Category: Books & Writers

The End Matter: The nightmare of citation

Louis Menand has written an amusing—occasionally hilarious—article in The New Yorker on citation and style.

Any of us who wrote a term paper pre-computer will be reminded of the all-nighters.

As you are typing note 65, you realize, many pages too late, that you have two note 11s. You discover that you have been op-citing a work that you never cited. You curse yourself for not buying the corrasable bond. Flakes of whiteout litter the surface of the now unpleasantly hot Smith-Corona. You have started to make corrections with a pencil. You look at the page you just pulled out of the typewriter. It looks like a ransom note.

Menard, a Pulitzer prize winning author and Professor of English, has nearly as much trouble with today’s tools.

The potential for rage and heartbreak is even greater, in fact, for the very technology that is supposed to speed the task of information-processing is now your most insidious foe.

First of all, it is time to speak some truth to power in this country: Microsoft Word is a terrible program.

He saves some of his most amusing, yet biting commentary for the newly revised Chicago Manual of Style.

The problem isn’t that there are cases that fall outside the rules. The problem is that there is a rule for every case, and no style manual can hope to list them all. But we want the rules anyway. What we don’t want to be told is “Be flexible,” or “You have choices.” “Choice” is another of modern life’s false friends. Too many choices is precisely what makes Word such a nightmare to use, and what makes a hell of, for example, shopping for orange juice: Original, Grovestand, Home Style, Low Acid, Orange Banana, Extra Calcium, PulpFree, Lotsa Pulp, and so on.

In all a delightful trip through footnotes and endnotes, then and now.

Small Wonder

Author Barbara Kingsolver has an interesting web site. There are small excerpts from many of her works — these alone are worth the price of admission — and the FAQs are informative.

Is it possible to become a writer if you don’t like to read?

Answer: Not on your life.

Believe it or not, someone really did write to ask me that. (I’m tempted to reply: If you didn’t like Dalmatians, would you breed them?) But in all fairness, many more people have asked these interesting questions: Who are your favorite authors? What one book would you take to a desert island? And finally, Do you read other people’s books while you’re writing?

I read as if time were running out, because technically it is. As I grow older I find I’m increasingly impatient with mediocre entertainments: I want books that will take my breath away and realign my vision. As a writer of fiction, I mostly read contemporary fiction, but I also return constantly to the classics. My favorite dead authors are probably George Eliot, Jane Austen, Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck. Among my favorite living ones are Doris Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Annie Dillard, Alice Munro, Isabel Allende, Russell Banks, Linda Hogan, John Irving, Toni Morrison, Eudora Welty and Reynolds Price. And I rely on Emily Dickinson, Sharon Olds, Pablo Neruda, Dylan Thomas, and William Shakespeare; I immerse myself often in poetry, I guess, for the same reason painters rinse their brushes — to keep the colors true. I also love memoir if it’s truly great, which is to say, about something larger than one person’s life (Nabokov’s Speak, Memory; Margaret Mead’s Blackberry Winter; Nancy Mairs’s Waist High in the World), and I’m devoted to good science writing (Darwin for the poetry of his world view; Stephen Jay Gould for the insight).

If I were exiled to that famous island where they only let you take one book, I would cheat and take two: George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

I’ve heard writers say they don’t read other books while they’re writing, for fear it will somehow contaminate their style. I don’t share this worry. When I’m writing, I read Steinbeck and Shakespeare with all my might, and pray to be contaminated.

[Thanks to Debby]

Mark Twain on Juries

From Roughing It [1872]

The men who murdered Virginia’s original twenty-six cemetery-occupants were never punished. Why? Because Alfred the Great, when he invented trial by jury and knew that he had admirably framed it to secure justice in his age of the world, was not aware that in the nineteenth century the condition of things would be so entirely changed that unless he rose from the grave and altered the jury plan to meet the emergency, it would prove the most ingenious and infallible agency for defeating justice that human wisdom could contrive. For how could he imagine that we simpletons would go on using his jury plan after circumstances had stripped it of its usefulness, any more than he could imagine that we would go on using his candle-clock after we had invented chronometers? In his day news could not travel fast, and hence he could easily find a jury of honest, intelligent men who had not heard of the case they were called to try–but in our day of telegraphs and newspapers his plan compels us to swear in juries composed of fools and rascals, because the system rigidly excludes honest men and men of brains.

I remember one of those sorrowful farces, in Virginia [City], which we call a jury trial. A noted desperado killed Mr. B., a good citizen, in the most wanton and cold-blooded way. Of course the papers were full of it, and all men capable of reading, read about it. And of course all men not deaf and dumb and idiotic, talked about it. A jury-list was made out, and Mr. B. L., a prominent banker and a valued citizen, was questioned precisely as he would have been questioned in any court in America:

“Have you heard of this homicide?”
“Yes.”
“Have you held conversations upon the subject?”
“Yes.”
“Have you formed or expressed opinions about it?”
“Yes.”
“Have you read the newspaper accounts of it?”
“Yes.”
“We do not want you.”

A minister, intelligent, esteemed, and greatly respected; a merchant of high character and known probity; a mining superintendent of intelligence and unblemished reputation; a quartz mill owner of excellent standing, were all questioned in the same way, and all set aside. Each said the public talk and the newspaper reports had not so biased his mind but that sworn testimony would overthrow his previously formed opinions and enable him to render a verdict without prejudice and in accordance with the facts. But of course such men could not be trusted with the case. Ignoramuses alone could mete out unsullied justice.

When the peremptory challenges were all exhausted, a jury of twelve men was impaneled–a jury who swore they had neither heard, read, talked about nor expressed an opinion concerning a murder which the very cattle in the corrals, the Indians in the sage-brush and the stones in the streets were cognizant of! It was a jury composed of two desperadoes, two low beer-house politicians, three bar-keepers, two ranchmen who could not read, and three dull, stupid, human donkeys! It actually came out afterward, that one of these latter thought that incest and arson were the same thing.

The verdict rendered by this jury was, Not Guilty. What else could one expect?

The jury system puts a ban upon intelligence and honesty, and a premium upon ignorance, stupidity and perjury. It is a shame that we must continue to use a worthless system because it was good a thousand years ago. In this age, when a gentleman of high social standing, intelligence and probity, swears that testimony given under solemn oath will outweigh, with him, street talk and newspaper reports based upon mere hearsay, he is worth a hundred jurymen who will swear to their own ignorance and stupidity, and justice would be far safer in his hands than in theirs. Why could not the jury law be so altered as to give men of brains and honesty and equal chance with fools and miscreants? Is it right to show the present favoritism to one class of men and inflict a disability on another, in a land whose boast is that all its citizens are free and equal? I am a candidate for the legislature. I desire to tamper with the jury law. I wish to so alter it as to put a premium on intelligence and character, and close the jury box against idiots, blacklegs, and people who do not read newspapers. But no doubt I shall be defeated–every effort I make to save the country “misses fire.”

LDS Response to Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven

Three responses from the Church posted under Mistakes in the News. “The first is a short response from the Church’s Director of Media Relations. The second is a summary by Richard E. Turley, managing director of the Family and Church History Department and an authority on Church history and doctrine. The third is a review by Robert L. Millet, Professor of Religious Understanding at Brigham Young University.”

The Bounty — Bligh Was No Charles Laughton

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.”

One City, One Book

I think I was conscious of the One City, One Book movement, but only in the past few days have I become fully aware it was a nationwide effort; indeed extended to Canada, Australia and the U.K. A locality somehow selects one book and calls upon all of its adults and teenagers to read it during a specified period. The purpose is to bring the community together in a shared experience, leading I suppose to discussions in the check-out line. The program began in Seattle, lead by librarian —and action figure model — Nancy Pearl.

It’s interesting to see the books that various communities have chosen. I list some — arbitrarily — below. The Library of Congress Center for the book has a page with many more. There’s another list here.

  • Arizona — Animal Dreams (2002), Plainsong (2003)
  • Tucson, Austin — Bless Me, Ultima
  • Los Angeles — Fahrenheit 451
  • Chicago , Duluth and many other communities — To Kill a Mockingbird
  • District of Columbia — Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years
  • Orlando — Charlotte’s Web
  • Kentucky — The Bean Trees
  • Maine — Killer Angels
  • Ann Arbor — Abraham Lincoln’s DNA and Other Adventures
  • Eugene — Sometimes a Great Notion
  • Waco, Houston and many others — A Lesson Before Dying
  • Virginia — Sophie’s Choice

Is this a good thing? Certainly Judith Shulevitz in The New York Times is doubtful — You Read Your Book and I’ll Read Mine.

Teach No Evil

“The Language Police is the first step toward ending the absurdities of educational censorship. It should be required reading in the education of every parent.” From review in Mother Jones.

See also review from The New York Times, which lists “just some of the things students aren’t supposed to find in their textbooks or tests:”

*Mickey Mouse and Stuart Little (because mice, along with rats, roaches, snakes and lice, are considered to be upsetting to children).

*Stories or pictures showing a mother cooking dinner for her children, or a black family living in a city neighborhood (because such images are thought to purvey gender or racial stereotypes).

*Dinosaurs (because they suggest the controversial subject of evolution).

*Tales set in jungles, forests, mountains or by the sea (because such settings are believed to display ”a regional bias”).

*Narratives involving angry, loud-mouthed characters, quarreling parents or disobedient children (because such emotions are not ”uplifting”).

Mars closer than ever; huge power outage — just a coincidence?

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

Opening paragraph, H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, 1898.

Book for first-graders inspires satire

From The Arizona Republic’s Political Insider: “With corporate underwriting and a hefty publisher’s discount, 80,000 little tykes will get their own copy of a book called This House Is Made of Mud, the touching (though a tad PC) story of an American Indian boy and the building of his adobe house.”


This House Is Made of Mud

By the way, This House is Made of Mud never states that the child is American Indian or a boy.

Life

“No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one.”

Wallace Stegner in Angle of Repose.

“The problem is it takes most of us most of our lives to understand what we should have known from the beginning.”

Leon Uris in Trinity.

“Though finally the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of suffering new regret just as you get a glimmer that nothing’s worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck up your whole life.”

Richard Ford in Independence Day.

Carolina controversy

According to it’s website, the UNC Chapel Hill “Carolina Summer Reading Program is designed to introduce you to the intellectual life of Carolina. Expected of all new undergraduate students (first year and transfer), it involves reading an assigned book over the summer, and participating in a two-hour discussion with select faculty and staff members.” The program is in its fifth year.

As might be expected, there has been controversy. Last summer a conservative Christian group filed a lawsuit on behalf of three students in an attempt to stop UNC from requiring the class of 2006 to read Michael Sells’ Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations. This year the reading is no longer "required&quot—it is "expected." Even so, some conservative UNC students and state legislators leveled criticism at the reading program for selecting Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a book that displayed what they deemed an incomplete view of working America.

[Raleigh] News & Observer columnist J. Peder Zane provides interesting commentary:

According to officials at UNC-Chapel Hill, they’re just a bunch of clueless naifs, mystified by the controversy surrounding the book they’ve asked incoming freshmen to read…But to their well financed right-wing critics, they’re calculating bomb throwers, bent on indoctrinating unformed minds with their leftist politics…

[T]he ‘Nickel and Dimed’ debate is far more than a tired rerun of the ongoing drama ‘Ivory Tower Liberals and the Right-Wing Fanatics Who Despise Them.’ The two radically divergent views of the book reflect the increasing compartmentalization of American intellectual life. As our politics become more partisan and our news sources more varied and ideological, it is becoming easier to pass one’s life without ever hearing many opinions that challenge one’s perspective. Broadly speaking, liberals get their version of reality from CNN, NPR, the Nation magazine and progressive books and Web sites, while the right feeds on a steady diet of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the Weekly Standard, Ann Coulter and conservative blogs.

Do the five selections demonstrate a bias? Should they? (Descriptions from Carolina Summer Reading Program with minor edits.)

2003 — Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America is Barbara Ehrenreich’s account of what it is like to make a living on the salary of a low paid or ‘unskilled’ worker. Taking jobs as a waitress, cleaning woman, nursing home assistant and Wal-Mart employee in three different cities across the nation, Ehrenreich struggled to make ends meet. Her account of these jobs, the generous and gutsy people she works with and their desperate struggles for survival on minimum wage is direct, vivid, and engaging.

2002 — Approaching the Qura’n: The Early Revelations, translated and introduced by Michael Sells, consists of thirty-five suras, or short passages from the chief holy book of Islam, that largely focus on the experience of the divine in the natural world and the principle of moral accountability in human life. Easily accessible to any college-level reader, these suras are poetic and intensely evocative, beautiful meditations, comparable in many ways to the Psalms of David and other classics of world literature.

2001 — Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman explores urgent yet painful questions of medical ethics and cultural difference. It tells the story of Lia Lee, the child of Hmong immigrants from Laos, who was born with severe, life-threatening epilepsy. Relating the tragedy of Lia, her parents, and her doctors with skill and compassion for all involved, Anne Fadiman explores the radically different notions of disease that divided the Hmong sense of health and disease from the views of American scientific medicine. The resulting conflict left behind heartbreak and bitterness and raises pressing questions for all thoughtful citizens.

2000 — Chosen by a group of students and faculty, Confederates in the Attic, a national bestseller by Tony Horwitz, is a poignant book about the Civil War and its effects on today’s society. Horwitz writes with a journalistic edge honed by his work with The Wall Street Journal and a few years dodging danger as a foreign correspondent. As many a Southerner will tell you, the war which technically ended 135 years ago continues to impact the nation’s cultural identity. Horwitz’s fast-paced and entertaining text describes a group of men and women attempting to relive the Civil War era in every detail.

(Even this was not without controversy: According to UNC, "the book’s Chapter 13 has engendered comments and criticisms of its portrayal of Mrs. Alberta Martin, the last known living widow of a Confederate Veteran.” See statement by the person who holds power of attorney for Mrs. Martin.)

1999 — There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing up in the Other America by Alex Kotlowitz tracks two young boys — Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers — and what it is like in parts of contemporary urban America by focusing on life in a tough public-housing project on Chicago’s west side over a two-year period. We get to see how real, good people, in a terrible environment, are affected by social problems and social policies at ground level.

West-Side Stories

In 1999 San Francisco Chronicle readers ranked the best fiction and non-fiction books of the 20th century written in, about, or by an author from the Western United States.

TOP 10 NON-FICTION
1. “Land of Little Rain,” Mary Austin
2. “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,” Wallace Stegner
3. “Desert Solitaire,” Edward Abbey
4. “This House of Sky,” Ivan Doig
5. “Son of the Morning Star,” Evan S. Connell
6. Western trilogy, Bernard DeVoto
7. “Assembling California,” John McPhee
8. “My First Summer in the Sierra,” John Muir
9. “The White Album,” Joan Didion
10. “City of Quartz,” Mike Davis

TOP 10 FICTION
1. “Angle of Repose,” by Wallace Stegner
2. “The Grapes of Wrath,” by John Steinbeck
3. “Sometimes a Great Notion,” by Ken Kesey
4. “The Call of the Wild,” by Jack London
5. “The Big Sleep,” by Raymond Chandler
6. “Animal Dreams,” by Barbara Kingsolver
7. “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” by Willa Cather
8. “The Day of the Locust,” by Nathanael West
9. “Blood Meridian,” by Cormac McCarthy
10. “The Maltese Falcon,” by Dashiell Hammett