“Like a phonograph before its time”

Fernando Pessoa, from text 224, The Book of Disquiet, trans. from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2003).

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Recently updated

“By the Book” for the rest of us Pete Anderson offers his responses to The Guardian ’s “Books that made me” prompts. And, inspired by Pete’s effort, Elaine Fine offers her responses to those prompts.

Orange Crate Art returns

Coming June 26, from Omnivore Recordings, a remastered reissue of Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks’s 1995 album Orange Crate Art, with instrumental tracks and three unreleased songs, including an affecting interpretation of “What a Wonderful World.” You can hear that song now via Rolling Stone.

To my mind, Van Dyke’s “Orange Crate Art” is, as the sidebar says, one of the great American songs. It’s twenty-five years old. It’s also timeless.

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“Nostalgia for scenes”

Fernando Pessoa, from text 208, The Book of Disquiet, trans. from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2003).

This passage made me think of Ted Berrigan’s poem “Cranston Near the City Line.” Which in turn made me think of the bamboo aperitif cups in my grandparents’ house. Exactly like these.

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USPS (b. 1775)

At The New Yorker, Casey Cep writes about the United States Postal Service, its origin, history, current woes, possible futures, and cultural value. An excerpt:

If the coronavirus kills the Postal Service, its death will have been hastened, as so many deaths are right now, by an underlying condition: for the past forty years, Republicans have been seeking to starve, strangle, and sabotage it, hoping to privatize one of the oldest and most important public goods in American history.

[Have you written a letter today? Me, not yet.]

Rats in your engine

From The New York Times: “Time to Check Your Pandemic-Abandoned Car for Rats.” No joke.

We had this problem in a minor way a few years back, after leaving our car in an airport parking lot for a week. Our dealer offered a suggestion for the future: leave the car with the AC/heat set to recirculate. Good advice? I don’t know, but if the car is parked, going nowhere, it can’t hurt.

If the Times had comments on for this article, I’d leave one. Instead, I’ve made this post.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

DNF. I Did Not Finish today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Lars G. Doubleday, aka Doug Peterson and Brad Wilber. But I DNF — Dang Near Finished, stymied by two baffling clues: 49-A, six letters, “’60s singer named for the Count of Monte Cristo” and 41-D, three letters, “Mugger.” What? If “’60s” and six letters led you to think of rock/pop and some mononymous singer and the name by which the singer is known, you’d be taking a wrong turn. As I did. As for “Mugger,” well, who knows what that’s about? I do, now, because I looked it up. Now I GI. Get It.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially like:

13-D, ten letters, “Father-to-be.” I had a hunch about this one.

17-A, nine letters, “100+ products at shopdisney.com.” It’s an amusing answer, even if it’s a reminder of cultural decadence.

23-A, five letters, “OK.” Such indirection. Adjective? Adverb? Noun? Verb?

27-D, ten letters, “Puppy activity.” URINATINGONTHECARP — no, too many letters.

36-A, seven letters, “Humorous movement.” I suppose I like this clue because I knew the answer and felt a bit smarty-pants about it.

63-A, nine letters, “Mozart, fraternally.” An unexpected answer.

But my favorite:

28-D, ten letters, “Whistler in 10 films.” A spelling challenge, at least for me.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Missing from MOOCs

I remember being in a class with a prof who was still teaching while getting radiation for cancer. He was not in good shape, but he’d come in smelling of aftershave, because he had taken the time to shave before class. You can’t get that from a MOOC.

I remember smoke breaks with another prof in the hallway during long once-a-week classes. Two or three of us with cigarettes, one guy with a pipe, our prof with Winston 100s, always for some reason in a Marlboro 100s pack. Or was it Marlboros in a Winston pack? Either way, you can’t get that from a MOOC. But you can’t get that anywhere now anyway. No smoking.

What do you remember that you can’t get from a MOOC?

[That’s just two. Elaine said I should mention the knock and weather. I’ll add unerased blackboards and pre-class blackboard art by students. And ice cream. And more ice cream. Somebody stop me before I remember again.]

Great performances and interactions

Kara Miller recently interviewed David Autor for the WGBH radio program Innovation Hub. Autor is an MIT economics professor and co-chair of the MIT Work of the Future Task Force. He believes that the coronavirus pandemic will strengthen some areas of the economy — higher education, for one. He says that “the change in educational modality” will be disruptive at first but beneficial in the long run. Why? Because in-person residential education is expensive, and all interactions “happen at low scale”:

“In hundreds of classrooms every fall, economics instructors open up Greg Mankiw’s Principles of Economics and do their version of that book for undergraduates. And it’s like, in a thousand theaters, a thousand mediocre versions of Hamlet are all being performed. [Laughter.] Why not just have one great performance by the British Shakespeare Society and we can all watch it on video?”

I guess the work of the future will require far fewer economics instructors. (MIT grad students, take note.) Far fewer directors, actors, theater managers, and set and costume designers too. Not to mention plays. Autor presents such a diminished idea of education — as one-way communication, with spectators watching a star at work. That’s the model, of course, for the MOOC (massive online open course), which I daresay is far inferior to many a local starless effort in building human abilities and relationships.

As for “the British Shakespeare Society,” there is, of course, no such organization. There is a British Shakespeare Association, which describes itself as “committed to bringing together scholars, students, teachers, theatre practitioners, community workers and other professions with a shared interest in Shakespeare.” And there’s the Royal Shakespeare Company, an institution no doubt gladdened by the thought of people performing Shakespeare wherever they may be. Ian McKellen himself appeared in a documentary about the Hobart Shakespeareans.

To his credit, Autor says that changes in the shape of higher education will show us what was valuable in past ways of doing things, and that we will better understand “why we were paying for all that.” But notice: were, as if the changes he anticipates have already happened, everywhere, for everyone.

A 2014 OCA post, The gold standard, haircuts, and everyone else, has more about the rhetoric of disruption in higher education. Why haircuts? Because there, too, all interactions “happen at a low scale.”

[I’ve edited Autor’s words to remove many you know s.]

Empires and fields

Bernardo Soares, the authorial identity at work in this prose work, is, at times, unmistakably stoic:


Fernando Pessoa, from Text 102, The Book of Disquiet, trans. from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2003).

Related reading
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