Prufrock: Inside Skull and Bones, the Pleasures of Being Email-Free, and Scalia Speaks

Marcel Proust’s letters to his editor, which will be sold at auction with a rare copy of Swann’s Way, show his savvy self-promotion: “The wealthy writer paid 300 francs – around £900 today – for a flattering reference to Swann’s Way to appear on the front page of Le Figaro, then – as now – one of France’s leading dailies. He paid a further 660 francs for another much larger summary of a glowing review by a friend of his to similarly appear on the front page of the Journal des Debats.”

Adam J. White and Barton Swaim review Antonin Scalia’s speeches. White: The “biggest contribution of Scalia Speaks to our American constitutionalism may prove to be not Scalia’s explanation of constitutional law, for which he is already famous, but the repeated examples of Scalia exhorting audiences to understand the crucial role that education—especially civic and moral education—must play in sustaining republican government.” Swaim: “Scalia’s adversaries admitted that he was a gifted writer but often said so in a way that implied he wasn’t a fine legal mind. I’ve heard Justice Stephen Breyer do this more than once in public forums. Some people suffer from ‘good writer’s disease,’ Breyer likes to say; the people who suffer from this disease (he means Scalia) happen upon a felicitous phrase and can’t help using it. The line gets a chuckle, but it’s meant to suggest that the force of Scalia’s writing derives from mere phrasemaking and that he wasn’t sufficiently discerning to see that his felicitous phrases didn’t amount to good arguments. Wrong.”

Wall Street Journal to stop European and Asian print editions: “The paper began publishing a separate Asian edition in 1976 and its European edition followed in 1983. The US edition of the WSJ will be available in some cities at a later unspecified date, the paper said. Despite recent losses, digital subscriptions are on the rise and the WSJ plans to focus on encouraging customers in Asia and Europe to read the paper online. Those gains in online-only subscriptions made ‘continuing the foreign editions no longer cost-effective’, the newspaper said.”

Inside Yale’s secret societies—and why they may no longer matter: “Richards’s microscopic view of his subject obscures the larger fact that Yale’s secret societies have long been in decline. They no longer have the cultural cachet they enjoyed in the days of John O’Hara and Dink Stover. Undergraduates walk past the brownstone tomb on High Street with no more interest than they walk past Yorkside Pizza. Membership is still sought after by the ambitious for networking purposes, but the secret societies have lost their glamor. Their decline coincided with the increasingly meritocratic policies of the 1960s. That much is clear. Less clear is what precisely about that seismic cultural shift proved fatal.”

The end of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE): “DARE was primarily supported by grants, especially from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. In recent years, small individual donations played an increasing role in the project’s funding. The institutional donors pretty much felt that they did their job to get the dictionary to ‘Z.’ The publicity from the completion of the main text led to an influx of enough money to finish Volume VI, which included maps and indices, but that was it. In the last few years, the staff applied for additional grants to update and add new entries; these failed to materialize. Squeaking by on royalties and individual gifts, and with several editors working on a volunteer basis, the dictionary was able to publish some quarterly updates, but by the beginning of the coming year, it will be necessary to lay off the staff.”

Essay of the Day:

In The Guardian, Alastair Gee writes about the plight of college adjuncts in America. A quarter are enrolled in Medicaid, some are homeless, and at least one has turned to prostitution to pay the bills:

“Mindy Percival, 61, a lecturer with a doctorate from Columbia, teaches history at a state college in Florida and, in her words, lives in ‘a shack’ which is ‘in the woods in middle of nowhere’.

“The mobile home she inhabits, located in the town of Stuart, north of Miami, was donated to her about eight years ago. It looks tidy on the outside, but inside there are holes in the floor and the paneling is peeling off the walls. She has no washing machine, and the oven, shower and water heater don’t work. ‘I’m on the verge of homelessness, constantly on the verge,’ she said.

“Percival once had a tenure-track job but left to care for her elderly mother, not expecting it would be impossible to find a similar position. Now, two weeks after being paid, ‘I might have a can with $5 in change in it.’ Her 18-year-old car broke down after Hurricane Irma, and she is driven to school by a former student, paying $20 a day for gas. ‘I am trying to get out so terribly hard,’ she said.

“Homelessness is a genuine prospect for adjuncts. When Ellen Tara James-Penney finishes work, teaching English composition and critical thinking at San Jose State University in Silicon Valley, her husband, Jim, picks her up. They have dinner and drive to a local church, where Jim pitches a tent by the car and sleeps there with one of their rescue dogs. In the car, James-Penney puts the car seats down and sleeps with another dog. She grades papers using a headlamp.

“Over the years, she said, they have developed a system. ‘Keep nothing on the dash, nothing on the floor – you can’t look like you’re homeless, you can’t dress like you’re homeless. Don’t park anywhere too long so the cops don’t stop you.’”

Read the rest.

Photo: Lightning over the Grand Canyon

Poem: James Matthew Wilson, “M.A.C.”

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