“In the end, we can’t [?] lose”

From a New York Times article on the fate of the humanities in higher education:

Some professors flinch when they hear colleagues talking about the need to prepare students for jobs.

“I think that’s conceding too quickly,” said Mark Edmundson, an English professor at the University of Virginia. “We’re not a feeder for law school; our job is to help students learn to question.”

His university had 394 English majors last year, down from 501 when he arrived in 1984, but Professor Edmundson said he does not fret about the future. “In the end, we can’t lose,” he said. “We have William Shakespeare.”

I respect Mark Edmundson’s work, as these three posts should make clear. But two observations:

To speak of the purpose of college without regard for what might follow is to speak from a lofty position indeed. If students are to learn to question, they might begin by questioning the investment of time and money that college requires. What does that investment amount to? What does it mean to graduate with tens of thousands in debt and few prospects?

I’m not nearly as confident as Edmundson that those who have Shakespeare cannot lose. Classics departments, after all, had Homer.

Der・ri・da

I tried and tried again to get OS X’s Dictation service to recognize Derrida : garita, Jerry Gary, die galley, Garry Donna, Gary Dodd, Jerry die, Gary doc, Gary dog .

And then back to garita.

A related post
Mac Dictation and boogie-woogie

A joke for the day

A seasonal joke from my dad, eighty-five and still turning them out: How did Bela Lugosi know what to expect?

No spoilers. The punchline appears in the comments.

Halloween, 1941

[Photograph by William C. Shrout. 1941. From the Life Photo Archive.]

The Life Photo Archive’s description, “Halloween party,” is hardly accurate. A better one: “Mayhem averted.” Or better still: “Cheese it — the cops!”

A cropped version of this photograph appeared in a Life feature about Halloween in Zionsville, Indiana (November 3, 1941). The caption reads: “Being nabbed by the cops is always thrilling, especially because few arrests ever seem to be made. Moving the town loafers’ bench to someone’s porch is always fun.” This mayhem is pretty obviously staged, no?

Rae Armantrout, taking notes

Rae Armantrout is for me a consistently engaging and inventive American poet. She is also a notetaker:

I carry a blank book journal around with me most of the time and jot down things I see and hear, especially if they seem puzzling. . . .

Anyway, I end up with a lot of unconnected journal entries. I know a poem is really on the way when I see how two or more of these separate notes might have some inner likeness, might connect. (I prefer improbable connections.) That’s why so many of my poems are divided with asterisks or numbers.

“My Poetry Isn’t Built on Hope: An Interview with Tom Beckett,” in Collected Prose (San Diego: Singing Horse Press, 2007).

In case anyone out there reads World Literature Today : I have a review of Armantrout’s most recent book, Just Saying, in the November-December 2013 issue. Lines from one of the book’s poems, “Circulating,” reference the notebook habit: “See something, say something. // Jotting in a notebook.” There’s Armantrout’s wit at work, converting a national-security mantra into a poetics.

Kurt Vonnegut, advice for students

From Letters of Note, Kurt Vonnegut writing to high-school students in 2006:

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives.

Other Vonnegut posts
“[B]eautiful and surprising and deep”
E-mail from Stefan Hagemann
Kurt Vonnegut, Manager
Kurt Vonnegut on English studies

Orson Welles, language maven

Orson Welles, on The Dick Cavett Show (July 27, 1970):

“You know, there are too many long words in the world nowadays. And the younger the people are, the longer the words are. Have you noticed that? It’s a very funny thing. They have a wonderful new hip language, which is really our old Harlem language that I used to know when I was running a theater up there, with a few new phrases, and they’re great and very colorful, but everything else is terribly long. Nobody says ‘I see a thing a certain way.’ They say ‘I envisage it.’ Nobody says, under thirty, ‘I would like to think up an idea.’ They say ‘I have conceived something,’ or ‘This is my conception,’ or ‘This is my relationship.’ Everything is four or five syllables long.”

Cavett’s priceless reply: “You know, there's a veracity in what you’re saying.”

Other Cavett Show posts
John Huston on James Agee
Marlon Brando on acting

[“When I was running a theater up there”: in 1936, Orson Welles directed Macbeth for the Federal Theater Project’s Negro Unit.]

Aww

[Family Circus, October 28, 2013.]

If we are ordering words by length, fall comes first. But alphabetically, it’s autumn. I know though that Billy is asking a different question. I know too that fall is the most beautiful and most poignant of seasons. The beauty of fall is the beauty of things fading away.

A related post
Family Circus homophone catastrophe

[If you cannot name all four Family Circus children, you need to spend more in the funny papers.]

Breyer on Proust

From an interview, conducted in French, with Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, speaking of Marcel Proust:

Proust is a universal author: he can touch anyone, for different reasons; each of us can find some piece of himself in Proust, at different ages. For instance, the narrator of the Recherche is obsessed with the Duchesse de Guermantes. To him, Oriane embodies a slice of the history of France and glows like a stained-glass window, wreathed in the aura of her aristocratic lineage. Now, however different the situations may be, we have all of us — in our childhood, our adolescence, or later in life — admired from afar someone who has dazzled us for this reason or that. And when we read Proust, we get a glimpse of ourselves. In fact, I think that the only human emotion he never explored — because he never experienced it himself — was that of becoming a father.

What is most extraordinary about Proust is his ability to capture the subtlest nuances of human emotions, the slightest variations of the mind and the soul. To me, Proust is the Shakespeare of the inner world.

Read it all: Ionna Kohler and Stephen Breyer, On Reading Proust (New York Review of Books).

Related reading
All Proust posts (Pinboard)
David Souter and Proust

Huston on Agee

As a guest on The Dick Cavett Show (February 14, 1972), John Huston told a story about James Agee having a first heart attack, at a resort in California. It was 1951:

“I went in and saw Jim, and the doctor was still there. And as soon as the doctor left, why, Jim said, ‘Would you give me a cigarette?’ And I said, ‘Of course not.’ It’s the worst thing in the world that could be done after a heart attack. And then — I forget whether it was that same night — I don’t suppose it was, but a couple of days later Jim said, ‘For God’s sake, give me a cigarette.’ I said, ‘Jim, I can’t do that. It’s impossible. And when you get well and you pull out of this, why, you’ve got to, you know, behave a little differently.’ Jim looked at me very straight and smiled [laughs], and I knew that he would never behave any differently.”

James Agee died of a second heart attack in 1955.

Another Cavett Show post
Marlon Brando on acting