In it what is in it

The iPad as a new way for children to learn?

First, I want you to see a YouTube video about a 2.5 year old's first encounter with an iPad. Is there any doubt that this device is meant for the newest generation?

A colleague introduced me to Dr. Seuss's ABC on an iPad. Remarkable simplicity: a friendly interactive interface that would draw a child in -- and help her or him to learn to read. The app first came out for the iPhone, and here is the video. But the video really does not do justice to the iPad experience, with the larger screen and a more 'natural' feel than the iPhone for books. At $3.99 it is worth it. Other Seuss favorites are also out, and for Earth Day there is The Lorax that teaches kids about the environment. For older kids, there is Alice (of Wonderland fame) as shown in this somewhat frenetic YouTube video for Alice. 

Tony Hoagland -- a poet for the times

few days ago at the library I picked up the unusually named, "Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty". A great discovery! Turned out to be Tony Hoagland's fourth full-length poetry collection and a stunner. Clear, witty, insightful poems perfectly tuned to today's America -- and I had never even heard of the guy! My fault, since Tony Hoagland's work has appeared in the full range of magazines where clever poetry first appears: American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, Agni, Ploughshares and the like. The fellow is even the recipient of two fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim and the National Endowment for the Arts. His last collection, "What Narcissism Means To Me: Poems", was the finalist for the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award. I hope "Honda" wins it for him this time.

Action Philosophers!

If you like your philosophers in small wacky chunks look no further than Action Philosophers! This is the newly published compilation of the award winning comic book series by the same name. Fred Van Lente is the artist and Ryan Dunlavey is the writer -- and they are having fun. From the pre-Socratics and Lao Tzu through Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida you get a chronological look at the lives and thoughts of all the Great Ones. I was surprised to find Rumi, Freud and Thomas Jefferson included -- but no complaints. The tales are told with humor, rendering the esoteric harmless and accessible to mere mortals. For the few whose works I knew, I was surprised as to how clear and 'faithful' the comic stories were, though brief and told in a slightly mad way.  It has now been a few weeks that Action Philosophers! has been my last-read at bed time.  I sleep smiling and feeling smarter.

Digg

Piet Hein's Grooks

ARS BREVIS: There is/one art,/no more,/no less:/to do/all things/with art-/lessness

Piet Hein died in 1996 at the ripe age of 91. A Danish scientist and mathematician who "played mental ping-pong with Neils Bohr" (!) he is better known as the brilliant inventor of "grooks". These are pithy, insightful and brief poems that Piet invented to get around the censors in World War II. They went on to become Denmark's much-beloved contribution to the world of letters. Twenty volumes of grooks were published, but were out of print until a 2-volume 'collected works' was published in Denmark in 2002. I paid $1.50 for the copy I show on the left. (Yes, it was a long time ago :)). It is listed at $93.43 'new' on Amazon, showing that Piet Hein has aged well.

Visit Terry Stewart's website page Grooks by Piet Hein to get a great sampling of his work. Here are a few that I like:

Cool drop caps

ool drop caps, like the "C" that leads this paragraph, are available from Daily Drop Cap. This is a project by typographer Jessica Hische where she creates a hand-crafted initial letter each day. It's free to use (she supplies the HTML) as long as you don't modify it, use it commercially, and attribute the work to her.

If you are fascinated by fonts and typography as I am, I have two recommendations. See the documentary Helvetica about the revolutionary typeface that turned 50 in 2007. (In our word processors we have known it as Arial). It is a fascinating story about how the font 'created' modernity and pretty much took over the world of signage (and has yet to let go). The film is available on Netflix.  My other recommendation is Robin William's book, "The Non-Designer's Design and Type Books". This is actually a compilation of her two books, one on Design, which talks of page layout and the other on Type, which deals with fonts and typefaces and how and where to use them. There are fascinating lessons from Robin. Interestingly enough, she hates Helvetica!

The Photographer

Afghanistan is the wound that never heals. A reminder of the past comes in the form of a riveting book, “The Photographer: Into War-torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders”. This is the story of young Didier Lefevre, a photographer, hired by Médecins sans Frontières (MSF; Doctors Without Borders) to document their journey to northern Afghanistan in 1986 to set up medical services. This is when the Russian invasion was in full swing with the MSF mission illegal and dangerous. (Matters became worse: in August 2004 MSF left Afghanistan, closing down all operations, after 5 MSF staff members were shot and killed.  After an absence of 5 years, in 2009 MSF started to engage again in Afghanistan because of the desperation there).

The book is unique. One always wonders upon seeing evocative photographs what happened before and after.  Here, Lefevre’s black and white photographs are interspersed between graphics panels in a seamless and compelling first-person narrative. This is a perfect blending of a graphical novel format with photo-journalism.  The art, in color, is by Emmanuel Guibert and is in complete balance with the story line.  But the storyline is not war, which is always distant if ever-present.  This is about the arduous travel, the work of healing, the impact of war and above all the Afghan temperament.

Poetry: Catching Life by the Throat

I remember reading Rumi and thinking how very much akin it was to white water rafting.  Great poetry is like that, leaving you breathless.  There are astonishments, surprises that transform to deeply felt truths, playfulness that you surrender to, insights that the mind revels in, and repeats to itself for pleasure.  But while I have read poetry that made me want to instantly relay it to everyone I knew, there have been few books about poetry and poets, except for some haiku ones, which have had the same impact.  Enter Josephine Hart’s, “Catching Life by the Throat”.  You may know Josephine Hart as the author of “Damage”, that slight, taut, dark, twisted and brilliant tale of want and betrayal.  That’s how I knew her.  But this book, with the byline, “How to read a poem and why”, is something else.  Eight poets are selected, W.H. Auden, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, Philip Larkin, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath and William Butler Yeats.  For each, there is an introductory essay of a couple of pages or so, and then a couple more introducing the poems selected.  But you are in the hands of a master.  This is cogent prose at its best; you are spellbound.  Josephine Hart knows her subject, and has just the telling anecdote or quote placed so as to be both insightful and delectable.  Take, for example, her opening lines to her essay on T.S. Eliot:

Virginia Woolf to T.S. Eliot: ‘We are not as good as Keats”.  T.S. Eliot to Virginia Woolf: ‘Oh yes, we are.  We are trying something harder.’  Checkmate!

Hooked?  I was.  And then on to being treated to how The Wasteland came to be:

It was to have as editor one of the great literary midwives in the history of poetry – the amazing Ezra Pound.  When he read it for the first time he wrote to Eliot, ‘Complimenti, you bitch.  I am wracked by the seven jealousies.’  What poet wouldn’t be?

Such gems abound.  For Sylvia Plath, a man saying, after a reading, “This is the first time I’ve ever been frightened by poetry.”  But let me stop. The point is made.  Read the book.

Logicomix -- An Epic Search For Truth

I have been reading Logicomix for a few nights now.  It is an ambitious undertaking: a graphic-factual exploration of Bertrand Russel's quest for a logical foundation for mathematics. Whitehead, Frege, Cantor, Wittgenstein all make their appearances -- and last night Kurt Godel showed up, innocently enough. But we can hear the pillars creaking...

The graphics by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna are stunning.  The story, by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimirtiou, is less stellar.  Doxiadis is the author of the rightly popular, "Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture".  Papadimitrou is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of, "Turing".  These are excellent credentials for the task at hand.  But the introspective forays, where the team occasionally shows up in the story, while clever at the start, seems to change from a bridge to a crutch in connecting different parts of the story.  There seems to be a desire to dramatize beyond what is needed.  The madness-logic theme is stressed till it becomes overdone.  But the story, told as a lecture by Bertrand Russel, remains true and leaves one empathetic to the concerns of driven minds seeking the truth.

Oh well; there is more to come and I may yet become enamored of the book.  But even without that glow, I am quite ready to recommend it.  The book has its own web site where you will find more.