Matthew Crawford on making judgments

Exactly right:

The experienced mind can get good at integrating an extraordinarily large number of variables and detecting a coherent pattern. It is the pattern that is attended to, not the individual variables. Our ability to make good judgments is holistic in character, and arises from repeated confrontations with real things: comprehensive entities that are grasped all at once, in a manner that may be incapable of explicit articulation. The tacit dimension of knowledge puts limits on the reduction of jobs to rule following.

Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (New York: Penguin, 2009).

Notice that Crawford is not saying that the reasons for a judgment may be beyond articulation: it’s the manner in which one grasps things “all at once” that may be beyond articulation.

In my line of business, the reduction of work to rule-following is probably best seen in the mechanical process of filling in squares on a grading rubric. Judgment can certainly be arbitrary or faulty, but a rubric is no guard against faulty judgment. And I would suggest that no rubric can so detailed as to account for every feature that might (and ought to) make a difference in one’s judgment. The rubric is a device that minimizes — or better, pretends to minimize — the necessary work of judgment. The rubric is a product of the same mindset that identifies rather than chooses a student to receive, say, a scholarship.

Other Shop Class as Soul Craft posts
On higher education
On problems

[It was this item that prompted me to get around to writing this post.]

Word of the day: phony

Teaching a Sappho poem (the fourth poem on this page), I showed my students the first stanza in Greek. It’s a fun thing to do, even for the Greekless: at least a handful of words in transliterated Greek will immediately suggest English descendants, reducing in some small way the distance between the ancient world and our own. For example: φωνείσας, phoneisas, a form of φωνεῖν, phonein, to produce a sound. After we hit phonics, phonograph, and telephone, I wondered: could phonein explain phony — something that sounds plausible, but isn’t?

Uh, no. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary suggests that phony may derive from an “alteration of fawney gilded brass ring used in the fawney rig, a confidence game, from Irish fáinne ring, from Old Irish ánne.” The Oxford English Dictionary has a citation from Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1823) that explains the game:

Fawney rig, a common fraud thus practised: — a fellow drops a brass ring, double gilt, which he picks up before the party meant to be cheated, and to whom he disposes of it for less than its supposed, and ten times more than its real, value.

M-W suggests that the Old Irish ánne is “perhaps akin” to anus. Which seems to make sense if we’re speaking of phonies.

A new song from Randy Newman

“With lyrics from the viewpoint of a voter who casts his ballot solely based on skin color, the song draws attention to something Newman has noticed and written about for 40 years: racism in America.” “I’m Dreaming” is a free download from Nonesuch Records.

A perfect way of writing

From a spam comment:

The place elѕe may just anybоdy get that type of information in such a perfect way of writing?

Frankly, no.

VDP, Letter from Berlin

Van Dyke Parks’s Letter from Berlin is now in the Los Angeles Times, with art by SMiLE illustrator Frank Holmes. It’s Proustian I tell ya.

Related reading
All Van Dyke Parks posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

A “wheelchair dude” in our Macs Does a curious sentence in the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus have anything to do with David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest? Now there’s an answer.

Now the other foot

This zillionaire doofus doesn’t need a Reverend Wright. He seems to be his own worst enemy.

Related reading
All OCA Mitt Romney posts
The Bain of My Existence (Elaine’s account of life at Bain & Co.)

A. L. Salomon & Co.

[The American Stationer and Office Outfitter, July 7, 1917. Click for a larger view.]

“Mother! Mother! Whatever shall we do? Our shawl straps are past mending, our silicate slates have cracked, and our mucilage pot is nearly dry! And we have yet many months of school to go!”

“There, there, children! Worry not! A. L. Salomon & Co., Wholesale Stationers, The House for School Supplies and Stationery Sundries, will supply all our needs!”

[They embrace.]

Nicholson Baker, re: Maeve Brennan

I am cheered to see Maeve Brennan’s name in a New York Times Q. and A. with Nicholson Baker:

Which writers are egregiously overlooked or underrated?

All writers are underrated. They’re all trying to do their best. It’s hard to finish a book. But Denton Welch deserves more of a fuss. Also John McNulty and that Long-Winded Lady, Maeve Brennan. Shakespeare is probably the most overrated writer of all time, although I must say his sonnets are incredible.

A related post
Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady

The new DFW biography

D. T. Max. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. New York: Viking, 2012. 356 pages. $27.95.

To its credit, D. T. Max’s biography deepens the enigma of David Foster Wallace’s character. The humble truth-teller of the rightly celebrated Kenyon commencement address was no saint. Wallace’s committment to “the capital-T Truth” (as he called it at Kenyon) did not extend to the presentation of the self in everyday life (claims of perfect SAT scores and other imaginary achievements) or to his non-fiction, which, it turns out, is filled with invented circumstances and events. Wallace’s dedication to teaching did not stop him from sleeping with his students. (He joked to a friend about trying to get fired.) His deep gratitude for the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous did not prevent him from “thirteenth-stepping,” seeking out sexual partners at meetings. The details of Wallace’s violence toward others — shoving a student, ramming a stranger’s car, throwing a table at a lover, plotting, at least briefly, to murder that lover’s husband — make for a very dark portrait.

And then there is the violence Wallace directed against himself. This biography omits the most gruesome detail of his suicide (it can be found in the autopsy report). But Max leaves so much more unsaid. One example: he mentions a history of suicide in Wallace’s mother’s family — and stops there. Did Wallace know about these suicides? Did they occur before his birth, or in his lifetime? Did he know the people involved? Could a family history of depression have had something to do with his struggles? The answers might explain nothing, but the questions are still worth asking. And if Max has no answers to them, that would be worth stating too. Another example: Max has spoken with a man he calls Big Craig, the model for Don Gately in Infinite Jest. That there was a Gately is big news, but it’s presented here in passing. We learn that Craig — also an addict in recovery — suspected that halfway-house resident Wallace was looking for material for a book. But what of their relationship? Did Craig become something of a mentor to Wallace? Did the two stay in touch? Does the climactic fight scene in Infinite Jest draw in any way from Big Craig’s life?

As one must now expect with new non-fiction from trade publishers, the writing in this biography is in need of more careful editorial attention. There are frequent problems with pronouns (missing referents) and at least one error in subject-verb agreement. And there’s a conspicuous factual error about Infinite Jest (Charles Tavis is Avril Incandenza’s half-brother, not her husband’s brother.) A larger criticism: Max’s attempt to link Wallace’s interest in “sincerity” to a midwestern habit of saying what one means is, I think, an East Coaster’s fantasy. Life in the midwest — trust me — can be full of evasions, silences, and mask-like tact. Some of the details of Wallace’s life in the midwest show just that.

Any reader of Wallace’s work will want to read this biography. But I’d suggest — and if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know where this sentence is going — getting it from a library.

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (via Pinboard)