Salomi and prosciuth

[Lassie, her friend Jeff, and an enemy. From the Lassie episode “The Dognappers” (December 3, 1961). Click either image for a larger view.]

I like to watch Lassie when I fold laundry. I’m not ashamed.

But I had to stop folding and hit Pause when I saw that window. I thought I knew what was up, and the wider view clinched it.

The show’s writers might be having a joke, or trying to have a joke, on Italian-American prounciation, though no one would change the /a/ sound of salami to an /o/ or spell the word with an o. And in Italian-American Italian, prosciutto is properly pronounced /pro-SHOOT/. If the writers aren’t joking about pronunciation, the odd-looking prosciuth might a joke on the improbability of an Italian grocery store in Calverton. Or maybe the writers just didn’t get it right.

The food names in the other window might help sort out these possibilities, but the signage is just too blurry, at least for me. I enlarged, experimented with contrast and resolution — just too blurry.

*

An astute reader sees copicoli and provoloni in the other window, and suggests that the propmaster was having a joke. The propmaster for this and 283 more Lassie episodes: Mariano Tomasino. He must have been having a joke.

Related posts
All OCA Lassie posts : Bafangool! : Capeesh? : New Jersey Italian : Parlando italiano a Brooklyn

And a 2004 New York Times article has more about Italian-American Italian.

Dream-machines

The narrator has fallen into “an uneasy friendship” with John Wolfson — Wolf.

Steven Millhauser, “The Room in the Attic,” in Dangerous Laughter (2008).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Avocado pareidolia

[Click for a larger smile.]

I see the eyes and nose over the left side of the smile, or, from Gus’s point of view, the right. His name is Augustine Vocado, A. Vocado. He runs a fruit-and-vegetable market (that makes sense) in one of the city’s older neighborhoods. A. claims to know Mac, the man who lived on my office floor: “Oh, me and him go way back.” I have no way of knowing if he’s telling the truth.

Related reading
All OCA pareidolia posts (Pinboard)

Footage / Fish

“Footage / Fish”: so says the webpage. More specifically: 1940s French Women Sardine Industry Cannery Workers Brittany Vintage Film Movie. Dig the coiffe. Dig the stacks.

Thanks, Brian.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

What’s going on at TCM

From NPR’s Fresh Air: David Bianculli, television critic explains why those who love film should be worried about what’s going on at TCM.

[I am.]

“HOME SWEET HOME”

Steven Millhauser, “Cat ’n’ Mouse,” in Dangerous Laughter (2008).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Aircut

George Bodmer’s Oscar’s Day: “You shouldn’t be able to cut the air.”

[Our air quality today: 178. Wildfires.]

Numerals

A quiz from The Chicago Manual of Style: Chicago Style Workout 77: Numerals.

Someday I’m gonna get 100. (I got an 80.)

“Why is this here?”

From xkcd : “Design Notes on the Alphabet.”

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.