Tom Lehrer, "Lobachevsky"

In light of recent events, my friend Norman points me, as I now point you, to a great Tom Lehrer song, "Lobachevsky." Enjoy.

(Thanks, Norman!)

Maureen Dowd, weaving, not linking

More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Josh Marshall, May 14, 2009

*

More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Maureen Dowd, May 17, 2009

Three thoughts about the Josh Marshall-Maureen Dowd affair:

1. Dowd's explanation of how a paragraph from Talking Points Memo ended up in her New York Times column —

i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column.

but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me.

— seems absurd. It credits friend and columnist alike with uncanny, savant-like powers of recall. It also fails to explain why Dowd didn't credit her alleged source for this observation. How'd you like to see your cogent sentence turn up without attribution in your friend's Times column? Some friend!

2. Weaving is an odd metaphor for what Dowd appears to have done — i.e., copied and pasted a useful bit that she then forgot to credit.

3. The corrected version of Dowd's column credits Marshall in a way that seems, well, demeaning:

Josh Marshall said in his blog: "More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

If you don't recognize Marshall's name, you wouldn't know that "his blog," unnamed, is a widely-read site for political news and commentary. The tone here reminds me of the ways in which traditional media will often credit "a blogger," unidentified. Worse still, Dowd doesn't even provide a link.

Sheesh.

Exhibits A and B
Josh Marshall's post (Talking Points Memo)
The corrected Maureen Dowd column (New York Times)

No mercy

The forms of physical abuse reported by witnesses to the Committee included punching, flogging, assault and bodily attacks, hitting with the hand, kicking, ear pulling, hair pulling, head shaving, beating on the soles of the feet, burning, scalding, stabbing, severe beatings with or without clothes, being made to kneel and stand in fixed positions for lengthy periods, made to sleep outside overnight, being forced into cold or excessively hot baths and showers, hosed down with cold water before being beaten, beaten while hanging from hooks on the wall, being set upon by dogs, being restrained in order to be beaten, physical assaults by more than one person, and having objects thrown at them.

Abu Ghraib? Guantánamo? No, Irish orphanages, reformatories, and schools, run by Roman Catholic religious orders, principally the Christian Brothers and the Sisters of Mercy. The passage above is part of a just-released 2,600-page report, nine years in the making, by Ireland's Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse.

Report Details Abuses in Irish Church-Run Reformatories (New York Times)
The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse
Executive Summary
Commission Report

LP, CD, DVD

I remember my firsts. (Cassettes, MP3s — I have no idea.)

LP
The Beatles, Something New (Capitol)

It must have been 1964. This LP must have been a present for my birthday (eighth). Help!, still among my records, still playable, was my second LP.

CD
Son House, The Complete Library of Congress Sessions, 1941-1942 (Travelin' Man)
Mississippi John Hurt, 1928 Sessions (Yazoo)
David Murray, McCoy Tyner, Fred Hopkins, Elvin Jones, Special Quartet (Sony)
World Saxophone Quartet, Metamorphosis (Nonesuch)

Yes, blues and jazz. I bought these CDs in 1991 in Bloomington, Indiana, at a record store specializing in blues, jazz, and classical music. Yes, the store is now defunct.

DVD
Carnival of Souls (Criterion Collection)

Herk Harvey's great 1962 horror film. I'm not sure when I bought this DVD (2000? 2001?), but I remember wondering whether a DVD purchased in New Jersey would play on a computer in Illinois. One reason among many that I think of my name is a synonym for naïf. I had heard something about "region codes."

Do you remember your first analog and digital artifacts? Please, share them in a comment. (Why not?)

No gadgets

Three tech execs:

Alain Dutheil, COO, ST-Ericsson: "I am not a gadget man. I prefer paintings."

Warren East, CEO, ARM: "I am a pen and paper kind of man. I can't live without my fountain pen, it goes everywhere."

Stan Miller, CEO, KPN Mobile International: "I don’t do gadgets."

No gadgets please (Reuters)

The Elements of Style, one more time

William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. The Elements of Style. 4th ed. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 2000. $9.95.

Recent debate about the value of The Elements of Style prompted me to do what I had not done in perhaps twenty years: read the book straight through. Here's what I found:

The most appealing aspect of The Elements is its case for a style of writing that exhibits, in E.B. White's words, "cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity," "plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity." Such a style requires, William Strunk says, "not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell." Or as Ezra Pound advises poets in his essay "A Few Don'ts" (1913), "Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something." Given the available evidence of Strunk's literary interests, I sense not Poundian influence but coincidence: a shared preoccupation with condensation and clarity, a shared disdain for 19th-century floridity and pomp, what Pound elsewhere calls "mush."

The Elements makes its case for a plain style with generosity and flexibility. Choices in writing are "somewhat a matter of individual preference," we're told. With questions of usage, "we have no lawgiver whose word is final." So much depends upon a good ear: "The question of ear is vital." The book's final chapter, "An Approach to Style" (by E.B. White), meditates upon the difficulty and mystery of good writing, offering tips, "gentle reminders," for those making their way in the dark: "Do not construct awkward adverbs"; "Use figures of speech sparingly."

There is little that's gentle in the preceding chapter, "Words and Expressions Commonly Misused," which covers what so-called sticklers seem to have in mind when they speak of Strunk and White: the misuse of such words as fewer and less, imply and infer, lie and lay. Recommendations here seem at times arbitrary: by what reasoning is insightful bad and perceptive good? And the tone is sometimes haughty. Re: flammable and gasoline trucks: "Unless you are operating such a truck and hence are concerned with the safety of children and illiterates, use inflammable." Re: prestigious: "It's in the dictionary, but that doesn't mean you have to use it."

The sniffiness in such remarks is evidence of what seems to me the strongest case against the continued pedagogical usefulness of The Elements of Style: the world of the book's sample sentences is dowdy, a bit snobbish, and very white. For example:

For two dollars you can call your mother in London and tell her all about George's taking you out to dinner.

Her father and mother arrived by the afternoon train.

Once a year he visited the old mansion.

She entered her boat in the round-the-island race.

The contents of a jar may be either singular or plural, depending on what's in the jar — jam or marbles.

My favorite sentence of this sort:

Mr. Oglethorp was chair of the meeting.

I suspect that the meeting was of the Downtown Merchants Association, about the children riding their bicycles on the sidewalks after school. Why, just last week Mrs. Oglethorp's sister was visiting, and she had gone downtown to buy some thread, and as she was leaving the store —

That's enough.

My point has nothing to do with so-called political correctness. It's more a matter of temporal correctness: afternoon trains and jars of marbles fit some versions of mid-20th-century life, but not an early-21st-century book of writing instruction. Yet these sentences are the stuff of The Elements of Style; some have become the stuff of art and music in Maira Kalman's illustrated version of the book (2005) and Nico Muhly's Elements song cycle (2005). I cannot imagine changing these sentences, any more than I can imagine equipping the denizens of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks with iPhones. Mr. Oglethorp must remain chair, even if the downtown stores are gone. It's perhaps relevant that The Elements of Style as we know it — Strunk and White — began with nostalgia: the unexpected gift to White in 1957 of a memory-triggering copy of Strunk's original Elements, a book White had last seen in 1919.

Datedness is evident too in the advice The Elements offers about manuscript preparation. "Keep righthand and lefthand margins roughly the same width"; "When a word must be divided at the end of a line, consult a dictionary to learn the syllables between which division should be made": these bits of advice, still in the fourth edition, date from 1959, the world of the typewriter. The following advice about documenting sources, first appearing in Strunk's 1918 Elements, is unchanged in the 2000 edition:

In scholarly work requiring exact references, abbreviate titles that occur frequently, giving the full forms in an alphabetical list at the end. As a general practice, give the references in parentheses or in footnotes, not in the body of the sentence.

Yes, it's as if MLA and APA guidelines did not exist, and in 1918, of course, they didn't, though the Chicago Manual of Style predates The Elements. But woe unto a student in 2009 who thinks The Elements is all one needs to know about managing sources.

Or all one needs to know about any number of writing matters — how to develop paragraphs, for instance, about which the book says little. The Elements of Style is useful though not as an all-purpose reference but as a source of inspiration. Chapters Two and Five ("Elementary Principles of Composition," "An Approach to Style") in particular can serve to keep the writer at the task of caring for words and sentences, cutting here, rearranging there, refusing, at all points, to settle. The Elements of Style may work best as a writer's talisman. That's the best explanation I can offer of the book's long-lived pseudo-sacred status.

[I consulted all editions of The Elements of Style: 1918, 1959, 1979, 2000, 2005, 2009. The 2009 fiftieth-anniversary hardcover reprints the text of the fourth edition, adding a very brief account of the book's history and four pages of tributes from writers and public figures.]

All posts on the great Strunk and White debate
Pullum on Strunk and White
Hardly (adverb) convincing (adjective)
Strunk and White and wit
More on Pullum, Strunk, White

On Maira Kalman, Nico Muhly, William Strunk Jr., and E.B. White
Elements of Style Goes Beyond Words (NPR)

"The kids"

My daughter Rachel and my son Ben made an appearance in the first post I wrote for Orange Crate Art, wherein I thanked them for getting me started writing online. They were "the kids" then, teenagers.

Today Rachel graduates from college, wearing a "cabin gown" — many years ago, she thought that's what they were called. (Congradulations, Rachel!) And Ben turns twenty. (Happy birthday, Ben!) "The kids" are now my daughter the linguist and my son the philosopher, having grown up into grown-ups, not quite out of the family orbit yet, but moving off into orbits of their own. Does that make them rogue planets? My astronomy metaphors are clumsy at best.

When I began writing Orange Crate Art in 2004 (as a place to collect items relevant to my teaching), I never thought I'd be writing about my children, except to thank them for getting me started. I have of course written about them many times since then. This post is to salute them for their generosity, humor, imagination, kindness, and wisdom — and whatever else I've left out.

[Photograph by Elaine Fine, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, May 15, 2009.]

Related posts
Big Day, Huge Feelings (Elaine's post today)
Happy Father's Day (with a c. 1990 photo)
Things my children no longer say (e.g., "cabin gown")

Hi and Lois in search of lost time

Indeed.

[Mort Walker and Dik Browne, two panels from Hi and Lois, October 7, 1963, in The Best of “Hi and Lois” (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2005), n.p.]

ΦΒΚ

Matching father-daughter copies of Phi Beta Kappa's Key Reporter. My daughter Rachel was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa tonight. Κῦδος, kiddo.

I know that Rachel finds the idea of matching father-daughter magazines as amusing as I do. That is, mildly amusing. A bit arch, a tad droll. Sherry? Yes, I would, thank you.

The pre-event background music: Handel's Water Music, followed by rain followed by hail followed by rain.

Positive emotions and risk

The June 2009 Atlantic has a long piece by Joshua Wolf Shenk, "What Makes Us Happy?" Shenk looks at the Grant Study, a longitudinal study (begun in 1937) of 268 Harvard men, and talks with George Vaillant, professor at Harvard Medical School and psychiatrist. Vaillant is the longtime director of the study, associated with it for more than forty years.

I find the following passage especially resonant. Shenk is recounting Vaillant's explanation to a group of graduate students of why "positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones":

One reason is that they're future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs — protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections — but in the short term actually put us at risk. That's because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of his "prize" Grant Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. "On his 70th birthday," Vaillant said, "when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, 'Would you write a letter of appreciation?' And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters — often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him." Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. "George, I don't know what you're going to make of this," the man said, as he began to cry, "but I've never read it." "It's very hard," Vaillant said, "for most of us to tolerate being loved."