Happy Birthday, Dad

My dad turns eighty today. Wholly cats!

I am grateful to my dad for many things — among them, my love of jazz, my love of "supplies" (notebooks, pens, pencils, and such), my habit of whistling, my willingness to work hard while focusing on the work and not the possible reward (my mom has something to do with that last one too). And I owe my dad (and mom) my being here. Thanks, Dad! (Mom too!)

Eightieth-birthday cards, at least the ones I could find, are dreadful. Elaine suggested sending two fortieth-birthday cards. They proclaim forty to be the new thirty, which makes eighty the new sixty.

Posts with art by James Leddy
Abe's shades
Boo!
Happy holidays
Hardy mums
Thanks!

["Wholly Cats" is the title of a 1940 Benny Goodman tune.]

Proust and his schoolmates

At the Bibliothèque nationale de France, a wonderful photograph from the Lycée Condorcet. Can you spot Proust?

Charles Van Doren

The July 28 New Yorker has a long piece by Charles Van Doren, "All the Answers," about the quiz show scandal that unfolded in the late 1950s and life thereafter:

For fourteen weeks in the winter and spring of 1956–57, I came into millions of American homes, stood in a supposedly soundproof booth, and answered difficult questions. I was considered well spoken, well educated, handsome, the very image of a young man that parents would like their son to be. I was also thought to be the ideal teacher, which is to say patient, trustworthy, caring. In addition, I was making a small fortune. And then — well, this is what happened.

Van Doren took his lumps — he was fired from NBC, resigned from Columbia University, and pleaded guilty to perjury — and went on to make a life for himself and his family. In the early 1990s, he turned down a $100,000 fee to serve as a consultant to the film Quiz Show. Along the way, a little gyroscope helped him "survive and somehow find a way back."

No link: this piece is available only in the magazine.

[Update, July 29: As a reader points out, this piece is now online.]

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Words from Charles Van Doren

Lawsuits of the young and entitled

Andrew Giuliani has filed a lawsuit against Duke University and its men's golf coach. From today's New York Times:

Mr. Giuliani, who is 22, is the older of two children that Rudolph W. Giuliani had with his former wife, Donna Hanover.

On Wednesday, he filed a lawsuit in federal court in Durham, N.C., accusing the university of bad faith by "aggressively" recruiting him as a high school student to play for Duke, then dashing his dreams by taking steps during his junior year in college to dislodge him from the team.

In the lawsuit, he acknowledges that he may have misbehaved in February by flipping his putter a few feet, throwing and breaking a club, gunning his engine out of a parking lot and tossing an apple at a teammate's face in a skirmish.

Rather than "quibble" about the details, the student said he had apologized for his own conduct, and said it pales next to the "bizarre" treatment he received from the school once Coach Orrin Daniel Vincent III took over the men’s golf program last summer.

The complaint is worth reading. It refers to Giuliani as "Andrew" and to his fellow golfers as "boys," and it alleges that the coach implemented a "bizarre scheme" drawn from Lord of the Flies to remove young Andrew, "a rising senior," from the team.

Somebody needs to grow up a little.

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"The Disadvantages of an Elite Education"

"The Disadvantages of an Elite Education"

William Deresiewicz, who taught at Yale for ten years, has been thinking about elite education:

An elite education not only ushers you into the upper classes; it trains you for the life you will lead once you get there. I didn't understand this until I began comparing my experience, and even more, my students' experience, with the experience of a friend of mine who went to Cleveland State.

Read it all:

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (The American Scholar)

(Thanks, Matt, at Submitted for Your Perusal, for pointing me to this essay.)

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