Separated at birth?

Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and poet Ted Berrigan.

Related posts
Elaine Hansen and Blanche Lincoln
Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks
Ted Berrigan, "A Final Sonnet"

The Simpsons theme, a cappella

The group is called Canvas:

The Simpsons theme, a cappella (YouTube)

(Thanks, Elaine!)

New Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov's unfinished final work, The Original of Laura, will be published on November 3, 2009, in the UK (Penguin) and the States (Knopf).

Even better: the book will reproduce the 138 index cards containing the text.

A related post
Vladimir Nabokov's index cards

(via Paper Bits)

Microsoft Office 2010 preview

Says Lifehacker: "it looks like a decent start." It looks to me like a disaster, and it reminds me how happy I am minus Windows, minus Microsoft Office.

See what you think:

Office 2010 Screenshots (Lifehacker)

A related post
Word 2007

(via Daring Fireball)

On Duke Ellington's birthday

Edward Kennedy Ellington was born 110 years ago today.

Q. Who are you?

A. I am a musician who is a member of the American Federation of Labor, and who hopes one day to amount to something artistically.

Q. Are you not being too modest?

A. Oh, no, you should see my dreams!

Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (New York: Doubleday, 1973)

[Photograph by Thomas D. McAvoy, 1957, from the television broadcast A Drum Is a Woman. Paul Gonsalves is on the viewer's left; Jimmy Hamilton, on the right. Photograph from the Life photo archive.]

Related posts
Beyond category
The Duke Box
Ellington for beginners
On Duke Ellington's birthday

Bousquet v. Taylor on higher education

If you've read Mark C. Taylor's New York Times opinion piece on American higher education, End the University as We Know It, follow up with Marc Bousquet's persuasive reply, More Drivel From the New York Times.

Says Taylor:

Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist).

Says Bousquet:

In fact, there are plenty of teaching positions to absorb all of the "excess doctorates" out there. At least 70 percent of the faculty are nontenurable. In many fields, most of the faculty don’t hold a Ph.D. and aren’t studying for one. By changing their hiring patterns over the course of a few years New York or California — either one — alone could absorb most of the "excess" doctorates in many fields.

The problem isn’t an oversupply of qualified labor. It’s a restructuring of "demand" so that work that used to be done by people with doctorates is being done by persons with a master's or a B.A., or even by undergraduates.

70% of U.S. college faculty are indeed nontenurable. In 2007, tenured and tenure-track professors composed 31.2% of college teaching personnel.

I recommend Bousquet's How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York University Press, 2008) to anyone interested in American higher education.

A related post
NYT and higher ed

Trouble in Ithaca

In the news this morning:

Hollywood's Warner Bros. studio has hired Jonathan Liebesman to direct a movie inspired by Homer's epic Greek poem The Odyssey. . . .

Odysseus is about what happens when the king of Ithaca returns home after years of fighting the Trojan Wars and discovers his kingdom is occupied by an invading force, the entertainment industry trade newspaper [Variety] noted.

Wars? No, war. His kingdom? No, his oikos. An invading force? No, young aristocrats seeking to marry Penelope.

The article notes that Liebesman is the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006).

O, ye gods.

Gmail and Firefox

If you're having trouble getting Gmail to open in Firefox, try typing

https://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0

I found this solution in a post at the Gmail Labs Google Group. Thanks, dojibear.

Buy Indie Day

Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?

Friday, May 1 is Buy Indie Day, a day for buying a book or two or more from an independent bookstore. In the United States, you can search for such bookstores with the Indie Store Finder.

If you'd like to share news of what you've scored and where, stop by and leave a comment on Friday (I'll add a post for that). It will be fun to see the bookbuying activity of readers hither and yon, especially yon.

[Question courtesy of Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi."]

Strunk and White and wit

Commenting on a previous post, a reader suggested that a sentence in The Elements of Style that some read as an obvious joke is in fact "a dunder-headed Strunken mistake." "You can't just declare that it's a joke," wrote this reader.

The Elements of Style has many touches of wit. Here, for example, is the passage that follows the precept "Do not overstate":

When you overstate, readers will be instantly on guard, and everything that has preceded your overstatement as well as everything that follows it will be suspect in their minds because they have lost confidence in your judgment or your poise. Overstatement is one of the common faults. A single overstatement, wherever or however it occurs, diminishes the whole, and a single carefree superlative has the power to destroy, for readers, the object of your enthusiasm.

Look at the language: instantly, everything, everything, single, wherever or however, single, destroy. Note too the conspiciously missing superlative: "one of the [most] common faults." I hereby declare that E.B. White (the passage is his) is joking.

And here is the passage that follows "Avoid the use of qualifiers":

Rather, very, little, pretty — these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words. The constant use of the adjective little (except to indicate size) is particularly debilitating; we should all try to do a little better, we should all be very watchful of this rule, for it is a rather important one, and we are pretty sure to violate it now and then.

One could take such passages as evidence of supreme cluelessness or as evidence of wit. Wit is the better choice, one that respects the intelligence of Strunk and White and their readers.

Related posts
Pullum on Strunk and White
Hardly (adverb) convincing (adjective)
More on Pullum, Strunk, White
The Elements of Style, one more time