September 11

[Thornton Dial, The Morning of the End of the World. 2001. Wood, clothing, carpet, enamel, and spray paint. 82 x 58 x 46 inches. Photo: Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio. From the collection of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation.]

Thornton Dial’s art also appears in September 11 posts from 2011 and 2013.

A Nabokov schoolroom

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (1966).

This post is for my friend Sara, who was just dreaming of an oval mirror.

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

[The “schoolroom” is of course a room of Nabokov’s family’s own, with a private tutor.]

Domestic comedy

[In the aisle of Crunchy Stuff. ]

“It is my downfall. Also, my uplift.”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Even if that aisle can indeed be both, it’s best avoided.]

English American English

An English attempt “to do an advertisement in the American manner.” From the London publication Autocar, February 4, 1922:

Say, bud, jest haow do you calculate to buy an automobile? Do you act pensive after you’ve bought, or do you let a few facts form fours on your grey matter before you per-mit the local car agent to take a hack at your bank balance?

F’rinstance, what horse-power class do you aim to get into? Will your pocket bear a 20 h.p., and, if not, will a 10 h.p. bear your family? That’s the first problem, and the best way to answer it is to think what old friend Solomon would have done and cut th’ trouble in half by making your car an 11.9 — safe both ways up.

Wal, after you’ve laid out your cash an’ folded its arms on its little chest, there are just two people who are liable to hold you up for ransom; the tax-collector and and th’ polisman. Per-sonally, I give a polisman just nuthin’ and a tax-collector as little as George and Mary will let me. If I’m in the 11.9 h.p. class I can send the kids to school with th’ tax balance? Get me?

H. L. Mencken, The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States , 4th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936).

Mencken adds: “Colloquial English is just as unfathomable to most Americans as colloquial American is to Englishmen.”

Also from The American Language
The American v. the Englishman : B.V.D. : “[N]o faculty so weak as the English faculty” : Playing policy : “There are words enough already” : The -thon , dancing and walking : The verb to contact

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)