Griffy, Zippy, and Proust

[“Dead White Cornflakes,” Zippy, May 4, 2013.]

I just went In Search of Lost Zippy: this panel is from yesterday’s strip. The Zippy archive has five more Proustian strips: “Proust Reduced,” “Forgetfulness of Things Past,” “Taste Is Everything,” “Proust Schmoust,” and “Within a Budding Grove.”

[Griffy: cartoonist Bill Griffith’s stand-in. Have you seen the word kidult before?]

Separated at birth?

[Three detectives: Hopper, Derrida, Falk.]

The funny thing is that William Hopper (Perry Mason’s Paul Drake) and Peter Falk (Lieutenant Columbo) look nothing like one another. But each in some way looks like Jacques Derrida. I think that this is what they mean by différance. I would prefer a white-haired Hopper to deepen the Derrida resemblance, but I couldn’t find a suitable picture. I think this is what they mean by absence.

Other long-lost siblings
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop
Steve Buscemi and John Davis Chandler
Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt
Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov
Ted Cruz and Joseph McCarthy
Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln
Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls
Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks

San José profs nix Harvard MOOC

The Philosophy Department at San José State University has decided not to make use of Harvard professor Michael Sandel’s MOOC [Massive open online course] JusticeX. The department has explained its decision in an open letter to Sandel. An excerpt:

In spite of our admiration for your ability to lecture in such an engaging way to such a large audience, we believe that having a scholar teach and engage his or her own students in person is far superior to having those students watch a video of another scholar engaging his or her students.

I’d be proud to knew these faculty as colleagues. Their principled stand for (what I call) real-presence education and against its cheap simulacrum should prove a model for faculty in similar circumstances.

More from the Chronicle of Higher Education
Why Professors at San José State Won’t Use a Harvard Professor’s MOOC
The Philosophy Department’s open letter
Michael Sandel’s response

Thanks to Stefan Hagemann for catching these developments before I did. If you care about teaching and learning, take the time to read Stefan’s post about how to answer a professor’s question in class.

Mina Shaughnessy on error

Anyone who has read, say, a comma-free student essay (comma-free for fear that using commas might mean making mistakes), will see the wisdom in Mina P. Shaughnessy’s observations about error. From Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing (1977):

The discovery by a student that he can do something he thought he couldn’t releases the energy to do it. Students who make many errors feel helpless about correcting them. Error has them in its power, forcing them to hide or bluff or feign indifference but never to attack. The teacher must encourage an aggressive attitude toward error and then provide a strategy for its defeat, one that allows the student to count his victories as he goes and thereby grow in confidence. . . .

The alternative course of ignoring error for fear of inhibiting the writer even more or of assuming that errors will wear off as the student writes more is finally giving error more power than it is due. The “mystery” of error is what most intimidates students — the worry that errors just “happen” without a person’s knowing how or when — and while we have already noted that some errors can be expected to persist even after instruction, most of them finally come under the control of the writer once he has learned to look at them analytically during the proofreading stage of composition. Freedom from error is finally a matter of understanding error, not of getting special dispensations to err simply because writing formal English is thought to be beyond the capabilities or interests of certain students.

Shaughnessy is sometimes criticized as reducing students to their errors, or patterns of error. I can’t agree with that criticism: understanding patterns of error is what makes it possible to move beyond them.

[A new habit for the end of a semester: pulling out a handful of books I haven’t looked at in years.]

Bob Brozman (1959–2013)

Bob Brozman was the best friend the National guitar ever had. Here is the obituary from his hometown newspaper, the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

A YouTube sampler: “Highway 49 Blues,” “Minnie the Moocher,” “Moana Chimes,” “Ua Like.” The last two are duets with Ledward Kaapana.

NYT cursive debate

In the New York Times, four responses to this question: Should schools require children to learn cursive?

Suzanne Baruch Asherson thinks that cursive matters. Kate Gladstone thinks that handwriting matters, not cursive. Jimmy Bryant sees cursive as a way to carry on the tradition of the handwritten letter. (A little optimistic, that.) All three (wisely) avoid using writing and wall in the same sentence. Only Morgan Polikoff looks forward to a future without handwriting. Says he, “The writing is on the wall.”

Sigh. A Google search for cursive “writing is on the wall” yields 379,000 results. The joke should be allowed to die, or at least to retire.

As you may already know, Orange Crate Art is a handwriting-friendly zone. My thoughts on the advantages of writing by hand may be found this post.

Related reading
All handwriting posts (Pinboard)

Who’s who on Route 66

[George Maharis as Buz Murdock and Martin Milner as the other guy, “The Swan Bed,” October 21, 1960.]

When Route 66 aired on Nickelodeon some years ago, we were never able to keep track of the other guy’s name. You know, the one played by Martin Milner, who later starred in Adam-12. Elaine came up with the name Not Buz.

We are now watching Buz and Not Buz on DVD, with more than cursory attention. Among the actors in the first four episodes: Lew Ayres, Whit Bissell, Keir Dullea, Betty Field, Henry Hull, Patty McCormack, and Everett Sloane. Mind, boggle.

Elaine has now come up with a name for the series: Naked Country. Like Naked City (also filmed on location), Route 66 was the creation of Stirling Silliphant and Herbert B. Leonard.

Related reading
The end of the trail (Route 66, Santa Monica)
Naked City posts

[It’s a shame that George Maharis never got to play Jack Kerouac, though in a way, as Buz Murdock, he did. Not Buz’s real name: Tod Stiles.]

Cartoonists against gun violence

A surprisingly affecting video: Cartoonists Demand Action to End Gun Violence (YouTube).

The World in Words

I just discovered a worthwhile podcast from Public Radio International’s The World: The World in Words. The most recent episode: How to Fake an Accent and Get Away With It.

How to improve writing (no. 43)

Here’s the work I did to improve two sentences in a recent post. The first draft:

If the most powerful and moneyed interests who now seek to reshape higher education have their way, what we call “college” will soon become a two-tier system, with the real thing reserved for a privileged few and credits and credentials — haphazardly assembled, vocationally themed — for everyone else. If this future weren’t already in itself appalling, the rhetoric of inevitability that accompanies it — get on board or risk being swept away — might alone be reason enough to object.

The work of revising, with additions in red, some deleted:

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

Most of the changes are in the interest of concision, fewer words with no loss of meaning or detail (the noun clause “what we call ‘college,’” for instance, reduced to “‘college,’” with the quotation marks doing the work of the deleted words). I used a pair of commas to avoid the ungainly repetition of dashes. I hit on prospect as a better choice than the trite future or the loftier vision, and chose sells as a far better verb than accompanies. The aside about MOOC stars came to me while revising: and yes, I do think there’s shameless cynicism in trading on prestigious names to sell a feeble replacement for real-presence education. The aside is practical too: the interruption eliminates the slightly misleading and of “a privileged few and credits.” The revised sentences:

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.

The changes are all minor. But such changes, multiplied over sentences and paragraphs, add up. Are they worth the time and effort? They are.

Related reading
All How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)
Draft, draft, draft, draft (John McPhee on revision)

[This post is no. 43 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose. This post is one of two about my writing. Here’s the other.]