Telegram (Easy Living)

A telegram, as seen in Easy Living (dir. Mitchell Leisen, 1937). You either find this sort of thing inspired and funny or you don’t. I do. Easy Living has a great Automat scene with Jean Arthur and Ray Milland. The screenplay is by Preston Sturges.

Thanks to Paul Harrington for recommending this film.

Related posts
Automat beverage section
How to send telegrams
“Lunch Hour NYC”
New York, 1964: Automat
One more Automat

[725 West 112th Street? Somewhere in the Hudson River.]

The new Blogger interface on the iPad

The new Blogger interface is better than it was: one now can at least edit existing posts on an iPad. But it’s difficult to see this barely readable text as an improvement. It’s difficult to see this text at all.

Related posts
Blogger interface on the iPad
The new Blogger interface, unliked

[So difficult that I didn’t catch the lowercase i at the beginning of the third sentence.]

Close reading and the brain

Stanford researchers are looking at the effect of close reading on the brain. It’s all good.

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.)