Reluctant professors

“Thousands of instructors at American colleges and universities have told administrators in recent days that they are unwilling to resume in-person classes because of the pandemic”: The New York Times reports on reluctant professors.

The University of Illinois faculty and staff petition for an open forum on re-opening, mentioned in the article, is worth reading.

A related post
College, anyone?

“The time just before”

Every so often I’ve tried to track down a passage I read years ago — something to the effect that the time we’re most curious about or enamored of or nostalgic for is the time just before our own. I thought I might have finally found the passage:

The time just before our own entrance into the world is bound to be peculiarly fascinating to us: if we could understand it, we might be able to explain our parents, and hence come closer to persuading ourselves that we know why we are here.

The only problem: this passage appears in “The World in a Very Small Space,” a review by Robert B. Shaw of The Stories of John Cheever, published in the December 23, 1978 issue of The Nation. Was I reading The Nation in 1978? No. Would I somehow have found my way to a 1978 issue years later? That’s doubtful, though I did subscribe to The Nation in the late 1980s. Did I have an interest in John Cheever’s work that would have brought me to this review? Nope. So the search must go on.

This review has a wonderful passage from Cheever’s preface to the collection:

These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke the world in the morning with their coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like “the Cleveland Chicken,” sail for Europe on ships, who were truly nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are.

There are ample reasons not to miss that long-lost world. But it’s hard to beat the Benny Goodman quartet — or trio. Maybe I should read some John Cheever.

The sentences that made me give up on Shirley

Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (1849).

“Ah!” said I, shaking my head, and heaving a deep sigh. Life’s too short. And Shirley hadn’t even shown up yet.

Also from Charlotte Brontë
A word : Three words : Jane Eyre, descriptivist : Bumps on the head : “In all quarters of the sky” : Small things : Some trees

Simile of the day

[Watching the news, thinking about those who chose to support him.]

"It’s like they hitched their wagon to a time bomb.”

Idiom of the day: go to pot

Elaine and I wondered about the pot in go to pot . We had three guesses between us: a chamber pot, a cooking pot, and a pot for a plant.

The kitchen wins. The idiom “dates from the late 1500s and alludes to inferior pieces of meat being cut up for the stewpot.” Source: Christine Ammer, The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

I suppose that if something wasn’t good enough for the stewpot, it might have become hogwash.

Word of the day: hogwash

As found in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849). Hortense, indignant, reports what Sara said about the choucroute. Go ahead, Hortense:

“That barrel we have in the cellar — delightfully prepared by my own hands — she termed a tub of hog-wash, which means food for pigs.”

Yes, it does, or did.

The Oxford English Dictionary: “kitchen refuse and scraps (esp. in liquid form) used as food for pigs; pigswill. Now chiefly historical.“ The dictionary’s first citation is from circa 1450. Its most helpful citation is the most recent one, from Judith Flanders’s The Victorian House (2004):

Cooks who were not thrifty put all the kitchen leavings into a bucket. The content was called “wash,” and the washman visited regularly to buy it: he then sold it as “hog-wash,” or pigswill.

By 1610 the word acquired a “depreciative” meaning: “any liquid for drinking that is of very poor quality, as cheap beer, wine, etc.” I like this citation, From Thomas Boyd’s Through the Wheat (1923):

“Wine? You call that red hog-wash wine?”

And later, a third colloquial meaning originated in the United States: “nonsense; esp. worthless, ridiculous, or nonsensical ideas, discourse, or writing.” The dictionary’s first citation is from Mark Twain, writing in The Galaxy (1870):

I will remark, in the way of general information, that in California, that land of felicitous nomenclature, the literary name of this sort of stuff is “hogwash.”

In OED citations, it’s sometimes hogwash, sometimes hog-wash. In our time, the hyphenless form is vastly more frequent. As perhaps is hogwash itself.

“Heritage”

This is a battle to save the Heritage, History, and Greatness of our Country! #MAGA2020

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 30, 2020

He won’t be happy until there’s a second civil war.

Pizza with sardines

[From our kitchen. We prepare all dishes with a vignette filter.]

The war is on. Germany has invaded France. The unnamed narrator of Anna Seghers’s novel Transit has fled Paris. Stuck in Marseille, he lives on cigarettes, coffee, pizza, and rosé. Pizza for him is new:

Back then I was surprised to find out that pizza wasn’t sweet but tasted of pepper, olives, or sardines.

A sardine pizza? Our household’s curiosity went into overdrive. I found a recipe that called for baking the crust once (fifteen minutes) and then again (eighteen to twenty minutes). Huh? Elaine decided to do her own thing.

The ingredients:

1 teaspoon dry yeast
¾ cup water
1 tablespoon olive oil
½ teaspoon kosher salt
Bob’s Red Mill whole-wheat pastry flour
    and King Arthur white flour, equal parts

2 onions, sliced
1 tablespoon butter
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
some black pepper
1 can skinless and boneless sardines
    in olive oil, drained and chopped
8 oz. finely shredded Italian cheese
    (the usual supermarket offering)

The directions:

Dissolve yeast in water. Add olive oil and salt. Wait a few minutes; then begin stirring in flour. Knead, and let dough rise in a towel-covered bowl for 50 minutes. Elaine says you’ll need to knead to know how much flour you might have to add. It’ll vary with the weather. She adds flour half a cup at a time.

Melt butter in a pan. Add onions and salt. Caramelize the onions on medium heat.

Roll out the dough and assemble the pizza — sardines first, then onions, then cheese. Bake at 400° for about twenty minutes.

The result was spectacular: savory, fishy, absolutely satisfying. Very Mediterranean. We added some red pepper flakes at the table and drank some cheap rosé. Elaine had a few leaves of fresh basil with her slices. I found the basil took too much away from the taste of the sardines.

In 2013 New York Review Books published Transit (1944) in a translation by Margot Bettauer Dembo. In 2018 the novel was adapted for the screen by Christian Petzold. I recommend the novel, the film, and this pizza with great enthusiasm.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

[There’s nothing missing from the recipe. It’s a sauceless pizza.]

A pocket notebook sighting

[From The Devil and Miss Jones (dir. Sam Wood, 1941). Click any image for a larger view.]

John P. Merrick (Charles Coburn) keeps careful notes. He’s gone undercover in the department store he owns, working as a shoe clerk while seeking to identify union organizers. The shoe department is a hotbed of agitation.

Contexts for these notes: Merrick didn’t do well on the intelligence test given to prospective employees. Miss Jones (Jean Arthur) gave him money, thinking he didn’t have enough to buy himself lunch. Elizabeth (Spring Byington) maybe kinda sorta likes the snarky section manager (Edmund Gwenn). Thus the deleted question mark.

More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Bombshell : The Brasher Doubloon : Cat People : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : Sleeping Car to Trieste : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Time Table : T-Men : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Walk East on Beacon! : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once

Is it treason yet?

From the Associated Press:

Top officials in the White House were aware in early 2019 of classified intelligence indicating Russia was secretly offering bounties to the Taliban for the deaths of Americans, a full year earlier than has been previously reported, according to U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the intelligence.

And from Carl Bernstein:

In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials — including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff — that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations.