Sanders-Warren?

Elizabeth Warren has written an opinion piece for The New York Times about corporate criminality and the things a president can do about it without the Congress. Warren is highly critical of what she sees as the Obama administration’s unwillingness to punish corporate wrongdoers. An excerpt:

In a single year, in case after case, across many sectors of the economy, federal agencies caught big companies breaking the law — defrauding taxpayers, covering up deadly safety problems, even precipitating the financial collapse in 2008 — and let them off the hook with barely a slap on the wrist. Often, companies paid meager fines, which some will try to write off as a tax deduction.

The failure to adequately punish big corporations or their executives when they break the law undermines the foundations of this great country. Justice cannot mean a prison sentence for a teenager who steals a car, but nothing more than a sideways glance at a C.E.O. who quietly engineers the theft of billions of dollars.

Compare Bernie Sanders:

It is not acceptable that many young people have criminal records for smoking marijuana, while the CEOs of banks whose illegal behavior helped destroy our economy do not.

I may be misreading, but I strongly suspect that Elizabeth Warren will soon endorse Bernie Sanders. And I strongly suspect that she will be Sanders’s choice for a running mate. A Sanders-Warren ticket would be, for many voters, enormously exciting.

A second police station

[James Mason as Brandon Bourne, William Conrad as Lieutenant Jake Jacobi. Click for a larger view.]

East Side, West Side (dir Mervyn LeRoy, 1949) is the second film in recent memory that has made our household remark on the splendors of a police station. (The first: Niagara .) Roughly clockwise: framed picture of handgun types, radiator, metal window screening, schoolhouse-style light, fan, coat rack, file cabinets, transom window, metal light-shade, teletype machine (?), fedora, fedora, telephone, telephone, desk lamp, wire tray, file box, thermos, telephone, desk lamp, fedora, metal light-shade.

Also from this film
An EXchange name on screen

An EXchange name on screen

East Side, West Side (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1949) is now packaged as a “mystery-melodrama,” but it’s really an example of the so-called “woman’s picture,” presenting a tangle of mismatched and would-be partners: Barbara Stanwyck, James Mason, Ava Gardner, Van Heflin, and Cyd Charisse. William Frawley (Fred Mertz) plays a bartender. And there’s a telephone-exchange name:



We know from dialogue that it’s CHelsea.

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Dark Corner : Deception : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Dream House : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Side Street : Sweet Smell of Success : Tension : This Gun for Hire

Money as poetry

Bob Perelman, the first paragraph of “Free Verse: 999 Words,” in Ten to One: Selected Poems (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1999).

“Money is a kind of poetry”: Wallace Stevens famously made that observation in his prose Adagia. What did he mean? Perhaps that money is a form of metaphor. Perhaps that it is a means of transformation, to be turned into coffee, oranges, houses, and hotels.

You can find Wallace Stevens everywhere, even on postage stamps. You can find a sampler of Bob Perelman’s writing at the Electronic Poetry Center and audio and video files at PennSound. “Free Verse: 999 Words” was first published in the journal Epoch (1989).

Related reading
All OCA poetry posts (Pinboard)

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