Dolphins

Dolphins heading north in Estero Bay as I ran today.

MLA's open anti-semitism makes me think of the saying of a birdwatcher friend

"Thank God I'm not long for this world."

What Elizabeth Scala Should Learn: Who Would Have Thought The Old Man Had So Much Blood In Him?

This is Scala on Lee Patterson's TEMPORAL
 CIRCUMSTANCES (2006) and ACTS OF
RECOGNITION (2010) in STUDIES IN THE AGE
OF CHAUCER 33.1 (2011) 356-360.

So "Patterson belongs to a generation of critics
who did not have to write a monograph for tenure."
Perhaps, just perhaps, his failure to publish a book
a year or two after his first employment gave him
time to think earnestly and even with relentless
skepticism about received truths and to weigh such "truths"
in the light of his patient, dry-as-dust discoveries.
Perhaps his not having to write a monograph for
tenure meant that his first book had a chance of
revolutionizing Chaucer scholarship. Was it worth
waiting for?

50 Years since Surgeon General's Report on Smoking! Here from MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: An Inside Narrative--Why I Left Delaware

25 October 1990--RW smoking away--I got very sick because I did not notice it soon enough--Left word for Hayward Brock.

5 November 1990--Mailed letters to Hayward and Maxine--want violations on record--Someone has been smoking in the dome, even.

7 November 1990--Wrote the Director of Libraries after she refused to move ashtray urns from the entrances: "If I as part Choctaw and part Cherokee I complained that the only way I could get into Morris Library was to walk past signs where the urns read: ‘THE ONLY GOOD INDIAN IS A DEAD INDIAN’ you would find the authority, fast, to remove the signs. I don't see that a psychological assault such as a racist sign should be regarded as necessarily more dangerous than a direct physical assault, which is what anyone allergic to tobacco smoke now suffers in order to enter the library." I added parenthetically: "the users of Smoking Room 323 [in Morris Library] cannot sit in their own smoke: they often prop open the door to let smoke go out into the stacks." I continued: "I am sending a copy of this letter and (with your permission) a copy of your letter to Ronald Whittington, Maxine Colm, Robin Elliott, and Dean Edith Anderson as a way of raising consciousness about the need to see anyone's objection to smoking by an entrance to a building of the University of Delaware strictly as an access issue.  We build ramps for people confined to wheelchairs.  We can find ways of preventing unnecessary damage to the health of people who are still mobile but already damaged by tobacco smoke." [The urns and the smokers stayed, and the door to Smoking Room 323 continued to be open to the stacks much of the time. I retired early in large part because I never could gain smoke-free access to the library.]

12 November 1990--Smokers in lobby--Big blue No Smoking sign torn down--No sign even in men's room--Left word at Dean's office.

20 November 1990--Very depressed by RW and other violators and vandalizing of signs.

As I say in MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE, I had to leave the University of Delaware because I could never gain smoke-free access to Morris Library and once inside could never reach smoke-free areas because there were none.

Is it better in Dublin and Rome and London and Paris now? Is it better in Delaware now?

Bridgegate is already on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Lee_lane_closure_controversy

All honor to Wikipedia and ongoing fast-moving easily-correctible instant history. 

This article may be affected by a current event. Information in this article may change rapidly as the event progresses.

George Washington Bridge

The Fort Lee lane closure controversy, also known as "Bridgegate," concerns actions taken by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's staff and his Port Authority appointees to create a traffic jam in Fort Lee, New Jersey, as political retribution. Dedicated toll lanes for one of the Fort Lee entrances to the upper level on the George Washington Bridge, which connects to Manhattan, New York, were reduced from three to one from September 9, 2013, to September 13, 2013.
Originally, Port Authority officials claimed that the closure was due to a traffic study evaluating proper number of lanes for Fort Lee traffic.^[1] The most frequently cited hypothesis suggested for these actions is that Christie's staff wanted to punish Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, a Democrat, for not supporting Christie, a Republican, in the 2013 New Jersey gubernatorial election. Another claim is that Christie's staff may have sought to punish New Jersey Senate majority leader, Loretta Weinberg, who represents the New Jersey district containing Fort Lee, as retribution for the Democrats' intentions to block Christie's reappointment of a New Jersey Supreme Court justice. Christie withdrew his reappointment consideration for Helen E. Hoens, a Republican, while referring to New Jersey Senate Democrats as "animals" on August 12, 2013, one day before Christie's deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, sent an e-mail to one of Chritsie's appointees at the Port Authority in which she initiated plans to cause traffic congestion in Fort Lee.^[2] Talking Points Memo's Eric Lach spoke with New Jersey Senate President Stephen Sweeney regarding Rachel Maddow's theory in which he replied “That’s a real conspiracy thing, right?” “That can’t be part of that,” he continued. “That can’t be.”

I have to dig out my 1980s diaries for a contact with Lee Patterson

What happened? Why do I think it had something to do with Stephen Crane and not Chaucer? Was it Patterson's wife who was on the program? I was not on the podium. At this NYC MLA I was four or five rows back in the audience in a small room, next to (maybe) Noel Polk. In order to challenge Lee Patterson about something I stood up to my full 6' 3" (as I then was). I remember because my companion (it must have been ironical Noel) was vastly amused at my unwinding my stature to face Patterson's tall taut form rather than raising an issue from my chair. What was the issue? I can find out, now that I see that Patterson in his Introduction to TEMPORAL CIRCUMSTANCES: FORM AND HISTORY IN THE "CANTERBURY TALES" has shown himself to be the critic who, so far, has most clearly demonstrated that he understood the significance of the much-trashed FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS (30 years old this year).

Age is an issue, given Patterson's death in 2012 and the appalling last paragraph of 1994 PhD Elizabeth Scala's review I just quoted.

We have Elizabeth Scalas enough writing on Herman Melville.

Lee Patterson 1940-2012: Professor Scala (PhD 1994) Demonstrates How to Drive an Old Man Down, Down, Down

This is the end of Scala's review of Patterson's TEMPORAL CIRCUMSTANCES and his ACTS OF RECOGNITION in STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER 33:1 (2011). When were copies first available?