Colleges and bakeries

A college that offers more online classes to remedy its financial woes? That’s like a bakery opting to sell Twinkies and Wonder Bread. Each move gives the public less reason to believe in the value of the real thing. Each move endangers long-term well-being for the sake of short-term gain.

[I tried to get the right comparison: fine luggage and cheap knockoffs? No. Elaine thought of a bakery and Wonder Bread. The Twinkies are on me.]

The Art Ensemble of Chicago in Boston

[The Art Ensemble of Chicago. Front: Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman. Back: Famoudou Don Moye (behind a cymbal), Malachi Favors Maghostut. Lulu White’s, Boston. Probably 1981. Photographer unknown. Click for a larger view.]

I found this newspaper clipping in a file folder that I rediscovered earlier this week. If you look carefully, you can see the tape that held this clipping to an apartment wall long long ago. The photograph most likely appeared in Boston’s Real Paper, an alternative newspaper. Remember alternative newspapers?

I was fortunate to see the Art Ensemble five times between 1980 and 1985: at a midnight concert at New York’s Town Hall, at Lulu White’s in the South End (twice), at Jonathan Swift’s off Harvard Square, and at the Berklee School of Music. Every performance but the last was staggeringly great, some of the most exciting and inspiring music I’ve ever heard. And talk about intimacy: at the club dates an early bird could end up sitting less than ten — or five? — feet from the bandstand.

I remember being admitted to the band’s dressing room in Town Hall and noticing the mix of cigar smoke and pot. I remember standing in the street at three o’clock in the morning talking with Malachi Favors as instruments went onto a truck. Other moments of conversation too, before a show at Lulu White’s, after a show at Jonathan Swift’s. As I said: fortunate.

To the best of my knowledge, this photograph is unavailable elsewhere online.

Related reading
Lulu White, the woman (Wikipedia)
Lulu White, the club (On Troy Street)
Some have gone and some remain (on revisiting Jonathan Swift’s)

Also from this file folder
Jim Doyle on education
A Meeting with Ludwig Wittgenstein
Tile-pilfering questionnaire

[Lester Bowie died in 1999; Malachi Favors in 2004. The Art Ensemble has continued to perform, at least intermittently, as a trio, as a quartet, and as a quintet with trumpeter Corey Wilkes and bassist Jaribu Shahid. For an introduction to the group, I’d recommend Nice Guys (ECM, 1978) or Full Force (ECM, 1980). If you have a little patience, People in Sorrow (Nessa, 1969). There are hours of filmed performances at YouTube. Here’s a good sample.]

What parents need to know about college faculty

Instructor to campus-tour guide:

“I’m not mad at you; I’m just curious: Your class knows I’m a graduate student, not a full-time professor with tenure. I don’t even have my doctorate yet. Why did you tell that parent all university faculty were full time?”

The guide’s reply:

“That’s what the university wants us to say to parents.”

Ex-adjunct Joseph Fruscione offers some guidance of his own: What parents need to know about college faculty (PBS NewsHour).

A joke in the traditional manner

Why did the doctor spend his time helping injured squirrels?

No spoilers here. The answer is in the comments.

More jokes in the traditional manner
How did Bela Lugosi know what to expect?
How did Samuel Clemens do all his long-distance traveling?
Why did Oliver Hardy attempt a solo career in movies?
Why was Santa Claus wandering the East Side of Manhattan?

[“In the traditional manner” means à la my dad.]

From a file folder

[Questionnaire by Jim Leddy, on a 3" x 5" index card. Click for a larger view.]

My dad sent me this questionnaire probably not long after I moved to Boston. You know what they say about apples and the trees from which they fall.

I refer to humor, not criminality. The vintage tiles in my possession (great paperweights) are unstolen goods. My dad saved them when tearing out walls.

Also from a file folder
Jim Doyle on education
A Meeting with Ludwig Wittgenstein


[Ceramic tile trim. 6" x 1¼". Click for a larger tile.]

Pagan signage

A nearby Christian center must have been taken over by pagans: why else would its signboard now advertise (in all capitals) SUN WORSHIP?

Related reading
Other OCA signage posts (Pinboard)

x + 1

At 21st-Century Stoic, William B. Irvine explains how to increase the value of x to x + 1.

Related posts
I can’t get no satisfaction
Stoic-colored glasses

From a file folder

On a scrap of paper, words from my favorite teacher Jim Doyle, most likely an offhand remark in class:

Education is instilling relativism in the pretentious mind.

I will be posting further bits of paper (or transcriptions of bits) from a file folder long out of sight and mind. Now it’s back.

Also from a file folder
A Meeting with Ludwig Wittgenstein

[Relativism? I would have sworn that the noun was humility. That sounds more Doyle-like to me.]

Arum and Roksa on life after college

The Chronicle of Higher Education has two articles — one, two — on Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s new book Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates, the sequel to Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (2011). The news is not good.

And here, also from this week’s Chronicle, are Arum and Roksa themselves:

We find it implausible that in a globalized knowledge economy, the current state of affairs will continue indefinitely. Not just because the growth in college costs is unsustainable, but also because legislators, families, and students will have difficulties justifying why resources are increasingly allocated not to improving instruction but to building new dormitories, student centers, and athletic facilities. While this might be an effective institutional strategy for attracting 17-year-olds as consumers and keeping them satisfied with “bread and circuses” once enrolled, it has produced a competition to provide the best amenities and student services money can buy and the least challenging academic demands and expectations.

I think of the reading list I created when I first taught a garden-variety freshman-lit class: Barthes’s Mythologies, The Turn of the Screw, Dubliners, A Confederacy of Dunces, The Blue and Brown Books — oh, and Don Quixote, all of it. Today that list would look like the dark dream of some horrible outlier.

A related post
A review of Academically Adrift

[Did the students read and get something from those works? They sure did. And Cervantes and Toole went together well.]

From a file folder

A Meeting with Ludwig Wittgenstein

E. George Wilson

I recall was great fondness and a measure of sadness my meeting with Herr Wittgenstein. One spring afternoon I was in my rooms reading for my exams when I heard a noise in a nearby tree. Curious, I rose from my chair, looked out the window, and beheld a preternaturally young-looking man descending from the boughs in a brisk no-nonsense fashion. I hurried outside to inquire of him as to the meaning of his action and was in turn asked, ‘What do you mean by “meaning”?’ I found myself unable to answer and straightaway admitted the foolishness of my question. Wittgenstein laughed (I had the curious feeling that he was laughing both with me and at me), presented me with a dish mop, and asked in a low tone if I would care to take in a ‘flick’ with him that evening. I realized at once that I was in the presence of the finest philosophical mind of the twentieth century.

The years dim my memory, and with the passing of time I find I have only faint recall of the film itself (I remember only a darkish woman with citrus fruits arranged on her head), but I can still vividly picture Wittgenstein as I called for him in his rooms. Upon my knock, he removed the door from its hinges and set it against the wall. ‘This,’ he smiled, ‘illustrates the method of philosophy.’ His rooms bespoke a spartan nature, utterly devoid of a desire for useless ornament. A paint-by-the-numbers set, later to prove of inestimable value in his work on color, rested on the one table; a toy duck and rabbit and several dish mops sat in an open safe. I noticed that his rooms contained not one of what I, in my greenness, thought of as philosophical works; the one bookcase held three or four comic books, a monograph on toothache, and the piece of string that served as the model for several of the amusing diagrams contained in his works. The only other objects visible were a small bottle and a number of dead flies.

I was by this point frankly in awe, and Wittgenstein’s conversation during our walk to the cinema served only to confirm me in my feeling. ‘We say that penguins have no conception of time,’ he observed, ‘but then why do we say of a particular penguin that he’s always late for his dental appointments?’ I confessed that I could not explain the contradiction. The talk continued in this matter, with Wittgenstein posing questions that left me unable to respond. There was a brief interlude during which he busied himself looking for a particular grouping of trees that formed, he said, the ‘big W.’ I jested that, my name being Wilson, I should like to contest his claim to such a group of trees. Wittgenstein smiled and asked me another question.

After the flick we were both feeling famished, and Wittgenstein suggested that we visit a small restaurant noted for its cold pork pies. I almost wish I had not agreed to this plan, for it was to give me a glimpse of the dark forces the tormented this brilliant soul. After we had consumed our pies, Wittgenstein called for the waiter and calmly announced that he had no money to pay the bill. ‘But Herr Wittgenstein,’ I exclaimed, ‘I would be only too glad to pay for our pies!’ ‘I would not hear of it,’ he said seriously, and proposed to the waiter that he might wash dishes as a means of paying for our meal. The manager was consulted and the proposal accepted. Wittgenstein rose from his chair, extracted a dish mop from his coat pocket, and walked off in the direction of the kitchen.

Thus ended my meeting with Ludwig Wittgenstein. Holding my gift mop in my hands, I have wrestled with my conscience for many an hour, debating whether I should disclose my knowledge of his dishwashing mania. Since no member of the Wittgenstein circle has come forward, I find it my duty to make my experience public. I can only hope that my honesty will prompt others to follow my example. At this point we need not fear for Wittgenstein’s reputation: his place in the realm of philosophy is secure; his light shines with ever increasing brightness in these dark times.

[Found recently in a file folder. I wrote this piece as a graduate student in 1983. Norman Malcolm’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (1958) was my inspiration. Yes, I was deeply under Wittgenstein’s spell. The imaginary “E. George Wilson” was of course British, as his diction and punctuation should suggest.]

Related reading
Other OCA Wittgenstein posts (Pinboard)