Earlier Time

Aldinger was once a mayor. Now he is an escapee from a concentration camp, nearing his hometown.


Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross. 1942. Trans. from the German by Margot Bettauer Dembo (New York: New York Review Books, 2018).

Tremendously suspenseful and tremendously moral, The Seventh Cross insists on a human spirit of resistance that cannot be broken. The 1944 film adaptation focuses almost exclusively on one of seven escapees. The novel, far more expansive than the film, follows the fortunes of dozens of characters, shifting from one to another through seven days in seven long chapters. Another NYRB rediscovery, one I recommend with enthusiasm.

From Anna Segher’s Transit
“Have been and will always be” : “A substitute for home and hearth”

Stuffin’, of bear, knocked out

[The Long Night (dir. Anatole Litvak, 1947). Click for a larger view.]

“Sure knocked the stuffin’ out of you, pal,” Joe Adams (Henry Fonda) says.

This post is for my friend Fresca, who’d know how to help this bear.

Going to Graduate School

There’s going to graduate school, as in “Um, I think maybe I’d like to be a professor someday.” And then there’s Going to Graduate School, which takes place on some other planet:

To keep options open, I applied to five graduate schools in five different fields. Having loved the work of art historian Meyer Schapiro, I applied to New York University, where he taught; second, I applied to the interdisciplinary program in social thought at the University of Chicago, which sounded fascinating; then to Columbia University’s program in English literature, and to Brandeis University, to study with philosopher Herbert Marcuse. What intrigued me most, though, was Harvard's doctoral program in the study of religion, which offered opportunities to study Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism, so I chose Harvard.

Elaine Pagels, Why Religion?: A Personal Story (New York: Ecco, 2018).

I’ve learned a lot from Pagels — from The Gnostic Gospels (1979), Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988), and The Origin of Satan (1995) — but I gave up on this book (a memoir of ideas, I’d call it) early in the third chapter. The writing is just not good enough: awkward sentences, glitches in chronology, missing details. For instance: Pagels’s choice to apply to graduate schools follows a post-college stint at the Martha Graham School. And yet Pagels mentions nothing about a background in dance before or during college. Also missing: the college major (and minors?) that made this range of grad-school choices possible.

But it seems to go without saying that Pagels (a Stanford grad) was accepted to all five programs.

Guthrie mailbox

[Art by Mike Shine. House paint on wood panel, 10″ × 12″. Original here. Click for a larger view.]

Elaine saw this image shared on Facebook. Its meaning is clear. But it was not especially easy to figure out the source.

“This Machine Kills Fascists” was the message on Woody Guthrie’s guitar, first painted on, later lettered on a gummed label and pasted on.

Peach muffins

Elaine has shared her recipe for peach muffins. If you’re two people and you buy an enormous box of peaches from an orchard, there must be muffins.

Rutgers and grammar

I’ve been reading about this story for a week and saying to myself, No, that is not what Rutgers said. Not at all. Now Snopes has it covered: “Did Rutgers University Declare Grammar ‘Racist’?”

Long story short: writing instruction at Rutgers will place greater emphasis on grammar and other sentence-level matters so as not to disadvantage students from multilingual or “non-standard” academic backgrounds. I’m reminded of what Bryan Garner says: “Standard English: without it, you won't be taken seriously.” To let students believe otherwise is to put them at a disadvantage.

*

August 4: Reuters too confirms that the claim that Rutgers called grammar racist is false.

Related posts
Grammar in the writing center : W(h)ither grammar

Awkward

On Jeopardy a few minutes ago, someone answered a question about “Donald Trump’s second wife” with “Who is Ivanka Trump?”

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by “Anna Stiga,” or Stan Again, the puzzle’s editor Stanley Newman. Pretty, pretty, pretty easy, with the only difficulties coming from the grid itself, which breaks the puzzle into five nearly discrete sections. Must . . . navigate . . . narrow . . . straits. Phew, made it.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

1-D, eight letters, “KO, in the DJIA.” Something to do with some rarefied form of boxing? No. I got the answer but had no idea what this clue meant until I looked it up.

17-A, eight letters, “Calliope and kin.” Not circus folk.

19-A, three letters, “Transit terminal.” Not a HUB.

28-D, ten letters, “Element #117, named for a state.” Ahh, good old lifelong learning.

35-D, eight letters, “Personal digital device.” That’s amusing.

38-A, three letters, “She’s from Nevada.” Such clues are less surprising when you expect them, but I still like getting the point.

53-A, eight letters, “Newspaper in La Paz and Nueva York.” Takes me back to newsstands.

Two clue-and-answer pairs I’d quarrel with:

31-A, seven letters, “Easy to start using, as paper rolls.” Huh? My alternative clue: “Live and lost.”

37-A, seven letters, “Home of Heartland of America Pk.” Just ugly.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Students, stay home

Faculty members at Appalachian State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have written open letters to their schools’ students asking them to stay home this fall.

An excerpt from the ASU letter:

We all look forward to a full return to campus, but the current environment does not allow this. We are aware of an economic impact of remaining online. We are aware of the much greater impact an outbreak in Boone [North Carolina] would have. Some risks are worth taking. A full return of the student body in August is not one of those.

Related posts
Choose your own nightmare : College, anyone? : Reluctant professors : Something is rotten in Iowa : What if

[Via The Chronicle of Higher Education.]

A baseline preference

Virginia Heffernan, writing in the Los Angeles Times about Herman Cain, Louie Gohmert, and opposition to face masks:

At this stage in the coronavirus lottery, the rejection of masks expresses nothing so much as a death wish, which makes it not just irrational but unusual. Most of us want to stay alive as long as possible. Common to all animals, this baseline preference for life over death is nonpartisan, non-ideological, noncontroversial.

Here’s wishing Gohmert a speedy recovery — of both his health and his senses.