Listening

President Donald Trump holds notes during a White House listening session with students and parents affected by school shootings. (AP Photo by Carolyn Kaster) pic.twitter.com/Z0lZbSVaoF

— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) February 21, 2018

No 5. reads “I hear you.” Pathetic. One of the president’s suggestions: bring back mental institutions. Another: more guns, concealed on teachers, janitors, and administrators.

But kudos to Samuel Zeif, who spoke about the madness of selling “a weapon of war” as a retail product. And to Mark Barden, who spoke about the madness of arming teachers. “Madness” is my word, not theirs. But it’s madness.

I noticed that the only D.C. people present were from charter schools. Score one for Ms. DeVos. And why so much praising of the president for the direction in which he’s taking the country? (Taking is right.) Someone needs to find out how the participants for this listening session were selected.

Zippy and Kafka

[Zippy, February 21, 2018.]

And:

You can withdraw from the sufferings of the world — that possibility is open to you and accords with your nature — but perhaps that withdrawal is the only suffering you might be able to avoid.

Franz Kafka, Aphorisms, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 2015).

Venn reading
All OCA Kafka posts : Kafka and Zippy posts : Zippy posts

[You can read Zippy daily at Comics Kingdom.]

“Swept strangely clean”

On the boulevard, the wind is blowing:


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

Economy: like an Imagist poem in prose.

Also from this novel
“La belle nature” : “What was it around him” : “All that has been, is now, and ever will be done by painters until the day of doom”

[Ezra Pound in a letter to Harriet Monroe, January 1915: “Poetry must be as well written as prose. . . . It must be as simple as De Maupassant’s best prose, and as hard as Stendahl’s.”]

Needed: a word other than meddle

To meddle in an election? There must be a word that better captures the enormity.

Merriam-Webster’s definition of meddle: “to interest oneself in what is not one’s concern : interfere without right or propriety.” M-W gives a sample sentence from George Bernard Shaw: “I never meddle in other people’s private affairs.”

From Webster’s Second, a more eloquent definition: “to interest, engage, or concern oneself unnecessarily or impertinently; to interfere improperly.” And from a W2 note on meddle and related words: “To meddle (with or in) is to concern oneself officiously or impertinently with another’s affairs.”

Notice: to interest oneself in what is not one’s concern; to concern oneself officiously or impertinently with another’s affairs. Meddle suggests individual interference in another person’s life. To meddle is to be a buttinsky or a Nosey Parker, to plant doubts, to offer unsolicited advice, to ask questions to which the only proper response is None of your B.I. bizness! To engage in a well-funded operation to sow national discord and sway an election: that goes well beyond meddling.

More appropriate words: to interfere in an election, to subvert democracy. “Russian meddling” is too trivial a description of what’s gone on. I’m going to avoid using it.

I don’t know what B.I. stands for either. But that’s what we said in Brooklyn.

Netflix as TLC

From an e-mail with the subject line “Michael, we just added a docuseries you might like.” It’s called Strippers :

Explore the personal and professional lives of the dancers who take it all off for cold, hard cash in Scotland’s three biggest cities.

I’m not sure what in my viewing history would prompt Netflix’s algorithms to push this “docuseries” at me. My best guess: the documentary Voyeur (dir. Myles Kane and Josh Koury, 2017) about Gay Talese and a peeping-Tom motel owner. If so, bad algorithm.

Earlier this month I had the thought that Netflix resembles a crummy video store. Now it seems to be turning into TLC.

[And the writing: “personal and professional lives,” “take it all off,” “cold, hard cash.” What really gets me though is “Scotland’s three biggest cities”: Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Glasgow?]

Boolean days

Just wondering how many families have reinvented Boolean operators when playing the children’s game Guess Who?

“Does your person have facial hair OR glasses?”

Naomi, teacher

A short film from the BBC, “What Babies Can Teach Us.” Naomi is a teacher with Roots of Empathy/Racines de l’empathie, a Canadian project that teaches students to care about others.

Thanks to Rachel for noticing this film.

Emma González for Congress

Emma González is a high-school senior. But I hope that when she turns twenty-five she runs for Congress. Here is her address Saturday to a rally for gun control. And here is a transcript.

A Fred Rogers stamp

Coming in March, from the USPS, a Fred Rogers stamp. The New York Times has the story. NPR has a story this morning about Fred Rogers’s legacy. But they forgot the stamp. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood first aired nationally fifty years ago tomorrow.

Related posts
Blaming Mister Rogers : Lady Elaine’s can : Off, or back, to school

[King Friday must be wondering why his stamp has some guy in a sweater on it.]

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Shame on John Shimkus A previous biblical tweet is causing him some difficulty.