Author: NewMexiKen

The New York Times publishes its choices, five fiction, five non-fiction.

It’s the birthday of Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, in Florida, Missouri (1835), who wrote Life on the Mississippi (1883), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and his own favorite, The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1891). He was cynical and irreverent, but he had a tender spot for cats. There were always kittens in the house, and he gave them names like “Sin” and “Sour Mash.” “Mamma has morals,” said his daughter Suzy, “and Papa has cats.” He swore constantly and without shame. His streams of profanity broke his wife’s heart on a daily basis. One day he cut himself shaving, and she heard a string of oaths from the bathroom. She resolved to move him to repentance, and she repeated back to him all the bad words he had just said. He smiled at her and shook his head. “You have the words, Livy,” he said, “but you’ll never learn the tune.” After he published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he found himself awash in cash, which he invested in a typesetting machine that was very complicated and very ingenious and demanded more and more investment and in the end would not work. He had to declare bankruptcy, and he decided to go on a worldwide lecture tour, the proceeds of which he would use to pay back all of his creditors. His visits to Africa and Asia convinced him that a God who allowed Christians to believe that they were better than savages was a God he wanted no part of. He was a funny man and is remembered for his humorous sayings. He said, “It is better to keep you mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.” He also said, “Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”

The Writer’s Almanac

Listen to Garrison Keillor recite the above and more.

American University linguistics professor Naomi S. Brown wonders in the Los Angeles Times if we’re “Killing the written word by snippets.” This excerpt:

But today’s college crowd has a tool we did not: the search engine. Want to learn tap dancing in Austin? Lessons are just a few clicks away. So are the words spoken by the White Rabbit in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” or every reference to dogs in “The Canterbury Tales.” Between Microsoft Word’s “find” function, Project Gutenberg, Amazon’s “Search Inside” feature and Google Print, seeking out precise fragments of information has become child’s play.

Search engines are a blessing. Unquestionably, they save all of us vast amounts of time and shoe leather, not to mention their democratizing effect for users without access to substantial book collections. But there is a hitch.

Much as automobiles discourage walking, with undeniable consequences for our health and girth, textual snippets-on-demand threaten our need for the larger works from which they are extracted. Why read “Bowling Alone” — or even the shorter article upon which it builds — when you can lift a page that contains some key words? In an attempt to coax students to search inside real books rather than relying exclusively on the Web for sources, many professors require references to printed works alongside URLs. Now that those “real” full-length publications are increasingly available and searchable online, the distinction between tangible and virtual is evaporating.

Professor Brown concludes: “If we approach the written word primarily through search-and-seizure rather than sustained encounter-and-contemplation, we risk losing a critical element of what it means to be an educated, literate society.” Is she right?