Alice Notley on “non-careerist”

In the preface to Coming After: Essays on Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), the poet Alice Notley considers neglected poets (the so-called second generation of the so-called New York School) and observes that “‘non-careerist’ . . . is not the same as not professional.” That’s a useful distinction for makers and practitioners who are deadly serious about what they do but unconcerned about making the right moves or pleasing the right people.

Orange pencil art

[Click for a larger view.]

Gunther at Lexikaliker sent me an array of German and Japanese pencils, one of the most thoughtful gifts I’ve ever received. Above, three orange examples of the art of pencilmaking. From top to bottom: an A.W. Faber Faber 6 copying pencil, a Lyra Orlow steno pencil, and a Lyra Orlow-Techno.

[Click for a larger view.]

These pencils have the appeal of well-made tools: everything about them bespeaks careful attention to detail. I like the contrast between the stately A.W. Faber and the sans serif Faber 6. I like the contrast between the capitalized cursive Orlow and the modernist lower-case orlow-techno. I like the scales and lyres, especially the lyres. I like the different shades of orange. I like everything about these pencils.

Thank you again, Gunther!

[Photographs by Michael Leddy.]

David Marsh on the subjunctive

With a nod to Macbeth, David Marsh looks at the subjunctive: If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done correctly (The Guardian).

(And he quotes OCA on if I were and if I was.)

The Great American Dream Machine

Coming soon to a PBS station near you, unless it already has or isn’t ever: The Great American Dream Machine 40th Anniversary Special.

As a high-school student all those years ago, I was crazy for The Great American Dream Machine, which felt like an oasis of hipness and intelligence. Here’s one clip, Marshall Efron grading olives.

Related reading
The Great American Dream Machine (Wikipedia)

Flurries

One of the rewards of keeping a blog is spotting (via the excellent StatCounter) what I will call flurries — mysterious surges of interest that lead searchers to a post. One day several weeks ago, several dozen people across the United States were searching for Mongol 2 3/8 and found my post on that great pencil of the past. Today, several dozen people in Great Britain have searched for director of White Heat and High Sierra and found my post on those films (directed by Raoul Walsh). My guess is that an an eBay item prompted the Mongol search; a crossword clue, the Raoul Walsh search. I’m happy though to remain in the dark, with flurries.

[Mysterious, really? Okay, slightly mysterious.]

Ben Leddy on YouTube

He’s playing Balkan and French-Canadian tunes, clawhammer-style.

Lucille Ball

[“Maurice Chevalier, Lucille Ball and her husband Desi Arnaz (L-R) during rehearsal for the TV show I Love Lucy.“ Photograph by Leonard McCombe. Hollywood, California, August 1959. From the Life Photo Archive.]

Lucille Ball was born one hundred years ago today.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

What can you do when family members ask you to go? Go. I’m glad that I did: Rise of the Planet of the Apes (dir. Rupert Wyatt) is some powerfully fun stuff. The film trades on various deep fears: of disease, genetic engineering (Pandora’s box), street violence, and terrorism (apes crash into and out of buildings). James Franco and Freida Pinto play a supremely clueless couple who’d be better off forgetting about other primates and concentrating on each other. (You dolts!) John Lithgow is very good as a father with Alzheimer’s. The real stars of the film though are the apes, with faces and gestures more expressive than those of the non-animated actors.

Two opposable thumbs up.

Lysistratic nonaction

The Guardian reports that in Barbacoas, Colombia, women have sworn off sex until the government builds a paved road to their small town. Says Ruby Quinonez, one of the strike’s leaders, “‘We are being deprived of our most human rights and as women we can’t allow that to happen.’” Follow the link and you’ll understand why the need for a road is urgent.

The Guardian reporter seems not to know that the so-called “crossed legs” strategy is not new to Colombia. In 1997, a women’s sex strike led to a brief ceasefire among guerrillas, drug traffickers, and paramilitaries. In 2006, the girlfriends and wives of gang members in Pereira refused to have sex until their partners renounced violence.

An appropriate name for this sort of protest: Lysistratic nonaction. The term appears in a list of 198 methods of non-violent protest in Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation (Boston: The Albert Einstein Institution, 2002).

[In Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata (411 BCE), Lysistrata leads the women of Greece in a sex strike to end the Peloponnesian War.]

Word of the day: pupil

I noticed a now-fading distinction in Theodore Bernstein’s The Careful Writer (1965):

Those who attend elementary schools are pupils; those who attend higher institutions of learning (high schools may be included among these) are students.

Pupil seems to belong with chalkboard and filmstrip and lunchroom in some school of the past (where I was a pupil). At any rate, Google shows student enjoying wider use:

“elemetary school students”: 4,230,000
“elementary school student”: 1,190,000

“elementary school pupils”: 3,550,000
“elementary school pupil”: 390,000

But why pupil anyway? Like any unexamined word suddenly examined, it looks a bit odd. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate explains:

1 : a child or young person in school or in the charge of a tutor or instructor : STUDENT
2 : one who has been taught or influenced by a famous or distinguished person

Middle English pupille minor ward, from Anglo-French, from Latin pupillus male ward (from diminutive of pupus boy) & pupilla female ward, from diminutive of pupa girl, doll

M-W dates the word to 1536. Related words, as you might suspect: puppet (1538), puppy (1567), and pupa (1815).

But why does pupil also mean (since 1567) “the contractile aperture in the iris of the eye”? M-W explains:

Middle French pupille, from Latin pupilla, from diminutive of pupa doll; from the tiny image of oneself seen reflected in another’s eye

The explanation smacks of folk etymology, but it’s for real. The Oxford English Dictionary corroborates: “so called on account of the small reflected image seen when looking into someone’s pupil.” Thus John Donne in “The Good-Morrow”:

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares,
And true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest.

And thus James Bond in Goldfinger, where a reflection in Bonita’s eye saves Bond from a blackjack to the head.

[In choosing between pupil and student, consider: which word confers greater dignity on children?]