Life in colledge

$160,000

. . . so as to end up flaccid, immobile, alone on the carpet of a dorm room, shirtless, wheezing, intellectually menopausal, cutting lines on an iBook with a pre-paid Discover card, watching consecutive hours of user-generated porn, in the dark, in a hoodie, apolitical, remorseless, eating salt-and-vinegar potato chips from a bag without a napkin: like some hero, pretending to be otherwise, on a Wednesday, during discussion section.

That's the text of a sign created by Adam Delehanty, a Brown student, as a comment on life in college, or in what I call colledge, "the vast simulacrum of education that amounts to little more than buying a degree on the installment plan."

As University Diaries has pointed out, the model for this catalogue is likely Allen Ginsberg's Howl. With, I would add, this difference: Howl is a chronicle of endless, frenzied action, while Delehanty's catalogue is a chronicle of torpor.

Sign of the Times? (Inside Higher Ed)

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Homeric blindness in colledge

Campaign e-mail etiquette

I'm a strong supporter of Barack Obama, but I'm dismayed to receive a campaign e-mail message in his name with the subject line "Hey." Even worse is the subject line on a follow-up e-mail bearing Michelle Obama's name: "RE: Hey." There are at least three good reasons to abandon "Hey":

1. A message with the subject line "Hey" is easily mistaken for spam. That the "Hey" purports to come from a well-known figure makes it look, to my eyes, even more like spam.

2. The too-casual "Hey" is likely to strike younger voters as lame.

3. The too-casual "Hey" is likely to strike older voters as saucy, pert, and less than presidential. (Do older people still complain about sauciness and pertness?)

I will add that I've met both Barack and Michelle Obama, and my sense is that neither would address a reader/voter in this way.

A better choice for a subject line might be "A message from Obama '08," "A message from Barack Obama," or "A message from Michelle Obama." Not very original: novelty in subject lines is not necessarily a good thing.

David Plouffe, if you're listening, please drop the "Hey."

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Campaign e-mails (again)
Obama e-mail improvement

Barack Obama on facts
Barack Obama on race
Ideology v. values
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Typographic walking tour

Yesterday, type designer Tobias Frere-Jones led a typographic walking tour in lower Manhattan for the American Institute of Graphic Arts. A Flickr set holds some of the highlights. My favorites: Baby Ruth Candy, the Cup & Saucer Luncheonette (remember luncheonettes?), and the lethal-looking Z of Zenith Color Television.

AIGA/NY Frere-Jones Typography Walking Tour (Flickr)
Hoefler & Frere-Jones

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Helvetica
Type terms

Telephone exchange names on screen (no. 2)

[Courtland Trenholm (George Brent) prepares to pay his fare.]

Baby Face (dir. Alfred E. Green, 1933) is a pre-Code film, the story of Lily Powers (Barbara Stanwyck), a young woman whose encounter with a Nietzsche-espousing cobbler inspires her to climb (i.e., sleep) her way to the top. The film is available on a DVD compilation, Forbidden Hollywood, Volume 1.

Miss Powers' phone number is SChuyler 3-2215.

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Telephone exchange names
Telephone exchange names on screen
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All "dowdy world" posts (via Pinboard)

Three blogs from Burma

Burmese blogger Ko Htike writes:

In Burma, the only path to oppose the military junta is to demonstrate peacefully. The military junta repressed the peaceful demonstration brutally by hiding truth. The longer the military junta represses the people we are bound to loos more lives.

Burma Digest ("A magazine specializing in human rights affairs of Burma")
ko htike's prosaic collection (A Burmese blogger in London)
Saffron Revolution ("Citizens’ photographs of the monk-led protests against military dictatorship in Burma, September 2007")

[Photograph from Burma Digest]

Proust on possessions and intelligence

Now it is precisely and only those people who do not understand us whom it may be useful to impress with possessions, since our intelligence will be enough to win the regard of superior beings.

Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 2003), 159

All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

The whole world is watching

How to improve writing (no. 15 in a series)

From a sign in a Cracker Barrel parking lot (Elaine insisted that I see the inside of a Cracker Barrel):

Lock your car and remove your valuables.

If one wanted to follow this advice in earnest, it would be necessary to revise, like so:

Lock your car. Then unlock your car, remove your valuables, and lock your car again.

But there's a better way:

Remove your valuables and lock your car.

The moral of the story: think about sequence. Why these elements in this order?

This post is no. 15 in a very occasional series, "How to improve writing," dedicated to improving stray bits of published prose.

All "How to improve writing" posts (via Pinboard)

Cmaj7#4

Backing out of a parking space on this always grey and sometimes rainy day, I thought that if the day were a chord, it would be the one above, a major seventh with a raised fourth. It's a Monkish chord (as in Thelonious), and to my ear it suggests wet streets, bare trees, and the need for lamplight, even if it's only the early afternoon.

Thanks to Elaine for the chord's name and notation, and for thinking that it sounds good (because of the wide voicing).

[If you don't read music, the notes from bottom to top are C G F# B E.]

Jonathan Shay wins MacArthur grant

Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay has been awarded a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation grant. Dr. Shay works with Vietnam veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. And he's the author of Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, books that find in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey patterns of experience that shape the lives of Vietnam-era veterans with PTSD. These books will teach you more about the trauma of war, ancient and modern, than you might want to know.

Dr. Shay's hope is that centuries of effort will lead to the elimination of war as a human practice. As he writes in Odysseus in America,

The original Abolitionists understood that their work would take more than one lifetime. They passed it as a heritage to their children. In the words of the Talmud, "You are not expected to finish the job, but neither are you free to lay it down."

Psychiatrist treated veterans using Homer; work made him MacArthur fellow (Boston Globe)
Achilles in Vietnam (Amazon)
Odysseus in America (Amazon)