheereful-sounding sobriquet” for some time.

31-A, fifteen letters, “Portraitist’s preface.” Well, maybe.

39-A, five letters, “Oaf’s handlers.” I was thinking of bouncers and tough guys.

42-D, six letters, “Word from the Greek for ‘ship.’” The online Merriam-Webster and the OED disagree about the source. Webster’s Third and the OED agree.

44-A, ten letters, “Big cheeses.” A nice clash of diction between clue and answer.

47-A, five letters, “It replaced all its STOP signs with PRIORITE A DROITE.” Un fait amusante.

51-A, six letters, “Wedgwood or Spode.” Sneaky.

My favorite in this puzzle: 14-D, fourteen letters, “Impenitent pronouncement.”

*

And on that got away because I missed it on my marked up screenshot of the completed puzzle: 30-D, five letters, “Floor show specialist.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

There is no bottom

A real headline, from The New York Times this morning (gift link). The subhead makes it clear that the current occupant did indeed post this racist slop. He was on a late-night social-media spree.

Walls, close in, please.

*

The post has been removed. But it was posted and a press secretary defended it.

To paraphrase Gertrude Stein: There ain’t any bottom, there ain’t going to be any bottom, there never has been any bottom, that’s the bottom.

On “meeting them where they are”

In The Atlantic, Walt Hunter suggests that teachers of literature teach difficult texts, whole books, and stop meeting students where they are (gift link):

The iterative process of confusion, endurance, and incremental understanding is what literature professors teach when they assign whole books. This march toward understanding doesn’t have a great name other than reading. We need to help students grow into the difficulty of reading. The best way to do that is not to “meet them where they are,” a bromide that has become doctrine for higher education. We have to do as Whitman says instead: Stop somewhere ahead and wait for them to catch up.

Amen, and amen.

Hunter’s essay makes me recall a moment from the day-long campus visit that got me my job on the tenure-track. A faculty member asked what I was teaching, and I ran down the reading list from my freshman lit class: Don Quixote, A Confederacy of Dunces (they went together well), some Shakespeare sonnets, some Dickinson poems, The Turn of the Screw, Barthes’s Mythologies, and a little bit of Wittgenstein’s Blue and Brown Books. “Oh, you could never do that here,” my interlocutor replied. “Well,” said I, “I take my students as I find them.” It never occurred to me to say that I would “meet them where they are.” Why would anyone do that?

And why, speaking of “meet them where they are,” do so many teachers refer to students as they and them ? As in “I gave them an assignment”: gah!

A related post
Parts and wholes (On teaching whole books, difficult ones)

[I wouldn’t choose to teach A Confederacy of Dunces in 2026 — its comedy has worn badly. But I would still teach, say, Bleak House and Infinite Jest, novels that I taught in sophomore-level lit classes. Those two took up the semester. Why not? Grapple, readers, grapple.]

Recently updated

Words of the year: now with more slop.

“You’ll put down strangers”

On Wednesday night’s episode of The Late Show , Ian McKellen gave an extraordinary performance of a speech from Sir Thomas More, a sixteenth-century play by many hands. The speech McKellen performed has been attributed to William Shakespeare and survives in what appears to be his hand.

Jason Kottke has done the work of establishing the context, reproducing the text, and embedding the video, so I’ll let his post do most of the work: The Strangers’ Case. But I’ll add the earliest definition of stranger from the Oxford English Dictionary:

One who belongs to another country, a foreigner; chiefly (now exclusively), one who resides in or comes to a country to which he or she is a foreigner; an alien.

The stranger is an immigrant, still subject to what Shakespeare called “mountainish inhumanity.”

ICE, close to home

Elaine and I met Meysam Ghodraty, a flutist and graduate student, this past spring. We just learned that he has been in ICE detention in Louisiana for two months. From a GoFundMe page to raise money for his legal assistance:

He came to the United States legally and was in the process of obtaining an Optional Practical Training (OPT) extension to his visa in order to start a Doctoral program in flute performance in Fall 2026. We believe that his OPT may have been denied due to a clerical error and want to help him correct this situation.

Meysam was living in a university residence just a short walk from our house. As Fresca in Minneapolis says, we all live right next door.

*

The GoFundMe page for Meysam’s legal support has nearly (95%) reached now exceeded its goal. And there’s an update to the case.

February 10: And now Meysam’s bond has been paid and accepted. And though the GoFundMe page doesn’t mention it yet, Meysam been released and is on his way back to Illinois.

The em dash on 99% Invisible

A fun episode of the podcast 99% Invisible : “The Em Dash,” its past, present (in which it is sometimes disrespected as “the ChatGPT hyphen”), and future.

You didn’t think I would make a point of using a dash in this post, did you?

A related post
How to punctuate more sentences (Featuring the dash)

[Contra Fiona Green, who talks about Emily Dickinson in this episode: most readers would say that we are meant to register the pauses in Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Meter (often irregular) does not override all else.]

From Blues to Banjo

“In recognition of Black History Month, the Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive (IULMIA) is proud to highlight films from our collections that center Black communities, voices, and lived experiences”: From Blues to Banjo: Black Music in the IU Libraries Moving Image Archive.

First up: Time of the Horn (dir. Russell Merritt, 1964), a fantasia in which a boy finds a discarded trumpet and begins to blow. The playing is by Jonah Jones. The two unidentified Duke Ellington compositions heard in this short film are “Echoes of Harlem” and (appropriately enough) “Boy Meets Horn.”

Recently updated

Illini Republicans at Play Now with the name of the group’s president and some more details of their activities online.

Pocket notebook sighting

[From May December (dir. Todd Haynes, 2023). Click for a larger view.]

Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) is taking notes.

[Click for a larger view.]

The notebook is likely a Moleskine or Leuchtturm. If you click on the close-up and squint, you can see the elastic closure. The pen looks like a stainless-steel Parker Jotter.

Related reading
All OCA notebook sightings (Pinboard)

A mondegreen and a m’onderstanding

A mondegreen long in my ears:

Down on the corner, out in the street
Sayin’ both boys are playin’
Singin’ Mister, tap your feet

But what Creedence Clearwater sang:

Down on the corner, out in the street
Willy and the Poor Boys are playin’
Bring a nickel, tap your feet

And a m’onderstanding long in my head:

Poor boy twangs the rhythm out on his Kalamazoo
Willy goes into a dance and doubles on kazoo

I always thought that Kalamazoo was just an fanciful variation on kazoo. But now I know that a Kalamazoo is a guitar. Kalamazoo was Gibson’s budget brand of stringed instruments. Depression-era Kalamazoo guitars now sell for non-budget prices.

You can see Tom Waits pick up and play a Kalamazoo at the 1:54 mark in this video. You can hear CCR’s “Down on the Corner” and follow along with the lyrics here.

OCA readers may recall that m’onderstanding is a word that Elaine coined to denote a lyric heard correctly but misunderstood. It captured my obtuseness about the Erie Canal song “Low Bridge, Everybody Down”.