Matthew Crawford on higher education

A philosopher and mechanic, on higher education:

When the point of education becomes the production of credentials rather than the cultivation of knowledge, it forfeits the motive recognized by Aristotle: “All human beings by nature desire to know.” Students become intellectually disengaged.

Maybe we can say, after all, that higher education is indispensable to prepare students for the jobs of the information economy. Not for the usual reason given, namely, that there is ever-increasing demand for workers with more powerful minds, but in this perverse sense: college habituates young people to accept as the normal course of things a mismatch between form and content, official representations and reality.

Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (New York: Penguin, 2009).

Recently updated

Living in the Middle Ages Todd Akin’s theorizing about rape and pregnancy dates back at least to the late thirteenth century.

Zippy and Bukowski

[Zippy, August 21, 2012. Click for larger views.]

Dingburg poet laureate Slouch Gavitsky looks and sounds a lot like Charles Bukowski.

Related posts
Nancy + Sluggo = Perfection
Read Charles Bukowski 4 what?

[The Bukowski photograph is by Sam Cherry and appears in Post Office (1971). I found it here.]

Henry at the shoe repairman

[Henry, August 22, 2012.]

In May 2012 post on shoe repairmen as the new typewriter repairmen, I wrote: “I can remember as a boy sitting in a stall-like structure with a swinging door, waiting while new heels were put on my shoes. Was that common?”

In Henry, it still is.

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March 29, 2013: It seems they were called “shoe booths.”

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April 7, 2015: April 7, 2015: A recent post at Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York visits a Grand Central Station shoe-repair shop with shoe booths. An earlier VNY post about Jim’s Shoe Repair (E. 59th Street) has more booths. Jeremiah Moss calls them ”modesty booths.”

Other Henry posts
Betty Boop with Henry
Henry, an anachronism
Henry and a gum machine
Henry buys liverwurst
Henry, getting things done
Henry mystery
Henry’s repeated gesture

The Beloit Mindset List, again

The latest edition of the Beloit Mindset List is now available. I would call it the 2012 list, but Beloit calls it the 2016 list, to mark the anticipated year of graduation for this fall’s college freshmen. (A bit optimistic, that. Has Beloit not heard of The Five-Year Plan?) The new list, like lists before it, collects odd, tacky, and often unconvincing markers of changing times. A sampling:

“Michael Jackson’s family, not the Kennedys, constitutes ‘American Royalty.’” News to me.

“Herr Schindler has always had a List; Mr. Spielberg has always had an Oscar.” In other words, Schindler’s List received Oscars in 1994, the year of a hypothetical eighteen-year-old freshman’s birth. This item is particularly tasteless and would be so even without the grotesque pun on Oskar and Oscar. I’m surprised this item withstood institutional scrutiny.

“If they miss The Daily Show, they can always get their news on YouTube.” No, if “they” — or I — want to catch The Daily Show, the destination is thedailyshow.com.

“They have had to incessantly remind their parents not to refer to their CDs and DVDs as ‘tapes.’” The closest we’ve come to this goofy scenario in our household is with the words album and record, which do indeed still describe recorded works, analog or digital.

“Their lives have been measured in the fundamental particles of life: bits, bytes, and bauds.” Bauds?

“They have always lived in cyberspace, addicted to a new generation of ‘electronic narcotics.’” Electronic narcotics? No wonder they call it the Information Superhighway. Seriously though, the term “electronic narcotics” has little currency beyond the Beloit Mindset List. A Google search for “electronic narcotics” -beloit -2016 returns a mere 935 results.

My real objection to the Beloit Mindset List though concerns not its particulars but the mindset behind the list. As I wrote in a post on the 2010 (or 2014) list:

What bothers me about the Beloit list involves some unspoken assumptions about reality and young adults. The list reads like a nightmare-version of the proposition that begins Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921): “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.” “The world is all that is the case” — all that is the case, that is, in the life-experience of a hypothetical eighteen-year-old American student.

If you want to read more:

Re: the Beloit Mindset List (on the 2010 list)
The Beloit Mindset List: 2011 edition

[In my lifetime, Bix Beiderbecke, Emily Dickinson, Juan Gris, and Fats Waller have always been dead. And the point is — what?]

Living in the Middle Ages

Wally (Wallace Shawn), in My Dinner with André (dir. Louis Malle, 1981):

“In the Middle Ages, before the arrival of scientific thinking as we know it today, well, people could believe anything. Anything could be true: the statue of the Virgin Mary could speak or bleed, or whatever it was. But the wonderful thing that happened was that then in the development of science in the western world, well, certain things did come slowly to be known and understood. I mean, you know, obviously, all ideas in science are constantly being revised; I mean, that's the whole point. But we do at least know that the universe has some shape and order and that, you know, trees do not turn into people or goddesses. And there are very good reasons why they don't, and you can't just believe absolutely anything.”

I think that Todd Akin is living in the Middle Ages.

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August 22: Todd Akin’s theorizing about rape and pregnancy dates back at least to the late thirteenth century.

DFW, thesaurus entries

At davemadden.org, a brief guide to David Foster Wallace’s contributions to the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus . Wallace contributed a couple of dozen notes on usage to the OAWT, at least some of which are available in the Mac’s version of the thesaurus.

Now I’m wondering if Wallace might have had something to do with a very strange sample sentence in the OAWT : “I observed this wheelchair dude in the vestibule waiting for me.” Infinite Jest is filled with men, dangerous men, in wheelchairs. I’m thinking in particular of a scene in the novel in which Rémy Marathe, posing as a survey-taker, sits in a hotel hallway and knocks on a door. The only vestibules in IJ though are found at the Enfield Tennis Academy. Is this “wheelchair dude” waiting for Hal Incandenza?

The “wheelchair dude” has disappeared from the Mac’s OAWT but lives on in this 2010 post.

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (via Pinboard)

&QuA?

[Frontispiece to Sheridan Baker’s The Practical Stylist (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1962).]

Sheridan Baker’s The Practical Stylist is a much-acclaimed, long-lived textbook for college writing classes. The above frontispiece comes from the tenth printing (1967), whose cover design and typography are credited to Guy Fleming. Perhaps the frontispiece appears in earlier printings too. Bravo to the publisher who thought it fitting to give a lovely bouquet of letters and punctuation marks to a textbook.

Who was Guy Fleming? The New York Times has a 1956 wedding announcement for a Guy Fleming and a Ruth Foster. The Guy Fleming in question was then attending the Yale School of Graphic Arts. I think he must be our man. A 1961 Times review of James Joyce’s Scribbledehobble: The Ur-Workbook for Finnegans Wake, says that “Guy Fleming, who designed the book, is the only person to emerge from the enterprise with enhanced reputation.” A comment on a 2008 post about Fleming’s work says that Fleming died “about four years ago.”

Here are six sources for more of Fleming’s work:

Guy Fleming jackets (Dreamers Rise)
More Fleming jackets (Julian Montague Projects)
One more Fleming jacket (Bennington College)
Another jacket (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Still another (Robotspaceshiptank)
One more (The Ward-O-Matic)

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September 20, 2013: I was delighted to receive an e-mail from Guy Fleming’s daughter Faith Fleming. Guy Fleming (1931–2001) did indeed study at Yale (bachelor’s in Art History, 1953; master’s in design, 1955). Faith describes her father as “a book designer, jacket designer, typographer, cartographer, illustrator, painter, and wood carver.” An excerpt from her e-mail (used here with permission):

My memories are a bit sketchy about the publishers he worked with but the list included a number of the major trade publishers of the time: Knopf, Harper & Row, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, etc. After a few years he and my mother moved to Eastern Long Island (where my mother’s family had a potato farm) and he began working from home with weekly trips to the city. At some point, he went freelance and worked by mailing his designs and mechanicals to the publishers. In the early 1960s we moved to Maine where he would work as a freelance designer until he had to retire due to poor eyesight.

I remember when he worked on the jackets for Gabriel García Márquez. I would visit his studio daily after school and loved watching him work and talking with him. His studio was unheated except for a massive woodstove, usually included a sleeping dog and or cats, a radio playing a classical radio station, and a lot of cigarette smoke. He read a majority of the books he designed and all of the ones he did jackets or illustrations for. He was extremely well read, witty and passionate about his work.

Good news for anyone who admires Guy Fleming: Faith plans to share photographs of her father’s work online.

Sheaffer cartridge pens, 1959

[Life, August 17, 1959.]

[An old coot turns the pages of Life and finds this ad.]

“The kids today . . . what with their hula hoops and rocket ships. And cartridge pens! A pen should fill from a bottle!”

Be cool, imaginary coot. I like the picture of things this ad presents: high schoolers and college students thinking about their writing instruments. If you click on the ad, you’ll get a larger view with readable text. Let me prove it. Here’s what Sally Cunningham, a junior at Birmingham (Michigan) High School has to say:

“By carrying Skrip cartridges in your pocket or purse, you can fill your Skripsert pen right during a class or exam! And quickly!”

Very practical, Sally! No embarrassing ink spills for you!

Mike Redman, Yale freshman, says:

“In addition to my Skripsert fountain pen, I’m taking a matching pencil back to school! After all, whoever heard of going through a year of solid trigonometry without an eraser?”

Smart choice, Mike! Your enthusiasm — and your sense of humor — are contagious!

What makes this ad especially great is the appearance of Ann Marget Olsson (last name misspelled as Olson). Yes, Ann-Margret. Yes, Ann-Margret, who indeed attended Northwestern.




I’m so stuck on fountain pens that at first I didn’t realize what should be immediately clear to any reader of this ad: Sheaffer is trying to keep the kids away from b-ll-p--nts. Shh.

[All kidding and coots aside, bottled ink is a better choice for fountain pens: far less expensive. The fountain-pen cartridge is the precursor of the inkjet-printer cartridge.]

“No job is overwhelming if”

Good advice from Helen and Scott Nearing:

No job is overwhelming if you have a general idea of what you are about, break the project into manageable units, put through these units one at a time and have the thrill of fitting them into the over-all pattern.

Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World (New York: Schocken Books, 1970).

A related post
Granularity