DOMA

From this morning’s Supreme Court decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy writing for the majority:

DOMA singles out a class of persons deemed by a State entitled to recognition and protection to enhance their own liberty. It imposes a disability on the class by refusing to acknowledge a status the State finds to be dignified and proper. DOMA instructs all federal officials, and indeed all persons with whom same-sex couples interact, including their own children, that their marriage is less worthy than the marriages of others. The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity. By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others, the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment.

Supreme Court Bolsters Gay Marriage With Two Major Rulings (New York Times)

[I’m glad he got this one right.]

Feeding time

If you are reading Orange Crate Art in Google Reader, you’d better choose a new reader before July 1, when Google shuts things down. Otherwise, we will be torn asunder posthaste. Of the 13,295 readers now subscribed to Orange Crate Art, 12,835 use Google Reader. That’s a lot of asunder.

It’s easy to keep reading all your feeds by exporting them from Google Reader and importing them to another app or service. To export from Google Reader, go to Settings (the gear icon), Reader Settings, Import/Export, Download your data through Takeout, Create Archive. Then use the Archive to import your feeds elsewhere. It’s quick and easy.

I would imagine that many Reader users are still wondering which way to go. I’ve settled on two alternatives: Feedly and The Old Reader. Feedly is slick; The Old Reader is dowdy. I use Feedly on my Macs (with a Chrome plug-in) and as an iPad app. The Old Reader is available from any device. My main misgiving about Feedly: it takes too many liberties with images.

Here, if you need it, is the feed for Orange Crate Art. The link is also available from the sidebar.

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A reader suggested adding a widget to allow for e-mail subscriptions. There’s now one in the sidebar. Thanks, reader.

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Nope, widget’s gone. All that’s needed for an e-mail subscription is the right URL to follow.

Shoeless scholarship

[“Girls w. their shoes kicked off as they sit at desks listening to lesson in classroom at New Trier High.” Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt. Winnetka, Illinois, June 1950. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

There’s something startling — to me, anyway — about the feet. If bare feet in class were ever a norm, the norm is long gone, I think.

Notice that no one is taking notes. That norm: not long gone. Perhaps the students are listening to a recitation. Or perhaps they’re just not taking notes. It’s June. No shoes, no notes, no problem. School will soon be out for the summer.

New Trier High School was the subject of a Life magazine article, “A Good High School” (October 16, 1950). The article describes what we see here as “shoeless scholarship,” “regularly indulged in, spring and fall.”

[In New York City and some other places, today is the last day of school. New Trier was done on June 7. The school is the subject of a Wikipedia article.]

Grammar and writing resources

From the University of Chicago Writing Program, Grammar Resources, “an annotated collection of grammar and writing resources from around the web.”

Strawberry tips

From Oregon, tips on refrigerating and freezing strawberries.

Elaine and I have been eating locally grown strawberries from our farmers market like there’s no tomorrow — which there isn’t, as the season (we’re told) will be quite short. Any strawberries are better than none, but store-bought strawberries will be bitter fruit indeed after the real thing.

Present&Correct

Stationery supplies, old and new, and a beautifully designed website: Present&Correct.

A poem for RZ

My friend Rob Zseleczky figured out his pantheons and stuck to them. Duane Allman, Mike Bloomfield, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, B. B. King. Geoffrey Chaucer, Robert Frost, John Keats, John Milton, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Butler Yeats. I may have left someone out, but I don’t think so.

On June 13 Rob sent an e-mail with a sampling of Yeats poems to mark the poet’s birthday. So our last e-mails were about Yeats, his genius and his self-regard, both of which we both acknowledged. Rob loved Yeats more than I do, or at least with greater fidelity than I can muster. Yeats’s “The Song of Wandering Aengus” seems very Zseleczkyesque to me right now. I post the poem in memory of my friend, angler and poet.

Rob Zseleczky (1957–2013)

Manson H. Whitlock in the news

Manson H. Whitlock, ninety-six-year-old typewriter repairman, has suspended business while he attends to a medical problem. Says Mr. Whitlock of his shop, “It isn’t closed. It’s temporarily not open.” I like that distinction. Get well soon, sir.

In 2010, the Yale Daily News ran an interview with Mr. Whitlock. It makes for delightful reading.

Rob Zseleczky (1957–2013)

[Rob Zseleczky, August 2010. Photograph by Elaine Fine. The blur is accidental. I like it.]

I first met Rob on Fordham University’s Bronx campus. Was it 1978? We were a year or two apart in our trek through “English,” and I knew him as a fellow traveler in the field. Rob was a poet and the editor of Fordham’s student literary publication The Monthly (which was not a monthly), and he liked and printed the poems I offered. Our paths crossed again at Boston College, where we both ended up in grad school in 1980. I saw Rob at an orientation for new grad students, at the end of a row of folding chairs: a familiar face! After the orientation, we had a beer, and we became friends, for keeps. And we both became friends (again for keeps) with Luanne Paulter, another grad student in English (now half of the duo Jim and Luanne Koper).

In recent years, Elaine and I saw Rob every summer when we traveled east, always in the company of our hosts Jim and Luanne. There would be much food, much wine, much laughter. The nights would run very late. Rob and I would always play guitars for a while. Rob was a brilliant guitarist — beautiful tone, beautiful touch. And when he played something like, say, “Fire and Rain,” it was note-perfect. Yes, he liked that James Taylor stuff. Our common musical ground was blues. A, E: buy your vowel, or key, and we could go on forever.

Rob’s generosity went on forever too. It was there in e-mails, in letters, in mixtapes and CDs. When our son Ben took up the guitar, Rob gave him much encouragement. When Ben began tinkering with an electric, Rob gave him a Marshall amp. Just a couple of weeks ago, I got an envelope in the mail with a cartoon torn from The New Yorker, “24-Hour Blues Cycle”: “My woman done left me, ran off with my best friend. / Well, my woman done left me, said she ran off with my best friend. / Details are sketchy at this time, so let’s go to Jennifer Diaz standing by in Washington.” How had I missed that?

In the last two or three years Rob’s poetry got better and better and better. I saw “To the Coin Toss I Lost” in an earlier version in 2011. The finished version appeared last year in the Concho River Review (Spring 2012). I have typed out the poem — no mistakes.¹ I take the last two lines to heart:

Four related posts
A poem for RZ
Another poem for RZ
Good advice from Rob Zseleczky
Rob Zseleczky on clutter and stuff

¹ Rob worked as a copy editor and proofreader.

Hi and Lois interstice fail

[Hi and Lois, June 20, 2013.]

Anything can happen in the Hi and Lois interstice: furniture can disappear, hairstyles can change (if they can be called hairstyles). I have seen these things with my very own eyes, and they make me feel like Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight.

No, wait: I now believe that I am Ingrid Bergman. The Flagstons have made me mad.

The best explanation I can manage for today’s strip: it’s the work of a two-man operation. Let not thy right panel know what thy left panel doeth.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)