Orange Crate Art

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

“Rich kids” and English

Linkbait from The Atlantic : “Rich Kids Study English,” complete with a stock photo of an oh-so-white, oh-so languid young woman, shades on, shoes off, reading, sort of, supine on the grass. The more temperate claim that the writer advances: “Kids [kids ?] from lower-income families tend toward ‘useful’ majors, such as computer science, math, and physics. Those whose parents make more money flock to history, English, and performing arts.”

I am skeptical about this claim. It’s not clear how much statistical evidence supports it: all we’re told is “National Center for Education Statistics data.” The graph presenting this evidence seems far from conclusive: “Associate’s Degree only” goes with an average parental household income of $56,636 ± $41,496. English goes with $99,533 ± $59,856. Of all majors listed, the greatest range in parental household income goes with the English major, which would seem to suggest that its students come from all kinds of backgrounds.

Which I believe is the case. I’ve known countless students from decidedly unprivileged backgrounds who have chosen to major in English. (I was one such major too.) This Atlantic piece furthers the pernicious idea that traditional study in the humanities is for a privileged few, while more practical fields offer a proper path for the rest of us. I will quote from a previous post:

If powerful and moneyed interests now seeking to reshape higher education have their way, “college” will soon become a two-tier system, with the real thing for a privileged few . . . and credits and credentials, haphazardly assembled, vocationally themed, for everyone else.

The idea that the humanities are for “rich kids” is one that any humanist must reject.

Tuesday, July 7, 2015

It’s still WCW’s wheelbarrow

The New York Times reports on Thaddeus Marshall, “the forgotten man behind William Carlos Williams’s ‘red wheelbarrow.’” Interesting, certainly. But the wheelbarrow of “The Red Wheelbarrow” has been abstracted — removed from its source, dissociated from its surroundings (save for some chickens), lifted into the zone of the imagination, whose work upon things is the focus of Spring and All, the 1923 volume in which the poem (known only as XXII, an exhibit number of sorts) first appeared. To say (as the Internets now say) that Mr. Marshall owned the wheelbarrow in Williams’s poem is to make a category mistake about the relation between life and art.

Williams’s poem, like so much modernist art, is above all a work of juxtaposition: of the made and the natural, the one and the many, the red and the white. As Hugh Kenner observes, the poem forms “an ideogram of the barnyard.” “The Red Wheelbarrow” has small surprises: the broken words “wheel / barrow” and “rain / water,” the mysterious word glazed, which turns the wheelbarrow, if only for a moment, into a work of art, glazed like, oh, say, a Grecian urn. And the poem has a haiku-like economy of form: four two-line stanazas, of four syllables and two, three and two, three and two, four and two. Reading the poem at Princeton University in 1952, Williams invoked the opening line of John Keats’s Endymion : “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”

It’s good to know where things come from. (It was Hugh Kenner who discovered that “Prufock” was the name of a St. Louis furniture company.) But it’s also possible in English studies to contextualize a work into oblivion — in other words, to miss what’s most important about it . What’s most important about “The Red Wheelbarrow” is its presentation of an everyday, unpoetic reality as the material of poetry. Not a Grecian urn: a wheelbarrow. Not nightingales and skylarks: chickens.

Related reading
All OCA William Carlos Williams posts (Pinboard)

Burt Shavitz (1935–2015)

The Burt behind — or at a distance from — Burt’s Bees has died: “Burt Shavitz, Scruffy Face of Burt’s Bees, Dies at 80” (The New York Times).

Elaine and I happened to watch the documentary film Burt’s Buzz (dir. Jody Shapiro, 2013) on Saturday. Its story was strange and sad: the guy whose face has sold who-knows-how-many tubes of lip balm turns out to have been exiled from the company that bears his name. Yet he still made appearances as a real-life brand emblem, when he would have liked nothing better than to stay on his thirty-seven acres. “A good day is when no one shows up and you don’t have to go anywhere,” he tells the camera. Saddest scene: Burt in Taiwan, using Skype to talk to — and then howl with — his beloved dog.

Magical thinking about poverty and education

My son Ben sent me something from The Atlantic that saddened him, a short piece asserting that “Fixing Urban Schools Without Fixing Poverty Is Possible.” Here’s the most saddening part, from Pamela Cantor, the founder, president, and CEO of the non-profit Turnaround for Children:

The argument that says we can’t fix education until we fix poverty is a false one. We can’t fix poverty or the other adverse events of children’s lives, but we can “fix” the impact of stress on the developing brain. In fact, we have to. We can and must teach schools and teachers how to do this now.

There it is: we can’t fix poverty. But we can “‘fix’” (meaning?) its effects. I daresay that’s magical thinking.

CitizenAudit.org notes that in the year ending June 2014, Turnaround for Children Inc had assets of $16,387,573. The organization’s most recent Form 990 (Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax) lists $7,437,077 in salaries for seventy-seven employees. The organization’s officers, directors, trustees, key employees, and highest-paid employees (no indication of their number) account for $1,349,525 in compensation.

*

1:57 p.m.: An interesting detail from Wikipedia’s Atlantic article: “The Atlantic Media Company receives substantial financial support from the Gates Foundation through the National Journal ($240,000+) to provide coverage of education-related issues that are of interest to the Gates Foundation and its frequent partner in education policy initiatives, the Lumina Foundation.”

A Sheffield contrivance

The Pequod’s carpenter, a human being seen as an array of tools:

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851).

A page from Egginton Bros Ltd traces the manufacture of pocket knives in Sheffield to the mid-to-late seventeenth century. The knives became increasingly complex, “with a multitude of other folding tools for various uses — spikes for removing stones from horses’ hooves, scissors, small saws, corkscrews, leather punches and even railway carriage door keys.” Here, for instance, is a Sheffield-made farrier’s or veterinarian’s knife, perhaps from the 1830s.

Also from Moby-Dick
“Nothing exists in itself” : Nantucket ≠ Illinois : Quoggy : “Round the world!” : Gam : On “true method” : “A certain semi-visible steam” : Ishmael, dictionary user

[Multum in parvo: much in little.]

Another Henry gum machine

[Henry, July 7, 2015.]

One can never have too many streetside gum machines. I like the weathered-metal effect.

More gum machines
Henry : Henry : Henry : Perry Mason : Henry : Henry : Henry : Henry

Monday, July 6, 2015

Domestic comedy

“There’s nothing like the nostalgia of having worked hard.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Mark Trail, reuse, recycle

[Mark Trail, July 4, 6, 2015.]

Mark Trail is an environmentally conscious comic strip. James Allen, like Jack Elrod before him, recycles. Some delightful examples: here, here, here, and here.

Yes, there are slight differences. The whites of Mark‘s eyes disappear; shadows move about. But it’s the same face, warmed over. Look closely, for instance, at the pixels of Mark’s ear. (How’s that for a twenty-first-century sentence?)

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)