Novelist and radio-show host Garrison Keillor had a writer’s studio built in River Falls, Wis. as part of an 11.5-acre retreat he created on the St. Croix River. The property includes a guesthouse, saunas, and a clay tennis court. The main residence features log-cabin style interior walls, soaring ceilings, reclaimed-wood floors, and a wood-burning stove. Photos: Inside authors’ homes
The Exclamation Comma. “Just because you’re excited about something doesn’t mean you have to end the sentence.”
That’s true.
Beginning Of The End Of An Era of the Day: Indiana’s public school will no longer teach students the art the “fair hand,” permanently replacing cursive writing with keyboard proficiency.
“The Common Core State Standards do not include cursive writing at all,” says the Department of Education in a memo to state Superintendents. “Instead, students are expected to become proficient with keyboarding skills.”
41 states have adopted the new common core standards for English which does not require schools to teach cursive writing, but have yet to ditch the time-honored tradition.
I’m from Indiana, and despite how much time I spend at a computer, I still write in cursive on a pretty regular basis. Sigh. Oh well.
Friday book recommendations!
Looking for something to read? Reuters.com editor James Ledbetter, author of a new history of Dwight Eisenhower and the military-industrial complex, recommends works that cover famous addresses from Lincoln, Washington, Kennedy and others that changed U.S. politics. Here, a sampling from his recommended reading list:
Tear Down This Wall by Romesh Ratnesar (Simon & Schuster, $27). We think of Ronald Reagan’s 1987 Brandenburg Gate address as a quintessentially Reaganesque speech, but one of the surprises in Ratnesar’s book is that many in the administration did not want the president to demand that the Berlin Wall come down. Had their cautions been heeded, it seems unlikely the speech would be remembered at all.
What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President? by Kevin Mattson (Bloomsbury, $16). Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “malaise” speech is one of the strangest presidential addresses of all time, an attempt to heal America’s “crisis of confidence.” But Mattson’s survey of the troubled late-’70s American landscape creates in the reader a genuine respect for Carter’s courage in trying to break the mold of typical politics.
King’s Dream by Eric J. Sundquist (Yale, $14). Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is probably the most celebrated American speech not given by an elected official. Sundquist’s masterful research ties King’s 1963 address to Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Frederick Douglass, and teases out the extensive connections between King’s ideas and the culture and politics of his time.
You can see the full list here. Happy reading!
Anne Trubek, author of “A Skeptic’s Guide to Writer’s Houses,” has highlighted books that draw visitors to their authors’ home towns. Here’s a sampling of the reads she recommends:
The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain (Signet, $8). Twain’s novel about Americans traveling through Europe and the Holy Land mocks Americans’ penchant for tacky tourism: “We find a piece of the true cross in every old church we go into… And as for the bones of St. Denis, I feel certain we have seen enough of them to duplicate him if necessary.” What would he make of the Twain-land erected in his hometown of Hannibal, Mo.?
Martin Eden by Jack London (Penguin, $16). At the end of his life, London, a best-selling author, was sick of writing, but he kept at it to pay bills. In Sonoma County, Calif., he bought a ranch and built a glorious house that burned to the ground the day he was to move in. Martin Eden is about a young writer who becomes disillusioned once famous. Both the novel and the burned remains of London’s house display the folly of foresight.
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (Bantam, $6). “If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles,” Whitman writes. At his house museum in Camden, N.J., visitors go to see Whitman’s boot soles, to see his stuff. Whitman’s poetry tries to bridge the divide between the material and spiritual worlds. Writers’ houses, monuments to the imagination, do the same.
Read the full list here. And happy Friday!
An interviewer asks novelist Robert Stone if he mostly types his manuscripts. His reply:
“Yes, until something becomes elusive. Then I write in longhand in order to be precise. On a typewriter or word processor you can rush something that shouldn’t be rushed — you can lose nuance, richness, lucidity. The pen compels lucidity.”
With the ubiquity of keyboards large and small, neither children and adults need to write much of anything by hand. That’s a big problem, says Gwendolyn Bounds in The Wall Street Journal. Study after study suggests that handwriting is important for brain development and cognition — helping kids hone fine motor skills and learn to express and generate ideas. Yet the time devoted to teaching penmanship in most grade schools has shrunk to just one hour a week.
