Domestic comedy

“8:30?”

“8:30.”

“I feel like I’m signing a contract.”

“You are.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

The End of the Tour

The End of the Tour (dir. James Ponsoldt, 2015) is a likable and unlikable film. I found less bromance than I had anticipated (and dreaded), several moments of high seriousness and emotional darkness, and (via Joan Cusack) some sweetly comic relief. The relationship between interviewer David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) and interviewee David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel), which develops over five days of talk and travel, is never without its duplicities. Does Wallace offer Lipsky a “guest-roomish” spare bedroom out of sheer hospitality, or is the interviewee trying to disarm his interviewer early on? Lipsky’s snooping around in medicine cabinets and empty rooms is less ambiguous.

Jason Segel has an uncanny grasp of Wallace’s speaking voice — or of one Wallace voice, the plain-ordinary-guy voice. (Here is a different Wallace voice.) But in appearance, Segel’s Wallace is grotesque: slovenly, hulking, and slightly crazed-looking. My offhand nominee for a more convincing Wallace: Edward Burns.

The edited transcript of Lipsky and Wallace’s conversations appeared in book form as Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (2010). This film might better have been titled Although of Course You End Up Becoming a Caricature of Yourself.

But worth seeing, even if only to satisfy a reader’s curiosity.

Related reading
All OCA David Foster Wallace posts (Pinboard)

Life and death and Molly Dodd

Elevator operator/doorman Davey McQuinn (James Greene) to Molly Dodd (Blair Brown):

“Life goes on, Miss Dodd. Count on it.”

That’s from The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd episode “Here’s a Bunch of Photos from an Old Album” (April 14, 1988), in which Molly’s father dies.

Our household loves The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd.

Related posts
Molly Dodd, Molly Dodd, Molly Dodd
Molly Dodd, Mongol user

How to enter a classroom

[Assuming there’s still a classroom to enter. Advice for college students, for “syllabus week” and beyond.]

1. Put away any devices before entering, so that you can be marked “present” — that is, fully present, ready to engage whatever will be going on. It’s a sad and dopey feeling for an instructor to find a roomful of students intent on their devices.

2. If your instructor has not arrived and the room is dark, turn on the lights. It’s a sad and dopey feeling for an instructor to find a roomful of students sitting in the dark. If an instructor is present and the room is dark, there may be a PowerPoint presentation in the offing. Uh-oh.

3. Don’t sit toward the back. It’s a sad and dopey feeling for an instructor to find a roomful of students sitting toward the back.

The only thing worse than finding a roomful of students intent on their devices is finding a roomful of students intent on their devices and sitting in the dark. And the only thing worse than finding a roomful of students intent on their devices and sitting in the dark is finding a roomful of students intent on their devices and sitting in the dark toward the back. A teacher with sufficient gumption will ask students to put away the devices and move toward the front. That teacher will also turn on the lights, and even ask that students do so in the future.

For the first time since 1961, falltime won’t mean for me the start of “school.” (Even during sabbaticals, life is governed by the academic calendar.) It feels exciting to be back in a pre-kindergarten environment. But I still think about what goes in school.

Related posts
How to answer a professor (Guest post by Stefan Hagemann) : How to be a student a professor will remember (for the right reasons) : How to e-mail a professor : New year’s resolutions : Rule 7 : Seeing professors clearly : Syllabus week

Universities, hedge funds, and private equity funds

Victor Fleischer writes about “the symbiotic relationship between university endowments and the world of hedge funds and private equity funds”: “Stop Universities from Hoarding Money” (The New York Times).

As The Arthurian pointed out in a comment on a recent post, Fleischer’s observations go well with a passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson that Stefan Hagemann quoted in an earlier comment on that post:

Gowns and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year.

VW punctuation

“It’s important to stop at the right moment”: fun with punctuation in three advertisements for the Volkswagen Passat.

Related reading
All OCA punctuation posts (Pinboard)

[No. 2 though would work better with items in a series: x , y , and z .]

Lassie Ticonderoga

[Timmy (Jon Provost) and Ruth Martin (June Lockhart). And, of course, Lassie. From the Lassie episode “The Owl,” September 28, 1958. Click for a larger view.]

In a farmhouse just outside Calverton, the pencil of choice is the Dixon Ticonderoga. The ferrule gives it away. There’s also an episode in which Timmy sits at the kitchen table and writes a note with a Ticonderoga, but I can find no trace of that epsiode online.

Other Ticonderogas
Bells Are Ringing : The Dick Van Dyke Show : Harry Truman with Ticonderoga : The House on 92nd Street : Pnin

New directions in teaching

From The Chronicle of Higher Education, an article on the use of “machine teaching”: “The hope is if we can quantify the student’s learning process, then maybe we can come up with a more efficient curriculum or lesson.”

Two observations:

This model of teaching allows for no possibility of conversation or improvisation or discovery: it is always already clear “what knowledge [the researcher] wants to impress upon the learner.” I think of the “little vessels” in the opening scene of Dickens’s Hard Times , schoolchildren waiting to be filled with facts.

This model of teaching assumes that efficiency is a desirable end. But what counts as “a more efficient curriculum or lesson”? Is it inefficient to spend a semester teaching Infinite Jest ? Is it inefficient to spend a class meeting on a single Dickinson poem? Or two or more hours looking at a single painting? What would a “more efficient” approach to such works require? What would be gained and lost in taking such an approach? And why didn’t Socrates just come out and say what he meant instead of asking all those questions? Not a very efficient philosopher.

Related posts
Models for education (Sages, guides, and improvisation)
New directions in assessment (Scanning brains to determine the effects of college)

[I twice had the pleasure of spending a semester on Infinite Jest, and I spent many a class meeting looking at single poems. But I don’t know how to spend hours looking at a single painting.]

Name the actor

He reminds me of the scholarly gentleman on packs of Club cigarette papers. Can you identify this actor? Take your best shot in the comments. I’ll drop hints as needed. Disclosure: I would not be able to guess correctly.

Here are links to posts with ten more mystery actors, from Naked City , Route 66 , and “the movies”: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Collect them all!

*

A hint: The actor is probably best known for his television work.

*

The answer is now in the comments, courtesy of an eagle-eyed Crow.

Overheard

[One teenager to another, on a park bench. ]

“I’m a little too patty-caked out.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)