Liberal-arts trashing

“Dismissing the liberal arts seems to have become a litmus test for conservative politicians”: Christopher Scalia, “Conservatives, Please Stop Trashing the Liberal Arts” (The Wall Street Journal ).

[The link goes to a Google search. A direct link works only for WSJ subscribers. Christopher Scalia is a professor of English and son of Antonin Scalia.]

Overheard

“It’s a whacked-out, motherfuckin’ weekend, bro.”

And probably not for the first time.

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

[Three compound words there, but only one hyphen.]

A movie theater in the movies

[The Culver. From Tension (1949, dir. John Berry).]


[The Kirk Douglas Theatre. From Google Maps, 2015. Click either image for a larger view.]

Elaine and I gave a little leap when we watched Tension again last night. We know this theater. In 1949, it was the Culver. Today, it’s the Kirk Douglas Theatre. We heard the Culver City Symphony there in 2014. Hearing the Symphony is a Thing to Do in Los Angeles.

I still want to track down the location of the drugstore in Tension, which I think must be the best drugstore in the movies. A street sign, barely legible in one street scene, looks as if might read Something Alexandria Avenue . North? South? East? West? Must investigate further.

*

3:46 p.m.: Having traveled N. and S. Alexandria via Google Maps, I don’t think any trace remains of that drugstore.

*

May 29, 2018: The drugstore stood at the southwest corner of W. 6th Street and S. Alexandria Avenue in Los Angeles.

An adjunct instructor’s student becomes an adjunct instructor

Carmen Maria Machado writes about learning from an adjunct instructor and becoming an adjunct instructor:

The irony of this setup has not escaped me: the adjuncts who teach well despite the low pay and the lack of professional support may inspire in their students a similar passion — prompting them to be financially taken advantage of in turn.

“O Adjunct! My Adjunct!” (The New Yorker)

I’ll say it again: the exploitation of adjunct labor is the shame and scandal of American higher education.

A related post
The Adjunct Project

“[I]t’s readers”

[A sidebar to an article in today’s York Times.]

Here’s a post with Jessica Mitford’s tongue-in-cheek advice for choosing between its and it’s.

[Trying to create a post in Blogger’s iOS app is hell on wheels, with three flat tires.]

Another relic

Diane Schirf continues her “Relics” series by writing about the push reel lawn mower.

[To my surprise, lawn mower really is two words.]

Mr. Hyphen and Mr. Faulkner

From Edward N. Teall’s Meet Mr. Hyphen (And Put Him in His Place) (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1937):

In the downfunnelled light of a curbchannelled street in a neartropical metropolis, a tall, circuitriderlooking man stood amid the carnival confettisplatter overhead and confettidrift underfoot. His clothes were neartweed; his shoes flimsy, as though made of imitationleather. The package he carried contained a new hat of admirable machinesymmetry, purchased after much scribblescrawling of figures and a deal of coinfumbling, as a weddingpresent for —

All those crazycat compounds actually appear in “Pylon,” one of William Faulkner’s novels. Along with them go such others as cheeseclothlettered, mirageline, corpseglare, coffincubicles, bottomupwards, wirehum, canallock, umbrellarib.

“In the downfunnelled light”: that’s not Pylon (1935); it’s Teall’s assembling of compounds from the novel — Faulkner words, or better, Faulknerwords — in a handful of sentences. A sampling from Light in August (1932), which I’m now teaching: branchshadowed, cinderstrewnpacked, fecundmellow, hardfeeling, hardsmelling, moonblanched, pinkwomansmelling, sootbleakened. I love modernism.

Faulkner’s habit of compounding owes much to the example of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922): cabbageeared, dressinggown, hairynostrilled, scrotumtightening, snotgreen. These compound words make me think of Anglo-Saxon poetry and Homeric epithets. Κορυθαίολος Ἕκτωρ : Hector moving-the-helmet-quickly.

I wonder if Teall was aware of William Carlos Williams’s decouplings in “The Red Wheelbarrow”:

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

I love modernism.

Also from Meet Mr. Hyphen
Funk & Wagnalls logo
Living on hyphens

Another college president plagiarizing?

News from 13News: “The incoming president of Virginia Wesleyan College has a history of plagiarism, according to a book and published media reports.”

Plagiarism in high places in a minor theme in Orange Crate Art. The presidents of Jacksonville State University, Malone University, Minnesota State College-Southeast Technical, South Central College, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and Tennessee Temple University have appeared in earlier posts.

Related reading
All OCA plagiarism posts (Pinboard)

An attendance policy

Plain and practical:

I hope all of you will attend at least as regularly as I do.

From a Fall 1973 syllabus by the poet Ted Berrigan. It’s the “at least” that kills me.

Other Ted Berrigan posts
“A Final Sonnet”
“Resolution”
Separated at birth? With C. Everett Koop
“Whoa Back Buck & Gee by Land!”

The gender-neutral hen

News from The Guardian : “The official dictionary of the Swedish language will introduce a gender-neutral pronoun in April, editors at the Swedish Academy have announced.”

The word is hen . Han and hon are Swedish for “he” and “she.” Notice that The Guardian cannot tell us what hen is Swedish for: there’s no gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun in common use in English yet.