My son showed me an ad from Discover: "Dad, isn't that the bald guy?"
Yes, it's the bald guy:
I don't mean to make light of disease and suffering. I do mean to point out the strangeness of seeing a stock image reappear in another context.
Why do I have a box of Bald Guyz Head Wipes? Because it features one of the best typos I've ever seen. Read all about it:
Laughing in the drugstore(Thanks, Ben!)
At a talk given this past April, the linguist William Labov noted in passing that girls' names ending in a long e sound have become much more prevalent in the last hundred years.
At my son's college registration today, the three students leading the group of student-workers: Ashley, Ebonee, and Kristy.
There's a wonderful, perhaps apocryphal story that people tell about Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the brilliant, prickly, and iconoclastic late senator from New York. Apparently, Moynihan was in a heated argument with one of his colleagues over an issue, and the other senator, sensing he was on the losing side of the argument, blurted out, "Well, you may disagree with me, Pat, but I'm entitled to my own opinion." To which Moynihan frostily replied, "You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts."
Moynihan's assertion no longer holds. We have no authoritative figure, no Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow whom we all listen to and trust to sort out contradictory claims. Instead, the media is splintered into a thousand fragments, each with its own version of reality, each claiming the loyalty of a splintered nation. Depending on your viewing preferences, global climate change is or is not dangerously accelerating; the budget deficit is going down or going up. . . .
But sometimes there are more accurate or less accurate answers; sometimes there are facts that cannot be spun, just as an argument about whether it's raining can usually be settled by stepping outside. The absence of even rough agreement on the facts puts every opinion on equal footing and therefore eliminates the basis for thoughtful compromise. It rewards not those who are right, but those -- like the White House press office -- who can make their arguments most loudly, most frequently, most obstinately, and with the best backdrop.
Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Crown, 2006), 126-27
Related posts
Barack Obama on race
Ideology v. values
Yes, the iPhone is a thing of beauty. But what strikes me about this Apple commercial (also, yes, a thing of beauty) is its depiction of the iPhone as a tool of continuous partial attention. Watch a movie clip, think calamari, search a map for seafood restaurants, call the closest one. Really just a chic variation on Homer Simpson's "Mmm, donuts."
What about the movie?
What movie?
You can see all three commercials via the link:
iPhone commercials (Apple)
Paul McCartney doesn't read or write music. Neither, he says, did John Lennon:
"Someone once told us that the Egyptian pharaohs couldn't read or write -- they had scribes to put down their thoughts. So John and I used to say, 'We're like the pharaohs!'''
From "When I'm Sixty-Four," a profile of Paul McCartney by John Colapinto (New Yorker, June 4, 2007)
Choose one:
1. If you're visiting from Joshua Sowin's website, Fire and Knowledge, welcome to Orange Crate Art. You might like browsing via one or more of the Pinboard categories in the sidebar. Or you might enjoy these posts:
The inverse power of praise (On reading and difficulty)2. If you're a regular or occasional reader of Orange Crate Art, you might want to look at Michael Leddy on Reading, an interview that I just did with Josh for his Reading Interviews series.
Richard Rorty on the value of literature
Zadie Smith on reading
George Steiner on reading
Mark Edmundson tells it like it is (Excerpt from Why Read?)
Words, mere words (Another excerpt from Why Read?)
The narrator brings us into present time at the end of Swann's Way, when he recounts taking a walk "this year" in the Bois de Boulogne, where he used to see Mme. Swann, looking "like a queen." From the novel's final paragraph:
Nature was resuming its rule over the Bois, from which the idea that it was the Elysian Garden of Woman had vanished; above the artificial mill the real sky was gray; the wind wrinkled the Grand Lac with little wavelets, like a real lake; large birds swiftly crossed the Bois, like a real wood, and uttering sharp cries alighted one after another in the tall oaks under their druidical crowns and with a Dodonean majesty seemed to proclaim the inhuman emptiness of the disused forest, and helped me better understand what a contradiction it is to search in reality for memory's pictures, which would never have the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from not being perceived by the senses. The reality I had known no longer existed.[A note glosses Dodonean: "In Dodona, in Epirus, the priests of Zeus' sanctuary gave oracles by interpreting the sound of the wind in the sacred oaks." (463)]
From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 443-44
All Proust posts (Pinboard)
My daughter, glancing at Steve Ettlinger's Twinkie, Deconstructed (2007) in the library, pronounced it "Unreadable." She may be right. The subtitle alone is off-putting:
My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated into What America EatsPublishers rely upon ever-lengthening subtitles to press (yes, press) content into the reader's face. But there's a clumsy dissonance between the terse, elegant title (which assumes at least a pop-culture grasp of deconstruction) and the self-promoting, astonished, grandiose tone of what follows: My Journey; Yes, Mined; What America Eats. (What America will soon be eating, at least in my house, is an Amy's California Burger.)
One could be forgiven for thinking that all one might have to do to find out what goes into a Hostess® Twinkies® "Golden Sponge Cake with Creamy Filling" is to simply ask the company that makes them. But it is not that simple."One could be forgiven": A cliché, and one that makes no sense if the reader has read the book's subtitle.
In fact, Interstate Bakeries Corporation, one of the country's largest wholesale bakeries, which owns Hostess®, Drake's® Cakes (Yodels, Devil Dogs, Yankee Doodles, and Ring Dings), Wonder® Bread, Home Pride®, Dolly Madison Bakery®, Butternut®, Merita®, and Cotton's® Holsum, among other familiar brands, was initially receptive to my requests for tours and interviews. However, after about twenty-four hours of contemplation, the company declined via phone, citing its preference to help writers who are merely reminiscing about their sweet childhood memories.
One might think that finding out what goes into Hostess® Twinkies® would require no more than asking the company that makes them. But it was not that simple.Looking closely at these sentences reminds me that with contemporary non-fiction, it's often smart to try (via the library), not buy.
Interstate Bakeries Corporation, one of the country's largest wholesale bakeries, was initially receptive to my requests for tours and interviews. But one day after I visited IBC headquarters, a company representative called me to decline, citing the company's preference to help writers who reminisce about childhood foods.
All "How to improve writing" posts (Pinboard)
Twinkie, Deconstructed (the website for the book)
abjureThe start of a list: 100 words that "every high school graduate should know." To the extent that such lists serve as models for writers, they're dangerous stuff. ("I would not kowtow to her loquacious acumen" -- that's the kind of sentence that can result.) To the extent that such lists make for better readers, they're helpful.
abrogate
abstemious
acumen
antebellum
auspicious
100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know (Houghton Mifflin)
