Great Works of Copy Editing Literature

Behind every great work of literature is a great copy editor. But what if editors weren't behind it, but out in front?

Last Friday on Twitter, Benjamin Dreyer and Jonathon Owen got some of us started rethinking what some of the great works of literature might be like if the novels were written about copy editors. I came to the conclusion that literature can only be improved if more novels were written about those of us in the word business.

Here are the 17 best first lines of novels written about copy editors:

Literature Needs More Groupies

Last night, I went to the monthly Indy WordLab meetup, where writers of all types and skill levels come together at a great bookstore and try some new things with their writing. Erik Deckers kicked off this particular WordLab by talking about some of the mechanics of humor writing, and then we set off into our various corners to write something funny, based on his advice.

After a while, we came back together to share what we had created. Maybe half the writers (of around 14) shared their humorous works with the whole group.

I was one of them.

Book Review: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, by Charles Yu

About the story (3.5 of 5 clocks)

I read How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (hereafter How to Live) in e-book format, so I don't have the benefit of the various blurbs and synopses that accompany print books. But if this book's dust cover doesn't say something like the following, then someone wasn't paying attention:

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is about a time travel technician who, while searching for his father, finds himself instead — both metaphorically and literally.

My Response to Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest is a strange novel.

I'm slightly embarrassed to say that I started reading Infinite Jest back in January of this year, and I just last night (finally) reached the final period of the final sentence. There may be spoilers in the words that follow here, but they will be more or less spoilers about the way David Foster Wallace wrote IJ and not so much about what happens in IJ. It would be hard to spoil that novel, like telling you the ending. As you'll see soon enough.

And per my usual unusual logophilic touch, I will attempt to mimic DFW's predominate IJ style while I write about IJ.

Mimic, not mock.

Ray Bradbury: Literary Artist and Hero

Ray Bradbury (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ray Bradbury died today.

Of course, I only ever knew the man through his works, but he sure taught me a lot about what our language can do.

Ray Bradbury is one of those literary artists whose work straddles the line between prose and poetry. He’s the one who taught me that there is so much more to a great story than just the story, that there’s so much beauty just in the words themselves, the way they string together and sound and feel on our lips, regardless of what they actually mean.

Ray Bradbury, for me, was a wonderful poet who just didn’t worry about adding those incessant line breaks that make poems look like what we think poems should look like.

Consider the beginning of The Martian Chronicles:

One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing every roof, children skiing on slopes, housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets.

And then a long wave of warmth crossed the small town. A flooding sea of hot air; it seemed as if someone had left a bakery door open. The heat pulsed among the cottages and bushes and children. The icicles dropped, shattering, to melt. The doors flew up. The children worked off their wool clothes. The housewives shed their bear disguises. The snow dissolved and showed last summer’s ancient green lawns.

Read that passage out loud. Listen to the words. Feel the words on your lips and tongue.

“...housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets.” This could be a line straight out of Ginsberg’s “Howl.” And can’t you just feel the pulsations when you say “cottages and bushes and children”?

And consider the images that he forces into your mind! Can you see the closed-up buildings, the housewives, the icicles?

Or this bit, from later in the book:

See all the carnival lights? There are beautiful boats as slim as women, beautiful women as slim as boats, women the color of sand, women with fire flowers in their hands. I can see them, small, running in the streets there. That’s where I’m going now, to the festival; we’ll float on the waters all night long; we’ll sing, we’ll drink, we’ll make love. Can’t you see it?

Can’t you see it? This isn’t just narrative. This isn’t Hemingway-esque simplicity. This is using language to create not just a story, but an artwork. This is the difference between a lecture on the Spanish Civil War and Salvador Dalí’s “Premonition of Civil War.”

It’s poetry, pure and simple.

Salvador Dalí's Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

And that's what I learned from Ray Bradbury: When you're writing, how you say something is every bit as important as what you say. Your words can be brief and straightforward. They can be relaxed and familiar. But most of all, they can be beautiful.

Ray Bradbury wrote so many beautiful sentences.

There are some who say it’s difficult to feel sad about the passing of a man who lived a full life into his nineties. But that’s the thing about heroes. It isn’t enough to cling to that metaphor that they will live forever in your heart; we want our heroes to live forever in the hearts of everyone. We want our heroes to be everyone's heroes.

And Ray Bradbury was one of my heroes. Still is.

I have to wonder if he had any idea how important and instructive and inspirational his work was to me and to millions of readers and writers like me. I hope he did. I hope he died knowing that the world was a better place because of what he did during his short time on it.

But I shouldn’t have to wonder. It’s a simple thing to let our heroes know, while they’re still alive, what influence they've had on us. And there’s no reason they shouldn’t know that they are our heroes, that their lives extend beyond their bodies and into the hearts and minds of others.

So I encourage you today, right now, to write to your heroes — to your favorite author, or artist, or politician, or teacher — whoever it is that has pointed you toward your definition of success, or excellence, or happiness. Tell them how they have changed you. Let them know that the world, or at least your world, is better for having had them in it.

And do it now, before your heroes are gone.

The Most Amazing David Foster Wallace Resource Since David Foster Wallace

And no, I’m not talking about this blog. (What do you take me for?)

It’s no secret that the vocabulary David Foster Wallace used in Infinite Jest is at a level few authors, and perhaps fewer readers, would ever hope (or want) to achieve. I don’t care who you are — and this includes well-weathered lexicographers — you’ll find words you’ve never seen before in Infinite Jest.

Which is how we ended up with a theme for many of this month’s posts.

In the annals of cliché history, the phrase “wouldn’t it be great if someone” has preceded thousands of great ideas that, for one reason or another, were abandoned and either lost to time or picked up for profit by someone else. (e.g., “Wouldn’t it be great if someone put sleeves in this blanket?”) And certainly someone — probably multiple someones — got about a quarter of the way through the literary jungle that is Infinite Jest and said, “Wouldn’t it be great if someone collected all of David Foster Wallace’s unusual and off-kilter words in one place and defined them?”

Many have thought that, I’m sure. And someone actually did it!

While I was researching online for the upcoming IJ posts, I stumbled upon the David Foster Wallace Wiki, a crowdsourced compendium that offers spoiler-free, page-by-page definitions of some of the more or less esoteric vocabulary found in IJ.

Twelfth-century facepalm. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So in short, you can find all the definitions to all the IJ words at this wiki any time you want instead of spending your time here at Logophilius.

But then you’d miss my clever word play, unexpected connections, and overall sparkling personality.

And my humility.

Tomorrow, then, we begin with the shortest word on my Infinite Jest vocabulary list.

Writing is . . .

I was tagged by Tony Noland earlier this month with the question "What does writing mean to me?" I've been thinking about this question a lot throughout these busy weeks, when I haven't had much time to write.

When the last weekend rolled around, and hadn't written anything substantial in weeks, I was feeling emotionally weird, like the Sunday comics when the colors don't line up the way they're supposed to. Blurry. Discombobulated. Unbalanced.

And then the answer to that question (and a few others) was clear. I just had to find the time to write it down.

Writing is balance.

Writing is like balancing a scale. On one side of the scale are life, living, humanity, and a million other things I don't understand, from the mundane (sleeveless turtlenecks, tandem mountain bikes, British spelling) to the sublime (ignorance, death, women). I write to fill the other side of that scale and find or create balance — either in the world or just within myself.

Writing is an attempt to balance ignorance with knowledge, intolerance with understanding, and stupidity with . . . well, normally sarcasm and irony. (I have a really hard time understanding stupid.)

All the greatest works of literature have one thing in common: They show what "being human" means and, in the process, show us how to do it better. This is what I try to do when I write: to find some shortcoming — a misunderstanding, an error, a sin — and balance it out. Show that it isn't so complicated or powerful or impossible after all. Hopefully, that shortcoming loses its weight, bringing the scales closer to balance.


I hope now that these lucky bloggers will answer the question, "What does writing mean to me?"

• Melissa Ecker (@MelissaEcker), who, as a writer of erotic fiction, probably writes for completely different reasons. [Looks like someone else tagged Melissa just last week. You can read her answer here.]
• Sherry Noik (@SherryNoik), who is not only a writer, editor, and logophile, but a Canadian to boot. So I'm just asking for trouble.
• Pauline Campos (@AspiringMama), who will probably block me on Twitter for tagging her.
• Alexa Offenhauer, (not on Twitter, unfortunately [nudgenudgewinkwink, Alexa!]), who not only writes well and passionately, but teaches writing, too.

The Anti-Esquire List

Last week, Esquire published "The 75 Books Every Man Should Read," which was billed as "An unranked, incomplete, utterly biased list of the greatest works of literature ever published." It seemed innocent enough at first, even the type of post that should be encouraged if it gets more men to read great fiction.

But then we started taking a closer look at the books that made the list. We got rankled, and rightfully so. The author warned us that the list was biased, so we were expecting to see more books of a particular genre. Thrillers, maybe. Or mysteries. Or sci-fi. Or even erotica.

But the bias apparent in that list of 75 "of the greatest works of literature ever published" was of an entirely different and unexpected sort.

Of the 75 books on the list, only one was written by a woman (Flannery O'Connor).

(Although I have no proof, I'm convinced that Ms. O'Connor's appearance on the list was itself accidental. Flannery isn't a common name; perhaps Esquire's author thought Flannery O'Connor was a man. Because, with all respect to Ms. O'Connor, there are a few female authors who should have made the list in front of her, Harper Lee being the first. How can To Kill a Mockingbird not be in the top 75 greatest works of literature ever published?)

Though I don't have nearly the reach that Esquire does, I'm here to do what I can to balance the scales. Here is my anti-Esquire list, a collection of 75 other authors whose works are just as great and just as important as any named on Esquire's list. It, too, is "unranked [it's in alphabetical order], incomplete, [and] utterly biased."

75 More Great Authors Who Could Have Made Esquire's List

Isabel Allende

The House of the Spirits
City of the Beasts

Laurie Halse Anderson

Speak

Maya Angelou

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid's Tale
Oryx & Crake

Jean Auel

The Clan of the Cave Bear

Jane Austen

Nothanger Abbey
Pride and Prejudice

Simone du Beauvoir

The Second Sex

Judy Blume

Forever

Erma Bombeck

The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank

Charlotte Brontë

Jane Eyre

Emily Brontë

Wuthering Heights

Gwendolyn Brooks

Annie Allen (poetry)

Pearl S. Buck

The Good Earth

Willa Cather

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Kate Chopin

The Awakening

Agatha Christie

Murder on the Orient Express
And Then There Were None

Mary Higgins Clark

On the Street Where You Live
Where Are the Children?

Beverly Cleary

Dear Mr. Henshaw

Suzanne Collins

The Hunger Games trilogy

Emily Dickinson

Collected Poems

Joan Didion

Democracy
The Year of Magical Thinking (nonfiction)

Annie Dillard

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Living by Fiction (nonfiction)

Lois Duncan

Killing Mr. Griffin

Jennifer Egan

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Helen Fielding

Bridget Jones's Diary

Cornelia Funke

The Inkworld trilogy

Nadine Gordimer

The Conservationist
Burger's Daughter

Jane Hamilton

The Book of Ruth

Lorraine Hansberry

A Raisin in the Sun

S.E. Hinton

The Outsiders

Alice Hoffman

Fortune's Daughter
Practical Magic

Zora Neale Hurston

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Erica Jong

Fear of Flying

Sue Monk Kidd

The Secret Life of Bees

Barbara Kingsolver

The Poisonwood Bible
The Bean Trees

Maxine Hong Kingston

The Woman Warrior

E.L. Konigsburg

A View from Saturday
Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth

Jhumpa Lahiri

Interpreter of Maladies

Anne Lamott

Imperfect Birds
Bird by Bird (nonfiction)

Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird

Ursula K. Le Guin

The Left Hand of Darkness

Lois Lowry

The Giver
Number the Stars

Katherine Mansfield

Short story collections

Daphne du Maurier

Rebecca

Toni Morrison

Beloved
The Bluest Eye
Song of Solomon

Alice Munro

The Love of a Good Woman

Iris Murdoch

The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

Anaïs Nin

Henry and June

Joyce Carol Oates

them

Dorothy Parker

Death and Taxes (poetry)

Ann Patchett

Bel Canto

Katherine Paterson

Bridge to Terabithia
The Master Puppeteer

Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar

Katherine Anne Porter

The Collected Stories of Katherine Ann Porter

Annie Proulx

The Shipping News

Anna Quindlen

Object Lessons

Ayn Rand

We the Living
Anthem
Atlas Shrugged

Jean Rhys

Wide Sargasso Sea

Anne Rice

Interview with the Vampire
The Vampire Lestat

J.K. Rowling

The Harry Potter Series

Arundhati Roy

The God of Small Things

Alice Sebold

The Lovely Bones

Anne Sexton

Live or Die (poetry)

Mary Shelley

Frankenstein

Carol Shields

The Stone Diaries

Jane Smiley

A Thousand Acres

Betty Smith

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Mary Stewart

The Crystal Cave

Elizabeth Strout

Olive Kitteridge

Amy Tan

The Joy Luck Club
The Kitchen God's Wife

Anne Tyler

The Accidental Tourist
Breathing Lessons

Alice Walker

The Color Purple

Eudora Welty

The Optimist's Daughter

Edith Wharton

Ethan Frome
The House of Mirth

Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway


I hope that the women of the world understand that Esquire does not represent what real men are really like — especially men who read.

And I hope that Esquire's editors recognize that they are doing a disservice to their readers by providing such a limited definition of "great literature."

Books, Movies, and the Library

I went to the public library today to work on this Monday's post.* Before I left, I took a closer look at the "decorations" adorning the library walls. There were a few, smaller posters of the "READ @ your local library" variety, but the largest posters, the ones demanding the most attention, were movie posters. I found this sad.

I grant you that the posters weren't entirely out of place in a library. They mostly advertised either movies adapted from well-known books (Last of the Mohicans, Charlotte's Web, Laurence Fishburne's Othello, and the ubiquitous Harry Potter) or movies about writers and writing (Finding Neverland). But even those smaller, less-emphasized READ posters featured well-known actors.

Although it's nice to know that every single actor in the Twilight movies supports local libraries, it still struck me as sad and wrong that a library -- an institution indelibly linked with books -- had to resort to marketing its wares with icons from an entirely different medium.

That isn't how it should be. People shouldn't look at a book as a thing that might lead to a good movie, or to look to Hollywood to tell us what books are worth reading. We shouldn't be using icons of movies -- a passive activity -- to promote the value of books and of the idea of reading, which requires active participation. It's too incongruous. It sends the wrong message.

We don't look to professional musicians to get us excited about watching movies. We don't go to art museums to find out about good music. Why, then, do we rely on Hollywood to point us toward literature? Why shouldn't we instead look to the icons of literature to remind us of the joy of reading?

Were I a graphic artist, correcting this mismatch would be a great cause for me to pursue. If I had the skills and the equipment, I could create "movie posters" for classic works of literature and do what I could to get them in public libraries, perhaps donating two or three for every one I sold.

And these wouldn't just be poster-sized versions of front cover art. They would get the full treatment: tag lines, blurbs from other authors, starred literary views, and recognition of awards -- anything that drives home the joy, excitement, and importance of the work and of reading in general and places good books on par with good movies.

Because we, the readers and writers, know that books are far superior to movies.

I could do all this, of course, only if I had the skills, the time, and the equipment, which I don't. I might, though, from time to time, try to play around with the idea here in purely digital form. I encourage you to do the same (to be safe, stick with books in the public domain) .

If someone picks up this idea and tries to run with it, or if someone is already doing this, please let me know here. I'd love to get involved.


* It turns out that I have a lot of editorial peeves that start with D. I might have to split next week's posting in twain.

The Joy (and Pain) of Writing

I've wanted to be a writer ever since I picked up my first Kurt Vonnegut novel sometime in the late eighties. (It was probably Cat's Cradle.) Since then, I've put together a few things, been published in a couple magazines, populated this blog, and published some original essays professionally online. But I've never really put in the writing time necessary to really call myself a "writer."

I enjoy writing, and I have enjoyed writing: the sense of accomplishment, the pride of creating something that didn't before exist. But it has always been a small, passing joy, like winning a soccer game or getting a bingo in Scrabble. And I think it's because that joy of writing was so fleeting that it hasn't really instilled in me that drive to really be a writer.

This year (thanks to Twitter), I discovered NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. I've really started putting in the time writing down one of the stories that has been floating around in my mind for probably a decade. And tonight, something unexpected and wonderful happened.

I felt like a writer.

In the past, my writings have dwelled mainly in the realm of essays and poems. This stab at NaNoWriMo is my first real attempt at character development. Tonight, one character (Maria) asked another character (Billy) a simple question: "Who is your favorite artist?" While crafting Billy's answer, I felt what I can only imagine is the emotion that other writers feel that compels them to write, to keep at it, pushing out chapter after chapter and story after story, even if they never get published.

Billy hadn't really considered who his favorite artist was until Maria had asked. He realized that he had always enjoyed leafing through the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Durer. Maria brought up the Mona Lisa, and Billy said that he never really got much out of the Mona Lisa. That he much more preferred to examine the artists' sketches that led up to the finished work.

(In first-draft form:)

"What I really like about the sketches is that they're both art and works-in-progress. Like, when you look at the Mona Lisa, you know that it's done. It'll never be anything but the Mona Lisa. But those sketches -- the pen and pencil drawings -- show the artist working partway through both the artistic and technical aspects of a composition, but they aren't finished yet. They're on the page, but they aren't fully formed. What starts as a sketch of a woman could be a gypsy dancing, or a queen, or a witch. They could be --"
   "They could be anything," Maria finished.
   "Right! Exactly! They could be --" he stopped then. His eyes lit up and he smiled, saying -- more to himself than to Maria -- "They could be anything."

And that was when I felt it. It was like fatherhood: I was guiding this boy whom I had created through a simple path of self-discovery. I was proud. Not only had I watched this surrogate "son" grow as a person, I had made it happen. And beyond that, I had created the perfect symbol for what this character would be like: more interested in the process and challenge of creation than the finished product.

And it was also sad, because I had also foreshadowed Billy's fate. I had identified him with -- and as -- a sketch instead of a finished piece. I had made him, and would make him, an unfinished painting.

It was like fatherhood. It was like love.

And now I have to get back to it. because I'm terribly behind on my NaNoWriMo word count.

NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month

November is national novel-writing month, and I am starting to get caught up in NaNoWriMo.org. Part contest, part cheering section, NaNoWriMo challenges you to write an entire 50,000-word novel by the end of November. Sign up on the site and get pep talks, link up with other writers, and post your own novel-writing progress. To those who finish, fame and prizes -- and most importantly, a completed novel -- await.

NaNoWriMo began in San Francisco in 1999 with only 21 writers. It has grown every year since. Last year, NaNoWrimo had 119,301 adult participants from around the world, 21,683 of whom made it to the finish line. And this year will likely break those records.

So if you don't see quite as many posts from me this month, it's because I'm busy writing the marathon novel. If you've always wanted to write a novel but never had, I suggest you click on over to NaNoWriMo and sign up now. It might be just the kick in the pants you need to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard).

And if you want to see how I'm doing over there, my username is 4ndyman, and you can find me here: http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/720868. Day one is done: 1,268 words down, 48,732 to go!

Today’s Word: quiddity

quiddity: Something's essence — it's whatness. Also the name of the mythic living sea in Clive Barker's The Great and Secret Show and Everville. "No matter how many sitcoms and low-budget movies he's cast in, Billy Ray Cyrus's quiddity is not acting."

Maybe it's because I saw it in The Great and Secret Show long before I learned that it was a "real" word, but quiddity has a unique calming effect on me that no other word has. I just love to say it. "Quiddity."

The Great and Secret Show really hooked me on Clive Barker way back in the early '90s. I've always been a serial monogamist when it comes to books, so I went on to read (in no order) Imajica, Sacrament, Galilee, Coldheart Canyon, Cabal, and Everville. I remember one gaffe in Galilee that disturbed me and gave me pause. It was a simple grammatical error, but it was made by a character who had devoted his centuries-long life to recording the history of his family. That is, he had devoted his life to writing, and writing well, and made a simple grammatical error. It didn't match up.

Coldheart Canyon was the last one I read, and it left me with a cold heart (ba-dum bum). Aside from an arousing, surreal, supernatural sex scene, it simply wasn't a good book. Barker was on his way down, in my eyes. I think he's come out with a few books since then, but I'm just not interested.

I don't remember when it was, but my first exposure to Neil Gaiman was Good Omens, which he wrote with Terry Pratchett. I loved this book. I tried other Terry Pratchett books, but they weren't for me. But I did like Neil Gaiman's stuff, and he's only gotten better, and now he's one of my favorite authors. With American Gods, the Sandman comics, big-screen movies, small-screen miniseries (Neverwhere), the death of Batman, and numerous awards, Neil Gaiman is what Clive Barker could have been. Neil Gaiman's quiddity is storytelling, and he's a master.

Previously Unpublished Vonnegut Short Story

The LA Times has published "Look at the Birdie" online, apparently a previously unpublished short story by Kurt Vonnegut that was supposed to be part of a collection published by Delacorte Press. In the beginning, it sounds like the setup for a joke; by the end, though, it sounds like something Neil Gaiman could have written. Check it out.

Today's Word: stentorian

stentorian: Loud. Very, very loud. Usually referring to the volume of one's voice. In Greek mythology, Stentor was a Greek herald with a powerful voice. He is mentioned in Homer's The Iliad; here is an excerpt from the Samuel Butler translation (with thanks to Project Gutenberg):

When they [Minerva and Juno, a.k.a. Athena and Hera] came to the part where the bravest and most in number were gathered about mighty Diomed, fighting like lions or wild boars of great strength and endurance, there Juno stood still and raised a shout like that of brazen-voiced Stentor, whose cry was as loud as that of fifty men together. "Argives," she cried; "shame on cowardly creatures, brave in semblance only; as long as Achilles was fighting, if his spear was so deadly that the Trojans dared not show themselves outside the Dardanian gates, but now they sally far from the city and fight even at your ships."

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye is a powerful book. It's a beautiful book, in the way that Picasso's La Guernica is a beautiful painting. It doesn't have a happy ending; it has a real ending.

The story proper begins like this: Quiet as it's kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father's baby that the marigolds did not grow. It only gets worse from there.

I think the reason Toni Morrison has been so successful, the reason she earned her Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes, is because her writing somehow manages to combine polar opposites without collapsing into itself. She writes about the worst of us, the vilest acts, the evilest desires, the proverbial underbelly of humanity, but she does it with so much beauty and eloquence that we don't realize what we've swallowed until it's down. It's crême brulée and Drano. It's road kill martinis. It's the Mona Lisa painted in poop.

I know that there's a CliffsNotes for this book, but I certainly hope no one tries to teach this in high school. Not because of the language, or because of the descriptions of sex, or for anything like that. I just don't think that someone in high school would know how to react to it. Frankly, and I know this sounds strange, I don't think a virgin should read this novel. Unless you understand what sex can do to you, how it can change you, you can't really understand some of the reactions. You can't really understand what the worst parts of this story are, or understand why they're so horrible.

This is a book for adults. This is a book for a parent, or a parent-to-be. Especially if you have a daughter.

There is an interesting typographical tool in The Bluest Eye. To be honest, I didn't even notice it until I was halfway through the book: some of the text is fully justified, but some of it is left justified with a ragged right. I haven't taken the time to go back and study it closer, but I imagine that the more descriptive text is justified, while the narrative text if ragged right. If you pick up The Bluest Eye, keep an eye out for the typography. Also notice when Morrison switches between first and third person, another useful device to focus the storyline.

And if you get a copy that includes an afterword that Toni Morrison wrote in 1993, read the afterword first.

About Toni Morrison

After finishing Cormc McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses (a review is on its way), I picked up Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. This is my first adventure into Toni Morrison's work, but already I see that her veneration as a great writer — as well as her Nobel Prize in Literature — is well-deserved. Toni Morrison's writing is just like the perfect woman: the perfect balance of eloquence and profanity, of femininity and grit. When I came across the following text, the opening of the "Winter" section, I just had to read it twice, and thought it worthy to share as an example of great writing. I wish I could write like this:

My daddy's face is a study. Winter moves into it and presides there. His eyes become a cliff of snow threatening to avalanche; his eyebrows bend like black limbs of leafless trees. His skin takes on the pale, cheerless yellow of winter sun; for a jaw he has the edges of a snowbound field dotted with stubble; his high forehead is the frozen sweep of the Erie, hiding currents of gelid thoughts that eddy in darkness. Wolf killer turned hawk fighter, he worked night and day to keep one from the door and the other from under the windowsills. A Vulcan guarding the flames, he gives us instructions about which doors to keep closed or opened for proper distribution of heat, lays kindling by, discusses qualities of coal, and teaches us how to rake, feed, and bank the fire. And he will not unrazor his lips until spring.

When it comes to reading literature, I've been somewhat of a serial monogamist since the sixth grade, latching on to an author and swallowing whole whatever parts of his library I could get my teeth on. First, there was John Bellairs, then Robin Cook, a relatively brief tryst with Stephen King, then Douglas Adams, Clive Barker, Kurt Vonnegut, Ayn Rand, William Burroughs, and most recently Neal Stephenson and Neil Gaiman. Toni Morrison may be my next long-term literary relationship.

An Okay Kurt Vonnegut Resource

Anyone who knows me knows that one of my favorite authors — one of my favorite people — is fellow Hoosier Kurt Vonnegut. I've already read everything by him and a lot of things about him, so I really didn't have a great need to look for further resources about his life and works. I can't even remember now how I stumbled upon (maybe through Stumble Upon) http://www.vonnegutweb.com, but stumble I did.

The site hasn't been updated in quite a while (Vonnegut's death hasn't been registered there yet), but since Vonnegut didn't write a whole lot in the last decade of his life, that doesn't leave a lot of holes in his coverage. For Vonnegut lovers like myself, this is a good place to find some of his lesser-known writings and commencement addresses, as well as the standard biographical and bibliographical info.

Perhaps if the owner of VonnegutWeb starts to see more traffic, he'll feel the urge to update it. (Or give it to me?)

Douglas Adams and the Meaning of Liff

I was probably in the seventh or eighth grade when I first read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and fell in love with Douglas Adams. Since then, I've read everything he's written. Well…with one exception.

In the list of his works in the front of some of his books, I'd keep seeing the title The Meaning of Liff. I always kept an eye out for it in bookstores, and I'd try card catalogs and, later, library databases trying to find this book and see what it's all about. Eventually, I gave up looking and started reading Neil Gaiman.

Anyway, thanks to my old friend Dolph for pointing out that The Meaning of Liff is available for free (and in need of a good proofreading) online. I don't know that it's legally available for free, so follow the previous link at your own peril: the ghost of Douglas Adams may come back and start hiding your towels, dropping your cufflinks behind the refrigerator, or teaching your disgruntled parrot some sailor lingo.

From the intro on the Web page, The Meaning of Liff appears to be Pseudodictionary-like collection of definitions for common elements of life and living it assigned to placenames found on signposts, especially throughout the United Kingdom. Many of the definitions are quite useful for concisely referring to something that doesn't currently have a "real" definition. For example, I'm a skilled alltamist and kalamist, I once limerigged my leg so hard in college that I was in an air cast for three weeks, and I'm a horrible abinger (though I don't own a cheese grater).

Other definitions are a little too specialized for general usage, though all definitions are perfectly brisbane. Check it out! Is it worth reading from start to finish? Yesnaby!

Today's Word: mugwump

mugwump: In the late 19th century, mugwump was a disparaging term for New York Republicans who supported Democrat Grover Cleveland in the 1884 presidential election. It stems from an Algonquin term for a "person of importance" — a high muckety-muck.

The epithet was supposedly given by Charles Anderson Dana, editor of the New York Sun, who claimed that the party-crossing Republicans had their "mug" on one side of the fence and their "wump" on the other.

More recently, William Burroughs commandeered the term for his own purposes. From Naked Lunch:

On stools covered in white satin sit naked Mugwumps sucking translucent, colored syrups through alabaster straws. Mugwumps have no liver and nourish themselves exclusively on sweets. Thin, purple-blue lips cover a razor-sharp beak of black bone with which they frequently tear each other to shreds in fights over clients. These creatures secrete an addicting fluid from their erect penises which prolongs life by slowing metabolism. . . . Addicts of Mugwump fluid are known as Reptiles. A number of these flow over chairs with their flexible bones and black-pink flesh. A fan of green cartilage covered with hollow, erectile hairs through which the Reptiles absorb the fluid sprouts from behind each ear. The fans, which move from time to time touched by invisible currents, serve also some form of communication known only to the Reptiles.

During the biennial Panics when the raw, pealed Dream Police storm the City, the Mugwumps take refuge in the deepest crevices of the wall, sealing themselves in clay cubicles and remain for weeks in biostasis. In those days of grey terror the Reptiles dart about faster and faster, scream past each other at supersonic speed, their flexible skulls flapping in black winds of insect agony.

The Dream Police disintegrate in globs of rotten ectoplasm swept away by an old junky, coughing and spitting in the sick morning. The Mugwump Man comes with alabaster jars of fluid and the Reptiles get smoothed out.

The air is once again still and clear as glycerine.

In David Cronenberg's movie adaptation of Naked Lunch, the Mugwump's "erect penises" sprout not from between the legs, but from the top of the head. Here's a picture of William Burroughs with a movie mugwump.