My Inner Editor’s Irritation (Over Admittedly Little Things)

In the early pages of The Midnight Library, a bestselling novel by Matt Haig, I screech to a frustrated halt on page 8. The character Neil “joined his hands together and made a steeple of his index fingers, which he placed under his chin, as if he was Confucius….” But he is clearly not the long-dead Chinese philosopher, so the subjunctive is called for in the sentence, which should read “as if he were Confucius,” and I’m mildly annoyed. 

 

A couple more flubbed opportunities to use the subjunctive correctly come along – and then, suddenly, on page 16, the author snaps into his grammar garb: “As Nora escaped the shop, she wished there were nothing but doors ahead of her…,” and I want to cheer! Too soon! We return to ragged error at the very next grammatical crossroads.

 

Then on page 25, a new demon rears its head. As Nora enters and begins to explore the magical Midnight Library, she is staggered by her surroundings. 

 

She turned down one of the aisles and stopped to gaze in bafflement at the seemingly endless amount of books. 

 

And once more my inner copyeditor screams out in pain. No, no, no! It is the number of books that astounds our Nora! Books can be counted, as can people. (A “large number of people” assembled for the event, not a “large amount of people.”) Sugar is measured in amounts (teaspoons, cups, pounds, etc.), as is sand and gravel -- also liquids, such as water or milk – and I have to say here that even the Word grammar-checker (not always my best friend) caught this blunder, double-underlining the word ‘amount’ in that sentence quoted.

 

And this is Viking, a Penguin Random House imprint, Viking, founded in 1925, that calls itself “a legendary imprint” on its own web page. I will continue reading the story but hope not to be amazed by the copyeditors’ oversights on page after page.

Of course, if I were seriously editing my own copy here for publication between hard covers, I'd eliminate this blizzard of italics. And that quote set in the middle of the page that's only two lines long, rather than three lines, is a boo-boo, too. A blog, however, is much more casual, more apt to let the author's voice go unedited.

Postscript: I finished the book and enjoyed it despite its flaws -- and despite having seen well in advance how it was going to end.

The Enemy of the Good – and of Community

Once again, for the umpteenth time, I’ve been obsessing about the notion of ‘community’ and whether or not community – coming together as one -- ever exists in human societies, except as an ideal. Maybe now and then, briefly, in experiences of celebration or mourning, but day to day? Even in groups of like-minded individuals, it seems, those individuals are constantly testing one another to answer the question, Are you really ‘one of us’?

Once again, I’m feeling there is nowhere I truly belong. This morning, in fact, I woke up with a French song in my head, a song by Alain Souchon expressing modern alienation so beautifully that if you didn’t know French you would never know it for a sad song. And I would keep these negative feelings to myself, except that I’m pretty sure a lot of other people feel the same way.

Where do my feelings come from this time? I can tell you. Lately I’ve been saddened, in exchanges with people I know would be ashamed to exclude or stigmatize others on the basis of skin color or religion or ethnic background, to find that they have no problem excluding or stigmatizing on the basis of gender or association. A liberal mind, whether possessed by man or woman, recoils at male dismissal of “women writers,” and yet a woman writer friend of mine says she has no use whatsoever for anything written by a “dead white male.” Anything? I am stunned and speechless. This friend is willing to read books by living white males, but another rules out all men, white or otherwise.

Then there is Facebook, sometimes fun, sometimes torment. In the past few days, it has been the latter.

Imagine yourself a famous person. Wherever you go, people want pictures of themselves with you. Imagine yourself with friends in Hollywood. You go to parties and have your picture taken with others there. Imagine yourself running for high political office, with supporters contributing to your political campaign. Do you vett each contributor? Refuse contributions unless a contributor’s values, personal and political, align completely with yours? How can you know?

Well, well now! Isn’t this wonderful? We have found a way to discredit individuals we could not sufficiently condemn any other way: guilt by association!

Somehow for most of my life I had missed a saying that has recently grown to have enormous meaning for me: “Perfection is the enemy of the good.” All through last year’s campaign cycle, one dear friend posted one link or comment after another showering Democratic candidates and office-holders with scorn for their failings. I know this person did not support or vote for the current administration in Washington. But wait! Is that correct? I say “did not support,” but he could hardly have worked harder against the Democratic ticket had he been wearing an elephant costume.

I’ve never been a loyalist of any party and would never claim any candidate or office-holder beyond criticism. No human being is perfect, after all -- and that's exactly my point. No politician will say precisely what I would wish or do exactly as I would hope. Sometimes we will disagree on certain ends, other times on means, and often compromise will be necessary to get anything done at all. I did not understand this at age 18, but I understand it now. I don’t expect perfection, either from friends or from politicians.

But that doesn’t mean anything goes or that there are no standards. There are better and worse choices. Bad-mouth the better at every opportunity, and you give ammunition to the much worse. Throw away the better because it isn’t perfect, and you pave the way for enthroning the much worse.

If the views of my friends can be attributed to me by association, then am I too guilty of hating male writers and condemning imperfect liberal politicians? Does that make any sense whatsoever? And where, then, would you find a single not-guilty person in the world?

Is there an alternative? Should I un-friend everyone who disagrees with me on anything important? Cut off dialogue? What a dilemma!

The dilemma is wrenching. On the one hand, liberals are urged, and even urge one another, to listen to those with different views and values, however violently opposed to their own. On the other hand, it seems that the closer those liberal values align to anyone in politics, the more we are urged, by the same people urging listening to the opposition, to condemn any politician who falls short of heroic perfection.

The hell with it! Life is too damn short to spend it wallowing in negativity, and I found a way to cheer myself up today. BeauSoleil, the Cajun band, is coming to the Dennos Museum Center, and I’ll be there in the front row, lettin’ the good times roll!

People come together in music like nowhere else.

P.S. 10/13/2017 - You think I was pissed off and sarcastic? Read what Rebecca Solnit has to say. Man, she is the greatest!

“Honey, We’re Shrinking Our Brains!”

A New Device

A telephone company representative – a very helpful, pleasant young man, and I’m not blaming him one bit – convinced me recently to go for a new plan on my business phone line. Under the new plan, I would receive for ninety-nine cents a “tablet” that would let me do do everything but make phone calls. Hell, why not?

The tablet came, and it was cute. The rep thought it would arrive charged up so I could use it immediately, but such was not the case. The dark screen remained dark that first afternoon. I plugged it in and turned back to my bound and printed books, leaving the device to take on energy enough to be useful.

I won’t go into all the reasons for my disenchantment, because only one is pertinent to my point today: There is no keyboard. Oh, there is a tiny representation of a keyboard, but one cannot type on it. Not the way I learned to type, using all my fingers and whaling away at 120 words a minute. Impossible. Not enough room for hands. One is limited to poking at letters with a forefinger and hitting the wrong “key” as often as the one aimed at.

“This device,” I announced, “is not going to be my new best friend!” At this stage of the game, in fact, I don’t see myself using it at all.

Portability vs. Literacy

“But it’s so portable!” a friend urged in its defense, and I know that people love their small devices. The tablet, smaller than a pad and larger than a phone, fits nicely into a little leather zippered notebook carrier that can also hold all manner of cards and papers. It’s lightweight. Cute. Small.

But it is no use whatsoever for the things I do routinely on my Macbook, such as writing this blog post.

The tiny representation of a keyboard, limiting the user to forefinger poking or the two-thumbs method I see many people employing, discourages complex development of thought or imagery. It is ideally matched with the character limitation of certain kinds of social media, granted -- and we are told those limitations can produce a new kind of “poetic” expression. But how often, really, are word-limited blasts carefully composed and rewritten and distilled into anything memorable? There is more to a haiku, after all, than the prescribed limit of its syllables.

Real writing is real work. James Joyce’s “stream of consciousness” writing was not the author spewing out whatever passed through his own mind. It was his careful, line-by-line, imaginative construction of a created character’s thought process. Huge difference, kids.

The more difficult the mechanical composition process, the shorter the productions. The more instantaneous the forms produced, the greater the temptation to spew. To bypass reflection. To throw a rose or give the finger and move on, eschewing reason.

The debate over attention span continues: Is our attention span shrinking the more we read online, jumping from one screen to another like cats on a series of hot tin roofs? I submit that not only our reading habits but also our writing habits should be examined. Thinking, like sleep, can be shallow or deep. Lightweight devices, I’m thinking, encourage lightweight thought.

And no, not every communication needs to be a philosophical treatise. Of course not! But we don’t want to eliminate deep thought, do we? Make it obsolete?

A Shrinking Population?

When I began writing my first blog, Books in Northport, back in 2007, not everyone in the world was uploading photos and exchanging links on social media twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week; instead, most of us who wrote blogs and followed those of other people dedicated a certain portion of each day to these pursuits. We composed our posts thoughtfully, and comments sections encouraged substantive exchange.

It’s different now. People around the world live every waking moment in the virtual world but “don’t have time” to read blogs (especially, I’m guessing, the wordy ones like this). It’s like asking people to leave a cocktail party for a public affairs lecture. Ugh! Where’s the fun?

The online audience in general is not shrinking, but what about the audience for serious discourse? Cat videos are ever popular. Super Bowl commercials are viewed over and over. T-shirt and bumper sticking sayings, ready-made, fly around Facebook. It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s fun! Best part is, there’s no take-away, nothing to pack out and carry home.

This probably sounds like hectoring. I sound like a scold, saying other people should be more like me. I know how it sounds, but what I’m really saying is that it’s getting lonely on my virtual island. The cruise ships pass by, and tourists along the rail wave hankies and call out greetings, and that’s all very nice, but I am starving for deeper engagement. I am ready to listen to you, to read your words and reflect on them, and if you are willing to listen to me in turn, read my words, reflect on them, and respond in kind, you are a godsend! “We few, we happy few!” I want to shout on the rare occasion this occurs.

But I exaggerate. After all, I am blessed with a life partner whose active, nimble mind continues to engage with mine and with the world, and we have dear friends of whom the same can be said, whether or not they can navigate my blogging platform easily enough to leave comments. And anyway, I am what I am and have no real desire to become essentially different.

And so I go on, writing these long posts and corking them up in metaphorical bottles to be thrown out onto Lake Michigan. There’s nothing inherently wrong with cocktail parties. Some of us are just better in quieter contexts.

Who Will Read Your Blog -- or Your Book?

I remarked recently to one writing friend (frustrated at a number of friends who had not read his book) that I think a lot of people resist reading novels by people they know out of nervous terror. What if it’s lousy? What if I hate it so much I can’t get through the damn thing? Embarrassed ahead of time for their writing friend by the possibility they won’t enjoy the book, they postpone opening it at all, and it gets misplaced or buried or put away on a shelf and forgotten. Better to make excuses for not having gotten around to it yet, they seem to think, than feel pressured to like and praise.

And life is so busy, dontcha know? Everyone is “busy,” in one way or another. I know I am. Aren’t you?

Coming home after my winter sabbatical, I could tell instantly who read Books in Northport once in a while and who never looked at it once while I was away. Anyone asking, “So where did you spend the winter?” or “What did you do all winter?” obviously felt no curiosity, because pretty much my whole winter was right there online, in words and pictures, for anyone to follow. No charge to read it, either. Free! Followers who couldn’t deal with reading online (one friend I know of for sure) could at least scroll through and look at the photographs and enjoy the images, and even the time commitment for speed-reading the rest could probably be satisfied in 10 or 15 minutes a week. Leaving comments was and is always entirely optional, as is giving me feedback in person when we’re back together in the same room.

So why...?

“I don’t have time to read blogs,” I hear from a couple friends routinely on Facebook, it seems, 24/7. Huh?  Some say, more honestly, “I never read blogs.” Okay, I know where I stand with them. The worst is the apologetic, “I should read it....” There is no ‘should’! It’s there for anyone who’s interested! Not interested? Not obligated!

But also, I couldn’t help noticing that when I wrote this past winter of travel adventures or posted photographs of Southwest scenery, a comment or two would usually result, while if I wrote of my novel-in-progress and how the writing was coming along, the silence was deafening. If a post combined writing news and topics unrelated to writing, the latter got the responses.

Again, I can’t help thinking it’s embarrassing to a lot of people when someone mentions working on a novel. It’s as if you’re claiming to have been Marie Antoinette in a previous life. Uh, yeah, sure, they think, praying you’ll change the subject.

Interest. Priorities. How well friends know you -- or want to know you.

My life, my blog, and my writing are priorities in my life but not necessarily priorities for all my friends. Other people have, each and every one of them, their own lives, their own priorities and interests. None of us can pay attention to everything.

All Cranked Up: The Trouble with Leaving Out Commas

Might as well accept it: this blog is my cranking place! Sigh! Well, it is what it is, so here are a couple of peevish items for December:

First, here’s a sentence quoted from an advance reader’s copy of a novel reviewers are asked not to quote (and I take the liberty because I am not reviewing the book, and it came out in 1996, anyway): “The olive-green river slid smoothly between the high ochre buildings and the soaked terracotta roofs seemed luminous.” And yes, I would have used a comma before the “and” that joins the two independent clauses of this compound sentence. Why?

A visiting writer-researcher in the midst of a book she intends to self-publish told me recently, very, very firmly, that a comma was not necessary in a compound sentence. Oh, really? Well, here’s my problem: I’m reading along and I see the subject-noun phrase “river slid,” the preposition “between,” and then along comes “buildings,” obviously an object of the preposition, and there’s that conjunction, and then there’s another noun, “roofs,” and without no comma between the two independent clauses, I’ve been set up to read “roofs” as a second object, i.e., “between the buildings and the roofs,” which doesn’t make much sense, but that’s where the punctuation leads me – and then along comes another verb, signaling a second independent clause, and I have to backtrack and re-read the sentence! Damn, that’s annoying!

Two paragraphs down the problem occurs again:

“It was the ideal time to walk about and look at the city and the Marshal and his wife were always saying....”

You see what I mean? “It was ... time to walk .. and look at the city and –.” Huh? Look at the city and the Marshal and his wife? No, not at all. Well, how much trouble would it have been to use a comma before “and the Marshal”?

Writers who omit the comma in the compound sentence are probably the same people who come to an intersection and fail to signal their turns. Even if you are “following the highway,” how are other drivers supposed to read your mind and know that? Which way are you going? Give me a clear indication! Don’t leave me standing here on the curb when I could have crossed safely, and don’t make me read every one of your brilliant sentences twice, please.

The woman determined not to use commas in her compound sentences was also planning to write a history book without an index. Need I say more?

The Always Pithy Mr. White --

“The names of great centuries and epochs in human history are always given to them by their remote descendants. Few men realized while they lived it that the age of Augustus was the high point in a thousand years of history. When XX Legio Valeria Victrix left Britain in A.D. 403, none of its men realized that the golden eagles of Rome would never return to the island, or that they were part of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Certainly no Renaissance man knew he was living in a century that other men would call the “rebirth,” just as his great-great-great-grandfather had no knowledge that he was part of the Middle Ages. Thus we do not know what to call our time, what label to give the remarkable and extraordinary events that we not only witness but live.” – Theodore H. White, FIRE IN THE ASHES: EUROPE IN MID-CENTURY (1953)

“A whisper of suspicion from on high, a gout of irritation . . . exaggerated and repeated by thousands of skilful and ambitious men until it reaches an echo that drums, deafens and freezes the thinking of the very men who started it.” – Ibid.

Just Call Me "Nobody"

As in --

"Nobody reads books any more." (I do.)

"Nobody writes real letters any more." (I do.)

"Nobody uses e-mail any more." (They do everything through their "social networks"? Not me.)

So e-mail, send me a letter, or write me a book. I'll get the message.