Leon Wieseltier on Amazon and the closing of Washington, D.C.’s Melody Record Shop:
How easy must every little thing be? A record store in your neighborhood is also convenient, and so is a bookstore. There is also a sinister side to the convenience of online shopping: hours once spent in the sensory world, in the diversified satisfaction of material needs and desires, can now be surrendered to work. It appears to be a law of American life that there shall be no respite from screens. And so Amazon’s practices raise the old question of the cultural consequences of market piggishness. For there are businesses that are not only businesses, that also have non-monetary reasons for being, that are public goods. Their devastation in the name of profit may be economically legitimate, but it is culturally calamitous. In a word, wrong.Record stores I have known
Going to Melody (The New Republic, found via Music Clip of the Day, where you can read more)
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)
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
“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.]
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.A related post
Social Relations and Technology (The Dartmouth)
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.[The macron and breve mark long and short syllables (and sometimes stressed and unstressed syllables) in metrical poetry.]
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York: New York Review Books, 2000). Originally published as Aphorisms (1990).
The New York Times reports that Barnes & Noble bookstores will not stock Amazon-published books.
A related post
Barnes & Noble v. Amazon
[“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.
