Deep story, deep resentment

I recently made my way through Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016). In other words, I turned every page but read just here and there, lacking the patience to follow along with Hochschild’s investigator-on-a-journey approach and its predictable narrative markers: “As I take leave of the Arenos,” “as I take my leave,” “we climb back in his red truck,” “we climb into her tan SUV,” and so on. The core of the book may be found between pages 135 and 145, which present the “deep story” that informs the thinking of the Louisiana Tea Partiers whom Hochschild has sought to understand. You can also find the deep story in condensed form in this New York Times review.

Hochschild’s book helped me to understand something I have never understood: why it might be that so many people in my state-university-dependent town seem unfazed by and even gleeful about the effect of Illinois’s manufactured budget crisis on higher education — declining enrollment, hundreds of faculty and staff positions lost, maintenance and repairs left undone. “They need to live within their means,” “they need to work harder instead of protesting”: that’s the sort of stuff that shows up in comments in the local newspaper. It can’t be anti-intellectualism and distrust of academics alone that account for these attitudes: carpenters, clerical workers, electricians, groundskeepers, and janitors have also lost jobs in the absence of state funding.

I found a possible explanation of local attitudes in two of the “common impressions” shared by people Hochschild spoke with. One: ”A lot of people — maybe 40 percent — work for the federal and state government.” Two: “Public sector workers are way overpaid.” As Hochschild points out, these impressions have no foundation in reality. In 2014, she notes, “less than 17 percent of Americans worked for the government,” and that percentage includes all enlisted and reserve military personnel and all employees of federal, state, and local government, including teachers and hospital workers. Hochschild also points out that private-sector workers “earn 12 percent more than their public sector counterparts.”

A deep resentment of “government” and those it employs seems hard at work in my town. But it’s still remarkable to me that any resident of a town that depends upon a public university for its economic well-being would not be troubled to see that university in decline. It’s like cheering as your own house burns.

Separated at birth

 
[Karl Held and David Bowie.]

The actor Karl Held appeared in several Perry Mason episodes as David Gideon, young legal assistant to Mr. Mason. Young indeed: in the closing minutes of “The Case of the Malicious Mariner” (1961), he drinks a glass of milk while the grown-ups sip coffee.

Everyone knows David Bowie.

Also separated at birth
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti : Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop : John Davis Chandler and Steve Buscemi : Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt : Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov : Ted Cruz and Joe McCarthy : Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Gough : Jacques Derrida, Peter Falk, and William Hopper : Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln : Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls : Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks : Steve Lacy and Myron McCormick : Fredric March and Tobey Maguire : Michael A. Monahan and William H. Macy : Molly Ringwald and Victoria Zinny

Tea Making Tips

From the Empire Tea Bureau, a short film: Tea Making Tips (1941). With six golden rules and countless helpful hints. For instance: “Do not store near to fruit, soap, cheese, spices, or disinfectant.”

It’s probably also best to store the fruit, cheese, and spices at some distance from the soap and disinfectant.

Related reading
All OCA tea posts (Pinboard)

Red lead

On January 3, 1888, Thomas Alva Edison wrote out a five-page list of “Things doing and to be done.” Among its items: “Red Lead pencils equal to graphite.”

As Henry Petroski notes in The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (1989), Edison took his pencils seriously: “Edison’s pencils, which he ordered in lots of one thousand and always carried in his lower vest pocket, had very soft lead, were thicker than average, and were only about three inches long.” Graphite was one of the many materials Edison and his co-workers tested in the search for a suitable light-bulb filament.

I can find no evidence that Edison succeeded in his quest for a better red pencil. Not even an alchemist can turn wax into graphite.

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

“Quote-extra-unquote quote-virgin-unquote quote-olive-unquote oil.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)
Lemonade and lies

Today’s weather

Stefan Zweig, “Compulsion.” 1920. The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig. Trans. Anthea Bell (London: Pushkin Press, 2013).

Other Zweig posts
Destiny, out of one’s hands : Erasmus ekphrasis : Fanaticism and reason : Happy people, poor psychologists : Little world : “The safest shelter” : School v. city : “A tremendous desire for order” : Urban pastoral, with stationery : “With no idea where he was going” : Zweig’s last address book

Read this post and save $119

Here is a quick and easy way to save $119: do not buy Snore Circle, a recent bit of technology meant to stop snoring. (Yes, I am the snorer.)

One problem: it’s impossible to switch sides while sleeping with the Snore Circle. Doing so will hurt.

Another problem: even if you can live with sleeping on only one side, the Snore Circle can hurt. Not at first. But after four or five hours, the area behind the ear can become impossibly uncomfortable, even painful. That’s because the Snore Circle is large enough to push the ear out from behind. I tried using the device for four nights and could not last for more than four or five hours a night. I realized how painful this device can be when I was out walking in the cold one morning and felt the ache, still there behind my ear.

One more problem: the cost of returning the Snore Circle to its Chinese manufacturer is prohibitive — about $70 in postage from downstate Illinois. (We paid only $80 for the device by singing up early.) And the company’s e-mails and responses to online comments leave me less than confident that a refund would ever be arriving anyway.

Does Snore Circle reduce snoring? In my case, yes, at least sort of. Setting the device to send a strong signal after a single snore gave me a hellish four or five hours of endlessly waking up. (That’s one way to stop snoring.) Setting the device to send a moderate signal after a ten-snore delay seemed to reduce my snoring by half (if the device’s data, sent to a phone app, is accurate). But again, that’s over only four to five hours, after which I had to remove the device from my ear.

What’s done much more to reduce my snoring, with no electronics and no aching ears: a beans72 buckwheat pillow, recently arrived.

There are so many products popping up now that claim to stop snoring. As I said to Elaine last night, “It looks like the world has fucking had it with snoring.” (And who can blame it?) But the simple stuff — a better pillow, Breathe Right strips, a white-noise machine (i.e., a fan) — might prove more helpful than higher-tech gadgetry.

[Note: beans72 makes no claim that its pillows reduce snoring. Your sleep may vary.]

“Ron Padgett”

The name ”Ron Padgett” seems to be everywhere these days, or at least in many places, and also now in this post. Padgett is the writer whose poems appear in Jim Jarmusch’s new film Paterson.

Here (from the website Ron Padgett) is an introduction to Padgett’s work: “Ron Padgett,” an essay that I wrote for World Poets (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2000), a three-volume reference work edited by Padgett. The essay is meant for students, but it’s good, I think, for all ages.

And here are three more posts that contain the name “Ron Padgett.”

First sentences

My variation on a first-sentences meme from Robert Gable’s aworks: take the first sentence from each year’s posts to make a new-year blog post. So:

“If you’re going to be this uptight and worried about it, you’re not going to be a very happy blogger.” Another adventure in cooking. My wife Elaine mentioned yesterday an observation of Leonard Bernstein’s in his lecture-series The Unanswered Question — that audiences inevitably hear tonal patterns in atonal music. My wife Elaine and I just discovered a wonderful film, Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932). Small calendars for the new year, well designed and free. Poster from the Illinois WPA Art Project, artist unknown. Looking for some resolutions? If you’re stuck fumbling for a resolution or two, you might try Monina Velarde’s Resolution Generator. I’m a sucker for a good free calendar. Click for a larger view. Click for a larger view. Click for a larger view. Caught on tape: “This is a close-up of our real family life: having boring stuff doing.”

[The Resolution Generator is, alas, defunct. I remember “Drink more tea.”]

Fake New Year’s Eve 1916

[“New York Rejects a Fake New Year’s. Apathy Marks the Slim Crowds That Gather for a Cold-Storage Celebration. Hotel Men Are Dejected. With Three Days in Which to Gather a Harvest Their Returns Are Less Than on One ‘Regular’ Day.” The New York Times, January 2, 1917.]

My favorite part of that lengthy headline: “Hotel Men Are Dejected.” But still: Happy New Year.