The recommended daily allowance
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
12.15.2003
Not for grammar geeks only
"It's not, 'If I was'; it's, 'If I were,' isn't it?" someone asked last night. A short but delightful conversation about — what else? — the subjunctive ensued.
I see a few of you surreptitiously scratching your heads. Bosh! None of that. We all know our instruction in English grammar was spotty at best. Don't wonder. Learn.
To the subjunctive, then.
"English has had a subjunctive mood since Old English times, but most of the functions of the old subjunctive have been taken over by auxiliary verbs like may and should, and the subjunctive survives only in very limited situations. It has a present and past form. The present form is identical to the base form of the verb, so you only notice it in the third person singular, which has no final -s, and in the case of the verb be, which has the form be instead of am, is, and are. The past subjunctive is identical with the past tense except in the case of the verb be, which uses were for all persons: If I were rich ……, If he were rich ……, If they were rich……."
You can read more here or visit God save the subjunctive!, but the salient point is that last bit: The past subjunctive is identical with the past tense except in the case of the verb be, which uses were for all persons.
If I were you...
If that were true...
If he were the only boy in the world and I were the only girl...
You get the idea.
"If I was," indeed. Bleah.
Hey, if you've visited The Underground Grammarian you already know what to do if someone tortures the language (as in, "If I was an angel, I'd have gotten a halo to go with these here wings").
"Do not boo and stamp your feet when some barbarian [misuses the language]; it will bring reprisal, for barbarians are vindictive. Simply mutter, just loud enough to be heard, 'Clickety-click-click.' This requires no lip movement and suggests a wind-up toy. With a female barbarian, an equally good response is 'Ding-dong,' familiar to all television-addicted barbarians and suggesting some more appropriate career in cosmetics."
Heh, heh, heh.
Look. Before you click off in a huff, let me remind you that a good deal of this is spirited play. I certainly don't intone, "Ding-dong," every time I hear grammar gaffes (although I confess that among some people, the effort required to refrain from doing so makes me feel like a child who has tried one too many times to win the who-can-hold-his-breath-the-longest contest; but I refrain, gentle readers; I refrain). I am simply having a little fun.
You know, grammar is one of those subjects that can divide people as quickly as, say, politics, religion, or parenting methods: prescriptive grammar versus descriptive grammar. Jack Lynch, associate professor at Rutgers University, explains:
"The grammar books you're used to are what linguists call prescriptive: that is, they prescribe rules for proper usage. For several hundred years, 'grammar' was synonymous with 'prescriptive grammar.' You went to a book to get the official word: thou shalt not split infinitives, thou shalt not end sentences with prepositions. (This is presumably why you're reading this guide now: to find out what's 'right' and what's 'wrong.')
"Linguists today are justly dubious about such things, and most spend their time on descriptive grammars: descriptions of how people really speak and write, instead of rules on how they should. They're doing important work, not least by arguing that no language or dialect is inherently better than any other. They've done a signal service in reminding us that Black English is as 'legitimate' a dialect as the Queen's English, and that speaking the way Jane Austen writes doesn't make you more righteous than someone who uses y'all. They've also demonstrated that many self-styled 'grammar' experts know next to nothing about grammar as it's studied by professionals, and many aren't much better informed about the history of the language. Many prescriptive guides are grievously ill informed.
"Fair enough. Sometimes, though, I enjoy picking fights with those linguists, usually amateur, who try to crowd prescription out of the market altogether. The dumber ones make a leap from 'No language is inherently better than another' (with which I agree) to 'Everything's up for grabs' (with which I don't). The worst are hypocrites who, after attacking the very idea of rules, go on to prescribe their own, usually the opposite of whatever the traditionalists say. These folks have allowed statistics to take the place of judgment, relying on the principle, 'Whatever most people say is the best.'
"These dullards forget that words are used in social situations, and that even if something isn't inherently good or evil, it might still have a good or bad effect on your audience. I happen to know for a fact that God doesn't care whether you split infinitives. But some people do, and that's a simple fact that no statistical table will change. A good descriptivist should tell you that. In fact, my beef with many descriptivists is that they don't describe enough. A really thorough description of a word or usage would take into account not only how many people use it, but in what circumstances and to what effect."
Ah, a grammar nut could fall hard for someone like Professor Lynch.
(*sigh*)
Well, read the rest here. (Scroll down to the entry entitled, "Prescriptive versus Descriptive Grammars.") And Google using terms "prescriptive," "descriptive," and "grammar." Fascinating.
Hmmm. This little sojourn into language and its intricacies reminded me of a post I made in another forum over the summer. I wanted to share a link to Terry Sullivan's delightful essay, "Sign's of the Time's: The Apostrophe Is in Deep Trouble; Can One Codger in a Van Save It?" He begins:
"A great weight has been lifted from my back, and I tread the streets of Chicago as lightly as a youth. For some time now, I've been troubled by how I should occupy myself in my golden years. Not on tap for tomorrow exactly, but the prospect looms, what with friends taking early retirements and doing things like buying lathes. I don't want a lathe. There are enough little wooden bowls in America to last the millennium.
"My 401K says I will keep typing, of course, but I would like to stay active, or get active for a change, and now I know how. I shall become Johnny Apostrophe, and I've already picked out a van. More on this later, but first the unmet need.
"Gingers Ale House on North Ashland Avenue. For years, it's been Gingers, not Ginger's. Ginger, an ex-Royal Navy man, seems apostrophe-impaired and he is not alone in that. Mulligan, of Mulligans Public House in Roscoe Village, ran out of apostrophes too. So did Marshall Field, if the ‘mens' and ‘womens' rooms at the State Street store (as in so many other places) are any indication. I could go on.
"And I think I will. Ajays Italian Beef on Archer Avenue; Phillips Towing at Halsted and Division; Medusas Circle at Clark and School Streets. Maybe there is no Yakzie behind Yakzies, but surely ‘. . . Wrigleyvilles finest staff' could have found one unused apostrophe in the back room."
The article originally appeared in the June 8, 2003 issue of the Chicago Tribune Magazine, but it is now archived and available only for a fee, although I suspect that if your library offers an online periodical search, you just may be able to uncover the complete text of this gem. It's worth a few hunts, pecks, and searches.
As I mused on all of this "language stuff," what to my wondering eyes did appear but an email message from one of our ideal readers. In it was simply a link to "A Period Piece Punctuates Fear Of Elliptical in U.K.," which appears in today's Wall Street Journal. Charles Goldsmith writes:
"The English have always been persnickety about punctuation, but a little book about commas, apostrophes and semicolons is making quite a pointed exclamation.
"Initially slated for a first press run of just 15,000, a 209-page hardback called 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' has in the five weeks since its publication generated orders of 510,000 copies for tiny publisher Profile Books. Its title refers to a joke about a panda that walks into a cafe, eats a sandwich, fires a gun and walks out. But as its subtitle — 'A Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation' — suggests, its topic is no laughing matter to many in Britain who remain punctilious about their punctuation.
"For them, being picky about dashes, colons and quotation marks represents a last stand against sloppiness and rogue influences, often from the U.S., that are infiltrating the British version of English. A recent affront: The Oxford English Dictionary's online edition recently added Homer Simpson's famous outburst 'Doh.'"
Uh-oh. Doh, y'all.
Well, for more grammar and language fun (descriptive, prescriptive, and otherwise), try these links:
The Apostrophe Protection Society
The Grammar Curmudgeon
Test Your Knowledge: A Punctuation Exercise
Test Your Knowledge of English Grammar
Punctuation Project
The Editorial Eye
The Gallery of Misused Quotation Marks
Happy clicking.
I see a few of you surreptitiously scratching your heads. Bosh! None of that. We all know our instruction in English grammar was spotty at best. Don't wonder. Learn.
To the subjunctive, then.
"English has had a subjunctive mood since Old English times, but most of the functions of the old subjunctive have been taken over by auxiliary verbs like may and should, and the subjunctive survives only in very limited situations. It has a present and past form. The present form is identical to the base form of the verb, so you only notice it in the third person singular, which has no final -s, and in the case of the verb be, which has the form be instead of am, is, and are. The past subjunctive is identical with the past tense except in the case of the verb be, which uses were for all persons: If I were rich ……, If he were rich ……, If they were rich……."
You can read more here or visit God save the subjunctive!, but the salient point is that last bit: The past subjunctive is identical with the past tense except in the case of the verb be, which uses were for all persons.
If I were you...
If that were true...
If he were the only boy in the world and I were the only girl...
You get the idea.
"If I was," indeed. Bleah.
Hey, if you've visited The Underground Grammarian you already know what to do if someone tortures the language (as in, "If I was an angel, I'd have gotten a halo to go with these here wings").
"Do not boo and stamp your feet when some barbarian [misuses the language]; it will bring reprisal, for barbarians are vindictive. Simply mutter, just loud enough to be heard, 'Clickety-click-click.' This requires no lip movement and suggests a wind-up toy. With a female barbarian, an equally good response is 'Ding-dong,' familiar to all television-addicted barbarians and suggesting some more appropriate career in cosmetics."
Heh, heh, heh.
Look. Before you click off in a huff, let me remind you that a good deal of this is spirited play. I certainly don't intone, "Ding-dong," every time I hear grammar gaffes (although I confess that among some people, the effort required to refrain from doing so makes me feel like a child who has tried one too many times to win the who-can-hold-his-breath-the-longest contest; but I refrain, gentle readers; I refrain). I am simply having a little fun.
You know, grammar is one of those subjects that can divide people as quickly as, say, politics, religion, or parenting methods: prescriptive grammar versus descriptive grammar. Jack Lynch, associate professor at Rutgers University, explains:
"The grammar books you're used to are what linguists call prescriptive: that is, they prescribe rules for proper usage. For several hundred years, 'grammar' was synonymous with 'prescriptive grammar.' You went to a book to get the official word: thou shalt not split infinitives, thou shalt not end sentences with prepositions. (This is presumably why you're reading this guide now: to find out what's 'right' and what's 'wrong.')
"Linguists today are justly dubious about such things, and most spend their time on descriptive grammars: descriptions of how people really speak and write, instead of rules on how they should. They're doing important work, not least by arguing that no language or dialect is inherently better than any other. They've done a signal service in reminding us that Black English is as 'legitimate' a dialect as the Queen's English, and that speaking the way Jane Austen writes doesn't make you more righteous than someone who uses y'all. They've also demonstrated that many self-styled 'grammar' experts know next to nothing about grammar as it's studied by professionals, and many aren't much better informed about the history of the language. Many prescriptive guides are grievously ill informed.
"Fair enough. Sometimes, though, I enjoy picking fights with those linguists, usually amateur, who try to crowd prescription out of the market altogether. The dumber ones make a leap from 'No language is inherently better than another' (with which I agree) to 'Everything's up for grabs' (with which I don't). The worst are hypocrites who, after attacking the very idea of rules, go on to prescribe their own, usually the opposite of whatever the traditionalists say. These folks have allowed statistics to take the place of judgment, relying on the principle, 'Whatever most people say is the best.'
"These dullards forget that words are used in social situations, and that even if something isn't inherently good or evil, it might still have a good or bad effect on your audience. I happen to know for a fact that God doesn't care whether you split infinitives. But some people do, and that's a simple fact that no statistical table will change. A good descriptivist should tell you that. In fact, my beef with many descriptivists is that they don't describe enough. A really thorough description of a word or usage would take into account not only how many people use it, but in what circumstances and to what effect."
Ah, a grammar nut could fall hard for someone like Professor Lynch.
(*sigh*)
Well, read the rest here. (Scroll down to the entry entitled, "Prescriptive versus Descriptive Grammars.") And Google using terms "prescriptive," "descriptive," and "grammar." Fascinating.
Hmmm. This little sojourn into language and its intricacies reminded me of a post I made in another forum over the summer. I wanted to share a link to Terry Sullivan's delightful essay, "Sign's of the Time's: The Apostrophe Is in Deep Trouble; Can One Codger in a Van Save It?" He begins:
"A great weight has been lifted from my back, and I tread the streets of Chicago as lightly as a youth. For some time now, I've been troubled by how I should occupy myself in my golden years. Not on tap for tomorrow exactly, but the prospect looms, what with friends taking early retirements and doing things like buying lathes. I don't want a lathe. There are enough little wooden bowls in America to last the millennium.
"My 401K says I will keep typing, of course, but I would like to stay active, or get active for a change, and now I know how. I shall become Johnny Apostrophe, and I've already picked out a van. More on this later, but first the unmet need.
"Gingers Ale House on North Ashland Avenue. For years, it's been Gingers, not Ginger's. Ginger, an ex-Royal Navy man, seems apostrophe-impaired and he is not alone in that. Mulligan, of Mulligans Public House in Roscoe Village, ran out of apostrophes too. So did Marshall Field, if the ‘mens' and ‘womens' rooms at the State Street store (as in so many other places) are any indication. I could go on.
"And I think I will. Ajays Italian Beef on Archer Avenue; Phillips Towing at Halsted and Division; Medusas Circle at Clark and School Streets. Maybe there is no Yakzie behind Yakzies, but surely ‘. . . Wrigleyvilles finest staff' could have found one unused apostrophe in the back room."
The article originally appeared in the June 8, 2003 issue of the Chicago Tribune Magazine, but it is now archived and available only for a fee, although I suspect that if your library offers an online periodical search, you just may be able to uncover the complete text of this gem. It's worth a few hunts, pecks, and searches.
As I mused on all of this "language stuff," what to my wondering eyes did appear but an email message from one of our ideal readers. In it was simply a link to "A Period Piece Punctuates Fear Of Elliptical in U.K.," which appears in today's Wall Street Journal. Charles Goldsmith writes:
"The English have always been persnickety about punctuation, but a little book about commas, apostrophes and semicolons is making quite a pointed exclamation.
"Initially slated for a first press run of just 15,000, a 209-page hardback called 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' has in the five weeks since its publication generated orders of 510,000 copies for tiny publisher Profile Books. Its title refers to a joke about a panda that walks into a cafe, eats a sandwich, fires a gun and walks out. But as its subtitle — 'A Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation' — suggests, its topic is no laughing matter to many in Britain who remain punctilious about their punctuation.
"For them, being picky about dashes, colons and quotation marks represents a last stand against sloppiness and rogue influences, often from the U.S., that are infiltrating the British version of English. A recent affront: The Oxford English Dictionary's online edition recently added Homer Simpson's famous outburst 'Doh.'"
Uh-oh. Doh, y'all.
Well, for more grammar and language fun (descriptive, prescriptive, and otherwise), try these links:
The Apostrophe Protection Society
The Grammar Curmudgeon
Test Your Knowledge: A Punctuation Exercise
Test Your Knowledge of English Grammar
Punctuation Project
The Editorial Eye
The Gallery of Misused Quotation Marks
Happy clicking.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
12.14.2003
The recommended daily allowance
"But it is a little easier to dismiss one's obligations to local interests and party ties than to face squarely the problem of one's responsibility to the will of his constituents. A Senator who avoids this responsibility would appear to be accountable to no one, and the basic safeguards of our democratic system would thus have vanished. He is no longer representative in the true sense, he has violated his public trust, he has betrayed the confidence demonstrated by those who voted for him to carry out their views. 'Is the creature,' as John Tyler asked the House of Representatives in his maiden speech, 'to set himself in opposition to his Creator? Is the servant to disobey the wishes of his master?'"
Profiles in Courage: Decisive Moments in the Lives of Celebrated Americans.
Profiles in Courage: Decisive Moments in the Lives of Celebrated Americans.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
"Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!"
"In a part of the world where pride and dignity mean everything, the images were clearly intended to shame. A nameless doctor or medical technician, wearing rubber gloves, was seen closely examining the man's hair, perhaps looking for vermin. Prodded with a tongue depressor, the man opened his mouth; the doctor peered at the pink flesh of his throat and scraped off a few cells for DNA identification. Then the world saw the man's face. Haggard, defeated, slightly disgusted and unquestionably Saddam Hussein, tyrant and terrorist, sadist and murderer, object of one of the greatest manhunts in history."
The Newsweek coverage is fairly straightforward and comprehensive.
The Newsweek coverage is fairly straightforward and comprehensive.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
12.13.2003
The recommended daily allowance
"Popularity does not guarantee literary quality, as everybody knows, but it never comes about for no reason. Nor are those reasons always and necessarily feeble or meretricious ones, though there has long been a tendency among the literary and educational elite to think so. To give just one example, in my youth Charles Dickens was not regarded as a suitable author for those reading English Studies at university, because for all his commercial popularity (or perhaps because of his commercial popularity) he had been downgraded from being 'a novelist' to being 'an entertainer.' The opinion was reversed as critics developed broader interests and better tools; but although critical interest has stretched to include Dickens, it has not for the most part stretched to include Tolkien, and is still uneasy about the whole area of fantasy and the fantastic — though this includes... many of the most serious and influential works of the whole of the later twentieth century, and its most characteristic, novel and distinctive genres (such as science fiction)."
Tom Shippey's J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century examines the linguistic and the mythological roots of Tolkien's works. What could have been intolerably dense in less able hands is an accessible commentary in Shippey's. In these final days before the release of The Return of the King, this will prove a worthwhile way to pass the time.
And a gentle reminder: If you're enjoying this "un-blog" and considering a purchase that can be made at Amazon.com, please support the site by clicking one of the book links or entering at one of the Amazon.com links posted in this and other entries, as well as in the sidebar. Many thanks!
Tom Shippey's J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century examines the linguistic and the mythological roots of Tolkien's works. What could have been intolerably dense in less able hands is an accessible commentary in Shippey's. In these final days before the release of The Return of the King, this will prove a worthwhile way to pass the time.
And a gentle reminder: If you're enjoying this "un-blog" and considering a purchase that can be made at Amazon.com, please support the site by clicking one of the book links or entering at one of the Amazon.com links posted in this and other entries, as well as in the sidebar. Many thanks!
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
Hab SoSlI' Quch!
(The above is a severe Klingon insult roughly translated as, "Your mother has a smooth forehead!")
It's funny what a pining for the opening of Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King will lead you to if you surf long enough. It led "Mental multivitamin" to the Klingon Language Institute (KLI) (by way of some investigation into Elvish, which we'll come to shortly). KLI is a nonprofit 501(c)3 corporation that facilitates "the scholarly exploration of the Klingon language and culture."
M-mv pauses a moment to wonder if any among us are unfamiliar with Star Trek, and by extension, Klingons. Ah, a few bewildered looks. (In Klingon, nuqjatlh? In English, huh?) By way of explanation, then, this from KLI's website:
"The Klingon language is something truly unique. While there have been other artificial languages, and other languages crafted for fictional beings, Klingon is one of the rare times when a trained linguist has been called upon to create a language for aliens. Add to this more than a quarter-century of the Star Trek phenomenon, a mythos that has permeated popular culture and spread around the globe. These factors begin to explain the popularity of the warrior's tongue.
"Klingon was invented by Marc Okrand, for use in some of the Star Trek movies. He invented not just a few words to make the Klingons sound alien, but a complete language, with its own vocabulary, grammar, and usage."
No small achievement, that. Okrand recently spoke about the linguistic structure of his creation at Mary Washington College. An article promoting the lecture series in which he was a featured speaker notes, "When Marc Okrand created the Klingon language for a movie back in 1984, he never thought anyone else would use it. But when he met a Polish linguistics professor at a conference in Belgium two years ago, the only way they could communicate was by speaking his invented language."
The article later points out, "Okrand's creation of a whole language —vocabulary, grammar, syntax, etc. — has been likened to the languages J.R.R. Tolkien invented for his "Lord of the Rings" books," although Okrand points out that Tolkien's language is limited to books, whereas Klingon is "more of a living language."
Hmmm, says M-mv, affecting a Marge Gunderson demeanor. I'm not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work, there, Lou. I mean, Marc. Seems to me Elvish has its share of live speakers, dontcha know?
Turning to Elvish, then...
The Guardian sums up Tolkien's linguistic achievement:
"Around a dozen languages are mentioned in the Lord of the Rings but Tolkien only properly developed two of them — Qenya and Sindarin, the languages used by the elves.
"'Qenya is the Elvish Latin — a literary language not used as a spoken vernacular; it was reserved for poetry, for song, for lament, for magic,'" says [Fred] Hoyt [a linguistics researcher at the University of Texas in Austin who also teaches a course on Elvish]. 'Whereas Sindarin, at least among the elves in his book, was a spoken language.'
"Qenya is based on the grammatical principles of Finnish and, on paper, has similar dots and umlauts to indicate any changes in sound of the various characters. Also, words in Finnish and Qenya have a high number of possible word endings depending on the context of the sentence.
"Sindarin, described in the books as a descendant of Qenya, is based heavily on Welsh, one of Tolkien's favourite languages because of the way it sounded."
And, asserts Hoyt, they may be "invented languages but they are completely logical and they're linguistically sound."
So there, Marc. Elvish is as much alive as Klingon, thank you.
Looking for more information about Elvish? Visit the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, an international organization devoted to the study of J.R.R. Tolkien's invented languages. Or, if this society of elvish wordsmiths seems daunting, try "So You Want to Learn Elvish?," a down-to-Middle-Earth look at Tolkien's contructed languages.
It's funny what a pining for the opening of Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King will lead you to if you surf long enough. It led "Mental multivitamin" to the Klingon Language Institute (KLI) (by way of some investigation into Elvish, which we'll come to shortly). KLI is a nonprofit 501(c)3 corporation that facilitates "the scholarly exploration of the Klingon language and culture."
M-mv pauses a moment to wonder if any among us are unfamiliar with Star Trek, and by extension, Klingons. Ah, a few bewildered looks. (In Klingon, nuqjatlh? In English, huh?) By way of explanation, then, this from KLI's website:
"The Klingon language is something truly unique. While there have been other artificial languages, and other languages crafted for fictional beings, Klingon is one of the rare times when a trained linguist has been called upon to create a language for aliens. Add to this more than a quarter-century of the Star Trek phenomenon, a mythos that has permeated popular culture and spread around the globe. These factors begin to explain the popularity of the warrior's tongue.
"Klingon was invented by Marc Okrand, for use in some of the Star Trek movies. He invented not just a few words to make the Klingons sound alien, but a complete language, with its own vocabulary, grammar, and usage."
No small achievement, that. Okrand recently spoke about the linguistic structure of his creation at Mary Washington College. An article promoting the lecture series in which he was a featured speaker notes, "When Marc Okrand created the Klingon language for a movie back in 1984, he never thought anyone else would use it. But when he met a Polish linguistics professor at a conference in Belgium two years ago, the only way they could communicate was by speaking his invented language."
The article later points out, "Okrand's creation of a whole language —vocabulary, grammar, syntax, etc. — has been likened to the languages J.R.R. Tolkien invented for his "Lord of the Rings" books," although Okrand points out that Tolkien's language is limited to books, whereas Klingon is "more of a living language."
Hmmm, says M-mv, affecting a Marge Gunderson demeanor. I'm not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work, there, Lou. I mean, Marc. Seems to me Elvish has its share of live speakers, dontcha know?
Turning to Elvish, then...
The Guardian sums up Tolkien's linguistic achievement:
"Around a dozen languages are mentioned in the Lord of the Rings but Tolkien only properly developed two of them — Qenya and Sindarin, the languages used by the elves.
"'Qenya is the Elvish Latin — a literary language not used as a spoken vernacular; it was reserved for poetry, for song, for lament, for magic,'" says [Fred] Hoyt [a linguistics researcher at the University of Texas in Austin who also teaches a course on Elvish]. 'Whereas Sindarin, at least among the elves in his book, was a spoken language.'
"Qenya is based on the grammatical principles of Finnish and, on paper, has similar dots and umlauts to indicate any changes in sound of the various characters. Also, words in Finnish and Qenya have a high number of possible word endings depending on the context of the sentence.
"Sindarin, described in the books as a descendant of Qenya, is based heavily on Welsh, one of Tolkien's favourite languages because of the way it sounded."
And, asserts Hoyt, they may be "invented languages but they are completely logical and they're linguistically sound."
So there, Marc. Elvish is as much alive as Klingon, thank you.
Looking for more information about Elvish? Visit the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, an international organization devoted to the study of J.R.R. Tolkien's invented languages. Or, if this society of elvish wordsmiths seems daunting, try "So You Want to Learn Elvish?," a down-to-Middle-Earth look at Tolkien's contructed languages.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
12.12.2003
The countdown to December 17 continues.
More about the Wright Brothers: "A century of powered flight."
And Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King premiered in the United Kingdom. Read "First Reviews" at BBC. The Telegraph got it right:
"What will Christmas next year be like without a fresh instalment of the Ring to look forward to?"
Rather hard to imagine now, isn't it?
Neat quote from Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn):
"Mortensen said part of what appealed to him about 'The Lord of the Rings' was its positive message about integrity in leadership.
"'Everyone thinks (Aragorn) is the man for the job, because he has humility, a concern with the consequences of his actions and words on others and an interest in finding common ground with other people. All are qualities which I wish there were more of in real life in our modern-day leaders. There's an unfortunate lack of humility and overabundance of arrogance.'"
Read the complete story, "Mellow warrior: Viggo Mortensen inherited last-minute 'Rings' throne," here.
And Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King premiered in the United Kingdom. Read "First Reviews" at BBC. The Telegraph got it right:
"What will Christmas next year be like without a fresh instalment of the Ring to look forward to?"
Rather hard to imagine now, isn't it?
Neat quote from Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn):
"Mortensen said part of what appealed to him about 'The Lord of the Rings' was its positive message about integrity in leadership.
"'Everyone thinks (Aragorn) is the man for the job, because he has humility, a concern with the consequences of his actions and words on others and an interest in finding common ground with other people. All are qualities which I wish there were more of in real life in our modern-day leaders. There's an unfortunate lack of humility and overabundance of arrogance.'"
Read the complete story, "Mellow warrior: Viggo Mortensen inherited last-minute 'Rings' throne," here.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
12.11.2003
The recommended daily allowance
"The links to early childhood abound in the artistic realm. When but children, all of the modern masters were already fascinated with the domains of their artistry. As adults, they continued to examine the productions of young children and of populations that seemed to them primitive and childlike, and they often sought to capture such aspects in their own work. And perhaps most fundamentally, the modern masters centered their own work around the elements that are salient for the young child: Picasso, around the rough scribbles and collagelike juxtaposition of the toddler; Stravinsky, around primordial rhythms and repetitive tonal clusters reminiscent of singing in the nursery; Eliot, around the remembered images and flavor of youthful experience; and Graham, around the stripped-down versions of movement and the basic dualities of contraction and relaxation that permeate early physical experience. In each case, these childlike fragmentary features occur in works that simultaneously call on the audience members to achieve some kind of integration — a childlike sense of the whole."
From Howard Garner's Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi. Highly recommended.
From Howard Garner's Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi. Highly recommended.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
Defining creativity
"Be creative."
How many times did a teacher exhort you to "Be creative!" Never mind that classrooms and school (and their adult kin, cubicles and meetings) are often if not the death then the terminal illness of creativity. (Classrooms. Ah, the great equalizers. Talent and gifts are muted, mediocrity is celebrated, and no one is left behind. We are all above-average. Shhh. Don't tell anyone that today's above-average is yesterday's unacceptable.)
"Be creative."
When genuine creativity, which by its nature challenges the conventional wisdom, draws derison from classmates, bemusement from teachers? Indeed. One might as well say, "Become the scorn of the playground."
"Be creative."
What the teacher likely means is, "Add some color. Some pizazz. Use construction paper. Add some illustrations. Do something so that all of the projects (essays, etc.) don't look exactly the same."
"Be creative."
"But don't be different. Because how would I grade that?"
"Be creative."
Yeah. Whatever. Who wants to watch t.v. at my house?
(*sigh*)
Today the word "creative" is ascribed with enthusiasm to scrapbooking, stenciling, and salads, as in "What a creative hobby!" "What a creative way to decorate!" and "What a creative use of bacon bits and grated cheese!"
Egads.
If being creative is that, I don't want to be creative.
If, on the other hand, creativity is the "difference between proficiency and imagination," "the ability to identify connections between things or ideas — meaningful connections, useful connections — that others do not perceive," oh, then let me at it. Please!
This past Monday, the Capital Times ran an article about the public discussion series, "Conversations on Creativity." Dr. Richard Burgess, oncologist and founder of the UW Biotechnology Center, was one of the featured speakers.
"'In my profession, you have to have passion,' [Burgess] says. 'If you're easily discouraged, you'll pack it up and go home. Researchers are driven by the desire to understand what is not yet understood, to understand something that is new.'
"Perseverance has a role [in creativity]. So does a rebellious nature. It is about challenging dogmas and sometimes ignoring the skepticism of peers."
Later in the article:
"In both the arts and sciences, he [Burgess] makes a distinction between excellent technicians and the creative genius. A virtuoso performer may not be particularly creative, Burgess observes, but he is great performer who 'can get all the notes and timing right.'
"Similarly, in science, there is a difference between proficiency and imagination."
There is a difference between proficiency and imagination.
And the difference is as obvious to me as the difference between, say, scrapbooking and, oh, sculpting.
Creativity, imagination, needs a space — a mental and emotional freedom from chores, rote assignments, media, and the common. It requires a patch of clear air or lush green that few of us find in the city of concrete that is school, work, and our over-scheduled, micromanaged lives.
It may be difficult, but find it, readers, thinkers, and autodidacts. Find the clear land. Daydream. Sit idle. Breathe. Think. Be passionate. Persevere. Rebel. Ignore skepticism.
Be creative.
How many times did a teacher exhort you to "Be creative!" Never mind that classrooms and school (and their adult kin, cubicles and meetings) are often if not the death then the terminal illness of creativity. (Classrooms. Ah, the great equalizers. Talent and gifts are muted, mediocrity is celebrated, and no one is left behind. We are all above-average. Shhh. Don't tell anyone that today's above-average is yesterday's unacceptable.)
"Be creative."
When genuine creativity, which by its nature challenges the conventional wisdom, draws derison from classmates, bemusement from teachers? Indeed. One might as well say, "Become the scorn of the playground."
"Be creative."
What the teacher likely means is, "Add some color. Some pizazz. Use construction paper. Add some illustrations. Do something so that all of the projects (essays, etc.) don't look exactly the same."
"Be creative."
"But don't be different. Because how would I grade that?"
"Be creative."
Yeah. Whatever. Who wants to watch t.v. at my house?
(*sigh*)
Today the word "creative" is ascribed with enthusiasm to scrapbooking, stenciling, and salads, as in "What a creative hobby!" "What a creative way to decorate!" and "What a creative use of bacon bits and grated cheese!"
Egads.
If being creative is that, I don't want to be creative.
If, on the other hand, creativity is the "difference between proficiency and imagination," "the ability to identify connections between things or ideas — meaningful connections, useful connections — that others do not perceive," oh, then let me at it. Please!
This past Monday, the Capital Times ran an article about the public discussion series, "Conversations on Creativity." Dr. Richard Burgess, oncologist and founder of the UW Biotechnology Center, was one of the featured speakers.
"'In my profession, you have to have passion,' [Burgess] says. 'If you're easily discouraged, you'll pack it up and go home. Researchers are driven by the desire to understand what is not yet understood, to understand something that is new.'
"Perseverance has a role [in creativity]. So does a rebellious nature. It is about challenging dogmas and sometimes ignoring the skepticism of peers."
Later in the article:
"In both the arts and sciences, he [Burgess] makes a distinction between excellent technicians and the creative genius. A virtuoso performer may not be particularly creative, Burgess observes, but he is great performer who 'can get all the notes and timing right.'
"Similarly, in science, there is a difference between proficiency and imagination."
There is a difference between proficiency and imagination.
And the difference is as obvious to me as the difference between, say, scrapbooking and, oh, sculpting.
Creativity, imagination, needs a space — a mental and emotional freedom from chores, rote assignments, media, and the common. It requires a patch of clear air or lush green that few of us find in the city of concrete that is school, work, and our over-scheduled, micromanaged lives.
It may be difficult, but find it, readers, thinkers, and autodidacts. Find the clear land. Daydream. Sit idle. Breathe. Think. Be passionate. Persevere. Rebel. Ignore skepticism.
Be creative.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
12.10.2003
The recommended daily allowance
"Painting is like having a bad mistress who spends and spends and it's never enough... I tell myself that even if a tolerable study comes out of it from time to time, it would have been cheaper to buy it from somebody else."
"I feel such creative power in myself that I know for sure that the time will arrive when, so to speak, I shall regularly make something good every day. But very rarely a day passes that I do not make something, though it is not yet the real thing I want to make."
"You do not know how paralysing that staring of a blank canvas is; it says to the painter, You can't do anything... Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the really passionate painter who is daring -- and who has once and for all broken that spell of 'you cannot'."
Step into the world of Vincent Van Gogh — his letters are a geography of the artist's world.
Searching for an online gallery to which to refer M-mv readers, I stumbled upon this recent news story about the Dutch artist.
And here is the online gallery.
"I feel such creative power in myself that I know for sure that the time will arrive when, so to speak, I shall regularly make something good every day. But very rarely a day passes that I do not make something, though it is not yet the real thing I want to make."
"You do not know how paralysing that staring of a blank canvas is; it says to the painter, You can't do anything... Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the really passionate painter who is daring -- and who has once and for all broken that spell of 'you cannot'."
Step into the world of Vincent Van Gogh — his letters are a geography of the artist's world.
Searching for an online gallery to which to refer M-mv readers, I stumbled upon this recent news story about the Dutch artist.
And here is the online gallery.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
The interface of science and art
"Astronomical Sleuths Link Krakatoa to Edvard Munch's Painting The Scream," according to a press release issued by Sky and Telescope.
The press release issued Tuesday notes, in part, "A new analysis of Edvard Munch's The Scream provides the precise location where Munch and his friends were walking when he saw the blood-red sky depicted in the 1893 painting, as well as an explanation of why the sky appeared to be on fire. Through Munch's journals, topographic analysis, and a connection to the eruption of Krakatoa, proof now exists that the spectacular twilight seen in one of today's most recognizable paintings was inspired by this dramatic event."
What a cool story.
CNN picked it up, too.
The press release issued Tuesday notes, in part, "A new analysis of Edvard Munch's The Scream provides the precise location where Munch and his friends were walking when he saw the blood-red sky depicted in the 1893 painting, as well as an explanation of why the sky appeared to be on fire. Through Munch's journals, topographic analysis, and a connection to the eruption of Krakatoa, proof now exists that the spectacular twilight seen in one of today's most recognizable paintings was inspired by this dramatic event."
What a cool story.
CNN picked it up, too.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
12.09.2003
The recommended daily allowance
"Recently, I lectured at Harvard on how we are shaped by the movies we see while growing up. In preparation for the lectures, I watched The Prince and the Pauper for the first time since 1937. Like most of the movies that impress themselves on a child, the story is simple, but the subtexts are disturbingly complex if one is the right age to be affected by them. The prince and the pauper were played by Bobby and Billy March, identical twins who were the same age as I — twelve. So there I was, in surrogate, on the screen not once but twice, not only prince but pauper, and the two of them — of us? — were so alike as to be interchangeable as well."
From Gore Vidal's memoir Palimpsest.
From Gore Vidal's memoir Palimpsest.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
A "Mental multivitamin" favorite — Bill Bryson — has moved back to Britain.
According to the Telegraph, "Bill Bryson's relationship with Britain has always been a bit marital — a yeasty mix of exasperation, teasing, rows, deep affection and great chemistry. He was homesick for our patchwork landscape and peculiar ways the moment he returned to his native America eight years ago — though he didn't dare tell his wife - and now he's back, happy as a prodigal."
Read the complete story here. (Note: Registration is required but free, easy, painless.)
Read the complete story here. (Note: Registration is required but free, easy, painless.)
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
12.08.2003
The recommended daily allowance
"Most people would find the picture of our universe as an infinite tower of tortoises rather ridiculous, but why do we think we know any better? What do we know about the universe, and how do we know it? Where did the universe come from, and where is it going? Did the universe have a beginning, and if so, what happened before then? What is the nature of time? Will it ever come to an end? Recent breakthroughs in physics, made possible in part by fantastic new technologies, suggest answers to some of these longstanding questions. Someday these answers may seem as obvious to us as the earth orbiting the sun — or perhaps as ridiculous as a tower of tortoises. Only time (whatever that may be) will tell."
Stephen Hawking's brilliant A Brief History of Time is far more accessible than you may think. You don't like green eggs and ham? Try them. Try them, and you may.
Just gentle reminder: If you're enjoying this "un-blog" and considering a purchase that can be made at Amazon.com, please support the site by clicking one of the book links or entering at one of the Amazon.com links posted in this and other entries, as well as in the sidebar. Many thanks!
Stephen Hawking's brilliant A Brief History of Time is far more accessible than you may think. You don't like green eggs and ham? Try them. Try them, and you may.
Just gentle reminder: If you're enjoying this "un-blog" and considering a purchase that can be made at Amazon.com, please support the site by clicking one of the book links or entering at one of the Amazon.com links posted in this and other entries, as well as in the sidebar. Many thanks!
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
"In the time it takes to read this paragraph...
NASA officials say the Hubble Space Telescope will travel nearly 60 miles across the sky, gather some of the six CD-ROMs' worth of data it fills each day, and come that much closer to a fiery burial at sea.
"Easily the space agency's celebrated science platform, Hubble can peer 13 billion light-years into the past and spot evidence of planets forming among far away stars.
"Much of what astronomers have learned about the universe in the last 10 years came from the Hubble. Nevertheless, scientists and NASA administrators say it now orbits the Earth in uncertainty, speeding toward the end of its useful life.
"As they debate the number of productive years Hubble has left, others have been tasked with finding a way of bringing the bus-sized, 24,500-pound hunk of 1970s construction down safely once that time comes.
"'It was originally designed to be a 15-year flight mission,' NASA Hubble program executive Michael Moore said of the telescope, which has orbited Earth since 1990. 'I hate to say we couldn't service it anymore, but it doesn't appear to give us enough return on our investment,' Moore said."
"After Hubble, NASA will have a big space to fill" can be found at the online version of the Chicago Tribune. (Registration is required but free, easy, painless.)
Now. Consider the juxtaposition of a story early lamenting the fiery death of the Hubble because it doesn't provide enough return on our investment with this story: Five hours before the Trib story was available, Astronomy magazine posted news that the Hubble had spied stellar formation in a nearby galaxy.
"In the autumn constellation Triangulum the Triangle, a spiral galaxy known as the Pinwheel (M33) harbors an enormous region of star formation within one of its arms. A giant cloud of mostly hydrogen gas 1,300 light-years in diameter, NGC 604 contains more than 200 brilliant, young, blue stars. It is one of the largest star-forming regions known — second only to 30 Doradus (the Tarantula Nebula) in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.
"In early December, the Hubble Heritage Team presented to the public a dazzling new picture of this amazing region. The view is a composite of images taken over the past decade by various teams of scientists using Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2."
Ironic at best, overwhelmingly sad at worst. Our eye into the heart of other galaxies, worlds and worlds beyond ours is no longer worth the investment.
According to the Washington Post article, "Now in Their Sights, the Hubble's Demise," maintaining and "shoring up" the Hubble is simply not in the budget: "[It] would require an extra refurbishing visit by astronauts at an estimated cost of at least $600 million and possibly much more -- money that is not currently contemplated in NASA's budget planning."
This article from yesterday's Huntsville Times gives "Mental multivitamin" wan hope, though. "There's building speculation in Washington that President Bush will soon announce a long-term space exploration program that could send Americans back to the moon to build a base as a first step to Mars."
News of the reinvigoration of the country's space exploration program is grand, especially since it hints at serious consideration of the need for space colonization, but it appears that the program will come at the expense of NASA.
"The Feb. 1 Columbia accident spurred the Bush White House to take a hard look at America's overall space policy, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said during a meeting with his advisory panel in Washington last week... [but] John Glenn, former senator and the first American to orbit the Earth, wondered whether the Bush space policy might diminish NASA's role in America's space program. He told [NASA Administrator Sean] O'Keefe last week that a wide-ranging policy could have bad implications for NASA and might slow plans to complete the space station and build an Orbital Space Plane or crew rescue vehicle."
A thought: I'd be willing to accept the argument that the Hubble is no longer viable if and only if time, talent, and treasure were then funneled into space colonization efforts.
The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.
— Robert Heinlein
The question to ask is whether the risk of traveling to space is worth the benefit. The answer is an unequivocal yes, but not only for the reasons that are usually touted by the space community: the need to explore, the scientific return, and the possibility of commercial profit. The most compelling reason, a very long-term one, is the necessity of using space to protect Earth and guarantee the survival of humanity.
— William E. Burrows, The Wall Street Journal
Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring--not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive... If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I'm an optimist. We will reach out to the stars.
— Stephen Hawking, interview with the Daily Telegraph
"Easily the space agency's celebrated science platform, Hubble can peer 13 billion light-years into the past and spot evidence of planets forming among far away stars.
"Much of what astronomers have learned about the universe in the last 10 years came from the Hubble. Nevertheless, scientists and NASA administrators say it now orbits the Earth in uncertainty, speeding toward the end of its useful life.
"As they debate the number of productive years Hubble has left, others have been tasked with finding a way of bringing the bus-sized, 24,500-pound hunk of 1970s construction down safely once that time comes.
"'It was originally designed to be a 15-year flight mission,' NASA Hubble program executive Michael Moore said of the telescope, which has orbited Earth since 1990. 'I hate to say we couldn't service it anymore, but it doesn't appear to give us enough return on our investment,' Moore said."
"After Hubble, NASA will have a big space to fill" can be found at the online version of the Chicago Tribune. (Registration is required but free, easy, painless.)
Now. Consider the juxtaposition of a story early lamenting the fiery death of the Hubble because it doesn't provide enough return on our investment with this story: Five hours before the Trib story was available, Astronomy magazine posted news that the Hubble had spied stellar formation in a nearby galaxy.
"In the autumn constellation Triangulum the Triangle, a spiral galaxy known as the Pinwheel (M33) harbors an enormous region of star formation within one of its arms. A giant cloud of mostly hydrogen gas 1,300 light-years in diameter, NGC 604 contains more than 200 brilliant, young, blue stars. It is one of the largest star-forming regions known — second only to 30 Doradus (the Tarantula Nebula) in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.
"In early December, the Hubble Heritage Team presented to the public a dazzling new picture of this amazing region. The view is a composite of images taken over the past decade by various teams of scientists using Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2."
Ironic at best, overwhelmingly sad at worst. Our eye into the heart of other galaxies, worlds and worlds beyond ours is no longer worth the investment.
According to the Washington Post article, "Now in Their Sights, the Hubble's Demise," maintaining and "shoring up" the Hubble is simply not in the budget: "[It] would require an extra refurbishing visit by astronauts at an estimated cost of at least $600 million and possibly much more -- money that is not currently contemplated in NASA's budget planning."
This article from yesterday's Huntsville Times gives "Mental multivitamin" wan hope, though. "There's building speculation in Washington that President Bush will soon announce a long-term space exploration program that could send Americans back to the moon to build a base as a first step to Mars."
News of the reinvigoration of the country's space exploration program is grand, especially since it hints at serious consideration of the need for space colonization, but it appears that the program will come at the expense of NASA.
"The Feb. 1 Columbia accident spurred the Bush White House to take a hard look at America's overall space policy, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said during a meeting with his advisory panel in Washington last week... [but] John Glenn, former senator and the first American to orbit the Earth, wondered whether the Bush space policy might diminish NASA's role in America's space program. He told [NASA Administrator Sean] O'Keefe last week that a wide-ranging policy could have bad implications for NASA and might slow plans to complete the space station and build an Orbital Space Plane or crew rescue vehicle."
A thought: I'd be willing to accept the argument that the Hubble is no longer viable if and only if time, talent, and treasure were then funneled into space colonization efforts.
The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.
— Robert Heinlein
The question to ask is whether the risk of traveling to space is worth the benefit. The answer is an unequivocal yes, but not only for the reasons that are usually touted by the space community: the need to explore, the scientific return, and the possibility of commercial profit. The most compelling reason, a very long-term one, is the necessity of using space to protect Earth and guarantee the survival of humanity.
— William E. Burrows, The Wall Street Journal
Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring--not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive... If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I'm an optimist. We will reach out to the stars.
— Stephen Hawking, interview with the Daily Telegraph
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
12.07.2003
The recommended daily allowance
The following is an excerpt from an article-review hybrid about lies, lying, and a helpful book entitled Lies We Live By. "Lies Unlimited: Honesty is the best policy — or is it?" appeared in a university magazine in fall 2000 (prior to the presidential election). The excerpt appears here with the author's permission.
from "Lies Unlimited"
We're pummeled with more words, numbers, and images than we could ever hope to properly catalogue and use. Carl Hausman, author of Lies We Live By, agrees: "[O]ne byproduct of the information explosion is that we're overfed with information but starved for time to figure it out." He adds that we're "so accustomed to being lied to that we reflexively roll over and expose our bellies when confronted with misleading information."
In short, our comfort with social lying and the frantic rate of information-processing required by our "connected" society have made us easy targets for the half-truths professionals in commerce and government concoct, mostly in the name of selling us something or someone.
And it didn't happen overnight.
Hausman, associate professor of communications at Rowan University and author of numerous books, contends that we've been "suckers for half-truths" ever since Christopher Columbus made his pitch to Spain's rulers, and, desperate to recoup some of their war losses, they agreed to finance his adventure to the New World. Taking advantage of the "new, new thing" of his time — the printing press — Columbus widely distributed brochures describing the gold and riches he could bring home, exciting readers' interest in advance of his sales presentation to the king and queen. The rest is the stuff of history lessons.
Little has changed in 500 years. Like Ferdinand and Isabella, we see gold and riches where they may or may not exist: in political statements denying any "improper relationship" with a 22-year-old intern, in advertisements declaring that we can get our new luxury car for zero down and $199 per month, and in letters certifying that we have won a sweepstakes.
That's where Hausman comes in. A journalist and educator specializing in communications ethics, Hausman has worked in both print and broadcast media. His experience lends an insider's immediacy to Lies We Live By, an expose of the tools of deception used in advertising, politics, and the media to befuddle consumers and constituents. "[W]e've trained liars to exploit us by rewarding them with our money, or our votes, or both," writes Hausman. "The industries of influence – honest, dishonest, and in the gray area – are huge, and when we make decisions we're up against a well-financed army of persuaders." He adds, "Persuasion has grown into a serious and sophisticated business and has interwoven itself into the fabric of society — so much so that we're sometimes not sure what's ‘real' and what's ‘made up.'"
Keeping it simple, Hausman outlines fifteen techniques commonly used to trick, confuse, and mislead — five each for words, numbers, and images, respectively. For example, department stores frequently employ "tortured definitions" — a form of lying with words — to lure us to sales. They advertise "20 - 50% OFF ALL* JEWELRY" or "20% off STOREWIDE." The fine print, of course, tells the real story: ALL* excludes watches and fashion jewelry, and STOREWIDE excludes several departments!
Lying with numbers can be even more bamboozling than lying with text because "we are respectful — practically worshipful — of numbers," says Hausman. "Is it any wonder that in the age of the information avalanche we cling to the spurious precision of numbers?" One example of duping with numbers, is the "veiled variable," a technique used by hotels, which offer room rates as low as $40 per night — but not in any of the locations to which you're traveling; mastered by credit card companies, which offer wonderfully low introductory rates only to increase the interest rate exponentially if one or two late payments are posted to the account; and brought to new levels of creativity by automobile retailers, which quote marvelous lease options and hide the down payment and fees in the incomprehensible flurry of words at the end of the advertisement.
In outlining the techniques used to deceive with graphics, Hausman writes, "Lying with images is the most diabolical method of. . . persuasion because we see the result with our own eyes and are, therefore, reluctant to believe that we could be hoodwinked." For example, a print advertisement for an automobile dealer appears to promise that we can buy a car for $199 a month and $0 down. But careful analysis of the "graphic garble" reveals that $0 down is available — resulting in monthly payments significantly higher than $199 — and that the particular car you want requires a trade-in or money down. Finally, the agate type at the bottom of the ad packs the nastiest punch: If you do choose to pay $199 a month, your final monthly bill will be for a balloon payment of more than $11,000!
While the marketplace is rife with examples of duplicity to get us in the door of the department store, the auto dealership, or the bank, the techniques of deception are not limited to commerce. For example, to manipulate potential voters, politicians and their spin doctors use the graphic technique "ambiguous event," perhaps better known as photo opportunity. In his afterword to Daniel Boorstin's The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, columnist George F. Will writes, "A photo opportunity is an obviously staged. . . event in which a public official or candidate for office does something photogenic. . . for the purpose of striking a pose useful in symbolizing an attitude or intimating a promise." You know what he means: A candidate appears on our nightly news reading aloud to earnest and well scrubbed children in a local elementary school. Another story follows later in the broadcast or maybe the next day in which a candidate is shown helping a crew break ground at the site of a new cultural center. "A photo opportunity," continues Will, "properly understood, is someone important doing something solely for the purpose of being seen doing it. The hope is that those who see the resulting pictures will not see the elements of calculation (not to say cunning) that are behind the artifice."
Not that politicians and campaign advisers are limited to deception by images only. Hausman predicted that the tortured definition might be one technique employed by the Gore camp in its presidential bid. "Gore likes to say he has always supported a ‘woman's right to choose,'" says Hausman. "But he voted against federal financing for abortions in the late 1970s and early '80s. That's what happens when we shorthand everything," he continues. "‘Woman's right to choose,' to Mr. Gore seems to be pretty elastic. That's a tortured definition."
He notes that Bush can put "some definitions on the rack, too," pointing out that the Texas governor "has a habit of touting his state governance in sweeping terms. For example," says Hausman, "in his primary advertising he took credit for a ‘patients' bill of rights.' He actually let stand, without signing, the right for patients to sue HMOs. He also vetoed legislation reforming HMOs proposed in 1995."
"We like shorthand," Hausman told Mike Cuthbert on "Prime Time Radio" earlier this year. "Substance is scary; it's boring and hard." Inevitably, though, voters confuse the slogans and symbols — the political shorthand for what a candidate may believe — for the skills necessary to lead, and they end up being manipulated out of their votes.
Not that Hausman envisions a world of plainspeak. "I think everybody's entitled to a little puffery," he says of advertising. "In fact, the Federal Trade Commission even gives ‘puffery' protection. So I can live with someone calling his car ‘the most elegant vehicle on the road.' But lying," he continues, "is another matter. . . When a car rental company quotes you a rate over the phone and then springs all sorts of hidden charges on you at the airport — when you, quite literally, are in no position to walk away — that's grounds for public hanging."
Well, we can't hang the hapless clerk working the counter of the airport's auto rental center (no matter how appealing that may sound after a long flight followed by the news that your $25 a day rental car is now going to set you back a cool $55 daily). But, by anticipating the tortured definitions, veiled variables, and garbled graphics that may be leveled at us, we can — if not stop spin — at least refuse to reward those who set the wheels of deceit in motion. You see, while we may accept the relative benefits of at least five degrees of social lying, we don't see much merit in the pervasive use of deception in commerce and government, not when it robs of us of money, time, and votes.
from "Lies Unlimited"
We're pummeled with more words, numbers, and images than we could ever hope to properly catalogue and use. Carl Hausman, author of Lies We Live By, agrees: "[O]ne byproduct of the information explosion is that we're overfed with information but starved for time to figure it out." He adds that we're "so accustomed to being lied to that we reflexively roll over and expose our bellies when confronted with misleading information."
In short, our comfort with social lying and the frantic rate of information-processing required by our "connected" society have made us easy targets for the half-truths professionals in commerce and government concoct, mostly in the name of selling us something or someone.
And it didn't happen overnight.
Hausman, associate professor of communications at Rowan University and author of numerous books, contends that we've been "suckers for half-truths" ever since Christopher Columbus made his pitch to Spain's rulers, and, desperate to recoup some of their war losses, they agreed to finance his adventure to the New World. Taking advantage of the "new, new thing" of his time — the printing press — Columbus widely distributed brochures describing the gold and riches he could bring home, exciting readers' interest in advance of his sales presentation to the king and queen. The rest is the stuff of history lessons.
Little has changed in 500 years. Like Ferdinand and Isabella, we see gold and riches where they may or may not exist: in political statements denying any "improper relationship" with a 22-year-old intern, in advertisements declaring that we can get our new luxury car for zero down and $199 per month, and in letters certifying that we have won a sweepstakes.
That's where Hausman comes in. A journalist and educator specializing in communications ethics, Hausman has worked in both print and broadcast media. His experience lends an insider's immediacy to Lies We Live By, an expose of the tools of deception used in advertising, politics, and the media to befuddle consumers and constituents. "[W]e've trained liars to exploit us by rewarding them with our money, or our votes, or both," writes Hausman. "The industries of influence – honest, dishonest, and in the gray area – are huge, and when we make decisions we're up against a well-financed army of persuaders." He adds, "Persuasion has grown into a serious and sophisticated business and has interwoven itself into the fabric of society — so much so that we're sometimes not sure what's ‘real' and what's ‘made up.'"
Keeping it simple, Hausman outlines fifteen techniques commonly used to trick, confuse, and mislead — five each for words, numbers, and images, respectively. For example, department stores frequently employ "tortured definitions" — a form of lying with words — to lure us to sales. They advertise "20 - 50% OFF ALL* JEWELRY" or "20% off STOREWIDE." The fine print, of course, tells the real story: ALL* excludes watches and fashion jewelry, and STOREWIDE excludes several departments!
Lying with numbers can be even more bamboozling than lying with text because "we are respectful — practically worshipful — of numbers," says Hausman. "Is it any wonder that in the age of the information avalanche we cling to the spurious precision of numbers?" One example of duping with numbers, is the "veiled variable," a technique used by hotels, which offer room rates as low as $40 per night — but not in any of the locations to which you're traveling; mastered by credit card companies, which offer wonderfully low introductory rates only to increase the interest rate exponentially if one or two late payments are posted to the account; and brought to new levels of creativity by automobile retailers, which quote marvelous lease options and hide the down payment and fees in the incomprehensible flurry of words at the end of the advertisement.
In outlining the techniques used to deceive with graphics, Hausman writes, "Lying with images is the most diabolical method of. . . persuasion because we see the result with our own eyes and are, therefore, reluctant to believe that we could be hoodwinked." For example, a print advertisement for an automobile dealer appears to promise that we can buy a car for $199 a month and $0 down. But careful analysis of the "graphic garble" reveals that $0 down is available — resulting in monthly payments significantly higher than $199 — and that the particular car you want requires a trade-in or money down. Finally, the agate type at the bottom of the ad packs the nastiest punch: If you do choose to pay $199 a month, your final monthly bill will be for a balloon payment of more than $11,000!
While the marketplace is rife with examples of duplicity to get us in the door of the department store, the auto dealership, or the bank, the techniques of deception are not limited to commerce. For example, to manipulate potential voters, politicians and their spin doctors use the graphic technique "ambiguous event," perhaps better known as photo opportunity. In his afterword to Daniel Boorstin's The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, columnist George F. Will writes, "A photo opportunity is an obviously staged. . . event in which a public official or candidate for office does something photogenic. . . for the purpose of striking a pose useful in symbolizing an attitude or intimating a promise." You know what he means: A candidate appears on our nightly news reading aloud to earnest and well scrubbed children in a local elementary school. Another story follows later in the broadcast or maybe the next day in which a candidate is shown helping a crew break ground at the site of a new cultural center. "A photo opportunity," continues Will, "properly understood, is someone important doing something solely for the purpose of being seen doing it. The hope is that those who see the resulting pictures will not see the elements of calculation (not to say cunning) that are behind the artifice."
Not that politicians and campaign advisers are limited to deception by images only. Hausman predicted that the tortured definition might be one technique employed by the Gore camp in its presidential bid. "Gore likes to say he has always supported a ‘woman's right to choose,'" says Hausman. "But he voted against federal financing for abortions in the late 1970s and early '80s. That's what happens when we shorthand everything," he continues. "‘Woman's right to choose,' to Mr. Gore seems to be pretty elastic. That's a tortured definition."
He notes that Bush can put "some definitions on the rack, too," pointing out that the Texas governor "has a habit of touting his state governance in sweeping terms. For example," says Hausman, "in his primary advertising he took credit for a ‘patients' bill of rights.' He actually let stand, without signing, the right for patients to sue HMOs. He also vetoed legislation reforming HMOs proposed in 1995."
"We like shorthand," Hausman told Mike Cuthbert on "Prime Time Radio" earlier this year. "Substance is scary; it's boring and hard." Inevitably, though, voters confuse the slogans and symbols — the political shorthand for what a candidate may believe — for the skills necessary to lead, and they end up being manipulated out of their votes.
Not that Hausman envisions a world of plainspeak. "I think everybody's entitled to a little puffery," he says of advertising. "In fact, the Federal Trade Commission even gives ‘puffery' protection. So I can live with someone calling his car ‘the most elegant vehicle on the road.' But lying," he continues, "is another matter. . . When a car rental company quotes you a rate over the phone and then springs all sorts of hidden charges on you at the airport — when you, quite literally, are in no position to walk away — that's grounds for public hanging."
Well, we can't hang the hapless clerk working the counter of the airport's auto rental center (no matter how appealing that may sound after a long flight followed by the news that your $25 a day rental car is now going to set you back a cool $55 daily). But, by anticipating the tortured definitions, veiled variables, and garbled graphics that may be leveled at us, we can — if not stop spin — at least refuse to reward those who set the wheels of deceit in motion. You see, while we may accept the relative benefits of at least five degrees of social lying, we don't see much merit in the pervasive use of deception in commerce and government, not when it robs of us of money, time, and votes.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
Chipping away at your privacy
The opening to the Chicago Sun-Times article of the same title as today's entry chilled the blood of most thinkers; of course, it sent conspiracy theorists into a deafening chorus of "I told you so!"s.
From the November 9 feature:
"RFID chips could make your daily life easier, but they also could let anyone with a scanning device know what kind of underwear you have on and how much money is in your wallet[.]
"But these same super-small computer chips might also, for the convenience of retailers, be tucked into every shirt you wear, every book you buy and even every dollar bill you put in your wallet — and that could inadvertently create a profound threat to your personal privacy. A clever snoop, armed with a scanner that can read the radio signals coming from the microchips, could size you up in an instant while just strolling past you on the street.
"Is that a home pregnancy test in your briefcase? Is that a bottle of Viagra in your backpack? You wear Fruit of the Loom boxer shorts? Do you really have $500 in your wallet?"
[*shudder*]
Here's more on privacy and RFID technology. "In Your Cereal?" appeared in the September 29 issue of Newsweek:
"That’s where privacy advocates start wringing their hands. If all the things we own, including our clothes, invisibly emit data, what will stop voracious companies from reading those tags to see what we’re likely to buy? Or, even worse, who will prevent governments from tracking our location with RFID readers buried in the ground, in doorways or at airports? For the past year privacy organizations around the world have been asking these questions. When Gillette, Wal-Mart and Italian retailer Benetton talked about experimenting with RFID tags on individual items, rather than crates, privacy advocates organized protests and Internet boycotts. Each company subsequently backed off, although they claim they simply decided that RFID isn’t cheap enough yet to put on individual items. The RFID industry responds to privacy concerns by saying it will offer kill switches that allow consumers to turn off the chip once they leave the store. That doesn’t give opponents much comfort. "A kill switch is not particularly reassuring to people with my world view," says Katherine Albrecht, a Harvard doctoral student who has been leading the charge, and who owns a bookshelf full of material about oppressive 20th-century governments that exploited available technologies."
Katherine Albrecht is the outspoken founder of CASPIAN — Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering. According to Albrecht, "Supermarket cards and retail surveillance devices are merely the opening volley of the marketers' war against consumers. If consumers fail to oppose these practices now, our long-term prospects may look like something from a dystopian science fiction novel." Visit CASPIAN's "Stop RFID" for an index of related articles and news reports, including "How to Find That Needle Hopelessly Lost in the Haystack," a New York Times piece appearing in late September.
Albrecht was interviewed by Deborah Rowe, a WLS Newstalk 890 AM host at some point in the last three months. I remember that several engineers and software developers called in to rebut her gloomy forecast for the future. Too expensive, claimed one. Too difficult to manage, asserted another. The rebuttal that most concerned me, though, was the one that served more to support Albrecht's rather shrill rallying cry than refute it: Similar technology has been in place for a long time, claimed one self-described industry specialist. Anything anyone wants to know about you is already available. It's just a matter of organizing the data.
[*shudder*]
From the November 9 feature:
"RFID chips could make your daily life easier, but they also could let anyone with a scanning device know what kind of underwear you have on and how much money is in your wallet[.]
"But these same super-small computer chips might also, for the convenience of retailers, be tucked into every shirt you wear, every book you buy and even every dollar bill you put in your wallet — and that could inadvertently create a profound threat to your personal privacy. A clever snoop, armed with a scanner that can read the radio signals coming from the microchips, could size you up in an instant while just strolling past you on the street.
"Is that a home pregnancy test in your briefcase? Is that a bottle of Viagra in your backpack? You wear Fruit of the Loom boxer shorts? Do you really have $500 in your wallet?"
[*shudder*]
Here's more on privacy and RFID technology. "In Your Cereal?" appeared in the September 29 issue of Newsweek:
"That’s where privacy advocates start wringing their hands. If all the things we own, including our clothes, invisibly emit data, what will stop voracious companies from reading those tags to see what we’re likely to buy? Or, even worse, who will prevent governments from tracking our location with RFID readers buried in the ground, in doorways or at airports? For the past year privacy organizations around the world have been asking these questions. When Gillette, Wal-Mart and Italian retailer Benetton talked about experimenting with RFID tags on individual items, rather than crates, privacy advocates organized protests and Internet boycotts. Each company subsequently backed off, although they claim they simply decided that RFID isn’t cheap enough yet to put on individual items. The RFID industry responds to privacy concerns by saying it will offer kill switches that allow consumers to turn off the chip once they leave the store. That doesn’t give opponents much comfort. "A kill switch is not particularly reassuring to people with my world view," says Katherine Albrecht, a Harvard doctoral student who has been leading the charge, and who owns a bookshelf full of material about oppressive 20th-century governments that exploited available technologies."
Katherine Albrecht is the outspoken founder of CASPIAN — Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering. According to Albrecht, "Supermarket cards and retail surveillance devices are merely the opening volley of the marketers' war against consumers. If consumers fail to oppose these practices now, our long-term prospects may look like something from a dystopian science fiction novel." Visit CASPIAN's "Stop RFID" for an index of related articles and news reports, including "How to Find That Needle Hopelessly Lost in the Haystack," a New York Times piece appearing in late September.
Albrecht was interviewed by Deborah Rowe, a WLS Newstalk 890 AM host at some point in the last three months. I remember that several engineers and software developers called in to rebut her gloomy forecast for the future. Too expensive, claimed one. Too difficult to manage, asserted another. The rebuttal that most concerned me, though, was the one that served more to support Albrecht's rather shrill rallying cry than refute it: Similar technology has been in place for a long time, claimed one self-described industry specialist. Anything anyone wants to know about you is already available. It's just a matter of organizing the data.
[*shudder*]
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
12.06.2003
The recommended daily allowance
See below.
The "Mental multivitamin" is rather exhausted from linking all of those texts and has given itself the rest of the day off.
The "Mental multivitamin" is rather exhausted from linking all of those texts and has given itself the rest of the day off.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
On your nightstands or, What you're reading right now (some survey results)
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, "Mental multivitamin" asked about the books in the lives of our readers. "What are you reading right now?" we wondered. One of our favorite responses?
"Umm, truthfully," wrote one M-mv reader, "just finished Ender's Game, in the middle of Life among the Savages, and near the beginning of In Defense of Elitism. Not that I'm a groupie or anything, but checking in with you is like having a personal reading navigator."
Personal reading navigator. Love it! Love it nearly as much as learning that a M-mv reader's husband calls the site the "un-blog."
We may be doing something right here, folks.
In another favorite survey response, a M-mv reader confided with candor and humor, that in addition to reading The Odyssey with her thirteen year-old-daughter "for school? pleasure? I can't figure out... sometimes one and sometimes the other," she is also reading "various books on menopause that I don't want my initials or name placed next to. I already got the 'joy' of receiving one of them as a gift from my [mother-in-law] last Christmas... opened unsuspectingly in front of everyone. My brothers-in-law must have shuddered to see the title, wondering what the spunky sister-in-law will be up to in the next hormonal phase of life."
SLM, another M-mv reader and survey respondent, shared this: "I know there are many more [books], but I am drawing a blank. I often pick up ‘an old friend' to browse and remember. I have been a reader all my life. My parents used to shake their heads at my one book a day habit. However, in the last few years I have realized how shallow my book choices were. Yep, mostly brain candy. I still love an entertaining, light read, but I have discovered a whole new world of books. Incidently, I discovered this world of books all on my own. Can you believe I received a bachelor's degree without ever being required to read a single book other than a textbook? [Yes, we can.] Scary. [Yes, it is.] That's not counting high school; I read a few whole books there."
Welcome, SLM. You are a reader, a thinker, and an autodidact.
Several folks note that they're reading Don Quixote, with a nod to Susan Wise Bauer, author of The Well-Educated Mind. Don Quixote is recommended in the first section of Bauer's multi-part reading plan.
The M-mv reader with Wuthering Heights on her nightstand wrote, "One time I was looking through the soundtrack section in a music store, and I came across Wuthering Heights: The Musical. Can you imagine such a thing?!?"
No, gentle reader, we cannot. [*shudder*]
Several M-mv readers are making their way through Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. One noted, "Disgusting and disturbing, and I'm only on page 92!"
And one of our favorite correspondents struck the nail on its head with this observation about our survey: "That kind of information [what we're reading, favorite childhood books, books we reread, etc.] can be very revealing, don't you think? More so than age, marital status, names of children, etc."
Ayup.
Here are some of the books on the nightstands of your fellow readers, thinkers, and autodidacts. More survey results to follow soon. Many thanks again to all of you who "revealed" yourselves by responding.
Amusing Ourselves to Death (Neil Postman)
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Other Writings (Benjamin Franklin)
Catching Alice (Clare Naylor)
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Carl Sagan)
Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes; note: many translations from which choose to choose; the new one by Edith Grossman is accessible)
Endangered Minds (Jane M. Healy)
Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
Fast Food Nation (Eric Schlosser)
Fifty Acres and a Poodle (Jeanne Marie Laskas)
Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Jared Diamond)
Hamlet's Dresser (Bob Smith)
Harry Potter series (J.K. Rowling)
The Highwaymen: Florida's African-American Landscape Painters (Gary Monroe)
How to Live Through a Bad Day (Jack Hayford)
How to Read a Book (Mortimer Adler)
In the Deep Heart's Core (Michael Johnston)
In Defense of Elitism (William Henry III)
In Search of Belief (Joan Chittister)
The Irrational Season (Madeleine L'Engle)
Just Six Numbers (Martin J. Rees)
The King of Torts (John Grisham)
Life among the Savages (Shirley Jackson)
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (J.R.R. Tolkien)
Master and Commander (Patrick O'Brian)
Middletown, America (Gail Sheehy)
The Odyssey (Homer; note: again, many translations from which to choose; Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Fagles are among the finest and most accessible)
Prodigal Summer (Barbara Kingsolver)
Sacred Cows Make the Best Burgers (Robert Kriegel, David Brandt)
The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (Harold Bloom)
A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson)
Undaunted Courage (Stephen Ambrose)
Violence in the Workplace (S. Anthony Baron)
Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
"Umm, truthfully," wrote one M-mv reader, "just finished Ender's Game, in the middle of Life among the Savages, and near the beginning of In Defense of Elitism. Not that I'm a groupie or anything, but checking in with you is like having a personal reading navigator."
Personal reading navigator. Love it! Love it nearly as much as learning that a M-mv reader's husband calls the site the "un-blog."
We may be doing something right here, folks.
In another favorite survey response, a M-mv reader confided with candor and humor, that in addition to reading The Odyssey with her thirteen year-old-daughter "for school? pleasure? I can't figure out... sometimes one and sometimes the other," she is also reading "various books on menopause that I don't want my initials or name placed next to. I already got the 'joy' of receiving one of them as a gift from my [mother-in-law] last Christmas... opened unsuspectingly in front of everyone. My brothers-in-law must have shuddered to see the title, wondering what the spunky sister-in-law will be up to in the next hormonal phase of life."
SLM, another M-mv reader and survey respondent, shared this: "I know there are many more [books], but I am drawing a blank. I often pick up ‘an old friend' to browse and remember. I have been a reader all my life. My parents used to shake their heads at my one book a day habit. However, in the last few years I have realized how shallow my book choices were. Yep, mostly brain candy. I still love an entertaining, light read, but I have discovered a whole new world of books. Incidently, I discovered this world of books all on my own. Can you believe I received a bachelor's degree without ever being required to read a single book other than a textbook? [Yes, we can.] Scary. [Yes, it is.] That's not counting high school; I read a few whole books there."
Welcome, SLM. You are a reader, a thinker, and an autodidact.
Several folks note that they're reading Don Quixote, with a nod to Susan Wise Bauer, author of The Well-Educated Mind. Don Quixote is recommended in the first section of Bauer's multi-part reading plan.
The M-mv reader with Wuthering Heights on her nightstand wrote, "One time I was looking through the soundtrack section in a music store, and I came across Wuthering Heights: The Musical. Can you imagine such a thing?!?"
No, gentle reader, we cannot. [*shudder*]
Several M-mv readers are making their way through Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. One noted, "Disgusting and disturbing, and I'm only on page 92!"
And one of our favorite correspondents struck the nail on its head with this observation about our survey: "That kind of information [what we're reading, favorite childhood books, books we reread, etc.] can be very revealing, don't you think? More so than age, marital status, names of children, etc."
Ayup.
Here are some of the books on the nightstands of your fellow readers, thinkers, and autodidacts. More survey results to follow soon. Many thanks again to all of you who "revealed" yourselves by responding.
Amusing Ourselves to Death (Neil Postman)
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Other Writings (Benjamin Franklin)
Catching Alice (Clare Naylor)
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Carl Sagan)
Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes; note: many translations from which choose to choose; the new one by Edith Grossman is accessible)
Endangered Minds (Jane M. Healy)
Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
Fast Food Nation (Eric Schlosser)
Fifty Acres and a Poodle (Jeanne Marie Laskas)
Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Jared Diamond)
Hamlet's Dresser (Bob Smith)
Harry Potter series (J.K. Rowling)
The Highwaymen: Florida's African-American Landscape Painters (Gary Monroe)
How to Live Through a Bad Day (Jack Hayford)
How to Read a Book (Mortimer Adler)
In the Deep Heart's Core (Michael Johnston)
In Defense of Elitism (William Henry III)
In Search of Belief (Joan Chittister)
The Irrational Season (Madeleine L'Engle)
Just Six Numbers (Martin J. Rees)
The King of Torts (John Grisham)
Life among the Savages (Shirley Jackson)
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (J.R.R. Tolkien)
Master and Commander (Patrick O'Brian)
Middletown, America (Gail Sheehy)
The Odyssey (Homer; note: again, many translations from which to choose; Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Fagles are among the finest and most accessible)
Prodigal Summer (Barbara Kingsolver)
Sacred Cows Make the Best Burgers (Robert Kriegel, David Brandt)
The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (Harold Bloom)
A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson)
Undaunted Courage (Stephen Ambrose)
Violence in the Workplace (S. Anthony Baron)
Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
12.05.2003
The recommended daily allowance
In the spirit of countdowns, we recommend that you enter the world of The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King (can you say, "Oscar!"?) opens on December 17.
"Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie."
— J.R.R. Tolkien
"Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie."
— J.R.R. Tolkien
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
"I am convinced that human flight is possible and practical."
...said Wilbur Wright in 1899.
The Wright Brothers National Memorial in North Carolina will be closed all of next week to prepare for the five-day First Flight Centennial Celebration, December 12 through 17.
Eleven, ten, nine, eight...
If you're counting down the days until December 17, a tour of Wright Brothers Aeroplane Company, a virtual museum of pioneer aviation, may be just what you need to pass the time.
Or visit the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's online exhibition. "On December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the Wright Flyer became the first powered, heavier-than-air machine to achieve controlled, sustained flight with a pilot aboard. December 2003 will mark the 100th Anniversary of this historic and groundbreaking achievement. Learn how two small town businessmen invented a technology that would define the 20th century."
Of course, the Wright Brothers and the Smithsonian maintained a rather uneasy, at best, relationship.
"After Wilbur's death in 1912, Orville became passionate about defending the Wright Brothers standing as inventors of the airplane. When Smithsonian officials displayed one of Secretary Langley's 'Aerodromes,' as Langley called his airplanes, with the label stating that Langley had constructed a machine 'capable' of flight before the Wright Brothers successful flight, Orville was not happy. Because of this, in 1925, he loaned the Wright 1903 Flyer to the London Science Museum, promising that it would not return to the United States until the Smithsonian renounced its claim. It is not until 1944 that Smithsonian Secretary Charles G. Abbot and Orville Wright came to terms. The Wright 1903 Flyer was placed on display in the Smithsonian's Arts and Industries Building on December 17, 1948."
Read more here.
And the following news stories and reflections may also interest folks who find this "countdown" to the anniversary of the Wright Brothers' history-making, world-as-we-know-it-changing flight more compelling than, say, Christmas shopping.
[Insert Scrooge-like "Bah! Humbug!" audio clip here.]
A fair wind sent Wright brothers soaring
"A re-creation of the first powered flight by Wilbur and Orville Wright a century ago has concluded that they came perilously close to failure."
Wright brothers' curiosity, skill changed world
"The Wright brothers bridge the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century and the Knowledge Economy of the 21st century. They were men who loved tinkering with machines. But they were also engineering geniuses."
A century of flight
"The Wright Brothers merit our appreciation not only for what they accomplished, but for what they began. They proved it could be done. Humans, using a combination of desire, ingenuity, and courage, could break the chains of gravity not just in a balloon moving at the whim of air currents, but in powered, controlled flight."
Wright brothers unleashed world-altering force
"No one knows who first harnessed the awesome power of fire. No date is recorded for the first spin of a wheel. But here where the turbulent Atlantic meets the dunes of North Carolina's Outer Banks, on a blustery Dec. 17, 1903, man first conquered the air.
"Nothing has ever been the same."
The Wright Brothers: After Kitty Hawk
On November 30, NPR's "Weekend Edition Sunday" featured stories about the lives of the brothers after 1903. Listen to the audio and check out the image gallery.
The Wright Brothers National Memorial in North Carolina will be closed all of next week to prepare for the five-day First Flight Centennial Celebration, December 12 through 17.
Eleven, ten, nine, eight...
If you're counting down the days until December 17, a tour of Wright Brothers Aeroplane Company, a virtual museum of pioneer aviation, may be just what you need to pass the time.
Or visit the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's online exhibition. "On December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the Wright Flyer became the first powered, heavier-than-air machine to achieve controlled, sustained flight with a pilot aboard. December 2003 will mark the 100th Anniversary of this historic and groundbreaking achievement. Learn how two small town businessmen invented a technology that would define the 20th century."
Of course, the Wright Brothers and the Smithsonian maintained a rather uneasy, at best, relationship.
"After Wilbur's death in 1912, Orville became passionate about defending the Wright Brothers standing as inventors of the airplane. When Smithsonian officials displayed one of Secretary Langley's 'Aerodromes,' as Langley called his airplanes, with the label stating that Langley had constructed a machine 'capable' of flight before the Wright Brothers successful flight, Orville was not happy. Because of this, in 1925, he loaned the Wright 1903 Flyer to the London Science Museum, promising that it would not return to the United States until the Smithsonian renounced its claim. It is not until 1944 that Smithsonian Secretary Charles G. Abbot and Orville Wright came to terms. The Wright 1903 Flyer was placed on display in the Smithsonian's Arts and Industries Building on December 17, 1948."
Read more here.
And the following news stories and reflections may also interest folks who find this "countdown" to the anniversary of the Wright Brothers' history-making, world-as-we-know-it-changing flight more compelling than, say, Christmas shopping.
[Insert Scrooge-like "Bah! Humbug!" audio clip here.]
A fair wind sent Wright brothers soaring
"A re-creation of the first powered flight by Wilbur and Orville Wright a century ago has concluded that they came perilously close to failure."
Wright brothers' curiosity, skill changed world
"The Wright brothers bridge the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century and the Knowledge Economy of the 21st century. They were men who loved tinkering with machines. But they were also engineering geniuses."
A century of flight
"The Wright Brothers merit our appreciation not only for what they accomplished, but for what they began. They proved it could be done. Humans, using a combination of desire, ingenuity, and courage, could break the chains of gravity not just in a balloon moving at the whim of air currents, but in powered, controlled flight."
Wright brothers unleashed world-altering force
"No one knows who first harnessed the awesome power of fire. No date is recorded for the first spin of a wheel. But here where the turbulent Atlantic meets the dunes of North Carolina's Outer Banks, on a blustery Dec. 17, 1903, man first conquered the air.
"Nothing has ever been the same."
The Wright Brothers: After Kitty Hawk
On November 30, NPR's "Weekend Edition Sunday" featured stories about the lives of the brothers after 1903. Listen to the audio and check out the image gallery.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
12.04.2003
The recommended daily allowance
These days, by 2:30, the afternoons fade like Jackson Pollack's "Grayed Rainbow." If work, children, and the rest will allow, let yourself fade a little some afternoon. Nurse a cup of Trader Joe's French roast, curl up in a chair by a window, and listen to The Red Violin.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
"No, Alex, Jordan, Kayla, Brandon, Emily, Dylan, and friends, there is no Santa Claus."
A first-grade teacher in a Florida school advised her class that Santa is make-believe, according to a CNN story.
"When the subject of Santa came up, the teacher started questioning parts of his story — How could a fat jolly man fit down a chimney? How could reindeer fly around the world in one night? — and told the children that wasn't possible.
"'It's all been blown out of proportion,' [Geneta] Codner [the teacher] said. 'I'm sorry (parents) think I meant it that way. We were just having a discussion. I don't know where all this hurt came from.'"
"All this hurt came from" having dreams dashed a little too early, I would imagine. One would think that someone trained and paid to teach little children would know that, though, huh? Can you say, "Homeschooling"?
While skimming headlines at CNN, I saw this story about the first bio-engineered household pet: "Glofish," a zebra fish that glows fluorescent. Zebra fish are usually black and silver; "Glofish" are inserted with genes from sea anemones or jellyfish, which turns them red or green. They glow under black or ultraviolet lights.
According to the story, "California is the only state with a ban on genetically engineered species, and the Fish and Game Commission said it would not exempt the zebra fish from the law even if escaped fish would not pose a threat to the state's waterways."
"'For me it's a question of values, it's not a question of science,' said commissioner Sam Schuchat. 'I think selling genetically modified fish as pets is wrong.'"
Later in the story, Schuchat is quoted again:
"'Welcome to the future. Here we are, playing around with the genetic bases of life,' Schumchat said. 'At the end of the day, I just don't think it's right to produce a new organism just to be a pet. To me, this seems like an abuse of the power we have over life, and I'm not prepared to go there today.'"
My reaction to this story occurred not in my brain but my gut. I feel he's right; I just haven't reasoned or worked out why yet.
While on the subject of pets... one of our family-centered learning projects involved Grow-a-Frog: We raised tadpoles with clear skin through their metamorphosis into frogs. After nearly four years, one is still with us. Only two of the eight or so tadpoles the company sent reached maturity, but they were reasonably long lived. (Three Rivers of Brooksville has an excellent guarantee and will ship tadpoles until you have success.) The skin of the Grow-a-Frog tadpoles is translucent, a characteristic of the African clawed frog, so you can see the tiny creature's organs. Bookish types (including me) can be a fussy lot; busy, needy pets, then, are low on our list of priorities. But Grow-a-Frog is a low-maintenace, educational pet. What more can I say?
Finally this afternoon, a few weeks ago, a cyber bud with whom I swap recipes (not! never! just kidding, for gosh sakes!) sent me a quote from a preview of the remake of The Stepford Wives. I will not launch into my rant about the collective lack of imagination demonstrated by filmmakers' obsession with revisiting films that have already successfully (and not so) flitted across the big screens, although I am sorely tempted. Rather, I will point out this salient observation in Margaret Talbot's "A Stepford for Our Times":
"A Stepford Wives that worked as social satire today would be different from its predecessor: It would be at least as much about the project of perfecting children as that of perfecting wives. It would be about the collaboration between ambitious fathers and mothers who believe both in the meritocracy and in doing what it takes to rig it in the interest of their own offspring's Ivy League prospects. It would be about shameless string-pulling to get kids into the right nursery school. Status anxiety about three-year-olds. The subtle assessing of other people's children in relation to one's own."
Ouch. Yes. That's it!
Read Talbot's complete article here.
"When the subject of Santa came up, the teacher started questioning parts of his story — How could a fat jolly man fit down a chimney? How could reindeer fly around the world in one night? — and told the children that wasn't possible.
"'It's all been blown out of proportion,' [Geneta] Codner [the teacher] said. 'I'm sorry (parents) think I meant it that way. We were just having a discussion. I don't know where all this hurt came from.'"
"All this hurt came from" having dreams dashed a little too early, I would imagine. One would think that someone trained and paid to teach little children would know that, though, huh? Can you say, "Homeschooling"?
While skimming headlines at CNN, I saw this story about the first bio-engineered household pet: "Glofish," a zebra fish that glows fluorescent. Zebra fish are usually black and silver; "Glofish" are inserted with genes from sea anemones or jellyfish, which turns them red or green. They glow under black or ultraviolet lights.
According to the story, "California is the only state with a ban on genetically engineered species, and the Fish and Game Commission said it would not exempt the zebra fish from the law even if escaped fish would not pose a threat to the state's waterways."
"'For me it's a question of values, it's not a question of science,' said commissioner Sam Schuchat. 'I think selling genetically modified fish as pets is wrong.'"
Later in the story, Schuchat is quoted again:
"'Welcome to the future. Here we are, playing around with the genetic bases of life,' Schumchat said. 'At the end of the day, I just don't think it's right to produce a new organism just to be a pet. To me, this seems like an abuse of the power we have over life, and I'm not prepared to go there today.'"
My reaction to this story occurred not in my brain but my gut. I feel he's right; I just haven't reasoned or worked out why yet.
While on the subject of pets... one of our family-centered learning projects involved Grow-a-Frog: We raised tadpoles with clear skin through their metamorphosis into frogs. After nearly four years, one is still with us. Only two of the eight or so tadpoles the company sent reached maturity, but they were reasonably long lived. (Three Rivers of Brooksville has an excellent guarantee and will ship tadpoles until you have success.) The skin of the Grow-a-Frog tadpoles is translucent, a characteristic of the African clawed frog, so you can see the tiny creature's organs. Bookish types (including me) can be a fussy lot; busy, needy pets, then, are low on our list of priorities. But Grow-a-Frog is a low-maintenace, educational pet. What more can I say?
Finally this afternoon, a few weeks ago, a cyber bud with whom I swap recipes (not! never! just kidding, for gosh sakes!) sent me a quote from a preview of the remake of The Stepford Wives. I will not launch into my rant about the collective lack of imagination demonstrated by filmmakers' obsession with revisiting films that have already successfully (and not so) flitted across the big screens, although I am sorely tempted. Rather, I will point out this salient observation in Margaret Talbot's "A Stepford for Our Times":
"A Stepford Wives that worked as social satire today would be different from its predecessor: It would be at least as much about the project of perfecting children as that of perfecting wives. It would be about the collaboration between ambitious fathers and mothers who believe both in the meritocracy and in doing what it takes to rig it in the interest of their own offspring's Ivy League prospects. It would be about shameless string-pulling to get kids into the right nursery school. Status anxiety about three-year-olds. The subtle assessing of other people's children in relation to one's own."
Ouch. Yes. That's it!
Read Talbot's complete article here.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
12.03.2003
The recommended daily allowance
"There's a kind of writing that might be called journalese, and it's the death of freshness in anybody's style. It is the common currency of newspapers and of magazines like People — a mixture of cheap words, made-up words and cliches that have become so pervasive that a writer can hardly help using them automatically. You must fight these phrases or you'll sound like every hack who sits down to write. You will never make your mark as a writer unless you develop a respect for words and a curiosity about their shades of meaning that is almost obsessive. The English language is rich in strong and supple words. Take the time to root around and find the ones you want."
William Zinsser's On Writing Well was first published in 1976 (the year before, coincidently, Richard Mitchell began publishing The Underground Grammarian). Now available in a twenty-fifth annviersary edition, the guide is one of three books that must be pressed on anyone who says, "I want to be a writer." The other two? An excellent dictionary and The Elements of Style.
William Zinsser's On Writing Well was first published in 1976 (the year before, coincidently, Richard Mitchell began publishing The Underground Grammarian). Now available in a twenty-fifth annviersary edition, the guide is one of three books that must be pressed on anyone who says, "I want to be a writer." The other two? An excellent dictionary and The Elements of Style.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
The Underground Grammarian
The 11.15.2003 recommended daily allowance was Richard Mitchell's Less Than Words Can Say. Mitchell, also known as "The Underground Grammarian," was something of a "type" — a cranky (dare I use "curmudgeonly"?) scholar bent on uncovering the misuses and misapplications of language (and by extension, thought), especially by educators and their students.
I confess. I like the type. He makes me think. No higher compliment I can pay.
Mitchell died a year ago this month, but the website chronicling his articles, newsletters, and books has been maintained in his memory. I stopped in today to remind myself what a treasure he was.
"The Underground Grammarian does not advocate violence; it advocates ridicule. Abusers of English are often pompous, and ridicule hurts them more than violence. In every edition we will bring you practical advice for ridiculing abusers of English.
"This month's target is any barbarian who says advisement. We can advise, or give advice, or even do some advising. Advisement permits nothing beyond what we can already mean with the words we have. Perhaps, by analogy to confinement, it might name a condition in which we suffer the consequence of having been advised; or, like government, it might indicate some cloud of loosely related abstractions and institutions. Those who say it to us must simply mean advising, but they fear that a clear naming of what they do will reveal how little it needs doing, and they will find themselves in the streets selling wind-up toys. Such people feel degraded unless what they do ends with -ment or some other official sound such as -ation or -ivity. Work that ends with -ing makes them nervous.
"Do not boo and stamp your feet when some barbarian says advisement; it will bring reprisal, for barbarians are vindictive. Simply mutter, just loud enough to be heard, 'Clickety-click-click.' This requires no lip movement and suggests a wind-up toy. With a female barbarian, an equally good response is 'Ding-dong,' familiar to all television-addicted barbarians and suggesting some more appropriate career in cosmetics."
— from the first issue of The Underground Grammarian, January 1977
"When we say, as we seem to more and more these days, that education in America is "failing," it is because we don't understand the institution. It is, in fact, succeeding enormously. It grows daily, hourly, in power and wealth, and that precisely because of our accusations of failure. The more we complain against it, the more it can lay claim to our power and wealth, in the name of curing those ills of which we complain. And, in our special case, in a land ostensibly committed to individual freedom and rights, it can and does make the ultimate claim — to be, that is, the free, universal system of public education that alone can raise up to a free land citizens who will understand and love and defend individual freedom and rights. Like any politician, the institution of education claims direct descent in apostolic succession from the Founding Fathers."
— from The Graves of Academe
Visit "The Underground Grammarian."
I confess. I like the type. He makes me think. No higher compliment I can pay.
Mitchell died a year ago this month, but the website chronicling his articles, newsletters, and books has been maintained in his memory. I stopped in today to remind myself what a treasure he was.
"The Underground Grammarian does not advocate violence; it advocates ridicule. Abusers of English are often pompous, and ridicule hurts them more than violence. In every edition we will bring you practical advice for ridiculing abusers of English.
"This month's target is any barbarian who says advisement. We can advise, or give advice, or even do some advising. Advisement permits nothing beyond what we can already mean with the words we have. Perhaps, by analogy to confinement, it might name a condition in which we suffer the consequence of having been advised; or, like government, it might indicate some cloud of loosely related abstractions and institutions. Those who say it to us must simply mean advising, but they fear that a clear naming of what they do will reveal how little it needs doing, and they will find themselves in the streets selling wind-up toys. Such people feel degraded unless what they do ends with -ment or some other official sound such as -ation or -ivity. Work that ends with -ing makes them nervous.
"Do not boo and stamp your feet when some barbarian says advisement; it will bring reprisal, for barbarians are vindictive. Simply mutter, just loud enough to be heard, 'Clickety-click-click.' This requires no lip movement and suggests a wind-up toy. With a female barbarian, an equally good response is 'Ding-dong,' familiar to all television-addicted barbarians and suggesting some more appropriate career in cosmetics."
— from the first issue of The Underground Grammarian, January 1977
"When we say, as we seem to more and more these days, that education in America is "failing," it is because we don't understand the institution. It is, in fact, succeeding enormously. It grows daily, hourly, in power and wealth, and that precisely because of our accusations of failure. The more we complain against it, the more it can lay claim to our power and wealth, in the name of curing those ills of which we complain. And, in our special case, in a land ostensibly committed to individual freedom and rights, it can and does make the ultimate claim — to be, that is, the free, universal system of public education that alone can raise up to a free land citizens who will understand and love and defend individual freedom and rights. Like any politician, the institution of education claims direct descent in apostolic succession from the Founding Fathers."
— from The Graves of Academe
Visit "The Underground Grammarian."
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
12.02.2003
The recommended daily allowance
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
The United States Constitution.
Want a friendly companion with whom to share today's RDA? Try Linda Monk's The Words We Live By.
The United States Constitution.
Want a friendly companion with whom to share today's RDA? Try Linda Monk's The Words We Live By.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
Common-Place
I discovered the marvelous Common-Place last year, while searching for articles about the Constitution. A family book club discussion was creeping up, and I was unprepared.
A Google search later, I was in American history heaven — Common-Place.
In Object Lessons: Relics, Reverence, and Relevance (July 2002), Beth A. Twiss-Garrity writes:
"Almost one million people flock to the National Archives on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., each year to see, among other things, the United States Constitution. The National Constitution Center (NCC), set to open in Philadelphia on July 4, 2003, expects one million annually to troop through its doors as well. But reverence does not imply knowledge. Despite the high interest in the document that these attendance numbers might suggest, public opinion research and visitor studies conducted over the last two decades demonstrate that the Constitution remains, as Michael Kammen once wrote, 'swathed in pride yet obscured by indifference.' Many National Archives visitors whom I interviewed last summer saw their trip to D.C. as a pilgrimage to a sacred shrine. Yet when queried about the particulars of the Constitution, many people cannot accurately quote the document or determine its function."
Reverence does not imply knowledge.
The opening remark of a grand evening of discussion.
A Google search later, I was in American history heaven — Common-Place.
In Object Lessons: Relics, Reverence, and Relevance (July 2002), Beth A. Twiss-Garrity writes:
"Almost one million people flock to the National Archives on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., each year to see, among other things, the United States Constitution. The National Constitution Center (NCC), set to open in Philadelphia on July 4, 2003, expects one million annually to troop through its doors as well. But reverence does not imply knowledge. Despite the high interest in the document that these attendance numbers might suggest, public opinion research and visitor studies conducted over the last two decades demonstrate that the Constitution remains, as Michael Kammen once wrote, 'swathed in pride yet obscured by indifference.' Many National Archives visitors whom I interviewed last summer saw their trip to D.C. as a pilgrimage to a sacred shrine. Yet when queried about the particulars of the Constitution, many people cannot accurately quote the document or determine its function."
Reverence does not imply knowledge.
The opening remark of a grand evening of discussion.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
12.01.2003
The recommended daily allowance
"The politics implicit in classic American writing are those of liberal democracy — a society of individuals restrained within a structure of mutual responsibility but free to pursue happiness by refusing the designated status of their parents, race, sex, or any other limiting accident of birth. These writers celebrated American democracy, or called it to account for its failures, because they believed that individuals, whether born as servants or masters, should be able to break out of what William James called 'the circumpressure of [one's] caste and set' to achieve lives of freedom and fulfillment."
— from Andrew Delbanco's Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now.
— from Andrew Delbanco's Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
"Oh, who is it you wish to see?"
Have you read this article in The New Yorker — "A Fire in the Brain: The difficulties of being James Joyce’s daughter" by by Joan Acocella?
The lead paragraph:
"William Butler Yeats, when he was riding the bus, would occasionally go into a compositional trance. He would stare straight ahead and utter a low hum and beat time with his hands. People would come up to him and ask him if he was all right. Once, his young daughter, Anne, boarded a bus and found him in that condition among the passengers. She knew better than to disturb him. But when the bus stopped at their gate, she got off with him. He turned to her vaguely and said, 'Oh, who is it you wish to see?'"
Acocella notes that this literary anecdote illustrates what it must be like to be the child of an artist. Think, then, how it must have been for James Joyce's progeny, eh? Acocella offers a capable review of Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake by Carol Loeb Shloss, a Joyce scholar who teaches at Stanford.
For a "shot of science" (since I've been a little "lit-heavy" these last few days), visit Sky and Telescope's "Interactive Sky Chart." The moon, the stars, the planets... folks, remember to look up at night. We are all so accustomed to studying the sidewalk and averting our eyes that we often neglect the astonishing peek into the infinite that is the night sky. Look up. Oh, do look up.
Hey, I must return a favor: JoanneJacobs.com gave "Mental multivitamin" two plugs in November. Visit the site for "free thinking and linking."
And I must thank folks who responded to the survey about books. We're sorting through the responses and will cobble together a post by week's end. It's not too late if you'd still like to participate. Click here for more information.
Finally tonight, I know that a good portion of the rest of the world is counting the shopping days until Christmas. Not I. No, I'm marking the days until December 17:
— The anniversary of the Wright Brothers' remarkable flight!
— The opening of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King!
The lead paragraph:
"William Butler Yeats, when he was riding the bus, would occasionally go into a compositional trance. He would stare straight ahead and utter a low hum and beat time with his hands. People would come up to him and ask him if he was all right. Once, his young daughter, Anne, boarded a bus and found him in that condition among the passengers. She knew better than to disturb him. But when the bus stopped at their gate, she got off with him. He turned to her vaguely and said, 'Oh, who is it you wish to see?'"
Acocella notes that this literary anecdote illustrates what it must be like to be the child of an artist. Think, then, how it must have been for James Joyce's progeny, eh? Acocella offers a capable review of Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake by Carol Loeb Shloss, a Joyce scholar who teaches at Stanford.
For a "shot of science" (since I've been a little "lit-heavy" these last few days), visit Sky and Telescope's "Interactive Sky Chart." The moon, the stars, the planets... folks, remember to look up at night. We are all so accustomed to studying the sidewalk and averting our eyes that we often neglect the astonishing peek into the infinite that is the night sky. Look up. Oh, do look up.
Hey, I must return a favor: JoanneJacobs.com gave "Mental multivitamin" two plugs in November. Visit the site for "free thinking and linking."
And I must thank folks who responded to the survey about books. We're sorting through the responses and will cobble together a post by week's end. It's not too late if you'd still like to participate. Click here for more information.
Finally tonight, I know that a good portion of the rest of the world is counting the shopping days until Christmas. Not I. No, I'm marking the days until December 17:
— The anniversary of the Wright Brothers' remarkable flight!
— The opening of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King!
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
11.30.2003
The recommended daily allowance
"There is no single way to read well, though there is a prime reason why we should read. Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found? If you are fortunate, you encounter a particular teacher who can help, yet finally you are alone, going on without further mediation. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.
— from Harold Bloom's How to Read a Book ad Why
"Writers form themselves into the pyramid we see in all areas of human talent and human creativity. At the bottom are the bad ones. Above them is a group which is slightly smaller but still large and welcoming; these are the competent writers. They may also be found on the staff of your local newspaper, on the racks at your local bookstore, and at poetry readings on Open Mike Night... The next level is much smaller. These are the really good writers. Above them — above almost all of us — are the Shakespeares, the Faulkners, the Yeatses, Shaws, and Eudora Weltys. They are geniuses, divine accidents, gifted in a way which is beyond our ability to understand... [M]ost geniuses aren't able to understand themselves, and many of them lead miserable lives, realizing (at least on some level) that they are nothing but fortunate freaks...."
— from Stephen King's On Writing
Remember, dear readers, thinkers, and autodidacts, these and other books recommended at "Mental multivitamin" are available at Amazon.com. Thank you for supporting this site.
— from Harold Bloom's How to Read a Book ad Why
"Writers form themselves into the pyramid we see in all areas of human talent and human creativity. At the bottom are the bad ones. Above them is a group which is slightly smaller but still large and welcoming; these are the competent writers. They may also be found on the staff of your local newspaper, on the racks at your local bookstore, and at poetry readings on Open Mike Night... The next level is much smaller. These are the really good writers. Above them — above almost all of us — are the Shakespeares, the Faulkners, the Yeatses, Shaws, and Eudora Weltys. They are geniuses, divine accidents, gifted in a way which is beyond our ability to understand... [M]ost geniuses aren't able to understand themselves, and many of them lead miserable lives, realizing (at least on some level) that they are nothing but fortunate freaks...."
— from Stephen King's On Writing
Remember, dear readers, thinkers, and autodidacts, these and other books recommended at "Mental multivitamin" are available at Amazon.com. Thank you for supporting this site.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
Book wars
In other forums, other essays, I have posited that in one hundred years, lit students will likely study the sprawling, sometimes sloppy, always accessible novels of Stephen King in the same way lit students once studied the sprawling, sometimes sloppy, always accessible novels of Charles Dickens.
Heresy, spit some.
Ayup, maintain others.
It is a discussion that can easily and quickly dissolve into a shouting match between polemicists, this dialogue about literature. Not unlike discussions about, say, politics or religion.
What is literature? What should people read? Quick! Choose a side!
Well, certainly not King, maintains the cranky but brilliant scholar Harold Bloom.
"The decision to give the National Book Foundation's annual award for 'distinguished contribution' to Stephen King is extraordinary," opined Bloom in a Boston Globe editorial, "another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I've described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind... What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis. The publishing industry has stooped terribly low to bestow on King a lifetime award that has previously gone to the novelists Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and to playwright Arthur Miller. By awarding it to King they recognize nothing but the commercial value of his books, which sell in the millions but do little more for humanity than keep the publishing world afloat. If this is going to be the criterion in the future, then perhaps next year the committee should give its award for distinguished contribution to Danielle Steel, and surely the Nobel Prize for literature should go to J.K. Rowling."
Yeah, Bloom isn't fond of Pottermania, either. Three years ago, in a Wall Street Journal editorial, Bloom declared that, yes, thirty-five million readers could most assuredly be wrong. He concluded, "A vast concourse of inadequate works, for adults and for children, crams the dustbins of the ages. At a time when public judgment is no better and no worse than what is proclaimed by the ideological cheerleaders who have so destroyed humanistic study, anything goes. The cultural critics will, soon enough, introduce Harry Potter into their college curriculum, and The New York Times will go on celebrating another confirmation of the dumbing-down it leads and exemplifies."
Jennie Rothenberg at The Atlantic interviewed Bloom this past summer. She wrote, "Depending on one's ideology, Bloom can be perceived in one of two ways: as a Don Quixote tilting at the whirring blades of social progress or as a noble Sir Lancelot, defending a literary kingdom whose nobility includes Homer, Milton, and Dante. In this second paradigm, Bloom's King Arthur is undoubtedly William Shakespeare, the writer to whom he reverently refers as 'my mortal god.'"
She continues, "At seventy-three, Bloom lives with his wife, Jeanne, near the campus of Yale University, where he is the Sterling Professor of Humanities. He leads a proudly anachronistic existence... But for all his old-fashioned geniality, Bloom remains a powerful warrior on the literary field, always ready to raise his lance in the name of the Western tradition."
I rather fancy the image of Bloom (whose essays and books about Shakespeare are the catechism of bardolatry, a secular religion with a passionate following) as a blend of Quixote and Lancelot.
Rereading "Don Lancelot's" remarks, then, reminds me that if my shelves and baskets and leaning piles of books are like a city, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, The Stand, and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone must be uneasy neighbors, warily eyeing each other and wondering, "What's he doing in this neighborhood?"
No easy answer to this question, I'm afraid. I cannot explain simply the strange seredipity that led me from one book to another. I wonder, though, if my views about literature aren't a little like Alan Wolfe's take on the culture wars. John T. McGreevy reviews two new Wolfe titles in today's Chicago Tribune ("Books"). By way of introduction, he summarizes Wolfe's One Nation, After All:
"There he argued that polemicists on both sides of the culture wars had it wrong. If you actually listened to the middle-class Americans, Wolfe explained after conducting interviews around the country, you discovered a tolerant citizenry. A non-judgmental ethos and a respect for the right of individuals and families to make their own moral choices had become the standards of contemporary suburbia, not the sullen paranoia imagined by liberals barricaded within city limits or the snarling conservatives favored by talk-radio hosts."
Ouch.
By extension, then, if Bloom and King (who leveled his own snarky remarks at his detractors on accepting his award) actually listened to readers, they might realize that we are generally a fairly tolerant bunch. A Scott Turow novel might prove a fine neighbor to, say, Middlemarch.
In a guest column at MobyLives, Steve Almond (who notes that he has not read Middlemarch) muses that Bloom should forget his rage and "excoriat[e] the true opponents of creative enlightenment. A short list would include: the deification of consumerism, the decline in funding for public education, the economic inequality that has become the hallmark of late-model capitalism. This culture discourages creativity, and deep thought, because such actions are not profitable. The horrible fact that people turn to Stephen King rather than Saul Bellow is, in other words, symptomalogy."
"[L]urking beneath [Bloom's] petulant elitism is an egalitarian impulse," Almond asserts. "He knows that young people are turning away from the great books that might save them. But he fails to concern himself with why." Almond does, though. "[I]t's NOT because Americans are dumb or lazy, but because they fear the chaos of their feelings. Our masters of commerce are quite happy with this arrangement. They want us in this state of terror, as it makes us more likely to obey their constant buy messages. The unexamined life, it might be said, offers an extraordinary profit margin." [Emphasis added.]
Almond concludes, "We [writers] will achieve a greater measure of relevance not by tearing one another down, or making literature exclusive, but by working to promote our common goal, which is to get people reading, thinking, and feeling again." [Emphasis added.]
Hey! Maybe I am a petulant elitist with lurking egalitarian impulses, too. I certainly wouldn't be in bad company. I confess that after attempting to synthesize all of this material, when I examine my reader's heart of hearts, I do have my prejudices. King is no Bellow, not by any standard. Bellow is a finely prepared meal served at a five-star restaurant; King is candy bar wheedled out of an exhausted parent who succumbs to the "impulse purchase" while waiting for the novice checker to scan the fifteen items of the elderly woman who will pay for her purchase with crumpled singles and a bunch of coins.
In the end, I guess, a reader must contend with the fact that his choices are as good as infinite; he cannot read all that there is to read, so he must choose some books and reject others. While we cannot always afford a meal at a five-star restaurant, we also cannot endure a steady diet of candy bars. There is a balance, "a tolerant citizenry" of books. It probably doesn't include much James Patterson, Nicholas Sparks, Jackie Collins, or "chick lit," though, whether they can afford the rent in this city or not.
Heresy.
Ayup.
Happy reading.
Heresy, spit some.
Ayup, maintain others.
It is a discussion that can easily and quickly dissolve into a shouting match between polemicists, this dialogue about literature. Not unlike discussions about, say, politics or religion.
What is literature? What should people read? Quick! Choose a side!
Well, certainly not King, maintains the cranky but brilliant scholar Harold Bloom.
"The decision to give the National Book Foundation's annual award for 'distinguished contribution' to Stephen King is extraordinary," opined Bloom in a Boston Globe editorial, "another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I've described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind... What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis. The publishing industry has stooped terribly low to bestow on King a lifetime award that has previously gone to the novelists Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and to playwright Arthur Miller. By awarding it to King they recognize nothing but the commercial value of his books, which sell in the millions but do little more for humanity than keep the publishing world afloat. If this is going to be the criterion in the future, then perhaps next year the committee should give its award for distinguished contribution to Danielle Steel, and surely the Nobel Prize for literature should go to J.K. Rowling."
Yeah, Bloom isn't fond of Pottermania, either. Three years ago, in a Wall Street Journal editorial, Bloom declared that, yes, thirty-five million readers could most assuredly be wrong. He concluded, "A vast concourse of inadequate works, for adults and for children, crams the dustbins of the ages. At a time when public judgment is no better and no worse than what is proclaimed by the ideological cheerleaders who have so destroyed humanistic study, anything goes. The cultural critics will, soon enough, introduce Harry Potter into their college curriculum, and The New York Times will go on celebrating another confirmation of the dumbing-down it leads and exemplifies."
Jennie Rothenberg at The Atlantic interviewed Bloom this past summer. She wrote, "Depending on one's ideology, Bloom can be perceived in one of two ways: as a Don Quixote tilting at the whirring blades of social progress or as a noble Sir Lancelot, defending a literary kingdom whose nobility includes Homer, Milton, and Dante. In this second paradigm, Bloom's King Arthur is undoubtedly William Shakespeare, the writer to whom he reverently refers as 'my mortal god.'"
She continues, "At seventy-three, Bloom lives with his wife, Jeanne, near the campus of Yale University, where he is the Sterling Professor of Humanities. He leads a proudly anachronistic existence... But for all his old-fashioned geniality, Bloom remains a powerful warrior on the literary field, always ready to raise his lance in the name of the Western tradition."
I rather fancy the image of Bloom (whose essays and books about Shakespeare are the catechism of bardolatry, a secular religion with a passionate following) as a blend of Quixote and Lancelot.
Rereading "Don Lancelot's" remarks, then, reminds me that if my shelves and baskets and leaning piles of books are like a city, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, The Stand, and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone must be uneasy neighbors, warily eyeing each other and wondering, "What's he doing in this neighborhood?"
No easy answer to this question, I'm afraid. I cannot explain simply the strange seredipity that led me from one book to another. I wonder, though, if my views about literature aren't a little like Alan Wolfe's take on the culture wars. John T. McGreevy reviews two new Wolfe titles in today's Chicago Tribune ("Books"). By way of introduction, he summarizes Wolfe's One Nation, After All:
"There he argued that polemicists on both sides of the culture wars had it wrong. If you actually listened to the middle-class Americans, Wolfe explained after conducting interviews around the country, you discovered a tolerant citizenry. A non-judgmental ethos and a respect for the right of individuals and families to make their own moral choices had become the standards of contemporary suburbia, not the sullen paranoia imagined by liberals barricaded within city limits or the snarling conservatives favored by talk-radio hosts."
Ouch.
By extension, then, if Bloom and King (who leveled his own snarky remarks at his detractors on accepting his award) actually listened to readers, they might realize that we are generally a fairly tolerant bunch. A Scott Turow novel might prove a fine neighbor to, say, Middlemarch.
In a guest column at MobyLives, Steve Almond (who notes that he has not read Middlemarch) muses that Bloom should forget his rage and "excoriat[e] the true opponents of creative enlightenment. A short list would include: the deification of consumerism, the decline in funding for public education, the economic inequality that has become the hallmark of late-model capitalism. This culture discourages creativity, and deep thought, because such actions are not profitable. The horrible fact that people turn to Stephen King rather than Saul Bellow is, in other words, symptomalogy."
"[L]urking beneath [Bloom's] petulant elitism is an egalitarian impulse," Almond asserts. "He knows that young people are turning away from the great books that might save them. But he fails to concern himself with why." Almond does, though. "[I]t's NOT because Americans are dumb or lazy, but because they fear the chaos of their feelings. Our masters of commerce are quite happy with this arrangement. They want us in this state of terror, as it makes us more likely to obey their constant buy messages. The unexamined life, it might be said, offers an extraordinary profit margin." [Emphasis added.]
Almond concludes, "We [writers] will achieve a greater measure of relevance not by tearing one another down, or making literature exclusive, but by working to promote our common goal, which is to get people reading, thinking, and feeling again." [Emphasis added.]
Hey! Maybe I am a petulant elitist with lurking egalitarian impulses, too. I certainly wouldn't be in bad company. I confess that after attempting to synthesize all of this material, when I examine my reader's heart of hearts, I do have my prejudices. King is no Bellow, not by any standard. Bellow is a finely prepared meal served at a five-star restaurant; King is candy bar wheedled out of an exhausted parent who succumbs to the "impulse purchase" while waiting for the novice checker to scan the fifteen items of the elderly woman who will pay for her purchase with crumpled singles and a bunch of coins.
In the end, I guess, a reader must contend with the fact that his choices are as good as infinite; he cannot read all that there is to read, so he must choose some books and reject others. While we cannot always afford a meal at a five-star restaurant, we also cannot endure a steady diet of candy bars. There is a balance, "a tolerant citizenry" of books. It probably doesn't include much James Patterson, Nicholas Sparks, Jackie Collins, or "chick lit," though, whether they can afford the rent in this city or not.
Heresy.
Ayup.
Happy reading.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
11.29.2003
The recommended daily allowance
"I have always been something of an obsessive about books — which is why the house in which I live contains between twenty and thirty thousand of them. Every room is lined with bookshelves, so that there is no more space for more... When we ran out of wall space, we began to erect sheds in the garden — three so far."
How could a reader not want to hear more from such a kindred spirit? Check out Colin Wilson's The Books in My Life.
How could a reader not want to hear more from such a kindred spirit? Check out Colin Wilson's The Books in My Life.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
"Black Friday," indeed
Does this story disturb anyone else as much as it disturbed me?
For a DVD player.
Almost unbelievable.
But, then, the idea that anyone would line up outside a Wal-Mart (or any store) at dawn on a holiday weekend by turns baffles and repulses me. I believe these extended weekends are made for flannel shirts, warm beds (or couches or old, comfy rockers), and, well, books... oh, and hot chocolate, a long walk to nowhere after lunch, games with family, and, well, more books.
The juxtaposition of the story above with this one, though, is even more disturbing.
(*SHUDDER*)
To escape these goblins, I visted the BBC's book page and hopped to "The Big Read" to take their literary quiz (see the sidebar on "The Big Read" page).
Ah, much better.
(Postscript: A regular "Mental multivitamin" reader just sent this link, "The Wal-Mart you don't know.")
For a DVD player.
Almost unbelievable.
But, then, the idea that anyone would line up outside a Wal-Mart (or any store) at dawn on a holiday weekend by turns baffles and repulses me. I believe these extended weekends are made for flannel shirts, warm beds (or couches or old, comfy rockers), and, well, books... oh, and hot chocolate, a long walk to nowhere after lunch, games with family, and, well, more books.
The juxtaposition of the story above with this one, though, is even more disturbing.
(*SHUDDER*)
To escape these goblins, I visted the BBC's book page and hopped to "The Big Read" to take their literary quiz (see the sidebar on "The Big Read" page).
Ah, much better.
(Postscript: A regular "Mental multivitamin" reader just sent this link, "The Wal-Mart you don't know.")
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
11.28.2003
The recommended daily allowance
"By the end of my year in school, I knew that the culture-ideologues, both left and right, are largely talking nonsense. Both groups simplify and caricature the Western tradition. They ignore its ornery and difficult books; they ignore its actual students, most of whom have been dispossessed. Whether white, black, Asian, or Latino, American students rarely arrive at college as habitual readers, which means that few of them have more than a nominal connection to the past. It is absurd to speak, as does the academic left, of classic Western texts dominating and silencing everyone but a ruling elite or white males. The vast majority of white students do not know the intellectual tradition that is allegedly theirs any better than black or brown ones do. They have not read its books, and when they do read them, they may respond well, but they will not respond in the way that the academic left supposes. For there is only one 'hegemonic discourse' in the lives of American undergraduates, and that is the mass media. Most high schools can't begin to compete against a torrent of imagery and sound that makes every moment but the present seem quaint, bloodless, or dead."
From David Deby's Great Books, which is subtitled "My Adventures with Homer, Rosseau, Woolf, and other Indestructible Writers of the Western World." Denby is a film critic and staff writer for The New Yorker and was for twenty years film critic of New York magazine. His Great Books is one for the permanent library.
From David Deby's Great Books, which is subtitled "My Adventures with Homer, Rosseau, Woolf, and other Indestructible Writers of the Western World." Denby is a film critic and staff writer for The New Yorker and was for twenty years film critic of New York magazine. His Great Books is one for the permanent library.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
I am tempted to buy a mask...
because I am an awful patient. The common cold reduces me to a whimpering, complaining, sniffling mess. The flu? I shudder to think about it. But I must. Sandwiched between commentary on Bush's Thanksgiving trip to Iraq and cheers for shoppers online and in line ("Parking lots are filling up! The Internet is slow! Lots of folks are shopping! Go, go, go!) was news of an "especially virulent strain" of flu virus.
According to CNN, "Thousands of people have been sickened across the country with what health officials say is a severe strain of influenza in a season that started earlier than expected.
"Colorado is one of the hardest-hit states. Four children there have died from the highly contagious respiratory virus."
Yes, I know this is "Mental multivitamin," but if you've ever had the flu, you know that you can't even think while you're down with it, let alone read, work, or dream. Take care, readers, thinkers, and autodidacts. Stay healthy.
Finally tonight, synesthesia ("from the Greek roots syn (together) and aesthesis (perception)"):
"As a child, Julian Asher had a theory about the symphony concerts he attended with his parents. 'I thought they turned down the lights so you could see the colors better,” he says, describing the 'Fantasia'-like scenes that danced before his eyes. Asher wasn’t hallucinating. He’s a synesthete—a rare person for whom one type of sensory input (such as hearing music) evokes an additional one (such as seeing colors)... Almost any two senses can be combined. Sights can have sounds, sounds can have tastes and, more commonly, black-and-white numbers and letters can appear colored. For Patricia Lynne Duffy, author of 'Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens,' five plus two equals green: her color for seven. Sound crazy? For most of the last century, scientists dismissed synesthesia as the product of overactive imaginations. But in recent years they’ve done an abrupt about-face, not only using modern technology to show that it’s real but also studying it for clues to the brain's creativity. 'Synesthesia is not a mere curiosity,' says retired neurologist Richard Cytowic, who helped spur the current interest. 'It's a window into an enormous expanse of the mind.'"
If you missed the article about synesthesia in the current issue of Newsweek, here's a link.
According to CNN, "Thousands of people have been sickened across the country with what health officials say is a severe strain of influenza in a season that started earlier than expected.
"Colorado is one of the hardest-hit states. Four children there have died from the highly contagious respiratory virus."
Yes, I know this is "Mental multivitamin," but if you've ever had the flu, you know that you can't even think while you're down with it, let alone read, work, or dream. Take care, readers, thinkers, and autodidacts. Stay healthy.
Finally tonight, synesthesia ("from the Greek roots syn (together) and aesthesis (perception)"):
"As a child, Julian Asher had a theory about the symphony concerts he attended with his parents. 'I thought they turned down the lights so you could see the colors better,” he says, describing the 'Fantasia'-like scenes that danced before his eyes. Asher wasn’t hallucinating. He’s a synesthete—a rare person for whom one type of sensory input (such as hearing music) evokes an additional one (such as seeing colors)... Almost any two senses can be combined. Sights can have sounds, sounds can have tastes and, more commonly, black-and-white numbers and letters can appear colored. For Patricia Lynne Duffy, author of 'Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens,' five plus two equals green: her color for seven. Sound crazy? For most of the last century, scientists dismissed synesthesia as the product of overactive imaginations. But in recent years they’ve done an abrupt about-face, not only using modern technology to show that it’s real but also studying it for clues to the brain's creativity. 'Synesthesia is not a mere curiosity,' says retired neurologist Richard Cytowic, who helped spur the current interest. 'It's a window into an enormous expanse of the mind.'"
If you missed the article about synesthesia in the current issue of Newsweek, here's a link.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
11.27.2003
The recommended daily allowance
"Rereading can be... a humility-inducing activity, when, on rereading, one learns that the first time around with a book, one's politics or fantasies or personal anxieties were in fact doing most of the work. Rereading books first read when young, one is inclined to weep for the naif one not so long ago was. And while at it one discovers, if one gets to reread the same book twenty years hence, one is even one now."
— Joseph Epstein
"Books are... a delight at home, and no hindrance abroad; companions at night, in travelling, in the country."
— Cicero
"It seems to me as natural and necessary to keep notes, however brief, of one's reading, as logs of voyages or photographs of one's travels. For memory, in most of us, is a liar with galloping consumption."
— F. L. Lucas
For these and other quotes about reading, rereading, books as objects or as friends, libraries, bookstores, oh, and everything related to a life filled with literary pleasures, turn to The Reader's Quotation Book edited by Steven Gilbar. It's one for the permanent library collection; trust me on this.
— Joseph Epstein
"Books are... a delight at home, and no hindrance abroad; companions at night, in travelling, in the country."
— Cicero
"It seems to me as natural and necessary to keep notes, however brief, of one's reading, as logs of voyages or photographs of one's travels. For memory, in most of us, is a liar with galloping consumption."
— F. L. Lucas
For these and other quotes about reading, rereading, books as objects or as friends, libraries, bookstores, oh, and everything related to a life filled with literary pleasures, turn to The Reader's Quotation Book edited by Steven Gilbar. It's one for the permanent library collection; trust me on this.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
Take our survey. It won't hurt. We promise.
Between bites of lasagne and rounds of Othello, Mancala, River Crossing, and Clue, we've been cobbling together the list for the "In the permanent library collection" feature (see sidebar), which led to a delightful discussion about, what else, books.
Join the conversation, dear readers, thinkers, and autodidacts.
Tell us:
What are you reading right now?
What was the last wonderful book you read?
What is your favorite childhood book?
And to what book(s) have you returned? What books in your reading life of "so many books, so little time" have merited a second or third reading?
Paste these questions and your responses into a message to mentalmultivitamin@yahoo.com or click HERE. Include your first name or initials or some moniker by which we can refer to you when we compile the answers for a post next week.
We look forward to hearing from you. As always, thank you for visiting "Mental multivitamin." If you're considering a purchase at Amazon.com, consider supporting this site by entering Amazon.com through one of our links. Again, thank you.
Join the conversation, dear readers, thinkers, and autodidacts.
Tell us:
What are you reading right now?
What was the last wonderful book you read?
What is your favorite childhood book?
And to what book(s) have you returned? What books in your reading life of "so many books, so little time" have merited a second or third reading?
Paste these questions and your responses into a message to mentalmultivitamin@yahoo.com or click HERE. Include your first name or initials or some moniker by which we can refer to you when we compile the answers for a post next week.
We look forward to hearing from you. As always, thank you for visiting "Mental multivitamin." If you're considering a purchase at Amazon.com, consider supporting this site by entering Amazon.com through one of our links. Again, thank you.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
11.26.2003
The recommended daily allowance
"But if you don't have fun doing this thing, my friend, then it will be the dumbest damned thing you have ever done. I don't mean taking the weight off and keeping it off, I mean the crucial matter of gaining control of a part of your life. That's what you'd better glory in; otherwise you might as well ask your mother what to do next.
"Here's the sticker: you won't know if you enjoy it until you do it. To find out, you have to commit yourself to attaining the goal. You must take what Kierkegaard called a leap of faith. Of courseKierkegaard — like Pascal — worried about whether or not his choice of belief in Christianity was the right one."
The Philosopher's Diet: How to Lose Weight and Change the World is an introduction to philosophy masquerading as a diet book. Cool.
"Here's the sticker: you won't know if you enjoy it until you do it. To find out, you have to commit yourself to attaining the goal. You must take what Kierkegaard called a leap of faith. Of courseKierkegaard — like Pascal — worried about whether or not his choice of belief in Christianity was the right one."
The Philosopher's Diet: How to Lose Weight and Change the World is an introduction to philosophy masquerading as a diet book. Cool.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
'Twas the night before Thanksgiving...
And all along the highways inched minivans and SUVs, sedans and wagons, filled with family and friends headed to their once-upon-a-time homes.
"The improving economy and flat gas prices were expected to make this the busiest Thanksgiving weekend since the 2001 terrorist attacks. The AAA travel group expected 36 million people nationwide to travel 50 miles or more from their homes over the weekend," reported Newsday.com a few hours ago.
Not I, dear readers. I am already home.
Some thoughts on this Thanksgiving eve:
Challenge the conventional wisdom.
Reexamine traditions.
Serve roast beef or lasagne instead of turkey, especially if you never liked turkey much, anyway.
Refuse Christmas at the door. Don't tack up the wreath, set up the tree, or address any cards. Rather, relish these final days of November. Sandwiched between the month-long preparation for Halloween and the onset of the Christmas season, November rarely gets its due. Celebrate this holiday before rushing to the next.
Let the television be lonely tomorrow. The Macy's parade will serve up nothing we haven't seen before; the scores of all of the games will run in the Friday papers. Who needs the insistent noise of the commercials? (She doesn't really want diamonds, anyway. She wants what November wants: her due.) Instead, find joy in matching wits with loved ones, heads nearly touching over board games or puzzles. Delight in books, whether in comfortable silence or in colorful streams of words as you read aloud.
Happy Thanksgiving, "Mental multivitamin" readers.
"The improving economy and flat gas prices were expected to make this the busiest Thanksgiving weekend since the 2001 terrorist attacks. The AAA travel group expected 36 million people nationwide to travel 50 miles or more from their homes over the weekend," reported Newsday.com a few hours ago.
Not I, dear readers. I am already home.
Some thoughts on this Thanksgiving eve:
Challenge the conventional wisdom.
Reexamine traditions.
Serve roast beef or lasagne instead of turkey, especially if you never liked turkey much, anyway.
Refuse Christmas at the door. Don't tack up the wreath, set up the tree, or address any cards. Rather, relish these final days of November. Sandwiched between the month-long preparation for Halloween and the onset of the Christmas season, November rarely gets its due. Celebrate this holiday before rushing to the next.
Let the television be lonely tomorrow. The Macy's parade will serve up nothing we haven't seen before; the scores of all of the games will run in the Friday papers. Who needs the insistent noise of the commercials? (She doesn't really want diamonds, anyway. She wants what November wants: her due.) Instead, find joy in matching wits with loved ones, heads nearly touching over board games or puzzles. Delight in books, whether in comfortable silence or in colorful streams of words as you read aloud.
Happy Thanksgiving, "Mental multivitamin" readers.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
11.25.2003
The recommended daily allowance
Reading Diana Athill's Stet is like taking a seminar in the art and craft of editing and then being invited to tea with the professor afterward.
Consider this gem:
"[A]n editor must never expect thanks (sometimes they come, but they must always be seen as a bonus). We must always remember that we are only midwives — if we want praise for progeny we must give birth to our own."
Or this (she is writing about the shrinking population of critical readers):
"Of course a lot of them still read; but progressively a smaller lot, and fewer and fewer can be bothered to dig into a book that offers any resistance. Although these people may seem stupid to us, they are no stupider than we are: they just enjoy different things."
Whether you edit church bulletins or your city's daily, whether you answer phones at a small press in the hopes of moving up or you cull gems from the slush pile, don't miss Athill's attempt to prevent her experience from being erased with her passing.
Consider this gem:
"[A]n editor must never expect thanks (sometimes they come, but they must always be seen as a bonus). We must always remember that we are only midwives — if we want praise for progeny we must give birth to our own."
Or this (she is writing about the shrinking population of critical readers):
"Of course a lot of them still read; but progressively a smaller lot, and fewer and fewer can be bothered to dig into a book that offers any resistance. Although these people may seem stupid to us, they are no stupider than we are: they just enjoy different things."
Whether you edit church bulletins or your city's daily, whether you answer phones at a small press in the hopes of moving up or you cull gems from the slush pile, don't miss Athill's attempt to prevent her experience from being erased with her passing.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
(Re)thinking
John S. wrote a terrific response to the 11.22.2003 entry ("Revisionist History 101?"). With five years of service in the U.S. Navy, four of those aboard nuclear submarines, he is uniquely qualified to challenge my convictions. The greatest compliment I can pay him is to say that he has made me think. Thank you, John — for that, for your lucid commentary, and for your service to our country.
The following excerpts are reprinted with permission.
"One thing that I have always felt separated the submarine community from the other soldiers and sailors was that no matter what the world was doing, when we began a patrol, we always considered ourselves to be at war," explains John S. "You close the hatch and make the assumption that you will be called to action at any time. Not that other service members aren't ready to launch at any time, but submarines have a distinct disconnection from the rest of the world once that hatch shuts. No sunshine, no fresh air, no newspapers or pizza delivery. Just a job to do. That job was to go underwater for months at a time and defend the interests of our country, utilizing any and all of the means available."
He continues, "We also understood that when we shut the hatch, across the ocean standing toe to toe with us was our mirror image. Those that disagreed with our way of life and were as committed as we were, to defending their own way of life. The only thing that differed was our perspective on the correct way of life... I have to believe that a large segment of the men that rode the submarines for our enemies were very much like me. They were brave, patriotic men that wanted to serve their country and defend their way of life. They gave up significant freedoms to work in service to their countries for very little monetary return. Their real reimbursement came from their sense of honor and dedication to their families and those of the people of their homeland...We never doubted the bravery or conviction of our enemy.
"I have to say it one more time: We never doubted the bravery or conviction of our enemy."
John S. concludes, "I hope that you do not take away from this that I had any sympathy for the Nazis or any of our other enemies, for that matter. I am an American. Devoted to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What I do want to impress upon you is that the men from countries that we don't agree with, that go out and defend their ways of life, are very similar to us. They should not be confused with the few that dictate policy and manipulate the masses. They are simply men willing to sacrifice their lives so that their families can live in peace.
"No matter which side of the ocean they shut the hatch on."
The following excerpts are reprinted with permission.
"One thing that I have always felt separated the submarine community from the other soldiers and sailors was that no matter what the world was doing, when we began a patrol, we always considered ourselves to be at war," explains John S. "You close the hatch and make the assumption that you will be called to action at any time. Not that other service members aren't ready to launch at any time, but submarines have a distinct disconnection from the rest of the world once that hatch shuts. No sunshine, no fresh air, no newspapers or pizza delivery. Just a job to do. That job was to go underwater for months at a time and defend the interests of our country, utilizing any and all of the means available."
He continues, "We also understood that when we shut the hatch, across the ocean standing toe to toe with us was our mirror image. Those that disagreed with our way of life and were as committed as we were, to defending their own way of life. The only thing that differed was our perspective on the correct way of life... I have to believe that a large segment of the men that rode the submarines for our enemies were very much like me. They were brave, patriotic men that wanted to serve their country and defend their way of life. They gave up significant freedoms to work in service to their countries for very little monetary return. Their real reimbursement came from their sense of honor and dedication to their families and those of the people of their homeland...We never doubted the bravery or conviction of our enemy.
"I have to say it one more time: We never doubted the bravery or conviction of our enemy."
John S. concludes, "I hope that you do not take away from this that I had any sympathy for the Nazis or any of our other enemies, for that matter. I am an American. Devoted to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What I do want to impress upon you is that the men from countries that we don't agree with, that go out and defend their ways of life, are very similar to us. They should not be confused with the few that dictate policy and manipulate the masses. They are simply men willing to sacrifice their lives so that their families can live in peace.
"No matter which side of the ocean they shut the hatch on."
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
11.24.2003
The recommended daily allowance
"Shopping is sometimes exciting, sometimes neurotic, sometimes wasteful. But it's not frivolous. We use things and give them meanings. What we're looking for — at Target, at Tiffany's, at the flea market, or on the Web — are tools and attributes, possibilities and disguises. We're looking for better times, and for rewards for our virtues that no one else will give us. We're looking for a sense of excitement, and conspire with retailers to create a benign sense of uncertainty. We're expressing our love. We're reveling in our competence. We're seeking out surprises and good prices. We hunt. We gather. We rummage. We haggle. We splurge.
"We're human. And so we shop."
I've been advised that Christmas is only a month of shopping days away. Thomas Hine's I Want That! How We All Became Shoppers: A Cultural History is just the book for this "Debit or charge?" season. Hines explores the history and psychology of shopping, from trading to marketplaces to fairs to shopping districts to department stores to malls to the internet (Amazon.com!). Hines notes, "This book is about the passions that make people shoppers, and how these impulses have changed the world, from prehistoric times to the age of the Internet."
"We're human. And so we shop."
I've been advised that Christmas is only a month of shopping days away. Thomas Hine's I Want That! How We All Became Shoppers: A Cultural History is just the book for this "Debit or charge?" season. Hines explores the history and psychology of shopping, from trading to marketplaces to fairs to shopping districts to department stores to malls to the internet (Amazon.com!). Hines notes, "This book is about the passions that make people shoppers, and how these impulses have changed the world, from prehistoric times to the age of the Internet."
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
"Adults are buying these books too, in the same spirit as they have been watching Star Wars for 25 years."
"Until recently adults were assumed and even expected by publishers and bookshops to stick to their side of the fence. But in the past five years, as the full impact of the Rowling revolution has made itself felt, the literary landscape has changed. Adults, all of a sudden, are devouring children's books. Some of the best writers are confining themselves to the children's and young adults' sector. Meanwhile, books written for young adults have never been more grown-up. The result is that the line between children's fiction and adult fiction has blurred. In the case of Pullman's trio of Miltonic fables, it has blurred almost to invisibility."
This story from the Telegraph describes the "crossover" appeal of books like Louis Sachar's Holes, David Almond's Skellig, and the magnificent His Dark Materials trilogy (Philip Pullman). The question, posits the reporter, is whether adults' fascination with lit formerly marketed only to children and young adults is further evidence of a general societal "dumbing down" or a quest for books that rely on powerful and direct narrative rather than "trendy, pretentious, hifalutin stuff which some adults will be enraptured by."
Good question.
This story from the Telegraph describes the "crossover" appeal of books like Louis Sachar's Holes, David Almond's Skellig, and the magnificent His Dark Materials trilogy (Philip Pullman). The question, posits the reporter, is whether adults' fascination with lit formerly marketed only to children and young adults is further evidence of a general societal "dumbing down" or a quest for books that rely on powerful and direct narrative rather than "trendy, pretentious, hifalutin stuff which some adults will be enraptured by."
Good question.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
11.23.2003
The recommended daily allowance
"One of my strongest-held beliefs is that no one should ever finish a book that [he] is not enjoying, no matter how popular or well reviewed. Believe me, nobody is going to get any points in heaven by slogging [his] way through a book [he isn't] enjoying but think[s] [he] ought to read. I live by what I call the "rule of fifty," which acknowledges that time is short, and the world of books is immense. If you're fifty years old or younger, give a book about fifty pages before you decide to commit yourself to reading it, or give up. If you're over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100 — the result is the number of pages you should read before deciding."
Nancy Pearl may be the world's most famous librarian. She received a lot of ink in this summer and early fall when her likeness was used to develop a librarian action figure. But her idea for the "If All of Seattle Read the Same Book" program, which has been adopted in cities around the world (e.g., One Book, One Chicago), is her greatest achievement.
The quoted passage appears in the introduction to Book Lust, Pearl's book recommendations "for every mood, moment, and reason." Pearl is not a particularly good writer, but she is engaging (primarily because of her profound love of books and reading), and her recommendations are generally top-drawer.
Nancy Pearl may be the world's most famous librarian. She received a lot of ink in this summer and early fall when her likeness was used to develop a librarian action figure. But her idea for the "If All of Seattle Read the Same Book" program, which has been adopted in cities around the world (e.g., One Book, One Chicago), is her greatest achievement.
The quoted passage appears in the introduction to Book Lust, Pearl's book recommendations "for every mood, moment, and reason." Pearl is not a particularly good writer, but she is engaging (primarily because of her profound love of books and reading), and her recommendations are generally top-drawer.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
Connecting the dots
I neglected to make the vital connection between yesterday's entry about the U-505 and previous entries about reluctant hero Zan Hornbuckle and the Wall Street Journal's assertion that "Americans' tendency to venerate survivors more tha[n] aggressors since the Vietnam War helps explain why Jessica Lynch is a household name while Zan Hornbuckle, who rose to great heights on the battlefield in Iraq, returned home to anonymity."
The connection? I think it's something about the veneration of survivors and the hand-wringing over the enemy's loss in battle.
Good is supposed to triumph over evil, folks.
The connection? I think it's something about the veneration of survivors and the hand-wringing over the enemy's loss in battle.
Good is supposed to triumph over evil, folks.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
11.22.2003
The recommended daily allowance
Art Fraud Detective was, apparently, designed for children. What is that saying about youth being wasted on the young? Well, I wouldn't say this book is wasted on a child — quite the contrary, in fact. But I would say that like River Crossing and Manacala, it is a pursuit that brings pleasure to children of all ages from nine to ninety-nine. Published in association with the National Gallery in London, Art Fraud Detective is one part art history and one part Clue. Readers must identify the differences between faked masterpieces and the real deal and then identify the forger.
What a delightful way to pass an evening.
What a delightful way to pass an evening.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
Revisionist history 101?
In about a month, the U-505 submarine will go off exhibit until 2005 so the Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) can move the vessel to an indoor facility and restore it.
For more than forty-five years, the U-505 has played a dual role: educational display to MSI visitors and memorial to the fifty-five thousand Americans who died serving on the high seas during World War I and World War II. The Chicago Tribune has called the submarine "one of the most prized museum holdings in the nation": It is the only maritime vessel of its type on display in the United States.
Okay. Stay with me for just a little longer.
The U-505 was launched in Hamburg, Germany, in 1941. In 1942, eight allied ships (including three American and two British) were sunk by the submarine. According to the MSI narrative, the U-505 was attacked by the USS Guadalcanal task group 22.3 under the command of Captain Daniel V. Gallery on June 4, 1944. The submarine was boarded and captured by sailors from the destroyer escort USS Pillsbury — the first capture of an enemy ship of war on the high seas by U.S. Navy sailors since 1815, when the USS Peacock seized HMS Nautilus as part of the War of 1812.
All right. So maybe I'm "old-school," but to me, this is a story of victory — for the Allies, of course. In fact, that's just how the Navy presented it in a press release nearly one year after the capture:
So, given that this is such a terrific piece of U.S. Naval history, why, oh, why did our tour leader today repeatedly mention the bravery of the U-505 crew and their unfortunate loss of life? Huh? It was a Nazi submarine. "Brave" Nazis? "Unfortunate" loss?
WHAT?!?
The story of the capture of the U-505 is certainly one about bravery and brains — of the "might for right" variety, though, folks, not the variety that we were spoon-fed at MSI this morning. No, sir.
Brains? Well, how about this: The Guadalcanal task group knew U-boats were operating off the African coast near Cape Verde because American and British cryptanalysts had decrypted the German naval code.
Bravery? Listen to this:
What a terrific story from history: Drama! Excitement! The Allies victorious!
And there's more: The Enigma encryption machine on board the captured vessel and the related documentation greatly aided Allied decryption efforts for the rest of the war.
Go, Allies!
But today my family and I were reminded about "the brave crew of the U-505" and their loss of life.
Um, one fatality in that action.
Look, we've all read our high school history books (not a good time to mention The Language Police, I know): World War II (1939 - 1945) was the the most widespread, most destructive war in history. The Axis Powers were Germany, Italy, and Japan; the Allied Powers were the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, France, and China. Hey, let's make it Animal Farm-simple: Allies gooood! Axis baaaaad!
Brave crew, indeed.
Folks, when was history revised and rewritten? By whom? Why? And what are we going to do about it?
For more than forty-five years, the U-505 has played a dual role: educational display to MSI visitors and memorial to the fifty-five thousand Americans who died serving on the high seas during World War I and World War II. The Chicago Tribune has called the submarine "one of the most prized museum holdings in the nation": It is the only maritime vessel of its type on display in the United States.
Okay. Stay with me for just a little longer.
The U-505 was launched in Hamburg, Germany, in 1941. In 1942, eight allied ships (including three American and two British) were sunk by the submarine. According to the MSI narrative, the U-505 was attacked by the USS Guadalcanal task group 22.3 under the command of Captain Daniel V. Gallery on June 4, 1944. The submarine was boarded and captured by sailors from the destroyer escort USS Pillsbury — the first capture of an enemy ship of war on the high seas by U.S. Navy sailors since 1815, when the USS Peacock seized HMS Nautilus as part of the War of 1812.
All right. So maybe I'm "old-school," but to me, this is a story of victory — for the Allies, of course. In fact, that's just how the Navy presented it in a press release nearly one year after the capture:
One of the best kept secrets of the war was revealed today by announcement that on June 4, 1944, a U.S. Navy escort carrier task group reverted to the tactics of the early Continental Navy and hunted down, attacked, boarded, and captured the Nazi submarine U-505, 150 miles west of Cape Blanco in French West Africa. The Task Group then towed their prize 2,500 miles to Naval Operating Base, Bermuda. This was the first time the U.S. Navy had boarded and captured a foreign enemy man-of-war in battle on the high seas since 1815.Whoo-hoo! You get 'em, boys!
So, given that this is such a terrific piece of U.S. Naval history, why, oh, why did our tour leader today repeatedly mention the bravery of the U-505 crew and their unfortunate loss of life? Huh? It was a Nazi submarine. "Brave" Nazis? "Unfortunate" loss?
WHAT?!?
The story of the capture of the U-505 is certainly one about bravery and brains — of the "might for right" variety, though, folks, not the variety that we were spoon-fed at MSI this morning. No, sir.
Brains? Well, how about this: The Guadalcanal task group knew U-boats were operating off the African coast near Cape Verde because American and British cryptanalysts had decrypted the German naval code.
Bravery? Listen to this:
While Chatelain and Jenks picked up survivors, Pillsbury sent its motor whaleboat to the circling submarine where Lieutenant (junior grade) Albert L. David, USN, led the eight-man party on board. Despite the probability of U-505 sinking or blowing up at any minute and not knowing what form of resistance they might meet below, David and his men clambered up the conning tower and then down the hatches into the boat itself. After a quick examination proved the U-boat was completely deserted (except for one dead man on deck — the only fatality of the action), the boarders set about bundling up charts, code books, and papers, disconnecting demolition charges, closing valves, and plugging leaks.(For more, click here.)
What a terrific story from history: Drama! Excitement! The Allies victorious!
And there's more: The Enigma encryption machine on board the captured vessel and the related documentation greatly aided Allied decryption efforts for the rest of the war.
Go, Allies!
But today my family and I were reminded about "the brave crew of the U-505" and their loss of life.
Um, one fatality in that action.
Look, we've all read our high school history books (not a good time to mention The Language Police, I know): World War II (1939 - 1945) was the the most widespread, most destructive war in history. The Axis Powers were Germany, Italy, and Japan; the Allied Powers were the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, France, and China. Hey, let's make it Animal Farm-simple: Allies gooood! Axis baaaaad!
Brave crew, indeed.
Folks, when was history revised and rewritten? By whom? Why? And what are we going to do about it?
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
11.21.2003
The recommended daily allowance
"Quot capita, tot sententia."
(There are as many opinions as there are people.)
"Variat omnia tempus."
(Time changes everything.)
"Pauca sed bona."
(Few things but good ones.)
Yes, I'm recommending "a collection of 1,188 quotations in Latin," Latin Proverbs: Wisdom from Ancient to Modern Times. Yeah, it's good for you, but it actually tastes good, too.
And just three gentle reminders, dear readers, thinkers, and autodidacts:
(1) If you're enjoying the site and considering a purchase that can be made at Amazon.com, do it through this site, either by clicking on one of the RDA recommendations or on Amazon.com.
(2) Consider sharing the link to "Mental multivitamin" with other readers, thinkers, and autodidacts.
(3) And don't forget to write. The link to "Mental multivitamin" feedback is in the sidebar. The address is mentalmultivitamin@yahoo.com. We've been enjoying the comments, the praise, and the book recommendations.
Thank you!
(There are as many opinions as there are people.)
"Variat omnia tempus."
(Time changes everything.)
"Pauca sed bona."
(Few things but good ones.)
Yes, I'm recommending "a collection of 1,188 quotations in Latin," Latin Proverbs: Wisdom from Ancient to Modern Times. Yeah, it's good for you, but it actually tastes good, too.
And just three gentle reminders, dear readers, thinkers, and autodidacts:
(1) If you're enjoying the site and considering a purchase that can be made at Amazon.com, do it through this site, either by clicking on one of the RDA recommendations or on Amazon.com.
(2) Consider sharing the link to "Mental multivitamin" with other readers, thinkers, and autodidacts.
(3) And don't forget to write. The link to "Mental multivitamin" feedback is in the sidebar. The address is mentalmultivitamin@yahoo.com. We've been enjoying the comments, the praise, and the book recommendations.
Thank you!
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
Research shows that more zzzzz = more productivity
"When fatigue strikes during the workday, employees of the Gould Evans Goodman Associates design firm in Kansas City, Mo., have an alternative to coffee and other caffeinated beverages. In the building's atrium are 'spent tents' — single-person tents the firm has set up specifically for napping. Inside each are a pillow, blanket, clock and a CD player that offers soothing, snooze-inducing music."
Now if only we could persuade our employers (and/or children and spouses) of the value of a little power-napping, eh?
The Naples Daily News article also includes this "Mental multivitamin" tie-in:
"Why a nap makes people feel better remains a medical mystery, he said. Doctors know little about why almost all living creatures need sleep, and even less about what takes place during a nap to help people feel rejuvenated.
"Because the brain is the only organ that benefits from a nap (the others remain hard at work doing things such as pumping blood and digesting food), many experts believe that sleep allows the brain to process all the information it's bombarded with each day."
So, we don't need a nap; we a need a brain respite. I think we can sell brain respite to the corporate bigwigs, what say you? Now, the children and spouse? I believe they will require bribes before they buy into it. A nap by any other name, after all, is still a nap.
Zzzzzz.
Now if only we could persuade our employers (and/or children and spouses) of the value of a little power-napping, eh?
The Naples Daily News article also includes this "Mental multivitamin" tie-in:
"Why a nap makes people feel better remains a medical mystery, he said. Doctors know little about why almost all living creatures need sleep, and even less about what takes place during a nap to help people feel rejuvenated.
"Because the brain is the only organ that benefits from a nap (the others remain hard at work doing things such as pumping blood and digesting food), many experts believe that sleep allows the brain to process all the information it's bombarded with each day."
So, we don't need a nap; we a need a brain respite. I think we can sell brain respite to the corporate bigwigs, what say you? Now, the children and spouse? I believe they will require bribes before they buy into it. A nap by any other name, after all, is still a nap.
Zzzzzz.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
11.20.2003
The recommended daily allowance
"More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to. It would be charitable to say that the results are sometimes mixed.
"Consider this hearty announcement in a Yugoslavian hotel: 'The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid. Turn to her straightaway.' Or this warning to motorist in Tokyo: 'When a passenger of the foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet at him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage, then tootle him with vigor.'"
Thus, Bill Bryson introduces us to vast subject of the history, development, and oddities of the English language — and he turns a laborious lesson into one delightful discovery after another. Don't miss The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way.
"Consider this hearty announcement in a Yugoslavian hotel: 'The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid. Turn to her straightaway.' Or this warning to motorist in Tokyo: 'When a passenger of the foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet at him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage, then tootle him with vigor.'"
Thus, Bill Bryson introduces us to vast subject of the history, development, and oddities of the English language — and he turns a laborious lesson into one delightful discovery after another. Don't miss The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
A fish story (or two)
"On Tuesday, aquarium officials at the Steinhart Aquarium [in San Diego] honored an Australian lungfish, Methuselah, who arrived at the aquarium in 1938 as a fully grown adult. That makes it at least 65 years old," reports CNN.
Wow. I am having trouble wrapping my mind around the idea of a fish that lives long enough to celebrate a one-month anniversary, let alone a sixty-fifth birthday. (Yes, we've had some trouble with fish in the past. Let's leave it at that.)
But wait. It turns out that the John G. Shedd Aquarium in Chicago is home to an even older fish — a lungfish named Granddad; he arrived at the Shedd as an adult in 1933, which makes him at least seventy years old.
Wow, again.
The Shedd actually made bigger headlines just last month when they successfully nursed Bubba, a Queensland grouper, through chemotherapy. The complete story ran in the Chicago Tribune, but was picked up in several other papers.
Fascinating fact: "Bubba started life as a girl, as do most groupers. While growing up at the aquarium, he turned into a male, a common phenomenon among many fish species known as 'protogynous hermaphroditic.' It is nature's way of waiting to see how many males are needed for successful breeding in a given population, then meeting that need."
It is just a mood, I am sure, but this bit of information by turns fascinated me (as most of science does) and dissolved me into helpless giggles. "How many males are needed for successful breeding in a given population," indeed.
Heh, heh, heh.
Wow. I am having trouble wrapping my mind around the idea of a fish that lives long enough to celebrate a one-month anniversary, let alone a sixty-fifth birthday. (Yes, we've had some trouble with fish in the past. Let's leave it at that.)
But wait. It turns out that the John G. Shedd Aquarium in Chicago is home to an even older fish — a lungfish named Granddad; he arrived at the Shedd as an adult in 1933, which makes him at least seventy years old.
Wow, again.
The Shedd actually made bigger headlines just last month when they successfully nursed Bubba, a Queensland grouper, through chemotherapy. The complete story ran in the Chicago Tribune, but was picked up in several other papers.
Fascinating fact: "Bubba started life as a girl, as do most groupers. While growing up at the aquarium, he turned into a male, a common phenomenon among many fish species known as 'protogynous hermaphroditic.' It is nature's way of waiting to see how many males are needed for successful breeding in a given population, then meeting that need."
It is just a mood, I am sure, but this bit of information by turns fascinated me (as most of science does) and dissolved me into helpless giggles. "How many males are needed for successful breeding in a given population," indeed.
Heh, heh, heh.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
11.19.2003
The recommended daily allowance
"I had already learned, for instance, that although I was one of the most overeducated people I knew, I couldn't possibly write the variety of books I manage to do out of the knowledge I had gained in school alone. I had to keep a program of self-education in process."
Amen.
Janet Jeppson Asimov edited the third volume of Isaac Asimov's autobiography It's Been a Good Life, which was published posthumously. Short, accessible chapters like "Becoming a Writer," "Writing and Thinking about Writing," and "Sexism and Love" make this book perfect for a few weeks of nightstand duty; one can dip and sample with ease and pleasure.
Amen.
Janet Jeppson Asimov edited the third volume of Isaac Asimov's autobiography It's Been a Good Life, which was published posthumously. Short, accessible chapters like "Becoming a Writer," "Writing and Thinking about Writing," and "Sexism and Love" make this book perfect for a few weeks of nightstand duty; one can dip and sample with ease and pleasure.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
I bet this one made "geek squad" members spit their coffee all over their flat-screen monitors.
"[T]he innovations of the last couple of decades have succeeded too well—at least from the point of view of those peddling software. The very ubiquity of computer power makes it unremarkable, he says, and no longer offers a strategic advantage to companies employing it. The big innovations are over, the low-hanging fruit has been picked and 'the IT buildout is much closer to its end than its beginning,' he writes. More and more, technology that once seemed unique has now been commoditized, and can be bargained for and bought in bulk like office furniture and paper clips. And in a suggestion that chills the soul of an industry based on first-movers and constant upgrades, he advises companies to spend less. 'Follow, don’t lead,' he cautions."
Uh, oh.
Read the complete article here.
In other news...
Because the topic of high school and college and work is humming (still) along my mind's highways and byways, it was with great interest that I read "Lawmakers may drop H.S. senior year."
I'm not certain that the idea of eliminating high school and adding preschool is necessarily a good one, but I'll tell you what: The article gives me hope. Why? Because such an idea may represent the beginning (the earliest, humblest beginning, to be sure) of fresh thinking about our nation's public school model.
This troubled me, though. "Hoang Nguyen, a 17-year-old senior at suburban Arvada High School, said it would be a mistake to eliminate 12th grade. He said colleges might hold it against students who fail to complete a traditional high school curriculum.
"'The senior year is the next step to going to college. It's a year when you find out who you are,' he said."
Oh, honey. If only that were true.
But it's not.
Uh, oh.
Read the complete article here.
In other news...
Because the topic of high school and college and work is humming (still) along my mind's highways and byways, it was with great interest that I read "Lawmakers may drop H.S. senior year."
I'm not certain that the idea of eliminating high school and adding preschool is necessarily a good one, but I'll tell you what: The article gives me hope. Why? Because such an idea may represent the beginning (the earliest, humblest beginning, to be sure) of fresh thinking about our nation's public school model.
This troubled me, though. "Hoang Nguyen, a 17-year-old senior at suburban Arvada High School, said it would be a mistake to eliminate 12th grade. He said colleges might hold it against students who fail to complete a traditional high school curriculum.
"'The senior year is the next step to going to college. It's a year when you find out who you are,' he said."
Oh, honey. If only that were true.
But it's not.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
11.18.2003
The recommended daily allowance
"Marge Gunderson is one of a handful of characters whose names remain in our memories, like Travis Bickle, Tony Manero, HAL 9000, Fred C. Dobbs. They are completely, defiantly themselves in movies that depend on precisely who they are. Marge is the chief in Brainerd, Minn., still has bouts of morning sickness, eats all the junk food she can get her hands on, speaks in a 'you betcha' Minnesota accent where 'yeah,' pronounced ya, is volleyed like a refrain. She's a natural police officer, very smart; at the crime scene she quickly and correctly reconstructs what happened, and determines there were two killers, one big, one small. Her male partner, not so swift, fails to realize that 'DLR' indicates a dealer plate; that inspires one of the movie's famous lines: 'I'm not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work there, Lou.'"
Fargo was so good it merited two Ebert reviews. Read the rest of the one quoted above here. The other can be found here.
Ebert writes, "[Fargo] is 'based on a true story' that took place in Minnesota in 1987. It has been filmed on location, there and in North Dakota, by the Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, who grew up in St. Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis, and went on to make good movies like 'Blood Simple,' 'Miller's Crossing' and 'Barton Fink,' but never before a film as wonderful as this one, shot in their own backyard."
Here's some more Marge wisdom:
"Say, Lou, didya hear the one about the guy who couldn't afford personalized plate so he went and changed his name to J3L2404?"
"And I guess that was your accomplice in the woodchipper."
"There's more to life than a little money, ya know. Don'tcha know that? And here ya are. And it's a beautiful day. Well. I just don't understand it."
Fargo is a movie that merits a third and fourth viewing, for Frances McDormand's Marge Gunderson, of course, as well as for William H. Macy's Jerry Lundegaard.
Jerry Lundegaard: Well, heck, if you wanna play games here! I'm workin' with ya on this thing, but I... Okay, I'll do a da**ed lot count!
Marge Gunderson: Sir? Right now?
Jerry Lundegaard: Sure right now! You're darned tootin'!
If you missed the film when it was released in 1996 and never made your way to it in the intervening seven years, buy or rent Fargo this week. Highly recommended.
Fargo was so good it merited two Ebert reviews. Read the rest of the one quoted above here. The other can be found here.
Ebert writes, "[Fargo] is 'based on a true story' that took place in Minnesota in 1987. It has been filmed on location, there and in North Dakota, by the Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, who grew up in St. Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis, and went on to make good movies like 'Blood Simple,' 'Miller's Crossing' and 'Barton Fink,' but never before a film as wonderful as this one, shot in their own backyard."
Here's some more Marge wisdom:
"Say, Lou, didya hear the one about the guy who couldn't afford personalized plate so he went and changed his name to J3L2404?"
"And I guess that was your accomplice in the woodchipper."
"There's more to life than a little money, ya know. Don'tcha know that? And here ya are. And it's a beautiful day. Well. I just don't understand it."
Fargo is a movie that merits a third and fourth viewing, for Frances McDormand's Marge Gunderson, of course, as well as for William H. Macy's Jerry Lundegaard.
Jerry Lundegaard: Well, heck, if you wanna play games here! I'm workin' with ya on this thing, but I... Okay, I'll do a da**ed lot count!
Marge Gunderson: Sir? Right now?
Jerry Lundegaard: Sure right now! You're darned tootin'!
If you missed the film when it was released in 1996 and never made your way to it in the intervening seven years, buy or rent Fargo this week. Highly recommended.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
Clap on, clap off
If it's too warm to wear a coat but too cold to go without one, if it's dark when you grab your first cup of Trader Joe's French roast and dark again before your fourth, if you're weary of Christmas already and you haven't even preheated your oven for turkey, why, it must be mid-November in the midwest.
(*sigh*)
When it gets this way, I tend to do somewhat foolish things in the name of "sunny spontaneity." Case in point: Last week, I bought a Chia Pet.
Now, before you click screaming from "Mental multivitamin," I want to tell you that I've parlayed even this little piece of commercial banality into a mental exercise: I have developed a graph to track the number of minutes it takes the sprouts to reorient themselves to the light when I spin the clay creature from side to side. Their fastest time is twenty-one minutes.
Ah, heliotropism.
According to an awkwardly written piece at about.com, Chia Pets were designed by Joseph Enterprises, Inc., of San Francisco, the same folks responsible for "The Clapper." The first Chia Pet, a ram, was marketed in 1982. This means, then, that I resisted the lure of Ch-ch-chia! for more than twenty years. It's going to be bad winter if this lapse in judgment is any indication.
(*sigh*)
When it gets this way, I tend to do somewhat foolish things in the name of "sunny spontaneity." Case in point: Last week, I bought a Chia Pet.
Now, before you click screaming from "Mental multivitamin," I want to tell you that I've parlayed even this little piece of commercial banality into a mental exercise: I have developed a graph to track the number of minutes it takes the sprouts to reorient themselves to the light when I spin the clay creature from side to side. Their fastest time is twenty-one minutes.
Ah, heliotropism.
According to an awkwardly written piece at about.com, Chia Pets were designed by Joseph Enterprises, Inc., of San Francisco, the same folks responsible for "The Clapper." The first Chia Pet, a ram, was marketed in 1982. This means, then, that I resisted the lure of Ch-ch-chia! for more than twenty years. It's going to be bad winter if this lapse in judgment is any indication.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
11.17.2003
The recommended daily allowance
"Language is the soul's ozone layer, and we thin it at our peril."
From Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies. Of course, Birkerts would probably loathe that his book — an impassioned argument against the electronic delivery (e.g., CD players, computer screens, etc.) of literature — was being touted on a blog. (A little shudder, then, on his behalf.)
From Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies. Of course, Birkerts would probably loathe that his book — an impassioned argument against the electronic delivery (e.g., CD players, computer screens, etc.) of literature — was being touted on a blog. (A little shudder, then, on his behalf.)
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
For those who enjoyed yesterday's entry...
here are links that may interest you.
The first I found by way of Utne Reader. In an article entitled "School's Out: The new economic reality of 'free agents' is reshaping American education" (January/February 2002), Craig Cox amply quoted Daniel Pink, who penned a fairly exhaustive piece on the subject of "the new age of individualized education" in the October 2001 issue of Reason. Here's a bit from the opening of Pink's piece:
"Whenever students around the world take those tests that measure which country's children know the most, American kids invariably score near the bottom. No matter the subject, when the international rankings come out, European and Asian nations finish first while the U.S. pulls up the rear. This, we all know, isn't good. Yet by almost every measure, the American economy outperforms those very same nations of Asia and Europe. We create greater wealth, deliver more and better goods and services, and positively kick butt on innovation. This, we all know, is good.
"Now the riddle: If we're so dumb, how come we're so rich? How can we fare so poorly on international measures of education yet perform so well in an economy that depends on brainpower? The answer is complex, but within it are clues about the future of education — and how 'free agency' may rock the school house as profoundly as it has upended the business organization.
"We are living in the founding of what I call 'free agent nation.'"
You'll find the complete text of Pink's article here. Look for his remarks about homeschooling, apprenticeships, and teenage entrepreneurship.
The Utne Reader article is available for a fee. It simply serves as an introduction to (or summary of) Pink's piece, though, so save your money. (Buy books via this site instead. (*wink*))
Another link of interest is the full text of Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society. This is not a simple read, but it's worth the challenge. From Chapter Six, "Learning Webs":
"Such criticism leads many people to ask whether it is possible to conceive of a different style of learning. The same people, paradoxically, when pressed to specify how they acquired what they know and value, will readily admit that they learned it more often outside than inside school. Their knowledge of facts, their understanding of life and work came to them from friendship or love, while viewing TV, or while reading, from examples of peers or the challenge of a street encounter. Or they may have learned what they know through the apprenticeship ritual for admission to a street gang or the initiation to a hospital, newspaper city room, plumber's shop, or insurance office. The alternative to dependence on schools is not the use of public resources for some new device which 'makes' people learn; rather it is the creation of a new style of educational relationship between man and his environment. To foster this style, attitudes toward growing up, the tools available for learning, and the quality and structure of daily life will have to change concurrently.
"Attitudes are already changing. The proud dependence on school is gone. Consumer resistance increases in the knowledge industry. Many teachers and pupils, taxpayers and employers, economists and policemen would prefer not to depend any longer on schools. What prevents their frustration from shaping new institutions is a lack not only of imagination but frequently also of appropriate language and of enlightened self-interest. They cannot visualize either a deschooled society or educational institutions in a society which has disestablished school."
Frankly, I have trouble envisioning a world without schools. Maybe "lack of imagination" has more to do with it than Illich allows. (*wan smile*)
Finally, tonight: If you're enjoying the "Mental multivitamin," I urge you to share the link with other readers, thinkers, and autodidacts. And if you like a recommendation and are considering a purchase, click through to Amazon.com.
The first I found by way of Utne Reader. In an article entitled "School's Out: The new economic reality of 'free agents' is reshaping American education" (January/February 2002), Craig Cox amply quoted Daniel Pink, who penned a fairly exhaustive piece on the subject of "the new age of individualized education" in the October 2001 issue of Reason. Here's a bit from the opening of Pink's piece:
"Whenever students around the world take those tests that measure which country's children know the most, American kids invariably score near the bottom. No matter the subject, when the international rankings come out, European and Asian nations finish first while the U.S. pulls up the rear. This, we all know, isn't good. Yet by almost every measure, the American economy outperforms those very same nations of Asia and Europe. We create greater wealth, deliver more and better goods and services, and positively kick butt on innovation. This, we all know, is good.
"Now the riddle: If we're so dumb, how come we're so rich? How can we fare so poorly on international measures of education yet perform so well in an economy that depends on brainpower? The answer is complex, but within it are clues about the future of education — and how 'free agency' may rock the school house as profoundly as it has upended the business organization.
"We are living in the founding of what I call 'free agent nation.'"
You'll find the complete text of Pink's article here. Look for his remarks about homeschooling, apprenticeships, and teenage entrepreneurship.
The Utne Reader article is available for a fee. It simply serves as an introduction to (or summary of) Pink's piece, though, so save your money. (Buy books via this site instead. (*wink*))
Another link of interest is the full text of Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society. This is not a simple read, but it's worth the challenge. From Chapter Six, "Learning Webs":
"Such criticism leads many people to ask whether it is possible to conceive of a different style of learning. The same people, paradoxically, when pressed to specify how they acquired what they know and value, will readily admit that they learned it more often outside than inside school. Their knowledge of facts, their understanding of life and work came to them from friendship or love, while viewing TV, or while reading, from examples of peers or the challenge of a street encounter. Or they may have learned what they know through the apprenticeship ritual for admission to a street gang or the initiation to a hospital, newspaper city room, plumber's shop, or insurance office. The alternative to dependence on schools is not the use of public resources for some new device which 'makes' people learn; rather it is the creation of a new style of educational relationship between man and his environment. To foster this style, attitudes toward growing up, the tools available for learning, and the quality and structure of daily life will have to change concurrently.
"Attitudes are already changing. The proud dependence on school is gone. Consumer resistance increases in the knowledge industry. Many teachers and pupils, taxpayers and employers, economists and policemen would prefer not to depend any longer on schools. What prevents their frustration from shaping new institutions is a lack not only of imagination but frequently also of appropriate language and of enlightened self-interest. They cannot visualize either a deschooled society or educational institutions in a society which has disestablished school."
Frankly, I have trouble envisioning a world without schools. Maybe "lack of imagination" has more to do with it than Illich allows. (*wan smile*)
Finally, tonight: If you're enjoying the "Mental multivitamin," I urge you to share the link with other readers, thinkers, and autodidacts. And if you like a recommendation and are considering a purchase, click through to Amazon.com.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
11.16.2003
The recommended daily allowance
"The kind of elitists I admire are those who ruthlessly seek out and encourage intelligence and who believe that competition — and, inevitably, some measure of failure — will do more for character than coddling ever can. My kind of elitist does not grade on a curve and is willing to flunk the whole class. My kind of elitist detests the policy of social promotion that has rendered a high school diploma meaningless and a college degree nearly so... My kind of elitist hates tenure, seniority, and the whole union ethos that contends that workers are interchangeable and their performances essentially equivalent."
Heh, heh, heh. One has to wonder what folks like Henty (the above is from his book In Defense of Elitism) and Paul Fussell would make of our-happy-family blogs. I think it's Fussell who deplores the snapshot-as-art approach to mantle decoration. (See Class: A Guide through the American Status System.) The mantle in my livingroom, then, with its ample sprinkling of family photos, would greatly offend him. (*grin*)
Heh, heh, heh. One has to wonder what folks like Henty (the above is from his book In Defense of Elitism) and Paul Fussell would make of our-happy-family blogs. I think it's Fussell who deplores the snapshot-as-art approach to mantle decoration. (See Class: A Guide through the American Status System.) The mantle in my livingroom, then, with its ample sprinkling of family photos, would greatly offend him. (*grin*)
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
About college
In my 11.4.2003 entry, I noted, "I've simply lost the unwavering commitment to the idea that college is the natural, right, or even desirable next stop for today's high school graduate — no matter what his SAT scores, transcript, and favorite teacher may say. This, of course, is the stuff of another day's entry." This idea interested several readers, who asked that I develop the thought a little further.
As promised, then.
William A. Henry III wrote:
Doubt me? Name twelve parents who number themselves among our nation’s middle class (I know, I know — who doesn’t?) who don’t expect their children to go to college after high school. It would be easier to find fifty, nay, one hundred who will be humiliated if their little Brandon or Dylan or Taylor doesn’t get into if not a good school at least a decent school. And they’re willing to pay; in fact, via college funds and other savings plans, they have been paying for just this moment in their little darlin’s life since, oh, before they were born.
Egads.
Henry notes:
No kidding.
Are you still wondering why I’ve lost my unwavering commitment to the idea that college is the next best step in a high school senior’s life?
It’s simple. It’s got to mean something, folks. The average (note the judicious and right use of the word "average") person of eighteen has not had enough life experiences to know how to chart his life's course. Leaping from one institutional setting to another, blindly and as expected, sets one up on a path of mediocrity, not discovery. It’s when we challenge the conventional wisdom (in this case, when we accurately assess the need for higher education) that we often discover the pools of talent, interest, and passion within us.
I don’t need thirty-seven email messages of the “well-I-went-to-college-right-after-high-school-and-I-turned-out-just-fine-thank-you” variety. I did, too, and am glad of it. But even now, two degrees later, I am unconvinced that the path I took was the only or even the best. That I am solely responsible for my higher education, though, plays no small role in my appreciation of it. Of course, I am one of those parents who have been telling my children (since before they were born (*wink*)) that they will pay their way through college, if they choose that path. I will invest all of my time, talent, and treasure in their education up through secondary school. After that, the path — wild, exciting, and as yet, undetermined — is theirs to navigate... and finance.
Finally, dear readers, it is a simple fact that just as someone must mend our broken bones, someone must mend our broken cars. We cannot all be "upper-middle-class, white-collar workers." I am unclear when it became desirable that we all should be, and I don’t plan to perpetuate the myth by asking a young adult with a gift for art to attend college and major in art history when she has already developed a plan to work nights at the local video store so that she might draw, paint, and sculpt by day when the light in her small, shabby studio is best.
As promised, then.
William A. Henry III wrote:
We have foolishly embraced the unexamined notions that everyone is pretty much alike (and, worse, should be), that self-fulfillment is more important than objective achievement, that the common man is always right, that he needs no interpreters or intermediaries to guide his thinking, that a good and just society should be far more concerned with succoring its losers than honoring and encouraging its winners to achieve more and thereby benefit everyone. At times — indeed, at almost all times when educational policy is involved — we are as silly as the people in Garrison Keillor's fictional heartland, where all the children are claimed to be "above average." (In Defense of Elitism)Ayup. In fits and starts, we have eliminated ability tracking from our schools; no more canaries, orioles, and blue jays in our classrooms; we are all birds, capable of fantastic eagle-like flight, although in this brave new classroom, no one dares to fly too high, too fast, or too soon. These days, teachers are not encouraged or trained to nurture the potential best (Best? Why, there is no best!) but rather to cater to the at-risk, to teach to the middle, and, as a result, to give everyone a just-so-so education. We parents, teachers, students celebrate and reward the "above average" in Lake Woebegone; in other words, the mediocre. And nowhere is this more depressingly apparent than in our system of higher education, where, at some point in the last six decades, we came to embrace the notion that anyone who wants it should have access to a college education, which has (pardon the pun) by degrees, reduced the value of the college diploma to a mass transit pass, duly punched as one hops along the map of his life: preschool, elementary school, high school, college, job, retirement, death (with an ample bit of taxes tossed in for good measure).
Doubt me? Name twelve parents who number themselves among our nation’s middle class (I know, I know — who doesn’t?) who don’t expect their children to go to college after high school. It would be easier to find fifty, nay, one hundred who will be humiliated if their little Brandon or Dylan or Taylor doesn’t get into if not a good school at least a decent school. And they’re willing to pay; in fact, via college funds and other savings plans, they have been paying for just this moment in their little darlin’s life since, oh, before they were born.
Egads.
Henry notes:
In today's United States, the social value of mass higher education is generally considered so obvious as to be beyond discussion. It is reflexively credited with having produced a better work force, a more stable electorate, a more flexible economy, a more civilized culture. It is considered an emblem of fairness. And it has certainly fed the national appetite for belief in betterment... [N]o symbol sums up process of advancement more convincingly to the common man than having the first-ever member of one’s own clan cross the great divide and enroll in college.Of course, with the waves of "above average" students clamoring for admission (sixty-five percent of high school graduates in 1991), even our finest colleges and universities must offer developmental ed (i.e., remedial) courses to their incoming freshmen because even kids ranked in the top ten percent of their classes cannot write or compute well enough to succeed as undergraduates, even though (sorry for the three “evens”) as Russell Jacoby crankily observes in Dogmatic Wisdom, today’s students are enrolled at “vastly less demanding institutions.”
No kidding.
Are you still wondering why I’ve lost my unwavering commitment to the idea that college is the next best step in a high school senior’s life?
It’s simple. It’s got to mean something, folks. The average (note the judicious and right use of the word "average") person of eighteen has not had enough life experiences to know how to chart his life's course. Leaping from one institutional setting to another, blindly and as expected, sets one up on a path of mediocrity, not discovery. It’s when we challenge the conventional wisdom (in this case, when we accurately assess the need for higher education) that we often discover the pools of talent, interest, and passion within us.
I don’t need thirty-seven email messages of the “well-I-went-to-college-right-after-high-school-and-I-turned-out-just-fine-thank-you” variety. I did, too, and am glad of it. But even now, two degrees later, I am unconvinced that the path I took was the only or even the best. That I am solely responsible for my higher education, though, plays no small role in my appreciation of it. Of course, I am one of those parents who have been telling my children (since before they were born (*wink*)) that they will pay their way through college, if they choose that path. I will invest all of my time, talent, and treasure in their education up through secondary school. After that, the path — wild, exciting, and as yet, undetermined — is theirs to navigate... and finance.
Finally, dear readers, it is a simple fact that just as someone must mend our broken bones, someone must mend our broken cars. We cannot all be "upper-middle-class, white-collar workers." I am unclear when it became desirable that we all should be, and I don’t plan to perpetuate the myth by asking a young adult with a gift for art to attend college and major in art history when she has already developed a plan to work nights at the local video store so that she might draw, paint, and sculpt by day when the light in her small, shabby studio is best.
© 2003-2009 Mental multivitamin/M-mv Link
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M-mv/Mental multivitamin
Previously on
Mental multivitamin
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