Domestic comedy

“I think a sandwich tastes better cut on the diagonal.”

Related reading
All “domestic comedy” posts

“Going Up the Country,” corrected

There’s a clever faux-documentary from the future airing on YouTube, The Beatles: 1000 Years Later. A sample: “The Beatles rose to prominence when they traveled from their native Linverton to America to perform at Ed Sullivan’s annual Woodstock Festival.” I thought of this documentary while reading WCBS-FM’s description of Canned Heat’s 1968 song “Going Up the Country”:

It was the heart of the 1960s, when the first wave of Baby Boomers were reading Steinbeck and Kerouac and romanticizing life on the road. Delivered in [Bob] Hite’s warbling, almost embarrassed falsetto — complete with jug and recorder as accompaniment — “Going Up The Country” invites us to “pack [our] leaving trunk” to go to some unknown place where “the water tastes like wine” and jump in and “stay drunk all the time.”

Could there be a more romantic, utopian and fantastic picture of life in the country?

“Steinbeck and Kerouac”: Kerouac, okay, but Steinbeck? I suppose the writer might be thinking of Travels with Charley (1962).

“Hite’s warbling, almost embarrassed falsetto”: Alan Wilson, not Bob Hite, sings on “Going Up the Country.”

“[C]omplete with jug and recorder”: neither jug nor recorder can be heard on the record. There is a flute though, played by Jim Horn. Where do the jug and recorder come from? From this lip-syncing performance, which features beer bottle (not jug) and wooden flute (not recorder).

“Could there be a more romantic, utopian and fantastic picture of life in the country?” Well, yes. Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” comes to mind. What the WCBS-FM writer overlooks in “Going Up the Country” is the urgency of flight:

Now baby, pack your leavin’ trunk, you
    know we got to leave today
Just exactly where we’re goin’ I cannot say
But we might even leave the USA
’Cause there’s a brand-new game I don’t
    want to play

I remember thinking (back in the day) that these lines carried a suggestion of fleeing to Canada to avoid the draft. Perhaps that was the start of my life as a close reader.

Other Canned Heat posts
Alan Wilson
Canned Heat (in east-central Illinois)
Forty years apart (“Bull Doze Blues” and “Going Up the Country”)
Hooker ’n Heat

Infinite Jest and Mike Huckabee

Hal Incandenza is working out a taxonomy of liars:

“Then there are what I might call your Kamikaze-style liars. These’ll tell you a surreal and fundamentally incredible lie, and then pretend a crisis of conscience and retract the original lie, and then offer you the lie they really want you to buy instead, so the real lie’ll appear as some kind of concession, a settlement with truth. That type’s mercifully easy to see through.”

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).

Hal’s observations might help one to understand Mike Huckabee’s statements earlier this week about Barack Obama’s childhood. Huckabee began with the claim that Obama grew up in Kenya:

“And one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American. . . . But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.“

And later:

“In my answer, I simply misspoke when I alluded to President Obama growing up in Kenya and meant to say Indonesia.”

And later:

“I do think he [Obama] has a different world view, and I think it is, in part, molded out of a very different experience. Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas.”

See? Not Kenya. Indonesia. And madrassas. Obama did not attend a madrassa, and he spent most of his childhood in Hawaii. Scouting and Rotary, by the way, are alive and well there, as they are in Indonesia and Kenya. Mercifully easy to see through? I hope so.

As Andrew Sullivan observes, Huckabee is “Palin without the figure.”

Related reading
Huckabee’s “Kenya” clarification (Washington Post)
Huckabee: Obama Was Raised in Kenya (Mother Jones)
Gerakan Pramuka Indonesia (Scouting in Indonesia)
Kenya Scouts Association
Pramuka Indonesia (Wikipedia)
Rotary Clubs vs Madrassas (The Daily Dish)
Rotary Clubs vs Madrassas, Ctd (The Daily Dish)
Rotary Clubs vs Madrassas, Ctd (The Daily Dish)
Rotary in Indonesia (Rotary First 100)
Rotary in Kenya (Rotary District 9200)

Semi-mistaken identity

Not only was I mistaken for a librarian by a public-library patron this afternoon; I also answered that patron’s question to her satisfaction, a question that the patron asked knowing that I was not a librarian.

[I’m still not a librarian.]

Remediation in community colleges

The New York Times reports on remediation in community colleges:

The knowledge gap at community colleges is increasingly being recognized as a national problem. About 65 percent of all community college students nationwide need some form of remedial education, with students’ shortcomings in math outnumbering those in reading by 2 to 1 . . . .

Nationwide, as at CUNY, fewer than half of students directed to take one or more remedial classes — “developmental education” is the term administrators prefer — complete them.

The saddest thing in this article is the lament of a student newly aware of his deficits in mathematics, reading, and writing: “‘Throughout high school, I was a good math student, and to find out that it was my lowest grade of all three was really surprising.’”

A junkie’s pockets

[Click for a larger view.]

Clockwise from the left, the contents of Professor Darcy’s pockets: matches, Life Savers, uncanceled stamp torn from an envelope (?), dip pen (?), pocket notebook, pencil, coin, Camel cigarette pack, key, coins, penknife, keys. The professor is also a junkie. Seeing these 1933-things on the screen just sends me.

The Mystery of the Wax Museum (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1933) is a stylish pre-Code horror film in glorious two-color Technicolor. Lots of snappy patter, much of it from Fay Wray. If you know her only from King Kong, as I did, you’ll find this film a surprise.

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Extras : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The House on 92nd Street : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : The Sopranos : Spellbound

PEREC, not ADAIR

Errors in New York Times crossword clues are rare. There’s one in today’s puzzle: 60-Across, “Gilbert       , author of A Void, a 290-page novel without the letter E.”

Gilbert Adair is not the author of A Void (1994); Georges Perec is. Adair translated Perec’s novel La disparition (1969) from French to English. Translating sans e a novel sans e is no ordinary feat of translation, but Perec is the author, as I’m sure Adair would be the first to say.

[The capitals in the post title? Not shouting, just a convention with crossword answers.]

Random Exhibit Title Generator

“Apposite Banality: The Dysfunction of the Local”: just one of many titles from the Random Exhibit Title Generator (via Coudal).

See also Write Your Own Academic Sentence.

For Infinite Jest readers only

“We think 2011 is clearly going to be the year of iPad 2,” Mr. Jobs said.

Some Infinite Jest posts
Attention : Description : Loveliness : “Night-noises” : Novelty : Romance : Sadness : ❍ : Telephony : Television

FeedBurner problems

My FeedBurner stats this morning show a drop from 7,389 readers to 223. I’m guessing that the other 7,166 have been put to work sorting stacks of recently lost Gmail.

Update, March 3: FeedBurner is working again. Welcome back, readers. Welcome, new readers, too.

[FeedBurner too is a Google service.]