Domestic comedy

[After tearing a paper towel in two.]

“That wasn’t very even of me.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

One more from Mr. Hyphen

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

Duke University publishes the Journal of Parapsychology. Its editors would not grieve over loss of a reader who might puzzle it out a parapsy chology, but there is fairness in the question, How far should we go in trying to make the reading easy for all? Should we refrain from cooperate because someone might, either seriously or facetiously, pronounce it coop-erate ?

Something will have to be said about this!

I learned about Mr. Hyphen from Mary Norris’s Between You & Me. Here’s what I’ve written about that book.

More from Meet Mr. Hyphen
Living on hyphens
Mr. Hyphen and Mr. Faulkner
Funk & Wagmalls trademark

Mark Bauerlein on professors and students

Mark Bauerlein, writing in The New York Times:

One measure of interest in what professors believe, what wisdom they possess apart from the content of the course, is interaction outside of class. It’s often during incidental conversations held after the bell rings and away from the demands of the syllabus that the transfer of insight begins and a student’s emulation grows. Students e-mail teachers all the time — why walk across campus when you can fire a note from your room? — but those queries are too curt for genuine mentoring. We need face time.

Bauerlein’s description of alienation and isolation in present-day academia — few office doors open, few students waiting to speak to profs — rings true for me. His picture of the way things were in the 1980s — “you couldn’t walk down the row of faculty offices without stepping over the outstretched legs of English majors lining up for consultations” — is less convincing. As a grad student in the early 1980s, always around an English department, I certainly never saw anything like that. And Bauerlein’s contention that students saw their professors as figures to emulate — “students looked to professors for moral and worldly understanding” — seems to me true only in a limited way. A student more likely looked to one professor, or two. As I wrote in a 2006 post, several fellow undergrads and I wanted to be James P. Doyle, to be able to read (that is, interpret) poetry as he did. While I found many other profs deserving of deep respect and affection, I’m quite sure that I never thought of them as guides to life. But they were great guides to medieval philosophy, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the nineteenth-century novel, and so on.

One change in academic life that Bauerlein fails to mention: the rising number of adjunct instructors. It’s difficult for students to line up for office hours when there’s no office. An office shared by half a dozen instructors hardly makes for a congenial setting for life lessons. An adjunct instructor racing from one campus to another may not have time to stop and chat. And looking to an adjunct instructor for worldly understanding seems like a contradiction in terms.

To my mind, the importance of Bauerlein’s essay (right now the most e-mailed item at the Times) lies in its implicit acknowledgement of the value of what I have come to call real-presence education. Face time.

Two related posts
The gold standard, haircuts, and everyone else
How to talk to a professor

Recently updated

Another college president plagiarizing? Cleared, kinda sort of.

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)