Ben Leddy rocks the world

Our son the musical geographer. He previously rocked the fifty states.

Terry Eagleton on “the hot pursuit of the student purse”

Terry Eagleton, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education on “The Slow Death of the University.” Here he addresses institutions’ willingness to see students as customers:

One result of this hot pursuit of the student purse is the growth of courses tailored to whatever is currently in fashion among 20-year-olds. In my own discipline of English, that means vampires rather than Victorians, sexuality rather than Shelley, fanzines rather than Foucault, the contemporary world rather than the medieval one. It is thus that deep-seated political and economic forces come to shape syllabuses. Any English department that focused its energies on Anglo-Saxon literature or the 18th century would be cutting its own throat.

In the same issue of the Chronicle, an article about video trailers for college courses.

[N.B. (as we say in academia): Both articles are behind the paywall.]

Milwaukee bus passes

From CityLab, a chronicle of Milwaukee bus passes. The paper passes will soon give way to an electronic fare system. Flickr has Kindra Murphy’s pass collection, 1930–1979. Says Murphy, “The colors are insane!”

O dowdy world, that had such bus passes in it.

Recently updated

Henry at the shoe repairman Now with shoe booths, real ones.

Billie Holiday centenary

Eleanora Fagan, Billie Holiday, Lady Day, was born on April 7, 1915. WKCR-FM is playing her music all day today and all day tomorrow. All Day, all day. Now: Billie Holiday and Ben Webster.

Other Billie Holiday posts
In the Manhattan telephone directory : On December 8 : Portrait of Billie Holiday and Mister : “[T]hree days after Bastille day, yes”

Sidney synchronicity

The quoted passage attached to Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day today is from Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, the final lines of sonnet 1:

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for
    spite,
“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy
    heart, and write.”

I dig Sidney: Astrophel and Stella , An Apology for Poetry , Arcadia. I’m pretty sure that I read both The Old Arcadia and The New Arcadia back in grad school days. One, or both, came in the form of an enormous Penguin, orange-spined.

[The title of Sidney‘s sequence appears on a classroom blackboard in this post. You can subscribe to Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day here. I’ve used a different text from Garner’s for Sidney’s poem. Why getting lines of poetry to look right on an iPhone means having them look awkward elsewhere, I just don’t know.]

Overheard

“It is important for men in the middle ages to eat right.”

And for Renaissance men, too.

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

[The television was on for “warmth.” The speaker meant middle age.]

“Us teenagers”

[“Us Teenagers. Beard hopefully started on pensive teenage high school student as others work on lessons at blackboard & desk.” Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt. Oklahoma City, 1948. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

What was going on in this classroom: Astrophel Stella, Conebury Tails, Liric Poetry, Elizabethan, Elizabethan, Elizabethan? Spelling practice?

*

7:54 a.m.: Elaine figured out that it must be a grid: Macbeth → Drama → Elizabethan. But the grid also yields Conebury Tails → Liric Poetry → Elizabethan. I thought J. Celia (Celio ?) might mean Ben Jonson’s “Song: to Celia,” but whatever it is, it goes with Essay and Old English. Help! Which, by the way, is Old English.

[A Google search for conebery tails yields ”Did you mean: canterbury tales.”]

Jeremiah Moss’s Vanishing New York

“A Cranky Blogger Crusades to Preserve the Ordinary in New York”: The New York Times reports on Jeremiah Moss and Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York.

The rising cost of college

Law professor Paul F. Campos, writing in The New York Times about “The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much” : “If over the past three decades car prices had gone up as fast as tuition, the average new car would cost more than $80,000.”

The real reason, Campos explains (and which should be no surprise to anyone who has observed the workings of colleges from the inside): the growth of administration and administrative salaries. Vice presidencies, directorships, and assistants to assistants to assistants. I’m exaggerating, but not by much.

[The real reason? At least a real reason. Campos could also consider amenities: increasingly lavish recreation centers and such. And lack of public funding has hurt higher education.]