Joyeux anniversaire, M. Proust

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871.

Style is in no way an embellishment, as certain people think, it is not even a question of technique; it is, like color with certain painters, a quality of vision, a revelation of a private universe which each one of use sees and which is not seen by others. The pleasure an artist gives us is to make us know an additional universe.

Marcel Proust, in a letter to Antoine Bibesco, November (?) 1912. From Letters of Marcel Proust, translated by Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx Books / Books & Co., 2006).

Related reading
All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

Hi and Bell

[Hi and Lois, July 10, 2011.]

Today’s Hi and Lois is a grand tour through the brave new world of self-service: Hi Flagston takes his bottles and cans to a recycling center, buys a newspaper from a machine, pumps his own gas (from a rather retro pump), scans his own groceries, stops at an ATM (helpfully marked “ATM”), rents a DVD from a Redbox-like machine, and dials an automated help-line. Meanwhile, son Chip wonders where the summer jobs are.

I found myself paying too much attention to the panel above. Do you see why?

I remember the last time I saw a Bell System Public Telephone sign: last September, at Schubas Tavern in Chicago. It was too dark to take a decent photograph. The above photograph, “Bell Telephone Sign,” is by mdf3530 and is licensed under a Creative Commons 2.0 License. Thanks, mdf3530, for sharing your work.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts (via Pinboard)
Van Dyke Parks in Chicago (At Schubas Tavern)

Betty Ford (1918–2011)

From the New York Times:

Betty Ford, the outspoken and much-admired wife of President Gerald R. Ford who overcame alcoholism and an addiction to pills and helped found one of the best-known rehabilitation centers in the nation, died Friday in Palm Springs, Calif. She was 93.

The Times quotes Betty Ford’s 1987 book Betty: A Glad Awakening: “I am an ordinary woman who was called onstage at an extraordinary time.” Ordinary? Read the obituary and see if you agree.

Theodore Dalrymple on handwriting

Theodore Dalrymple draws an extreme conclusion:

Those who learn to write only on a screen will have more difficulty in distinguishing themselves from each other, and since the need to do so will remain, they will adopt more extreme ways of doing so. Less handwriting, then, more social pathology.

The Handwriting Is on the Wall (Wall Street Journal)

Two observations:

It seems doubtful that young people as a rule now distinguish themselves from one another by means of handwriting.

Dalrymple’s claim here would seem to argue against everything from one-inch margins to school uniforms.

A related post
Cursive writing in Indiana

[Editors, please, no more headlines with handwriting and wall.]

P.S. 131 for the win

Michal (Mike) Khafizou, a fifth-grader at Public School 131 in Brooklyn, recently won first prize in an essay contest sponsored by Hamilton Parkway Collision. From the New York Daily News:

Borough Park auto body shop owner Brian Nacht has come up with an interesting assignment for students that combines a love of cars with good essay writing.

For the past 15 years, Nacht, owner of Hamilton Parkway Collision on Fort Hamilton Parkway, has asked public school fifth-graders to write an essay: “If you were a part of a car, what [part] would it be?”

Brian Nacht sounds like a good guy. And Michal Khafizou sounds like a creative student with a great attitude toward learning. Excerpts from Michal’s winning essay:

When I first came to [my teacher’s] class, I felt disappointed in myself . . . so if I was a part of a car I would be the GPS. . . . The GPS is a part of a car that guides you if you are lost. . . . The work is not too hard; you just have to see what is in front of you.

Congratulations, Michal, from a former P.S. 131 student.

P.S. 131 class pictures
1962–1963 1963–1964 1964–1965 1965–1966 1966–1967

More P.S. 131
P.S. 131 on television
P.S. 131 in 1935 and 1979
The P.S. 131 fence (A photograph)

[Fort Hamilton Parkway is a Boro Park thoroughfare. Boro Park is a section of Brooklyn. For residents, it’s usually Boro, not Borough. I’d be a rear-view mirror, looking into the past. How about you?]

The benefits of handwriting

From a Chicago Tribune article about the benefits of handwriting:

“For children, handwriting is extremely important. Not how well they do it, but that they do it and practice it,” said Karin Harman James, an assistant professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University. “Typing does not do the same thing.”

James’s research suggests that writing by hand helps preliterate children to recognize letters. Other research mentioned in this article suggests that writing by hand aids memory and leads to greater fluidity in composition. These claims seem intuitive and obvious to me, but it’s nice that there’s data to lend support.

A related post
Cursive writing in Indiana (Planned obsolescence)

[I’m reminded of the Field Notes slogan: “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.”]

CopyPasteCharacter

CopyPasteCharacter is a helpful webpage if you need accented characters, currency symbols, manicules, snowmen, &c. (via One Thing Well). Also useful: HowToType.net.

[In some fonts the snowman sports a top hat; in others, a fez.]

Cursive writing in Indiana

Handwriting is in the news in (or out of?) Indiana. As of fall 2011, the state will no longer require public schools to teach cursive writing:

State officials sent school leaders a memo April 25 telling them that instead of cursive writing, students will be expected to become proficient in keyboard use.

The memo says schools may continue to teach cursive as a local standard, or they may decide to stop teaching cursive altogether.

“Keyboard use”: that’s the skill formerly known as typing.

The news from Indiana doesn’t help matters, but I continue to think that reports of the death of handwriting have been greatly exaggerated. The 2008 Pew report Writing, Technology and Teens includes this observation:

Most teens mix and match longhand and computers based on tool availability, assignment requirements and personal preference. When teens write they report that they most often write by hand, though they also often write using computers as well. Out-of-school personal writing is more likely than school writing to be done by hand, but longhand is the more common mode for both purposes. [My emphasis.]

One thoughtful student, quoted in the report:

I type so much faster than I write. But if I want to make a paper much better I have to type it out first, then hand write in the changes, then type the good copy. And it makes it easier to think things through if I can handwrite it. And I think my worst work is when I just type it and don’t handwrite it.

Between handwriting and typing, there’s no necessary either/or. It’s smart to be able to do both well.

[Thanks to Sean at Blackwing Pages for pointing me to the Indiana news.]

Related reading
Archaic Method? Cursive writing no longer has to be taught (Tribune-Star)
Typing Beats Scribbling: Indiana Schools Can Stop Teaching Cursive (Time)

Two related posts
Writing by hand
Writing, technology, and teenagers

Cy Twombly (1928–2011)

My responses to modern art are typically as immediate and unreflective as my responses to food: I really like, or I don’t. Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell: I really like. Hans Hoffman, Jackson Pollock: I don’t. The lists could go on.

I really like Cy Twombly, who died yesterday at the age of eighty-three.

American Artist Who Scribbled a Unique Path (New York Times obituary)
Cy Twombly (Gallery of images)

“Act V”

This week’s This American Life (first aired in 2002) is a must-listen: the story of inmates in a Missouri prison rehearsing and performing the final act of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Act V.”