An editorial

A New York Times editorial: “Seizing Children From Parents at the Border Is Immoral. Here’s What We Can Do About It.” Have you called your representatives in Congress yet?

And now, just minutes ago: “Trump says he would oppose immigration bill cobbled together by House GOP, dealing a blow to leaders rallying support for it” (The Washington Post).

[There is such a thing as overriding a veto.]

Mac hardware :(

Mac developer Quentin Carnicelli writes about the sad state of Mac hardware:

It’s very difficult to recommend much from the current crop of Macs to customers, and that’s deeply worrisome to us, as a Mac-based software company. For our own internal needs, we’ve wound up purchasing used hardware for testing, rather than opting to compromise heavily on a new machine. That isn’t good for Apple, nor is it what we want. . . .

Apple needs to publicly show their commitment to the full Macintosh hardware line, and they need to do it now. As a long (long) time Mac OS developer, one hesitates to bite the hand that feeds. At a certain point, however, it seems there won’t even be anything left worth biting.

My late-2011 MacBook Pro won’t be able to use the upcoming macOS 10.14. I’d like to buy a new, faster machine, but one try at the MBP’s redesigned keyboard put me off. And that was before I knew about keyboard failures. So for now, I’ll be holding out with Roy Earle.

One quick way to make an older machine faster online: use Cloudflare’s DNS. Bam!

“Germania Round the Clock”

Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz. 1929. Trans. Michael Hoffman (New York: New York Review Books, 2018).

Related reading
All OCA Döblin posts (Pinboard)

Prestigious signatures

An ugly episode in academia: a Title IX investigation of Avital Ronell, followed by a letter supporting her, signed by prominent academics, that reads like an effort to decide the case. The Chronicle of Higher Education describes the situation. The letter (a version has been posted online) acknowledges that those who have signed have “no access to the confidential dossier” of the complaint against Ronell. Still, the signers “seek to register in clear terms our objection to any judgment against her.” The letter trades, blatantly, on academic prestige:

There is arguably no more important figure in literary studies at New York University than Avital Ronell whose intellectual power and fierce commitment to students and colleagues has established her as an exemplary intellectual and mentor throughout the academy. As you know, she is the Jacques Derrida Chair of Philosophy at the European Graduate School and she was recently given the award of Chevalier of Arts and Letters by the French government.

I will quote something I wrote in 2007, when a story came to light about Jacques Derrida’s attempt quash a sexual harassment charge against a friend and colleague:

Injustice in this situation would seem to me to be the use of academic power and prestige to influence the resolution of a harassment charge.

That goes for this situation as well.

Ronell knows something about prestigious signatures. She was quoted in a Los Angeles Times article about the Derrida case:

“Toward the end of his life, he enjoyed the same status as Aristotle among the ancients, and every perception of injustice was routed to his desk,” said Avital Ronell, a Derrida protege who teaches at New York University. “Even as he was crawling with fatigue, he put himself in the service of those seeking his help and needing the strength of his prestigious signature.”

Very strange: by 2009, that passage, which lives on at several websites, had disappeared from the online article. And today, neither Derrida nor Ronell can be found in the Times archives. Stranger still: this afternoon, they can be. But this article is still missing.

August 15: Further developments.

[In a 2007 Chronicle article (behind the paywall), Ronell describes Derrida’s friend and colleague in less than noble terms: “‘This guy had nothing better to do than to ask Jacques for help.’”]

La Posta Fazzio

[Click for an even larger label.]

Elaine and I like South American wines. When we finished reading Jorge Luis Borges’s Collected Fictions, we bought several bottles from Argentina. It was the label that drew me to La Posta Fazzio Malbec. It so happens that the wine is good too. But that label!

Here is Domingo Fazzio, holding a bottle of his Malbec. ¡Salud!

Zippy Dean

[Zippy, June 13, 2018.]

In today’s Zippy, Zippy walks in the rain, just like James Dean in a famous Dennis Stock photograph. The last panel of today’s strip has its source in a less famous photograph. The other two panels? Nothing has turned up.

This post has been brought to you by the S&A Detective Agency, tracking down sources and analogues since earlier this week.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[“Sources and analogues”: a form of literary scholarship. For instance, Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.”]

Whatever became of John Kidd?

“I started by contacting all the homeless shelters in Brookline”: in The New York Times, Jack Hiatt recounts his search for the James Joyce scholar John Kidd. Readers of a certain age may remember Kidd’s 1988 article “The Scandal of Ulysses” and the controversy surrounding Hans Walter Gabler’s 1984 edition of Joyce’s novel. And here is David Abel’s 2002 Boston Globe article about John Kidd, “A Plummet from Grace.”

I sold my copy of Gabler’s three-volume “critical and synoptic edition” some years ago. It had begun to feel like an artifact from someone else’s life.

[Two quarrels with Hiatt’s article: Kidd was not regarded as “the greatest James Joyce scholar.” And Leopold Bloom is not a “schlub.”]

“Sliding imperceptibly forward”

Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz. 1929. Trans. Michael Hoffman (New York: New York Review Books, 2018).

Related reading
All OCA Döblin posts (Pinboard)

Channeling Chandler

[Zippy, June 12, 2018.]

Zippy is channeling Raymond Chandler again. From the story “Red Wind” (1938):

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.

Today’s strip borrows also from The Big Sleep (1939). Just doing my job here at S&A.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)
Talking like a Raymond Chandler novel

[S&A: the Sources and Analogues Detective Agency.]

DKNK

Nicholas Kristof: “It’s breathtaking to see an American president emerge as a spokesman for the dictator of North Korea.”

And then there was this comment:

“They have great beaches. You see that whenever they’re exploding their cannons into the ocean, right? I said ‘Boy, look at that view. Wouldn’t that make a great condo behind?’ And I explained, I said, you know, instead of doing that you could have the best hotels in the world right there. Think of it from a real-estate perspective.”

As Elaine can attest, I thought that hotels were going to come into the discussion.

[DK: Dunning K. Trump. With apologies to DKNY. I have transcribed Trump’s remarks about beaches to add the behind and you know that the Times omitted.]