Definitive Jest

Jarett Myskiw’s Definitive Jest: “a vocabulary-building and SNOOT-approved word-of-the-day blog centered around David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.”

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (via Pinboard)

[In the essay “Authority and American Usage,” Wallace glosses SNOOT as his “nuclear family’s nickname for a really extreme usage fanatic.” The acronym stands for “Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance” or “Syntax Nudniks Of Our Time.“ “Authority and American Usage” appears in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown, 2005). The essay first appeared in Harper’s as “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage.”]

Bands and punctuation

Some of what’s here is diacritics, not punctuation. But it would be pedantic to point that out: A Brief Guide to Band Name Punctuation.

[Don’t forget Tony! Toni! Toné!]

PHONE SCAM

I had to laugh when I saw the ID for this incoming call: was it the result of some new truth-in-dialing law? No. It’s the phone company doing its work. Do a search for 567-248-4400 and you’ll find endless reports of nuisance calls about lowering credit-card rates. Bravo, phone company.

Illegibility and shopping

On the list:

plague rinse

sympathy carol

nuanced garlic

basmati nice

Yes, that was my own handwriting staring back at me. And National Handwriting Day is just days away. I better get in shape.

Jessica Mitford on the Famous Writers School

From the July 1970 Atlantic, Jessica Mitford’s Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers. Go, read!

[Correspondence schools: the original “distance learning.”]

Writing about writing

If you’re going to write about writing, write well. Someone at the Huffington Post didn’t:

“Twitter, with it’s unavoidable limitations . . . .”

[When is it its? When it’s not it is. When is it it’s? When it is it is.]

“”The logical steps your reader has to navigate to find the meaning of your sentence is more difficult if you use the passive voice.”

[Well, sometimes, sort of. But we don’t navigate steps in reading a sentence; we navigate the sentence. And we don’t “find the meaning” of a sentence; we understand a sentence (or don’t). Things are also more difficult when your subjects and verbs don’t agree.]

“Adverbs are inherently weakening.”

[I wondered whether the writer is joking about inherently, but nothing else in his presentation makes me think that he is. At any rate, this claim about adverbs is absurd: if I say I slept fitfully, the adverb is crucial to my meaning.]

[“When is it its?” is from Jessica Mitford’s Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (1979). Does anyone still read — or listen to — Jessica Mitford? I was Huffington Post-free for weeks till (not ’til) a Google Alert pulled me back in, dammit.]

A related post
Its and it’s

Print as the new vinyl

From an e-mail by an “industry insider”:

Long-term there’s no future in printed books. They’ll be like vinyl: pricey and for collectors only.

Confessions of a Publisher: “We’re in Amazon’s Sights and They’re Going to Kill Us” (PandoDaily)

(Found via Daring Fireball)

Update, 9:48 a.m.: Apple has just announced iBooks Author, a free OS X app for destroying textbook publishers creating e-books.

More imaginary liner notes for VDP

My imaginary liner notes for Van Dyke Parks’s latest singles are now available for your reading pleasure at Bananastan Records. The music — “Black Gold” b/w “Aquarium,” with art by Frank Holmes, and “Amazing Graces” b/w “Hold Back Time,” with art by Charles Ray — is terrific. “Black Gold,” a ballad of environmental catastrophe, is, to my ears, one for the ages. You can sample 1:30 of its 6:21 at iTunes.

I’m honored to have my writing be part of VDP’s singles project.

Related reading
All Van Dyke Parks posts (via Pinboard)

[The abbreviation “b/w” is from the previous century, the world of records: “backed with.”]

Susan Cain on “the New Groupthink”

Susan Cain is skeptical about too much togetherness:

Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.

The Rise of the New Groupthink (New York Times)

I’m reminded of an observation from Richard Mitchell in The Graves of Academe (1981):

The acts that are at once the means and ends of education, knowing, thinking, understanding, judging, are all committed in solitude. It is only in a mind that the work of the mind can be done.

[Introverts of the world, separate!]

Stop PIPA and SOPA

Yes, I am opposed to PIPA and SOPA and have let my representatives in Congress know that. As a Blogger user, I cannot “go dark.” I don’t want to either. I already have enough problems when I try to use Blogger on an iPad.

The images above are the work of Sam Anderson, found here.

Further reading
Stop American Censorship (Fight for the Future)
Stop the Internet Blacklist Legislation (Electronic Frontier Foundation)