Domestic comedy

“It’s a spout-type thing. What am I saying? It’s a spout.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts

Handwritten Bresson

[“As I am too sad to return to this house since my daughter’s death and have failed to sell the farms, why not farm the land yourself using modern techniques, as you once said you’d like to.”]


[Arnold who? The film gives him no last name, and I cannot make it out here.]

Au hasard Balthazar (1966) is another Robert Bresson film with handwriting. Balthazar is a donkey who suffers indignities and outright cruelty with immense dignity.

Other Bresson posts
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
Diary of a Country Priest
A Man Escaped
Pickpocket

[My Harrap’s gives “at random” and “haphazardly” for au hasard. here. Click on either image for a larger view.]

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Jack Elrod passes the ball

[Mark Trail, March 8, 2014.]

”James Allen said he felt like the heavens opened up before his eyes when he first met cartoonist Jack Elrod a decade ago”: and now Mark Trail gets a new artist.

Related reading
All Mark Trail posts

[Readers of Mark Trail — and there are allegedly 23 million of them — know that Jack Elrod’s name appears in a little ball in each strip.]

Naked Fordham City

[“Memory of a Red Trolley Car,” Naked City, June 13, 1962. Click for a larger view.]

That’s the Rose Hill campus of Fordham University, the Bronx, New York. The beautiful building in the background, past the lawn known as Edwards Parade, is Keating Hall. I kissed a girl standing under that arch. Sigh.

It feels odd to me that the distance between this Naked City episode and my college years is far smaller than the distance between my college years and the present. Sigh.

This is the second and last Naked City episode featuring the Rose Hill campus. The first, “Murder Is a Face I Know,” has glimpses of the campus and the Fordham Road-Webster Avenue intersection. Again: Sigh. But also: Represent.

Related reading
All OCA Naked City posts (Pinboard)

Sheila MacRae (1921–2014)

“From 1966 to 1970, Ms. MacRae portrayed Alice, the long-suffering but tough-talking wife of Ralph Kramden, the blustery Brooklyn bus driver played by Jackie Gleason”: from the New York Times obituary. Jane Kean, who played Trixie Norton to Sheila MacRae’s Alice, died last year.

Joyce Randolph, the subject of a 2007 Times article, is now the Last Honeymooner.

Related reading
All OCA Honeymooners posts (Pinboard)

[How fortunate I was to grow up with those thirty-nine episodes endlessly available. Thank you, WPIX.]

The procrastinator’s NDU

The National Day of Unplugging began at sundown yesterday. The NDU website is filled with photographs of people who have filled in the blank to explain why they are unplugging: to bike, to knit, to read, to talk. But here, courtesy of me, is the National Day of Unplugging for procrastinators:



I cast no aspersions on the NDU. But I think that Evgeny Morozov offers a useful general caution:

The embrace of the mindfulness agenda by the technology crowd is especially peculiar. . . . Never before has connectivity offered us so many ways to disconnect.

In essence, we are being urged to unplug — for an hour, a day, a week — so that we can resume our usual activities with even more vigor upon returning to the land of distraction.

That’s not the point of the NDU. But skipping candy one day a week is useful only if it leads to changes on the other six days.

To my mind, the great irony of the NDU is that it asks participants to post photographs to the NDU website: Hey, friends and family, look at me! Which means that your friends and family have to go online. Which helps drive traffic to the website, right?

Ghostwriter

Ghostwriter was our fambly’s obsession during our children’s kidhood years. Every Sunday night: Word! Do you remember Ghostwriter, reader? No? Okay, forget it.

I just found this item about the show, which confirms what I always suspected. Ghostwriter was an escaped slave:

“Ghostwriter was a runaway slave during the Civil War,” [the show’s producer and writer Kermit Frazier] said. “He was killed by slave catchers and their dogs as he was teaching other runaway slaves how to read in the woods.”

Thanks, RL.

[What led me to think escaped slave: on one occasion, Ghostwriter writes to the team about protecting the children; on another, about hearing the dogs. The link went to the New York Times feature “The Local,” now gone.]

Roz Chast on her parents

Not behind The New Yorker paywall: Roz Chast’s “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?” These pages are an excerpt from a graphic memoir of the same name, to be published in May. Good reading for children of all ages.

Related posts
The many hates of Roz Chast
Me? (The guy in Chast’s cartoons who looks like me, sort of)

Coffee in the classroom

The student was sitting at the back of the classroom. On the floor, a water boiler, plugged into the wall outlet. On a desk, a Chemex coffee maker. He was making coffee, and I realized that I would have to revise my syllabus.

And then I woke up. Yes, it was only a dream.

In the waking world, my syllabi have a statement about decorum that reads like so:

The atmosphere in our class should be serious — not somber or pretentious, but collegiate and genuinely intellectual. No eating, sleeping, talking, texting, or doing work for other classes. No headphones, iPods, or phones. Electronic devices should be off and out of sight before class begins. Please show respect for our community of learning.

At one point my syllabi prohibited knitting: it had become a thing. Times change, and syllabi change with them.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)