A joke in the traditional manner

What do dogs always insist on when they buy a car?

The punchline is in the comments.

More jokes in the traditional manner
The Autobahn : Did you hear about the cow coloratura? : Did you hear about the new insect hybrid? : Did you hear about the shape-shifting car? : Did you hear about the thieving produce clerk? : Elementary school : A Golden Retriever : How did Bela Lugosi know what to expect? : How did Samuel Clemens do all his long-distance traveling? : How do amoebas communicate? : How do ghosts hide their wrinkles? : How do worms get to the supermarket? : Of all the songs in the Great American Songbook, which is the favorite of pirates? : What did the doctor tell his forgetful patient to do? : What did the plumber do when embarrassed? : What happens when a senior citizen visits a podiatrist? : What is the favorite toy of philosophers’ children? : What’s the name of the Illinois town where dentists want to live? : What’s the worst thing about owning nine houses? : What was the shepherd doing in the garden? : Where do amoebas golf? : Where does Paul Drake keep his hot tips? : Which member of the orchestra was best at handling money? : Who’s the lead administrator in a school of fish? : Why are supervillains good at staying warm in the winter? : Why did the doctor spend his time helping injured squirrels? : Why did Oliver Hardy attempt a solo career in movies? : Why did the ophthalmologist and his wife split up? : Why does Marie Kondo never win at poker? : Why is the Fonz so cool? : Why sharpen your pencil to write a Dad joke? : Why was Santa Claus wandering the East Side of Manhattan?

[“In the traditional manner”: by or à la my dad. He gets credit for the Autobahn, the elementary school, the Golden Retriever, Bela Lugosi, Samuel Clemens, the doctor, the plumber, the senior citizen, Oliver Hardy, and the ophthalmologist. Elaine gets credit for the Illinois town. Ben gets credit for the supervillains in winter. My dad was making such jokes long before anyone called them dad jokes.]

Undone by an archivist

Debra Steidel Wall, Acting Archivist of the United States: that’s the signature on a May 10, 2022 letter to one of the defeated former president’s lawyers, letting him know that the National Archives and Records Administration would be turning materials over to the FBI.

There’s something sweet and fitting about the prospect of a man with no regard for history and no regard for the written word (save for its monetary value) being undone by an archivist. If the arc of the moral universe isn’t exactly bending toward justice, it might at least be bending toward poetic justice.

“Home”

I cringe a little and laugh a little every time I hear a news outlet refer to Mar-a-Lago as the defeated former president’s “home.”

House of course won’t do. But how about property ? Or residence ? Granted, home fits better in headlines. But there’s something ludicrous about calling a resort that houses (no pun intended) a private club a home.

Leaving a Ph.D. program

Here’s an anonymous piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Why I’m Planning to Leave My Ph.D. Program.” The subtitle explains it all: “My family can’t live on $17,000 a year.” An excerpt:

Over four years in my English Ph.D. program, I’ve taught 132 students as the instructor of record, a total of 396 credit hours, and so, at my college’s stated tuition rates, helped it bring in something on the order of $575,000. While those funds aren’t entirely profit, the minimal overhead of my class means I’ve more than paid my way. In addition, I’ve served as a research assistant and worked in the writing center. In exchange, my institution paid me a stipend averaging $17,000 per year.

The writer quotes from Ulysses at the end of his essay, likening his contemplation of his young daughter’s future to Stephen Dedalus’s contemplation of his sister Dilly’s sad prospects. More bitterly, I think of repurposing Stephen’s famous observation about Ireland in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man : Academia is the old sow that eats her farrow.

For me the saddest thing about the Chronicle piece is that the writer never considers what might follow the completion of his degree. One cautionary tale along those lines: William Deresiewicz’s account of why he left academia.

Where’s Mary?

From Axios: “Mary Miller missing from IL GOP messaging.” She was missing from a Republican Day rally at the Illinois State Fair:

When reporters repeatedly asked IL GOP chair Don Tracy about her absence at the rally, he responded, “I don’t know where Mary Miller is.”

Given Miller’s Adolf Hitler moment and her celebration of “white life,” it may be that those in charge thought it would be safer not to have her present. Or perhaps she chose not to show up because she might have to answer a question from a news outlet. She doesn’t do that. (She refuses. Sometimes she hides.) Nor does she answer letters from at least some of her constituents. I’ve written four, the first of which had no response but put me on her newsletter list. (They must have had an e-mail address for me from her predecessor, John Shimkus.) I immediately unsubscribed. The other three letters had no response.

Regular readers of OCA will know that Mary Miller is “my” representative in Congress.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

Only Murders

I called it. I didn’t have the details, only a now-validated hunch. How about you?

The final episode of the second season of Only Murders in the Building is extremely good. It helps make up for the meta jokes and time-killing schtick that run through the season. A third season is in the works.

[Please note: Comments with spoilers will not appear on this post.]

“Trumpery insanity”

A startling phrase in the “Oxen of the Sun” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses: “Trumpery insanity.” It applies to a man in a mackintosh, a “seedy cuss,” “once a prosperous cit,” who “thought he had a deposit of lead in his penis.” The phrase, alas, is not political prophecy, and it’s not even of Joyce’s invention. Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1970) to the rescue. Its definition:

a c.p [catch-phrase] directed at the frequency of this verdict in cases of suicide : ca. 1880–1900.

Partridge cites Heinrich Baumann’s Londonismen (1887).

Here’s a condensed presentation of the Oxford English Dictionary meanings for trumpery. As a noun:

1. Deceit, fraud, imposture, trickery. Obsolete.

2. “Something of less value than it seems”; hence, “something of no value; trifles” (Johnson); worthless stuff, trash, rubbish. (Usually collective singular; also, now rarely, plural.)
    a. Applied to material objects.
    b. Applied to abstract things, as beliefs, practices, discourse, writing, etc.: Nonsense, “rubbish.”
    c. Applied contemptuously to religious practices, ceremonies, ornaments, etc. regarded as idle or superstitious. (Cf. trinket.) Now rare or merged in general sense.
    d. Showy but unsubstantial apparel; worthless finery.
    e. Horticulture. Weeds or refuse, such as hinder the growth of valuable plants. Obsolete exc. dialect.
    f. Applied to a person, esp. a woman: cf. trash ? Obsolete exc. dialect.

As an adjective:

Of little or no value; trifling, paltry, insignificant; worthless, rubbishy, trashy.

There’s much more that could be said, and has been said, about the man in the mac. All I want to do here is call attention to a remarkable phrase.

[If you’re in emotional distress or suicidal crisis, ask for help. Google has a global list of resources.]

Dreaming of Paris

There we were, in a restaurant. Everyone was speaking French. How great!

I stepped outside to get our car. Someone was walking into a very large salon. Haircuts cost fifty dollars.

As we started to drive back home, I realized that we had not seen, and would not get to see, the Arc de Triomphe. It had been a very short visit.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[Post title from a Van Dyke Parks song.]

Ulysses again

I first read Ulysses in 1979, finishing, not by plan, on June 16. I read the novel for a second time in 1980, and again in 1984. Coming back to the novel this summer, I find my aspirant-academic self in the marginal notes on the foxed pages, in penciled printing now so faint that I need (anyone would need) a magnifying glass to read it.

I often cringe at my earlier reading, which was informed — if that’s the word — by various commentaries and reader’s guides. Sun = son. Fetal position. Rebirth? Rebirth. Trinities everywhere. And of course the specific Homeric correspondences, some so improbable, so strained, that they now seem to me largely beside the point. Buck Mulligan = Antinous? Blazes Boylan = Eurymachus? Well, that’s what I was told.

What I missed so much of earlier on: the characters’ humanity. I missed Leopold Bloom’s utter loneliness: in his family life, in his relationships with other male Dubliners. He conducts a covert pseudonymous correspondence with “Martha Clifford” (whoever she, or he, is); he masturbates while looking at a seventeen-year-old girl (two years older than his daughter Milly, who’s now away for the summer); he’s haunted by the thought of Blazes Boylan’s afternoon visit to Molly Bloom, so much so, it seems, that he doesn’t return to his house at 7 Eccles Street until the early hours of June 17. Bloom is an outsider in the alcoholic, Catholic world of men: a (thrice-baptized!) Jew who drinks only in moderation, a figure whose kindnesses and advocacy of pacifism make him the subject of mockery. He’s haunted by losses: his father’s suicide, the death of his own infant son. With his daughter away, Bloom attempts to create a new familial triangle by proposing to bring Stephen Dedalus into his household: Molly will give Stephen singing lessons, and Stephen will instruct Molly in proper Italian pronunciation and provide intellectual companionship for Bloom.

Poor Stephen: a writer manqué who escaped to Paris only to return to Dublin, with no clear place of residence, haunted by the death of his mother (for whom he refused to pray), abandoned by his fellow carousers in his hour of extremity, the son of a hapless drunk who has ceded the role of parent to his oldest daughter. Stephen stands by silently while others plan literary gatherings; his own literary pull is no more than the means to get his boss’s letter about foot-and-mouth disease in a newspaper. On June 16, Stephen drinks heavily and eats nothing. He last bathed in October. When Stephen declines Bloom’s offer of a place to stay and leaves 7 Eccles Street in the early hours of June 17, he has, literally, no place to go. Like Mr. Duffy in “A Painful Case” (Dubliners), Stephen is alone.

And then there’s Molly Bloom. Her stream of consciousness is an amusing and often outlandish torrent of grudges, suspicions, cutting remarks, and sexual fantasies, the product of a male imagination with its own particular obsessions. But here too, I missed Molly’s humanity. I now see much more clearly that she, like her husband, like Stephen, is profoundly isolated. She is contemptuous of the crass, presumptuous Blazes Boylan, who is merely a respite from the sexual death that is her marriage. Imagining Stephen, she thinks “it’ll be a change the Lord knows to have an intelligent person to talk to about yourself.” Men, she thinks, “have friends they can talk to weve none.” But do men have such friends? Bloom doesn’t. But neither Molly nor Bloom recognizes the other’s isolation. I’ve swooned at Molly’s final “yes I said yes I will Yes,” and I still do. But that was in the past, as Molly and Leopold lay among the rhododendrons on Howth Head. Things are different at 7 Eccles Street.

So I now see more in Ulysses than I once did. And what I understand much better now is that the work’s value is not in its small cryptic details. Joyce famously said that he

put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.

I think that Joyce was working with the sources-and-analogues model of literary scholarship in mind: reading as a form of archaeology or genealogy, to figure out where a particular plot element comes from, what a topical reference means, what an allusion references, where a saying or proverb might first be found. All worthy efforts of course. I suspect that Dante looms large here, given the vast body of commentary on the Divine Comedy.

But are enigmas and puzzles the reason anyone reads Dante? I don’t think so. I respond to Dante’s brutal wit, his bizarre pageantry, his extraordinary similes, and the tension between what doctrine dictates and what feeling demands: “Ser Brunetto, are you here?” Nor are enigmas and puzzles the reason anyone reads Chaucer, or the Shake, or the Brontës, or Proust, or Morrison, or Frank O’Hara, or, or, or. I think of literature, always, as what Kenneth Burke called it: “equipment for living.” It deepens our understanding of our common humanity: “always meeting ourselves,” as Stephen says. It deepens our understanding of the possibilities of language and imagination, of what might be made in words. Those are good reasons to read Ulysses. I’m glad I had another chance.

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

A pinned note

A note pinned to a wall in Alex Katz’s studio:

Last year in Spain a journalist asked me if I considered myself a over the hill minor talent I said I didn’t but a lot of people do. I dedicate this show to all the people who did not take me seriously. You provided the fuel for my rage.

Transcribed from a photograph in a New York Times profile of Katz: “Alex Katz Is Still Perfecting His Craft.”

A handful of Alex Katz posts
Alex Katz meets Lionel Hampton : Alex Katz’s piano : Focusing : Foods