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treyf 22's List: 00-Introduction/General
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Test Section 2
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Add Sticky NotePhilip Davis pleasures his brain with shifting Shakespearean syntax, measures the results on an electroencephalogram, and finds evidence that powerful writing can literally change the ways in which we think ...
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Test Section
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Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, students are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials... Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.
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All reading is not the same. It takes more than the apparition of words to constitute a book and its inner forms. Bleak House is not e-mail (even if it once was serialized) and Atonement does not deliver information. "Search" is not the most exciting demand that one can make of a text.
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What will life be like if people stop reading?
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As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
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I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. I think I know what’s going on ...
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The humanities are imprecise by their very nature. But that does not mean they are a form of intellectual finger-painting. The knowledge they convey is not a rough, preliminary substitute for what psychology, chemistry, molecular biology, and physics will eventually resolve with greater finality. They are an accurate reflection of the subject they treat, the most accurate possible. In the long run, we cannot do without them.
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Despair over the decline of the written word was at an all-time low last week as an essay in the New York Times revealed that reading, or at least understanding the secret language of literature, is still a popular activity -- if only as a mating strategy.
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Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”
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For as long as Stephen Harper is Prime Minister of Canada, I vow to send him every two weeks, mailed on a Monday, a book that has been known to expand stillness.
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I've done the math and here's the bottom line. If you want consistent artistic bang for your buck, skip the movies, forget the theatre and turn off your TV set. Instead, read a book. More specifically, read a novel.
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The starting point is a question. Outside theology and fantastic literature, few can doubt that the main features of our universe are its dearth of meaning and lack of discernible purpose. And yet, with bewildering optimism, we continue to assemble whatever scraps of information we can gather in scrolls and books and computer chips, on shelf after library shelf, whether material, virtual or otherwise, pathetically intent on lending the world a semblance of sense and order, while knowing perfectly well that, however much we’d like to believe the contrary, our pursuits are sadly doomed to failure. Why then do we do it? Though I knew from the start that the question would most likely remain unanswered, the quest seemed worthwhile for its own sake. This book is the story of that quest.
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The students are back at university. First-year undergrads wander around searching for classes. Frat pledges block traffic and try to look like they're having fun. Here's a question: Did anyone ever use the term “ivory tower” in a non-pejorative way?
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n the past few weeks, tens of thousands of young men and women have begun their college careers... They will find courses devoted to every question under the sun. But there is one question for which most of them will search their catalogs in vain: The question of the meaning of life, of what one should care about and why, of what living is for.
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"I've read at least 100 books in the past year. Seriously. Probably more like 150 to 200," a user named Phyllis wrote on the literary blog Trashionista. "My husband? I'm guessing zero, unless you count picture books and comic books he has read to the kids."
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... you could say reading is a learning technology. It enhances the way our minds work. It requires effort and fires up multiple areas of the brain. Reading has allowed us to develop more complex mental capacities. It changes the way we think.
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Many people believe that the ubiquity of prepackaged computer software that helps users prepare such presentations has not only taken much of the life out of public speaking by homogenizing it at a low level, but has also led to a kind of ersatz thought that is devoid of original ideas.
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Oct 22, 07
Summary of an article from October 22, 2007 issue of the New Yorker. Full article is only available in the print edition.
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Discusses the abridged âMoby-Dickâ in detail. The Orion âMoby-Dickâ is not defaced; it is, by conventional contemporary standards of good editing and critical judgment, improved. When you go back to find the missing bits, you remember why the book isnât just a thrilling adventure but a great book. The subtraction does not turn a good work into hackwork; it turns a hysterical, half-mad masterpiece into a sound, sane book. It is all Dick and no Moby. Discusses the abridged âVanity Fir,â noting the elimination of Thackerayâs rambling commentary and intrusions. But Thackeray without his jokes and asides becomes another, duller writer. Meaning resides in the margins. The real lesson of the compact editions is not that vandals shouldnât be let loose on masterpieces but that masterpieces are inherently a little loony.
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Oct 22, 07
Summary of a profile of historian and teacher Jacques Barzun. Full article from October 22, 2007 issue of the New Yorker is only available in the print edition.
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Barzun chooses to think of himself as an “amateur,” someone who takes genuine pleasure in what he learns about... The charge against Barzun is that he spread himself too thin, but he always wanted to write for a general audience. He wanted to do on the page what he did in the classroom: help the reader âcarry in his head something more than the unexamined history of his own life.â
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