How to improve writing (no. 3 in a series)

Today's example, a newspaper headline, reporting on the lack of student attendance at a One Book, One Campus discussion:

One Book draws less than one student

The writer is clearly aiming for comic effect, but what does "less than one" mean? A less awkward headline:

One Book, no students

Too bad that it wasn't possible to write "One Book draws overflow student crowd." That's a headline I'd like to see.

Link » Other How to improve writing posts, via Pinboard

More Paris Review interviews

3703 students: These have us covered for the next two weeks--

Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, both interviewed by the poet Donald Hall.

There is no Paris Review interview with H.D. (or if there is, it's not listed on the website).

January 24

[W + (D-d)] x TQ
        M x NA

That's the formula a British researcher has used to determine that January 24 is the most depressing day of the year (at least in the British Isles). Here's an article to explain.

Psychologist Cliff Arnall (Doctor Arnall), the creator of this formula, seems like a good candidate for an Ig Nobel Prize. (I just nominated him.)

Good advice on looking at art

I learned from Joe that the first thing to do when looking at a work of art was to do just that--look. Let your eyes take in what is in front of them. Look at a picture from different distances. Look away and then look back, but, since each picture suggests a visual starting point in it, choose a different point each time you look. At this stage, try not to have any thoughts about the work, such as where it fits in the artist's oeuvre or in art history or social history. You can do that later. If you allow such thoughts at this point, they will distance you from your seeing. And so Joe's comments at an exhibition would be of the "Look at that red" variety, when the very thing I had overlooked was the fact that red was the star--perhaps the raison d'être--of the picture. . . . For me Joe's visual perceptions were literally eye-opening.

From Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard, by Ron Padgett (Coffee House Press, 2004). Joe Brainard, American painter, is also known as the author of I Remember. Ron Padgett, American poet, is the author of many books--poems, translations, and memoirs. He and Brainard met and became friends in high school, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

#1 COMEDY OF ALL TIME!

Those were the words (all caps) on the cardboard displays filled with copies of Troy.

Thanks to my son Ben, who has a fine eye for the incongruous and spotted this example in Walmart.

Frost interview

3703 students: The esteemed Paris Review is making all its interviews available on-line. You can find the PR interview with Robert Frost here, as a downloadable Adobe file.

Many of the best-known Paris Review interviews are collected in the paperback series Writers at Work. To make all the interviews available, for free, is a gesture of tremendous good will and generosity. Thank you, Paris Review.

Patriarchal names

From an article in today's New York Times:

The gesture to the mothers of France seemed to shake the sacred pillar of patriarchy.

New Year's Day quietly ushered in a change in France's law on last names. It abolished the centuries-old obligation that parents give the patronymic, or name of the father, to their children.

That means that a couple will now be able to give its newborn baby either the mother's last name, the father's last name or both names in the order the parents choose.

A "societal disruption," another proof that fathers are being forced "to renounce one by one the attributes of what used to be called their familial power," complained an editorial in Le Figaro, the center-right daily.

"This reform--we decree it silliness without a name," said a right-wing Roman Catholic newspaper, La Croix, in an editorial, calling the change a boon for genealogists, a nightmare for notaries.

Names are serious indicators of status in a country like France.

3009 students: You (who are now reading a poem about Odysseus, son of Laertes, and Telelmachus, son of Odysseus) can read the whole article here.

[Scroll down this page to "Two Actresses" to learn how to access Times articles.]

Overheard

"It's a great class. You never have to open a book. All you have to do is show up."

In the bank (overheard by a friend): "Tell the professor that I'm in Indianapolis and that the roads are really bad."

Roads not taken

3703 students: If you have some time, look at "What If...," a page devoted to mapping out (with some hilarity) alternative paths in life.

Another reason not to be called "Doctor"

Laura L. Callahan was very proud of her Ph.D. When she received it a few years ago, she promptly rewrote her official biography to highlight the academic accomplishment, referring to it not once or twice but nine times in a single-page summary of her career. And she never let her employees at the Labor Department, where she served as deputy chief information officer, forget it, even demanding that they call her "Doctor."

From an article on diploma mills and the widespread problem of phony academic credentials among government employees. "Doctor" Callahan made it to the position of deputy chief information officer in the Department of Homeland Security before being forced to resign.