Academic futures

Behind the Chronicle of Higher Education paywall, Sharon O’Dair writes about “Shamelessness and Hypocrisy at the MLA.” What she found at the Modern Language Association’s 2018 convention: a profession that produces too many Ph.D.s, and then encourages those degree recipients to seek a future outside academia:

If the way to a career with a Ph.D. in English is to take one-third of an M.B.A. program, why not take the M.B.A., a mere two years, rather than the six or eight years for a Ph.D. in English? Why spend all those years studying slave narratives, if your digital-humanities work is going to get you a career in an IT department? #Opportunity-Cost, if you want to get businesslike about it.

Who benefits from the overproduction of Ph.D.s? Colleges, whose budgets depend on inexpensive teaching labor. This overproduction also serves the interests of tenured faculty members, whose lives are cushioned by reduced teaching loads and research help. John Guillory’s dour judgment in 1996 that "graduate education appears now to be a kind of pyramid scheme" still strikes at the heart of the question.

I’ll quote from a post I wrote about academic futures: “the very telos of doctoral study in the humanities is a life of teaching and scholarship on the tenure-track. That’s what grad school is supposed to be for.” But a tenure-track position in the humanities is an ever-diminishing possibility. And it’s doubtful that the years of work required for a doctorate in the humanities are sensible preparation for any other career.

I’ll quote myself again: “Imagine going to medical school when the odds are slim that you’ll ever practice.”

Monsters

Jennie Willoughby, talking to Anderson Cooper last night:

“That’s a question that I am asked a lot: Why did you stay if he was a quote-unquote monster? And the reality is that he’s not a monster. He is an intelligent, kind, chivalrous, caring, professional man — and he is deeply troubled, and angry, and violent.”

One could argue that “intelligent, kind, chivalrous, caring, professional” just makes for a monster who is less likely to be recognized as such.

That and which

Bruce Ross-Larson’s Edit Yourself: A Manual for Everyone Who Works with Words (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982) has impressed me again. Twenty-six pages in, I have found useful advice for solving the problem of a relative clause that doesn’t follow the noun it modifies.

Ross-Larson’s example: “The meaning of the sentence, which is usually obvious from. . . .” What can make it clear that the relative clause beginning with which modifies meaning and not sentence ? Ross-Larson suggests four workarounds:

~ “Make the object of the prepositional phrase plural and rely on verb number.” Thus: “The meaning of sentences, which usually is obvious from. . . .”

~ “Repeat the noun before a relative clause.” Thus: “The meaning of the sentence, meaning which usually is obvious from. . . .”

~ “Delete the intervening prepositional phrase.” Thus: “The meaning, which usually is obvious from. . . .”

~ ”Rewrite the sentence.” Thus: “The meaning of sentences usually is obvious from. . . .”

This small (half a page) section of Edit Yourself interests me because it offers alternatives to the rather loopy New Yorker strategy of “the irregular restrictive which,” a which that replaces that when a relative clause is separated from the noun it modifies. Notice that in Ross-Larson’s example, which could be the work of a writer who intends an irregular restrictive which. But that intent does nothing to remove the ambiguity.

And consider this New Yorker sentence, by John McPhee, which accompanies his explanation of the irregular restrictive which :

In 1822, the Belgian stratigrapher J. J. d’Omalius d’Halloy, working for the French government, put a name on the chalk of Europe which would come to represent an ungainly share of geologic time.

If you want to avoid that because a reader might mistakenly read “that would come to represent . . .” as referring to chalk and not to name, you can avoid the irregular restrictive which by rewriting the sentence:

In 1822, the Belgian stratigrapher J. J. d’Omalius d’Halloy, working for the French government, gave the chalk of Europe a name that would come to represent an ungainly share of geologic time.

Problem solved. At $13.95, Edit Yourself is a bargain.

[I’d prefer a slightly different rewriting: “The meaning of a sentence is usually obvious from. . . .” No need for the plural, and usually, to my ear, falls more naturally after the verb.]

An art catalogue

It’s varnishing day at the Salon Carré:


Guy de Maupassant, Like Death, trans. Richard Howard (New York: New York Review Books, 2017).

Also from this novel
“La belle nature” : “What was it around him”

Alex Katz’s piano

In 2013, the painter Alex Katz told an interviewer that he ate instant oatmeal for breakfast and sardines for lunch. And now an article in Women’s Wear Daily notes that Katz “eats the same thing most days, taking cereal for breakfast and a can of sardines for lunch.”

Art, check. Sardines, check. But if I ever happen to meet Alex Katz, I will have a third topic of conversation up my sleeve: we have the same model Beckwith piano at home. Look: that’s our Beckwith too.

Other Alex Katz posts
Painter, eater : Focusing : Meeting Lionel Hampton

Misspelling history

It’s Black History Month, yes, and the office of the White House press secretary has misspelled Frederick Douglass’s last name.

Reality TV and the White House

Raj Shah, White House principal deputy press secretary, a few minutes ago: “Omarosa was fired three times on The Apprentice, and this is the fourth time we let her go.”

“We”?

The blurred line between reality TV and the White House could not be clearer.

[Omarosa Manigault Newman has been in the news today, warning that life under Dunning K. Trump is “not going to be okay.”]

Renoir sardines

[Julien Carette and Jean Gabin in La Bête humaine (dir. Jean Renoir, 1938).]

This railroad engineer (Gabin, right) is generous. But his fireman is no fan of the noble sardine. His loss.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

Separated at birth

 
[Jean Renoir and Steve Wozniak.]

We were watching Jean Renoir’s La Bête humaine (1938), and there was Renoir himself as Cabuche — or Steve Wozniak.

Also separated at birth
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti : Bérénice Bejo and Paula Beer : Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop : David Bowie and Karl Held : Victor Buono and Dan Seymour : 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 : Henry Daniell and Anthony Wiener : 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 : Don Lake and Andrew Tombes : William H. Macy and Michael A. Monahan : Fredric March and Tobey Maguire : Molly Ringwald and Victoria Zinny

Bushmiller, Strunk, and Wilde

A detail from Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden’s How to Read “Nancy”: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2017): at a meeting of the National Cartoonists Society, Ernie Bushmiller asked for the floor and delivered what a fellow cartoonist described as “an impassioned speech” in favor of fewer words in comic strips.

Bushmiller would have liked William Strunk Jr.’s exhortation in The Elements of Style to “omit needless words”:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

The Elements of Style, revised and expanded by E.B. White, became an American best-seller in 1959. Might Bushmiller have read that new edition? Might it have prompted his speech? There’s no date given for the cartoonists’ meeting, but Karasik and Newgarden reproduce a 1962 Peanuts strip that seems to be a comment on Bushmiller’s criticism. If Bushmiller read The Elements of Style, he would have found in Rule 17 (“Omit needless words”) a confirmation of his long-established habits of work. “No unnecessary words,” “no unnecessary lines”: that sounds like a description of Nancy.

Karasik and Newgarden describe Bushmiller as ever exacting about words:

Toward the end of his life, stricken with Parkinson’s disease, Nancy’s creator required additional help to keep his strip on schedule. Al Plastino, one of the most capable chameleons of the comics, who was hired to execute the Sunday strip, recalls, “Bushmiller would call me up and tell me to take out a word didn’t like. Then he’d call up five minutes later to tell me to put it back in. That he’d call up again and tell me to replace it with another word. He’d call me ten to twenty times a day!"

This story puts me in mind of Oscar Wilde, not Gustave Flaubert, removing a comma in the morning, reinstating it in the afternoon. But Bushmiller worked faster.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy and Strunk and White posts

[Elsewhere in How to Read “Nancy” , Karasik and Newgarden cite Rule 17 as a model for the cartoonist: “Faulkner’s prose is usually full of vigor but not necessarily concise. Rembrandt’s most vigorous drawings often contain numerous ‘unnecessary’ lines. But when it comes to comics, Strunk and White were right on the money.” Speculation about Bushmiller and The Elements of Style is all mine.]