Illinois-15 in The Washington Post

“Political scientists and analysts said that when state Democrats packed so many conservatives into a single district, they created the environment for [Mary] Miller to win despite holding views that are out of step with most general-election voters in Illinois and even with most GOP House members”: The Washington Post takes a long look at Illinois’s gerrymandered fifteenth congressional district.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

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Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Stan Newman, constructing as Anna Stiga. Which means, I think, that the puzzle will be tougher than one by Lester Ruff but not as tough as one by S.N. himself. I found today’s puzzle challenging. I got it done, but I don’t think I was ever on its wavelength.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

7-D, fifteen letters, “Since lots wanted it.” Broke open much of the puzzle for me.

14-D, eight letters, “Nutcracker participants.” Oops — SQUIRRELS is off by one letter.

15-A, six letters, “One of British rock’s ‘holy trinity.’” Okay, I guess so, but I’ve never thought of such a thing.

19-A, eight letters, “Really eager.” One of at least two clues that made me think I was in a time warp.

20-D, five letters, “Maxim’s scratch.” Stumper-y.

31-A, six letters, “Track participant.” A little sneaky.

44-A, seven letters, “Parting word.” See 19-A.

54-D, four letters, “Square one.” Groan.

My favorite in this puzzle: 55-A, nine letters, “Dashboard setting.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

OCA mobile

I was poking around in the Google Search Console this afternoon — idle curiosity — and discovered that Google disapproves of my use of the same OCA layout for desktop and mobile views. That layout seems to me to work just fine: on a phone, I just embiggen the main column of text and the sidebar sails off to the right. And it’s over there if I want it back. The sidebar has some wonderful stuff. It also has a picture of me.

But the lack of a layout for mobile devices makes these pages less attractive to the overlords who scan the Internets and put URLs in search results. So after holding out for many years, I’ve added a sidebar-less mobile view. Comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome.

If you’re on a mobile device and would like to see things in the old-fashioned way, just choose View web version from the bottom of any page.

Reading in Massachusetts

“Lost in a world of words” is the first in a series of articles about the state of reading instruction in the state of Massachusetts (The Boston Globe ). An excerpt:

Before the pandemic, only about half of public school third-graders had adequate reading skills. Post-pandemic, the story is even worse.

Scores for all third-graders have slipped below the 50 percent mark, and the most vulnerable kids are in serious trouble; 75 percent of low-income third-graders could not pass the reading comprehension test on last spring’s MCAS [Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System] exam. Roughly 70 percent of Black third-graders, 80 percent of Latino students, and 85 percent of children with disabilities couldn’t understand grade-level reading passages well enough to answer questions about them accurately.

It bears repeating: The vast majority of Black and Latino children and kids with disabilities are being sent off to the fourth grade — where students start reading to learn instead of learning to read — hobbled by this major deficit, which has cascading effects on spelling and writing as well. Some can’t sound out words on the page. Others can’t understand what they’re reading. Many never catch up; they drop out of high school or fail to finish college. The social and economic rifts in our society widen.

Just wait for Skippy the Frog.

The podcast series Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong is a great introduction to what’s at stake.

“I think he was in the chess club”

Steven Millhauser, “Kafka in High School, 1959,” in Disruptions (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Steven Millhauser’s Disruptions

Steven Millhauser. Disruptions: Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023. 270 pp. $28 hardcover.

Having read all of Steven Millhauser’s published fiction, I sometimes torment myself by trying to decide which of his books to recommend as a way into his work, recognizing that to begin with one would be to miss — at least for a time — the delights of all the others. If a reader were to begin reading Millhauser with a book other than Disruptions, his new collection of eighteen stories, here is some of what that reader would miss:

~ Stories that explore the strangeness of other people's houses, one (allegedly) haunted, another the scene of an inconclusive nighttime encounter between a high-school boy and his girlfriend’s mother.

~ Stories that explore the way adolescence changes everything, and not for the better. “My hair was wrong. My walk was wrong. My face was wrong”: and the narrator smashes his framed yearbook photograph. In “The Change,” transformation takes the form of adolescent self-obliteration in a terrifying Ovidian metamorphosis.

~ Stories in which suburban realities — lawns, hedges, tree-lined streets — become increasingly strange, as residents drain their lives of color or climb ladders into the sky or let nature overtake their houses and public buildings (think Detroit, if Detroit were a tidy suburb) or grow accustomed to the presence of a town guillotine. And, always, there’s a narrator who speaks on behalf of the place (to whom?) and calmly thinks things through:

The post office, the library, the high school, the beach club, the guillotine, the bank, the movie theater, the Historical Society, the Presbyterian church, the new stop sign out by the hardware store — it was the town we all knew, the town most of us had grown up in, with its familiar monuments, its careful preservation of the past, its openness to reasonable change. A guillotine on the town green was beginning to seem no more remarkable than the new crosswalk between Vincenzo’s Drugstore and the Downtown Diner or the new post-office branch out by the renovated junior high. What really occupied our attention wasn’t the blade and the bloody neck but the new parking meters installed on two downtown blocks and the road-repair project that closed off half a dozen streets and produced traffic jams causing ten-minute delays.

~ Stories that develop in the manner of a metaphysical conceit, ingeniously exploring aspect after aspect of a given premise. The tour de force here is “The Little People,” a new expression of Millhauser’s fascination with the miniature, an account of a town that houses a separate community known as Greenhaven, whose residents are two inches tall. What kinds of work do they do? How do they avoid danger from birds, squirrels, unleashed pets, and children? How do they handle money? And what happens when a large person and one of the Little People embark on a sexual relationship? The story is told from the perspective of a large person, who finds the Little People ultimately and comically unknowable:

Sometimes we suspect that they are happier than we are, though this may only be because we cannot always see the expressions on their faces.

As with Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, whose turn-of-the-twentieth-century Grand Cosmo prefigures Disney World, Las Vegas, video games, Hudson Yards, and the Metaverse, the allegory here is overdetermined: Are the Little People the invisible labor force that sustains a local economy? Are they the unpowerful? (Recall Leona Helmsley: “Only the little people pay taxes.”) Is Greenhaven meant to suggest segregation in housing? Are the Little People an Other whose way of being the (literally) larger culture tries to emulate? (The high-schoolers in the story start a Shortness Club.) Millhauser’s fable is all the more powerful for its irreducibility to any one possibility.

~ Stories — all of them — that are endlessly inventive. The standout here might be “Kafka in High School, 1959,” which imagines Franz as an American teenager: hiding Four Great Russian Short Novels in his lap in AP English, looking at himself in the mirror (“His chin sticks out like an unclosed drawer in a lamp table”), staring at the “pale-haired goddesses” Bonnie Wilcox and Janet Pearson, always choosing the hat in Monopoly:

As a child he liked to try on his father’s hats, and now, at sixteen, he says that the hat is necessary because when you’re descended in a direct line from Miles and Prudence Kafka, who sailed over on the Mayflower and settled in Plymouth Colony, the least you can do is show a proper respect for the memory of your distinguished ancestors.

Here’s a quick test — though not a page-ninety test. Turn to page 215 and read the section of this story titled “Kafka Asks Himself What He Knows.” If you like what you’re reading, why not begin reading Steven Millhauser with Disruptions?

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

[The first two quoted passages are from ”The Fight” and “After the Beheading.”]

More than some rocks

[Nancy, September 16, 1950. Click for larger rocks.]

It’s not always some.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts : “some rocks” posts (Pinboard)

[Yesterday’s Nancy is also today’s Nancy.]

“Hi, Papa”

We were visiting my mom, sitting in the big common area of her memory-care residence. A boy, maybe four or five, waved at me from across the room: “Hi, Papa.”

Say what? It turns out that he was the grandson of one of the nurses. And though he hadn’t mistaken me for his grandfather, he saw me as a grandfather type. Is it that obvious? It may be.

What that boy didn’t know is that Papa is indeed my official grandfatherly name, a young granddaughter’s approximation of grandpa. (“I named you,” she recently said.) In our fambly it’s pronounced with the same stress on each syllable: pa pa.

A related post
Obviously a professor, and obviously not from here

Monkey jungle

I was walking to a classroom when I stopped in front of a half-dozen cafeteria tables at which students sat studying. I asked if I could have their attention for a minute. “What do you call this apparatus?” I asked, gesturing to the thing that stood next to the tables. The students were unanimous: they called it a jungle gym. I had always known it as the monkey bars.

In waking life I have always known it as the monkey bars. That was the term I knew in my Brooklyn childhood. But jungle gym seems to be the more common term. The NYC Parks website has a page about playgrounds with two great photographs of jungle gyms — that’s what the website calls them: 1, 2. The NYC Municipal Archives have many more photographs. Searching the Archives for monkey bars returns nothing.

Wikipedia: “In Australian English, the term ‘monkey bars’ is sometimes used to refer to the entire jungle gym.” But I didn’t grow up in Australia.

Post title with apologies to Duke Ellington’s “Money Jungle.”

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[“Only fools and children talk about their dreams”: Dr. Edward Jeffreys (Robert Douglas), in Thunder on the Hill (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1951).]

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

Yes, she’s holding a paintbrush, but she’s no artist.

Leave your guess(es) in the comments. I’ll drop a hint if one is needed.

*

(Two hours later.) I think a hint might be needed. In two of her celebrated roles, she played a detective’s wife and an Army veteran’s wife. I’ll check the comments again later today.

The answer is now in the comments.

More mystery actors (Collect them all!)
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[Garner’s Modern English Usage notes that “support for actress seems to be eroding.” I use actor.]