Extending a metaphor

In The New York Times this morning: “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.”

The shit will continue to hit the fan with tiny fecal hands, knocking the fan off the tabletop (it’s a table fan) and making a mess everywhere. It’ll be years before the mess is cleaned up — if it can be cleaned up.

Valentine’s Day

[A reddened version of an illustration from an 1890s anatomy text. Weirder than last year’s heart. Found at The Graphics Fairy.]

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Doing without teachers

William Deresiewicz:

If you want a good education, you need to have good teachers. It seems ridiculous to have to say as much, but such is the state that matters have reached, both in academia and in the public conversation that surrounds it, that apparently we do. Between the long-term trend toward the use of adjuncts and other part-time faculty and the recent rush to online instruction, we seem to be deciding that we can do without teachers in college altogether, at least in any meaningful sense. But the kind of learning the college is for is simply not possible without them.

Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014).

Related reading
Other Deresiewicz posts

[Deresiewicz is not arguing that an adjunct cannot be a good teacher. He’s arguing that an institutional reliance on adjuncts is at odds with a genuine commitment to teaching.]

English studies and adjunct labor

In “The Great Shame of Our Profession,” Kevin Birmingham, writes about English studies and adjunct labor:

Why do our nation’s English departments consistently accept several times as many graduate students as their bespoke job market can sustain? English departments are the only employers demanding the credentials that English doctoral programs produce. So why do we invite young scholars to spend an average of nearly 10 years grading papers, teaching classes, writing dissertations, and training for jobs that don’t actually exist? English departments do this because graduate students are the most important element of the academy’s polarized labor market. They confer departmental prestige. They justify the continuation of tenure lines, and they guarantee a labor surplus that provides the cheap, flexible labor that universities want.

The abysmal conditions of adjuncts are not the inevitable byproducts of an economy with limited space for literature. They are intentional. Universities rely upon a revolving door of new PhDs who work temporarily for unsustainable wages before giving up and being replaced by next year’s surplus doctorates. Adjuncts now do most university teaching and grading at a fraction of the price, so that the ladder faculty have the time and resources to write. We take the love that young people have for literature and use it to support the research of a tiny elite.

All of this is to say that the profession of literary criticism depends upon exploitation.

I’ll repeat what I first wrote in 2013: The exploitation of adjunct labor is the shame and scandal of American higher education.

“No challenge is to great”

[Except for spelling.]

I agree: it’s a “glaring typo,” or a glaring example of a common confusion of words. Everyone makes mistakes. I typed 2917 instead of 2017 earlier today. But. Still. Even so.

The Trump inauguration print has been pulled from the Library of Congress Library Shop. The cached page that sold it lives on, at least for a while, here. (And at the Internet Archive.) Quoth the Store: “Printed in the USA, this print captures the essence of Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency of the United States.” Yep.

A related post
“No job to small”

[Thanks to Fresca, who caught my typo.]

The Ethnic Heritage Ensemble

[Kahil El’Zabar, Corey Wilkes, Alex Harding. Photograph by Michael Leddy. Click for a larger view.]

The Ethnic Heritage Ensemble
Krannert Center for the Performing Arts
Urbana, Illinois
February 9, 2017

Kahil El’Zabar: cajón, drumkit, footbells, mbira, voice
Alex Harding: baritone saxophone
Corey Wilkes: trumpet

Kahil El’Zabar last visited the Krannert Center in 2008, with the Ritual Trio and guest musician Hamiet Bluiett. Last week El’Zabar returned with the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, founded in 1973. The Ensemble’s continuing premise: two horns and percussion (originally, saxophonists Edward Wilkerson and Ernest Khabeer Dawkins and El’Zabar). In a pre-performance talk, El’Zabar told the story of bringing his father on an Ensemble tour in 1986. Would people really turn out to hear nothing more than two horns and percussion? Indeed, they did, and still do.

“Nothing more than”: in other words, what a listener won’t find is the familiar rhythm section of piano, bass, and drums, or just bass and drums. But there’s nothing missing in the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble’s sound, which is full of color and texture. Much of that is due to El’Zabar, who provides a constant commentary as he plays: singing, scatting, humming, grunting, stomping, and shouting encouragement. (“Go to Texas!” he told Alex Harding at one point.) Harding’s baritone adds another layer of commentary, one that looks back to the earliest jazz traditions, in which the tuba (or sometimes bass saxophone) assumed the role later taken over by the string bass.

Here is one example of the ensemble in action: in “All Blues,” El’Zabar set a groove for the deepest sort of slow blues with nothing more than footbells, stomps, and mbira. Harding’s baritone added an element of R&B to the tune’s familiar vamp, and the vamp resurfaced behind Wilkes’s solo and in Harding’s own solo. Like El’Zabar, Harding and Wilkes are master musicians: Harding’s huge tone and rhythmic drive suggest both Harry Carney and Hamiet Bluiett; Wilkes’s playing ranges from boppish complexities to Miles-isms to shakes, wails, and, at one point, a 180-degree blast of plain air.

Some especially bright moments: El’Zabar soloing on mbira, sounding something like, say, John Lee Hooker worrying a handful of notes; El’Zabar stepping down from the bandstand to scat and dance; Harding interpolating “Lester Leaps In” when soloing in “The Eternal Triangle,” an invitation taken up by the other musicians; Wilkes’s baby daughter responding to the sound of her father’s Harmon mute. And one more: El’Zabar preaching during “Pharoah Sanders”: “We can never win with pessimism. Even in dark times, we need optimism.”

The tunes: “All Blues” (Miles Davis), “The Eternal Triangle” (Sonny Stitt), “Little Sunflower” (Freddie Hubbard), “Pharoah Sanders” (El’Zabar), “Freedom Jazz Dance” (Eddie Harris).

Related reading
Ethnic Heritage Ensemble : Kahil El’Zabar : Alex Harding : Corey Wilkes

Dante, Beatrice, and Nancy

[Gustave Doré and Ernie Bushmiller, with help from the alpha tool and me. Click for a larger view.]

Not exactly a beatific vision, but as close as I can get.

Related reading
All OCA Dante posts : All OCA Dante and Nancy posts : All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Publius Sluggo

[Nancy, November 20, 1946. From Random Acts of Nancy.]

Leave it to Sluggo to try to keep Nancy from attaining the beatific vision. Troublemaker. But who would be taking over as guide here? Fritzi Ritz? Aw, that ain’t no fun.

Related reading
All OCA Dante and Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[The Nancy dash is often but not always made of “some hyphens.”]

Domestic comedy

“She’s some kind of a star.”

“That must be why we’ve never heard of her.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Dictionaries rising

Jesse Sheidlower, lexicographer: “Right now there are a lot of questions about what is true. We want clear statements about what things are, and dictionaries provide that.” And: “In times of stress, people will go to things that will provide answers. The Bible, the dictionary, or alcohol.”

From the Fashion and Style pages of The New York Times, a report on increased interest in dictionaries.

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)