Howard Dully: "My Lobotomy"

Howard Dully was twelve years old when he was subjected to a transorbital lobotomy in 1960:

"If you saw me you'd never know I'd had a lobotomy," Dully says. "The only thing you'd notice is that I'm very tall and weigh about 350 pounds. But I've always felt different--wondered if something's missing from my soul. I have no memory of the operation, and never had the courage to ask my family about it. So two years ago I set out on a journey to learn everything I could about my lobotomy."

I heard most of "My Lobotomy" on National Public Radio last night. What Howard Dully endured--and why--beggars description.

LINK: "My Lobotomy": Howard Dully's Journey (from National Public Radio)

Update: This documentary aired on NPR but was produced by Sound Portraits. (Thanks to dalton for this information--see comment below.)

LINK: More on "My Lobotomy" (from Sound Portraits)

LINK: Sound Portraits Sound Portraits' radio documentaries are available as RealAudio files from its website.

Science and Buddhism

Science has always fascinated me. As a child in Tibet, I was keenly curious about how things worked. When I got a toy I would play with it a bit, then take it apart to see how it was put together. As I became older, I applied the same scrutiny to a movie projector and an antique automobile.

At one point I became particularly intrigued by an old telescope, with which I would study the heavens. One night while looking at the moon I realized that there were shadows on its surface. I corralled my two main tutors to show them, because this was contrary to the ancient version of cosmology I had been taught, which held that the moon was a heavenly body that emitted its own light.

But through my telescope the moon was clearly just a barren rock, pocked with craters. If the author of that fourth-century treatise were writing today, I'm sure he would write the chapter on cosmology differently.

If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview.

From "Our Faith in Science," by Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama

LINK: "Our Faith in Science" (from the New York Times)

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

No candy for me

A recent newspaper photograph depicts someone showing an audience how to reward students with candy. The workshop that was the occasion for this demonstration focused on using games in the "classroom": crosswords, murder mysteries, bingo, and the like. The workshop was for college professors. Yes, the students to be rewarded with candy after playing these games are college students. I'm thinking of some of the reading I did in college--Aquinas, Borges, Chaucer, Dickinson, and so on--and I'm trying, really trying, to imagine one, just one, of my professors presiding over a bingo game and giving out candy. But I cannot.

Orange Crate Art anniversary

The album whose title-song gave my blog its name was released ten years ago today. Happy anniversary to Orange Crate Art, by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. Thanks to Bob from the Yahoo VDP mailing list for sharing the news of the occasion.

The song "Orange Crate Art" was my gateway to the music of VDP and BW (and the Beach Boys). Watching (out of simple curiosity) the documentary Brian Wilson: I Just Wasn't Made for These Times, I found myself listening over and over to the partial performance of "Orange Crate Art" therein. I figured out the chords on the piano. Shortly thereafter, I bought the album. Then I thought I'd give Pet Sounds a try. And so on, and so on.

Orange Crate Art is a remarkable album--popular music of the highest order, made to please the muses, not the chthonian gods of commerce. As such, it's something to seek out--soon!--before it disappears from view.

How to improve writing (no. 11 in a series)

I noticed this example of "educationese" yesterday in a newsletter for parents:

The school district will be implementing a new call out system to assist the building in calling parents with announcements.

How many problems in this sentence?

"Implementing" is mere jargon.

"Implementing," "building," "calling": three "-ings" in one sentence.

"Call out system" is, at best, imprecise; at worst, obscure. (What is a "call out system"?) A Google search suggests that "call-out system" is the usual phrase.

The reference to "the building" is oddly dehumanizing. And what sort of building is capable of making phone calls, even with a newly implemented system to assist it?

Howzabout this revised sentence?

We'll be using an automated calling system to contact parents with announcements.

From 20 words to 12; from 31 syllables to 22.

Even better:

We'll be using an automated system to call parents with announcements.

From 12 words to 11; from 22 syllables to 19.

And better still:

We'll use automated dialing to call parents with announcements.

From 11 words to 9; from 19 syllables to 17. Final savings: over 50% off.

This post is the most recent installment in a very occasional series.

Link » Other How to improve writing posts, via Pinboard

Brief review: Bait and Switch

Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005. $24.00

Like Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, Barbara Ehrenreich's new book bears a title in which the word in parenthesis makes all the difference. Between the hope and its fulfillment falls the futility.

Bait and Switch takes us into a world of people living in parenthesis, white-collar people who are "in transition," the corporate newspeak substitute for "unemployed." As in Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich goes undercover, this time seeking a corporate position, presenting herself as a long-time freelancer (better make that consultant) looking for a position in public relations. Her job-search becomes a job in itself, a miserable one, with episode after episode in a surreal world of life-coaches, image consultants, and résumé rewriters, whose fees total several thousand dollars. Her recommended reading includes The Ultimate Secret to Getting Absolutely Everything You Want, which declares that "you alone are the source of all the conditions and situations in your life." (If you're unemployed, it's not the economy, stupid; it's you.) "Networking" events bring her into impersonal contact with other jobseekers, all trying to be upbeat in chain restaurants and windowless hotel conference rooms. I won't reveal how Ehrenreich's search turns out, except to say that the offers that finally come her way are a very far cry from what she was looking for. Bait and Switch closes by looking at white-collar people who have taken what are called "survival jobs" as "associates" in big-box stores and such: sad to say, their failed searches have ended in the world of Nickel and Dimed.

Many colleges are using Nickel and Dimed in "one book, one campus" programs. I greatly admire that book, but its campus use has, for me, always smacked of piousness--an intention to make students feel a vague compassion for poor people. A college community with reckless courage might ask its students to follow up with Bait and Switch. The two books would give business majors (and everyone else) a chance to rethink the ethics of the brave new corporate world awaiting them.

"Cómo enviarles correos electrónicos a los profesores"

David Acosta, who teaches at the Corporación Universitaria Unitec in Bogotá, Colombia, has translated "How to e-mail a professor" for his students (with my okay, natch). I'm grateful to David for disseminating these guidelines en español.

Click on the link below to download a .pdf file of the translation. Or follow the link in this post from David's blog, Estudio Hacks.

LINK: "Cómo enviarles correos electrónicos a los profesores," por Michael Leddy

Invisible Man and the yam

I took a bite, finding it as sweet and hot as any I'd ever had, and was overcome with such a surge of homesickness that I turned away to keep my control. I walked along, munching the yam, just as suddenly overcome by an intense feeling of freedom--simply because I was eating while walking along the street.

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

3009 students, here are some useful links to learn about yams. All are interesting; the first, third, fourth, and fifth have the most helpful background for the novel. Thanks to Danny and Lara for these links.

"Home Cooking: Sweet Potatoes or Yams" [from about.com]

"How have yams changed medicine?" [from killerplants.com]

"Supercrop: the yam bean" [from Natural History via zinkle.com]

"What are yams?" [from HungryMonster.com]

"The world's healthiest foods: Yam" [from whfoods.com]

Catachresis

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

catachresis \kat-uh-KREE-sis\ noun
*1 : use of the wrong word for the context
2 : use of a forced and especially paradoxical figure of speech

Example sentence:
The paper printed a correction for the previous day's catachresis: dubbing a local artist-philanthropist a "socialist" when they meant "socialite."

And here's an example from an opinion column in a local newspaper:

Prohibition proved a tremendous dud; many of the same people who hailed it spent a great deal of time and effort flaunting it.

That should be flouting, not flaunting.

Shopping with Rev Run

"Who said that a man of God is supposed to drive a Pinto?"

"I'm very Kenny G, slow music CD-101."

"I'm going to stay in my pool and eat fat-free hot dogs for the rest of my life."

From a "shopping with" profile of Rev Run (as in Run-D.M.C.). Rev Run drives a Rolls-Royce. CD-101 is a "smooth jazz" radio station in New York. And fat-free hot dogs are available at your local supermarket.

LINK: "A Rap Minister Works the Aisles" [from the New York Times]

[To read the Times online, visit BugMeNot for a name and password, or create an account of your own.]