“He’s like the antithesis of public health”: Dr. Irwin Redlener of Columbia University, speaking of you-know-who on MSNBC a few minutes ago.
Wednesday, October 14, 2020
Tackling with chutzpah
From a New York Times review of Christophe Honoré’s stage adaptation of Marcel Proust’s The Guermantes Way :
Not only does it takes chutzpah to tackle Proust’s magnum opus, whose meandering style has wrong-footed many film and stage directors, but Honoré ups the ante by dispensing with the first two books.What I first noticed: the profusion of clichés. After which I paused to take issue with “meandering style.” Merriam-Webster: “Meander implies a winding or intricate course suggestive of aimless or listless wandering.” Proust’s prose is neither aimless nor listless. It was only after copying and pasting the review sentence into this post that I noticed takes, which has stood in the review since October 8.
Also: the narrator’s family never had “a stay with the Guermantes in Paris.” They had an apartment in the Hôtel de Guermantes.
Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)
“The Problems of a President”
The Reverend Simon Darcourt has been visiting his colleague Ozias Froats, who studies not faces but faeces, human faeces.
Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels (1981).
The Oxford English Dictionary confirms that at least most of these names for animal faeces are real. Watch your step.
The Rebel Angels is the first novel of The Cornish Trilogy.
Related reading
All OCA Robertson Davies posts (Pinboard)
[Collect: “a short prayer comprising an invocation, petition, and conclusion. Specifically, often capitalized : one preceding the eucharistic Epistle and varying with the day” (Merriam-Webster).]
Tuesday, October 13, 2020
Fifty PBS shows
In The New York Times, appreciations of fifty PBS shows that have made “a lasting imprint on our culture.” Reading through, I realize that I’ve watched a lot of children’s television: I’m happy to see Ghostwriter and Wishbone among the fifty. And I’m happy to see the very funny bilingual comedy ¿Qué Pasa, U.S.A.? And look: PBS has a page for that show, with several episodes.
Naked City Mongols
Whichever side of the law you’re on, the Mongol is the pencil of choice in the Naked City.
[Henry Casso as a numbers runner. James Franciscus, Harry Bellaver, and John McIntire as Detective Jimmy Halloran, Detective Frank Arcaro, and Lieutenant Dan Muldoon. From the Naked City episode “Ten Cent Dreams,” March 10, 1959. Click either image for a larger view.]
I missed these Mongols the first time around. Other Naked City Mongols: here, here, and
here. When I was a kid, the Mongol was the pencil of choice in our family. Still my favorite pencil.
Related reading
All OCA Mongol posts and Naked City posts (Pinboard)
Monday, October 12, 2020
“Illinois has no place to go”
Thus said our president this morning on Twitter. And he’s right. We’re hemmed in by other states: Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Kentcky, Missouri, Iowa. There is Lake Michigan, but Illinois can’t squeeze in there. Truly, our state has no place to go.
Except to the polls, to vote this president out.
George Floyd in high school
The Washington Post continues its series on how systemic racism shaped George Floyd’s life. The focus in today’s article is education, in high school and college. From a description of life at Jack Yates High School in Houston:
In Floyd’s senior year of high school, 21 percent of the juniors and seniors at Yates who took the mandatory state test passed all three sections, compared with 43 percent in the district and 54 percent statewide. About half the class took college entrance exams, but almost no one scored at a college-ready level.A related post
It was a school where many students came from poor families, with little support at home, and where teachers were flooded with students with significant needs. So it was that students like Floyd, good kids who didn’t cause problems, could skate through academically, able to do the minimum. . . .
For top athletes at Yates, things were easier — for Floyd and also for Dexter Manley, the former Washington Redskins star who graduated in 1977 even though he was unable to read or write.
“One thing about athletes, at every level there were people to help you,” Manley said in an interview. “Because football is king in Texas — I mean king — that means those faculty are going to work with the head football coaches. They’re going to give you the support. They’re going to give me the help.”
Teachers asked little of him, he said, satisfied that he turned up for class and even that he sat toward the front. “You’re getting a lot of credit for attendance,” Manley said. He laughed when asked if he ever was asked to write a paper, and said he’d get “help” from girlfriends on tests.
Near the end of his all-pro career, Manley testified before a Senate panel on education that he had been illiterate through high school and college. He struggled to read his statement. “The only thing that really made me feel good in schools was athletics,” he said through tears. “That built self-esteem and some self-worth in Dexter Manley. Other than that, I had no identity.”
“You didn’t fail, sir,” Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) told him. “The system failed you.”
Four months later, George Floyd started high school in that same system.
Opportunities
Brooklyn, represent
I called the assisted-living place to reserve the gazebo for a visit with my mom. “You sound just like her,” the staff member said.
I have long known that I sound just like my dad. Plumbers, when I would answer my dad’s business phone: “Oh, jeez, you sound just like your father.” But yesterday marks the first time anyone has told me that I sound just like my mother.
As the staff member went on to say, she meant my accent, or alleged accent. Students, too, used to tell me sometimes: “I love your accent.” Only people from elsewhere have accents, of course.
The Brooklyn lives loudly within me.
[That final sentence is meant to ring a bell.]
“Red meets black, you’re okay, Jack”
[Mark Trail, October 12, 2020. Click for a larger view.]
Mark Trail has a new artist. Her name is Jules Rivera. She calls herself Mark Trail’s new dad. Here’s an article about the change.
Yes, that’s a camcorder, not a phone, in Cherry Trail’s hands, which I think must be a joke at the expense of the early aughts.
*
And now I’m surprised to see that news of the switch made The New York Times in September.
Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)
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