The Subway in Pictures, 1917–2010, from a special Subway Issue of the New York Times.
The truth universally acknowledged, that Jane Austen was one of the most pristine literary stylists of all time, has been exploded: her punctuation was erratic, her use of capital letters eclectic and her paragraph breaks often nonexistent.The above passage, from the manuscript of Persuasion, makes me think of Emily Dickinson’s fascicles.
John Dodig, a student at Connecticut College:
Our generation is wired and well connected — that’s not a bad thing. But we’re creeping toward a point where college life is more about being social and less about being intellectually engaged. The whole point of having a laptop in class should be to expand scholarship and increase efficiency, but I’ve found that they’re having the opposite effect. Strangely enough, classes have become something to be tolerated rather than the reason we’re here.Read more:
From Wisconsin Public Radio’s To the Best of Our Knowledge: “Fonts,” with Nicholson Baker, Matthew Carter, Kitty Burns Florey, Tobias Frere-Jones, Jonathan Hoefler, and Tracy Honn.
My favorite moment, Nicholson Baker’s comment on the Kindle: “I think that this machine was developed by people who weren’t really book people.”
“Did you see that guy?”
“He’s unbelievable!”
“What a lunatic!”
“–––––––!”
“––––––– ––––––– –––––––!”
[Ever since I posted a commentary on five sentences from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Internauts searching for five sentences (that is, their homework) have been ending up at Orange Crate Art. Five sentences about the driver is the latest such search. This post is rated “S” for salty language, or for the suggestion thereof.]
Other “five sentences” posts
Bleak House : The cat : Clothes : Life : Life on the moon : The past (1) : The past (2) : The ship : Smoking : The telephone
“You knew about these bugs, but you’re selling this software anyway?”
Office for Mac Isn’t an Improvement (New York Times)
“It wouldn’t be the same without books”: Faton Begolli, college sophomore. Read more:
In a Digital Age, Students Still Cling to Paper Textbooks (New York Times)
A few related posts
From the Doyle edition (A marked-up page from college)
No Kindle for me
Smell of Books™
My daughter Rachel passes on a fine parody of This American Life: “Stories from This American Life,” by The Kasper Hauser Comedy Project.
Thanks, Rachel!
From a recipe in the poet’s handwriting: Emily Dickinson’s gingerbread cake (Boston Globe).
As the recipe includes only a list of ingredients, the Globe adds prosaic instructions requiring the use of a whisk, mixer, bowl, pan, and oven. I would like to imagine though that making this cake properly involves tossing the ingredients from a swiftly-moving carriage into the mouth of a well-heated volcano.
