Not from The Onion

[The Chronicle of Higher Education , October 7, 2016.]

It’s a genuine headline, and the article is not behind the firewall. The links in the article (all worth following) add up to yet another reason not to go to graduate school: toxic personalities.

[Note: This post makes a generalization about academic life, identifying no individual, in or out of academic life, as a toxic personality.]

Priorities!

More than four hundred faculty and staff have lost their jobs at my university as a result of Illinois’s manufactured budget-crisis. But there is still money for fireworks at the end of a football game. They ran just now for fifteen minutes or so, rattling windows at some distance from the stadium.

Priorities!

Related reading
All OCA Illinois budget crisis posts (Pinboard)

Reality TV?

Just a thought: is the cheap-looking background in Donald Trump’s self-serving taped “statement” meant to look like the kind of background one sees on cable news? Is the background meant to give (someone) the impression that Trump is answering an anchor’s question and not merely reading from a script?

[Fair warning: the link goes to the tweet with the video.]

Ginsberg Zippy

[Zippy , October 8, 2016.]

A tip of the hat to Allen Ginsberg. The last stanza of his poem “On Burroughs’ Work” (1954):

A naked lunch is natural to us,
        we eat reality sandwiches.
But allegories are so much lettuce.
        Don’t hide the madness.

The poem appeared in Reality Sandwiches (San Francisco: City Lights, 1963).

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)
A Kerouac notebook page : Poor flowers

Usage tip of the day

From Leddy’s Imaginary Dictionary of Usage (2016).

Milk and sugar may be added.

ZNH

Florida 1928:


Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

Floridians, be safe.

David Letterman on Donald Trump

An excerpt from an interview, as quoted in The New York Times:

“If I had a show, I would have gone right after him. I would have said something like, ‘Hey, nice to see you. Now, let me ask you: what gives you the right to make fun of a human who is less fortunate, physically, than you are?’ And maybe that’s where it would have ended. Because I don’t know anything about politics. I don’t know anything about trade agreements. I don’t know anything about China devaluing the yuan. But if you see somebody who’s not behaving like any other human you’ve known, that means something. They need an appointment with a psychiatrist. They need a diagnosis and they need a prescription.”

[I made this post before learning about the latest Donald Trump news.]

★☆☆☆☆

It’s always sobering to read Amazon’s one-star reviews of literary works. One-starrers can serve to remind teachers of lit of what they may be up against.

A review of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood :

This was pointless and It stunk. For those who enjoyed this I would seriously like to know what you are on.

Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House :

Drama wasn’t so high a drama as it is now days. At times the writing was good, but the story was just dull, dull, dull. Originally the writer wrote a long short story. Then for some reason, perhaps because the publisher said it wasn’t long enough to be a book, she added a beginning and an ending. The middle part is the good part. The added beginning and end cause the work as a whole to suck like a vacuum cleaner.

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man :

Invisible man by ralph ellison gave me the worst agony of any book i’ve ever had to read in school. it has absolutely NO plot and it is totally biased. i hated it- and if your under the age of 65 you will too.

William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying :

This is definatly one of the worst books I have ever read. Faulkner must have just accidently wrote a book or something. The storyline is that the mother of a family dies and they take her to a city to be buried, except it is much boring boring than that and much more disgusting and Faulkner drags it out over about 50 chapters. This book is boring, disgusting, and barely even makes sense. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone but Satan himself.

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God :

WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH NOT LETTING US RATE IT AS A ZERO. WISH I COULD HAVE. this book was a burden on my soul, then entire time i was forced to read it. it drivels on in such a manner as to make the novel a complete horror to read. i don’t care if it’s a classic about a woman’s fight to survive or find her soul. A BOOK IS ONLY GOOD BASED ON HOW MUCH YOU ENJOY READING IT, ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU’RE FINISHED IT. i just wanted it to be over, so i could take the test and pass it, because it was such a blandly written piece of trash that a four year old could understand it and hate it as well. i’m sure there are people out there that love this novel, not everyone shares the same view. hey, that’s why Titanic was such a popular movie. my whole point is to not think it’s good just because a critic says so, myself and about 30 of my classmates would rather be punched in the gut than forced to think about this for another second. why write a review if i hate it so much you ask? i’ll tell you why...it’s really late and i’m bored. i’m writing a letter to my teacher and i needed to know how to spell the author’s name, so i came here. so to anyone out there that doesn’t just think things are good because someone says they are...don’t touch this silly novel for the life of you. i’m done now, you can all tell me taht this didn't help you now, to get it off the list of reviews, and how pathetic is that? are you that insecure about the quality of your novel? you should be. in conclusion, i hated this novel even more than i hated that stupid book Kindred.

Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis :

This book really wasnt that good. It opens with the guy turning into a bug... at the end, well, I wont spoil it for you all who are going to read it. But my point is, nothing really happened. I dont see the point of him turning into this vile creature... I thought it was supposed to be some big anaology of the world today, but if it is, I still dont get it. Maybe its just beyond me. There are a lot of better books out there. If I could give it 0 stars, I would.

J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey :

wHERE SHOULd I start well how about this book sucked. Boys and Girls don’t waste your time. Never once in my reading was I even closed to becoming entertanined. I hated it because it was boring had no point and most importantly wasted my time, and if you read it it will waste your time. J.D.Ss the Catcher in the Raye was a great book read that one. If you have to read this book in school boy it sucks to be you. The only reason I gave this book one star was because that was the lowest grade I could of given it. I would of given this book 1/4 of star because I like the title of the book. Remember don’t waste your time do something else ok

Anyone can play.

[Reproduced as found, with curly (smart) apostrophes replacing straight ones.]

Tertan and Blackburn and Howe

Two excerpts:


Lionel Trilling, “Of This Time, Of That Place” (1943).

A colleague pointed me to “Of This Time, Of That Place” some years ago. Reading John Williams’s novel Stoner (1965) and thinking about its depiction of the student Charles Walker prompted me to read Trilling’s story again. Its protagonist Joseph Howe is a poet and instructor at a private college in a town of picket fences and dinner parties — the academic pastoral. Into Howe’s life enter two cases of what now would be called “the difficult student”: “Tertan, Ferdinand R.” and “Blackburn, sir, Theodore Blackburn, vice-president of the Student Council.” That’s how they introduce themselves.

I suspect that Trilling’s depiction of these students, one of whom — but which one? — is madder than the other, will be of interest to anyone who teaches young adults. Who is really the more troubling case: Tertan, whose writing in the first passage above is an extemporaneous response to the in-class prompt “Who I am and why I came to Dwight College”? Or Blackburn, who pleads “I've never had a mark like this before, never anything below a B, never”?

You can read “Of This Time, Of That Place” at archive.org. I found the story in the Trilling-edited anthology The Experience of Literature  (1967).

[An aside: I suspect that Williams had Trilling’s story in mind: like Blackburn, Walker gets into in a class by special arrangement, as a result of a teacher’s generosity. Please, please, please.]

Word of the day: ambisinistrous

Joe Gould speaks of his childhood:

“Usually, when I was supposed to be paying attention to something, I was busy blowing my nose. Also, I was just generally inept. Not long ago, looking up something in the unabridged dictionary, I came across a word that sums up the way I was then, and for that matter, the way I am now — ‘ambisinistrous,’ or left-handed in both hands.”

Joseph Mitchell, “Joe Gould’s Secret” (1964).

It’s for real. Webster’s Second (perhaps the unabridged dictionary Gould used?) has it, coupled with the adjective ambisinister : “Left-handed, or clumsy, in the use of both hands.” Both ambisinister and ambisinistrous are missing from the Third .