Ignore the Writing Manuals

We often advise our students to read some writing manuals (ok, at least I do). In the Fiction 2010 Supplement to the May 2010 Atlantic, there is a humorous essay by Richard Bausch, “How to Write in 700 Easy Lessons,” that parodies such manuals. Although the focus is on fiction manuals, there are some good points made by Bausch, such as follows:

“With a frequency that is dismaying, I run into people who are widely versed in the manuals, and quasi-literate in all other ways. They have no sense of the love of the art they wish to practice, because they have very seldom or never been in the thrall of a work of fiction as practiced by the great artists in their own literary heritage, or even the good craftsmen in the genres. They may have had some exposure to the great writers, or some anthology-exposure to a fraction of someone, little pieces of the treasure that is there. Or their reading is so deficient that in fact the only books they’ve read that might be called fiction are the few best sellers that achieve some literary merit or cachet. Which is to say that these people, many of them college students, want to be considered serious writers; they seek literary excellence; but they have come to believe that they can accomplish this by means of the convenient shortcut. And the industry that produces the how-to manuals plays to them, makes money from their hope of finding a way to be a writer, rather than doing the work, rather than actually spending the time to absorb what is there in the vast riches of the world’s literature, and then crafting one’s own voice out of the myriad of voices.

My advice? Put the manuals and the how-to books away. Read the writers themselves, whose work and example are all you really need if you want to write.”

You can read the full essay at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/04/how-to-write-in-700-easy-lessons/8043/

Summer Porch Reading

Ulrich Boser. The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft. New York: HarperCollins, 2009.

While somewhat breathless in tone, this page-turner does present extensive details of the aftermath of the theft of works by Rembrandt and Vermeer from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. Following an introduction to Museum’s founder and her approach to the collection and placement of the objects, journalist Boser moves on to discuss the reasons for and methods of successful art thefts in museums great and small. These include complacency, underpaid security guards, the reticence of museums to acknowledge thefts – alas, no surprises here. Caught up in the Gardner search himself, the author regales the reader with accounts of colorful characters of art theft investigators, convicted and unconvicted art thieves, art dealers and curators which unfortunately lapses into a somewhat tedious litany of dropped names and dead leads. And yes, he believes that the Gardner paintings will reappear, probably damaged, but he will not be the one that discovers them.

Thanks to former Archives student Kristin Justham for alerting us to this work. For an update on the Gardner’s director Anne Hawley, and her plans for expanding this museum of a museum, see Julia Klein’s “Elitism for all” in the March 23, 2010 issues of the Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052748703580904575131660016264280-lMyQjAxMTAwMDIwMzEyNDMyWj.html#printMode. Hawley had joined the Museum in 1989, the year before the "Gardner Heist."

Get this: Pittsburgh's young workforce among top 5 most educated in US...

Who knew? Pittsburgh's young workforce is among top 5 most educated in US ?!?

Once defined by heavy-industry and blue-collar masses, Pittsburgh now hosts the fifth most educated young workforce in the United States, a distinction that groups the city with such bastions of erudition as Boston, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., according to a recent report in the Pittsburgh Economic Quarterly published by the University of Pittsburgh's University Center for Social and Urban Research (UCSUR)

The blog story is at http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/pittsburghs-young-workforce-among-top-5-most-educated-us.html and the UCSUR report is at www.ucsur.pitt.edu/files/peq/peq_2010-03.pdf .

LoC acquires the Twitter archive

I case you haven't seen it you might find this interesting:

We will also be putting out a press release later with even more details and quotes. Expect to see an emphasis on the scholarly and research implications of the acquisition. I’m no Ph.D., but it boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data. And I’m certain we’ll learn things that none of us now can even possibly conceive.

Just a few examples of important tweets in the past few years include the first-ever tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey (http://twitter.com/jack/status/20), President Obama’s tweet about winning the 2008 election (http://twitter.com/barackobama/status/992176676), and a set of two tweets from a photojournalist who was arrested in Egypt and then freed because of a series of events set into motion by his use of Twitter (http://twitter.com/jamesbuck/status/786571964) and (http://twitter.com/jamesbuck/status/787167620).

So I wonder what the metadata for the following tweet would be (collected just moments ago):

"All Time Low didtngin gr2 ABG..?! Ogah ah dtg..(tp, klo diksh gratis jg gpp..hehe)"

Why Other Stuff Matters

When the information professional thinks of architecture and design, he or she is usually not reflecting on the built environment of structures we move in, around, and through. However, reading about the nature of the built environment can be useful to anyone interested in how information plays a role in our society. Paul Goldberger, Why Architecture Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) is an excellent way to mull over such matters. Goldberger, architecture critic for the New York Times, writes authoritatively about architecture’s symbolism, comfort, buildings as objects, the nature of space, the role of buildings in memory, and how time and place are represented. This is an insightful and entertaining read about architecture, and anyone taking it on will find elements that resonate with them. As an archivist, concerned with appraisal and skeptical about technocrats who believe everything can be saved, I found this comment by Goldberger very useful: “If a city preserves everything, no matter how good its architecture is, keeping new life flowing through its veins becomes much more difficult, all the more because Americans have a tendency to preserve important buildings as if they were fragile hothouse orchids, wanting them to look pristine and perfect and show no sign of the passage of time” (p. 195). Selection is a function that is critically important to every discipline. Goldberger also, at times, more explicitly discusses the implications of information technology, such as in this passage, where he argues that the “technological revolution makes everything, in effect, a city. The random connections, the serendipitous meetings, that occur on the Internet, the replacement of linear order with the interlocking web of ties, broken and reformed and broken again a million times, the sense of accident and surprise – these are the very events that real physical cities have always provided and for which they have been valued. Random encounters are the city’s greatest gift, and random encounters are cyberspace’s stock-in-trade.” Then Goldberger adds, “the technological explosion is making the entire world a virtual city, a new city, the new market place of human encounters, which happens not to be defined by architectural form” (p. 227). Here we have an example of understanding how new digital forms really relate to older forms, rather than buying into the idea that new digital technologies necessarily change everything.