“Plato: Teacher and Theorist”

History of Education, a prerequisite, holds few memories for Beverly Cleary:

What I do recall is the paper the entire class was required to write on one subject, “Plato: Teacher and Theorist.” The paper had to be twenty-four pages long. Not twenty-three, not twenty-five. Twenty-four. Fortunately, I was fresh from Plato the previous semester, but I resented every word of that paper, every footnote, every ibid., every op cit., and longed to add one footnote, “I thought of this myself.” Footnotes in foreign languages, according to the wisdom of Stebbins, always impressed a reader, but I couldn’t work one in on Plato. Someday, someday, I vowed, I would write entire books without footnotes.

Beverly Cleary, My Own Two Feet: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1995).

This paper and its footnotes were to become the stuff of a scene in the 1963 Cleary novel Sister of the Bride.

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[Stebbins: Stebbins Hall, University of California at Berkeley.]

“Poet voice”

From Atlas Obscura: An Algorithmic Investigation of the Highfalutin “Poet Voice.” You know, that ineptly . . . musical voice? The one that rises? And falls where you least . . . expect it? Poet voice (or as I call, poetry voice) tells an audience that the person reading is a poet, the real thing, because this is what poetry sounds like. One voice fits all.

And now I’m reminded of an observation from the poet David Bromige, posted to the SUNY-Buffalo Poetics List, January 10, 1997. He’s writing about teaching poetry to college students and about the damage done by high school:

They cd only recognize a poem when it was in the missionary position. That a poem might be as opaque as a person, capable of many kinds of caress, much playful laughter, of brooding withholding silences, of orderly thought or persuasive choplogic, of trivial drivel, of witty observations — that it might even be a dreadful machine psychotic — they had not been permitted, though in their years of sturm and drang, to realize.

And now I’m hearing Frank O’Hara in my head: “Lana Turner has collapsed!” Not poet voice: a poet.

Two related posts
Here’s a poem for today : Marjorie Perloff on the “well-crafted” poem

[I’ve borrowed a description of poetry voice from a post about a 2015 Toyota commercial.]

Imaginary elevator

[Two people recognize each other as they wait for an elevator.]

“Oh. Well, hello. About that joke — I have to admit, it’s pretty dated. And I can see how it must have struck you as offensive. I should have realized that not everyone is going get a joke that relies upon knowledge of department-store elevator operators, and that calling out something about lingerie could sound enormously inappropriate. Believe me, I won’t be making that joke again.”

“Well, I’m glad. Really, it’s not my responsibility to instruct grown men about what’s appropriate and inappropriate in public spaces. But your reference to lingerie did suggest, in a rather crass and public way, a preoccupation with women’s bodies. Still, I’m willing to take you at your word that your joke was meant as an elevator joke, nothing more.”

“It’s good to know that.”

[The elevator arrives, the door opens, and they enter.]

“What floor?”

“Notions and Sundries.”

[They laugh.]

Whatever happens in the aftermath of a recent incident of elevator trouble, it is unlikely to take the form that I’ve presented here. My elevator is entirely imaginary.

The ambiguity about who’s making the joke at the end is intended.

Broadening a point

College English with Mr. Frank Palmer, who sports a Phi Beta Kappa key on his watch fob:

Mr. Palmer guided us through Beowulf and Macbeth, which I had studied in high school, The Mayor of Casterbridge, biography, essays, and modern American poetry. He required us to learn to spell Nietzsche, the name of a German philosopher I have never had occasion to use. Best of all, he assigned original compositions but instructed us never to use the expression “broaden our horizons” because, he said, “the horizon is the point at which the earth and sky meet, and it is impossible to broaden a point.” I never have, even though I am not sure I agree.

Beverly Cleary, My Own Two Feet: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1995).

It’s smart to avoid “broaden our horizons” as a stale, trite expression. But isn’t the horizon better conceived as a line, at least a figurative one? Merriam-Webster: “the line where the earth seems to meet the sky.” The vanishing point, well, that’s a point.

I hope that this post has broadened all your horizons.

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Proust auction

Coming soon to the Paris Sotheby’s, the Marie-Claude Mante collection of Proustiana:

a major Proustian archive from the library of Proust’s grandniece: 60 lots of letters, books, presentation copies and literary manuscripts. In addition to an unpublished pastiche of Ruskin, galley proofs of À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, a first draft on the source of the river Loir (prelude to a famous part of Du Côté de chez Swann) and an original drawing, the collection includes a very significant collection of letters from Gaston Gallimard to Marcel Proust between 1912 to the author’s death in 1922.

Here’s a more detailed description of what’s for sale.

What I love about this kind of unattainable reality: there is a catalogue of it, in French, filled with photographs, free for the downloading. The Proust material begins on page 125. Thank you, auctioneers.

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Elevator trouble in academia

First reported in The Washington Post. Now also in The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed.

The trouble stems from a quip made in an elevator during the conference of the International Studies Association: when a passenger (male in one account, female in another) asked which buttons to press, another passenger, a male academic, requested “Ladies’ Lingerie” or “Women’s Lingerie” (it’s not clear which). A female academic riding in the elevator made a formal complaint to the ISA. An e-mailed non-apology from the offender to the offended has created further trouble. The ISA has asked the offender to make an “unequivocal apology.” And news of this incident has led to vicious comments and threats posted to the offended party’s webpage.

The joke is old and silly, recalling the days when elevator operators announced department-store departments floor by floor. In 2018, the joke is unmistakably inappropriate. “Haberdashery” or “Linens, please” might be a better joke, if one must make a joke in an elevator full of strangers. And — if one must make a joke that assumes knowledge of a long-past elevator custom, a custom that some of those strangers may not know about.

This sentence from the offended party’s complaint stands out: “It took me a while to figure out that this man thought it was funny to make a reference to men shopping for lingerie while attending an academic conference.” But he wasn’t making a reference to shopping for lingerie while attending an academic conference; he was doing so while riding in an elevator. The academic who filed the complaint was raised abroad and came to the United States in 1989 — which makes me wonder whether she knew about department-store elevator announcements. If she did, a request for “Ladies’ Lingerie” (or “Women’s Lingerie”) would still be unmistakably inappropriate. If she didn’t, a request for “Ladies’ Lingerie” (or “Women’s Lingerie”) would seem bizarre, frightening, unfathomable.

A possible response, spoken in the moment: “Don’t be a sexist jerk.” Or stronger words to that effect. But I don’t think this quip — or even a refusal to apologize for it — should become the stuff of an ISA inquiry. Not every social misfire or misjudgment should lead to sanctions.

A related post
Imaginary elevator (The offender and the offended meet again)

[If the offended party didn’t know about the convention of floor requests, she does now. The offender’s e-mailed non-apology says that in the 1950s, asking for the hardware or lingerie department was “a standard gag line” for elevator passengers. Yes, in the 1950s. Not now.]

*

November 15, 2018: The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the ISA has rejected the offender’s appeal and has asked, again, that the offender make an “unequivocal apology.” If he doesn’t, he will receive a letter of reprimand. The offender has announced that he will sue for defamation. Not clear who’ll be sued.

[Note the academic pace of events here: six months for the ISA to come to a decision.]

Pareidolic parking

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

Barnes & Noble & the future

David Leonhardt, writing in The New York Times about saving Barnes & Noble, quotes Owen Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, an association of independent bookstores:

Once the country emerges from the Trump presidency, I hope we will have a government that takes monopolies seriously. Until then, I’ll be rooting for Barnes & Noble. So, it turns out, are some people who once viewed it as the enemy. “It’s in the interest of the book business,” Teicher says, “for Barnes & Noble not just to survive but to thrive.”

In a 2011 post about Barnes & Noble, I wrote that “Bookstore survival-strategy seems to be premised on everything but books.” At my nearby Barnes & Noble that’s still the case, with larger sections of the store given over to toys and games and collectibles. Leonhardt mentions that the chain is planning “smaller, more appealing stores focused on books.” But his link goes to an article about a Barnes & Noble store whose main attractions are a bar and a restaurant. And oh, there are books, seeming like an afterthought: “No Barnes & Noble would be complete without its books.”

Recently updated

One space, two spaces The Washington Post reports on the one-space-or-two research study.

Dowdy finals

Dowdy-world final exams at the University of California at Berkeley:

In those days, before ballpoint pens, we filled our fountain pens, emptied them, and refilled them just to make sure. We self-addressed postcards to enclose in our blue books so readers could send us our grades before official grades came out. Then, as was the Cal custom the first day of finals, the Campanile tolled “An’ they’re hangin’ Danny Deever in the morn’.”

Beverly Cleary, My Own Two Feet: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1995).

As a college student in the 1970s, I routinely turned in postcards with my finals. Students were still doing so when I started on the tenure track in 1985.

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[“Readers”: graduate students.]