I am nonplussed

My friend the dictionary has let me know not only that I've misunderstood the word nonplussed but that everyone around me misunderstands it too.

I've taken nonplussed to mean "not bothered," "unfazed," as did a colleague in a brief exchange about my son the college student:

"It's a lot more work than high school was."

"Well, I'm sure he's nonplussed about it."

"Oh, he's plussed. He's a little plussed."

Please imagine my rejoinder as Larry David might deliver it, for this conversation is as close as I've ever come to having life imitate Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Plussed, at least as I was using it, is not a word (as I suspected, and my son wasn't fazed anyway). Nonplussed of course means the opposite of what my colleague and I thought it meant. From the Oxford English Dictionary:

nonplus, v. trans.
To bring to a nonplus or standstill; to perplex, confound. Freq. in pa[st]. p[artci]ple. (cf. NONPLUSSED adj.).

nonplussed, adj.
Brought to a nonplus or standstill; at a nonplus; perplexed, confounded.

The words go back to the Latin non plus, meaning "not more," "no further." An OED sample sentence, from Josephine Tey's novel The Franchise Affair (1949): "Now, seeing the actual physical Betty Kane again, he was nonplussed."

Realizing my mistake about the word nonplussed left me nonplussed, but only briefly. It was probably a lot worse for the guy who saw Miss Kane, actual, physical, again.

[Faze: A word that looks as though it must be misspelled, no? I always reassure my students that, yes, it's legit.]

Obama syllabus

The New York Times has made available a syllabus and eight final examinations from courses that Barack Obama taught at the University of Chicago Law School. Below, a paragraph from the syllabus for Racism and the Law (Spring 1994), acknowledging both the unpleasantness and possible advantage of reading marked-up materials in a course packet:



You can find your way to all these materials (and commentary thereon) via the link:

Inside Professor Obama's Classroom (New York Times)

Picturing the Museum

The American Museum of Natural History has an online collection of historical photographs, Picturing the Museum. Here's one photograph:


[Children viewing North West Coast Canoe, 77th Street Foyer. Photograph by Alex J. Rota, 1962. American Museum of Natural History Library, image number 328835. Click for a larger view.]

This photograph reminds me of what I take to be the essence of museum-going: looking. A museum is for looking. The buzzword interactive requires, really, no more than attention and its object. Note, for instance (in the larger version of the photograph), the expression on the face of the boy on the far side of the canoe (second from the right). Can one doubt that he's already planning to build this canoe at home?

And speaking of looking: look at how these children are dressed. Like little ladies and gentlemen, as people used to say. They're representing their school! Even the boy with his shirttail sticking out is wearing what appear to be dress pants. The girls' white socks and shoes remind me of First Communion wear. Are those trenchcoats on the boys, or yellow raincoats? Only a color photograph knows for sure.

The Great Canoe is one of the best known objects in the Museum of Natural History. It's part of Holden Caulfield's museum reverie, an element in his celebration of the permanence of museum displays (a variation, I now realize, on "Ode on a Grecian Urn"):

Then you'd pass by this long, long Indian war canoe, about as long as three goddam Cadillacs in a row, with about twenty Indians in it, some of them paddling, some of them just standing around looking tough, and they all had war paint all over their faces. There was one very spooky guy in the back of the canoe, with a mask on. He was the witch doctor. He gave me the creeps, but I liked him anyway.

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in The Rye (1951)

He gave me the creeps too, long before I read Salinger, and much later in adulthood too. He was a scary guy. The canoe is now displayed minus its people. The New York Times tells that story, quoting curator Peter M. Whiteley: “I suppose some people will miss the Indians, just as some people miss Pluto.” Too true.

"[H]appiness-producing processes"

When we think about the things that alter our lives in a moment, nearly all of them are bad: phone calls in the night, accidents, loss of jobs or loved ones, conversations with doctors bearing awful news. In fact, apart from a last-second touchdown, unexpected inheritance, winning the lottery, or a visitation from God, it is hard to imagine sudden good news. Virtually all the happiness-producing processes in our lives take time: learning new things, changing old behaviors, building satisfying relationships, raising children. This is why patience and determination are among life's primary virtues.

Gordon Livingston, Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart (New York: Da Capo, 2004), 82–84

For another pasage from Gordon Livingston, visit this post on Elaine's blog.

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Frank O'Hara and Mad Men

Watching Mad Men for the first time tonight, I was surprised to see ad man Don Draper reading the paperback edition of Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency (1957). Don picks up a copy after seeing someone reading the book in a bar.

Meditations was published in a very limited run: 90 hardcover and 900 paperback copies. Brad Gooch's O'Hara biography A City Poet notes that by 1960 the book was out of print. This episode of Mad Men focuses on Valentine's Day, 1962 (the night of A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy). How does Don Draper get hold of this book so readily? Well, it's television.

At the end of the episode, Don reads aloud the fourth (last) section of "Mayakovsky," the last poem in Meditations:

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

Is O'Hara's poem charting this character's future? Tune in next week.

["Mayakovsky" is available in O'Hara's Collected Poems (1971), in two editions of Selected Poems (1974, 2008), and in the reissued Meditations in an Emergency (1996).]

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Morris Freedman on reading

Morris Freedman fesses up:

For several years now I've been reading fewer books, from start to finish, that is. Not that my reading has diminished. If anything, I'm reading more now, more words certainly, every day, every week, daily and Sunday newspapers, weeklies, fortnightlies, monthlies, book reviews, quarterlies, portions of books, encyclopedia articles, professional publications, computer manuals and magazines, student papers. I used to spend much of my time reading books in their entirety, for pleasure, study, and work: fiction, plays, poetry, essays, criticism, biography, scholarship, reportage, reference sources. . . .

I am confident that I cover a wider, more diverse, and even a more nourishing intellectual landscape at this point in my life by grazing widely, occasionally pausing to linger over an appetizing patch, rather than feeding narrowly and deeply all the time.

If Freedman is following current conversation about reading, he might say, "Hey, I covered that in 2002." He did, even if his essay is more about print than pixels:

Why I Don't Read Books Much Anymore (Virginia Quarterly Review)

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Happy Birthday, Dad

My dad turns eighty today. Wholly cats!

I am grateful to my dad for many things — among them, my love of jazz, my love of "supplies" (notebooks, pens, pencils, and such), my habit of whistling, my willingness to work hard while focusing on the work and not the possible reward (my mom has something to do with that last one too). And I owe my dad (and mom) my being here. Thanks, Dad! (Mom too!)

Eightieth-birthday cards, at least the ones I could find, are dreadful. Elaine suggested sending two fortieth-birthday cards. They proclaim forty to be the new thirty, which makes eighty the new sixty.

Posts with art by James Leddy
Abe's shades
Boo!
Happy holidays
Hardy mums
Thanks!

["Wholly Cats" is the title of a 1940 Benny Goodman tune.]

Proust and his schoolmates

At the Bibliothèque nationale de France, a wonderful photograph from the Lycée Condorcet. Can you spot Proust?

Charles Van Doren

The July 28 New Yorker has a long piece by Charles Van Doren, "All the Answers," about the quiz show scandal that unfolded in the late 1950s and life thereafter:

For fourteen weeks in the winter and spring of 1956–57, I came into millions of American homes, stood in a supposedly soundproof booth, and answered difficult questions. I was considered well spoken, well educated, handsome, the very image of a young man that parents would like their son to be. I was also thought to be the ideal teacher, which is to say patient, trustworthy, caring. In addition, I was making a small fortune. And then — well, this is what happened.

Van Doren took his lumps — he was fired from NBC, resigned from Columbia University, and pleaded guilty to perjury — and went on to make a life for himself and his family. In the early 1990s, he turned down a $100,000 fee to serve as a consultant to the film Quiz Show. Along the way, a little gyroscope helped him "survive and somehow find a way back."

No link: this piece is available only in the magazine.

[Update, July 29: As a reader points out, this piece is now online.]

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Lawsuits of the young and entitled

Andrew Giuliani has filed a lawsuit against Duke University and its men's golf coach. From today's New York Times:

Mr. Giuliani, who is 22, is the older of two children that Rudolph W. Giuliani had with his former wife, Donna Hanover.

On Wednesday, he filed a lawsuit in federal court in Durham, N.C., accusing the university of bad faith by "aggressively" recruiting him as a high school student to play for Duke, then dashing his dreams by taking steps during his junior year in college to dislodge him from the team.

In the lawsuit, he acknowledges that he may have misbehaved in February by flipping his putter a few feet, throwing and breaking a club, gunning his engine out of a parking lot and tossing an apple at a teammate's face in a skirmish.

Rather than "quibble" about the details, the student said he had apologized for his own conduct, and said it pales next to the "bizarre" treatment he received from the school once Coach Orrin Daniel Vincent III took over the men’s golf program last summer.

The complaint is worth reading. It refers to Giuliani as "Andrew" and to his fellow golfers as "boys," and it alleges that the coach implemented a "bizarre scheme" drawn from Lord of the Flies to remove young Andrew, "a rising senior," from the team.

Somebody needs to grow up a little.

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