Naked City Mongol

Yes, it’s a Mongol pencil in the social worker’s hand. The above images are from “Golden Lads and Girls,” an episode of Naked City that aired May 22, 1963. It tells the stories of two married couples, one living at 715 Park Avenue, the other in a tenement a few blocks away. The two husbands are alcoholic and violent; each man’s wife is his target. The parallels between the couples’ lives are heightened when the story cuts back and forth during their interviews with social workers, with questions put to one husband or wife answered by the other.

“Golden Lads and Girls” is a Naked City episode with a tremendous variety of ingredients: trips to Manhattan’s Home Term Court (an institution created in 1946 to address non-felony domestic cases); Tom Bosley as a judge; a quick stop at Toots Shor’s Restaurant; a group meeting at “Alcoholics Clinic” (that is, Alcoholics Anonymous); marital counseling; a nightmare-tormented, pyromaniacal child; and, for comic relief, a scene in a delicatessen with Lieutenant Mike Parker (Horace McMahon), Detective Adam Flint (Paul Burke), and Adam’s girlfriend Libby Kingston (Nancy Malone). Adam has ordered pastrami on white. On white?

Libby: “With Adam it's a matter of principle — nonconformity.”

Mike: “On rye bread, yes. On a hard roll, yes. But never on white. Have you no respect for the cultural heritages?”

Adam: “I like it on white. . . . Mike, you have to believe that pastrami won’t always come on rye.”

Libby: “Oh, I take it you’re using cold cuts as a symbol.”

Adam: “On white. It’s a symbol of hope.”

Libby describes the Park Avenue couple as “rich and very fashionable,” “part of the success culture, the golden lads and girls.” (Note: she knows no details. Adam has maintained confidentiality.)

Adam: “That’s from something, isn’t it?”

Libby recites: “Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”

Adam: “Shakespeare, Cymbeline.”

Mike: “You know, when I have lunch with you two, it’s like being with Bennett Cerf.”

That last line is the punchline, Bennett Cerf being Mike Parker’s idea of an hifalutin intellectual.

Back to those screenshots. The pencil’s identity is obvious. But do you recognize the actress? First prize is an all-expenses-paid week in the Naked City. You are responsible though for furnishing the time machine. Leave your answer in a comment.

Related reading

Other Mongol posts: Harry Truman with pencil : Jimmy Hoffa’s Mongol : Molly Dodd, Mongol user : Mongol No. 2 3/8 : “Sound-testing a MONGOL” : Stolen Mongols

Other Naked City posts: GRamercy 7–9166 : GRamercy again : MUrray Hill 7-3933 : Naked Bronx : Nearly plotzing : “Old Rabbit Ears” : Poetry and Naked City : Positively Naked City : TW8-4044 : “WE DELIVER”

[Orange Crate Art is a Naked City-friendly zone.]

Fran Lebowitz on voice

From the documentary Public Speaking (dir. Martin Scorsese, 2010), Fran Lebowitz, taking questions from an audience:

Q: “Do you think there’s a difference between a female voice and a male voice in literature?”

A: “Even on the phone there’s a difference between a female voice and a male voice.”

The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum

Gunther at Lexikaliker pointed me to an item I’d have missed otherwise: a brief tour of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State. At 1:39: glimpses of a Sunday installment of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy. Thanks, Gunther.

[How wonderful to see an educational URL with the word cartoons in it: cartoons.osu.edu.]

Recently updated

Adjunct teaching and health insurance The Chronicle of Higher Education continues to follow the story.

When clichés collide

“There’s no free lunch at the end of the day”: Congressman Chris Van Hollen (D, Maryland-8), as heard on MSNBC a few minutes ago.

LearningCurve, busted

[The correct answer is C: my patience.]

From an educational publisher: “Students love LearningCurve because it allows them to study using a game-like interface and master material in a less linear fashion than simply reading and re-reading.” That’s a sample LearningCurve question above.

I tried LearningCurve’s demo activity yesterday. Was I studying? Hardly. Was it game-like? I felt no fun. I read the questions (about, of all things, memory) and schemed the correct answers as quickly as I could. One was seventy: I picked it as the most reasonable choice of four — not too high, not too low. Seventy what? Couldn’t tell ya. Seventy letters or numbers or words that someone with a Russian name was able to memorize. Another correct answer: ninety, ninety percent of slides that someone showed. People could recognize ninety percent of 250 of them after some period of time. Who showed the slides? I dunno, some guy. All I was after was the right answer. I got every one of them. So much for mastery.

That leaves “less linear,” which seems to me an optimistic way to characterize the element of mindless, loop-the-loop repetition that makes LearningCurve feel miserably regimented. By the end of the demo, I was typing the same answer to different forms of the same damn question again and again — a question I’d been getting right all along. I would much rather have been reading and rereading something, anything, else.

And speaking of reading and rereading (or “simply” reading and rereading): when did they become subject to criticism for being “linear”? Yes, word follows word, and sentence follows sentence, because that’s how words and sentences work, even the words and sentences that form the rudimentary paragraphs of LearningCurve’s questions. But flipping among scattered passages in, say, a novel, offers far greater freedom of movement and far greater opportunities for complex thinking than LearningCurve’s dentist’s chair. (Drill, baby, drill.)

If this blog post were a LearningCurve activity, you’d now be reading the following message: “You’re more than half way through with the blog post!” Yes, LearningCurve feels like a race to get it over with — another way in which it’s different from a genuine game.

I just discovered by chance the following passage in an excellent though painfully dated book, The Lively Art of Writing (1965). Lucile Vaughan Payne now sounds downright counter-cultural in her insistence on education that makes room for invention and self-discovery:

Too often students let themselves become machines, ingesting the information their teachers offer them and then feeding it back, like ticker tape, in the form of rote recitations and answers to examination questions. But a student is no machine when he writes an essay; he is a human being — judging, evaluating, interpreting, expressing not only what he knows but what he is. Thus every attempted essay is a kind of voyage toward self-discovery.

Judging, evaluating, interpreting; reading, rereading, writing: they are the stuff of genuine education. It’s a sad sign of the times that it is necessary to say so.

[I will grant that a student for whom a test looms is likely to move through a LearningCurve activity more deliberately than I did. That student would be, I think, even more miserable. LearningCurve, however, has testimonials to the contrary.]

E. L. Konigsburg (1930–2013)

“Children’s books, she once said, are ‘the key to the accumulated wisdom, wit, gossip, truth, myth, history, philosophy, and recipes for salting potatoes during the past 6,000 years of civilization’”: E. L. Konigsburg, Author, Is Dead at 83 (New York Times).

Fellow blogger Bill Madison met Konigsburg in the 1990s. Read what he has to say about the writer and her work.

Related posts
From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Q.: “Where are you going to get a typewriter?”

Richie Havens (1941–2013)

His performance kicked off the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, but he’s forever side one, track three. The New York Times has an obituary.

“A fully realized adult person”

John Churchill, Secretary of Phi Beta Kappa, in the Spring 2013 Key Reporter :

There is a powerful push to vocationalize college curricula and to measure the worth of a degree solely in economic terms. This tendency will magnify differences of access to transformative liberal arts experiences. Ironically, students who would benefit most from immersion in the liberal arts and sciences will be increasingly less likely to encounter them. This is a bad thing for America.

It is time to reassert plain facts. College is not only about training for jobs. It is about citizenship. It is about shaping oneself into a fully realized adult person. It is about learning to cope constructively with questions of meaning and value. In a democracy, we need to take as many of us, as far as possible, down that path.

If powerful and moneyed interests now seeking to reshape higher education have their way, “college” will soon become a two-tier system, with the real thing for a privileged few (MOOC stars have to teach somewhere, right?) and credits and credentials, haphazardly assembled, vocationally themed, for everyone else. If this prospect weren’t in itself appalling, the rhetoric of inevitability that sells it — get on board or be swept away — would be reason enough to object.

Kingsfield’s cup of tea

Elaine and I are making our way through our second year of law school. In other words, we’re watching the second season of The Paper Chase, Netflick by Netflick, and we just saw an episode we’d been giddy about getting to, “My Dinner with Kingsfield” (first aired July 24, 1984). The premise is wacky: a terrible snowstorm, and Charles Kingsfield (John Houseman) gets stuck driving to the airport. When he knocks at the nearest residence to use the telephone, who answers? James Hart, “Mr. Hart,” Kingsfield’s stellar student (James Stephens). Hilarity ensues, with broken plumbing, Bulgarian Beaujolais, and the spectacle of Kingsfield wearing Hart’s bathrobe as his own clothes dry. (“I just had it laundered,” Hart adds helpfully.) Later in the episode: a brief recitation from Bleak House and some memorable, even profound bits of dialogue about love and marriage and learning.

Elaine and I made some tea before sitting down to watch, and I chose Earl Grey. I said (and I have a witness) that if Kingsfield drank tea in this episode, it would be Earl Grey. So I went a little crazy when the professor set down his wine and asked Hart for a cup of tea, “anything that’s hot and sturdy.” Hart offers Earl Grey. Is that sturdy enough? Kingsfield says it will be fine. And as Hart calls to check on the whereabouts of a lady friend flying in from New York, Kingsfield stands and muses on a box of Twinings tea bags:

“Earl Grey tea . . . Charles Grey, the second Earl Grey, leader of the Whig opposition and largely responsible for the repeal of the African slave trade. He became prime minister of England in 1830.”

Hart, on the phone, asks distractedly, “Who?” And Kingsfield, fiercely: “Earl Grey.” It’s all true.

Here’s a Kingsfield observation about marriage:

“Let me tell you something: all those years I was married, of course I kept thinking I should have spent longer sowing my wild oats, but the longer my marriage lasted, the more convinced I became that being married to someone, no matter how banal it might seem on the surface, was infinitely more satisfying and more exciting than the wildest of affairs.”

And here’s another moment, when Hart admits that Kingsfield’s lukewarm response to his recent paper has made it impossible for him to begin work on a new project:

“James, for God’s sake, stop sulking. You’re an adult. You’re one of the better students in this institution: you should not need to be told that. You know your work is good: that’s all that matters. Doing your best should be its own reward, and you shouldn’t need me to tell you about it.”

But students do need to hear about it when they do well (and when they don’t); even Kingsfield knows that. (Notice the repetition of should.) And yes, he now offers the praise that he withheld. If he were a different person though, he’d be intoning, “Stop . . . worshiping . . . me, Mr. . . . Hart.”

[“My Dinner with Kingsfield” isn’t the first takeoff on My Dinner with André (1981): My Breakfast with Blassie appearted in 1983. Kingsfield’s remarks on marriage are reminiscent of what André Gregory says about the shallowness of affairs and the mysteries of marriage: “Have a real relationship with a person that goes on for years: that’s completely unpredictable. Then you’ve cut off all your ties to the land and you’re sailing into the unknown, into uncharted seas.” Major props to the writers of this episode, James Bridges and Lee Kalcheim.]

Other Paper Chase posts
“Do the work”
How to improve writing (no. 42)
“Minds, not memories”