Teaching at Harvard

John H. Summers taught at Harvard:

I joined the staff of the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard University in 2000. As tutor, then as lecturer, I advised senior theses, conceived and conducted freshman and junior seminars and taught the year-long sophomore tutorial, Social Studies 10, six times. The fractured nature of my appointment, renewed annually for six successive years while never amounting to more than 65 per cent of a full-time position in any one year, kept me on the margins of prestige and promotion even as it kept me there long enough to serve three chairmen of social studies, two directors of study and three presidents of Harvard.

Summers' account of teaching "the rich, the powerful and the unalienated," with a grading scale running from A to B, reveals one kind of academic predicament: that of the professor who loathes the institution while desiring its approval. Read it all:

All the rich must have prizes (Times Higher Education)

WALL·E

There's a lot to like in Pixar's WALL·E: echoes of City Lights, E.T., Metropolis, Star Wars, and 2001; several Apple jokes; a doofus CEO (played by Fred Willard) whose advice is to "stay the course" (sound familiar?); the poignant use of an old musical; and a satiric, ominous portrait of a sedentary consumer-culture in which all food comes in cups. I'm very glad that I saw WALL·E, despite my reluctance about seeing "a love story about robots."

What most impressed me in the movie is the expressiveness of WALL·E and EVE. These characters have minimal language and no faces, only heads and eyes (and EVE's eyes have no pupils). Thus feeling resides in tone, gesture, and head and eye movement. In creating these characters, Pixar's animators have worked out a grammar of eloquent emotion.

So go see this love story about robots.

From Eliot to Woolf to Montaigne

A July 20 New York Times article on downsized travel plans begins

When T.S. Eliot said that it is the journey, not the arrival, that matters. . . .

Did Eliot say that? It rings no bell for me. Google and Google Book Search turn up many attributions to Eliot but none with a source. The Journey Not the Arrival Matters though is the title of an autobiographical volume by Leonard Woolf (1969). A 1989 Times review of Woolf's letters attributes the title observation to Montaigne. I'm unable to find anything in Montaigne that concise, but in the essay "Of Vanity," Montaigne did write (in this 1877 Charles Cotton translation)

"But, at such an age, you will never return from so long a journey." What care I for that? I neither undertake it to return, nor to finish it: my business is only to keep myself in motion, whilst motion pleases me; I only walk for the walk's sake.

Yes, I've e-mailed the Times, for the walk's sake.

Related post
It is the correction that matters

Hot dogs and work shops again

My son Ben (smart kid!) had the answer to today's mystery challenge: the text that I quoted is from an ad for the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair. That ad seems quaintly innocent now, as elements of the so-called counter-culture have become the staples of any middle-American "fair" or "fest."

I found the Woodstock ad in the July 20, 1969 New York Times, while searching for the details of the first concert I attended — Pete Seeger and the Hudson River Sloop Singers (August 4, 1969, at Gaelic Park in the Bronx). The Times seems rather serious about restricting the use of its materials, so I won't reproduce the Woodstock ad here. But a similar ad with identical text is available online.

Ben's correct guess saves me from having to work up clues. I did have one ready: "A little less bottom end on the guitar, please." Anyone know the source?

[Thanks, Dad, for taking me to Gaelic Park way back when.]

Hot dogs and work shops

A mystery challenge, for you, reader. What event are the following paragraphs advertising?

Crafts Bazaar — If you like creative knickknacks and old junk you'll love roaming around our bazaar.

Food — There will be cokes and hot dogs and dozens of curious food and fruit combinations to experiment with.

Work Shops — If you like playing with beads, improvising on a guitar, or writing poetry, or molding clay, stop by one of our work shops and see what you can give and take.

Leave your best guess in a comment. You may guess more than once. No using the Google. The prize: undying fame in the form of a follow-up blog post. If no one gets it, I'll post the answer on Thursday.

[Update, 6:59 p.m.: There is a winner.]

A previous challenge
The Three Juices

Ben Sakoguchi's orange crate art

Ben Sakoguchi turns modern culture into orange crate art. To the left, Lady Day Brand (1994).

Orange Crate Label Series
The Unauthorized History of Baseball

(via The Baseball Reliquary)

The Baseball Reliquary

The Baseball Reliquary is a repository of the odd and unlikely. Its collections hold a piece of Abner Doubleday's skin, a Babe Ruth cigar (partially smoked), a Babe Ruth hot dog (partially eaten), Dock Ellis' hair curlers, and a tortilla bearing the likeness of Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley.

Some of these objects appear to be real, while others prompt one to ask "What is 'the real'?" and other postmodern questions. The Reliquary might be described as a Museum of Jurassic Technology for baseball.

Maxims from a physicist

In 1992, physicist David P. Stern wrote out some maxims for physics and life. E.g.,

Look for kindred souls. They are few and far between, and nothing is more precious.

Physicist or no, read them all:

Credo (found via BrownStudies)

[Update, 11:44 a.m.: Stern's site is down, but you can still read a cached version.]

James Brown estate sale

The most curious lot of the day was not the bracelet, however, or the singer's platform shoe collection ($15,000) or the paranoid note he once scrawled on loose leaf paper alleging that his record label was out to kill him ($7,000). It was not the suite of red leather furniture that conjured up images of the recreation room on a mother ship ($40,000).

In tomorrow's New York Times, a report on the James Brown estate sale.

The James Brown Collection (Christie's)

Pasta with spinach and lemon

What follows is too simple to be called a recipe, but the result is delicious anyway. The lemon zest gives this dish an ineffable zing.

1. Cook one box of pasta, minus the box. (I like penne.) You can do everything that follows as the water comes to a boil and the pasta cooks.
2. Smash and chop up some garlic, as much or as little as you like. I usually use six or eight cloves.
3. Scrape the zest from one lemon. A zester makes this work easy. If you remove the zest in long strands, chop them into smaller pieces.
4. Squeeze the juice from the now-denuded lemon.
5. Lightly brown the garlic in olive oil in a pan. Add some red pepper flakes, salt, and pepper.
6. Add a bag of baby spinach leaves to the pan, minus the bag.
7. Marvel at the way the spinach reduces so quickly in the heat.
8. It's really amazing, isn't it?
9. Add the lemon juice and zest.
10. Drain the pasta and mix with everything else.

Serve with Parmesan or Romano cheese, or no cheese. Dry white wine goes well with this dish (on the side, in a glass).

Related post
Adventures in grain (two more pasta dishes)