Overheard

An old man looking at a men's room door:

"Wheelchairs — why do they always put men in wheelchairs?"

All "Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Elaine and I watched Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) last night — it seems an appropriate movie to go back to in an election year. No, we haven't mistaken Jefferson Smith (James Stewart¹) for Barack Obama; there's a world of difference between the wide-eyed Boy Ranger from parts unknown and our senator. But there's much to ponder in the story of a man who stands on principle while those who hold and seek to continue holding power engage in, well, the politics of personal destruction. Here's what aide Clarissa Saunders (Jean Arthur) tells Smith as they sit in the dark in front of the Lincoln Memorial:

"Your friend Mr. Lincoln had his Taylors and Paines. So did every other man who ever tried to lift his thought up off the ground. Odds against them didn't stop those men; they were fools that way. All the good that ever came into this world came from fools with faith like that. You know that, Jeff. You can't quit now. Not you. They aren't all Taylors and Paines in Washington. That kind just throw big shadows, that's all. You didn't just have faith in Paine or any other living man. You had faith in something bigger than that. You had plain, decent, everyday, common rightness, and this country could use some of that. Yeah, so could the whole cock-eyed world, a lot of it."

And how.

There's plenty of Capra-corn in this film (think of Harry Carey as the president of the Senate, smiling and chuckling at Smith's boyish ways, or the Boy Rangers and their printing presses). But the "big shadows" are real and dangerous: a press that shapes opinion by manufacturing reality (reality is Taylor-made), a political machine that employs any means necessary to defeat its enemies, and politicians who are unapologetically cynical. "You can't count on people voting. Half the time they don't vote anyway. That's how states and empires have been built since time began," says the Silver Knight, Senator Joseph Harrison Paine (Claude Rains).

And there are several scenes of utter emotional desolation. This image of Smith, a drunk Saunders, and Saunders' also-drunk would-be husband Diz (Thomas Mitchell) in Smith's barely furnished office looks more like Gregg Toland's deep-focus than Capra:



And this shot of Saunders and Diz weaving down the hallway (and abandoning Smith) makes me think of the Empire Hotel (Judy Barton's building) in another Stewart movie, Hitchcock's Vertigo:



Okay, you can go rent the movie if you like.

¹ James, not Jimmy? Yes, that how he's billed.

Related post
Young woman with a pencil

New Ephemera

[From the brochure "Come to New Ephemera."]

Amanda Spielman's New Ephemera thus far exists only in brochure form:

Come Visit New Ephemera (.pdf download)

Young woman with a pencil

She's Jean Arthur, as Clarissa Saunders, in Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Her pencil appears to be an Eagle Mikado. (How can one tell? By the distinctive band on the ferrule, not quite visible in this soft-focus shot.) After Pearl Harbor, the Mikado was renamed Mirado.

Related posts
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Red-headed woman with reporter's notebook

"George Fox"

One must wonder about the sense of irony that might have gone into Eliot's Spitzer's choice of alias.

George Fox (Wikipedia)

Thin Air into thin air

It was safe at home — before it disappeared.

So what happened? In lieu of the presence of a poltergeist with techno-lust, I have developed a theory that I first viewed as remote, but now believe explains the fate of my Air.

Technology writer Steven Levy thinks he knows what became of his MacBook Air. Read all about it:

Gone, Without a Trace (Newsweek)

Back in January, when I read about a MacBook Air sleeve made to look like a manila envelope, the worrier in me imagined the worst.

Feature creep and the contemporary syllabus

From Paula Walsey's "The Syllabus Becomes a Repository of Legalese," in The Chronicle of Higher Education (March 14, 2008):

"[T]he syllabus gets longer and longer each time students think up something new that you wouldn't necessarily want them doing," says Susan R. Boettcher, an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

More than a third of her nine-page syllabus for a course on the Reformation is taken up by explanations of her policies on attendance, laptop usage, and how to round grades, and her availability to write letters of recommendation.

Her detailed policy on scholastic dishonesty includes a clause stating that "the rules of academic honesty also apply to extra credit." It was an addition that she made after a judicial board overturned her recommendation that a student fail her course for plagiarizing an extra-credit paper. Her syllabus had not explicitly stated that students could fail for cheating on extra-credit projects.

I'm both impressed and horrified by the nerve of the student who challenged Professor Boettcher's decision. As I point out when I teach the Inferno, plagiarists would likely end up in the tenth bolgia of the eight circle of Dante's hell, reserved for falsifiers (alchemists, counterfeiters, perjurers, impersonators), those who tamper with the integrity of things, words, and persons.

No link: most items in the Chronicle are available only to subscribers. But here's Wikipedia's article on creeping featurism.

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"Extra credit?"
Paper chase
Syllabi

In search of lost sound

Milk bottles, steam engines, typewriters: these and other sounds of the past are available from Marnix Koolhaas' Library of Vanished Sounds (aka the Museum of Lost Sounds).

Larry David on the red phone

["The Lefty Call," Curb Your Enthusiasm (2007).]

Larry David has strong feelings about who should be answering the red phone:

On the Red Phone (Huffington Post)

Related post
Larry David's notebook

Aqua Velva

From a television commercial:

"Through the years, many things pass from father to son, like Aqua Velva After Shave."

En mi casa, it's not Aqua Velva that has passed from father to son; it's a beard. Across generations, we heed the anonymous wisdom of these words (from 1879!):

Those who shave do well; but those who do not do better. If nature intended for men to shave, she would not have been so lavish in providing them with beards, and it is best for men not to shave at all, for nothing adds to the beauty of man so much as a full flowing beard.

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Hair
Perfect Etiquette (1879)