B. B. King (1925–2015)

B. B. King has died at the age of eighty-nine. It really feels like the end of something. The New York Times has an obituary.

[Live at the Regal (1965) is a good place to start.]

Mark Trail, reuse, recycle

[Mark Trail revised, May 10, 2014; Mark Trail, May 14, 2015. Click for larger views.]

If you’re me, you may remember the context for the first panel. If not, see here.

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

Word of the day: lane duck

The word of the day is one of my recent invention:

lane duck \ ˈlān-ˈdək \ noun
: a motorist or motor vehicle traveling immediately behind a slow-moving vehicle and thus unable to pass into a lane of more rapidly moving traffic because vehicles to the rear are already passing

Sample sentence: Dammit, I’m a lane duck.

More made-up words
Humormeter : oveness : power-sit : ’sation : skeptiphobia

A moment of puzzled self-promotion

I have no idea what it means, but Teads Labs ranks Orange Crate Art as forty-ninth of one hundred top blogs for culture in May 2015. And the month ain’t even half over.

At sixty-seven: The Chicago Blog, from the University of Chicago Press. At the top of the list: Gawker.

Ben Leddy on songs in the classroom

Our daughter Rachel put it this way: “This fifth-grade teacher says he has a superpower. What he reveals next will shock you.” It’s our son Ben at the Boston EdTalks 2015: “A Different Tune: Rethinking Songs in the Classroom.”

William Zinsser (1922–2015)

The New York Times has an obituary.

William Zinsser was a giant of sane, humane guidance in writing. I used a substantial excerpt from his talk “Writing English as a Second Language” in many writing classes. Written English really is a second language, for all writers.

Zinsser’s work is the subject of several OCA posts. This one and this one are the substantial ones.

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.