"Nil admirari in stone, the waiter"

[Jean Lenauer as the waiter, My Dinner with André (dir. Louis Malle, 1981).]

25 février. — C'est le nil admirari en marbre, que le garçon de café. Le nimbe d'un Jésus à Emmaüs cerclerait la tête d'un dîneur ou bien le truc d'une féérie enlèverait tout à coup la robe d'une femme, qu'il continuerait à servir la femme, comme si elle était habillée, ou le dîneur comme s'il était un simple mortel.

[February 25. — That's nil admirari in stone, the waiter. The halo of Jesus at Emmaus could encircle a diner's head or a woman's dress disappear by magic, he would continue serving the woman as if she were clothed, or the diner as if he were a mere mortal.]

Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal des Goncourt: 1866–1870, vol. 3 (Paris: Charpentier,1888), 29.

[I found this passage via Marthe Bibesco's The Veiled Wanderer: Marcel Proust, translated by Roland Gant (London: Falcon Press, 1949), which refers to it by means of a very loose, embellished paraphrase. The translation is mine. The Latin expression nil admirari means "to be excited by nothing," "equanimity." My Dinner with André has just been re-released on DVD by the Criterion Collection.]

Bob Koester

"I don’t pay that much attention to sales figures. You put them out and hope for the best."

That's Bob Koester, founder of Delmark Records and the Jazz Record Mart, in a New York Times profile.

How I blog

In a Father's Day post, I noted that I'd been waiting almost a year to put up Ernie Bushmiller's "DADDY-O!" That prompted Matt Thomas to wonder, in a comment, about how I blog. And so I'm writing this post.

I've written about the why in blog-anniversary posts from 2005 and 2008. As for the how: I jot ideas for posts in a pocket notebook (since last summer, an orange Quo Vadis Habana notebook). I usually draft longer posts in that notebook or on blank pages of my Moleskine page-a-day planner. Sometimes I use a legal pad. I usually write shorter posts in a text-editor on a MacBook.

I sometimes draft a post long before it appears, but that doesn't work well: those drafts often begin to seem stale, and I often end up deleting them unpublished. The time between writing and posting seems significant for me, and the explanation probably lies in the long gap between submission and publication in academia. (I've always felt strange seeing my writing in print well after the fact.) But I can work on a post for a long time or "plan" to write a post for any length of time and then write it, with no ill effect, or at least none that I can see. I "planned" to write something about the astonishing song "I Got Your Ice Cold NuGrape" for almost two years before writing a post. Right now I'm "planning" to write a post on Hooker 'N Heat, the 1971 double-album by John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat (recorded forty years ago next May).

As a regular reader knows, I've been posting almost every day for some time. This practice is a matter not of compulsion but of pleasure. "I can quit whenever I want," and so on. My greatest happiness in Orange Crate Art is that it has made writing a pleasure, not something I have to do but what I do, an always available possibility. I love the idea of "a post" — small enough to fit in the hand, like a letter or card, but as short or long as it needs to be. Addressed, reader, to you.

"More square"

My son Ben, describing a father with his son in a museum:

"He was dressed sort of like you, but more square."

(Thanks, Ben!)

Work and online life

From a thoughtful piece (with an ill-chosen title) on "work-relevant characteristics of online life":

Intrinsic rewards matter most.

The web is a testament to the power of intrinsic rewards. Think of all the articles contributed to Wikipedia, all the open source software created, all the advice freely given — add up the hours of volunteer time and it's obvious that human beings will give generously of themselves when they’re given the chance to contribute to something they actually care about. Money's great, but so is recognition and the joy of accomplishment.

Read it all:

Gary Hamel, The Facebook Generation vs. the Fortune 500 (Wall Street Journal)

(Thanks, Elaine!)

November 27, 1958

I was a little more than two. (Still am.) I think that the thing on my head was called, simply, a "winter hat." Sharp!

[Photograph courtesy of Jim and Louise Leddy, taken November 27, 1958, Brooklyn, New York.]

Specialized skills, no longer needed

"I know how to wait for four days for a mailed letter to arrive."

Mark Patinkin says that his specialized skills are no longer needed.

Corrupted-Files.com

Another reason for profs to insist upon paper: Corrupted-Files.com.

The website urges "Keep this site a Secret!" Oops — too late!

Thanks, George.

[To students: Don’t try it. Your professors are likely aware of this trick. Even if they’re not, a file that refuses to open is your problem, not theirs. When getting such a file, few if any professors will feel anything other than the feeling that they’re being had. They can figure out that they’re being had by opening the file with a text-editor and discovering the big piece of nothing you’ve just sent. You’ll then be in even deeper trouble for having engaged in academic misconduct.]

"Let the Earth Bear Witness"

[Caution: This video includes graphic images of a state's brutally violent response to its citizens.]

The music is by Mike Scott of The Waterboys. The words are by William Butler Yeats (and George Moore).

A song from the play Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), sung by the Poor Old Woman:

They shall be remembered for ever,
They shall be alive for ever,
They shall be speaking for ever,
The people shall hear them for ever.

From "The Blood Bond," a song from the play Diarmuid and Grania (1901), by Yeats and Moore, lines sung by Diarmuid:

Let the sea bear witness,
Let the wind bear witness,
Let the earth bear witness,
Let the fire bear witness,
Let the dew bear witness,
Let the stars bear witness!

[Texts from William Butler Yeats, The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1983), 537, 538.]

A grade worse than F

Simon Fraser University now offers a grade worse than F: FD, "failed for academic dishonesty." The FD, given only by department chairs, will remain on a student transcript for two years after graduation, at which time it fades to a plain old F. Rob Gordon, chair of SFU's Senate Committee on Academic Integrity in Student Learning and Evaluation, describes the FD as appropriate for students whose misconduct "warrants a severe penalty, usually because they are repeat violators."

Putting this sort of policy into practice might be difficult: is a student who engages in petty, small-scale cheating on quizzes more deserving of an FD than a student who turns in one massively plagiarized paper? But perhaps the fear of FD — scarlet letters indeed — will deter some students from cheating at all.

Read more:

New FD grade a student’s record of shame (SFU News Online)
New grade exposes academic dishonesty (Martlet)