In search of found time

Let x = the time the alarm clock is set for. Let (x − 1 hour) = the time you wake up, check the alarm clock, and go back to sleep. You have just gained an hour of sleep.

From a Van Gogh letter

Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, November 16, 1883:

The ride into the village was beautiful. Enormous mossy roofs of houses, stables, covered sheepfolds, barns. The very broad-fronted houses here are set among oaktrees of a superb bronze. Tones in the moss of gold-green, in the ground of reddish or bluish or yellowish dark lilac-greys, tones of inexpressible purity in the green of the little cornfields, tones of black in the wet tree trunks, standing out against the golden rain of swirling, teeming autumn leaves, which hang in loose clumps — as if they had been blown there, loose and with the light filtering through them — from the poplars, the birches, the limes and the apple trees.

The sky smooth and bright, shining, not white but a barely detectable lilac, white vibrant with red, blue and yellow, reflecting everything and felt everywhere above one, hazy and merging with the thin mist below, fusing everything in a gamut of delicate greys.

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

Also from Van Gogh’s letters
“Admire as much as you can”
“It was a bright autumn day and a beautiful walk”
“Lately, during the dark days before Christmas”
“So you must picture me sitting at my attic window”
“At the moment, I can see a splendid effect”

Is a phone a “mythical device”?

In the documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine (dir. Alex GIbney, 2015), the New York Times writer Joe Nocera attempts to demystify Apple and its iPhone:

“The real magic of it is that these myths are surrounding a company that makes phones. A phone is not a mythical device. And it sort of makes you wonder less about Apple than about us.”

Once when we move beyond shields and swords, I’m not sure that anything can rightly be called a “mythical device.” But what about “magical”? Marcel Proust thought there was something extraordinary about the telephone (as did modernists more generally). The unnamed narrator of In Search of Lost Time calls the telephone a “miracle” and a “supernatural instrument.” Beverly Cleary’s character Jane Purdy backs him up: in Fifteen , she thinks of the telephone as “a miracle, a real miracle.” Jane, now Jane Crandall, seventy-five, does FaceTime with her grandchildren these days. And Stan Crandall, seventy-six, is finally using an iPhone. Another miracle, says Jane.

[Joe Nocera has some history with Apple and Steve Jobs. Beverly Cleary celebrates her hundredth birthday tomorrow.]

The Illinois higher-ed crisis makes it into The New York Times

The article begins:

The lack of a state budget in Illinois has been dismissed by many here as politics as usual, another protracted ego contest between the Republican governor and the Democrats who rule the Legislature.

It is good to see the Times paying attention. But the opening sentence is, as far as I can see, wrong: I don’t know of anyone in Illinois who sees the current budget crisis as a matter of “politics as usual.” The state has been without a budget for more than nine months. Such a situation is, to my knowledge, without precedent.

The Times article focuses on Chicago State University, noting that while other state schools are in difficulty, none are in “the dire predicament of Chicago State.” That’s true. But several downstate schools are not far behind. And in small downstate cities, public universities serve as major employers, crucial players in local economies. As a school goes, so goes a city. In my city, For Sale signs are everywhere.

I’m not writing this post as a downstate resident who feels slighted: I’m only pointing out that Illinois’s higher-ed crisis is even more dire than the Times article suggests.

Related reading
All OCA Illinois higher-ed crisis posts (Pinboard)

[I’ve already e-mailed the Times reporter to say more or less what I’ve said here.]

MSNBC, sheesh

An anchor on MSNBC earlier this afternoon:

“Between he and former president Bill Clinton . . .”

A related post
NPR, sheesh

[Attention, W. W. Norton: send that newsroom a copy of Mary Norris’s Between You & Me .]

Mystery actor

Elaine called it, immediately. I followed her lead: “Oh, yeah.” Do you recognize the actor?

More mystery actors
? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ?

Three B s

A great name appeared in my spam folder this afternoon: Mr. Berenguer Bolivar Basilio. Sounds like a cosmopolitan phantom from the early poetry of T. S. Eliot.

Various websites associate Berenguer Bolivar Basilio with Nigerian scammers. Wrong. Mr. B. explains in his e-mail that he is “a Spanish national base in United Kingdom” — a transplant, like T. S. Eliot himself, who, too, ended up “base in United Kingdom.”

More spam names
The folks who live in the mail : Great names in spam : Introducing Rickey Antipasto : “Order updated” : The poetry of spam : Spam names : Spam names again

From a Van Gogh letter

Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, October 22, 1882:

At the moment, I can see a splendid effect out of my studio window. The city, with its towers and roofs and smoking chimneys, is outlined as a dark, sombre silhouette against a horizon of light. This light is, however, no more than a broad streak over which hangs a heavy raincloud, more concentrated below, torn above by the autumn wind into large shreds & lumps that are being chased away. But that streak of light is making the wet roofs glisten here & there in the dark mass of the city (on a drawing one would achieve this with a stroke of body colour), so that although the mass has a single tone one can still distinguish between red tiles & slates. The Schenkweg runs through the foreground like a glistening streak through the wetness, the poplars have yellow leaves, the banks of the ditches & the meadows are a deep green, the little figures are black. I would have drawn it, or rather tried to draw it, had I not been working hard all afternoon on figures of peat-carriers, which are still too much on my mind to allow room for anything new, and should be allowed to linger.

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

As I discovered just yesterday (via Open Culture), Van Gogh’s letters are available online from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam: original texts, facsimiles, and English translations. Odd to discover that the Penguin text combines three paragraphs into the one paragraph above.

If I were teaching the art of description, I would ask my students to read some of Van Gogh’s letters.

Also from Van Gogh’s letters
“Admire as much as you can”
“It was a bright autumn day and a beautiful walk”
“Lately, during the dark days before Christmas”
“So you must picture me sitting at my attic window”

[The Schenkweg? Wikipedia explains.]

Lives and writings

Joseph Joubert:

We must treat our lives as we treat our writings, put them in accord, give harmony to the middle, the end, and the beginning. In order to do this we must make many erasures.

The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection  , trans. Paul Auster (New York: New York Review Books, 2005).

I’m reminded of what William Faulkner said about peace.

Also from Joseph Joubert
Another world : Form and content : Politeness : Resignation and courage : Self-love and truth : Thinking and writing

Henry’s New Math

[Henry , April 8, 2016.]

Today’s Henry is strong evidence that the strip’s twenty-first-century reruns date from no earlier than the 1960s. Yes, the world of the New Math. Tom Lehrer provides a wonderful introduction to the subject in a song. I just listened for the first time in many years, and it’s still hilariously good. (As an irreverent teenager, I borrowed Lehrer’s That Was the Year That Was from the library, repeatedly, repeatedly.)

Wikipedia notes that in 1965 the New Math was the subject of several Peanuts strips: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)