Overheard

In a hallway:

"The nineties? What's that?"

"That's ancient history."

Previous "Overheard" posts

Paris and Niles Crane

In Iliad 13, the Trojan prince Hector, who has been leading an assault on the Greek ships, finds his brother Paris off to the side of battle. Hector, furious, begins berating Paris, and ends his short speech in despair:

                                             "Troy is doomed.
The whole towering city is as good as gone."

And then, for one strange and hilarious moment, Paris sounds remarkably like Niles Crane:

"I see you're in a testy mood, Hector.
I may have held back from battle before,
But not now. My mother didn't raise
A total weakling."

(Translated by Stanley Lombardo)

Related posts
Homer's Rumsfeld
Paris, pretty-boy

Patients like Philoctetes

"We have created a subclass of patients like Philoctetes with modern medicine. They are abandoned on their islands to live long, but have we risen to the challenge of taking emotional care of them?"

Pediatrician Lyuba Konopasek and classicist Bryan Doerries (his words above) find in Sophocles' Philoctetes a way to help medical students understand the needs of patients receiving long-term care.

The Difficult Patient, a Problem Old as History (or Older) (New York Times)

Somme diary

From the Telegraph:

A British soldier's pocket diary of life in the trenches during the early days of the Battle of the Somme have been made public for the first time. Pte Walter Hutchinson was a young shop manager when he enlisted in the 10th Battalion, York and Lancaster Regiment. His poignant record of the battle, in 1916, includes a moving account of the first day during which more than 62,000 comrades died. Pte Hutchinson's handwritten account gives a graphic story of his own survival as wave after wave of soldiers went "over the top" only to be cut down by German fire.

The battle of the Somme (July 1-November 13, 1916) stands as one of the most horrific battles in history, with more than a million casualties. (Note: The figure given in the article seems to be an estimate of first-day British casualties, not of soldiers killed.)

The diary is being offered for sale at an auction in London tomorrow.

Forgotten diary captures horror of the Somme (telegraph.co.uk, via notebookism)

Excerpts: Diary from the Somme (telegraph.co.uk)

Battle of the Somme (Wikipedia)

Update:

The diary of a First World War soldier who fought in the Battle of the Somme has been sold for £7,000.

Written by Walter Hutchinson, the diary went for almost ten times its original guide price at an auction in London.

Somme diary sold for £7k (UKTV)

April 16, 2015: Save for the Wikipedia article, the links are gone.

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.]