Still life

[Click for a larger view.]

One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn’t belong.

This post is an example of what Elaine and I call “making our own fun.”

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Domestic comedy

“I had them when I was young, when they were in style.”

“Were they ever in style?”

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[They? These.]

Mystery Pier on Off-Ramp

KPCC’s Off-Ramp has a short feature on Mystery Pier Books. Happening upon this bookstore — right next to Book Soup — was a highlight of our visit to Los Angeles last summer.

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Separated at birth?

[Michael A. Monahan and William H. Macy.]

William H. Macy looks like Michael A. Monahan all grown up. Sources: an epsiode of Father Knows Best (1956) and Air Force One (1997).

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Erik Spiekermann on “obsessive attention to detail”

Erik Spiekermann says that being obsessive about detail is being normal. He explains it to an interviewer:

Q. The meticulousness of typographic work seems to require an obsessive attention to detail. Would you describe your work in typography as an obsession and, if so, why does this particular discipline require this level of engagement?

A. Wrong question. Every craft requires attention to detail. Whether you’re building a bicycle, an engine, a table, a song, a typeface or a page: the details are not the details, they make the design. Concepts don’t have to be pixel-perfect, and even the fussiest project starts with a rough sketch. But building something that will be used by other people, be they drivers, riders, readers, listeners — users everywhere, it needs to be built as well as can be. Unless you are obsessed by what you’re doing, you will not be doing it well enough.

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Poetry and memory

From an interview with the poet Susan Howe:

I have an old friend who is in the advanced stages of dementia. He can barely remember his children. But he remembers music. If you play him something from his youth, songs from South Pacific or Cole Porter musicals, he knows melody and score. I brought him T. S. Eliot the other day, because he went to Harvard during the early 1950s when T. S. Eliot was a sort of god. I read him “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and from The Waste Land. He remembered whole lines, the familiar ones that used to astonish us then. “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.” “Do I dare to eat a peach?” “I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. / I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.” I thought, my God, how great T. S. Eliot is. These poems are so musical they can be remembered even after the ability to string words together has dissolved.

January 20: It turns out that there’s an Alzheimer’s Poetry Project.

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Life of Zippy

[Zippy, January 19, 2015.]

The middle panel of today’s Zippy, Zippy speaking with himself in a tavern, spoke to me. I know that tavern. I know those glasses. I know that man, and that other man, the doppelgänger one.


[Life, May 20, 1940.]

I’ve owned a copy of the May 20, 1940 Life for many years. I have no idea how I latched onto it. The men above appear in a full-page advertisement for the United Brewers Industrial Foundation. The ad proclaims the virtues of the Moderation Hour:

Good beer and ale, in wholesome, modern taverns, offer Americans pleasant, inexpensive relaxation!

The ad mentions a plan to keep things that way by cleaning up or closing up “any anti-social retail establishments that may exist.” Notice the cuckoo clock floating in space, a welcome touch in any modern tavern. Is the Moderation Hour beginning or ending? Either way: HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME.

I’ve looked at this ad closely on several occasions to appreciate the way it presents manly variety: older man, younger man; cigarette smoker, pipe smoker. Yes, that covers it. The cigarettes are Chesterfields: in the print ad, the name on the pack is more readable than it is here. And while I haven’t looked at the ad in a long time, I recently took the opportunity to visit the Google Books version of this very issue of Life to borrow a liverwurst ad. Liverwurst too would benefit from a Moderation Hour.

The title of today’s Zippy, “Totally Wolvertonian,” references Mad cartoonist Basil Wolverton. Oh, and the United Brewers Industrial Foundation has long since given way to the Beer Institute. That’s about it for today’s Zippy. Burp.


[“Moderation in the pursuit of beer is no vice.”]

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MLK

[Edward Biberman (1904–1986), I Had a Dream, c. 1968. Oil on Masonite. 24" x 30". Los Angeles County Museum of Art.]

I saw this painting at LACMA last summer. It is not currently on display.

Why I am skeptical about tuition-free community college

President Obama’s proposal of two years of tuition-free community college comes with greater complications than brief news reports allow. One such complication: the plan would cover only coursework that provides job-training or that transfers to four-year schools. Thus the “developmental” (read: remedial) classes that begin (and end) many a community-college student’s coursework would appear not to be included.

Greater access to higher education ought to look like an unqualified good. Yet I find myself deeply skeptical about whether tuition-free community college (hereafter TFCC) will serve any purpose but greater economic and social stratification. I see in this proposal (which probably has little chance of becoming law) the same logic that underwrites MOOCs: a four-year residential experience gets reserved for a privileged few, with something else for the rest of us. A family of modest means, faced with a choice between free and far from it, would find it difficult not to choose free. It’s already well known that capable students from disadvantaged families tend to aim low and think locally when applying to colleges. TFCC would do much to encourage diminished educational choices: community college rather than, say, a four-year state school. It seems to me a higher-ed version of tracking.

And there’s good reason to wonder whether TFCC is likely to prepare students for academic success. Great things can happen at community colleges — I have taught brilliant students who studied there. But for most students who start at community colleges, the chances of moving on to a four-year degree are small. The Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College has the dispiriting numbers, with thirteen percent of community-college students earning a bachelor’s degree in five years, fifteen percent earning the degree within six.

Another problem with TFCC involves instruction. The overwhelming majority of community-college faculty are adjunct instructors being paid a pittance for their work — according to The Adjunct Project, an average of $2100 per course at public two-year schools, or $140 a week. TFCC, which allots no additional funds for instruction, would serve to further the adjunctification of teaching. A greater influx of students into community colleges would require ever more adjuncts, each with the small courseload that institutions assign to avoid having to pay into health insurance. Call it the academic version of the twenty-nine-hour week.

A bolder proposal (which would stand even less chance of passing than the Obama proposal) would offer, in the spirit of the GI Bill, free tuition for two years of coursework wherever a student chooses to go (call it TFP: tuition-free, period). TFP could be made available to students whose families earn under, say, $100,000 a year. And the dollar amount could be capped, which might encourage institutions to lower tuition. Like TFCC, TFP would do nothing to reverse higher education’s increasing reliance on adjunct instructors. But TFP would at least encourage greater choice and greatly reduce the cost of college for students at both two-year and four-year schools.¹

Bolder yet would be a revamping of K-12 education that addresses the cruel inequities of school funding. As Jonathan Kozol has often observed, there’s something deeply wrong with a culture in which the accident of one’s birth determines the quality of one’s education.² TFCC will change none of that. Those who can afford to go from high school to a four-year college will continue to do so, and everyone else will have less reason to aspire to do so.

¹ Pipedreams ought not to require details. These details are the best I can do.

² I realized only after writing that “cruel inequities” is an unconscious variation on the title of Kozol’s Savage Inequalities.

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[I have voted three times for Barack Obama. I have knocked on doors for him in two cities and have made substantial contributions to his presidential campaigns. But when it comes to education, I find him an utter disappointment.]

Domestic comedy

“That’s not Aunt Bee!”

“That’s the Anti-Bee.”

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[It was Dorothy Konrad as Flora, in an episode of Mayberry R.F.D., a show so unremittingly, sickeningly wholesome that it makes The Andy Griffith Show look like film noir.]