A joke in the traditional manner

Did you hear about the thieving produce-clerk?

No spoilers. The punchline is in the comments.

More jokes in the traditional manner
The Autobahn : Did you hear about the cow coloratura? : Elementary school : A Golden Retriever : How did Bela Lugosi know what to expect? : How did Samuel Clemens do all his long-distance traveling? : What did the doctor tell his forgetful patient to do? : What did the plumber do when embarrassed? : What happens when a senior citizen visits a podiatrist? : What is the favorite toy of philosophers’ children? : Which member of the orchestra was best at handling money? : Why did the doctor spend his time helping injured squirrels? : Why did Oliver Hardy attempt a solo career in movies? : Why did the ophthalmologist and his wife split up? : Why does Marie Kondo never win at poker? : Why was Santa Claus wandering the East Side of Manhattan?

[“In the traditional manner”: by or à la my dad. He gets credit for all but the cow coloratura, the toy, the squirrel-doctor, Marie Kondo, Santa Claus, and this one.]

NYT sanitizes DFW

In marking the twentieth anniversary of the publication of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (February 1, 1996), The New York Times has sanitized an often-quoted sentence from a Wallace interview. Here’s Wallace, speaking with Larry McCaffery in 1993:

Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.

And now Tom Bissell, writing in the Times :

In interviews, Wallace was explicit that art must have a higher purpose than mere entertainment: “Fiction’s about what it is to be a . . . human being.”

Bissell’s piece is excerpted from his foreword to a forthcoming twentieth-anniversary edition of Infinite Jest . The word explicit is odd here, as the Times — I assume it’s the Times, not Bissell — has chosen to be less than explicit.

The excision of fucking may be less deplorable than the outright rewriting a Philip Larkin poem in a 2012 review by Michiko Kakutani: “They mess you up, your mum and dad.” But the Times hasn’t only removed a word: the added ellipsis may too easily be read as an indication of a hesitation or pause in Wallace’s speaking, changing his blunt, inelegant remark into a moment of bathos: “a . . . human being.” It would be easy enough for the Times to suggest the full content without resorting to the ellipsis: “Fiction’s about what it is to be a [f---ing] human being,” or “Fiction’s about what it is to be a [****ing] human being.” They mess you up, The New York Times .

Related reading
All OCA DFW posts (Pinboard)

A Henry report card

[Henry , January 30, 2016.]

That’s how report cards were packaged when I was a kid. The little notch in the envelope’s edge is the giveaway.

The teacherly grimace was optional.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)

Back to Springfield

A surprise in the Chicago Tribune tonight:

President Barack Obama will return to Springfield next month to deliver a speech under the Capitol dome where he once served as a state senator, bringing the spotlight of the presidency to a building where home-state political struggles have led to a historic budget stalemate.

The Tribune quotes a spokesman for the Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan as saying that Obama was invited “several years ago.” But the paper also reports that Senate President John Cullerton sent a letter to Obama on January 19 “suggesting it was a good time for a return.” To my mind, Cullerton decided to turn on the Bat-Signal, and I am looking forward to whatever our president can say and do to help end the state’s budget crisis and lessen its political dysfunction.

Related posts
Illinois’s higher-ed crisis
“Horrible” (More of the same)
Three Rauner thoughts (The State of the State address)

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.]