BASIC

It’s the fiftieth anniversary of Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Time has a lengthy report: Fifty Years of BASIC. Dartmouth has a celebration: BASIC at 50. It puzzles me that Google has nothing. Doesn’t BASIC’s fiftieth rate a Google Doodle?

Raise your hand if you remember typing in BASIC programs from books and magazines.

Mark Trail revised

[Mark Trail, May 1, 2014.]


[Mark Trail revised, May 1, 2014.]

Thinking about this panel, I thought of Sappho: “Midnight. / The hour has gone by. / I sleep alone.” I thought of Djuna Barnes: “Watchman, What of the Night?” I thought of Ted Berrigan: “It is night. You are asleep. And beautiful tears / Have blossomed in my eyes.” And then I just thought “night.”

To revise this panel, I borrowed some night (not pants) from today’s Hi and Lois.


[Hi and Lois, May 1, 2014.]

It’s getting late. I was supposed to punch in at the Continental Paper Grading Co. nineteen minutes ago. Back tomorrow.

Related reading
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[The lines from Sappho are from Stanley Lombardo’s 2002 translation. “Watchman, What of the Night?” is a chapter title in the novel Nightwood (1936). “It is night”: from XXXVII, The Sonnets (1964).]

Mark Trail revised

[Mark Trail revised, April 30, 2014.]

Look at Mark.

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[If you don’t read music, go here and here.]

Ballpoints, not for writing?

Caught during the “Breaking Barriers” episode of the PBS series Pioneers of Television, Tom Willis (Franklin Cover) of The Jeffersons speaking to his wife Helen (played by Roxie Roker):

“Helen, I can’t find my fountain pen.”

“Use one of the ballpoint pens. There are lots of them on your desk.”

“Ballpoint pens are not for writing. They’re for making marks. I need a pen with a point. Now what have you done with my pen?”

“I don’t know, I might have taken it to do the marketing list.”

“You wrote with it?”

Some ballpoints are a pleasure to write with: writing with, say, a Parker T-Ball Jotter is a breeze. But I understand where Mr. Willis is, as they say, coming from. The clip begins at 47:33.

Related reading
A 1963 Jotter ad : A 1964 Jotter ad : A 1971 Jotter ad : Five pens

Mark Trail revised

[Mark Trail revised, April 29, 2014.]

I had to do it. Mark’s original thought balloon: “My shoulder!”

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The end-of-paragraph transition

A strange element in the writing of many college students: the end-of-paragraph transition, a final sentence stating the main idea of the paragraph that will follow. This kind of transition creates two problems. One: the shift to something new at the end of a paragraph damages that paragraph’s unity. Two: the sentence that begins the new paragraph, identical or nearly identical to the sentence that ended the preceding paragraph, looks absurdly repetitious. For a reader seeing the end-of-paragraph transition for the first time, the effect must be baffling. In drastic form, it goes like so:

Achilles’s speech shows his clear rejection of his community’s belief in the value of tīme . . . . [The paragraph then develops this idea.] But Achilles also rejects his community’s belief in kleos.

Achilles also rejects a belief in kleos.

Many of my students tell me that they’ve been taught to organize their paragraphs in this way. Thus the end-of-paragraph transition is both a bug and a feature. Where it comes from, I don’t know. I’ve never seen a text that teaches it.

I try to counter this mistaken paragraph strategy by pointing to the work of professional writers (whose paragraphs don’t work in this way) and by appealing to logic: the best place to present a new idea is in a . . . yes, in a new paragraph. But I don’t want students to go just by what I say — that tends to reinforce a suspicion that writing instruction is a matter of quirks and whims, one instructor wanting things one way and another wanting the opposite. And I’ve never found an authoritative source that addresses the end-of-paragraph transition clearly.

Until now. Bryan Garner’s The Winning Brief: 100 Tips for Persuasive Briefing in Trial and Appellate Courts (1999) addresses the problem in tip no. 16:

Begin a paragraph with a topic sentence. Don’t end the preceding paragraph with what should be the next paragraph’s topic sentence.

Granted, this advice appears in a text for lawyers. But four of the five quoted passages on paragraph construction that accompany this advice come from non-lawerly sources (William Zinsser and others). Not all writing requires explicit statements of main ideas, and such statements need not appear (as Garner acknowledges) at the starts of paragraphs. No. 16 best applies to writing that argues and expounds — the kind of writing that college students do (or should be doing) all the time, with new ideas in new paragraphs.

Thanks, Bryan Garner.

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[Here’s a discussion thread on the end-of-paragraph transition that makes for interesting reading. Oxford University Press will publish a third edition of The Winning Brief on May 1.]

On Duke Ellington’s birthday

[LPs. Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

I bought my first Ellington LP when I was in college: This One’s for Blanton, piano-bass duets with Ray Brown. I had read that Ellington’s piano style had influenced Thelonious Monk. That made me curious.

But where should you start? (And you should, really.) The answer, I think, is still The Great Paris Concert, now a bunch of files, and a ridiculously good buy from the usual sources.

Ellington plays all day today at WKCR.

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Mark Trail revised

[Mark Trail, original and revised, April 28, 2014. Click for larger views.]

I thought of Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail”: “I got to keep moving, I got to keep moving.” I thought of “Whoopsie!” and “Oops!” I thought of putting this thought in two heads. But I like better what Elaine suggested.

Thanks, Elaine, for your suggestion and for the use of your humormeter.

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Fun with Wikipedia

From a Wikipedia article: “The Four Square Writing Method is a simplified graphic organizer for teaching writing to children in school. While primarily used to teach persuasive writing, it has also been used to help teach deconstruction.”

Someone is having fun with Wikipedia. I think.

Mark Trail revised

[Mark Trail revised, April 26, 2014.]

It’s now three days straight. But I’m not planning to make a habit of it. Not. I can stop at any time.

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[Context here.]