Photo of Oscar Levant at dorothyfields.co.uk

Most people today don’t remember Oscar Levant, but for three decades he stood as one of the leading wits of the age. He was a classical pianist who studied at UCLA with Schoenberg, an actor/musician in films including “Humoresque” and “An American in Paris,” host of the talk show “The Oscar Levant Show,” and author of sketch-filled reminiscences “Memoirs of an Amnesiac” and “The Unimportance of Being Oscar.”

I just read “Unimportance,” and laughed and smiled all the way through. It’s a pleasure to find comedy based on word play, worldliness, self-deprecation, and a recognition of fallen realities. For years his quips stood alone — I think he first said, “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin” — and in his books they come at you in rapid fire. And the revelatory tales he spins made him enemies of long standing.

He wandered in...

Obama is set to announce his replacement for Souter this morning, and insiders have indicated that he intends to nominate Sonia Sotomayor, a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals, the Second Circuit. Democrats might like the pick, but some Republicans have already intimated that they might be gearing up for a filibustery fight.

Sotomayor represents one a version of a fairytale story, a kind of textbook example of what “The American Dream” is supposed to mean. She grew up in a public housing project complex in New York City and was raised by Puerto Rican migrants in the South Bronx just a few years before a Diasporic form of vernacular music, hip-hop, concretized into something globally marketable along that same neighborhood’s sidewalk space. Sotomayor lost her dad before she became a teenager, and her mother raised the family alone. Sotomayor still thrived.

She...

Yesterday I watched the Princeton Memorial Day parade. We have a classic small town event that proceeds for about six or eight blocks down the main drag (Nassau St.). No floats, but three or four high school bands, the Cub-Girl-Boy Scouts, several pieces of fire and EMS equipment, and a locally-owned steam calliope (my favorite). I was a couple of minutes late, so I suppose missed a few veterans, and the mayor. There were lots of parents and kids on the sidewalks, watching on a warm day with clear blue skies. It was a wonderfully American event.

My thoughts yesterday were shaped by the trip I had taken earlier this week to Havana. Whereas America yesterday was basking in sentimentalism, the Cubans are going through a difficult time. Fidel Castro has stepped down from official office, which is now held by his younger (not much) brother Raul. About six months ago Raul removed two of ...

“Regardless of how you try to explain to people it’s a ‘war on drugs’ or a ‘war on a product,’ people see a war as a war on them. We’re not at war with people in this country.”

That’s what new White House Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske said in an interview a few weeks ago. (See here for full write-up in The Wall Street Journal.) And he’s right. How can you fight a war on a thing. Once you declare war on a ‘product,’ you carry it to the people involved in the product, and if you want to prosecute the war well, you end up doing things such as raiding medical marijuana dispensaries in the 13 states in which the people at large have voted to approve it. (This is another area in which social conservatives and small government and libertarian conservatives clash — What happened to the principle of federalism? the latter ask ...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

In this week’s lead story at The Chronicle of Higher Education, Robin Wilson has a spread of four pieces scoffing at the notion of a national problem with undergraduate debt: A Lifetime of Debt? Not Likely.

Splashed above the fold on the front page — during Congressional hearings regarding major reforms in student lending — this story flies in the face of massive public and legislator concern about the funding of higher education, including a longrunning series of scandals in student lending: corruption among state and federal education officials, predatory lending, abusive collections, lax oversight, outrageous executive pay, perks, and bonuses.

While acknowledging that what she dubs a vocal minority of undergraduate borrowers have “very real” problems with the system of college financing, Wilson asserts that students in loan...

Our academic culture turns scholars into grant writers.

Institutions increasingly place emphasis on securing “external funding” for work in the humanities, where there is no equivalent of Pfizer to fund research and development.

And, as a result, many faculty members have learned to become as persistent (but not as amicable or useful) as ordinary panhandlers. They spend their time with a hand out, but with their fingers on the keyboard; they use their writing talents attempting to secure their institutions more money in order that they might be permitted to get a small percentage for themselves.

In retail, as I remember, we called this “working on commission.”

At a national conference not too long ago, I was seated next to a distinguished administrator — once an Americanist — who spent the entire dinner explaining why those working in the humanities should be judged by the...

We have two kinds of bailouts going on: one for banks, one for the auto industry. I wrote last week about bank executives skittering to leave the TARP program — to escape control and executive pay limits — even if it hurts the bank’s health and the shareholders. Now the banks want even a better deal. Yesterday Bank of America, one of the nations most troubled banks, announced it is selling its most valuable assets and new shares to raise cash and break off with the federal government.

The U.S. government signals this is OK since the Treasury is allowing banks to buy back valuable assets — warrants — for cheap.

This is how it works. In exchange for TARP funds banks gave the...

Although experts dispute how much and what kind of exercise we’re supposed to have in order to live forever, I recently learned that the consensus is that walking isn’t enough. To live forever (or at least to the age of 100, which is a kind of forever), we need to get up off our bottoms and do the following: Rid ourselves of stress and anxiety, assume an easygoing personality, be an optimist, reside in the Midwest, avoid all food that doesn’t taste like cardboard, drink nothing but water, and (most important) get our hearts heavily pumping, our sweat seriously dripping, and our arms and legs flailing wildly, at least three times a week.

The thought occurred to me that maybe walking does more harm than good, since its very nature invites looking at the world, which in turn leads to ruminating on it, which rapidly evolves into philosophizing, which produces stress and anxiety. ...

My Penn colleague Salamishah Tillet has just penned a piece on Spike Lee’s Kobe Bryant documentary, Kobe Doin’ Work, which ESPN aired this past weekend. I DVR’d the final section of the film, so I was able to catch a little bit of it.

Tillet and I co-taught a course on Spike Lee last semester, so we both got re-acquainted with all of his films. We even took our students to see (and critically engage) his latest theatrical release, Miracle at St. Anna. (I blogged about that course last year.)

Tillet’s article is a review of the Kobe film and the Kobe phenomenon.

“I’ve never been a Kobe Bryant fan,” she admits. “Maybe it’s because I’m still getting over the Lakers 4-1 deafening defeat of my mainstay, the Philadelphia 76ers in the 2001 NBA finals. Maybe I just don’t like his particular blue-chip swagger. Of his generation of athletes, I have always appreciated Serena Williams’...

The current issue of The Chronicle Review has a short piece by Carlin Romano on the marriage and partnership of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese. The occasion is the publication of Gene’s memoir, Miss Betsey, a reminiscence of their long and happy romance.

It’s a delightful essay, and it catches well the extraordinary affection of two brillant minds and forceful temperaments. Like the many obituaries that followed upon Fox-Genovese’s death a year and a half ago, it mentions, too, her controversial position in academe, particularly in the world of women’s studies. As is well known, her anti-abortion position put her at odds with her field, and even though she founded the first doctoral program in women’s studies in the...