Scott Robinson, “8 min. 46 sec.”

[Found via Music Clip of the Day. Thanks, Richard.]

Millimetres

Fernando Pessoa, from “Millimetres (the sensation of small things),” The Book of Disquiet, trans. from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2003).

See also William Carlos Williams and Wallace Shawn on powders, pencils, mountains, and cigars.

Related reading
All OCA Pessoa posts (Pinboard)

[Five periods: the translator’s symbol for a “place where a sentence breaks off, space left for an unwritten sentence or paragraph, or blank space inside a sentence where the hiatus does not interrupt a phrasal unit.”]

A metaphor

From a Washington Post article about Republicans fearing doom in November:

There is no sign yet of a mass exodus from the runaway Trump train. If anything, most elected Republicans see themselves as prisoners onboard, calculating that jumping off would lead to almost certain defeat, according to interviews with more than a dozen party strategists, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly.

Oh, those poor helpless passengers. How could they have known that that the driver was utterly unqualified to operate a train? And that there never were any brakes?

Related reading
All OCA metaphor posts (Pinboard)

The country and the city

Fernando Pessoa, text 459, The Book of Disquiet, trans. from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2003).

Related reading
All OCA Pessoa posts (Pinboard)

Opportunities

From a New York Times article about the life of George Floyd:

After graduating from high school, Mr. Floyd left Texas on a basketball scholarship to South Florida Community College (now South Florida State College).

“I was looking for a power forward and he fit the bill. He was athletic and I liked the way he handled the ball,” said George Walker, who recruited Mr. Floyd. “He was a starter and scored 12 to 14 points and seven to eight rebounds.”

Mr. Floyd transferred two years later, in 1995, to Texas A&M University’s Kingsville campus, but he did not stay long. He returned home to Houston — and to the Third Ward — without a degree.

I know nothing of George Floyd’s experiences in secondary and higher education. But I know something about the ways in which educational institutions can exploit student-athletes. And I know something about the ways in which educational institutions can leave students, athletes and non-athletes, woefully underprepared for future learning. So I think it’s reasonable to wonder: did high school, where George Floyd excelled in both basketball and football, prepare him well for college? Did community college prepare him well for a four-year school? Did that four-year school offer him — a first-generation student, raised in poverty — the support he might have needed to succeed?

This comment in the Times article, from Stephen Jackson, a retired NBA player and friend of Floyd’s, struck me:

“I tell people all the time, the only difference between me and George Floyd, the only difference between me and my twin, the only difference between me and Georgie, is the fact that I had more opportunities.”

*

October 8: A Washington Post article about how systemic racism shaped George Floyd’s life describes his time in college:

By the time Floyd left high school in 1993, he wasn’t academically prepared to go to college. But his athletic skills earned him a place at a two-year program in South Florida before he transferred closer to home — to Texas A&M University-Kingsville, a small, mostly Latino school known as a pipeline to the NFL.

“Big Floyd was always talking about going to the league,” said his close friend Demetrius Lott, who also was on the football team and lived in the same apartment complex. “It was what we all wanted.”

The Black students stuck together and supported one another. The red tile-roofed Spanish Mission architecture of the campus, with its rustling palm trees lining quiet streets, was a world away from Third Ward projects. Adjusting to college life wasn’t always easy for him, his friends said, but it was a happy, triumphant time because few from his neighborhood had made it that far. . . .

Floyd, a tight end, went to practice every day, but he wasn’t making the grades or completing the credits that would have allowed him to get on the field. Many of Floyd’s friends also fell short, unable to finish college or make it to the pros.

Other students, particularly White ones, had “a better foundation, a better support system,” said college roommate Marcus Williams. “Me and Floyd didn’t have that.”

There are more Washington Post articles to come. The next one is to be all about education.

*

The second article in the Post series clears up the question of whether Floyd was an athlete at Texas Kingsville: he was taking developmental (remedial) classes that did not count toward eligibility. Thus he could practice with the football team but not play.

Domestic comedy

[We were watching The Dick Van Dyke Show, with Laura Petrie (Mary Tyler Moore) calling her husband “darling,” over and over and over.]

“Why doesn’t she just call him Rob?”

“For the same reason Sally is the typist.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[In the writers’ office, Sally Rogers (Rose Marie) is the one who types.]

An EXchange name sighting

[From The Blue Gardenia (dir. Fritz Lang, 1953).]

A Los Angeles switchboard monitor (Fay Baker) looks on as artist and man about town Harry Prebbles (Raymond Burr) interrupts his sketching. Prebbles has been sketching switchboard operator Crystal Carpenter (Ann Sothern). He’s written in her number, GRanite 1466, which she just gave, unasked, to newspaper columnist Casey Mayo (Richard Conte). Prebbles has been trying to get her number for a week.


[Click either image for a larger view.]

GRanite 1466 runs through The Blue Gardenia like a musical motif. GRanite was indeed a Los Angeles exchange name. The movie is available online.

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 : The Brothers Rico : Chinatown : Danger Zone : The Dark Corner : Dark Passage : Deception : Deux hommes dans Manhattan : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Down Three Dark Streets : Dream House : East Side, West Side : Fallen Angel : Framed : 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 : Out of the Past : Perry Mason : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Side Street : The Slender Thread : Stage Fright : Sweet Smell of Success : Tension : This Gun for Hire : Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Jared’s verbs

Jared Kushner, speaking today at the White House:

“The law enforcement community heard the cries from the community, saw the injustices in the system that needed to be fixed, and they responded by coming together to fix it, and it’s been a great partnership to do that. Those reforms make our communities safer and have made our system fairer, and that’s the type of action that we’ve been able to accomplish by working together.”

It’s blather, of course, but blather of a curious kind.

“They responded by coming together to fix it, and it’s been a great partnership to do that.” Past and present perfect verbs. Mission accomplished.

“Those reforms make our communities safer and have made our system fairer, and that’s the type of action that we’ve been able to accomplish by working together.” Present and present perfect. Done and done. And “those reforms”? What reforms?

Jared’s verbs (and his demonstrative adjective) claim reality for what’s non-existent. The present king of France is bald.

[My transcription.]

“Proto-neofascist”

Vanity Fair reports that James Mattis has told people that Donald Trump* is a “proto-neofascist.”

See also Mattis’s public statement on Trump*.

“Manufacturing crime”

I read this Twitter thread by Sean Trainor earlier today. It’s an account of one night riding along with a high-school classmate who’d become a police officer. What Trainor says he witnessed: “a full shift devoted to manufacturing crime.” Please, read what he wrote.

While you read the thread, I’ll note that after I read it, I went for a walk. And had lunch. And then the power went out. But now it’s back.

Trainor’s thread made me realize how many arrests in my small corner of reality follow a pattern: a “routine stop” for “a minor traffic violation.” And then a search with a dog, and the discovery of what’s usually a piddling amount of an illegal substance, and someone goes to jail, almost inevitably followed by probation. Sometimes a vehicle is seized.

Should someone be driving around with drugs in their car? No. But does this pattern represent the best use of a community’s resources? Does it help anyone, or is it, really, an exercise in manufacturing crime?

Thanks, Rachel.