Learning to write (Dickens)

Esther has been teaching Charley how to write. Esther has hope:

I had not been at home again many days, when one evening I went up-stairs into my own room to take a peep over Charley's shoulder and see how she was getting on with her copy-book. Writing was a trying business to Charley, who seemed to have no natural power over a pen, but in whose hand every pen appeared to become perversely animated, and to go wrong and crooked, and to stop, and splash, and sidle into corners, like a saddle-donkey. It was very odd, to see what old letters Charley's young hand made; they, so wrinkled, and shrivelled, and tottering; it, so plump and round. Yet Charley was uncommonly expert at other things, and had as nimble little fingers as I ever watched.

"Well, Charley," said I, looking over a copy of the letter O in which it was represented as square, triangular, pear-shaped, and collapsed in all kinds of ways, "we are improving. If we only get to make it round, we shall be perfect, Charley."

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)

Ellen Lupton on writing

Ellen Lupton, in an essay on teaching writing to graphic-design students:

[M]any young designers are wondering if their own college English courses were tough enough to prepare them for real-world writing tasks such as bidding for jobs, justifying design solutions, delivering presentations and marketing their work. Even routine email communication requires command of the written language. (Some of my students seem to believe that just because they can't spell, their employers won't be able to, either.)

Writing 101: Visual or Verbal? (AIGA Journal of Design)

(via Design Observer)

Money and "the teaching function"

In the news:

College students are covering more of what it costs to educate them, even as most colleges are spending less on students, according to a new study.

The study, based on data that colleges and universities report to the federal government, also found that the share of higher education budgets that goes to instruction has declined, while the portion spent on administrative costs has increased. . . .

“Students are paying more, and a greater share of the costs, but are arguably getting less,” said Jane Wellman, the executive director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity and Accountability, which drafted the study. . . .

"The institutions whose primary mission is teaching — the masters and community colleges and bachelors colleges, are slowly disinvesting in the teaching function," Ms. Wellman said.

Students Paying More and Getting Less, Study Says (New York Times)

Here's the study.

In today's Hi and Lois

[Hi and Lois, January 15, 2009.]

Behold, in today's Hi and Lois, a license plate floating in space.

(Yes, those grocery bags look like Tuesday's trash bags. Speaking of which, yecch.)

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

Schulz's Beethoven

On Beethoven in Peanuts:

"If you don't read music and you can't identify the music in the strips, then you lose out on some of the meaning," said William Meredith, the director of the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University, who has studied hundreds of Beethoven-themed Peanuts strips.

When Schroeder pounded on his piano, his eyes clenched in a trance, the notes floating above his head were no random ink spots dropped into the key of G. Schulz carefully chose each snatch of music he drew and transcribed the notes from the score. More than an illustration, the music was a soundtrack to the strip, introducing the characters' state of emotion, prompting one of them to ask a question or punctuating an interaction.

Listening to Schroeder: Peanuts Scholars Find Messages in Cartoon's Scores (New York Times)

Jellyby closets

A Dickens catalogue:

Poor Mr Jellyby, who very seldom spoke, and almost always sat when he was at home with his head against the wall, became interested when he saw that Caddy and I were attempting to establish some order among all this waste and ruin, and took off his coat to help. But such wonderful things came tumbling out of the closets when they were opened — bits of mouldy pie, sour bottles, Mrs Jellyby's caps, letters, tea, forks, odd boots and shoes of children, firewood, wafers, saucepan-lids, damp sugar in odds and ends of paper bags, footstools, black-lead brushes, bread, Mrs Jellyby's bonnets, books with butter sticking to the binding, guttered candle-ends put out by being turned upside down in broken candlesticks, nutshells, heads and tails of shrimps, dinner-mats, gloves, coffee-grounds, umbrellas — that he looked frightened, and left off again. But he came in regularly every evening, and sat without his coat, with his head against the wall; as though he would have helped us, if he had known how.

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)

Other Bleak House posts
At Peffer and Snagsby's
"It must be a strange state"
Reading don't pay

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"