Spot story

I pulled into a choice spot in a parking lot — aah, shade. As soon as I opened the driver’s door and stepped out, the driver to our left rolled down her window: “I hope you’re not going to start banging my car. You’re parked so close to the line.”

“Believe me, I’m as careful with my car as I am with everyone else’s,” I said. (I know that I should have said it the other way around, but this story is true in every detail.) Up went her window. I closed my door and stepped back to check my parking. Our car was centered in the narrow space, as I more or less already knew. I don’t think a measuring tape would have added anything to what was obvious to the eye — my parking was, well, perfect.

As for our neighbor to the left: her SUV was parked within perhaps three inches of the white line between our cars. On her driver’s side, she had perhaps a foot and a half of space.

I wasn’t willing to let it go. I walked around to the other side of the SUV. “Would you like to look at how our cars are parked?” I inquired. She pulled out her phone and started her car. I worried for a moment that she was calling the cops. But she just backed out of her space, still talking on her phone. I stood at a distance and watched her leave.

This moment was my first experience of rudeness from a stranger in a long time. Elaine told me to let it go: was I going to let an idiot ruin my day? No. Not the idiot in the SUV next to us, and not the idiot in me who wanted to hang on to my indignation. I let it go long before writing this post.

[Yes, it felt like a moment from Curb Your Enthusiasm.]

George Bodmer at 1,000

George Bodmer’s daily cartoon Oscar’s Day has reached the one-thousand mark. Hurrah!

No to MFA

At the University of Southern California, seven MFA students in art and design have just said no:

We are a group of seven artists who made the decision to attend USC Roski School of Art and Design’s MFA program based on the faculty, curriculum, program structure, and funding packages. We are a group of seven artists who have been forced by the school’s dismantling of each of these elements to dissolve our MFA candidacies. In short, due to the university’s unethical treatment of its students, we, the entire incoming class of 2014, are dropping out of school and dropping back into our expanded communities at large.

Julie Beaufils, Sid Duenas, George Egerton-Warburton, Edie Fake, Lauren Davis Fisher, Lee Relvas, and Ellen Schafer: a year’s worth of students saying no to what might be described as an academic bait-and-switch. It’s sad to say that these seven men and women seem to be the graduate students of the future, getting wise and walking away.

Thanks to Ian Bagger for pointing me to this story.

Related reading
MFA NO MFA

John Ashbery and Marcel Proust

From an interview with John Ashbery in The New York Times:

Q. Who is your favorite novelist of all time?

A. Proust.

And:

Q. If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be?

A. Again, Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, for better or worse. You finish it feeling sadder and wiser, so if you’re O.K. with the sadder part, you should take it on.

[Luanne, this post is for you.]

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.