Mesopotamia: Bushmiller Country

[Photograph by Sluggo Smith. As seen at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.]

We drove up to Chicago to see our friends Jim and Luanne Koper and make a visit to the Oriental Institute. Luanne was the first to spot this sign, on a placard showing the evolution of cuneiform. It’s the proto-cuneiform of kur, mountain. I took a picture. Some rocks!

If you have any doubt that ancient Mesopotamia was Bushmiller Country, I give you this excerpt from a chart:


[“The origin and development of selected cunieform signs from c. 3000 to 600 BC.” Steven Roger Fischer, The History of Writing (London: Reaktion Books, 2004). Click for a larger view. And here’s the full chart. See? It’s real.]

The later stylized kur maintains the logic of ”some”: not two (a pair), not four (one more than “some”). Ernie Bushmiller would be pleased. “Bushmiller Country” is cartoonist Bill Griffith’s name for the Nancy-and-Sluggo world, which is a region of Griffith’s own Dingburg — but which now also includes Mesopotamia.

Here is an explanation of “some rocks,” along with the search for same.

Related reading
“Some rocks” in a 1556 woodcut (Lexikaliker) : “Some rocks” in paintings by Carlo Crivelli and Romare Bearden (l’astronave) : Zippy and rocks : More rocks : Still more rocks : Yet another post with “some rocks” : What? More rocks? : Lassie and Zippy and some rocks : Conversational rocks

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.]