Jeremy Wagstaff on Burma

From Jakarta, Jeremy Wagstaff writes about technology for the Wall Street Journal:

I would love to think that technology could somehow pry open a regime whether it pulls the plug or not. But Burma has, in recent weeks and in recent years, actually shown the opposite: that it's quite possible to seal a country off and to commit whatever atrocities you like and no amount of technology can prevent it.

By holding the recent uprising as an example of citizen journalism and a turning point in the age of telecommunications we not only risk misunderstanding its true lesson, but we also risk playing down the real story here: the individual bravery and longtime suffering of the Burmese people who had, for a few heady days, a flickering of hope that their nightmare was over.

Read it all:

The Real, Sad Lesson of Burma 2007 (Loose Wire Blog)

Type terms

Is there a difference between a font and a typeface? Between a type designer and a typographer? Answers here:

Ask Hoefler & Frere-Jones (typography.com)

Related posts
Helvetica
Typographic walking tour (Flickr)

Helvetica

[Helvetica film poster.]

A chance I didn't think I'd have: I got to see the documentary film Helvetica (2007) last night, a one-time screening at a nearby community college. Helvetica is of course the ubiquitous modern typeface. Helvetica a wonderful film: a chance to hear type designers talk about their work, their ideas of beauty, the history of post-WW2 type design, and Helvetica itself (some love it; some loathe it). Many shots of workspaces and work, with pencils, erasers, coffee cups, and Macs. (Not a single Windows machine in the film.)

Coming out of the theater, I saw Helvetica everywhere: signs on walls, announcements on a television monitor. Helvetica: we're soaking in it.

My favorite moments in the film: Matthew Carter's explanation of how he begins thinking through a type design, Michael Bierut's commentaries on corporate letterheads and Coca-Cola ads, and Erik Spiekermann's confession:

I'm obviously a typomaniac, which is an incurable if not mortal disease. I can't explain it; I just like looking at type. I just get totally out of it. They are my friends, you know. Other people look at bottles of wine or whatever, or, you know, girls' bottoms. I get kicks out of looking at type. It's a little worrying, I must admit. It's a very nerdish thing to do.

The film's site has several short clips, including one with Erik Spiekermann. The DVD arrives on November 6.

Helvetica (A documentary film by Gary Hustwit)

Related posts
Font haiku : Type terms : Typographic walking tour

["We're soaking in it": Readers of a certain age will recognize a reference to "You're soaking in it," from television commercials for Palmolive Dishwashing Liquid.]

24/7, 25/8

"24/7" and its noisier sibling "24/7/365" bother me. When used to describe individual activity, these expressions are ludicrous hyperbole: "24/7, I never slow down"; "I am thinking about my work 24/7/365." "24/7" may well apply to services that are always available, but in those cases, the dowdier "around the clock" might serve as well. "Around the clock" has the added advantage of placing us in an analog reality, governed by a 12-hour timekeeper.

There's worse though than "24/7." A couple of days ago, with CNN playing in the background, I heard someone refer to "25/8." More bigger! "25/8" doesn't seem to be in widespread use yet: only one of Google's first ten results is relevant, for a computer repair company with the awkward name "onCALL 25/8."

But what if one wants to press further? If one lives 25/8, what number ought to replace 365? If an ordinary person's year is made of 52 seven-day weeks and an extra day, the year of the eight-days-a-week achiever might be calculated like so: 52 × 8 = 416 days. Add an extra day, and one is busy 25/8/417. But since the 25/8 person's days and weeks are already longer than those of ordinary people, more elaborate calculations might be appropriate: 25 × 8 = 200 hours (one week). 52 × 200 = 10,400 hours in a year. Add one more day: 10,425 hours. And to translate those hours into ordinary days: 10,425 ÷ 24 = 434.375. So there it is.

I am thinking about stuff for my blog 25/8/434.375.

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.]