A new use for PowerPoint

"After everyone left the room, I sat down and went through Ron's final presentation in slide-sorter view," Williams said. "Man, I gotta tell you, it blew me away. That presentation really utilized the full multimedia capabilities of Microsoft's PowerPoint application."

"We're really gonna miss Ron around here," Williams added.

From The Onion, "Project Manager Leaves Suicide PowerPoint Presentation." You can read the article by clicking here.

Thanks to my friend Norman for "pointing" me to this article.

Evaluating an anthology

3703 students: You can read Marjorie Perloff's deeply thoughtful and deeply critical review of Cary Nelson's Anthology of Modern American Poetry by clicking here.

English professor spam

I received this item today:

Dear Professor of English,

Please submit a paper for [name withheld], an International journal . . . . Please visit the journal's website.

The important-sounding International was amusing, and the sheer absurdity of this invitation made it impossible not to visit the website. (Note: I have a strong anti-virus program and a firewall on my computer.)

The journal must be unique in the world of English studies in having an Angelfire homepage. It's probably also unique in having images of foxes (wolves?), polar bears, and walruses on its homepage. An individual copy costs $30 ($50 if you're a library). A $10 "processing fee" must be included with one's essay, the check made out not to the journal but to an individual. There is no indication what sort of essays the journal is seeking. My best guess is that it's seeking essays accompanied by $10 checks. Best of all, submitting authors are asked to name two people to serve as referees. Not what one usually means by "refereed journal"!

I can't decide: Is this a scam in which you hand over your money and get "published"? Or does the "publisher" simply take your money and disappear? Either way, this lit crit scam is a welcome diversion from the usual junkmail. At least these people know that I teach English, unlike the Nigerian barristers who are always knocking at my e-mail door.

Related post
The National Dean's List

Getting organized . . . part 6

One more suggestion: the Hipster PDA. That is, a stack of index cards held together with a binder clip. The ways in which people have worked out the details of this analog organizing tool are pretty amazing. Google returns close to 10,000 hits for "hipster pda."

Tip of the (Valentine's) Day: A Hipster PDA makes a great Valentine's Day gift. Use pink index cards and write something on each. (Happy Valentine's Day, Elaine!)

Links

I've added a number of links to the column on the right. Big deal, eh? To me, it is though--I'm happy to have learned how to do so.

Trompe l'oeil

3703 students: From the wordsmith.org word-a-day service:

trompe l'oeil (tromp lye) noun

1. A style of painting in which objects are rendered in extremely realistic detail, giving an illusion of reality.

2. A painting, mural, etc. made in this style.

[From French, literally "fools the eye", from tromper (to deceive) + le (the) + oeil (eye).]

"Good trompe-l'oeil work is magical. It persuades you that the subject of the mural is real, that you are indeed seeing a view of smoking Mount St Helens, or a formal baroque garden glimpsed through a filigree-screen gateway, or a stretch of beach on a windy day."
Stephen Anderton; When We Practise to Deceive; The Times (London, UK); Jan 4, 2003.

There, in an extreme form, is the project of the "beautiful illusion" that William Carlos Williams rejects. WCW on Shakespeare: "He holds no mirror up to nature but with his imagination rivals nature's composition with his own."

In memory of Alan Speer

Alan Speer died Sunday at a swim meet in Michigan. He was 34, a Charleston kid who grew up into a witty, learned man. He knew more about film than anyone, and I mean that just about literally.

My wife Elaine, who taught Alan flute, was close to him and remembers a story that he once told her. In his high-school days, Alan went to Turkey as an AFS student and, of course, learned Turkish. Years later, in his grad-school days, he was riding in an elevator when the two other passengers, both young women, began giggling and talking about how cute he was. Here's the good part: they were talking in Turkish, never imagining Alan could understand them. He stood there taking it all in, and when the elevator stopped at his floor, he turned to them, said something in Turkish, and left. I wish I could remember what it was he said (Elaine can't either). "I heard every word"? "Thank you"? "I agree with you completely"?

Whatever it was, I'm sure it was smart and funny and kind, like Alan himself.

Alan's writing on film is plentifully available online. His webpage for his film criticism, Cinemadox, can be found by clicking here.

Focus groups and language

My dad sent me a clipping from the Bergen Record (a NJ newspaper) that shows focus groups in action. The writer, Peter Grad, is writing about semantics and Social Security:

[W]e learned that the White House is banning the use of the term "privatization"--the key principle behind its push to overhaul Social Security--because focus groups distrust the word in the wake of Enron and other corporate scandals. Instead, the administration is encouraging the use of the phrase "personal accounts," a friendlier, warmer and fuzzier term.

A number of news stories have posited the same rationale behind the push for Social Security "reform" rather than "privatization."

Lost in translation

Another item from Peter Grad (whose articles for some reason are largely unavailable online):

Linguist Christopher Moore scans the globe in search of words that are not easily translatable into English. In the Republic of Congo, for instance, he found ilunga, which 1,000 translators deemed the world's most untranslatable word: As best as they can describe it, it means "a person who is ready to forgive any transgression a first time and then to tolerate it for a second time, but never for a third time."

There is also the Czech litost (pronounced lee-tosht), meaning "a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery."

And the beautiful French idiom esprit de l'escalier, which refers to the clever reply one thinks of only afterward, in this case, on the way down the stairs after having made a remark in an upstairs room.

Ah, language!

Grad's article was inspired by a story on National Public Radio, which you can read about and listen to here.

Paying attention to distractions

From an article by Katie Hafner in in today's New York Times, "You There, at the Computer: Pay Attention":

Humans specialize in distraction, especially when the task at hand requires intellectual heavy lifting. All the usual "Is it lunchtime yet?" inner voices, and external interruptions like incoming phone calls, are alive and well.

But in the era of e-mail, instant messaging, Googling, e-commerce and iTunes, potential distractions while seated at a computer are not only ever-present but very enticing. Distracting oneself used to consist of sharpening a half-dozen pencils or lighting a cigarette. Today, there is a universe of diversions to buy, hear, watch and forward, which makes focusing on a task all the more challenging.

For the full article, click here.

[To read the Times, use mediajunkie as your name and password. For more names and passwords to enter free sites that require registration, go to bugmenot.]