Chuck Berry (1926–2017)

[Chuck Berry at the Newport Jazz Festival, 1958. From Jazz on a Summer’s Day (dir. Bert Stern, 1960). Click for a larger view.]

The musician and, I’d say, master builder Chuck Berry has died at the age of ninety. The New York Times has an obituary.

Up late again

One more “paper” to grade: a handwritten transcript of Saint-John Perse’s poem Anabase (1924). Did the student transcribe the French original, or T. S. Eliot’s 1930 translation? And what was he or she thinking? And how was I supposed to evaluate this effort? Beats me. I woke up.

This is the eighth teaching-related dream I’ve had since retiring. The others: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

[Perhaps the student was in one of Kenneth Goldsmith’s classes.]

Another text for the day

Fintan O’Toole:

We Irish are not Know Nothings. We know something important: what it’s like to be feared, to be discriminated against, to be stereotyped. We know from our own family histories that anti-immigrant hysteria is founded on lies. And we know that, over time, those lies are exposed.

Up late grading

I was sitting on the sofa, bent forward, grading “term papers.” I had a juice glass filled with bourbon to help in the endeavor. I held the glass in one hand and graded with the other, with the papers on my knees. Ten or twelve papers, all awful. How even to begin commenting? One student had submitted a legal pad, with the cardboard backing still attached. The “paper” in this case was nothing more than meager notes from class, really just isolated words: Myth. A word. Sacred. I didn’t go beyond the first page. It was two or three in the morning, and I was done grading.

This is the seventh teaching-related dream I’ve had since retiring. The others: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

[There’s considerable anecdotal evidence that work dreams in retirement tend to go badly.]

A text for the day

Drink a sip, drankasup, for he’s as sooner buy a guinness than he’d stale store stout.

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939).

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day.

[The name Leddy is Irish.]

James Cotton (1935–2017)

The harpist and singer James Cotton has died at the age of eighty-one. The New York Times has an obituary.

Here, courtesy of YouTube, is a 1996 outing with Cotton, Joe Louis Walker (guitar), Dave Maxwell (piano), and Charlie Haden (bass), Deep in the Blues. Really.

Scratchpad for macOS

Scratchpad, by Rinat Khanov.

Li’l Trumpy and Li’l Judge Judy

[Zippy, March 16, 2017.]

Today’s Zippy turns out to be exceedingly well-timed.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[In the news: “Two Federal Judges Rule Against Trump’s Latest Travel Ban” (The New York Times).]

Cultural xenophobia

Jane Jacobs:

Cultural xenophobia is a frequent sequel to a society’s decline from cultural vigor. Someone has aptly called self-imposed isolation a fortress mentality. [Karen] Armstrong describes it as a shift from faith in logos, reason, with its future-oriented spirit, ”always . . . seeking to know more and to extend . . . areas of competence and control of the environment,” to mythos, meaning conservatism that looks backward to fundamentalist beliefs for guidance and a worldview.

Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead (New York: Random House, 2004).

Also from this book
Credentialing v. educating

[The unidentified quotation is from Karen Armstrong’s The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism (New York: Random House, 2000.]

An Oxford comma in the news

Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma? The United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, for one. Its decision in a Maine case concerning overtime pay hinges on the absence of an Oxford comma. Here’s the text of the decision.

Me, in a post about basic punctuation: “If you always put the [Oxford] comma in, you avoid problems with ambiguous or tricky sentences in which the comma’s absence might blur the meaning of your words.” Yep.

Thanks to the New Arthurian for passing on this news item.

Related reading
All OCA punctuation posts (Pinboard)

[The impertinent question that begins this post is the property of Vampire Weekend.]