We never know where our random, internal stream of associations will lead us.  I think about where I have misplaced my glasses, and within seconds I might be thinking about an essay by Montaigne.  For Farhad Manjoo over at Slate, the journey is not nearly as interesting:  thoughts about Julian Assange of Wiklieaks fame hitting on a 19-year-old girl brings a long jeremiad against those of us who use double spaces after full stops. Like this.   As he tries to explain, it is  “is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong“:

What galls me about two-spacers isn’t just their numbers. It’s their certainty that they’re right. Over Thanksgiving dinner last year, I asked people what they considered to be the “correct” number of spaces between sentences. The diners included doctors, computer programmers, and other highly accomplished professionals. Everyone—everyone!—said it was proper to use two spaces. Some people admitted to slipping sometimes and using a single space—but when writing something formal, they were always careful to use two. Others explained they mostly used a single space but felt guilty for violating the two-space “rule.” Still others said they used two spaces all the time, and they were thrilled to be so proper. When I pointed out that they were doing it wrong—that, in fact, the correct way to end a sentence is with a period followed by a single, proud, beautiful space—the table balked. “Who says two spaces is wrong?” they wanted to know.

So Manjoo goes into the genealogy versus the 1- versus 2-space rule, which he alleges is based on the old manual Smith-Corona I still have squirreled away in the garage somewhere, which I keep not only for old times sake, but just in case all the computers die forever in some post-Armageddon world, I’ll still be able to pound out my pearly prose, as long as my 30-year-old ribbon lasts.

Here’s Manjoo (you can feel his blood pressure go up as he writes):

“The problem with typewriters was that they used monospaced type—that is, every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space. This bucked a long tradition of proportional typesetting, in which skinny characters (like I or 1) were given less space than fat ones (like W or M). Monospaced type gives you text that looks ‘loose’ and uneven; there’s a lot of white space between characters and words, so it’s more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule—on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read. Here’s the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. First electric typewriters and then computers began to offer people ways to create text using proportional fonts. Today nearly every font on your PC is proportional. (Courier is the one major exception.) Because we’ve all switched to modern fonts, adding two spaces after a period no longer enhances readability, typographers say. It diminishes it.”

Behold and weep, Manjoo

Ho, I don’t know where he comes from, but ancient moi still remembers working with the last hot-type presses in the 1970s, with their molten-lead typesetting and manually locked pages.  They used proportional typesetting. For The Michigan Daily and The Pontiac Press, I remember the complicated jigsaw puzzle of writing out headlines to fit the columns — each character counted for 1, except for i and j, which counted 1/2, and m’s and w’s, which were 1-1/2.  In a pinch, you might be able to count an r and t as a little less than one.  Even so, we always put two spaces between sentences.  Which shoots Manjoo’s argument all to hell.

But what can you say about a man who claims, “Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. It’s one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork …”

Well, no.  It depends on how the courses are served.  If it’s fish course first, entrée second, and salad course third, then the fork goes closest to the plate, on the right.  Everybody knows that.

Kids, do not — repeat, do not — use the essay below as a model for your Stanford or Ivy League entrance application.  The following is from the young John F. Kennedy in 1935, responding to the question: “Why do you wish to go to Harvard?”

The reasons that I have for wishing to go to Harvard are several. I feel that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university. I have always wanted to go there, as I have felt that it is not just another college, but is a university with something definite to offer. Then too, I would like to go to the same college as my father. To be a “harvard man” is an enviable distinction, and one that I sincerely hope I shall attain.

April 23, 1935
John F. Kennedy

The occasion for this revelation is the hoopla surrounding the 50th anniversary of JFK’s inauguration. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library is digitizing reams of JFK artifacts. The Gawker issues this invitation:  “If you find something cool in the JFK Presidential Library’s increasingly thick digital archives, post it in the comments.”

His father’s letter to the dean was brutally honest: “Jack has a very brilliant mind for the things in which he is interested, but is careless and lacks application in those in which he is not interested. This is, of course, a bad fault.”  Apparently he wasn’t too interested in getting into Harvard, from the evidence.  His grades weren’t so hot, either.

In fairness, however, the lackluster “essay” probably indicates how low-key the application process was, 80 years ago, especially if you came from a tony family.  This was long before the era when upper-crust families would hire marketing teams and Nobel laureates to tailor the applications.  His acceptance was probably a foregone conclusion, and the application little more than an annoyance.

The revelation comes to us courtesy the Gawker, which charitably describes the application as “refreshingly banal.”

There’s more.  In the comments, Jukie notes:  “My freshman year at princeton I had a class that took us into the school’s library archives to look at JFK’s application. (JFK spent a few months at Princeton before transferring to Harvard. Academic Wimp.) His application included a christmas card from his family and a hand-written note from his father.”

Octothorp asks:  “Why didn’t he just save himself some time, scrawl ‘My dad is Joe Kennedy’ across the first page, and hand that in?”  Anne V6 adds, “I hope they gave him a handwriting scholarship.”

His poem read in Tucson

Speaking of the U.S. poet laureate, I just got an email from Copper Canyon Press, publisher of the current poet laureate, W.S. Merwin.

I was unaware that this week’s memorial service in Tucson concluded with his poem, “To the New Year.” The email read: “This message speaks to the inherent power of poetry, how we reach for necessary words at times when any words are difficult to find.”

To the New Year

With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible

Robert Pinsky, whose has a new collection of poems coming out soon, talked to the Voice of America about, among other things, his tenure as poet laureate between 1997 and 2000:

Pinsky (Photo: Juliet van Otteren)

He resists the idea that he was an ambassador for poetry as many characterize the Poet Laureate’s role. “I was not an ambassador for poetry,” as if he were a salesman for a brand of soap.

“I hope I wasn’t even an advocate for poetry,” he says. “I hope I was like that ape that has a good tasting piece of fruit in its hand and say to another ape, ‘Mmm. Tastes good.’” And a lot of the time I was not doing it at all, I was asking other people to do it and listening to what they had to say.”

Robert launched the ongoing Favorite Poem Project.  It invites everyday people to introduce a poem that is meaningful to them, and then recite it on video for others.

Handsome fella, too.

Castle: Love me tender

Speaking of The Chronicle of Higher Education … In the onslaught of the holiday season, we rather lost track of Terry Castle‘s honors.  Her The Professor and Other Writings was named one of the top ten books of the year by New York Magazine, which praised her “big human stew of tones: goofy, analytical, slangy, raw, confessional.” It was also among BookForum’s “favorite books of 2010” by which noted that Terry’s “radical candor makes it hard to enlist her under any ideological or political banner, and this recalcitrance alone gives her book an invaluable civic function.”  Amazon also named it #2 among its top ten books in gay and lesbian studies.

Looking back at the year in criticism between hard covers, one finds lines lingering in the mind, and not a few belong to Terry Castle. Her images of Susan Sontag as “sibylline and hokey and often a great bore,” a “bedazzling, now-dead, she-eminence.” Her self-portrait as a “japing, naysaying, emotionally stunted creature,” the “Spoiled Avocado Professor of English at Silicon Valley University.” …

Castle’s own self-grasped pathology (“Sontag was the Supremo and I the obsequious gofer”) makes the essay a masterpiece on the anxiety of influence in intellectual life. Yet deftly woven in, with all her other jewels of insight, is the superb, ruthless, spot-on assessment of Sontag as a “great comic character,” one with whom Dickens, Flaubert, or James “would have had a field day.” For Castle, “the carefully cultivated moral seriousness—strenuousness might be a better word—coexisted with a fantastical, Mrs. Jellyby absurdity. Sontag’s complicated and charismatic sexuality was part of this comic side of her life. The high-mindedness, the high-handedness, commingled with a love of gossip, drollery, and seductive acting out.”

Earlier today, a friend mentioned that Mark Twain once said something like, “The easiest way to be recognized as a leader is to find a parade and get in front of it.”  I can’t find the quote anywhere — but as Ken Kesey said, I’m sure it’s the truth, even if it didn’t happen.

And it’s especially fitting in a day the Book Haven achieved a brief flicker of fame via Mark Bauerlein in The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s “Brainstorm” blog here. He retraced our steps in the Huck Finn and the n-word kerfuffle — “as far as I know, the controversy began with a blog post by Cynthia Haven here” — and then follows the twists and turns through Sam Gwynn‘s concerns and Alan Gribben‘s explanations to conclude masterfully:

Haven’s selections are illuminating, for in Gribben’s and Gwynn’s explanations the whole problem crystallizes. When Gwynn puts the n-word in CAPS, he registers its force, which explains why he feels justified in deleting it.  This is, however, to give the term a moral meaning that it does not deserve. Yes, the n-word has moral meaning, but in the classroom it should be circumscribed by its historical existence. To grant it so much power today, at this moment, is to be captive to the power it possessed in 1884 and in 1950.

Likewise, when Gribben terms the n-word ”now-indefensible,” he assumes a moral stance toward it that is misdirected. No teacher should approach the language in a book written more than 100 years ago as in a condition of defensible or indefensible. Assigning a work is not the same thing as endorsing it. It is to hold the work up to analysis.  Furthermore, one of the lessons of the assignment should be to recognize that one can analyze something that one deplores. Simply deploring it is not enough, we should tell our students. The deletion of the n-word in the novel does the opposite, teaching students to consult their sensitivities more than their intellects.  Thanks, Cynthia, for bringing the action into the light.

And thank you, Mark, for framing the history so succinctly and the issues so thoughtfully.  We now return to our accustomed obscurity.