Father Thomas Roth (Dana Andrews), in Edge of Doom (dir. Mark Robson, 1950):
“I always like a cup of hot tea in the afternoon, drink it slowly. It helps empty the mind. It’s a minor blessing, but not one to be sneezed at. It’s good with lemon.”Edge of Doom is good too, even if Andrews makes an improbable priest. The movie is at YouTube.
A brief tour: “David Foster Wallace’s Peaceful Prairie” (The New York Times).
But I have to say: Lynn Freehill-Maye’s celebration of the American midwest’s “meditative spaces,” “down-to-earth people,” and “sincerity” does not quite ring true. That pastoral picture omits all kinds of rural bleakness — miseducation, poverty, xenophobia, among others. As for midwestern sincerity, something that Wallace’s biographer D. T. Max makes much of, I’ll quote myself: “Life in the midwest — trust me — can be full of evasions, silences, and mask-like tact.” But I don’t want to talk about it. (See?)
Related reading
All OCA DFW posts (Pinboard)
A new New York Times feature: “This Week in Hate,” tracking “hate crimes and harassment around the country since the election of Donald Trump.”
In a Chronicle of Higher Education article about Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s choice for education secretary, Margaret Spellings, president of the University of North Carolina, describes DeVos thusly:
“She’s been an education-reform warrior and has put her money where her mouth is, literally and figuratively, for a very long time.”Literally and figuratively? I think I know what Spellings might mean. To put one’s money where one’s mouth is to “back up one’s opinion with action.” So Spellings might mean that DeVos has worked to shape education policy and has put money toward that end. She has backed up her opinions with action — and with money.
Garner’s Modern English Usage is now available as an iOS app, beautifully designed and exceedingly useful. So when I’m reading The New York Times on my phone and see this editorial headline —
— I can open the app and find this entry:
[Click for a larger view.]
And then I can go back to reading the Times and thinking with ever-deepening dread about where our country is headed.
Related reading
All OCA Garner-related posts (Pinboard)
[An Android app is supposed to be available soon. The star at the bottom is for marking an entry as a favorite, a good way to keep track of anything a writer needs to check again and again (for me, if and whether). One thing I miss: full-text search, which I’m guessing would have been unwieldy with so much text. The Times uses both caldron and cauldron. Caldron appears to be the more common spelling among Times writers. AP and Reuters appear to prefer cauldron.]
Last week we spent a happy hour browsing and buying at Three Lives & Company. Three Lives is a great small bookstore, the kind in which nearly every book is a good one. Following the store’s fortunes via Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York made me want to go and buy some books.
I noticed a tall stack of Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing (2012) on a counter and asked if the book was especially popular. Yes, they sell many copies and have trouble keeping it in stock. Smart city! Several Short Sentences is one of the best books I know for learning about or teaching writing.
Related reading
All OCA Verlyn Klinkenborg posts (Pinboard)
[After reading a draft post, I changed “one of the display counters” to “a counter.” That’s the kind of attention to sentences that Klinkenborg’s book fosters.]
I was waiting to teach a night class — my least favorite kind of teaching. The class was to start at 7:30. I waited outside the room in a narrow hallway: low ceiling, bare lightbulbs, tile walls, no windows, basement-like. The water fountain in the hallway was combined with a urinal. The drain was in the floor, right next to the fountain’s foot pedal, so that pressing to get a drink would almost certainly have meant stepping into someone’s urine. Still waiting for class, I went out to walk by the seashore with my teacher Jim Doyle. I told him how surprised I was to learn — from reading his notes and marginalia — that he loved football. He’d written to the president about it and had received a reply. Jim’s voice sounded raspy. I knew that Jim had died, but here he was. I was happy to see him.
I started teaching at 8:00. I asked the students, “How’d it get so late?” No one knew. I was teaching a Dickens novel and had notes, of some sort, with me, but I hadn’t read the novel, or at least not for a long time. Among its elements: an orphan girl at school, an adjunct instructor, an evil headmistress, a mysterious woman. I described the novel as “a vast canvas.” Instead of beginning with the orphan, the first character to appear, I began with the mysterious woman. Comparisons to Ishtar and Circe — the dangerous seducer. This woman was also a damsel in distress. I showed a clip from a French film adaptation of the novel and wanted to go back to a moment in which a great many emotions play across the character’s face: fear, confidence, doubt, longing. But I could find only commercials. At some point I noticed a colleague — one of my least favorite colleagues — sitting in the back row, smiling. He had come to observe.
Time was running out. “Next time we’ll begin by talking about the orphan,” I said. Students were already leaving. Two students in a corner had turned on a television and were watching a cowboy movie. “I need one more minute to finish what I need to say,” I yelled. “Please turn off the TV.” I asked four times before walking to the set, unplugging it, and waking.
Likely sources: a tiled hallway in Widener Library (perhaps this one), rest-stop bathrooms, manuscripts at the Morgan Library & Museum (including A Christmas Carol and many Charlotte Brontë items), Jim Doyle’s videotaped reading of Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” an NPR story about letters to President Barack Obama, Jean Stapleton’s expressive face in an All in the Family episode, academic politics, and who knows what else. This is the sixth classroom dream I’ve had since retiring from teaching. The others: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
Steven Greenhouse, writing in The New York Times about labor unions and the election:
Most labor leaders viewed Mr. Trump far more harshly than his union backers did; they often attacked him as a con artist and a threat to unions and workers. Mrs. Clinton would have prevailed had she adopted a more muscular pro-worker message, union leaders lament, more like Bernie Sanders’s message attacking trade deals and inequality.There’s something sadly funny about the idea of trying to shape a candidate to resemble another candidate whom you’ve already chosen not to support. I can think of only one candidate who could have persuasively offered a message more like Bernie Sanders’s message: Bernie Sanders.
“Losing New York diner culture would probably be a watershed in the city’s history. How will New Yorkers get along without these antidotes to urban loneliness?” In The New York Times, George Blecher writes about the disappearance of the New York diner.
Elaine and I spent a day in Manhattan last week. No diners, but we did go to a café and a restaurant, both local. I expect that someday we’ll visit and find that every small independent business we like has disappeared from the city.
Thanks, Lu, for pointing me to this story.
[As seen in the museum’s lobby. Click for a larger view.]
Above, a display for four exhibitions at the Morgan Library & Museum. Whoever designed the posters and their sequence must have put much thought into — and taken much pleasure from — the work. The sequence honors neither historical chronology nor opening dates, but it’s hardly random. What patterns do you see? (Be sure to click for a larger view.)
Elaine and I found the Morgan a perfect museum experience: three hours of great variety and endless surprises, a day before Thanksgiving. Dig the architecture, the art, the books, the manuscripts.
