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Memorizing poetry

“Is it difficult to learn a poem by heart? Of course”: Molly Worthen, historian, writes about the value of memorizing poetry: “Memorize That Poem!” (The New York Times).

Or as Brisbane once said, “Learn that poem.”

What do I know by heart? Poems by Ted Berrigan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Philip Larkin, Lorine Niedecker, the Shake, William Carlos Williams, William Butler Yeats. All by osmosis. How about you?

DJT + JA

At The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot asks why Donald Trump likes Joe Arpaio. An excerpt:

Trump is likely a fan of Arpaio’s because Arapio is a fan of his — an early supporter who also went all in for birtherism, at one point sending members of a so-called Cold Case Posse to Hawaii to dig up something incriminating about Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

But Trump probably also likes Arpaio because the former sheriff represents in miniature what the President would like to be more maximally — a successful American authoritarian.

With a link to William Finnegan’s 2009 New Yorker profile of “Sheriff Joe,” who once called his jail “a concentration camp.”

Chock full o’Nuts on the screen

[From The King of Comedy (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1982). Click any image for a larger view.]

This Chock full o’Nuts location was ready for its close-up but spent most of its screen time in the company of Sandra Bernhard (Masha) and Robert De Niro (Rupert Pupkin). And when the close-up came, the restaurant shared the screen with a wall.

Masha and Rupert stand and sit in front of Paramount Plaza, 1633 Broadway, Manhattan. The Chock full o’Nuts stood at 1627 Broadway, the southwest corner of 50th and Broadway. A clue: the now-gone Rivoli Theatre is across the street in the background (second screenshot).

In 1989 a New York Times article mentioned a 50th and Broadway location, likely this same southwest corner, as home to a food court, “adorned with an enormous electric sign that lures customers with the quintessential promise of Kentucky Fried Chicken, Nathan’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, Pizza Hut and Le Croissant Shop.” The food court’s parent company, the Riese Organization at one time owned Chock full o’Nuts.

The 1627 location is now home to — what else? — a Duane Reade.

Related posts
Chock full o’Nuts (Reverie)
A 1964 guidebook description
Chock full o’Nuts lunch hour, 1955
Paige Morton Black (1915–2013)
Chock full o’Nuts returns

[In our household right now, five cans of Chock full o’Nuts coffee. And one empty can, whose silhouetted Manhattan skyline includes the World Trade Center. Missing from this post but in The King of Comedy: Jerry Lewis.]

To all those on the Gulf Coast

Stay safe, Gulf Coast residents.

Colledge signage

A sign outside a bar, right across the street from a campus in Anytown, USA:

ASK ABOUT OUR

DRINKING DEGREE

SOMETHING U CAN

GET ALL A S IN

Yes, that’s a space between the A and the S. If I were a student, I might laugh — for a few seconds. And then I’d think about how this sign is serving to cheapen my school’s reputation and my degree. If I were a prospective student, I would wonder whether the school right across the street was a good choice.

I have no animus against alcohol or humor. But I do think of college as a serious endeavor, not something to treat as a joke. The joke is what I call colledge: “the vast simulacrum of education that amounts to little more than buying a degree on the installment plan.” Colledge students and college students can be found on the very same campus, perhaps right across the street from some bar.

I have brought this sign to the attention of those who might be expected to have sway. Right now the sign still stands. And on another corner, in front of a rental property:

WELCOME BACK STUDENTS.

WE’RE GLAD YOUR HERE!

*

August 29, 9:48 p.m.: Just saw that, for whatever reason, the bar sign has been removed. Something beginning with LADI was taking its place as I drove by.

Related reading
All OCA colledge posts (Pinboard)
Homeric blindness in colledge
#finals

Information retrieval

[From À nous la liberté (dir. René Clair, 1931). Click any image for a larger view.]

Louis (Raymond Cordy) obliges his friend and employee Emile (Henri Marchand) by requesting information about employee Jeanne (Rolla France). The request travels by pneumatic tube; a worker types in the necessary information (each employee at the factory is known by a number); a drawer springs open; and there’s Jeanne. There must be a cross-reference on her card. More typing, another drawer, and her uncle appears. Into the tube they go. And Louis and Emile smile.

A series of tubes, just like the Internet. See also the New York Public Library and an earlier post with Emile and a butterfly.

Escapees in nature

[Emile (Henri Marchand) contemplates a flower. From À nous la liberté (dir. René Clair, 1931).]


[Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) contemplates a butterfly. From O Brother, Where Art Thou? (dir. Joel Coen, 2000). Click either image for a larger view.]

Perhaps a coincidence. But both Emile and Delmar have escaped from prison, and Tim Blake Nelson does resemble Henri Marchand, at least vaguely. And phonographs and records play an important part in each film. I’m going with more than coincidence. I’m going with tip o’ the hat.

Words, can’t stand ’em

Fresca at l’astronave has written a post about words she can’t stand.

We all have words and phrases we can live without. My friend Stefan Hagemann and I were talking about that just this morning. And then Fresca mentioned the word ginormous in a comment on a post about hyperbolic indefinite numerals. And now I’m here.

What words can’t you stand? What words can you live without? Comment on Fresca’s post, and comment here, too, if you like. Think of yourself as contributing to a merry little culture of complaint.

[I’ve written several posts about words I can live without: this one, about the educationese expressed that, has links to the others.]

Rita Felski on “critique”

On “critique” as a way of reading literature:

Critique proves to be a remarkably efficient and smooth-running machine for registering the limits and insufficiencies of texts. It also offers a yardstick for assessing their value: the extent to which they exemplify its own cardinal virtues of demystifying, subverting, and putting into question. It is conspicuously silent, however, on the many other reasons why we are drawn to works of art: aesthetic pleasure, increased self-understanding, moral reflection, perceptual reinvigoration, ecstatic self-loss, emotional consolation, or heightened sensation — to name just a few. Its conception of the uses and values of literature is simply too thin. . . .

[I]ts overriding concern with questioning motives and exposing wrongdoing (the moral-political drama of detection) results in a mindset — vigilant, wary, mistrustful — that blocks receptivity and inhibits generosity. We are shielded from the risks, but also the rewards, of aesthetic experience.

Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

If I were a young teacher hoping to inculcate in my students some reverence for works of the imagination, I’d take great heart from this book.

Related posts
Hoagies, pizzas, and English studies
Politics and theory
Verlyn Klinkenborg on the English major

[My snarky quotation marks around “critique” signal that critique itself is under suspicion here. I think I reached my limit when I heard a graduate student give a paper arguing that Charles Dickens showed “sexist bias.” That was the point, and the student’s condescension toward Dickens was unmistakable. O benighted nineteenth-century fool!]