Microsoft's Songsmith

Microsoft's Songsmith is real, and it's being marketed as a tool for "novices and experienced songwriters." But you'd never know it from this video (also real).

Note that the child in the opening scene is using a Macbook Pro. A sticker covers the Apple logo.

My favorite moment: "Microsoft, huh? So it's pretty easy to use?"

[Update: The link above is now a dud, as Microsoft has removed this video (titled "Everyone Has a Song Inside") from Songsmith's front page. You can still find the video on this Microsoft page, with other Songsmith videos and audio clips. Or watch here, on YouTube.]

Dickens on the Kindle

Christine Rosen tried Nicholas Nickleby on the Kindle:

Although mildly disorienting at first, I quickly adjusted to the Kindle’s screen and mastered the scroll and page-turn buttons. Nevertheless, my eyes were restless and jumped around as they do when I try to read for a sustained time on the computer. Distractions abounded. I looked up Dickens on Wikipedia, then jumped straight down the Internet rabbit hole following a link about a Dickens short story, “Mugby Junction.” Twenty minutes later I still hadn’t returned to my reading of Nickleby on the Kindle. . . .

We are so eager to explore what these new devices do — particularly what they do better than the printed book — that we ignore the more rudimentary but important human questions: the tactile pleasures of the printed page versus the screen; the new risks of distraction posed by a device with a wireless Internet connection; the difference between reading a book in two-page spreads and reading a story on one flashing screen-display after another. Kindle and other e-readers are marvelous technologies of convenience, but they are no replacement for the book.

People of the Screen (The New Atlantis)

Good news, bad news about reading

The good news:

After years of bemoaning the decline of a literary culture in the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts says in a report that it now believes a quarter-century of precipitous decline in fiction reading has reversed.

And the bad:

At the same time the survey found that the proportion of adults who said they had read any kind of a book, fiction or nonfiction, that was not required for work or school actually declined slightly since 2002, to 54.3 percent from 56.6 percent.

Fiction Reading Increases for Adults (New York Times)

Reading don't pay

Grandfather Smallweed sits all day. Does he do anything while? Mr George wonders:

"And don't you occupy yourself at all?"

"I watch the fire — and the boiling and the roasting —"

"When there is any," says Mr George, with great expression.

"Just so. When there is any."

"Don't you read or get read to?"

The old man shakes his head with sharp sly triumph. "No, no. We have never been readers in our family. It don't pay. Stuff. Idleness. Folly. No, no!"

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)

Other Bleak House posts
At Peffer and Snagsby's
"It must be a strange state"

Lear cover-up

Though it will still feature the eye-gouging of Gloucester, the poisoning of Regan and other assorted tragic fates that befall its characters, the PBS broadcast of "King Lear" will avoid offense to delicate sensibilities by hiding the nudity in a scene with Ian McKellen, who plays the title role.

Every Inch a King, But No Nudity in PBS's "Lear" (New York Times)

The writer, Dave Itzkoff, means for that sentence (and the headline) to amuse the reader, no?

1984 Macintosh review

Remember that $2,495 buys you only the box, the keyboard and the mouse. You'll need a printer ($595) and software. I strongly suspect you'll also need a second disk drive ($495), because the built-in 3 1/2-inch Sony drive holds only 400K of memory, much of which is taken up by operating software. And you really ought to have a modem (yet another $495). That puts the price up to $4,000 without software. At that, though, the Macintosh is competitive with the IBM PC, and it's a lot more powerful. If you can accept the price, you'll see what performance mean[s] to the computer pros.

From Clifford Barney, "Not a Toy but the Real Thing," a 1984 review of "Apple Computer's new Macintosh," available from the archives of The Whole Earth Catalog, now online.

[$595 for a printer? I remember paying about that much for an Apple ImageWriter II in 1985.]

Blagojevich and "Ulysses"

Rod Blagojevich today:

"And so I'll leave you with this poem by Tennyson, which goes like this:

                                                          tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we
     are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

Somehow I don't think that these lines, from Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Ulysses," are meant to suggest that Blagojevich is ceding power to Telemachus and departing Ithaca. Drat. What must appeal to the gov in these lines is not the idea of setting out, once more, with diminished powers, but that final not to yield (i.e., resign) — thus turning the political life of our beautiful state into what promises to be a long-running farce.

Odysseus/Ulysses is in some ways a good model for Blagojevich: reckless, thieving, vain. Think too of Ulysses Everett McGill in O Brother, Where Art Thou?: "My hair!"



[I've quoted a transcript of Blagojevich's remarks that botches Tennyson's lines. I haven't heard the governor's statement and don't know if the botches are his. I've presented the lines accurately above.]

[Update: Blagojevich's botches: "the strength," "by fate." Watch here.]

"Writing in the Age of Distraction"

Cory Doctorow has six suggestions for writing amid the distractions of our time. I especially like this one:

Researching isn't writing and vice-versa. When you come to a factual matter that you could google in a matter of seconds, don't. . . . Instead, do what journalists do: type "TK" where your fact should go, as in "The Brooklyn bridge, all TK feet of it, sailed into the air like a kite." "TK" appears in very few English words (the one I get tripped up on is "Atkins") so a quick search through your document for "TK" will tell you whether you have any fact-checking to do afterwards.

Read it all:

Writing in the Age of Distraction (Locus Online, via Boing Boing)

Involuntary memory in Mayberry

Aunt Bee is distraught. What gives?

Andy Taylor explains it to Opie: women are more emotional, see. The slightest thing can set them off. A song might remind them of a ride in a canoe with a nice fella. Or a certain smell. Or, or —

Opie: "I bet it's the liver. She looked at the liver and got reminded of when we had liver last week."

Liver, a Mayberry madeleine.

What's a campus?

I have the word campus on my mind, as I will soon be "on campus," several days a week.

It's odd that a word so familiar can suddenly look strange. Campus is the Latin word for field. The Oxford English Dictionary traces its history in English to Princeton University, 1774, citing John Freylinghusen Hageman's History of Princeton and Its Institutions (1879). Hageman quotes a January 1774 letter by Charles C. Beatty (class of '75):

Tea parties! Effigies! The kids today!

[Image courtesy of Google Book Search.]