Valves, Valvoline, and singing circuits
I borrowed Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk from the library. “I want to learn more about our next president,” I told the librarian. She laughed.
Reading and writing in the dark
From E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr.
Less reading, more “writing”
To my mind, reading and writing are just things one does in a college class. As students’ language skills decline, assigning less reading and more “writing” solves nothing.
“Slow Reading”
Richard Lanham: “Every course in composition ought to be a course in Slow Reading.”
Whose whom?
I’d bet a Happy Meal that Trump didn’t write this statement.
W(h)ither grammar
How many problems in reading stem from an ignorance of basic grammar? And how many problems in writing stem from an ignorance of basic grammar?
Nat Hentoff (1925–2017)
“I was addicted to books.”
The page-ninety-nine test
Should really be the page-ninety test.
Also from Robert Walser
“When I read, I am a harmless, nice and quiet person and I don’t do anything stupid.”
Verlyn Klinkenborg on the English major
“Ventriloquistic syntax.”
William Zinsser, listening
“People read with their ears, whether they know it or not.”
“[B]eautiful and surprising and deep”
A passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.
PUSH
An old metal sign, good advice for reading, writing, and teaching.
Walter Benjamin on readers and writers
It is a truth universally acknowledged, sort of, that we are all writers now. Walter Benjamin’s observations suggest that we were all writers “then,” too.
Readers and writers
From a supercomputing glossary
Proust again
On reading, an excerpt from Swann's Way