Joseph Joubert:
Those who never back down love themselves more than they love the truth.Also from Joseph Joubert
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection , trans. Paul Auster (New York: New York Review Books, 2005).
From a New York Times article about Donald Trump’s butler Anthony Senecal and life at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s estate, once the home of Marjorie Merriweather Post:
In the early years, Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka slept in the same children’s suite that Dina Merrill, an actress and a daughter of Mrs. Post, occupied in the 1930s. Mr. Trump liked to tell guests that the nursery rhyme-themed tiles in the room were made by a young Walt Disney.
“You don’t like that, do you?” Mr. Trump would say when he caught Mr. Senecal rolling his eyes. The house historian would protest that it was not true.
“Who cares?” Mr. Trump would respond with a laugh.
I noticed my SYSMAX A4 Clipboard staring up at me from a horizontal storage area (the floor). It is a beautiful and sweetly incoherent thing, purchased from a United States outpost of the Korean stationery chain ArtBox. Down the right side of the clipboard, in right-justified sans serif:
And that’s the end.JeudiThere is only onehappiness in life,to love and to beloved.
LIVE THE LIFE YOU’VE IMAGINED
A4®
MardiThe busier you are,the more you need to taketime to do things right.
JeudiWe need to record wordsfor our learning.
VendrediHave you given any thoughtto your future? Let’sdo one thing at a time.
SamediEveryone is necessarily thehero of his own life story.
SYSMAX
Ball of Fire (dir. Howard Hawks, 1941) is a glorious piece of silliness. Eight scholars are writing an encyclopedia of the world’s knowledge. A chance conversation makes Professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper) realize the inadequacy of his article on slang. He resolves to update his understanding of the subject, going out into the world with a pencil and a pocket notebook. He listens to people talking — on the street, on the El, at a baseball game, pool hall, and nightclub.
It’s in the nightclub that Potts meets Sugarpuss O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck), singer of the killer diller tune “Drum Boogie.” O’Shea soon moves in with the scholars. Yes, it’s a variation on Snow White.
[Snow White, her prince, and the seven dwarfs. Clockwise from the lower left: Tully Marshall, Henry Travers, Richard Haydn, S. Z. Sakall, Aubrey Mather, Oscar Homolka, Leonid Kinskey.]
Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder’s screenplay has some hilarious O’Shea-Potts exchanges about grammar and usage:
“I came on account of you.”She calls Potts “a regular yum-yum type.” And later:
“Me?”
“And not on account of you needed some slang. On account of because I wanted to see you again.”
“Miss O’Shea, the construction ‘on account of because’ outrages every grammatical law.”
“So what? I came on account of because I couldn’t stop thinking about you after you left my dressing room. On account of because I thought you were big, and cute, and pretty.”
“Say, I found out what’s wrong with ‘on account of because.’ It’s saying the same thing twice. You know, like calling somebody a rich millionaire. You call it a pleo-, no, play-”And:
“A pleonasm?”
“Yes. Is that how you pronounce it?”
“That’s it. Who told you that?”
“This room’s full of books about grammar. I read for a couple of hours.”
“I thought I was married to my books. The only thing I thought I could care for deeply was a correctly constructed sentence. The subject, predicate, adverbial clause, each its proper place. And then —”The December 15, 1941 issue of Life had an article about Ball of Fire with a list of slang expressions used in the film. Dig it, or them:
Senator Bernie Sanders spoke at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, today. Elaine and I got on line at nine this morning. We were standing for the next seven and a half hours or so, with brief interludes of walking and sitting. Worth it? Yes.
ABC’s Chicago affiliate WLS estimated the (overflow) crowd at 4,800. ABC’s downstate affiliate WICS reported an estimate from fire officials of 20,000 showing up, most of whom could not get inside. Either way, yuge. It was a wonderful and wonderfully varied crowd. We spent much time talking with our neighbors in line, mostly U of I students. The kids are alright.
A great many introducers preceded Senator Sanders. The standouts: Ben Jealous and Tulsi Gabbard. Cabinet appointment, anyone?
[Yikes: As I wrote in 2022, Tulsi Gabbard is the Sarah Palin of Christopher Hitchenses.]
My favorite Sanders line, which I transcribed word for word: “Now I have been criticized for saying this, so let me say it again.” Say what again? That health care is a right of all people.
I took many photographs. The accidental one above is my favorite. But here’s grainy proof that we were there, or at least that Bernie Sanders was there.
[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)
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).
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.
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 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.
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.”
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
