Saturday, June 13, 2009
Another column from the Freep -- Transported by Words
I was drifting through the National Automobile Museum in Reno not long ago, and I came to a car that had a landau roof. Nearby, there was an inscription on the wall explaining why a roof that looks like it belongs on a convertible, but isn't, is called a landau, and it occurred to me that there are a lot of odd words in the world of automobiles.
The landau, in fact, was a carriage (first built in Landau, Germany) with a top that could be folded down, and the landau roof we know on cars has an ornamental doodad that looks very much like the hinge on the old landau.
The landaulet was a smaller carriage, a coupé, with the same type of roof. The coupe, as we now spell it (from the French for “cut”), is supposed to be a closed two-seater (unlike my MG, which is open most of the time), although it is commonly used for anything with an uncomfortable rear seat. The coupé de ville is a larger car, enclosed, with an open section for the driver. You've seen them in movies. (This isn't at all what we can now see in the Cadillac pre-owned lot. For Cadillac, “DeVille” was just a trim designation.) The Deuce coupe is a specific model: the 1932 (the “deuce” is for the year) Ford Model B, one of the first V-8's and the original hot rod.
That coupé de ville is one type of a limousine, whose name comes from a supposed similarity of its profile to a type of hood worn in the area of Limoges, France. The similarity to the Limousin hood vanishes when the driver moves into the main cabin of the car, even if he is separated by a window from the passengers. In any case, many of what we now call airport limos are not so luxurious (see “van” in a couple of paragraphs).
The sedan is what the British call a saloon, a car with room for at least two adults each in front and rear. The name has nothing to do with the French city, but comes from the sedan chair, which in turn gets its name from the Italian sede, “chair.” The sedan chair was also once known as a “go-cart.”
Sedans are pretty popular, but in the school parking lot they seem to be outnumbered by minivans. We understand the “mini” part there, but what is a van? Again we can go to the British terminology, where it is called a caravan; we have shortened it, but it is still the sort of vehicle (again, originally drawn by horses) that one might see in a caravan of traders.
Before minivans, of course, suburban moms drove station wagons. I actually saw one of the earliest station wagons in Reno, a wooden motorized coach custom-built for a hotel, so it could meet passengers at the railroad station and carry them up the mountain to the hotel.
A “truck” started as a small wheel, but the meaning got transferred to the small-wheeled cart used to carry heavy loads, and thence to what so many people in the South drive. The “pickup” part comes from the original purpose, to make deliveries and collections (pick-ups). But the “truck” has now made its full circle, in reference to the wheel sets for skateboards. (To be fair, it never lost that meaning on the railroads.)
And finally, when we all get on at once, the omnibus (Latin, “for all”) has shortened itself to bus, sharing a root, if not a route, with the busboy.
Friday, May 29, 2009
The Curse (?) of Cursive
Grammar buffs—writers, teachers, editors, and copyeditors, all of which I have been—took delight from Kitty Burns Florey's slim volume about sentence diagramming, Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog. It was witty, anecdotal, and well-designed, even if it didn't quite explain how to diagram sentences (although there were examples and enough discussion of the principles to bring much of it back). But its goal was not to teach us how to; it was to remind us that, no matter how well or poorly diagramming works to teach us grammar, a solid knowledge of grammar is useful.
Florey's new book, Script & Scribble (190 pp., $22.95, Melville House) addresses the problem that penmanship seems to be going the same way as diagramming. She claims that many school districts are no longer teaching cursive, replacing it with “keyboarding” (what was billed as “typing” when I took the course in the summer of 1965). We don't write letters, college papers are typed (or keyboarded), and our handwriting gets worse and worse. Doctors are being sued for illegible prescriptions.
Like the last book, this one hangs from the framework of dual histories: that of the process and that of the author's connection to the process. Writing has a longer (and frankly more interesting) history than diagramming, and Florey's discursive approach gives us story and context together. The book's design also highlights her footnotes, which constitute a strong argument for more footnotes in popular writing (unfortunately, one of the numerous production glitches that diminish the pleasures of this book sets the notes and their reference numbers out of sync through most of the first chapter).
While these features are entertaining, they aren't necessary to get us interested in the meat. Most of us don't write well, and most of us don't feel good about it. Most of us (at least most of us of a certain age) were also trained in some variant of the Palmer method (Zaner-Bloser and D'Nealian cursive, popular in Tennessee, are both derived from Palmer). So is the problem with us, or with the people who taught us cursive, or with cursive itself? Should we give up trying to write with anything other than block letters?
Florey combines realism with optimism, so her answer to the last question is no. To the question before that, she says yes: all three factors share responsibility. She gives numerous examples of what even the notoriously difficult Spencerian script can do when taught well to students who apply themselves. But she also realizes that most of us won't put in that much work, since we already haven't. We prefer to think that our illegible handwriting is a sign of how unique we are.
The art of handwriting interpretation comes out of and supports that conclusion. As Florey points out, there is little science to say that graphology works, or how it might work, but that does not stop us from believing in it. However, many of the systems of graphology (and there are nearly as many as there are systems of cursive script) depend on elements that are not universal, such as looping ascenders and descenders. There may be something to it, but I'm afraid that it is, like Florey's discussion of it here, only an interesting diversion.
But many of us really do need to write legibly, and not only doctors and those of us who draft with fountain pens. Florey's entertaining little book cajoles us into a reasonable solution, one that has been tested in school systems and self-education programs. It isn't the latest idea, but it's clear and relatively easy to learn. I, for one, will be trotting off to teach myself how to write the “fine Italian hand” of 16th-century italic.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Assessing the Installation
(Another column from the Nashville Free Press.)
This is aside from the headline in The Onion, “Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job,” although I certainly agree with that. But what does it mean to be “installed?”
Originally (the Oxford English Dictionary's first citation is from 1548), this was used strictly for bishops and other churchmen. One of the many advantages of being a bishop is that you don't have to sit in a regular pew with the peasants. You get a special seat, in a row of seats, slightly recessed so that you have walls and armrests at your sides. When you are officially invested with your authority as bishop, you get the right to the bishop's stall. You are placed in the stall (much as at an investment into office you are put in the specific clothing--vestments--of that position, robes and sashes and whatnot).
Although we (sadly, perhaps) lack an official costume of the presidency (some countries do still have sashes), we do have an official seat. It is not the chair itself--presidents get to pick from an assortment of chairs--but its location in the Oval Office that makes it the boss's chair. The tradition of departing presidents leaving notes for their successors, even if they switch desks, lends this weight. So the new president, after taking the oath, is entitled to do business from the presidential chair in the presidential office.
Of course, most of what we watched on January 20 was not part of the installation. There were only two elements of all the presentations that had binding value, and they were the administration of the two oaths, for vice president and president. (“Administer,” as you may have guessed, comes from an Anglo-Norman root meaning to officiate at a religious ceremony.) Those oaths constitute the actual inauguration.
So what does that mean, “inaugurate?” Does it have anything to do with drilling a hole in the ground? No. (That's “auger.”) The Latin root is inaugurare, to read omens from the flight of birds. Before making any change in government, it would only make sense (to a pious Roman) to see what could be divined about the consequences of the change. We may have lost our faith in omens, but 68% of us (according to last year's Pew poll) believe we have guardian angels. Consulting or relying on the supernatural is second nature to us.
Bringing a new president in office is cloaked with words that tie it to a religious rite, a solemn obligation. The words try to remind us of the importance of the moment, of the words of the oath--words so important that they had to be administered twice, you will recall.
This is all fitting for a man who chooses his words as well and as carefully as our new president. I expect the next four years to give us a lot of language worth thinking about.
Friday, May 22, 2009
How do you like your eggcorns?
I've recently started writing a column for the Nashville Free Press. Here's the first one.
The English language is wonderful. The best estimates of the available vocabulary range from about 600,000 to a million words. In the right hands it can make us weep or cry, sometimes simultaneously. And that's without even using all of it, not to mention the new words that are being added daily, such as “misunderestimate.”
Like any good software, English (and most languages, in fact) has a lot of redundancy built in. We can raed a stencene lkie this one and usrdnenatd it. We can solve acrostic puzzles, using scattered letters and the lengths of missing words to reconstruct a sentence. We can usually guess what the word at the top of the next column or page will be. (Of course, a lot of this is thanks to our amazing brains as well, but this is a column about language.)
Redundancy doesn't only catch errors and fill in gaps. It also gives us puns and all sorts of wordplay, and mondegreens and eggcorns.
A mondegreen is the mishearing of a song so that we rearrange the sounds into different words, as with the classic hymn, “Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear,” or the Jimi Hendrix lyric, “'Scuse me while I kiss this guy.”
An eggcorn is similar, but is based on some common word or phrase that we mis-hear and reinterpret in our own way. “Eggcorn” for “acorn” is the eponymous error, and you can see how it almost makes sense.
Of course, in the modern world we now have machines that can create eggcorns for us. I have a collection of phrases, many from student phrases, and I'm fairly sure that some of them--”a girl fried” and “a calibration of life,” for example--come from excessive reliance on spelling checkers. (Let me interject a favorite peeve here: While I sometimes check my spelling, I rarely make a mistake with my spells, and never do them on the computer. I do not use a spell checker.)
Many of the best eggcorns, though, come out of creative ignorance. George Orwell, in his classic essay “Politics and the English Language,” complains about some of the early sightings, such as “tow the line,” which appears to have something to do with barges rather than the orderly disposition of feet. The very best open up new lines of meaning for us to think about. The young man who complained about the “pre-Madonna” on his football team had a vague sense of what he meant to say, but the gaps in his knowledge let pop-culture and classical religious iconographies seep in. The student who was “knocked incautious” may well have been a poor speller, but has also introduced a new understanding of human behavior.
At their finest, eggcorns approach poetry. They offer alternative interpretations, giving us a deck from which we can launch our own creativity. In fact, I've already written six poems based on my collection. (To be honest, the first wasn't based on an eggcorn, but on this line from a final exam: “Writing, for me, is a way of putting my thoughts on paper.” That's an idea that gives a writing teacher a warm glow of achievement.) I take them all literally, as though the original authors knew what they were saying. Literalism isn't often the best approach to poetry, but it's working for me.
I do have an interesting sense of conflict about this. I'm getting good material from these mistakes, but one of my day jobs is to teach students not to make them any more. If my campaign ever succeeds, and I get people to think before they commit their words to paper, I'll run the risk of running out of ideas for this series of poems. On the other hand, I've already got dozens stockpiled. That should last me, at the very least, through my summer vocation.
Like any good software, English (and most languages, in fact) has a lot of redundancy built in. We can raed a stencene lkie this one and usrdnenatd it. We can solve acrostic puzzles, using scattered letters and the lengths of missing words to reconstruct a sentence. We can usually guess what the word at the top of the next column or page will be. (Of course, a lot of this is thanks to our amazing brains as well, but this is a column about language.)
Redundancy doesn't only catch errors and fill in gaps. It also gives us puns and all sorts of wordplay, and mondegreens and eggcorns.
A mondegreen is the mishearing of a song so that we rearrange the sounds into different words, as with the classic hymn, “Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear,” or the Jimi Hendrix lyric, “'Scuse me while I kiss this guy.”
An eggcorn is similar, but is based on some common word or phrase that we mis-hear and reinterpret in our own way. “Eggcorn” for “acorn” is the eponymous error, and you can see how it almost makes sense.
Of course, in the modern world we now have machines that can create eggcorns for us. I have a collection of phrases, many from student phrases, and I'm fairly sure that some of them--”a girl fried” and “a calibration of life,” for example--come from excessive reliance on spelling checkers. (Let me interject a favorite peeve here: While I sometimes check my spelling, I rarely make a mistake with my spells, and never do them on the computer. I do not use a spell checker.)
Many of the best eggcorns, though, come out of creative ignorance. George Orwell, in his classic essay “Politics and the English Language,” complains about some of the early sightings, such as “tow the line,” which appears to have something to do with barges rather than the orderly disposition of feet. The very best open up new lines of meaning for us to think about. The young man who complained about the “pre-Madonna” on his football team had a vague sense of what he meant to say, but the gaps in his knowledge let pop-culture and classical religious iconographies seep in. The student who was “knocked incautious” may well have been a poor speller, but has also introduced a new understanding of human behavior.
At their finest, eggcorns approach poetry. They offer alternative interpretations, giving us a deck from which we can launch our own creativity. In fact, I've already written six poems based on my collection. (To be honest, the first wasn't based on an eggcorn, but on this line from a final exam: “Writing, for me, is a way of putting my thoughts on paper.” That's an idea that gives a writing teacher a warm glow of achievement.) I take them all literally, as though the original authors knew what they were saying. Literalism isn't often the best approach to poetry, but it's working for me.
I do have an interesting sense of conflict about this. I'm getting good material from these mistakes, but one of my day jobs is to teach students not to make them any more. If my campaign ever succeeds, and I get people to think before they commit their words to paper, I'll run the risk of running out of ideas for this series of poems. On the other hand, I've already got dozens stockpiled. That should last me, at the very least, through my summer vocation.
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Marina Pessl
When Special Topics in Calamity Physics first came out, I read some of the reviews, and they made the book sound interesting. When I could get a copy from Audible.com, therefore, I invested a credit (and the very long time it takes to download a book on my dialup service.
As it happens, I was in Borders Books the other day (it's right next door to the Vanderbilt benefits office, and I'm a new Vanderbilt employee), and saw a copy on the rack, and took a look at the flap copy. It says the book is a satire. I like satire, so I went ahead and listened to it.
(All right, that's not exactly true. I had already started listening, and was wondering when the story was going to start developing. But I decided to think of it as a satire and give it the benefit of the doubt. After all, satire doesn't operate by the same rules as, say, Robertson Davies. We don't necessarily expect complexities of story and characterization from satire.)
So I kept on listening, while feeding the dogs and driving around in the MG (and it isn't so easy to listen to a book in the MG) and so on, and I tried to get involved in this young woman, Blue, and her tribulations. And it was all tribulations. Aside from possibly developing a crush on one of the teachers at her new school, everything was unpleasant for her. She had no friends, and the group at school into which she was drawn didn't seem to like her very much; well, she wasn't very likable, so who can blame them?
Blue is pretty sure she is smarter than everyone else she knows, except possibly her father, who is just as obnoxious and has raised her to be just what she is. She doesn't seem to hide this attitude, except amid the aforementioned group, when she is almost totally silent. So what's to like?
And of what is it supposed to be a satire? Wealthy, over-achieving high school students? They aren't important enough to me for me to be interested in a satire of them. Besides, I didn't get a laugh out of the first half of the book.
Which is about as far as I got.
But it did get me interested in the nature of satire. After all, one of the qualities of Jane Austen, whose Northanger Abbey I will be teaching this semester, is her satire on her own (small, defunct) society and its attitudes toward fiction. Those are hardly current concerns for me. But Austen makes them imminent for me, in large part because she makes me care about her people. (You can't worry too much about her plots; usually the resolutions have no surprises.)
Similarly, Wodehouse can be read as a satire of upper-class life (or a certain strain of it) in an England that was dead long before he stopped writing about it. (I'm currently listening to Jeeves and the Mating Season.) But Wodehouse is a hoot, and Bertie is so naive that we can't help a certain fondness for him. (This can be dangerous; I had to stifle a laugh in the dentist's chair today.)
Pessl, although her writing is lively (she's very good at verbing), never got me to care about anyone in the story. Now, I know people of about that age, if not of the same social class (I may meet some this semester at Vandy, but they don't come my way outside the classroom, and I didn't run into any at TSU). They don't seem to have the same problems as Pessl's characters, and they surely don't have the same flat personalities.
I think you can get away with flat characters if the satire is broad enough or funny enough or topical enough. But while "no one appreciates just how wonderful I am" is a pretty universal adolescent problem, and one that is fairly easy to make fun of, but it doesn't sustain a novel very well.
I get the feeling that I'm missing something, but it may just be that, like most television today, I'm just not supposed to get it. It's for younger people, and I can go suck eggs.
As it happens, I was in Borders Books the other day (it's right next door to the Vanderbilt benefits office, and I'm a new Vanderbilt employee), and saw a copy on the rack, and took a look at the flap copy. It says the book is a satire. I like satire, so I went ahead and listened to it.
(All right, that's not exactly true. I had already started listening, and was wondering when the story was going to start developing. But I decided to think of it as a satire and give it the benefit of the doubt. After all, satire doesn't operate by the same rules as, say, Robertson Davies. We don't necessarily expect complexities of story and characterization from satire.)
So I kept on listening, while feeding the dogs and driving around in the MG (and it isn't so easy to listen to a book in the MG) and so on, and I tried to get involved in this young woman, Blue, and her tribulations. And it was all tribulations. Aside from possibly developing a crush on one of the teachers at her new school, everything was unpleasant for her. She had no friends, and the group at school into which she was drawn didn't seem to like her very much; well, she wasn't very likable, so who can blame them?
Blue is pretty sure she is smarter than everyone else she knows, except possibly her father, who is just as obnoxious and has raised her to be just what she is. She doesn't seem to hide this attitude, except amid the aforementioned group, when she is almost totally silent. So what's to like?
And of what is it supposed to be a satire? Wealthy, over-achieving high school students? They aren't important enough to me for me to be interested in a satire of them. Besides, I didn't get a laugh out of the first half of the book.
Which is about as far as I got.
But it did get me interested in the nature of satire. After all, one of the qualities of Jane Austen, whose Northanger Abbey I will be teaching this semester, is her satire on her own (small, defunct) society and its attitudes toward fiction. Those are hardly current concerns for me. But Austen makes them imminent for me, in large part because she makes me care about her people. (You can't worry too much about her plots; usually the resolutions have no surprises.)
Similarly, Wodehouse can be read as a satire of upper-class life (or a certain strain of it) in an England that was dead long before he stopped writing about it. (I'm currently listening to Jeeves and the Mating Season.) But Wodehouse is a hoot, and Bertie is so naive that we can't help a certain fondness for him. (This can be dangerous; I had to stifle a laugh in the dentist's chair today.)
Pessl, although her writing is lively (she's very good at verbing), never got me to care about anyone in the story. Now, I know people of about that age, if not of the same social class (I may meet some this semester at Vandy, but they don't come my way outside the classroom, and I didn't run into any at TSU). They don't seem to have the same problems as Pessl's characters, and they surely don't have the same flat personalities.
I think you can get away with flat characters if the satire is broad enough or funny enough or topical enough. But while "no one appreciates just how wonderful I am" is a pretty universal adolescent problem, and one that is fairly easy to make fun of, but it doesn't sustain a novel very well.
I get the feeling that I'm missing something, but it may just be that, like most television today, I'm just not supposed to get it. It's for younger people, and I can go suck eggs.
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
Polyp
So, I went in for my semi-regular physical, and Doc Trilby (as we call her around our house; she's the Primary Medical Care Officer, or whatever they call it, for both adults in residence) asked, just in passing, "Have you ever had a colonoscopy?"
I don't care how you ease it into a conversation. This is not a casual question. In fact, a couple of decades ago I had a sigmoidoscopy, where they just look at the lower parts of your bowel, and it was one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my life. Not painful, just uncomfortable. Intensely uncomfortable.
But I can just barely still count myself as being in my mid-fifties, and I should have considered the possibility of colon cancer starting about seven years ago. I am happy enough in this marriage that I'd rather stay alive, so I need to have my insides checked out.
All right, I'm not the first person I know who has had this procedure, and by the time I make the appointment I know pretty much what is going to happen, but the prep is simply not a lot of fun. For those of you who have not had the pleasure, this involves making your lower intestines nice and clean for the camera. You don't eat anything the day before the procedure (which is why so many of them are scheduled for the morning), and starting at 3 in that afternoon you start taking laxatives -- in my case, one of them mixed with 64 ounces of Gatorade.
It worked very well, let's say. The pictures are nice and clear and clean.
I was scheduled to arrive at the hospital at 9 and be done by 11:30 or noon. Then we would go out to Monell's, a boarding-house style all-you-can-eat restaurant that is in any case a favorite of ours. When one of us is especially hungy, it is an even bigger favorite. But, even though the procedure only takes about twenty minutes, when 10:30 came around and I was still waiting in the prep room, we started to suspect we were not going to be eating at noon. At least the nurses let Judy and Hinda in to keep me company.
Finally, someone came by to say that they would wheel me in in about twenty minutes. Then she came back almost right away to say that there had been a change of plans, and I was going then. Fine. Let's get this thing over with.
As the orderly rolled me in, I heard the doctor talking to the escort of the woman whom he did just before me. Something about ten or so polyps, all of which were removed. Urgh. I hadn't actually counted on that.
So they wheeled me into the room, checked my name and procedure for the umpteenth time, rolled me onto my side, and put the sedative into the IV. After that I have a vague memory of seeing a TV screen with a picture of my bowels and the words, "large, but only one." Then I was waking up.
Yes, there was a polyp. Large (ten to twenty millimeters), but only the one. Pediculated, which I'm told is a good sign. The doctor snipped it off right there and hauled it out, which meant that I could not go to Monell's for lunch. I was allowed only soft and bland foods for the rest of the day (they can't put a Band-Aid on the wound, after all). There are worse fates: there is a good Middle Eastern restaurant not far from the hospital, so I had rice and baba ghanoush.
I'm still not allowed any alcohol until Friday or so, but I got a call from the doctor last night: the biopsy came back negative, with no signs of cancer. Another doctor, a friend of ours, mentioned that if you leave them alone, nearly all intestinal polyps will, in time, become cancerous, so you do want them taken out.
I don't care how you ease it into a conversation. This is not a casual question. In fact, a couple of decades ago I had a sigmoidoscopy, where they just look at the lower parts of your bowel, and it was one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my life. Not painful, just uncomfortable. Intensely uncomfortable.
But I can just barely still count myself as being in my mid-fifties, and I should have considered the possibility of colon cancer starting about seven years ago. I am happy enough in this marriage that I'd rather stay alive, so I need to have my insides checked out.
All right, I'm not the first person I know who has had this procedure, and by the time I make the appointment I know pretty much what is going to happen, but the prep is simply not a lot of fun. For those of you who have not had the pleasure, this involves making your lower intestines nice and clean for the camera. You don't eat anything the day before the procedure (which is why so many of them are scheduled for the morning), and starting at 3 in that afternoon you start taking laxatives -- in my case, one of them mixed with 64 ounces of Gatorade.
It worked very well, let's say. The pictures are nice and clear and clean.
I was scheduled to arrive at the hospital at 9 and be done by 11:30 or noon. Then we would go out to Monell's, a boarding-house style all-you-can-eat restaurant that is in any case a favorite of ours. When one of us is especially hungy, it is an even bigger favorite. But, even though the procedure only takes about twenty minutes, when 10:30 came around and I was still waiting in the prep room, we started to suspect we were not going to be eating at noon. At least the nurses let Judy and Hinda in to keep me company.
Finally, someone came by to say that they would wheel me in in about twenty minutes. Then she came back almost right away to say that there had been a change of plans, and I was going then. Fine. Let's get this thing over with.
As the orderly rolled me in, I heard the doctor talking to the escort of the woman whom he did just before me. Something about ten or so polyps, all of which were removed. Urgh. I hadn't actually counted on that.
So they wheeled me into the room, checked my name and procedure for the umpteenth time, rolled me onto my side, and put the sedative into the IV. After that I have a vague memory of seeing a TV screen with a picture of my bowels and the words, "large, but only one." Then I was waking up.
Yes, there was a polyp. Large (ten to twenty millimeters), but only the one. Pediculated, which I'm told is a good sign. The doctor snipped it off right there and hauled it out, which meant that I could not go to Monell's for lunch. I was allowed only soft and bland foods for the rest of the day (they can't put a Band-Aid on the wound, after all). There are worse fates: there is a good Middle Eastern restaurant not far from the hospital, so I had rice and baba ghanoush.
I'm still not allowed any alcohol until Friday or so, but I got a call from the doctor last night: the biopsy came back negative, with no signs of cancer. Another doctor, a friend of ours, mentioned that if you leave them alone, nearly all intestinal polyps will, in time, become cancerous, so you do want them taken out.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Peter Carey
I had wanted to read My Life as a Fake for a while, and then it turned up as a discount audiobook at Daedalus Books (I heartily recommend the Daedalus catalogue; I've even been to their store in Maryland, as part of the preparatory work on my wedding. No, really, we made a point of getting to the store and inviting one of the people there to the wedding. We also bought a lot of books, of course.).
The idea is fascinating: a grumpy poet writes a pseudonymous parody of modern styles, which is acclaimed as genius, and then the poet shows up. It's based on a real literary hoax, well known in Australia (you can Google "Ern Malley," and Carey uses the Malley poems as those of his hoax poet, Bob McCorkle), and the story is framed by the narration of an editor, Sarah Wode-Douglass, who is also after the poems and has a few levels of fakery of her own.
Almost everyone here is lying about something. Wode-Douglass has managed to delude herself about her mother's death; John Slater (old family friend and the man she has blamed for said death) has kidded the world along about his own talents, and he insists on a couple of false truths about Christopher Chubb and Chubb's daughter; Chubb is the mediocre poet who created McCorkle and the original McCorkle poems, who has given up claims to the truth but still wants it to be told; Chubb's daughter, if she is his daughter, denies his parentage and claims she is pure McCorkle; and McCorkle, who is dead as the story is told and may never have existed at all, claims to have come into being without a childhood, at the moment of the creation of the original poems. Underneath all this is a new trove of McCorkle poems, always held just out of view but attested as brilliant by the two people who claim to have seen it.
I'll admit that the obvious Frankenstein connection didn't come to me at first, but it is obvious once it's pointed out. McCorkle is preternaturally tall, elementally strong, always out of his element, seeking a place -- and family -- that cannot be purely his own. He and his creator try to destroy each other and, arguably, both succeed. But while that is an interesting and perhaps important perception, it isn't, in my opinion, Carey's fundamental concern.
Creating a work of art is, at its bottom, lying. Art makes sense of the world, yet the world really doesn't make any sense. Christopher Chubb lies about his poetry, attributing it to someone else, and no one believes he wrote it because it's so much better than anything he's written. The truth doesn't matter, in one sense, as long as the art is good. Did Chubb write it? Did McCorkle? Has Wode-Douglass fabricated the whole episode? The answer to all questions is no, of course: Ern Malley (or his creators) wrote the poems, and Carey fabricated the rest. As an early critic asked, "What is truth?"
dmh
The idea is fascinating: a grumpy poet writes a pseudonymous parody of modern styles, which is acclaimed as genius, and then the poet shows up. It's based on a real literary hoax, well known in Australia (you can Google "Ern Malley," and Carey uses the Malley poems as those of his hoax poet, Bob McCorkle), and the story is framed by the narration of an editor, Sarah Wode-Douglass, who is also after the poems and has a few levels of fakery of her own.
Almost everyone here is lying about something. Wode-Douglass has managed to delude herself about her mother's death; John Slater (old family friend and the man she has blamed for said death) has kidded the world along about his own talents, and he insists on a couple of false truths about Christopher Chubb and Chubb's daughter; Chubb is the mediocre poet who created McCorkle and the original McCorkle poems, who has given up claims to the truth but still wants it to be told; Chubb's daughter, if she is his daughter, denies his parentage and claims she is pure McCorkle; and McCorkle, who is dead as the story is told and may never have existed at all, claims to have come into being without a childhood, at the moment of the creation of the original poems. Underneath all this is a new trove of McCorkle poems, always held just out of view but attested as brilliant by the two people who claim to have seen it.
I'll admit that the obvious Frankenstein connection didn't come to me at first, but it is obvious once it's pointed out. McCorkle is preternaturally tall, elementally strong, always out of his element, seeking a place -- and family -- that cannot be purely his own. He and his creator try to destroy each other and, arguably, both succeed. But while that is an interesting and perhaps important perception, it isn't, in my opinion, Carey's fundamental concern.
Creating a work of art is, at its bottom, lying. Art makes sense of the world, yet the world really doesn't make any sense. Christopher Chubb lies about his poetry, attributing it to someone else, and no one believes he wrote it because it's so much better than anything he's written. The truth doesn't matter, in one sense, as long as the art is good. Did Chubb write it? Did McCorkle? Has Wode-Douglass fabricated the whole episode? The answer to all questions is no, of course: Ern Malley (or his creators) wrote the poems, and Carey fabricated the rest. As an early critic asked, "What is truth?"
dmh
Updike, Run
I'd managed to go a long time without reading Rabbit, Run. I hadn't been avoiding it, mind. I've enjoyed all of Updike's short fiction that I've read, and I've even taught "A&P," and I've enjoyed his poetry (although I don't think it's really first-rate), and I liked Memoirs of the Ford Administration more than I expected. But the book that put him on the map had fallen under my personal radar. Well, a lot of my current reading is aimed at filling in gaps like that.
The book is definitely an artifact of the Fifties. So much of the behavior and attitudes on which the story depends is tied to that post-Korea era, with memories of World War II still fresh, and the strains on and of family life being forced to the forefront of the American consciousness. But the heart of the book is in that strain, and the way it worked on some people not as freedom from the difficulties of the war years (two wars in rapid succession, after all; we think of WW II as long, but it was four and a half years, not long by current standards, and the time between the two wars was about as long as the war had been; one measure is that many men served in combat in both wars) but as a prison. For Rabbit Angstrom, family life and its expectations, and his own expectations, are a prison.
Of course, part of Rabbit's problem is that he hasn't yet grown up. He has no way of connecting with the world outside his own desires, no sense of what he wants for himself. He is, despite being a veteran and a father, unformed. Like so many American men then and since, he has no idea of how to be a grown-up on his own. All he knows is that the old rules no longer work. He has, pointedly, declined to join his father in the print shop. He's lighting out for the territories, but there is no frontier any more, and the unexplored lands are not in Pennsylvania -- they're in the unformed soul of Rabbit Angstrom.
It's hard to like Rabbit. He's a guy who twice runs out on women who are pregnant with his children, and though he does go back to one of them, he runs away from her twice more. He lacks ambition -- and I don't mean ambition in wanting to make a lot of money or to make a good career, but an ambition to define himself. Nonetheless, I did feel sorry for him, and felt the poignancy of his inability to commit to any kind of stability.
I suppose now I'll have to read the other books about him.
dmh
The book is definitely an artifact of the Fifties. So much of the behavior and attitudes on which the story depends is tied to that post-Korea era, with memories of World War II still fresh, and the strains on and of family life being forced to the forefront of the American consciousness. But the heart of the book is in that strain, and the way it worked on some people not as freedom from the difficulties of the war years (two wars in rapid succession, after all; we think of WW II as long, but it was four and a half years, not long by current standards, and the time between the two wars was about as long as the war had been; one measure is that many men served in combat in both wars) but as a prison. For Rabbit Angstrom, family life and its expectations, and his own expectations, are a prison.
Of course, part of Rabbit's problem is that he hasn't yet grown up. He has no way of connecting with the world outside his own desires, no sense of what he wants for himself. He is, despite being a veteran and a father, unformed. Like so many American men then and since, he has no idea of how to be a grown-up on his own. All he knows is that the old rules no longer work. He has, pointedly, declined to join his father in the print shop. He's lighting out for the territories, but there is no frontier any more, and the unexplored lands are not in Pennsylvania -- they're in the unformed soul of Rabbit Angstrom.
It's hard to like Rabbit. He's a guy who twice runs out on women who are pregnant with his children, and though he does go back to one of them, he runs away from her twice more. He lacks ambition -- and I don't mean ambition in wanting to make a lot of money or to make a good career, but an ambition to define himself. Nonetheless, I did feel sorry for him, and felt the poignancy of his inability to commit to any kind of stability.
I suppose now I'll have to read the other books about him.
dmh
