Rosa Parks stamp

The United States Postal Service honors Rosa Parks, born February 4, 1913. Also in the news: because of a conflict between relatives and executors, Parks’s archives sit in a Manhattan warehouse, unavailable to scholars: The Rosa Parks Papers (Religion & Ethics Newsweekly).

Related reading
Rosa Parks materials (Library of Congress)

“Minds, not memories”

Professor Charles Kingsfield, explaining why his midterm examination will not focus on landmark cases and may instead include landmark cases, obscure cases, and hypothetical cases:

“I intend to test minds, not memories.”

[From The Paper Chase, “An Act of Desperation,” first aired December 19, 1978. Elaine and I are watching episodes of the show on DVD. We both like the goofy warmheartedness. Think of it: a television series about people studying. And no study guides.]

Separated at birth?

 
[John Davis Chandler (as Vincent Coll) and Steve Buscemi.]

Mad Dog Coll (dir. Burt Balaban, 1961) is a magnificently lurid crime story. Abusive father: check. Sexual inadequacy: check. Phallic weaponry: check. (Mad Dog carries a machine gun as you or I might carry a wallet.) Unattainable woman with some class: check. (She plays the violin.) Available woman with less class: check. (She’s a, uh, dancer.) Increasingly bold and dangerous criminal schemes: check, and checkmate. With Brooke Hayward, Jerry Orbach, Telly Savalas, and Vincent Gardenia as Dutch Schultz.

A special treat: seeing James Greene (Davey McQuinn of The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, Councilman Milton of Parks and Recreation) as a hit man. Good call, Elaine.

Related posts
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop
Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt
Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov
Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln
Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks

Bad metaphor of the day

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe this morning, Joe Scarborough made reference to “all sides of the political spectrum.”

Related reading
All metaphor posts (Pinboard)

[I think it’s seven sides: Roy G. Biv.]

Two-word utterances of my adolescence

In imaginary order of increasing frequency:

No way. Right on. Double dribble. Oooh, cutdown.

[Cutdown, noun, with the accent on the first syllable: an insult. This meaning has eluded both Merriam-Webster and the OED.]

“Swing for the L”

Reading Kitty Burns Florey’s Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting (Hoboken: Melville House, 2009), I realized that the perfect L in my dad’s signature is straight outta Palmer:


[From A. N. Palmer, The Palmer Method for Business Writing (Cedar Rapids: A. N. Palmer, 1915). Found at the Internet Archive.]

Handwriting is in the news again this morning, as I discovered only after deciding to make this post.

Salinger bio and documentary

From Time:

A new J. D. Salinger film and biography are being billed as an unprecedented look into the mysterious life of the author of The Catcher In the Rye.

Simon & Schuster announced Tuesday that it had acquired The Private War of J.D. Salinger, an oral biography compiled by author David Shields and filmmaker-screenwriter Shane Salerno, whose screenplay credits include the Oliver Stone film Savages.

Salerno has been working for several years on his documentary, which PBS will air next January for the 200th of its American Masters series.

No news about whether unpublished work from Salinger is forthcoming.

Related reading
All Salinger posts (Pinboard)

David Bromwich on higher education

David Bromwich:

[H]igher education is the learning of certain habits, above all a sustained attention to things outside one’s familiar circuit of interests; and it is the beginning of a work of self-knowledge that will decompose many of one’s given habits and given identities. In these respects the aims of education are deeply at odds with the aims of any coherent and socializing culture. The former is critical and ironic; the latter purposeful and supervisory.

Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

[From the back cover: ”In this eloquent book a distinguished scholar criticizes attacks on liberal education by ideologies of the right and left, arguing that both groups see education as a means to indoctrinate students in specific cultural and political dogmas. David Bromwich calls for a return to the teaching of independent thinking, self-knowledge, and tolerance of other points of view, values that he claims are the essence of a true liberal education.” I found my way to this book after reading Diana Senechal’s Republic of Noise.]

Butch Morris (1947–2013)

Sad news in the New York Times:

Butch Morris, who created a distinctive form of large-ensemble music built on collective improvisation that he single-handedly directed and shaped, died on Tuesday in Brooklyn. . . .

Mr. Morris referred to his method as “conduction,” short for “conducted improvisation.” He defined the word, which he trademarked, as “an improvised duet for ensemble and conductor.”

Here is Morris’s website, Conduction. And three examples of conduction, from 2009, 2010, and 2011. Try one, or more. As the narrator of Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” says at that story’s end, “It’s really something.”

Diction levels, crisscrossing

On the PBS NewsHour last night, a New York Times reporter referred to Judy Woodruff and company as “you guys.” And on the local PBS station, a student-weatherperson referred to “tornadic activity.”

[What’s a good alternative to “you guys,” good people?]