Something in common

It's wonderful when a man and a woman discover they have something in common. What Delwood Reese and Rae Lynn Cobb have in common in Donna Everhart's 2022 novel The Saints of Swallow Hill is very uncommon: They both have out-of-body experiences. They are dead, but then alive again with incredible stories to tell, though they both hesitate to tell them.

Set in Georgia in 1932, the Depression well under way and jobs hard to find, Del is a womanizing young man who has a relationship with the wrong man's wife. That man is his boss, who in revenge gives Del the dangerous job of climbing inside a grain bin to break up the corn inside. But then his boss opens the door at the bottom of the bin, letting the corn run out and causing Del to get buried. Later he can remember watching other men trying to rescue him, even though his unconscious body is buried in corn.

Now having lost his interest in women, becoming the first of our saints, he ends up working on a turpentine farm with a boss even more savage than his previous one. Any man Crow doesn't like and or who he doesn't think is working hard enough he puts in a small sweat box for days at a time. Del is one of these victims, though he manages to survive, unlike some others.

Meanwhile Rae Lynn Cobb kills her badly injured husband in a desperate act of mercy, then flees to Georgia and that same turpentine farm, where she gets a job by pretending to be a man named Ray Cobb. She can't keep up with the men and is placed in the sweat box for three days, where she has her own out-of-body experience. 

Finally released and barely alive, she is discovered to be a woman. Cornelia, the abused wife of the storekeeper, brings her back to life and gives her a place in the store, against her husband's wishes.

The relationship between these two characters takes the entire novel to develop, through many hardships, all of which make it sweet and believable, the miracles notwithstanding.

Autoconfusion

"She recently had lost much with Rick and Pam."

That was a sentence in an otherwise clear email I received recently from a friend from high school. But what did it mean? What had been lost? What did Rick and Pam have to do with it? Instead of emailing back for an explanation, I decided to call my friend, Judy. Nothing had been lost, she told me. Linda, another high school friend, had simply had lunch with Rick and Pam, two other friends from high school.

It's nice to know that after more than 60 years, we Swanton Bulldogs remain connected, and also that Linda, Rick and Pam hadn't actually lost anything. So what happened in that email? Blame autocompletion.

When you are writing on a computer or phone, the device seems to look over your shoulder and try to complete your thoughts, correct your errors and save you trouble. Sometimes this works nicely and actually does save time and trouble. Other times it just gets you into more trouble, as in the above email. We can only imagine what series of typos and "corrections" turned "had lunch" into "had lost much," thanks to autocompletion, One needs to read over everything you have written with great care, which of course takes more time than autocompletion usually saves.

In his book Knowing What We Know, Simon Winchester calls autocompletion a "somewhat diabolical and wholly unnecessary nuisance, the bane of the writer's life."  

Smilin' Ed and Froggy

When I was a kid back in the 1950s I loved a Saturday morning TV show featuring a puppet named Froggy the Gremlin, about whom we often heard the catchphrase "Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy." The best part of the show, as far as I was concerned, came when Smilin' Ed McConnell and later Andy Devine tried to tell a story, while Froggy, in effect, autocompleted his sentences in outrageous ways, greatly irritating Smilin' Ed or Andy to the amusement of children like me.

It was great fun. Then. Now I sympathize more with Smilin' Ed and Andy. Do we really need a Froggy the Gremlin in our phones and computers?

Profit motive

Most of us, if we think about it at all, probably assume the Bible was first book printed by Johannes Gutenberg for religious reasons. Not true, says Simon Winchester in Knowing What We Know. Gutenberg printed the Bible first for financial reasons. He needed to make as much money as possible to recoup his expenses. That meant printing a book that someone would actually buy.

"What the Gutenberg publishing house was bent on creating during its three years of intense work was a book designed primarily for those who would pay for it," Winchester writes.

Before moveable type made printed books possible in large numbers, there was little reason for most people to learn how to read. Literacy was a gift enjoyed by few, mostly the elite and especially those within the Church. And these were the people with enough money to buy books. Winchester says the first printed Bibles cost the equivalent of $30,000 in today's money.

Just as important, Gutenberg needed to maximize income by selling his book beyond Germany. Why would people in France or other countries in Europe pay for a book printed in German? And there wouldn't be enough customers in Germany to make a book printed in German profitable.

But members of the clergy throughout Europe could read Latin, making a Latin Bible the ideal choice for the first book printed with moveable type.

"Thus did Johannes Gutenberg follow a rule that applies to this day: the books most likely to make money are the books that get published," Winchester says. And all these centuries later, Bibles continue to make money for publishers.

Encyclopedia's end

A few decades ago, encyclopedia sets were a fixture in any library, large or small. When I was in high school, the World Book was the first source — and in many cases the only source — most students went to when they had to write a theme paper. The entries were relatively brief and relatively easy to understand, a better choice than the Britannica for most students.

So what happened to encyclopedias? Why don't they exist anymore? The Internet, right? Well, no, says Simon Winchester in his book Knowing What We Know. They were done in by knowledge. Knowledge began expanding too rapidly for a printed encyclopedia to keep up.

Winchester writes: "The Britannica started showing its age, appearing to be long past its sell-by date, dying on its feet The pace of change was beyond the capacity of so unwieldy and arthritic a behemoth to record it. It had become a myth. It had become a victim of its own gargantuan ambition."

An encyclopedia took years to assemble, then became outdated long before it got into print and on anybody's shelf. The Encyclopedia Brittanica stopped publication in 2012, but it was essentially dead long before that. And it outlasted most other multi-volume encyclopedias.

Much the same is true of dictionaries and other kinds of reference books. There are quicker, cheaper, more reliable ways of obtaining the latest information. New words are added to the vocabulary and old words change their meanings faster than a printed dictionary can produce a new edition.

Those encyclopedias and dictionaries that remain in print are usually single volumes that collect information that doesn't change much, or doesn't change rapidly, such as a Bible dictionary.

Encyclopedias probably served their purpose, but I doubt that many people miss them. I only rarely ever opened it even when I had a set in my home. It may have been comforting to have all that knowledge there, easily available even if rarely used, but the books took up so much space and cost so much money that they were impractical for most people. I had a set only because the local library didn't want it any longer and I thought, mistakenly, that it might be useful.

Several years ago A.J. Jacobs read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from beginning to end and wrote a book about the experience, The Know-It-All. The successful book was published in 2005, or not long before the printed version was abandoned for good. He may be among the very few people who ever actually got their money's worth.

The history of knowledge

Knowledge makes humble. Ignorance makes proud.

Confucius

Books are depositories of knowledge. Now Simon Winchester has written a book about knowledge itself, Knowing What We Know (2023).

How is knowledge gathered? How is it used? How is it conveyed to others? How is it stored? Winchester tackles all such questions and in so doing discusses everything from oral traditions to schools to the invention of moveable type to the Encyclopedia Brittanica to Wikipedia and Google. He writes about libraries and newspapers and universities, as well as about many great individuals  down through the ages from all parts of the world, from Asia to Africa to Europe to America, who have advanced the cause of knowledge.

Yet knowledge has a dark side, and Winchester does not ignore it, devoting a few pages to propaganda, which either creates fake knowledge or emphasizes one side of a question while downplaying the other. In other words, he writes about such things as politics and advertising. Unfortunately Winchester sometimes turns political himself and tosses in his own propaganda.

The most disturbing part of his book comes near the end when he wonders if knowledge may be becoming obsolete. Because of calculators, we no longer need to know even basic math. Because we have GPS. we no longer need to know much about geography. In which direction does the sun set? We no longer need to know even that. Because of Wikipedia and Google and Siri, we no longer need to know much of anything. What does this mean for the future of mankind?

Winchester packs so much into this book that it seems hard to believe that it comes in under 400 pages.

Mostly funny stuff

In his introduction to P.J. O'Rourke's The Funny Stuff, a collection of brief excerpts from O'Rourke's writings, Christopher Buckley describes the selection of these quotations as being like plucking "one low-hanging fruit after another." In other words, what could be easier than finding funny things P.J. O'Rourke wrote?

When I read that, I agreed with it, for I have read a number of O'Rourke books and laughed my way through each of them. Yet after finishing this book, I found that I disagreed. So what went wrong?

The main problem, I think, is that O'Rourke's lines are funnier in context than standing alone. There are exceptions, of course:

"There is only one hard-and-fast rule about the place to have a party: someone else's place."

"If you run more than twenty miles a week, try not to die young, It will make people snigger."

"El Salvador has the scenery of northern California and the climate of southern California plus — and this was a relief — no Californians."

"Freedom of speech is important — if you have anything to say. I've checked the Internet; nobody does."

Yet so many of the lines quoted were, I'm sure, much more amusing in the context of the book or article in which they are found. They are like the punch lines without the jokes.

And many of the excerpts collected by Terry McDonell, the editor, are not really funny at all, but just good examples of clever writing, even witty writing, but not knee-slapping stuff. Here is a sample about Tanzania" "Probably every child whose parents weren't rich enough has been told, 'We're rich in other ways.' Tanzania is fabulously rich in other ways." That's a great line, but I wouldn't call it funny.

I enjoyed The Funny Stuff very much, but I think I would have called it The Good Stuff. 

Fowler play

Connie May Fowler

Before Women Had Wings, the novel by Connie May Fowler I reviewed favorably two days ago, was purchased by mistake in a used bookstore. I had become a fan of Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and other fine novels, and got the names confused. I wanted Karen Joy but got Connie May.

Some mistakes turn out to be blessings, and this was one of them. I enjoyed Connie May's novel as much as I have Karen Joy's.

But adding to the confusion, there is also Therese Anne.

Therese Anne Fowler is the author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, A Well-Behaved Woman and other novels. I have not read any of her books, but this Fowler may actually have sold more books than the other two. I don't really know about that, but her books seem easier to find. I do know that when one gets to the F's in the fiction section of a bookstore or library, one needs to be careful about those Fowlers.

There is also an Earlene Fowler, but fortunately she does not use her middle name, and her books are usually shelved with the mysteries.