About last night

Our trip to hear our state representative speak on funding for our university turned out to be an interesting waste of time. We arrived about ten minutes late — Google Maps gave two locations for the venue, miles apart, and we chose the wrong one first. What we missed: all but a minute or two of someone from state government explaining how to create a household budget. (Metaphor? Parable?) She gave up, saying that she felt that she was lecturing. But we heard every word of our rep’s presentation, a meandering, ill-organized combination of plain-folks talk, high dudgeon, and cynicism. Though the event had been advertised as a discussion of university funding, that subject came up only briefly. The main purpose of our rep’s presentation seemed to be to run down the clock — he even joked that he was leaving about “one minute” for questions. Ha ha.

Key words: billion , billions . Yes, Illinois spends billions and billions of dollars (which, really, are no laughing matter). Our rep failed to mention though that Illinois has one of the lowest rates of per capita spending of all states. Other key words: Chicago , Democrats , them , they . The last two words referred to Democrats.

Low point: our rep holding up and then thumbing through a binder-clipped, printed version of a stack of PowerPoint slides. (He was not using a computer or projector.) As he explained at another point in his presentation, he is “not yet technically savvy.”

I was disappointed to see so few members of my university community in attendance. Perhaps they had concluded that they would be wasting their time. I did my bit by talking (at some length) about our rep’s dubious arithmetic and about public higher education and the national attention that our state’s manufactured budget crisis has drawn. One older man stared at me angrily when I mentioned a recent Daily Show skit and its advice for students: “Get the fuck out of Illinois.” I left the fuck out: I respect decorum, at least at public meetings. This man had turned around angrily at my mere mention of The Daily Show .

Elaine and I had ice cream and strawberries when we got home.

Related reading
All OCA Illinois budget crisis posts (Pinboard)

Work advice

Roger Rosenblatt:

You are likely to work for some company or other, but keep a safe distance. There is no contempt as bitter as that felt by compromised minds for the independent ones that have joined them. Grin broadly at the water cooler, and go home to where you live.

“Speech for a High School Graduate,” Time (June 9, 1997).

Years ago I clipped these sentences and pasted them into a commonplace book. I think they offer good advice for any worker, despite the scornful tone (“compromised minds”), despite the possible absence of a water cooler. It’s necessary to have a life apart.

It just occurred to me that the economy of television storytelling often makes co-workers and social circle just about identical. Think, for instance, of The Mary Tyler Moore Show . You work all day, and who comes over to your house? Mr. Grant, or Ted. Life should be larger than television.

Creative accounting

Our representative in the Illinois General Assembly, a local mogul turned statesman, is proclaiming that he has helped bring to our public university ninety percent of its state funding. Ahem.

For FY 2016, the school received thirty percent of its funding.

For FY 2017, the school has received a little more than sixty percent of its funding.

Thirty plus sixty: ninety! As Elaine observes, this logic would allow a tenant renting from our mogul to pay half the rent one month, half the next, and be all paid up.

Our rep has scheduled a public meeting to discuss university funding. The meeting takes place in a town forty miles away. But guess what? People know how to drive! It should be an interesting time.

Related reading
All OCA Illinois budget crisis posts (Pinboard)

How to improve writing (no. 65); or, CBS, sheesh

From a CBS This Morning story about Ken Burns:

Fittingly, Burns also released his first children's book this week called Grover Cleveland, Again!: A Treasury of American Presidents , featuring illustrations and “fun facts” about past American presidents. The idea began when he used to drill his daughter, Sarah, now 33 years old, on the commander-in-chiefs.

Make that commanders-in-chief . But notice too that commander-in-chiefs appears in this passage only because its writer, in an effort to avoid repeating the word presidents , has succumbed to the lure of what H. W. Fowler called “elegant variation” (which Bryan Garner has renamed “inelegant variation”). Why not rethink the entire passage? My best shot:

Fittingly, Burns also released his first children's book this week: Grover Cleveland, Again!: A Treasury of American Presidents , an illustrated book of “fun facts.” The idea for the book took shape years ago, when Burns would quiz his daughter Sarah, now 33, on the presidents.

I’ll leave all but one of my changes to speak for themselves: Burns has four daughters, so no comma after daughter .

Thanks to Sean at Contrapuntalism for alerting me to this passage.

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

[Garner’s Modern English Usage points out that commanders-in-chief  is nineteen times more common than commander-in-chiefs . Of course, as The Onion reminds us, the effort to get plurals right can lead in the direction of the daffy. This post is no. 65 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

David Foster Wallace, Pokémon Go, Trump-Pence

It feels like the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, or the Year of Something . In other words, it feels like we’re living in DFW Time. The Pokémon Go fad makes me recall Wallace’s idea of the “spect-op.” In the world of Infinite Jest , ninety-four percent of all entertainment is consumed at home. It’s a world of “Total freedom, privacy, choice”:

Hence the new millennium’s passion for standing live witness to things. A whole sub-rosa schedule of public spectation opportunities, “spect-ops,” the priceless chance to be part of a live crowd, watching. Thus the Gapers’ Blocks at traffic accidents, sewer-gas explosions, muggings, purse-snatchings, the occasional Empire W.D.V. with an incomplete vector splatting into North Shore suburbs and planned communities and people leaving their front doors agape in their rush to get out and mill around and spectate at the circle of impacted waste drawing sober and studious crowds, milling in rings around the impact, earnestly comparing mental notes on just what it is they all see.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).

But now it’s a matter of standing live witness to virtual creatures on a screen.

*

The Trump-Pence logo seems like icky icing on the cake of a strange and awful week. In its hilariously crude absurdity, the logo seems to have made for the world of Infinite Jest . (I can imagine an editor: “But David, don’t you think it’s a little far-fetched?”) Trump strongly resembles the novel’s Johnny Gentle, entertainer, germaphobe, and president of the United States, “first U.S. President ever to say shit publicly,” president of “a new-era’d nation that looked out for Uno.” Of course in the novel, the border that concerns the president is the one to the United States’ north.

Related reading
All OCA DFW posts (Pinboard)
A brief explanation of Subsidized Time

“Another”

Mike at brownstudy wrote last week: “I dread hearing the word ‘another.’” That’s how I feel.

Uni-ball Signo FTW

From an obituary for the cartoonist Michael Crawford, a recollection from his wife Carolita Johnson:

“When one of the doctors at the hospital was trying to assess Michael’s mental acuity she picked up some random pen and asked, ‘Mr. Crawford, what would you do with this?’” Ms. Johnson wrote. “And he replied ‘I wouldn’t do anything with that. I use a Uni-ball Signo.’”

[My favorite gel pen: the Uni-ball Signo RT.]

Van Gogh’s ear

The New York Times has a good article about Vincent van Gogh’s left ear. Unlike the Telegraph article that Arts & Letters Daily recently linked to, the Times article makes clear that there is still no consensus about just what Van Gogh did to his ear.

I must admit though that after reading 500+ pages of Van Gogh’s letters, it never occurred to me to wonder whether Van Gogh severed an ear or part of an ear. Is the second possibility really any less horrifying than the first?

Related reading
All OCA Van Gogh posts (Pinboard)

Cleary and the critics

[Endpaper. Beverly Cleary, Sister of the Bride (1963).]

It’s pleasure to open a library copy of a children’s book and find traces of previous readers — if only underlined words (“vocabulary words”) or passages marked off, perhaps for reading aloud. This library copy of Sister of the Bride though is exceptional:

A great book
         Yah!
            Yah!

The
    Grooviest!!
Goovrest

  Very
Groovy!

  A
Fab!
Wow!
Book

I suspect a Beatle influence in the first and last comments. Yeah, yeah, yeah!

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

Roguish Gramma

Beverly Cleary, Sister of the Bride (1963).

There’s an occasional kiss in the Cleary First Love series, but nothing else like Gramma’s comment. I imagine that it prompted any number of young readers to look up roguishly , make a puzzled face, and keep reading.

Like Lady Elaine Fairchild’s “Here it is, my lovely can”, Gramma’s comment is a naughty speck in a chaste fictional universe.

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)