Domestic comedy

“You can’t objectify me. You’re too subjectified!”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Irving’s Toy & Card Shop

Watching the news last night: Brookline! Specifically, a story about Irving’s Toy & Card Shop. Ethel Weiss’s store (founded with her husband) has been in business on Harvard Street since 1939. Our fambly was in there some years ago. Now I want to go again. Watch: Candy shop owner going strong at 101 (CBS Evening News).

Irving’s has a YouTube presence: a report made for a college class by Steve Burns, and a mini-documentary by Brookline Interactive Group.

The World Book Encyclopedia

This Atlantic item makes me miss the World Book Encyclopedia of my childhood. The World Book was great for school reports, and perfect for the reading room, so-called.

“Here’s a post that might make you think of candy cigarettes”

Vinyl for the young: from Light in the Attic and (Jack White’s) Third Man Records, an LP titled This Record Belongs To          and a Children’s Turntable (33, 45, 78!). The LP includes, among others, Woody Guthrie, Ella Jenkins, Harry Nilsson, Van Dyke Parks, Nina Simone, and Miss Abrams & The Strawberry Point 4th Grade Class.

[Post title in the manner of The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd , revised twice for a stronger resemblance.]

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.

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