Overheard

In the supermarket:

“He’s an eye doctor. If he were a proctologist, it would be different.”

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All “Overheard” posts
If I were, if I was

The iPad and dolphins

Perhaps the iPad is just fine if you’re using it on the bus or at the office, but I have to wonder if Steve Jobs’ geniuses ever once stopped to think about what might happen, for example, if an aquatic mammal wanted to use his tablet while frolicking in a gentle ocean cove.

Do The New Tablets Own Up To The Hype? (The Onion)

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The iPad and college students

A Salinger sentence

A soldier’s sweetheart sends letters:

She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations.

J.D. Salinger, “For Esmé — with Love and Squalor,” in Nine Stories (1953)

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“[D]ark, wordy, academic deaths”

David Foster Wallace’s dictionary

Abulia, benthos, cete, distichous: words circled in David Foster Wallace’s dictionary, part of the David Foster Wallace Archive at UT-Austin.

Word of the day: lave

From Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day:

The Word of the Day for March 8 is:

lave \LAYV\ verb
1 a : wash, bathe b : to flow along or against
2 : pour

I learned lave years ago while reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962). I still think of the novel whenever I see the word (as this post would seem to demonstrate). The word doesn’t appear in the novel, but it’s handy in what narrator Charles Kinbote calls “so-called word golf,” as it lets one make “hate-love in three”: hate, late, lave, love.

Other Pale Fire golf games: “lass-male in four,” “live-dead in five (with ‘lend’ in the middle).”

Edward Tufte, presidential appointment

Edward Tufte says:

I will be serving on the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. This Panel advises The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, whose job is to track and explain $787 billion in recovery stimulus funds. . . . I’m doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I’ll learn something.

Read more:

Edward Tufte Presidential Appointment (Ask E.T.)

Harvey Wang’s New York

Harvey Wang. Harvey Wang’s New York. Foreword by Pete Hamill. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. $9.95 (paper).

Max Morrison, ninety-seven-year-old scrap-metal collector:

“I can’t sit still on a chair reading comics or walk around the streets doing nothing. I certainly do enjoy collecting metal. It’s legitimate, not too heavy.”

Harvey Wang’s New York is a book of photographs of forty-nine New Yorkers in endangered or obscure lines of work. A mannequin maker, a rabbinical tailor, a scrap-metal collector, a seltzer bottler, a television repairman: each appears in a black-and-white portrait (35mm film), with a brief life-story on the facing page. Harvey Wang’s New York feels like a book that one might have found, once upon a time, in a used-book store. Improbably and wonderfully, the book is still in print. You can see samples at Harvey Wang’s website.

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David Foster Wallace on attention

I’ve gotten in the habit of reading to my students this passage from a 2005 commencement speech:

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

It’s more difficult to find this speech online now that it’s been packaged as a book (one sentence per page). But here it is, still standing.

More on the iPad and college

From Forbes.com:

Many educators are pointing to Apple Computer’s recently announced iPad as the prototype for an e-reader that will be able to hold all the textbooks a student needs. Its color touch-screen, interactive-video capability and virtual keyboard, they say, give it greater potential for textbook users than monochrome readers like Amazon’s Kindle.

Apple has been quiet about its designs on the textbook business since unveiling its new device, which will go on sale this month.

Correction: next month, April 3.

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The iPad and college students
iPad news

Would it have been worth it, after all

From “The Deflationist,” Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of Paul Krugman (New Yorker, March 1, 2010). Krugman’s wife Robin Wells is speaking:

“As a spouse, you have your little list of things that you jokingly won’t forgive your spouse for. Right after he started writing for the Times and attacking George Bush, we got an invitation to have dinner with Paul Newman and his wife, but he wouldn’t go. And now he’s dead.”

“It was inconvenient,” Krugman says. “I just don’t get any joy out of thinking, Oh, here I am with the movers and shakers. It would have required really discombobulating my schedule just to be able to say I’d had dinner with Paul Newman, and it’s not worth it.”

I think Krugman has it wrong. The point of having dinner with Paul Newman and “his wife” — who too has a name, Joanne Woodward — is not to be able to say that you had dinner with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. The point of having dinner with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward is to have dinner with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

Re: that list: maybe you do.

[Post title with apologies to T.S. Eliot and J. Alfred Prufrock.]