Block that transition

"These are tough times not only for orangutans but for humans."

Public Radio International's The World this afternoon, segueing from endangered orangutans to AC/DC's new album, a "veritable banana for you if you're starving for good news."

. [dot]

Would you like a book about the dot? Would I? I plan to find out (but via the library!):

Despite the humble origins of its name (Anglo Saxon for "the speck at the head of a boil"), the dot has been one of the most versatile players in the history of written communication, to the point that it has become virtually indispensable. Now, in On the Dot, Alexander and Nicholas Humez offer a wide ranging, entertaining account of this much overlooked and minuscule linguistic sign.

The Humez brothers shed light on the dot in all its various forms. As a mark of punctuation, they show, it plays many roles — as sentence stopper, a constituent of the colon (a clause stopper), and the ellipsis (dot dot dot). In musical notation, it denotes "and a half." In computerese, it has several different functions (as in dot com, the marker between a file name and its extension, and in some slightly more arcane uses in programming languages). The dot also plays a number of roles in mathematics, including the notation of world currency (such as dollars dot cents), in Morse code (dots and dashes), and in the raised dots of Braille. And as the authors connect all these dots, they take readers on an engaging tour of the highways and byways of language, ranging from the history of the question mark and its lesser known offshoots the point d'ironie and the interrobang, to acronyms and backronyms, power point bullets and asterisks, emoticons and the "at-sign."

If you're wondering, Wikipedia explains the irony mark, the interrobang, and backronyms.

Mad Men and Frank O'Hara (not again)

What a tease: "Meditations in an Emergency," tonight's episode of Mad Men, made no reference to Frank O'Hara's poetry. Instead, O'Hara's title served as a nothing more than a metaphor for the anxieties of the Cuban Missile Crisis. (The emergency of O'Hara's 1954 poem seems to be love, or life itself.)

I wonder whether the prominent use of O'Hara's "Mayakovsky" in the season's first episode ("For Those Who Think Young") was designed to elicit a lit crit sort of interest in the series. If so, it worked, at least on me. I watched every episode, followed every stilted conversation, often wanting to tell these people to turn some lights on. (I know, the show is "dark.")

Here's a brief passage from Frank O'Hara's prose-poem "Meditations in an Emergency," presenting the poet as sunny anti-pastoralist:

One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.

Related posts
Frank O'Hara and Mad Men
Frank O'Hara and Mad Men again

"Uncle Barney Frank"

At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall is wondering why Sarah Palin is referring to Barney Frank as "Uncle Barney Frank." The context:

McCain's running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, said Saturday that an Obama presidency combined with Democratic control of Congress would lead to bigger government.

"Now they do this in other countries where the people are not free — government as part of the family, taking care of us, making decisions for us," she said during a rally in Sioux City, Iowa. "I don't know what to think of having in my family Uncle Barney Frank or others to make decisions for me."

My guess is that this odd bit of phrasing is a barely veiled swipe at sexual orientation. If the gummint is going to be our family, Frank would be an uncle, our gay uncle. It would seem beyond Palin's version of reality to imagine a gay man as a father or grandfather.

How low can they go? I don't think we've found out.

*

A further thought, two hours later: perhaps uncle is meant to suggest "Uncle Joe," Joseph Stalin, or "Uncle Ho," Ho Chi Minh.

Interstice

[Hi and Lois, October 25, 2008.]

I sometimes wonder whether the panels of Hi and Lois strips are a matter of piecework. (I've read that eight people "animate" the strip, whatever that means.) Composition by piecework is a plausible explanation of the odd continuity problems that vex the Flagstons, as in today's strip.

Or could it be that Hi and Lois is asking us to think about what happens in the strip's interstice? Are we to understand that while Hi ties, Lois makes the bed, rearranges the furniture, and adds depth to the headboard?

Nah, I didn't really think so either.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

Oh, Lee—wan—do!

Elaine found and forwarded a link to an extraordinary Google Books find: several volumes of old Boston Symphony Orchestra programs. This ad for Lewandos, from the 1917–1918 season, spoke to me right away:

Yes, that's an illustration of a cat hanging out chicks to dry. (Yikes.) But what interested me is a Duke Ellington connection:

"[E]verything we used to do in the old days had a picture. We'd be riding along and see a name on a sign. We used to spend a lot of time up in New England, around Boston, and we'd see this sign, 'LEWANDO CLEANERS,' and every time we saw it we'd start singing:

'Oh, Lee—wan—do!'

Out of that came 'East St. Louis Toodle-oo.' Probably it would have gone better if we had called it 'Lewando' and got some advertising money from it."

Duke Ellington, quoted in Stanley Dance's The World of Duke Ellington (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970)

You can hear one of the first recordings of "East St. Louis Toodle-oo" on YouTube. The Boston Globe reported the disappearance of the last Lewandos in 2002.

Goodbye, local paper

I live in a town where people take — not subscribe to — the local newspaper. But after twenty-five years, I can no longer take it.

Our paper has never been very good, but it was until recently at least dependably mediocre. When I first began taking the paper, it was something of a print version of UHF television: a reliable source of strange and fleeting entertainments. Colorful personalities shared the streams of their consciousness in weekly columns, several of which became the stuff of tipsy reading with friends on New Year's Eve. The religion page featured helpful explanations of why all but a few readers would be going to hell. The paper was never big on reporting, investigative or otherwise: when a local state employee constructed a small palace of nepotism at taxpayers' expense, it was the college paper that told the story, in articles by an ace student-journalist (who has since established a national reputation). The local paper followed that student's lead, usually publishing the scandal's latest developments a day later. I long ago learned not to rely upon the local paper for much in the way of reporting on local reality.

In the past year or so though, our paper has begun a sharp and almost certainly irreversible decline. There is less local reporting than ever, with whole pages turning into press releases ("Chiropractor Honored") and photographs of people holding checks ("Wal-Mart Makes Donation"). With early voting having begun in Illinois, the paper has offered not one article detailing the positions of candidates in local elections. Doonesbury and Mallard Fillmore have disappeared from the editorial page, so that the paper's writers must digress and meander and pad to get the columns that they are writing to have enough words and be long enough to reach the bottom of the page and not leave empty space with nothing to fill it, which would be a problem and not look good. Photographs and headlines have grown larger, and the comics page has become a travesty of layout, with some strips arbitrarily enlarged, as the paper pays for fewer and fewer comics. Frequent full-page displays proclaiming the relevance and well-being of newspapers are reminders that there is no there there — no articles, no advertising.

And faced with declining revenue, our paper seems to have made a play for what it imagines to be its base, shading its selection of Associated Press articles with increasing obviousness. Barack Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic convention received no coverage, while Sarah Palin's acceptance speech at the Republican convention received a front-page article, followed by a long personality piece with an extra-large photo of the governor, her husband, and their youngest child. This selective representation of reality has continued: a reader who depends on the paper alone for news would not know about John McCain's melodramatic campaign suspension. Nor would that reader know that polls of independent voters have given all three debates to Barack Obama. In August, the publisher gave press credentials to a non-journalist friend, who went to the Democratic convention to provide a Republican perspective on events. And still, no coverage of Obama's acceptance speech, or of much else from the convention. (In case it doesn't go without saying: there was no paper-sponsored Democratic observer at the Republican convention. And a friendship with a non-journalist offering a "Republican perspective" is exactly what the publisher acknowledged in a brief printed statement — to avoid, he said, any accusation of bias.)

But the worst move the paper has made is to "go interactive," with articles, editorials, and letters to the editor now online as bait to draw comments (pseudonymous or otherwise) and thus increase page hits and ad revenue. The result is ugly, very ugly, with anonymous attacks (from all quarters), name-calling (from all quarters), and thinly disguised displays of racism. While the paper claims to moderate comments, there's little evidence that it does so. One bright spot, sort of: with local news, one can often learn more from comments (what used to be called "town-talk") than from the articles to which they're appended.

So after twenty-three years, I'm out. I'll read obituaries and reports on City Council meetings online and follow all other usual sources for news and analysis (and comics). Goodbye, local paper.

Andy, Henry, Ron

Three for Barack Obama.

"The new narrative"

The upcoming New York Times Magazine story on the everchanging narrative of the McCain campaign is now online. An excerpt:

The new narrative — the Team of Mavericks coming to lay waste the Beltway power alleys — now depended on a fairly inexperienced Alaska politician. The following night, after McCain's speech brought the convention to a close, one of the campaign's senior advisers stayed up late at the Hilton bar savoring the triumphant narrative arc. I asked him a rather basic question: "Leaving aside her actual experience, do you know how informed Governor Palin is about the issues of the day?"

The senior adviser thought for a moment. Then he looked up from his beer. "No," he said quietly. "I don’t know."

The Making (and Remaking) of McCain (New York Times)

Trading places

I've asked my freshman composition students to read the 2007 National Endowment for the Arts report To Read or Not to Read, which is filled with thought-provoking bits of detail about the fate of reading in contemporary American culture. Here's an example, presented in the report without explication (the analysis that follows is mine):

[Click for a larger view.]

Notice how categories trade places over eleven years. The reading level of the 1992 high-school graduate (268) becomes that of the 2003 high-school graduate who has completed a post-high-school course of study (268). The reading level of the 1992 student with a two-year degree (306) becomes roughly that of the 2003 student with a four-year degree (314). And the reading level of the 1992 college graduate (325) is virtually the same as that of the 2003 college graduate who's had some graduate study (327).

These numbers suggest that acquiring genuine readerly competence is increasing a do-it-yourself matter: simply going to school, whether it's high school or college, guarantees less and less. For the prose literacy test cited above, proficiency equals a score of 340 or higher (out of 500). Thus by 2003, even students with graduate study were falling short as proficient readers.

That's why I'm asking my comp students to read words, words, words (and the occasional chart).