Strunk and White cat

It will HAVE a cheezburger.

[We now return to the Continental Paper Grading Co., already in progress.]

“When Seymour was twenty-one”

(When Seymour was twenty-one, a nearly full professor of English, and had already been teaching for two years, I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn’t think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library.)

J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction (1963)

I like “nearly full.”

Rock Odyssey

Homer for kids: Rock Odyssey.

Telemachus is sixteen years old in this retelling, which would seem to mean that the Trojan War and Odysseus’ wanderings now run for eight (not ten) years apiece — or that while Odysseus is away, Penelope — no, not that.

Poems that dont look like plagiarism

A Google search — poems that dont look like plagiarism — brought a hapless surfer to Orange Crate Art. But I can help, sort of. Here is a poem that doesn’t look like plagiarism. It looks entirely original, like no one else’s poems. That’s because I just wrote it myself, honest. Enjoy.

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us?
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

An Illinois coinage

Blagodoccio.

Related reading
All Rod Blagojevich posts

Caffeine-free

For about a week, I’ve been humming along without caffeine. (See blog description above, at least for today.) I’d say I’m surprised, but in my caffeine-free equanimity, I’m only mildly puzzled.

My withdrawal began without intention. For several days, for no particular reason, I was drinking only tea, without my usual cup or two of coffee. (I like tea.) Then I began drinking less tea, more water, just to see how I would feel. (I felt fine.) Then I began drinking one cup of tea with breakfast, and decaffeinated tea and coffee for the rest of the day. After a couple of days, I could feel the unpleasant difference — call it vague anxiety — that the one caffeinated cup was making in my mornings. So I switched to decaffeinated, period.

Decaf tea and coffee make me think of filter cigarettes: flavorwise, there’s something missing — not caffeine, but whatever else gets lost in decaffeination. But I suspect that decaf, like soy milk, will soon enough turn into a real thing in its own right.

[May 22, 2010: For several days, the “blog description above” read “Now caffeine-free.” Still is. Still am.]

Grade inflation in the NYT crossword

In tomorrow’s New York Times crossword:

11-Down: “Pretty good grade.” The answer: AMINUS. In my gradebook, that’s more than “pretty good.”

[No spoilers here. Highlight the empty space to see the answer.]

“[S]omething carelessly solid”

From New Directions in Prose & Poetry, 1938, ed. James Laughlin (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1938).

This brief passage (concerning lines from John Milton’s L’Allegro) closes the volume; there is no commentary, and no Exhibit B. Anyone tempted to moan about a decline in literary studies might do well to consider what passed for high criticism in 1938. (The Miltonic Setting, Past and Present was published by Cambridge University Press.) A rhythm that is “solidly based” in a cottage? A slight rise in rhythm? A rhythm that “has something carelessly solid in it”? Say what? Or more formally: Explain??

As for the oaks, I think they lost their dignity by appearing in this bit of exegesis. Tillyard’s bit, I mean; not mine.

English majors of a certain age might recall being exposed to Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture (1943). I remember thinking that everyone was walking around with humours and spheres and angelic orders in their heads. Worldviews! Worldviews for sale!

Roger Ebert on 3-D

He hates it:

The marketing executives are right that audiences will come to see a premium viewing experience they can’t get at home. But they’re betting on the wrong experience.

Read more:

Why I Hate 3-D (And You Should Too) (Newsweek)

Bill Moyers on public broadcasting

Bill Moyers, from a 2004 interview with Terry Gross:

I think the most important thing that we can do is to continue to treat Americans as citizens, not just consumers. If you look out and see an audience of consumers, you want to sell them something. If you look out and see an audience of citizens, you want to share something with them, and there is a difference.

Fresh Air has assembled excerpts from several interviews to mark Moyers’s retirement from PBS.