Marty again

If you watched the 1955 film Marty on TCM this morning and want to know what happened after the final scene, I explained it all in a 2009 post, Happy birthday, Mr. Piletti.

Marty turned ninety in 2009. He will hit his hundredth birthday this November. Clara turns ninety-five this year. They’re doing great.

[Yes, shameless self-linking.]

A swipe at John D’Agata

John McPhee, in Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process (2017):

Is it wrong to alter a fact in order to improve the rhythm of your prose? I know so, and so do you. If you do that, you are by definition not writing nonfiction.

That must be a swipe at John D’Agata, who in The Lifespan of a Fact (2012) explains that he changed a “thirty-one” to a “thirty-four” in a piece of reportage because “the rhythm of ‘thirty-four’ works better in that sentence.”

If McPhee takes other swipes at D’Agata, I’m not able to recognize them, because I gave up on The Lifespan of a Fact after two pages.

There are many things to like in the essays of Draft No. 4, but the essay that gives the book its title has by far the best stuff. And speaking of titles and factual accuracy: I want to be accurate about the title of McPhee’s book, but I’m not sure how to be. On the title page: Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process. But the Library of Congress catalogues the book as Draft No. 4: Essays about the Writing Process.

Related posts
Deresiewicz v. D’Agata (With a quotation (?) from Orwell)
Make it known (D’Agata borrowing without attribution)

Re: that governor

He was in the photograph. But which person was he? He wouldn’t say. Then he wasn’t in the photograph. Then he wasn’t in the photograph, but he had dressed up in blackface. And then he had dressed up in blackface, and, as CBS News discovered, one of his nicknames in military school was “Coonman.” The Internet Archive has the yearbook. Methinks there’s a pattern here.

I’m reminded me of what I would sometimes say to students who had engaged in academic misconduct: “You have one chance to tell me the truth.” I remember, in some cases, hoping that a student would admit to plagiarizing so that I could explain the need to work hard on reading and writing skills and overcome deficits from earlier education. I would’ve helped with that. Instead I would hear a student deny what was painfully obvious.

If Ralph Northam had spoken frankly about his past, about attitudes he had grown up with, about shameful choices he made as a much younger man, it might be possible for the citizens of his state and country to understand, forgive, and, as they say, move forward. But his shifting explanations and refusal to answer an obvious question (blackface, or Klan costume?) mean that he must resign. He had one chance to tell the truth. And he blew it.

I’ll play whatabout for one paragraph and ask whether it’s fair for Northam to resign when the likes of Steve King and Donald Trump remain in office. It isn’t. But giving Northam a pass would make it all the more difficult to insist that racism has no place in public life.

The larger questions that I haven’t heard asked in the Northam affair: How did that photograph — in 1984, no less — ever get into a medical-school yearbook? And why, in nearly thirty-five years, did no one ever object?

*

February 6: The New York Times has an article about yearbooks at Northam’s medical school, Eastern Virginia Medical School. Says a former student, “The practice of letting students run a yearbook unsupervised should have just been shut down.”

[“You have one chance to tell me the truth”: yes, it’s a line from Cops. But I was looking to offer a second chance, not to bust someone.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Lester Ruff, is cause for calendrical confusion. Is it really Saturday? Because today’s puzzle is easy. For instance, 31-Across, four letters, “Traditional diner name.” Or 44-Across, four letters, “‘You’re getting on that plane with Victor’ speaker.”

A clue that I especially liked seeing: 2-Down, six letters, “What anatomists call ‘minimus.’” I knew the answer because I wrote a post in 2008 after learning about the minimus from a New York Times crossword. (Lifelong learning.) And I liked 63-Down, three letters, “Start to color,” for its misdirection. I felt rather sure of myself writing in TAN. But no.

The oddest clue: 36-Down, eight letters, “Spaces around a Trivial Pursuit board.” Huh?

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

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.