Period Exclamation point

The Obama campaign slogan now has an exclamation point: Forward!

And yes, the word forward — followed by a period or an exclamation point, either one — makes a sentence. It’s an instance of the hortatory subjunctive.

I still prefer the understated seriousness of the period.

A face on my floor

[Diameter: 1.5 inches.]

I spotted this guy a couple of days ago on my office floor. He is old, or older. “Young fella,” he calls me, as in “Hey there, young fella.” His name? “Name o’ Mac.”

Smoking is not permitted in the building, but that doesn’t stop Mac: smoke drifts at all times from the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. A tiny Camel, as you might guess. The smoke makes him squint, and cough.

Busy, busier

At the Atlantic, James Fallows interviews David Allen:

Q. How will we handle “busyness” in the future? Better, because of technology? Worse, because of overload? Both?

A. I think the degree and depth of the “busy trap,” where you’re always distracted and trying to catch up, is going to increase, because more people will be affected by it.

Things on your mind need to be externalized — captured in some system that you trust. You capture things that are potentially meaningful; you clarify what those things mean to you; and you need maps of all that, so you can see it from a larger perspective.

Read it all:

Busy and Busier (short version)
David Allen on How to Fix Your Life (long version)

date:yesterday

A handy Mac tip from David Sparks at MacSparky: typing date:yesterday in Spotlight produces list of all apps and files that you accessed the day before. I can see date:yesterday being useful as a quick way to get back to some part of the day’s work.

My discoveries:

If you’ve cleared your browser’s cache, the browser doesn’t show up among apps used.

If you use Dropbox with more than one Mac, files you’ve worked with one computer will show up on another.

Typing date:today works too.

Jacques Barzun (1907–2012)

From the New York Times:

Jacques Barzun, the distinguished historian, essayist, cultural gadfly and educator who helped establish the modern discipline of cultural history and came to see the West as sliding toward decadence, died Thursday night in San Antonio, where he lived. He was 104.

Barzun’s pronouncements on present-day culture leave me cold, but I find his writing on education engaging, persuasive, and often eerily prescient.

All Barzun posts
Jacques Barzun on gadgets and education
Jacques Barzun on multiple-choice
Jacques Barzun, teacher
Rooms, radios, hurdles

Stepping in it

Talking with Rolling Stone, Barack Obama used a bad word with reference to “the other guy,” one Mitt Romney:

“You know, kids have good instincts,” Obama offered. “They look at the other guy and say, ‘Well, that’s a bullshitter, I can tell.’”

Here’s a passage that I posted without comment in August, from a philosopher’s consideration of bullshit:

When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

Romney’s willingness to say anything, take any position, to suit his purpose makes him, in my eyes, a bullshitter. I can tell. Score a hit for Obama.

A related post
Mitt Incandenza

“I remember”

I remember “wine and cheese.”

*

The artist and writer Joe Brainard (1942–1994) gave the world a deceptively simple writing prompt: “I remember,” two words to begin a sentence or a paragraph. The above “I remember” dropped into my head yesterday morning, apropos of nothing. About “wine and cheese”: when I was in college, it seemed that every on-campus event promised, as added attractions, wine and cheese. Impossible now. But what a grown-up way for young adults to learn how to enjoy alcohol: a little food, a little wine, some conversation.

Do you remember “wine and cheese”? If not, what do you remember? You’re welcome to leave an “I remember” or two or three or more in the form of a comment. Why not?

Related posts
Beans Spasms returns
Good advice on looking at art
I remember Sgt. Pepper
I remember Thanksgiving

[Also: Joe Brainard loved Nancy.]

From The Waste Books

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) was a professor of experimental physics and a keeper of Sudelbücher, “waste books” filled with observations and opinions. Here are three non-consecutive entries:

I forget most of what I have read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.

*

Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.

*

Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older . . .

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

One could do worse than be a reader of New York Review Books books.

A related post
From The Waste Books

Madeline Kahn’s notebook

Bill Madison’s story about Madeline Kahn’s notebook rivals André Gregory’s story about browsing in a surrealist magazine. As Bill says: uncanny.

The New Yorker endorses Obama

The editors of the New Yorker have endorsed Barack Obama. An excerpt:

The reëlection of Barack Obama is a matter of great urgency. Not only are we in broad agreement with his policy directions; we also see in him what is absent in Mitt Romney — a first-rate political temperament and a deep sense of fairness and integrity. A two-term Obama Administration will leave an enduringly positive imprint on political life. It will bolster the ideal of good governance and a social vision that tempers individualism with a concern for community. Every Presidential election involves a contest over the idea of America. Obama’s America — one that progresses, however falteringly, toward social justice, tolerance, and equality — represents the future that this country deserves.

Watching last night’s debate (or most of it — I had to miss the first twenty minutes) confirmed for me that Mitt Romney is the political version of Infinite Jest’s Orin Incandenza, the pick-up artist who says, “Tell me what sort of man you prefer, and then I’ll affect the demeanor of that man.” I am hoping that American voters won’t get fooled.

[Notice the New Yorker umlaut dieresis: reëlection.]