A welcome sign

[A real road sign. No, really, for real.]

I thought of such a sign, looked online, couldn’t find one, and so made my own. You can too.

Related reading
All OCA signage posts (Pinboard)

Moby-Dick at Harvard

Julianna Aucoin, a Harvard undergraduate, has written an essay about reading Moby-Dick (sort of) in one night and discussing it in one two-hour seminar meeting:

Fumbling our way through the discussion, we misunderstood major plot points and mixed up the characters. Queequeg, Ahab, and Ishmael, all rather prominent presences within the work, became “his friend,” “the captain,” and “the narrator.” We leapt over important and edifying details and focused on themes and sweeping generalizations about the prose. By posing questions like “Is that scene homo-erotic?” and overanalyzing the secondary source we had also been assigned, we got through the seminar. The class was over and we never mentioned Moby-Dick again.

My experience of plowing through Moby-Dick reveals problems deeper than procrastination.

It’s sad to think of the faux mastery that passes for English studies in this account, and impossible to imagine playing the game, as student or teacher, without losing all intellectual self-respect. I admire Ms. Aucoin’s willingness to question the order of things.

I’m surprised that @English_Harvard is tweeting about this essay. Maybe they’ve only skimmed it. But it doesn’t surprise me that of all possible courses of study at Harvard, Adam Wheeler chose English.

[I’ve corrected Melville’s title in the quoted text.]

No college?

In The New York Times today, an article about Maurice Sendak’s estate. Lynn Caponera, Sendak’s housekeeper and caretaker, heads a foundation established by Sendak and is one of his executors:

Recently she decided to withdraw more than 10,000 original artworks Mr. Sendak had lent over decades to the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, where many assumed the bulk of his work would remain. The works are now headed back here, to a house museum being planned by the foundation, a decision that some are questioning. They are also expressing concerns about the ability of Ms. Caponera, 54, who did not attend college and has no formal business training , to shepherd a complex philanthropic foundation worth tens of millions of dollars. [My emphasis.]

I think it’s worth pointing out that Maurice Sendak too did not attend college and had no “formal business training.” It was Sendak who chose Caponera as executor and foundation president. And it’s Sendak’s will that stipulates the creation of a house museum in what one publishing person calls “the middle of nowhere.”

Someone always knows better, right? But people are capable of making their own choices, even if they never went to college.

[“The middle of nowhere”: Ridgefield, Connecticut, fifty-odd miles from Manhattan.]

Another Yosemite bug

I thought this bug was specific to Chrome, but no: Attack of the 50-Foot Save Sheet (Six Colors). The Yosemite bug that I discovered remains unzapped in 10.10.1. It too involves a basic interface element. Sheesh.

I used to suggest to students in need of a new machine, “Buy a Mac. You will be so much happier.” And I still think that’s the case. But it’s more and more difficult to agree that “It just works.”

“Day at a time”

Assistant State’s Attorney Ilene Nathan (Susan Rome) is questioning Omar Little (Michael Kenneth Williams) about his occupation:

“Mr. Little, how does a man rob drug dealers for eight or nine years and live to tell about it?”

[Smiling .] “Day at a time, I suppose.”

From The Wire episode “All Prologue” (July 3, 2003).

Elaine and I are deep into The Wire, which I sometimes call Breaking Baltimore.

“The Power of the Printed Word”

In 1979, International Paper began a print-ad campaign, “The Power of the Printed Word,” a series of fifteen ads offering how-to wisdom from household names. I have a vague memory of these ads: two-page black-and-white magazine spreads with columns of text broken up by silly photographs. Looking for Merriam-Webster ads via Google Books, I spotted a “Power of the Printed Word” spread in Ebony, with George Plimpton’s advice for making a speech. And the chase was on.

It turns out that this campaign was a terrific (and terrifying?) public-relations success, generating twenty-seven million requests for free reprints. International Paper put together selections of ads as “survival guides” (also free) for business people and college students. Thirteen of the fifteen ads became a book, How to Use the Power of the Printed Word, edited by advertising man Billings S. Fuess Jr., the Ogilvy & Mather creative director who created the campaign and wrote the first drafts. The complete series:

Steve Allen, “How to enjoy the classics”
Russell Baker, “How to punctuate”
Erma Bombeck, “How to encourage your child to
    read”
Bill Cosby, “How to read faster”
Walter Cronkite, “How to read a newspaper”
James Dickey, “How to enjoy poetry”
Malcolm Forbes, “How to write a business letter”
John Irving, “How to spell”
James A. Michener, “How to use a library”
George Plimpton, “How to make a speech”
Jane Bryant Quinn, “How to read an annual report”
Tony Randall, “How to improve your vocabulary”
Jerrold G. Simon, “How to write a resume”
Edward T. Thompson, “How to write clearly”
Kurt Vonnegut, “How to write with style”

Here from Info Marketing Blog is an unofficial PDF of the series, nearly complete. And here, from Paper Specs, is one more, also nearly complete. Missing from the first: Simon. Missing from the second: Baker and Cronkite. Missing from both: Bombeck.

I know: it’s advertising. But I like the idea that these ads might have inspired readers to think about punctuation and card catalogs and etymologies. And anyway, I’m a sucker for a free PDF. How about you?

[The details of the campaign’s success come from the introductory pages of the Info Marketing Blog’s PDF. I wish it were Cosby not Bombeck who was missing.]

*

January 23, 2015: As reader Kayhan Vayuz has noted in a comment, Garrison Keillor’s “How to write a personal letter” is also part of the ad series. It appears to be a late addition: the earliest appearance I can find is from 1987. (Here is a more readable 1988 version.) The essay was republished as “How to write a letter” in Keillor’s book We Are Still Married: Stories and Letters (1989) and has often been anthologized.

Rubbermaid red

Found today at our friendly neighborhood multinational retailer, the large Rubbermaid drain board in red. Call it the midlife-crisis drain board. Call it Big Red. For years Elaine and I have been on the lookout for Big Red. Small red drain board? Yes. Large red? No. Never no large. But there it was today, and here it is now, in our crisis-free kitchen.

A tenuously related post
Repurposed dish drainer (Also Rubbermaid red)

Bob Montgomery, typewriter repairman

“I’m catering to people who are willing to pay $125 for a machine that was obsolete fifty years ago”: Bob Montgomery, who will be ninety-three in January, is a typewriter repairman.

Related reading
All OCA typewriter posts (Pinboard)

Merriam-Webster in Ebony

Given the all-white world of Merriam-Webster’s 1965 and 1966 Life advertisements, I wondered: did the company ever advertise its products to African-Americans? I checked the Google Books holdings for Ebony and Jet and found a single ad, which appeared in Ebony in October 1967. It’s clearly pitched to parents wanting to do right by their children. No reference to “friends at the office” or “families having fun with word games and puzzles”: here the dictionary is a means to academic success. Which it is. Consider The Dictionary Project.

And now I remember what we had in the house when I was a kid: the World Book Dictionary, and of course, the World Book Encyclopedia. Great bathroom reading.

But that table, that chair: now I’m back in my high school’s library. It’s study hour again.

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)

Merriam-Webster holiday shopping

[Life, November 26, 1965.]


[Life, November 25, 1966. Click either image for a larger view.]

Sixteen of twenty people on your Christmas (or “holiday”) list need a Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. I used to recommend that students acquire and use a collegiate dictionary. Now I say college-level . Can you guess why?

The four people who have no need of a dictionary will be happy with Parker T-Ball Jotters.

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)