Poor Mojo's Newswire

The 200 or so draft pages of The Pale King were found two months after Wallace's death by his wife, Karen Green, when she was sorting out the garage where Wallace worked. The book is set in a tax office in the American midwest and features a cast of bored Internal Revenue Service agents who seek to transcend the tedium of their jobs.

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The work expands on the concept of the virtues of mindfulness and concentration that Wallace tackled at a 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, when he declared that true freedom "means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."

Serves readers, pays writers: so far, so good. But there’s another thing about Kindle 2 — its heavily marketed text-to-speech function. Kindle 2 can read books aloud. And Kindle 2 is not paying anyone for audio rights.

True, you can already get software that will read aloud whatever is on your computer. But Kindle 2 is being sold specifically as a new, improved, multimedia version of books — every title is an e-book and an audio book rolled into one. And whereas e-books have yet to win mainstream enthusiasm, audio books are a billion-dollar market, and growing. Audio rights are not generally packaged with e-book rights. They are more valuable than e-book rights. Income from audio books helps not inconsiderably to keep authors, and publishers, afloat.

"The full-pay kid this year is going to be at a premium," said Frank Vellaccio, senior vice president at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, which does not consider finances in admissions decisions. "Those students are going to have a lot more choices now and will get into schools that they might not have normally."

To widely varying degrees, colleges consider students' financial means when they assemble incoming classes. But the dismal economy and problems in the credit market have complicated these calculations and renewed questions about economic disparities on campuses.

The rule here, according to conventional wisdom, is that we use “I” as a subject and “me” as an object, whether the pronoun appears by itself or in a twosome. Thus every “I” in those quotes ought to be a “me.”

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For centuries, it was perfectly acceptable to use either “I” or “me” as the object of a verb or preposition, especially after “and.” Literature is full of examples. Here’s Shakespeare, in “The Merchant of Venice”: “All debts are cleared between you and I.” And here’s Lord Byron, complaining to his half-sister about the English town of Southwell, “which, between you and I, I wish was swallowed up by an earthquake, provided my eloquent mother was not in it.”

It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that language mavens began kvetching about “I” and “me.” The first kvetch cited in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage came from a commencement address in 1846. In 1869, Richard Meade Bache included it in his book “Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech.”