Making Slow Progress

Many things to work on. Key word: Progress. Adjective: Slow.

Postcard available from Hold the Mustard Photo Cards.

November 22, 1963

[Photograph by Art Rickerby. From the Life Photo Archive.]

I remember being let out of school early (second grade). I remember standing in the doorway between my brother’s bedroom and mine and being aware that everything was now sad in a way that was beyond any previous sadness. And I remember seeing Lee Harvey Oswald shot on television — that is what’s most vivid. What do you remember?

The Margaret Mary Vojtko story

L. V. Anderson looks into “what really happened to Margaret Mary Vojtko” and concludes that “better benefits and job security would not have altered many of the personal factors that precipitated Vojtko’s crisis.” Even so, Anderson says, the use of adjunct labor in higher education is “a scourge.”

A related post
Death of an adjunct

New directions in carpeting

Item #2013-N. “Autumn Medley.” For porch or patio. An innovation in outdoor carpeting. Miracle material renews itself as you work, play, relax. Stains and spills disappear like magic. Installs in seconds.

The Tie Bar

For a long time, I wore a tie only rarely. But a year or so ago, I realized that my ties are now vintage ties. And I started wearing them on teaching days. It’s fun, and now when I wear a shirt with an open collar, it feels like something is missing. I bought a couple of square-end knit ties at Macy’s — ridiculously expensive. I found a few more at a Goodwill — they look a little sad. And then Elaine discovered The Tie Bar. A great selection, $15 a tie, any tie, with a flat $5.99 for shipping. And many square-end ties, the ties I like best.

I’ve posted the front and back of this card not only for your information but for mine. When the card itself has vanished and a tie has broken out in spots, these instructions will be here.

From The Onion? No, The Times.

Marie Myung-Ok’s New York Times column The Internet: A Welcome Distraction has at least one Onion-worthy sentence:

I have come to realize that my writing brain has been waiting for something exactly like today’s dizzyingly overfull, warp-speed Internet.

But she’s not writing a parody. The sentence that really got me thinking though is this one:

Jonathan Franzen found the Internet such a threat that he disabled it by plugging an Ethernet cable into his computer with super glue.

Damn that Franzen. He must be using one powerful computer.

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, November 18, 2013.]

Escher-like constructions have appeared in Hi and Lois before:
an impossible hot-dog cart, an all-in-one wall. My best explanation for the wall in this panel (other than Escher or “sloppy”): the Flagstons are part of a museum installation. That’s not an exterior wall behind Hi: it’s a gallery wall with trompe l’oeil curtains and window.

Related posts
All Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

It is weather

The storms that passed through Illinois and other states yesterday left my environs almost untouched. We had a brief interval of heavy rain and strong wind in the early afternoon. And then the sun came out, though the wind continued for several hours. Other cities and towns were not nearly as fortunate.

When I think about weather, I think of lines from Philip Larkin’s poem “Talking in Bed”:

Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us.

The weather is not destructive or unforgiving or violent. It doesn’t care about us. It just is.

William Weaver (1923–2013)

He was a translator and an FOFOH (friend of Frank O’Hara). The New York Times has an obituary. More about Weaver and FOH in a Paris Review interview, The Art of Translation.

A related post
791 Broadway (Weaver remembering FOH)

New directions in multitasking

All together now: smoking, texting, skateboarding.