Wade Mainer (1907–2011)

Sad news: Wade Mainer, a Pioneer of Bluegrass Banjo, Dies at 104 (New York Times). I’ve become aware of his music via Joe Bussard’s Country Classics.

YouTube has an interview with Wade Mainer in three parts. Bonus: songs and banjo tricks with Wade and Julia Mainer, who were married for seventy-three years.

Taylor Branch on college sports

Taylor Branch’s Atlantic article The Shame of College Sports is a must-read for anyone who cares about education. One detail, concerning a civil suit brought against the University of Georgia by Jan Kemp, an English instructor who was fired after refusing to change students’ grades:

In trying to defend themselves, Georgia officials portrayed Kemp as naive about sports. “We have to compete on a level playing field,” said Fred Davison, the university president. During the Kemp civil trial, in 1986, Hale Almand, Georgia’s defense lawyer, explained the university’s patronizing aspirations for its typical less-than-scholarly athlete. “We may not make a university student out of him,” Almand told the court, “but if we can teach him to read and write, maybe he can work at the post office rather than as a garbage man when he gets through with his athletic career.”

Ads on campus

The New York Times reports on corporations using college students as “‘brand ambassadors’ or ‘campus evangelists’”:

Companies from Microsoft on down are increasingly seeking out the big men and women on campus to influence their peers. The students most in demand are those who are popular — ones involved in athletics, music, fraternities or sororities. Thousands of Facebook friends help, too. What companies want are students with inside knowledge of school traditions and campus hotspots. In short, they want students with the cred to make brands seem cool, in ways that a TV or magazine ad never could.

The Times article highlights a move-in-day crew of students wearing American Eagle T-shirts and a Hewlett-Packard student-rep who wears an HP shirt and sits with her HP laptop in a wi-fi spot.

What I find especially irksome about these corporate efforts is the way they exploit the decency and naiveté of young adults, few of whom would be willing to tell a fellow student, any student, to take a hike. The sighing response of a student who received help and merch from the American Eagle crew: “I’ll probably always remember it.”

More troubling to me though are advertising efforts that originate on campus. Electronic signage, mixing advertisements and announcements, is a recent collegiate innovation that threatens to make every sighted member of an academic community a member of a captive audience. Such signage comes with an assurance that alcohol, tobacco, and weapons will — of course — not be advertised. I find nothing reassuring about that assurance, because I conceive of a college campus as something close to a sacred space, set apart, dedicated to purposes above commerce. I would never object to advertising in a stadium (where I never have to set foot if I so choose). But the prospect of quads filled with glittering commercials is intolerable. And there’s no telling a sign to take a hike.

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 1999 about ads on university websites, former Indiana University president Thomas Ehrlich described his struggles with creeping commercialization. While president, he once “in a moment of weakness” approved a large sign for announcements and ads. It came down when “faculty and others howled.” Ehrlich’s conclusion:

Higher education is a calling, and its mission is to enhance society by teaching, research, and service. Colleges and universities have obligations, as well as opportunities, to strengthen the fabric of our society by stressing essential dimensions of life that are not commercial — in particular, the moral and civic responsibilities of every student, faculty member, and administrator on campus.

Would that everyone in higher education saw it that way.

[The Chronicle piece is behind a paywall. Orange Crate Art, by the way, will always be an ad-free blog.]

Tupperware pencil

If this pencil could talk:

Girls Ladies, I hope that you have you’ve all enjoyed the chance this demonstration opportunity to try see for yourself get acquainted with the latest products from Tupperware. Each Every Tupperware product locks in flavor and preserves keeps your moist foods moist, crisp foods crisp. Yes, Tupperware keeps all your foods airtight fresh. I know that you’ll all want to . . . . Now wrap it up and start taking orders.

[This post is the twelfth in an occasional series, “From the Museum of Supplies.” The museum is imaginary. The supplies are real. Supplies is my word, and has become my family’s word, for all manner of stationery items. The imaginary script borrows a bit of phrasing — “keeps moist foods moist, crisp foods crisp” — from a 1963 print ad.]

Also from the Museum of Supplies
Dennison’s Gummed Labels No. 27
Eagle Turquoise display case
Eagle Verithin display case
Fineline erasers
Illinois Central Railroad Pencil
A Mad Men sort of man, sort of
Mongol No. 2 3/8
Moore Metalhed Maptacks
Real Thin Leads
Rite-Rite Long Leads
Stanley carpenter’s rule

Word of the day: iridescent

From Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day, it’s iridescent:

PRONUNCIATION:
(ir-i-DES-uhnt)

MEANING:
adjective: Displaying a rainbow of colors that change when seen from different angles.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin irido- (rainbow), from iris (rainbow, iris plant, diaphragm of the eye), from Greek iris. Iris was the goddess of rainbows in Greek mythology. Earliest documented use: 1794.

Iridescent brings to my mind two bits of poetry. One is the first lines of Stanley Lombardo’s translation of Sappho’s appeal to Aphrodite:

Shimmering,
          iridescent,
                   deathless Aphrodite

Note how iridescent echoes shimmering and deathless echoes iridescent. You can read the poem and an explanation of the translation at Jacket.

Iridescent for me also means a sentence in Marianne Moore’s “The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing”:

                It’s fire in the dove-neck’s

iridescence; in the
       inconsistencies
of Scarlatti.

Dove-neck’s, iridescence, in the inconsistencies, of (rhyming with dove), Scarlatti: ah! music. You can read the poem on the fly at Google Books.

A related post
Other words and works of lit (apoplexy, avatar, bandbox, heifer, sanguine, sempiternal)

September 11

[Thornton Dial, 9/11: Interrupting the Morning News. 2002. Pencil, charcoal, watercolor, and coffee stains on paper. 41 × 29 inches. Collection of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation.]

The Class of 9/11

Manhattan’s P.S. 150 stands eight blocks from where the World Trade Center stood. In Jacques Menasche’s short film The Class of 9/11, parents, teachers, staff, and the young people who were first-graders in the fall of 2001 talk about September 11, 2001 and its aftermath: The Class of 9/11 (Vimeo).

Sonny Rollins, Kennedy Center honoree

“They’re not here now, so I feel like I’m sort of representing all of them, all of the guys. Remember, I’m one of the last guys left, as I’m constantly being told”: Sonny Rollins is a 2011 Kennedy Center honoree, along with Barbara Cook, Neil Diamond, Yo-Yo Ma, and Meryl Streep. The awards were announced this past Wednesday, on Rollins’s eighty-first birthday.

Other Rollins posts
Sonny Rollins and golf
Sonny Rollins in Illinois
Sonny Rollins, J.D. Salinger, Robert Taylor
Sonny Rollins on paying the rent

Strunk and White parody

From Gary Klien’s The Elements of Press Release Style:

1. Omit needless words.

Vigorous writing is precise. A press release should contain no unnecessary words, for the same reason a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

BAD
“The company regrets its role in this major environmental catastrophe, and we are fully committed to making the community whole.”

BETTER
“This environmental catastrophe is regrettable.”

Related reading
All Strunk and White posts (via Pinboard)

From Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day

How many times did I hear, as an undergraduate, someone say “Man qua man” and mean it? Too many times. From Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day:

Qua (= in the capacity of; as; in the role of), is often misused and is little needed in English. “The real occasion for the use of qua,” wrote H.W. Fowler, “occurs when a person or thing spoken of can be regarded from more than one point of view or as the holder of various coexistent functions, and a statement about him (or it) is to be limited to him in one of these aspects” (Modern English Usage [1st ed.] at 477). Here is Fowler's example of a justifiable use: “Qua lover he must be condemned for doing what qua citizen he would be condemned for not doing.” But as would surely work better in that sentence; and in any event, this use of qua is especially rare in American English.

One is hard-pressed to divine any purpose but rhetorical ostentation or idiosyncrasy in the following examples:

“Such developments . . . do not explain why students qua students have played such an important role in stimulating protest.” Seymour Martin Lipset, “Why Youth Revolt,” N.Y. Times, 24 May 1989, at A31.

“The proposal that a physician qua physician (or a medical ethic as such) is the necessary or best authority for the existential decision of rational suicide misrepresents medical knowledge and skills.” Steven H. Miles, "Physician-Assisted Suicide and the Profession's Gyrocompass," Hastings Ctr. Rep., May 1995, at 17.

Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (Oxford University Press, 2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly site.

Related posts
Singular they (and the patriarchal language of my undergrad education)
The word of the day: quaquaversal