By: Kirsty,
on 9/12/2011
W. B. Yeats is usually seen as a great innovator who put his stamp so decisively on modern Irish literature that most of his successors worked in his shadow. R. F. Foster's new book, Words Alone: Yeats and his Inheritances, weaves together literature and history to present an alternative perspective.
By: Lauren,
on 10/25/2010
For most young people, the transition to adulthood is a gradual process. Many continue to receive financial and emotional support from their parents or other family members well past age 18. This is in stark contrast to the situation confronting youth who must navigate the transition to adulthood from the U.S. foster care system. Too old for the child welfare system but often not yet prepared to live as independent young adults, the approximately 29,000 foster youth who “age out” of foster care each year are expected to make it on their own long before the vast majority of their peers.
The federal government has long recognized the challenges facing foster youth, providing states with funds to help prepare them for independence since the late 1980s. Federal support for foster youth making the transition to adulthood was enhanced in 1999 with the creation of the John Chafee Foster Care Independence Program. This legislation doubled available funding to $140 million per year, expanded the age range deemed eligible for services, allowed states to use funds for a broader range of purposes (e.g., room and board), and granted states the option of extending Medicaid coverage for youth who age out of foster care until age 21. Vouchers for post-secondary education and training were also added to the range of federally-funded services and supports potentially available to current and former foster youth making the transition to adulthood. While the services provided through the Chafee Program were a step in the right direction, the fact remains that in all but a few states youth are still summarily discharged from foster care on or around their 18th birthday, rendering them “independent” of foster care, but seldom self sufficient.
That may finally be changing for the better. Recently, there was a fundamental shift toward greater federal responsibility for supporting foster youth during the transition to adulthood. The Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008 extended the age of eligibility for federal reimbursement of foster care from 18 to 21. Beginning this year, states will be able to claim federal reimbursement for the costs of providing foster care until foster youth are 21 years old. To qualify for reimbursement, foster youth age 18 and older must be either completing high school or an equivalent program; enrolled in postsecondary or vocational school; participating in a program or activity designed to promote or remove barriers to employment; employed for at least 80 hours per month; or incapable of doing any of these activities due to a medical condition. They can be living independently in a supervised setting as well as placed in a foster home or group care setting.
This change in federal policy was informed by findings from the Midwest Evaluation of the Adult Functioning of Former Foster Youth (“Midwest Study”), the largest longitudinal study of young people aging out of foster care in the U.S. The Midwest Study paints a sobering picture of the outcomes experienced by foster youth making the transition to adulthood; foster youth fare much worse than their peers
By: Ashley,
on 11/5/2008
By Ashley Bray, Intern Extraordinaire
Few people can get excited over thesauruses like writers can, and as a writer and student 
myself, I eagerly sat down to take a look at the new Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus. I was immediately drawn to the Word Notes, which are comments from contributing authors about word entries. I love these notes because they bring you inside the heads of authors to show you just what they are thinking about certain words— a privilege a budding writer almost never gets! I looked up a bunch of notes by David Foster Wallace in light of his recent death, and I wanted to share my favorites.
One of the more interesting notes I came across was for pulchritude, which is a synonym for beauty. Wallace points out that this word is anything but beautiful:
“A paradoxical noun because it means beauty but is itself one of the ugliest words in the language. Same goes for the adjectival form pulchritudinous. They’re part of a tiny elite cadre of words that possess the very opposite of the qualities they denote. Diminutive, big, foreign, fancy (adjective), colloquialism, and monosyllabic are some others; there are at least a dozen more. Inviting your school-age kids to list as many paradoxical words as they can is a neat way to deepen their relationship to English and help them see that words are both symbols for things and very real things themselves.”
Well, Wallace is right about the ugliness of pulchritude. Words like putrid and sepulcher come to mind before beauty ever does. Wallace also points out a very interesting activity that I think appeals to word-lovers just as much as “school-age kids.” I decided to take his suggestion in a different direction and started to make a list of words that do correlate with their meaning. Here’s what I came up with:
What words can you think of that are either paradoxical or parallel to their meanings?
Wallace also wrote an awesome entry for hairy. Here’s another word game for you— how many different ways can you think of to say the word hairy?
You’d be surprised at the answer. Wallace writes about 22 different ways (and two additional classifications) to say the word hairy. I won’t list them all here, but I’ll give you a taste of some of the most “hair-raising” (excuse the pun):
Come on fellow writers, any takers?
By: Kelly Fineman,
on 2/3/2008
When I was at ALA, I scored a paperback copy of How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines by Thomas C. Foster. I've only read a bit of the book thus far, but I can tell you that thus far, the subtitle is not a lie. The chapters are short. They are written conversationally. And they are full of pithy advice and sentences, some of which are oversimplifications, but most of which are useful in any case.
On poetry
Foster's fourth chapter is entitled "If It's Square, It's a Sonnet". He goes on to explain that he doesn't bother teaching much of anything but sonnets (fie on Mr. Foster, fie!), because unless you're a poet or really into poetry, it's kind of pointless. (A thousand times fie! Which would, I suppose, be fie thousand. But I digress.) He notes that a sonnet contains 14 lines, and is usually in iambic pentameter (10 syllables per line), which means that it's roughly as high as it is wide on the page. And then he says this:
I think people who read poems for enjoyment should always read the poem first, without a formal or stylistic care in the world. They should not begin by counting lines, or looking at line endings to find the rhyme scheme, if any, just as I think people should read novels without peeking at the ending: just enjoy the experience. After you've had your first pleasure, though, one of the additional pleasures is seeing how the poet worked that magic on you. There are many ways a poem can charm the reader: choice of images, music of the language, idea content, cleverness or wordplay. And at least some part of the answer, if that magic came in a sonnet, is form.
Huzzah! for Mr. Foster after all. And his further explication of what a sonnet is and what it can accomplish is equally good. He closes his chapter by noting that "Sonnets are . . . short poems that take far more time [to write], because everything has to be perfect, than long ones. We owe it to poets, I think, to notice that they've gone to this trouble, as well as to ourselves, to understand the nature of the thing we're reading. When you start to read a poem, then, look at the shape."
On writing compelling biography or nonfiction
I recently read a 2003 New York Times interview with Laura Hillenbrand, the author of the acclaimed bestseller, Seabiscuit. Here are some bits from the interview. The first bit is her explanation as to how she made the book feel alive and contemporary.
I think the secret to bringing immediacy to any nonfiction story is to ferret out every detail that is there to be found, so that the reader feels like an eyewitness. To do this, I consulted a very broad range of sources, from record books to living witnesses, and everything in between. I studied every film and photograph that I could find, and acquired complete newspapers and magazines from the period and read them cover to cover so I could put myself in the mindset of the men and women of the era. I researched what things cost, what books and movies were popular, what the weather was on a particular day, anything that might help me stand in the shoes of an average American of the Depression era. I was very fortunate in that Seabiscuit was covered very heavily in the press and followed by millions of people, so there was a lot to be found.
My goal as an historian is to make nonfiction read as smoothly as fiction while adhering very strictly to fact. I read a lot of nonfiction, and have certainly been influenced by such superb historians as Bruce Catton and David McCullough, but the writers who have had the greatest impact on me have been novelists. Michael Shaara's masterpiece "The Killer Angels," an historic novel about Gettysburg, has had a tremendous influence on my writing. Tolstoy has also been a wonderful teacher, namely "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina." Other writers I read over and over again, and try to emulate, include Austen, Wharton, Fitzgerald and Hemingway.
Don't forget that Masterpiece Theatre is airing Miss Austen Regrets at 9 p.m. on most PBS stations tonight. And try not to laugh (as I did) at the name of the lovely younger girl pictured here in the role of Fanny Austen Knight. (And no, Fanny isn't the name I found funny - it's her real name, Imogen Poots, that cracked me up. I am so very immature.)
By: Jessamyn West,
on 6/28/2007
Many people have worked hard on ALA’s I Love Libraries website. I know this because I was (in a small way) one of them.The site was advertised in the State of America’s Libraries published by ALA in April but didn’t go live until this week, just in time for Annual. In the intervening time we got what can only be described as a sub-par “coming soon” page which is really amazing to me considering that the URL had already been widely distributed.
I don’t see much need to pick apart the website page by page, but I do have some critiques that I hope will be illustrative or helpful.
1. Who didn’t learn anything about long URLs? ALA didn’t. There is no reason in 2007 to have that much extra junk in a URL.
2. In 2007, a “find your library” page should not go to a list of links of how you can find your library. It should go to a search box or a map.
3. Don’t hide your blog. Don’t bury new content at the bottom of your main page.
4. Things professional websites have that this one doesn’t: favicons, copyright statements in the footer or on the legal page not up top looking defensive, an overall design sensibility, content (not just links to content), an about us page with the names of real people on it, valid markup, alt text for images, accessible coding, valid security certificates, copyright statements that word wrap appropriately.
5. The rules for adding content to the Ilovelibraries.org Flickr group exclude humans and allow only institutions. Which 2.0 guideline does this violate? I asked to join. I never even heard back from the group moderator. Why is this restriction necessary?
In short, this is a 1.0 site that is pretending to be a 2.0 site and is a perfect example of how all the blogging tools in the world won’t make your organization responsive and interactive if your corporate culture is restrictive and controlling. Put another way, I’ve been clicking around this site for half an hour and I don’t even know what it’s trying to do. It’s all over the place. Is it to raise money for ALA and libraries in various ways? Is it a way to ask questions and get information about libraries? Is it a way to share content and/or my love of libraries with other people? Is it a way to push ALA content at more than the usual suspects? Is it a way to make ALA seem hipper and more “with it”? The about this site page is unrevealing: “Simply put, you love libraries, and we hope this Web site will keep it that way!” Huh.
I feel like if we could understand why ALA thinks ilovelibraries.org is a good, well-designed website for achieving their goals, we might understand more about why people have a hard time with technology and why there is such a digital divide in librarianship, much less among the public at large. For now it remains a bit of a mystery, at least to me.
accesibility, ala, ill, ilovelibraries, webdesign, website
montrocv
An interesting post.
Surely we are here wandering into the classic lexical dichotomy of autological vs hereological - words that refer to themselves (tiny, pentasyllabic, seventeen-lettered) vs words that don’t refer to themselves - monosyllabic, huge, abbreviated.
All of which could bring us very neatly to the mindblowing Grelling–Nelson paradox:
“All adjectives, it would seem, must be either autological or heterological, for each adjective either describes itself, or it doesn’t. The Grelling–Nelson paradox arises when we consider the adjective “heterological.
Is “heterological” a heterological word? If the answer is ‘yes’, “heterological” is autological (leading to a contradiction). If the answer is ‘no’, “heterological” is heterological (again leading to a contradiction).”(SourceWikipedia)