Arteries of New York City

“Buses are slower than the subway, but they offer the pleasure of being able to see store windows and the people of the city as they work and play.” From the Prelinger Archives, it’s Arteries of New York City, a 1941 Encyclopedia Britannica film (found via The Atlantic).

Life in colledge

In the news: “A college student claims he was injured when a fraternity member in a ‘drunken stupor’ decided ‘that it would be a good idea to shoot bottle rockets out of his —

I’m stopping right there. You’ll have to click through to read the rest (found via Boing Boing).

Why colledge? That’s my word for “the vast simulacrum of education that amounts to little more than buying a degree on the installment plan.” Colledge cheapens the experience of students who are in college. Colledge students and college students are often found on the very same campus.

Related reading
All colledge posts (via Pinboard)

Same time, next year (plagiarism)

February 2011: dozens of MBA applicants at Penn State’s Smeal College of Business are found to have submitted plagiarized essays.

February 2012: a dozen MBA applicants at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management are found to have submitted plagiarized essays.

A plagiarized grad-school application essay suggests a long and successful undergrad history of academic misconduct, don’t you think? Professors who discover plagiarism and are thinking about proper penalties should always ask themselves: how likely is it that this is the first time the student has plagiarized?

Related reading
All plagiarism posts

Mysterious apologies

“I take back any false or bad remarks, any rudeness or negative actions.” Mysterious written apologies are baffling the town of Whitstable, Kent.

[My guess: someone in a twelve-step program is making amends.]

Social relations and technology

Dartmouth student Benjamin Schwartz:

When we draw our social experiences, including our most solemn and profound ones, out of the well of personal interaction and cast them into the public domain, they often are swept up in the current of exhibitionism. Genuine connections are made when people can let go of the notion that they might be judged and make self-expression the priority rather than endearment. Facebook crowds out the opportunities for this to happen. Ironically, this can render a tool meant to foster “connections” a profoundly isolating force.

Social Relations and Technology (The Dartmouth)

A related post
Infinite Jest, telephony

From The Waste Books

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) was a professor of experimental physics and a keeper of Sudelbücher, “waste books”:

Merchants have a waste-book (Sudelbuch, Klitterbuch, I think it is in German), in which they enter from day to day everything they have bought and sold, all mixed up together in disorder; from this it is transferred to the journal, in which everything is arranged more systematically, and finally it arrives in the ledger, in double entry after the Italian manner of book-keeping. . . . This deserves to be imitated by the scholar.

Sounds like proto-blogging. One more sample:

It is strange indeed that long syllables are designated with a ˉ and short ones with a ˘, since the former is the shortest way between two points and the latter is a crooked line. The inventor of these things must therefore have been been thinking of something else when he invented them, if he was thinking of anything at all.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York: New York Review Books, 2000). Originally published as Aphorisms (1990).

[The macron and breve mark long and short syllables (and sometimes stressed and unstressed syllables) in metrical poetry.]

Barnes & Noble v. Amazon (2)

The New York Times reports that Barnes & Noble bookstores will not stock Amazon-published books.

A related post
Barnes & Noble v. Amazon

NYPL Stereogranimator

[“Ivy Baldwin breaking the record for tight-rope walking-rope 580 feet high and 555 feet long, near Boulder, Colo. (c.1907).”]

You too can create animated GIFs and 3D images with the New York Public Library’s Stereogranimator.

January 31, 1971 (?)

John Ashbery on “the dictatorship of the months and years”:

On this Sunday which is also the last day of January let us pause for a moment to take note of where we are. A new year has just begun and now a new month is coming up, charged with its weight of promise and probable disappointments, standing in the wings like an actor who is conscious of nothing but the anticipated cue, totally absorbed, a pillar of waiting. And now there is no help for it but to be cast adrift in the new month. One is plucked from one month to the next; the year is like a fast-moving Ferris wheel; tomorrow all the riders will be under the sign of February and there is no appeal, one will have to get used to living with its qualities and perhaps one will even adjust to them successfully before the next month arrives with a whole string of new implications in its wake.

“The System,” in Three Poems (1972).

[Sounds like a parody of a sermon. In 1971, January 31 fell on a Sunday.]

From Gilbert Sorrentino’s final work

It begins:

Mundane things, pitiful in their mundane assertiveness, their sad isolation. Kraft French dressing, glowing weirdly orange through its glass bottle, a green glass bowl of green salad, a bottle of Worcestershire sauce, its paper wrapper still on. All are in repose, in their absolute thingness, under the overhead alarming bright light of the kitchen. They may or they should, they must, really, reveal the meaning of this silent room, this silent house, save that they won’t. There is no meaning. These things will evoke nothing.

In years to come, almost three-quarters of a century, they still evoke nothing. Orange, green, incandescent glare. Silence and loss. Nothing. There might be a boy of four at the table. He is sitting very straight and is possibly waiting for someone.

Gilbert Sorrentino, The Abyss of Human Illusion (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2009).

The back cover calls The Abyss of Human Illusion a novel. In fact it is a collection of fifty short pieces of doom and wit. I love Sorrentino’s writing. The details of his Brooklyn are the details of my Brooklyn.

Related posts
Bandbox (a word in a Sorrentino novel)
Gilbert Sorrentino (1929–2006)

[This book is available at a sadly low price from you-know-where.]