Nabokov: “mere scenery”

The past, in the form of the wreckage of an affair:


Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969).

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College prez likens college prez to star infielder, English prof to minor leaguer

I heard about it but had to read it to believe it. Scott Scarborough, president of the University of Akron (rebranded “Ohio’s Polytechnic University”), explaining the disparity between administrative and faculty salaries:

“It”s hard to explain why a president might make eight times as much as an English-faculty professor in the same way it’s hard to explain why a power-hitting third basemen makes more than someone playing for the RubberDucks. They’re both playing the same sport. They’re both playing the same position. And yet one makes a thousand times more.”

Aside from the insult, this analogy is remarkably faulty. Administrators and faculty don’t do the same work. And there is no reason to assume that an administrator as such is a stellar performer or that a faculty member as such is strictly minor league. The RubberDucks, as you might know, are Akron’s minor-league team, so Scarborough is insulting not just faculty but the hometown team as well.

The University of Akron appears to be a school in crisis. It’s never a good sign when a school’s president becomes the object of mockery in an online game.

The Adjunct Project reports that Akron pays its adjunct faculty $800 to $4,000 per course. Scott Scarborough’s starting salary: $450,000.

*

June 1, 2016: The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Scott Scarborough has resigned.

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Income disparity in higher ed
Inequality v. disparity

“Slang is . . . ”

From a Mencken footnote:

“Slang,” said Carl Sandburg, “is language that takes off its coat, spits on its hands, and gets to work.” “Slang,” said Victor Hugo, “ is a dressing-room in which language, having an evil deed to prepare, puts on a disguise.” “Slang,” said Ambrose Bierce, “is the speech of him who robs the literary garbage-carts on their way to the dumps.” Emerson and Whitman were its partisans. “What can describe the folly and emptiness of scolding,“ asked the former (Journals, 1840), like the word jawing ?” “Slang,” said Whitman, “is the wholesome fermentation or eructation of those processes eternally active in language, by which the froth and specks are thrown up, mostly to pass away, though occasionally to settle and permanently crystalize.” (Slang in America , 1885). And again: “These words ought to be collected — the bad words as well as the good. Many of the bad words are fine” (An American Primer , c . 1856.)

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).

And now I think of Julia A. Moore, the Sweet Singer of Michigan, and her trenchant praise of “Temperance Reform Clubs” and their members:

Those noble men were kind and brave
    They care not for the slang —
The slang they meet on every side

Aw, nerts.

Also from The American Language
The American a : The American v. the Englishman : Anglic : “Are you a speed-cop?” : Benjamin Franklin and spelling : B.V.D. : English American English : Franco-American : “[N]o faculty so weak as the English faculty” : On professor : Playing policy : Proper names in America : “There are words enough already” : The -thon , dancing and walking Through -thing and -thin’ : The verb to contact

Signage

As seen on a billboard: “We Are Into S & N.” That is, spaying and neutering. With a photograph of a cat and dog wearing leather.

Cute? Not so much.

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Missing pencil sculpture

A pencil sculpture — twelve-feet tall, 200 pounds — is missing from the campus of Purdue University.

Okay, whodunit?

*

November 20: The pencil has been found.

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Sardines and cigarettes

 
[“Baskets of sardines.” Cigarette card from the George Arents Collection. From the New York Public Library Digital Collections. Click either image for a larger view.]

Not quite the ring of “coffee and cigarettes.” (A fine movie, Jim Jarmusch.) “Pilchards and cigarettes” doesn’t quite work either. But “semolina pilchard” — now there’s something.

A recent story from a British tabloid gives new meaning to “sardines and cigarettes.” Proceed at your own risk.

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A brief message from the Academy of Lifelong Learning

A problem should retain its shape and size. If a large problem cannot be found, a small problem ought not to step in to take its place.

[Me, today, UPS and USPS.]

Robert Walser: “a sleeping sardine”

Since arriving in Berlin, I’ve lost the habit of finding humanity laughable. At this point, by the way, I myself request another edible wonder: a plank of bread bearing a sleeping sardine upon a bedsheet of butter, so enchanting a vision that I toss the whole spectacle down my open revolving stage of a gullet. Is such a thing laughable? By no means. Well, then. What isn’t laughable in me cannot be any more so in others, since it’s our duty to esteem others more highly than ourselves no matter what, a worldview splendidly in keeping with the earnestness with which I now contemplate the abrupt demise of my sardine pallet.

Robert Walser, “Aschinger,” in Berlin Stories , trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: New York Review Books, 2012).

Related reading
Aschinger (Wikipedia)
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Robert Walser: comestibles, ephemeralities, liverwurst

How enchanting this is: being permitted to take a bit of pleasure in something rustic, even only a grosch’n’s worth. Fresh eggs, country ham, country and city liverwurst! I have to admit: I do like standing and scallywagging about in the proximity of tempting comestibles. Again I am reminded of the most vivid ephemeralities, and what is alive is dearer to me than the immortal.

Robert Walser, “Market,” in Berlin Stories , trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: New York Review Books, 2012).

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Robert Walser, Looking at Pictures

Robert Walser. Looking at Pictures . Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky, Lydia Davis, and Christopher Middleton. New York: Christine Burgin/New Directions, 2015. 144 pages, illustrated. $24.95 hardcover.

The ancient practice of ekphrasis is a matter of speaking about a work of visual art, providing a verbal analogue of a mute image. (Think shield of Achilles , Iliad 18.) In these twenty-five short prose pieces, Robert Walser (1878–1956) writes about paintings, to paintings, and from within paintings. And at times he leaves paintings aside to discuss other things. Each work of art becomes an occasion for the writer’s own imaginative performance.

Walser writes about paintings (by his brother Karl, Fragonard, Watteau, Van Gogh, Cezanne, and others) as if no one had ever thought to do so before. Thus the element of arch naïveté in his prose: “A painter is a person who holds a brush in his hand. On the brush is paint.” “Every great painter the world has known has been cheerful, quiet, thoughtful, clever and superbly educated.” Historicizing a Fragonard painting, Walser presents himself as a game amateur doing his best: “Railroads didn’t exist yet, and the niceties of central heating had not yet been worked out. No one had ever heard of petroleum lamps.” And of Watteau:

Knowing little about him, I shall nonetheless promptly make my way, as if rambling across meadows, into the task of describing his life, as if stepping into an attractive, prettily wallpapered little house, this being a life devoted to gaiety, that is to art, in other words to a certain delight in one’s own person.

A delight in one’s own person indeed.

The aesthetic of Looking at Pictures is a playful blend of realism and its alternatives. An imaginary painter writes in a notebook of painting “meticulously precise likenesses” of people and things. Elsewhere Walser praises painted bouquets as possessing “flower-bouquetishness,” and painted domiciles, “domesticity.” And of a Beardsley candle: “It may be that never before has an illustrator reproduced the flickering of a candle in so candle-like a manner, so flickery.” Paintings (or the figures therein) at times become so real that they talk back: Van Gogh’s Madame Joseph-Michel Ginoux tells Walser of her early life; Manet’s Olympia asks Walser to tell her a story. The high point of this play comes in a piece about Diaz’s The Forest Clearing : its landscape becomes the setting for a terrifying monologue by a mother abandoning her child, a mother conscious of her presence within a painting: “I swear to you, as truthfully as I am standing here with you in this forest painted by Diaz, you must earn your livelihood with bitter toil so that you will not go to ruin inwardly.” And the leaves on the ground offer their comment on Walser’s work:

“What has been written in this brief essay appears to be quite simple, but there are times when everything simple and readily comprehensible recedes from human understanding and only can be grasped with great effort.”

Elsewhere Walser leaves paintings behind. “An Exhibition of Belgian Art” begins with an undescribed visit to one exhibition site, followed by a stop at a café, thoughts about a girlfriend, recollections of military sevice, more thoughts about a girlfriend, an account of a dream, a story from Swiss history, until finally:

Pleased as I am to have had the opportunity to speak about a stately and beautiful artistic event, I consider myself obliged to limit myself with regard to the extensiveness of my remarks. Everything I have neglected to say can be given voice to by others.

The deciphering of Robert Walser’s pencilled microscripts and the rediscovery of his beautiful, funny, sad, enigmatic work (in German and in English translation) is one of the great developments in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century literary culture. I look forward to further new arrivals in translation from both published works and the Bleistiftgebiet (pencil zone).

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[Thanks to the publishers for a review copy of the book. Cover image from the New Directions website.]