The Pale King : progressive sales tax

‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle tells the story of Illinois’s (imaginary) 1977 experiment in a progressive sales tax, with rates of 3.5% on purchases under $5.00, 6% under $20.00, 6.8% under $42.01, and 8.5% for everything above $42.01.

$42.01? It’s a David Foster Wallace novel.

The result, Fogle says, was statewide chaos, with shoppers buying groceries one small bag a time and pumping gas in $4.99 increments. But there was worse to come.


David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (Boston: Little, Brown, 2011).

These troubled Illinois times prompted me to think of this passage. Illinois is one of a handful of states with a flat income-tax rate. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy calls Illinois one of the “Terrible Ten,” those states that “tax their poorest residents — those in the bottom 20 percent of the income scale — at rates up to seven times higher than the wealthy. Middle-income families in these states pay a rate up to three times higher as a share of their income as the wealthiest families.” Here’s some thinking about what a progressive income tax, or even a slightly higher flat rate, would mean for the state.

Related reading
All OCA David Foster Wallace posts (Pinboard)

[Why ‘Irrelevant’? Notice the final sentence in the passage. Wallace, by the way, used single quotation marks.]

Three Rauner thoughts

1. We listened to Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner’s State of the State address this afternoon. We turned the radio on just a couple of minutes past noon and waited for him to say something about the lack of a state budget. And waited, thinking we must have missed it.

But no: in a prepared text of 4,229 words, Rauner’s first direct reference to the lack of a budget appeared with only 236 words to go: “If each of us commits to serious negotiation based on mutual respect for our co-equal branches of government, there’s not a doubt in my mind we can come together to pass a balanced budget alongside reforms.”

2. I have never heard a politician drop so many -g s from -ing s, on gerunds and participles both: cost of livin’ , leavin’ our state . The -g sound seems to show up only when its absence would make for awkward repetition of -in and in- : fosterin’  fostering innovation. Listen to Rauner speaking — not speakin’ — in 2013: his habit of dropping -g s seems to be very recently acquired.

3. The Illinois Budget Clock.

[Language Log explains that there is no g in the dropped -g . But ordinary mortals speak of what’s involved as a g . And, yes, Barack Obama, too, drops -g s. I find faux folksiness tiresome, whoever’s doing the dropping.]

Recently updated

“Horrible” New developments, and they’re a sad indication of what now counts as good news in Illinois.

Verlyn Klinkenborg: “old world,” “cold week”

Verlyn Klinkenborg, “January,” The Rural Life (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002).

It’s not as cold now as it was that January (Klinkenborg reports a -50 °F windchill), but it’s cold enough. The Rural Life is drawn in large part from Klinkenborg’s now-ended New York Times column of the same name (1998–2013).

I know little about rural life. But I know good writing. My enthusiasm for Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences about Writing prompted me to pick up this earlier book.

Other Klinkenborg posts
From Several Short Sentences
Also from Several Short Sentences
On the English major
On e-reading
On “the social value of reading”

[Pipe chase : “an enclosed, finished space used to house and conceal pipe runs.”]

Thornton Dial (1928–2016)

The artist Thornton Dial has died at the age of eighty-seven. The New York Times has an obituary.

Elaine and I found our way to Dial’s art in 2011, when we went to Indianapolis Museum of Art just to spend an afternoon and spent it looking at “Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial” and little else. Here is the image gallery from that exhibition. What the images don’t suggest is the sheer size of many of Dial’s artworks. For instance: 71 × 114 × 8 inches.

Thornton Dial’s art appears in four Orange Crate Art posts (1, 2, 3, 4), three of which mark the anniversary of September 11, 2001. His work is in what William Carlos Williams called “the American idiom,” using the materials at hand to make works of distinctive and difficult beauty.

“Horrible”

Illinois’s higher-ed crisis has made The Chronicle of Higher Education. The article, “For Illinois’s Public Colleges, No State Money Means Plenty of Pain,” is behind the paywall. Here’s one short excerpt. Pat McGuire chairs the Illinois Senate’s Higher Education Committee:

Earlier this week, Senator McGuire said he had attended a program for prospective college students at a high school in his district. Once the presentation turned to financial aid and the state’s grant program, Mr. McGuire said, “a pall fell over the room.”

It pained him, he said, to see working-class families trying to figure out how to afford college and not knowing whether the aid would be there. “What we’re doing to them,” he said, “is horrible.”

Chicago State (whose student population is almost seventy-five percent African-American) is in imminent danger of closing. Other schools are taking further cost-cutting measures and looking at further layoffs. (At one school, tenured professors with fifteen years of service have received layoff notices.) The present catastrophe-in-the-making threatens to damage public higher education in Illinois for years to come. Faculty members and prospective faculty members who can find positions elsewhere will take them, and students and prospective students will think hard before sticking with or choosing a state school. If Governor Bruce Rauner is aiming to dismantle much of public higher education in the state (to be replaced by cheap, outsourced, vocationally-themed online offerings?), he is succeeding.

*

January 27: A Chicago State faculty member reports the school’s president as saying that CSU will not be closing in March. And a new Chronicle article (also behind the paywall) reports that Western Illinois University has taken tenured faculty off its layoff list.

A related post
Illinois’s higher-ed crisis

Spellings of the future

[As seen in print.]

Another spelling of the future. Just spell it the way it sounds!

There are indeed “Poke-a-Dots”: children’s books with raised buttons to poke. (Hours of fun, apparently.) But what this writer wanted was polka dots .

And why polka ? For no very good reason. The Oxford English Dictionary: “The use of polka as a trade name developed in the 1840s due to the huge popularity of the dance in that period.” Like fox trot, or macarena, dots.

Other spellings of the future
Aww : Bard-wired fence : Bud : Now : Off : Our : Self-confidance : Where

The text most often assigned

The Open Syllabus Project (described in this New York Times piece) has collected and drawn data from 1.1 million college syllabi. The text most often assigned? William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White’s The Elements of Style . The titles of texts assigned alongside The Elements suggest that the book is used in many disciplines: art, business, economics, education, film, history, international relations, journalism, mathematics, philosophy, political science, the sciences, theater — and even in English.

The Open Syllabus Project records not a single course using Michael Harvey’s The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing , to my mind a book far more helpful to student writers than The Elements . Nor is there a single course using Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences about Writing, also to my mind more helpful. No syllabi from me in the Project’s corpus.

I hope that Geoffrey Pullum misses this bit of news about The Elements . Pullum’s animus against the book is strong and deep: “Strunk and White” is his “Niagara Falls.” Who knows what this news might lead to?

Related reading
All OCA Elements of Style posts (Pinboard)
The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing
From Several Short Sentences
Also from Several Short Sentences

Twelve more films

Nine of which I recommend with great enthusiasm. In the order of viewing:

Los Angeles Plays Itself (dir. Thom Andersen, 2003). The city in film and television, as background, as character, as subject. A great demonstration of the principle of fair use, and a great way to learn about films. Here’s a (complete?) list of the films and television shows excerpted in this documentary.

*

The Crimson Kimono (dir. Samuel Fuller, 1959). Its lurid, arresting opening scenes begin Los Angeles Plays Itself. A stripper is murdered, and two detectives (Glenn Corbett and James Shigeta) set out to solve the crime, with help from an college student and painter (Victoria Shaw). A forward-thinking film with an “interracial” romance.

*

Grandma (dir. Paul Weitz, 2015). Lily Tomlin as Elle Reid, a misanthropic, grief-filled lesbian poet, recently widowed, no longer publishing. (In appearance, at least, she suggests Eileen Myles, whose work give the film an epigraph: “Time passes. That’s for sure.”) Julia Garner plays Elle’s teenaged granddaughter Sage, who shows up at Elle’s door, needing to get together, by the end of the day, $600 for an abortion. The quest is on. Overtones of Thelma and Louise and Sideways and Nebraska , though this film might better be described as utterly original.

*

The Martian (dir. Ridley Scott, 2015). Matt Damon as an astronaut left for dead on Mars. How the heck can he get back to earth? I like this film’s celebration of interplanetary hard work and geeky ingenuity.

*

Bringing Up Baby (dir. Howard Hawks, 1938). Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and a leopard named Baby. Good clean American insanity. The best line comes from Cary Grant, wearing a négligée: “Because I just went gay all of a sudden!” What?

*

Die Mörder sind unter uns [The murderers are among us] (dir. Wolfgang Staudte, 1946). Two strangers, a military doctor and a death-camp survivor, share an apartment in what’s left of Berlin. One of the first post-war German films. The only reason this film follows the previous one is that we had both out from the library. Our movie-watching is promiscuous and follows no train of thought.

*

Angel Face (dir. Otto Preminger, 1952). Robert Mitchum as Frank Jessup, a former race-car driver, now ambulance driver (ha), saving up to open a garage. Jean Simmons as Diane Tremayne, the world’s most beautiful psychopath. As in Vertigo, in which Scottie Ferguson leaves the world of daylight (good old Midge) for the attractions of Madeleine Elster, our sap-protagonist is torn between daylight Mary (Mona Freeman) and seductive Diane. Even when you know it’s coming, the ending is a shock. My favorite line, Frank commenting on Diane’s family: “It’s a weird outfit. Not for me.”

*

Whiplash (dir. Damien Chazelle, 2014). As the film’s brutal music teacher would say, “Not my tempo.” The worst film about music I’ve seen. Whiplash presents jazz practice and performance as a joyless blood sport. (Literally.) And the frame of musical reference is so limited: “jazz” appears here in the form of a conservatory studio band playing hack arrangements of unmemorable “originals.” Why care about some tune called “Whiplash”? Or about a young musician (Miles Teller, played by Andrew Neiman) whose chief inspiration is Buddy Rich? (Not Max Roach? Art Blakey? Elvin Jones? Tony Williams? Jack DeJohnette? Hamid Drake?) Or about an music teacher (J. K. Simmons, played by Terence Fletcher) who trots out a distorted version of the famous story in which Jo Jones tossed a cymbal at the feet of a young, fumbling Charlie Parker. In Simmons’s telling, the cymbal is aimed at Parker’s head. Elaine and I hated this film.

*

Irrational Man (dir. Woody Allen, 2015). And this one. Allen’s picture of academic life in the early twenty-first century is laughable, with a visiting star professor (Joaquin Phoenix as Abe) arriving to teach what seems to be an undergraduate survey course, with Kant’s categorical imperative and Kierkegaard’s dread. Abe drinks from an ever-present flask, but he evidently grade papers now and then, because he compliments Jill (Emma Stone) on her paper’s “originality,” especially the parts where she disagreed with “his ideas.” Abe and Jill are soon taking long walks together, and, of course, she falls for him. (Can you tell that it’s an Allen film?) The title is a nod to William Barrett’s Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958). I used to joke that everyone who went to college had a copy. Woody Allen went to college: he, too, must have a copy. One redeeming element: Parker Posey as a philandering spouse.

*

The Fallen Idol (dir. Carol Reed, 1948). From a story by Graham Greene. A boy, a butler, the butler’s wife, and the butler’s girlfriend. A world of lies and secrets, small and large. With Ralph Richardson and Sonia Dressel as Mr. and Mrs. Baines, Michèle Morgan as Julie, and Bobby Henrey as Philippe.

*

I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story (dir. Dave LaMattina and Chad N. Walker, 2014). Caroll Spinney found his way to puppeteering early in life and paid a price for being a boy who played with “dolls.” That revelation is one of the very few troubling moments in a relentlessly calm and kind documentary. Uplifting music plays behind every person speaking, or so it seems. The best scene is one in which no one speaks: when Big Bird sings at Jim Henson’s memorial. Spinney is now eighty-two and still performs as Big Bird and Oscar.

*

Youth (dir. Paolo Sorrentino, 2015). We had high hopes for this one and were hugely disappointed. (The trailer is rather misleading.) Michael Caine plays Fred Ballinger, a retired composer and conductor, now said to be “apathetic.” Harvey Keitel plays Mick Boyle, a film director and Fred’s best friend. They and various other people (including a levitating Buddhist monk) are sojourning at a Swiss hotel/spa/resort whose decor features chessboard motifs (a veiled reference to Vladimir Nabokov’s years at the Montreux Palace Hotel?). There are touches of Wes Anderson and Federico Fellini and Terrence Malick in this beautiful-looking movie. But the bits and pieces of atmosphere and mystery and gratuitous nudity add up to very little. And the dialogue is often leaden. Messrs. Caine and Keitel, how could you bring yourselves to speak some of those lines? Jane Fonda’s cameo is an embarrassment: Sorrentino seems to think that the more often you put the words fuck , shit , and balls into dialogue, the more you increase its emotional content.

Elaine and I laughed (silently) and cringed through the big musical finale, in which we finally are given more than a phrase or two of Ballinger’s Simple Songs. As I wrote in a letter to a friend, this piece (by David Lang) makes The American Symphony from Mr. Holland’s Opus sound profound. The lyrics begin: “I feel complete. I lose all control. I lose all control. I respond.” We didn’t. Here, make up your own mind.

Elaine has also offered a warning against Youth .

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)
Thirteen recommendations
Fourteen more recommendations

National Handwriting Day

It’s National Handwriting Day (John Hancock’s birthday), which comes six days after the more awkwardly named National Send a Handwritten Letter Day. Two handwritten holidays in one week!

I have three letters to write and will write one of them today. So I will declare Local Handwriting Days in the near near future.

Time has an article whose title seems designed to command the attention of younger passersby: “People Have Been Freaking Out About the Death of Cursive Way Longer Than You Think.” The article includes links to Time reports from 1935, 1947, 1953, and 1980. “‘Penmanship is sort of dying out,’” said a pencil salesman, “softly,” in 1935.

The growth of interest in small notebooks (Field Notes Brand, Moleskine, and so on) suggests to me that writing by hand (though perhaps not in cursive) is powerfully appealing to those who already spend too much time at a keyboard. Writing by hand: not dead yet.

Related reading
All OCA handwriting and letter posts (Pinboard)