Smith going backward

In Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel Nightwood, Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O’Connor, who is not a doctor, speaks in mighty and fantastic monologues. A small sample:

“We say someone is pretty for instance, whereas, if the truth were known, they are probably as ugly as Smith going backward, but by our lie we have made that very party powerful, such is the power of the charlatan, the great strong! They drop on anything at any moment, and that sort of thing makes the mystic in the end, and,” he added, “it makes the great doctor.”

The simile “as ugly as Smith going backward” sounds as if it has vernacular authority, but try as I have, I find no source for it other than Barnes’s novel. Like the punchline “No soap, radio,” the simile sounds as if it means something, but what? I think it suggests someone who is so ugly that he does us a small favor by turning as he walks away.

I know of one other Smith going backward: an early chapbook by the poet Steve Carey owes its title to Barnes. (Does anyone else know that?)


[Steve Carey, Smith Going Backward. San Francisco: Cranium Press, 1968. Cover illustration by Peter Kanter. A long-ago used-book-store find.]

The book’s title poem seems to pay brief homage to Nightwood with the line “in moods strange as a fictional doctor.” I will guess that Carey was reading Nightwood and that the novel, like so much else — street sounds, weather, a cold sore, Oreos — found its way into his work.

Here are the beautiful last eight lines of another poem from Smith Going Backward, “Half a Western”:

When five and again when six comes
everybody just yells a name and
walks upstairs swinging keys
Myself, Buzz Sawyer, Beetle Bailey
we bother the breezes for the coat of RJ Reynolds

The mystery of me is mine
the book no one knows I’m writing
Times with all my heart I wish it showed

 
[Djuna Barnes (1892–1982) and Steve Carey (1945–1989). Photographs by Alfred Stieglitz and Rochelle Kraut. About “Half a Western”: Carey’s grandfather and father were Harry Carey and Harry Carey, Jr., actors with long careers in cowboy films and much else. Buz Sawyer (one z) was a comic strip. Beetle Bailey is one.]

DARE needs help

John McIntyre has put out the word that the Dictionary of American Regional English needs help.

Les Blank (1935–2013)

“He shot what he wanted, captured it beautifully, and those subjects are now gone. The homogenization of American culture has obliterated it”: director Taylor Hackford, quoted in the New York Times obituary for filmmaker Les Blank.

I can vouch for The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins (1970) and Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980). Neither is currently available from Netflix. The films are available from Blank’s website, and samples may be found in the usual place.

Repurposed

Other repurposings
Bakeware : Dish drainer : Doorstop : Tea tin

[For clarity: the first five came with the box.]

Rebecca Schuman on graduate study

Rebecca Schuman: “After four years of trying, I’ve finally gotten it through my thick head that I will not get a job — and if you go to graduate school, neither will you”: Getting a literature Ph.D. will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor (Slate).

Schuman’s narrative reminds me of the tale told in Chapter Sixteen of The Grapes of Wrath: “You goin’ out there — oh, Christ!” The tale’s anonymous, ragged teller is the man who’s been: he’s been to California, he’s seen what’s there, and he’s heading back home to starve. Nothing he says can persuade the Joads to turn around: they have nothing to go back to. Perhaps Rebecca Schuman’s account of grad school though will persuade some aspirant undergraduates to rethink their lives’ trajectories. There are, as Schuman concedes, jobs, but the odds are against you, whoever you are.

I remember being told as a prospective doctoral student that “There are, of course, no jobs.” I nodded and thought, “Well, I’ll somehow get one.” Delusional, yes? Back then the odds were about fifty-fifty, and I was lucky. Today, the odds are worse.

Teenaged multitasking

[“Teenager Pat Woodruff pondering homework while listening to radio in living room.” Photograph by Nina Leen. United States, 1944. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

This young lady appears to be the epitome of the tech-savvy analog native, digging the tunes and getting the homework done.

A related post
Studying alone, really alone

About machine-scoring

In the New York Times, a report on machine-scoring college writing:

Imagine taking a college exam, and, instead of handing in a blue book and getting a grade from a professor a few weeks later, clicking the “send” button when you are done and receiving a grade back instantly, your essay scored by a software program. . . .

EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks.

It is worth asking: is this scheme meant to “free” professors for other tasks, or for unemployment? Machine-scoring seems to point toward a future in which the human presence is ever more superfluous for the work of teaching and learning.

Especially galling is the claim, from University of Akron professor Mark D. Shermis, that critics of machine-scoring tend to come from the nation’s elite schools, where human beings do a much better job than machines. “There seems to be,” he says, “a lack of appreciation of what is actually going on in the real world.” Indeed. The great variety of institutional affiliations represented by the signers of the Human Readers petition against machine-scoring suggests that opposition to the practice extends well beyond elite schools. Thoughtful and helpful evaluations of student writing by what the Times article calls “human graders” can be found at all levels as well.

My mantra re: technology, which I will now repeat (because that’s what makes it a mantra): technology makes it possible to do things, not necessary to do them. And its converse: technology makes it possible not to do things, not necessary not to do them.

Roger Ebert (1942–2013)

From Life Itself: A Memoir (2012), quoted in the Chicago Sun-Times obituary:

I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

Roger Ebert was a son of east-central Illinois. Champaign’s fifteenth Ebertfest takes place later this month.

A better Life Photo Archive search

Arjan den Boer has created a better tool to search Google’s Life Photo Archive: Better search for LIFE Photo Archive. I just tried it out:

A search for duke ellington : LPA: 34 results; Arjan’s search: 156 results.

A search for post office : LPA page: 38 results. Arjan’s search: 218 results.

A search for typewriter : LPA: 45 results; Arjan: 158 results.

Arjan’s search not only yields far more results; it presents those results in a legible uniform size, twenty to a page.

The Life Photo Archive is a wonderful place to get lost. It’s now easier than ever to get lost and stay there. Thanks for sharing your work, Arjan.

*

March 12, 2014: As Arjan wrote in a comment, Google has a new way to search Life photos. Thanks for the memories, Arjan.

The New York Times on Walmart

Breaking news! Walmart offers a crummy shopping experience, with empty shelves and awful produce.

[This is breaking news?]