Bully for Woolly

A short New Yorker piece, “Disruption Spreads to the Nightstand,” describes a new product from the mattress company Casper: Woolly, “a magazine that embraces the hunger for hygge and covers the bedtime beat.”

I thought I was reading a spoof, but no, Woolly is real. The first issue contains, among other things, a feature on sweatpants comfort pants and an “Adulting Coloring Book.” A picture caption: “I flossed!”

Opinions

One narrator’s family:


Alice Munro, “Family Furnishings,” in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (New York: Vintage, 2002).

Also from Alice Munro
“Rusted seams” : “That is what happens” : “Henry Ford?” : “A private queer feeling” : “A radiance behind it”

Pronouns and institutions

Lindsay Shepherd is a graduate student and teaching assistant in communication studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. Teaching first-year students about pronoun use, Shepherd showed a short clip from a television debate about gender-neutral singular pronouns — and specifically, about whether speakers and writers should be required by law to honor the pronouns that other individuals choose for themselves. As Shepherd tells it, she was not taking sides; she was presenting a debate and inviting students to comment. Later, one or more students complained. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on what followed.

Part of what followed: a meeting in which two faculty members and a staff member questioned Shepherd and opined about what happened (and about much else). The recording of that meeting offers a deep experience of the Kafkaesque. No one will tell Shepherd who or how many students complained, or the nature of the complaint or complaints. Shepherd’s presentation of a current debate about language is deemed by her interlocutors to have created a “toxic climate.” Shepherd is told that she has targeted “trans folks” and committed an act of “gender-based violence” and transphobia. Even as a faculty member tells Shepherd that there are “two sides” to every story, it’s clear that he and his colleagues have already made up their minds about what happened.

What might be the most extraordinary moment: “Your role as TA is not really to be teaching about the politics of grammar; it’s to be teaching grammar.” And yet teaching grammar includes teaching the use of singular pronouns, which, in English, are gendered — which is to say, political. Someone then asks Shepherd if she’d be willing to stick to “more traditional” matters in grammar. And yet a “more traditional” presentation would likely prohibit any consideration of gender-neutral singular pronouns. As I said, Kafkaesque.

Lindsay Shepherd describes herself as “a reasonable leftist.” The conclusion she has reached about her university, as presented on her Twitter page: “Confirmed: WLU is a mental institution.”

*

December 19: An investigation has exonerated Lindsay Shepherd of any wrongdoing. From a statement issued by Wilfrid Laurier president Deborah MacLatchy:

There were numerous errors in judgement made in the handling of the meeting with Ms. Lindsay Shepherd, the TA of the tutorial in question. In fact, the meeting never should have happened at all. No formal complaint, nor informal concern relative to a Laurier policy, was registered about the screening of the video. This was confirmed in the fact-finding report. . . .

There was no wrongdoing on the part of Ms. Shepherd in showing the clip from TVO [TVO: TVOntario, an educational television station] in her tutorial. Showing a TVO clip for the purposes of an academic discussion is a reasonable classroom teaching tool. Any instructional material needs to be grounded in the appropriate academic underpinnings to put it in context for the relevance of the learning outcomes of the course. The ensuing discussion also needs to be handled properly. We have no reason to believe this discussion was not handled well in the tutorial in question.

[A specifically Canadian context for this controversy: Bill C-16. See also a recent post by Geoffrey Pullum, unrelated to events in Canada: “I’m on the same side as my non-binarist and gender-neutral and transsexual friends,” Pullum writes, but he thinks of singular they with a personal name for antecedent as ungrammatical.]

John Gruber on Messenger Kids

John Gruber’s comment on Facebook’s Messenger Kids app: “This is like Philip Morris introducing officially licensed candy cigarettes. You’re nuts if you sign your kids up for this.”

All the books are green, almost

The Washington Post reports on “the odd assortment of books that make up the White House Christmas book tree.” The books were chosen for their green covers — or, in the words of Stephanie Grisham, director of communications for first lady Melania Trump, “their varieties of green color tones.” The green books set off Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s copy of A Christmas Carol, bound in red.

[See also Nicholson Baker’s “Books as Furniture.”]

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger, perhaps more recognizable view.]

He’s appearing in his first film role. Do you recognize him? Leave your best guess as a comment, and enter as often as you like. I’ll drop a hint if necessary.

More mystery actors (Collect them all!)
? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ?

Robin Wright on words and sentences

Ilan Stavans’s podcast In Contrast offers an excellent interview with the journalist and foreign correspondent Robin Wright. Wright offers, in passing, some provocative observations about the teaching of writing in the United States:

There is the illusion that the longer the sentence, and the more multisyllabic words are used, the longer the paragraph, the better the writing, when in fact, it’s exactly the opposite. I always say “Tight is right”: write short, write pithy, write to the point, write things people understand in one bite, rather than compound ideas in a single sentence. . . .

Unfortunately, in universities, people write quite dull prose.

Wright is right, of course. One idea, one sentence is a good maxim, as long as one acknowledges that ideas come in all sizes and may be made of many parts. (See, for instance, Proust.) If you look at any of Wright’s recent pieces for The New Yorker, I think you’ll agree that her sentences, whatever their length, are models of clarity.

A related post
Sentences, short and long

[Transcription mine.]

Stefan Zweig in Turkey

Stefan Zweig is reported to be the most-read writer in Turkey.

Related reading
All OCA Stefan Zweig posts (Pinboard)

Van Dyke Parks meets Merle Haggard

As told by Kinky Friedman:

“Van Dyke was worried he’d get lynched because, well, he’s a sort of Noel Coward type,” Friedman says. “So he asked everybody, ‘How long have you known Merle?’ And every one of them would answer, ‘Ever since.’ ‘Ever since,' 'Ever since,’ ‘Ever since.’ So he asked me, ‘What does that mean, ever since?’ I told him, ‘Ever since prison, stupid!’ Stupid is one thing Van Dyke is not. But ever since prison.

Related reading
All OCA Van Dyke Parks posts (Pinboard)

[“A sort of Noel Coward type”? What?!]

Charles Simic on the pencil

Charles Simic writes about “The Poet’s Pencil”:

I knew a poet who could only write his poems with a stub of a pencil. Nothing else worked for him as well. His family and friends bought him fountain pens, ballpoints, typewriters, and laptops, but he kept away from them. “It’s like giving a dog a wristwatch for Christmas,” his wife said.

The poet, of course, is Simic himself.

About Simic’s offhand characterization of “an age of computers and smartphones when pencils are becoming extinct”: with enough use, individual pencils have always become extinct. But the species? No. Not now. Not yet.