More about H. Neil Matkin

The Chronicle of Higher Education has its most detailed report to date on the life and times of H. Neil Matkin, president of Texas’s Collin College, where students are customers, professors work without tenure, and the dangers of COVID-19 are deemed to be exaggerated: “That Man Makes Me Crazy.”

Related posts
Meet H. Neil Matkin : Once again : And once more

[You can read Chronicle articles that aren’t behind the paywall using Reader View or the Kill Sticky Headers bookmarklet.]

A letter from Oliver Sacks

No, not to me. To Austin Kleon. And it’s handwritten.

Bonuses: the note-taking effort that prompted the letter, and a tour of Sacks’s desk. Dixon Ticonderogas, a pencil sharpener, many chunks of metal, and a Mont Blanc fountain pen.

[If you’ve seen Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, you’ll have a better understanding of the chunks of metal.]

Recently updated

How to improve writing, no. 89 Now with more tedious discussion of the phrase a pair of twins.

Thankful

I am so thankful that Joe Biden is our president.

[Typed during the memorial service for William “Billy” Evans, Capitol police officer.]

Time travel

Yes, you can roam around.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, trans. Peter Collier (London: Penguin, 2003).

Proust’s narrator is speaking, of course, of memory. But as Carol Clark points out in the introduction to her translation of The Prisoner in this same volume, the narrator can indeed be years older or younger from pargraph to paragraph. She quotes from a letter by Evelyn Waugh to John Betjeman:

Well, the chap was plain barmy. He never tells you the age of the hero and on one page he is being taken to the W.C. in the Champs-Elysées by his nurse & the next page he is going to a brothel. Such a lot of nonsense.

Clark says that Waugh was “facetiously complaining.” I hope so.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

SAFE-T

The killing of Daunte Wright and the events that followed last night in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, prompt me to share a Chicago Reader article about Illinois’s SAFE-T Act. It’s a criminal-justice reform bill, signed into law in February. The acronym stands for Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity — Today. In other words, now.

“That attention to detail”

The Duc and the Duchesse de Guermantes admire Mademoiselle de Forcheville’s tact and intelligence.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, trans. Peter Collier (London: Penguin, 2003).

The Duc and Duchesse’s evaluation of Mademoiselle is (at least thus far) wholly positive. Add to Mademoiselle’s tact and intelligence her wit, and the way she pronounces certain words — just like her father! Oh, and her brio. Yes, her father was witty too, but he did not have such brio. Let the hair-splitting analyses begin.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

“It’s pathetic”

Here’s an anonymous resident of Villa Grove, Illinois, quoted in the Chicago Sun Times. She’s speaking of life in the town where a bar opening in February 2021 was linked to forty-six cases of COVID-19 and a two-week-long school closing. You can easily figure out why she chose to be anonymous:

“They don’t check to see how many people are in businesses. There are no mask mandates. When restaurants and bars were supposed to be closed except for pickup, there were still several that were open like there was nothing going on,” she said. “There’s hardly anywhere that mandates masks. It’s pathetic.”

That’s the meaning of “freedom” in downstate Illinois.

And that’s my airing of grievances for the day.

A related post
COVID-19 in Douglas County

[Says the bar’s owner, “We don’t want Chicago telling us what to do.” The state capital is Springfield.]

Airing of grievances

For some people, every day is Festivus.

[Worth clicking through if only to see the startling photograph.]

Idiom of the day: soup up

A clue in yesterday’s Newsday crossword — five letters, “Jazzes (up)” — prompted me to (finally) write a post about soup up.

My guess about an origin: perhaps a way to describe the adding of soup to a meal. I imagine a seedy little café, circa 1927, adding a bowl of soup to, say, the beef stew, roll, and coffee it usually serves its patrons: “We souped up the dinner for ya, Bill. Eat hearty.” But it’s tough to guess correctly about these things.

Merriam-Webster gives these definitions for soup up:

to increase the power, efficiency, or performance of

to heighten the impact of : to make more exciting or colorful

It’s the origin of the verb that’s surprising. According to M-W, soup up comes from soup, “drug injected into a racehorse to improve its performance.” M-W dates soup up to 1924. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the verb to 1931. The OED dates soup-as-drug to 1909, citing the 1909 ‌Webster’s New international : “any material injected into a horse with a view to changing its speed or temperament.” The OED suggests the prefix super- as an influence.

And now I recall that in The Asphalt Jungle (dir. John Huston, 1950), “soup” is what the criminal gang calls the nitroglycerine they use to blow up a bank vault. Sure enough, the Oxford English Dictionary has soup as nitroglycerine or gelignite, with a first citation from 1902. I like this 1903 citation, from Isaac Kahn Friedman’s The Autobiography of a Beggar: “Louis learned how ter make de ‘soup’ from a gang of ‘yeagers’ dat used ter blow de doors off country banks.” Yeagers are more commonly known as yeggs: that is, safecrackers.

And crackers remind me of soup, and of the imaginary café. If I keep going on with this post, it’ll soon be time for lunch. There will be soup.

[The Autobiography of a Beggar is not an autobiography. It’s a book of what look like colorful stories by a Chicago journalist.]