We have a winner!

I have written here many times about some of our local self-published writers. They figure that if they run their prose through the spell-checker, it's good to go. Story editing? Forget it. Audience analysis? Not for them. A well designed cover? They have Microsoft Paint and aren't afraid to use it. Illustrations that support the text? See "Microsoft Paint," above. A price point that will move books? They have to recoup their investment from the publisher (or the local copy place), so they charge $16.95 for a 32-page children's book.

After seven years in the book business, I think we have a winner, Dipsy. Dipsy's agent brought in four books, which are so unrelievedly awful as to be worthy of display in a glass case with bits of string and dead mice.

Contrast these two passages, one from Jonathan Edwards, the other from Dipsy. They're both about the same length (85 words vs. 82 words). But notice how Edwards, in his famous sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," uses vivid, frightening images to convey the ideas of fear and dread. Kathleen Norris would say that such language is incarnational; that is, the language relies on imagery to convey meaning at multiple levels.

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.

The sentence, though long, is easy to follow because of the imagery and construction. Contrast it with Dipsy's account, which apparently made sense to her.

The glass was a barrier for the billowing clouds of steam pumped by machines at the rear, which like projectors in a theatre, streamed images on the stage set, shutting out the billows of the Image Chamber, as it was called, closed as  it would be on a stage set, shutting out the billows before the next ones formed, giving the viewer time to figure out what he had just seen, an imaginative world made of steam no less, wet and changeable.

Cover art should not provoke a reaction opposite the one the illustrator had in mind. Consider the cover art, which Dipsy did her own self. A lot is going on. It apparently is a preview of everything in the book.

However, nobody on the staff at the bookstore could get past the gray thing in the center of the illustration. Alan started choking on his lunch and had to be patted on the back. Ellen said, "Well, great. An erect penis in the kids' section." I told Ellen that the book was for young adults. She replied that no young adult reader would be caught dead with a book featuring an erect penis, a clown, and a giant reptile. Michele asked, "What's that red stuff? Is it flames or blood? And did the guy climbing the building just poop out an s?"

When a book causes reactions ranging from numb bemusement to dry heaves, we won't carry it—but I'll hang on to it for show 'n' tell.

I'm not a peasant, but I play one on TV

The Santa Fe Opera presented the world premiere of Life Is a Dream by Lewis Spratlan, and we're seeing it this Friday. To prepare myself and to revisit a play that I read as an undergraduate (but which I have absolutely no memory of), I bought a copy of Life Is a Dream (La vida es sueño) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca and translated by Gregary Racz.

Gregary Racz's translation of La vida es sueño is, as Racz explains in a note on his translation, "the first attempt to render the drama entirely in analogous meter and rhyme since 1853, when both Denis Florence MacCarthy and Edward FitzGerald, with varying degrees of success, contemporaneously produced full-length English language versions of the play." A reviewer of Racz's translation wrote, "With Calderón utilizing 'a variety of metrical and rhyming patterns,' Racz's attempt to mirror that in the English is particularly noteworthy. Obviously, a bilingual edition, with the Spanish text facing the English one, would be the ideal solution, but fortunately the Spanish text of the play can readily be found on the Internet, and Racz's version does effectively give a sense of the sound and feel of the original for those who want to focus solely on an English text."

Well, that's pretty cool! As I read, I noticed that most of the verse was iambic tetrameter.

What's life? A frenzied, blurry haze.
What's life? Not anything it seems.
A shadow. Fiction filling reams.
All we possess on earth means nil,
For life's a dream, think what you will,
And even all our dreams are dreams.

And as I kept reading, I thought, "Why is this making me nuts? The translation is acclaimed, and Racz seems to have captured the sound and feel of Spanish. Is it me?"

Then I answered my own question: "Yes, you peasant, it is indeed you. You keep thinking about a certain poem by Longfellow, which is also written in iambic tetrameter, and at the end of every speech in Life Is a Dream, you want to say, 'Excelsior!'"

The shades of night were falling fast,
As through an Alpine village passed
A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice,
A banner with the strange device,
Excelsior!

Pie: a cut above

Years ago we were in a restaurant--I can't even remember where--and it offered pie for dessert. The price was "$1.50 per cut." (We see the same phrase in Zagat-rated restaurants and in the menu for the Pan-American Exposition of 1901, so it seems to be nothing new or unusual.)

The phrase confused me. If pie is $1.50 per cut, does it mean that if you are the first person to ask, for example, for a piece of a pristine raspberry pie, one that had emerged fresh and fragrant from the oven and then taken the air on the windowsill so that it was still warm enough to gently melt the vanilla ice cream, you would be charged $3.00 for your dessert? After all, it takes two cuts to get that first piece. Or is the word "cut" a synonym for "slice"?

I didn't want to ask the waitress, because there are Scared Straight inmates less formidable than the server we had that day. The restaurant must have been in New Jersey, come to think of it.

I couldn't find anything in the Dictionary of American Regional English to clarify the question, so I hauled out the compact edition of Oxford English Dictionary. That was no small feat, because even in the two-volume form, it takes six men and a boy to maneuver it out of the bookcase. And forget about using just that magnifying glass. At my age, I needed my glasses, the magnifier, and the harsh, gynecological light of the bathroom to read the definitions. ("What are you doing in the bathroom, P-doobie?" "Reading the OED to research pie. What do you think I'm doing?")

Definition 23 is "A piece of anything cut off, esp. meat; a slice." Thus, it would seem that a cut of pie and a slice of pie are the same things. So why not just say a slice of pie and not keep me brooding about it for, lo, these many years?

So you'll be voting for the Marquis de Sade, Lord Byron, and Eliot Spitzer?

Michele and I volunteered to work with the local Obama campaign. Last Sunday, Michele canvassed in Quemazon, and today I canvassed in Western Area. We've also donated to the campaign. 

Canvassing was fun. We're not supposed to go into people's houses, but instead talk to them from the porch. One elderly woman in a wheelchair answered the door and invited me in. I thanked her and said that we weren't supposed to go inside, presumably so people can't whack us. She gave me a shrewd look and said, "You never know."

When I asked another senior about whom she would be voting, she said, "Not Obama, that's for sure! His wife is a lippy pitbull. And McCain's not much better. I think I'm going to vote for those Libertines, Barr and Root!"

Meet Zetz!

Michele and I got the house a Blendtec Total Blender for . . . um . . . National Chocolate Chip Day (August 4)! Its name is Zetz, which is Yiddish for a smack or a whack, and also onomatopoetic for the sound it makes. We've made smoothies, and I'm going to try some grape jam with the grapes from Mr. Mac's arbors ("Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant."--Proverbs 9:17). Tonight Michele made a smoothie with yogurt, blueberries, and honey, and mine was strawberry, frozen banana, and blueberries. Yummmmm!

Zetz

If two trains traveling 40 mph leave their respective stations at 10:00 a.m., how many rods are in a rood?

Today's topic is practical math. Things are not going well.

I recently went to the service station in my neighborhood to buy some sodas. For many months they've displayed a sign advertising three Coke products for $3.00. So I went to the counter with three Coke products, and the nice young woman said, "That'll be $4.17." I said, "No, they're three for $3.00." She replied, "No, the price is now four for $5.00. But the price is still the same; you just get more bottles."

A young man in his late teens or early twenties and seemingly of normal intelligence regularly comes into the store for the Magic and Pirates of the Spanish Main gaming cards. The cards are all $4.49 a pack. And he always says, "I have $20.00. How many packs can I buy?" Michele has tried to walk him through the estimating process but to no avail. The next time he asks her, she said, she'll be tempted to answer, "Two."

Today I got the following exciting news from the Netherlands Lottery. "The Lottary gaming board (LOTTO.NL) is pleased to inform you of the result of the online award program.Your E-mail address attached to serial number NL90-4264, Lucky Number:24,2,6,35,45 and online number #1453128, was awarded the sum of 700,000.00 euros. This is from a total cash prize of €3,500,000.00 shared amongst the first Twelve (5) lucky winners in this category."

I was walking several years ago in Bandelier National Monument and came upon two women of a particular regional persuasion (you know the one: Texas). They were discussing cameras and "fim."

"I got this fim in Germany. The strange thing is it has 27 exposures instead of 24."

"Hmmm. Must be metric."

"Niagra Falls" redux

Here's another one.

Editing prodigy or pretentious pedant? You decide!

Monday I got new reading glasses (pictures to follow in a later post). They are really swell, with flexible frames, protective and anti-reflective coating, and transition lenses so I can read outside. They also have rubberized temples for a finer, lighter chew.

My new glasses triggered a memory from childhood, and one thing led to another.

When I was in elementary school, I got books from the Scholastic Book Club, and one of the offerings was a book of clever things to write in people's autograph books (of the "Yours till Niagara Falls" ilk). I didn't get the book, but some of my classmates did. I remember reading what one of them wrote in another's autograph book:

When you are old
And cannot see,
Put on your specks
And think of me.

I said to the writer, "You misspelled the word. 'Specks' are little marks or dots. You mean s-p-e-c-s, which is short for spectacles."

As early as second grade I was at it. In shop class, one of the girls had done a fine job of sanding her wood project and invited her buddies to feel it. "It's so soft!" she said. I said, "It's not 'soft.' It's smooth." (Or as Dad would have said, "It's not just smooth. It's smewwwwth!")

Our neighbor John H. had a rabbit that he decided to call "Fluffily." I told him that the rabbit could be named "Fluff" or "Fluffy," but "Fluffily" was not right the word. I had understood, almost instinctively at a tender age, the difference between adjectives and adverbs.

Had I known then that I could get paid for correcting people's grammar and spelling, I probably would have started being obnoxious even earlier in life.


Fluffily the Chihuahua sez, "I'm going to kill them for not letting me get contacts."

The Nietzsche Family Circus

Check out The Nietzsche Family Circus, which "pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote. " I think Colleen will like it. It certainly takes most of the curse off the strip for me. That Billy!


Women can form a friendship with a man very well; but to preserve it--to that end a slight physical antipathy must probably help.

Tossing off the high C's and C notes

Saturday Michele and I went to the Lensic in Santa Fe for the last live broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera's season, La Fille du Régiment. We were in the next-to-the-last row, so I couldn't wear my custom-designed suction cups, catapult myself to the screen, and attach myself to Natalie Dessay, my ultimate hug-honey after Michele. Juan Diego Flórez has received some fairly ecstatic press for nailing all the high Cs in Ah! mes amis (including a solo encore). You may have to subscribe to the online NYTimes (free), but you can also hear an excerpt of the aria at his website. The opera was a delight; the singing and the acting were superb.

Natalie Dessay as Marie, la fille du régiment

Before the opera began, we enjoyed listening to the people sitting behind us.

"Do you speak French? It looks like we're in for a lot of French today."

"I don't speak French."

"Well, we're in for a lot of French today in this opera by Donizetti. Wait. Donizetti. That's Italian. Then why are we in for a lot of French?"

They then started talking about their travels. "No, they're not dead people! What they are is mummies." I was glad to have that distinction clarified.

At all the operas at the Lensic, I noticed a woman who seemed to know everyone, and everyone appeared to know her. I figured I should introduce myself, just in case we should know each other. So I went up, introduced myself, and shook her old cow hand. She introduced herself to me. Well, the woman is richer than God. She raised $9 million to renovate the Lensic, owns the Eldorado Hotel, and does other philanthropic work. I thanked her for all she does. Yep, she's someone worth knowing.

"I wish I'd said that." "You will, P-Doobie. You will."

Ever since 1968, when I graduated from high school, I've kept a commonplace book of quotations, funny and interesting words, and felicitous turns of phrase. It's a little notebook that holds paper 3 1/2 inches by 6 inches that I bought at TG&Y, which I think was still where the Central Avenue Grill is now. It has 2918 entries right now, with quotations ranging from my senior English teacher, Mrs. Campbell, to the novelist Jerome Jerome and the letters to and from Groucho Marx. One of my favorite quotations in it is from the play No Trifling with Love by Alfred de Musset: "Shall I not find a sensible man here? Upon my word, when you look for one, the solitude becomes appalling." It's appropriate for so many situations.

Here's the front of my commonplace book.

Here's the back.

And here's a page spread.

Oh, you mean like "did gyre and gimlet in the wabe"?

I've often said that if a person can't find what she needs at Otowi Station, Metzger's Hardware, or CB Fox, she probably doesn't need it. I don't need a gimlet.

I have a framed image I want to hang in my office. I needed to start a hole for the screws that hold the eyelets that hold the wire that hangs on the hook that lives in the house that Jack built, and a using power drill was a little like using a sledgehammer to swat flies. So I schlepped across the street to Metzger's and wandered around for a while. Finally someone asked whether I had been helped, and I said not yet, and he asked how he could help, and I said, "I need a gimlet."

"It's too early in the day for a gimlet," he said. I explained that I didn't need a drink. I needed something to bore a little hole to start a screw. I needed a gimlet. "I've been working here for 42 years, and I've never heard of a gimlet," he said, looking at me as if I were making up words just to confuse him.

"I'm an English major. I know lots of words. I need a gimlet. You know, like 'a gimlet eye and a terrible swift sword.' Frank B. Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey used the phrase to describe their father in Cheaper by the Dozen." I thought I was being helpful, but it was obviously more than he wanted to know.

"Let me get Ernie," Mr. 42 said. "He can help you." I wandered around for a bit, and eventually Ernie, a curious cashier, and Mr. 42 came toward me in solemn procession. Mr. 42 said to Ernie, "This is the lady who needs a gimlet." The cashier said, "I've never heard of a gimlet." Ernie asked what a gimlet does. I explained that it bores a hole so you can start a screw. "What you need is a drill bit," he said.

"I have a drill bit. The job is too small for a drill bit," I said.

The cashier said, "I've never heard of a gimlet." Ernie told Mr. 42, "She really needs a drill bit. That'll start the screw." Mr. 42 said, "Yep, I think a drill bit is what she needs." I said, "I'm standing right here." The cashier said, "What's a gimlet. I've never heard of a gimlet." Another clerk joined us. "She needs a gimlet," the cashier explained. "What's a gimlet?" the clerk asked.

Ernie squatted and stared at the display of drill bits with the same expression and intensity as someone just stumbling on Shakespeare. Finally he stood up with a packet of two 2.38-mm high-speed steel drill bits. "These will start the holes." By that time I felt a sporting obligation to buy the drill bits and get the heck out of there before the rest of the staff joined in the discussion. I walked back to the store brooding about why I am so weak in front of sales clerks. A twine will lead me.

As I went into my office, I saw my backpack. My Leatherman tool was inside. It has an awl. And it worked a treat, too. I wondered what would have happened if I had asked for an awl. Would they have led me to the lubricants and asked what kind of awl I wanted? It was too much to contemplate. I started on the hole for the second screw.

neu·rot·ic adj. 1. Of, relating to, derived from, or affected with a neurosis; see also bookselling

If the National Institute of Standards and Technology ever wants to create the definitive standard for "comparison shopper," all they need to do is get a bell jar, create a vacuum therein, chill to zero degrees Celsius, and send for a senior citizen looking for a dictionary.

I love dictionaries. The staff knows I love dictionaries. And whenever a person wants a dictionary, I can help. Unless the customer is a senior citizen. Then all certainties vanish, the world is flat again, and I am peering into the abyss.

I have come to dread a staffer saying, “We have a senior citizen who needs your help with a dictionary.”

“May I help you?” I ask the woman, who seems to be about 70.

“I want a dictionary. Mine is old. What do you recommend?”

I reach for the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. “I recommend this,” I tell her. “It has definitions of the new words in the language and excellent notes on usage. And it has pictures.” I open it for her. “It’s designed to be browsed.”

“Pictures turn me off,” she says. “And there’s too much white space. It’s wasted space. They could have used that space to put in more words.” She pokes at a Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary as if it were an under-ripe cantaloupe in the produce section. “What about this? How many words are defined?” I say it has more than 200,000 definitions. “I know it has more than 200,000 definitions. I just read that. How many words does it define?”

“It doesn’t say.”

“How am I supposed to make a comparison if all the dictionaries are shrink-wrapped? How about the Oxford American Dictionary?"

“Well, you can’t go wrong with Oxford.”

“What do they know about American English? They’re British, aren’t they? Why aren’t they writing about British English? Don’t they do that anymore? How many words are defined in this one? If I’m going to buy a dictionary, I want the most words per dollar spent!”

I’m wishing I had some cold rags to apply to my forehead, when suddenly I flash back to fourth grade and the word problems: “P-doobie wants a dictionary. The American Heritage Dictionary costs $59.73 and defines 90,000 words and 10,000 new words. The Oxford American Dictionary costs $62.98 and defines 107,000 words. If each dictionary leaves its respective station at 10:15 a.m. . . . . "

I snap back from my reverie. “The cover says it has more than 204,000 definitions.”

“I know how many definitions it has. I just read that, and then you read it to me. How many words does it define?”

“Doesn’t say.”

“I want to look inside both of these. I want to know whether they define the word goth with a lower-case g. And they better have the definition of emerods in them.” The dictionaries are shrink-wrapped, and my handy Swiss Army classic is in my jacket pocket back in the office, and going to get a box cutter right now is a really, really, really bad idea. I turn my back to her and gnaw a starter hole in the shrink-wrap. I pull off the shrink-wrap and hand her the dictionaries. She pokes and prods them. “I wish I knew which one has more words. I want a lot of words, but I can’t lift an unabridged dictionary.”

“This one has a CD-ROM you can use in your computer,” I suggest helpfully.

“Do I look like I have a computer in the house?”

“No, ma’am.”

She hefts American Heritage and Oxford English. "I guess I’ll take this one," she sighs, handing me the American Heritage. I start to ring her up.

“That will be . . . .”

“Wait! Does it come in paper? It’s very heavy.”

“Yes, ma’am.” We return to the dictionaries, and I hand her the paper version.

“The print is too small! Doesn’t it come in a large print edition?”

“Yes, ma’am, but it has only 35,000 definitions.”

“No good. I’ll just take this one.” She flips through it to make sure that there’s a definition of goth with a lower case g, and smirks. She murmurs to herself, “I’m going to whip their butts in Scrabble down at the senior center.”

When you're down and out, lift up your head and shout, "La plomberie est imparfaite, et je suis incapable de se laver!"

One of my favorite channels on XM radio is 102, Sur la Route, which features French pop tunes. I love to listen to it when I'm feeling down. I never know what the lyrics are, but even if the song were about a school bus being hit by a train, it still makes me happy because the music is so great.

Today I was listening to Sur la Route on the way to work, and the song seemed vaguely familiar. The title wasn't much help, because my knowledge of French fits in the eye of a needle. When I got to work, I wrote down the title and the artist, used Google, and sure enough, the tune was the one we called "that breathing song" in college, "Je t'aime (moi non plus)." You can also find it on YouTube, but the recording is more vivid and erotic than the videos.

Don't blench! Here come the F.A.N.T.O.D.S.!

Thanks to Izzy, I've made it my goal the past many years to read 25 new books. However, I quickly realized that that goal was much too conservative for a bookseller, so thus far this year, I've read 21 new books.

The latest one, The Portable Obituary, seemed like a good idea at the time, but as I read about the deaths of many famous people, I became increasingly annoyed by the author's (or maybe his copyeditor's) sloppy usage and straining to make weak or snarky jokes.

Throughout the book, for example, anyone who committed suicide by hanging is said to have "hung himself." Hanged, as a past tense and a past participle of hang, is used in the sense of " to put to death by hanging."

In the account of the death of Julio Gallo, who mass-produced inexpensive wines, we read, "In 1993, at age eighty-three he died while surveying his vineyard in Modesto, California, after his Jeep overturned when it hit a ripple in the road. (Ripple was another Gallo brand once popular with the alcoholic, the destitute, and college students.)"

But I digress. I recently picked up a book on word origins, and the first thing I read was that the word cop began as an acronym for "constable on patrol." And then I started thinking about the supposed origin of the f-word: "for unlawful carnal knowledge" or "fornication under consent of king" back in the Middle Ages. From there it was only a short leap to packages of manure stamped "ship high in transit" so they wouldn't produce methane gas when wet and blow up the ship.

And then I got cranky and had to lie down with a cold rag on my head. I'm expected to make a complete recovery.