Working with Avital Ronell

At The Chronicle of Higher Education, Andrea Long Chu writes about working as one of Avital Ronell’s teaching assistants. Chu believes the allegations against Ronell: “It is simply no secret to anyone within a mile of the German or comp-lit departments at NYU that Avital is abusive.” An excerpt:

A culture of critics in name only, where genuine criticism is undertaken at the risk of ostracism, marginalization, retribution — this is where abuses like Avital’s grow like moss, or mold. Graduate students know this intuitively; it is written on their bones.

Yes. I remember the joking self-characterization of my school days: “I am a lowly graduate student.” That should never have been a joke.

Related posts
The Avital Ronell story : Prestigious signatures : Derrida’s archives

What Biden was paraphrasing

What Joe Biden was paraphrasing in his eulogy for John McCain:

’A was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.

That’s from Hamlet, I.2, Hamlet speaking of his father to Horatio. Biden’s paraphrase: “We shall not see his like again.”

[I don’t think there’s yet a transcript of the eulogy. Biden’s words about grief and mourning, reprised from 2012, are online and well worth reading.]

Nancy pop corn

[Nancy, n.d.]

Today’s installment of yesterday’s Nancy prompts the question: Was popcorn once spelled as two words? Yes. The Oxford English Dictionary has citations for the variety of maize and the snack with pop corn, pop-corn, and popcorn. The earliest citations with the solid spelling: 1893 for the maize, 1922 for the snack. But pop corn soldiered and soldiers on. Look:


[Life, December 25, 1950.]

Today the Jolly Time website uses both pop corn and popcorn: “He grew popcorn.” “Popcorn is the perfect snack.” “Butter, sea salt, pop corn & oil.”

Oh — popcorn machines first appeared in movie theaters in 1938. My mom and I were wondering about that recently.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Oliver Sacks and words

In The New York Times, Bill Hayes writes about Oliver Sacks’s love of words:

Even if he had never written a single one, I am sure Oliver would still have been that funny fellow who took giant dictionaries to bed for light reading (aided by a magnifying glass). He delighted in etymology, synonyms and antonyms, slang, swear words, palindromes, anatomical terms, neologisms (but objected, in principle, to contractions). He could joyfully parse the difference between homonyms and homophones, not to mention homographs, in dinner table conversation. (He also relished saying those three words — that breathy “H” alliteration — in his distinctive British accent.)

If you, like me, are fumbling to articulate the difference between homonyms and homphones, not to mention homographs: look here. (Not hear.)

Related reading
All OCA Oliver Sacks posts (Pinboard)

“An idiosyncrasy peculiar to the herring”

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1998).

Donald S. Murray’s Herring Tales: How the Silver Darlings Shaped Human Taste and History (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) says that there is “no evidence” that the effort to illuminate cities with fishy phosphorescence was successful:

The failure of the “eccentric undertaking” described by Sebald was so great that it left little of lasting legacy. It is tempting to conclude that the author’s odd choice of names for his scientists — Herrington and Lightbown — is a quirky invention, one of his own “red herrings,” sending the reader off on every bit as much a wrong scent as the fox in that ancient practice, when that strong-smelling fish was employed to trick the hounds from following in their quarry’s tracks. For all that the practice of generating light from herring occurred in the late nineteenth century, there does not appear to be a record of the existence of any two English scientists with their names.

Related reading
All OCA Sebald posts (Pinboard)

Falltime

One way to know you’re now in your sixties: at a yearly physical, the first question from both nurse and doctor is “Have you fallen in the last year?”

Uh, no.

Deb Larson-Venable talks about David Foster Wallace

I found it by chance: a 2014 recording of Deb Larson-Venable talking with Christopher Lydon about David Foster Wallace. Deb is the executive director of Granada House, the halfway house where Wallace got sober. Lydon asks,

“He wrote that he did this under a death sentence — that it was either get into recovery or you’re dead in two years. That concentrates the mind, and maybe that propels you willy-nilly toward community. Are there other ways to get there?”

And Deb’s answer: “You mean from — ? No.”

Deb, a Granada House resident who stayed on, appears in Infinite Jest as Pat Montesian. Deb’s story of recovery appears at the Granada House website. As does Wallace’s, the first story on this page.

Why have I written Deb and not Larson-Venable? Because I met Deb Larson-Venable in 2010, on a trip to Boston, when Elaine and I went to Granada House to make a contribution.

A related post
DFW and Granada House

[Wallace’s history of cruelty and violence toward women was well known, at least in part, by 2014. It plays no part in the conversation.]

Pocket notebook sighting

This fellow shows up in one scene in La roue (The Wheel) (dir. Abel Gance, 1923). His newspaper is just a cover. His real work: recording the drinking habits of the trainmen.


[Click any image for a larger view.]

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : Cat People : City Girl : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : Route 66 : The Sopranos : Spellbound : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Time Table : T-Men : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window

MSNBC, sheesh

A few minutes ago: “Mueller might lay low.”

Garner’s Modern English Usage on lie low and lay low: “The latter phrase is common but loose. The two phrasings both appear in print, but the correct lying low is three times as common as laying low.”

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

[This post is the kind of thing that happens when I watch the news.]

A last word from John McCain

From a letter addressed to his “fellow Americans”:

We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.

We are three-hundred-and-twenty-five million opinionated, vociferous individuals. We argue and compete and sometimes even vilify each other in our raucous public debates. But we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement. If only we remember that and give each other the benefit of the presumption that we all love our country we will get through these challenging times. We will come through them stronger than before.

The letter echoes McCain’s 2017 speech at National Constitution Center. I hear too what I think is an echo of what Barack Obama said in 2011: “The forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.” I hope that Obama and McCain are right.