No mail

It was the start of the semester, the second or third class of the first week. I walked into the classroom with a backpack full of books and CDs, which I thought would increase my cred with students. I hadn’t brought anything related to the class, as I realized when I looked through the backpack. Several students gathered at my desk to look at the CDs. And I thought to myself: what was I going to assign? A student whom I knew from a previous class asked me to explain something in “the book” — not a book for our class, just some book. I looked at the page and explained it, and she thanked me.

Then I went to check my mail. The mailboxes had been reorganized into three rows from six, and the first row now began with the end of the alphabet. Where was my name? “You don’t work here anymore,” a colleague told me. That’s right, I thought. I’m retired, but I’m still teaching, so there could at least be a mailbox for me. I recognized another colleague in the hallway. He had lost an enormous amount of weight and was nearly bald, but still, I recognized him, or thought I did. I felt that I was taking a chance when I addressed him by name. He too was retired but still teaching, so I asked him if he knew where I could find my mail. He showed me a drawer under the mailboxes. But it was filled with Band-Aids: no mail.

It was now 5:30, and I walked through the hallways looking for someone else to ask. I saw no one, though many of the offices had the door open and lights on. I thought about how strange it might feel to all at once see someone in what appeared to be an empty well-lit building.

[This is the thirteenth teaching-related dream I’ve had since retiring. Not one has gone well. The others: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12.]

Poetry on NPR

I respond deeply to bad blues, bad jazz, and bad poetry. I groan, wince, make guttural sounds. I can’t take it, I tell ya. Lemme out!

Driving through the night last night, Elaine and I heard an NPR segment with a poet recommending books of poetry to give as gifts. “Poetry is short,” the poet said, “so you can actually reroute your day productively in like five minutes with something that really captures your imagination.” Well, no. I groaned.

Then came the recommended books, with sample passages. Here’s nature: “Perhaps the butterflies are mute because / no one would believe their terrible stories.” Well, no. The poet would, for one. The recommender would, for two. And from another book, more nature, this time bees: “tipsy, sun drunk / and heavy with thick knitted leg warmers / of pollen.” After those lines I made guttural sounds.

And no, NPR, the witches’ song from Macbeth is not a sonnet. I’d better use up my wince here.

A related post
A Palm memo (With some bad poetry)

[I have reproduced the lines accurately, after checking the texts.]

Unabated

The hypocrisy never ends: in Bedminster, New Jersey, an undocumented immigrant cleans house at Trump National Golf Club. And: “She said she was not the only worker at the club who was in the country illegally.”

“The Immigrants”

Gaby Moreno and Van Dyke Parks’s recording of David Rudder’s “The Immigrants” has made Jon Pareles’s list of the best songs of 2018. All proceeds from downloads and streaming go to the Central American Resource Center of California.

Not just a white Christmas

The times are changing: Hallmark premieres four movies this holiday season with African-American male and female leads, the first such movies in Hallmark history. The movies themselves appear to be the same old same old: Christmas galas and festivals, a gingerbread contest, a historic-preservation battle, a return to a childhood home. But now with leads of color.

Two of these movies, Christmas Everlasting and A Majestic Christmas, air tonight. Memories of Christmas airs on Saturday the 8th; A Gingerbread Romance, on Sunday the 17th. Check, as they say, your local listings.

Italic frenemy

Nancy’s friend Esther has a frenemy: “Esther, it’s so nice to see you.”


[Nancy, December 6, 2018.]

I am cheered to know that at least one cartoon character is alert enough to notice and comment snarkily on typography. But hold up: what about Nancy’s own words in boldface? Well, boldface has always been available in Nancy, old and new, available for everyone to use. I assume that for Nancy, boldface is just the way things have always worked. Nothing to see there.

Olivia Jaimes’s tricky meta-comedy is a delight. Jaimes and Bill Griffith rule my small comic-strip world.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Clara

Arthur Schnitzler, “Baron von Leisenberg’s Destiny.” 1904. In “Night Games” and Other Stories and Novellas, trans. Margret Schaefer (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002).

Other Schnitzler posts
“Maestro!” : A morning after

Whither the Usage Panel?

David Skinner traces the evolution of the American Heritage Dictionary: “The Dictionary and Us” (The Weekly Standard). The impetus for the article: the quiet, very quiet disbanding of the famed AHD Usage Panel (yes, capitalized) this past February. According to Skinner, the panel never had more than “a very modest role” in the making of the AHD.

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)
A review of The Story of Ain’t, Skinner’s history of Webster’s Third

[“Quiet, very quiet”: so quiet that I can’t find anything about it online, not even at the Dictionary Society of North America. The AHD website still lists Usage Panel members. But Skinner himself was a member, so he would know if the panel has been disbanded.]

Lines

Just a few of the redacted lines in the addendum to Robert Mueller’s sentencing recommendation re: Michael Flynn. Flynn is described as assisting in “several ongoing investigations.” As little Talia would say, “Uh-oh!”

You can read the memo and the addendum at Axios.

New directions

A Hallmark movie has quoted “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: the line about measuring out life with coffee spoons. Yes, someone runs a café. And the reply: “You’re an Eliot fan too?” OMG they’re made for each other.

[The movie is Love Always, Santa (dir. Brian Herzlinger, 2016). I’ve been misremembering the Eliot line as “in coffee spoons” for, like, forever. OMG.]