Dots and forms

[Click for a dottier view.]

It’s oddly reassuring to see that our trash pickup still bills with a dot-matrix printer and tractor-feed forms. But this year: no side perforations on the forms. Times, changing.

Luddite Club

“We’re not expecting everyone to have a flip phone. We just see a problem with mental health and screen use”: in Brooklyn, teenagers have formed a Luddite Club. They meet to draw, paint, read, talk. Their mascot: Arthur from PBS.

[A great premise for a Wes Anderson film?]

NYT Spelling Bee fail

From today’s New York Times Spelling Bee:

 

Note to the Times: there is always an aporia.

[After Yeats, on the work of the poet: “He never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always a phantasmagoria.”]

Me, reading

The perspicacious Michael Leddy of Charleston, Illinois, was on my Panel of Critical Readers for this book. I’m told that he has been in this position for hours, with rapt (not *wrapt) attention. He brings relentless perspicacity to the reading. #GMEU5 pic.twitter.com/ywlPoDSrIB

— Bryan A. Garner (@BryanAGarner) December 15, 2022

Bryan Garner asked panel members to send photographs of themselves reading entries they commented on for the now-published fifth edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage. So here, or there, I am. The photograph is by Elaine Fine.

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Word of the day: niche

In Crime and Punishment (trans. Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky), Svidrigailov asks, “Où va-t-elle la vertu se nicher?” In other words, “Where is virtue going to build her nest?” A note for this sentence reads, “The playwright Molière (1622–73) is said to have asked this of a beggar who thought he had made a mistake in giving him a gold piece.”

I wondered: is the English word niche related to nicher ? Maybe, possibly, maybe, perhaps.

I recall the mantra that the local Chamber of Commerce repeated in weekly newspaper columns aimed at area merchants: Find your niche. Find your niche. I think that many a merchant must have closed up and skipped town to look for theirs.

Free COVID tests (again)

Once again, every United States household can order four free COVID-19 tests: here.

Words and money and adjunctdom

In The Washington Post Helaine Owen asks, “How progressive can a college be when instructors make poverty wages?” Before a recent strike and settlement, adjunct faculty at New York City’s The New School (87% of all New School faculty) were paid as little as $4000 a course, “while the university hired pricey management consultants and offered its president the opportunity to live in a multimillion-dollar New York City townhouse”:

This apparent unfairness sat uneasily with the principles of equality that have become so important on college campuses, particularly left-leaning ones like the New School. Like most colleges, the school regularly announces DEI — that’s diversity, equity and inclusion — initiatives. And the school’s president, Dwight McBride, tweets such things as “liberation is intersectional.” It’s not surprising that many less-than-well-compensated staffers eventually asked, “What about me?”

“Words like ‘equity,’ ‘inclusion’ or ‘care’ should be used with consideration for what they really mean,” says Matthew Spiegelman, who teaches photography at the New School’s Parsons School of Design. “The more they get used in conversation and not acted on, the less they mean anything.”

Jean who?

“The phenomenon of A Christmas Story leaves those of us familiar with Shepherd as a writer wondering just how many of the multitude of viewers ever read, or even know of, the original short stories, which both inform and interestingly differ from the film”: Samuel G. Freedman writes about Jean Shepherd (The Washington Post).

I listened to Jean Shepherd through much of high school — transistor radio and earphone. One man talking, on WOR, night after night. Excelsior!

Woolworth’s

Night. We were standing in front of a Woolworth’s. We hadn’t been inside one for years. A month’s page from a calendar hung from a string in front of the store. It looked just like a month from my homemade calendars. A tiny piece of newsprint was stapled to one corner of the calendar. I moved closer and saw that it was a short obituary notice. And I remembered that this was the Woolworth’s where an employee had been shot to death.

To the side of the calendar was a kiosk with copies of The New York Times Magazine, a special issue devoted to the employee who had been killed. These were free for the taking. There was also a tiny book of poetry by the employee, resembling the tiny books that used to be for sale at supermarket checkouts — 100 Uses for Vinegar, stuff like that. On the back of the poetry book was the price: 25¢. But these little books, too, were free for the taking. I took one magazine and one book.

When we entered Woolworth’s we saw an aisle that had been blocked off with pieces of china on the floor. Someone was cleaning or reorganizing the aisle’s shelving. I realized that though the magazine and book were free, we had to pay for the items in our shopping cart, which included a set of Venetian blinds.

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