Movie recommendation: Phoenix

Phoenix (dir. Christian Petzold, 2014) is dark, stylish, and excellent. Nelly Lenz, an Auschwitz survivor (played by Nina Hoss), returns to Berlin. Her face has been horrifically damaged by a bullet wound. She undergoes reconstructive surgery and, with new features, seeks out her husband.

Phoenix has touches of Dark Passage (dir. Delmer Daves, 1947) and Eyes Without a Face (dir. Georges Franju, 1960), and owes a large debt to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Like Vertigo, it has an unforgettable ending.

That’s all you should know if you plan to see this movie.

Education, early and later on

From The New York TImes, two pieces on education, early and later on: Claire Cain Miller, “Why What You Learned in Preschool Is Crucial at Work”; Molly Worthen, “Lecture Me. Really.”

I’m not a fan of “working in groups” in a college setting: there are many other ways to develop social skills. Nor am I a fan of lectures, from either side of the podium. (I think of the line from T. S. Eliot: “Teach us to sit still.”) I like the possibilities of a discussion, but a discussion with someone at the wheel, neither sage on the stage nor guide on the side (so-called, so-called).

Pitching Wishbone

VISIONARY: My winsome Jack Russell Terrier is no mere peddler of phonics. He is the bard, the scop, the muse. He is the flame that lights the cave.

SUIT #3: And that’s totally PBS!

From Abbey Fenbert’s “The Pitch Meeting for Wishbone ” (The Toast ). Wonderful stuff.

Wishbone was (still sort of is , kinda?) a favorite in our household. YouTube has a daunting playlist. Alas, “Homer Sweet Homer,” the series’s Odyssey episode, is missing the closing bit in which Ellen Talbot explains Homeric epithets while riding a stationary bicycle. (She is “hard-pedaling Ellen.”) But you can still hear high-jumping Wishbone recite the opening words of the poem in Greek.

Now we need the pitch meeting for Ghostwriter .

Bernie Sanders’s honeymoon

Anderson Cooper’s debate-night accusation that Bernie Sanders honeymooned in the Soviet Union went by so quickly that I did little more than make a puzzled face: what an odd canard . Daughter Number Three looked into it.

Here is the best-documented account of Sanders’s Soviet getaway I can find. Long story short: in 1988, Sanders, mayor of Burlington, Vermont, visited the Russian city of Yaroslavl with his wife Jane and ten other people. They were members of an official delegation: Burlington and Yaroslavl were sister cities, and “honeymoon” was the Sanderses’ joking description of the trip. The two had been married the day before. Sister Cities International is a program that began with Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. Anderson Cooper, you took a cheap shot.

There are many more reasons to be dissatisfied with CNN’s management of Tuesday night’s debate (and the aftermath). As I mentioned to DN3, I haven’t watched a minute of CNN since Tuesday, and I have no plans to pick up again.

An aside: I see something of Senator Sanders in me. In public settings, I too have often refrained from arguing back, even when it would have been to my advantage to do so. Here, Sanders should have set things straight. And while I think of it:

It doesn’t matter how many Victorian husbands addressed their wives as “My child” in letters: Charles Dickens’s Bleak House does not present the possibility of a sexless marriage between Esther Summerson and the much older John Jarndyce as inviting the reader’s approval. Such a union could result only from Esther’s self-abnegation, her sense of herself as damaged, inferior, unworthy of erotic love. In the economy of the novel, the Esther–Allan Woodcourt marriage stands as the happy middle way, between Ada Clare and Richard Carstone’s unrestrained desire and an Esther–Jarndyce union. There, I said it.

Quandaries 101; or, why I wouldn’t reschedule an exam because of a ballgame

In the news: a University of Illinois professor rescheduled a student’s midterm exam so that the student could attend the Cubs’ wild-card game. Here’s a Washington Post article with the details. The student-professor e-mail exchange went viral, and everyone is happy. The student got to go to the game, and the professor is, of course, a cool guy. Win-win. Also: #myprofessorgetsit .

Elaine and I began talking about this scenario while walking. (What good subjects we happen upon when not listening to podcasts.) We agreed that if we were placed in this prof’s situation, we would not reschedule an exam. Here’s my reasoning:

1. I would invoke a remembered-from-a-philosophy-class version of Kant’s categorical imperative. If I reschedule an exam for this reason, I must, if I am to be fair to all students, be willing to reschedule exams for other reasons as well, reasons that involve not emergency or tragedy or university activity but pleasure. (If going to the game involved a university activity — say, interviewing a player for a journalism assignment, rescheduling would be appropriate.) A concert, an art exhibit, a chance for a road trip with friends, a family vacation: each might seem to a given student a compelling reason to plead for rescheduling. If just five or six students were to request rescheduled exams, a nightmare of planning and exam-making could ensue.

2. To hold some sort of line by discriminating among occasions — Vermeer, yes; One Direction, no — would place me in the inappropriate position of judging what the student alone should be free to judge — the attractiveness and urgency of a particular opportunity. That’s not for me to decide.

3. A practical matter: in the case of the Cubs’ game, it might be possible to go to the game and take the exam. Fly back after the game instead of spending the night in Pittsburgh.

And now I remember a beloved professor from my undergrad days, both joking and serious: “I don’t care if they’re staging the Last Supper with the original cast, the exam is scheduled for,” &c.

Seth, Stefan, don’t hate me.

[I wonder: did this student read How to e-mail a professor? He wrote a rather respectable e-mail.]

Through -thing and -thin’

A footnote on anything and everything, because baseball . Those who know more about the sport than I do might know whether these expressions and distinctions are still in play.

The late Ring Lardner once said:

“I used, occasionally, to sit on the players’ bench at baseball games, and it was there that I noted the exceptions made in favor of these two words. A player, returning to the bench after batting, would be asked, ‘Has he got anything in there?’ (‘He — in there’ always means the pitcher.) The answer would be ‘He’s got everything .’ On the other hand, the player might return and (usually after striking out) say, ‘He ain’t got nothin’ .’ And the manager: ‘Looks like he must have somethin’ .’”

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).

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

[“Because baseball ”: I couldn’t resist that phrasing.]

Got hyphens?

Every “tobacco free campus” — and there are many — needs a good supply of hyphens. Phrasal adjectives like tobacco-free need hyphens.

More signage and signage trouble
All OCA signage posts (Pinboard) : Intercollegate : Premisis

OMG and others

From Oxford University Press, nine words that are older than you might think. Or eight words and one acronym. See above.

When I taught King Lear this past spring, I took inordinate pleasure in seeing the word holla. Why not? Kent: “he that first lights on him / Holla the other.” And Goneril: “Holla, holla!” Holla also makes Oxford’s list.

Defending Brooklyn

“We particularly resent the picturization of a Brooklynite as a dumbbell and a fellow who says dese , dem , and dose ”: from WYNC, a 1948 interview with Sidney H. Ascher, president of the Society to Prevent Disparaging Remarks about Brooklyn. Scroll down for the original broadcast.

YouTube has a soundless version of Brooklyn, U.S.A. , the 1947 film mentioned in the interview. Mr. Ascher appears therein. A 1999 newspaper article and an Amazon page for Sid Ascher’s World of Trivia and More! have more on his life (and, I suspect, legend).

I’m happy to be from “the garden spot of the world, Brooklyn, U.S.A.” Extra credit if you know which Brooklyn resident called the borough that.

Related reading
All OCA Brooklyn posts (Pinboard)

Still life with coffee and laundry

[As seen in east-central Illinois. Click for a larger view.]

America’s Cup Coffee, “The Cup That Cheers,” was produced in Peoria, Illinois. That’s the America’s Cup trophy painted on the brick.

I had to make sure that I was reading the words at the top correctly: White Front Auto Laundry / Service Station? Yes. Webster’s Second defines auto laundry : “a place where, or device with which, automobiles are washed.” The term is not found in Webster’s Third , though one can still subscribe to the Auto Laundry News.