VDP on Song Cycle

“It was outside of its time, and it still is”: Van Dyke Parks on Song Cycle, a short film by Richard Parks.

Related reading
All Van Dyke Parks posts

Teacher, beware

I just had a look at the Terms and Conditions at sharemylesson.com, available via a tiny link at the bottom of the main page. The link is labeled t&cs, so that you’re sure to recognize its importance at once.¹ Here’s one passage from Terms and Conditions:

With respect to all Content you post on the Service, you grant SML a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive and fully sub-licensable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed. With respect to all Content you post to the Service, you hereby waive any moral rights you have in the Content. You agree to perform all further acts necessary to perfect any of the above rights granted by you to SML, including the execution of deeds and documents, at our request. SML does not acquire any title or ownership rights in the Content that you submit and/or make available. After you submit, post, email, display, transmit or otherwise make available any such Content, you continue to retain any such rights that you may have in such Content, subject to the rights, licenses and privileges granted herein.

In other words, SML can do what it wants with your work. In copyright law, moral rights include the right to attribution. If you waive that right, I’m not sure what “any such rights that you may have in such Content” can mean. What this passage seems to mean though is that anyone who contributes material to Share My Lesson can kiss her or his work goodbye.

Another passage:

You acknowledge that other persons may have submitted Content to us, may have made public or developed, or may originate, submit, make public or develop, material similar or identical to all or a portion of your Content or concepts contained therein, and you understand and agree that you shall not be entitled to any compensation because of the use or exploitation thereof and the submission of Content, or any posting or display thereof, is not any admission of novelty, priority or originality. Even if you subsequently see or learn of a presentation, sound recording, composition, demo, idea, script, drawing, motion picture, photograph, film, video or any other content which appears to incorporate any idea or concept or include anything similar or identical to that contained in any Content you or anyone else submits, that is purely coincidental and unavoidable.

I.e., kiss your work goodbye.

And then there’s this passage:

You are prohibited from reproducing, copying, modifying, renting, leasing, loaning, selling, distributing, exploiting, extracting, providing links to, creating derivative works of or otherwise communicating or making available to third parties any part of the Content of the Service without SML’s prior written consent.

You acknowledge that, by making use of the Service, you are agreeing to comply with this prohibition and that any breach thereof is likely to result in legal proceedings being issued against you.

This passage is merely puzzling. It seems to say that teachers cannot reproduce materials from Share My Lesson for use in their classes. Yet doing so seems to be the whole point of the website.

Teacher, beware.

¹ Irony.

A related post
sharemylesson.com

sharemylesson.com

The New York Times reports that the American Federation of Teachers has created a website for teachers to share curriculum materials: sharemylesson.com. In 2009 the Times reported on teachers who buy and sell lesson plans online. It’s sad to see the AFT (my union) getting involved in this sort of effort, even if no money changes hands.

The descriptions of Share My Lesson materials are often dispiriting. Here are three, my quick choices, cut and pasted from the site:

Analyzing Atmosphere in Romeo and Juliet
Analyzing Atmosphere in Romeo and Juliet. Analyzing atmosphere in Romeo and Juliet

Fact Sheet Elegy Tichbourne
Fact Sheet Elegy Tichbourne. This is a fact sheet on the background of the poem Elegy, it can be used in conjunction with the lesson Powerpoint that i have also uploaded.

Of mice and men Unit
Of mice and men Unit. Huge set of resources tracing theme, characterization, language, etc. Almost a complete unit.

I worry about the habits of mind that would lead a teacher to repeat a description three times, to make elementary mistakes in punctuation, to type i and let it stand, to capitalize unit while lower-casing the nouns in a novella’s title, to call something both a unit and “almost a complete unit.” Can we expect these teachers to take more care with the sheets and units themselves? Can we expect the maker of “Fact Sheet Elegy Tichbourne” to take more care when he or she evaluates student writing?

A student once told me that in her high-school English classes students and teachers alike used Cliffs Notes. Everyone pretended to be reading. How long before the kids catch on and get the jump on their lesson-sharing teachers? (All one needs to join sharemylesson.com is an e-mail address.) And how long before teachers catch on and realize that this sort of endeavor does little to further their cause with the American public?

Thanks, Stefan, for pointing me to this article (and to the 2009 article).

Related posts
Reinventing the wheel
Teacher, beware (on Terms and Conditions for Share My Lesson)

Randolph Bourne on discussion

These sentences are going on my syllabi for the fall:

A good discussion increases the dimensions of every one who takes part. Being rather self-consciously a mind in a group of minds means becoming more of a person.

Randolph Bourne, “On Discussion” (1916). In History of a Literary Radical and Other Essays, ed. Van Wyck Brooks (New York: Biblio & Tannen, 1969).

The essay is online at The New Republic. I found my way to Randolph Bourne’s work by means of Christopher Lasch’s Plain Style, which presents a short essay by Bourne to exemplify good writing.

Postal abbreviations

Christopher Lasch on postal abbreviations:

Do not use the new postal abbreviations either in the running text or in footnotes. The old abbreviations — Mass., Miss. — are sanctified by custom. The new ones — MA, MI — are bureaucratic innovations designed to surround the postal service with an illusory air of efficiency. Accordingly they fall under the general prohibition of bureaucratic speech and writing, the invariable purpose of which is evasion and obfuscation, even when it appears, as here, to signal the streamlined, computerized elimination of waste motion.

Plain Style: A Guide to Written English, ed. Stewart Weaver (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).

Lasch’s mid-1980s recommendation was sound: the thirteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style (1982), whose recommendations Lasch adopts here and there in Plain Style, includes both sets of abbreviations, with the dowdy ones listed first as “preferred” in notes and bibliographies. That arrangement and judgement hold in the fourteenth edition (1993), which also notes that short names “like Alaska, Iowa, Maine, and Ohio” may be spelled out. Everything changes with the fifteenth edition (2003): there the two-letter abbreviations come first, though the editors note that “Many writers and editors . . . prefer the older forms.” In the sixteenth edition (2010), the editors are more direct about their preference: “Chicago prefers the two-letter postal codes to the conventional abbreviations.”

A related post
Christopher Lasch’s Plain Style

[This post is for Daughter Number Three, who hates to see postal abbreviations in writing.]

Christopher Lasch’s Plain Style

Christopher Lasch. Plain Style: A Guide to Written English. Ed. Stewart Weaver. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. 121 pages. $18.95.

I am grading papers with the usual sense of futility. . . . Every year the illiteracy gets worse.

Christopher Lasch, in a letter to his father, May 1985

O you who teach: there is bitter consolation in knowing that you are not alone, in knowing that even, say, Christopher Lasch (professor at the University of Rochester, eminent cultural historian, author of The Culture of Narcissism) felt the futility of grading student writing. Many instructors hide from that feeling, dispensing cheery grades and wishful comments in the margins (“Take more care!”). But Lasch, in early 1983, began work on a style sheet for his students’ use. What set him to this task: the poor writing of his graduate students and their failure to improve after exposure to William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White’s The Elements of Style. By October 1985 the style sheet had grown into a small guide to writing, typed and duplicated for distribution to students in Rochester’s history department.

Lasch’s final revised typescript is the source for Plain Style, which might be the most streamlined guide to writing now available: just seventy-seven printed pages, with chapters on “Elementary Principles of Literary Construction” (commentary on a short essay by Randolph Bourne), “Conventions Governing Punctuation, Capitalization, Typography, and Footnotes,” and “Characteristics of Bad Writing,” followed by lists of misused words, mispronounced names and words (“Neet′-chuh, not Neetsch or Neet-chee”), and proofreaders’ marks.

Plain Style invites comparison to The Elements of Style: both books began as in-house publications for student use; both number their principles and rules (allowing for brief marginal corrections); both issue confident, no-nonsense directives:

Strunk (revised by White) on interesting: “An unconvincing word; avoid it as a means of introduction. Instead of announcing that what you are about to tell is interesting, make it so.”

Lasch on life style: “The appeal of this tired but now ubiquitous phrase probably lies in its suggestion that life is largely a matter of style. Find something else to say about life.”

You may want to dismiss these sorts of prohibitions as the grumblings of curmudgeons, but any competent teacher would call attention to “It is interesting to note that” or “Agamemnon’s lifestyle” in student writing. There is nothing curmudgeonly about suggesting that a writer show rather than tell or that a writer avoid trite (and anachronistic) phrasing. If you labor in the realm of what Lasch calls “downright unreadable sentences,” you already understand that teaching students to become better writers is often a matter of teaching what not to do: don’t write “It is interesting to note that”; don’t use “a famous quote”; don’t begin with “In this essay I will discuss.” Or as teachers end up writing in the margin, Avoid.

Plain Style is a worthy successor to The Elements of Style (a book not nearly as bad as its detractors suggest, though in many ways dated). Lasch values strong verbs, distrusts abstractions and the passive voice, and hates blather and cant. The sentences and passages illustrating his points are wonderfully varied and assume a reader with a lively range of cultural reference: Aaron Burr, Candide, Steve and Cyndy Garvey, Antonio Gramsci, Pauline Kael, Beatrix Potter’s Mr. McGregor, George Orwell, Talcott Parsons, and William Faulkner’s Snopeses all make at least one appearance. Lasch’s guidance is hardly exhaustive: the brief paragraph on the semicolon, for instance, is not likely to cure comma splices. And complications sometimes grow beyond what’s helpful: the discussion of conventions governing quotation marks might create confusion where none had existed.

Is Plain Style enough? No, but no one book is enough to solve writing problems. The Elements of Style is dated; Michael Harvey’s The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing is not especially helpful on thesis statements; Joseph Williams’s Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace is at times bewildering (and, always, a typographical horror). Plain Style is beautifully designed and well written, and the soundness of its prose makes a strong case for the soundness of its advice. Lasch of course knew that one book was not enough:

We learn to write well, if we ever do, by reading good prose, paying close attention to our own words, revising relentlessly, and recalling the connections between written and spoken language.

Close attention to one’s words, a healthy (not paralyzing) self-consciousness, is what Plain Style seeks to foster in its reader.

Plain Style includes a lengthy introduction by Stewart Weaver, who places this guide to writing in the context of Lasch’s intellectual development and interest in the political implications of language. Professor Weaver tells me that Plain Style is still given free to the Rochester history department’s incoming graduate students.

xkcd: “Words for Small Sets”

Today’s xkcd:



What you get in the mouseover:

If things are too quiet, try asking a couple of friends whether “a couple” should always mean “two.” As with the question of how many spaces should go after a period, it can turn acrimonious surprisingly fast unless all three of them agree.

My son Ben and I have debated “a couple,” just once, for a few minutes. Garner’s Modern American Usage sides with Ben.

Happy Father’s Day

[Photograph by Louise Leddy, May 25, 1957. Click for a larger view.]

My dad James and me, posing for my mom, on a Saturday in Brooklyn. My dad still has that smile: he remains one handsome devil. Happy Father’s Day, Dad. And Happy Father’s Day to all.

Bloomsday 2012

From the catechetical “Ithaca” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922):

What is home without Plumtree’s Potted Meat?

Incomplete.

With it an abode of bliss.

Manufactured by George Plumtree, 23 Merchants' quay, Dublin, put up in 4 oz pots, and inserted by Councillor Joseph P. Nannetti, M. P., Rotunda Ward, 19 Hardwicke street, under the obituary notices and anniversaries of deceases. The name on the label is Plumtree. A plumtree in a meatpot, registered trade mark. Beware of imitations. Peatmot. Trumplee. Moutpat. Plamtroo.

The present time of Ulysses: June 16, 1904. (The novel ends in the early hours of June 17.) June 16 is Bloomsday, named for the novel’s hero, Leopold Bloom. “Potted meat” is death: yes, ads for Plumtree’s appear in the newspaper under obituary notices, and Bloom’s just-buried friend Paddy Dignam is, as Bloom thinks, potted meat. Potted meat is also sexual union, something missing from Leopold and Molly Bloom’s marriage. Without: incomplete. With: yes, an abode of bliss. Yes: that’s Molly’s last word, the novel’s last word. Happy Bloomsday.

[The Strand Magazine, December 1898.]

Other Bloomsdays
2007 (The first page)
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (Leopold Bloom, “water lover”)
2011 (“[T]he creature cocoa”)

SAF-T-HED Thumb Tacks

[Life, January 11, 1960.]

I found this (in reality tiny) advertisement while looking, as usual, for something else. Before seeing this ad, I never thought about the danger of pin passing “thru head.” Now I’ll be unable to press on a thumbtack without thinking about that danger. Ouch. I like though the idea that our nation once had a favorite thumbtack. Imagine the conversations.

The American Tack Company, founded in 1937, lives on as AmerTac, “a decorative home accent company,” making everything but thumbtacks.

Related posts
Antique Packaging
Moore Metalhed Maptacks

[This post is for Gunther, who appreciates thumbtacks.]