This cartoon from Abstruse Goose needs to be in every freshman handbook.

Via Lisa Wade at Sociological Images.

Posted without comment.



Via @wynkenhimself.

Speaking of periodization and time, here's a corporate interpretation thereof.

"Fashion flies away, style remains. Mexx. Style is Timeless."

Photo taken in downtown Vancouver with my trusty old-school cell phone. Notice the artful glare on the window.

The slogan is an eerily apt gloss on the way we talk about literary aesthetics now. What's the difference between a "fashion" ("Amygism"?) and a style ("period style"; "avant-garde")? "Fashion" is understood as, by definition, arbitrary and nonhistorical (that is, not consequential for history), even though recent modernist studies have paid a lot of attention to fashion (the clothing kind). Style, on the other hand, is something that influences what will come after, and therefore persists through history.

That's not, of course, to say that it's "timeless" (or, as the sign would have it, "Timeless"). For literary critics, style is historical; for Mexx, style transcends time and counteracts its force. Message: buy our clothes; you will never need to get rid of them because they transcend time.

YUP. Timeless.

Nerd alert: University of Washington Information School librarians significantly improve upon Lady Gaga's "Poker Face":



[Lyrics][Via Lisa Gold.]

When you care enough to give the very best poetry.

I ran into this book in the basement of Moe's this evening, while looking for something else:



It's the Oxford Illustrated Book of American Children's Poems, edited by Donald Hall. (I was underwhelmed by the table of contents, honestly.)

This is the hilarious thing that caught my eye:



There's literally a gold star on it indicating that the book is poet-laureate-approved.

I guess it's like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval, or the Oprah's Book Club seal, only less well known. This particular kind of call on expertise belongs to a consumer logic. Eight out of ten dentists recommend.

The volume is edited by a nationally famous poet, and just in case a nationally famous poet isn't famous enough, here are his credentials. You wouldn't want to get screwed on a bad volume of poetry. It would be like buying a bad toaster, the kind that always either under-toasts or burns the bread. You can't be expected to have researched poetry, just like you can't be expected to be an expert on toasters; that's why Consumer Reports, and gold poet laureate stickers, exist. To save you, the consumer, the labor of finding out more than you really need to know about poetry. I mean, who has time to compare all the stats, right? You just want a book that does the job.

To close, some wholly unrelated words of wisdom, courtesy of Google Ads:

All ye need to know

A commenter writes of this post on an inappropriate literary reference:

"Aw, come on, no need to cll it inappropriate. They probably think they have made a profound, beautiful slogan! XD"

My response is apparently too long to fit in the comment box, so here it is as a blog post. It occurs to me that when I spot literature in advertising I would do well to explain what's going on, so that this blog could be educational rather than just a place for me and my friends to laugh at the inappropriateness of quoting that particular line from Keats on the wall of a drug store.

* * * * *

Right, Dare, the glibness of the quotation -- the idea that you could just take that line and attribute it to John Keats like he was giving you life advice, or beauty tips -- is exactly what's so hilarious, because in the context of the poem that line is incredibly problematic. That particular line was a bone of contention for the New Critics and the subject of a famous essay by Cleanth Brooks in The Well Wrought Urn (1947), precisely because of its fortune-cookie quality, its apparent quotability. Brooks quotes T.S. Eliot as writing of it, "this line strikes me as a serious blemish on a beautiful poem; and the reason must be either that I fail to understand it, or that it is a statement which is untrue."

Whatever you feel about the New Critics, I think it has to be agreed that you can't take the line straight. Keats is not offering you life advice. Brooks writes that "[t]he very ambiguity of the statement, 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' ought to warn us against insisting very much on the statement in isolation, and to drive us back to a consideration of the context in which the statement is set." Brooks, for his part, points out that the line quoted on the pharmacy wall is "spoken" not by a lyric "I" but by the urn, a work of art whose beauty lies in its silent withholdings.

As my friend Charlie Légère has pointed out, Brooks, with disconcerting pro-rape cheerfulness, describes the scene painted on the urn as one "of violent love-making." This is the painted scene -- of a rape -- that Keats praises in the "Ode," and indeed, the urn itself partakes of the nature of the scene that it depicts.

"Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness" -- what a beautiful line, and what a troubling one. The figures depicted in the scene are suspended in time, just on the point of rape, "the maiden," as Brooks says (with offputting enthusiasm), "always to be kissed, never actually kissed." But the "still unravish'd bride" is not the woman on the urn; it is the urn itself, still unravished, always on the point of being ravished -- by quietness, not by loud speech (nor by an ad slogan) but by "quietness," the soft speech that could undo the urn (the soft speech, one might speculate, of criticism).

For Brooks, the source of tension is this deathly stillness, the contrast between the violence of the rape scene ("What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?") and the fixity of the art work. That the rape is never actually completed seems to Brooks to be -- not a defect, for it's the condition of the urn's status as art, but a loss. The art work, by being art, must exit life and movement. It's a reading enabled by the theory that rape is something to be followed through with, a consummation of life itself! -- Which, no doubt, it is, for certain values of "life."

A somewhat less pro-rape reading might see the suspension of both maiden and urn in their about-to-be-raped state as a suspension in dread, a fixing of a moment of terrible intensity. It's like that feeling you get reading L'Assomoir and having to put the book down for a while because you know Lantier is about to show up, and you know it will be seriously bad news. You dwell in a state of dread.

The urn, Keats writes, will persist in its fixity long after we're gone; "Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours." Being in midst of woe seems to be the point, the enabling condition for that final, rather too-smug sentence, "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'" The maiden frozen in the terror of facing a rapist, the urn "still unravish'd" only because it can be ravished, we amidst our woe and some future viewers of the urn amidst theirs are all canceled out, and yet fed upon, by that final line. Does beauty trump woe when it (because it) encodes a permanent state of violence? The urn may tell us that, but is it right?



Of course, everything I've just said has to do with the internal logic of the poem. A more obvious source of incongruity is that "beauty" in the "Ode" is a timeless, unmoving beauty in art, a beauty rather fearsome for being so very suspended in time, so chilly, so violent. In the photo, it's sitting above a shelf full of "beauty products," where "beauty" is now a debased commercial term for the stuff you're supposed to do to your body to avoid social censure, a "beauty" to be acquired by means of apricot scrub.

FYI.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty." Taken inside the pharmacy next to the Rockridge Trader Joe's.

Best inappropriate literary reference since the Shakespearean sugar cookies.

Here is the thing about the Wheeler Hall occupation and the protesters being charged with "burglary" for entering in the middle of the night.

The issue of access to Wheeler has come up intermittently in the department for years. Wheeler is an old-school building that the university will not pay to keep up (they want the English department to pay), so it has old-school locks as well. Grad students don't have keys to the building.

When the faculty inquired about this, they were told by campus police that grad students could not be given keys for two reasons.

1. It was a security risk to give out that many keys (we have approximately 150 grads at any given time).

2. The windows in Wheeler Hall stick, so if grads really needed to get into the building they always could.*

YES. I know.

The protesters were doing what campus police told grad students they could do in lieu of having keys.

* blithely ignoring the ADA, of course

[Aaron on the occupation]
[Twitter list]
[Oakland North's article on the protest]

The L.A. Times blogs about graffitti in the Regenstein Library.

Full Flickr set here.

(Via @UChicagoPress.)

A website is listing Berkeley as the 43rd most dangerous city in the U.S. (source).

The "dangerous cities" league table shows no other Californian city with more than 25,000 residents as being more dangerous than Berkeley.

Hah!

Hint to NYT: tides are not a result of wakes.

Another one for the "my alma mater sometimes embarrasses me" files: Twitterature.

Admittedly, I am primarily interested in Twitter because of its potential pedagogical applications.

Update: The Chronicle has more.

(Via HUP. Yes, Twitter.)

Joining the great sugar-cookie question of our time:

Adventures in racial misidentification

Earlier today...

SCENE: I am leaving the office for a meeting on campus. DUDE is sitting on the steps outside the office door with an assortment of cassette tapes (!), enthusiastically chatting with another dude. He and his tapes are blocking the exit.

ME: Excuse me.

DUDE: Oh, hey, sorry, lemme get out of your way. (He half-looks at me.) Hola.

ME: ...

DUDE picks up some of his cassettes, leaving a path for me.

ME: Thank you.

As I leave, DUDE looks up at my face for the first time.

DUDE: Oh! You are Chinese!

ME (halfway down the block by now): wtf.

We are told that Gertrude Stein tried to publish some research when she was in medical school, that the journal rejected the work, and that the two editors argued about it.

The two people arguing about it were called Dr. Barker and Dr. Knower.

Barker and Knower? Seriously?



Also: Knower won the argument.

"In the case of James Joyce as in the case of the zebra, a cross section will not suffice and the complete aspect is bewildering."

    -- Marianne Moore, "English Literature since 1914," The Marianne Moore Newsletter 4.2 (Fall 1980): 19. Print.

Today in hilarious non sequiturs

The sign reads, "Got the flu? Take necessary steps to prevent it!"

Thanks for that helpful tip, Temescal Walgreens. I think I'll buy twelve bottles of Clorox to wantonly spray everywhere. Doubtless this will help prevent the flu that I already have.

There is a reason one of these lists is not like the others.

Pitch received from my alumni association:

One of these lists is not like the others.

The U of C is a leader in Nobel Prizes, Fulbright scholarships,
and Peace Corps service...

* Nobel Prize Winners
* 82 UCHICAGO
* 77 COLUMBIA
* 76 HARVARD
* 34 YALE
* 32 PRINCETON
* Total Number of Nobel Prizes awarded to students, alumni, faculty, or affiliates of the University.
SOURCE: WWW.NOBELPRIZE.ORG


* Fulbright Scholars
* 122 UCHICAGO
* 115 YALE
* 96 PRINCETON
* 68 HARVARD
* 66 COLUMBIA
* Number of Fulbright Scholars* since 1998-99.
SOURCE: US.FULBRIGHTONLINE.ORG
*When available, the number of undergraduate recipients is used


* Peace Corps Volunteers
* 63 UCHICAGO
* 43 YALE
* 42 COLUMBIA
* 42 HARVARD
* 42 PRINCETON
* Number of graduating seniors who volunteered to serve in the Peace Corps over the last two years.
SOURCE: PEACE CORPS


Alumni Giving
* 60% PRINCETON
* 43% YALE
* 41% HARVARD
* 36% COLUMBIA
* 32% UCHICAGO
* Percentage of undergraduate alumni who give back to their alma mater.
SOURCE: 2008 US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT


It's time to move alumni giving into the top ranks too.

Indeed. Time to tap the doubtless overflowing coffers of those alumni researchers, grad students, and Peace Corps volunteers.

Helpful tips from my cell phone user's manual

Do not attempt to operate your phone charger if it has received a sharp blow, been dropped, thrown from a speeding motorcycle or is otherwise damaged; doing so may damage your phone.

Emphasis added.

Composition students are invited to rectify the faulty parallelism.

T-Mobile. Getting Started. TM1524 GH68-18756A. p. 27.
(The MLA guidelines for citing a cell phone user's manual are frankly insufficient.)

Every day on the way to my office I pass by a nail salon with the best disembodied hand display I have ever seen.





It really makes me want to have my nails done there.