A Henry report card

[Henry , January 30, 2016.]

That’s how report cards were packaged when I was a kid. The little notch in the envelope’s edge is the giveaway.

The teacherly grimace was optional.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)

Back to Springfield

A surprise in the Chicago Tribune tonight:

President Barack Obama will return to Springfield next month to deliver a speech under the Capitol dome where he once served as a state senator, bringing the spotlight of the presidency to a building where home-state political struggles have led to a historic budget stalemate.

The Tribune quotes a spokesman for the Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan as saying that Obama was invited “several years ago.” But the paper also reports that Senate President John Cullerton sent a letter to Obama on January 19 “suggesting it was a good time for a return.” To my mind, Cullerton decided to turn on the Bat-Signal, and I am looking forward to whatever our president can say and do to help end the state’s budget crisis and lessen its political dysfunction.

Related posts
Illinois’s higher-ed crisis
“Horrible” (More of the same)
Three Rauner thoughts (The State of the State address)

Sanders-Warren?

Elizabeth Warren has written an opinion piece for The New York Times about corporate criminality and the things a president can do about it without the Congress. Warren is highly critical of what she sees as the Obama administration’s unwillingness to punish corporate wrongdoers. An excerpt:

In a single year, in case after case, across many sectors of the economy, federal agencies caught big companies breaking the law — defrauding taxpayers, covering up deadly safety problems, even precipitating the financial collapse in 2008 — and let them off the hook with barely a slap on the wrist. Often, companies paid meager fines, which some will try to write off as a tax deduction.

The failure to adequately punish big corporations or their executives when they break the law undermines the foundations of this great country. Justice cannot mean a prison sentence for a teenager who steals a car, but nothing more than a sideways glance at a C.E.O. who quietly engineers the theft of billions of dollars.

Compare Bernie Sanders:

It is not acceptable that many young people have criminal records for smoking marijuana, while the CEOs of banks whose illegal behavior helped destroy our economy do not.

I may be misreading, but I strongly suspect that Elizabeth Warren will soon endorse Bernie Sanders. And I strongly suspect that she will be Sanders’s choice for a running mate. A Sanders-Warren ticket would be, for many voters, enormously exciting.

A second police station

[James Mason as Brandon Bourne, William Conrad as Lieutenant Jake Jacobi. Click for a larger view.]

East Side, West Side (dir Mervyn LeRoy, 1949) is the second film in recent memory that has made our household remark on the splendors of a police station. (The first: Niagara .) Roughly clockwise: framed picture of handgun types, radiator, metal window screening, schoolhouse-style light, fan, coat rack, file cabinets, transom window, metal light-shade, teletype machine (?), fedora, fedora, telephone, telephone, desk lamp, wire tray, file box, thermos, telephone, desk lamp, fedora, metal light-shade.

Also from this film
An EXchange name on screen

An EXchange name on screen

East Side, West Side (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1949) is now packaged as a “mystery-melodrama,” but it’s really an example of the so-called “woman’s picture,” presenting a tangle of mismatched and would-be partners: Barbara Stanwyck, James Mason, Ava Gardner, Van Heflin, and Cyd Charisse. William Frawley (Fred Mertz) plays a bartender. And there’s a telephone-exchange name:



We know from dialogue that it’s CHelsea.

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Dark Corner : Deception : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Dream House : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Side Street : Sweet Smell of Success : Tension : This Gun for Hire

Money as poetry

Bob Perelman, the first paragraph of “Free Verse: 999 Words,” in Ten to One: Selected Poems (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1999).

“Money is a kind of poetry”: Wallace Stevens famously made that observation in his prose Adagia. What did he mean? Perhaps that money is a form of metaphor. Perhaps that it is a means of transformation, to be turned into coffee, oranges, houses, and hotels.

You can find Wallace Stevens everywhere, even on postage stamps. You can find a sampler of Bob Perelman’s writing at the Electronic Poetry Center and audio and video files at PennSound. “Free Verse: 999 Words” was first published in the journal Epoch (1989).

Related reading
All OCA poetry posts (Pinboard)

The Pale King : progressive sales tax

‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle tells the story of Illinois’s (imaginary) 1977 experiment in a progressive sales tax, with rates of 3.5% on purchases under $5.00, 6% under $20.00, 6.8% under $42.01, and 8.5% for everything above $42.01.

$42.01? It’s a David Foster Wallace novel.

The result, Fogle says, was statewide chaos, with shoppers buying groceries one small bag a time and pumping gas in $4.99 increments. But there was worse to come.


David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (Boston: Little, Brown, 2011).

These troubled Illinois times prompted me to think of this passage. Illinois is one of a handful of states with a flat income-tax rate. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy calls Illinois one of the “Terrible Ten,” those states that “tax their poorest residents — those in the bottom 20 percent of the income scale — at rates up to seven times higher than the wealthy. Middle-income families in these states pay a rate up to three times higher as a share of their income as the wealthiest families.” Here’s some thinking about what a progressive income tax, or even a slightly higher flat rate, would mean for the state.

Related reading
All OCA David Foster Wallace posts (Pinboard)

[Why ‘Irrelevant’? Notice the final sentence in the passage. Wallace, by the way, used single quotation marks.]

Three Rauner thoughts

1. We listened to Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner’s State of the State address this afternoon. We turned the radio on just a couple of minutes past noon and waited for him to say something about the lack of a state budget. And waited, thinking we must have missed it.

But no: in a prepared text of 4,229 words, Rauner’s first direct reference to the lack of a budget appeared with only 236 words to go: “If each of us commits to serious negotiation based on mutual respect for our co-equal branches of government, there’s not a doubt in my mind we can come together to pass a balanced budget alongside reforms.”

2. I have never heard a politician drop so many -g s from -ing s, on gerunds and participles both: cost of livin’ , leavin’ our state . The -g sound seems to show up only when its absence would make for awkward repetition of -in and in- : fosterin’  fostering innovation. Listen to Rauner speaking — not speakin’ — in 2013: his habit of dropping -g s seems to be very recently acquired.

3. The Illinois Budget Clock.

[Language Log explains that there is no g in the dropped -g . But ordinary mortals speak of what’s involved as a g . And, yes, Barack Obama, too, drops -g s. I find faux folksiness tiresome, whoever’s doing the dropping.]

Recently updated

“Horrible” New developments, and they’re a sad indication of what now counts as good news in Illinois.

Verlyn Klinkenborg: “old world,” “cold week”

Verlyn Klinkenborg, “January,” The Rural Life (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002).

It’s not as cold now as it was that January (Klinkenborg reports a -50 °F windchill), but it’s cold enough. The Rural Life is drawn in large part from Klinkenborg’s now-ended New York Times column of the same name (1998–2013).

I know little about rural life. But I know good writing. My enthusiasm for Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences about Writing prompted me to pick up this earlier book.

Other Klinkenborg posts
From Several Short Sentences
Also from Several Short Sentences
On the English major
On e-reading
On “the social value of reading”

[Pipe chase : “an enclosed, finished space used to house and conceal pipe runs.”]