Paper clips

I do my best to concentrate in my office, but sometimes it's difficult. Students I've never seen will stand at my door asking if I have a paper clip. I ask a friend: can you imagine when we were students asking a professor for a paper clip?

I can. I am standing at a door. A professor selects a paper clip from a desk drawer and shoots it into the air. The clip misses and flies past me, faster than light, into the hallway of the future, where it plinks against the floor. The plink travels at the speed of plinks to the ears of some students walking in that future, on that floor. A paper clip: just what they need.

And now I can get some work done.

I dream of Inara George and Van Dyke Parks

We were in a library. Inara George was waiting in line for the water fountain. "You're Inara George!" I said. "I really like your voice!" She thanked me. Van Dyke Parks was sitting at a table working on an arrangement, writing chord symbols on unlined paper. I noticed Cm7 and Gm7. "Is it hard to do that without a piano?" I asked. "I have one," he said, and produced a cardboard keyboard. We shook hands, and I left the library.

I should've asked where they were playing. The answer: Largo at the Coronet, Los Angeles, September 13, 8:30 p.m.

Related posts
I dream of Citizen Kane
I dream of Mingus
John Ashbery and Fred Astaire on The Mike Douglas Show
Proust was the next president
Review: Inara George and Van Dyke Parks

Ed Koch endorses Obama

I was hoping in a comment yesterday that some congressional Republicans would publicly express their dismay re: McCain-Palin. That hasn't happened (yet). But former New York City mayor Ed Koch, a Democrat who endorsed George W. Bush in 2004, has just endorsed Barack Obama. From Koch's statement:

Protecting and defending the U.S. means more than defending us from foreign attacks. It includes defending the public with respect to their civil rights, civil liberties and other needs, e.g., national health insurance, the right of abortion, the continuation of Social Security, gay rights, other rights of privacy, fair progressive taxation and a host of other needs and rights. If the vice president were ever called on to lead the country, there is no question in my mind that the experience and demonstrated judgment of Joe Biden is superior to that of Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin is a plucky, exciting candidate, but when her record is examined, she fails miserably with respect to her views on the domestic issues that are so important to the people of the U.S., and to me. Frankly, it would scare me if she were to succeed John McCain in the presidency.

You can read Koch's full statement here: Koch backs Obama, calls Palin "scary" (Ben Smith's Blog, at Politico)

Details

[Advice for students, at work perhaps on the first essays of the semester.]

According to a 2006 survey developed by OfficeTeam, 84% of executives polled consider one or two typos in a résumé sufficient to remove a job-candidate from consideration. Translated into academic terms, one or two typos in a paper would equal a failing grade.

I'm not sure how much I want to trust this poll: the sample is small (perhaps only zealots chose to reply), and NO TYPOS ANY TIME might apply only in some Platonic ideal (or nightmare) of a workplace. Still, this poll is a reminder: the world beyond "school" is tough, with standards sometimes far more stringent than those of the strictest professor. Here are a few details to get right, always, when you're writing in college. They might be details that no professor or teaching assistant will ever take time to comment on. But they're important, even if no one seems to be watching.

One: Use one space after a period.

Two spaces were the norm when everyone produced monospaced text with a typewriter. Using one space is a good way to show that you’re at home in print (where additional space after a period now looks like an unnecessary gap) and in HTML (where the second tap of the spacebar doesn’t register). If you were brought up with "two spaces" and find it a difficult rule to break, use search-and-replace in your word-processor to find and eliminate extra spaces.

Two: Two hyphens equal an em dash.

On a Mac, the em dash is a cinch: just press Option-Shift-hyphen. Off a Mac, set up your word-processor to replace two hyphens (--) with a dash (—). In print, the em dash—a really useful mark of punctuation—does its work without additional spaces, as in this sentence. In HTML, proper dashes (like proper quotation marks) don't display properly on all systems and sometimes make a mess of line length and word-wrap, so double-hyphens preceded and followed by spaces -- see? -- seem to be fine.

Three: Take care with your titles.

Use the same point-size that you're using in your essay (a jumbo title looks silly). Type your title without quotation marks (unless the title includes a quotation), and don’t capitalize entire words. Capitalize articles, prepositions, and coordinating conjunctions only if they’re first or last words. If you're using a quotation, type the words just as they appear in the source, adding an initial capital letter in brackets if necessary. If you need more than one line, break your title across the lines in a logical way. Not

"To be or not to be": Hamlet's Soliloquy and Modern
Introspection

but

"To be or not to be":
Hamlet's Soliloquy and Modern Introspection

Four: Take care too with the titles of works you're referencing.

Titles of longer works that stand on their own — a long poem, for instance, or any book — should be underlined or italicized; titles of shorter works such as a short poem, a short story, or a song go in quotation marks: Homer's Odyssey, Marcel Proust's Swann’s Way, William Blake's "The Tyger," Eudora Welty's "Why Live at the P.O.," Duke Ellington's "Mood Indigo." For more complicated title questions, consult a standard source (Chicago Manual of Style, MLA Handbook, Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association). One more small but important point: novel is not a synonym for book. The Chicago Manual of Style, for instance, is not a novel. Swann's Way is.

Five: Take care with spelling proper names.

If you're writing about, say, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, keep the author's last name handy to copy and paste, or add it to your AutoCorrect entries, so that you can have it appear by typing its first few letters. You especially don't want a misspelling or typo in your professor's name or your own name. (I've seen both, many times.)

Bonus advice: Staple! Or use a paper clip if you're asked to.

Some professors and teaching assistants will not notice or correct these sorts of details. Others might notice and grumble. And with some academics, anything goes. So why bother? Because in doing so, you cultivate a habit of careful attention that will serve you well in the world beyond the classroom, where anything won't go.

"The fright begins"

Andrew Sullivan has been tracking John McCain's vice-presidential pick at The Daily Dish. From a post today:

Whatever is to come in the Palin story, the fundamental truth that will remain true is that John McCain made this vital decision in such a reckless, cursory, cynical way that his candidacy really should be over. If this is what he promises in executive decision-making, then no one can be comfortable voting for him this November.

And from a column in The Times:

If you thought a president who went to war on flawed intelligence with no plan for the aftermath was reckless, then I have news for you. You haven't seen anything yet. Imagine the kind of decision-making McCain has just demonstrated applied to life-and-death decisions with respect to Iran and Russia.

Yes, you have permission to be afraid.

I am.

Read it all:

Andrew Sullivan, The fright begins (The Times)

Sonny Rollins is 78

Our Man in Jazz turns 78 today. There's a "multimedia celebration" at his website, including a facsimile of an elegant 1962 letter to Coleman Hawkins. Happy Birthday, Sonny Rollins!

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Sonny Rollins in Illinois
Sonny Rollins on paying the rent

(Thanks, Elaine, for pointing me to this news.)

9 - 6 = 3

[Hi and Lois, September 6, 2008.]

Shouldn't that arithmetic problem be on the blackboard, where it belongs?

The levitating oval and triangle on the dresser must be a perfume bottle. But it took me several long looks to figure out the objects stuck in the door. Fishhooks? Safety pins? Darts? If you give up and would like to see my best guess, highlight the empty space following the colon: perspiration.

[Second-guessing: that could be an Ad Reinhardt, not a blackboard.]

Related posts
The cabinet of Hi and Lois
Hi and Escher?
House? (1)
House? (2)
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Vacationing with Hi and Lois

Corrections of the Times

I like the straight-facedness with which the New York Times makes corrections:

The Well column on Tuesday, about the potential dangers to children who focus early on one sport, misstated the coach-to-athlete ratio recommended by Dave Peterson, the owner of a sports center in California. Mr. Peterson suggested a coach-to-student ratio of 1 to 6 in preschool and about 1 to 8 for older athletes, not 6 to 1 and 8 to 1.

Related posts
A correction
Fit to print

Word Clock

[Click for a larger view.]

The most beautiful and functional screensaver I've ever seen: Word Clock by Simon Heys, a free download for iPhone, Mac, and Windows. [Via kottke.org.]

Five bloggers blogging

Five bloggers, posting pretty regularly, and always interesting to me:

Musical Assumptions Elaine Fine (yes, Mrs. Orange Crate Art) on music and culture.

Notes of an Anesthesioboist T. is an English major turned anesthesiologist turned oboist, writing about medicine with great compassion and insight.

Relative Esoterica Trombonology's astute, evocative commentary on film, jazz, and popular song.

Submitted For Your Perusal Matt Thomas' New York Times digests almost always point me to items I'd otherwise overlook.

(what is this?) Angela has a great eye for ephemera. From her Blogger Profile list of interests: "flea markets, memory, ruins."

And one more:

The Daily Dish Andrew Sullivan's day-by-day, hour-by-hour, and sometimes minute-by-minute commentary on culture and politics.

[On the Internets, five, like ten, is a magic number, right?]

[Update, September 9: Save for a reader-contributed photograph, there's been nothing posted to The Daily Dish since Sunday night. I hope all's well with Andrew Sullivan and that he's back soon.]