NYC schooldays

Today is the first day of school in New York City. The New York Times has a look at the first day in photographs through the decades. I like seeing the classroom windows (1957), the marbled composition-notebook (1961), and the briefcases (1961, 1975). Not book bags: briefcases. In the 1960s nearly every boy in my school, P. S. 131, Brooklyn, carried a briefcase. Was it a New York thing? Moving to New Jersey meant ditching my briefcase — one of many varieties of culture shock.

Here in east-central Illinois school begins in mid-August, with oppressively warm classrooms and early dismissal as the norm. A post-Labor Day start seems to me sane and humane.

The U of Iowa has a new president

His name is Bruce Harreld. Less than three percent of faculty who responded to a survey think he’s qualified. He will be earning $590,000 a year.

You can read more at the Chronicle of Higher Education , the New York Times , and Slate . Harreld’s job talk and answers to faculty and student questions may be found at YouTube. Many Iowa faculty may likely be found working on their exit strategies.

*

November 6, 2015: The President and The Yes Men. Thanks to Unknown.

Whitman’s last pencil

[“Walt Whitman’s pencil / the last used / Given me by John Burroughs / 1 April 1892.”]

From Walt Whitman at the Lilly, an Indiana University online exhibition: Whitman’s (alleged) last pencil. It’s a Dixon’s American Graphite. Click through for a much larger photograph and Whitman’s thoughts about pencils and their uses. (Hint: spoon .)

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)

Karr and Nabokov

Chapter Three of Speak, Memory, the source of a paragraph I posted earlier today, comes up in a new book by Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir. From a review:

Even Nabokov, whose Speak, Memory is praised extensively and poetically in one full chapter of Karr’s book, comes under fire for his pretentious indulgences later. “Nabokov devotes the third chapter of Speak, Memory to all his family estates and heraldry and his fancy-pants ancestors, Baron von So-and-So and Count Suck-On-This.”

It’s not clear to me that memorializing one’s ancestors is a matter of pretentious indulgence: to collect and recount the details of an aristocratic pedigree might be a gesture of mournful reverence. And the chapter’s brief discussion of heraldry is really about the workings of memory, Nabokov’s memory having at one point distorted the family crest beyond recognition. The estates and ancestors of this deeply Proustian chapter are the places and people of a lost world, now remembered or, at least, evoked. Fancy pants are not the point. As Nabokov writes later in the chapter,

My old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any question of property. My contempt for the emigre who “hates the Reds” because they “stole” his money and land is complete. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.

Karr’s dismissal of estates and ancestors seems to me a form of snobbery in reverse: it’s okay to write your life if you come from a rough or messy background. But fancy-pants aristocrats, Keep Out.

The reviewer adds a parenthetical comment about the sentence from Karr:

(After laughing out loud at this line, I misread Karr’s Nabokov excerpt about “Prince Wittgenstein’s Druzhnoselie” as “Prince Wittgenstein’s Douchenozzle.”)

It’s sad to see such snark passing for lit crit.

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

A Nabokov digression

Carl Heinrich Graun: Nabokov’s great-grandfather Ferdinand von Korff’s great-grandfather. The “young explorer”: Nabokov’s great-grandfather Nikolay Aleksandrovich Nabokov. “[O]f all places”: because Zembla (not Nova Zembla) is the (supposed) homeland of Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire. This paragraph turns into an amusingly Kinbotean digression:


Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (1966).

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

A letter to Martin Milner

In 2013 Elaine and I wrote to Martin Milner and George Maharis to express our appreciation for Route 66. Here is one of our letters:

Dear Mr. Milner,

We spent a good part of April, May, and June watching the complete run of Route 66 on DVD. We’re writing to thank you — fifty years late — for the terrific work you did as Tod Stiles. We greatly enjoyed the series’s writing, camerawork, and, especially, the acting. Among our favorite Tod-centric episodes are “The Thin White Line” and “The Cruelest Sea of All.”

It is amazing to see a series that can range from tragedy to comedy, even slapstick, while always making room for fisticuffs, poetry, and progressive jazz. We’re both in our fifties — too young to have paid attention to Route 66 the first time around, old enough now to realize how great the series was.

All best wishes, &c.

We received a letter from George Maharis, but we never heard from Martin Milner. I hope that he saw our letter.

Related reading
All OCA Route 66 posts (Pinboard)
Martin Milner (1931–2015)

Martin Milner (1931–2015)

The actor Martin Milner has died. From the Los Angeles Times obituary:

The red-haired, freckle-faced Milner had more than a dozen years of work in films and television behind him in 1960 when he began plying the highways and byways of America on Route 66 , portraying Yale dropout Tod Stiles opposite George Maharis’ streetwise New Yorker Buz Murdock.

Martin Milner is probably better known these days for his role as Officer Pete Malloy on Adam-12, but Route 66 is the better measure of his gifts.

Our household is a Route 66 -friendly zone.

Related reading
All OCA Route 66 posts (Pinboard)
A letter to Martin Milner

Recently updated

James Ward’s supplies Now with a reason why Mr. Ward should send his office supplies to me.

A Nancy Labor Day

[Nancy, September 7, 1953. Those rocks!]

From GoComics, Guy Gilchrist and John Lotshaw’s Random Acts of Nancy reprints single Ernie Bushmiller panels in colorized form. Scott McCloud’s Five Card Nancy is the inspiration.

Also from GoComics, Gilchrist’s Nancy and Bushmiller’s original Nancy strips (the latter running every day but Sunday).

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Labor Day

[“A. S. Gerdee, of 3251 Maypole(?) Street, working as a switchman at Proviso yard of C & NW RR, Chicago, Ill.” Photograph by Jack Delano. April 1943. Click for a larger view.]

The Library of Congress has made this photograph available via Flickr.