Redbud and sky

[Click for larger leaves.]

The solar storm gave us a sky dark as night. Because it was night, and night is dark, even when seen via cameras, which are said to pick up more light. Our cameras picked up more dark. O dark dark dark, as the poet said.

Much more attractive is the sky seen through the leaves of our redbud tree.

Bud’s Eraser Shop

A Far Side production.

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All OCA eraser posts (Pinboard)

Paul Berman on slogans

Paul Berman was a key figure in anti-war protests at Columbia University in 1968. He recalls chanting, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win!” Here he comments on slogans in use in contemporary protests. From an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Those slogans are horrifying. People will say that the chants are calls for the human rights of Palestinians. And people will say that in chanting those slogans that’s what they mean. But this is an example of bad faith.

Bad faith is when you don’t like the truth so you lie about it. Then you lie about having lied about it. You might even convince yourself that in lying about lying you’re not lying. That’s bad faith. It’s a twisted consciousness. We’re seeing a mass movement for a twisted consciousness.

The real meaning of the “river to the sea” is that the state of Israel should not exist, that 50 percent of the world’s population of Jews should be rendered stateless. And the real meaning of “globalize the intifada” is that there should be a globalization of the events that introduced the word “intifada” to the world, namely the intifada of circa 2001, which was a mass movement to commit random acts of murderous terror. But people don’t want to acknowledge that. They get red in the face denying that’s the case. But they can’t explain why the students want to chant these things. The students want to chant these things, of course, because these slogans are transgressive. But no one wants to say what the transgression is because it’s too horrible. So we’re having a mass euphemism event: Horrible things are being advocated by people who deny that they’re advocating it.

Berman blames professors, not students. An opinion piece published in The Washington Post explains why.

Here, also from the Chronicle, is an article about a course at Johns Hopkins that moves beyond sloganeering: “Yes, Students Can Have a Reasoned Debate about Israel–Hamas.”

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Current events : A “Day of Resistance” toolkit : Nihilism in disguise

Witness for the prosecution

[As seen on MSNBC earlier today.]

I did not expect to see Fred Rogers testify as a witness for the prosecution in Donald Trump’s hush money campaign-finance violation trial today.

[That courtroom sketch is of course meant to depict Michael Cohen. Other eyes in the fambly see Neil Gorsuch and a fambly friend.]

FSRC: annual report

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, has finished its ninth year. The club began after I retired from teaching, so the year runs from May to May. Here’s what Elaine and I have read, in alphabetical order by writer, and chronological order by work:

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

Italo Calvino, Marcovaldo, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Invisible Cities, If on a winter’s night a traveler, Mr. Palomar

Anton Chekhov, The Prank: The Best of Young Chekhov

E.T.A. Hoffman, The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr

Helen Keller, The World I Live In

Katherine Mansfield, Stories

Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories, We Others: New and Selected Stories, Voices in the Night, Disruptions

Vladimir Nabokov, Despair

Jean Stafford, Boston Adventure, The Mountain Lion, Collected Short Stories

Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Children

United States of America v. Donald Trump (the Jack Smith indictment)

Thanks to the translators who brought several of these works to us: Anthea Bell, Maria Bloshteyn, Dmitri Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov, Maya Slater, Nicolas Pasternak Slater, and William Weaver.

The FSRC is forging ahead with Chekhov’s Peasants and Other Stories (trans. Constance Garnett).

Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 2021, 2022, and 2023.

Reading or not in college

The Chronicle of Higher Education asks, “Is This the End of Reading?” Reading in college, that is. An excerpt:

Academics across the country are talking about the reading problems they are seeing among traditional-age students. Many, they say, don’t see the point in doing much work outside of class. Some struggle with reading endurance and weak vocabulary. A lack of faith in their own academic abilities leads some students to freeze and avoid doing the work altogether.

And a significant number of those who do the work seem unable to analyze complex or lengthy texts. Their limited experience with reading also means they don’t have the context to understand certain arguments or points of view.

The limited ability of many students to read and write about complex or lengthy texts is a sad and still largely unacknowledged fact of college life. I’ll quote myself, looking backwards as a retired professor of English:

I wonder about the extent to which the dreary professorial practice of outlining the textbook on “the board” is not merely a matter of professorial laziness but a way to compensate, consciously or unconsciously, for students’ weaknesses as readers. And I wonder about the extent to which the decline of interest in the humanities might be explained at least in part by the difficulty so many college students have with the mechanics of reading. Figuring out the words is, for many college students, just plain hard — because they were never properly taught how.

The most revealing bit in the Chronicle article: the story of an academic who wrote in 2019 about her decision to require less reading, because less is (somehow) more. How did that work out? As time went on, she found her students still struggling, or not doing the reading at all:

She has long followed the mantra “meet your students where they are.” But she says if she meets them any further down, she’ll feel like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.

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Car trouble, continued

[1694 Madison Avenue, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Last Sunday we had car trouble on Madison Avenue. I found a second photograph with the same trouble, seen from the other side of the avenue. The numbers that go with the photographs show this one, ending in 0017, coming first. (The other ends in 0022.) Thus we can imagine an adult or two looking on before walking away, leaving a man to struggle as two boys (his boys?) watch.

The buildings in this photograph, like the ones on the other side of the avenue, are now gone.

[Click either image for a larger view.]

In yet another tax photograph, the Wonder Bread truck makes a return appearance. (Thanks, Brian.)

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

Mother’s Day

[“Mother’s Day is the second busiest day of the year for Long Distance calling.” Life, May 12, 1967. Click for a larger view.]

Happy Mother’s Day to all.

Trump punctuation

“ ‘It is my understanding that he liked to use the Oxford comma,’ she added.”

Which just made using that comma feel a little stupid.

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All OCA comma posts (Pinboard) : How to punctuate a sentence

David Shapiro (1947–2024)

The poet David Shapiro has died at the age of seventy-seven. The New York Times (gift link) has an obituary.

I met David by telephone in 1995. I had written a review of his After a Lost Original, and he (somehow) looked me up and called me at home one night to thank me. That was maybe an hour-long, wildly exhilarating call, with me listening to a rapid-fire discourse of endless quotation and reference and putting in an occasional comment. Lucy Sante’s description of David’s talking (in the Times obituary) is exactly right.

I met David in person in 2002 at the Museum of American Folk Art, where he was introducing a reading by John Ashbery and A.N. Homes (an event tied to an enormous Henry Darger exhibit). David introduced me to his wife Lindsay like so: “He’s a poet, journalist, professor, and bon vivant. He has a wife and two kids.” How did he know that I have two kids? I have no idea.

Here are a handful of lines from “The Foot Speaks,” in New and Selected Poems (1965–2006):

Quoth the raven: I am language.
I am language,
And nothing in language is strange, to me.