WALK

In a small town without public transportation (semi-rural sprawl, it could be called), getting into one's car or mini-van or pickup-truck or SUV to drive a mile or two to "the store" seems to most people as necessary and unremarkable as breathing. My wife Elaine and I prefer to walk, whenever possible, to do this sort of errand. And we thus become, at times, figures who prompt curiosity. For we are simply walking, not in exercise clothing but, more conspicuously, in what my high-school gym teacher used to call "street clothes." People tell us that they saw us walking back from the grocery store and wondered if our car was in the shop. Then, they say, they realized that we were just walking.

Our town is not friendly to walkers. The traffic signals at our major intersection (which spans four lanes of traffic and two turning lanes) flash WALK only briefly before beginning to hammer out a warning. Even the fastest of walkers (me) cannot cover more than three lanes before the warning begins. A major thoroughfare near our college has nothing more than a flashing yellow light to make it easier for people to cross, and for most drivers yellow seems to mean Keep Going, Don't Slow Down -- certainly not Yield.

And speaking of college -- college students are about the only people in town for whom walking is a standard mode of transportation. In our elite subdivisions, one can drive on street after street and never see a biped. In my more modest neighborhood, there are many people whom I have never seen leaving the area on foot.



The saddest indication of our town’s preference for wheels: the only parts of town with significant foot traffic (older streets with student-rental properties) are also the parts with the poorest sidewalks.

[Photograph by Rachel Leddy]

Related, antithetical reading

A city before cars (Sign Language)

Isa Chandra Moskowitz

Isa Chandra Moskowitz, vegan chef, on chickens, eggs, and Brooklyn:

“I would love to live in a world where I knew the eggs came from happy chickens. But in Brooklyn? That’s not going to happen."

From a profile in today's New York Times:

Strict Vegan Ethics, Frosted With Hedonism (NYT)
The Post Punk Kitchen (Isa's site)

He's back

Jeanne Meyers called my attention to this news item:

A clutch of modern pagans honored Zeus at a 1,800-year-old temple in the heart of Athens on Sunday -- the first known ceremony of its kind held there since the ancient Greek religion was outlawed by the Roman empire in the late 4th century.

Watched by curious onlookers, some 20 worshippers gathered next to the ruins of the temple for a celebration organized by Ellinais, a year-old Athens-based group that is campaigning to revive old religious practices from the era when Greece was a fount of education and philosophy.

The group ignored a ban by the Culture Ministry, which declared the site off limits to any kind of organized activity to protect the monument. But participants did not try to enter the temple itself, which is closed to everyone, and no officials sought to stop the ceremony. Dressed in ancient costumes, worshippers standing near the temple's imposing Corinthian columns recited hymns calling on the Olympian Zeus, "King of the gods and the mover of things," to bring peace to the world.

Modern pagans honor Zeus in Athens (AP)

Thanks, Jeanne!

"A lot out there is conspiring to distract you"

More on continuous partial attention and reading habits:

I recently spoke with a junior who was stressed about her decreasing ability to focus on anything for longer than two minutes or so. I tried to inspire her by talking about the importance of reading as a way to train the brain. I told her that a good reader develops the same powers of concentration that an athlete or a Buddhist would employ in sport or meditation. "A lot out there is conspiring to distract you," I said.

She rolled her eyes. "That's your opinion about books. It doesn't make it true." To her, the idea that reading might benefit the mind was, well, lame.

A library's neglected shelves reveal the demise of something important, especially for young readers starved for meaning -- for anything profound. Still, I'm not ready to throw in the towel just yet.

From a piece by librarian Thomas Washington in the Washington Post:

A Librarian's Lament: Books Are a Hard Sell

Glenn Gould's chair

Elaine Fine just alerted me to the web presence of a company marketing a replica of Glenn Gould's chair (news found via Soho the Dog). The chair is the creation of the designer René Bouchara and the Italian furniture maker Cazzaro.

Glenn Gould's piano chair is a story in itself, and Kevin Bazzana tells it in his biography Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould. Bert Gould customized a folding chair for his son in 1953 (what used to be called a bridge chair, for use at a cardtable), cutting several inches off each leg and adding a bracket and half-turnbuckle so that the height of each leg could be adjusted. Gould used the chair for the rest of his life. In the 1959 film Glenn Gould: On the Record, the chair can be seen (in Columbia's Manhattan recording studio) with white tape strengthening the intersections of legs and seat. In later photos the seat's stuffing is spilling out from the back. Later still, the seat disappeared altogether, leaving only a wooden frame. One of the most poignant photographs I know is this shot (by Lorne Tulk) of Gould's Toronto apartment, taken in 1982 shortly after the pianist's death.



The replica chair (seat included) sells for 990 euros ($1282). With a price like that, perhaps the manufacturer can invest some of the profits in a better English translation for the website. Here's a sample of what's there now:

Gould's chair cannot certainly be considered of the universe of design. At maximum it reminds a style chair, which original model has been modified for two times. The first time because the mechanical of the folding chair had damaged its shape. The second time because Glenn’s father, Bert Gould, had stricken on it a deathblow [!] by cutting off ten centimetres from every leg and by fixing on them a jack. . . .

Since Gould chair has become famous together with him, until becoming indivisible from his image. While the piano player became a legendary, his «chair-object» became «chair-worship».

Alas, this project reminds me of fake Rosebuds and Casablanca barware. And I'm put off by the slightly sniffy tone in the above passages ("cannot certainly be considered of the universe of design"). But I do want to get to Ottawa one day, to the National Library of Canada, where the Gould chair, the thing itself, now sits on display in a glass case.

The Glenn Gould Chair (Cazzaro) [Link’s dead.]
glenngould.com

Other Glenn Gould posts
Glenn Gould chair project (with a $35 Costco chair!)
Glenn Gould's chair again
A Glenn Gould story
Classical music for beginners
The Search for "Pet" Clark
Three records

11:55 p.m.

From the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) is moving the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to midnight. It is now 5 minutes to midnight. Reflecting global failures to solve the problems posed by nuclear weapons and the climate crisis, the decision by the BAS Board of Directors was made in consultation with the Bulletin's Board of Sponsors, which includes 18 Nobel Laureates. . . .

By moving the hand of the Clock closer to midnight -- the figurative end of civilization -- the BAS Board of Directors is drawing attention to the increasing dangers from the spread of nuclear weapons in a world of violent conflict, and to the catastrophic harm from climate change that is unfolding. The BAS statement explains: "We stand at the brink of a Second Nuclear Age. Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices. North Korea's recent test of a nuclear weapon, Iran's nuclear ambitions, a renewed emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons, the failure to adequately secure nuclear materials, and the continued presence of some 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are symptomatic of a failure to solve the problems posed by the most destructive technology on Earth."

The BAS statement continues: "The dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons. The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause irremediable harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival."

[Above, the Doomsday Clock, redesigned by Pentagram.]

"Doomsday Clock" Moves Two Minutes Closer To Midnight (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)

The Doomsday Clock (Pentagram)

Freshmen surveyed

                            Books are a load of crap.
                            Philip Larkin, "A Study of Reading Habits"

"The 2007 National Freshman Attitudes Report" is a survey of 97,626 first-year college students at 292 public and private two- and four-year colleges. Its overall conclusion:

The major finding of this annual national study is that today's entering undergraduates are arriving on campuses highly motivated to complete their college degrees. Yet at the same time, many admit they do not enjoy reading and bring less-than-ideal study habits to the classroom.

Here are some representative details, as given in a bar chart¹ in the report:



These numbers are, among other things, a study in irony: a "very strong desire" to continue one's education apparently need not manifest itself in "very careful notes" or "very hard" studying. I'm struck too by the number of students who aren't willing even to pretend that books have been important in their lives. They've probably had their fill of such pretending for now, having cranked out college-application essays about their passion for learning and the way in which reading [Insert Your Title Here] changed their lives.

The speaker in Philip Larkin's poem "A Study of Reading Habits" comes to his cynical conclusion about books in middle age. The average age of the respondents to the freshman survey is 20.

¹ This post marks the first -- and perhaps last -- appearance of a bar chart on this blog.

2007 National Freshman Attitudes Report .pdf download, from Noel-Levitz

[Noel-Levitz is a consulting group. From the website: "Noel-Levitz helps campuses and systems reach and exceed their goals for enrollment, marketing, and student success."]

A related post
American reading habits

A little help

[Advice for students]

When I'm reading a student's essay and see a significant writing problem, I'll often write this sentence: "If you'd like some help, just ask." Alas, many students are reluctant to do so. They often believe (as I know from talking with them) that they "can't write," that they're "no good" at writing. They make that point about themselves in harsher, cruder ways too. Such students seem resigned to getting along as well as they can.

But some students do come in for help during office hours. The help that I offer sometimes involves talking through the process of organizing ideas into an essay. Sometimes it involves matters of paragraphs — stating, developing, and keeping to a main idea without getting lost in tangents. Most often the issue is punctuation. I've found that taking just thirty or forty-five minutes to show a student how to find and fix comma splices or run-on sentences can go a long way toward solving the problem.

It's useful for students to keep in mind that a college campus is in many ways a vast, standing offer of help. That offer doesn't always come in the form of a personal invitation. But it's there. So if you're baffled by a microfilm machine or by the arrangement of the library stacks, ask a librarian. If you need to get in touch with a professor who's on sabbatical, ask a department secretary (secretaries are often the most helpful and well-informed people on campus). If you're trying to cope with an impossible roommate, talk to a resident assistant. If you're in emotional or financial difficulty that threatens to overwhelm you, make an appointment with a counselor. If you're wandering the labyrinth of a classroom building in search of a room number, ask someone who works there. And if you have questions about the work of a course, talk to your professor. There are questions that in retrospect might seem naïve (or even stupid), but it's better to ask them and get them cleared up than to let them go unanswered. I can remember as a college freshman mistaking the vast library reference room for the main stacks. I'm glad I asked for help.

Asking for help should never be a matter of asking someone else to assume responsibility that's yours. It's comically inappropriate to ask an instructor to proofread an essay for you before you turn it in (yes, that happens) or to step unannounced into a professor's office and ask for a stapler (yes, that happens too). But a legitimate request for help will likely meet with a generous and kind response.

That can be the case in the so-called real world too.

Thanks, Elaine, for suggesting this topic.

MLK

January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968

The Reverend Samuel "Billy" Kyles, a Memphis minister, recalls listening to Martin Luther King's last speech. King was leaving to have dinner at Kyles' house when he was assassinated.

Power and Prescience of King's "Mountaintop" Speech (National Public Radio)
I've Been to the Mountaintop (April 3, 1968), text and audio, from the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford University

[Photograph from Wikimedia Commons.]

Blockwriter

Here's another free tool for writing, Sadhana Ganapathiraju's Blockwriter (Windows only), inspired by Khoi Vinh's still-hypothetical Mac program of the same name.

Blockwriter offers an extremely simple (some will say limited) writing environment: no deleting by backspacing; no cut, copy, or paste; no options to change window size or font size. The delete key replaces letters with bullets. There is no option to print, but Control-S will save what you've written as a text file. If you click to close the program before saving, there's no prompt asking if you'd like to save your work. The most enticing feature, for me, is the dark screen that covers the desktop (and any other open windows) as long as Blockwriter is running.



Blockwriter is alpha software, with at least two possibly annoying problems. One: if you minimize the Blockwriter window, everything remains dark, with no way to get the program back (it's necessary to call up the Task Manager -- Control-Alt-Delete -- to close the program). Another problem (explained on the programmer's website) involves involuntary auto-scrolling.

Blockwriter might be a little extreme for ordinary writing (I'm always fixing typos on the go, so I miss the backspace key), but it might be just the ticket for someone who needs to eliminate all distractions and get something said. Blockwriter offers a writing environment that manages to be both austere and inviting.

Update, January 22, 2007: A new version of the program fixes the two problems described above. Thanks, Sadhana!

Blockwriter (requires .NET 2.0 from Microsoft)
Blockwriter (Khoi Vinh's program proposal)

Related posts
Dark Room
Jedi Concentrate