Happy birthday, Ted Berrigan

[From A Certain Slant of Sunlight (Oakland, CA: O Books, 1988).]

The American poet Ted Berrigan was born eighty years ago today. He died on July 4, 1983. I‘ll quote from an essay that I wrote some years ago for a reference series on American poetry:

In twenty-five years of writing, Ted Berrigan created a poetry that melded intelligence, emotion, and wit in unexpected ways, a poetry of what he calls in sonnet LIII “baffling combustions.” Berrigan’s poetry can be at once dazzlingly opaque and utterly clear, full of dense verbal collage and unashamed sentiment, blatantly appropriative yet singularly original.

Berrigan established himself as a poet with the radical formalism of The Sonnets (1964), turning the form, as he said in a 1978 interview, into “fourteen units of one line each.” The poems of this sequence collage fragments of Berrigan’s own unsatisfactory early work with words lifted from elsewhere, creating rich and strange textures in fourteen (or fifteen or sixteen) lines.¹ In his final years Berrigan discovered a new possibility for a radical formalism in the writing project 500 American Postcards, which took the postcard as a poetic form, a fixed space determining (along with the variable of handwriting) the size of the poem.

“Whoa Back Buck & Gee by Land!” is a postcard poem. It takes its title from a song Leadbelly sang (but it’s the lamb, not land ). The third line comes from Frank O’Hara’s poem “River”; the fourth, from Auden’s “A Lullaby”; the sixth, from John Wieners’s “Act #2” (“Women in / the night moan yr. name”). Those are the sources I recognize; there may be others. The poem itself, however, could be the work of only one poet. “Man, that was Ted Berrigan!”

It is 5:15 a.m. Happy birthday, Ted.

Related posts
Canon-formation
“A Final Sonnet”
“Resolution”
Separated at birth: C. Everett Koop and Ted Berrigan

¹ Rich and strange: including lines from The Tempest.

“LEASH-CURB AND CLEAN UP”

[Local signage.]

Leash-curb ? Or leash curb ? Non-native speakers are rightly confused. Leash, curb, and clean up: items in a series.

Related reading
All signage posts (Pinboard)

[Yes, the dog walker looks like an extraterrestrial.]

Jeepers, they’re euphemisms

Did you know that gee is “probably a shortening of Jesus! (or Jerusalem! )”?

Did you know that jeez or jeeze is a corruption of Jesus?

Did you know that jeepers is also a corruption of Jesus?

And did you know that sheesh is “probably an alteration of jeez ”?

I found my way to these words after using the word jeepers in an e-mail and wondering where it came from. The Oxford English Dictionary identifies all four words as originating in American English. Gee is the oldest (1895). The OED labels jeez (1923) and jeepers (1929) as slang, sheesh (1959) as colloquial. 1959? Sheesh was in use well before that. I can hear Ed Norton speaking to Ralph Kramden, somewhere in the 1955–1956 season of The Honeymooners: “Sheesh, what a grouch!” Get on it, OED.

[My answers to these questions: yes, yes, no, no.]

Scott Pelley, phallologocentrist

I just heard it again on the CBS Evening News , Scott Pelley’s language of man: “Mankind lands a spacecraft on a comet.” If mankind is supposed to be an improvement on Pelley’s plain old man , well, it’s not.

This post’s title is a joke, out of all proportion to the moment. But the language of man and mankind is absurdly out of date. As is also, perhaps, the idea of “the evening news.”

[What to say instead of mankind ? How about “the European Space Agency”?]

A teacher resigns

From a letter of resignation by Gerald J. Conti, a high-school social-studies teacher in Syracuse, New York:

My profession is being demeaned by a pervasive atmosphere of distrust, dictating that teachers cannot be permitted to develop and administer their own quizzes and tests (now titled as generic “assessments”) or grade their own students’ examinations. The development of plans, choice of lessons and the materials to be employed are increasingly expected to be common to all teachers in a given subject. This approach not only strangles creativity, it smothers the development of critical thinking in our students and assumes a one-size-fits-all mentality more appropriate to the assembly line than to the classroom.

The gold standard, haircuts, and everyone else

“There is a change coming. There has to be a change coming. The four-year undergraduate residential experience is the gold standard — small classes, lots of intimate contact. How do we create as close to that ideal as we can, while reducing cost?”

That’s John Hennessy, the president of Stanford University, appearing in the documentary Ivory Tower (dir. Andrew Rossi, 2014). In this film and elsewhere, Hennessy is a voice of inevitability: disruption and all that. But there’s nothing inevitable about diminished access to real college, by which I mean not dorm life but a community of teaching and learning, with professors and students present to one another. Diminished access is the result of institutional choices: fewer professors, more online courses, more administrative bureaucracy, extravagant construction projects, and ever-increasing costs to students. MOOC developers Sebastian Thrun and John Owens follow Hennessy’s turn in Ivory Tower. Thrun likens online coursework to videogames and says that such coursework “empowers” students. Owens says that online work puts the focus “back on the student,” then blithely speaks of the MOOC professor as a “rock star,” one professor doing the work once done by 500. So who, exactly, is in the spotlight?

An often-repeated claim among those who insist on educational disruption is that the efficiencies of teaching — one teacher, one room — have stayed the same for too long. But then the efficiencies of, say, cutting hair — one barber, one head — haven’t changed much either. Perhaps there are good reasons why. The great irony for me in the rhetoric of disruption: those who speak it will no doubt seek for their own children what Hennessy calls “the gold standard.” There will always be real college for the few. For everyone else, it may be another story.

But perhaps change is indeed inevitable. Before Ivory Tower was released, Thrun pronounced his company’s courses “a lousy product.” His new venture: nanodegrees. And just two weeks after the film’s release, Hennessy voiced his disappointment with MOOCs. Haircut, anyone?

A few related posts
The Adjunct Project : College debt : Colleges and bakeries : “A fully-realized adult person” : The New Yorker on MOOCs : Offline, real-presence education : What parents need to know about college faculty

Veterans Day

[“Color guard of Negro engineers, Ft. Belvoir(?), [Va.]” Between 1941 and 1945. From the Library of Congress Flickr pages. Click for a larger view.]

Cubicles in publishing

A book editor speaks: “Having a door and a window is starting to feel like having a car and driver.” Read more: Cubicles Rise in a Brave New World of Publishing (The New York Times).

There have long been cubicles (or less) in publishing. Back in college, I did a summer internship at Basic Books, whose space was a mix of offices, cubicles, and desks on the open range. I, a lowly copywriter, had an office with a window. The previous occupant, an editor, had recently died. The fellow who supervised me was in a cubicle. The editorial assistants had desks set against a long wall, no dividers.

Domestic comedy

[Reading the package aloud, spontaneously.]

“Organic rooibos and green tea meet under the apple tree and follow a hidden trail through brambly hillsides to their hidden bullshit pa — strawberry patch.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)
Presto change-o, Tazo
Tazo Wild Sweet Orange

[The Tazo people, they’ll make up anything.]

“You can improve that paper”

The linguist Geoffrey Pullum, after reading a student paper with endless passive-voice sentences, and after acknowledging that some writers (Noam Chomsky, Anthony Trollope, Jeffrey Ullman) get things right the first time:

Our students should not imagine they can adopt the working practices of such brilliant exceptions. They are mostly like you and me: Our first drafts aren’t good enough, and need many restructurings, improvements, and corrections before they are fit for a reader. Yes, a few authors can produce publishable prose without ever looking back, but they are outliers, not role models. Balzac “revised obsessively.” Dickens did likewise.

So, to the typical student working late Thursday night for a Friday paper deadline I say: You are not Chomsky or Ullman or Trollope, and you have left it too late! You cannot write A+ material the first time through. Next time start your paper at least a week ahead. Then rewrite it. Then read it aloud, and go through it again fixing some more of its faults: the echoes and clunkinesses; the slips in verb agreement; that vague bit you thought you might get away with; the sentence where you decided on a structure but changed syntactic horses midstream and ended up with gibberish.

And don’t tell me you don’t have the time! Ordinary working people do 40 hours a week. Typical millionaires work 70 or 80. Admit it, you’re not committing that kind of time to your studies. You can improve that paper, and ensure that reading it isn’t like being repetitively bludgeoned. Please.

Related posts
Pullum on Strunk and White
More on Pullum, Strunk, White
Hardly (adverb) convincing (adjective)

[Pullum commented on the first of these posts. He’s never touched the third, which looks at his untenable claim that The Elements of Style forbids the use of adjectives and adverbs. In the Lingua Franca piece I’ve excerpted, Pullum still can’t acknowledge that inappropriate use of the passive voice is his student’s problem. Instead, it’s the student’s “tin ear.” I cannot see the difference. But I think this exhortation is worth sharing.]