Foxtrot, Marie Kondo, and the eternal return

Yesterday I found a 2002 Foxtrot strip in a stack of clippings. The strip is a beautiful joke on the conventions that underlie visual representation. I should post a picture, I thought, and scrap the clipping. I mean, the clipping brings joy, but it would continue to do so as a blog post, right? And lo, I discovered that the strip is still available online. I wouldn’t even need to take a photo. So I started writing a post titled “Foxtrot and representation”, bringing in E.H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion and the New Yorker cartoon by Alain that starts off the book, a 1955 joke on the conventions that underlie visual representation. And then I wondered, Have I posted anything else from Foxtrot ?

Yes. In 2013 I made a post about this same Foxtrot strip, with the same title, “Foxtrot and representation.” The only difference: this time around I cited Art and Illusion. In the 2013 post, the Gombrich connection is clear from the link to a reproduction of the cartoon.

The eternal return — an idea I somehow picked up on as a freshman in college — is real. But the life-changing magic of tidying up poses a challenge. Because I don’t think I’ll be rediscovering this clipped strip again, at least not in my house.

Related posts
Joad’s corollary : Stubbs’s corollary

Today’s Saturday Stumper

I will turn, as I did this past December, to cake. Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Lester Ruff, is a piece of cake. Moist? No. Luscious? Not exactly. Light as a feather? Lighter, really, given the weight of pixels. But still a piece of cake, though virtually weightless. And virtually tasty.

Clues that I especially liked: 40-Across, three letters, “Short-range missile.” 60-Across, eight letters, “What many freshmen must enroll in.” (ENGLISHI? No.) 9-Down, four letters, “Floor (as a noun or verb).” 61-Down, three letters, “Strong-connection interjection.” And best of all, 1-Down, six letters, “Carrier bought by Evenflo.”

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Reading or not

Behind the Chronicle of Higher Education paywall, Steven Johnson’s report on “The Fall, and Rise, of Reading” in college courses. A few highlights (quotations from Johnson, not from his sources):

~ The National Assessment of Educational Progress reports that fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores have risen since the 1990s, while twelfth-grade scores have fallen. Only thirty-seven percent of high-school seniors “graduate with ‘‘proficiency’ in reading, meaning they can read a text for both its literal and its inferential meanings.”

~ The National Assessment of Educational Progress reports that the average seventeen-year-old reads less for school than the average nine-year-old.

~ The ACT reports that in 2005, only half of high-school graduates were prepared for college-level reading. Yet sixty-two percent of students were on track to be prepared when they were in eighth and tenth grade.

~ The National Survey of Student Engagement reports than “the average college student in the United States spends six to seven hours a week on assigned reading.” In the mid-twentieth century, it was twenty-four hours a week.

~ A study from 2000 of 910 college students found that twenty percent of students made a habit of doing the reading for their classes. Sixteen years earlier it was eighty percent.

There’s the fall. As for the rise: Johnson examines several strategies to encourage reading, one proprietary, six not. The proprietary: Perusall, an online platform for what might be called collective reading, allowing students to make notes and respond to other students’ notes while reading e-books and online course materials. (E-books must be ordered through Perusall.) The six non-proprietary strategies: Make reading count toward a grade by means of quizzes and journals. Don’t summarize for students. Ask students to do more than recall brute facts. Devote time to “reading” audio and visual media. Go over confusing material in class. And teach students to be better readers.

Any capable teacher of literature has likely already put into practice the last five of these six strategies. The first is probably the point of greatest resistance: everyone hates quizzes. I think I must have been way ahead of some curve, as I began giving brief quizzes at the start of class at least twenty-five years ago. Quizzes usually counted for twenty or twenty-five percent of a semester grade. And because I dropped the two or three lowest quiz grades and offered occasional extra-credit questions, a quiz average could easily rise above 100. (I think 113 was the record high.) And because a quiz average could sink well below the lowest letter grade, students who didn’t do the reading tended to drift away mid-semester. So my classes were filled with students who did the reading.

One thing about quizzes: because there are so many ways not to do the reading in a literature class, quizzes had to be Spark- and Shmoop-proof. I would come in with a handful of questions that could be answered only from having done the reading (or so I hoped). Quizzes were fast: often just one answer to get 100. Notes were permitted. Students could cover their bets too, if they wanted. And if questions didn’t click, I’d happily supply others. Was it tedious to collect all that paper? You bet. I saved further tedium by holding on to quizzes and returning them in stapled bunches.

It occurs to me only now that doing-the-reading is a matter of Rule 7:

The only rule is work. If you work, it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.

The long and short of it is that I was willing to pay my students, so to speak, to do the reading. It was in everyone’s interest to do so.

Sally couldn’t care less

[Peanuts, May 3, 1972.]

Sally Brown knows her usage. Alas, she’s replying to the question “Who was the father of Henry IV?”

Garner’s Modern English Usage:

Although some apologists argue that *could care less is meant to be sarcastic and not to be taken literally, a more plausible explanation is that the -n’t of couldn’t has been garbled in sloppy speech and sloppy writing.

Garner cites an explanation from linguist Atcheson L. Hench: “Couldn’t care has two dental stops practically together, dnt. This is heard only as d and slurring results. The outcome is I c’d care less.”

About “some apologists”: Garner is thinking of Steven Pinker, for one, who insists that “I could care less” is not illogical but sarcastic. I hear not sarcasm but dismissiveness: “I couldn’t care less” and “I could care less” are both dismissive, but one makes sense, while the other is, yes, illogical.

But the answer to the teacher’s question is “John of Gaunt.” Or, “John of Gaunt, though I could not possibly care less.”

Related reading
All OCA Peanuts posts (Pinboard)
Linus, nauseated not nauseous : Lucy’s whom : Woodstock’s wormwise

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

Kamala Harris asking questions

In The Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin writes about yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing: “Most members on the committee spoke too much, argued too frequently and failed to pin down Barr on key facts. There was one exception to the political demolition derby.” That was Senator Kamala Harris (D-California). Here she is:

Complete exchange between @senkamalaharris and Attorney General William Barr. pic.twitter.com/EzydIr8twh

— CSPAN (@cspan) May 1, 2019

Close reader, careful listener, persistent questioner. Also presidential candidate.

“The allure of ‘us’ and ‘them’”

A stream runs through a woodcutter’s settlement, a few houses on each side of the stream.


Johannes Urzidil, “Where the Valley Ends.” In The Last Bell. Translated from the German by David Burnett. (London: Pushkin Press, 2017.)

Also from this book
Apartments : “Well, that’s the Renaissance” : “Realistic underwear” : “This is now it normally works”

Another tribute in dubious taste

The latest Palomino Blackwing pencil, or “Blackwing” pencil, glows in the dark. From the box:

In a speech delivered at the New York Public Library in 2010, the late Dr. Maya Angelou poetically described the humble library as a “rainbow in the clouds” so that “in the worst of times, in the meanest of times, in the dreariest of times . . . at all times the viewer can see a possibility of hope.”

Libraries are more than just archives, they’re representations of our collective human experience. They’re reminders of where we’ve been, inspiration for where we want to go, and collections of all the beauty, pain, and wisdom that fills the gaps.

The Blackwing 811 is a tribute to libraries and the hope they represent. It features an emerald gradient finish and gold ferrule inspired by the iconic green lamps that light the halls of libraries around the world. Each pencil is coated with a special phosphorescent topcoat, so it can be a literal light in the dark. The model number 811 is a reference to the section of the Dewey Decimal System that contains some of Dr. Angelou’s most famous works, along with the works of countless other inspirational writers.

The same text appears in a company blog post. And the same text accompanies a company video for the pencil.

The curious thing: there’s no mention of Maya Angelou on the company’s page for this pencil. Instead:

The Blackwing 811 is a tribute to libraries and the hope they represent. It features an emerald gradient finish and gold ferrule inspired by the iconic green lamps that light the halls of libraries around the world. Each pencil is coated with a special phosphorescent topcoat, so it can be a literal light in the dark. The model number 811 is a reference to the American poetry section of the Dewey Decimal System that contains the works of countless inspirational writers.

I wonder if the Angelou estate got in touch.

While this pencil is indeed a tribute in dubious taste, it cannot rival the Palomino “Blackwing” tribute to Dorothea Lange’s photograph Migrant Mother.

Related reading
All OCA Blackwing pencil posts (Pinboard)

[I’ve corrected Palomino’s nonstandard ellipsis, but I’ve let their comma splice stand. Google’s cached version of the company’s page for the pencil is from April 9. If Angelou’s name was ever on the page, it must have been removed by then.]

Word of the day: snitty

William Barr on Robert Mueller‘s letter: “The letter’s a bit snitty, and I think it was written by one of his staff people.“

Merriam-Webster has a nice entry for snitty, a word now trending.

“Mallware”

Yes, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) pronounced malware as “mallware.”

“Mister General”

Senator John Kennedy (R-Louisiana) has now addressed William Barr as “General” and “Mister General.”