The Committee

 In What I Think I Did, Larry Woiwode quotes a conversation with his professor Charles Shattuck:

"So often I'm asked to chair the departmental committee that awards the writing prizes. This year it was no question with the committee on short stories--the pair of stories, submitted by 'number 19' were beyond measure the best of the season."

"Once we agreed on that, we hurried to the office to discover who the author of these brilliant revelations of a feminine imagination could be--so sensitive, so delicately phrased, so poetic, yes, in the highest sense!--I run out of terms we were using to characterize my nineteen-year-old feminine author, and in our hurry to find out who, this honestly came to me: that lovely young woman my feature actor [again, Woiwode] has been captivated by!"

"But no, Larry, it's you! You're the one. Dear Larry, good Larry, fine Larry, you've won it! How could you keep this from me?"

 I wonder how many women were on the committee that year, 1961? The question would not have occurred to at 20, or perhaps at 30, but it does now. I am happy to suppose that professors who read and grade the work of many young women every semester do know more about the feminine imagination than most male civilians would; still, I wonder.

Order of Adjectives

 In teaching English as a Second Language (ESL), I learned that there is a rule governing the order of certain adjectives, as in describing clothes: size, then color, then pattern. I suppose that I had followed this consistently from childhood without ever thinking to articulate it.

It is easy to think of at least two-component examples from titles of songs or books: "Long Black Veil", Thin Red Line, and so on. I found it harder to think of those with three components, though I know perfectly well that my wife has a long black and white striped dress. But this year, I thought of a title that included all components, in proper order: "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini". I did not mention this to the class, given the difficulty of explaining the terms for size.

Paul Vance, who wrote the lyrics to "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" died last month. The New York Times carried an informative obituary of him.

Reading Matter

 I am in a hotel room in Philadelphia, near the Pennsylvania Convention Center. The room is clean and reasonably quiet. But it amazed me with its lack of reading matter. A canvass of the room showed the evacuation plan attached to the inside of the door, telephone instructions attached to the phone, operational instructions on the safe, and such labels as appear on the products in the bathroom and on the coffee. There is no stationery, no local information, no Gideon Bible. Management has concluded that the generation now traveling does not read print. I think this is premature.

Ties

 Clive James wrote that

Auden lived long enough for me to see his tie. I thought it had been presented to him by Jackson Pollock until I realized that it was a plain tie plus food.

("Sergei Diaghilev", collected in  Cultural Amnesia.)

In his memoir What I Think I Did, the late Larry Woiwode reported that

A sad-eyed grad who attended the Iowa Workshop and is back for his Ph.D. says Illinois lost its real writer, Bill Gass, when somebody in the administration complained about the food on his ties.

Well, since the beginning of the pandemic I have stained no ties, for I have rarely worn one.