Fact-free history

In The New York Times, an introduction to Vladimir Medinsky, Putin adviser and lead author of new history textbook for Russian high-school students:

“Facts by themselves don’t mean very much,” Mr. Medinsky wrote in one of his books. “Everything begins not with facts, but with interpretations. If you love your homeland, your people, then the story you write will always be positive.”

Impossible to think about what’s happening there without thinking about what’s happening here: Stalin was a wise leader; slaves developed skills. War is peace, &c.

A related post
Reporting the teacher

“A fairly precise notion of the book”

From the diary of Silas Flannery:


One instance of the “reading” that follows:

Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1981).

In the digital humanties, it’s now called distant reading. I’ll say it is.

Also from this novel
The formula : Novels and theories

Reporting the teacher

The Washington Post has a long article about Mary Wood, a South Carolina high-school English teacher who was reprimanded after two of her AP students reported her to the school board for teaching about race. Wood had assigned her students selections from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me.

The clips of residents calling for Wood to be “disciplined” or fired are chilling.

[Gift link, no subscription needed.]

What not to-do

From The Guardian :

Donald Trump has denied wrongdoing after a report on Monday said that one of the former president’s long-time assistants told federal investigators he repeatedly wrote to-do lists for her on documents from the White House marked classified.

The aide, Molly Michael, told investigators that more than once she got requests or tasks from Trump written on the back of notecards that she later recognized as sensitive White House materials, ABC News reported on Monday, citing sources.

As a longtime maker of to-do lists, mostly paper-based, I know that this is what not to-do. A scrap of paper, a fresh index card, or a page in a pocket planner is always a better choice than a classified document.

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Ta-da

The rules

From a pre-school:

~ No hurts.

~ Be kind.

~ Have fun.

Useful for later life too.

[“No hurts,” as explained to me: “Keep your hands to yourself.”]

Sentences and their fortunes

Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) gets his sentence tangled in a conversation with new station manager Kate Costas (Mercedes Ruehl). From the episode “She’s the Boss” (September 19, 1995):

“Some people — and this is so unfortunate — can't tell the difference between self-respect and pigheadedness.”

“Yes, but those people are usually rigid little demagogues who don’t know the difference between the kind of respect that is earned and the kind of respect that is irrespective … of what others expect.“

“Isn’t it sad when bad things happen to good sentences?”

“I think I made myself clear.”

See and hear this exchange at YouTube.

Four Duryea’s

[Duryea’s Confectionery and Duryea’s Restaurant, 2 and 26 City Island Avenue, The Bronx, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

An island in The Bronx? Yes:

City Island is a neighborhood in the northeastern Bronx in New York City, located on an island of the same name approximately, a mile and a half long, half a mile wide.

I visited City Island a couple of times with friends in my student days. The lure was seafood, inexpensive and wonderful. For now I’m going back by map. Seeing the name Duryea — though alas there’s no obvious relation to Dan — is a bonus.

Duryea was a prominent name on City Island. There was a Duryea pier at the south end of City Island Avenue.

[Port and Terminal Facilities at the Port of New York (1942).]

The New York Times has two Duryeas, Herman B. and Albert B., most likely a father and son, participating in yacht races at City Island. Herman’s name first appears in 1902. Albert’s name last appears in 1964. The 1914 Official Automobile Directory of the State of New York lists an Albert Duryea residing on City Island as the owner of a Ford. The 1940 Bronx telephone directory has an A. Duryea living at 151 Belden Street (no tax photograph), which would more or less next to Duryea's Restaurant. A New York magazine article about City Island (August 1, 1977) mentions a Norma Duryea, “whose family goes far enough back to have once owned much of the south end, including what is now the Lobster Box restaurant.”

Indeed: 26 City Island Avenue, once the location of Duryea’s Restaurant, is now part of the larger Lobster Box (no. 34). What was Duryea’s Confectionery (serving Bruckner’s beverages and Gobel’s frankfurters) is now the site of a parking lot for Johnny’s Reef Restaurant.

Today there are two restaurants with name Duryea’s on Long Island, in Montauk and Orient Point. I reached out to ask if there’s a connection and received a reply from someone who said she wasn’t sure and that “the restaurant” (I assume the one in Montauk) was bought from a family with “deep roots in Montauk.” I would suspect that there’s a connection.

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

Today’s Saturday Stumper

My philosophy of crosswords: If I can finish a puzzle, the puzzle is at least pretty good. If I cannot finish a puzzle, there’s something wrong with it. (Solipsism 101.) I had to look up two answers to finish today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper. So I regret to say that there’s something wrong with Steve Mossberg’s puzzle. Kidding aside, I think most crossword doers with find today’s Stumper ultra-difficult.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, nine letters, “Sharp-turn roller coaster.” Whaddaya know — I’ve passed one many times. But I had to look up the answer.

4-D, three letters, “Something sold in a snap case.” I was sure it was PEA, until I realized there was a less obvious possibility.

12-D, ten letters, “Collegiate quarters.” My first guess was UNIVERSITY — after all, a university can be home to a college. But there’s a trickier answer.

18-A, five letters, “One of Africa’s Big Five.” I thought it had to be GHANA. This one, too, I had to look up.

29-D, ten letters, “Summer academic workshop.” NEHSEMINAR? Uh, no.

46-D, five letters, “Old-school kind of guy.” Neither BUB nor MAC fits.

58-A, nine letters, “One seen in seasonal snaps.” I had a hunch, and it proved correct.

60-A, nine letters, “Crown jewel.” Dang clever.

My favorite in this puzzle: 15-A, nine letters, “Break for biscuits.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

[The Newsday puzzle still won’t load from the Newsday website, at least not on my Mac. Brains Only and The Washington Post have the puzzle for online solving on the day of publication. A printable puzzle can be found the night before publication at creators.com. I wish Newsday would offer a separate subscription for its crossword. The price for a digital subscription to the newspaper — $99 a year — makes no sense for a non-Long Islander.]

West Virginia University cuts

From Inside Higher Ed:

Despite pleas from students, faculty members and academic organizations to change course, and despite student protesters disrupting its Friday meeting, the West Virginia University Board of Governors voted today to eliminate 143 faculty positions and 28 academic programs from its flagship Morgantown campus.

Some students wept, and an assistant math professor stormed out of the meeting room Friday morning as board members approved cut after cut, with only the student body president, the Faculty Senate president and another faculty representative consistently voting no. . . .

The university is eliminating all its foreign language degrees, which include bachelor’s degrees in French, Spanish, Chinese studies, German studies and Russian studies, along with master’s degrees in linguistics and TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages).

WVU will also eliminate all its foreign language minors, with the possible exceptions of Spanish and Chinese, the two languages in which it will still offer courses. There was one relevant change Friday: the board preserved two faculty positions in the Department of World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics.

The current minors allow students to study Arabic, Italian and Japanese. Those will all be eliminated. The languages and literatures department will go from 24 faculty members to seven.

The university will also end its master’s in public administration program, along with its master’s degree in higher education administration and its Ph.D. in higher education. There are also cuts in the arts, though the board saved one faculty position each in art and music.

The university is also eliminating its current graduate degree offerings in mathematics, though it says the School of Mathematical and Data Sciences has been given “approval to begin the intent-to-plan process” for replacement master’s and doctoral degrees. Sixteen faculty positions will be eliminated in that school, a third of the current faculty.

University officials have said these and other cuts will take effect at various times, as WVU provides individual employees notices of planned termination, and as professors finish teaching graduate students in discontinued programs and undergraduate students who have accumulated at least 60 credit hours toward their degrees. Those with fewer credit hours have no guarantee they’ll be able to finish their intended degrees at WVU.

Some faculty members may lose their jobs as soon as May.

WVU is led by E. Gordon Gee, who has the (dubious, to my mind) distinction of having held more college presidencies than any other American. He is seventy-nine years old and is being paid $800,000 a year.

You can find the grim paper trail leading to the cuts here.

Bill Griffith in Bushmillerland

Bill Griffith. Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, the Man Who Created “Nancy.” New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2023. 265 pages. $24.95.

Bill Griffith is a longtime visitor to what he calls Bushmillerland. He learned to read, he says, by looking at Nancy. His own work is characterized by crosshatching and density — there might be more lines in one Zippy panel than in an entire Ernie Bushmiller strip — but Griffith’s admiration for Bushmiller’s “pristine simplicity of composition” is absolute. And that simplicity was the result of extraordinary care: in his later years, Bushmiller let his assistants know that Nancy’s hair was to have 69 to 107 spikes, no more, no less.

For Griffith, Nancy is the irreducible essence of comics. As he writes, “Nancy doesn’t tell you what it’s like to be a child. Nancy tells you what it’s like to be a comic strip.” As if to prove the point, we learn late in this graphic biography that Bushmiller kept a copy of the American Heritage Dictionary next to his favorite chair, the volume opened to page 266, where a 1957 Nancy served to illustrate comic strip.

Ernest Bushmiller (1905–1982), a child of the Bronx, left school at fourteen and became a copy boy at the New York World. Work on crossword grids and comic strips followed, and in 1925 he took over Fritzi Ritz, a cheesecake strip. Nancy, Fritzi’s niece, came onboard in 1933, and in 1938 the strip was renamed Nancy. (Fritzi stayed on, ever glamorous, something Griffith ponders in a meditation on “The Persistence of Cheesecake in Nancy.”) Though Bushmiller thought of himself as producing entertainment for the “gum chewers,” he found himself in esteemed company: James Cagney, George Herriman, Rea Irvin, Harold Lloyd, Groucho Marx, and Eleanor Roosevelt are among those whose paths crossed his. By the mid-1970s Nancy appeared in more than 800 daily newspapers. When Parkinson’s began to limit Bushmiller’s ability to draw, assistants took on ever greater responsibilities with the strip.

The Bushmiller who takes form in this biography is more than slightly driven: living a frugal life in Connecticut with his wife Abby, working his way through vacations, browsing the Sears Roebuck catalogue for comic possibilities, forever looking for the next “snapper,” the gag idea from which he would work backwards to create a strip. Drawing on the recollections of Bushmiller’s friend and assistant Jim Carlsson, Griffith has many surprising details to share: Bushmiller admired Velázquez, Fats Waller, and Thomas Wolfe; he corresponded with a young Charles Schulz; he worked at four drawing boards, switching from strip to strip; he kept a bathroom plunger close at hand for inspiration (“It’s golden,” he said). Griffith now and then depicts himself as a tour guide in an imaginary Bushmiller Museum of Comic Art, making a case for Nancy as stuff for grown-ups, and suggesting largely convincing parallels to the work of Hopper, Magritte, and Warhol.

This biography is, of course, full of art, with full-page illustrations and many smaller panels depicting places and events in Bushmiller’s life. Dozens of original Nancy strips serve as exhibits. Many other Nancy strips and single panels are repurposed to tell parts of the story, with Griffith keeping characters as Bushmiller drew them and adding new dialogue and backgrounds. The repurposing of Nancy images reaches an emotional and imaginative peak in the book’s final pages, with “Professor Griffith” visiting a United Feature Retirement Facility to meet the aging Nancy, Sluggo, Dagmar, Plato, and Spike. But you’ll have to read to find out what happens.

[A representative composite panel: Nancy and rocks by Bushmiller, mise en scène by Griffith.]

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)