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.”]
Friday, January 20, 2012
Definitive Jest
By Michael Leddy at 8:27 AM comments: 0
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!]
By Michael Leddy at 8:22 AM comments: 5
Thursday, January 19, 2012
PHONE SCAM
By Michael Leddy at 8:03 PM comments: 0
Illegibility and shopping
On the list:
plague rinseYes, that was my own handwriting staring back at me. And National Handwriting Day is just days away. I better get in shape.
sympathy carol
nuanced garlic
basmati nice
By Michael Leddy at 5:10 PM comments: 3
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.”]
By Michael Leddy at 8:43 AM comments: 0
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?” 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.]
[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.]
A related post
Its and it’s
By Michael Leddy at 8:42 AM comments: 0
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.(Found via Daring Fireball)
Confessions of a Publisher: “We’re in Amazon’s Sights and They’re Going to Kill Us” (PandoDaily)
Update, 9:48 a.m.: Apple has just announced iBooks Author, a free OS X app for
By Michael Leddy at 8:39 AM comments: 0
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
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.”]
By Michael Leddy at 9:53 PM comments: 0
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.I’m reminded of an observation from Richard Mitchell in The Graves of Academe (1981):
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)
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!]
By Michael Leddy at 9:24 PM comments: 4
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)
By Michael Leddy at 6:13 AM comments: 6