Recently updated

“Stalin as Linguist” One student has been cleared.

Deleting a podcast from iTunes

A chance discovery while tidying up: choosing Delete from Library will not remove a podcast from iTunes. What will: highlighting the name of the podcast and pressing Delete. The Delete-from-Library problem has been a problem since at least 2017. As someone wrote then, “Something’s wrong in Cupertino.”

“Impassive gray, impassive blue”

Maeve Brennan, “The Poor Men and Women,” in The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

Related reading
All OCA Maeve Brennan posts (Pinboard)

“Like a music roll”

So if the nuns sleep in their coffins, what if a nun moves from one convent to another? Would she bring her coffin with her? Uncle Matt has the answer.


Maeve Brennan, “The Barrel of Rumors,” in The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

Related reading
All OCA Maeve Brennan posts (Pinboard)

Talking responsibilty

Taking its cue from the misspelled responsibility on Australian currency, The New York Times is inviting students thirteen and older to offer their thoughts on spelling and misspelling. Teachers, ask your students to comment. Hey, kids, you can be in the Times!

[The misspelling in the post title is deliberate.]

Nigel and Patrick

Nigel Ratburn just got married. His husband is Patrick, a chocolatier. Their marriage is news. All best wishes, Nigel and Patrick!

FSRC: annual report

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, just finished its fourth year. The FSRC year runs from May to May. (The club began after I retired from teaching.) In our fourth year we read twenty-three books (same as last year). In non-chronological order:

Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

Maeve Brennan, The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin

Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz

Kenneth Fearing, The Big Clock, Clark Gifford’s Body

Clifford Hicks, Alvin’s Secret Code

Yoel Hoffman. ed. The Sound of One Hand: 281 Zen Koans with Answers

Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs

Toni Morrison, Jazz, Song of Solomon

Alice Munro, The Progress of Love

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Arthur Schnitzler, Desire and Despair: Three Novellas, Late Fame, “Night Games” and Other Stories and Novellas

Leonardo Sciascia, To Each His Own

W.G. Sebald, Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn

Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and England, Tristram Shandy

Johannes Urzidil, The Last Bell

Credit to the translators whose work gave us access to the world beyond English: David Burnett, Adrienne Foulke, Michael Hoffman, Yoel Hoffman, Michael Hulse, Kathleen Raine, Margret Schaefer, and Alexander Starritt. Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, and 2018.

Recently updated

The Avital Ronell story, cont. Student-government members object to NYU’s decision to return Ronell to the classroom.

Mother’s Day

[“Migrant agricultural worker’s family. Seven children without food. Mother aged thirty-two. Father is a native Californian. Nipomo, California.” Photograph by Dorothea Lange. March 1936. From the Library of Congress.]

I want to say Happy Mother’s Day, but I also want to think about what mothers endure, with and without their children. This photograph is not “the past.”

The name of the mother in this photograph: Florence Owens Thompson.

Morning Edition as madeleine

Robinson Meyer:

Five months ago, I happened to find the Morning Edition theme on YouTube, and as the hi-hat glimmered and the jazz guitar began, I was surprised to find myself transported. Suddenly, I was sitting in the back of my dad’s Mazda sedan, being driven to elementary school, listening to the NPR sports commentator Frank Deford, the car smelling of seat leather and something acrid that I couldn’t place.

The acrid smell, I realize now, as an adult, was coffee. I knew that the Morning Edition theme smelled like coffee before I knew what coffee smelled like. The next day, I bought a clock radio, and I’ve been waking up to Morning Edition ever since.

The context for this reverie: the new Morning Edition theme music. Meyer hates it. Our household hates it too. Elaine hears The Sims (as does someone quoted in Meyer’s essay). I hear the background music for The Weather Channel’s local broadcast Weatherscan.

Thanks, Ben.