Happy Mother’s Day

[Louise Leddy and son, April 21, 1957. Photograph by James Leddy. Click for a larger view.]

I was, or should have been, humming “I’m Just a Lucky So-and-So.” I am fortunate indeed to have such a wonderful woman for a mother.

Happy Mother’s Day to my mom and to all mothers.

Domestic comedy

“I, tense and preoccupied?”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[But it was a few days ago.]

Accidental bird

[Post-its and eraser crumbs. Photograph by Michael Leddy. Click for a larger view.]

To my eye, It looks like a chicken or rooster, facing left or right.

I wonder whether the series of events that produced this accidental bird is common: 1. Fill book under discussion with Post-its to mark significant passages. 2. Get suddenly fed up with the fringe of slightly curled notes running down the side of the book. 3. Remove Post-its as quickly as possible, sticking one to another to another. Aah, room to breathe.

A related post
Twenty uses for a Post-it note

Why I (still) blog

Fresca said that she’d like to read responses to this question: Why do you (still) blog? The adverb suggests, rightly, that it’s a little archaic to write this way. As I joked in a 2013 post, blogging feels so early-twenty-first-century. And older still, reaching back to the commonplace book and daybook.

I began writing here as a way to collect items useful in teaching — when such items began turning up more often online than in print. And then my purpose and my readership began to widen. I now think of Orange Crate Art as Philip Whalen thought of his poetry: “a picture or graph of a mind moving.” (But I’m not comparing myself to Philip Whalen.) To write in this daily way is to make a record of preoccupations, questions, habits of attention, associations of ideas. It’s all personal, but in the spirit of illustration rather than confession, snapshots along the way. And it’s all factory direct. No middleman, or -person.

I (still) blog, and I still write letters (with a fountain pen), and I still wear an analog watch (Timex). That fewer and fewer people do so makes no difference to me. My writing practice here is, to use a Van Dyke Parks phrase, of supreme unimportance . One can read that phrase with emphasis on the third word or the second.

Small Colon Collider, up, running

Back in business:

“The Small Colon Collider is a huge project involving cooperation between many European nations and we therefore built in filters for acute and grave accents, umlauts, cedillas, circumflexes and even the ringpull on the top of a Swedish å, but the Spanish only came into the project late and gummed the whole thing up with their mañanas.

“The tildes kept slipped off the first n and getting stuck in the machinery.

“But now we’ve cleaned them all up and installed a tilde filter, so it’s all systems go.”

A related post
Dark punctuation

“OH NO!!”

[Mark Trail, May 6, 2015.]

“OH NO!!” is what Abbey Powell (a real person) should have said when Mark Trail called her about the problem in Wallace Wood’s timber empire. Better still: she should have spent Invasive Plant Pest and Disease Month (April) on vacation. Having tripped on a log, she has now lost her glasses and her truck. I would like to say that no one can take away her dignity, but I think James Allen’s comic strip already has.

I think that those are flaming truck parts leaping up at Ms. Powell. As I said on April 14, the day she entered the strip: Run, Abbey, run!

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

Marco Arment on Apple problems

Marco Arment, writing about persistent problems in Yosemite:

This is what’s so frustrating about today’s Apple: if a bug persists past the early beta stages of its introduction, it rarely ever gets fixed. They’re too busy working on the new to fix the old.

As the discoverer of the sempervirens bug, I have reason to agree. Arment though is writing about serious problems, not minor ones that can be given playful names from Latin.

“Such is the future of education”

From a new novel of academic life, Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members :

Alex Ruefle has prevailed upon me to support his teaching application to your department, which I gather is hiring adjunct faculty members exclusively, bypassing the tenure track with its attendant health benefits, job security, and salaries on which a human being might reasonably live. Perhaps your institution should cut to the chase and put its entire curriculum online, thereby sparing Ruefle the need to move. . . .  You could prop him up in a broom closet in his apartment, poke him with the butt end of a mop when you need him to cough up a lecture on Caribbean fiction or the passive voice, and then charge your students a thousand dollars each to correct the essays their classmates have downloaded from a website. Such is the future of education.

Maureen Corrigan talked about the novel on NPR’s Fresh Air. Thanks to Sean at Contrapuntalism for sending the link and this excerpt.

As I’ve often written in these pages, I think real college will continue to be available for a fortunate few. Malia and Sasha Obama and Mitt Romney’s grandchildren will no doubt go to college, the real thing. But for the rest of us, the prospects are likely to be different. The great democratization of American higher education in the aftermath of the Second World War begins to look like a glorious, sadly short-lived experiment.

[Pop quiz: Dear Committee Members is written as a series of recommendation letters. What other novel of the teaching life takes the form of letters, memos, and notes?]

VDP’s Lost Weekend

Friday and Saturday at Los Angeles’s Largo at the Coronet: The Lost Weekend, Van Dyke Parks’s last piano/vocal performances. There will be Very Special Guests. I wish I could be there.

[Has anyone out there read Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend?]

The honorific Mx

The gender-neutral title Mx may be joining the honorifics Miss , Mr , Mrs  and Ms in the Oxford English Dictionary. OED assistant editor Jonathan Dent:

“This is an example of how the English language adapts to people’s needs, with people using language in ways that suit them rather than letting language dictate identity to them.”

Here, from The Guardian , is the most helpful article on Mx I could find. Newspaper articles referring to the “next edition” of the OED are almost certainly in error: the online OED is updated quarterly.

[See also the Swedish gender-neutral pronoun hen, which has several uses. The honorifics Mr , Mrs  and Ms appear in the OED without periods.]