Jacques Barzun, teacher

Educator, professor, or teacher: which shall it be?

At best the title of teacher is suspect. I notice that on their passports and elsewhere, many of my academic colleagues put down their occupation as Professor. Anything to raise the tone: a professor is to a teacher what a cesspool technician is to a plumber. Anything to enlarge the scope: not long ago, I joined a club which described its membership as made up of Authors, Artists, and Amateurs — an excellent reason for joining. Conceive my disappointment when I found that the classifications had broken down and I was now entered as an Educator. Doubtless we shall have to keep the old pugilistic title of Professor, though I cannot think of Dante in Hell coming upon Brunetto Latini, and exclaiming, “Why, Professor!” But we can and must get rid of “Educator.” Imagine the daily predicament: someone asks, “What do you do?” — “I profess and I educate.” It is unspeakable and absurd.

Jacques Barzun, Teacher in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945).

If you teach: What do you call yourself? What do you ask your students to call you?

[“Cesspool technician” reminds me of Ed Norton’s self-description in a Honeymooners episode: “I’m an engineer in subterranean sanitation.” The club is no doubt the Century Association, “an association of over two thousand authors, artists, and amateurs of letters and the fine arts.“ Dante says to Brunetto Latini, “Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto?” [Ser Brunetto, are you here?] (Inferno XV.30). An explanation: “The title ser (the second element in messer, cf. French monsieur) placed before Brunetto Latini’s first name is a sign of respect, as is the use of in the Italian text of the formal pronoun voi”: Anthony Oldcorn, in the notes to Stanley Lombardo’s translation of the Inferno (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009). Jacques Barzun will be 104 on November 30. And if you’re wondering why it’s How to e-mail a professor: professor is the word I thought students would search for.]

Update, November 18: Just out, a biography by Michael Murray: Jacques Barzun: Portrait of a Mind (Savannah: Frederic C. Beil, 2011).

Hooverville 2.0

In the wee small hours of this morning, police removed protesters from New York’s Zuccotti Park. This Hooverville conversation seems eerily relevant:

Tom asked, “Why would they push a fella like that aroun’?”

The young man stopped his work and looked in Tom’s eyes. “Chris’ knows,” he said. “You jus’ come. Maybe you can figger her out. Some fellas say one thing, an’ some says another thing. But you jus’ camp in one place a little while, an’ you see how quick a deputy sherriff shoves you along.”

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

[Hooverville: “a shantytown built by unemployed and destitute people during the Depression of the early 1930s. . . . named after H.C. Hoover, during whose presidency such accommodations were built” (New Oxford American Dictionary).]

Jim Koper’s photographs from Zuccotti Park
“I go to time out for cheating”
“Take the rich off welfare!”
Man with beard
Woman with sign
Man with flag
Tarps

American Censorship Day

Today Tomorrow is American Censorship Day, marking the start of congressional hearings on H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act. As the website Public Knowledge puts it, “This bill seriously screws with the Internet.” Creative Commons explains:

SOPA would drastically increase both the costs and risks of providing platforms for sharing and collaboration (think sites ranging from individual blogs to massive community projects such as Wikipedia, from open education repositories to Flickr and YouTube), and vaporize accessibility to huge swathes of free culture, whether because running a platform becomes too costly, or [because] a single possibly infringing item causes an entire domain to be taken down. [My emphasis.]

Related reading
Text of H.R. 3261 (Public Knowledge)
Urgent: Stop [U.S.] American censorship of the Internet (Creative Commons)

If you’re an educator a teacher, consider signing Creative Commons open letter to the ranking members of the House Committee on the Judiciary. You can also send a message to your representative in Congress via Public Knowledge.

[Oops: the sixteenth is tomorrow, not today. But better early than never.]

Jodi Birdwell

Jodi Birdwell, Recap. Four vintage typewriters, four vintage boxes, four vintage stools, four vintage paper lanterns, Victorian rug. 2011.]

Elaine and I took a drive this weekend to see an exhibition of Jodi Birdwell’s work, “Love Letters to Cy . . . and other notes.” Cy is Cy Twombly, and Birdwell’s work bears traces of his in the form of faint inscriptions. But her work is really her own. Her materials often suggest a garage or workshop: house paint, plywood, casters and furniture knobs. These paintings and installations seem to be working out a grammar of forms: birds and elephants; cups and pots; sausage shapes that begin to resemble socks; dome-like shapes that suggest bowls, cradles, igloos, lamps, planets, and tents. Walking around the gallery became ever more interesting as the family resemblances among paintings became more noticeable. I noticed resemblances too in some of the written elements in paintings: biRb and biRd, and a list of rhymes: pail, kale, and so on.

Missing from these photographs is the warmth of this installation: the Christmas lights on the floor function like a campfire for this gathering of typewriters big and small, out under a paper moon and stars.

Jodi Birdwell
“Love Letters to Cy . . . and other notes”
The Merwin & Wakeley Galleries
Illinois Wesleyan University
Bloomington, Illinois
November 8 – December 8, 2011

Further reading and viewing
Jodi Birdwell (artist’s website)
The Merwin & Wakely Galleries

Mitt Romney at Bain

In the New York Times, a look at Mitt Romney, man of business:

Mr. Romney’s career at Bain Capital, which he owned and ran as chief executive, is a cornerstone of his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination — a credential, he argues, that showcases the management skills and business acumen that America needs to revive a stalled economy. Creating jobs, Mr. Romney says, is exactly what he knows how to do.

The White House, though, is already preparing a less flattering portrayal, trying to frame Mr. Romney’s record at Bain as evidence that he would pursue slash and burn economics and that his business career thrived by enriching the elite at the expense of the working class.

You can guess which account of life at Bain Capital I think is more convincing.

Elaine worked at Bain & Company (pre-Bain Capital) in the 1980s, processing other people’s words, including Mitt Romney’s. As she puts it, Romney sees the world through “Bain-colored glasses.”

Further reading
Downsizing and Outsourcing (Management Tools 2011, Bain & Company)

In the groves of academe

A’s for everyone:

Students at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences who received A’s for two [online] courses that were never taught will get their money back, but they’ll still get to keep the academic credit, an administrator reported on Wednesday. . . .

After reviewing the course work of the enrolled students, the university decided that all of them had met the learning objectives of the two online courses “through other courses, clinical experience, and educational activities embedded throughout the curriculum.”

Students of Professor Who Didn’t Show Up Keep Their A’s and Get Refunds, Too (Chronicle of Higher Education)

It’s telling, I think, that only three students complained when the professor went missing.

[For the plural of a letter, Garner’s Modern American Usage recommends italic type followed by a plain -s: As. I’ve followed the Chronicle in using an apostrophe.]

Eleven, eleven, eleven

Wikipedia explains it:

Eleven is the first number which cannot be counted with a human’s eight fingers and two thumbs additively. In English, it is the smallest positive integer requiring three syllables and the largest prime number with a single-morpheme name. Its etymology originates from a Germanic compound ainlif meaning “one left.” It is also the second number in the “teens.”

I like the quotation marks around “teens.” But is eleven a teen? The American Heritage Dictionary defines teens as “The numbers 10 through 19 or 13 through 19.” Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate says “the numbers 13 to 19 inclusive; specifically : the years 13 to 19 in a lifetime or century.” And the Oxford English Dictionary agrees: “The numbers of which the names end in -teen. Also, years, temperatures, pay, etc., measured in quantities which end in -teen.” I’m pointing out these complications here, not on the Wikipedia article’s Talk page. (Eschew disputation!)

November 11, 1921

[“Cities Observe Day from East to West: San Francisco, at Telephone, Hears President Deliver Arlington Address.” New York Times, November 12, 1921.]

Related posts
November 11, 1918
November 11, 1919
November 11, 1920

Ajax on my mind

Watch Joe Paterno address the students gathered outside his house last night. He advises them to get a good night’s sleep and to study, and adds one more thing: “We are Penn State,” with a fist in the air. As George Vecsey writes of Paterno in the New York Times, “he still doesn’t get it.”

The disgraceful events at Penn State have me thinking about Sophocles’ Ajax, a play I taught last week. As the play begins, Ajax, the great representative of old-school warrior values, is doing the unspeakable. Furious that Odysseus and not he has been given Achilles’ armor, he sets out to murder Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Odysseus. But Athena deludes him, and he ends up torturing and killing animals, thinking they’re the Greek leaders. Then he comes to his senses, and his pain grows infinitely greater. His wife Tecmessa describes his reaction to what he has done:

And when he saw the carnage under his roof,
He grasped his head and screamed,
Crashing down onto the bloody wreckage,
Then just sitting in the slaughter, fists clenched,
His nails tearing into his hair.

Ajax, as we would say, gets it, and chooses to fall on his sword. Paterno might at least acknowledge some measure of shame and sorrow for his silence.

[Source: Sophocles, Four Tragedies. Trans. Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007). The Ajax translation is by Meineck.]

Bil Keane (1922–2011)

“As a child, he drew on his bedroom walls”: Bil Keane, Creator of The Family Circus, Dies at 89 (New York Times).