The blog Welcome to Pottersville has a collection of screencaps from Fox News that are simultaneously hilarious and angering. Did you know that Saddam Hussein gave his WMDs to Hezbollah? It’s true!
In elementary school, high school, and even a freshman college English course, I diagrammed sentences. It was a logical, almost mathematical approach to sentence structure and grammar, and it was one of the few useful exercises thrust upon unwitting students by the public school system. Unfortunately, the sentence diagram is going the way of cursive writing classes and phonics.
Lucky for us dinosaurs, there’s a new book out about the dying practice. Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences written by Kitty Burns Florey, explores the world of diagramming with a nostalgic eye. NPR reviews.
In 1918, the New Orleans Times-Picayune declared jazz “an atrocity in polite society,” and fulminated that “we should make it a point of civic honor to suppress it. Its musical value is nil, and its possibilities of harm are great.”
But jazz went on to become an international language, surviving even in dictatorships that banned it. Nazi Germany condemned the music as a disgusting “Negro-Jewish” mongrelization. And in the years jazz was still prohibited in the U.S.S.R., a Moscow tenor saxophonist wrote me that he had translated my John Coltrane liner notes and covertly distributed them to other musicians in unlawful samizdats.
But as the years went on, and more sidemen and leaders grew ill or fell out of fashion, few of the music’s admirers here or around the world were aware of the barren last years of these musicians. Jazz musicians do not have pensions, and very few have medical plans or other resources. Pianist Wynton Kelly, for example—a vital sideman for Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie—died penniless. I was at the first recording session of pianist Phineas Newborn, whose mastery of the instrument was astonishing. As jazz musicians say, he told a story. His ended in a pauper’s grave in Memphis.
First world birth rates have been dropping since the 20th century, but that may change thanks to good old Darwinian evolution. From David Friedman’s blog:
The theoretical argument is simple and persuasive. Humans vary in, among other things, their taste for having children. It seems likely that some of that variation is genetic. …So people with more of a taste for having children, those who are more phyloprogenitive, will out-reproduce those who are less, increasing the share of their descendants in the population and, eventually, bringing average birth rates back up.
It is a persuasive argument, but I have one problem with it. Human generations are long, so human evolution is slow. … We live in a time of very rapid change, driven by technological progress. That makes all long term predictions highly uncertain.
So, people who are genetically predisposed to have lots of kids will give birth to children with the same disposition, ad infinitum. Darwin in action, baby.
Tell me, why does Mitch Albom have the best-selling book according to BookSense, which only tracks INDEPENDENT BOOK STORES?
I doubt City Lights is stocking Mitch Albom.
Author William Styron died a week or so ago. From the New York Times obit:
Mr. Styron’s early work, including “Lie Down in Darkness,” won him wide recognition as a distinctive voice of the South and an heir to William Faulkner. In subsequent fiction, like “The Confessions of Nat Turner” and “Sophie’s Choice,” he transcended his own immediate world and moved across historical and cultural lines.
Critics and readers alike ranked him among the best of the generation that succeeded Hemingway and Faulkner. His peers included James Jones, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer.
“I think for years to come his work will be seen for its unique power,” Mr. Mailer said of Mr. Styron in a telephone interview a few years ago. “No other American writer of my generation has had so omnipresent and exquisite a sense of the elegiac.”
Guardian Unlimited discussed the copious amounts of awards out there. Eventually awards will outnumber humans, at which point the balance of power will shift and their armies will devour our young.
“For ours is truly the age of awards. Prizes are becoming the ultimate measure of cultural success and value. One prize inevitably spawns another, in imitation or reaction, as the perceived male dominance of the Booker spawned the Orange Prize for women’s fiction. There are now so many, in so many different fields, that it can be difficult to find a professional artist, writer or journalist who has not been shortlisted for a prize.
The proliferation of prizes is perhaps greatest in the movie industry, where there are now twice as many cinema prizes (about 9,000) as there are feature films produced each year. The troubled pop star Michael Jackson has won more than 240 awards. The architect Frank Gehry has won 130. The novelist John Updike has won 39. Where will it end? Can it end?”
The Washington Post declared cursive writing an endangered species:
“The computer keyboard helped kill shorthand, and now it’s threatening to finish off longhand.
When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.
And those college hopefuls are just the first edge of a wave of U.S. students who no longer get much handwriting instruction in the primary grades, frequently 10 minutes a day or less. As a result, more and more students struggle to read and write cursive.“
I remember those annoying writing tablets that we used in elementary school to practice cursive writing. We’d spend a few hours each week practicing our cursive skills, skills that most of us quit using once computers became cheap. (I will admit that writing in cursive is quicker than block printing, though.)
Of course, this was bound to happen. Typing is so much faster than writing, and digitized works will last for perpetuity, unlike hand-written works. Even acid-free paper is unlikely to survive more than 50 years. Paper is too easily destroyed to make it viable for archival purposes.
As usual, numerous hours of schooling go down the drain. Oh, well.
I agree with you in spirit, vicious hipster kids. Of course MTVs programming is vapid and retarded. Of course it’s incredibly depressing that the market has supported their ride down the slippery slope of Herculean atrocities against brain cells. But if I had a way to use that colossus to my own ends… I’d do it without batting an eye. And keep on going.
I’m not just pulling a Lewis Black here. You want to call MTVs programming vapid? Make Something Better. I know you can do it. But you’re going to have to sweat blood. It’s easier to throw stones.
…
I want to get my work out there to people, and eat at the end of the day. I’d shoot myself in the face if I was driving an Aston Martin with $30,000 spark plugs, but I’m sipping on a pretty good 2004 Riesling right now, and I prefer it to Pabst Blue Ribbon, thank you very much.