Planter

[As seen in Boston’s North End.]

I took a quick picture of this planter, which hangs outside a restaurant. We thought that everything here is likely edible. Can anyone identify all the plants? Click for a much larger, much tastier view.

HGSE Dean’s speech at Open Culture

James E. Ryan, Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, gave a terrific speech at the HGSE diploma ceremony in May. (I linked to the video in this post.) The speech focuses on five questions:

Wait, what?
I wonder why, or if?
Couldn’t we at least?
How can I help?
What really matters?

And a “bonus” question, from Raymond Carver’s poem “Late Fragment”: “And did you get what / you wanted from this life, even so?” (Misquoted as “And did you get what you wanted out of life, even so?”)

An excerpt from the speech is now the stuff of a post at Open Culture, which asserts that the questions will bring “happiness & success.” Well, no. The most the dean claims is that asking these questions will give a person “a very good chance of being both successful and happy,” and it’s a tongue-in-cheek claim, “slightly outlandish, but this is a graduation speech.” Carver’s answer to the question “And did you get what / you wanted from this life, even so?” is “I did”:

And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

And Dean Ryan:

if you never stop asking and listening for good questions, you will feel beloved on this earth, and just as importantly, you will help others, especially students, feel the same.

Now that’s a good definition of happiness and success.

A related post
Commencement addresses (With a single question from my undergrad commencement)

Recently updated

Hillary Rodham on the possible and the impossible With a link to audio excerpts from her 1969 commencement speech.

From Fred Rogers

And his mother Nancy Rogers: “Look for the helpers.”

How to improve writing (no. 64)

I began reading an essay in The New York Times and stopped after the first sentence:

There are many moments throughout my average day that, lacking print reading material in a previous era, were once occupied by thinking or observing my surroundings: walking or waiting somewhere, riding the subway, lying in bed unable to sleep or before mustering the energy to get up.

It’s a bad sentence, in several ways. Tense blurs: there are moments that were . The phrase “lacking print reading material in a previous era” is awkward, and moments cannot lack reading material. Moments “once occupied by”: an ungainly passive-voice verb. There’s something at least slightly odd about the idea of having nothing to read while walking. And the order of the gerunds “thinking or observing” gives the momentary suggestion that the writer is thinking his surroundings. A possible revision:

Not that long ago, if I found myself with nothing to read — waiting for someone, riding the subway, lying in bed unable to sleep or not ready to get up — I would observe my surroundings or think.

From forty-seven words to thirty-five.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 64 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

.

The New York Times reports on the linguist David Crystal’s contention that the period is going out of style. “We are at a momentous moment in the history of the full stop,” he says. “In an instant message, it is pretty obvious a sentence has come to an end, and none will have a full stop. So why use it?” The Times has, rather predictably, run the story without periods.

The period’s disappearance from text messages, and its occasional function therein as a marker of tone, are, I think, evidence that texting is more akin to speech than to writing. Different forms of discourse have different conventions. Telegrams lacked periods[stop] To-do lists, too, lack them, even when written as complete sentences:

Walk plants[.]
Water dog[.]

Reports of the period’s death are greatly exaggerated.

Related posts
All OCA punctuation posts
On “On the New Literacy”

Destruction, degree by degree

Public higher education in Illinois: Western Illinois University is preparing to eliminate degree programs in African-American studies, philosophy, religious studies, and women’s studies. Faculty positions may be cut in the 2017–18 school year.

In March I wrote about what I called “the mantra of ‘flexibility’” in higher education. I described it as

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 present (manufactured) budget crisis in Illinois offers an easy excuse for “flexibility,” really another name for destruction.

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All OCA Illinois budget crisis posts (Pinboard)

“English professors have many wiles”

In January 1936, Willa Cather wrote to Carlton F. Wells, a professor of English at the University of Michigan, thanking him for a letter in which he commented on Cather’s use of a Mendelssohn oratorio in the novel Lucy Gayheart . “You are one in about seventy-five thousand,” she told Wells, the only reader who had noticed how and why Cather had made a slight change in the oratorio’s text. Wells wrote back, asking if Cather’s letter could be printed in William Lyon Phelps’s syndicated newspaper column. Cather replied on January 23:

Dear Mr. Wells:

I am sorry not to be able to oblige you, but I never allow quotations from personal letters to be printed. When, among a great number of the rather flat and dreary letters I receive, I come upon that is alive and intelligent, I am rather prone to answer it in a somewhat intimate and unembarrassed tone. I take for granted that a person who writes a discriminating and intelligent letter is the sort of person who would not use any portion of my letter for publicity of any kind.

Very sincerely yours,

Willa Cather

I should like to oblige Mr. Phelps, but I shall do that at some other time, and in some other way. I did not even know that I was writing to your English class, Mr. Wells. English professors have many wiles, but I honestly thought you were interested in the question you asked me. O tempora, O mores! (The second “O” looks like a zero, certainly!) Enough: I become more cautious every day.

W. S. C.

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather , ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (New York: Knopf, 2013).

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

Rauner sues Rauner

Diana Rauner, wife of Illinois governor Bruce Rauner, leads a child-advocacy group suing the governor and various state agencies for breach of contract. The Ounce of Prevention Fund is one of eighty-two social-service agencies awaiting payments from the state.

Illinois has been without a budget for eleven months, nine days, seventeen hours, eighteen minutes, and thirty-nine seconds. It is not clear how long the governor will continue sleeping on the couch.