I asked Facebook to recommend books I should read next, and this is what Facebook said (arranged alphabetically by author’s name):
The only one of these I’ve read is Freedom, which I mostly enjoyed but thought Conner Oberst wouldn’t like much. I look forward to checking some of the rest of these out! If you have a recommendation yourself, please add it in the comments, either here or on Facebook and I’ll update the list.
- On being a sperm donor; or, #occupyspermbanks.
- On being a sperm donor in a different way.
- “Ian Frazier’s entrée into this 1997 essay about his typewriter repairman is approximately how I feel about smartphones.
- Claire Needel Hollander, a New York City public school teacher, puts forward the humanist case for studying Literature (as opposed to rhetoric, or tests). I don’t dispute her point really, but I do wonder why it seems so difficult for her say “In my class we study how language is used to affect the world,” thus accepting the burden that poetry and drama and fiction and nonfiction and speech and everything in between all make up the umbrella they sit under? Why bemoan the absence of “Literature” in the materials you use? (You’re right, Ms. Hollander, I haven’t addressed your objection that what you teach doesn’t test. It’s true there are real limitations in the tests we have—some cultural (as has been shown time and again), some practical. But may it not be a problem too because it reveals that what you teach is limited in ways it needn’t be?)
- That said, classrooms like Hollander’s aren’t the classrooms to worry about. These are. (You know your report about cheating is damning when you end it with a parent worrying, “I expect teachers to be ethical.”)
- On a lighter note, Mike Konczal analyzed the data presented by the We Are the 99% Tumblr and came away with some interesting results #occupystatistics
I’ve recently completed a project editing a novel. It was the first project of the sort I had done as a freelancer, and it was a large one: The initial manuscript weighed in at more than 125,000 words. All did not go smoothly at first—I made some rookie mistakes in planning and then managing my time and perhaps even in gauging the appropriate amounts of copyediting versus commentary to give—but the author was happy with my work, and I know now how to make the next project like it work out. The book is currently being shopped for a publisher—I wish the author luck.
Meanwhile, two very different manuscripts I’ve edited in the last year have been accepted for publication, the first in Sociology of Education and the second in the Arkansas Times. Both authors came asking for help making substantial cuts to their manuscripts. I’ll not try to guess how the authors felt about seeing their work chopped so (in the case of the latter, I don’t have to guess). I am proud to have assisted on both pieces—the recognition the authors have received for their work is well deserved.
From late 2006 to early 2007, a lot of Iowa City ink was spilled over a proposal by the University of Iowa Community Credit Union to change its name to “Optiva,” a name which had been proposed by a branding agency and selected by the board for conveying optimism and tiva-ness. Those were heady days: mortgage-backed securities were hot and creaky and loans were easy to come by, Hillary Clinton was reality and Barack Obama a dream, and Facebook hadn’t yet flattened everyone’s relations to gathering around a news trough. Many people then said “I see myself in University of Iowa and Community, but not in Optiva, and I don’t like that,” and they took a series of moves that, despite long odds and unlikely circumstances, succeeded in embarrassing the credit union’s board of directors and killing Optiva. I chronicled some of that story in a series of blog posts at the time:
Now, five years after Optiva died, thefinancialbrand.com has revisited the story and written what may be the most comprehensive exposé of the controversy there will be.
It started two or three weeks ago when I took Gabriel out for a walk around the neighborhood and he pointed out every green city garbage can he saw. Though he has a small vocabulary, at twenty months G is still not a talker; when he notices something, he points and asks “Eh?” Because he also requires that everything he sees be acknowledged, if you had watched us walk that day (or any day since), this is what you would have seen:
G, walking happily down the sidewalk, stops in front of a driveway, points, and asks, “Eh?”
“It’s a garbage can,” I say. “It’s green.”
G moves on a few steps to the next driveway. He looks up toward the garage. He points, and asks “Eh?”
“It’s a garbage can,” I say. “It’s green.”
And so forth it goes until G tires of walking and I carry him. This doesn’t stop him from pointing out the cans, of course; because I walk faster, it allows him to point out cans faster. Sometimes he notices the garbage cans across the street; he’s ecstatic if it’s trash day and all the cans are out on on the curb.
It took a couple of rounds of this before I realized that G wasn’t so much pointing out garbage cans as he was pointing out the sameness they represented. In his toddler way, he was saying that this can is like that one, which is like the two cans behind our house, which is like every other can, too. It’s a bit of a shame that garbage cans were the initial (and continuing) object of this cognitive development, but I suppose there’s no way to control exactly what a toddler will fixate on.
Since G began pointing out the garbage cans, he has also begun to point out illustrations of trees in his books. At the same time, he has begun to point out the fact that pictures of things in books are things in the world. The bookshelf in Goodnight Moon is like the bookshelf in his room; the pussy cat who visits the queen, though in the illustration looks nothing like our cats, is nevertheless a cat, and so he points out Bingley or Jane when we read that page.
So, slowly but surely, G continues to learn the ways of language, how representations of things (words, images) refer, generally and specifically, to things.
