Dine?

I wonder:

Does anyone out there "dine"?

I, for one, don't. I "eat."

It's lunchtime.

Navel-gazing with the Greeks

From Anu Garg's A.Word.A.Day:

omphaloskepsis (om-fuh-lo-SKEP-sis) noun

Contemplation of one's navel

From Greek omphalos (navel) + skepsis (act of looking, examination). Ultimately from the Indo-European root spek- (to observe) which is also the ancestor of suspect, spectrum, bishop (literally, overseer), despise, espionage, telescope, spectator, and spectacles.

I've liked the word omphalos -- so strange, so sonorous -- from my first acquaintance with it in James Joyce's Ulysses. In "Telemachus," Buck Mulligan calls the Martello tower where he and Stephen Dedalus live "the omphalos." The word reappears in Stephen's consciousness in "Proteus":

The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos. Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one.

I later learned (yes, bass-ackwards) about the part the word plays in Homer's Odyssey. The island of Ogygia, where Calypso keeps Odysseus as her love-slave, is said to be near the sea's omphalos, suggesting a center point, as far away from any mainland as possible. Ogygia is the middle of nowhere.

The passage from Ulysses is taken from an online edition:

Ulysses A hypertextual, self-referential edition

Watching SparkNotes

I'm always curious about the Google searches that bring people to Orange Crate Art. Many are right on the money -- e-mail to professor, for instance. Some are interestingly wrong: how to make a cootie cather comes up again and again, because of a reference to trumpeter Cootie Williams and a sidebar link for Willa Cather. (It's catcher, catcher, I want to tell these seekers.) A rather sad Google search that I noticed this afternoon:

sparknotes for movies

Sheesh.

Derrida's archives

The Los Angeles Times reports that philosopher Jacques Derrida sought to use his archives as a bargaining chip to quash a sexual harassment charge against a vampire expert:

When a vampire expert allegedly seduced a tipsy [University of California at] Irvine student four years ago, he inadvertently set off a chain of events that now jeopardizes the school's control of a dead philosopher's prized archives. The story came to light after UCI announced last week that it would drop a lawsuit against the widow and sons of philosopher Jacques Derrida. . . .

Buried in the news that UCI would resume negotiations with Derrida's family was a mysterious footnote: The feud over his archives was sparked by a letter Derrida sent to UCI shortly before his death.

According to multiple sources, Derrida wanted UCI to halt its investigation of a Russian studies professor, Dragan Kujundzic, who was accused of sexually harassing a 25-year-old female doctoral student. So he tried to use his archives as leverage to derail the case, they said.

What I find most striking in this account is Avital Ronell's comment on Derrida:

"Toward the end of his life, he enjoyed the same status as Aristotle among the ancients, and every perception of injustice was routed to his desk," said Avital Ronell, a Derrida protege who teaches at New York University. "Even as he was crawling with fatigue, he put himself in the service of those seeking his help and needing the strength of his prestigious signature."

Injustice in this situation would seem to me to be the use of academic power and prestige to influence the resolution of a harassment charge. Ronell's characterization should look ironic to anyone who knows (or in my case, remembers) Derrida's Limited Inc, which is, among other things, a deconstructive inquiry into the power and prestige of signatures.

All of the LA Times article is worth reading, including details from court records of opera music, photographs of Moscow, and Transylvanian wine.

A philosophical view of sex (Los Angeles Times)

More info: The LA Times article draws no connection between Derrida and Kujundzic and leaves the impression that news of Kujundzic's situation somehow made it to Derrida's desk. Kujundzic has in fact written about Derrida and curated a UC Irvine exhibit of his work. A 2002 publication of the UC Irvine Libraries characterizes Kujundzic as a friend and colleague of Derrida's for "many years."

UC Irvine Libraries Newsletter (2002)

*

June 27, 2018: Very strange: by 2009, Avital Ronell’s comment, which lives on at several websites, had disappeared from the online article.

In a 2007 Chronicle article (behind the paywall), Ronell describes Derrida’s friend and colleague in less than noble terms: “‘This guy had nothing better to do than to ask Jacques for help.’”

A related post
Prestigious signatures

Paula Scher on design

Graphic designer Paula Scher, on the "second" that it took her to design the Citi logo:

How can it be that you talk to somebody and it's done in a second? But it is done in a second; it's done in a second and 34 years. You know? It's done in a second and every experience and every movie and every thing of my life that's in my head.

Paula Scher, a short film by Hillman Curtis

You can see Paula Scher's original sketch of the logo here:

Moving to the Big Citi (Pentagram)

[Thanks, Marjorie.]

The inverse power of praise

A few paragraphs from an article by Po Bronson that any parent, student, or teacher might benefit from reading:

For the past ten years, psychologist Carol Dweck and her team at Columbia (she's now at Stanford) studied the effect of praise on students in a dozen New York schools. Her seminal work -- a series of experiments on 400 fifth-graders -- paints the picture most clearly.

Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles -- puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, "You must be smart at this." Other students were praised for their effort: "You must have worked really hard."

Why just a single line of praise? "We wanted to see how sensitive children were," Dweck explained. "We had a hunch that one line might be enough to see an effect."

Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they'd learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck's team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The "smart" kids took the cop-out.

Why did this happen? "When we praise children for their intelligence," Dweck wrote in her study summary, "we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes." And that’s what the fifth-graders had done: They'd chosen to look smart and avoid the risk of being embarrassed.

In a subsequent round, none of the fifth-graders had a choice. The test was difficult, designed for kids two years ahead of their grade level. Predictably, everyone failed. But again, the two groups of children, divided at random at the study's start, responded differently. Those praised for their effort on the first test assumed they simply hadn't focused hard enough on this test. "They got very involved, willing to try every solution to the puzzles," Dweck recalled. "Many of them remarked, unprovoked, 'This is my favorite test.'" Not so for those praised for their smarts. They assumed their failure was evidence that they weren't really smart at all. "Just watching them, you could see the strain. They were sweating and miserable."

Having artificially induced a round of failure, Dweck's researchers then gave all the fifth-graders a final round of tests that were engineered to be as easy as the first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first score -- by about 30 percent. Those who’d been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning -- by about 20 percent.

Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. "Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control," she explains. "They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child's control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure."

In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids' reasoning goes; I don't need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized -- it's public proof that you can't cut it on your natural gifts.

That last paragraph helps me understand why so many college students regard their abilities as innate and unchangeable. Self-proclaimed "A students," who have no doubt been told again and again how smart they are, often fail to realize that an A in a college class might require some greater expenditure of effort. More numerous, in my experience, are students who say that they "can't write," that they "suck" at writing, that they're "no good" at English, as if their ability were, again, unchangeable, beyond their control, and not a matter of dedicated practice and increasing mastery.

Bronson's article also helps me understand why so many students shut down when facing a difficult job of reading. It seems to me so obvious -- poignantly obvious -- that reading literature requires and rewards effort, that making one's way into a poem or novel requires a real investment of time and a willingness to proceed, as John Holt puts it, "on the basis of incomplete understanding and information," with the confidence that things will later become clearer. That investment of time involves thinking and rethinking, making and remaking assumptions, marking up the book, circling back to an earlier line or passage in light of a later one. I like to show my students how readers annotate poems -- the page turning into a Talmudic assemblage of older and newer commentary. I like to explain now and then how my understanding of a poem has changed and deepened over time. And I like to rely upon voices more authoritative than my own:

Oprah Winfrey: "‬Do people tell you they have to keep going over the words sometimes‭?"

Toni Morrison: "‬That,‭ ‬my dear,‭ ‬is called reading.‭"

Or as William Carlos Williams says in the poem‭ "January Morning,‭"

            I wanted to write a poem
that you would understand.
For what good is it to me
if you can't understand it‭?
                        But you got to try hard‭ --

Trying hard, I realize, was what my parents always encouraged me to do. "Do the best you can" was one refrain of my childhood -- a lot more helpful for the work of learning than "You're so smart!" (My own children too know that they should do the best they can.)

How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The Inverse Power of Praise (New York)

Related posts
Andrew Sullivan on self-esteem
Good advice from Rob Zseleczky
John Holt on learning and difficulty
Zadie Smith on reading

And from flickr.com: Shakespeare annotated (A photo by murky)

[Thanks to Elaine Fine and Stefan Hagemann for pointing me to Po Bronson's article.]

Australia shifts to compact fluorescent bulbs

From today's New York Times:

Australia looks ready to become the first country to phase out incandescent light bulbs in favor of more energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs, as part of its drive to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

The Australian environment minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said Tuesday that he would work with the states to get rid of incandescent bulbs by 2009 or 2010.

"The most effective and immediate way we can reduce greenhouse-gas emissions is by using energy more efficiently," Mr. Turnbull said. "Electric lighting is a vital part of our lives; globally, it generates emissions equal to 70 percent of those from all the world's passenger vehicles."

Australia Is Seeking Nationwide Shift to Energy-Saving Light Bulbs (New York Times)

Related posts
An Inconvenient Truth
Wal-Mart's Bright Idea

W. H. Auden centenary

Wystan Hugh Auden was born on February 21, 1907, and died on September 23, 1973.

Let your last thinks all be thanks:
praise your parents who gave you
a Super-Ego of strength
that saves you so much bother,
digit friends and dear them all,
then pay fair attribution
to your age, to having been
born when you were. In boyhood
you were permitted to meet
beautiful old contraptions,
soon to be banished from earth,
saddle-tank loks, beam-engines
and over-shot waterwheels.
Yes, love, you have been lucky:
Sing, Big Baby, sing lullay.

From "A Lullaby," April 1972

Overheard

"As far as I'm concerned, an 'artist' is someone who paints pictures, just as a 'doctor' is someone who fixes your knee."

Previous "Overheard" posts

John Ashbery and Fred Astaire on The Mike Douglas Show

In a dream:

I was watching the start of the The Mike Douglas Show, the daytime talk show that I watched countless times after school as a kid. The guest host for the day: Fred Astaire. Also appearing: the poet John Ashbery, who was going to read a poem entitled "Dedicated to Fred Astaire." And coming up later in the show: "A special feature on language-poetry and experimental music."

That would have been some Mike Douglas Show.

As I ponder this dream, it occurs to me that Philadelphia, for many years the home of The Mike Douglas Show, is now the home of PENNsound, a spectacular archive of recorded poetry housed at the University of Pennsylvania. And a few years back, I watched an online broadcast of John Ashbery at the U of P's Kelly Writers House.

But how does Fred Astaire fit in? Elaine Fine thinks that a wonderful television clip might be in the background of this dream.

The Mike Douglas Show (Wikipedia)

PENNsound (University of Pennsylvania)

John Ashbery at the Kelly Writers House (University of Pennsylvania)

Fred Astaire sings, Oscar Levant plays (YouTube, via Musical Assumptions)