A year in the Here and Now under a Paradise Sky

Each year at this time I enjoying a game that involves answering questions, the same ones each year, using only the titles of books read that year. Let's see what happens.

Describe yourself: Ruined by Reading

How do you feel: Going Around in Academic Circles

Describe where you currently live: Here and Now

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: The Bookstore

What's your favorite form of transportation: Trains and Lovers

Your best friend is: Our Mutual Friend

You and your friends are: The Invisible Ones

What's the weather like where you are: Paradise Sky

What is the best advice you could give: The First 25 Years Are the Hardest

Thought for the day: No Time to Spare

How would you like to die: Die Laughing

What is your soul's present condition: The Heavenly Table

Well that was easier than I thought. Most of my answers even contain at least a grain of truth.

Fun with superlatives

I can't think of a superlative for Remarkable Reads: 34 Writers and Their Adventures in Reading, edited by J. Peder Zane. This book, however, is all about superlatives. Bebe Moore Campbell writes about the most memorable book she has read, Frederick Busch writes about the most dangerous book he has read, Robert Morgan about the wisest, Charles Frazier about the most tempting, Lee Smith about the most luminous, and so on.

The chosen books are fascinating, as are the superlatives and the essays explaining how those particular superlatives apply to those particular books. Many of the books are classics, or at least books you are likely to have heard about. Among these are E.M. Forster's Howards End, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. Other books may be new to most readers, such as The Tarahumara by Antonin Artaud and  Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo.

The superlatives don't always mean what you might think they mean. When Eric Wright calls Howards End the classiest book he has read, what he refers to is the novel's focus on the British class system of the time. Perhaps the most interesting thing Wright has to say is his observation that all the great children's books by British writers, from The Wind in the Willows to the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, were written by middle-class writers for middle-class children. All those references to nannies, cooks and housemaids meant little to children in lower classes. (Of course,  they mean little to today's middle-class children, but those children still love the stories.)

Possibly the book's best essay (there's my superlative) is the one in which Nasdijj describes To Tame a Land by Louis L'Amour as the saddest book he has read. He doesn't mean he shed any tears while reading it. Rather he means the novel is what he terms "cow manure." Nasdijj has worked as a cowboy and knows something of the history of the West, and this novel, he says, "kills even the shadow of truth." It describes "a picture of a place that never was and a time that never happened." He says he and other modern cowboys would sit around campfires at night and make fun of Louis L'Amour novels. That is sad.

A sad comic novel

There's something special about novels that can make a reader both laugh and cry, sometimes both at the same time. Patrick deWitt's French Exit is such a novel.

Frances Price is a 65-year-old heiress who has gone through her fortune and has virtually nothing left but a mama's boy son, Malcolm, who depends upon his mother for everything. A young woman, Susan, has fallen in love with him against her better judgment, but Malcolm prefers the company of his mother.

Booted out of their longtime New York City residence, they sell what possessions they have and escape to Paris, where they move into the apartment of Frances's only friend. Yet almost immediately she begins to make new friends, or at least hangers-on who want to see what happens next in the life of this fascinating woman. As for Frances herself, her main goal in life seems to be to spend what little money she has left as quickly as she can.

But I have not mentioned Little Frank, the cat Frances believes is her late husband reincarnated. Frank Price was a cut-throat attorney who made lots of money for his beautiful wife to spend. When she discovered his naked body following his heart attack, the cat was on his chest. Rather than call the authorities, Frances had just gone ahead with the ski trip she had planned. That act made the newspapers and made her a notorious woman, even in Paris when she arrives there years later, Little Frank in her handbag.

The book's title has multiple meanings, but at novel's end DeWitt leaves a hint of a possible French Entrance, a new life about to begin for at least one of his characters.

I listened to the audio version of the novel, perfectly read by Lorna Raver.

Swaddled

At Christmas Eve services around the world tonight, Christians will hear these words from the Gospel of Luke: "And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn." When I hear them tonight I will likely focus most on the word swaddling.

Until a few days ago I had never given the phrase “swaddling clothes” much thought. I assumed it was just another term for baby blanket. Weren't all babies wrapped in something warm soon after birth? It turns out the purpose of swaddling has as much to do with restriction of movement as warmth. A Wikipedia article states, "Swaddling clothes described in the Bible consisted of a cloth tied together by bandage-like strips. After an infant was born, the umbilical cord was cut and tied, and then the baby was washed with salt and oil, and wrapped with strips of cloth. These strips kept the newborn child warm and also ensured that the child's limbs would grow straight."

Swaddling went out of fashion in Europe about three centuries ago, although it is still practiced by some parents in some cultures, usually for less than the eight or nine months common in earlier times. I would think that swaddling would limit muscle development more than it would ensure straight limbs, but what do I know?

More recent translations of the Bible do not mention swaddling at all. In the New Internatonal Version, Mary just wraps her baby in cloths. In The Message it’s just a blanket. Perhaps the use of the word in the King James Version stems from the fact swaddling was still practiced in England at that time.

What prompted my attention to the practice of swaddling was the article “The Gift of Wrapping” by Jeff Peabody in the December issue of Christianity Today. “The conditions of his advent were a small metaphor for his entire life,” he writes. Consider what happened after Jesus died. He was anointed with oil and wrapped tightly in cloths and placed not in a manger but a tomb. And he died nailed to a cross. What could be more constricting than that? And yet, Peabody points out that as the Son of God, Jesus “experienced an unfathomable limitation of himself” his entire life. Perhaps the Resurrection was not just a victory over death but a victory over life itself.

This is a thought to ponder not just on Christmas Eve but on Christmas morning as I remove the wrappings from my gifts and set them free.

Vigor, complexity and flavor

I love to look at old books for some of the same reasons botanists like to study old vegetable strains. They have not been through the often highly dubious processes of refinement that have weeded out vigor and complexity, and flavor, too, from the contemporary language of ideas.

Marilynne Robinson, "Grace and Beauty," Ploughshares

Linguist John McWhorter tells of Civil War soldiers, many of them with barely eight years of formal education, writing wordy letters, filled with (to us) challenging sentences and references to Greeks and Romans and great works of literature, to their wives, sweethearts or parents back home. That's just the way people were taught to write once upon a time, with prose full of what Marilynne Robinson terms vigor, complexity and flavor.

Today clarity and simplicity are favored by those who teach writing and most of those who read it and write it. The use of words that somebody might have to look up or cultural references that are not clear to everyone are discouraged. As I noted a few weeks ago, those who read the Bible today are more comfortable with The Message, a paraphrase by Eugene Peterson, than the King James Version. Clarity trumps grace and beauty, especially when one is in a hurry, as we all seem to be.

To be sure, one can still find writing of recent vintage that is full of vigor, complexity and flavor. Try reading Robinson's essay in its entirely, for example, or any of her novels.

Thankfully Robinson is not alone either in writing books of this type or in preferring to read them. There will always be some who would rather read Jane Austen than Danielle Steel, Charles Dickens than James Patterson, King James than Eugene Peterson.

Grace and beauty, peanut butter and jelly

As a fiction develops, a writer has the exhilarating experience of losing options, of saying "Of course!" to things that emerge on the page with an aura of necessity about them.

Marilynne Robinson, "Grace and Beauty," Ploughshares

Marilynne Robinson

Imagine desiring a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch and then having to select a supermarket from all those in your area, at which you must pick one loaf of bread from all those many available, one jar of peanut butter from all those on the shelves and one jar of jelly from the many different brands and flavors you have to choose from. Thankfully, unless we happen to be in the mood for something different, we already know which supermarket, which kind of bread, which brand of peanut butter and which flavor of jelly we prefer. Thus we can shop with our mind free to ponder more important decisions, such as what to get for that evening's main course.

So is this the kind of "exhilarating experience" Marilynne Robinson is talking about? As a writer makes more and more choices about a story and the characters who populate it, there become fewer and fewer choices yet to be made. The writer is free to focus on more important questions, such as where to go with the story and how best to get there.

But there is something more here, suggested by that phrase "aura of necessity." Those early decisions don't just make the later ones easier. They also make them obvious, or at least more obvious. Many authors speak of their characters as having minds of their own. Once they are given a personality and a backstory, they seem to make their own decisions about what to do next. From the author's perspective, what those characters do is what they must do. Yet somehow in the best fiction, what may seem so obvious to the author never seems obvious to us readers. We are almost always surprised. Perhaps that's because we readers don't know the characters as well as the author does.

Robinson goes on to say this about Charles Dickens, "A great part of the pleasure of reading Dickens comes from the strange compound of utter originality and perfect inevitability invested in his best characters. After one or two brilliant details, every subsequent choice is disciplined by them." The result is grace and beauty, the subjects of Robinson's essay.

Two tips for readers

H.W. Brands

Historian H.W. Brands tells in Remarkable Reads about being assigned the book The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams as an 18-year-old college student and finding it lacking. Many years later he read it again, and then again and again, each time finding much of value there. So why the difference? Brands offers two explanations: he was a different person when he read the book a second time, and as a student he had skipped the book's introduction.

If one were to make a list of tips for readers, these two should be on that list:

1. Read a book at the right time.

2. If a book has an introduction, read it.

When I wrote about Middlemarch earlier this year I told how I had found George Eliot's novel incomprehensible when I attempted to read it as a college student. Decades later I found it rich and rewarding. The book hasn't changed, but I have. Some books, such as The Catcher in the Rye or A Separate Peace, are best read in one's youth. I think the high school and college years are the best time to read most of the classics. That time of life is when great literature is most likely to speak profoundly to us.

As for nonfiction, the obvious time to read it is when it interests us. You wouldn't read a book about parenting before parenthood or after the kids are in college. Of course, some books would interest us if we would only give them a chance, so a reader needs to be open to new possibilities.

As for introductions, reading them is wise, especially for students. A book's introduction is often like the overture to a Broadway musical, summarizing what is to come. It can make a book, especially one one like The Education of Henry Adams, easier to follow. An introduction often tells how the author came to write the book, as does the introduction to The Rhine, a new book by Ben Coates. He says the idea for the book came to him after ice skating in Amsterdam. Bryan Kozlowski's introduction to What the Dickens?, a book I reviewed a week ago, tells of Charles Dickens's passion for unusual words.

Not all books have introductions. Taking a few books off one of my shelves I found, for example, that David McCullough didn't think one was necessary for The Great Bridge, nor did Oliver Sacks for his autobiography On the Move. Good for them. I admire writers who can get right to the point. But when a writer deems an introduction necessary, it's best not to ignore it. If it's important to them, it may be important to us.

Introductions are rare in novels. There are often prologues, but they are a different beast. An author might write an introduction for a new edition of a successful novel first published 20 or 30 years earlier. Classic novels often have new introductions penned by professors of literature. The edition of Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens that I read earlier this year has such an introduction. It helped me follow the novel, and students especially would be wise not to pass it over.

Not a dull paragraph

A couple of years ago William Morrow reissued the Inspector Banks novels by British writer Peter Robinson in new paperback editions, giving those of us who missed them the first time around a second chance. I took that chance with Blood at the Root, first published in 1997, and I am delighted I did.

The inspector prefers music, especially opera, to solving crimes, and there are references to his passion for music every few pages. Even so Banks is an excellent detective, so excellent, in fact, that it nearly costs him his job.

The case seems open and shut. Twice in fact. A young man, who it turns out was a racist and would-be Nazi, is found beaten to death in an alley. He had had words with young men with darker skin at a pub earlier that night, so they seem likely suspects. Evidence is lacking, however, and holding them causes political repercussions. So the investigation continues.

Acting on a tip, Banks goes to Amsterdam for a weekend, right after his wife has left him, and he gets information relating to the case from an undercover cop. Upon his return he learns the murder has been solved after a young man has confessed and, what's more, Banks is suspended for dereliction of duty by leaving the country. Not trusting his boss to keep quiet about the undercover man and still not having all the evidence he needs, Banks stays mum and continues investigating on his own.

There's not a dull paragraph in the book, yet it seems incomplete. Questions remain after the final page, such as, will Banks get his job (and his wife) back? Apparently so, for Robinson continues to write Inspector Banks novels.

We all need a Flo

One television commercial I actually enjoy watching is the one in which Flo (played by Stephanie Courtney, who may just be the best actress on TV) leads some people through the jungle to a tribe of insurance agents, whose strange language she translates for them. Who among us wouldn't love to have a translator with us when speaking with insurance agents?

In fact, we could use such a translator when talking with doctors about our test results, with bankers about a mortgage, with mechanics about car repairs, with contractors about our remodeling project or when we attempt to tackle our federal income tax forms on our own. Last night our condo association faced decisions regarding reserve funding, pooled reserves and surplus operating funds. Where was Flo when we needed her?

Every industry, and even a hobby like sewing or stamp collecting, has and needs its own vocabulary. The more technical the activity, the more obscure the lingo will be to outsiders. The best insurance agents, doctors, bankers, etc., know how to talk in laymen's language.

A few days ago I read a Popular Science article about geologist Lucy Jones, who has made a career out of being the Flo between seismologists and the politicians, builders and the citizens of California, explaining the dangers posed by future earthquakes and what can be done about them. One civil engineering professor says of her, "What makes her different from other technocrats is she can understand what people outside her discipline are telling her very quickly, and she can extract stuff that you really need to know. I can't think of five people who have the ability to distill information the way she does."

If safer buildings, bridges and dams are going to be built and existing ones are going to be made safer, people like Lucy Jones are going to be necessary.

After reading the article, it occurred to me that understanding the technical and the complex and explaining it in terms others can understand is what Popular Science magazine has been doing since 1872.

Words Dickens loved

I wallow in words.

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Like William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens invented many words. Unlike Shakespeare, the words coined by Dickens rarely found their way into the language. Some words associated with Dickens, such as humbug, were not actually his inventions. Rampage, footlights, boredom, kibosh and snobbish have also been wrongly attributed to the great Victorian novelist.

One finds this information in What the Dickens?, a wonderful dictionary of Dickensian words written by Bryan Kozlowski and published a couple of years ago.

Dickens loved interesting names and interesting words, as any of his readers can attest. Often he enjoyed turning his characters' names into words, such as, Barnacleism, Pecksniffian, Nellicide, Smallweedy and Pumblechookian. Considering how many common English words have been formed from the names of real or fictional people, it seems surprising that none of these words has caught on.

My vote for the best Dickens creation goes to sassigassity, found in his story "A Christmas Tree." The word, meaning audacity with attitude according to Kozlowski, is fun to say and should be a part of everyone's vocabulary. Unfortunately it isn't. Other Dickens failures include adverbiously, comfoozled and the delightful phrase gas and gaiters, meaning everything is satisfactory.

In his commentary on each word, Kozlowski usually strays into trivia about the author's life and works, making his book almost as much a biography as a dictionary. About the word trumpery (which one would think would be undergoing something of a revival these days), he tells us that Dickens seemed to need a title before he could get serious about writing a novel. Before he could write Martin Chuzzlewit, for example, he flirted with such surnames as Sweezleden, Sweezleback and Chuzzletoe. Not until he came to Chuzzlewit did the novel fall into place.

For those who love Charles Dickens and those who love words, and these may well be mostly the same people, What the Dickens? is a good book to wallow in.

Technology makes writers

Linda and I had never baked bread in our lives until she was given one of those bread-making machines as a Christmas gift. Just like that we became bread bakers, at least until the machine broke down and was never replaced. When new technology makes something easier, more people are going to do it. That goes for writing, as well.

John McWhorter

Listening to a lecture by linguist John McWhorter the other day, I heard him say, "I'm a writer because of word processors." McWhorter has written several books, and I have read some of them. They are terrific. Would he never have written them had not the word processor been invented? He said he hated writing with a typewriter. Remember the bother of making corrections or doing any kind of correcting or rewriting?

Yet, being of an earlier generation, it was the typewriter that made a writer out of me. I was 13 or 14 and had never noticed any interest in writing or aptitude for it. Then my parents brought home a typewriter, and I was hooked almost immediately. Typing was so much easier than scratching something out with pen and ink, especially with my poor penmanship.

But I can imagine someone from a still earlier generation becoming a writer because of the ease of writing with a fountain pen or even a ballpoint. Certainly the invention of the printing press made writers out of many people.

Today people can write easily on their home computers, tablets and even phones. Anyone can start a blog, write reviews of books, restaurants or almost any kind of product or service, and what they write may be read by thousands of others. New technology has also made self-publishing easier and more affordable, turning many would-be authors into actual authors.

If you are over a certain age, you can probably remember a time when you didn't know anyone who had written a book. Today most of us probably know several such people. We may have even written one ourselves.

Technology may not turn us into great writers, or even good writers, but it can turn us into writers. Just ask John McWhorter. Or me.

Miss Julia starts slow

To be the executor of an estate is an important job, and for some people it may even be an interesting one. Rarely does it lead to comedy or adventure, however, so Ann B. Ross faces quite a challenge when she has Miss Julia named executor of a casual friend's estate in her 2016 novel Miss Julia Inherits a Mess. How can she turn this dull premise into a typical, rollicking Miss Julia novel? Unfortunately she can't, at least not until the final chapters.

For most of the way this is pretty tame stuff. Mattie Ross, an elderly woman Miss Julia knows, but not well, dies and surprisingly names her to see that her many beneficiaries receive the money she bequeaths them. But there may be more beneficiaries than money. Except for a modest bank account, Mattie didn't seem to have much.

Things start to get interesting when some of the dead woman's jewelry and furniture hint at value and a man turns up claiming to be Mattie's long lost nephew interested only in family history. Mattie had never mentioned any living relatives. Whether an actual relative or a con man, his very presence makes Miss Julia more alert. Might Mattie Freeman have been worth more than what is apparent to the executor of her estate?

Eventually this tale shifts into typical Miss Julia gear, and the conclusion is great fun

How we talk vs. how we write

Spoken language has always differed from written language. Humans have been talking to each other for eons, but we've been writing for just a few thousand years. And for most of those few thousand years, only a handful of educated people could read or understand what had been written.

When people wrote, whether it was poetry, a book that would eventually become a part of the Bible or a letter home, it would inevitably be in more formal and proper language than what they spoke in normal conversation. Shakespeare probably didn't sound like Shakespeare when he went home at night. When we are writing, we have time to think about what we are saying. We can go back and make corrections. We can dress up our language to make a good impression.

In the movie The Green Book, a rough nightclub bouncer is hired by an educated black pianist to drive him on a concert tour. Along the way Tony Vallelonga writes stumbling letters to his wife, but then Don Shirley, the musician, helps him dress up those letters in eloquent prose. The wife isn't fooled. She knows Tony has had help. Still the letters make the desired impression.

Over the past half century or so, thanks to e-mail and a variety of other factors, the differences between spoken English and written English have narrowed, yet still differences exist, and probably will continue to do so.

Here are some ways in which how we talk differs from how we write:

1. Shorter sentences. Complex sentences are rare in normal conversation.

2. Incomplete sentences. One of my previous blog posts tells of my difficulty in getting a good quote as a newspaper reporter because my sources often didn't complete their sentences.

3. Simpler words. You can't look up a word in a thesaurus when you're talking on the phone.

4. More slang, more profanity.

5. Repetition. When we can't think of what to say next, we repeat what we've said before.

6. The use of conversation fillers like "you know" and "like" and "ummm."

7. Context. When you are writing, you have to explain the context. What or who exactly are you writing about? In conversation, however, the other person probably already knows or even shares the context. They may be in the same room. They see what you see and hear what you hear.. That's why reading the Watergate transcripts is so confusing. Had you been in the Oval Office at the time knowing what Richard Nixon and his henchmen knew, it would have made perfect sense. In the same way, a transcript of your conversation with a friend probably wouldn't make much sense to a stranger reading it.

8. Impermanence. What we say disappears into the air, while what we write has a bit of a shelf life. Anyway this use to be true. Now one never knows when one's words are being recorded. This is especially true of politicians and other well-known individuals. They need to always be careful about what they say, and this too may be serving to bring spoken language and written language closer together.