“Quantities of genius”

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities. 1930–1943. Trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

See also William Carlos Williams and Wallace Shawn on powders, pencils, mountains, and cigars. And this hardware store, this drugstore, and this other drugstore. Density!

Related reading
All OCA Musil posts (Pinboard)

A guide to the cigarettes of Out of the Past

Elaine and I watched Out of the Past (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1947) a few nights ago and were astonished by the number of cigarettes smoked in the course of the film. Here Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) offers a cigarette to Jeff Markham (Robert Mitchum):

“Cigarette?”

“Smoking.”

The story goes that Mitchum, who was already absent-mindedly smoking, saved the take with quick thinking. (See this moment at YouTube). A later moment in the film seems to be a premeditated joke, when Jeff pauses after knocking out a nightclub manager to fire up the manager’s lighter and light a cigarette from the manager’s desk before fleeing.

Here, after careful review, is a guide to the cigarettes of Out of the Past:

Joe smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Fisher smokes a cigarette. Joe smokes a cigarette. (“Smoke a cigarette, Joe,” Whit says.) Whit smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. A man in a nightclub smokes a cigarette. A guide to Acapulco smokes a cigarette. Kathie smokes a cigarette. Kathie smokes a cigarette. Someone at a roulette table smokes a cigarette. Whit smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Kathie smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Whit smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Meta smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. A cabbie smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes the cabbie’s cigarette. (“Here, you finish it,” the cabbie says.) Kathie smokes a cigarette. Joe smokes a cigarette. Club manager attempts to light cigar. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Whit’s gambling crony smokes a cigarette. A man outside the municipal building smokes a cigarette. Another man outside the municipal building smokes a cigarette. A man talking with Jim smokes a cigarette. Jim smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Jim smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette.

Thus we have thirty-eight cigarettes and thirty-nine acts of cigarette smoking (via the shared cigarette) in the film’s ninety-seven minutes, or roughly one cigarette every two-and-a-half minutes. The thirty-nine smokes! And there’s one attempted cigar. Jeff smokes seventeen of the cigarettes. Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer) is a distant second with four. Whit and Joe Stefanos (Paul Valentine) smoke three apiece. The film has a small non-smoking section, with The Kid (Dickie Moore), Ann Miller (Virginia Huston), Ann’s parents, and Leonard Eels (Ken Niles).

I don’t mean to make light of smoking, which killed Robert Mitchum. But I think that cigarette consumption in this film serves to quietly spoof the conventions of film noir. The Whit-and-Jeff exchange, the lighter-and-cigarette bit, and the smoking talk (“Smoke a cigarette, Joe”; “Here, you finish it”) all point in that direction. There’s also a contrarian touch: Jeff never smokes when he’s sitting alone and drinking. One more detail: on a return trip to the nightclub manager’s office, Jeff tosses a still-lit cigarette on the rug, and a thug rushes to grind it out. Damn those cigarettes.

Related posts
An Out of the Past exchange name : Dueling chin dimples (Douglas and Mitchum)

An EXchange name sighting

[Out of the Past (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1947). Click for a larger view.]

To my eye this composition looks like a Charles Sheeler painting. But it’s not really a composition at all. That cab has already pulled away from the curb.

TUxedo was indeed a San Francisco exchange, as telephone number-cards attest.

More EXchange names on screen
Act of Violence : The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Brasher Doubloon : Chinatown : The Dark Corner : Dark Passage : Deception : Deux hommes dans Manhattan : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Down Three Dark Streets : Dream House : East Side, West Side : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder by Contract : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Nightfall : Nightmare Alley : Perry Mason : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Side Street : Stage Fright : Sweet Smell of Success : Tension : This Gun for Hire : Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Eva Brann on teaching

Eva Brann has been teaching the Great Books curriculum at St John’s College since 1957. I have learned much from her Homeric Moments (2002) and thus picked up Open Secrets/Inward Reflections (2004), the first of her two books of aphorisms and observations.

I’ve found less to admire in this book. At 435 pages, Open Secrets/Inward Reflections is exhausting in its repetitiveness and its willingness to go on; a book a third of this one’s length would be more appealing. And Brann’s perspective is often deeply uncongenial to me: she is suspicious of modernity and youthful protest; she thinks that “ethnicity” gives a person a “specimen look” that disappears when one becomes “American”; she condemns shyness as pathology or a sign of excessive self-regard. What?! Reading this book reminds me, too often, of the unpleasant experience of listening to someone given to making pronouncements, cheerfully, endlessly.

But I’m glad that I stuck around for Brann’s thoughts on education. It’s there that I feel I’m in the company of a kindred spirit — meaning not someone I agree with but someone I can admire and learn from. Here are four samples of Brann on education:

I think of myself — as do my colleagues — neither as a professor nor a scholar, nor even as a teacher, but as one of a company of curators of a community of learning.

A community of learning is people together in one place talking to each other about that which has gone out of time and beyond place.

What is good teaching? Not a performance, though one certainly has a strenuous sense of “being on”; not a broadcast, though where there is a classroom of students one can’t help now and then talking to the air between them. The teacher’s problem then is how to talk with students rather than to them and how to address each student rather than all. But that’s the least of it; listening to them is the real art.

There is an almost voluptuous surrender in the narrow specialization of academics. Some professions are so engrossing or demanding that an exchange of breadth for depth is required. But that a teacher should live with a willfully incomplete humanity? For the mastery of what? For preeminence over whom?

Open Secrets/Inward Prospects: Reflections on World and Soul (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2004).

See also Michael Oakeshott on education as emancipation from “the immediate contingencies of place and time of birth” and Carl Cederström and Michael Marinetto on micro-megalomaniacs in academia. And I still stand by what I wrote in this post: The gold standard, haircuts, and everyone else.

[Brann’s other book of aphorisms and observations is Doublethink/Doubletalk: Naturalizing Second Thoughts And Twofold Speech (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2016).]

“An infinitely interwoven surface”

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities. 1930–1943. Trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

Not an “orderly sequence of facts” but “an infinitely interwoven surface”: Musil’s novel itself.

Related reading
All OCA Musil posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Nancy

Today’s Nancy, by Olivia Jaimes, is a delight, from the title panel(s) to Aunt Fritzi’s frown.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

Today’s Saturday Stumper With some alternative clues.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Bruce Sutphin and Erik Agard, seems to me best characterized by a word I saw in another recent crossword: UNFUN. Not because it took me an hour and four minutes to finish, but because too many clues seemed strained or dubious in their attempts to be stumpy or clever. For instance, 10-Down, four letters, “Upper-level arrangement.” Or 17-A, six letters, “How some ice cream is made.” Or 22-D, five letters, “Heavy lifting?” Or 52-D, “Roast beef.” Or 61-A, eight letters, “V sign in a selection process.” No, no, no, no, and no.

Not everything here was a no. Three clues I especially liked: 13-D, nine letters, “Proposal phrase.” 29-D, nine letters, “One not called.” 36-D, eight letters, “Smooth pass.” Even this last one though feels a bit strained.

No spoilers: the answers, and the explanations for my no votes, are in the comments.

*

10:55 a.m.: I tried to come up with plausible alternative clues:

10-D: “Head arrangement.” Or, “It’s offered at a head shop.”

17-A: “A typo, believe it or not.”

22-D: “It starts as a sneeze.” Yes, I’m trying for stumpy.

52-D: “Youthful offense.”

61-A: “Rock hater.” Or, “Snippy sort.”

I wouldn’t claim that these clues are particularly good, but I think they’re better than the ones that came with the puzzle.

Why go?

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article (behind the paywall, natch) on the job prospects of doctoral students in English at Columbia University. The prospects are not good: in the last academic year, one Columbia student found a tenure-track position. And new students continue to enter the doctoral program — nineteen this academic year.

Alan Stewart, chair of Columbia’s English and comp-lit department, is paraphrased in the article:

Professors have to be honest from the minute students arrive on campus, or even the minute they turn up on visiting day, about the fact that this very likely won’t turn into a tenure-track job after six years, Stewart said.

I’d revise that: professors have to be honest from the minute undergrads begin talking about the dream of becoming a professor — a dream with less and less chance of realization. And why wait for students to show up to tell them how bleak the prospects are? And why have a “visiting day” if the prospects are so bleak?

And then there’s this:

The department will spend this year developing a course that will directly introduce graduate students to careers outside of academe, Stewart said. Faculty members are looking into bringing people to campus who have been part of its graduate program in the past, who currently work outside of academe, he said. The department wants to emphasize internships and help students spend summers working in galleries or museums and perhaps “find where else they might be happy.”

But here’s the thing: if you’re looking for a career outside academia, devoting five or six or more years to the pursuit of a doctoral degree in English is neither necessary nor wise. And to the best of my knowledge, those often-touted gallery and museum positions are typically the stuff of personal connections within ultra-privileged circles.

I’ll quote something I wrote in a previous post on these matters:

The very telos of doctoral study in the humanities is a life of teaching and scholarship on the tenure-track. That’s what grad school is supposed to be for.

If a tenure-track position is not likely to be in the offing, why go? So that senior professors can run graduate seminars, while you, a student in those seminars, teach the freshmen? There are better ways to be happy.

I’m all out of rhetorical questions, so I’ll link to a post that describes my fortunate stumble into a tenure-track position: Fluke life. Talk about contingency.

Ordering

Apropos the mad king’s most recent Twitter decrees: the vice president and Cabinet are hereby ordered to invoke the 25th Amendment.