Handwriting, pro and con

Jessica Kerwin Jenkins, in a contrarian review of Anne Trubek’s forthcoming book The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting :

Though one technology often supplants another, that doesn’t necessitate concession. Considering its rich significance, instead of hustling handwriting off to the graveyard, perhaps what’s called for is resurrection.

Reading Trubek’s recent New York Times piece “Handwriting Just Doesn’t Matter” made me dubious about investing time in the book. Two sentences from the Times piece:

People talk about the decline of handwriting as if it’s proof of the decline of civilization. But if the goal of public education is to prepare students to become successful, employable adults, typing is inarguably more useful than handwriting.

Notice how the first sentence stacks the deck by characterizing those who value the practice of writing by hand as fuddy-duddy doomsayers. As for the second sentence: is the goal of public education to produce “successful, employable adults”? And what does “successful” mean? Here, from John Churchill of Phi Beta Kappa, is another perspective on the purpose of education.

And what about all those people writing in pocket notebooks and journals?

Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)
On “On the New Literacy”

Pencils in school

At the City and Country School, the eight-year-olds ran a school-supplies store and learned about the things they sold:

They wrote letters to pencil factories asking permission to visit, and were disappointed and at the same time curious when permission was refused because of trade secrets, a mysterious phrase into which they immediately inquired. The manufacturers did send them samples of pencils in various stages of manufacture, and leaflets telling about the graphite mines on Lake Champlain and the Florida cedar wood. Maps were again consulted; some of the children made what they called “pencil maps,” showing the sources of materials and the routes by which they were brought to the factories.

Caroline Pratt, I Learn from Children: An Adventure in Progressive Education . 1948. (New York: Grove, 2014).

Recent photographs in this edition show nine-year-olds running the supplies store, called Pencil Plus. Sign me up.

Also from Caroline Pratt
Art criticism : Caroline Pratt on waste in education : Snow in the city in the school

Other states

In The New York Times , a state-by-state analysis of how many students leave their home states to attend public universities elsewhere: “How Cuts to Public Universities Have Driven Students Out of State”.

Illinois — no surprise — is a big loser: 2,117 students coming to the state to attend a public university, and 16,461 leaving the state to go elsewhere.

Related reading
All OCA Illinois budget crisis posts (Pinboard)

Rudy Van Gelder (1924–2016)

The recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder has died at the age of ninety-one. Contra this obituary’s headline, he wasn’t a “New Jersey jazz giant.” He was a giant in the world of music who happened to live and work in New Jersey. Consider the Van Gelder Studio’s discography.

As I get older, I find it impossible to say, Well, he was ninety-one , or whatever ripe old age it may be. Yes, he was. But now he’s not. There will never be another Rudy Van Gelder.

*

August 26: The New York Times has an obituary.

Teleprompter glitch

On the news, Donald Trump, reading from a teleprompter a few minutes ago:

“She is against school choice. You need your education is a disaster.”

What he must have meant to say, or what someone must have meant for him to say:

“She is against [the?] school choice you need. Your education is a disaster.”

Fascinating to see him switch from the teleprompter to ad libbing and back to the teleprompter. The move back involves not a smidgen of continuity.

Tony Bennett’s pencil

In The Zen of Bennett (dir. Unjoo Moon, 2012), Tony Bennett tells his granddaughter about the mechanical pencil he’s using to sketch:

“David Hockney told me to use these pencils. They’re really like, really like stationery stores for cheap. They’re great, they’re great — it has a great eraser, great eraser. It just works great, you know?”

We later see him sketching at a rehearsal and in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.


[All images from The Zen of Bennett (dir. Unjoo Moon, 2012). Click any image for a larger view.]

But what kind of pencil is he using? It’s a yellow-barreled mechanical pencil, black or grey eraser, black at the point, black print on the barrel. Except for the black accents (and the silver sticker (?) in the third image), it looks like a Paper Mate Sharpwriter. Identification might be easier were it not for the tricks with focus that run through the film.

Any guesses about Tony Bennett’s pencil?

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)
Tony Bennett at ninety

Reinventing philanthropy

Donna Shalala, president of the Clinton Foundation, on the PBS NewsHour tonight, speaking of Bill Clinton:

“The president has reinvented philanthropy in this country.”

And how.

“A tremendous desire for order”

Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday . 1943. Trans. Benjamin W. Huebsch and Helmut Ripperger (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964).

I don’t need to tell you whom Stefan Zweig is writing about. It’s enough to say that the parallel between the world Zweig writes of and our own is unmistakable.

Other Zweig posts
Happy people, poor psychologists : Little world : School v. city : Urban pastoral, with stationery

[I do not endorse Zweig’s generalization about “the German people.” Nor would I endorse a generalization about “the American people” or any other “people.” People are too various.]

Word of the day: wayzgoose

It turns out that August 24 means something: wayzgoose , the Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Day:

An entertainment given by a master printer to his workmen around St Bartholomew’s Day (24 August), marking the beginning of the season of working by candlelight. In later use: an annual festivity held in summer by the members of a printing establishment, consisting of a dinner and (usually) an excursion into the country.

A sample sentence (1875): “The wayzgoose generally consists of a trip into the country, open air amusements, a good dinner, and speeches and toasts afterwards.” A 2005 citation makes clear that the annual festivity continues in the world of printers. Seattle printers will have a wayzgoose in September.

Post-Depression cuisine

Talking on the phone recently, my mom and I got onto Foods of the Past. Here is her best recollection of a week’s meals in her post-Depression girlhood:

Weekday dinners
Monday: chicken soup, chicken
Tuesday: escarole soup, chicken croquettes
Wednesday: meatloaf
Thursday: macaroni (i.e., pasta) and meatballs
Friday: fish

Weekend lunches and dinners
Saturday: pizza, steak
Sunday: chicken, cold cuts

Everyone listened to The Shadow while eating cold cuts for dinner.

Potatoes and vegetables (carrots, green beans, peas, zucchini) accompanied chicken, fish, and meatloaf. Produce came from a fruit and vegetable store. (Gardening in my mom’s family was devoted to roses.) Chickens were freshly killed at a poultry store. Everything was homemade: my mom’s grandmother ground chicken to make croquettes, and she made and cut pasta, even spaghetti, by hand, without a machine, every strand the same.

My mom wants it to be clear that this schedule was not unvarying: lamb chops and pork chops and other dishes came into play. This schedule was more or less a routine — and a pretty nice one, I’d say.

All details used with permission. Thanks, Mom.

A related post
Depression cuisine