This spring, it will be 10 years since I graduated from grad school.

With all of the hoopla around the iPad, iPhone apps, Google Books and ubiquitous instantaneous information access in general, I keep imagining what it would be like to be  a grad student in English now.

Back in 2000, I was thrilled to be able to access OASIS, our university’s online “card catalog”, via dial-up at my apartment so that I could put in an interlibrary loan order for a rare academic book housed at the University of Michigan library, delivery of which would take 5 days at least. How quaint.

All of my massive reference books that I’ve been hauling around for a decade are now iPhone apps — like The American Heritage Dictionary 4th edition (with 60,ooo pronunciation sound files!), which I bought last week.

The fact that I’m happy to pay $29.99 for a dictionary app makes me a dinosaur, because it doesn’t seem like most under-20s particularly care about exact meaning or etymology or spelling. Words to them are more pliable and meaning is conveyed through spoken inflection and typography rather than through a varied vocabulary.

I would have loved having the American Heritage app back in 2000, when I was so worried about mispronouncing, misspelling, and misusing words. I would have come off as way more erudite than I actually was.

“I don’t know how long this feeling is going to last, but the best thing the book did was to push me to really consciously treasure feeling fine. It’s very difficult to feel grateful for the absence of something, but feeling well is really the precondition for every pleasure.” – Lionel Shriver, talking about her new novel So Much for That in the Washington Post

This has been around a while I’m told, but it’s still funny. A good reminder that books were once, at one point, new technology (via DRS).

• Serious Eats pulled a recipe for Candied Pecans (SCD legal!) from Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home and I’m baking them up now. It’s a snowy, cold night and the house smells like candy shoppe.
• Jeffery Eugenides’ love-story anthology, My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead — one of the best short story collections I’ve ever read — has so far introduced me to two remarkable authors I’ve never heard of before: David Bezmozgis (ordered Natasha) and Deborah Eisenberg (The Collected Stories comes out at the end of March).