Proustian advice for students

My friend Stefan Hagemann has observed that so many students on a college campus seem to be elsewhere. As I walk around my university's campus, I understand what he means: phone conversations, text-messaging, and iPod management can take precedence over attention to one's surroundings. Even without the distractions of a gadget, the sidewalks and quads of a campus sometimes turn into nothing more than empty yardage to be traversed, as quickly as possible, on the way from one class to the next.

I like Marcel Proust's words: N'allez pas trop vite. Don't go too fast. It might not be practical to slow down when one has ten minutes to get from one end of a campus to the other. But a college student might benefit in numerous ways from slowing down and looking at and learning about her or his surroundings. Here are five suggestions:

1. Learn about a building, your residence hall perhaps, or a classroom building. How old is it? Who designed it? What style of architecture does it represent? For whom was it named? Did it serve another purpose in the past? What if anything once stood where it was built? A neighborhood? A cornfield? These kinds of questions might spark more general ones: What's the oldest building on your campus? What buildings retain significant original elements? Noticing old light fixtures, old doorknobs, old signage (painted by hand on doors and walls), and old staircases (their steps worn from generations of shoes) can help you recognize the history that you're walking through every day.

2. Give some attention to the monuments and portraits that most students (and faculty) walk past. Commemorative plaques, presidential portraits, class gifts (sometimes in the form of a fountain or gate), memorials to alumni in military service: all these can help you to recognize that as a college student, you're a member of a community that spans generations of endeavor. I remember studying, as an undergraduate, a stained-glass library window with the university seal, and realizing that students could have been looking at the same seal in the same window fifty years before.

3. Learn some legends. Stories, natural and supernatural, abound on college campuses. Learning some local lore (perhaps through clippings or microfilm in the library) might brighten (or darken!) your experience of campus life. If you're interested in historical research, looking into such stories might lead you to material for a paper, a thesis, or an article in a campus publication.

4. Browse through some old yearbooks. They're likely to be available in the library, and they make for fascinating reading. Yearbooks offer an easy and sometimes poignant way to come close to the lives of earlier generations of college life. Those students who look so young, perhaps younger than you: how old are they now? What did professors (perhaps your professors) look like twenty years ago? Where did everyone go before Starbucks and Subway? A yearbook can help you begin to think about such things.

5. Journey into the unknown. Look into an unfamiliar part of the campus, an unfamiliar building, an unfamiliar part of the library. Academic buildings, especially older ones, are filled with nooks and crannies. You might find a great, unexpected place to study by exploring an unfamiliar part of your campus.

And by that time, it might be time to get back to work.

[Proust's remark N'allez pas trop vite was recorded by British diplomat Harold Nicolson, who met Proust at a party in 1919. Proust asked Nicolson to slow down and add detail to his account of the post-war peace conference. You'll find the story in this post: Harold Nicolson meets Proust.]

Free Burma

[International Bloggers' Day for Burma, sponsored by free-burma.org.]

Thomas Merton and a snapshot

I love reading Thomas Merton, Trappist monk and writer extraordinaire. (You don't have to be Catholic or even Christian to love reading Thomas Merton.) In his journals, he is unguarded, funny, impatient, and introspective, always open to the possibility of discovery as he thinks aloud on the page. Here's Merton at the age of fifty, looking at an old photograph:

A distant relative sent an old snapshot taken when he and his wife visited Douglaston thirty years ago. It shows them with Bonnemaman [Merton's grandmother] and myself — and the back porch of the house, and the birch tree. There is Bonnemaman as I remember her — within two years of dying. And there am I: it shakes me! I am the young rugby player, the lad from Cambridge, vigorous, light, vain, alive, obviously making a joke of some sort. The thing that shakes me: I can see that that was a different body from the one I have now — one entirely young and healthy, one that did not know sickness, weakness, anguish, tension, fatigue — a body totally assured of itself and without care, perfectly relaxed, ready for enjoyment. What a change since that day! If I were wiser, I would not mind but I am not so sure I am wiser: I have been through more, I have endured a lot of things, perhaps fruitlessly. I do not entirely think that — but it is possible. What shakes me is that — I wish I were that rugby player, vain, glorious, etc. and could start over again!! And yet how absurd. What would I ever do? The other thing is that those were, no matter how you look at it, better times! There were things we had not heard of — Auschwitz, the Bomb, etc. (Yet it was all beginning, nevertheless.)

And now what kind of a body! An arthritic hip, a case of chronic dermatitis on my hands for a year and a half (so that I have to wear gloves); sinusitis, chronic ever since I came to Kentucky; lungs always showing up some funny shadow or other on x-rays (though not lately); perpetual diarrhea and a bleeding anus; most of my teeth gone; most of my hair gone; a chewed-up vertebra in my neck which causes my hands to go numb and my shoulder to ache — and for which I sometimes need traction; when you write it down it looks like something, and it is true, there is no moment any more when I am not aware that I have something wrong with me and have to be careful! What an existence! But I have grown used to it — something which thirty years ago would have been simply incredible. [December 21, 1965]

From The Journals of Thomas Merton: Volume Five, 1963-1965, ed. Robert E. Daggy (NY: HarperCollins, 1998) 325-26

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Background on Burma

Useful links, from BBC News:

Q & A: Protests in Burma
Where the world stands on Burma
Should it be Burma or Myanmar?
Profile: Aung San Suu Kyi
Burma's hardline generals
Who are Burma's monks?
Burma's 1988 protests

Tool to limit browsing

Here's a free tool to limit browsing: open the page (from the link below), decide how long you'd like to browse, and you'll see a timer counting down in your browser's title bar or, if you use tabbed browsing, in a tab. Granted, a kitchen timer works just as well, as do freestanding virtual timers (I like Minuteur and Tiny Alarm for the Mac). Having the time ticking away right in the browser though might add some incentive to finish up and get back to work.

Okay, I'm getting back to work. But reader, please feel free to continue reading Orange Crate Art. You can always try a timer sometime tomorrow.

Timer (The Insomniac Society, via Lifehacker)

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)

Related post
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."

Related posts

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.

Related posts
Telephone exchange names
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MOre TElephone EXchange NAme NOstalgia
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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]