The New Yorker is my favourite. At its best, the writing in it is dizzyingly good. It's best feature are the clippings (which I learned are called newsbreaks, courtesy of this site).

They have been appearing in the New Yorker since its inception. They are submitted by readers and also fastidiously gathered by members of staff.

They were originally used when there were column inches remaining at the end of feature articles, but soon became a favourite feature in their own right. According to 'Ask the Librariians': "By the 1930s, readers were sending in as many as a thousand 'newsbreaks' a week; at that time, the magazine also employed staff members whose duties included scanning the daily newspapers for potential breaks."

Nowadays, the New Yorker receives far fewer clippings than itused to, and no one on staff is now employed to scan papers and other journals for potential scre ups. In spite of this, most of the clippings printed in The New Yorker still come from readers.

Very popular in these Newsbreaks were 'etaoin shrdlu'-sequences of letters that occur on a linotype machine. Often they came out such as: "Her name was given to the police as mari etoin".

See, the letters on Linotype keyboards were arrayed by letter frequency,

'Etaoin shrdlu' were the first two vertical columns on the left side of the keyboard. Linotype operators who had made a typing error could not easily go back to delete it, and had to finish the line before they could eject the slug and re-key a new one. Since the line with the error would be discarded and hence its contents didn't matter (and since the line needed to be filled to successfully pass through the casting unit), the quickest way to enter enough letters to finish it was to run a finger down the keys, creating this nonsense phrase.

After casting the final line of the story an operator placed the rejects in the empty assembler, filled the line by running a finger down the keys (with a spaceband between each line), added a few em spaces, and sent the line of mats through. Such lines would normally have been caught by the proofreaders or compositor.

Late last week the Association of American University Presses held its annual meeting in New Orleans, or in what was left of it. Attendance is usually around 700 when the conference is held in an East Coast city. This time, just over 500 people attended, representing more than 80 presses — a normal turnout, in other words, justifying the organizers’ difficult decision last fall not to change the location. Inside the Sheraton Hotel itself, each day was a normal visit to Conference Land — that well-appointed and smoothly functioning world where academic or business people (or both, in this case) can focus on the issues that bring them together. Stepping just outside, you were in the French Quarter. It wasn’t hit especially hard by last year’s catastrophic weather event. But there were empty buildings and boarded-up windows; the tourist-trap souvenir outlets offered a range of Katrina- and FEMA-themed apparel, with “Fixed Everything My Ass” being perhaps the most genteel message on sale. The streets were not empty, but the place felt devitalized, even so. Only when you went outside the Quarter did the full extent of the remaining damage to the city really begin to sink in. On Thursday morning — as the first wave of conference goers began to register — a bus chartered by the association took a couple dozen of us around for a tour led by Michael Mitzell-Nelson and Greta Gladney (a professor and a graduate student, respectively, at the University of New Orleans). If the Quarter was bruised, the Ninth Ward was mangled. It was overwhelming -– too much to take in. More imagery and testimony is available from the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, a project sponsored by the University of New Orleans and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. So you came back a little unsettled at the prospect of discussing business as usual. Then again, the prevailing idea at this year’s AAUP was that business has changed, and that university presses are rushing to catch up. The announced theme of the year’s program was “Transformational Publishing” — with that titular buzzword covering the myriad ways that digital technologies affect the way we read now. It was a far cry from the dismal slogan making the rounds at the AAUP meeting three years ago: “Flat is the new ‘up.’ ” In other words: If sales haven’t actually gone down, you are doing as well as can be expected. The cumulative effect of increasing production costs, budget cuts, and reduced library sales was a crisis in scholarly publishing. The lists of new titles got shorter, and staffs grew leaner; in a few cases, presses closed up shop. I asked Peter Givler, the association’s executive director, if anyone was still using the old catch phrase. “Right now it looks like up is the new up,” he said. “It’s been a modest improvement, and we’re hearing from our members that there’s been a large return of books this spring. But it’s not like the slump that started in 2001.” Cautious optimism, then, not irrational exuberance. While the word “digital” and its variants appeared in the title of many a session, it is clear that new media can be both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, the association has been able to increase the visibility of its members’ output through the Books for Understanding Web site, which offers a convenient and reliable guide to academic titles on topics of public interest. (See, for example, this page on New Orleans.) At the same time, the market for university-press titles used in courses has been undercut by the ready availability of secondhand books online. And then there’s Google Book Search. The AAUP has not joined the Authors Guild’s class action suit against Google for digitizing copyrighted materials. But university presses belong to the class of those with an interest in the case — so the organization has incurred legal expenses while monitoring developments on behalf of its members. One got the definite impression that the other shoe may yet drop in this matter. During the business meeting, Givler indicated that the association would be undertaking a major action soon that would place additional demands on the organization’s resources. I tried to find out more, but evidently its Board of Directors is playing its cards close to the vest for now. With new obligations to meet, the board requested a 4 percent increase in membership dues. This was approved during the business meeting on Thursday. (Three members voting by proxy were opposed to it, but no criticism was expressed from the floor during the meeting itself.) Proposals for longer-term changes in the organization’s structure and mission were codified in its new Strategic Plan (the first updating of the document since 1999). A working draft was distributed for discussion at the conference; the final version will be approved by the board in October. This document — not now available online — conveys a very clear sense of the opportunities now open before university presses. (For “opportunities,” read also “stresses and strains.”) Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/06/21/mclemee

This cracked me up. Learn how America handles its relations with the rest of the world in this global civics lesson provided by the kind folks at WONDER SHOWZEN.

 

Check it out!

If you haven't had a chance to catch an episode of 'Wonder Showzen,' you're missing out on what can only be described as Sesame Street Psychedelica. It's primarily a puppet-animated show, peppered with hysterical Flash-animated segments by Augenblick Studios, which together look like a kids show. But as the Washington Post recently pointed out, "This Show's Not for Children." Vomit, racism, blood, dismemberment and spot-on send-ups of classic animation will forever cast this show into Cult Fandom, but if that's your bag, order the season 1 DVD, and clear tonight's schedule.

And no, we don't get it over here in Korea -- but you can grab it off all the P2P networks or Bittorrent, etc.

I always felt that Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" was an anti-war poem.

A friend argues the opposite, stating that the poem reflected the jingoistic nature and sentimentality of Victorian England.

What do you think?

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!
"Charge for the guns!" he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

"Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Someone had blunder'd:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air,
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel'd from the sabre stroke
Shatter'd and sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honor the charge they made,
Honor the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred.

Part of a BBC Online article that Mary Ann from poets.org found says:

Thanks in no small part to the lines of Tennyson's poem - "Into the Valley of Death/Rode the six hundred... Cannon to the right of them/ Cannon to the left of them" - the Charge of the Light Brigade has long held its place in the public imagination. It is a symbol of heroic failure, a high-Victorian icon of self-sacrifice and devotion to duty. This week [October, 2004] the National Army Museum is commemorating the 150th anniversary of the charge, as part of a wider exhibition about the Crimean War.

"The British have always loved their defeats as much as their victories," says the exhibition's curator Alastair Massie. And the ill-fated cavalry charge appeals to our appetite for "glorious failure". 

It was also an event that caught a world about to change - showing that chivalric cavalry charge and officers in full-dress uniforms were no match for modern fire-power.

"It was the most lethal costume party in history," he says.

G. Wilken's maintains that  "They did not have the concept of anti-war back then. That this is jingoistic seems obvious." and asks "What do you think is anti-war about it?"
 
I know it's weird, but given the social climate of Victorian Britain, the criticism of the generals in the second verse ("Not tho' the soldier knew, Someone had blunder'd") was a pretty acerbic indictment for a poet laureate (he was laureate at the time wasn't he?). Anyway I felt the poem made a distinction between the stupidity of the commanders and the bravery of the cavalry riding into certain death (a theme often alluded to in anti-war literature, movies -- think "Full metal jacket" and the notion of Viet Nam's "Hamburger Hill".)

Maybe I'm projecting a more modern sentiment on a victorian poem?
 
However, a little more research showed that anti-war literature and peace movements existed among the Romantics, et al. According to Wikipedia, Amelia Opie, a romantic, was publishing poetry in the early 19th century and was an active anti-war campaigner. She wrote poetry with some pretty hardcore antiwar rhetoric: 

Ah then in her danger, her pale look of death,
He forgot all the laurels he'd won.
O father accurst!" she exclaimed, "in that youth
You slaughtered your Alfred....your son!"

Some things that lead me to believe that Tennusyon's poem has at its heart anti-war sentiments are for example, the way in the poem the enlisted men of the light brigade were told to march into certain death, and they did.

Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs but to do and die, 

The lines above are often misquoted and glorified “Ours but to do or die.” Ask someone to try and recite it to you. Bet they mess it up. In fact this poems has made phrases like "to do or die" commonplace in the English speaking world. There's no glory and patriotism in the lines "Theirs but to do and die", however. Just senselessness. In part I feel that this begins to reveala a subtle encoding by the poet of a multi-level criticism of war. As said earlier, given the social climate of Victorian Britain, the criticism of the generals in the second verse ("Not tho' the soldier knew, Someone had blunder'd") was a pretty acerbic indictment for a poet laureate (he was at the time, I checked).

This poems popularity at the time does not necessarily imply that it was jingoistic. Why do we look at pictures from war journalists of the suffering or dying? It allows us to participate in a moment that is common to all of us, but is as yet denied us. The horror of the poem increased its popularity, rather than mitigated it.

Despite those who feel that this poem is ennobling of the men who died during this charge, I still feel there may be a little subversion rolling around underneath it all.

What do you think? I've got threads on this all over the place: at the foetry message board, the academy of american poets, and on my own blogger blog.

Now that I have internet access set up at my apartment in Seoul -- all these place will be hearing lots from me.