Knowing and not knowing

“What I know is rivaled only by what I do not know”: Elaine Fine writes about knowledge and humility. It’s a great post.

Elaine’s post makes me want to revise what I wrote in an earlier post about information and knowledge: competent people not only know stuff; they also know how much they don’t know.

On the Bowery

[Click for a larger view.]

On the Bowery (dir. Lionel Rogosin, 1956) is a grim and gripping film whose players are not professional actors but men and women of the Bowery. Elaine Fine has written about its musical score, the work of Charles Mills. You can watch a trailer and learn more at the film’s website.

Swingline “Tot 50”

[Life, September 17, 1956. Click for a larger view.]

I think that some of the claims for this stapler defy plausibility. Though for all I know, reader, you too make your own sandwich bags, carry extra staples anywhere you go, and consider the “Tot 50” “the ideal gift.” You may even sport a Swingline beanie.

For me the most evocative trace of the past in this ad is neither the book cover nor the book bag but the reference to variety stores. The store I remember is Cheap Charlie’s (Thirteenth Avenue, Brooklyn). I can still see in my mind’s eye the shelf that held the Elmer’s Glue-All and LePage’s Mucilage. No staplers though.

For students: this post explains why you should staple pages (unless, that is, your professor asks for paper clips).

[The quotation marks surrounding Tot 50 appeared on the “stapler itself.” Weird.]

Avoiding and averting

Can one avert a fiscal cliff? No, just as one cannot avert a mountain or a banana peel. Cliffs, like mountains and peels, are just there. One can avoid — “keep away from” — them, by paying attention and steering clear, or by putting on the brakes.

One can avert — “see coming and ward off” — an event, say, a disaster, such as the disaster of going over a cliff, literal or figurative. But the cliff itself? No.

[Definitions from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Written after listening to too much NPR.]

Landscape with some rocks

[Zippy, November 17, 2012.]

Bill Griffith is one of Ernie Bushmiller’s not-so-secret admirers. Today’s visit to “Bushmillerland” includes another landscape with the mystical formation known as “some rocks.”

Other Nancy and Zippy posts
“Bushmiller Country”
Hommage à Ernie Bushmiller
Nancy + Sluggo = Perfection

Overheard

“Did you know, Mother, that the sun shines practically every day in Los Angeles?”

Related reading
All “overheard” posts

[The television was on in the background, for “warmth.” And it worked.]

College and the trades

A philosopher and mechanic on college and the trades:

Any high school principal who doesn’t claim as his goal “one hundred percent college attendance” is likely to be accused of harboring “low expectations” and run out of town by indignant parents. This indignation is hard to stand against, since it carries all the moral weight of egalitarianism. Yet it is also snobbish, since it evidently regards the trades as something “low.” The best sort of democratic education is neither snobbish nor egalitarian. Rather, it accords a place of honor in our common life to whatever is best.

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

Other Matthew Crawford posts
On higher education
On making judgments
On problems

Holding it in

Me, writing in 2010:

I cringe a little when I hear students refer to college work as a matter of — dire phrase — “retaining information.” Pick a field, any field, and think of people who are competent in it: are they “retaining information”? No: they know stuff. They understand the contexts in which “information” may be meaningful and are thus able to draw relevant conclusions and solve problems.

I heard the dire phrase again yesterday, and it occurred to me: “retaining information” sounds like a grim successor to toilet training. Holding it in, whatever it is, as long as the teacher requires — yipes.

The HeartRescue Project

Please watch and pass it on: HeartRescue Project.

DFW blues howler

David Foster Wallace’s writing on language and mathematics comes with many mistakes of fact. But the following statement has gone, to my knowledge, unremarked:

Early Blues history reports Chess Records’ legendary Chess brothers shlepping out into Mississippi cotton fields to recruit promising artists on their lunch breaks.

Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace, Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1990).

Sheer nonsense. Leonard and Phil Chess were Chicago-based. The post-war musicians they recorded are not a matter of “early Blues history,” whatever that may be. And no writer on blues ever described the brothers Chess recruiting musicians in Mississippi.

My best guess to explain this howler: In 1941 and 1942 Alan Lomax recorded Muddy Waters in Mississippi for the Library of Congress. The recordings were released on the Chess label in 1966 as the album Down on Stovall’s Plantation. And years later, a writer with a cursory knowledge of his subject attributed the recordings to the brothers Chess.

[Why assign an error in a co-authored book to Wallace? The sentence I’ve quoted is from one of the “D.” sections of the book.]