Miss Kopp rides again

Amy Stewart's Constance Kopp novels make compulsive reading, and Miss Kopp Just Won't Quit (2018) ranks with the best in the series.

Six-foot-tall Constance Kopp, based on an actual person, is the first female deputy sheriff in Hackensack, New Jersey, in the years just before America enters World War I. She takes care of the female prisoners and sometimes spends the night in her own cell. Yet as a woman in a man's world, she is always newsworthy and even controversial. especially now that it is an election year. The election of a new sheriff could jeopardize her fledgling career.

Yet that is a mere subplot here. The title's real significance applies to her determination to help a housewife whose husband routinely sends her to a mental asylum. Charged with taking the woman to the institution, Constance becomes convinced there is nothing mentally wrong with Mrs. Kayser. Although told to back off because it is not her responsibility to question a judge's order, she nevertheless pursues justice for this woman, even to to the point of getting an attorney and a private investigator.

Meanwhile her home life once again proves entertaining. Her sister, Norma, remains all business, always busy and totally committed to getting the Army to use her carrier pigeons when they go to France. Her other sister (actually her secret daughter), Fleurette, remains flighty, gifted at making clothing but more interested in singing and dancing.

This novel doesn't end with a bang, but rather peters out, but keep in mind that it is fiction based on true events.

Novel relationships

Every novel. every narrator can't help offering the promise of a relationship.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

Relationships are important to all of us — friends, lovers, families, even store clerks and those working in medical offices whom we see periodically. But novels or the narrators of novels? Can we have meaningful relationships with them?

Jane Smiley

I like that Jane Smiley, in making the statement above, clarifies it with the phrase "offering the promise of a relationship." This promise is not fulfilled in every novel or in every narrator. Some novels we read and soon forget. Of course, that also may be true of some human relationships. First dates don't always lead to second dates. Even close friendships can evaporate quickly after one person moves away.

I think something very much like a relationship can develop while one is engrossed in a novel. The same is true of movies, of course. We become invested in the story. The words and actions of the characters matter to us. We want to give them advice: Don't open that door. Don't believe what he's saying. Kiss her, you fool.

Some fictional relationships can last longer than many real human relationships. Why do we keep some novels on our shelves long after we have finished reading them or why do we want to read some novels again and again?  It's because the relationship isn't over.

Fun with English

Patricia T. O'Conner formerly worked for the New York Times, helping writers and reporters clean up their prose, but perhaps she might have been been more at home at the New York Post.

The Post is known for its fun-filled and pun-filled headlines, A recent issue, for example, had headlines like "AND THE DRESS IS HISTORY," about Melania Trump's inaugural gown being donated to the Smithsonian, and "Snow way! More white stuff for us?" about another predicted storm for New York City.

If you can enjoy the Post for its headlines, you might enjoy Origins of the Specious by O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman (2009) for its subheads (and a lot more). For example:

"Wake My Day" — Should we say "I woke" or "I waked" or "I have woken" or "I have waked" or "I have woke"? I have been a writer for most of my life, but I am still confused by that one. O'Conner, in her always witty and informative fashion, sets us straight. Any will do.

"A Niche in Time" — What is the proper way to pronounce the word niche? Should it be NITCH or NEESH? She says NITCH, thank goodness. Only snobs say NEESH.

"Ivory League" — Here she digs into the question of why we use the term "ivory tower" to refer to the intellectual elite. She gives us quite a history of the phrase, beginning with the Song of Solomon, where we can find, "Thy neck is as a tower of ivory." She moves on to Mary McCarthy's 1963 novel The Group," which include the sentence, "We called you the Ivory Tower group."

"Axe, and It Shall Be Given" — Here she delves into the question of why so many people, especially black Americans, pronounce the word ask as axe. Guess what! This goes back to England hundreds of years ago. Chaucer, for example, wrote, "a man that ... cometh for to axe him of mercy."

O'Conner, with Kellerman's assistance, makes the language fun.

An escape or a confirmation?

Lawrence Durrell

"I don't believe one reads to escape reality," the British novelist Lawrence Durrell said. "A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he had not experienced."

But can't both be true, even at the same time?

A man may work in an office in Cincinnati or as a plumber in Philadelphia and, in the evening, enjoy reading western novels. He may want to both escape the reality of his own circumstances — perhaps there is even a nagging wife — while at the same time wanting to experience a reality, even if it's an imagined one, that he can never experience in real life.

Or a war novel may be read by someone with no military experience at all. He will never know what it is really like being in combat, but a book can confirm that reality, while at the same taking him briefly away from his normal routine.

A lonely middle-aged woman who has never experienced romance in her life may read one romance novel after another to confirm a reality that she believes other women have known.

And so on.

Thanks to books, one can travel into space, explore the deep ocean, find true love, win a bar fight, hit a home run in the World Series, solve mysteries, travel the world or do almost anything else. There are many more realities than any one person can experience in one lifetime. Books expand our possibilities.

Behind the scheme

Emily St. John Mandel's 2020 novel The Glass Hotel is a bit hard to peg. It covers a lot of years in relatively few pages. There are numerous characters. It is about a Ponzi scheme, yet it is also a ghost story

All this adds to the novel's charm.

The hotel of the title is where the novel begins and where it ends. Hotel Caiette is isolated on Vancouver Island, accessible only by boat. Only rich people stay there. Only those who prefer isolation can work there.

Early on Jonathan Alkaitis, a wealthy investor, meets Vincent, the bartender. Despite the misleading name, Vincent is actually a beautiful young woman. Alkaitis quickly makes her his pretend wife, never a replacement for his beloved late wife, but an attractive woman to keep on his arm and to share a bed with.

The life suits them both of them until authorities arrest Alkaitis for stealing from his many wealthy clients. He goes to prison. Vincent goes into isolation, working aboard ships where nobody knows her past.

Meanwhile Mandel looks into the lives of the scheme's victims, as well as those who worked with Alkaitis and suspected something was wrong yet were making too much money to take a stand. While all this is going on,  ghosts come and go, appearing to several people during the course of the novel.

This is not your usual crime novel — or ghost story — but it is a gem.

Why no ads?

Magazines and newspapers can have more ads than articles. Television interrupts every show every few minutes with several minutes of commercials. Even supposedly ad-free public television throws in ads at the beginning and end of programing. When you go to the movies, you must sit through several minutes worth of commercials before the movie finally starts. On the web, you can't watch YouTube videos, do a Google search or do much of anything else (reading this blog being an exception) without encountering ads.

So how have books survived all these years without advertising?

To be sure, each book's publisher probably promotes other books they publish, especially those by the same author, somewhere in each volume. But you don't find Pepsi ads between chapters. You never find a State Farm ad on the back cover. How can this be?

Other media survive thanks to advertising, but not books. Advertising makes mass communication free, or at least relatively cheap. Somebody has to pay for "free" television programs. Somebody has to pay for web searches. Film producers and movie theaters need extra income to stay afloat.

Yet publishers keep publishing books, more and more each year, without putting advertising between the covers. What gives?

First, many people like to see their words in print, meaning they are willing to write books for little financial return. For publishers, books are relatively inexpensive to print, but they are not inexpensive to purchase. We readers are the ones who pay the freight. Books might actually be less expensive if they contained advertising. We must now pay about $30, sometimes a lot more, for a hardback book and nearly $20 for a paperback. Perhaps some advertising would help publishers, authors and readers, at least financially.

We are spared advertising in books, in part, because most books aren't all that popular. Most books, in fact, sell only a few thousand copies, if that. Even bestsellers don't necessarily sell enough copies to make authors — or potential advertisers — rich. Thus advertising in books doesn't make much sense in the book business. Why buy advertising in a book that may sell relatively few copies? And if publishers ever became dependent on advertising, fewer books might be published.

The ad-free tradition helps. It's how books have always been. We don't want our books "sponsored" because advertisers may try to influence content. Sometimes, for example, we see certain products in films because the manufacturers of those products have invested money in the productions. We might possibly see something similar if books contained advertising.

Quite piossibly the future of book publishing depends upon the industry keeping books ad-free.

Underwater sound

We may have heard about humpback whales that sing in the ocean, but it may not have ever occurred to us that other forms of sea life communicate by sound, as well. It was Jacques-Yves Cousteau who coined the phrase "the silent world" in one of his films about the sea, and most people believed him.

Yet the oceans are a concert of sound, it turns out. Amorina Kingdon tells us about it in her 2024 book Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water. Many different species communicate by sound. These are not necessarily vocal sounds. Some species produce sound by rubbing body parts together or in other ways.

Kingdon writes, "Sculpins move their pectoral girdle. Toadfish, squirrelfish, and others drum on their swim bladder with special muscles or tendons, making resonant hums, moans, and boops. Blue grunt or beau-gregory scrape or grind special teeth in their throats. Some fish burp or expel gas from their anus."

Researchers have speculated that the songs of humpback whales may actually, in a sense, rhyme.

Whale sounds can travel many miles. It is how they communicate with each other. Some species use sound to attract mates or to find their young in dark water.

Humans have a way if interfering with the natural world without meaning to, such as by simply cutting down  dead trees. This is true of underwater sound, as well. The engines of ships, sonar and windmills, for example, can make life difficult for sea life and may be responsible for those mysterious beached whales.

Kingdon gives us the good and the bad of underwater sound.