Crooked teeth?

"I don't know what makes me any more interesting than anybody else," he says. "Crooked teeth?"

Paul Giamatti, quoted in Rolling Stone. You can read the article by clicking here.

[Note: Paul Giamatti is one good reason to see Cinderella Man.]

Editing

From Jeremy Wagstaff's Loose Wire:

I only recently realised, for example, that I’ve always been saying 'esconced' for some reason. Only yesterday did I find out it should be 'ensconced', as I’m sure you all know. (Well, maybe not all of you: There are more than 5,000 sites where the word 'esconced' is used. But you're right to laugh at me.)

This doesn't stop me having my bugbears. I once nearly got myself fired for suggesting to his face that the then head of the multinational news organisation I was working for was using the word 'enervated' incorrectly, and that it meant the opposite of how it sounded. (It means 'lacking energy'.)

Then I noticed a couple of newspapers recently have misspelled 'loath' as 'loathe'. Loathe is the verb, loath is the adjective. I am loath to point such a thing out, but loathe it when I see the words misused.

I must stop being an editor. Two things happen: You quickly turn into a pedant, while at the same time realising that you knew far less about the English language than you thought you did.

You can (or should it be may?) read "The Humiliation of Being an Editor" by clicking here.

E-mail from Stefan Hagemann

My friend Stefan Hagemann writes:

On another note, I just finished rereading Slaughterhouse Five. I think it sort of counts towards your suggestion to reread a "crucial book from childhood," though I didn't read it for that reason. Rather, I was talking politics with a neighbor who is also an avid reader and somehow our conversation came around to Vonnegut. We'd both read it in high school, and while I probably remembered it a bit better (maybe because I'm a little younger), our memories were pretty fuzzy, so we both revisited it. It was a good experience and I'm looking forward to discussing it with her. There were entire scenes that I'd forgotten. My favorite is when Billy Pilgrim is time traveling/hallucinating and he encounters a war movie in reverse:

"The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. The used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new....The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby."

Now I'm rereading Paradise Lost in preparation for the fall semester. Like Slaughterhouse Five, it's a much easier go this time than the last, but unlike Slaughterhouse Five, there aren't a lot of laughs. Lots of infinite wrath and infinite despair, however. So it goes.

A's for everyone

From a piece by Alicia C. Shepard, journalist-in-residence at American University:

It was the end of my first semester teaching journalism at American University. The students had left for winter break. As a rookie professor, I sat with trepidation in my office on a December day to electronically post my final grades.

My concern was more about completing the process correctly than anything else. It took an hour to compute and type in the grades for three classes, and then I hit "enter." That's when the trouble started.

In less than an hour, two students challenged me. Mind you, there had been no preset posting time. They had just been religiously checking the electronic bulletin board that many colleges now use.

"Why was I given a B as my final grade?" demanded a reporting student via e-mail. "Please respond ASAP, as I have never received a B during my career here at AU and it will surely lower my GPA."

You can read the rest by clicking here.

In the groves of academe

From the Associated Press:

A community college professor has been charged with using his students' names and Social Security numbers to obtain department store credit cards.

Bradley Neil Slosberg, 49, of Winter Haven, was arrested Friday on charges of criminal use of personal identification and scheming to defraud, the Polk County Sheriff's Office said.

Slosberg and his girlfriend, Deborah Hafner, stole the identities of at least three of the students from his anatomy and physiology class at Polk Community College, sheriff's office spokeswoman Carrie Rodgers said.

Hafner, 45, filled out the credit card applications and committed the forgeries, Rodgers said. She was charged with two counts of forgery and one count each of criminal use of personal identification and scheming to defraud.

The couple could not be reached for comment early Monday.

Slosberg had asked his students to write their names and Social Security numbers on a sign-in sheet, students said. "We all signed it," Amanda Bracewell said. "We figured, 'He's a teacher, what is he going to do with it?"'

(Via CNN.)

Oprah picks Faulkner

From Reuters:

Talkshow host Oprah Winfrey propelled Nobel-prize winning author William Faulkner up the bestseller list on Saturday, proving again why her television book club is one of the biggest sales drivers in publishing.

Within 24 hours of being picked as the summer reading pick for Oprah's Book Club, a boxed set of the three novels "As I Lay Dying," "The Sound and the Fury" and "Light in August" was the number two seller on Amazon.com, second only to J.K. Rowling's next Harry Potter book, which hits the shelves in July.

Publishers Weekly reported that publisher Vintage, a division of Random House, had already shipped 500,000 copies of the boxed set.

You can read the rest of the article by clicking here.

The front table

From today's New York Times:

The once humble conventions of book display--the neighborhood bookstore window, the recommended-books table near the cash register--have also been supersized beyond recognition. In fact, many publishers say that the tables and flashy cardboard displays that crowd the front of chain bookstores have emerged as a marketing force fully as powerful as the traditional ways of trying to bring a book to the public's hard-won attention--through newspaper and magazine ads, reviews, author tours and radio and television interviews.

But this promotional device, like most others, comes with a cost. It is known, somewhat deceptively, as a cooperative advertising agreement. In plain terms, it means that many of the books on display at the front of a store or placed face out at the end of an aisle are there because the publisher paid for them to be there, not necessarily because anyone at the bookstore thought the book was noteworthy or interesting.

You can read the article "Cash Up Front" by clicking here.

[Use mediajunkie as your name and password.]

From the Greek

From the Wordsmith word-a-day list:

gamut (GAM-uht) noun

The complete range of something.

[From Medieval Latin, contraction of gamma ut, from gamma (third letter of the Greek alphabet), used to represent the lowest tone + ut, from the names of the notes ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si (ut and si later changed to do and ti). Gamma + ut contracted to gamut and the meaning expanded to denote all notes. The names ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si are derived from the initial syllables of a Latin hymn.]

Overheard

Neighbor Aber, on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood:

I'll deconstruct this landing place later.

Yes, I sometimes watch a few minutes of Mister Rogers for old times' sake.

Perfect Etiquette (1879)

Moving books between my home and my office, I rediscovered a pamphlet that I bought some years ago at a library sale: Perfect Etiquette; Or, How to Behave in Society. A Complete Manual for Ladies and Gentlemen, Embracing Hints on Introduction, Salutation, Conversation, Friendly Visits, Social Parties, On the Street, In Public Places, In Traveling, Driving and Riding, Letter Writing, At the Table, Making and Receiving Presents, Courtship, Wedding Etiquette, Christening, Funerals, Etc., with Suggestions How to Dress Tastefully. The Toilette, With Simple Recipes for Improving the Complexion, etc. (New York: E.G. Rideout & Co., 1879). It appears to be the cheapest of paperbacks, the pages stapled, the cover nothing more than another page. Yet the 1879 pages are virtually free of foxing, which is more than I can say for paperbacks that I bought as an undergraduate in the 1970s.

Here are three entries from Perfect Etiquette. About the salad oil, I will add the usual disclaimer: do not try this at home.

Our Hair.
A good head of hair is the pride of every one, and to be kept in order, it should be brushed often and carefully. The brush should be of medium hardness, and the hair should be divided, so as the scalp should be brushed also, and all the scurf taken away.

Pure unscented salad oil is all that is required for the hair, and this should be applied with the hands, and rubbed off with flannel before going to bed, so as not to stain the pillow.

Bald Heads.
The covering of the head is one of the natural causes of baldness which is found more often in men than women; and whenever it is noticed coming on, the silk hat ought to be dispensed with and a straw one substituted.

The Beard.
Those who shave do well; but those who do not do better. If nature intended for men to shave, she would not have been so lavish in providing them with beards, and it is best for men not to shave at all, for nothing adds to the beauty of man so much as a full flowing beard.