Muriel and Victor redux

[Henry , July 1, 2015; March 12, 2016.]

A blog post can make things available for easy recall: better memory through outsourcing. I noticed dowdy Muriel and dowdy Vic last July and engaged in a brief reverie about their names, one of which is also the name of a cigar and the title of a Tom Waits song.

I am glad to see that Muriel has come around, and I think it’s sweet that she calls Victor by his full name. Perhaps those names had meaning for Carl Anderson, Henry ’s maker.

All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)

Off the rails

From the local news: “Former president Clinton has been on the road since January, going around the country railing for his wife.”

The word needed: rallying . To rail is “to revile or scold in harsh, insolent, or abusive language” (Merriam-Webster).

“White House” (Executive Branch Song)

It dropped this afternoon. A new song by Ben Leddy, with Madelaine Eulich, Andrew Levine, Audrey Pindell, and Zakaria Sherbiny. Like Ben’s other pop-takeoffs, it aims to make elements of history and government memorable for the young. The inspiration here is Flo Rida’s “My House” (which, I will admit, I had never heard of before Ben told me about his song).

There’s a karaoke version so that students and teachers can sing along.

More songs at Ben’s YouTube channel.

Back to earth

From The Chronicle of Higher Education , “Wisconsin Regents Approve New Layoff and Tenure Policies Over Faculty Objections.” An excerpt:

The University of Wisconsin’s Board of Regents overwhelmingly approved new policies regarding layoffs and tenure on Thursday, despite the objections of faculty leaders and a few board members who argued that the changes would hurt the university system’s educational quality and recruitment of talented professors.

The debate over the policies, which are intended to replace tenure protections stripped from state law last year, became heated at times. Advocates of the new policies argued that they would be in line with those at peer institutions, give chancellors flexibility to adjust academic offerings in a tough fiscal climate, and offer sufficient assurances that layoffs and post-tenure reviews will not be used to squelch academic freedom.

Critics argued that the policies would leave tenured faculty members more vulnerable than their peers elsewhere to being laid off in retaliation for speaking out, and would let chancellors override shared governance and ignore important educational considerations in making faculty-layoff decisions. . . .

José Vásquez, a regent who opposed the new policies, drew applause from the audience at the board meeting by protesting that the financial pressures on the system were not its own doing but the result of a lack of adequate financial support from the state.

“It was not tenure that caused the fiscal crisis. It was not faculty who were entrenched and did not want to terminate programs,” Mr. Vásquez said. “The fiscal crisis that we have has been imposed on us.”

“The fiscal crisis that we have has been imposed on us”: that’s what we face in Illinois, where a manufactured crisis has become the occasion for hundreds of layoffs.

Everyone has wondered — and wondered, and wondered — about our governor’s end purpose in creating our present crisis. Clearly Bruce Rauner wants to weaken unions. But I suspect that his ambition goes further: the mantra of “flexibility” now in play in Wisconsin would seem to be a strategy to diminish or eliminate whole fields of academic endeavor: African-American studies, art history, classical studies, cultural studies, foreign languages, literature, philosophy, queer studies, women’s studies, whatever might be deemed impractical, unprofitable, unacceptable. The Wisconsin Board of Regents vice president, quoted in the Chronicle article: “When a chancellor is looking at a program discontinuance, they need flexibility, flexibility, flexibility, flexibility.” I expect that we’ll hear the mantra of “flexibility” in Illinois soon.

A colleague has suggested a larger end purpose: that Bruce Rauner would like to be president. If so, he would (yet again) be following in Scott Walker’s cloven footprints. It’s probably of little solace to many Wisconsites that Walker’s presidential ambitions fizzled so quickly. If Rauner makes a try for the presidency, citizens who have known him as a governor will have plenty of stories to tell.

Related reading
All OCA Illinois budget crisis posts (Pinboard)

[Back to earth: that is, after the joys of Bach.]

Bach, Goode

Richard Goode, piano
Foellinger Great Hall
Krannert Center for the Performing Arts
University of Illinois, Urbana
March 10, 2016

Bliss:

The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II : Prelude
    and Fugue no.1 in C major
French Suite no. 5 in G major
15 Sinfonias

The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II : Prelude
    and Fugue no. 11 in F major
Partita no. 2 in C minor
Italian Concerto in F major

Partita no. 1 in B flat: Sarabande (encore)

Richard Goode looks, to me, like an old-school humanities professor, slightly rumpled, un-self-conscious, probably teaching Shakespeare, probably carrying a briefcase. His performance last night was devoid of self-presentation: it was about nothing but the music. He turned his own pages and played. Special extra bliss: the Gigue from the French Suite, the ninth and fifteenth Sinfonias, the Capriccio from Partita no. 2, the Italian Concerto, and the encore Sarabande.

Listening to Richard Goode play Bach made me feel happier than I’ve felt in weeks. Take that, current events!

*

1:50 p.m.: As Elaine reports, we got a hear a second performance of the Italian Concerto while driving home.

Related reading
Richard Goode’s website

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