Marco Arment on blogging

“This site represents me, and I’m random and eccentric and interested in a wide variety of subjects.” From all the way back in 2009, Marco Arment’s Avoiding the blogger trap, good advice for anyone who writes online.

[Marco’s Instapaper has changed my life — and for the better.]

Literature and word-processing

The New York Times has a good story on literature and word-processing: The Muses of Insert, Delete and Execute. One choice bit:

Jimmy Carter set off what may have been the first word-processing-related panic in 1981, when he accidently deleted several pages of his memoir in progress by hitting the wrong keys on his brand-new $12,000 Lanier.

Here’s a picture of a Lanier Model 103.

“Don’t be a brute”

[“Don’t be a brute: handle your disks as you would handle LPs — by the edges.” Click for a larger view.]

The words above, in stately mauveine, come from a three-page guide that I made for students in a Spring 1987 writing class, an experiment in teaching writing with word-processing. I discovered this document in a folder underneath a folder underneath a — suffice it to say that the document is recently unearthed. I’m amused to realize that it’s the older disks in my analogy that would be familiar to at least some 2011 students.

In 1987, teaching writing with word-processing was a bit cutting edge. Now computer-assisted writing classes are everywhere. I remain unenthusiastic though, because writing is not word-processing. The work of inventing, developing, and arranging ideas is entirely different from the work of preparing a document. Word-processing makes it all too easy for the novice writer to conflate the two kinds of work, so that even the roughest draft (what Anne Lamott calls the “shitty first draft”) looks like a finished product. I take great happiness in seeing my students discover the difference between writing (really writing) and word-processing, typically by (1) working out ideas on paper before typing and (2) revising on paper.

My favorite tools of writing: index cards, pocket notebooks, legal pads, TextWrangler, and WriteRoom. I consider a word-processing window a hostile workplace.

A related post
Beagle Bros disk-care warnings
Writing by hand

[The disks we used in 1987: 5¼" floppies.]

Ebert documentary picks

Roger Ebert picks the best documentaries of 2011.

“Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story”

From NPR, to stream or download: Paul Auster reads “Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story.”

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it.

Eggnog economics

Why don’t they make make eggnog all year long? The answer may not surprise you.

A related post
Charles Mingus’s eggnog recipe

Steve Jobs on PowerPoint

To be posted in all classrooms:

“People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”

Steve Jobs, quoted in Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).

[A reasoned, nuanced evaluation? Hardly. For that, see Edward Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. And yes, Jobs used a presentation app, Apple’s Keynote, for his keynotes.]

Juneberry78s

Juneberry78s is a great resource for anyone interested in (or soon-to-be interested in) traditional American music. Juneberry’s Listening Room offers MP3s to stream or download. Here are ten (just ten) samples:

Clarence Ashley, “The Coo-Coo Bird”
Barbecue Bob, “Yo Yo Blues”
Dock Boggs, “Country Blues”
Blind Roosevelt Graves and Brother, “Woke Up This Morning (With My Mind on Jesus)”
Frank Hutchinson, “Train That Carried the Girl from Town”
Sam McGee, “Franklin Blues”
The Mississippi Moaner, “It’s Cold in China Blues”
Moonshine Kate, “My Man’s a Jolly Railroad Man”
Ernest and Hattie Stoneman, “Too Late”
Henry Williams and Eddie Anthony, “Georgia Crawl”

Lost mitten

[Photograph by Michael Leddy. Click for a larger size.]

<pathetic fallacy>

Poor little mitten. It’s been waiting on this telephone pole for at least a month.

</pathetic fallacy>

Related reading
Pathetic fallacy

“change modify revise alter rewrite amend chop to pieces change”

[“The strongest drive is not love or hate. It is one person’s need to change modify revise alter rewrite amend chop to pieces change another’s copy.”]

The above poster appears in Arthur Plotnik’s The Elements of Editing: A Modern Guide for Editors and Journalists (New York: Macmillan, 1982).

Also from The Elements of Editing
“Plotnik’s mantra of follow-up”