A $64,000 question

In an article on student debt in the Fall 2013 issue of the American Federation of Teachers publication On Campus, a sidebar describes the situation of a University of Illinois-Chicago lecturer in English who is not sure that he can afford to continue teaching. He makes $30,000 a year, owns no car, and cannot buy a house. He is paying off the loans that financed his graduate work at UI-C. His loans total $64,000.

It is sad to say, but I’ll say it: Borrowing $64,000 to finance graduate work in the humanities is folly. Borrowing any amount of money to finance graduate work in the humanities is folly. And anyone who encourages a student to take out loans to finance graduate work in the humanities is dangerously out of touch with the economic realities of academic labor.

In case you’re wondering: the On Campus article, which focuses on rising college costs, decreased need-based aid, and for-profit schools, says none of these things.

[Interesting numbers: the UI-C English website lists thirty-two non-emeritus professors, forty-seven lecturers, and seventy-eight doctoral students.]

Family Circus homophone catastrophe

[The Family Circus, October 11, 2013.]

Pros:

1. The old-school thermometer.

2. The scene in the window.

Cons:

1. Billy’s first your .

2. Billy’s second your .

I suppose it’s possible that Billy is spelling cute. (Aww.) He does though get to and too right. I think it’s likely that the yours are a grown-up’s mistakes.

[I know that cute isn’t an abverb. But see here.]

Write Space

[Click for a larger view.]

Write Space: “a customizable full-screen text-editor that lives in your web-browser. It is designed to minimize the distractions that come between you and your writing.”

Write Space is a free extension for Chrome, comparable in its look and feel to the OS X app WriteRoom. Pin a Write Space tab to the tab bar, and there’s always a place for dropping text and URLs while browsing.

Thank you, Haydn Trowell, for this beautiful and useful extension.

A related post
Browser notepad

Writerly realia

“You can’t very well tell a donor, ‘The library is not interested in T. S. Eliot’s Panama hat or Charles Dickens’s walking stick.’” That was Peter Accardo of Harvard’s Houghton Library, quoted for a slidehow of items that belonged to writers: The things they carried.

The library-science term for such stuff: realia, “three-dimensional objects from real life . . . that do not easily fit into the orderly categories of printed material.” I trust that reproducing a tiny bit of realia here — the point of a pencil that belonged to E. E. Cummings — counts as fair use.

Certain readers, take note: Cummings’s pencil says “Half the pressure, twice the speed.” Five of the fifteen photographs in the slideshow are pencil-centric.

[Pencil point from a photograph by Stephanie Mitchell.]

Gray, Ra, Wilkerson

Larry Gray presents Chicago Connection
Larry Gray, bass and cello
Avreeayl Ra, percussion, wind tube, Native
    American flute
Edward Wilkerson, clarinet, alto clarinet, tenor
    saxophone, didgeridoo

Krannert Center for the Performing Arts
University of Illinois, Urbana
October 9, 2013

Elaine and I heard Larry Gray this summer and were happy for the chance to hear him again, this time leading a trio with longtime members of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. The trio played a seven-part suite by Gray (untitled except for one movement, “Memory Mirror Waltz”) and an unrelated (also untitled) piece. The suite’s themes ranged from stately to funky, each giving way to collective and individual improvisation. So many textures in this music: Gray’s doublestops, false harmonics, and thrumming; Ra’s dusted cymbals and pitched drums; Wilkerson’s plaintive clarinet tone and husky tenor. (I thought of the clarinet and tenor of the Ellington orchestra’s Jimmy Hamilton.) The most unexpected texture: cello and didgeridoo supporting the cries and murmurs of a wooden flute.

It was a pleasure to hear this music in a hall with great acoustics. It was also a pleasure to see and hear musicians taking obvious delight in performance: Gray and Wilkerson springing slightly into the air now and then, Ra laughing quietly at the end of one movement. Whitney Balliett famously described jazz as “the sound of surprise.” I love that kind of surprise.

More on the musicians
Larry Gray : Avreeayl Ra : Edward Wilkerson

Orange car art

[Photograph by Elaine Fine. Click for a larger view.]

On the road as the sun set, one driver, one photographer, one shadow. From bottom to top: road, grass, corn, sky.

Other posts with orange
Crate art, orange : Orange art, no crate : Orange crate art : Orange crate art (Encyclopedia Brown) : Orange flag art : Orange manual art : Orange mug art : Orange newspaper art : Orange notebook art : Orange notecard art : Orange peel art : Orange pencil art : Orange soda art : Orange stem art : Orange telephone art : Orange timer art : Orange toothbrush art : Orange train art : Orange tree art : Orange Tweed art

Grammarly, WhiteSmoke

A student mentioned today that someone had recommended using Grammarly or WhiteSmoke to help with writing problems. I just looked at these online services. Grammarly costs $29.95 a month, $139.95 a year; WhiteSmoke, $79.95 a year.

There’s no way to try WhiteSmoke without signing up [see below], but I pasted into Grammarly’s demo the text of a review that I just wrote. My score: 71 of 100, “adequate, can benefit from revision.” The service alleged many problems: seven grammar errors, three spelling errors, two punctuation errors, two problems with “style and word choice,” and plagiarism. I would have to sign up to learn just where the alleged problems lie. But I already know where they lie: in the algorithms that found nonexistent problems.

I then tried a long excerpt from William Zinsser’s essay “Writing English as a Second Language.” Grammarly again alleged many problems. The overall score: 52 of 100. "Weak, needs revision," Grammarly said. But then I remembered: Zinsser’s essay has sentences and passages of dull, lifeless writing to illustrate cumbersome phrasing, inappropriate use of the passive voice, and so on. I went back and deleted those passages. The score went up to a 54.

Feeling sneaky, I tried a passage from the Grammarly website. Grammarly is slick: if you try to check text from its site, you’re told that “You cannot improve on perfection.” So I changed every Grammarly in the passage to WhiteSmoke and scored a 61 ("weak, needs revision"). Could the camel-cased WhiteSmoke be a problem? I changed it to Michael and got another 61. Any service that gives its own writing a 61 and William Zinsser a 54 is a service I wouldn’t trust. I’ll add that any service that gives my writing a higher score than Zinsser’s is a service I wouldn’t trust.

Here’s a thoughtful review of Grammarly from someone who signed up (and who no longer runs Grammarly ads). I’m unable to find anything equally thoughtful about WhiteSmoke, but the reviews at CNET are overwhelmingly negative. Some of those reviews, granted, could be the work of a competitor, but I can see no reason to recommend the service.

For the cost of a couple of months of Grammarly or a year of WhiteSmoke, you could buy a serious dictionary, a writing handbook, and Garner’s Modern American Usage, resources that would serve you well for many years. Learning from those resources, you could become a better writer. That’s how it happens, not by trusting to algorithms.

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January 9, 2014: An open-source alternative: Language Tool. Language Tool did a much better job than Grammarly with the review that I mention above, flagging thirty-two possible spelling errors (mostly compound words and proper names) and a possible wrong word. More interesting: Language Tool noted two instances of the same word beginning three successive sentences. The word is the, and in one case, the repetition is harmless; in the other, purposeful. But such repetition isn’t always harmless or purposeful, and mechanical scrutiny might reveal a genuine problem that even a careful writer has overlooked. I didn’t notice the first triple-the until Language Tool pointed it out.

Language Tool is available for download and online use. Thanks to developer Daniel Naber for letting me know about it.

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November 26, 2014: WhiteSmoke now has a demo. Pasting in text from the company’s website, two or three paragraphs at a time, the only score I could pull was an 80 (of 100), with one to five “critical writing mistakes” per sample.

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November 29, 2014: Comments on this post add some background on the computer science that goes into WhiteSmoke.

Pilot Razor Points

Looking at supplies in an Office Max this past weekend, I was surprised to see that the Pilot Razor Point is now an object of nostalgia: “The Yellow Cap Original,” the package says, “Since 1974.” Pilot Razor Points served me well through college and some of grad school. I haven’t used one in years, but I had to buy a four-pack.

The only difference in design that I notice: the yellow top now has a deep well with a hole in its side (lessening the danger of suffocation if the cap is inhaled or swallowed). The pen has the same shiny barrel, the same plastic point, the same thin dark line. Using fountain pens for years makes me realize how light this pen is — too light, really. But I’m enjoying the opportunity to commune with my disposable past.

I have no idea when I bought the single Razor Point in the photograph. This pen, stashed away in a drawer, goes back to the time when Wal-Mart items carried price stickers.

If you like this post, you should read this one: Five pens. It’s the story of my life in five pens: a Parker Jotter, a no-name ballpoint, the Uni-Ball, a Mont Blanc, and a Pelikan. There’s also “a long blur of Bics, Flairs, and Pilot Razor Points.”

Dots

Elaine and I have tried telling ourselves that Dots is a piece of educational software, teaching us colors and shapes. Repeat after us: “I am not playing a game. I am having an educational experience.” We have also tried telling ourselves that we can quit whenever we want. But we know better. Dots is fiendishly addictive. With tricks, trophies (see the Nerd Dot trophy above), and more and more dots, there is no end in sight.

Dots is available for iOS and Android.

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October 12: A Dots update adds an Endless Mode ($1.99).

I have begun to think of Dots as the mobile-device form of “the Entertainment,” the MacGuffin at the heart of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Endless Mode clinches the connection. The only symbol that could be more telling than ∞: ☺, the symbol found on copies of the Entertainment.

I have no plans to purchase endlessness. And I’d be careful about clicking on that smiley face if I were you.

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October 27: Dots was once happily ad-free. Today’s update adds an ad for Samsung, whose technology now manages weekly lists of top Dots scores. Yes, a Samsung ad in iOS. That’s part of the ad to the left. No thanks. Our devices are now Dots-free.

There’s a reminder here, for me and for anyone reading: if you like an app, read before you update. The developer’s description makes no mention of the ad, but the comments from users do. And how.

If you’re already in iOS 7, you can turn off automatic updates.

Van Dyke Parks on Bookworm

Michael Silverblatt recently interviewed Van Dyke Parks on KCRW’s Bookworm . A sample:

“I don’t draw any distinction between the stuff that has my name on the banner or something that I might do anonymously to help someone else in their album effort. It’s all the same to me. . . . Someone asked [Henry Busse] once about who would be billed on the marquee. He said, ‘I don’t eat light bulbs.’ And that’s the way I feel about it.”

Trumpeter and bandleader Henry Busse co-wrote “Wang Wang Blues.” On tour in Europe with Paul Whiteman, he came across Robert Katscher’s song “Madonna, du bist schöner als der Sonnenschein,” which became “When Day Is Done” (with English lyrics by Buddy DeSylva). Busse played cornet on the Whiteman hit recording. Elaine and I swing that song like crazy, violin and guitar, though we’d never heard of Henry Busse. To borrow from an old commercial: When Van Dyke Parks talks, people learn stuff.