New year's resolutions

People in academic life, teachers and students alike, get a curious bonus — while everyone else trudges from January to December, we have a chance to begin anew with each semester, term, or quarter. In a wonderful passage from his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), Thomas Merton evokes the feeling of possibility on a college campus when everything is about to begin again:

October is a fine and dangerous season in America. . . . It is a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful. The names of the subjects all seem to lay open the way to a new world. Your arms are full of new, clean notebooks, waiting to be filled. You pass through the doors of the library, and the smell of thousands of well-kept books makes your head swim with a clean and subtle pleasure. You have a new hat, a new sweater perhaps, or a whole new suit. Even the nickels and quarters in your pocket feel new, and the buildings shine in the glorious sun.

Here’s a suggestion for the beginning of an academic year: Make and keep a resolution or two to address what’s really urgent in your academic life.

If, for instance, like J. Alfred Prufrock, you tend to think that “There will be time, there will be time” and endlessly defer getting to work, resolve to work as though the first weeks of class are already the last few. Every semester I talk with students who acknowledge that they could benefit from this resolution — they begin with Ds and Cs and sometimes, much later in the semester, when they make a real effort, they get Bs and As. Alas, their semester grades reflect all their work, not just what happens when they get going.

If you’ve felt invisible in your classes, you might resolve to bring your invisibility to an end. Don’t sit in the back of the room or off to one side, as far away as you can be without being elsewhere. Contribute to class discussions, even if you feel uncertain about doing so. Ask questions after class, and seek out your professors during office hours. Faculty are sometimes too willing to lump all students together as iPod-toting consumerists who want nothing more from their education than a good grade-point average. If that’s not you, make your professors see who you are.

Your resolution doesn’t have to be complex. It might be a matter of simple, direct action — placing an alarm clock at a significant distance from your bed (and remembering to turn it on), or buying and using a datebook to keep track of what you need to do. (I’m always amazed to see students who have no reliable means of planning — no datebook, no PDA, no hipster PDA.)

The academic year is an almost magical construction. Here in my corner of the northern hemisphere, I always marvel that when the leaves are changing color and the calendar year is running out, everything is also beginning again.

Link » Odes to autumn (A related blog post)

McDonald's [sic] goes vegan

In India, that is:

It may come as a surprise to many that McDonald's, the company known worldwide for its meat burgers and milkshakes, celebrated "Meatout", an annual affair by advocates of vegetarianism, at select outlets here [Bangalore] and [in] Thane by offering a "Vegan Meal" for two days this week. . . .

McDonald's Vegan Meal promotion in the country consisted of a regular iced tea and medium fries which could be used to complete a meal of one of the many McDonald's India vegan dishes including "McVeggie McAloo Tikki" and "Cripsy Chinese."

McDonald's India also offers McCurry [sic].

Link » McDonald's goes "vegan" (from The Hindu)

Link » Menu card for New Delhi McDonald's, featuring McCurry and other vegan items

Link » McDonald's Settles Beef Over Fries, on fries, beef tallow, and a $10 million settlement (from CBS News)

Mnemonic

Heard on NPR, a mnemonic for the names of the planets:

My very educated mother just served us nine pizzas.

I somehow made it way past twelfth grade without hearing this charming sentence.

Thinking ahead: If Pluto loses planet status, nine can turn into nachos, and the kids won't go hungry.

Update: More than pizza is at stake: new planets may be on the way, as an AP article describes. The possible lineup: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Charon, "and the provisionally named 2003 UB313." Which might yield

My very educated mother Ceres just served us nine plump chicken tacos.

Link » Mnemonic (Wikipedia article with an amazing array of mnemonic devices, including some for remembering the early digits of pi)

Things I learned on my summer vacation

Long car trips are far more enjoyable when the driver refrains from gratuitous "stress-busting" profanities.

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Pete Seeger is the best driving music, at least for my family. (For a related post, see here.)

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My children love Bob Dylan's song "Farewell."

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Taco Bell is perhaps the best road-food choice for vegans. In second place: Subway.

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Edward Hopper's sketches are as terrific as his paintings.

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Blaise Cendrars' Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jeanne de France (1913), with stencil designs by Sonia Delaunay, is on display at the New York Public Library (in an exhibit of French book art). It's an extraordinary work, printed accordion-style, and measuring 6' 6 5/16" when unfolded. A Parisian bookseller appears to have a copy for sale, with a vibrant photograph thereof. The colors of the NYPL copy are far more delicate.

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Changing strings on a six-string guitar should take twelve minutes, tops.

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"Ramblin' on My Mind" is great to sing and play, no matter how many times you've done so.

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It's very difficult choosing among varieties of excellent dark chocolate.

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The shape of the glass can change the taste of the wine (especially if it's good wine).

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A dowdy-world tradition for ladies: when you buy a new pocketbook, you drop in a shiny new penny.

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Theodore Roosevelt's wife and mother died on the same day (February 14, 1884.)

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To counter the effects of various drugs and thereby stay awake, Marcel Proust would drink seventeen consecutive cups of coffee.

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"New Jersey is a diner."

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We are stardust, just as Joni Mitchell says in "Woodstock." (There's an explanation here.)

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Sufjan Stevens' Illinois sounds especially good when heading west out of Indiana.

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Somewhere in Pennsylvania is a driver whose license plate reads "THE PURV."

Pete Seeger synchronicity

In the car in upstate New York with my family, a Pete Seeger tape running. The Vietnam allegory "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" began:

It was back in 1942,
I was a member of a good platoon.
We were on maneuvers in Lou'siana,
One night by the light of the moon.
The captain told us to ford a river,
That's how it all begun.
We were knee deep in the Big Muddy,
The big fool said to push on.

Within two or three seconds of the song's start, we saw a sign for the town of Westmoreland. Readers of a certain age (or of any age) will recall that General William Westmoreland commanded American military forces in Vietnam War from 1964 to 1968.

In 1967, CBS would not allow Seeger to sing "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Seeger finally got the chance in 1968. He writes about the song and its history in a 1983 piece available from the link below:

Of course, a song is not a speech, you know. It reflects new meanings as one's life's experiences shine new light upon it. (This song does not mention Vietnam or President Johnson by name.) Often a song will reappear several different times in history or in one's life as there seems to be an appropriate time for it. Who knows.

Link » How "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" Finally Got on Network Television in 1968 (from peteseeger.net, a fan site)

[Note: The lyrics quoted in this piece differ slightly from those of the 1966 recording. I've followed the recording in typing the verse given above.]

Duke Jordan (1922-2006)

From today's New York Times:

Duke Jordan, a pianist whose work with the saxophonist Charlie Parker endures in the jazz canon, died on Tuesday in Valby, Denmark, a suburb of Copenhagen. He was 84, and he had lived in self-imposed exile from the United States since 1978, continuing to perform in the musical tradition he helped create. . . .

His work with Parker, recorded for the Dial and Savoy labels, soared with a lilting intensity. It was hard-driving and lyrical, heady and heartfelt, said Ira Gitler, a jazz critic who heard Mr. Jordan and Parker in 1947, at the Onyx Club and the Three Deuces, two long-vanished nightclubs on West 52nd Street in Manhattan.

A handful of recordings from 1947 and 1948 featuring Parker, along with Miles Davis on trumpet, Mr. Jordan on piano and Max Roach on drums, are considered masterpieces. They include "Embraceable You," "Crazeology," and "Scrapple From the Apple."

Mr. Jordan’s "beautifully apt introductions," in the words of Phil Schaap, curator of Jazz at Lincoln Center, lasted only seconds. But they set the stage for three-minute explosions of creativity.

If you've never heard the Parker quintet's "Embraceable You," pick up the Ken Burns Charlie Parker CD and listen — to the beautiful introduction and all that follows.

Link » Duke Jordan, 84, Jazz Pianist Who Helped to Build Bebop, Dies (New York Times)

Overheard

Heard while walking down the street (Madison Avenue, NYC, to be exact):

"It was like a perfect high school reunion — no red wine."

Link » "Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)

I am in the Wall Street Journal.

That's something I've never had occasion to say before today. (And I may never have occasion to say it again.) I'm quoted in the Wall Street Journal, in "Lost in Translations," an article by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg on recent translations of great literature. In a sidebar listing various translations, I comment on Lydia Davis' translation of Swann's Way: "Extremely readable in all its complexity, that complexity being the complexity of Proust's sentences." I'm proud to have used the word complexity three times in a single sentence.

Link » Lost in Translations: Flood of Re-Translated Classics Hits Shelves, Igniting Debate (Wall Street Journal)

Link » Proust posts, via Pinboard

What not to wear: Back-to-school edition

I find myself shifting among various personae with regard to dress. Sometimes I want to feel my connection to the late sixties, to the radical politics that inspired me as a student. I wear jeans on those days, and sometimes even dig an old blue work shirt from the closet. I also have a few billowing shirts like those worn by Russian peasants, and I wear these whenever I lecture on Walt Whitman, considering them as a kind of teaching aid. Whenever I lecture on T.S. Eliot, I try for a more formal manner of dress. Eliot, after all, was a London publisher by profession, and he favored traditional suits with a bowler hat and rolled umbrella as accessories. Last year when teaching The Waste Land I put on an old pinstripe, and it felt right in that context. For the most part, I find myself most comfortable in something from the L.L. Bean catalogue.

Jay Parini, The Art of Teaching (New York, Oxford University Press, 2005)

Ah, academia.

Twilight comma

A headline from the local paper:

Twilight, mule races added to fair schedule