headshot, swash, projectionist, bar none

Along with his Profile in The New Yorker, Scully also made the cover of Time. That huzzah from the past, repeated in the early obituaries, struck me as so improbable that I checked it, and there he was. Not, as I imagined, with arms folded in front of the canyon-like corrugated-concrete entrance to Paul Rudolph’s Yale Art and Architecture Building (“The main entrance stair on York Street . . . lifts grandly . . . It is open to the sky between the towering, overhanging cliffs that rise on both sides of it . . . This is the most dramatic entrance in the United States of America, bar none”), but as part of a May 6, 1966, group cover on “Great Teachers,” a.k.a. nine headshots of white men in ties.


What I take from Scully is the idea that we can make our own mentors, Frankenstein’s-monster-like, from the elements great teachers and writers lay before us. I can leave aside the parts I don’t like: Scully’s embrace of New Urbanism as the alternative to urban renewal, his hero worship of Thomas Jefferson (his tendency to hero worship, period), even the way he yelled at his projectionist when the images did not drop. Usually a slide screwup was played, in Scully profiles, for laughs, but I worked in the slide collection as a student, and I saw how the women who worked there scurried when he entered the premises. I’ll take the swash and the idea of experience as the root of criticism, and leave the transformation into a demigod.

swash¹

VERB

[NO OBJECT]

• 1(of water or an object in water) move with a splashing sound.

  ‘the water swashed and rippled around the car wheels’
• 2archaic (of a person) flamboyantly swagger about or wield a sword.

  ‘he swashed about self-confidently’

NOUN

• 1The rush of seawater up the beach after the breaking of a wave.

  ‘the swash tends to push shingle up the beach’

  1. 1.1archaic The motion or sound of water dashing or washing against something.
     ‘the swash of the sea’

projectionist

NOUN

• A person who operates a film projector.

  ‘two projectionists will be in the booth at all times’

headshot

NOUN

• 1A photograph of a person's face or head and shoulders.

  ‘casting directors sift through hundreds of headshots, looking for the person with the right look for a particular role’
• 2A bullet or gunshot aimed at the head.

Phrases

• bar none
• With no exceptions.
  ‘the greatest living American poet bar none’