After browsing John Guillory

I’m browsing John Guillory’s Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). I find many good observations in what I’ve read: about the displacement of the literary text as an object of study, about criticism of society as the motive of scholarship, about the contracting of literary study to modern and contemporary realist prose narratives “amenable to interpretation within a political thematic” — developments that I too lament.

But then I read this passage in an essay about graduate education, with a suggestion about how to improve doctoral study:

What I want to propose more urgently is a way of relating the temporary career of graduate students to the lives they will most likely have after graduate school, if circumstances do not favor their getting a tenure-track job. I argued in another venue (at the MLA conference of 2020) that graduate students need to be apprised of market conditions and of alternatives to the career of college professor as soon as they arrive on campus. Only such honesty and transparency, instated at the very beginning of the first semester, has any chance of preventing or mitigating the bitterness of disappointed expectations. . . .

“The very beginning of the first semester”? Isn’t that a bit like — or more than a bit like — explaining the problems of owning a time-share after the buyer has already signed?

Guillory further suggests that the best way to help graduate students maintain an engagement with literary study after graduate school

is to introduce [them] to as many alumni of the system as are willing and able to speak to them about their careers after graduate school. Many of these alumni, we know, did not get tenure-track jobs but escaped the trap of adjunct labor; many are now employed in nonacademic professions. Let us invite them to return and tell us what they got from their experience in graduate school.

That certainly sounds like a risky proposition. And notice that phrase: “the trap of adjunct labor.” Here, as in English studies generally, the emphasis is on encouraging students to identify with the lucky few deemed winners. So yes, even if you don’t get a tenure-track position, you too can be a museum curator, &c.

Browsing this book makes me think anew about my life in academia, which I call a fluke life.

“Artists wear Wranglers”

[Life, August 19, 1962. Click for a much larger view.]

What the advertisement says:

The beret and the beard help. But blue jeans are as vital as North light to his creative spirit. Jeans are standard equipment with a lot of unusual people. Wranglers are the jeans they choose. We can’t promise you a one-man show at the Metropolitan; but we can give you the same lean, slim fit, the same sure-sizing that every artist wants. Pre-shrunk to the right size before they’re even sewn together. In sizes for all the artists in your family. From $2.49 to $4.29.

If you look closely at that beard, you’ll see that it’s pasted on.

[Found while looking for something else in Google Books’ Life archive. There was a series of “________ wear Wranglers” advertisements in Life. This one is, I think, the goofiest.]

English orthography

Steven Millhauser, “An Adventure of Don Juan,” in The King in the Tree: Three Novellas (2003).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Hitler Moms

News from Indiana, as reported in The Indianapolis Star:

The Hamilton County chapter of Moms for Liberty, a national organization recently listed as an "extremist group" by a civil rights watchdog, apologized Thursday morning after it launched a newsletter called The Parent Brigade Wednesday that featured a quote from Adolf Hitler on its front cover.

The quotation was a variation on the words Representative Mary Miller (R, IL-15) spoke on January 5, 2020: “Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’” The Moms have it as “He, alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future.”

The Star also reports on two other appearances of these words in recent American discourse, on a billboard in 2014 and in a 2023 Facebook post by a member of a Colorado Springs school aboard.

It never occurs to these dangerous people that Hitler did have the youth — the Hitler Youth, as I reminded Mary Miller in 2022. But as I pointed out to her, he did not have the future. And neither will the Moms.

Notice who’s speaking later this week at an event the Moms are promoting: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

Surface absence

[Beetle Bailey, June 22 and 26, 2023.]

I noticed the absence of surfaces Last week and thought about putting in a line, but I’m happy to see they got around to it themselves.

A Boro Park five-and-ten

[4318 13th Avenue, Boro Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

In our house it was known as the five-and-ten. Or Woolworth’s. I have a limited number of specific memories of the Woolwort's pictured here: Silly Putty, smooth wood floors, enormous (or so they seemed) glass cases full of loose candy to be scooped into paper bags, small Christmas presents for my grandparents — a comb, a pocket mirror.

Note the baby carriages parked in front of the store. I’ve established to my satisfaction that yes, people really did leave carriages outside stores. It was another world, in a number of ways: here is the lunch counter in the Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth’s that is now the International Civil Rights Center & Museum.

More pictures of interiors: the Library of Congress has a number of photographs of shoppers in the 1930s and ’40s; a Wisconsin newspaper offers nine photographs from the 1955 opening of a Woolworth’s in Falls River. And here’s Madison Woolworth’s, also from 1955. The 1968 film The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter has scenes in a working Woolworth’s. I put two representative shots in this post. The Woolworth-hungry reader can find more photographs by searching for woolworth store interior.

In recent years this Brooklyn storefront has housed a Duane Reade, a Carter’s with clothing for babies and kids, Little Luxury (baby clothes), and Regency Family Wear.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Steve Mossberg. Gosh, is it ever. When I finished, forty-three minutes after starting, I thought of a clue to capture my reaction: “Initial disbelief.” Answer: WTF. I’ve rarely seen a Stumper this difficult. In other words, I loved it. Or better: I loved having solved it.

The three clues that broke the puzzle open for me: 16-A, ten letters, “Group amusement”; 40-A, thirteen letters, “Literally, ‘harm joy’”; and 59-A, five letters, “Seasonal swimmer septet.” That last clue was my starting point, which gives some idea of this puzzle’s difficulty.

Some other clue-and-answer pairs of note:

5-D, seven letters, “Entry-level guy.” Clever.

7-D, four letters, “Duettist in Haydn’s Creation.” My first thought was OBOE. If it’s in a crossword, it must be an OBOE, right?

13-A, ten letters, “Instrumental part favored by Beethoven.” It seems to be true.

26-D, ten letters, “Made a cactus garden, say.” Hoo boy.

31-A, three letters, “Toaster’s goal, perhaps.” Pretty oblique.

35-D, eight letters, “Hybrid outerwear.” Initial disbelief hardening into permanent disbelief.

36-D, eight letters, “Directive for details.” Not exactly misdirective, but not especially directive either.

56-A, ten letters, “They pair well with pasta.” I should have seen it right away.

My favorite in this puzzle: 50-D, four letters, “What a seer often says?” It’s my favorite because I didn’t understand it until thinking about it for the third or fourth time.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

“A big white moon”

Steven Millhauser, “Revenge,” in The King in the Tree: Three Novellas (2003).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

In a Mellotron

“Conceived as a parlor instrument, it made its way into countless formative hits that continue to define classic rock stations today and laid the groundwork for some of our most common studio tools.” From JSTOR Daily, “Tape Heads,” a look at the Mellotron in rock.

And speaking of a parlor instrument, in 2008 I made a short post about a 1965 demo that presents the Mellotron as just that. When I looked up the demo this morning, without even thinking about that post, I noticed the same slightly crazed look on the keyboardist’s face at 2:41. But this time I also noticed an only slightly less crazed look on the demonstrator’s face at 2:11. The host and demonstator are conductor Eric Robinson and magician David Nixon, who together created the Mellotronics company to sell the Mellotron. The keyboardist is Geoff Unwin, an early Mellotron user.

Here’s Paul McCartney demonstrating the instrument.

[Post title with apologies to Duke Ellington.]

From The Pencil

From Henry Petroski’s The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (1990):

Pencils can be as important as toys, and they often have been used as toys. We once wrinkled our faces to hold mustache pencils between the upper lip and the nose, and we scribbled pencil mustaches on posters in the days of erasable graffiti. Young boys made pencil tusks hang from their nostrils, and older girls put pencils under their breasts to test if they needed a bra. We twirled, chewed, tapped, doodled, and sometimes even took notes with pencils during classes, as we would later during meetings.

We use pencils to stir paint, prop up windows, open stubborn plastic bags, dial telephones, and punch holes in aluminum beer cans whose ring openers have come off in our fingers. As calculator buttons grew smaller we used, in an ironic twist, the eraser end of a pencil to tap out our sums. Still later, as parents, we showed our small children how to fit the pencil eraser into the holes left by the broken buttons on a Speak & Spell, and now our children show us how to use a pencil to remove tapes from a videocassette recorder whose eject button has fallen inside. It works because a pencil lead conducts electricity.

Some of us, before our arthritis got too bad, tried to experience the sensation known to the medical profession as Aristotle’s anomaly: “When the first and second fingers are crossed and a small object such as a pencil is placed between them the false impression is gained that there are two objects.” Apparently, for some people at least, when the pencil touches two parts of the skin that are not ordinarily touched simultaneously by a single object, the one pencil is perceived as two. As our arthritis got worse, our doctors prescribed medicine in containers designed to be opened with a pencil acting as a lever.

The pencil is always an extension of the fingers. With a pencil we can count beyond our ten digits, usually striking out every four marks with a fifth — four vertical fingers made into a hand by a diagonal thumb. We can turn the pages of slick magazines and catalogues more quickly with the dry eraser than the licked finger. We can dial or press telephones that our nails are too long or our fingers too fat to work. We can hold more places in books by sticking pencils where our fingers were. We can point to details that our fingers would obscure. We can exaggerate our gestures. We can make visible what our fingers can only trace in air. We can vote not by raising our hands but by marking our secret ballots.

A related post
Henry Petroski (1942–2023)