From a dream

“It’s as if my wiles had vanished into thin air.”

“Exceedingly thin air.”

Whence such dialogue? I must have had Downton Abbey in my sleeping head.

Other dreams, arranged by subject
John Ashbery and Fred Astaire : Baloney recovery : Beach Boys reunion : Citizen Kane : “Columbain coffee” : The Cummerbund Response : “Darn That Dream” : Jack Dempsey : Inara George and Van Dyke Parks : Infinite Jest : Charles Mingus : Skeptiphobia : “Smoked chicken water” : Ulysses : United States of America commercial

A Seymour Barab celebration

As Elaine likes to say, Seymour and Margie King Barab are our “favorite inhabitants of the Upper East Side.” I wish we could be in New York this coming Sunday.

Related reading
The After Dinner Opera
Seymour Barab (the composer’s website)
One Foot in Oz (Margie King Barab’s blog)

College completion

In the New York Times, an article on a report from the National Commission on Higher Education Attainment (now there’s a great name) on the need to increase graduation rates. The group’s chair is Ohio State University president E. Gordon Gee:

The report, “College Completion Must Be Our Priority,” which will be released on Thursday, calls on colleges and universities to find ways to give students credit for previous learning, through exams like the College Board’s College-Level Examination Program, portfolio assessments or other college equivalency evaluations. It also calls for more services and flexibility for nontraditional students, suggesting innovations like midnight classes, easier credit transfers and more efficient course delivery, including online classes.

“These are all very important things, they’re all unusual, and they’re things we’re not doing,” Dr. Gee said. “We concentrate most on the admissions side of things, getting the bodies in, and there’s no one in charge of seeing that they get through and graduate. I’m going to call this person the completion dean.”

I’m struck by two things in Gee’s remarks:

1. The frank language of business: “getting the bodies in” and moving them out (while still warm of course). Here is the language of credentialism at its worst. The life of the mind? The pursuit of knowledge? Not so much.

2. The assumption that there must be someone “in charge” to see to it that students graduate. Thus the solution to any academic problem: more administration.

Gee’s Wikipedia article makes interesting reading. You can find the report here.

Ezra Klein explains the filibuster

Writing in the January 28 New Yorker, Ezra Klein explains the filibuster:

There is no perfect measure of how frequently filibusters occur. The closest thing we have to a count is the number of cloture votes the majority mounts. From 1917 to 1970, the majority sought cloture fifty-eight times. Since the start of President Obama’s first term, it has sought cloture more than two hundred and fifty times. Even that is probably in undercount, as it misses all the moments when the majority just gave up on an issue before a vote was melted. The truth, filibuster scholars say, is that almost everything in today’s Senate is effectively filibustered, since at least sixty members have to want to let anything move forward for it to do so. And, in the past thirty years, the only time the party has held or controlled sixty votes out right was in 2009, when the Democrats did for just six months.

And in the Washington Post, Klein writes about today’s Senate “deal” on filibuster reform:

A pro-reform aide I spoke to was agog. “Right now, you have to negotiate with McConnell to get on a bill,” he said. ”Tomorrow, if this passes, you still need to negotiate with McConnell to get on a bill. It changes nothing on how we move forward.”

Klein’s conclusion: “filibuster reformers have lost once again.”

[Cloture: “(in a legislative assembly) a procedure for ending a debate and taking a vote” (New Oxford American Dictionary). The New Yorker piece is for subscribers only.]

Punctuation fail

[Low-hanging fruit, before and after.]

A new Microsoft ad for Internet Explorer gets it wrong: an apostrophe, not a left quotation mark, should precede 90s. What makes the mistake interesting to me is that such mistakes often occur with word-processing, in the ’90s and today.

Related reading
All punctuation posts (Pinboard)

[I made the correction using the free Mac app Seashore.]

“In the hinterlands”

I love this sort of nonsense, from an episode of the radio program Suspense. The hinterlands in question are Connecticut:

Alice: Well, you two, I’m so glad you've come. It gets kind of dull here in the hinterlands.

Bess: Oh, I’m glad too.

Bob: Say, wait’ll you get one of our extra-special cold martinis into ya. You’ll feel shipshape.

Harry: Still know how to mix ’em, huh?

Bob: Better than ever. You get lots of practice these long country winters.

[Laughter.]

“A Friend to Alexander,” August 3, 1943. From a story by James Thurber, adapted by Fria Howard, with Robert Young as Harry and Geraldine Fitzgerald as Bess. These exchanges are by Howard.

“The country” and its close relation “the lake” were remote, even mythic destinations in radio and television, away from everything. I would like to have visited.

[“A Friend to Alexander” is easy to find online, here for instance.]

Overheard

[Loud, and louder.]

“I never read!”

[Laughter.]

Related reading
Aliteracy (Wikipedia)
All “overheard” posts (Pinboard)
“Proud non-reader”

Gospel of Intolerance

“The filmmaker Roger Ross Williams reveals how money donated by American evangelicals helps to finance a violent antigay movement in Uganda”: Gospel of Intolerance (New York Times).

DFW on writing by hand

David Foster Wallace liked using pens and typewriters:

Writing by hand and typewriter not only brings out the best in me — it brings out stuff I never would have dreamed was there. . . . It is this — not improvement, but transfiguration of the contents of my head that I am addicted to. It is astonishing when it happens — magical — and it simply doesn’t happen on a computer.

From a letter to Sven Birkerts, quoted in D. T. Max’s Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (2012). Ellipsis in the original.

Related reading
A page from “the earliest substantial draft” of Infinite Jest (New Yorker)

National Handwriting Day

Today is John Hancock’s birthday, and thus it’s National Handwriting Day. I’ve posted samples of my handwriting, even one from fifth grade, on previous NHDs. But my favorite post marking the day is this one: Five pens, an autobiography of sorts in writing instruments.

Related reading
All handwriting posts (Pinboard)

[I think that reports of handwriting’s death are greatly exaggerated.]