Slow down and read

When it comes to reading, lifehacking tends to focus on speed — more words, fewer minutes. That might be fine if reading is understood as a matter of moving information with maximum efficiency from the page to the brain. The faster the connection, so to speak, the better.

But there are other kinds of reading. No one can race through a poem by Emily Dickinson or a short story by James Joyce and take away very much from the experience. Therein lies a problem for students reading literary works. On the one hand, there's the impulse to get through an assignment, to knock off a poem or story and move on to another task. On the other hand, there's the poem or story, the kind of text that invites and rewards patient attention.

My advice: slow down. Here's what the poet Ezra Pound says about reading literature: "no reader ever read anything the first time he saw it." Or consider this exchange between Oprah Winfrey and the novelist Toni Morrison: "Do people tell you they have to keep going over the words sometimes?" "That, my dear, is called reading." Or as the poet William Carlos Williams says in the poem "January Morning,"

I wanted to write a poem
that you would understand.
For what good is it to me
if you can't understand it?
                       But you got to try hard —

And here's the novelist Zadie Smith, in an interview, likening the reader of literature to a musician learning a piece of music,

an amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don't know, who they probably couldn't comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That's the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It's an old moral, but it's completely true.

Taking the time to slow down — marking a passage, pondering a detail, looking up a word, writing down a question, changing your mind, looking at the page in a way that allows you to begin to notice what's there — might change, for keeps, your idea of what it means to read literature. Slowing down will also help you begin to understand how it is that some people seem to see so much in what they're reading. They know that reading well sometimes means taking your time.

Rorty on Proust

The late Richard Rorty had some wonderful things to say about Proust. My hunch is that Rorty too would be skeptical about the promises of a Proust tour. The novel's the thing, not the Guermantes way, not Combray, not Balbec:

Proust succeeded because he had no public ambitions — no reason to believe that the sound of the name "Guermantes" would mean anything to anybody but his narrator. If that same name does in fact have resonance for lots of people nowadays, that is just because reading Proust's novel happens to have become, for those people, the same sort of thing which the walk à côté de Guermantes happened to become for Marcel — an experience which they need to redescribe, and thus to mesh with other experiences, if they are to succeed in their projects of self-creation.

From Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 118

A related post
Richard Rorty on the value of literature

All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

Pages (iWork '08): How to make a drop capital

When I switched from Windows XP to Mac OS X, I decided not to install Microsoft Office on my new computer. I chose instead to go with Apple's sleek and beautiful iWork. iWork is not an Office-clone or Office-killer; it's a set of three elegantly-designed programs: Pages, for word-processing and document design; Keynote, for presentations; and Numbers, for spreadsheets. I spend most of my time in Pages and plan to keep my gradebook in Numbers. I am happy.

One disappointment though: Pages has no option for creating an initial, aka a drop capital or "drop cap." That omission seems surprising in a program that offers so many tools for page layout. It's relatively easy though to make drop caps in Pages '08 (or '06). Once you have some text to work with, here's what to do:

1. From the Pages toolbar or from Insert, choose Text Box.

2. Replace the words "Type to enter text" with the capital letter of your choice.

3. Highlight the letter that you've added and choose an appropriate font and size. Doing so will probably involve some trial and error.

4. Left-click outside and then inside the text box to show its borders.

5. Resize the text box. Here too, expect some trial and error.

6. With the borders of the text box still showing, open the Inspector (from the Pages toolbar or from View > Inspector) and choose Wrap Inspector, the third icon from the left.

7. For Object Placement, select "Inline (moves with text)."

8. Check "Object causes wrap" and select the icon on the far left.

9. For Text Fit, select the icon on the left. Change the Extra Space setting to 0. (You might experiment later.)

10. Now position the text box in your document. Depending upon the letter (or numeral) you're dropping in, you might need to tinker by changing Object Placement to Floating and moving your text box (then switching back to Inline). Or you might need to change the Extra Space setting. Getting things right here may prove tedious. But I think that the drop-cap effect is worth the effort.

Drop numerals look great too. I like to use them in materials for my students. Here's an example:



[Line spacing: 1.1. Text: 9 pt Lucida Sans. Drop-cap numeral: 36 pt Lucida Sans. Text box: .29 x .51. Extra space: 8 pt.]

On the radio: Memory and Forgetting

A one-hour broadcast, from the series Radio Lab. Includes a segment with Jonah Lehrer, author of the forthcoming Proust Was a Neuroscientist.

Listen online:

Memory and Forgetting (Radio Lab, WNYC Radio)

Visiting balloons

I discovered these balloons in the backyard this morning. Was someone trying to brighten our empty nest? No.

I discovered these balloons in the backyard this morning. Was someone trying to brighten our empty nest? No.

The card attached was addressed to the "Bus Garage Office": "Thanks for another smooth start." As I learned when I called the flowershop, these balloons were delivered yesterday.

The schoolbus company has its office on the outskirts of town. These balloons must have traveled about four miles to show up in our backyard.

Nest to let

Elaine has posted a photograph.

I remembered yesterday an exchange that took place nineteen summers ago. I was at a gathering for participants in an NEH seminar and their families. As my daughter Rachel, then one-and-a-half, toddled around, a fellow seminar member said to me, "They're such a nuisance, aren't they?"

No, they aren't.

Question Garners Local Man Coupons

[That's how the local newspaper might put it.]

The so-called lemonade that I wrote about about last week has continued to occupy my thought process. So I e-mailed Supervalu to ask (politely) how the words "old-fashioned recipe" apply to the product in question, a blend of water, chemicals, and dye. Days went by without a reply, so I tried again and was told that my comments had been forwarded to the manufacturer and that I could expect a reply soon. In today's mail, a polite non-answer ("Your comments are being forwarded to Our Own Brands Product Developers for their consideration"), along with $4 in coupons.

These coupons may be applied to products from an extended family of store brands: Flavorite, Foodland, Shoppers Value, Super Chill, Yotastic (there's a snappy name for yogurt), and many more. Super Chill Cola, a decent cola in three-liter bottles, and a sentimental family favorite, seems to promise the most bang for the buck. (Or four bucks.)

Related post
Lemonade and lies

On the radio

"The staff at Owens Funeral Home invites you to join them . . ."

Yipes!

". . . in supporting public radio."

Whew.

Sensosketch challenge

My son Ben asked for a family game of Cranium before heading off to college. The picture to the left comes from that game, from a Sensosketch challenge, requiring the player to draw with eyes closed.

Ben drew, no peeking allowed. His sister Rachel had the answer at once. Ben embellished the picture a bit in the post-game hubbub.

The score of the game: Kids: 1, Parents: 0. (Humph.)

What answer was Ben's picture meant to elicit?

Fifty — no, make that one-hundred bonus points and a free extra turn for the first commenter to get it.

The hint accompanying this Cranium challenge: band.

Max Roach (1924-2007)

Max Roach, a founder of modern jazz who rewrote the rules of drumming in the 1940's and spent the rest of his career breaking musical barriers and defying listeners' expectations, died early today in Manhattan. He was 83. . . .

Over the years he challenged both his audiences and himself by working not just with standard jazz instrumentation, and not just in traditional jazz venues, but in a wide variety of contexts, some of them well beyond the confines of jazz as that word is generally understood. . . .

Mr. Roach explained his philosophy to The New York Times in 1990: "You can't write the same book twice. Though I've been in historic musical situations, I can't go back and do that again. And though I run into artistic crises, they keep my life interesting."

Max Roach, a Founder of Modern Jazz, Dies at 83 (New York Times)

If you've never heard Max Roach, try Money Jungle, with Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus.