Joseph Joubert:
Nothing is better than a justified enthusiasm.Also from Joseph Joubert
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection , trans. Paul Auster (New York: New York Review Books, 2005).
Caroline Pratt (1867–1954) founded Manhattan’s City and Country School in 1914. She was a teacher at odds with established practices:
I once asked a cooking teacher why she did not let the children experiment with the flour and yeast, to see whether they could make bread. She said in a shocked voice, “But that would be so wasteful!”*
She was no more shocked by my question than I by her answer. That materials used in education should be considered wasted! Ours must be a strange educational system, I thought. And, of course, the more I studied it, the more convinced I became that it was very strange indeed. It was saving of materials, ah yes — but how wasteful of children!
Caroline Pratt, I Learn from Children: An Adventure in Progressive Education . 1948. (New York: Grove, 2014).
The work with [children of privilege] was easier — but it never seemed quite so important as with the others. There was no satisfaction in the private school which compared with the harder accomplishment of offering new opportunities to children who needed them so desperately, and who used them with such intelligence and joy.I should acknowledge that City and Country does offer need-based financial aid: “A significant portion of our operating budget is dedicated to tuition assistance.”
Jill Lepore. Joe Gould’s Teeth . New York: Knopf, 2016. 235 pages. $24.95 hardcover.
From a 1945 Harvard Crimson article, quoted in Joe Gould’s Teeth :
One of these days, someone is going to write an article on Joseph Ferdinand Gould ’11 for the Reader’s Digest. It will be entitled “The Most Unforgettable Character I Have Met” and it will present Joe Gould as an unusual but lovable old man. Joe Gould is not a lovable old man.Joe Gould (1889–1957) is best known as the subject of two New Yorker pieces by Joseph Mitchell, “Professor Seagull” (1942) and “Joe Gould’s Secret” (1964). Flea-ridden, often homeless, possibly autistic, forever losing eyeglasses and false teeth, Gould was a New York Bohemian who claimed to be writing the longest book in the world, an assembling of words he had heard spoken, entitled The Oral History of Our Time . The secret that Mitchell revealed in 1964: as he had long suspected, The Oral History did not exist. But letters that Mitchell received after the publication of “Joe Gould’s Secret” suggested that The Oral History did indeed exist. Readers claimed to have seen and read the composition books in which Gould wrote it. Jill Lepore decided to look into the question.
David Gregory on CNN earlier today, speaking of the need for Hillary Clinton to appeal to both progressives and possible Trump voters: “She’s straddling both ends of this.”
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All OCA metaphor posts (Pinboard)
Verlyn Klinkenborg:
“July,” The Rural Life (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002).
We live in town, emphatically in town. But we’ve had a fox sun itself in our driveway, looking like it was waiting for us to serve the iced tea. Deer in the backyard. A possum knocking at a ground-level window. A mouse in the kitchen. A bird in the downstairs. A dead rat in the toilet bowl. And a family of raccoons once chased Elaine across the driveway. It’s their driveway too.
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All OCA Verlyn Klinkenborg posts (Pinboard)
Bear in/on tree
[Mark Trail , April 13, 2015.]
[Mark Trail , July 25, 2016.]
It’s Abbey Powell. Abbey Powell. Cut and pasted and tinted. And tinted. And blow-dried. A close look at Ms. Powell’s eyebrows and glasses will make clear that James Allen, like Jack Elrod before him, is recycling. Is recycling. As am I. I posted the first panel last year, after discovering that Abbey Powell is a real person. A real person. And blow-dried.
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Stand down, Debbie, stand down, please. Stand down, Debbie.
*
3:06 p.m.: CNN is reporting that Democratic National Commitee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz will step down after this week’s Democratic convention.
[Context here. Inspiration from The English Beat.]
Another bit of evidence to support Tyler Cowen’s recommendation to seek out strip-mall restaurants: Siam Thai Restaurant in Charleston, Illinois (“east-central Illinois”). The NEW OWNER sign, which has been up since, I think, last winter, is important: the previous owner was a dud. The new restaurant is a two-woman operation: one host, one cook. The food comes in generous portions, beautifully prepared and intensely flavorful, without the sweetness that often dominates Thai dishes made for American tastes.
Hot? If you like, yes, from one to five, but all the flavors come through too. (That’s what happens with an expert cook.) Our host seems to understand our tastes well: one two and one three , which we share. They make a nice burn.
I have been eating Thai food with amateur enthusiasm since the early 1980s. Siam Thai is the best I have ever had.
A related post
Three great strip-mall restaurants
I’m a longtime fan of the web service StatCounter, which I use with Orange Crate Art. (See the orange odometer in the sidebar.) But I’m not a fan of the service’s new offering:
The StatCounter Growth Plan goes the next step and uses sophisticated technology to analyze your data and website for you. It then tells you in simple terms how to grow your traffic and improve your visitor experience with easy-to-understand steps.Or rather: I’m not a fan of the pitch for this new offering, which appears every time I check my stats, in the form of a banner that clicks open to reveal my “Rank Against [My] Competitors,” or my blog’s grades:
My blog, which has been going for nearly twelve years, gives me great pleasure without making me a dime. It has brought me into contact with wonderful people I would never have met otherwise. Believe me, I don’t feel that I’m getting a C+ (your overall grade for me). And I have no competitors. I don’t regard other websites as competition. The only person I’m competing against is myself — to stay curious and be the best writer I can be.I added that not everyone who’s online is looking for increased page hits or profit. There are other forms of satisfaction to be had in creating, as they say, “content.” I received a friendly reply from someone at StatCounter, saying that no insult was intended. I knew that, and wrote back to say so. It would be smart though for the company to realize that giving its users grades is probably not a great way to win their favor.
From Grant Snider’s Incidental Comics : Strunk and White’s Writers Style Guide.
This guide is a loose and witty translation of bits of advice from The Elements of Style . The active/passive panel doesn’t attempt to illustrate the difference between the active and passive voices. Only one panel quotes directly from The Elements : “Use figures of speech sparingly.” I especially like that panel.
Thanks, Steven, for pointing me to this work.
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[The title really should be Writer’s Style Guide, or Writers’ Style Guide .]
