How can both neuroscience and literature bear on the question of what makes writers not only able, but want, even need, to write? How can we understand the outpouring of authors like Joyce Carol Oates or Stephen King? Why does John Updike see a blank sheet of paper as radiant, the sun rising in the…
High schools no longer prepare most students to express ideas coherently or follow accepted English, let alone carry on serious intellectual work….. The task falls to me — in courses ostensibly about specified topics, not composition — to patch up these leaky vessels…. I hold that a university education ought to include a significant writing…
Robert Mendler, Holocaust SurviorLiteracy Weblog) I recently heard Holocaust survivor Robert Mendler, a resident of nearby Latrobe, Pennsylvania, who spent six or seven years in 10 different concentration camps. Mr. Mendler is a regular speaker here at Seton Hill and in the region; I attended his visit to a youth group at Our Lady of…
I’m reading Frank McCort’s Angela’s Ashes. I recently showed a video, “People Like Us,” to my Seminar in Thinking and Writing students. In the video, a talking head says that everyone with class aspirations has a copy of Angela’s Ashes, but that nobody has read it. Kind of like the opposite of The Bridges of…
Disney started producing films for a new animated character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, in 1927. | Mickey Mouse was conceived the next year during a cross-country train ride, according to the “official” company history. Walt Disney had just been forced to give up the Oswald rights to his ruthless New York distributor, who had exercised…
Some may not like the US President, but we should all appreciate what America has done for the world …. I don’t want the Americans to go home. In fact I am terrified of what would happen if they did. Their going home in the past has often meant suffering for others. Sure, I want…
Aviva, Diageo, Corus… the trend for rebranding companies with “nonsense” names has led to some notable additions to the corporate lexicon. | But a stunt designed to ridicule the tendency has come back to haunt its creators after several spoof names were registered for real. —Spoof brand names snapped up for real (BBC) Thanks for the…
A large number of my patients ascribe their current unhappiness to the fact that they were not offered counselling at the time of an unpleasant occurrence, such as a surgical operation or the death of a friend or relative. Every form of human suffering, it seems, is susceptible to the magical powers of therapy. It…
What began as the ultimate outsider activity — a way to break the newspaper and TV stranglehold on the gathering and dissemination of information — is turning into the same insider’s game played by the old establishment media the bloggerati love to critique. The more blogs you read and the more often you read them,…
The good text adventures had more than a series of puzzles to solve; they had as much atmosphere and clever writing as a good novel, and I decided in Grade 8 that I was going to merge my love of writing and computers to become a writer of interactive fiction. I set my sights on…
As delegates arrived at the meeting, they were handed an intelligent tag the size and weight of a PDA to wear around their necks. Called an nTag, each delegate’s device was pre-programmed with the conference schedule, which could be displayed on a small screen on the front of the tag, as well as with personal…
“Americans work more hours by far than any other workers in the [industrialized] world,” said Benjamin Balak, who teaches economic history at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla. “If you want to be a high-income wage earner, you have to work like a dog. If you want leisure in today’s economy, you’ll be stuck in…
“What can I tell you?” says New York Times Hollywood correspondent Bernard Weinraub. “I screwed up — I’m sorry.” | Weinraub’s apologies, given hurriedly in a very brief telephone conversation, are for lifting a paragraph from another source to use in his Monday, Nov. 11, bylined story about Hollywood private investigator Anthony Pellicano (“Talk of…
Freud’s granddaughter Sophie reminisces about her famous relative. “In my eyes, both Adolf Hitler and my grandfather were false prophets of the 20th century.” —Freud goes up in smoke (The Star) Number of times “Freud” appears in scholarly language & literature articles published published in 2002, as indexed by the Modern Language Association International Bibliography: 47.…
I suppose you could say that the subhead trend bothers me because I’m a writer and I try desperately to perfect antiquated stuff. Transitions and Flow Like transitions and flow, and because I think writing, like most everything else good in life, revolves around flow and rhythm. But the truth is, subheads bug me even…
2: about the laundering The wash becomes a finish the evening tomorrow at the front desk until 7 o’clock at night of the day . (It becomes the evening tomorrow in the morning even if it has.) —About the Laundering (Engrish.com) Found via happy ging. Disclaimer: If I tried writing in German (the only other language…
hey there…. i thought you should know about toastrecipes.com. It has some pretty cool stuff. i noticed you had something about Dr. Toast’s Amazing World of Toast. Well, I just thought you might like to check out toastrecipes.com. —James N. Mallamacee —Toast RecipiesE-Mail) Little did I know that when Rosemary sent me a rather giddy…
[H]umor is very important in the classroom: it can keep students’ attention, it can diffuse tense situations, it can encourage creativity, and it can call attention to absurdity (and sometimes absurdity deserves it, whether its a social phenomena or inherent to a student comment). I even make a number of wisecracks or sarcastic comments, which…
There is clearly a need for CSS to be taken seriously by graphic artists. The Zen Garden aims to excite, inspire, and encourage participation. To begin, view some of the existing designs in the list. Clicking on any one will load the style sheet into this very page. The code remains the same, the only…
Microdoc News has now had feedback from more than 100 users of Google Adwords. The response from small advertisers is not convincing that Google AdWords actually works. There are one or two excellent supporters of the Google AdWords idea, but there are also the 88% of small-time advertisers who are having less than stellar results.…