Garner covers 2012

Bryan Garner collects some news of the year in language and writing. A sample:

A Brooklyn resident contested a parking ticket based on the meaning of the preposition to. According to the New York Times, Mark Vincent parked under a sign that read: “No standing April to October.” He decided that to meant that parking was prohibited until the month of October began. Because it was October 2, he reasoned that he was within the law. Supported by Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries, he argued that to means “up to but not including,” while through means “to and including.” Although he did not win his appeal, the new sign reads: “No standing April 1–Sept. 30.”

I wish that Garner’s compendium came with links: they’d make for hours of happy (and sometimes dismaying) browsing. If you were reading Orange Crate Art in April, you saw a a post with a link to the Times article on to v. through.

[Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly site.]

Seconds and hours and art

Johnny Misheff, a curator of “Moving the Still,” an exhibition of GIFs at Art Basel Miami Beach, explains the relevance of the GIF:

“You know, this is like such an era of ‘Wow me in the least amount of time that you possibly can ’cause I don’t have time to like invest in your stuff.’ It's like the ‘prove it to me’ generation. If you haven't roped somebody in within two seconds, then you lost, you know?”

No, I don’t know. It saddens me to hear a curator speak as if such an attention span should be a measure of artistic programming. I think for contrast of an observation from the philosopher Richard Wollheim:

I evolved a way of looking at paintings which was massively time-consuming and deeply rewarding. For I came to recognize that it often took the first hour or so in front of a painting for stray associations or motivated misperceptions to settle down, and it was only then, with the same amount of time or more spent looking at it, that the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was.

I noticed that I became an object of suspicion to passers-by, and so did the picture that I was looking at.

From Painting as an Art: The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts (1987), a series talks given at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1984.

Wollheim’s way of looking at art requires a worthy object, one that does not “disclose itself” in seconds and that rewards looking again and again.

[I quoted Wollheim’s words in a 2010 post. I like GIFs too. But not as the measure of my attention span.]

Literature and reverence

Diana Senechal again:

The Chorus in Antigone says that he who honors the laws of the land and the justice of the gods will be hupsipolis, that is, he will have a great city. One could say this about literature: if students learn to enter it and honor it, they will have the makings of a rich life. They will also have an opening to true difference; by immersing themselves in the sole voice of another, they will start to hear their own voice, assenting, questioning, disputing, singing along, starting a new poem or song. Much of this literature is difficult for readers today; the ideas may seem distant, the words obscure, or the sentences long and complex. It is the teacher’s duty to help the student enter the work, and this takes time and care. It cannot be done when students in a given class are reading many different works at the same time. It requires a certain reverence — not the reverence of calling an author “great” just because everyone else does, but the reverence of treating the work, for a little while, as the most important thing in the room and mind.

Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2012).

Family accounting

Tickets for four to see Les Misérables: $34.

Champagne cocktails and one family member’s imitation of Anne Hathaway’s mouth: priceless.

[Les Misérables seems remarkably ill-conceived. Casting a musical with actors of limited vocal ability deprives those actors of any real chance to act. About all they can do is perform. Anne Hathaway seemed to our ears the best voice in the film. On another note: champagne cocktails — sugar, Angostura bitters, champagne — are delicious. Does the champagne cocktail immediately suggest to you, as it does to me, someone from “the movies”?]

Local man’s blog referenced in cartoon

George Bodmer’s Oscar’s Portrait today includes a veiled reference to Orange Crate Art. The veil is thin, almost transparent.

Thanks, George.

Fontella Bass (1940–2012)

Sad news in the New York Times: “Fontella Bass, the singer whose 1965 hit “Rescue Me” was an indelible example of the decade’s finest pop-soul, died on Wednesday in St. Louis.”

I know Bass best from her work with the Art Ensemble of Chicago and (later) with her once husband Lester Bowie. The Art Ensemble’s “Theme de Yoyo” is a great synthesis of funk, free jazz, and metaphysical conceits.

Domestic comedy

“Remember when you used to chase me around the house with lipstick?”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[The children, the children, the children.]

ISP, WTF?

It was a beautiful morning in mid-December when I mistyped a URL in my browser. I should then have seen something like this:



Instead I found myself looking at the sort of page I hadn’t seen in years, my Internet Service Provider’s own page of results, with nothing but links for various advertisers:



My typo was now serving my ISP’s profit motive. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation reports, the ISP practice of hijacking has been common with both searches and mistyped URLs. Not even the use of non-ISP Domain Name Service servers, such as Google’s 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, will always stop hijacking.¹

When I went to my ISP’s preferences page to opt out, I was told that my preferences were locked. When I deleted my ISP from Chrome’s list of search engines, it reappeared, again and again. And when I called my ISP to inquire as to what was going on, I found myself talking to a well-meaning fellow who knew much less about these things than I do — which, granted, is not that much. But I have figured out two simple ways to defeat this ISP practice:

1. In Chrome or Safari (I use both), clear the cache, disable all extensions, and attempt to opt out. For whatever reason, I was unable to opt out with my handful of extensions enabled. (I’m not patient enough to go back and try to find the offending extension by disabling one extension at a time.)

2. In Chrome or Firefox, use the EFF’s HTTPS Everywhere. The downside: depending on the speed of your connection, this extension might make browing noticeably slower.

After looking closely at my ISP’s website, I realize that I cannot expect very much in the way of technical experise. Here, from my ISP’s directions for setting up a homepage, is the complete list of supported browsers:



I think that covers it.

¹ And anyway, another DNS might much be slower than your ISP’s DNS. Why? As they say in real estate: location, location, location. Google’s free app namebench gives a fast and easy way to find the fastest DNS for your location.

Fighting distraction

Diana Senechal:

To fight distraction is to defend something that matters, something that requires devotion of the mind. This is part of the meaning of study: to honor things through thought and longing. Many dismiss such yearning as impractical; we have enough on our hands, they say, with the daily scramble and the demands of the age. But yearning can pull us out of the scramble; it can calm the scramble itself. The teacher who longs to read about Chinese history will set aside time for it in the evenings. The boy who longs to see a falling star will stay up late, looking up at the sky for hours. in Moby-Dick, it is the Rachel, returning from a vain search for the captain’s lost sons, that ultimately rescues Ishmael from the water near the sunken Pequod and makes the story possible. If we abandon such yearning and seeking, if we defer to the petty demon of “getting it now,” then nothing will be left but our vicissitudes, and we will have no will or thought but to follow them.

Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2012).

Also from Republic of Noise
“A little out of date”

Overheard

In a nearby restaurant, the owner’s son, a young boy with iPad in hands, earbuds in ears, came out from the back to tell his mom the news:

“It’s a blizzard starting! I’m not kidding!”

Related reading
All “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

[A blizzard is what we were promised, but the snowfall here is still pretty calm. It is a snowfall from a Pierre Reverdy poem, so far, so to speak.]