Proust's supplies

Céleste Albaret, Marcel Proust's housekeeper, has been describing Proust's writing posture — "more than half lying down," with knees for a desk:

It was astonishing how fast he could write in a position no one but he could have found comfortable. The pen flew along, line after line of his fine cursive writing. He always used Sergeant-Major nibs, which were plain and pointed, with a little hollow underneath to hold the ink. I never saw him use a fountain pen, though they were becoming popular at that time. I used to buy stocks of nibs, several boxes at a time. He always had fifteen or so pen holders within reach, because if he dropped the one he was using it could only be picked up when he wasn't there, because of the dust. They were just little bits of wood with a metal holder for the nib — the ordinary kind used in schools, like the inkwell, which was a glass square with four grooves to rest the pen and a little round opening with a stopper.

"Some people need a beautiful pen to write with, but all I need is ink and paper. If I didn't have a pen holder, I would manage with a stick."

Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust, translated by Barbara Bray (New York: New York Review Books, 2003), 270–271.

I suspect that Montblanc, the maker of this dubious tribute, has no idea how far removed its efforts are from the spirit of Proust's writing. Note in the "About the Author" sidebar the reference to In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past as "probably [Proust's] most important work." "Probably": in other words, Montblanc's people have no idea what they're talking about. O tempora, o mores!

But all's not lost. One can still buy Sergeant-Major nibs: here, for instance.

Related reading
All Proust posts (Pinboard)

[About the title: supplies is my word, and has become my family's word, for all manner of stationery items.]

Fun with APA style

Someone has been having fun — of the good clean sort — working on Wikipedia's article on APA style. A sample entry:

Electronic copy of a journal article, three to five authors, retrieved from database:

Costanza, G., Seinfeld, J., Benes, E., Kramer, C., & Peterman, J. (1993). Minutiæ and insignificant observations from the nineteen-nineties. Journal about Nothing, 52, 475–649. Retrieved October 31, 1999, from NoTHINGJournals database.

George must have fought hard to get top billing here.

There are also some Canadian in-jokes, which Canadian readers will understand better than I do.

Andrew Keen, amateurs, Wikipedia, and the Oxford English Dictionary

I've now read a book that I'd long been getting around to reading, Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2007). I too mourn the disappearance of book stores and record stores, but Keen's polemic seems to me mistaken in countless ways. What most bothers me in this book — aside from its soon-predictable reliance on sensationalist anecdotes, sweeping generalizations, and rhetorical questions — is its uncritical trust of those whom Keen calls "gatekeepers," the "seasoned," the "trained," the professionals whose work it is to select for everyone else what is worthy of attention. Keen equates these gatekeepers with those who manage traditional media, whose expert judgments are supposedly being undermined by anyone with an Internet connection. He misses the real point of the Internet: not that it makes everyone an expert (it doesn't of course), but that it allows independent expertise to flourish.

Keen reserves special contempt for Wikipedia. This passage gives a sense of his argument and tone:

On today's Internet, . . . amateurism, rather than expertise, is celebrated, even revered. Today, the OED and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, two trusted reference volumes upon which we have long relied for information, are being replaced by Wikipedia and other user-generated resources. The professional is being replaced by the amateur, the lexicographer by the layperson, the Harvard professor by the unschooled populace.

One might argue about whether the Britannica is what "we" have long relied upon for information (I grew up in a World Book house), but to present the Oxford English Dictionary as the people's choice is to distort reality. And it's certain that there's no user-generated resource now replacing it.

Moreover — here comes irony — Keen seems unaware that the OED is the result of the volunteer work of a considerable number of laypeople, reading books and sending in quotations to document words in use. Granted, laypeople did not write the entries, nor did OED editor James A. H. Murray believe them capable of doing more than collection work: "I have had to come to the conclusion that practically the only valuable work that can be done by the average amateur, & out of the Scriptorium, is that of reading books and extracting quotations."

Keen's contempt for Wikipedia is not shared by everyone on the Oxford side of things. In a recent (post-Cult) interview, Niko Pfund of the Oxford University Press says that he's "very fond" of Wikipedia and uses it daily, and he likens the resource to — yes, here comes more irony — the Oxford English Dictionary:

I'm actually increasingly bored by this question of whether Wikipedia is good or bad, and even more so by the easy vilification of it, a reaction often rooted in professional self-interest. After all, the Oxford English Dictionary, arguably the greatest reference work in the English language (and certainly the greatest reference work ABOUT the English language) found its origins in a wiki model, whereby scholars put out the word to English speakers far and wide that they would welcome hard evidence of the earliest appearances of English words. The response was astonishing (never underestimate the enthusiasm of amateur lexicographers), so much so that the building in which the word submissions were kept, called The Scriptorum, began to sink under the weight of all the paper. Wikipedia is here to stay and its evolution will be one of the more interesting publishing and technology stories in the next decade.

I wonder what Andrew Keen would say to that.

[The Murray quotation is from K.M. Elisabeth Murray, Caught in the Web of Words: James A. H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). One prolific OED contributor, William Chester Minor, did his work from an insane asylum. That story is told in Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998).]

Who blogs?

Jonathan Rauch suspects that it's introverts who blog. Recent studies suggest that "openness to new experience" and neuroticism are key factors:

The results of two studies indicate that people who are high in openness to new experience and high in neuroticism are likely to be bloggers. Additionally, the neuroticism relationship was moderated by gender indicating that women who are high in neuroticism are more likely to be bloggers as compared to those low in neuroticism whereas there was no difference for men.

Rosanna E. Guadagno, et al., Who blogs? Personality predictors of blogging (Computers in Human Behavior)

So if someone accuses me of being neurotic, I can reply, "What difference does it make?"

Lexicographers and Twitter

Oxford University Press lexicographers have been looking at the language of Twitter:

OUP lexicographers have been monitoring more than 1.5 million random tweets since January 2009 and have noticed any number of interesting facts about the impact of Twitter on language usage. For example the 500 words most frequently used words on Twitter are significantly different from the top 500 words in general English text. At the very top, there are many of the usual suspects: "the", "to", "as", "and", "in" . . . though "I" is right up at number 2, whereas for general text it is only at number 10. No doubt this reflects on the intrinsically solipsistic nature of Twitter. The most common word is "the," which is the same in general English.

The average number of words in a Twitter sentence: 10.69.

The average number of words in a sentence "in general usage": 22.09.

Read more:

RT this: OUP Dictionary Team monitors Twitterer's tweets (OUPblog)

[RT: "ReTweet, in the social networking and micro-blogging service Twitter, to re-post something posted by another user, usually preceeded with "RT" and "@username" to give credit to original poster."]

A related post
Geoffrey Nunberg on Twitter

Geoffrey Nunberg on Twitter

Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg comments on Twitter:

The English sentence has done very well for itself over the last thousand years or so, and it's not about to autodestruct because kids have suddenly started to text message each other rather than passing notes under their desk. In fact, what we're taught in school — the gospel according to Strunk and White — is to be concise. What imposes more constraints of conciseness than Twitter? So in that sense, Twitter could be the greatest thing that's happened to English since print.

Interview: Geoffrey Nunberg (Mother Jones)

My 140-character reduction:

Kids texting rather than note-passing won't ruin the sentence. Strunk & White = concision = Twitter! Greatest thing for English since print?

Boy chewing gum

He looks like a happy kid. He has gum. Gum is fun. And it's Friday. And there's no homework. And it's June. Pretty soon school'll be over. Yep, pretty soon.

[Young boy chewing bubble gum. Photograph by Bob Landry, 1946. From the Life photo archive.]

Proust's five-franc piece

A story from Marcel Proust, as recounted by his housekeeper Céleste Albaret. Marcel is off with his brother Robert to visit a relative, Mme. Nathan:

"Mother dressed us up all neat and clean, and before we went, said, 'Here's a five-franc piece each. When you get there and Marie, the maid, opens the door, make sure you first of all wish her a Happy New Year, and then give her the five-franc pieces.' On the way there, in place de la Madeleine, I saw a shoeblack swinging his arms and stamping his feet to keep warm. I went up to him, asked him to shine my shoes, though they were already as bright as new pennies, and gave him my five francs. When I got home, Mother said, 'I hope you were good and didn't forget to give Marie the five francs?' I told her about the shoeblack. 'What did you do that for?' she cried in despair. So I explained: 'I saw him waiting in the cold for a customer, so I let him shine my shoes.' And she kissed me."

Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust, translated by Barbara Bray (New York: New York Review Books, 2003), 138.

Related reading
All Proust posts (Pinboard)

Koko Taylor (1928-2009)

Blues singer Koko Taylor has died at the age of eighty.

I was fortunate to hear her in the early 1980s at Jonathan Swift's in Cambridge, MA. She was, as one of her album titles declares, a force of nature.

Here are two versions of her signature song, Willie Dixon's "Wang Dang Doodle." Yes, "All night long."

Ducks amuck

“'In the duck world, San Francisco is almost impossible.'”

Strange sentence. It's from an article on the use of kazoo-like instruments to promote amphibious-vehicle tours in San Francisco:

A Quacking Kazoo Sets Off a Squabble (New York Times)

I'd be remiss if I didn't include a link to the 1953 Merrie Melodies cartoon that gave me my title:

Duck Amuck (YouTube)

I should add that this cartoon is a major influence on John Ashbery's poem "Daffy Duck in Hollywood" (Houseboat Days, 1977).

What's that? I shouldn't?