I've invited Dan Kirklin, who comments frequently on Brainstorm, to write a guest blog:

Except as a visitor, I haven't been in a classroom in twenty-two years. So I wonder if I belong here, or if I have any real business commenting on Brainstorm.

I'm in the book business, in production. I usually first get involved in a book when it's "final" manuscript--when it's all complete, in the judgment of the author and the developmental editor. I'm done with it not long after it arrives, printed and bound, at the warehouse. I have a job that the entire known world, aside from my colleagues, thinks is too tedious for words.

I have always found words and type spellbinding. In my work, we also deal with numbers and pictures. Producing a book involves everything from copyediting to design, typesetting, proofreading, and checking corrections, until, as far as we can tell, the thing is perfect. It...

In my previous post, I wrote about how “advanced” vocabulary words that can be perfect when used in writing are often awkward or pretentious if used in speech. "Advanced” vocabulary words always take up residence in educated minds. They're wonderful, since they bring liveliness to writing by breaking up sentences that otherwise contain mostly ordinary words, and, if used right, they add subtlety and richness to ideas. There’s an arsenal of words that belong in this category -- words educated people know but keep stored in the closet of their vocabulary, only taking them out for reading and writing, and hardly ever using them in speech.

Another part of our vocabulary that's fascinating to ponder consists of those words we use regularly, and with full confidence, only to discover, well into adulthood, that we’ve always had their meaning wrong. One hopes there aren’t too many words on...

Any English speaker who reads a lot ends up with a fairly large, usable vocabulary. By “usable,” I mean words that can be read and understood even if they don’t readily come to mind in speech. I’ve read that English may just possibly have the largest vocabulary of any language ever (although figuring this out with any certainty would be a Herculean task). It certainly has more words than anyone can master, or would even care to master. Starting life off as a Germanic language, English moved on to absorb French and Latin. Now that it’s the most important international language in the world, it’s a veritable linguistic sponge, busily soaking up words from other languages as if they’re made of water.

But I digress. Here, I’m interested in the idea of “usable” vocabulary -- the kind that consists of knowing a substantial number of words merely as a result of reading. “Usable” is odd, though...

I deeply admire the Second Amendment guys in Arizona. Were it not for their love for, and knowledge of, our founding fathers (especially Thomas Jefferson, who had such a way with words), there wouldn’t be the safe open-carry law in Arizona. Why, that darn liberty tree Tom talked about would dry up and keel right over.

I don’t know about you, but I, for one, feel a hell of a lot freer to express my opinions whenever I stand next to a “gentleman” (the word CNN used to describe a man carrying a semi-automatic weapon across his shoulders at today’s health care rally near where Obama was speaking in Arizona) who’s openly packing. Just gives me that warm and cozy protected feel all over—so cozy a feeling, in fact, that I can barely stop myself from speaking up and saying exactly what I think about health-care reform.

What if something goes wrong, you say, and one of the gun-toting guys pumps ...

I’m not one to dwell on the idea that civilization is in decline. It probably is, but I try my best to follow Schiller’s advice that you must embrace your own times, yet not let them consume you. Reading the ideas of previous eras is important for thinking men and women; wallowing in nostalgia for the past is destructive to life lived now.

Sometimes, however, you stumble across something that makes you realize, with a jolt, just how far we’ve fallen from what things were like fifty years ago. Recently, my friend and painting colleague Doug Hilson, who loves to paw through second-hand stores that sell old books and magazines, showed me his most recent find. He’d discovered three copies of ARTnews magazine from 1957. He pointed to the table of contents in one issue. I looked and said, simply, “Wow.”

Here, verbatim, is the list of the articles and authors in that summer 1957 issue:

The...

Harvard has licensed its name to a clothing company to produce a line of “preppy” men’s clothing called “Harvard Yard.” Wearwolf Clothing will offer trousers starting at $195, shirts at $160 and up, and sport coats costing $495. According to Jeffrey Wolf, head of the company, the clothes have been designed to reflect Harvard’s “quality, heritage and excellence.” He added, “Harvard is the ideal—the pinnacle. When you think of modern prep, you think of New England and the Northeast. You think campus, quads, and you think Harvard.” I do? Actually, I don’t. I actually think places such as Andover and other preparatory schools from which the term “preppy” derives.

But that’s just a cavil. What about the clothes? These new Harvard duds are tres chers. My husband—who buys most of his sport jackets at thrift stores and has to be dragged by his heels to check out new clothes, even at a discount...

The word “amateur” (which etymologically speaking means “lover of”) cuts a wide swath, from the pejorative (“she’s an amateur physician”), to the praiseworthy (“she’s an amateur ornithologist”). Nowadays, we’re so cowed by professionals that it’s easy to ignore or dismiss even serious, excellent amateurs. Serious amateurs are marked by simple passion and sincere humility, often spending whole lives quietly pursuing their subject. And few, if any, expect or even desire external rewards like money or prestige.

When I say “amateur,” I’m not talking about amateurs in sports, where they’re as often as not actually professionals. Nor am I talking about scholars or thinkers who are professionals, but happen to do their work outside academe—such as Edith Hamilton or Jane Jacobs. Despite never earning doctorates, and not being members of university faculties, these two were renowned independent...

Americans have become very fat. According to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), two-thirds of Americans are overweight and a third of Americans are obese. A third of our kids are overweight and five percent of our kids are obese. Adults are fifteen to twenty pounds heavier than they were in the seventies. The good news is that the rate of increase in weight may finally be leveling off.  We are no longer the fattest nation--Germans and Finns, for example, now outweigh us.

To a lot of Americans, weight is strictly a private matter of individual rights. We have the right to choose what and how much we eat, and it’s no one’s business but our own how much we weigh. On this account, even broaching the topic of weight is unacceptable. There’s even a “fat rights” movement claiming that being fat or not is simply the way you are, of the same order as being black or white, or...

True, I’ve been crazy to stick with AOL for my personal email address, and not switch to my gmail account—in more ways than one, it now turns out. Today I truly see the error of my ways. Why? Because 58 percent of AOL respondents--58 percent!--checked the box that said they were doubtful President Obama was born in Hawaii. I share an email address with the same ending as these people?

I will not stoop to the absurd indignity of going over, yet again, the reasons (i.e., proof) for why the “Birther Movement” is wrong--on each and every count. If you're reading this, and you think I indeed ought to do this, I simply urge you to seek professional help in order to learn how human reason works. Nor will I stoop to name calling in talking about people who question President Obama's place of birth, although it’s tempting to bring up the words “stupid” or--uglier--“racist."

Instead, I'd like to as...

"You do what?" I asked, knowing full well what I'd just been told to do. My friend Lisa Rosen, who's an art conservator by profession, had just finished explaining to me, in some detail, that to clean the soot and grime off my old, damaged paintings, the best solvent was my own saliva. She had generously spent over an hour with me, painstakingly demonstrating how I was to do this, which explains why I'm spending a good part of this summer spitting on my own work.

I'm busily restoring the oldest paintings that will be included in my retrospective, in 2010, at the Williamson Art Gallery at Scripps College, in Claremont, Calif. The show opens a little more than a year from now, but Mary MacNaughton (the director of the museum and curator of my exhibition) and I have already been working on it. Now is the time for me to be putting in lots of hours spitting out saliva onto cotton swabs, and ...