Gotham tumblr

The Gotham Book Mart Project is a tumblr devoted to the inventory of Manhattan’s defunct Gotham Book Mart. The books and other materials are now in the collections of the University of Pennsylvania.

I thought it would be fun to browse the tumblr for something I bought at the Gotham and quickly found John Bernard Myers’s anthology The Poets of the New York School (1969). In the mid-1990s, I bought a copy from a stack of a least a dozen. Price: $8.50. If, as legend had it, the Gotham never threw away a book, the store was also not always much concerned about repricing older inventory. $8.50! I remember a poet of my acquaintance perking up when I mentioned my find. He didn’t buy every copy, as there was at least one left when the Gotham closed in 2007.

A related post
A Gotham bookmark, by Edward Gorey

[Found via Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York.]

Modest proposals

[Exceedingly modest proposals to improve college. I regret that I did not develop them in time for fall 2016 implementation.]

~ Goodbye to Big Sports. The NBA and NFL can subsidize their own farm systems. Convert the money that supported Big Sports into increased adjunct pay, new tenure-track positions, increased academic support services, and need-based scholarships. Current players retain their scholarships.

~ Goodbye to minor administrators, who can step back into lower-paying faculty positions. Convert the money that funded those administrative positions into increased adjunct pay and new tenure-track positions.

~ Use Peter Drucker’s 20:1 salary ratio to cap salaries: the highest full-time salary on campus should be no more than twenty times greater than the lowest full-time salary. Note: there will be no basketball or football coaches to complain about drastic reductions in pay. Presidents will have to deal.

~ Goodbye to all busy work assigned by administrators to faculty. Not all elements of program review and assessment, just the busy work.

~ Establish some version of tenure or, at the least, long-term contracts for adjunct faculty of some years’ standing.

~ Reduce doctoral programs to plausible numbers of students, in proportion to the realities of the job market. Then again, creating substantial numbers of tenure-track positions may make doctoral study increasingly plausible.

~ Require all first-year students to attend a convocation about academic endeavor. No cheers, no dance-offs, no face-painting, no door prizes. The convocation should include a faculty member who says something like this: “You are not here to learn how to make a living. You are here to learn how to make a life.” Emphasis should fall on the ways in which college will differ from and be more difficult than high school.

~ Require faculty and all first-year students to read (with appropriate background material and study questions) a work of some weight and difficulty over the summer. (Not an inspiring memoir or a work with a plain and unimpeachable message.) I nominate Sophocles’s Antigone , which raises every question one might want to consider about conscience, civil disobedience, gender and power, isolation and community, morality and law, competing claims about what’s right, conflict and negotiation. Utterly relevant to our present condition. The convocation should include some consideration of the reading.

~ Require all students and faculty to participate in small-group discussions of said work. These can take place during what so many (too many) students mistakenly think of as “syllabus week”. There should be some measure by which to determine that students have in fact done their reading: a brief written quiz and participation in a discussion. The faculty-student ratio will determine the size of the groups. In a school with, say, a 20:1 ratio, each faculty member can be responsible for two groups of ten students, two hour-long meetings. Students who are unprepared will be given additional opportunities to complete this work.

~ Require writing — genuine writing — in all courses. Class sizes will be small enough to allow for careful evaluation of students’ written work.

That’s all for now. Any questions?

[“You are not here,” &c.: something I heard at my freshman orientation. I’ve never forgotten it. I haven’t forgotten the high cost of college either. My proposals here aim to improve institutions. We must also make access to institutions more affordable.]

Harlem 1958 interactive

From the New York Daily News , Stoop Summit, an interactive version of Art Kane’s famed photograph Harlem 1958 . Click on a musician and you get a YouTube video and a link to a relevant website. Smart choices: the videos lean toward live performances rather than recordings. See and hear.

Custom notebooks in Japan

“Stationery options are so plentiful that a designated paper concierge is on hand to advise customers on selecting the just-right weight, texture, shade, sheen, and thickness”: from a brief report on custom notebooks in Japanese stationery stores (Quartz).

Thanks, Elaine.

Nancy snag

Sluggo has explained to Peewee that “There’s been someone along here before us.” How can Sluggo tell? “By dis broken twig --- they stepped on it.” So when Peewee sees this tree:


[Nancy , August 20, 1949.]

Peewee needs to work on reining in his imagination and expanding his vocabulary.


[Nancy revised , August 20, 1949. Yes, made with the original lettering.]

Giants anagrams into “Snag It,” but that’s a King Oliver tune and has nothing to do with the subject of this post.

You can read Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy six days a week at GoComics.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

Spinning and pitching Now with Stefan Hagemann’s patient deconstruction of a Trump-campaign metaphor.

Snow in the city in the school

At Caroline Pratt’s City and Country School, seven-year-olds built and rebuilt and ran a “play city,” with roads, waterways, “little people” (wooden figures), and buildings made of blocks. And the children sometimes staged performances:

One of the most charming I remember was nothing more than the representation of a snowstorm in the city. There were two scenes with backdrops painted by the children on large sheets of brown wrapping paper. The first showed the New York waterfront without snow; the second reproduced the same scene, but covered now with deep white drifts. In the first scene the children were snowflakes, improvising their own dance and finally falling to the ground. In the second scene, workmen came with snowplows and opened up the streets by pushing the fallen snowflakes aside. That was all there was to it!

Caroline Pratt, I Learn from Children: An Adventure in Progressive Education . 1948. (New York: Grove, 2014).

A few days ago I was reading about adolescents finding their city far more educational than their school. And now I’m reading about children whose schoolwork is to build a city of their own.

Also from Caroline Pratt
Art criticism
Caroline Pratt on waste in education

Spinning and pitching

Amy Kremer, co-chair of Women Vote Trump, on the news earlier this afternoon, spinning a three-part metaphor to explain why Donald Trump is now on his third campaign manager:

“You have your starting pitcher, your middle reliever, and your closer.”

There must be a joke about screwballs in there somewhere.

*

Stefan Hagemann (who’s made many an appearance in these pages, most notably here) tore the metaphor apart in a comment on this post:

The second item hints at why this is a poor metaphor: relief pitchers relieve. They don’t fire and replace the previous pitcher. Beyond that, the closer’s role is to maintain the lead, not to recapture it. The closer doesn’t pitch when the team is losing, and since pitchers don’t bat (American League) or hit well, usually (National League), the bullpen is unlikely to help a team come from behind.

Maybe the screwball joke is that one of the most famous and successful screwball pitchers, Fernando Valenzuela, is Mexican and would not be welcome in Trump’s America.

Thank you, Stefan.

Related reading
All OCA metaphor posts (Pinboard)

Urban pastoral, with stationery

Stefan Zweig describes Paris, which he visited as a young man, before the Great War:


Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday . 1943. Trans. Benjamin W. Huebsch and Helmut Ripperger (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964).

N.B.: “stationery which was supplied free of charge.” Garçon, plus de papier, s’il vous plaît!

Other Zweig posts
Happy people, poor psychologists : Little world : School v. city

School v. city

At fourteen and fifteen, Stefan Zweig and his classmates came to realize that Vienna had more to offer than school did:


Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday . 1943. Trans. Benjamin W. Huebsch and Helmut Ripperger (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964).

The World of Yesterday is a grand tour of a gone world. Our household prefers this dowdier (1943) text to the recent translation with the Wes Anderson/Grand Bupadest Hotel promo on the cover (also from the University of Nebraska Press). Caution: Amazon’s Look Inside tool will show the older translation, but Amazon will send the new one. The older translation can be had from Advanced Book Exchange or Alibris. The translators Huebsch and Ripperger are uncredited in both the 1964 and original 1943 editions.

Other Zweig posts
Happy people, poor psychologists : Little world