Go, third-graders, go

“We think they are ignoring us because we are kids”: students in a third-grade class spot an error in a math textbook, write three times to the publisher, wait five months for a response beyond a form letter, and start a petition to get the correction made. A cheering story of persistence from The Washington Post.

Meta-conversation

From Human Desire (dir. Fritz Lang, 1954). Jeff (Glenn Ford) and Vicki (Gloria Grahame) are having a conversation about their conversation. Jeff speaks first:

“Hey, this is some conversation we’re havin’.”

“I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”

At long last, the joys of the Criterion Channel are here.

“Th’ 24-hour puke cycle”

[“Up the Alimentary Canal.” Zippy, April 12, 2019.]

I quit in November 2016 and again in February of this year. And several more times in between. I try to watch no more than an hour a day.

“Horrific visions of Sean Hannity”: for me, it’s Stephen Miller. But either way, “horrific” is redundant.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Bad design, Apple

Say that you’re moving to and fro among web pages on a MacBook:

With the Magic Mouse: To get to the previous page, swipe left. To get the next page, swipe right.

With the trackpad: To get to the previous page, swipe right. To get to the next page, swipe left.

And just as the black MacBook cost more than its white counterpart ($200 more in 2006), the space gray Magic Mouse costs more than its silver counterpart ($20 more).

None of it makes sense.

Review: Bill Griffith’s Nobody’s Fool

Bill Griffith, Nobody’s Fool: The Life and Times of Schlitzie the Pinhead. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2019. 248 pages. $24.99.

If you’ve seen Tod Browning’s Freaks, you’ve seen Schlitzie. The plainest facts of his life are a blur, from date and place of birth (The Bronx, 1901?) to birth name (Simon Metz?). Schlitzie’s sideshow billings blur his origins (“Last of the Aztecs,” “Last of the Incas”), his gender (“Princess BiBi,” “Julius, the Missing Link”), and his very humanity (“Half Monkey, Half Human”). What is certain: a microcephalic child was consigned by his parents to the owner of a traveling sideshow. At some point the child became Schlitzie, and later, Schlitzie Surtees (the surname is that of a couple who managed Schlitzie and adopted him). Aside from a harrowing late-life episode in a psychiatric ward and a few years of peaceful retirement, Schlitzie spent his life performing (or being exhibited). He traveled with sideshows and appeared in a handful of films, most notably Tod Browning’s Freaks. Schlitzie’s appearance in that film inspired Bill Griffith to create Zippy the Pinhead. And now Griffith has honored his inspiration: his graphic biography of Schlitzie is a work of scholarly imagination, working with the facts of Schlitzie’s life to create an affectionate portrait of a remarkable human being.

Nobody’s Fool shows us humanity at its worst and best: the cruelty of so-called “normal” people (“Freak!” they shout) and the unstinting kindness of sideshow folk (“Come with me, little one — it’s time for supper”). It’s a sideshow performer, the sword swallower Bill Unks, working as an orderly at the Los Angeles County Hospital, who gets Schlitzie released from the psych ward. We learn of Schlitzie’s fondness for hats, music, dishwashing, and the occasional short beer. We follow his career as he crosses paths (or nearly so) with Charley Chase, Chester Morris, Norma Shearer, Jackie Cooper, Tom Mix, the Three Stooges, the Beach Boys, and Ed Sullivan. And we see the work of the sideshow as a matter of daily routine for those whose work it is: “You feel up to a show tonight, Schlitz?”

In Freaks Schlitzie’s speech is unintelligible, but he is said to have spoken clearly, and here he often seems to be channeling Griffith’s Zippy, with a repertoire of genially surreal remarks: “Boffo!” “Aw, go on!” “Is he married?” “Seven is my favorite flavor!”¹ I like this exchange:

“So how do you like Hollywood, Schlitzie?”

“With mustard!”

But there’s great pathos here too, in the trauma of Schlitzie’s separation from his family and the ever-uncertain series of caretakers and guardians who follow.² Griffith has given the story a Rosebud of sorts, a beloved Campbell’s Soup dish that Schlitzie must leave behind when he’s taken away to the circus. Thus for Griffith’s Schlitzie, dishes and dishwashing are forever associated with a lost family life: “My mother let me do the dishes. She says I’m a good boy.” (Does Schlitize identify with the cute Campbell’s Kid on the dish?) Griffith includes portions of a conversation he had with Wolf Krakowski, who as a teenager in 1965 ran a bumper-car concession and got to know Schlitzie:

“Like all children, Schlitzie craved tenderness and affection. He would snuggle up to me and I would put my arms around him. This simple contact and warmth caused him to moan and weep. I was too young and inexperienced at the time to grasp the totality of what he must have been feeling.”

Griffith’s art in this book is beautiful, detailed, and expressive: circuses, cityscapes, movie studios, scenes from Freaks, fantasias with beatniks, Bela Lugosi, Felix the Cat, and a sideshow of “normal” people (“Plays golf on weekends!! Alive!”). And, always, Schlitzie: angry (“Y'see?”), blissful (“Dishes!”), star-struck (“Will I see Sonny Bono?”), dancing to music from a transistor radio, talking to the ducks and pigeons in MacArthur Park. A caretaker reports that Schlitzie called each duck Tame Robert; each pigeon, Alan Barr Alan.

Bill Griffith’s current work in progress: a biography of Ernie Bushmiller. Yow!

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)
A review of Bill Griffith’s Invisble Ink

¹ The academic inside me insists on calling attention to apophrades, “the return of the dead,” a term from Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973). Bloom uses this word to describe the uncanny phenomenon of a precursor poet’s work seeming to resemble the work of a later poet.

² Griffith gives Zippy a far happier family life: he is married to Zerbina, with two children, Fuelrod and Meltdown. The Cast of Characters page at the Zippy website notes that Zippy’s parents Ebb and Flo “may have sold him to the circus sideshow when he was born. Who remembers?”

Block those metaphors

I heard this sentence on television a short time ago. The source is Politico:

Even as Democratic contenders are well into the process of courting high-ranking and local labor officials, union leaders plan to delay their endorsements as they take the temperature of members on the ground in an attempt to avoid the top-down approach that caused so much heartburn.

All those metaphors — they just lead to heartburn. So much heartburn. And such a strange courtship.

Related reading
All OCA metaphor posts (Pinboard)

Another Cabinet change

The New Yorker reports that Donald Trump has named Lori Loughlin as his new secretary of education, replacing Betsy DeVos:

In making the announcement, Trump praised Loughlin for her “disruptive approach” to college admissions and expressed hope that she could bring the same brand of innovative thinking to the Department of Education.

Gives new meaning to the term “acting secretary.”

Charles Van Doren (1926–2019)

The New York Times has an obituary for Charles Van Doren, who has died at the age of ninety-three. The snarky Times headline calls Van Doren “a quiz show whiz who wasn’t.” Yes, the quiz-show scandals.

But here’s another way to think of Charles Van Doren: as a deeply thoughtful student of the sorrows and possibilities of human life. And now I’m borrowing from a post I wrote in 2006:

In 1999, Van Doren was invited to address a reunion of Columbia College’s class of 1959. Like these alums, he started at Columbia in 1955 (as an assistant professor); he resigned in 1959. In the course of some remarks on how to live late in one’s life, he mentions Aeneas’s journey to the world of the dead, which begins at Lake Avernus in Italy, and quotes the Sibyl’s words to Aeneas:

“The way downward is easy from Avernus.
Black Dis’s door stands open night and day.
But to retrace your steps to heaven's air,
There is the trouble, there is the toil.”

[Virgil, Aeneid 6, translated by Robert Fitzgerald]

Van Doren notes (in his own translation) the advice that the shade of Phlegyas gives Aeneas: “Study justice, and do not scorn the gods!” (Phlegyas, enraged after Apollo seduced his daughter, set fire to the god's temple at Delphi.) Van Doren goes on to say that

None of us can take Aeneas’s journey, nor, in fact, did he. The story of his descent into the Underworld and his return to the brightness of the sun is a myth, and myths are stories that are so true they can never happen. Something like his journey may happen to anyone. The human name for it may be despair.

Despair — the Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard called it. As we enter this last part of our time we mustn’t forget that bad things can happen. The failure of hopes, the death of friends, the venality of politicians, the manifest cruelty that stalks the world — these may tempt us to descend from Avernus into that dark place where safety seems to lie. But then we scorn the gods. This great line is from Paul Valéry’s “Le cimitière mari”:

Le vent se lève; il faut tenter de vivre!

The wind's rising; we have to try to live!

Related reading
“All the Answers” (Van Doren’s 2008 New Yorker piece on the quiz-show scandals)
Two accounts of Van Doren’s talk — 1, 2 — from members of the class of ’59

“What’s a parvenu?”

A nice bit of dialogue from Stan & Ollie (dir. Jon S. Baird, 2018), with Stan Laurel (Steve Coogan), Oliver Hardy (John C. Reilly), and Hal Roach (Danny Huston):

Laurel: He's a cheapskate, a skinflint, and a — and a parvenu.

Hardy: A parvenu?

Laurel: He thinks because my contract's up and yours isn't that I won't be able to go anyplace else and I'll have to take what he's offering.

Roach: Wait, wait, wait, wait — what's a parvenu?

Laurel: Well, it's someone who started out with nothing, got rich, but has no class. Look it up in the dictionary, Hal. There's a picture of you.

Or there was. Here’s Merriam-Webster’s entry.

How to improve writing (no. 82)

From a New York Times article on funny stuff at the Friars Club:

Former staff members described questionable spending and sloppy bookkeeping, including a $160,000 loan to the executive director without interest that was never written down.

“To the executive director without interest that was never written down”: that’s an awfully clumsy string of sentence elements. Better:

Former staff members described questionable spending and sloppy bookkeeping, including an unrecorded interest-free $160,000 loan to the executive director.

When I read the news, I don’t go looking for things. They present themselves, and my sentence-repair alarm goes off. Elaine gets credit for “interest-free,” which she suggested when I read the sentence aloud.

Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 82 in a series, dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]