Eris in the news

From Andy Borowitz:

Eris, the Greek goddess of chaos, discord, and strife, revealed on Friday that she had wanted Donald J. Trump to be President.

Speaking from her temple on Mt. Olympus, the usually reclusive deity said that Trump was “far and away” her first choice to be President in 2016.

“I’d been following his career for years,” the goddess of disorder and ruin said. “The bankruptcies, the business failures. There was a lot for me to love.”

[Context: Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s comments about Trump and a different deity.]

Flee — it’s InCoWriMo!

It’s February, or International Correspondence Writing Month, which asks participants “to hand-write and mail/deliver one letter, card, note or postcard every day during the month of February.”

I am reminded of a story told by Bill Youngren, professor, polymath, all-around good guy. Bill knew a musician who spent time going through the telephone directory with a big stack of postcards. The musician (and, it appears, part-time surrealist) chose names at random, addressed cards, and added a short message: “Flee — all is revealed!”

He could have dispatched his InCoWriMo responsibilities in a single sitting.

More reading

On one page of The Chronicle of Higher Education, an argument for less reading and more “writing.” But on another page: an account of a community-college’s effort to make use of Columbia University’s core curriculum:

The first texts in the two-course sequence focus on nonfiction and typically include Plato’s dialogues, Wollstonecraft, Du Bois, and founding documents, including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and Federalist Paper No. 10, as well as a speech by Frederick Douglass on the meaning to slaves of the Fourth of July. The second semester is dedicated to fiction and has included The Odyssey, Hamlet, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.

I know the responses many academics will have to such a program. There will be talk of hegemony. And “We can’t ask our students to,” &c. But you can.

Strunk and Kondo again

The Elements of Style reappeared in the fifth episode of the Netflix series Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. The book is a point of contention between Aaron and Sehnita.


“Think you’re gonna use this, or you have the Internet?” Aaron asks. “You got the Internet, don’t you think?”


[Click for a much larger view.]

Sehnita frowns. And as Aaron pages through the book, she looks away and asks, “Can it be in a maybe pile?”


[Click for a much larger view.]

That’s the maybe pile, all around Sehnita. She likes books.

A related post
Strunk and Kondo

[There must be at least one ex-English major at work on this show.]

Less reading, more “writing”

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, a professor argues that the solution to the problem of students not reading is to assign less reading, no more than one five-page article per class meeting:

Call me unrigorous if you like, but rethinking reading lists has reinvigorated my classroom and my students’ writing in some surprising ways. In a future post, I’ll talk about including podcasts, interactive texts, and videos as part of students’ final “writing” projects.

Less reading and more “writing.”

So odd that assigning reading and writing in a college class becomes equated with “rigor” and “virtue-signaling.” To my mind, reading and writing are just things one does in a college class. As students’ language skills decline, assigning less reading and more “writing” solves nothing.

A related post
Academically Adrift

A Ravel Kaddish

Today, at the European Parliament in Brussels, the Quatuor Girard and Clémence Poussin performed Elaine Fine’s arrangement of a Maurice Ravel setting of the Kaddish, originally for voice and piano. The performance marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27). Video available here.

What an honor for Elaine, aka Musical Assumptions, aka my spouse.

For all in the weather

It was -12 °F earlier this morning, with a windchill of -37. And much worse elsewhere. May all in the weather be safe.

Angry robot

[Nancy, January 30, 2019.]

Everyone in the robotics club is mad at Nancy for skipping pre-competition practice, even the robot.

This bit of pareidolia owes something to Ernie Bushmiller. See, for instance, this school.

You can read Nancy by Bushmiller and by Olivia Jaimes at GoComics.

Peanuts chute

[Peanuts, February 2, 1972. Click for a larger view.]

There must be a chute. Sally has written to a pen pal — that’s why “a letter” is something that flies over the ocean.

See also: Slywy’s collection of mail chutes.

[Yesteryear’s Peanuts is this year’s Peanuts.]

BAGS TO RAGE

I misread — an honest late-night mistake — a screen title in an episode of Tidying Up with Marie Kondo last night.