Another week, another roundup. Because I know my wife reads these, I have attached a few pictures of AI-generated dog art, done with my prompts via Stable Diffusion.
Forever Floppy
Eye on Design has a delightful interview out this week with Tom Persky, owner and proprietor of www.floppydisk.com since 1990 and the self-proclaimed “last man standing” in the floppy disk distribution business. Like I wrote about last week, floppy disk manufacturing died out about fifteen years ago, but a robust aftermarket still exists, especially in certain corners of medical technology, manufacturing, and aviation (!) where machines still operate according to programs stored on floppy disks. The whole interview is a weird, very in-depth look at a corner of information technology and data storage that is both very obscure and very important: today’s decaying floppy disks are tomorrow’s failing flash drives.
Recovering Milton’s Library…
…isn’t easy, according to Hannah Yip at the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts. Her recent blog post there summarizes the state of Milton’s surviving library following the earth-shattering discovery of his copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio in Philadelphia a few years ago. (Well, it was earth-shattering if you’re a nerd or a Philadelphian, and I am both). Yip sent out dozens of inquiries and handled dozens of likely candidates around England, but with no decisive results. Milton, by the sound of things, was a very precise annotator and bibliophile, which is how we’ve managed to identify the handful of books that we do have, but there probably won’t be any more big discoveries for the time being. Still, it’s a useful look at how bibliophilic fieldwork is done.
The National Book Awards 2022 Longlist Is Here
If you care about that kind of thing. I haven’t read any of these titles, nor have I heard much about most of them. It’s telling that all but two of the titles seem to be works of domestic realism about How We Live Now, which I guess if fine if you like that kind of thing and get most of your reading recommendations from NPR. The non-fiction list looks more promising, as well as the translated literature. (As for contemporary poetry and children’s lit, I don’t really read those.) I don’t want to make the mistake of confusing an awards list from a single entity with the State of Literature, no matter how prestigious the prize, but if you only had NBA lists to go by, it sure looks like a booming time for creative, ambitious non-fiction, while American literary fiction has changed its content drastically in the last decade, but not so much its forms. That doesn’t mean there isn’t vitality in American fiction! I just don’t think our institutions at book world are doing a great job of encouraging innovation, weirdness, and ambition.
Talk to Books
Move over, literary critics. This week I learned that Google is experimenting with a new app that lets you question an archive of over 100,000 books. Using a language-model AI, the program searches its texts for any writing that seems to answer the question. I can easily imagine a scaled-up version of this program, trained on more academic literature, being essential for research and scholarship by the end of the decade. I played around with it for a few minutes, and some of the suggestions were pretty good!
The Death of Cursive?
Professor Drew Gilpin Faust wrote this week at The Atlantic about how his undergraduate history students are struggling to read primary sources in American history because they never learned to read or write in cursive. As most of them were born after 2000, they came of age under Common Core, which de-emphasized handwriting education. Most of Faust’s students now freely admit that they don’t understand it:
Had I heard him correctly? Who else can’t read cursive? I asked the class. The answer: about two-thirds. And who can’t write it? Even more. What did they do about signatures? They had invented them by combining vestiges of whatever cursive instruction they may have had with creative squiggles and flourishes
Faust is pessimistic about the future of cursive, and so am I. A few of my students, the ones I suspect were early readers and writers encouraged at home, have decent cursive, but the vast majority of my seniors write in various flavors of chicken-scratch. I agree with Faust that within a few decades, graduate students will take courses on cursive comprehension, just as they do now for various medieval and early modern types and scripts. I have pretty decent cursive—maybe teaching it to history students can be a late-career pivot for me around 2050? I’ll start brushing up on my penmanship, just in case.
That’s it for the week. Happy reading!