Verlyn Klinkenborg on the English major

Verlyn Klinkenborg on the decline and fall of the English major:

Each semester I hope, and fear, that I will have nothing to teach my students because they already know how to write. And each semester I discover, again, that they don’t.

They can assemble strings of jargon and generate clots of ventriloquistic syntax. They can meta-metastasize any thematic or ideological notion they happen upon. And they get good grades for doing just that. But as for writing clearly, simply, with attention and openness to their own thoughts and emotions and the world around them — no.

I like that phrase — “ventriloquistic syntax.” Making the right noises, so to speak, is one way to make it through the English major. In Is There a Text in This Class? (1980), Stanley Fish has a quintessential description of how it might be done:

A student of mine recently demonstrated this knowledge when, with an air of giving away a trade secret, she confided that she could go into any classroom, no matter what the subject of the course, and win approval for running one of a number of well-defined interpretive routines: she could view the assigned text as an instance of the tension between nature and culture; she could look in the text for evidence of large mythological oppositions; she could argue that the true subject of the text was its own composition, or that in the guise of fashioning a narrative the speaker was fragmenting and displacing his own anxieties and fears.

The cynicism that underwrites this description — performing in codified ways, whatever the object of inquiry, so as to “win approval” — makes me despair. What’s missing is an acknowledgement that works of the imagination challenge our ability to think about them, that they are things to live with, struggle with, and have reverence for. They are not unsuspecting saps on which to run our routines, whatever approval those routines might win.

It’s no fun being a ventriloquist’s dummy. You spend a lot of time stuck in a suitcase, where it’s awfully hard to breathe. There’s the real unsuspecting sap.

Other posts with Verlyn Klinkenborg
On e-reading
On “the social value of reading”
On writing

[Imagine a musician whose thinking about performance resembled Fish’s student’s thinking about interpretation. Who would want to listen?]

George Burns and Tess Gardella

Trekking through DVDs of The Dick Cavett Show, I stopped in my trek as George Burns was speaking. From December 15, 1971:

“I love all kinds of songs, but I make a lot of money by not singing popular songs. Irving Berlin pays me twenty-five dollars a week not to touch any of his numbers. In fact, during the holidays I’m not even allowed to whistle “White Christmas.” But there's a Berlin song that I sing that he wrote and he doesn’t know it. He wrote it for Aunt Jemima a thousand years ago — for Tess Gardell, and she was a great blues singer. And she was a very heavyset girl, and she used to dress up like Aunt Jemima, and she had five musicans on the stage that were dressed up like bakers. And he wrote her this special piece of material. And I played on the bill with her in Montreal. I did an act then called Gary and Smith, Sid Gary and Charlie Smith. I was Charlie Smith. “Fifteen minutes of songs and fun for everyone,” that was our billing. . . . Anyway, I played with Tess Gardell and Jessel, Jessel was on that bill too, George Jessel. . . . Anyway, Tess Gardell was singing this Irving Berlin song. . . . It’s the greatest song:

Hello, everybody, don’t you know my name?
I'm Aunt Jemima of the pancake fame.
You see me in the subways here and there,
In fact I’m on the billboards everywhere.
The pancake business it was slow,
So I got my pancake bakers and went out to get
    the dough.
’Cause I’m Aunt Jemima and my five bakers,
They’re all ragtime shimmy-shakers.
We got kind of tired of the place that we were
    at.
We all walked out and left the pancakes flat.
The boys are good at bakin’, also shimmy-
    shakin’,
That you must —

Anyway, that's the song.”

Too bad Burns didn’t finish. ASCAP’s ACE Index returns 498 Berlin songs, but not this one.

Billed as Aunt Jemima, Tess Gardella (1894–1950) appeared in vaudeville, in the musical theater, and in film. She was an Italian-American blackface performer, best known for originating the role of Queenie in Show Boat. She is my distant relation, my great-grandmother’s cousin.

Despite her stage name, Gardella had no connection to pancake mix or syrup. But she did indeed perform with a band of bakers. A 1920 issue of Variety lists Aunt Jemima and Her Five Bakers of Syncopation as a new act. Here from 1924 is a review of a performance with two-piano backing:


[Variety, September 9, 1924.]

Tess Gardella is still “‘in’ as a pop song specialist.” Listen to her 1928 recording of the song she introduced in Show Boat, “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” beginning at 15:23.

The strangest thing that I know about Tess Gardella: the photograph below appeared in the 1974 edition of The Black Book, identified as “Lois Gardella, the original Aunt Jemima, 1933.” A review of the book in Ms. magazine celebrated Gardella as “a beautiful woman!” — presumably African-American. A Gardella cousin (Frank) wrote to the magazine with a correction.

The photograph is missing from the 2009 edition of The Black Book. It seems reasonable to infer from the absence that the book’s makers at first mistook Tess Gardella for African-American.


[Tess Gardella. From The Black Book, ed. Middleton A. Harris (New York: Random House, 1974).]

*

June 18, 2020: An interesting perspective on Tess Gardella, suggesting that her success

was owing not to her perceived “whiteness” but instead to her ethnic positioning between white and black. Like both Jewish and African American women, Italian women have historically been portrayed as matriarchal nurturers – domineering precisely in their excessive capacity for affection — and so Gardella could be hailed as a natural delineator of black womanhood, while allowing the audience a comfortable distance from actual African American and Jewish women alike.

Doris Witt, Black Hunger: Soul Food and America (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

More Tess Gardella
“Didn’t I Tell You (That You’d Come Back)” (1928)
“C’mon Folks” and “Hey Feller” (1929, film footage from Show Boat)
“Does She Love Me”/“My Idea of Heaven” (1927, with Mal Hallet and His Orchestra)
“I Ain’t Got Nobody” (1932, with Howard Lanin and His Orchestra, from Rambling ’Round Radio Row #3)
“I’m Laughing” (1934, from Stand Up and Cheer!, dir. Hamilton MacFadden)

Vollkorn, updated

I’m not sure what just prompted me to look at the page for Friedrich Althausen’s typeface Vollkorn. But I’m happy that I did, because three days ago Vollkorn received a significant update.

Vollkorn is one of my two favorite serifs. Palatino is the other. Unlike Palatino, Vollkorn is free, licensed under the SIL Open Font License.

[Correction: I am sure what prompted me to look: purposeful procrastination.]

Richard Feynman and close reading

Richard Feynman speaking:

I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. And he says, “You see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is. But you as a scientist take this all apart, and it becomes a dull thing.” And I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people, and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is, I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean, it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting: it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery, and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

I find in this passage a helpful argument for the value of close reading. Flower: poem. To look at a poem closely is to deepen its excitement, mystery, and capacity to inspire awe.

Here is Feynman speaking. I found my way to this clip via a Jason Kottke post unrelated to poetry. The transcription and punctuation are mine.

Related reading
All OCA poetry posts (Pinboard)
Richard Feynman on honors

Domestic comedy

“I would have asked you, had I said something.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[It was very late.]

Any port in a storm

“Five-hour-energy-dot-com. This is NPR.”

More disturbing even than Lifestyle Lift’s sponsorship of the CBS Evening News.

Adjuncts on the PBS NewsHour

“I’ve been on food stamps for, I think, about six months”: from a PBS NewsHour report on adjunct faculty.

The spokesmen for officialdom in this report remind me of tobacco-industry reps: Smoking is an informed adult choice. Nobody forces someone to become an adjunct.

Related posts
The Adjunct Project
Adjunct teaching and health insurance

Henry, vacuuming

[Henry, February 6, 2014.]

This is what a vacuum cleaner looks like.


[Henry, February 6, 2014.]

And this is what a door-to-door salesperson looks like.

You can still buy a vacuum cleaner from a door-to-door salesperson, at least in areas that have such persons. But the machine’s price is very un-Henry. Very.

And this is what a doorbell sounds like. But be careful: there may be a vacuum-cleaner salesperson at the door.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)

WCW’s stars

From poem XII in William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All (1923), a cubist rendering of a catch-all box and its contents:

But the stars
are round
cardboard
with a tin edge

and a ring
to fasten them
to a trunk
for the vacation —

These lines seem to puzzle close readers. Marjorie Perloff, writing in The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981):

Finally, and most confusing, are the “stars” made of “round / cardboard / with a tin edge” inside the box or do they decorate its surface? How and why would one fasten “them” as opposed to “it” (the box) “to a trunk / for the vacation”?

It’s not that confusing. The stars are inside the box. A office-supplies-minded reader will recognize them as paper key tags. These objects must have served as luggage tags back in the day.

To say that the image is not confusing does nothing to detract from the work of the imagination (the work of “seeing-as”) in these lines. Recall William Blake, who saw a world in a grain of sand.

Related reading
Other OCA WCW posts (Pinboard)

Glenn Gould on watching television

Glenn Gould, in a 1959 interview:

“I don’t approve of people who watch television, but I am one of them.”

Quoted in Kevin Bazzana’s Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2003).

Bazzana reports that Gould pronounced himself a “vidiot.” One of his favorite broadcasts: The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Related reading
All OCA Glenn Gould posts (Pinboard)