Carnival of Pen, Pencil, and Paper

At Office Supply Geek, there’s a carnival of pens, pencils, paper, and supplies.

The highlights, for me: Diane Schirf’s Please Mr. Postman, a meditation on letters and mailboxes, and George Fox’s Scripto collection. And I’m honored to see that my September post on Eraser Matches is part of the fun.

Notebook Stories assembles this monthly carnival.

The Third Carnival of Pen, Pencil, and Paper (Office Supply Geek)

On “On the New Literacy”

So you finally got around to reading the piece in Wired about college students and writing?

If you mean Clive Thompson’s On the New Literacy, I read it some time ago.

So how come haven’t you written anything about it?

Well, I’ve been really busy, mostly grading student essays. That takes a lot of time. I've been putting in long hours at the Continental Paper Grading Co.

So you’ve haven’t been able to write something about students’ writing because you’ve been grading your students’ writing. Pretty ironic.

Whatever.

So what do you think about the claim that “online media are pushing literacy into cool directions”? Thompson quotes Andrea Lunsford, the director of the Stanford Study of Writing, who says that “we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.”

I, uh, don’t see it.

Because of the essays you’ve been grading?

Not really. More because of overall impressions developed over several years.

Can you elaborate?

I just haven’t see any remarkable development in students’ writing ability. To the contrary: I see much evidence of a long, sorry decline. It’s not unusual to read entire essays with no punctuation beyond the period. It’s not unusual to find confusions about spelling that not long ago were pretty much beyond my imagining: and for an, pros for prose.

What more concerns me is an overall decline in the ability to develop a coherent line of thought in an essay. What I find most urgently missing in student writing is skill in developing an overarching argument, within an essay and even within paragraphs. Much of the blame here goes not to the Internets but to the rigid list-oriented model of essay-writing that students are required to follow in their earlier schooling: “There are three foods that I like. First. Next. Last, but not least. In conclusion, there are three foods that I like.” By the time students get to college, the possibility of the essay as an adventure in thinking, a trying out of ideas, is largely gone. And without the reliable “three points,” the work of writing an essay becomes analogous to driving without a steering wheel.

But you have to admit, students are writing more than ever before.

Here too, I don't see it. Here’s what Thompson says, expanding on Lunsford’s claim that today’s college students do more writing than any previous generation:

Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

This generalization about the past is laughable, as anyone aware of the diaries, journals, and letters of earlier generations can attest. But the claim about today’s students can be plausible only if we count as writing any words made as marks by hand. Here are three of my recent texting efforts:

Yowza!

Idyllic!

Check yr email

And a recent shopping list:

Blue Silk

Cheerios

sun-dried tomatoes

fruit

These are examples of written language, but they’re hardly examples of the sustained thought that more typically defines that which we call writing.

What were you doing shopping for silk in the supermarket?

No, Silk, with a capital S, soymilk. Good stuff.

My mistake. I’m guessing that you’re also not persuaded by the claim that students are “remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos — assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across.”

No, I’m not persuaded. Or yes, I’m not — I’ve never figured out how that kind of question works. I don’t doubt that students texting friends are adept at kairos (as are debt collectors, extortionists, and political operatives, at least sometimes). But I’m not convinced that a grasp of kairos in socializing with peers transfers readily to other contexts. Consider, for instance, the lack of kairos evident in many student e-mails to professors, beginning, often, with the infamous “Hey,” or with no greeting at all, ending with no signature, and sent from unseemly addresses. Or consider the lack of interest many students show in following directions for written work. A strong sense of kairos would make unstapled pages, misspelled authors’ names, and “In the book it says” things of the past. But they’re all still with us, or at least with me, despite cautions and reminders galore.

Well, you finally got your two cents in. Do you think your readers know that you picked up the idea of the self-interview from Thomas Merton’s journals?

I’m sure of it.

Related post
How to e-mail a professor
Writing, technology, and teenagers

Time’s passing, an example thereof

“Time just seems to get quicker. You look in the mirror in the morning and you think, ‘I’m already shaving again!’”

Terry Jones of Monty Python, quoted in an article on the fortieth anniversary of the BBC series Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Read all about it:

On Comedy’s Flying Trapeze (New York Times)

I Love Lucy

“A blowtorch?!”

If you live in the United States, have cable television, and need to get things done today, you may not benefit from knowing that there’s an I Love Lucy marathon now playing on the Hallmark Channel (through Monday, 3:00 AM EDT).

As I type, Lucy has a loving cup stuck on her head.

The Blob and I

I recently watched The Blob (dir. Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr., 1958) and communed a bit with the material culture of the dowdy world.


[Click for a larger view.]

That desk could be mine, almost: I too have an inbox, fan, and lamp, though they look nothing like these. (I have a rotary telephone too, at work.) Note the stapler, bottled ink, cigarettes, and ashtray, and the safety-themed placard in the background. The drawer seems filled with stuff, which suggests to me that this scene, like many scenes in the film, was shot on location. (Perhaps a school office?)


[Click for a larger view.]

Note the battered bookcase and the polio-themed placard. And that calendar!


[Click for a larger view.]

Did I mention that calendar? 1957 was a very big year.

The beautifully designed 2009 Field Notes calendar has something of the same feel, on a smaller scale.

[A previous post defines “the dowdy world”: “modern American culture as it was before certain forms of technology redefined everyday life.”]

Related reading
All “dowdy world” posts (Pinboard)
Time passes (Calendar pages, 1930)
Is there a pencil in The House? (Pencils in The House on 92nd Street)

Montblanc’s Gandhi pen

Could there be a pen more ill-conceived than Montblanc’s “Yes We Can” pen? Yes, Montblanc’s Mohandas Gandhi pen:

Just 241 commemorative fountain pens will be sold — a nod to the number of miles Gandhi walked in his famous 1930 “salt march,” a mass protest against salt taxes levied by the British that dealt an early blow to their control over the subcontinent.

The pens are hand-made, adorned with Gandhi's signature and a saffron-colored opal. They come with an eight-meter (26-foot) golden thread that can be wound around the pen to invoke the spindle Gandhi used to weave plain cotton cloth each day. The pens also come with a commemorative booklet of inspiring Gandhi quotes.

Says Oliver Goessler of Montblanc, “It’s not an opulent pen. It’s a writing instrument that’s very pure."

Montblanc’s $25,000 Gandhi pen sparks controversy (Forbes) The link is dead.

In Gandhi's land, a $25,000 Montblanc (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

*

Update, February 24, 2010: Montblanc has suspended sales of the pen while awaiting a court ruling on whether the pen may be sold in India:

India court snub for luxury Gandhi pen (BBC News)

(Thanks to Stephen at pencil talk for pointing me to this news.)

A related post
Proust's supplies (Montblanc’s Proust pen, also ill-conceived)

Princeton students and the Kindle

Princeton students have been trying Amazon’s Kindle:

“I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool,” said Aaron Horvath ’10, a student in Civil Society and Public Policy. “It’s clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.”

Horvath said that using the Kindle has required completely changing the way he completes his coursework.

“Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” he explained. “All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.”

Another problem: no page numbers, which makes citations a challenge. Read more:

Kindles yet to woo University users (Daily Princetonian)

Related posts
From the Doyle edition
No Kindle for me

Red Cross

The American Red Cross International Response Fund

“Exclamation marks not trademarks!”

In the news:

An exclamation mark cannot be registered as a trademark, the European Court of First Instance has ruled.

The German clothing and perfume company Joop! applied to register the punctuation mark both on its own and inside a rectangle.

Read all about it:

Exclamation marks not trademarks! (BBC News)

Teleconference: Stanley Lombardo reads Homer

Classicist and translator Stanley Lombardo will read from his translation of Homer’s Odyssey in a live teleconference, December 14, 2009, 8:00 PM EST.

Lombardo is a brilliant translator and masterful reader. What Homer says of the poet Demodocus in the Odyssey — “He made them see it happen” — is true, I’d say, of Lombardo.

Tickets are free. Follow the link:

Stanley Lombardo: A Performance from Homer’s Odyssey (The Reading Odyssey)

Related reading
Stanley Lombardo interview (Jacket)
Whose Homer? (Lattimore? Fitzgerald? Fagles? Lombardo?)
Wonderland of voices, a review of Lombardo’s recordings of the Iliad and Odyssey (Jacket)