Today's Hi and Lois

Elaine put it best: "This Hi and Lois is on drugs."

A context clue (i.e., the strip's second panel) suggests that the large white shape in the first panel is neither a chest freezer nor a radiator nor a rogue wall but a faucetless sink, with a mirror and partly-tiled wall behind it and a shower curtain and tub to the right. Got that?

It's almost enough to make one overlook that the bathoom is missing a door.

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[H]ow to email professor asking to pass

The Google search how to email professor asking to pass just brought someone to my post How to e-mail a professor.

So how do you e-mail a professor asking to pass? The short answer may be found on Charles Bukowski's gravestone: "DON'T TRY." You should have been talking to your professor, face to face, much earlier in the semester. It might not be too late to do so now. But no professor with a shred of integrity will respond favorably to a pleading e-mail from a student who can't be bothered to come in during office hours. So try talking to your professor. Or use PayPal.

[Yes, I like a hyphen in e-mail. Keeping it old school.]

Why stop to think of weather?

Playing music with Elaine at a nursing home last week ("some of the old songs"), I realized that I had been misunderstanding a lyric since childhood. The song in question: "I'm in the Mood for Love" (1935), words and music by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields. This song was part of my 1960s childhood via Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer's performance in the 1936 Our Gang short The Pinch Singer, which I must've seen dozens of times on New York City's Channel 11 (WPIX). I always thought that Alfalfa had storms on his mind in the song's bridge (the "middle eight"). The lyric begins,

I'm in the mood for love,
simply because you're near me.
Funny, but when you're near me,
I'm in the mood for love.

Heaven is in your eyes,
bright as the stars we're under.
Oh! Is it any wonder?
I'm in the mood for love.

And here comes the bridge, and my misunderstanding. I had thought — from childhood's hour — that Alfalfa sang,

Why stop to think of weather?
This little dream might fade.

Who cares about the weather? Quickly, while the dream's on!

Looking at the music last week, I saw that the bridge is asking a question:

Why stop to think of whether
this little dream might fade?
We'll put our hearts together.
Now we are one: I'm not afraid!

My misunderstanding makes sense, sort of, given the rest of the lyric:

If there's a cloud above,
if it should rain we'll let it. [See? Weather!]
But for tonight, forget it!
I'm in the mood for love.

Well, I'm glad I got that straightened out.

Poetry and difficulty

Poetry: it's difficult. Thus Mark Bauerlein turned to Dana Gioia's "Summer Storm" to interest his students. The first stanza:

We stood on the rented patio
While the party went on inside.
You knew the groom from college.
I was a friend of the bride.

No course on modern painting or music would avoid what's "difficult" — cubism, abstract expressionism, atonality. But in English studies, accessibility often trumps other considerations.

Granted, one cannot ask students to read what they simply cannot read. But in my teaching, I've found that asking students to read beyond their means can sometimes create genuine excitement. Poems with a significant element of opacity and mystery (one form of "difficulty") are sometimes the best choices: they can create a more level playing field, or, to switch the metaphor, a playing field with so many unpredictable spots that teacher and student together are maneuvering with attentive uncertainty. I once taught Guillaume Apollinaire's "Les Fenêtres" [The Windows] to an introductory poetry class whose students dazzled me with the attention they brought to the poem. They knew that while I had ideas, I didn't have "the answer," which seemed to give them permission to come up with ideas of their own (very good ones). Opacity and mystery are, I would suggest, what made the closing lines of Frank O'Hara's poem "Mayakovsky" so compelling when they turned up in Mad Men. Removed from the context of a classroom, these beautiful lines became an occasion of feeling. In that context, "What does it mean?" is not an anxious request for an answer but a reverent acknowledgment of enigma.

The problem with turning to something like the Gioia poem quoted above is that it tells students that they're right, that poetry should be simple and transparent, that it shouldn't resist the intelligence, that it shouldn't touch upon possibilities of thinking and feeling that might exceed one's present abilities. Some words from the poet Kenneth Koch are helpful here, from Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry (New York: Touchstone, 1999):

Reading a poem includes knowing and not knowing. Uncertainty, shock, and surprise, as well as music and knowledge, may be a part of what the reader gets.

There are, it should be added, poems that are deliberately and perhaps permanently unclear. . . . Poets may wish to give, and readers be interested in the experience of getting, shocks of intellect, emotion, and sensation without entirely knowing where they are coming from.

It's important for teachers to acknowledge that.

A related post
Frank O'Hara and Mad Men

Hardly (adverb) convincing (adjective)

One more post on Geoffrey K. Pullum, William Strunk Jr., and E.B. White:

I wrote a few days ago that Geoffrey Pullum's Chronicle piece on The Elements of Style exhibits "a significant degree of distortion and plain misreading." I want to offer two more examples of such distortion elsewhere, not because I'm a great fan of Strunk and White but because I think it's important to consider the ways in which Pullum criticizes their work. Here's Pullum in 2005 on Strunk, White, adjectives, and adverbs:

One of the sternest strictures delivered in Strunk & White's stupid little book is the prohibition on the use of adjectives and adverbs. Simply do not use them, they say: "Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs" (The Elements of Style, p. 71).

Pullum repeated this claim three days ago, responding to a caller on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation (at 8:57):

You mentioned that we should omit needless words, Strunk's famous injunction — "Omit needless words" — and that in a hasty manner is verbose where hastily would be better. Yes, they do say that. They also say don't use adjectives and adverbs at all; write with nouns and verbs; and that would rule out hastily, wouldn't it? Some of the advice is just cuckoo.

Don't use adjectives and adverbs?! At all?! That advice would be cuckoo indeed. Talk of the Nation host Neal Conan let Pullum's claim go unquestioned.

Here's what Strunk and White say (on pages 71-72 in the 4th ed.):

Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place. This is not to disparage adjectives and adverbs; they are indispensable parts of speech. Occasionally they surprise us with their power, as in

        Up the airy mountain,
           Down the rushy glen,
        We daren't go a-hunting
           For fear of little men . . .

The nouns mountain and glen are accurate enough, but had the mountain not become airy, the glen rushy, William Allingham might never have got off the ground with his poem. In general, however, it is nouns and verbs, not their assistants, that give good writing its toughness and color.

Pullum not only represents Strunk and White as saying about adjectives and adverbs what they don't say; he represents them as saying something utterly absurd. What Strunk and White would like their reader to avoid is dopey overwriting: "cold, round doorknob," "wept sadly," "said humorously" (my examples). But as Strunk and White also recognize, adjectives and adverbs can be powerful stuff. Proust, for one — he's never far from my mind — strings together well-chosen adjectives in wonderful, unexpected ways.

In the 2005 item I quote above, Pullum tallies the adjectives and adverbs in a passage from a White essay and pronounces its author a "linguistic hypocrite" for failing to follow his own "rules" against adjective and adverb use. There are no such rules. I think that Pullum's disdain for The Elements of Style, the "stupid little book," often leads him to distort and misread the plain sense of the text. None of us are perfect, not Pullum, not Strunk, not White. And not me.

Related posts
Pullum on Strunk and White
More on Pullum, Strunk, White
Strunk and White and wit
The Elements of Style, one more time

Dr. Bronner, productivity guru

We haven't had a bottle of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap in the house for many years, but reading about "hyperbolic Bronnerianism" in label design brought me to a scan of the label for 18-in-1 Hemp Peppermint Pure-Castile Soap. I was surprised that the first bit of text to catch my attention was this bit of productivity messaging:



Imagine if Dr. Bronner had teamed up with David Allen: ALL- ONE! GETTING-THINGS-DONE!

[Update: We now have a bottle of Dr. Bronner's in the house.]

Domestic comedy

"I tell you, that ad really worked."

"What ad?"

"The artesian cracker ad."

"Artisanal cracker ad." [Self-correcting pause.] "Artisan."

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"[S]imply a controlled acute episode"

From page eleven of a memorandum from Jay S. Bybee, Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, U.S. Department of Justice, to John Rizzo, Acting General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency, August 1, 2002.

The "subject's body" — not the person. No "actual physical harm," although four pages later, the writer acknowledges that "the waterboard constitutes a threat of imminent death." But if we haven't really killed you, we haven't harmed you. And a sentence that is frightening in its calm logic: "The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering." Because it's only for a few seconds at a time that we've made you feel that you're going to die, we haven't really made you suffer. I suspect that "controlled acute episode" will join "enhanced interrogation techniques" as historical shorthand for the George W. Bush administration's utter corruption of language, moral reasoning, and democratic principles.

The American Civil Liberties Union has downloads of the four Office of Legal Counsel memoranda released today.

Van Dyke Parks on music

Now available on DVD from Endless Sky, an interview with Van Dyke Parks, wherein he talks about his musical childhood, early California years, collaboration and arranging, influences (among them, J.S. Bach, Spike Jones, Les Paul), film scoring, records, and the role of music in his life:

That's all I do. I have no real hobbies. I play a very hostile chess game with my wife occasionally — that clears the air. But other than that, it's just music that interests me. If I go to a movie, I think about the music, much more than I think about the words or the emotional content on the screen. I'm touched by the sound. That's just the way I'm built.

My favorite Parksism in this interview: "expensive Italian timber" — i.e., strings.

Mixed metaphor of the day

From Public Radio International's otherwise excellent The World:

With so many pressing issues on his plate, Mr. Obama is engaged in an astonishing juggling act.

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