Hello? Hello? Do I have any readers left?
Sorry, guys. This ranks up there with the top insane summers at Apt. 11D. AND IT”S NOT OVER, YET! Sigh. Limping to the finish line.
I’ve done lots of random things in the past few weeks, which is always good for the blog (and my brain) in the long term, but it does mean that I haven’t had a whole lot of computer-face time. I’ve promised myself a couple of hours here, so let me slowly get my feet wet with a linky-link post.
Slate has a great list of book gifts for college freshman.
Who’s going to log into the Target website at midnight on September 15th? I am.
Speaking of cute, cheap dresses, this tunic is way cuter in real life than on the website. Layer ethnic necklaces and flat sandals and you’re good to go.
Love this map of the county-level breakdown of slavery.
A montage of Seamus Heaney reading “Digging”.
Apt. 11d 
Books for college freshmen
Strunk & White (not updated, please!)
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Tufte)
Paying for the Party: How Colleges Maintain Inequality
Subscriptions to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal
My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
The Collected Works of Shakespeare
A dictionary (real book. like, printed on paper and everything.)
A thesaurus (real book)
LikeLike
Why would you give a new student a paper dictionary and thesaurus? That’s 10 extra pounds to that will have to be carted around for years of unsettled living.
LikeLike
1. The power does go out at times. Murphy’s Law guarantees an important paper will be due the day after the next big power outage.
2. Door stops are always handy. Dictionaries beat metal chickens hands-down.
3. Online dictionaries aren’t that good. The online experience skips the useful experience of reading other words on the same page of a printed book.
4. Carting around books is good for the soul.
5. Books are more durable than laptops. Dropping a laptop does in the laptop. Dropping a book doesn’t hurt anything–unless you manage to hit your toe.
LikeLike
The power outage problem is all I thought of. I suppose that would apply if, when writing a paper, there was enough warning for the student to print out the Wikipedia page being copied before the power went out and it’s during daylight hours. In other words, very unlikely to help.
LikeLike
Ooh, fun, here’s my list. (This is sort of the most influential books in my life.)
Sontag, Against Interpretation
Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn
Olson, The Logic of Collective Action
Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Lewis, The Abolition of Man
Fowler, Modern English Usage
Orwell, Politics and the English Language (this is only an essay, I know)
Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
This doesn’t include any imaginative literature. I’d have to do a separate list for that.
LikeLike
“Paying for the party” sounds fascinating. Worth reading, or is reading the meta-chatter enough?
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/04/01/colleges-party-emphasis-maintain-economic-social-inequality-new-research-suggests
LikeLike
If my power went out there’s no way a paper dictionary could help me write a paper, since it couldn’t make my computer work.
Strunk & White is full of nonsense (See the Language Log folks on this.) It’s basically a couple of guys expressing their idiosyncratic and often illogical preferences and nothing more.
Mostly making a list of books for freshmen (or whatever) is hopeless- there’s too much variation between people for it to be worth while. But, I was surprised to see Lermontov be suggested, as I’d always heard people call him the most boring of the great Russian novelists. I did finally read “The Fatalist”, and enjoyed it, but not so much that I wanted to go read the rest of _A Hero for Our Time._
LikeLike
I hear there are implements known as “pen” and “paper.” To complete being serious on a Friday evening, laptop batteries should be good for a few hours, as long as the user doesn’t let them run down too far. Now, we are talking of college students, so the chances are pretty good that the batteries have been nearly discharged by Call of Duty, before the students start the paper.
My husband has been shocked by Paying for the Party. I’m reading it after him. Beware of the “party pathway.”
LikeLike
Lermontov is actually pretty zippy compared to Turgenev. “Most-boring great Russian novelist” is a very, very crowded field.
LikeLike
I am completely willing to defer to your better knowledge here! (I have read little, if any, Turgenev- perhaps a short story or excerpt I don’t remember now- but will be in no hurry to try him.)
LikeLike
I think I probably like Turgenev more than Lermontov, but Lermontov is much more cinematic. You could make a pretty good Quentin Tarantino film out of Hero of Our Time. Nabokov and his son did a translation that I remember liking, and Nabokov’s commentary is pretty good. (It sounds like Hero of Our Time is a sort of 19th century Catcher in the Rye as far as impressionable adolescents are concerned.) Turgenev is more like a long weekend at a B & B with your parents–very talky, comfy, slow paced, not much happens. I don’t think Fathers and Children is his best work, but that’s the one that is most famous in the West.
I haven’t touched either author this century, but those are my rather fuzzy recollections from grad school long, long ago.
LikeLike
Strangely enough, I was reading Demon-Haunted World last weekend and am going to give an excerpt to my intro comp class. I concur with Phil Plait’s assessment of its value. (And whoa, I just remembered that Plait’s blog was one of my dad’s favorites, he having lost his patience with Pharyngula.)
Re a dictionary: even I don’t have a paper one any more.
Just came across this on the CAM site; looks interesting: http://cornellalumnimagazine.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1724
That tunic is nice, but alas, will not work for boobalicious women.
LikeLike
“That tunic is nice, but alas, will not work for boobalicious women.”
Sadly, what does, aside from a nice, roomy burka?
LikeLike
I find the book lists fascinating (though I’m not sure I’d go as far as to buy something for someone else). I’ve put a hold on Common Ground: Turbulent Times for my kiddo. She might enjoy that one.
You’ll have to tell e about Paying for the Party. It sounds a bit like what I think of as a long Atlantic article made into a book (or, in this case potentially a journal article made into a book, ’cause that’s the currency of the field). I often think I can get enough out of those books by reading the reviews of the books, but some of them are worth reading because they are readable. I liked Overachievers & The Price of Privilege — but, they’re for HS students.
A Google search suggests that the MU in the book is University of Indiana, based on the interior design and fashion merchandising major mentioned. The book doesn’t reflect the impression I have of two other state flagships (Ohio State & U Washington), but my knowledge of both places is of middle-class students who were well prepared, rather than either Greeks or the disadvantaged.
LikeLike
Interesting map. The darker areas are the “black belts,” called that, to the best of my understanding, because of the soil not the inhabitants. Ironically, if you overlay a current voting map, they are now the prime Democratic areas of the South–indeed, about the only rural areas in the whole country that vote Democratic.
LikeLike
I disagree on Strunk and White (the same for Fowler). The point is not whether you agree with all their prescriptions, much less follow them slavishly. The point is, one of the fruits of a higher education is supposed to be the ability to express yourself clearly and effectively in writing. Strunk and White have given serious thought to how this result may be achieved. Read their book, and think continually and conscientiously about the issues they raise, and your written expression will improve. If, after said continual and conscientious thought, you disagree with one of their prescriptions, that’s fine.
LikeLike
I recommend this article:
http://engineering.missouri.edu/civil/degree-programs/bs-cie/communication-toolbox/science-of-writing/
It’s not about writing for style but for clarity. The author tries to explain what makes clear writing about complex information for a non-naive audience. It doesn’t tell you how to write for a general audience necessarily, especially one that you have to excite, but how to keep the writing itself from becoming a significant barrier to understanding.
And I like Sturnk & White for the same reason y81 does. There’s value to starting with a structure and thinking about it. These days, a lot of writing is stream of consciousness and casual communication, but that style isn’t right for every communication.
LikeLike