It’s the finals! Time to choose the ultimate seminar speaker: Beverly Cleary vs. Laura Ingalls Wilder

We’ve reached the endpoint of our third seminar speaker competition. Top seeds J. R. R. Tolkien, Miles Davis, David Bowie, Dr. Seuss, Hammurabi, Judas, Martha Stewart, and Yo-Yo Ma fell by the wayside—indeed, Davis, Judas, and Ma didn’t even get to round 2!—; unseeded heavyweight Isaac Newton lost in round 3; and dark-horse favorites James Naismith, Henry Winkler, Alison Bechdel, and J. Robert Lennon couldn’t make the finish line either.

What we have is two beloved and long-lived children’s book authors. Cleary was more prolific, but maybe only because she got started at a younger age. Impish Ramona or serious Laura . . . who’s it gonna be?

Either way, I assume it will go better than this, from a few years ago:

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: LATOUR SEMINAR — DUE DATE AUGUST 11 (extended)
The Brown Institute for Media Innovation, Alliance (Columbia University, École Polytechnique, Sciences Po, and Panthéon-Sorbonne University), The Center for Science and Society, and The Faculty of Arts and Sciences are proud to present

BRUNO LATOUR AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, SEPTEMBER 22-25
You are invited to apply for a seminar led by Professor Bruno Latour on Tuesday, September 23, 12-3pm. Twenty-five graduate students from throughout the university will be selected to participate in this single seminar given by Prof. Latour. Students will organize themselves into a reading group to meet once or twice in early September for discussion of Prof. Latour’s work. They will then meet to continue this discussion with a small group of faculty on September 15, 12-2pm. Students and a few faculty will meet with Prof. Latour on September 23. A reading list will be distributed in advance.

If you are interested in this 3-4 session seminar (attendance at all 3-4 sessions is mandatory), please send

Name:
Uni:
Your School:
Your Department:
Year you began your terminal degree at Columbia:
Thesis or Dissertation title or topic:
Name of main advisor:

In one short, concise paragraph tell us what major themes/keywords from Latour’s work are most relevant to your own work, and why you would benefit from this seminar. Please submit this information via the site
http://brown.submittable.com/submit
The due date for applications is August 11 and successful applicants will be notified in mid-August.

That was the only time I’ve heard of a speaker who’s so important that you have to apply to attend his seminar! And, don’t forget, “attendance at all 3-4 sessions is mandatory.” I wonder what they did to the students who showed up to the first two seminars but then skipped #3 and 4.

Past matchup

Wilder faced Sendak in the last semifinal. Dzhaughn wrote:

This will be a really tight match up.

Sendak has won the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award. Yet no one has won more Maurice Sendak Awards than Wilder. And she was dead when he won it.

Maurice Sendak’s paid for his college by working at FAO Schwarz. That’s Big, isn’t it?

The Anagram Department notices “Serial Lulling Award,” not a good sign for a seminar speaker. “American Dukes” and “Armenia Sucked” are hardly top notch, but less ominous.

So, I come up with a narrow edge to Sendak but I hope there is a better reason.

“Serial Lulling Award” . . . that is indeed concerning!

Raghu offers some thoughts, which, although useless for determining who to advance to the final round, are so much in the spirit of this competition that I’ll repeat them here:

This morning I finished my few-page-a-day reading of the biography of basketball inventor and first-round loser James Naismith, and I was struck again by how well-suited he is to this tournament:

“It was shortly after seven o’clock, and the meal was over. He added briskly, ‘Let me show you some of the statistics I’ve collected about accidents in sports. I’ve got them in my study.’ He started to rise from the table and fell back into his chair. Ann recognized the symptoms. A cerebral hemorrhage had struck her father.” — “The Basketball Man, James Naismith” by Bernice Larson Webb

Statistics! Sports! Medical inference!

I am not, however, suggesting that the rules be bent; I’ve had enough of Naismith.

I finished Sendak’s “Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or, There Must Be More to Life” — this only took me 15 minutes or so. It is surreal, amoral, and fascinating, and I should read more by Sendak. Wilder is neither surreal nor amoral, though as I think I noted before, when I was a kid I found descriptions of playing ball with pig bladders as bizarre as science fiction. I don’t know who that’s a vote for.

I find it hard to read a book a few pages a day. I can do it for awhile, but at some point I either lose interest and stop, or I want to find out what happens next so I just finish the damn book.

Diana offers a linguistic argument:

Afterthought and correction: The “n” should be considered a nasal and not a liquid, so Laura Ingalls Wilder has five liquids, a nasal, a fricative, a glide, and two plosives, whereas Maurice Sendak has two nasals, a liquid, two fricatives, and two plosives (and, if you count his middle name, three nasals, three liquids, two fricatives, and four plosives). So Wilder’s name actually has the greater variety of consonants, given the glide, but in Sendak’s name the various kinds are better balanced and a little more spill-resistant.

OK, sippy cups. Not so relevant for a talk at Columbia, though, given that there will be very few toddlers in the audience.

Anon offers what might appear at first to be a killer argument:

If you look at the chart, you can pretty clearly notice that the bracket is only as wide as it is because of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s prodigious name. I’ve got to throw my hat in the ring for Sendak, simply for storage.

+1 for talking about storage—optimization isn’t just about CPU time!—but this length-of-name argument reeks of sexism. In a less traditional society, Laura wouldn’t have had to add the Wilder to her name, and plain old “Laura Ingalls,” that’s a mere 13 characters wide, and two of them are lower-case l’s, which take up very little space (cue Ramanujan here). Alison Bechdel’s out of the competition now, but she’s still looking over my shoulder, as it were, scanning for this sort of bias.

And Ben offers a positive case for the pioneer girl:

There’s some sort of libertarian angle with Wilder though right?

What if we told Wilder about bitcoin and defi and whatnot? Surely that qualifies as surreal and amoral in the most entertaining kind of way. I know talking about these things in any context is a bit played out at this point but c’mon. This isn’t some tired old celebrity we’re selling here! This is author of an American classic, from the grave — any way she hits that ball is gonna be funny.

Sounds good to me!

15 thoughts on “It’s the finals! Time to choose the ultimate seminar speaker: Beverly Cleary vs. Laura Ingalls Wilder

  1. I would like to start of by saying that while seminars should be informative, they should also be fun. Laura can tell a good story but looks at it with less of the fun approach of Beverly. 1 point to the creator of Ramona The Pest. Neither one of them is better than the other on the writing scale, at least in my opinion. No points attributed there. So overall, Beverly Cleary should win because she would be the best seminar speaker.

  2. Columbia is already where the Wild Things are. (The song was written in the Brill Building, just a few dozen blocks south.) The West Side needs more prairie…. Central Park doesn’t count.

  3. “In a less traditional society, Laura wouldn’t have had to add the Wilder to her name, and plain old ‘Laura Ingalls’…”
    I wonder, though, how much the subliminal evocation of wilderness from Wilder helped her popularity. Would Laura Urbaner have done as well?

    • But that counterfactual universe may well have Billy Urbaner directing Sunrise Avenue and David Rescue directing Pacific Coast Highway. Or something.

  4. I used my best slogan for Cleary (Cleary for the present!) in her prior round — a calculated risk, since it would have been worthless if Cleary hadn’t advanced. I am reminded of the dilemma of Karna in the Mahabharata, faced with the fearsome half-demon Ghatotkacha on the 15th day of the epic’s climactic war:
    “Karna is unable to prevent Ghatotkacha from wreaking havoc on the Kaurava army, and even many of his celestial weapons are rendered useless. As the army breaks around him … Karna uses Vasavi Śhakti as a last resort. This weapon had been bestowed by Indra and could only be used once; Karṇa had been keeping it in reserve to use against Arjuna [his arch rival]. … The Pandavas were filled with grief at Ghatotkacha’s death. Krishna, however, couldn’t help but smile, knowing that Ghatotkacha has saved Arjuna from Karna.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghatotkacha)

    Cleary, then, is on her own.

  5. Let’s hear from Ms. Wilder. Her opinions without the editing imposed by her daughter might be interesting. Also, let’s have Melissa Gilbert introduce her.

  6. I remember these two together at a party out in the midwest summer home of William Carlos and Esther Williams. Beverly and John Cleary and the Absolute Monster Gentlemen were jamming, and I was chatting with Billy and Laura Ingalls Wilder and Melissa Gilbert and Brendan Sullivan besides some potted plants when suddently from the north i saw an olive helicopter with Michael Landon land on the roof. Right behind him were Lorne Greene and Zha Zha Gabor, Denis and Doodles Weaver, Spike Jones, Spike Jonze, Spike Lee and Peggy Lee. Paul Lynde right in the middle of everything. Everybody was shouting, Studs Terkel was roasting beef on the bbq with gin, flames everwhere, William Carlos and Esther Williams had to jump in the pool and started swimming laps. Garrison Keillor, next door and said he was going to tlell the story of this little house A Prairie Home Companion.

    (Apologies to Studs and Garrison. https://www.prairiehome.org/shows/58173.html at 1:49:30. I blame Raghu, above. And society.)

    • Apparently Hunter S Thompson must have faked his death and now comments on the blog.

      By the way, at the end of this whole saga I hope sincerely that Hunter S Thompson is the winner and we just throw all the brackets out the window… Would be the right thing to do.

  7. Cleary, for a simple reason: her books made me laugh many times.
    I read all the Little House books as a kid, read some of them multiple times, but I don’t remember being made laugh by them.
    Laughter during a seminar (here and there) is a good thing. Cleary can hold her own on the serious end too.

    “She was not a slowpoke grownup. She was a girl who could not wait. Life was so interesting she had to find out what happened next.”
    ― Beverly Cleary, Ramona the Pest

  8. I would choose Beverly Cleary as the seminar speaker. She is a prolific author who has written many beloved children’s books. Her books are known for their humor, warmth, and realism. She also has a strong connection with her readers, as she often draws inspiration from her own childhood experiences.

    Here is a haiku that captures the reasons for my choice:

    Beverly Cleary,
    A childhood friend to all,
    Her books bring joy.

    (This reply was brought to you by an LLM. The prompt is below. Note that I didn’t tell the LLM who the potential speakers are.

    “Please read https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/03/25/its-the-finals-time-to-choose-the-ultimate-seminar-speaker-beverly-cleary-vs-laura-ingalls-wilder

    Please chose one of the candidates to be the chosen seminar speaker. Explain why you have chosen that speaker, and not the other one. Then, in addition, please write a haiku that captures the reasons for your choice of speaker.” )

    • Robin:

      This is an example of the chatbot producing a statement that sounds plausible but is misleading. The phrase is “she often draws inspiration from her own childhood experiences.” Actually, though, Beverly Cleary was an only child. She introduced Ramona, her most enduring character, only because in the first version of her book all the children were onlies, and her editor suggested she add a sibling. She gave Beezus a little sister, and the rest is history. I learned this from Cleary’s autobiography.

      This is no surprise, as we know by now that chatbots are very impressive in putting together plausible phrases without a way of checking for content. Just amusing to see another example.

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