Income disparity in higher ed

Daughter Number Three has a thoughtful post on income disparity: How Much Is Too Much? Her recommendation: 30:1. In other words, the highest-paid employee in a company should earn no more than thirty times what the lowest-paid employee earns. Peter Drucker’s recommended ratio was lower still: 20:1.

I thought it would be instructive to see how these ratios might work in a college setting. The highest-paid employee at some schools is of course not the president but the football coach. In December 2013, Forbes named the University of Alabama’s Nick Saban as the highest-paid college coach in the country, earning $5.4 million this season. A contract extension is about to bring him more than $7 million per season. Let’s call it an even $7 million.

With a 30:1 ratio, the lowest-paid employee at the University of Alabama would earn a yearly income of $233,333. With a 20:1 ratio, $350,000. Given a forty-hour week, a 20:1 ratio translates to an hourly wage of $168. Plausible? No. But neither, to my mind, is the coach’s salary.

The Adjunct Project reports adjuncts at Alabama earning $2,500 to $5,000 per course. If the lowest-paid full-time adjunct at Alabama earns $20,000 a year, the high-to-low ratio is 350:1. (And service workers likely earn less.) Something is rotten — and not just in Tuscaloosa.

[I became interested in Peter Drucker’s work after reading his Managing Oneself. There’s an excerpt in this post. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that in 2011, Robert J. Zimmer of the University of Chicago was the highest-paid college president. Total compensation: $3,358,723.]

A Homeric Faulkner simile

It’s in As I Lay Dying (1930). “Really a Homeric simile,” says my note in the margin. Darl Bundren is the narrator:

A feather dropped near the front door will rise and brush along the ceiling, slanting backward, until it reaches the down-turning current at the back door: so with voices. As you enter the hall, they sound as though they were speaking out of the air about your head.

It’s fitting that a Homeric simile should appear in this novel. As the 1990 Vintage edition of the novel notes,

When asked about source of his title, Faulkner would sometimes quote from memory the speech of Agamemnon to Odysseus in the Odyssey, Book XI: “ As I lay dying the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyes for me as I descended into Hades.”

The woman is Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra. I’m unable to find a translation that matches Faulkner’s.

[Homeric simile, or epic simile: an extended comparison. It presents the unfamiliar (actions and things from days of old, the epic past) in familiar terms: a fallen warrior likened, say, to a young tree swiftly cut down. Homer’s similes invoke the world of the farm, the countryside, everyday realities. They are occasions for the poet to show his stuff: a student of mine (whose name I wish I could remember) once likened them to guitar solos.]

National Handwriting Day

[Some of mine.]

Handwriting’s day has not yet passed: I believe in “the scrawl,” as E. B. White called it. Happy National Handwriting Day.

Related reading
All handwriting posts (Pinboard)

Five more punctuation marks in literature

Following yesterday’s post on punctuation marks in literature, five more, in order of increasing favoritism:

5. The forward slash (or solidus) that takes the place of the apostrophe in Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn: “I/ll see ya tomorrow.”

4. The apostrophes in line nine of William Shakespeare’s sonnet 116: “Love’s not time’s fool,” even if one of them is a later addition. The 1609 Quarto: “Lou’s not Times foole.”

3. The ellipsis that marks silences in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest:

‘Hal?’

‘. . .’

‘Hey Hal?’

4. The exclamation point that ends Rae Armantrout’s “Dusk”: “I’m not like that!”

5. The comma in the final line of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 6: “And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.” Or rather, that comma — not semicolon — as it figures in Margaret Edson’s play Wit. See here.

My top ten, in order of increasing favoritism: Selby, Shakespeare, Pound, Faulkner, Wallace, Joyce, Armantrout, Dickinson, Sterne, Edson.

Related reading
All OCA punctuation posts (Pinboard)

[I’m aware of the charge that the apostrophe is a matter of spelling not punctuation. But I still think of it as punctuation. I’ve read somewhere that Wallace picked up the ellipsis from Manuel Puig. The Playbill for Wit read W;t: a beautiful touch of you-know-what.]

Five punctuation marks in literature

Circulating on the Internets: Kathryn Schulz’s list of the five best punctuation marks in literature. It prompts me to make my own (Anglo-American-centric) list of favorites. I can’t claim “best.” But in order of increasing favor:

5. The colon that ends Canto I of Ezra Pound’s The Cantos: “So that:” Later used to end the first sentence of William Faulkner’s The Reivers: “Grandfather said:” And the rest follows.

4. The semicolons that end paragraphs in William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun:

The courthouse is less old than the town, which began somewhere under the turn of the century as a Chickasaw Agency trading-post and so continued for almost thirty years before it discovered, not that it lacked a depository for its records and certainly not that it needed one, but that only by creating or anyway decreeing one, could it cope with a situation which otherwise was going to cost somebody money;

3. The period that ends the “Ithaca” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses:

Where?

.

2. Emily Dickinson’s dashes, any one or more of them: “Are you — Nobody — too?”

1. The long dashes in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which I can only approximate here:

L--d! said my mother, what is all this story about?——

A COCK and a BULL, said Yorick —— And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.

Reader, what are your favorite punctuation marks in literature?

*

I wrote a second post with five more.

Related reading
All OCA punctuation posts (Pinboard)

Telephone exchange names on screen

[From the Naked City episode “A Kettle of Precious Fish,” May 31, 1961. Click for a larger view.]

The precious fish are men held for ransom on a boat. The last column holds the price for each man, exactly half of what’s in the bank. Possible exchange names: ACademy, CApital, CAstle, CIrcle; STate, STerling, STillwell, STory; WIlliam(s), WIlson, WIndsor. These names may all found in a list of Ma Bell’s Officially Recommended Exchange Names.

Related reading
All Naked City posts (Pinboard)

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : Born Yesterday : The Dark Corner : Deception : Dream House : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Side Street : Sweet Smell of Success : This Gun for Hire

“It's not the tool”

Hope, like they say, springs: New Leather-Bound Notebook To Really Unleash Area Woman’s Creativity (The Onion).

The photograph strongly suggests a Moleskine, though Moleskine notebooks are not leather-bound. I like Moleskines, though the mythology that surrounds (or surrounded?) them is a bit much. Further thoughts about legendary notebooks and creativity in this post and comment thread.

As Taking Note has observed, “It’s not the tool, stupid.”

Related reading
All Moleskine posts (Pinboard)

“Mistakes were made”

Roy Peter Clark on Chris Christie and the passive voice: How grammar helps craft governor’s image (The Record).

[The Record is the New Jersey newspaper that first reported on the Christie-Fort Lee story.]

Adam Gopnik on Duke Ellington

Ellington was a dance-band impresario who played no better than O.K. piano, got trapped for years playing “jungle music” in gangster nightclubs, and at his height produced mostly tinny, brief recordings.

Sounds like an Amazon troll, but it’s Adam Gopnik, writing about Duke Ellington in The New Yorker (December 23 and 30, 2013). This summary of Ellington’s accomplishments (followed by words of praise) suggests a writer who doesn’t understand Ellington’s accomplishments — as the leader of a highly idiosyncratic ensemble, as an instrumentalist, as a composer, as an early master of the recording studio. Though “tinny” might make sense if Gopnik’s experience of early Ellington is limited to major-label digital remastering.

And that’s the problem: Gopnik’s understanding of his subjects — Ellington and jazz — is limited. That’s a polite way of saying that Gopnik doesn’t know what he’s writing about.

Concerning Louis Armstrong:

He was not just a genius but an irresistible lion. Even the old complaints about his having sold out no longer seem credible: he simply went from making most of the best jazz records ever made to making some of best pop records.

“Most of the best jazz records ever made”: really? What’s glaringly wrong here though is the claim that Armstrong was charged with selling out. The surprise success of “Hello, Dolly!” was, if anything, a cause for celebration among those devoted to pre-rock-and-roll styles of music. (Armstrong dethroned the Beatles.) The real complaint about Armstrong (utterly mistaken, to my mind) was that he was an Uncle Tom, smiling and servile.

Concerning Ellington’s musicians:

The individual players he employed weren’t up-to-date urban players but, often, less sophisticated New Orleans musicians, whose great gift was a distinctly human tone, often achieved with the use of homemade mutes and plungers.

Ahh, primitivism. This claim is, by any measure, false. I can think offhand of just two New Orleans Ellingtonians: Barney Bigard (clarinet) and Wellman Braud (bass), both consummate musicians. Bubber Miley (cornet and trumpet) and Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton (trombone), whose mute and plunger styles were crucial parts of Ellington’s “jungle” sound, were from South Carolina and New York.

Concerning Billy Strayhorn’s contributions:

It’s long been known by fans that many of the most famous “Ellington” numbers are really the arranger Billy Strayhorn’s, including “Take the A Train” and “Chelsea Bridge.”

Strayhorn was a composer and co-composer. Ellington referred to him as his “writing and arranging companion.” The implication here is that knowledge of Strayhorn’s authorship was inside information. That’s nonsense. There are countless live recordings in which Ellington says something along these lines: “And now our theme, Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Take the “A” Train.’” And the A takes quotation marks.

Concerning the way in which Ellington musicians may have created phrases that became material for Ellington compositions:

What [the alto saxophonist] Johnny Hodges was doing in making those new melodies may have been more like the copying errors in ceaseless cell fission than like premeditated decision: as he set to playing the same chord changes over and over, night after night, a lucky error in a note may, one night, have touched another and become an innovation.

Well, Johnny Hodges didn’t make mistakes. But also: I doubt that any improvising musician would recognize in Gopnik’s imaginings a description of how improvisation and composition work.

It’s sad to see such ill-informed writing about music in the magazine that once gave Whitney Balliett a home.

Related reading
All OCA Duke Ellington posts (Pinboard)
Two Bands (The bit of Gopnik’s piece that’s not behind the New Yorker paywall)

[I haven’t yet read Terry Teachout’s Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, the book that Gopnik is reviewing. The pages of Duke I’ve sampled in Google Books read like a pastiche of previous writing on Ellington. I am happy though to see Ellington holding a Mongol pencil on the book’s cover.]

From the local news

Rewriting history on the television this morning: “Yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.”

The fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs & Freedom, the occasion of that speech, was August 28, 2013.

Related reading
Also from the local news
Also from the local news