Whither Barnes & Noble?

I went to a nearby Barnes & Noble last night to buy Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs — my first visit since Borders closed. I was surprised to see how large and empty the store looked. It’s not just that there were few customers: several aisles of books had been removed, and larger areas of floorspace were now given over to games and trinkets and just plain carpet. Is the handwriting on the wall for Barnes & Noble? Or better: are the pixels on the screen?

[Bookstore survival-strategy seems to be premised on everything but books.]

A school without technology

In Silicon Valley’s Waldorf School of the Peninsula, teaching and learning take place without computers. The school’s students include the children of Apple, Google, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and Yahoo employees:

Finn Heilig, 10, whose father works at Google, says he liked learning with pen and paper — rather than on a computer — because he could monitor his progress over the years.

“You can look back and see how sloppy your handwriting was in first grade. You can’t do that with computers ’cause all the letters are the same,” Finn said. “Besides, if you learn to write on paper, you can still write if water spills on the computer or the power goes out.”

A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute (New York Times)

[Found via Submitted for Your Perusal. Matt Thomas reads the Sunday New York Times far more thoroughly than I do.]

SafeLite, SafeLite, SafeLite

A commercial (or series of commercials) sometimes gets in my head — and my brain begins to dissolve. Case in point: commercials for SafeLite AutoGlass. Sing it with me: “SafeLite repair, Safelite replace.”

What gets me is the ritual that closes each windshield-repair vignette. The customer reaches for her or his wallet, only to be waved off: insurance has it covered. The customer then looks into the eyes of the SafeLite technician, each customer with a different response to this unexpected bit of good news. Behold, as SafeLite technicians Ray, Erik, and Pascal, and three unidentified customers perform the ritual. You can click each image for a larger view.

If these hands could speak, they would say, to a finger, “Your money is no good here.” But note the variety of responses.

Here we see earnest, mildly surprised gratitude. “Huh. We don’t see enough of your generosity in today’s world. Thank you, Ray. I will pay it forward.”

This fellow is too cocky for his own good, or anyone else’s. The money he’s saved will probably go toward larger and better mirrors. I’d like to remind him though that he will still be stuck with a less than perfect windshield.

This guy’s the best. He can’t believe his good fortune. “Really?” he asks. Yes, really. Pascal would not lie to you. Pascal shares his name with a great philosopher. Your insurance, sir, is covering the repair, which costs about a quarter of what a new windshield would cost. Yes, really.

You can see all three commercials, over and over and over, at YouTube: Ray, Erik, and Pascal.

Overheard

While out and about:

“’Cause they’re opinion-wise. Thank God! ”

What are they? Essays, I suspect (whose arguments in fact require support).

Opinion-wise reminds me of The Apartment (dir. Billy Wilder, 1960), which has -wise running through it: “Premium-wise and billing-wise, we are eighteen percent ahead of last year, October-wise.” In 1960, -wise was very much in the air. From the 1959 edition of William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style:

-wise. Not to be used indiscriminately as a pseudosuffix: taxwise, pricewise, marriagewise, prosewise, saltwater taffywise. Chiefly useful when it means in the manner of : clockwise. There is not a noun in the language to which -wise cannot be added if the spirit moves one to add it. The sober writer will abstain from the use of this wild syllable.

As you might suspect from the taffy and from the dry humor of that final sentence, the entry is White’s work.

Related reading
All “overheard” posts (via Pinboard)

At Zuccotti Park (6)

[Photograph by James Koper. Click for a larger view.]

Our friends Jim and Luanne Koper went to Zuccotti Park last Saturday and are sharing their photographs of the day. Here’s one more.

More photographs from Zuccotti Park
“I go to time out for cheating”
“Take the rich off welfare!”
Man with beard
Woman with sign
Man with flag

New from Homer

Here from The Economist is a review of a new edition of a venerable translation of the Iliad (Richmond Lattimore), two new translations (Stephen Mitchell, Anthony Verity), and a free adaptation (Alice Oswald): Winged Words. About Lattimore, the reviewer and I will have to disagree: the “certain grace” that he or she finds in Lattimore’s Iliad is missing from my copy. About Mitchell and Verity, I’m inclined to agree: the lines quoted offer little to recommend these translations. Oswald’s project sounds like an obvious imitation of Christopher Logue’s ongoing War Music: I’m surprised that the reviewer doesn’t mention Logue’s reimagining of Homer’s poem.

Mitchell’s bland admission to the Wall Street Journal — “I’ve never been able to read ‘The Iliad,’ actually, until I sat down to do this. . . . I could never get past book one in any translation. I found the language very dull” — raises an odd but relevant question: why might one sit down to translate a work one has never read, either in the original or in translation? Mitchell’s characterization of translations as “dull” makes me think that he must not have sampled Stanley Lombardo’s Iliad. It’s curious then that Mitchell’s colloquialisms — “Don’t talk to me of agreements, you son of a bitch“ — sound very much like the work of a poor man’s Stanley Lombardo.

For me, there’s one great Iliad in modern translation, and it‘s Lombardo’s. It’s the translation that made me understand Homer’s poem. I am interested though in browsing these new translations in a bookstore. (No samples at Amazon.)

Some related posts
Gilgamesh in translation (Stephen Mitchell and N.K. Sandars)
Whose Homer? (the Big Four: Lattimore, Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Fagles, Lombardo)
Translators at work and play (another line by the Big Four)
Three Virgils (Fitzgerald, Lombardo, Fagles)
Translations, mules, briars (Guy Davenport on Lattimore)

[“I could never get past book one in any translation”: why would Mitchell have been limited to reading the poem in translation anyway? Because he had no Homeric Greek? Did he thus invest time in learning a language to be able translate a poem he had never read? Very puzzling. Browse around and you’ll find that other readers have wondered whether Mitchell can read Homer’s Greek.]

At Zuccotti Park (5)

[Photograph by James Koper. Click for a larger view.]

Our friends Jim and Luanne Koper went to Zuccotti Park on Saturday and are sharing their photographs of the day. Here’s one more.

More photographs from Zuccotti Park
“I go to time out for cheating”
“Take the rich off welfare!”
Man with beard
Woman with sign

Gaddafi? Kadafi? Qaddafi?

Gaddafi? Kadafi? Qaddafi? However you spell it, it seems that he’s dead.

Three little words

Herman Cain, at yesterday’s Western Republican Leadership Conference: “My strategy for China is three words: Outgrow China.”

[Thanks, Elaine!]

You and us

Ah, pedagogy. I’ve changed the way I ask a standard question in class, for the better, I think.

Old version: What in the poem (or story, or text) makes you think that? What in the poem shows you that?

New version: What in the poem makes us think that? What in the poem shows us that?

The old version puts all the weight on the shoulders of one student and can be misheard as a challenge: where did you ever get that idea? The new version suggests that whatever the student has said makes sense, that other readers would think so too, and that evidence is indeed there in the text. Getting students to argue from the text is a more difficult proposition than you might imagine, so I’m always asking for evidence, even if it’s to support what appears to be obvious. Close, and closer, reading.