“The circus tent is open”

Wikipedia has a fine array of euphemisms from around the world with which to speak of an open fly. Are they all real? I hope so.

The benefits of quitting

A timeline of the benefits of quitting:

When Smokers Quit (American Cancer Society)

Today for me marks twenty years minus cigarettes. Yes, I’m still proud of myself.

A related post
Nineteen years later

ClickToFlash

John Gruber of Daring Fireball explains:

ClickToFlash is an open source web content plugin for Mac OS X that blocks all Flash content on web pages by default. As the name implies, if you do want to load a Flash element, just click it. I give ClickToFlash my highest recommendation — everyone should install it.

ClickToFlash does for Safari what the Flashblock extension does for Firefox, making webpages less distracting and helping your computer to run at lower temperatures. ClickToFlash is free for Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard.

ClickToFlash (“your web browsing prophylactic”)

[Of the last 500 visitors to Orange Crate Art, 133 — 26.6% — are using OS X.]

A headstone for James P. Johnson

Duke Ellington on pianist and composer James P. Johnson (1894–1955):

James, for me, was more than the beginning. He went right on up to the top. . . .

James he was to his friends — just James, not Jimmy, nor James P. There never was another.

Music Is My Mistress (New York: Doubleday, 1973), 94–95.

The James P. Johnson Foundation is raising funds to buy a headstone for Johnson’s unmarked Queens grave. Twelve pianists just performed in Manhattan for the cause.

Here, from the YouTube vaults, are two James P. Johnson performances: a 1921 QRS piano roll of his “Carolina Shout” and a 1944 Blue Note recording of “After You’ve Gone” (Turner Layton–Henry Creamer) by James P. Johnson’s Blue Note Jazzmen: Sidney DeParis (trumpet), Vic Dickenson (trombone), Ben Webster (tenor saxophone), Johnson (piano), Jimmy Shirley (guitar), John Simmons (bass), Sidney Catlett (drums). I first heard this “After You’ve Gone” as a reel-to-reel transfer, twenty-five or more years ago, at Bill Youngren’s house, with the volume turned to eleven. It was, and is, glorious.

[Personnel listing via the Blue Note Records Discography: 1939–1944.]

Comments problem

As Known Issues reported in September, Blogger has a problem with comments. Today the problem hit Orange Crate Art. If you’ve made a comment today and are wondering what has become of it, there’s the answer. Right now I can neither read or approve comments.

7:11 PM: Comments are back. I found a workaround that seems, for now, to work. Thanks, Google employee Gatsby.

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)