"Pete's banjo head"

["Pete's banjo head." Photograph of Pete Seeger's banjo by Tom Davis (tcd123usa), via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons License. Thanks, Tom, for sharing your work.]

Happy birthday, Pete Seeger

I remember watching Pete Seeger's Rainbow Quest on Channel 13 — table, benches, chairs, coffeepot, musicians. Folk music! I was eleven or ten.

I remember going to see Pete Seeger and the Hudson River Sloop Singers in Gaelic Park, the Bronx, August 4, 1969. I was twelve, and it was my first concert. My dad went with me (thanks, Dad). We parked under the elevated train tracks. It was quite an adventure to sing "Bring 'Em Home" and realize that everyone there was against the war in Vietnam.

I remember reading Pete Seeger's "Johnny Appleseed, Jr." column in Sing Out!: The Folk Song Magazine.

I remember Pete Seeger having a beard and always wearing a flowered shirt.

I remember "Living in the Country," "Old Devil Time," and "Sailing Up My Dirty Stream."

I remember "THIS MACHINE SURROUNDS HATE AND FORCES IT TO SURRENDER," written on the head of Pete Seeger's banjo.

I remember the heart-shaped sound-hole of Pete Seeger's twelve-string guitar.

I remember seeing Pete Seeger perform on the porch of a house in Little Compton, Rhode Island. He was visiting an old friend and did a short performance for the local people and "summer people," all there by word of mouth. I happened to be in Little Compton with a friend whose parents had a summer house. I remember "Guantanamera" as the last song.

I remember Pete Seeger's songs and records in the house after our children came on the scene.

I remember listening to our Pete Seeger tapes on many family drives from Illinois to the East Coast. From a previous blog post: "Pete Seeger is the best driving music, at least for my family."

I remember our family singing variation after variation on "Sailing Up, Sailing Down" (to the tune of Jimmy Reed's "Baby, What You Want Me to Do"):

Some are young (some are young)
Some are old (some are old)
Young, old, old, young, up and down the river
Sailin' on, stoppin' all along the way
The river may be dirty now
But it's gettin' cleaner every day

I remember remembering to write this post to mark the day that Pete Seeger turns ninety.


[The New York Times, August 4, 1969.]

[My model for this post is Joe Brainard's I Remember.]

David Souter and Proust

"Have you read Proust?" he asked me during an unsuccessful clerkship interview years ago, and then wistfully said he wished he could take a year off to teach a college seminar on Proust and Henry Adams.

Law professor Jeffrey Rosen, in a New York Times op-ed piece on David Souter.

Related reading
All Proust posts (Pinboard)

It's Buy Indie Day

Today is Buy Indie Day, a day to buy books from independent bookstores. If you'd like to share news of the spoils of your shopping, leave a comment.

My spoils, from Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstore: Kakuzo Okakura's The Book of Tea and Sara Suleri's Meatless Days.

Separated at birth?

Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and poet Ted Berrigan.

Related posts
Elaine Hansen and Blanche Lincoln
Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks
Ted Berrigan, "A Final Sonnet"

The Simpsons theme, a cappella

The group is called Canvas:

The Simpsons theme, a cappella (YouTube)

(Thanks, Elaine!)

New Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov's unfinished final work, The Original of Laura, will be published on November 3, 2009, in the UK (Penguin) and the States (Knopf).

Even better: the book will reproduce the 138 index cards containing the text.

A related post
Vladimir Nabokov's index cards

(via Paper Bits)

Microsoft Office 2010 preview

Says Lifehacker: "it looks like a decent start." It looks to me like a disaster, and it reminds me how happy I am minus Windows, minus Microsoft Office.

See what you think:

Office 2010 Screenshots (Lifehacker)

A related post
Word 2007

(via Daring Fireball)

On Duke Ellington's birthday

Edward Kennedy Ellington was born 110 years ago today.

Q. Who are you?

A. I am a musician who is a member of the American Federation of Labor, and who hopes one day to amount to something artistically.

Q. Are you not being too modest?

A. Oh, no, you should see my dreams!

Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (New York: Doubleday, 1973)

[Photograph by Thomas D. McAvoy, 1957, from the television broadcast A Drum Is a Woman. Paul Gonsalves is on the viewer's left; Jimmy Hamilton, on the right. Photograph from the Life photo archive.]

Related posts
Beyond category
The Duke Box
Ellington for beginners
On Duke Ellington's birthday

Bousquet v. Taylor on higher education

If you've read Mark C. Taylor's New York Times opinion piece on American higher education, End the University as We Know It, follow up with Marc Bousquet's persuasive reply, More Drivel From the New York Times.

Says Taylor:

Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist).

Says Bousquet:

In fact, there are plenty of teaching positions to absorb all of the "excess doctorates" out there. At least 70 percent of the faculty are nontenurable. In many fields, most of the faculty don’t hold a Ph.D. and aren’t studying for one. By changing their hiring patterns over the course of a few years New York or California — either one — alone could absorb most of the "excess" doctorates in many fields.

The problem isn’t an oversupply of qualified labor. It’s a restructuring of "demand" so that work that used to be done by people with doctorates is being done by persons with a master's or a B.A., or even by undergraduates.

70% of U.S. college faculty are indeed nontenurable. In 2007, tenured and tenure-track professors composed 31.2% of college teaching personnel.

I recommend Bousquet's How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York University Press, 2008) to anyone interested in American higher education.

A related post
NYT and higher ed