Robin Williams (1951–2014)

The actor and comedian Robin Williams has died, an apparent suicide.

So much sorrow in the world, far and near. In the words of Frank O’Hara: No more dying.

A request for good vibrations

Elaine’s brother Marshall Fine was in a horrific car accident last week. We learned about it late Saturday night and spent Sunday in Kentucky, visiting him in the hospital and retrieving his stuff from his car. We were assisted by an incredibly kind state trooper and an equally kind tow-operator.

The injuries are grievous, but there is much reason to think that Marshall will recover. If you have some good vibrations to spare, please send them his way.

*

7:55 p.m.: As I wrote in a comment earlier today, there’s less reason to be hopeful than there was when I wrote this post. But Marshall is getting excellent care, and we are still hopeful.

Here’s just one reason why someone might reconsider adjunct teaching

At the community college where my wife Elaine taught for a number of years, eight adjunct faculty have just learned that some or all of their fall classes have been canceled. They have received this news three weeks before the fall semester begins.

Adjunct is a strange term: what’s adjunct is supplemental, not essential. Yet so-called adjunct faculty are now a substantial majority of college faculty. A more accurate term: contingent faculty. As the AAUP says, such faculty serve “in insecure, unsupported positions with little job security and few protections for academic freedom.” See the previous paragraph.

Related reading
The Adjunct Project (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

[The reasons for the cancellations: budget cuts, declining enrollment.]

Rogeting

A new direction in academic misconduct: Rogeting, the use of a thesaurus when plagiarizing. The results, as reported in The Guardian, are both sad and hilarious. The stellar example, from Chris Sadler, the Middlesex University lecturer who coined the term Rogeting : “sinister buttocks.” In other words, “left behind.”

That students could hope to succeed by means of such substitutions suggests that something is broken — in their understanding of how language works, and in their ability to imagine a reader’s response to their writing.

Thanks to Ian Bagger for sending The Guardian article my way.

A related post
Beware of the saurus (Don’t hunt for “better words”)

Where were you when Nixon resigned?

[Andy Warhol, Vote McGovern. 1972. Screen print on Arches 88 paper. 42 x 42 in. From The Andy Warhol Museum. First spotted at Ordinary Finds.]

I know where I was on August 9, 1974: at home watching television. I remember the farewell speech — “My mother was a saint” — as painful to watch. I despised the man, but I took no pleasure in this sad spectacle. His life was in ruins, and there was his family, standing off to the side having to see it.

I have more vivid memories of the day before the resignation, the day Nixon announced that he would resign. I was working as my dad’s helper (tile work) at the house of a woman named Mrs. Zargami, somewhere in northern New Jersey. We had a transistor radio on and heard the news — in the afternoon, I think — that Nixon was going to address the nation that night. Mrs. Zargami gave me a twenty-dollar bill at the end of the day. I wondered whether she realized that my dad was paying me. We drove home and we all had dinner, and later that night we turned on the TV.

Where were you when Richard Nixon resigned?

Richard Nixon on the Irish
Six degrees of Richard Nixon

[Thank you again, Mrs. Zarghami. And how do I remember her name? My dad has quizzed me on it over the years. Thanks, Dad.]

Handwrytten

Handwrytten is an app for iOS:

Handwrytten allows you to send real cards and notes with your message written in pen and ink. Just select a quality card, type your message and hit send! Then, our robotic handwriting machines will “wryte” your message in realistic handwriting on the card, address the envelope and place it in the mail with a real stamp.

And the happy recipient may soon begin to wonder why these cards from various senders all have the same postmark and the same “handwriting.”

Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)

[As for Handwrytten’s claim that “it's even cheaper than running to the store yourself and buying a card”: you could buy a box of note cards and envelopes and come out way ahead, as would those receiving your genuinely handwritten messages. But why is “even cheaper” better anyway?]

Domestic comedy

“Nothing says ‘summer’ like a big pot of stew.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[It’s true too.]

Grammer and spelling

Mark Zuckerberg, inscribing a copy of The Elements of Style: “Now learn some grammer.”

Well, he could have been joking. Hard to say.

Related reading
All OCA Elements of Style posts (Pinboard)
Mark Zuckerberg and the Aeneid

Simulacrum alert

[Photograph by Michael Leddy. Click for a larger simulacrum.]

As seen earlier this summer at Garden State Plaza, Paramus, New Jersey.

A previous alert
Minetta Tavern and Monkey Bar

Review: J. D. Salinger, Three Early Stories

J. D. Salinger. Three Early Stories. Illustrated by Anna Rose Yoken. Memphis: Devault-Graves, 2014. $14.95 paperback. $8.99 e-book. $3.95 audio. 69 pages.

Three Early Stories reprints work for which J. D. Salinger, careful though he was, never held copyright: “The Young Folks” (Story, 1940), “Go See Eddie” (University of Kansas City Review, 1940), “Once a Week Won’t Kill You” (Story, 1944). The stories are short, and slight. Gathered here, they make a meager bouquet, but a bouquet nonetheless, and a wondrous one, something rather than nothing. In the first of these stories, a young woman at a party of “noisy young people” works hard to make conversation with a young man whose attention is directed to a “small blonde” who sits on the floor, at some distance. The blonde is laughing and already commanding the attention of at least three other young men. In the second story, a brother attempts to exert authority over his sister’s life by insisting that she give up her married lover and “Go see Eddie” about a job. In the third, a young soldier packs his suitcase and talks with his wife and aunt before shipping out. He struggles about how to tell Aunt Rena (now lost in a placid dementia) that he is leaving. These characters are recognizable as Salinger people: they smoke cigarettes, squint to avoid the smoke from their cigarettes, sip coffee, bite their fingernails. At least two characters are marked by lovely idiosyncrasies: the soldier remembers that his mother always whistled a risqué song through her teeth when drawing the blinds; the soldier’s aunt has started collecting canceled two-cent stamps. We are not far from Jane Gallagher’s habit of keeping her kings in the back row.

Already on display in these stories is Salinger’s ear for the registers of modern American speech. Consider Edna Phillips, the lonely young woman of “The Young Folks,” determined to be cheery and social, insisting with forced gaiety that people and things are grand: “He’s a grand person, don’t you think?” “It’s so grand out here.” “Oh, he’s a grand guy.” (Says Holden Caulfield of “grand”: “There’s a word I really hate.”) Edna later explains with Caulfield-like honesty and awkwardness her thinking about sex: “It’s gotta be the real thing with me. Before, you know. I mean, love and all.” Or consider this exchange between brother and sister:

“Have you ever seen his wife?” Bobby asked.

“Yes-I’ve-seen-his-wife. What about her?”

Or these words from the soldier’s wife:

“Well, I hope at least they send you to London. I mean where there’s some civilized people.”

There’s an element of defensiveness in Salinger’s effort to capture tone by means typography: “It had been three years and she had never stopped talking to him in italics,” the narrator observes. In other words, that’s just how she talks. Salinger’s characters would never stop talking in italics.

Also on display in these stories is Salinger’s indebtedness to Ernest Hemingway. A sentence in “Once a Week” about a woman’s arms — “They were brown and round and good” — is either hapless imitation or fine parody. The real debt to Hemingway in these stories involves narrative silence. Hugh Kenner offers a brilliant characterization of Hemingway’s achievement as a matter of “setting down, so sparely that we can see past them, the words for the action that concealed the real action.” After the distracted male partygoer walks off to pay attention to the blonde, Edna Phillips retreats to a forbidden part of her host’s house (a parental bedroom?), and returns with cigarettes. She is gone nearly twenty minutes: doing what? Grieving her social failure? The sudden violence of brother against sister suggests that the exhortation to “Go see Eddie” is just one more moment in a long history of sibling conflict and sexual tension. The poignance of Aunt Rena’s Miss Havishamish existence and the great losses that lie in her past are left for the reader to infer — or is it only suspect? — from a handful of details.

About the design of Three Early Stories: the cover is promising in its Salingerian austerity, but inside are mistaken choices. The text is printed recto-only in a large thin font (a Goudy Californian, I think), with a ragged right margin and generous space between lines. There are only thirty-two pages of text, and ten full-page illustrations. The design, especially when text and illustration appear side by side, too strongly resembles that of a young reader’s chapter book. This book is of course the first illustrated edition of Salinger, illustrations or annotations having been a requirement for permission to reprint. Anna Rose Yoken, the book’s illustrator, appears to be an artist of genuine ability, but her work here looks unidiomatic, far removed from the sophistication of mid-century commercial illustration. I’d like to see larger margins, a more substantial font, small blocks of text recto and verso, and (if need be) a handful of small line drawings. And one annotation I’d like to see: an explanation of “Tea Gardens” (for “Teagardens,” recordings by Jack Teagarden). Is that Salinger’s joke? Or an error in the original publication?

New Salinger work is supposed to begin arriving in 2015: David Shields and Shane Salerno’s Salinger (2013) describes five volumes to come but makes no mention of the early stories. Will Three Early Stories (and last year’s digital bootleg of three unpublished early stories) move the Salinger estate to consider making all the early work available in book form? I think that’s unlikely. Which makes the legitimate publication of these three stories an even more wondrous thing.

Thanks to the publisher for a review copy of the book.

Related reading
All OCA Salinger posts (Pinboard)

[In The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Holden describes Jane Gallagher’s checkerplay: “What she’d do, when she’d get a king, she wouldn’t move it. She’d just leave it in the back row. She’d get them all lined up in the back row. Then she’d never use them. She just liked the way they looked when they were all in the back row.” Hugh Kenner’s characterization of Hemingway’s achievement appears in A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (1975).]