UCLA is (not really) hiring Now with “additional context.”
Sunday, March 20, 2022
The Entenmann’s life
In The New York Times, Dan Barry writes about the Entenmann‘s life:
For some self-conscious fans, buying an Entenmann’s pastry may call for a little wink-and-nod: The organic bakery was out of its locally sourced herb scones, so we thought it’d be fun to have an Entenmann’s, like the ones our grandmother used to eat out of the box in Massapequa . . .A related post
But Long Island working-class families like mine believed that a box of Entenmann’s conveyed class. It would be on proud display in the kitchen, prominent on the refrigerator or displacing plastic flowers as the table centerpiece.
Charles Entenmann (1929–2022)
Diners
From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click any image for a much larger view.
I think of a line from Ron Padgett’s memoir of the poet Ted Berrigan, after a recounting of cafes and diners in Tulsa and Manhattan: “Every last one of these cafes is now gone.”
Thanks, Brian.
Related posts
Tiny Diner : Two diners from the outtakes : More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives
[I quoted from Ted: A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan (Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1993).]
Saturday, March 19, 2022
Today’s Saturday Stumper
Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by Lester Ruff — that is, Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, offering an easier puzzle. The puzzle would have been Les Ruff for me save for the west-central region, where I was, for some time, 34-A, fifteen letters, “Busted,” before realizing that I had the answer to 36-D, eight letters, “Knockout of an escort” wrong. When I hit the right word, four other answers fell into place and I was done.
Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:
14-D, six letters, “Texas oil center.” This clue feels off now.
17-A, seven letters, “March march VIP.” Cleverly put. But as for the answer, thumbs down.
18-A, seven letters, “Copyright law concept.” And it’s a good thing.
21-D, three letters, “Holder of markers.” The clue makes the answer new, at least for me.
26-A, four letters, “Sticks on your feet.” Pleasantly defamiliarizing.
28-D, five letters, “What bulls wallow in.” Ahh, it’s good to get away from the hogs.
35-D, eight letters, “It’s more than a Strong Breeze.” I like knowing that there’s a Beaufort Scale, even if I don’t know the scale itself.
47-A, three letters, “Vowelless Scrabble play.” Huh.
62-A, seven letters, “How some prefer their shells.” Nice.
63-A, seven letters, “Publisher’s semi-strong selections.” But they’re not what they used to be.
My favorite clue in this puzzle: 24-D, four letters, “User of scanning devices.”
No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.
[Well, one spoiler: here is the Beaufort Scale.]
UCLA is (not really) hiring
My friend Diane Schirf sent me a job listing:
The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA seeks applications for an Assistant Adjunct Professor on a without salary basis. Applicants must understand there will be no compensation for this position.Yes, it’s real. I’ve seen speculation that an insider — perhaps a UCLA researcher — may want to do some teaching and that fair-hiring practices require a job listing. Who knows. But I don’t doubt that UCLA will receive applications from outsiders — wishful thinkers who imagine that this position will afford a chance for future UCLA prospects.
As I thought about this job announcement, I was reminded that academia is indeed something of a cult. Cults, too, expect members to work with little or no compensation.
*
March 20: The job announcement has disappeared. (It’s still easy to find on Twitter.) The Facebook page for the UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry now has a fogged-up, poorly written apology of sorts:
[Click for a larger apology.]I can only conclude that someone already affiliated with UCLA is the intended candidate. I am imagining a dimly lit lab:
“You got a nice set-up here. A nice little grant. It’d be a shame to see anything happen to it. Now get in that classroom!”
Two more job listings
An extraordinary amount of work for $28,000 a year : “Our students tend to be poorly prepared”
At the MLA
“It was as if we had arrived after the fact — not in the midst of an event, but long after some catastrophe, the story of which we could tell only through fragmentary evidence”: in The Washington Post, Jacob Brogan writes about a visit to the Modern Language Association convention.
An excerpt that brought back memories:
Even in the good years, the convention was a bad place for graduate students searching for work. In a custom now officially discouraged by the association itself, interviews were traditionally conducted in hotel rooms, often with the interviewee sitting awkwardly on the bed as the tenured interviewers perched around them, a flock of judgmental ravens peering down from the eaves.Even worse, perhaps: a hotel-room interview with just one interviewer.
I wrote out the story of my MLA job-seeking in this post: Fluke life.
Friday, March 18, 2022
Cellar music
Vera Lytovchenko, violinist, plays for the dozen or so people in a bomb shelter in Kharkiv, Ukraine: “Ukraine’s ‘Cellar Violinist’ Plays On Amid Heaving Bombing” (Billboard ).
More videos at TikTok.
“Puffing defiance”
Monica Gall is back in Canada a a long sojourn abroad.
A Mixture of Frailties is the third novel of Davies’s Salterton Trilogy.
This post is for my blogging friend Jim Lowe.
Related reading
All OCA Robertson Davies posts (Pinboard)
Schwarzenegger speaks to Russians
You may have already seen the video. I didn’t know until I read a New York Times article this morning that when the video was posted, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Twitter account was one of twenty-two accounts that Vladimir Putin followed.
Schwarzenegger’s talk is a model of ethos, logos, and pathos.
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