Rosa Parks (1913-2005)

One legend had it that she was a cleaning woman with bad feet who was too tired to drag herself to the rear of the bus. Another had it that she was a "plant" by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The truth, as she later explained, was that she was tired of being humiliated, of having to adapt to the byzantine rules, some codified as law and others passed on as tradition, that reinforced the position of blacks as something less than full human beings.

"She was fed up," said Elaine Steele, a longtime friend and executive director of the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development. "She was in her 40's. She was not a child. There comes a point where you say, 'No, I'm a full citizen, too. This is not the way I should be treated.'"

From the New York Times obituary

LINK: "Rosa Parks, 92, Founding Symbol of Civil Rights Movement, Dies" (New York Times)

LINK: "They changed the world: The story of the Montgomery bus boycott" (Montgomery Advertiser)

[To read the Times online, use mediajunkie as your name and password, or visit bugmenot.com.]

A lost weekend

I Wireless zero
I came to a conclusion at about 2:00 this morning: pencils are a lot more reliable than network cards. Time spent getting one of the Dixon Ticonderoga Tri-Writes that I bought on Saturday up and running: about fifteen seconds in a sharpener. Time spent attempting to get the laptop network card that I bought on Saturday up and running (before giving up): about six hours. The six hours were largely a matter of looking online--for updated drivers and info on settings--and uninstalling and reinstalling the card. I also put in the usual obligatory (and fruitless) call to technical support. While browsing online, I found many discussion group messages from other people with Vaio laptops (and all manner of laptops) who have also found themselves in wireless hell, with--of course--no solutions. Do you turn on "wireless zero configuration"? Do you turn it off? Either way, it seems you lose. Wireless zero indeed.

II TV Land
Before giving up, I discovered that All in the Family, Sanford and Son, and Good Times are all on television really, really late at night. I wonder how many people remember that Good Times was a spinoff of Maude, which was itself a spinoff of All in the Family.

III My wireless solution
I bought a 100-foot ethernet cable. Doing so was a lot easier than trying to get a network card to work in a Vaio laptop. The cable doesn't even require sharpening.

IV In conclusion
I am now happily wireless-less.

Rule 7

As a college professor, I've long been giving my students (what I hope is) useful advice. Here's one of the best pieces of advice I know for doing well in college:

Rule 7

The only rule is work. If you work, it will lead to something. It's the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.

I found Rule 7 years ago in Learning by Heart, a book by the artist Corita Kent. It appeared in an informal list of rules, some funny, some serious, made for the students and faculty of a college art department. Rule 7 seems both funny and serious: a Zen-like joke, abolishing all the rules that precede and follow it, and a statement that's absolutely true, for makers of art and for anyone engaged in learning. Note that Rule 7 doesn't say that the only thing to do is work. Rather, the only necessary thing is work. The only way to catch on to things (or to make them happen, to change metaphors) is to put in the necessary time doing the work, whether that work is sketching, practicing scales, memorizing a declension, mapping out an argument, studying a timeline, making notes on an article, or looking up words in a poem.

Whoever thought up Rule 7 caught one of the key points of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: deeply rewarding activities require a significant investment of time and effort before they show any return. In this respect, Rule 7 differs greatly from Nike's more facile "Just do it." Rule 7 acknowledges that learning involves some struggle, that matters may not be clear at first. If you're just beginning Homer's Iliad, you are likely to feel quite lost. You can't "Just do it" when it comes to understanding an epic poem. But it's easy to catch on if you give yourself a chance by putting in the work.

It makes me happy when students recognize the truth of Rule 7 and make it their own. My students (who get Rule 7 at the start of the semester) often say that the way to do well in my classes is to "do the work." One of my wife's students just reinvented Rule 7 on his own. Seeing her on campus, he announced with delight that he had finally figured out how to do well in college: "Do the work!" Nothing could be simpler, or more profound.

A related post
Rule 7 and other rules (Who wrote it, really?)

The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing

Thinking about The Elements of Style prompts me to say something about a book that to my mind is far more useful, Michael Harvey's The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing. Harvey does a much better job of showing how to make prose better--clearer, more elegant, more concise. He's a great advocate of the "plain style," and offers wonderful advice (and many examples) to help a writer, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence. The Nuts and Bolts is not only the best book on improving writing that I know; it's one of the least expensive as well ($5.95 $12.00 in paperback). I assign it in all my classes.

LINK: The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing

The Elements of Style

Strunk and White's legendary "Elements of Style" was first published in 1959, and in the intervening decades, this little book on language and its proper usage has been force-fed to countless high school English students, who have read it zealously, dog-eared key pages, showered it in graphite love or else completely disregarded and forgotten it, usually at their own risk. Beyond its sage advice on matters of style, it is filled with the Solomonic rules and injunctions--"Make every word tell"; "Use the active voice"; "Be obscure clearly"--that have served as a lifeboat to both professional and amateur writers adrift on the perilous seas of split infinitives, dangling participles and weak or flabby prose.

But while "The Elements of Style" has never lacked fans or dutiful adherents, appreciation for this slim volume takes a turn toward the whimsical and even surreal this week, as the Penguin Press publishes the first illustrated edition, featuring artwork by Maira Kalman, and the young composer Nico Muhly offers a finely wrought "Elements of Style" song cycle, to be given its premiere tonight at 8 in a highly unusual, if oddly appropriate, concert setting: the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library.

Force-fed to students who have read it zealously and dog-eared its pages? Block that mixed, mixed metaphor!

LINK: "'Style' Gets New Elements"

[To read the New York Times online, use mediajunkie as your name and password, or visit bugmenot.com.]

Happy Dictionary Day

From Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day e-mail service:

lexicographer \lek-suh-KAH-gruh-fer\ noun
: an author or editor of a dictionary

Example sentence:
The great lexicographer Noah Webster, who wrote the first authoritative dictionary of American English, was born on October 16, 1758.

Did you know?
Happy Dictionary Day! We're celebrating with a look at a word that is dear to our hearts: "lexicographer." The ancient Greeks were some of the earliest makers of dictionaries; they used them mainly to catalog obsolete terms from their rich literary past. To create a word for writers of dictionaries, the Greeks sensibly attached the suffix "-graphos," meaning "writer," to "lexikon," meaning "dictionary," to form "lexikographos," the direct ancestor of the English "lexicographer." "Lexikon," which itself descends from the Greek "lexis" (meaning "word" or "speech"), also gave us "lexicon," which can mean either "dictionary" or "the vocabulary of a language, speaker, or subject."

As it's Dictionary Day, I'll mention that my most memorable dictionary experience has been looking up the word tappen in the Oxford English Dictionary. Edwin Cuffe, SJ, a funny and wonderful man, suggested that I look it up. I later learned that he pointed countless students to the joys of the OED via this word.

As I type, I realize that I work within easy reach of at least a dozen dictionaries, including the old Book-of-the-Month-Club two-volume OED.

Wireless

News from the world of continuous partial attention:

Dennis Adams, a computer-systems professor at the University of Houston, was thrilled a few years ago when his school began providing laptop computers to incoming students and set up wireless Internet access in classrooms. But in the past year, his enthusiasm has turned to dismay.

A recent visit to his class--where about half the 26 students are using laptops--explains why. While Prof. Adams lectures, five students use an online chat room to post comments on his lecture, on classroom stragglers, and on the meaning of his discussion questions. Another student spends nearly two-thirds of the three-hour class playing computer chess, instant messaging and viewing photos of a fraternity party posted on the Web. Meanwhile, 23-year-old Mike Fielden buys a pair of sneakers on eBay.

From an article in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required). Reporter Gary McWilliams goes on to note that many professors hesitate to ban laptops in class for fear of retaliation in student evaluations.

LINK: "The Laptop Backlash"

Odes to autumn

October is a fine and dangerous season in America. . . . It is a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful. The names of the subjects all seem to lay open the way to a new world. Your arms are full of new, clean notebooks, waiting to be filled. You pass through the doors of the library, and the smell of thousands of well-kept books makes your head swim with a clean and subtle pleasure. You have a new hat, a new sweater perhaps, or a whole new suit. Even the nickels and quarters in your pocket feel new, and the buildings shine in the glorious sun.

Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, 1948

Fall, thou ambiguous season, who begin
With the red cast-off sun-scorched skin of summer
And end with winter's pallor, hear oh hear
My chant to thee, harbinger of rebirth
Of school and love and work

Kenneth Koch, "Autumn," from The Seasons (homage to the 18th-century poet James Thomson), 1998

Jim Doyle (1944-2005)

[Photograph scanned from the 1978 Fordham College yearbook, The Maroon.]

I learned today that my favorite professor has died. Jim Doyle, James P. Doyle, was my teacher at Fordham College, Bronx, New York. He later taught at Lyndon State College in Vermont. His years at Fordham matched mine--he started in 1974 (when I started on my B.A.) and left in 1980 (the year I finished my M.A.).

Jim was the best teacher I ever had. He was the teacher who made the why of poetry clear to me, who made it clear that poetry was an urgent human enterprise. I had a class with him in my and his second semester at Fordham (drama), and it was not great, as he agreed. He was learning, I think, and he was facing a group of mostly uninterested and wary freshmen. But when I took his courses on modern and contemporary British poetry as a junior, I began to understand what literature was all about. Jim brought poetry to life, by any means necessary, often with humor, and always with absolute dedication and integrity. He was never ironic or glib about the works he was teaching. He was the real thing, and he presented tremendously difficult poetry (e.g., David Jones, Geoffrey Hill) to undergraduates in all its difficulty, without apology. I remember how several of us treasured our copies of Four Quartets, every page covered in notes from class ("the Doyle edition"). I still have my copy. I remember going to an optional review class during reading days before finals and coming in very late (after a grandparent's funeral, believe it or not), which prompted Jim to just keep going, out of kindness. What a teacher! I'm glad that I told him how much his teaching meant to me.

When I started on an M.A. at Fordham, I sat in on the modern British course I'd already taken, to get all the notes I'd missed the first time around. Here too, in that more leisurely world of reading days, there was an optional extra class, hours long, to get through Four Quartets. It was in mid-December, at night, in a more or less deserted classroom building. The room was packed, people listening intently, coats piled everywhere. There was the strangely magical feeling that sometimes comes from being in a classroom at night--brilliant fluorescent light inside and the black winter night in the windows. The class suddenly became very moving, as Jim stopped what he was doing to talk about the difficulty of the works we were reading and of how they wouldn't really become clear to us for years. It was an intensely human lesson about the whole project of living and learning.

I have so many memories of Jim. He once told us that he'd gone to church that morning (during Easter week, I think) and that he was the only person there--so it was a good thing that he went! I remember his hilarious account of trying to explain to a prim Fordham girl what a phallic symbol was. He brought one (or both, I can't recall) of his children to class--the only time in all my years as a student that I ever saw a professor open up his family life in that way (I'm proud to say that I did likewise when my two children were younger). He took me out of my graduate cubicle once with the invitation, "Come take a walk with me," and we went out to Fordham Road and had ice cream. I also remember a completely casual aside that Jim made while teaching "Prufrock." Many years later it came back to me when it was exactly what I needed to remember in my life, and I'm glad I was able to tell him so. I feel lucky to have some books that he gave me before he left Fordham, and some letters and cards from over the years.

Jim's obituary has something of his gratitude and humor in it: "Jim lived a wonderful life and was happy that it was long enough to see the Boston Red Sox win the World Series."

[December 11, 2007: A fair number of people have been finding this post by searching for jim doyle. If you've been looking for Jim online, do read the comments that follow, and please consider sharing your memories there too. Thanks.]

Other Jim Doyle posts
Department-store Shakespeare
Doyle and French
From the Doyle edition
A Jim Doyle story
Teaching, sitting, standing

No smoking

Today marks 16 years since my last cigarette.

And you still remember it to the day?

Of course I do. Don't underestimate the power of an addiction.

So you must've smoked a lot?

Not really. I probably averaged six to eight cigarettes a day. Every one of them was crucial.

What did you smoke?

At one time or another, every brand around, including obscurities like Philip Morris Commander, and excluding Eve, Virginia Slims, and 120mm brands. I settled in finally with unfiltered Camels and Lucky Strikes, and handrolled cigarettes made with Old Holborn tobacco and Abadie papers.

You still know all the details?

(Sigh.) Of course I do. Don't underestimate the power of an addiction.

So how did you quit?

It took me four tries. Wrigley's Extra peppermint gum was a strong enough flavor to make the absence of cigarettes bearable.

Do you still chew Wrigley's Extra?

Sure, sometimes, but not because I miss smoking. I still like the peppermint, and the new sour apple is really good too.

Do you think you'll ever smoke again?

No.

[Dialogue with self inspired by reading Thomas Merton's journals and Devra's Blue Streak.]