Shopping with Robert Frost

A 15 oz. can of Café du Monde coffee and chicory at our favorite Asian market: $5.25. The same can at a fancy “mart” a mile away: $12.55.

In the words of the poet (well, not really), “Compare, compare!”

Would Robert Frost have liked this coffee? “Earth’s the right place for Café du Monde”: I can hear almost hear him saying it. No, never mind; he’s signed up with Folger’s.

Café du Monde is great for making Vietnamese coffee.

[No poems were harmed in the making of this post.]

How to improve writing (no. 25)

From a book on design, a sentence about the look of a royal spouse’s “consort throne”:

It was gilded to look as if it were made of gold, the metal that is still the universal signifier of durability and status in almost every culture.

One way to improve this sentence: trust the reader to know what gilded means.

A second: clear up the inconsistency of “universal” and “almost every.”

A third: find a precise alternative to durability. That word might be associated with, say, long-wearing fabrics. But gold doesn’t resist wear; it doesn’t wear.

A fourth: rethink status. Yes, status does mean “high rank,” but I’d rather see the word with a modifier, for the same reason that I’m opposed to “quality” education.

A better sentence:

It was gilded, as gold still signifies high status and abiding value in almost every culture.

I’ve omitted the names of writer and book: neither should be judged by a single sentence. But many sentences in this book are in need of revision: cuts, breaks, rearrangement of parts, and plain old correction (of subject-verb disagreement, for instance). It makes sense that there is no note of thanks to an editor. W.W. Norton & Company, you’re slipping.

The moral of the story: Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. And many more are to be borrowed from the library. Try before you buy.

[This post is no. 25 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose. With apologies to Francis Bacon.]

Related reading
All How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

Sue Shellenbarger on time-management

Sue Shellenbarger tried three time-management strategies: FranklinCovey’s Focus, GTD, and the Pomodoro Technique. Her conclusion: borrowing a bit from each might work best. Read all about it, or them:

No Time to Read This? Read This (Wall Street Journal)

I’d never heard of the Pomodoro Technique, but I’m already thinking it would be appropriate to get the nifty timer, Technique or no.

T - U - I - T - I - O - N

The Strike Committee of the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has voted to suspend its strike. The strike won protection for tuition waivers for graduate employees (a basic element of graduate education). As they say on the Internet, GEO FTW!

I’m proud of those grad students (at least one of whom is a former student of mine) and of my undergrad son Ben, who picketed, drummed, and contributed a chant:

T - U - I - T - I - O - N, waive it and we’ll teach again.

A related post
Grad employees on strike at UIUC

Orange Caroline’s Crayons art

From Caroline’s Crayons, a lovely story, in words and pictures: Orange.

Reinventing the wheel

My friend Stefan Hagemann spotted a familiar metaphor put to new use in two articles in Monday’s New York Times. An article about teachers who buy and sell lesson plans online quotes Alice Coburn, a vocational education teacher, who explains her purchases like so: “I hate reinventing the wheel.” And an article about members of the House of Representatives whose House speeches on health care were written, in whole or in part, by corporate lobbyists quotes Stanley V. White, chief of staff for Representative Robert A. Brady (D, Pennsylvania-1): “There’s not much reason to reinvent the wheel on a Congressional Record entry.”

There can of course be great value in reinventing the wheel, in thinking through a matter and coming to conclusions for oneself. The saddest thing to me about Coburn’s statement: its unstated assumptions that such effort is of no value and that whatever a teacher might come up with would be mere repetition, no better than or different from what anyone else has done. As for White’s explanation, its implicit contempt for the Congressional Record is astonishing.

Says Stefan Hagemann, “I guess the next time a student hands me an essay lifted from SparkNotes, I can nod approvingly. No sense reinventing the wheel.”

Grad employees on strike at UIUC

From the GEO press release:

The strike committee of the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO), American Federation of Teachers/Illinois Federation of Teachers Local 6300, AFL-CIO, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), has authorized a strike against the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois to begin at 8am on Monday morning. After six hours of negotiation on Saturday afternoon, the GEO and administration bargaining teams managed to reach mutually agreeable terms on all aspects of the GEO contract except tuition waiver security. The administration’s refusal to guarantee the continuation of its current tuition waiver practice not only means that the majority of graduate employees could be forced to pay thousands of dollars in additional tuition charges, but also indicates its plans to implement such a change. By making graduate education untenable for all but the most affluent students, the administration is abandoning its responsibility to ensure access to the highest level of public education for all. This is contrary to the University of Illinois’ mission as a public land grant institution. By calling a strike, the Graduate Employees’ Organization is holding the University of Illinois administration accountable to its stated commitment to excellent and accessible higher education.

The arrogance and contempt in the University’s refusal to guarantee tuition waivers might not be immediately evident to a reader outside academia. Briefly: a graduate assistantship typically provides a tuition waiver and a modest (or very modest) salary. To refuse to guarantee tuition waivers is to threaten that graduate employees may have to underwrite their studies with their salaries (and with their savings, and with loans, loans, loans). That refusal thus threatens to remove the very possibility of graduate study, as the GEO says, “for all but the most affluent students.”

The University’s latest effort in brinksmanship and intimidation follows months of stalling in negotiating a contract. (The stall is a favored administrative strategy at other schools too.) The GEO is fighting the good fight in its effort to make the University of Illinois treat its graduate employees with dignity and pay them a living wage. I hope the GEO wins.

[Update, November 17, 2009: GEO FTW!]

Further reading
UIUC GEO

Steven Pinker reviews Malcolm Gladwell

From a New York Times review:

The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left. Unfortunately he wildly overstates his empirical case. . . .

The reasoning in Outliers, which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies, had me gnawing on my Kindle.

Another reason books are better than e-readers: easier to gnaw.

A kitchen girl and a restless corpse

Our son Ben Leddy and his friend Claire Johnson play a medley of the traditional “Kitchen Girl” and their own “Restless Corpse.”

Enjoy.

The Coen brothers and typos

Peter Stormare played Gaear Grimsrud in the Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo (1996). Here he comments on his second line in the film, “Where’s Pancakes House?”:

I said, “It’s gotta be Pancake House.” And then when we were doing the scene, I was saying "Where’s the Pancake House?" And Ethan: “Peter?” “Yeah?” “What were you saying there?” "Where’s the Pancake House?" “No, it says Pancakes House.” “Oh, I thought it was a typo.” “No, no, there’s no typos in our scripts.”

From Minnesota Nice (dir. Jeffrey Schwarz, 2003), a short documentary on the making of Fargo