Required Reading For Pedantic Sticklers

You must, must, must immediately check out this scorching bit of grammatical derring do by humorist Eric D. Snider.  Not only that, but you must then read all of the comments under it.  Next year, this will be required reading in all of my classes.  All good education more or less happens this way.

American Lit Review

A group of students working on a review assignment for my American Literature class this week got creative and decided to write a mash-up of all our major novels from throughout the year.  I think I’ll end up reading a silly story about Atticus Finch defending Hester Prynne on charges of witchcraft (said case to be financed by Jay Gatsby), all to be done as they float down the Mississippi River on a raft as they all look for work as farm hands in California.  That is, of course, if they can kill the white whale first.

Pun Good Turn…

Thanks again to the good folks over at Arts & Letters Daily for linking to this delightful piece where an African immigrant opines on the surprising animosity America has towards puns.  The essay is not only a worthy appreciation of punning, but a lucid work of style in its own right.  (Local note: author Teju Cole makes heavy use of Nigerian poet and playwright Wole Soyinak, a Nobel laureate and apparently an inveterate punster.  Soyinka has been associated with UNLV for several years.  Strangely, though, there’s not a single reference to James Joyce.) 

I don’t know that Americans hate puns, though.  Drive through your town and look at the independent store names.  For some reason, especially the beauty salons.  In Las Vegas alone, some popular spots that pop into mind are: Curl Up and Dye, Clip Joint, and Scissor’s Palace.  All locally appropriate, those.  There’s also an “exotic” barber shop called…wait for it…A Little Off the Top. 

And while we’re on the subject, let’s bring on a few more groans with my personal list of terrible puns:

1. Mildly humorous country in Eastern Europe: Chuckleslovakia
2. Inspires people to appreciate motor vehicles: automotivational
3. Sensibly applied care for the spine: chiropractical
4. Very impressive technical innovation: scienterrific
5. If U2 and Shakespeare collaborated: “Now is the winter of our discotheque.”
6. Nepalese monster with strong stomach muscles: Abdominal Snowman
7. Excellent Spanish speaking man: Juanderful
8. Excellent Spanish desert: flantastic
9. Bones of professional academics: scholartons
10. A leisurely-perambulating homeless artist from a swanky part of New York: A slo-mo boho hobo from Soho
11. A Celtic person lamenting a dearth of fortunate females: “Alas!  A lack o’ lucky lasses!”
12. When I say something pretentious or tacky: Hustontatious

Alternative Acronyms

Family friendly web sites like this one have long labored under the baneful curse of catchy Internet acronyms, those cheesy shorthand abbreviations that allow us to communicate shallow, generic, vague profanities in a convenient manner.  What are we to do, to avoid picturing unsavory phrases in our mind’s eye when these ubiquitous initials (dis)grace our screens?

Here are some helpful things to keep in mind when you no doubt come across these uncomfortable cringe-inducers:

“WTF?” could also mean:

• Where’s the fridge?
• Who toasted flapjacks?
• Wonderful turtles, Freddy?
• Wolverines tickle furiously?
• Walrus toenail fungus?

“OMG!” may better be read as:

• Orange mutant gas!
• Original manufacturer’s guarantee!
• Ostentatious Malaysian germs!
• Open, my garage!
• Old Muppets gargle!

You’re welcome.

The Commonplace Blog

As I finish planning for the fourth quarter of the school year today, I found among my materials from last year my directions for a summative project I made up called “The Commonplace Blog.” 

First, I review with students what a “commonplace” was.  This is especially relevant in American Lit:

“Commonplacing is the act of selecting important phrases, lines, and/or passages from texts and writing them down; the commonplace book is the notebook in which a reader has collected quotations from works s/he has read. Commonplace books can also include comments and notes from the reader; they are frequently indexed so that the reader can classify important themes and locate quotations related to particular topics or authors.”

 

“Students with literary tastes, in days when books were hard to come by, kept ‘commonplace’ or notebooks into which they copied out verses or prose extracts that particularly appealed to them.” The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England, by Samuel Eliot Morison (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965; reprint of the 2nd ed., 1956): p. 49.

 

“An early practitioner of reflective journaling was Thomas Jefferson. He would synopsize and capture the key points of his readings and add his own reflections, recording them in a journal which he called his ‘commonplace book.’ One of his biographers quoted Jefferson as saying ‘I was in the habit of abridging and commonplacing what I read meriting it, and of sometimes mixing my own reflections on the subject’ (Cunningham, 1987, p. 9). His tutor, James Maury, commended the practice as a means ‘to reflect, and remark on, and digest what you read’ (Wilson, 1989, p. 7).”-Herman W. Hughes, Dialogic Reflection: A New Face on an Old Pedagogy

 

So, it’s a very old tradition of keeping clips of writing you like in a sort of scrapbook.  For more about commonplace books, and especially to see how important they were in the early American tradition, see this article from Yale.

 

Recommended Reading: Madame Bovary

Short Review: This book is perfect.  It is now one of my favorites.

Longer Review: It always bugs me that when people list forms of art, they never put literature near the top of the list, or often won’t include it at all.  From now on, whenever anyone fails to recognize the artistic merit of literature, I will use this as my first and last proof. 

Madame Bovary is an exquisite masterpiece.  After I’d read the first few chapters, I realized that for the rest of the book, I wouldn’t be looking forward to the further unfolding of the plot (which was deft and well executed, but fairly pedestrian–unhappy housewife seeks satisfaction in adultery–so never really captured me), but rather to seeing more of Flaubert’s composition: his prose is some of the finest poetry I’ve ever seen, a bracing achievement of language crafted into its highest possible power. 

I was never disappointed.  Whenever I found myself daydreaming and not remembering what I’d just read, I went back and read it again, alert, not because I feared that I had missed some important turning point in the story, but because I knew I had missed some elegant phrasing. 

G-H-O-T-I Spells “Fish”

It’s been a long time since I’ve listened to an entire series of recorded lectures, but last week I picked up Michael Drout’s A Way With Words III: Understanding Grammar at the library, and I was immediately enraptured.  I haven’t listened to anything else since, burning straight through the seven discs during my drive times this week, absorbing the whole eight hour extravaganza. 

Drout is one of the most personable speakers I’ve ever heard lecture; his humor, pop references, voices, and casual approach were always perfect: he could have been sitting right next to me.  The lectures were substantive, too.  Not only does he review the basics, with some twists, but he clearly explained some things that I’ve seen other teachers clumsily belabor. 

For example, when the sticky issue of the pronoun of indeterminate gender came up (using “he” or “she” when you don’t know if the subject being referenced is actually male or female, as in, “Any student who wants to get a good education should read his little heart out”), instead of resigning himself to the lame stand by of using an inappropriate “their” (it’s singular, not plural), and decisively rejecting such politically correct constructs as “s/he,” he announces a policy so catchy and utilitarian that I’ve wanted to shout it as a battle cry ever since: Pluralize the antecedent!  (Which would make my example from before into, “Any students who want to get a good education should read their little hearts out.”) 

Ah, glorious.  I want that on T-shirts and posters.  I want to put on a mask and fight crime, with that as my rallying cry as I dash into a violent fray: Pluralize the antecedent!  Mel Gibson could paint half his face blue and ride in with that declaration ringing across the field. 

Ave Atque Vale: William F. Buckley, Jr.

Today marks one year since William F. Buckley passed away.  As a conservative and, especially, as a proponent of elegant English, Buckley was an idol of mine.  I remember getting his little book, The Lexicon, when I was in college.  I found joy on every page. 

Since then, I’ve delighted in his many books and articles, though I’ve yet to read one of his spy novels.  In tribute, might I recommend an article of his on a subject near and dear to my heart: follow this link and enter these key words to search: defense use unusual words.  The article with those words in the title will come up for your languorous perusal.  (I couldn’t find a direct link to it.  Sorry.) 

A terrific memorial is up today at National Review, the vanguard political establishment that Buckley founded, and which remains the best print voice for the movement.  Even the New York Times ran a respectful obit when he died, which gave a solid overview of Buckley’s career in commentary and composition.

Recommended Reading: An Instance of the Fingerpost

Two years ago I was waiting in the drive-thru at a Taco Bell, flipping through the newspaper.  I came across a review of a new book called Literacy and Longing In L.A.  It was a romance novel, but with a twist: the damsel in dating distress in this story is a bookworm, and she narrates her lovelorn saga with frequent references to things she’s reading. 

It sounded interesting, so I picked it up and gave it a whirl.  It was, of course, a disaster: every stereotype I’d heard about romance novels was right on the money.  It was Sex and the City with literary allusions. 

However, in its long list of names that were dropped I found two that I’d never heard of before that genuinely intrigued me.  The first was How Proust Can Change Your Life, by Alain de Botton, which I quickly read and thoroughly enjoyed.  The other was Iain Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost, which looked a little more daunting, so I never dove into it until recently. 

And now 2009 has its first perfect ten. 

An Instance of the Fingerpost is a massive tome, set against the turmoil of 1660’s England as the monarchy is being reestablished, where four narrators argue that they know who really committed a murder, that of Dr. Grove.  Each narrator adds details to that central plot while telling us of his own adventures, each a self-contained novel complete, each in a voice wholly unique and convincing.  Think Rashomon, but with cameos by English philosopher John Locke.

“Shy, Ugly, Flatulent Man Seeks The Impossible”

Last week I added a new link to my blogroll: the personal ads in the London Review of Books, which gets logged under humor, though I considered also putting it under language and literature.  That’s because these ads strive to break the mold, offering a zany, allusion-heavy parody of that most bland of genres, the personal ad.

You know how they go: “Fit professional SWM seeks fun-loving SWF for long walks on the beach at midnight.”  Gag me. 

When the LRB started doing these a few years ago, the submissions quickly turned into a contest to see who could write the most intellectually obscure–and the most ridiculously unattractive–personal ads.  Some of my favorites from the articles I’ve read about them:

 

1. Romance is dead. So is my mother. Man, 42, inherited wealth.

On the Joy of Sentence Diagramming

I recently finished Tim Russert’s memoir, Big Russ & Me.  It was moving and thought provoking, as it involved so many important events of recent history, and vividly captured the mundane but surprisingly fascinating aspects of typical American life in decades not too long gone by, but decidedly alien to today. 

One quote that particularly struck me was this:

What I especially disliked was an exercise that still makes me cringe when I think of it: diagramming sentences.  “I don’t know why we have to do this,” I used to mutter under my breath.  I also complained about it to Sister Lucille, but only in private.  “Nobody will ever ask us to diagram a sentence,” I assured her.  I had no idea what adult life held in store for me, but I was pretty sure that this particular activity was not included.  And yet I have to admit that diagramming sentences made me a better reader, and, I hope, a better writer.  (133, emphasis added)

Ten Literary First Lines Translated For Text Messaging

Just this morning I came across the brilliant web site The English-to-12-Year-Old-AOLer Translator.  Let’s see what happens when we take some famous literary first lines and translate them:

 

Now is the winter of our discontent    

becomes

NOW SI DA WINTAR OF OUR DISCONTENT!1!1!1! OMG LOL

Call me Ishmael.

is translated as

CAL M3 ISHMA3L!!!111!1 OMG WTF

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

appears to go back into its native Russian as

AL HAPY FMILEIS R ALIEK 3ACH UNHAPY FMILEY SI UNHAPY IN ITS OWN WAY
!11!!!1!! LOL

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only.

desecrates the memory of Thoreau when rendered as

WH3N I WROTE DA FOLOWNG PAEGS OR RATHAR TEH BULK OF TH3M I LIEVD ALONE IN TEH WODS A MIEL FROM ANY N3IGHBOR IN A HOUES WHICH I HAD BUILT MYSALF ON TEH SHORA OF WALDAN POND IN CONCORD MASACHUESTS AND 3ARNED MAH LIVNG BY TEH LABOR OF MAH HANDS ONLEY!1!1!1 LOL

I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.

looks suspiciously like a psychotropic beatnik first draft as

I FIRST M3T DEAN NOT LONG AFT3R MAH WIEF AND I SPLIT UP!!!1!!111 OMG LOL

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

isn’t that substantially worse than some modern “translations” when communicated to us thusly:

IN TEH BGINNG GOD CR3AETD TEH HAAEVN AND TEH EARTH!11!!1 WTF

The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.

guarantees that schlocky pulp will thrive for another generation when written like this:

TEH MAN IN BLAK FLAD ACROS DA DASERT AND TEH GUNSLNG3R FOLOWED!!111 OMG WTF LOL

In the second century of the Christian Era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.

loses ever such a minuscule degree of Gibbon’s elegant grandeur here:

IN TEH SECOND CENTURY OF DA CHRISTIAN ARA DA EMPIER OF ROM3 COMPREH3NDAD DA FARE3ST PART OF DA EARTH AND TEH MOST CIVILIEZD PORTION OF MANKIND!!!!!1 OMG LOL

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

is, perhaps not surprisingly, no noticeably more obscure after translation:

RIEVRUN PAST AVE AND ADMS FROM SW3RVE OF SHOR3 2 BND OF BAY BRNGS US BY A COMODIOS VICUS OF RECIRCULATION BAK 2 HOWTH CASTLA AND ANVIRONS!!1!!!1 LOL

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

is now ready to penetrate the deepest reaches of the adolescent soul:

MANY YAARS L8R AS H3 FAECD TEH FIRNG SQUAD COLONEL AUR3LIANO BU3NDIA WAS 2 R3MEMBR TAHT DISTANT AFTERNON WH3N HIS FATHER 2K HIM 2 DISCOVAR IEC!!11! OMG LOL

Lexicon-o-rama

Ever since high school, I’ve kept a list of my favorite words.  Some sound musically whimsical, some are bafflingly arcane, others are surprisingly utilitarian (did you know there’s a word just for throwing something out a window?). 

At first, it was a slip of scrap paper in the top drawer of a desk to which I added new words in different color inks every now and then.  Later, it became a page in my journal, with later entries scrunched up at the bottom of the small space I had foolishly allotted to something that clearly deserved better.

Now, it’s on my blog.  Presenting my 45 favorite words, often with links to dictionary.com or, preferably, the invaluable Wordsmith web site (if you don’t get their “word a day” email, you’re depriving yourself of a prime reason to get out of bed in the morning).  Onward, logophiles!

1. persnickety
2. discombobulate–”to confuse,” though I’ve also hear it used simply to mean “to disassemble”
3. onomatopoeia
4. schadenfreude–”pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others.”  Shocking–shocking!–that German has a word for this
5. facetious
6. subterfuge
7. coquettish
8. extrapolate
9. solipsism
10. supercilious
11. pontificate
12. loquacious
13. weltschmerz–a German version of the French ennui?
14. potentate
15. exacerbate
16. oxymoron
17. punctilious
18. zeitgeist
19. lackadaisical
20. ululate–used in Lord of the Flies
21. vociferous
22. circumambulate–used in Moby Dick
23. polyglot–first came across this one while reading commentaries on Finnegans Wake
24. cachinnate–”to laugh raucously”
25. obfuscation–as in “eschew obfuscation”
26. abecedary
27. besmirched
28. cackleberry
29. haberdashery–”a place that sells men’s clothes”
30. sacerdotal
31. skulduggery
32. hobbledehoy–useful insult for a teacher to know
33. expectorate
34. defenestration–”throwing something out of a window”
35. somnolent
36. plenipotentiary
37. whomp
38. sniffy
39. swivet
40. fartlek–”a method of physical training that alternates intense activity with periods of low effort”
41. penultimate–when I first heard this word, I thought it might mean something like “super ultimate.”  I was disappointed to find that it means “next to last”
42. bifurcated–you know, like the devil’s tail!  :)
43. canoodling
44. twitterpated–from Bambi
45. kerfuffle–I can’t believe I never heard this word until 2005’s Danish Muhammad cartoon kerfuffle

Bonus Simpsons Quote!  “Disingenuous mountebanks with their subliminal chicanery!  A pox on them!“  -Homer (no, really!), “Bart’s Friend Falls In Love,” Season 3

Two New Poetry Collections, One Of Which Is Excellent

At the library recently, I scanned the new release shelf on my way to check out.  Two poetry titles caught my eye, and I grabbed them as I passed. 

The first was The Best American Poetry 2007.  Oh, how I should have known better.  Pretentious junk like this is what turns people off to poetry.  Admittedly, I didn’t read the whole thing because, after opening to about a dozen works at random, all but one were infuriatingly bad.  They were full of pointless images that jumped around for the sole purpose of distracting you from any coherent thought.  The only one I liked was a sprite of a little piece that made a few clever puns on the prefix “be-”; it wasn’t brilliant, only mildly amusing.  But at least there was one poem that didn’t think it was God’s Ultimate Gift To English. 

Remember in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy when a poet recites some Vogon poetry (the third worst in the universe), and his own internal organs crawl up and choke his brain, just to make it stop?  OK, the poems in this book are worse than that. 

What’s really sad is that there is some wonderful poetry being written out there today that the establishment here seems to ignore.  Three examples come to mind:

• Sometimes, The New Yorker will reproduce translations of foreign poets.  Their work tends to be much more elemental than the grad school-wannabe meandering that passes for poetry in the U.S.
• A few years ago, reading an issue of a science fiction magazine (Analog or Isaac Asimov’s), I came across a poem that used reduced gravity on an alien planet as a metaphor for escaping the crushing weight of one’s reality with the power of dreams.  It might sound silly, but it was genuinely touching.  In fact, I’ve found a lot of good poetry in science fiction magazines.
• On my honeymoon five years ago, my bride and I spent some time in the mountains of Virginia.  One roadside diner didn’t have a tacky souvenir stand, they had a small library (next to a case of fresh pies, as I recall).  I picked up a couple volumes of local folklore and poetry.  Those poems–earnest, simple, and still ethereal, drove more power into their words than a hundred MFA candidates at NYU ever will. 

The other book I got at the library was the polar opposite–one of those things you find that instantly raises the whole quality of your life.  Actor John Lithgow–yes, the crazy alien from Third Rock From The Sun–has edited a collection called The Poet’s Corner: The One-And-Only Poetry Book For The Whole Family. 

Truer words were never written.

Lithgow’s introduction–based on his memories of his grandmother–takes us back into another generation where poetry was common, loved, and understood.  From there, Lithgow gives us works from fifty English-language greats.  They’re all standard textbook anthology stuff, but I’ve never seen them arranged like this, with the kind of loving commentary Lithgow gives: here, Dorothy Parker sits with Walt Whitman, Gwendolyn Brooks with Shakespeare.  Sweet.

Lithgow’s love of these classics even prompts him to include lots of Internet references so we can hear the authors themselves reciting when possible.  These are teriffic resources.

And then there’s the audio CD.  The main poems presented in the book by each of the fifty authors are performed exquisitely by Lithgow’s celebrity friends, and a fine assortment of voice talents they are: Gary Sinise reads work by Ginsberg, Morgan Freeman reads “The Weary Blues,” Jodie Foster recites “The Red Wheelbarrow,” Sam Waterston channels Poe on “Annabel Lee,” and Lithgow himself revels in his oration of Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life.”  Frankly, any time you get a chance to hear Lewis Carrol’s “Jabberwocky” out loud, you should go for it.

I’ll be getting a copy of this.  You should, too.  I only wish schools could afford to get a copy for every student (hopefully it comes out in paperback).  As it is, you can bet my personal copy will get heavy rotation in my classroom next year.

Recommended Reading

Last week, the Las Vegas Review-Journal ran a couple articles about recommended reading lists, here and here.  They aren’t bad, but what’s the point of suggesting books that most everybody has already heard of, to people who are likely to have already read them?

Here’s another list, perfect for summer reading.  They aren’t necessarily my favorites, though some are, nor do I think they’re the very best out there, though some are; they’re just great books that interested readers may have overlooked, or titles too quirky to have made a blip on the radar.

The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde. Yes, that’s how his name is spelled. Hilarious literary-fantasy nerdiness, e.g. a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard III as if it’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Please tell me you like it.

 

Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog, by Mark Leyner. His cutting-edge style blends a med school/Shakespearean lexicon with lots of violence, satire, and improbable observation.

 

How Proust Can Change Your Life, by Alain de Botton. How can self help-oriented literary criticism about the world’s longest, most dense French novel be so funny and down-to-earth?

 

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers. The title’s meant to be ironic. Or is it? This story is weird, true, hilarious, and genuinely touching.

 

A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole. Fat, philosophizing loser somehow has trouble making it in the real world. Ha! What’s not to like?

 

Mystic River, by Dennis Lehane. Every murder mystery he writes is a powerful, dark, achingly beautiful vision of humanity’s wrecked moral compass.

 

The Razor’s Edge, by W. Sommerset Maugham. Inspiring literary story of a young playboy, traumatized by WWI, who roams the world searching for enlightenment.

 

The Best American Non-Required Reading. This annual anthology collects some of the previous year’s best humor, reporting, stories, comics, and weird, random stuff…

 

Run With the Hunted, by Charles Bukowski. This collection of his stories and poetry chronicle the life of an American original: Bukowski was a tragic loser with a largely wasted life before it was cool.

 

The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book, by Bill Watterson. Just as incredible as the comics themselves are the artist’s ruminations on their origin, meaning, and legacy. Truly, contemporary art at its best.

 

The Know-It-All, by A.J. Jacobs. Another true story that’s both hilarious and insightful, this one’s about a snarky man’s quest to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica.

 

The Rule of Four, by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. A thousand times better than The Da Vinci Code, this literary historical mystery is set at Princeton and celebrates erudite nerdiness. Read it before the movie comes out.

 

Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi. Incredibly inspiring and well-written true story about a persecuted college professor in Iran who has to meet with her students in hiding in order to discuss Western literature. Bliss.

 

A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess. Not only is this a wonderful philosophical meditation, but it has, quite possibly, the most masterfully inventive use of English since Shakespeare.

 

Neuromancer, by William Gibson. Gibson wrote this cyberpunk novel about a techno-mercenary battling an Internet monolith in virtual reality ten years before the Internet was popular and fifteen years before The Matrix.

 

America Alone, by Mark Steyn. The funniest and most insightful political book I’ve read in years, Steyn uses endless puns and pop culture references to make a compelling case that demographic change lies at the heart of civilization’s major challenges this century. Agree or disagree, it’s a roller coaster of a read.

 

The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolstoy. The most sublime, most realistic and moving “search for the meaning of life” story I’ve ever read. And it’s under 100 pages long!