Sisyphus in Harlem

It’s still Saturday. John Grimes is sweeping.

James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953).

Also from James Baldwin
“The burden is reality” : “Every corner, angle, crevice” : “Life is tragic” : “She was Sanctified holy” : “Somewhere in time” : “What we make happen”

Manufacturing vinyl records

“A couple of years ago, a new record could be turned around in a few months; now it can take up to a year, wreaking havoc on artists’ release plans”: The New York Times reports on the difficulties of manufacturing vinyl records.

Centrist?

From The New York Times:

Five veterans tapped to advise Senator Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona Democrat, resigned from their posts on Thursday, publicly accusing her of “hanging your constituents out to dry” in the latest sign of growing hostility toward a centrist who has emerged as a key holdout on President Biden’s agenda.

It’s difficult to understand how being a “key holdhout,” a party of one, makes someone a “centrist.”

[Maybe it’s a party of two, but it’s impossible to know, because Sinema, unlike Joe Manchin, gives no indication of what she’ll support.]

New directions in academia

In the news:

Staff shortages at Michigan State University prompted an unusual request this week: A senior administrator asked colleagues to volunteer to clean tables and prepare and serve food in the cafeterias.

“Faculty and staff from around campus are invited to sign up to assist in the dining halls!” wrote Vennie Gore, senior vice president for residential and hospitality services and auxiliary enterprises, to an email list of deans, directors, and chairs. “We have specific needs during evenings and weekends. I ask that you share this message with your departments and units.”

“Faculty and staff from around campus are invited to sign up to assist in the dining halls!”: I like the cheerful exclamation point, which is obligatory in missives trying to make what’s unappetizing seem appetizing. No pun intended.

“Senior vice president for residential and hospitality services and auxiliary enterprises”: in other words, he is one of the people who run food services. His salary in 2020: $292,857, “274 percent higher than average and 354 percent higher than median salary in Michigan State University.”

Will time in the dining halls (eight hours a week!) count as university service, to be applied toward retention, promotion, or tenure?

Thanks, Diane! (Yes, that’s a cheerful exclamation point.)

[A longer article in The Chronicle of Higher Education requires an account.]

“Every corner, angle, crevice”

It is John Grimes’s fourteenth birthday. He is cleaning his family’s Harlem apartment, as he does every Saturday.

James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953).

I think of James Joyce’s “Eveline”: “She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from.”

Also from James Baldwin
“The burden is reality” : “Life is tragic” : “She was Sanctified holy” : “Somewhere in time” : “What we make happen”

[“He who is filthy”: Revelation 22:11.]

Firing Frank Lloyd Wright

“I am sick and tired of hearing people say Mr. Wright is wonderful, but he is not practical”: “”How to Fire Frank Lloyd Wright” (The MIT Press Reader).

Thanks, Elaine.

Related reading and listening
“Usonia 1” : “Usonia the Beautiful” (99% Invisible)

Diacritics with an external iPad keyboard

With a Mac, iPad, or iPhone, you just hold down a key to get a display of characters with diacritics. With an external iPad keyboard, diacritics are not especially intuitive. The Option key (⌥) is key. Briefly:

⌥ + E, followed by letter: acute accent

⌥ + `, followed by letter: grave accent

⌥ + I, followed by letter: circumflex

⌥ + N, followed by letter: tilde

⌥ + U, followed by letter: umlaut

⌥ + C: cedilla

Thus déjà vu, fête, mañana, Mädchen, garçon.

The key combination that needs glossing is ⌥ + `, which uses the sadly neglected accent that sits below the tilde in the upper-left corner of the keyboard. Yes, it might be mistaken for a single quotation mark.

Skullface

[Click for a larger skullface.]

It appears to be faintly smiling. I think it knows something.

[My first thought was “Cookie Monster.” But the skull shape is so clear, and Halloween is approaching. I say Skullface.]

A guest lecture

I had a guest lecturer coming to talk to my class. When I walked into the room, the guest was already there, standing at the front of the room, ready to begin. I said I first wanted to take a minute or two to show my students how I had solved a problem with a sentence. I handed out strips of paper with the sentence, which was about Lorine Niedecker’s poetry, and had something to do with making clear the difference between “blue-black and green” and “blue, black, and green.”

I took a seat and looked for my copy of the sentence in the sheaf of papers I’d brought to class and found another strip of paper with a much longer sentence about political philosophy. And I realized that there was nothing in it about colors. I asked the student sitting next to me if I could borrow his strip of paper. I had just handed out copies, but he didn’t have one.

Then a student two desks away volunteered how much he liked Simon and Garfunkel. Yes, I said, Paul Simon’s songs really hold up, though I always thought that Simon and Garfunkel’s albums suffer from too much production.

Half an hour of class time had now gone by. Twenty minutes left.

Another student volunteered to let me borrow her strip of paper. It was, she explained, in her underwear. She proceeded to remove her bloomers from under her dress — yes, bloomers, bright pink, made of crepe — and handed them to me. I asked her if she could remove the piece of paper herself.

Related reading
All OCA teaching dreams (Pinboard)

[This is the twenty-third teaching-related dream I’ve had since retiring. In all but one, something has gone wrong.]

“Idiosyncratic excess”

Uh-oh:

This sentence represents an extreme instance of Anne Brontë’s idiosyncratic excess and defect in the use of commas. I have not deleted the formally intrusive comma after “Because,” because I have chosen to read it as an emotional notation indicating the staccato breathlessness of speech under high stress; neither have I inserted a comma between “a trifle more” and “I imagine,” which may therefore represent the outpouring of indignation Anne Brontë intended.

I think I’m going to stop reading the notes in my edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. ”Idiosyncratic excess” too often describes the editor’s commentary.