Patricia T. O’Conner, a former editor at The New York Times Book Review, and the author of the national best-seller Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English, debunks some grammar myths for mental_floss Blog.
Among the myths she debunks:
Myth #1: Don’t Split an Infinitive.
Myth #2: Don’t End a Sentence With a Preposition.
Myth #4: None Is Always Singular.
“Death of a Racehorse” is a classic piece by the sportswriter W.C. Heinz from 1949.
It seems appropriate today.
They were going to the post for the sixth race at Jamaica, two year olds, some making their first starts, to go five and a half furlongs for a purse of four thousand dollars. They were moving slowly down the backstretch toward the gate, some of them cantering, others walking, and in the press box they had stopped their working or their kidding to watch, most of them interested in one horse.
“Air Lift,” Jim Roach said. “Full brother of Assault.”
Assault, who won the triple crown … making this one too, by Bold Venture, himself a Derby winner, out of Igual, herself by the great Equipoise … Great names in the breeding line … and now the little guy making his first start, perhaps the start of another great career.
They were off well, although Air Lift was fifth. They were moving toward the first turn, and now Air Lift was fourth. They were going into the turn, and now Air Lift was starting to go, third perhaps, when suddenly he slowed, a horse stopping, and below in the stands you could hear a sudden cry, as the rest left him, still trying to run but limping, his jockey — Dave Gorman — half falling, half sliding off.
“He broke a leg!” somebody, holding binoculars to his eyes, shouted in the press box. “He broke a leg!”
NewMexiKen read and enjoyed Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men 
It was, however, just as enigmatic as the movie (which follows the book rather faithfully).
From a review of Tony Horwitz’s newest book, A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World
In our version of America, we don’t go back nearly far enough. It’s the winners who make history, and that’s why we start with the Pilgrims: with the Anglo-American and New England version of the story. Culturally, we need to expand the story to include the Spanish in particular, but also the French and the Portuguese. Not only are we not an Anglo nation now, but we never really were. Early America, if you think about it, was a lot like America today — very diverse — and even the parts of the story we think we know, we don’t know at all.
Horwitz is a NewMexiKen favorite, having enjoyed his Confederates in the Attic and Blue Latitudes and this terrific essay, which no doubt came from the research for A Voyage Long and Strange.
NewMexiKen spent part of this afternoon in San Felipe Pueblo (May 1st is the feast of St. Philip), so named by the Spanish in 1591, and the other part of the afternoon in Santa Fe, founded in 1610. The story of large parts of early America have never been taught.
I ordered the book.
NewMexiKen has read both of Senator Obama’s books now — the autobiographical Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
I strongly recommend both of them. The first as an outstanding memoir — good reading by any standard. The second as a statement of issues facing the nation.
HISTORY:
Daniel Walker Howe, “What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848”
BIOGRAPHY:
John Matteson, “Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father”
FICTION:
Junot Diaz, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”
GENERAL NONFICTION:
Saul Friedlander, “The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945”
DRAMA:
Tracy Letts, “August: Osage County”
POETRY:
Robert Hass and Philip Schultz, “Time and Materials,” by Robert Hass ” and “Failure,” by Philip Schultz
MUSIC:
David Lang, “The Little Match Girl Passion”
SPECIAL CITATIONS:
Bob Dylan
Powell’s Books in Portland (Oregon, of course) remains the best bookstore NewMexiKen has ever visited. In the past it has edged out Tattered Cover in Denver for the top spot. After today I think Elliott Bay Book Co. in Seattle is number two.
(Larry McMurtry’s Booked Up in Archer City, Texas, is in a league all its own.)
Any other nominees — that is, bookstores I must visit?
Robert Frost was born on this date in 1874.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
… ought to be a national holiday. It’s Aretha Franklin’s birthday. The first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is 66 today.
Aretha Franklin is the undisputed “Queen of Soul” and the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She is a singer of great passion and control whose finest recordings define the term soul music in all its deep, expressive glory. As Atlantic Records co-founder Ahmet Ertegun observed, “I don’t think there’s anybody I have known who possesses an instrument like hers and who has such a thorough background in gospel, the blues and the essential black-music idiom.…She is blessed with an extraordinary combination of remarkable urban sophistication and of the deep blues feeling that comes from the Delta. The result is maybe the greatest singer of our time.”
Franklin was born in Memphis and grew up in Detroit, where her father, Rev. C.L. Franklin, served as pastor at the New Bethel Baptist Church. One of the best-known religious orators of the day, Rev. Franklin was a friend and colleague of Martin Luther King. Aretha began singing church music at an early age, and recorded her first album, The Gospel Sound of Aretha Franklin, at fourteen. Her greatest influence was her aunt, Clara Ward, a renowned singer of sacred music. Beyond her family, Franklin drew from masters of the blues (Billie Holiday), jazz (Sarah Vaughn) and gospel (Mahalia Jackson), forging a contemporary synthesis that spoke to the younger generation in the new language of soul.
Aretha signed with Columbia Records in 1960 after A&R man John Hammond heard a demo she cut in New York. She remained at Columbia for six years, cutting ten albums that failed to fully tap into her capabilities. Paired with pop-minded producers, she dabbled in a variety of styles without finding her voice. Franklin was never averse to the idea of crossover music, being a connoisseur of pop and show tunes, but she needed to interpret them in her own uncompromising way. In Hammond’s words, “I cherish the albums we made together, but Columbia was a white company who misunderstood her genius.”
Jerry Wexler was waiting in the wings to sign Franklin when her contract with Columbia expired. With her switch to Atlantic in 1966, Aretha proceeded to revolutionize soul music with some of the genre’s greatest recordings. Her most productive period ran from 1967 through 1972. The revelations began with her first Atlantic single, “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Loved You),” a smoldering performance that unleashed the full force of Franklin’s mezzo-soprano. Offering call-and-response background vocals on this and other tracks were Carolyn and Erma Franklin (Aretha’s sisters) and Cissy Houston.
Franklin’s greatest triumph – and an enduring milestone in popular music – was “Respect.” Her fervent reworking of the Otis Redding-penned number can now be viewed as an early volley in the women’s movement. …
Working closely with producer Jerry Wexler, engineer Tom Dowd and arranger Arif Mardin, Franklin followed her triumphant first album with recordings that furthered her claim to the title “Queen of Soul.” Her next three albums – Aretha Arrives (1967), Lady Soul (1968) and Aretha Now (1968) – included “Chain of Fools,” “Think,” “Baby, I Love You,” “Since You’ve Been Gone (Sweet Sweet Baby),” and a soulful rendering of Carole King’s “A Natural Woman.”
I Never Loved A Man, Respect, Baby I Love You, A Natural Woman, Chain of Fools, Think, The House That Jack Built, I Say a Little Prayer, Bridge Over Troubled Water — all great, but for NewMexiKen give me Aretha Franklin’s version of You Are My Sunshine.
Elton John is 61 today. Gloria Steinem 74. Astronaut Jim Lovell (the Apollo 13 commander) 80.
Marcia Cross is 46 and Sarah Jessica Parker is 43.
Author Flannery O’Connor was born on this date in 1925.
When she was five, she became famous for teaching a chicken to walk backward; a national news company came to town to film the feat and then broadcast it all around the country. She said, “That was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me. It’s all been downhill from there.”
. . .When she was 25, she was diagnosed with lupus, and she moved in with her mother on a farm in Georgia. The lupus left her so weak that she could only write two or three hours a day. She was fascinated by birds, and on the farm she raised ducks, geese, and peacocks. She traveled to give lectures whenever she felt well enough, and she went once to Europe where, because of a friend’s plea, she bathed in the waters at Lourdes, famed for their supposed healing powers.
She wrote two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and two short-story collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965). She died at the age of 39 from complications of lupus.
She said, “The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.”
Sports Illustrated, which faces fierce daily, even hourly, competition with ESPN, Yahoo Sports and others, has something its main rivals do not: a 53-year trove of articles and photos, most of it from an era when the magazine dominated the field of long-form sports writing and color sports photography.
On Thursday, the magazine will introduce the Vault, a free site within SI.com that contains all the words Sports Illustrated has ever published and many of the images, along with video and other material, in a searchable database.
Dan Neil’s review of the Mini includes this:
“The Mini is diamond-laced Champagne, a piano-playing Shetland pony, sex on the wing of an airplane. Simply put, if the Mini Cooper doesn’t put a smile on your face, you’re dead.”
The author Dee Brown was born 100 years ago today. His best known work, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
“I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there. See?”
Tom Joad, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, born on this date in 1902.
Pulitzer Prize-winner Scott Momaday is 74 today. He was presented with the National Medal of Arts last year. At first I wasn’t going to reprise this excerpt from House Made of Dawn
The Navajo Ben Benally remembers a snow-filled day:
And afterward, when you brought the sheep back, your grandfather had filled the barrel with snow and there was plenty of water again. But he took you to the trading post anyway, because you were little and had looked forward to it. There were people inside, a lot of them, because there was a big snow on the ground and they needed things and they wanted to stand around and smoke and talk about the weather. You were little and there was a lot to see, and all of it was new and beautiful: bright new buckets and tubs, saddles and ropes, hats and shirts and boots, a big glass case all filled with candy. Frazer was the trader’s name. He gave you a piece of hard red candy and laughed because you couldn’t make up your mind to take it at first, and you wanted it so much you didn’t know what to do. And he gave your grandfather some tobacco and brown paper. And when he had smoked, your grandfather talked to the trader for a long time and you didn’t know what they were saying and you just looked around at all the new and beautiful things. And after a while the trader put some things out on the counter, sacks of flour and sugar, a slab of salt pork, some canned goods, and a little bag full of the hard red candy. And your grandfather took off one of his rings and gave it to the trader. It was a small green stone, set carelessly in thin silver. It was new and it wasn’t worth very much, not all the trader gave for it anyway. And the trader opened one of the cans, a big can of whole tomatoes, and your grandfather sprinkled sugar on the tomatoes and the two of you ate them right there and drank bottles of sweet red soda pop. And it was getting late and you rode home in the sunset and the whole land was cold and white. And that night your grandfather hammered the strips of silver and told you stories in the firelight. And you were little and right there in the center of everything, the sacred mountains, the snow-covered mountains and the hills, the gullies and the flats, the sundown and the night, everything—where you were little, where you were and had to be.
This week NewMexiKen has really enjoyed reading The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World
The operating conceit of this odyssey memoir is that the author, a professed grouch (“My last name is pronounced ‘whiner,’ and I do my best to live up to the name”), will travel to the world’s happier places to explore to what degree an individual’s happiness is intertwined with a shared geography and culture. To that end, he shoots off to unusual locales — Bhutan, Iceland, Qatar — and to Thailand and India, perpetual stopovers for pleasure seekers, visiting nine foreign countries altogether over the course of a year. His final chapter is about the United States, which “is not as happy as it is wealthy.”
The Times reviewer, Pamela Paul, found Weiner’s humor forced or contrived — I found it amusing.
“We know a thing by its opposite. Hot means nothing without cold. Mozart is enhanced by the existence of Barry Manilow.”
“I picked up the companion book to Grumpy Old Men [a British TV series] and flipped to the foreword, written by a grump named Arthur Smith. He begins by observing that ‘life is shit organized by bastards.’ Then he gets negative.”
But mostly I found Weiner’s insights into what makes us happy — and what doesn’t — interesting.
“Social scientists estimate that about 70 percent of our happiness stems from our relationships, both quantity and quality, with friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors. During life’s difficult patches, camaraderie blunts our misery; during the good times, it boosts our happiness.”
“People are least happy when they’re commuting to work.”
And I always find it rewarding to read about other places and other people.
There’s an interesting dialogue with Weiner at World Hum.
A very worthwhile defense of books and reading by Timothy Egan. Go read what he has to say; it’s not long.
And any of Egan’s books are worth reading (I own three), especially The Worst Hard Time
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I’s Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century. The number of soldiers who died between 1861 and 1865, an estimated 620,000, is approximately equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. The Civil War’s rate of death, its incidence in comparison with the size of the American population, was six times that of World War II. A similar rate, about 2 percent, in the United States today would mean six million fatalities. As the new southern nation struggled for survival against a wealthier and more populous enemy, its death toll reflected the disproportionate strains on its human capital. Confederate men died at a rate three times that of their Yankee counterparts; one in five white southern men of military age did not survive the Civil War.
Above from This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust, a new history of the reaction to the unprecedented death and dying of the American War of the Rebellion.
… was born in Boston on this date in 1809.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore–
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“‘Tis some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door–
Only this and nothing more.”
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;–vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow–sorrow for the lost Lenore–
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore–
Nameless here for evermore.
The first two of 18 stanzas of “The Raven.”
Project Gutenberg has an illustrated version from 1885. The poem was first published in 1845.
The Poe Museum has a nice, concise biography of Poe.
The Library of Congress has a lot of interesting material on Poe.
NewMexiKen always looks around whenever I visit a home for the first time to see where the books are, what they are, and how many there are. I try not to judge books by their cover, but I often — though certainly not always — judge people by their books. (By “judge” I simply mean, get an impression.)
Not counting cookbooks, I have books in five bookcases in four rooms, around 700 altogether I believe.
How about you?
I received The World Without Us
The premise is what would happen if humanity were removed from the planet, but everything else, including all other creatures, remained in place. How long would our presence even be recognizable? In some instances it would not be long. Indeed, this book should put an end to those doomsday scenario movies with people living in the New York City subways. Without their hundreds of massive electric pumps, the subway tunnels would flood with the first good rain.
A good read, one of five nominees for the National Book Award for nonfiction for 2007.
NewMexiKen received a copy of Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
Toobin tells the story (tells the stories might be a better way of putting it) of the recent Supreme Court. Though he writes about the legal issues before the Court, it’s as much the story of the nine individuals who served as justices from 1994-2005 and the succession that took place in 2005-2006. (Eleven years is the longest that nine justices have ever served together.) Justice O’Connor has the leading role. It’s a readable, well-written, well-paced book.
The Nine was on many lists as one of the best nonfiction books of last year.
A truly substantive interview with The Wire‘s David Simon by Nick Hornby.
An excerpt:
[Simon:] But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak.
If you’re into The Wire, you’ll want to read this one. If you wonder what’s with all the fuss about The Wire, you’ll want to read it too.
Link via mental_floss Blog.
“Still, my faith in the Internet’s information democracy wilted with I once suggested to a friend facing eviction that we Google ‘renter’s rights’ to learn his options, and watched him type in ‘rinters kicked out.'”
Joe Bageant in Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War
NewMexiKen is three-quarters through Bageant’s book, which I first mentioned here last week. It’s readable, revealing and important, a good compliment to Barbara Ehrenreich’s classic Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Bageant returned to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, after being away for 30 years. There he learned that his family and friends — the people he grew up with, went to school with, hunted with — are fast becoming a permanent American underclass. He writes of these people with honesty and disdain, but mostly with respect, humor and love — and a lot of important insight.
… was born in Bedford, England on this date in 1886. From The Writer’s Almanac:
He’s the author of the Antarctic travelogue, The Worst Journey in the World (1922). His book is about a search for the eggs of the Emperor Penguin in 1912. He and his two companions traveled in near total darkness and temperatures that reached negative 77.5 degrees Fahrenheit. He wrote, “Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.”
As noted in The 25 (Essential) Books for the Well-Read Explorer:
Cherry-Garrard’s first-person account of this infamous sufferfest is a chilling testimonial to what happens when things really go south. Many have proven better at negotiating such epic treks than Scott, Cherry, and his crew, but none have written about it more honestly and compassionately than Cherry. “The horrors of that return journey are blurred to my memory and I know they were blurred to my body at the time. I think this applies to all of us, for we were much weakened and callous. The day we got down to the penguins I had not cared whether I fell into a crevasse or not.”
