Lucy, seeress

[Peanuts, February 17, 1970.]

In truth, Lucy was speaking of Snoopy, who was just promoted to Head Beagle.

Related reading
All OCA Peanuts posts (Pinboard)

“Past events”

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

See also yesterday’s press conference.

Related reading
All OCA George Orwell posts (Pinboard)

M. Proust?

Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan, of the University of Laval, Quebec, has discovered film footage that appears to show Marcel Proust in 1904, leaving a church after a friend’s wedding. Says Sirois-Trahan, “Tout tend à faire penser qu'il s'agit de Proust”: Everything tends to suggests that it’s Proust — though of course there is no certainty. Watch for the man in light-colored clothing who begins descending the steps at the 0:35 mark.

The best reports of this news that I can find are those in France24 (in French and machine-made English) and Le Point (in French and machine-made English).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[Can anyone identify the music? My guess: Reynaldo Hahn. The music is “L.A. I Love You” by John David Hanke. Thanks, Shazam.]

Neologism of the day

lanelocked \ˈlān-ˌläkt\ adjective
: stuck immediately behind a slow-moving vehicle and thus unable to pass into a lane of more rapidly moving traffic because vehicles to the rear are already passing into that lane

Sample sentence: Dammit, I’m lanelocked.

I thought I’d posted this word a long time ago, but I see now that I was thinking of lane duck. To be a lane duck or to be lanelocked: take your pick. In our car, lanelocked is more common. As in, “Dammit, I’m lanelocked.”

More made-up words
Alecry : Humormeter : Lane duck : Misinflame and misinflammation : Oveness : Power-sit : Plutonic : ’Sation : Skeptiphobia

Separated at birth

 
[Victor Buono and Dan Seymour.]

Diane Schirf suggested these actors for a separated-at-birth post. Yes. But finding a pair of photographs to suggest the resemblance was more difficult than I expected. Searching for “dan seymour” actor turns up relatively little (and that little includes a photo of Victor Buono). If this pair of photographs doesn’t convince you, please, take Diane’s word for it (and mine): these guys strongly resemble one other.

Also separated at birth
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti : Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop : David Bowie and Karl Held : 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 : Barbara Hale and Vivien Leigh : Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls : Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks : Steve Lacy and Myron McCormick : William H. Macy and Michael A. Monahan : Fredric March and Tobey Maguire : Molly Ringwald and Victoria Zinny

Gilmores and Gilligan

Elaine Fine, co-director of our household’s Center for Media Studies, had a thought: Gilmore Girls is Gilligan’s Island.

The Skipper: Taylor Doose. Gilligan: Kirk. The Howells: Emily and Richard Gilmore. Ginger: Lorelai. Mary Ann: Rory. The Professor: Luke.

Yes, the analogy is rough. Many Stars Hollow residents are unaccounted for. (Jess is pretty clearly some visitor to the island.) The Center will need at least one grant to work out the details.

Related reading
All OCA Gilmore Girls posts (Pinboard)

[Posted here with permission.]

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.