“Kids on the Case”

From the podcast Criminal, a great episode: “Kids on the Case,” true stories of children solving crimes, helping to solve crimes, and finding a missing person. These kids are living the dream, or at least my childhood dream. I was a boy secret agent.

Yes, this episode is from September. I’m catching up.

Speaks softly, doesn’t lie

From the This American Life episode “Personal Recount,” devoted to stories of people changing their minds. Louis Rosman is an Iowa farmer who voted for Donald Trump in 2016. His granddaughter Lizzie Johnson interviewed him for the show:

LJ: How long did it take you to figure out that Trump was not that change that you wanted?

LR: Well, this virus has really convinced me because he totally disregarded it and still does. He acts as if it don’t exist. And all these people are dying, and he still thinks that’s all you have to do, is just ignore it. And then he said, it’ll be over with by Easter. It’ll be over with by July. And it’s always a bunch of damn lies. It scares the hell out of me. I ain’t ready to die yet.

And then the deal the way they were handling those children down at the border, herding them around like a prisoner-of-war camp. Five hundred-some are separated from their parents, and some of them are six months old.

LJ: It sounds like thinking about those kids without their parents has really stuck with you.

LR: Well, why wouldn’t it? With anybody, anybody with feeling. Trump has no feeling. Absolutely none. That’s why I like Joe Biden, because he has a soft voice and he doesn’t tell lies. I wanted someone who cares for someone or something besides himself.

LJ: Would you have thought I was crazy if, in 2016, I told you, hey, you would vote for a Democrat in 2020, straight down the ticket?

LR: If you would have told me what was going on now back then, I wouldn’t have believed this could happen.

We need to hear more stories of people changing their minds.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump* is retweeting a crackpot who says that Georgia’s governor and secretary of state “will soon be going to jail.”

[“Who voted for Donald Trump”: I’ve dropped the asterisk for impeached, as Trump* wasn’t an impeached president in 2016. I’ve made one slight alteration in the TAL transcript.]

Items in a series

The narrator has heard Mlle. Swann’s mother yell: “Gilberte, come here! What are you doing?” And Gilberte’s name begins to touch everything:

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002).

People, a line of work, a neighborhood: I like that wildly disparate series.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Naked City Stonewall

Though the television series Naked City ranges all over Manhattan (and beyond), it makes the island feel more like a small town, its locations immediately recognizable. Look, there’s the Park again. And Park Avenue. And Riverside Drive. And The Old Landmark.

Here’s another landmark. Elaine spotted it first: the Stonewall Inn, 53 Christopher Street. The park is Christopher Park. Its fence is at least 130 years old. The Stonewall sign is now gone.

[Varney (Dana Elcar) and Joseph Irma (Paul Richards) talk over their plans. From the Naked City episode “Strike a Statue,” May 16, 1962. Click for a larger view.]

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All OCA Naked City posts (Pinboard)

Designing sardines

“We went against all packaging and labeling norms in this usually traditional industry to appeal to today’s quarantined customer”: Lindsay Megan Silveira of Linsanity Design has designed cans for sardines and other fish with the slogan “Buy Local. Taste Quality.” I would like to see these cans in person, so to speak, but “local” here means India.

Bonus: here’s a close-up of a tuna can, with a pun for good measure.

Thanks, Chris.

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All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

“Valedictory”

From The Washington Post:

It was only Trump’s defiance that prompted Biden to decide to give another valedictory speech.

No, another victory speech. Merriam-Webster tells us that valedictory is

borrowed from New Latin valedictōrius, from Latin valedic-, alternate stem of vale dīcere, valedīcere “to say goodbye” + -tōrius, adjective suffix (originally derivatives of agent nouns ending in -tōr-, -tor).

A valediction is “an act of bidding farewell.”

Odd: the sentence that follows the one I’ve quoted refers to Biden’s “victory speech more than five weeks ago.” Is valedictory an autocorrection error? An attempt at elegant (or inelegant) variation?

"Puppetlike dimensions”

M. Legrandin, snubby snob:

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002).

Related reading
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Sean Malone (1970–2020)

I learned this morning that my friend Sean Malone died last week. Friend, yes, though we never met in person. I was hoping that would happen in Los Angeles, on the other side of the pandemic.

Sean usually shows up in these pages as “Sean at Blackwing Pages” or “Sean at Contrapuntalism.” Sean loved pencils and brought a documentarian’s mind to the history of the Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602 and all things Faber (Faber-Castell and Eberhard Faber). And he lived a life as a brilliant musician. Take a look at his Wikipedia page, which covers his work as a performer and musicologist. His abilities are amply represented at YouTube. No pencils though.

When I taught The Grapes of Wrath, I would sometimes bring a Blackwing, a No. 2 3/8 Mongol, and a Blaisdell Calculator to class and pass them around for students to try out. Those were John Steinbeck’s favorite pencils, as documented . . . somewhere. I made a point of mentioning that the Calculator was a gift from a friend, a pencil aficionado and musician, Sean Malone. “From Cynic?!” a student asked. Worlds joining up, in a wonderful way.

“As documented . . . somewhere”: Sean would know where.

[The source for the brand names: Steinbeck’s “The Art of Fiction” (non-)interview in The Paris Review. Thanks, pencil talk.]

No influence

It has been raining. The narrator’s friend M. Bloch has arrived for lunch, an hour and a half late and covered in mud. But he has nothing to apologize for:

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002).

The narrator’s father draws a conclusion about M. Bloch: “He’s an imbecile.”

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Dr. Jill Biden

Joseph Epstein’s complaint in The Wall Street Journal about Jill Biden’s choice of honorific is a strange piece of writing. Epstein touts his own modest academic credentials (“I taught at Northwestern University for 30 years without a doctorate or any advanced degree”) while mocking Biden’s dissertation, bashing doctoral programs generally, and calling out the awarding of honorary doctorates to celebrities (while also letting us know that he has one such degree himself).

What I find most noteworthy about Epstein’s screed is not its condescending misogyny (“Madame First Lady — Mrs. Biden — Jill — kiddo: a bit of advice”) but its failure to consider the ways in which academic honorifics function in and out of academia. Ben Yagoda’s essay “What Should We Call the Professor?”is helpful on these matters:

Forms of academic address are not only intensely personal, but also tied up with far-ranging trends and issues of gender, prestige, and cultural change.

Notice: intensely personal.

My preference was always “Mister” — good enough for my dad and good enough for me, I used to tell students.  Or “Professor” (if you must). My choice, I happily acknowledge, was a form of reverse snobbery on a campus where “Doctor” was endemic (and where first names for profs were never a norm). If I were a woman in academia, I’d probably choose “Professor” and keep students from using “Miss” and “Mrs.” in place of “Ms.” If, like Jill Biden, I had received a doctorate later in life after many years of teaching, I might choose “Doctor.” Whatever the choice, it would be personal. And, like Dr. Biden’s choice, it would be none of Mr. Epstein’s b-i-bizness.

[The link in the first sentence should take you to the full WSJ piece. Fingers crossed.]