Ask a random current student if he or she has read something by William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, or Mark Twain, and the answer will almost certainly be a yes— whether that “yes” is voiced with fondness, indifference, or bitterness. Ask that student’s parents or grandparents the same question, and despite generational gaps, the answer likely will not change.
A young boy sits in the corner of a schoolroom, a coat on his lap. He looks under it intently. He looks periodically toward the door and sighs contently when he sees it remains shut. His quiet is soon interrupted when a teacher loudly opens the door and, seeing him sit there, comes over and taps him on the shoulder. “Young man,” he says, “What are you doing in here?” “Nothing, sir,” he says, his voice trailing off. “Is that right?”
When I lived in Seattle, I once attended a reading of the Megillas Esther, the ancient story of the triumph of the Jewish people over the wicked Haman who intended to wipe them out from the face of the earth, that really was special because of the way that the reader went through the story. When he would read the lines of dialogue as spoken by people in the story, he would read them in their voices — Queen Esther in one way, the vicious Haman in his own nasty voice. I appreciated it quite a bit because I would often do the same thing when reading it to myself — and when reading most other fiction, for that matter. Even some nonfiction — I tend to hear the voice of David Sedaris when I am reading his autobiographical pieces.
It is hard for me to remember a time when the following wasn’t drilled into my head — that there are different styles of learning and that depending on the style of learning, whether it was through reading or hearing or a combination of reading and hearing, different people needed to approach learning in their own way. That was my mantra when I was in school and even in the office I would tell people that I was a visual learner over an audio learner and therefore requested that they back up what they told me with the same information in writing.
The naming of products can be a funny and tricky thing. There is the often repeated and yet false story about how the Chevrolet Nova failed to sell well in Latin America because the name means that the car does not go in Spanish. Even the naming of web sites, thanks to the lack of spaces in the url, can turn an innocuous store like Pen Island into the less than innocuous Penisland. A place to find out Who Represents actors suddenly seems like it could really be about Whore Presents when you don’t parse the name of the site correctly.
We read to experience what we do not know. We write to share what we think we understand. Learning and sharing constructs leads to literacy and thus begins the formative memes of a shared, and cogent, morality.
When you take a forty-five minute to one hour train ride twice a day as I do, it is good to have something to occupy your time so that you don’t end up staring at the ground or looking at the passengers around you — this is particularly a good idea in a city where the wrong stare can get you attacked.
A thin man — maybe it was a woman (honestly was hard to tell in my tired state) was looking through one of the several bins of used records in front of Easy Street Records in West Seattle. I was walking to a friend’s apartment to take a short nap and my wife and I thought we saw our friend walk into the store.
The Department of Justice is the governmental agency tasked with enforcing compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and strangely enough, the DOJ are now proposing “Web Standards” for ADA compatibility.
For most of my school life, books were on loan for the year and then returned back to the school. At the beginning of the school year, we were given the books we needed and inscribed our names onto a bookplate which had been pasted into the book when it was originally purchased by the school. I was always very careful with the books I got from the school — it was not my property to do with as I wanted.
My wife Elizabeth and I were at Whole Foods on the Upper West Side for some good wholesome food shopping. On our way out, a collection of books near the exit caught my eye. There was a sign inviting people to take and leave books. Every so often someone would come by and take the books to a charitable organization whose name I have already forgotten because I was so focused on the fact that there were a lot of books being given away.
Today, the iPad is fulfilling it mission of appropriately and coyly tempting international wanderlust. Yesterday, closer to home, our two iPads finally arrived a few days before scheduled delivery after we purchased them online from Apple the first week of May. After less than a day of playing with the iPad, I can confirm what I said way back on February 5, 2010: The iPad is a killer device. Here are my iPad-only Apps:
McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern is a quarterly literary magazine started by Dave Eggers, originally with the goal of publishing stories of high literary merit that were rejected by other magazines. Eventually, it turned into a mixture of rejects and original submissions and Eggers made sure that every issue was different from the last — one issue came looking like a big stack of mail, for example. Another issue was nothing but graphic art and came wrapped in a giant newspaper comic section with original Sunday Funnies.
There is great power in the semiotic image. Sometimes it is simpler to grasp a complex idea with a simple vector graphic. Here’s the seminal work of the “World of 100” and as you can see in the image below, only one person in a village of 100 would have a college education.
