Cursive camp

“I love how, at the end of the day, you see all the amazing stuff we can do with letters”: in Danbury, Connecticut, a cursive-writing camp for children. And there’ll soon be a Friday-night offering for grown-ups.

Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)

Labor Day

[“Welder making boilers for a ship, Combustion Engineering Co., Chattanooga, Tenn.” Photograph by Alfred T. Palmer. June 1942. From the Library of Congress. Click for a larger view.]

Randy Weston (1926–2018)

“An esteemed pianist whose music and scholarship advanced the argument — now broadly accepted — that jazz is, at its core, an African music”: the pianist and composer Randy Weston has died at the age of ninety-two.

Here, from 1985, is Weston performing one of his best-known compositions, “Hi-Fly.” And here, from 2013, is an extended performance at the National Museum of American History.

Leaving Las Vegas

[I remembered this story the other day and thought it worth sharing here. I’ve reconstructed the dialogue. But every word is true.]

I was teaching an intro lit course in the fall, the usual twenty or so students. In the fourth week of the semester, someone new showed up. I remembered a name from the roster and asked, “Are you         ?” I asked to talk to him after class.

“It’s the fourth week of the semester,” I said, or words to that effect. “How come you haven’t been to class?” I could not have imagined what I was about to hear.

“I was in Las Vegas.”

“What were you doing in Las Vegas?”

“I was going to school.”

“But you were registered here, for this class. Have you missed all your classes here?”

“No, just this one.”

“So you’ve been going to your other classes? Why haven’t you come to this class?”

“I told you — I was in Las Vegas!”

I hadn’t yet read Infinite Jest. If I had, I would have registered the David Foster Wallace sign of baffled silence: “...”

I gave the student a syllabus and all materials that had gone out in class. He had already missed two writing assignments. An in-class writing assignment was scheduled for the next class meeting, which meant that he had to read quite a bit, right away.

As I soon learned, there was some truth to “I was in Las Vegas.” The student had transferred after attending a school in Las Vegas the previous academic year. So he had, at some point, been in Las Vegas. An athletics adviser (yes, the student was an athlete) called to assure me that he would be making up all his assignments promptly. The student must have alerted her to his sudden, unexpected difficulties. I had to alert her to the course policy: “Late writing is acceptable only if you have my approval in advance.”

As I recall, the student disappeared from the class not long after his first appearance. He never dropped, perhaps so that he could hold on to enough credit hours to remain a full-time student. I wish I could have asked him what it had been like going to school in Las Vegas.

Book clubs and the Internets

The Economist reports on book clubs and the Internets:

Surveys consistently reveal a thwarted desire among adults to read more, with work emails and mindless social-media scrolling being the main thieves of time that could otherwise be spent on a good book. Yet it is precisely these tools that are also enabling vast numbers of people to enter into dialogues, discover new writers and instigate friendships.

Elaine and I belong to a reading club that meets offline, virtually every day. Synchronous reading. Right now, Balzac’s Cousin Bette. And gosh, does Bette Fischer remind me of Avital Ronell.

As the formal study of literature continues to wane, informal reading groups will likely take on greater and greater importance. See George Steiner on “houses of reading.”

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Brad Wilber, is difficult. At first I thought it’d be a breeze. 1-Down, six letters: ”Supervisor of deck hands”? Kid stuff! But then I moved on.

The clue that broke the puzzle open for me: 38-Down, seven letters: “Made just for you in London.” Most fiendish clue of all: 16-Across, four letters: “Cap conclusion.” ITAL? TAIN? No. As always, no spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Oliver Sacks’s marginalia

Bill Hayes, Oliver Sacks’s partner in the last six years of Sacks’s life, is posting photographs of Sacks’s marginalia.

Related reading
All OCA Oliver Sacks posts (Pinboard)

A “fluid plane”

J.W. Dunne, An Experiment with Time, 3rd. ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1958).

J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time, first published in 1927 and widely read in its day, advances a theory of dreaming as a form of precognition. In a post about Insomniac Dreams, the recently published book that collects Vladimir Nabokov’s experiments with Dunne’s theory, I mentioned in passing that Dunne seems to be a figure straight from the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

I have now turned the pages of An Experiment with Time (thank you, interlibrary loan) and am excited to see a number of baffling diagrams. This one is my favorite. And now I strongly suspect that Dunne’s work helped to inspire the MJT’s Geoffrey Sonnabend and his theory of obliscence. Consider this diagram, which appears on an MJT T-shirt, or this one, which appears on the cover of a pamphlet summarizing Sonnabend’s work.

I’m a longtime fan of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and yes, I have both the T-shirt and the pamphlet. Lawrence Weschler’s Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995) is an excellent introduction to the museum and its work. I visited in 2012 and was lucky to meet David Wilson, who happened to walk by as we stood in the rooftop garden. Right place, right time.

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.]