Category: Books & Writers

Etymology of the f-word

South Knox Bubba, in the post linked below, questions whether people had even heard of the f-word at the time of Deadwood (1876). Indeed they had, as the American Heritage Dictionary tells us.

The obscenity fuck is a very old word and has been considered shocking from the first, though it is seen in print much more often now than in the past. Its first known occurrence, in code because of its unacceptability, is in a poem composed in a mixture of Latin and English sometime before 1500. The poem, which satirizes the Carmelite friars of Cambridge, England, takes its title, “Flen flyys,” from the first words of its opening line, “Flen, flyys, and freris,” that is, “fleas, flies, and friars.” The line that contains fuck reads “Non sunt in coeli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk.” The Latin words “Non sunt in coeli, quia,” mean “they [the friars] are not in heaven, since.” The code “gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk” is easily broken by simply substituting the preceding letter in the alphabet, keeping in mind differences in the alphabet and in spelling between then and now: i was then used for both i and j; v was used for both u and v; and vv was used for w. This yields “fvccant [a fake Latin form] vvivys of heli.” The whole thus reads in translation: “They are not in heaven because they fuck wives of Ely [a town near Cambridge].”

Personal aside: NewMexiKen attended a high school run by the Carmelite Fathers. Knowledge of this poem then would have been both lucrative and dangerous.

Mari Sandoz…

was born on this date in 1896. The Writer’s Almanac tells us:

It’s the birthday of Mari Sandoz, born near Hay Springs, Nebraska (1896). She wrote realistic books about pioneers and Indians, including The Buffalo Hunters (1954), The Battle of the Little Bighorn (1966) and Crazy Horse (1942), a biography of the Sioux Indian chief.

She grew up in rural Nebraska, and she had a hard childhood. She quit school after the eighth grade, and spent most of her time helping out with farm and household chores. Her fingers became crooked from holding a hoe for hours at a time, and she suffered from cramps in her arms her entire life. When she was thirteen, she and her brother spent a day digging their cattle out of a blizzard snowdrift, and it left her blind in one eye.

Her father would host soldiers, traders, Indians, and miners from the Black Hills; and she would stay up late at night listening to them tell stories about the West. She became obsessed with the people and places of the Old West, and she decided she wanted to write about them. She went to the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, and a dean there allowed her to take classes even though she didn’t have a high school diploma. She weighed about seventy-five pounds, wore old country clothes, and lived on the tea, sugar, and crackers that she got for free at the dining hall. She would spend hours reading old newspapers in the basement of the State Historical Society, collecting research for the books she was planning to write.

In 1933, Sandoz went back home to live with her mother on the family farm. She had written a manuscript for a book about her father, but it wasn’t accepted by any of the publishers she had sent it to. She had sold a few articles to newspapers and magazines, but not enough to make any real money. She was thirty-seven years old, it was the middle of the Depression, she was malnourished and suffering from migraines, and so she decided give up writing. She burnt her manuscripts and settled in with her mother.

But just a year later, she got word that a publisher had decided to publish the book about her father, Old Jules (1935). It became a Book-of-the-Month club selection and a bestseller, and it allowed Sandoz to go on to write many more books about frontier life.

Remember that you can hear Garrison Keillor narrate each day’s Writer’s Almanac on public radio or on-line.

Thomas Pynchon…

is 67 today. The always excellent Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor tells us about Pynchon.

It’s the birthday of novelist Thomas Pynchon, born in Glen Cove, Long Island (1937). In college at Cornell University, he majored in engineering physics. He got straight A’s in all his engineering and physics classes, but after taking a class from Vladimir Nabokov, he decided to switch his major to English literature.

After college, he got a job working as a technical writer for the Boeing aerospace company. Employees there described him as incredibly quiet and diligent. He worked at the company for two years, and then traveled to Mexico, where he produced his first novel, V. (1963), about drunken former sailors, alligator hunters in the sewers of New York City, and the search for a mysterious female spy. V. was one of the most critically acclaimed novels of the 1960s, and Time magazine sent a photographer to Mexico City to find the author. According to legend, Pynchon jumped out the window of his apartment and fled into the mountains to escape the photographer. Since that day, he has never willingly submitted to a photograph, given an interview, or appeared in public.

His second novel was The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), about a woman’s effort to uncover a secret international postal service called W.A.S.T.E., which uses a muted trumpet as its logo. The novel became a cult favorite among college students, and fans of the book began to draw muted trumpets on bathroom walls and subway corridors, to suggest that the fictional postal service actually existed.

In 1973, Pynchon published Gravity’s Rainbow, which many consider his masterpiece, the story of a secret society of rocket scientists conspiring to take over the world in the closing days of World War II. He didn’t publish another book for the next seventeen years, and he became a kind of mythical figure. People said that he lived on the run, giving out false names wherever he went. Some claimed he had joined a band of Mexican rebel fighters. Others claimed that he and J.D. Salinger were actually the same person. And near the end of the 1980s, there was speculation that he might, in fact, be the Unabomber.

Then, in the late 1990s, an article in New York magazine revealed that he lived in New York City with his wife and son. He wasn’t hiding out in an underground bunker; he just wasn’t seeking publicity. He published his most recent novel, Mason and Dixon in 1997, and he has since written the liner notes for a rock band called Lotion and provided an introduction for a new edition of George Orwell’s 1984. In January of this year, he played himself on the animated TV show The Simpsons, wearing a paper bag over his animated head.

Lube up

Only Dan Neil would begin a review of the Toyota Camry Solara convertible with:

I am a white man. Ethnically Caucasian, yes, but the term hardly does justice to my tragic lack of melanin. In God’s Sherwin-Williams paint-chip display, I am in the upper left-hand corner, between Easter Lily and Eyeless Abysmal Sea Creature.

I’m Powder.

At 44, I am also a member of the last generation to have sunbathed without a full appreciation of the possible consequences, which include premature aging and premature death, which is worse. Today’s sun worshippers head to the beach or pool well equipped with sunblock, hats and moisturizers. When I was in college the only thing we took was a Quaalude.

And so, the clock is ticking. When will I start to sprout festive bits of runaway tissue on my lip or ear or schnozzle? Or worse. I did a lot of skinny dipping back when I was a lad. Wouldn’t that be a priceless bit of poetic justice?

Read Dan Neil from the Los Angeles Times.

BTW Neil does mention the importance of sun screen when that convertible top is down or the sun roof is open.

We can’t have all this independent thinking

Good article from The New York Times on the reaction to The Da Vinci Code.

Fearing that the best-selling novel “The Da Vinci Code” may be sowing doubt about basic Christian beliefs, a host of Christian churches, clergy members and Bible scholars are rushing to rebut it.

In 13 months, readers have bought more than six million copies of the book, a historical thriller that claims Christianity was founded on a cover-up — that the church has conspired for centuries to hide evidence that Jesus was a mere mortal, married Mary Magdalene and had children whose descendants live in France.

Word that the director Ron Howard is making a movie based on the book has intensified the critics’ urgency. More than 10 books are being released, most in April and May, with titles that promise to break, crack, unlock or decode “The Da Vinci Code.” Churches are offering pamphlets and study guides for readers who may have been prompted by the novel to question their faith. Large audiences are showing up for Da Vinci Code lectures and sermons.

Continue reading from The New York Times.

Reading list

Circulating among the blogs that are not consumed with whether Vietnam medals are the same as ribbons, is a list of authors and works from literature. The idea is to highlight those you’ve read and post the list so that the world can see that you are a person of substance — or not.

NewMexiKen provides his version of the list below; if I wasn’t sure, I didn’t mark it, though I wouldn’t want to take a quiz on any. Alas, I seem to have read more of these works while I was in high school and the first few years of college than in all the years since.

Continue reading Reading list

Three Weeks with My Brother

NewMexiKen read Three Weeks with My Brother last night. It’s a memoir framed within a three-week around-the-world trip novelist Nicholas Sparks took with his brother Micah early in 2003. As it says on the jacket, “It was to mark a milestone in their lives, for at thirty-seven and thirty-eight respectively, they were now the only surviving members of their family.”

NewMexiKen expected a travel narrative, but—while there is a bit of descriptive material—the story is much more a memoir of growing up in the Sparks family. As such, it is funny, enlightening in a way, and emotionally moving. I can’t compare it to Sparks’ novels, as I haven’t read any, but I get the sense it may be similar. In any case, it kept me at it until 1 AM.

Sparks has a number of excerpts on line.

The crew of HMS Bounty

… mutinied on this date in 1789. The following is from the review of The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty by Caroline Alexander from The New York Times.

The events that took place aboard the Bounty at sunrise on April 28, 1789, boil down to the characters of two men, William Bligh, age 34, and the mutineer, Fletcher Christian, who was a decade younger. As he waited, hands bound behind him, to be lowered into the Bounty’s overloaded launch — and having shouted himself hoarse calling for aid — Bligh asked Christian, who had sailed with him twice before, how he could have found the ingratitude to mutiny. Bligh recorded Christian’s answer in his journal. ”That! — Captain Bligh,” said Christian, sounding much like Milton’s Satan, ”that is the thing — I am in hell — I am in hell.”

Harper Lee…

was born on this date in 1926. The Writer’s Almanac tells her story.

It’s the birthday of the woman who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Harper Lee, born Nelle Harper in Monroeville, Alabama (1926). She grew up in Monroeville, which had a population of about 7,000, and it was the model for the town of Maycomb in To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee wrote, “It was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.”

Her father was a lawyer, and she spent much of her free time hanging around the courthouse and playing golf with the children of other lawyers. She thought it seemed like a pretty good way to live, and for a long time she wanted to be a lawyer when she grew up. She went to law school at the University of Alabama, and after she graduated she worked as a reservation clerk for an airline in New York City. She spent all day at work, and then came home to write for four hours every evening. In the mid ’50s, Lee started working on a novel about the trial of a black man in a small town in Alabama.

In December of 1956, she wasn’t able to get back to Alabama to celebrate Christmas with her family, so instead she celebrated with a family she knew in Manhattan. On Christmas morning, Lee and the family gathered around the tree to open gifts. Most of them were for the children of the family, but when everything under the tree had been unwrapped, the parents asked Lee to open an envelope that was resting on the branches. Inside was a note that said, “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.” The couple gave her a loan to devote an entire year to nothing but writing, and it was during that year that Lee wrote most of the first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird.

She sent the manuscript to a publisher in New York, and they told her that it had potential but that it was too much like a collection of short stories and not enough like a novel. She spent the next two and a half years rewriting it, and To Kill A Mockingbird was published in July of 1960. It was priced at $3.95, and it sold more than two and a half million copies in less than a year. It was selected by the Reader’s Digest book club, the Literary Guild book club, and the Book-of-the-Month Club; and it was immediately published in more than a dozen languages. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961.

To Kill a Mockingbird tells the story of Atticus Finch, a lawyer who defends a black man named Tom Robinson, who is accused of raping a white girl. The title of the novel comes from something Finch says to his daughter: “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

To Kill a Mockingbird sells about a million copies every year, and it’s sold over thirty million copies since its publication. In 1963, just three years after its publication, it was taught in eight percent of U.S. public middle schools and high schools, and today that figure is closer to eighty percent. Only Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and Huckleberry Finn are assigned more often.

All the books you’ve read

From Three Bed Two Bath

From Peter Carlin’s interview with Tom Brokaw’s replacement, Brian Williams.

He’s moved among the world’s most powerful people for years, but Williams still works overtime to learn more about the nation and world he covers. A voracious reader of U.S. history (he’s currently reading John Dean’s biography of President Warren Harding and the diaries of Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson), Williams goes berserk when asked about C-Span.

“Oh my God. Oh yes, oh yes,” he said. “Ask my kids about me and Book-TV. Ask them what happens when I have a spare moment. I’ll watch anything on C-Span.”

All this, he knows, serves somehow to prepare for days such as Sept. 11, 2001, when network anchors must confront the camera for hours on end to narrate history’s most jarring moments.

“There’s no script, no teleprompter, nothing set up to help you,” Williams said. “This is where your learning comes in, all the books you’ve read, all the knowledge you can muster about your country.”

All the books you’ve read. This is why, when the Wife and I go to a stranger’s house, especially if they have kids, the first thing we look for are the bookshelves. No bookshelves, we get nervous.

Who is that man on the $10 bill?

David Brooks has reviewed Ron Chernow’s new biography, Alexander Hamilton, Rich Uncle of His Country. The review begins:

When Alexander Hamilton was 10, his father abandoned him. When he was around 12, his mother died of a fever in the bed next to his. He was adopted by a cousin, who promptly committed suicide. During those same years, his aunt, uncle and grandmother also died. A court in St. Croix seized all of his possessions, sold off his personal effects and gave the rest to his mother’s first husband. By the time he was a young teenager, he and his brother were orphaned, alone and destitute.

HamiltonCover.jpgWithin three years he was a successful businessman. Within a decade he was effectively George Washington’s chief of staff, organizing the American revolutionary army and serving bravely in combat. Within two decades he was one of New York’s most successful lawyers and had written major portions of The Federalist Papers. Within three decades he had served as Treasury secretary and forged the modern financial and economic systems that are the basis for American might today. Within five decades he was dead at the hands of Aaron Burr.

Alexander Hamilton was the most progressive, and is the most neglected, of the founding fathers. He was the most progressive because he saw that America could be a capitalist superpower, and he figured out which institutions it would need to realize that destiny.

He is the most neglected, first because he was a relentless climber (and nobody has unalloyed views about ambition), second because he was a great champion of commerce (and nobody has uncomplicated views about that either) and third because his most bitter rivals, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, outlived him by decades and did everything they could to bury his reputation. So there is no Hamilton monument in Washington, but at least we now have Ron Chernow’s moving and masterly ”Alexander Hamilton,” which is by far the best biography ever written about the man.

Continue reading the review or the first chapter of the book.

William Shakespeare…

may have been born on this date in 1564. That’s good enough for NewMexiKen, and good enough for The Writer’s Almanac, where you can listen to a variation of this very text in the mellifluous tones of Garrison Keillor.

Today is believed to be the birthday of William Shakespeare, born in Stratford-upon-Avon, England (1564). He was a playwright and poet, and is considered to be the most influential and perhaps the greatest writer in the English language. He gave us many beloved plays, including Romeo and Juliet (1594), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), Hamlet (1600), Othello (1604), King Lear (1605), and Macbeth (1605).

We don’t know much about his life, but we do know that he started out as an actor and later acted in his own plays. Scholars believe that he usually played the part of the first character that came on stage, and that in Hamlet he played the ghost.

He used one of the largest vocabularies of any English writer, almost 30,000 words, and he gave us many of our most common turns of phrase, including “foul play,” “as luck would have it,” “your own flesh and blood,” “too much of a good thing,” “good riddance,” “in one fell swoop,” “cruel to be kind,” “play fast and loose,” “vanish into thin air,” “the game is up,” “truth will out,” and “in the twinkling of an eye.”

Shakespeare has always been popular in America … [though] the first recorded performance of a Shakespeare play in the United States didn’t take place until 1730 in New York City. It was an amateur production of Romeo and Juliet. He fell out of favor after the Revolutionary War, but then pioneers revived his work out West. An illiterate mountain main named Jim Bridger became famous for having memorized most of Shakespeare’s plays, and he would recite them for audiences of miners and cowboys. Many of the mines and canyons across the West are named after Shakespeare or one of his characters. There is a city of Shakespeare in New Mexico, a Shakespeare Mountain in Nevada, a Shakespeare Reservoir in Texas, and a Shakespeare Glacier in Alaska. Colorado has mines called Ophelia, Cordelia, and Desdemona.

The South Coast Presidency

Top 5 Bestsellers from Amazon as of mid-morning Mountain Time.

  1. Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward
  2. The South Beach Diet Cookbook by Arthur Agatston
  3. Against All Enemies by Richard A. Clarke
  4. The South Beach Diet by Arthur Agatston
  5. Worse Than Watergate by John W. Dean

Readers apparently want to be thin and/or get the goods on the President.

Trip to the bookstore

Kieran at the thoughtful group blog Crooked Timber has an interesting survey about “what can we learn about the social sciences and humanities from a visit to the local book barn.” NewMexiKen particularly liked the summary for history:

Content has stablized since the 1996 law requiring that 90 percent of all history books be about the Civil War or World War II. The remainder can be about how the ethnic group of your choice saved everyone else’s sorry asses, but it’s not like people are grateful or anything.

The Known World

By Edward P. Jones

Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor — William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful man in antebellum Virginia’s Manchester County. Under Robbins’s tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation — as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at their plantation: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love beneath the weight of slavery begin to betray one another. Beyond the Townsend estate, the known world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave “speculators” sell free black people into slavery, and rumors of slave rebellions set white families against slaves who have served them for years.

An ambitious, luminously written novel that ranges seamlessly between the past and future and back again to the present, The Known World weaves together the lives of freed and enslaved blacks, whites, and Indians — and allows all of us a deeper understanding of the enduring multidimensional world created by the institution of slavery.

(From the book jacket)

A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration

By Steven Hahn

This is the epic story of how African-Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people–an embryonic black nation. As Steven Hahn demonstrates, rural African-Americans were central political actors in the great events of disunion, emancipation, and nation-building. At the same time, Hahn asks us to think in more expansive ways about the nature and boundaries of politics and political practice.

Emphasizing the importance of kinship, labor, and networks of communication, A Nation under Our Feet explores the political relations and sensibilities that developed under slavery and shows how they set the stage for grassroots mobilization. Hahn introduces us to local leaders, and shows how political communities were built, defended, and rebuilt. He also identifies the quest for self-governance as an essential goal of black politics across the rural South, from contests for local power during Reconstruction, to emigrationism, biracial electoral alliances, social separatism, and, eventually, migration.

Hahn suggests that Garveyism and other popular forms of black nationalism absorbed and elaborated these earlier struggles, thus linking the first generation of migrants to the urban North with those who remained in the South. He offers a new framework–looking out from slavery–to understand twentieth-century forms of black political consciousness as well as emerging battles for civil rights. It is a powerful story, told here for the first time, and one that presents both an inspiring and a troubling perspective on American democracy.

(From the book jacket)

Gulag: A History

By Anne Applebaum

The Gulag entered the world’s historical consciousness in 1972 with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s epic oral history of the Soviet camps, The Gulag Archipelago. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, dozens of memoirs and new studies covering aspects of that system have been published in Russia and the West. Using these new resources as well as her own original historical research, Ann Applebaum has now undertaken, for the first time, a fully documented history of the Soviet camp system, from its origins in the Russian Revolution to its collapse in the era of glasnost.

Anne Applebaum first lays out the chronological history of the camps and the logic behind their creation, enlargement, and maintenance. The Gulag was first put in place in 1918 after the Russian Revolution. In 1929, Stalin personally decided to expand the camp system, both to use forced labor to accelerate Soviet industrialization and to exploit the natural resources of the country’s barely inhabitable far northern regions. By the end of the 1930s, labor camps could be found in all twelve of the Soviet Union’s time zones. The system continued to expand throughout the war years, reaching its height only in the early 1950s. From 1929 until the death of Stalin in 1953, some 18 million people passed through this massive system. Of these 18 million, it is estimated that 4.5 million never returned.

But the Gulag was not just an economic institution. It also became, over time, a country within a country, almost a separate civilization, with its own laws, customs, literature, folklore, slang, and morality. Topic by topic, Anne Applebaum also examines how life was lived within this shadow country: how prisoners worked, how they ate, where they lived, how they died, how they survived. She examines their guards and their jailers, the horrors of transportation in empty cattle cars, the strange nature of Soviet arrests and trials, the impact of World War II, the relations between different national and religious groups, and the escapes, as well as the extraordinary rebellions that took place in the 1950s. She concludes by examining the disturbing question why the Gulag has remained relatively obscure in the historical memory of both the former Soviet Union and the West.

Gulag: A History will immediately be recognized as a landmark work of historical scholarship and an indelible contribution to the complex, ongoing, necessary quest for truth.

(From the book jacket)

Khrushchev: The Man and His Era

By William Taubman

Remembered by many as the Soviet leader who banged his shoe at the United Nations, Nikita Khrushchev was in fact one of the most complex and important political figures of the twentieth century. Complicit in terrible Stalinist crimes, he managed to retain his humanity. His daring attempt to reform Communism – by denouncing Stalin and releasing and rehabilitating millions of his victims – prepared the ground for its eventual collapse. His awkward efforts to ease the Cold War triggered its most dangerous crises in Berlin and Cuba. The ruler of the Soviet Union during the first decade after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev left his contradictory stamp on his country and the world. More than that, his life and career hold up a mirror to the Soviet age as a whole: revolution, civil war, famine, collectivization, industrialization, terror, world war, cold war, Stalinism, post-Stalinism.

The first full and comprehensive biography of Khrushchev, and the first of any Soviet leader to reflect the full range of sources that have become available since the USSR collapsed, this book weaves together Khrushchev’s personal triumphs and tragedy with those of his country.

It draws on newly opened archives in Russia and Ukraine, the author’s visits to places where Khrushchev lived and worked, plus extensive interviews with Khrushchev family members, friends, colleagues, subordinates, and diplomats who jousted with him. William Taubman chronicles Khrushchev’s life from his humble beginnings in a poor peasant village to his improbable rise into Stalin’s inner circle; his stunning, unexpected victory in the deadly duel to succeed Stalin; and the startling reversals of fortune that led to his sudden, ignominious ouster in 1964. Combining a historical narrative with penetrating political and psychological analysis, this account brims with the life and excitement of a man whose story personifies his era.

(From the book jacket)

Pulitzer Prizes for Letters and Drama

FICTION
The Known World by Edward P. Jones

DRAMA
I Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright

HISTORY
A Nation Under Our Feet by Steven Hahn

BIOGRAPHY
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era by William Taubman

POETRY
Walking to Martha’s Vineyard by Franz Wright

GENERAL NON-FICTION
Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum

MUSIC
Tempest Fantasy by Paul Moravec