On NPR's Weekend Edition this morning, garlic farmer Chester Aaron recalled visiting the country of Georgia:
Every morning, they'd have a cup of mint tea into which they pressed three cloves of garlic. And if they were in their eighties or nineties, they pressed five cloves of garlic. And if they were over a hundred, they pressed six to eight cloves [laughs] of garlic. Every morning, mint garlic tea.Weekend Edition is looking for garlic recipes.
"I'm feeling the shudder of the world as we live in it now": David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, telling an audience at the GTD Summit this week that he has laid off 40% of his consulting firm's staff.
Productivity guru faces changes of downturn (AP)
Today is π Day. 3.14, &c.
Richard Preston's 1992 New Yorker profile of the Chudnovsky brothers, David and Gregory, calculators of π, is online. David Chudnovksy:
"We need many billions of digits. Even a billion digits is a drop in the bucket. Would you like a Coca-Cola?"in 1992 the Chudnovksy brothers were unsalaried, untenured "senior research scientists" at Columbia University. They are now distinguished professors at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.
It's Pluto Day in Illinois. Above, an imaginary headline, also in Illinois.
Related post
MVEMJSUNP!
Here's a beautiful project with an appropriately Proustian title: Resemblance: The Portraits. David Richardson has made sixty-three 3" x 4 1/2" paintings, acrylic on balsa: one of Marcel Proust as a young man, one of Jeanne Proust, five of scenes from À la recherche du temps perdu, and fifty-six of the novel's characters.
These imagined portraits are wonderfully lit and highly expressive, and again and again, they seem right. Consider the portraits of young Gilberte Swann and the writer Bergotte:
Richardson's work also shows an understated sense of humor. A portrait of the composer Vinteuil bears a strong resemblance to César Franck, whose Violin Sonata in A Major (1886) is one of the real-world analogues of the Vinteuil Sonata. And Richardson's portrait of the the lift boy at the Balbec Grand Hôtel appears to be modeled on Johnny Roventini, the bellhop of "Call for Phillip Morris." I lived in Roventini's Brooklyn neighborhood when very young. No remembrance of things past here: I know only what I've been told. I was very, very young.
David Richardson's work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Thanks, David, for letting me know about your work.
Related reading
All Proust posts (Pinboard)
If you've read last Friday's New York Times article Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times, follow up with Marc Bousquet's Junk Analysis of Higher Ed by the Times. The Times:
Fulltime faculty jobs have not been easy to come by in recent decades, but this year the new crop of Ph.D. candidates is finding the prospects worse than ever.As Bousquet points out, it's not "the economy":
Most of the people who won't get tenure track jobs this year, like last year, and every year since 1968 (that’s all four "recent decades," but who's counting?), won't get them because universities have substituted casual student labor for full-time faculty and staff positions.And then of course there are adjunct positions. As Frank Donoghue notes in The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), tenured and tenure-track professors now compose only 35% of college teaching personnel in the United States, and that percentage is dropping.
"My childhood has bled into my adulthood. They're no longer separate entities."
Related reading
All "domestic comedy" posts
My state in action:
WHEREAS, Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of the planet Pluto, was born on a farm near the Illinois community of Streator; andThat's SR0046, from the Illinois General Assembly. I've never been prouder of my state — and its solar system. Maybe your state or country can get its own solar system too!
WHEREAS, Dr. Tombaugh served as a researcher at the prestigious Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona; and
WHEREAS, Dr. Tombaugh first detected the presence of Pluto in 1930; and
WHEREAS, Dr. Tombaugh is so far the only Illinoisan and only American to ever discover a planet; and
WHEREAS, For more than 75 years, Pluto was considered the ninth planet of the Solar System; and
WHEREAS, A spacecraft called New Horizons was launched in January 2006 to explore Pluto in the year 2015; and
WHEREAS, Pluto has three moons: Charon, Nix and Hydra; and
WHEREAS, Pluto's average orbit is more than three billion miles from the sun; and
WHEREAS, Pluto was unfairly downgraded to a "dwarf" planet in a vote in which only 4 percent of the International Astronomical Union's 10,000 scientists participated; and
WHEREAS, Many respected astronomers believe Pluto's full planetary status should be restored; therefore, be it
RESOLVED, BY THE SENATE OF THE NINETY-SIXTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, that as Pluto passes overhead through Illinois' night skies, that it be reestablished with full planetary status, and that March 13, 2009 be declared "Pluto Day" in the State of Illinois in honor of the date its discovery was announced in 1930.
[4 1/16" x 5/16".]
Another item from a now-defunct downstate-Illinois stationery store. Affixed to the back, a label with a price — 10¢ — in fountain-pen ink.
In 1921, the Rite-Rite Mfg. Co. began mfg. fountain pens, mechanical pencils, and pencil leads, clips, and erasers. The company later became a subsidiary of the Joseph Dixon Crucible Company (as in Dixon Ticonderoga). I have these details from a 1950 case heard in the United States Court of Customs and Patent Appeals, Rite-Rite Mfg. Co. v. Rite-Craft Co. Rite-Rite was unhappy about Rite-Craft's choice of name, claiming that it would lead to confusion among customers. The Court's decision includes this bit of dry impatience:
We cannot understand how any purchaser of a lead pencil or a fountain pen, which had applied to it as a mark the word 'Rite,' could imagine that such term meant anything except that it was a misspelling of the word 'write.' It is clearly descriptive of the character of the goods of both parties.Thus Rite-Rite and Rite-Craft kept mfg. under their chosen names, supplying supply-hungry writers before fading into the stationery past.
"The Doyle edition" is what a friend and I called our paperbacks of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, every page covered in notes from studying the poem in Modern British Poetry with James P. Doyle. The earliest notes on this page from "East Coker," the second of the quartets, must date from 1976, when I was a junior in college. I added to those notes when sitting in on the same Doyle course as a graduate student (to get all that I'd missed the first time). Many of the later notes came in when I was working on 20th-century long poems and, later still, when I was teaching a course on William Butler Yeats and TSE. The notes on this page span at least twelve years of reading.
I prefer my copy of Four Quartets to the Kindle.
Other Jim Doyle posts
Department-store Shakespeare
Doyle and French
Jim Doyle (1944–2005)
A Jim Doyle story
Teaching, sitting, standing
