Overheard

“If you’re making yourself look bad in front of us, that’s one thing, but if you’re making yourself look bad in front of girls, that’s something else.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

Robert Walser: “former beauty”

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

Related reading
All OCA Robert Walser posts (Pinboard)

A teaching dream

It’s the third such dream I’ve had since retiring. (The others: here and here.) I am teaching a class of fifteen or twenty students. We are supposed to end at ten to the hour. I keep going for another thirty minutes, and the class ends at twenty after. And all is well. Nothing remarkable about it.

Outside the dream world, things are likely to go differently. A beloved professor of mine routinely ran late, right up to the time a next class was to begin. On one occasion another professor pounded on the door and sought to enter while my prof’s class was still going. Something happened at the door — I don’t know what, as I wasn’t there. But there was a claim of an injured ankle.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

George Martin (1926–2016)

The record producer George Martin has died. From the New York Times obituary:

A modest man who had been trained as a classical pianist and oboist, Mr. Martin always deflected credit for the Beatles’ success, telling interviewers over the years that his own efforts were secondary to the songwriting genius of John Lennon, Paul McCartney and, to a lesser extent, George Harrison. The Beatles, for their part, recognized that Mr. Martin came to the job with a virtually infallible ear for arrangements. His advice and his behind-the-scenes scoring and editing gave some of the Beatles’ greatest recordings their characteristic sound.

Paul McCartney, writing on his website: “If anyone earned the title of the fifth Beatle it was George.”

CNN fail

John King showing off his map a minute or so ago: “The deeper the shading, the higher the percentage of African-American voters.”

Really, CNN?

More John King moments
“A-Tisket, A-Tasket” : John King, fast talker

“A-Tisket, A-Tasket”

If CNN’s John King makes just one more reference to “a basket of votes,” I will set the Erinyes after him.

A related post
John King, fast talker

Recently updated

Crosswords, copied The editor is “temporarily stepping away.”

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois , March 5 and 8, 2016. Click either image for a larger view.]

Since August 2008, I’ve been noticing (and sometimes solving) Hi and Lois problems. I don’t recall seeing the front door switch direction before. The switch seems to be dictated by the left-to-right logic of comic-strip dialogue.

*

9:30 a.m.: The door has switched before: for instance. The door’s direction does seem to vary with dialogue. The strip is off its hinges.

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

From a Van Gogh letter

Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, December 26, 1878:

Lately, during the dark days before Christmas, snow was lying on the ground. Everything reminded one then of the medieval paintings by, say, Peasant Brueghel, and by so many others who have known how to depict the singular effect of red & green, black & white so strikingly. And often the sights here have made me think of the work of, for example, Thys Maris or Albrecht Dürer. There are sunken roads here, overgrown with thornbushes and gnarled old trees with their freakish roots, which resemble perfectly that road on Dürer’s etching, Le chevalier et la mort.

Thus, a few days ago, the miners returning home in the evening towards dusk in the white snow were a singular sight. These people are quite black when they emerge into the daylight from the dark mines, looking just like chimney sweeps. Their dwellings are usually small and should really be called huts, they lie scattered along the sunken roads, in the woods and on the slopes of the hills. Here and there one can still see moss-covered roofs, and in the evening a friendly light shines through the small-paned windows.

The Letters of Vincent van Gogh , ed. Ronald de Leeuw, trans. Arnold Pomerans (New York: Penguin, 1997).

Peasant Brueghel: Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Matthijs Maris: this painting might suggest what Van Gogh had in mind. Albrecht Dürer: here is the etching.

Also from Van Gogh’s letters
“Admire as much as you can”
“It was a bright autumn day and a beautiful walk”

“Here’s what it’s like to live in the shadow of a Big Ten school”

The University of Illinois today announced the hiring of a new football coach. In such circumstances, our local news outlet (“Your News Leader”) turns into a muzzy cheer squad. “Crazy!” said the anchor. The first twelve minutes of tonight’s hour-long newscast were devoted to the hiring, with more coverage promised later in the hour.

Also today, Illinois governor Bruce Rauner appeared in two nearby towns “to hear [our] concerns” and stump for congressional candidate John Shimkus (who in 2014 described Rauner as someone who “can make the trains run on time”). At the first of these events, a journalist (a former student of mine) was denied entry. Citizens pressing for a resolution to the state’s budget crisis were also denied entry. I don’t know what happened at the second event. Our local news outlet covered neither event.

The school where I spent thirty years as a professor of English is down the road a ways from the University of Illinois, in more ways than one. My school is not a Big Ten school, not a Research I school. It’s what’s called a “teaching university”: students are the faculty’s first priority. My school is small and scrappy and chronically underfunded. And now, in the absence of a state budget, hundreds of employees have lost or will soon lose their jobs. None of that made tonight’s news either.

The U of I’s new coach has a six-year contract that will pay him twenty-one million dollars. Even the reporter explaining the contract’s details seemed to understand the unseemliness of that kind of money, noting that it comes not from the university budget but from “athletics.”

A new bill to fund Illinois state schools asks for forty million dollars for the state’s community colleges. One football coach equals about half that. As someone recently asked, “Where are our priorities?”

[Post title in the manner of The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd .]