How to improve writing (no. 16 in a series)

I thought the error in the following caption might be the work of my local paper, but no — the Associated Press gets the blame:

These undated handout artist renderings provided by the U.S. Mint shows four of the designs under consideration to replace the "tails" side of the Abraham Lincoln penny.

Yipes: renderings (plural) show (plural). Once the error in subject-verb agreement disappears, the sentence's awkward start and clutter become more obvious: what are "handout artist renderings"? And is it necessary to say that renderings show designs? Much simpler:

Four proposed designs to replace the "tails" side of the Lincoln penny. Source: U.S. Mint.

Note that the revision also manages to sound like a photo caption.

You can find the AP caption, error included, at many online news outlets. Here's the Yahoo News version. At MSNBC, the words "undated handout" are gone.

This post is no. 16 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)

Red-headed woman with reporter's notebook

[Lil Andrews (Jean Harlow) takes dictation.]

Red-Headed Woman (dir. Jack Conway, 1932) is another pre-Code film. The plot is similar to that of Baby Face: an enterprising woman (here without guidance from a Nietzsche-espousing cobbler) sleeps her way to the top in Renwood, Ohio, and then advances to points east. The screenplay is by Anita Loos, and it is said to tone down the serious elements of an earlier draft (by F. Scott Fitzgerald, from a novel by Katherine Brush). The result is engaging and odd, with Jean Harlow's Lil (Lillian Andrews, aka "Red") pursuing Chester Morris's William "Bill" Legendre, Jr., in a light sex comedy that nonetheless prefigures the stalking of Fatal Attraction.

In the above still, Lil has just begun the chase, having brought her ailing boss's mail to his house, hoping that she'll be asked to stay and "take dictation." That's one enormous stationery item Lil has brought with her. The words REPORTER'S NOTE BOOK are readable on the cover. I've flipped a cropped image from another still to make the words easier to see. Could someone stop thinking about Jean Harlow and try to read the rest?



Like Baby Face, Red-Headed Woman is available (no pun intended) on a DVD compilation, Forbidden Hollywood, Volume 1.

All "dowdy world" posts (via Pinboard)

Other notebook sightings
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
Moleskine sighting (in Extras)
Notebook sighting in Pickpocket
Pocket notebook sighting (in Diary of a Country Priest)
Pocket notebook sightings in Rififi

(Welcome, Moleskinerie readers!)

Early writing

From the family archives:

[Crayon on paper, undated.]

Many of these early works have the date and the name of the maker added in light pencil. Here it's a matter of guesswork. Elaine and I both think that Rachel wrote the first three names and then had Ben write his name at the bottom. Rachel and Ben now write papers on Frank O'Hara poems and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times.

And now I'm thinking of a line from Frank O'Hara's "Ode (to Joseph LeSueur) on the Arrow That Flieth by Day": "the unrecapturable nostalgia for nostalgia."

Related posts
Blue crayon (A packing list for an imaginary camping trip)
Happy birthday, Ben! (A family portrait)

News from 1984

The New Light of Myanmar is a government-owned newspaper, published by the Ministry of Information in the country formerly known as Burma. Yes, the above page is dated September 28, 2007. But at the Ministry of Information in "the peaceful and stable country," it's 1984.

I'll let the text speak for itself. One note though: if you click for the larger version, be sure to read the last paragraph, concerning Japanese journalist Kenji Nagai, shot at point-blank range. Note the passive voice: he was killed. But by whom?

The New Light of Myanamar (.pdfs for download)
The New Light of Myanmar (Wikipedia)
Video shows Japanese journalist "being shot deliberately" (Times Online) (Graphic content)
"Politics and the English Language" (George Orwell's essay)

Harold Nicolson meets Proust

Here's Harold Nicolson's account of meeting Proust (the story behind "N'allez pas trop vite"). Nicolson is describing the work of the Paris Peace Conference:

Proust is white, unshaven, grubby, slip-faced. He puts his fur coat on afterwards and sits hunched there in white kid gloves. Two cups of black coffee he has, with chunks of sugar. Yet in his talk there is no affectation. He asks me questions. Will I please tell him how the Committees work? I say, "Well, we generally meet at 10.0, there are secretaries behind. . . ." "Mais non, mais non, vouz allez trop vite. Recommencez. Vous prenez la voiture de la Délégation. Vous descendez au Quai d'Orsay. Vous montex l'escalier. Vous entrez dans la Salle. Et alors? Précisez, mon cher, précisez." So I tell him everything. The sham cordiality of it all : the handshakes : the maps : the rustle of papers : the tea in the next room : the macaroons. He listens enthralled, interrupting from time to time — "Mais précisez, mon cher monsieur, n'allez pas trop vite." [March 2, 1919]

From Peacemaking, 1919 (1933)

All Proust posts (via Pinboard)
Harold Nicolson (Wikipedia)

(Thanks, Google Book Search!)

[This post is the 1000th post to Orange Crate Art.]

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

Related posts
Movie recommendation: Into Great Silence
New year's resolutions
Odes to autumn
To educe

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)