Jim Leddy tells it like it is

After a stretch of time in the hospital and a longer stretch in rehab (not that kind of rehab), my dad is back home. One might think “Just in time for the Super Bowl,” but my dad takes no interest in football. He is indeed his son’s father.

And my dad is a gentleman — always. So I was amused and enlightened when he described the disorder of life in rehab like so: “Have you heard people use the expression ‘fucked up’?” Yes, Dad, but I never before heard you use it. That’s the measure of a place where a request for hot tea at breakfast brought iced, day after day after day.

Welcome home, Dad, and thanks to everyone who has sent good wishes his way.

[Dialogue used with permission. And notice that my dad was quoting.]

Overheard

While reading in a café: “I don’t hate you — I just couldn’t tell you that I was upset."

And a couple of minutes later: “I don’t hate you — I just couldn’t tell you that I was upset.”

And then again.

Aha: they were running lines from a play, or from an episode of Girls, or something.

Related reading
All “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

The Doomsday rule

BrownStudies explains the Doomsday rule, a nifty way to figure out the day of the week for a given date. Such stuff holds an irresistible appeal for the ten-year-old secret agent in me. Because say you were like stuck on a desert island or something, and you didn’t have a calendar, and you needed to figure out the day of the week that something was going to happen — well, you get the idea.

Last night I challenged my spouse to test me: pick a date, any date. And yes, June 23, 2014, falls on a Monday. It’s the rule.

See also Super Minimalist Micro Calendar.

Making it work

From a New York Times interview with Elaine Stritch:

Now that you’ve been settled in Michigan for almost a year, do you find yourself missing New York?

No, I don’t miss places. I really don’t. I get up in the morning, the sun is out, I’m a happy clam. I’m not unhappy because I’m not in this bedroom or that bedroom, or this living room or that living room. I’m going to make it work wherever I go.

I like her perspective.

Three for one

The folkloric measure of college coursework: two to three hours for each hour in class. This measure does not apply in all cases: Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa recently found that an average student spends twelve hours a week studying, and that thirty-seven percent of students spend less than five. Thus it’s of more than passing interest to know that a two-for-one recommendation appears in federal guidelines for a credit hour, which state that a credit hour “reasonably approximates not less than”

(1) One hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and a minimum of two hours of out of class student work each week for approximately fifteen weeks for one semester or trimester hour of credit, or ten to twelve weeks for one quarter hour of credit, or the equivalent amount of work over a different amount of time; or

(2) At least an equivalent amount of work as required in paragraph (1) of this definition for other academic activities as established by the institution including laboratory work, internships, practica, studio work, and other academic work leading to the award of credit hours.

Professors who don’t require students to do a reasonable amount of work conspire with their students in the creation of the vast simulacrum that I call “colledge.” Such professors make life more difficult for the rest of us.

Related reading
Program Integrity Issues; Final Rule (U.S. Department of Education)
OCA review of Academically Adrift

[The federal gummint appears to be short on hyphens, no?]

Writing and belief

As a writer, what do you believe in?

I believe in black ink, yellow legal pads, Castell 9000s, Mongols, Ticonderogas, wooden pencils in general, mechanical pencils in general, erasers in general, Pelikans, Safaris, Uni-ball Signos, the T-Ball Jotter, index cards, Post-it Notes, pocket notebooks (Field Notes, IBM Think pads, Moleskines), a larger notebook that my daughter gave me (Moleskine), PocketMods, nvALT, Simplenote, TextWrangler, WriteRoom.

But also: any available paper, any available Bic.

Humph

How like Arts & Letters Daily to take no notice of Pete Seeger’s death. (I didn’t think they would.)

Inequality v. disparity

The phrase income inequality — a phrase not in the State of the Union address, but a phrase that is everywhere in commentary on that address — makes me uneasy. In a capitalist economy, what could be the alternative to income inequality? People earn more or less, for many reasons. And indeed, some of those reasons are a matter of injustices woven deep into American life. But income, unlike rights, cannot be distributed equally to all.

Equal pay for equal work? Of course. But the phrase income inequality points to a larger matter: the great gap between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else. The problem there is not income inequality: it is income disparity.

A related post
Income disparity in higher ed

Pete Seeger (1919–2014)

[“Pete’s banjo head.” Photograph of Pete Seeger’s banjo by Tom Davis (tcd123usa), via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons License.]

The New York Times has an obituary.

Pete Seeger was the first musician I saw in concert. I was all of twelve: my dad took me on a Monday night, all the way from New Jersey to Queens. Years later I heard Pete Seeger sing from the porch of a house in Little Compton, Rhode Island.

Here’s a Joe Brainard-like post from 2009, when Pete Seeger turned ninety.

Thanks, Tom, for sharing your photograph. Thanks, Dad, for taking me to the Bronx. Thanks, Pete, for opening a world of music to me.

Related reading
All OCA Pete Seeger posts (Pinboard)

Naked City mystery guests

[From the Naked City episode “Sweet Prince of Delancey Street,” June 7, 1961.]

Can you identify the actors? One is making his first screen appearance.

“Sweet Prince of Delancey Street” appears as no. 93 on a 1997 TV Guide list of the hundred best television episodes, the only Naked City episode on the list. It’s a great episode, a variation on Hamlet that begins on a terrifying and disorienting note. But there are other Naked City episodes just as good. In truth, there are few episodes of Naked City that are less than compelling.

Making my way through the four seasons of the series confirms for me the Swiss-cheesiness of Steven Berlin Johnson’s claim that television past required little if any “intellectual labor” from a viewer. A Naked City episode (say, “The Deadly Guinea Pig”) can leave its viewer trying to figure out for twenty or thirty minutes what’s going on. Or, as at the end of the episode “The One Marked Hot Gives Cold,” what happened.

Related reading
All Naked City posts (Pinboard)