Henry’s end

 
[Zippy and Henry, October 28, 2018. Click for larger views.]

Now I understand why yesterday’s Zippy took the form of an ontological argument for the existence of Henry. As I learned this morning, Comics Kingdom has dropped Henry reruns from its offerings. Yesterday’s Henry is the last of Henry we’ll see.

In yesterday’s strip, Henry and his dog Dusty go rolling down a hill in their wagon. The wagon speeds out of control and boy and dog tumble out. As Sisyphean Henry prepares to ascend the hill, Dusty dashes away. I would like to think that the final panel (above) shows Henry having turned away from that hill, away from eternal repetition. Just whistle off, Henry, to fresh streets, and candy stores new. Dusty will follow.

Venn reading
Henry posts : Henry and Zippy posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)

A clean, well-lighted place

On doing das Äusserste, the utmost, or the Utmost:


Franz Kafka, Letter to the Father, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York: Schocken Books, 1966).

[Kafka’s definition of the utmost: “marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come, supporting them in this insecure world and perhaps even guiding them a little.” Kafka wrote this letter in 1919 and gave it to his mother Julie to give to his father Hermann. Hermann never received the letter. Max Brod gave the letter the title by which it’s known: Brief an den Vater. The father, not his, seinen.]

“A clearer perspective of the world”

Franz Kafka, Letter to the Father, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York: Schocken Books, 1966).

Related reading
All OCA Kafka posts (Pinboard)

Help Wanted

From The Washington Post:

President Trump on Saturday strongly condemned the deadly mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue as “pure evil” and anti-Semitic, and then, without skipping a beat, slipped into campaign mode with attacks on trade deals, a discourse on palm trees and a dig at a potential 2020 rival.

Just over a week before midterm elections, the president traveled to Indiana for a convention speech and later a political rally in Illinois, though he joked about canceling both events because of a “bad hair day.”

There is something wrong with this man. He needs help. Our country needs help.

Vote.

Learning to read

Emily Hanford, education correspondent for American Public Media, asks why we are still teaching reading the wrong way: “To become readers, kids need to learn how the words they know how to say connect to print on the page. They need explicit, systematic phonics instruction.” Yes, they do.

I recall, many years ago, working as a volunteer tutor with a local literacy program. Big emphasis on “sight words” — men, women, push, pull, danger — and yes, being able to recognize such words is of urgent importance. But I remember asking at a training session: If it’s only sight words, what is a student supposed to do with unfamiliar words? There was, as you might guess, no good answer.

In my tutoring I was able to use phonics-based workbooks, which proved immensely helpful to my students. And I remember one wonderful moment helping a student work out the sh sound with a word that wasn’t in our workbook, or in any workbook. “Here’s another word, Howard, one you’ve already known most of your life.” That was a moment of great hilarity in the library basement.

No screens for these kids

The New York Times reports on tech types who keep their children away from screens:

A wariness that has been slowly brewing is turning into a regionwide consensus: The benefits of screens as a learning tool are overblown, and the risks for addiction and stunting development seem high. The debate in Silicon Valley now is about how much exposure to phones is O.K.

Everything old is new again: in 2011 the Times ran an article about a screen-free Silicon Valley Waldorf school.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Greg Johnson, is challenging. For me, thirty-three minutes worth of challenging. The clue that helped me find my way: 47-Down, six letters, “It’s served in Elvis’ ‘Blue Hawaii.’” I had one letter, a vowel, took a guess, and had the answer that broke the puzzle open.

Three clues in especially liked: 14-Across, four letters: “California Perfume Company, today.” (I learned something.) 15-Across, five letters, “Hammer home.” And 61-Down, three letters, “What one might hang in the street.” I think the pronoun in that last clue is well chosen. No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Gray Wilkerson Ra

Larry Gray, bass, cello, six-string electric bass
Edward Wilkerson Jr., clarinet, alto clarinet,
    tenor saxophone, didgeridoo, oud
Avreeayl Ra, percussion, Native American flute

Krannert Art Museum
University of Illinois, Champaign
October 25, 2018

Five years ago this trio appeared at the University of Illinois’s Krannert Center for the Performing Arts as Chicago Connection, performing a seven-part suite by Larry Gray. This time, as Gray Wilkerson Ra, they played one extended (perhaps hour-long) improvisation whose shifts in mood were born of listening and responding from moment to moment. Or, to borrow from Theodore Roethke, thinking by feeling.

The performance began with the musicians taking soundings, as it were: Gray plucking high notes on the bass, Wilkerson playing tenor with a scarf in its bell to soften the sound, Ra striking a metal bowl placed on a drumhead. The sound opened out and grew in intensity before giving way to a dialogue for cello, oud, and percussion, with Gray and Wilkerson plucking and snapping strings. Later: bowed cello and alto clarinet, then bowed bass and didgeridoo, their musical lines weaving about one another. Still later, a flute joined by cello and alto clarinet, then clarinet with electric bass at the top of its register, sounding like a classical guitar. And at every turn, Ra’s percussion supporting, commenting, or adding intensity. There were moments of delicate beauty, moments of wild energy, and a terrifically swinging interlude for tenor (by this time without the scarf), walking bass, and drums. At some point the scarf went back in the bell. And then silence. Was more to come? No, that was the end, an end that felt both spontaneously arrived at and inevitable.

You can get some idea of the trio at work from YouTube, but this kind of music is best heard in the moment.

My favorite moment: seeing Gray and Ra lock eyes and dig in, as Wilkerson, eyes closed (I think), wailed on tenor. If music is the healing force of the universe, these musicians provided some serious universal healthcare last night.

Thanks to Jason Finkelman, who continues to bring the news of the world to east-central Illinois.

More on the musicians
Larry Gray : Avreeayl Ra : Edward Wilkerson Jr.

[“We think by feeling”: from Theodore Roethke’s poem “The Waking.” Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe: a 1969 album by Albert Ayler.]

FilmStruck

In the mail today:



The FilmStruck website offers no explanation, but Variety does:

The move appeared to be the latest by WarnerMedia, under AT&T’s ownership, to streamline operations by cutting niche-oriented business ventures. Two sources familiar with the decision said the plan to kill FilmStruck was made prior to AT&T’s closing the Time Warner deal; in any case, the strategy aligns with the new WarnerMedia blueprint to shift resources to mass-market entertainment services.

FilmStruck’s demise is a great loss for people who love film, or even just movies.

Remember when the advice to small businesses was to “find a niche”? Yeah, right. Our household’s response to WarnerMedia: Fie on you. Fie!

Secret, secretary

One more from Ammon Shea:

I’m constantly finding that the former meaning of a word differs significantly from how I know it today. When I learned that secretary meant “one privy to a secret” during the fourteenth century I was utterly delighted. And then almost immediately I began scolding myself for not having realized such an obvious precedent, and thought that I should feel no excitement at discovering something that in hindsight seems so obvious. But it is exciting to make these little discoveries about the language, and it shouldn’t matter at all if they are obvious to someone else.

Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages (New York: Penguin, 2008).

The earliest Oxford English Dictionary definition of secretary: “one who is entrusted with private or secret matters; a confidant; one privy to a secret.” Secretary comes into English from medieval Latin: “sēcrētārius a secretary, notary, scribe, etc., a title applied to various confidential officers (properly an adj.).”

Is the secret of secretary already obvious to you? It wasn’t to me. I told my mom, who worked as an executive secretary in the 1950s, about it: she didn’t know either.


[Peanuts, October 29, 1971. Peanuts past is Peanuts present.]

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)
Words of the day: apricity, apricot
A home entertainment system

[“One privy to a secret”: why the OED italicizes to must remain a secret.]