How to improve writing (no. 101)

From a New York Times article about unpaid labor in academia:

[A lecturer] says she has seen a devaluation, even though adjuncts often have similar credentials to tenured professors.

I take it that the mistake here belongs to the reporter. Ask: what is similar to what?

Corrected:

[A lecturer] says she has seen a devaluation, even though adjuncts often have credentials similar to those of tenured professors.

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[This post is no. 101 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Teaching for free

Prompted by the now-infamous listing for an unpaid teaching position at UCLA, The New York Times looks at the realities of academic labor: “The unspoken secret had been fleetingly exposed: Free labor is a fact of academic life.”

These unpaid arrangements are perhaps the most concrete example of the unequal power in a weak labor market — in which hundreds of candidates might apply for one position. Institutions are able to persuade or cajole people who have invested at least five or six years in earning a Ph.D. to work for free, even though, academics said, these jobs rarely lead to a tenure-track position.

I gotta say it again: Where else do people willingly work for free? In cults.

A related post
UCLA is (not really) hiring

Time for cheese

From The Mary Tyler Moore episode “Murray Takes a Stand” (January 31, 1976). Sue Ann Nivens (Betty White) speaks:

“No one is ever too busy for cheese.”

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An Automat documentary

The Automat, a documentary film, directed by Lisa Hurwitz. With Mel Brooks, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Colin Powell, and other fans. Here’s the trailer.

Someday, I hope.

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The 1950 census

Daughter Number Three offers ultra-helpful directions for looking up people and places in the 1950 census.

A wonderful coincidence: DN3’s looking-up answered a question I had. The 1950 census identifies my maternal grandmother as a — what?

[Click for a larger view.]

It looks like “comtomtoa oporatr.” An operator, obviously. But the first word? It’s comptometer. DN3 found a comptometer operator listed for the house her family later occupied.

Sweatin’ your nextra to the boo

Watch a stretch of TV news, and you will likely hear an annoying commercial with a jingle that begins:

If it hurts when you poop sometimes
Like pinchin’ off a porcupine

Can anyone decipher the next line? It sounds to me like “You’re sweatin’ your nextra to the boo.” I have found the Internets unhelpful in answering my question.

*

All is now revealed in the comments.

Telephone EXchange names

[Slightly Scarlet (dir. Allan Dwan, 1956). Click for a larger view.]

The movie is set in fictional “Bay City,” where TA and EX were real.

More EXchange names on screen
Act of Violence : The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Black Widow : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Blue Gardenia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Brasher Doubloon : The Brothers Rico : The Case Against Brooklyn : Chinatown : Craig’s Wife : Danger Zone : The Dark Corner : Dark Passage : Deception : Deux hommes dans Manhattan : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Down Three Dark Streets : Dream House : East Side, West Side : Escape in the Fog : Fallen Angel : Framed : Hollywood Story : Kiss of Death : The Little Giant : Loophole : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder by Contract : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Naked City (8) : Naked City (9) : Nightfall : Nightmare Alley : Nocturne : Old Acquaintance : Out of the Past : Perry Mason : Pitfall : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Red Light : Side Street : The Slender Thread : Stage Fright : Sweet Smell of Success (1) : Sweet Smell of Success (2) : Tension : Till the End of Time : This Gun for Hire : The Unfaithful : Vice Squad : Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

There’s something about Mary

From the April 5 installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American:

Today, as we learned of more atrocities by Russian troops in Ukraine, the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan resolution that called on the U.S. government to uphold the founding democratic principles of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO): “individual liberty, human rights, democracy, and the rule of law.” Since those values “face external threats from authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China and internal threats from proponents of illiberalism,” and since NATO countries have called for a recommitment to the founding values of the alliance, the resolution supports the establishment of a Center for Democratic Resilience within NATO headquarters. The resolution reaffirmed the House’s “unequivocal support” for NATO.

The resolution was introduced by Gerry Connolly (D-VA), who sits on both the Foreign Affairs and Government Oversight Committees, and had 35 other cosponsors from both parties. The vote in favor was bipartisan, with 219 Democrats and 142 Republicans voting yes. After all, what’s there to oppose in a nod to democratic values and diplomacy, when Ukraine is locked in a deadly battle to defend itself against an invasion and brutal occupation by Russian forces directed by authoritarian Russian president Vladimir Putin?

Sixty-three Republicans — those who tend to support former president Trump —voted against the resolution.

Here’s the text of the bill. Here’s the roll call.

Among the nays: Mary Miller (IL-15).

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Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, TCM, YouTube.]

That Brennan Girl (dir. Alfred Santell, 1946). You’re fourteen and you buy a gardenia for your mother (June Duprez) on Mother’s Day, only to find her in the company of some man, and she pretends that you’re her sister, not her daughter: no wonder the Brennan girl, Ziggy (Mona Freeman), goes astray. With her mother’s encouragement and the tutelage of Denny Reagan (James Dunn), Ziggy gets involved in all kinds of illegal schemes. Suffice it to say that her life goes very wrong before an improbable redemption. Mona Freeman is excellent playing a walking contradiction — hard as nails yet still vulnerable. ★★★ (YT)

*

Slightly Scarlet (dir. Allan Dwan, 1956). From Love’s Lovely Counterfeit, a James M. Cain novel I’ve never read. The movie feels like melodrama crossed with a crime story: in Bay City, two sisters, one “good” (Rhonda Fleming), one “bad” (Arlene Dahl), compete for the affections of a crooked cop (John Payne) while the “good” sister is also involved with the city’s mayor (Kent Taylor). Meanwhile, the king of the rackets (Ted de Corsia) is on his way back from Mexico to find the cop, who crossed him up. The best thing about the movie: Arlene Dahl’s campy over-the-top performance, which make me think of Harriet Sansom Harris’s Bebe Glazer in Frasier. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Million Dollar Legs (dir. Edward F. Cline, 1932). Pre-Code, but It’s not what you think: those legs belong to the Major-Domo (Andy Clyde, Cully Wilson of television’s Lassie), one of the countless athletes competing in the 1932 Olympics to raise money for going-bankrupt Klopstokia. Endless gags, verbal and visual, a spoof romance, and a chance to see how what a dextrous performer W.C. Fields was (I always think of him, wrongly, as drunk and bumbling). Susan Fleming, Jack Oakie, Lyda Roberti, and Ben Turpin are among the other performers in a movie that seems far ahead of its time. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Tampopo (dir. Juzo Itami, 1985). A ramen-obsessed truckdriver, Gorō (Tsutomu Yamazaki), helps a widow lady, Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto), turn her dilapidated little ramen shop into a place for the perfect bowl of noodle soup. Why did I write “widow lady”? Because Gorō is something of a Lone Ranger, in a film its witer-director called a “ramen western.” Gorō is helped by Tonto his trucking partner, an interior decorator, a chauffeur with a flair for noodles, and an elderly reed-thin master of ramen. Various unrelated side-stories weave through this funny, tender celebration of food and (sometimes) sex. ★★★★ (CC)

[Tsutomu Yamazaki, Ken Watanabe, Yoshi Katō, Kinzō Sakura, and Rikiya Yasuoka.]

[Tampopo and Jiro Dreams of Sushi (dir. David Gelb, 2011) would make a great double bill: two searches for perfection in food.]

*

Babette’s Feast (dir. Gabriel Axel, 1987). In the late 19th century, in remote, rugged Jutland, two elderly sisters, Martine (Birgitte Federspiel) and Philippa (Bodil Kjer), keep house with the help of Babette Hersant (Stéphane Audran), a French refugee who cooks for them. The sisters are the daughters of a charismatic (dead) pastor-prophet whose small band of elderly followers still keep to their severe, pleasure-denying life — at least until Babette prepares a glorious French dinner for them. An extraordinarily beautiful fable of generosity, humanity, body, soul, luck, and art. Babette recalls the words of a French singer: “He’d say, ‘Through all the world there goes one long cry of from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.” ★★★★ (CC)

*

Ladies in Retirement (dir. Charles Vidor, 1941). I like seeing the seeds of film noir repotted in unusual soil (Station West, say, or The Suspect). Here, as in The Suspect, it’s gothic noir, with a housekeeper (Ida Lupino), her potted sisters (Edith Barrett, Elsa Lanchester), her louche nephew (Louis Hayward), her wealthy employer (Isobel Elsom), and a siren-like maid (Evelyn Keyes). Events are both predictable and non-, Hitchcock-like, with moments of genuine suspense and creepiness. Fascinating to see Ida Lupino become more recognizably Ida Lupino as the story unfolds and her desperation deepens. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Blackmail (dir. Lesley Selander, 1947). Another one from Republic Pictures, a poor man’s version of The Big Sleep, with compromising photographs, a disappearing corpse, even a hothouse. You know a movie is in trouble when the fight scenes (which go on and on) and the snappy patter are occasions for incredulous laughter. Lavish sets, which may have left little money for writers and actors. “You couldn’t stand having the lid pried off that box, could you, Pandora?” ★★ (YT)

*

The Phantom of the Monastery (dir. Fernando de Fuentes, 1934). Lost in a dark wood, three hikers, a married couple and a best friend/aspiring cuckolder, seek shelter for the night at a monastery. The hikers’ conversation makes clear — repeatedly, repeatedly — that the monastery is somehow outside of space and time. It does harbor all sorts of strange phenomena: labyrinthine hallways, a room full of coffins, an inexplicable shadow, moans from a sealed cell. Good and weird, with a closing moral, this movie anticipates The Twilight Zone by several decades. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Murder Is My Beat (dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1955). The lure here was the director, celebrated for Detour. This film too is low-budget, but it’s plain ordinary and hilariously improbable, with disbelief suspended and left pleading, “Hey, get me down from here!” A police detective (Paul Langton) investigates a grotesque murder (the victim facedown in a fireplace) and becomes convinced that the convicted killer (Barbara Payton) is innocent. So he and she jump from the train that’s taking her to prison and set out to find the real killer, which, no surprise, they do. ★★ (YT)

*

The Artist (2011, dir. Michel Hazanavicius). Ah, yes, I thought: it’s “the movies,” to borrow Umberto Eco’s characterization of Casablanca. And it turns out that that’s what I thought when I first saw The Artist in 2012. Tropes galore, and actors and cinematography that look exactly right (contrast every recent Hollywood movie with men in fedoras). One of the best bits: Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) and George Valentin’s (Jean Dujardin) jacket. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Dragonwyck (dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1946). Overtones of Jane Eyre, with an unworldly young woman (Gene Tierney) coming to work as a companion to a child in a great house full of secrets. An imperious landowner (Vincent Price) is its master and mini-god. There’s a sickly wife (Vivienne Osborne), a kindly handsome doctor (Glenn Langan), and a mysterious upper room. I can’t forget to mention the harpsichord music that some residents of the house hear in the middle of the night. ★★★★ (CC)

*

The Crooked Web (dir. Nathan Juran, 1955). Probable impossibilities are better than improbable possibilities, right? But I’m still not sure that Aristotle would find much to like in this movie, in which a hamburger-stand everyman Stan (Frank Lovejoy) is sucked into a scheme to recover a stash of hidden loot in Germany. Double-crosses and plot twists and quick saves abound, and Stan turns out to be something more or less than an everyman. Aristotle might like Stan’s Diner, which, like Aristotle himself, is long gone. ★★ (YT)

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New not-new DFW

An excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King has been published by McNally Editions as Something To Do with Paying Attention. The excerpt, a section of the novel (§22), is indeed about paying attention, as is The Pale King itself. Someone who’s paying attention might notice that the McNally’s new paperback is more expensive than the paperback edition of The Pale King itself.

It’s not the first time §22 has appeared as a stand-alone piece of fiction: in 2013 Madras Press published §22 as The Awakening of My Interest in Advanced Tax, a modestly priced paperback, with the proceeds benefiting Granada House, where Wallace began living in sobriety in 1989.

§22 is an extraordinary piece of writing, a first-person account by “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle, a one-time college “wastoid,” of how he came to work for the IRS. The narrative bears an eerie (non-coincidental?) resemblance to Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, in which stepping into the wrong classroom changes a student’s life. With Merton, it was a class with Mark Van Doren at Columbia. With Fogle, it’s an accounting class with with a substitute faculty member, a pseudo-Jesuit who speaks of the work of the accountant as heroic:

“True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care — with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. Just you and the job, at your desk.”

On a lighter note, it’s §22 that transplants Los Angeles’s celebrated Foot Clinic sign to Chicago.

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