Lines from Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 8, 1911.

A related post
Elizabeth Bishop at Vassar

Plagiarism in the academy

At Pennsylvania State University's Smeal College of Business, a “perfect storm of plagiarism,” as twenty-nine applicants to the MBA program plagiarize in their application essays. One of the required essay topics: “the connections between principled leadership and business.”

Related reading
All plagiarism posts

“Painters and Poets”

John Ashbery Jane Freilicher Larry Rivers Frank
    O’Hara
Their names alone bring tears to my eyes

Kenneth Koch, “The Circus” (The Art of Love, 1975)

Three slideshows — from the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Tibor de Nagy — for “Tibor de Nagy Painters and Poets,” an exhibition devoted to collaborations among painters and poets in post-war New York.

AOL buys Huffington Post

Read more:  15, 300, 315, America, aol, AOL, AOL Inc., Benjamins, Best Buy, Big Bucks, Bread, Cabbage, Cash, Fifteen, Greenbacks, Hamiltons, HP, Huff, Huffington, Huffington Post, HuffPo, HuffPost, Huffy Bicycles,  Jackson 5, Jacksons, Long Green, Loot, Lorne Greene, Louisiana, Marge, Marge Simpson, Merge, Merge Left, Merge Right, Merger, Merging, Michael Jackson, Million, Millions, Moolah, Online, Post, Purchase, Sawbucks, Simoleons, Spartans, Starbucks, Three-Hundred

AOL has purchased the Huffington Post for $315 million.

[The pseudo-links are sarcastic high jinks. I’ve never been impressed by HuffPo’s style of journalism.]

Snail Mail

[Click for a larger view.]

“Without ZIP CODE the growing U.S. Mail load would move at a snail’s pace — if it moved at all!”: an advertisement from Life, November 22, 1968.

Poor Mr. ZIP: he lived to see all mail become snail mail. The Oxford English Dictionary traces snail mail — “the physical delivery of mail, as by the postal service, considered as slow in comparison to electronic mail; a letter, etc., sent by post” — back to 1982. Mr. ZIP retired in 1986. He later died of a broken heart.

Another SMiLE?

Beach Boy Al Jardine tells an interviewer that a Beach Boys version of Smile (or SMiLE, the traditional spelling) is on the way:

Are there plans for a new Beach Boys archival project?

Capitol Records plans to issue a Beach Boys version of Smile sometime this summer to begin the celebration of The Beach Boys’ anniversary. Smile is the Holy Grail for Beach Boys’ fans, so it will be good.

I don’t have many details on it, although we didn’t do any new recording. I’m happy to see it finally come out. Brian’s changed his mind about releasing the material, but it was inevitable, wasn’t it?

Beach Boys versions of songs from SMiLE have been released on various LPs (beginning in 1967 with Smiley Smile). More SMiLE material appeared in 1993 in the Capitol box-set Good Vibrations: Thirty Years Of The Beach Boys. And as you might guess, vast amounts of SMiLE and SMiLE-related material have become available on bootlegs. And Brian Wilson recorded and released SMiLE as a solo album in 2004. Mike Love even sued cousin Brian about it, which would seem to make it official.

A new release of Beach Boys SMiLE material (with, I trust, excellent remastering) would be a welcome thing, but it’s not as if the music is finally coming out.

[SMiLE, music by Brian Wilson, lyrics by Van Dyke Parks, began its legendary life in 1966. It’s a masterpiece. Surf’s up!]

Trochees

From xkcd, Trochee Fixation. And, on a similar note, Iambic Pentameter.

[Yes, my name’s made of trochees, but I try not to call attention to it.]

“Ice and Snow Blues No. 3”

Light to moderate my eye. It is really, really snowing. Only after I trudged out did I realize what a dumb thing I was doing: had I slipped, our camera would likely have been ruined.

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

Related posts
“Ice and Snow Blues”
“Ice and Snow Blues No. 2”

NoteSlate

“[Y]ou will love the wooden feeling of writing or drawing”: NoteSlate, a $99 electronic tablet. I think they need to work on the translation.

(Found via kottke.org)

Battling The Elements

In a review of Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence, Adam Haslett slams The Elements of Style and the “old Strunkian superego”:

The trouble with the book isn’t the rules themselves, which the authors are sage enough to recognise “the best writers sometimes disregard,” but the knock-on effect that their bias for plain statement has tended to have not only on expositional but literary prose.

The Art of Good Writing (Financial Times)

Haslett holds Strunk and White (and that guy Hemingway) responsible for the “pared-down prose“ “that has become our default ‘realism.’”

Josh Rothman responds:

[E.B. White] wasn’t an enemy of literariness. He saw, instead, that beginning writers face two struggles. On the one hand, there is lazy inattentiveness; on the other, there’s a self-conscious sense of “literary style,” which can stand in the way of a beginning writer’s progress. His suggestions about finding a middle way are as useful now as they were in 1959.

In Defense of Strunk and White (Boston Globe)

I’ll add one thought: Strunk and White’s emphasis on brevity does not preclude long sentences. The real point is concision — avoiding clutter (e.g., “the fact that,” “the question as to whether”) and combining short, choppy sentences to make longer, more fluent sentences. From the famous “Omit needless words” section of The Elements:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

A related post
Fish on Strunk and White