Sarah Cooper tonight

The great Sarah Cooper is streaming a Q&A tonight at 8:00 Eastern. Access costs $10, with part of the proceeds going to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Here’s the latest bit of channeling. There are three takes. I like this first one best:

How to Lincoln pic.twitter.com/zerw0PVs9x

— Sarah Cooper (@sarahcpr) June 14, 2020

Goodbye to Uncle Ben

Like Aunt Jemima, he is stepping away.

I wrote earlier today in a comment that I can imagine a short story (not for me to write) with Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Rastus (yes, that’s the name attached to the Cream of Wheat chef) all finally retired and talking among themselves: “I tried to tell ’em — for years I tried.” The Land O’Lakes “butter maiden” should also have a part in the conversation.

Mystery actor

Do you recognize him? Leave your answer in the comments. I’ll be mowing the grass for a while but will check back later and drop a hint if needed.

*

11:39 a.m.: It’s a big lawn. The answer is now in the comments.

More mystery actors (Collect them all!)
? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ?

Goodbye to Aunt Jemima

From NBC News:

The Aunt Jemima brand of syrup and pancake mix will get a new name and image, Quaker Oats announced Wednesday, saying the company recognizes that “Aunt Jemima’s origins are based on a racial stereotype.”

How did they ever figure it out?

One of the oddest things I can say about myself: I’m distantly related to another (non-Quaker) Aunt Jemima: Tess Gardella, an Italian-American singer who performed in blackface as “Aunt Jemima.” She originated the role of Queenie in Show Boat.

College, anyone?

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that two-thirds of American colleges and universities have announced plans to resume on-campus classes with the Fall 2020 semester. In my little university town, landlords are advertising off-campus student rentals. Schedule a tour today! Or not.

I’ve wondered, often, what college will look like in the fall. My town has suffered and will suffer mightily without a student population. I have friends and colleagues who will want to be teaching in classrooms, doing the work of what I like to call real-presence education. But I cannot imagine college-as-usual, or anything close to as-usual, in the fall.

As I’ve kicked around the idea of writing about the next academic year, I’ve found two people who have already done so to my satisfaction. Stan Yoshinobu, a professor of mathematics at California Polytechnic State University, has a piece behind the Chronicle paywall, “The Case Against Reopening,” and an earlier version on his blog, with twenty-three points against reopening. Yoshinobu does the awkward and necessary work of asking about practical contingencies: Do we ban parties? What do we do when a student coughs or sneezes in class? Will students be permitted to go home on weekends? For Thanksgiving? And I’ll add: Who’s supposed to keep track? And to what purpose?

As Yoshinobu says, he doesn’t like “virtual college.” But he sees it as the only reasonable and ethical choice for the next academic year.

As does Laurence Steinberg, a professor of psychology at Temple University. In The New York Times he offers a perspective shaped by decades of teaching and researching young people: “Expecting Students to Play It Safe if Colleges Reopen Is a Fantasy.” Steinberg begins by highlighting suggestions in a recent Times symposium on plans for college in the fall: masks, sanitizer, social distancing, and students placed in family-sized groups within dorms. (One contributor to that symposium imagines each small group taking classes together.) Steinberg’s blunt conclusion:

These plans are so unrealistically optimistic that they border on delusional and could lead to outbreaks of Covid-19 among students, faculty and staff.

Steinberg too looks forward to returning to teaching in a classroom. But not yet.

If I were still teaching, I’d want to insist on a virtual fall, and perhaps a virtual spring. I’d think of my virtual teaching as a difficult, memorable experiment. If I were a first-year student, I’d want to wait for my real-presence education and take a gap year if at all possible. If I were a sophomore, junior, or senior, I’d hope that my school would have the good sense not to bring everyone back to campus. There too I would think of a virtual semester or two as a difficult, memorable experiment. When we’re on the other side of this pandemic, there’ll be thousands of faculty and students, sick of screens, looking forward to the possibilities that a real-presence community of learning can once again offer.

My fear is that those who already want to make college a virtual experience for all but a small elite will take the pandemic as an occasion to further their scheming. But right now there’s already enough to worry about. Besides, when we’re on the other side of this pandemic, there’ll be thousands of faculty and students, sick of screens, looking forward to the possibilities that a real-presence community of learning can once again offer.

[The repetition is deliberate.]

Bloomsday 2020

From “Ithaca,” my favorite episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Here is Leopold Bloom, “potential poet”:



Other Bloomsday posts
2007 (The first page)
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (Leopold Bloom, “water lover”)
2011 (“[T]he creature cocoa”)
2012 (Plumtree’s Potted Meat)
2013, 2013 (Bloom and fatherhood)
2014 (Bloom, Stephen, their respective ages)
2015 (Stephen and company, very drunk)
2016 (“I dont like books with a Molly in them”)
2017 (Bloom and Stephen, “like and unlike reactions”)
2018 (“One sole unique advertisement”)
2019 (“To knock or not to knock”)

[Bloomsday : “the 16th of June 1904. Also: the 16th of June of any year, on which celebrations take place, esp. in Ireland, to mark the anniversary of the events in Joyce’s Ulysses” (Oxford English Dictionary).]

Rights

Human rights should be a self-evident good in our world. But that’s not the case, so there is cause for celebration when rights are affirmed. As with the rights of LGBTQ people in today’s Supreme Court ruling.

[The New York Times says LGBT. CNN, NPR, and The Washington Post say LGBTQ. No acronyms appear in the the text of the decision and dissents. The acronyms LGB and LGBQT+ appear in Samuel Alito’s dissent in the titles of footnoted sources.]

“A bridge between two mysteries”

Fernando Pessoa, from “Self-Examination,” The Book of Disquiet, trans. from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2003).

Bernardo Soares, the authorial identity to whom Pessoa attributes The Book of Disquiet, sometimes seems to speak for everyone, sometimes only for himself. Here, I’d say, he speaks for us all.

Senhor Soares has come to remind me of Henry Darger: like Darger, he is a secret maker, the creator of imaginary worlds known only to him. No one passing Soares on the street would have any idea, &c. Soares also reminds me of J. Alfred Prufrock: like Prufrock, he lives as an observer of life, removed, renunciatory, acutely aware of what he calls “the shy and ridiculous abnormality of my soul.”

I also think of Soares in the company of Joseph Joubert and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, writers whose work survives as pieces whose only order is the order of their composition. I think of Soares as especially close to Joubert: though Soares is far less given to aphorism, he too is a writer whose writing is always a preparation for writing, notes toward a project never to be realized. Here writing becomes a form of life: not the making of a great work but just what one does.

I once described Joubert as a writer who would be of interest to a reader who values “the fragmentary, the provisional, the unfinished.” So too Fernando Pessoa, in the person of Bernardo Soares.

This passage is the last I’m posting from The Book of Disquiet.

Related reading
All OCA Pessoa posts (Pinboard)

RZ, i.m.

I miss my friend Rob Zseleczky. We will toast to his memory tonight.

Say Their Names

[Kadir Nelson, Say Their Names. The New Yorker, June 22, 2020. Click for a larger view.]

What you really need to see: a The New Yorker online feature about this artwork, identifying the men, women, and children depicted therein.