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A small press v. the Salinger estate The Salinger Trust has asked that the suit be dismissed.

Hermann Zapf (1918–2015)

The typographer and calligrapher Hermann Zapf has died. Here, from Quartz, is a look at his work (it includes a 1967 film of Zapf drawing letters). Hermann Zapf, as in Optima, Palatino, Zapf Dingbats, and Zapfino.

From Robert Walser

A park like this resembles a large, silent, isolated room. In fact it’s always Sunday in a park, by the way, for it’s always a bit melancholy, and the melancholy stirs up vivid memories of home, and Sunday is something that only ever existed at home, where you were a child. Sundays have something parental and childish about them.

Robert Walser, “The Park,” in Berlin Stories, trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: New York Review Books, 2012).

I know: there are many kinds of Sundays, including those with “late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair.” But when I read Walser, I believe him.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Walser posts (Pinboard)

Ronnie Gilbert (1926–2015)

Ronnie Gilbert, singer, songwriter, and social and political activist, was one of the original Weavers. The New York Times has an obituary.

There’s more to Ronnie Gilbert’s work than the Weavers. But here is Weavers’ last song (and a little bit more).

Happy together

My turtles, like my people, have left my office for a new home. They’re living on the shelf of a Levenger study carrel. They think they’re in a library. Shh.

[This post is for Fresca, seeing as how she asked. The turtles were a gift from Elaine.]

New directions in assessment

The Chronicle of Higher Education describes one school’s plan to scan students’ brains to determine the effects of college and, more specifically, of study abroad.

A skeptical neurologist, asked to comment: “I was trying to think of something more ridiculous, but I couldn’t.”

[File under the quantification of everything.]

Scott Walker v. tenure

The New York Times reports on Scott Walker’s efforts to eliminate tenure at Wisconsin’s state universities:

A committee of lawmakers last week approved along party lines a proposal that would remove the notion of tenure in the university system from state statute, leaving the sensitive matter to the state’s Board of Regents, which oversees the system’s 13 four-year universities and some 180,000 students.

Under the proposal, the board’s 18 members — 16 of whom are appointed by the governor subject to the confirmation of the State Senate — would be permitted to set a standard by which they could fire a tenured faculty member “when such an action is deemed necessary due to a budget or program decision requiring program discontinuance, curtailment, modification or redirection,” not only in the case of just cause or a financial emergency, as permitted previously. Critics deemed it tenure with no actual promise of tenure.

Following those paragraphs, a comment from State Senator Sheila Harsdorf (R): “The reality is that we are not eliminating tenure.”

No, the reality is that they are eliminating tenure, or attempting to. “Program discontinuance, curtailment, modification or redirection” could mean anything from cutting single courses to cutting whole disciplines and departments.

Here in Illinois, I anticipate a similar effort to eliminate tenure, packaged, of course, as “tenure reform.” Bruce Rauner, Illinois’s version of Scott Walker, has pronounced tenure “a flawed concept.”

My people

These people shared an office with me for years. Now they live with me at home, alongside an Eagle Verithin display case. The little guy is not pleased. He never has been.

Related posts
A face on my floor : Kubrick remake : Officemates

[I’m pretty sure that these people came to me, one by one, as gifts from my children. But it’s been a long time.]

Dead Writers Perfume®

A new (old) scent: “The Dead Writers Perfume® blend evokes the feeling of sitting in an old library chair paging through yellowed copies of Hemingway, Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, Poe, and more.” The product is for real, unlike Smell of Books™, which remains but a concept.

Thanks, Zayne.

[Hemingway, Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, Poe: is it Dead White Male Writers Perfume®?]

MMusic Clip of the Day

MM: Richard McLeese’s Music Clip of the Day just hit its two-thousandth post.

Richard’s blog has introduced me to the music of Hamid Drake, Molly Drake, and any number of non-Drakes. Long may it wave.