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It is commendable that recent Prime Ministers have continued the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards even though, as with some other literary prizes, its future has often seemed under threat. It is a prestigious national award amongst the also-important state and other literary prizes. And it is lucrative, with winners receiving $80 000 and shortlisted authors […]

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A buzz has been building about Australian author Mark Henshaw’s long awaited second novel after Out of the Line of Fire. The Snow Kimono (Text) is a literary psychological thriller set in Japan and France. Insights into both those countries shape the contours, ridges and atmosphere of the novel. Paris is wet and snowy and […]

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By Andrew Zurcher

The “Februarie” eclogue of Edmund Spenser’s pastoral collection, The Shepheardes Calender, was first published in 1579. It presents a conversation between two shepherds, a brash “Heardmans boye” called Cuddie and an old stick-in-the-mud named Thenot. The two of them meet on a cold winter day and get into an argument about age: Cuddie thinks Thenot is a wasted and weak-kneed whinger, while Thenot blames Cuddie for his heedless and slightly arrogant headstrongness. To support his position, Thenot tells a moralising tale about an ambitious young briar and a hoary oak. In his eagerness to flaunt his brave blooms full in the sun, the briar persuades a local husbandman to chop down the mossy tree; but the end of the tale turns bitter for the little plant when, deprived of the sheltering support of his onetime neighbour, he is utterly blown away in a heavy gale. Thenot is in the middle of applying the moral of his tale when Cuddie interrupts, and leaves in a huff – petulant and dismissive to the last. As the eclogue breaks off, the reader is caught in an old-fashioned and hackneyed dilemma: is it better to embrace the beautiful but rootless new, or cling to the solid, gnarled old?

The Shepheardes Calender poses this gnarled horn of a problem in the middle of a printed book that, itself, has already begun to play in a very material way with the tensions between antiquity and newfangleness. Spenser’s eclogues are conspicuously modeled on those of Theocritus and Virgil, Marot and Mantuan. The poems were first published elaborated with E.K.’s prefaces, his introductions (or “Arguments”) to each of the twelve “aeglogae,” and his explanatory notes. These annotations are presented in a Roman type that contrasts visually with the black letter of Spenser’s poetry, framing it in a style that emulated early modern editions of Virgil’s eclogues, as well as the theological and legal texts that, in this humanist period, were often produced entirely engulfed in glosses and comments. Each of the eclogues is also accompanied by a woodcut, done in a rough style, and concludes with an “embleme” apiece for each of the eclogue’s interlocutors. These archaising features belie the novelty of Spenser’s project – the first complete set of original pastoral poems in English, and a collection that, in its allegorical engagement with the history of England’s recent and successive reformations, put this country and its fledgling literary culture on the map. Here at last was England’s Virgil, said Spenser himself. Just look at his book. But is it an old book, or a new book? Is it new-old, or old-new? What is the meaning of the new, if it be not interpreted by the old?

One of the most exciting aspects digitizing works such as in the Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO) project is

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Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. In this post, also posted on Baron’s personal blog The Web of Language, he looks at multitasking in a digital world.

Most of my students belong to the digital generation, so they consider themselves proficient multitaskers. They take notes in class, participate in discussion, text on their cell phones, and surf on their laptops, not sequentially but all at once. True, they’re not listening to their iPods in class, and they may find that inconvenient, since they like a soundtrack accompanying them as they go through life. But they’re taking advantage of every other technology they can cram into their backpacks. They claim it helps them learn, even if their parents and teachers are not convinced.

Recently one of my students, a college senior, added to this panoply of technology an older form of classroom inattention: while I explored the niceties of English grammar, he was doing homework for another class. When I asked him to put away the homework and pay attention, he replied that he was paying attention, just multitasking to maximize efficiency. “I can multitask too,” I said, taking out my cell phone and starting to text as I went on with the lesson.

My students didn’t like this. They expected their teacher’s full attention, even if they weren’t going to give me theirs. Plus, they argued, “When you text, you have to stop talking so you can look at the keyboard. That’s not multitasking.” I was using a computer before most of them were born, but they were right, I can’t talk and text. Their pitying expressions said it all: too old to multitask. But what really got them was the thought that I might actually want to multitask, that I might be able to sneak in another activity while I was teaching them.

Although it’s gotten a lot of attention in the digital age, multitasking isn’t new, nor is it the sole property of the young. We commonly do two things at once — singing while playing an instrument, driving while talking to a passenger, surfing the web while watching TV. Despite the fact that a growing body of research suggests that multitasking decreases the efficiency with which we perform simultaneous activities, the idiom he can’t walk and chew gum at the same time shows that we expect a certain amount of multitasking to be normal, if not mandatory.

As for predigital, adult multitasking, office workers have been typing, answering phones, and listening to music, since, like, forever, without any loss of efficiency, except of course when Richard Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, blamed the 18½ minute gap on one of the Watergate tapes on a multitasking mishap. Woods was listening to the tape and transcribing it when the phone rang. As she leaned

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I tend to find myself irresistibly attracted to charming things -- which has led me into trouble far more often than not -- but these delightful French chickens were crying out for attention and how could I say no? I am far too easily persuaded :) They belonged to the friend of a friend and sat on her table, all round and smooth and quite a pleasure to behold. I've changed the colours but hopefully retained the simplicity of form and it turned out to be a simple yet extremely therapeutic and enjoyable drawing.

I also have a wonderful queue of requests for my type designs which is a great but pleasant surprise. I'm going through them all in between drawings, but here's the last one I managed to do, for my niece:

 

I'm pleased to say that the sticker for it won me a TBA Award at zazzle on the 28 August :) Thanks Marisa!

 

French Hen products at Floating Lemons at Zazzle

Marisa cherry pink products at Floating Lemons Type at Zazzle

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I absolutely HATE text language. Nothing in the world annoys me more than seeing someone type in text language. Okay, I do use the occasional text language phrase like ‘you’ becomes ‘u’ and ‘are’ becomes ‘r’. I do use the occasional acronym like ‘to be honest’ becomes ‘tbh’, ‘laughing out loud’ becomes ‘lol’ and ‘by the way’ becomes ‘btw’. I think a text language vocabulary of up to 20 words should be tolerated. (Mine only reaches like 5 which is better but…! ) But when situations worsen to a point where you see someone write ‘I am busy right now’ in text language and it looks like ‘i m bc ryt nw’, at that point, you really want to bang your head on the nearest wall until your eyes pop out and even Homer Simpson seems as attractive as Brad Pitt.

Here is my list of why text language spelling should officially be allowed to get a criminal record (or better still - imprisonment) if exceeded by 20 words in its vocabulary list:

1. It makes you sound like a 2 year old. 2 year olds can’t type and when you type text spelling, it looks like you can’t type, thus making you look like a 2 year old.
2. It makes you sound illiterate. It feels like your mum and dad denied you the basic education you should have deserved.
3. It makes you look like you are so poverty stricken that your keyboard has been bashed by a cow but you still won’t replace it.
4. Text spelling seems to worm its way to exam papers and other official pieces of papers and THAT is despicable.
5. It looks like jumbled letters. It really looks like you are trying to teach little Molly how to read and write.
6. Using text language is denying other people the right to read. When they look at random letters, no punctuation and no use of the teensiest bit of decent grammar, then their mind goes into delirium whether what they are reading is proper or not, thus corrupting their minds.
7. Children will become weird because of text language and will take over the world with signs and posters and literally everything sounding that way.
8. Teachers won’t be able to correct exam papers because if the students use text spelling and the teachers can’t (I’m pretty sure half the teachers think ‘lol’ means lolling about because we find something funny, which really, makes no sense at all) that’s illiteracy stepped up a notch and a waste of doing exams anyway. As it is, the British government education folk are worried exams are getting easier by the second.
9. On a much more realistic note, text spelling is going out of fashion. More and more people shun it and funnily enough shun those who still use it, so if you use it, stop. Or you’ll find yourself tied to a pole near the bus stop getting thrashed by a bunch of geekily cool teenagers.

I know that was a pretty angry rant but, let’s face the facts, text language spelling isn’t great! If anything at all, it is wasteful. People say it reduces the effort to type but it increases the effort to read. Let’s all type decently and read decently and not become slaves to ‘txt lngage splng’ (or for normal people, text language spelling).

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I absolutely HATE text language. Nothing in the world annoys me more than seeing someone type in text language. Okay, I do use the occasional text language phrase like ‘you’ becomes ‘u’ and ‘are’ becomes ‘r’. I do use the occasional acronym like ‘to be honest’ becomes ‘tbh’, ‘laughing out loud’ becomes ‘lol’ and ‘by the way’ becomes ‘btw’. I think a text language vocabulary of up to 20 words should be tolerated. (Mine only reaches like 5 which is better but…! ) But when situations worsen to a point where you see someone write ‘I am busy right now’ in text language and it looks like ‘i m bc ryt nw’, at that point, you really want to bang your head on the nearest wall until your eyes pop out and even Homer Simpson seems as attractive as Brad Pitt.

Here is my list of why text language spelling should officially be allowed to get a criminal record (or better still - imprisonment) if exceeded by 20 words in its vocabulary list:

1. It makes you sound like a 2 year old. 2 year olds can’t type and when you type text spelling, it looks like you can’t type, thus making you look like a 2 year old.
2. It makes you sound illiterate. It feels like your mum and dad denied you the basic education you should have deserved.
3. It makes you look like you are so poverty stricken that your keyboard has been bashed by a cow but you still won’t replace it.
4. Text spelling seems to worm its way to exam papers and other official pieces of papers and THAT is despicable.
5. It looks like jumbled letters. It really looks like you are trying to teach little Molly how to read and write.
6. Using text language is denying other people the right to read. When they look at random letters, no punctuation and no use of the teensiest bit of decent grammar, then their mind goes into delirium whether what they are reading is proper or not, thus corrupting their minds.
7. Children will become weird because of text language and will take over the world with signs and posters and literally everything sounding that way.
8. Teachers won’t be able to correct exam papers because if the students use text spelling and the teachers can’t (I’m pretty sure half the teachers think ‘lol’ means lolling about because we find something funny, which really, makes no sense at all) that’s illiteracy stepped up a notch and a waste of doing exams anyway. As it is, the British government education folk are worried exams are getting easier by the second.
9. On a much more realistic note, text spelling is going out of fashion. More and more people shun it and funnily enough shun those who still use it, so if you use it, stop. Or you’ll find yourself tied to a pole near the bus stop getting thrashed by a bunch of geekily cool teenagers.

I know that was a pretty angry rant but, let’s face the facts, text language spelling isn’t great! If anything at all, it is wasteful. People say it reduces the effort to type but it increases the effort to read. Let’s all type decently and read decently and not become slaves to ‘txt lngage splng’ (or for normal people, text language spelling).

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Life is also very insistent when it needs attending to and easily distracts one from creative pursuits no matter how much one procrastinates ... :) I've had so much to attend to lately that I find myself slightly (or hugely depending on how I want to view it) blocked where art is concerned at the moment. So I've been fiddling around more with typography lately and this is one of the results.

I hand-draw into my sketchbook first now, as my tablet PC seems to have given up on me, and then scan the drawing in and polish it up in photoshop. After which I transfer it into Illustrator to fine tune the lines as it's the smoothest way of changing the colours on the letters if I wish to do so. 

I'm considering opening up a new store on zazzle devoted entirely to my play with fonts and type design, as they seem to be getting increasingly popular. It's also fun and almost as therapeutic as drawing, so I won't be giving up on it anytime soon. Cheers!

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I know it should be my job to post an exact text for this monthly prompt, so thanks Lyon for her post! I"ve found the whole tale here: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0709.html#snowwhite (better later than never...) . If you would like to put rich details of the tale to your works - here you are. Thank you for excusing and your patience, Linda must does it better than me :) Have a good job you all!

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Naomi S. Baron, author of Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World, is Professor of Linguistics at American University in Washington, DC. Always On explores the linguistic and social impact of computers and mobile phones. A former Guggenheim and Fulbright fellow, she is also the author of Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolvedand Where It’s Heading, which probes the influence of technology on English over the past 1200 years. Baron is currently studying mobile phone use in cross-cultural context.

Admit it.

Sometimes you don’t want to talk with certain people. You spy a colleague down the hall, coming towards you. He’s a notorious chatterbox, so you duck down the nearest corridor. Your sister-in-law calls as you are settling in for an evening’s television, and you concoct excuses about preparing to leave the house.

Telecommunication devices help us maneuver when we converse with whom. Answering machines (reborn as voicemail) respond for us, even when we are sitting beside the phone, listening in. Speaker phones free us to multitask – and to subject unwitting callers to larger audiences than they bargained for. Skype lets us choose who gets to see us and who may only hear our voice.

Or take instant messaging, which allows you to “block” people, leading them to believe you aren’t logged on to your IM client, when you actually are. One undergraduate I interviewed regularly blocked his mother whenever he wanted to post away messages containing raunchy language. After his friends had a day or so to take in his humor, he removed the message – and unblocked Mom.

Social networking sites add more control options. Studies of Facebook have observed how young people in America stage themselves through photographs, quotations, and relationship status – aptly illustrating Erving Goffman’s notion of “presentation of self in everyday life.” One student at my university described her page on Facebook as “more an expression of who one wants to be than who one really is. [It’s] me on my best day.” Like a puppeteer pulling the strings, she manipulates what her friends see (and presumably think) of her.

Both IM and social networking sites also redefine what it means to keep in touch with friends. College students frequently read friends’ away messages on IM to catch up on their activities, rather than picking up the phone or launching an IM conversation. Facebook has been described as “a way of maintaining a friendship without having to make any effort whatsoever,” since you can see what your friends are up to simply by viewing their pages. In fact, Facebook will notify you when the birthdays of your online “Friends” roll around, so you can post a birthday greeting on their Facebook “Wall” (think of an electronic notice board). It’s Happy Birthday without risk of personal involvement.

What’s the problem? For starters, micro-managed human interaction undermines personal courage. (“You lacked the guts to tell her to her face you have a new girlfriend, but sent her a text message?”) It also devalues the other person’s right of response, replacing dialogue with monologue.

Recently I have been studying how university students in Sweden, the US, and Italy use their mobile phones. To understand why young people choose to send a text message (rather than make a voice call), I asked students to evaluate this possible explanation: “I want to make my message short, and talking takes too long.”

The cross-cultural data were amazingly consistent. Between 68% and 73% of subjects in all three countries judged this rationale to be either a “very important” or “somewhat important” reason to send a text message instead of calling. Participants in subsequent focus groups repeatedly stressed how expedient it was to get their message out without having to “waste” time with pleasantries or risk getting into actual conversations.

Like most technologies, computers and mobile phones are mixed blessings. Internal combustion engines brought the convenience of automobiles, but they also pollute the planet. Mobile phones are invaluable for bridging distance, yet they magnify our ability to distance ourselves from others.

Admittedly, children have long posted “Keep Out” signs on their tree-houses or bedroom doors.
But consider this: Today’s college students hear their mobile phone ring, glance at the number, and proceed to ignore the call because “It’s only Mom” – a story I heard many times in the US and even in family-friendly Italy.

“Only Mom.” As communal beings, part of our socialization entails learning how to engage interpersonally. To make small talk, to empathize, to be available, even when we would rather be doing something else. Today’s communication technologies may be turning us into social control freaks, leading us to diminish the importance of open, real-time (and yes, sometimes risky or boring) discussion.

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Today I share the blogging with my son, Evan, age nine, who earlier today wrote an update of our time in the deep south (see below). Evan's comments will be in a bigger font. We just arrived in Bryan, Texas a moment ago, so I don't have much to say about Texas yet except that it is big and dark and rainy. [Oh, I just realized that as I type this, it is techincally by 41st birthday! :-) ]

EVAN: Ok, so yesterday we left Atlanta (we got up at 7:00) and did a 2 and a half hour drive to Alabama, and all Of a sudden, we see this sign that said: ENTERING ALABAMA CENTRAL TIME ZONE . What?! We shouted. Then the clock that before said 9:49 (which was when we were supposed to arrive) went down to 8:49. We could have slept an hour later! Well, at least we get to relive the past hour, said my dad. On the road we made up a game. The game was, if you saw a water tower and shouted torre de agua (that’s Spanish) first, then you would get a point. At the end of the trip, whoever had the most points, won. To me, the driving wasn’t very long, but that’s probably because I was waching tv.

MARK: I love the south. It's green and lush, and the people are friendly and the weather has been beautiful. I also love that it has a chain of grocery stores called Piggly Wiggly. Whevenver we see one, we Hugheses are all about the Piggly Wiggly! I took this picture through the windsheild of our car on our way to Birmingham, AL:


Oh yes, Piggly. I will follow...

One thing I do miss about Massachusetts, though, is the availability of Starbucks. In fact, I've been on a daily quest to find one anywhere near where we go. On the way to Birmingham I found one! I was so pleased, I took a picture of my grande Gazebo blend.



Evan: We went to the Alabama welcome center and my dad and me got Hank Williams posters. Hank Williams is like an Elvis to country music. My dad was very happy. I was happy too, except I had never heard of Hank Williams before this. But I'm sure he must be pretty good.

Mark: Because of the unexpected time-change (what? did we miss a memo or something?), we arrived in Birmingham earlier than planned, which allowed us time to look around. Since Birmingham metal-working played a big role in the city's history, they have a huge statue of Vulcan, the Roman god of the fire and forge.



EVAN: Later, we had lunch with Hester Bass the author of So Many Houses, and her family (father Clayton, kids Anderson and Miranda) in Birmingham. We ate at a Cracker Barrell, a southern place I'd never eaten before. It was good. My mom and dad ate southern food. I ate grilled cheese. It was good. Hester gave us copies of her book, which was very nice of her.

Mark: In addition to being the author of the early reader So Many Houses, Hester is also the author of a soon-to-be released picture book biography of American artist, Walter Inglis Anderson, to be illustrated by the acclaimed E. B. Lewis and published by Candlewick Press. Hester and her family were amazingly kind to drive all the way down to Huntsville to meet with us. It's lovely to meet such wonderful people when you're far from home. Many thanks to the 'Bama Basses, our new friends!

   

EVAN: Next, we had dinner with the Campbell family In Jackson, Mississippi. I played with three boys named Graem, Nathan and Douglas. They had a big snail called a wolf snail. I let it crawl up my arm. It was so cool!

Mark: Sarah is the author and photographer of an upcoming picture book about wolf snails, snails that eat other snails -- an amazing creature I'd never heard of before. Her photographs are absolutely beautiful and her book will be published in the Spring. Although we were total strangers, Sarah and Richard and their boys fed us and treated us like family. We had a wonderful Mississippi evening which we will never forget -- complete with fireworks set off by neighbors. Thanks you, Campbells, our other new friends in the south!




This morning (actually, yesterday morning now) we stopped by at Lemuria Books in Jackson, a cool independent bookstore with a relaxing atmosphere. Here we are with a very nice bookseller named Ciel. 



Lots of traffic problems on the way through Louisianna to Bryan, TX, so it took us much longer than it should have. Still, we're here safe, sound, and happy. Soon I'll actually go to bed. 

A big, Texas good night to y'all. 
-- Mark

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