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Memoir Tour: It's Back!
July 28, 2010
Memoir panels in New York City
Just in time for the dog days of summer, I am embarking on a (very) mini reunion tour for "Memoir: A History." Specifically, I will be on memoir panels on two consecutive nights in hip New York City venues. On Sunday, August 1, I'll be appearing at KGB Bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where I can retrace my grandfather's footsteps. My father's father, Sam, whom I never knew, apparently ran a steam bath there in the early decades of the last century. I will look for his ghost among the hipsters. As a further instance of synchronicity, some Yagoda relatives long maintained that Genrikh Yagoda, the feared head of the Soviet secret police under Stalin, was a distant relation. I have no further comment on that.
The next night, I will be on a panel at Greenlight Books in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, not far from where my father moved as a young man. He was a proud graduate of Bushwick High School.
For details on both events, including names of the other panelists, click the "Appearances" button on the top of the page.
Anyone in the NYC area, I hope to see you at one or both of these events.
Mr. Steinbrenner
July 14, 2010
Having been a diehard New York Yankee fan from 1961 (good time to start) to the mid-80s, when I had moved out of the New York metropolitan area for good, I was a little taken aback by the love that George Steinbrenner got after he passed away. I probably shouldn't have been: that's what winning will do for you, plus being a semi-character on Seinfeld. And it seems that he was known for anonymously giving a great deal of money to charity anonymously. Despite the paradox that suggests, I salute him for his generosity.
As for me, I'm thankful to Mr. Steinbrenner for one thing: his role in a memorable lesson on how to be a honorable human being. The person who taught me the lesson was Yogi Berra. In 1985, Steinbrenner fired Yogi as manager sixteen games into the season, despite having promised him a full year as Yankee manager. Yogi thereupon said he would no longer set foot in Yankee Stadium--not to watch a game, not to take part in Old Timers' Day, nothing.
And he didn't, for year after year. He didn't make a fuss, he just didn't participate in anything Yankee. To me, that was a shining example of taking a dignified principled stand, and one that surely cost the stand-taker significantly, in cutting himself off from the organization he'd been a part of for more than forty years.
Then, in 1999, Steinbrenner went to Yogi's home in New Jersey and apologized. Yogi accepted, and once again he was a presence at the Stadium and in the organization.
The fact that the Yankess had just won three World Series may have had something to do with Steinbrenner's action. But it doesn't matter. One honorable act, eventually, led to another. And on his death, it's that New Jersey pilgrimage I'll remember.
Footonote: The New York Times Quote of the Day today belonged to Yogi, and it was a good one: "George and I had our differences, but who didn't?"
Him or her or them
July 12, 2010
New wrinkle on the epicene pronoun
A lot of people, including me, have weighed in on the "epicene" (gender-neutral, singular) pronoun. Should it be old-school "he"; politically correct "her or she," "s/he" or "she"; or sensible and increasingly common "they"?
An NPR segment I heard the other day made me realize there's a popular compromise. Jeffrey Smith, a former State Department lawyer, said: "If a person agrees to be an agent for the U.S. intelligence community, we have an obligation to him or her to try to get them out."
The strategy--going with "him or her" at first, but subsequently reverting to "them"--sounded familiar because, I realized, it's what I do! The first time round, you want to be "correct," but it's really impossible to keep saying "him or her" again and again, so you dial it down to "they" or "them." I wonder if the linguists have a word for that grammatical two-step.
The coolest people I've interviewed
May 15, 2010
Seeing Michael Caine on "The Daily Show" a week or so got me to thinking that Caine (Sir Michael, now) is the coolest person I have ever interviewed, and set me to putting together a complete list of all the other very cool people to whom I have had the privilege of putting questions.
So here it is, in stream of consciousness order:
Tal Farlow (jazz guitarist and sign painter). Lester Bowie. Paul Mazursky. Jonathan Demme. Irving Caesar. Anjelica Huston. Ann Beattie. Bobbie Ann Mason. Sir Frank Kermode. Junot Diaz. Phil Rizzuto. Roger Angell. Eleanor Gould Packard. Joseph Mitchell. Peter De Vries. Fred Willard. Catherine O'Hara. Calvin Trillin. John Updike. Whitney Balliett. Terence Blanchard. Dan Crawford (NBA referee). Andre the Giant. Justice Stephen Breyer. Andrei Codrescu. Elmore Leonard. Peter Carey. Harold Bloom. Margaret Drabble. Clive James. Cynthia Ozick. James Wolcott. Tobias Wolff. William Maxwell. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Walter Bernstein. John Lukacs. Billy Collins. Dave Barry. Nicholson Baker.
There are more, but that's enough for now.
Me and the girls
April 03, 2010
This Saturday, April 10, at 11:45 AM, I'll be chairing a panel on, you got it, memoir, at the Empire State Book Festival in Albany. The panelists are five distinguished female memoirists: Julie Klam, Alice Eve Cohen, Julie Metz, Nancy Bachrach, and Amy Dickinson. Should be fun. The only trouble is, the session is only forty-five minutes long. I guess we'll have to talk fast.
Tredyffrin Talk
March 23, 2010
I'm talking on memoir at Tredyffrin Public LIbrary
I'll be speaking about memoir tonight (Tuesday, March 23) at the Tredyffrin Public Library, in the western Philly suburbs. So if you're in the Tredyffrin neighborhood (Trudyffrin in a funny word), set your GPS to 582 Upper Gulph Road, Strafford PA 19087, and come on over.
Finding Five and a Half
March 07, 2010
It is a little known fact that in the summer of 1971, I worked as a concrete inspector for the Pittsburgh Testing Laboratory in New York City. If you want to find out more, including not only a definition but a PICTURE of a slump test, click on "More News" then follow the link at the bottom of this item.
On the radio in Portland
February 24, 2010
If you're in the Portland, Oregon, area Thursday, February 24, at 9 (am OR pm) I am going to be interviewed on the Oregon Public Broadcasting show "Think Out Loud." Should be available online too, at a link you can follow if you click on "more news."
J.D. Salinger, 1919-2010
January 28, 2010
I would like to offer this space as a token of my respects to J.D. Salinger and his family. Just about everybody (including me) didn't like some of his works. And he was troubled, or so it appeared. But he was a major presence, with an unforgettable voice and perspective. Some of the things he wrote I'll always remember with great joy, like "Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters" and "The Laughing Man" (right, Lizy?). He will be missed.
A (very) short history of memoirs
January 26, 2010
So the panel at the 92nd Street Y in New York (see item below) was a lot of fun. It turned out two of the panelists had taken jazz dance lessons there. As discussion leader, I got to ask Larry Smith, inventor of the six-word memoir, a place-appropriate question: "Is it good for the Jews?" (The Y in 92nd Street Y is short for YMHA, which stands for Young Men's Hebrew Association, which is a Jewish alternative to the YMCA.)
Afterwards, we went out for a drink to Elaine's, the famed literary watering hole. (I believe you are required to use the term "watering hole" when discussing Elaine's.) Elaine herself was sitting by the door, and some of us kissed her ring/shook her hand.
The Smith people asked me to speak briefly (in keeping with six-word theme) on the history of memoirs. So I decided to do it in list form (obsessive compulsives do it in list form?), specifically as a history of memoirs as seen in the titles of memoirs. So here it is, in chronological order (with very slight creative license taken):
Julius Caesar, "Chronicles"
St. Augustine, "Confessions"
"The Travels of Marco Polo"
"The Life of Benvenuto Cellini"
John Bunyan, "Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners"
Rousseau, "Confessions"
"The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin"
William Wordsworth, "The Prelude"
Thomas De Quincey, "Confessions of an English Opium Eater"
"A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee"
Richard Henry Dana, "Two Years Before the Mast"
"Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass"
Thoreau, "Walden"
"The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself"
U.S. Grant, "Memoirs"
Mark Twain, "Roughing It"
Anonymous, "My Secret Life"
Nellie Bly, "Ten Days in a Mad House"
Helen Keller, "The Story of My Life" (1902—written at the age of 22)
Edmund Gosse, "Father and Son"
"The Education of Henry Adams"
"Art Smith’s Story: The Autobiography of the boy Aviator," “Edited by Rose Wilder Lane,” 1915
"Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story," written “with the assistance of Rose Wilder Lane,” 1916
Joan Lowell, "Cradle of the Deep"
"The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas"
Clarence Day, "Life With Father"
James Thurber, "My Life and Hard Times"
Betty McDonald, "The Egg and I"
John Gunther, "Death Be Not Proud"
Lillian Roth, "I’ll Cry Tomorrow"
Jim Piersall, "Fear Strikes Out"
Billie Holiday, "Lady Sings the Blues"
Elie Wiesel, "Night"
"The Autobiography of Malcolm X"
Claude Brown, "Manchild in the Promised Land"
Frank Conroy, "Stop-Time"
Lillian Hellman, "Pentimento"
Jan Morris, "Conundrum"
Christina Crawford, "Mommie Dearest"
"Iaccoca"
Tobias Wolff, "This Boy’s Life: A Memoir"
Paul Monette, Becoming a Man
Dave Pelzer, "A Child Called 'It'”
Elizabeth Wurtzel, "Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America: A Memoir"
Mary Karr, "The Liars’ Club"
Frank McCourt, "Angela’s Ashes"
Kathryn Harrison, "The Kiss"
Dave Eggers, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius"
Elizabeth Burton-Phillips, "Mum, Can You Lend Me Twenty Quid?"
Augusten Burroughs, "Running with Scissors"
AJ Jacobs, "The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World"
Pete Jordan, "Dishwasher: One Man’s Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States"
James Frey, "A Million Little Pieces"
“Margaret Jones,” "Love and Consequences"
J.R. Moehringer, "The Tender Bar"
Jeanette Walls, "The Glass Castle"
John Grogan, "Marley and Me"
Elizabeth Gilbert, "Eat, Pray, Love"
Elizabeth Gilbert, "Committed"
"Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure"
Howie Mandel, "Here’s the Deal: Don’t Touch Me"
Sarah Palin, "Going Rogue, An American Life"
Smith Mag's report on the panel, with a photo
Memoir Panel in NYC
January 20, 2010
If you're going to be in or near The Big Apple this Sunday (January 24), please consider attending what promises to be a fun panel on Sunday night at 7:30, at the 92nd Street Y. It's about memoir, specifically the six-word memoirs that Larry Smith has been publishing in his website, smithmag.net, and in a series of books.
I'll be on the panel along with Larry, memoirists A.J. Jacobs and Amy Sohn, and some other interesting folk. You can learn more and order tickets by clicking on the "More news" link and then the "For more information" link. Make sure to enter code SWM (for "six-word memoir") for a discount on tickets.
Hope to see you there.
Contact me (I think?)
January 11, 2010
On January 10, I published an essay on the back page of the New York Times Book Review called "The Perils of 'Contact Me'"--about the phenomenon of readers e-mailing writers with assorted questions and comments and all sorts of input. It was fun to do, and, predictably, I got good amount of e-mail about it, including one from a "semi-retired cardiologist" taking me to task for using the alleged redundancy "at this moment in time" and asking my opinion on whether it's okay to ever use split infinitives.
In the piece I talked about the many times when readers will write with obscure questions about the writer's area of expertise. A man from Cleveland took this to heart. He told me that in 1965, he was "going out with" Jane Kramer, then and now a New Yorker writer and asked me the following:
"For a long time I have believed that Jane told me that The New Yorker was publishing the entire Ulysses by putting a short sentence or maybe merely a few phrases in each issue of The New Yorker so that it appeared to be a typesetting error. It may be merely something I dreamed but I have a clear recollection that Jane told this to me and I also remember finding some examples of The New Yorker issued published in the late 1960’s. I have read Gill’s book and I went to my local library and read much of your history of the New Yorker, and I have looked at a few other sources but I have been unable to find any mention of this. I have the complete New Yorker on CD’s and have made a search of a few of the memorable phrases from Ulysses but nothing comes up."
I was actually able to explain to the man what it was all about. Does anybody out there know the explanation? The first to e-mail it to me will get a signed copy of my book "About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made."
Greenwich Village Reading
January 01, 2010
On Wednesday, January 6, at 6 PM, I will be reading from "Memoir: A History" at the Cornelia Street Cafe in New York, as part of the very cool Freerange Nonfiction series. Please come!
More info at the link below, and also at the Facebook event Freerange Nonfiction Reading Series.
New Year's Eve interview
December 30, 2009
Continuing the string of holiday eve radio appearances, Patt Morrison's interview with me about "Memoir: A History" will air 12/31 on Southern California Public Radio.
Talk of the Nation
December 23, 2009
I’m scheduled to be on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” on Thursday, Dec. 24, at 2 PM Eastern time, to talk about my new book “Memoir: A History.” So please give a listen as you’re wrapping your presents or trimming your tree, or whatever it is you do. Friendly call-in questions are also encouraged.
You can listen online at npr.org, or find a list of stations that carry the show by clicking the link below.
Merry Christmas to the Christmas folk, happy holidays to the holiday folk, and a fantastic Festivus for the rest of us!
On the Media Interview
December 17, 2009
This weekend, the NPR show "On the Media" will air an interview with me about "Memoir: A History." I had a good time talking with the host, Brooke Gladstone, and hope she was kind in the editing. The show airs on different days and at different times around the country, so click the link below to find out when it airs on your NPR station, or to listen online.
Get real
December 14, 2009
I've started a Facebook group called "Get The New Yorker to use 'gotten' instead of got." Among the magazine's peculiarities of usage--such as the extra "l" in "marvellous" and its obsessiveness about Harold Rossean "indirection" (hence the commas in phrases like "When he was born, in 1954, ...")--the most annoying to me is the insistence of the British "got" as the past participle of "to get," rather than the American "gotten."
So in the New Yorker you would find a sentence like "The temperature of the earth has got warmer over the last century."
What's with this? It makes New Yorker writers sound like they have a monocle and a bowler hat. It is high time that they cast their lot with this continent (especially now that Tina Brown has gone), and if enough people join this group, maybe we can make it happen!
The Early Reviews Are In
November 25, 2009
"Memoir: A History" has been out less than two weeks, and it's already been favorable reviewed in the Los Angeles Times (see link below), Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune, and Salon. The Sunday New York Times Review is sort of a Rorschach test--everybody who mentions it to me seems to think it was great, while I focus on a couple of negative words and phrases. So I choose to concentrate on the respect and real estate (full page, with a cool illustration) the NYTBR gave the book. I've also written short tie-in pieces for USA Today and The Daily Beast.
More to come, I hope.
Los Angeles Times review of "Memoir"
Boston Public Library
November 16, 2009
Please come to Boston! I will be speaking about "Memoir" at the Boston Public Library, Tuesday, November 17, at 6 PM. Also on the bill will be memoirist David Ellis Dickerson.
Slow Down, Sign Off, Tune Out
October 25, 2009
I have a review in today's New York Times Book Review of a book called "The Tyranny of E-Mail." My verdict is basically that e-mail can certainly be a pain, but "tyranny" probably overstates the case, and the good outweighs the bad. Read it and see what you think.
Memoir Panel
October 17, 2009
I'll be moderating a panel about memoir on Saturday, November 7, in Philadelphia. It's part of the outstanding First Person Arts Festival, and the other panelists will be memoirists A.J. Jacobs, Rachel Simon, and Laurie Sandell.
Please come! Should be fun.
PW Weighs In
September 16, 2009
"Memoir: A History" got a nice review in the publishing bible, Publishers Weekly. It was actually more than a nice review. PW chose the book as its "Pick of the Week" and gave the review prime real estate on page 2. Here it is:
"Yagoda, biographer of Will Rogers, presents a spirited account of a form of writing that since its inception has been one of the most contested and most popular. Without dwelling too heavily on the genre's most recent scandals, Yagoda begins with the fifth-century Confessions of Saint Augustine, still cited as a prime example. Autobiography, Yagoda says, helped give rise to the invention of the novel in 1719 when Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, “written by himself.” While this fictional memoir helped usher in real accounts of, among other things, adventures on the high seas and capture by hostile Indians, it is memoir's fraught relationship with the truth—which implicated both readers (who took Robinson Crusoe to be a true tale) and writers (embellishing or inventing particularly sordid episodes in their lives)—that explains the memoir's longevity, popularity and breadth, says Yagoda. In a fascinating break from his chronological study, Yagoda explores the fluid definition of “truth” and whether, given memory's malleability, it's possible to achieve it in any memoir. With its mixture of literary criticism, cultural history and just enough trivia, Yagoda's survey is sure to appeal to scholars and bibliophiles alike."
Ali, Michael, Tiger, Fed, and the Question of Modesty
September 13, 2009
I have a piece in Slate stemming from a problem faced by Roger Federer. He's the best tennis player in the world, he knows it, everybody else knows it, he knows they know it, they know he knows it: how does he deal with this in his public statements?
I originally started thinking about this in terms of John Updike, whom I (and many other writers I know) thought of as the Jordan/Woods/Federer of writing, but who always conveyed a sincere-seeming modest demeanor. But in the essay (for Slate's "Sports Nut" department), I didn't have space to stray from sports. So I'll try to get into the Updike question another time.
Good Notice from Kirkus
August 21, 2009
The first review for my new book, "Memoir: A History" (due out in November), is in, and it's a good one. Kirkus Reviews, a publishing industry mainstay, gives it a star (rewarded to "books of remarkable merit") and says:
"Under the memoir sun there’s nothing new—just a lot more of it. So argues biographer Yagoda (Journalism and English/Univ. of Delaware; When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better And/Or Worse, 2007, etc.) in this lively history/cultural study of the memoir. Unlike some students of the genre, he uses autobiography and memoir interchangeably, and credits Tobias Wolff for first removing the “s” from memoirs. Yagoda notes that memoir has rapidly become literature’s most popular genre, with “a million little subgenres.” After an introduction, the author looks at Julius Caesar’s Commentaries (noting the Emperor anticipated many others by writing of himself in the third person), then moves through the “confessions” with stops for closer looks at St. Augustine, Abelard, John Bunyan and others. He considers Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography as among the most influential; glances at works by Davy Crockett, Black Hawk and Melville; and notes the enduring, powerful effect of the I in slave narratives. About a third of the way in, Yagoda pauses to consider the issue of the bogus memoir, mentioning early fabrications by people claiming to be slaves and mountain men. (He delivers even more at the end.) The author reminds us several times that memory is not a digital recorder but a tenuous process of reconstruction. He admires the autobiography of U.S. Grant, the memoir-like writings of Mark Twain and the achievement of Helen Keller. He also considers the ubiquitous celebrity memoir—and the issue of ghostwriting—followed by an amusing disquisition on 1930s and ’40s warm-and-fuzzy memoirs like Clarence Day’s Life with Father and Frank Gilbreth’s Cheaper by the Dozen. Yagoda also discusses the re-emergence in the ’60s of stark memoirs by black writers—notably Dick Gregory and Claude Brown—and the recent explosion of the entire genre, with the unsurprising consequences of counterfeiters, fakers, narcissists and liars, and the decline in sales of literary fiction. Substantial, engaging and convincing."
"Substantial, engaging and convincing."
That's what she said!
BloggEd
August 20, 2009
Since our family both receives and pays out most of its income to institutions of higher learning, we decided we were entitled to start a blog about higher education. And so we did. Check it out at campuscomments.wordpress.com.
Noticed: There's Plenty of "They" There
August 17, 2009
Like many language commentators, I’ve written about the “epicene pronoun”—the custom of using “they” (instead of, say, “he or she”) for a singular antecedent, as in a sentence like “Everyone who wants to go on the trip should bring their money tomorrow.” This has become near-universal in speech and informal writing (e-mail, blogs, and advertising), and well on its way to acceptance in formal prose. One specific usage has already become accepted in print publications—with one prominent exception.
I’m talking about the use of “they” to refer to rock bands with singular names, like The Grateful Dead, Pearl Jam, and Sonic Youth. (It’s easier to call the Rolling Stones “they,” because you can think of the group as a collection of five Stones—hence the lot of them are “they.”) They-ing is ubiquitous not only on blogs, not only in the alternative press, but in mainstream newspapers and magazines as well. This example, plucked almost at random from Google News, originated in the Contra Costa (California) Times: “With a band like Sonic Youth, it's almost impossible to really get into a new record until you see them play it live, because CDs just can't replicate their live power.”
To stick with the indie faves Sonic Youth, even the New Yorker rock writer Sasha Frere-Jones goes with the plural flow, although he is (a bit shockingly, given the NYer’s famous strictness) inconsistent. In a piece in the 22 June issue, he most of the time refers to the band as “they,” noting that “Sonic Youth have always been a sober hardworking bunch” and “they began their career as an arty, hardcore-influenced band.” But later he talks about a technique that “Sonic Youth has so far largely avoided” and calls a CD “its sixteenth full-length album.”
That leaves The New York Times. That’s right, the Grey Lady has stuck to its it, as far as rock and roll bands are concerned. Reading the Times’ excellent rock critics, like Jon Pareles, Jon Caramanica, and Nate Chinen, you feel them straining to say “they” but being held back by some combination of inner resolve and copy-desk steel. Here’s Pareles on U2: “Once the band reached the arena and stadium circuit in the 1980s, it stayed there. It has had no lineup changes, no breakups, no reunions and no catering to nostalgia.”
Dude, let loose with a “they”! It’ll feel great.
Beyond Zeugma
August 06, 2009
Once you start looking for zeugma, you start seeing it everywhere, as in this headline from today's New York Times: "A Young Director Brings a Spaceship and a Metaphor in for a Landing" (link below).
But I don't want to give the impression that I'm ragging on the Times copyeditors (the folks who write the headlines). I think they are great, in the way they can capture the spirit of an article, haiku-like, in a prescribed number of characters. It's wit to fit.
All this has gotten me to thinking about great headlines--and I'm talking about the featurey, witty variety here, not the Sept. 11/Kennedy Shot historic moments, which have a poetry all their own. Barbara Beck pointed out a good one in yesterday's Politico, on Bill Clinton's mission to North Korea: "International Man of History." Attention has been paid lately to the impact of copydesk cutbacks on typos, grammatical mistakes, and factual errors; there was a good segment about it on last week's "On the Media," on NPR. But what about the headlines? Will they inexorably get duller as copydesks get sparser?
I think I have two all-time favorites. One was for an article Bill Kent wrote for Atlantic City Magazine, on the relative merits of and implied competition between Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck. The hed: "The Battle of the Bulge." The other was from the very early '90s, when the Boston Globe reported that the pitcher Oil Can Boyd, sometimes known as "the Can," had rented like 700 porno movies from a video store. They titled their story "The Can's Film Festival." (The genius lies in the fact that "can's" replicates the common mispronunciation of "Cannes.")
On the other hand, leaden heds are really leaden. There are cliches in every type of publication and story. I remember at the first magazine where I worked, The New Leader, we were ALWAYS calling articles "England Prepares to Vote," "Thailand Prepares to Vote," etc., etc. My boss at Philadelphia Magazine, Ron Javers, pointed out the crutch headline at the features desk. For fall gardening, it's "Beyond Geraniums." For unusual Japanese food, it's "Beyond Sushi." I guess for an article about headlines, it would be "Beyond Beyond."
It's a credit to the Times that I do not ever recall seeing a "Beyond" headline in its pages.
Anyone care to offer examples of best and worse headlines?
Noticed: Zeugma Overload
August 05, 2009
The not-so-dirty little secret of New York Times headline writers has been zeugma, defined by Wikipedia as "a figure of speech describing the joining of two or more parts of a sentence with a single common verb or noun." Their particular vice is syllepsis, defined (Wikipedia again) as "a particular type of zeugma in which the clauses are not parallel either in meaning or grammar."
This incongruity creates a nice humorous effect, as in Warren Zevon's lyric "I got a part-time job at my father's carpet store, laying tackless stripping and housewives by the score" and Tim O'Brien's line "He carried a strobe light and the responsibility for the lives of his men."
Syllepsis has long been the go-to figure of speech for Times copy editors, who have been generally good about not going to it TOO often. Someone nodded on Monday, however, when the front page of the sports section featured two examples: "Shift in Culture, and in Standings" (about the post-Barry Bonds San Francisco Giants) and "In Rome, Phelps Gets Satisfaction and Gold."
Week in Review
July 26, 2009
I was quoted in today's New York Times "Week in Review" section, in an article about Frank McCourt's influence on contemporary memoir. It was nice to be included, but I wish they had included the title of my forthcoming book: "Memoir: A History."
Eye-Rack, Ih-Rack: Let's Call the Whole Thing Off
June 16, 2009
'Ja ever notice how there are three roughly equally common pronunciations of Iraq: Ih-rahk, Ih-rack, and Eye-rack? I make some observations about the phenomenon in an NPR.org commentary at http://tinyurl.com/ngwetx
Noticed: Shrink-shrank-alooza
June 10, 2009
This sentence appeared in The New York Times on June 8: “Many journalists who have spent their lives scrambling up the greasy pole of traditional media have drank away many hours at Elaine’s ruing the passing of the good old days.” Right, “drank” instead of “drunk.” It might seem like a pretty egregious mistake, but it’s actually just one instance of a widespread recent switcheroo between past-tense and past-participle verb forms.
In non-standard speech, it’s very common to substitute the past for the participle (“He had went there”) or the other way around (“She done it”). But this has spread to the mainstream for a small group of rhyming or near-rhyming verbs: sing, drink, sink, shrink, spring, and stink.
It’s not a brand-new phenomenon. Alfred Lord Tennyson had a line in his poem “Mariana,” "And the blue-fly sung in the pane." T.S. Eliot quoted it approvingly, noting, “The line would be ruined if you substituted sang for sung.” And there is something about these “wrong” words that makes them seem stronger, more apt. Disney no doubt did extensive market research before deciding to call their movie “Honey, I Shrunk [instead of “Shrank”] the Kids.” (Christopher Darden, a prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson trial, went the other way when he said, “The gloves appeared to have shrank somewhat.”)
In recent months, for whatever reason, the practice has taken off. Blogging for the Atlantic about a Bruce Springsteen concert, Jeffrey Goldberg observed about the Boss’s endless ballad “Outlaw Pete,” “He shouldn’t have sang it at all.” And about two weeks ago, the Times said about a TV program, “The target audience sunk sharply in its second week, but the show rebounded.“
Google searches reveal that “it shrunk” beats “it shrank” by a more than 2-1 margin (1,040,000 hits to 419,000), while “it sunk” barely beats out “it sank,” and, surprisingly, the “correct” “it stank” still bests “it stunk,” 178,000 to 117,000.
I wonder what T.S. Eliot would have thunk about it all.
"Elements of Style" @ 50
April 26, 2009
The New York Times asked me to weigh in on Strunk and White’s “The Elements and Style” for on online forum it was putting together to commemorate the book’s fiftieth birthday. I complied, taking a swipe at the book’s overall arbitrariness, especially in regard to its ever-shifting sense of the word “style.” Little did I know that the four other contributors to the forum would show the book even less love. Basically, a bashathon.
A bit of a corrective would seem to be in order. And so I will point out, first, that E.B. White was a better writer than all five of us bloviators, possibly better than all five of us put together. To demonstrate that point, I’ll quote a bit from White’s Introduction to the 1959 edition. (For those not familiar with “The Elements of Style”’s complicated provenance: it began as a pamphlet, written and privately printed in 1918 by William Strunk, a professor at Cornell in the early decades of the 20th century. In the late ‘50s, White—long ago a student of Strunk’s—updated the book, and also provided it with an Introduction and closing chapter.) White writes:
“’Omit needless words!’ cries the author on page 17, and into that imperative Will Strunk really put his heart and soul. In the days when I was sitting in his class, omitted so many needless words, and omitted them so forcibly and with such eagerness and obvious relish, that he often seemed in the position of having short-changed himself, a man left with nothing more to say yet with time to fill, a radio prophet who had outdistanced the clock. Will Strunk got out of this predicament by a simple trick: he uttered every sentence three times. When he delivered his oration on brevity to the class, he leaned forward over his desk, grasped his coat lapels in his hands, and in a husky, conspiratorial voice said, ‘Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!’
“He was a memorable man, friendly and funny. Under the remembered sting of his kindly lash, I have been trying to omit needless words since 1919, and although there are still many words that cry for omission and the huge task will never be accomplished, it is exciting for me to reread the masterly Strunkian elaboration of this noble theme. It goes:
“’Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but every word tell.’”
That last paragraph is profound, and “omit needless words” is a Zen koan, simple on the surface, but dauntingly deep once you dive into it. A writer could spend his or her entire working life trying to achieve it—and its equally challenging and worthwhile corollary, “supply necessary words.” So as someone who not long ago celebrated (?) my own fiftieth birthday, I tip my hat to “Elements of Style” on its half-century mark. To be sure, it contains its share of arguable and even silly statements, but there’s wisdom to be found in it as well.
Noticed: Run-up in Britishisms
April 18, 2009
A few years ago, I published an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the new popularity in American speech and writing of certain British expressions: notably "to go missing," "run-up" (as a noun), and sell-by date.
The trend continues, as plentiful examples show. It's now much more common, I feel, to read references to good or bad "bits" in a book, rather than "parts." The New York Times obituary the other day of Clement Freud called him an expert in "cookery" rather than "cooking." (Yes, I know he was an Englishman, but the Times is an American paper!) You often hear a one-time event being referred to as a "one-off" and, more subtly, a lot more Yank writers are using the British participle "got" in favor of the American "gotten."
The veddy British expression I've been charting lately (via a Google News alert) is "it's early days," a common locution that means something like "it's too soon to tell." Google sends me five or six uses a day, and most days all of them are from British or Australian papers. Today, however, was the first day in which U.S. uses equaled British Empire ones: two each. One of the American cites was from a New York Times interview with an actress on "Gossip Girl," who said, talking of an upcoming movie role, "I’m the emotionally detached narcissist, but it’s early days and I still don’t know who’s playing the psycho opposite me."
The expression is oddly alluring, as witness this exchange on Fox News last weekend, between Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and economist Paul Laffer. They were discussing Barack Obama's popularity, which bemuses them:
Gigot: It's early days. It's still early days.
Laffer: It is early days.
The trend shows no sign of letting up. Next up: "going from strength to strength" and "spoiled for choice." Now pass me the damned tea.
Thinking About Dylan
March 30, 2009
I've been thinking about Dylan, a little more than usual, because I'm writing an essay about his lyrics, specifically about his penchant for changing them over time. The obvious examples are "Tangled Up In Blue" (where the carpenters' wives turned into truck-drivers' wives, and then truck-driving wives) and "You Ain't Going Nowhere" (which is pretty much different pretty much every time he sang it), but there are plenty of other examples. (If you have any good ones, please e-mail me.)
Anyway, I started Googling things like "Dylan changed the lyrics" and "Dylan 'different lyrics'" and was directed, naturally, to a lot of Dylan-related forums, blogs and bulletin boards.
I harvested some good examples, but I read a lot of interesting stuff on other topics as well. (In fact, the average level of intelligence and writing style was so high that it led me to gloomy thoughts about the future of newspapers: the thinking being, smart people are congregating at sites that speak to their special interests, not to general forums like local papers. But that's a topic for another day.)
One post talked about Dylan's stage demeanor, something that has bemused me for years. How odd that someone so brilliant at communicating through lyrics and music--someone so funny, earthy, and verbally resourceful--should be aggressively passive and mute on stage. I've seen Dylan about a dozen times in his Never-Ending Tour era, and I've never heard him utter anything beyond the names of the band and a couple of "thank you"s. (The one time he went beyond that was a great show at the New Orleans Jazz Fest. At the end of the show, he actually dropped to one knee in the direction of the audience. You could have knocked me over with a feather.) The paradox seemed greater when the wonderful "Theme Time Radio Hour" started playing on XM radio a couple of years ago. On "Theme Time," Bobby D. is your hip and funny uncle! He cracks wise, name-drops, tells jokes, and generally is warm and expansive. On one show a couple of weeks ago, he unleashed the following rather amazing sentence: "I was golfing with Ricky Jay, the magician, and he told me something interesting."
Reading the smart and appreciative talk, I had an epiphany: Dylan's manner on stage is necessary so as to keep the universe in balance. That is to say, he has given us so incredibly much in his songs and performances, and in the other artists he has inspired, that for him to give any more (of himself) in these venues would be to throw things totally out of whack.
Deal-Peal: What's the Big Shmeal?
March 17, 2009
Ever since 1965, when I saw a New York City Center production featuring Alan King as Nathan Detroit and Jerry Orbach as Sky Masterson (and Jake LaMotta, I just found out, as Big Jule), I have considered "Guys and Dolls" to be one of the great American works of art. So I was happy to see the New Yorker's John Lahr, in a review of the current Broadway revival in the March 9 issue, apply his considerable gifts to an appreciation of show's merits.
One line stopped me short, however. Lahr quoted the opening of one of the show's most memorable songs, sung by the gambler Sky: "My time of day is the dark time,/A couple of deals before dawn." Interesting, I thought. Lahr had gotten Frank Loesser's lyric wrong--in reality, it's "a couple of PEALS before dawn," as in peals of the clock. But the mistake was as good as the original, or nearly as good. I took this as a sign of Loesser's genius and sent Lahr a sympathetic e-mail saying as much. (I assumed he had gotten hundreds of communications about the mistake.)
His response was brief. It merely said that "deal" was the correct word--"couple of deals" referring to a couple of hands of cards.
I found it amusing that Lahr refused to admit the error. I looked up the song online so I could cite chapter and verse in my response. Oops. He was right and I was wrong--and I had been wrong for nearly forty-four years, every time I'd sung the song in the shower.
I still think this is a demonstration of Loesser's genius.
And I still think my version is better.
Talking Head
February 08, 2009
Make 'Em Laugh
I am a little late with this, but I was was interviewed for "Make 'Em Laugh," a documentary on the history of American comedy that recently aired on PBS. The comedian my head was talking about, not surprisingly, was Will Rogers.
Noticed
January 05, 2009
Not infrequently, I find myself noticing words and usages that are in the process of gaining popularity and, sometimes, acceptance. I thought I'd periodically post them here, under the heading "Noticed." Here's the first.
For some years, I've noticed that many of my students have a fondness for putting a comma after a sentence-starting conjunction, usually And, But or Yet. For example: "But, this is a non-standard usage." My hypothesis about this is that, like much else, it stems from a lack of reading, which is where one learns the conventions of punctuation. Comma-after-conjunction comes from listening, not reading; it replicates a pause that speakers often insert.
I've seen this comma twice in print. I didn't clip the first, which was a couple of months ago, I think. The second was a couple of days ago, in a headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer sports section:
"RAVENS, DOLPHINS LOOK TO RIDE IT OUT
Both teams have improved. Yet, each team now stands in the other's way."
I'm expecting to see it a lot more in the years ahead. But, who knows?
Note: My correspondent Ross Nowels writes that he refers to this as "'The Captain Kirk Effect,'i.e., inserting commas where they don't belong, thus creating unnecessary and often bizarre-sounding pauses, like 'Captain Kirk, making, a dramatic announcement.'"
