Month: January 2020

Preschoolers’ brains on screens. I can’t even bear to link to text from the story.

I don’t write in books I give as gifts anymore, unless they are books I wrote (in which case, I am totally cheaping out on your gift because I likely got the book for free). But that said, I used to love combing through the stacks at The Strand and daydreaming about who owned books before me. I also LOVE other people’s marginalia. Most of it is so dumb that it makes me feel better about my own prowess as a reader. And best of all is when you find something tucked into the cover a book, like a letter or show tickets or even an old bill. It’s got a strangely archeological feel about it. Like you’re a nerdy Indiana Jones.

Among bibliophiles, the debate can be polarising and nuanced. For example: is it ever acceptable to write in a book? If yes: in pencil, pen or – heaven forbid – highlighter? Are all books fair game, or just some? And once they are so “defaced” – can you ever then give them away?

…

For some secondhand buyers, motivated more by sentiment than money, the traces of past readers are part of the appeal of what Virginia Woolf termed “wild books”. In his pursuit of a complete set of Picadors, author Nicholas Royle has amassed a collection of paraphernalia tucked inside their pages: business cards, boarding passes, photographs, cheques, currency, love letters. “I call these things ‘inclusions’, like flies or bits of bark caught in amber – because they’ve stopped time, in a way.”

I just don’t get what everyone is always freaking out about. Languages evolve, and revolve, depending on need. I mean, there are many, MANY more important ways to “defend the language” than pretending your losing (and perhaps under-acknowledged?) ideological stance is based in a desire to protect. Anyway, get over it. If you’re stewing for a language fight, go after business speak or something.

For the still unpersuaded, he points out that singular “they” is older than singular “you.” Only in the 1600s did singular “you” start pushing out “thou” and “thee.” Having the same pronoun for both singular and plural forms makes for potential ambiguity. So colloquial plural forms have sprung up, such as “y’all,” common in the American South, or the more recent “you guys” — an oddly gendered locution at a time when the generic “he” is becoming extinct. Still, we get by. No one considers ditching the singular “you.”

For Baron, the benefit of singular “they” is that it is often used by those in search of a nonbinary or gender-neutral pronoun, as well as those who give such issues little thought. While many language mavens are coming around reluctantly to singular “they” — in December Merriam-Webster anointed “they” its “word of the year” — this newspaper is among those publications still holding out against it. The paper’s defense is convention. I admit that the nonbinary use of “they” to refer to a specific person — “Alex likes their burger with mustard” — still sounds jangly to my ears. I will get used to it. Language, as Baron eloquently shows, works as a dynamic democracy, not as rule by experts. The sticklers may not like “they” (singular) but they (plural) will eventually have to bow to the inevitable.

Dear Ninjas, it’s nuts here. Grocery stores opened today for the first time since Thursday and it looks like a 1982 Romanian bread line. Except it’s full of Newfoundlanders so everyone is laughing. Anyway, we have milk now and I imagine the state of emergency will be lifted closer to the weekend, so stability is on the horizon. Just no more snow, please.

• Montreal illustrator Isabelle Arsenault included on shortlist for prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award
• “Look, just because you happen to equate Orwell with damp, mould and misery doesn’t mean he didn’t enjoy getting his leg over sometimes.” 1984 Shades of Grey?
• Man makes entire career of writing about the fact that he reads, and here we are slogging it out like chumps
• What students get up to when they think the librarians aren’t looking (your imagination is better than this article, but still…)
• My co-Ninja by marriage contract used to run a series of poetry vending machines… Poetry jukeboxes were on the list for future plans until I whisked her away to the Fey Realm known as “Snowmageddontown”
• Lee Child is reachering for new horizons (damn, you know, I used to be good at this headline thing…)
• Librarians stand up against dumbass parents who want to block access to LGBTQ books

Yes, I browse too long. But do me and this book need to “get a room“? In rural China, a room with a book is apparently on offer.

Are all the books you haven’t yet read, but still have on your shelves (your “antilibrary”, as they call it here), worth more, spiritually, intellectually, and psychically, than the ones you have read?

The antilibrary’s value stems from how it challenges our self-estimation by providing a constant, niggling reminder of all we don’t know. The titles lining my own home remind me that I know little to nothing about cryptography, the evolution of feathers, Italian folklore, illicit drug use in the Third Reich, and whatever entomophagy is. (Don’t spoil it; I want to be surprised.)

“We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended,” Taleb writes. “It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. So this tendency to offend Eco’s library sensibility by focusing on the known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations.”

A theme park based on the fairy tales of Pushkin? Givver. But Alison Flood (who I seem to have been linking to on Bookninja for nearly 20 years) takes it a step further. Why not other writers? Stephen King for instance? I’d hit that ride. Please exit the blood tub to the right through existential dread turnstiles and remember to take all your body parts with you.

If we can have Pushkinlandia, then what else can we hope for? Discworld World? A Stephen King-themed park, hopefully in Derry, Maine? Looking into this, I discovered the delightful fact that Universal Studios Florida did once plan “an elaborate dark ride” themed on the master.

“Part-way through, riders would pull into the unload station and hear the usual instructions on how to exit without extensive bodily injury. But the restraints wouldn’t lift and the ride wasn’t over. A Shining-sized deluge of blood would flood out of the exit doors, Pennywise Itself would spring from the control room and riders would hurtle deeper into the nightmare/toward the gift shop,” reveals the Bloody Disgusting website.

While this is a very dignified LRB essay review on a book about the Romantics, the real take home nugget is that the poets of the day used to make fun of Wordsworth’s a-bit-too-on-the-nose name. Byron called him “Turdsworth”. Basically, this makes my year. You can only imagine what I’ve done to all your names in the bored hours of a snowy North Atlantic evening.

There​ are treasures in all of these chapters, but the tour de force, the greatest adventure, to use Wolfson’s term, and the set of interpretations that will drive some readers crazy, lie in the essay on Wordsworth’s wordplay. Some of us have been set up for this game by Nabokov’s Pale Fire, where Wordsmith is a college resembling Cornell, and Goldsworth a judge whose house our unreliable hero is renting. We see how pieces of writers’ names can be switched, creating a kind of literary quilt, and also that names, if they are made up of ordinary terms (word, smith, gold, worth), may revert without warning to their ordinary life.

Wordsworth doesn’t juggle with his name as other writers do: Shakespeare, for example, has plenty of fun with will, and Donne, speaking of the forgiveness of sins, writes: ‘When thou hast done, thou hast not done,/For I have more.’ But the fact that Wordsworth doesn’t play games of this kind doesn’t mean he doesn’t play games, and in Wordsworth’s Fun, a book recently reviewed in the LRB (4 July, 2019), Matthew Bevis persuasively suggests that Wordsworth had a sense of humour that has escaped almost all of his readers. He can’t not have noticed how easily his name falls apart into separate words or phrases: will, I am, words, worth. And even if he hadn’t noticed, others were prepared to make jokes using his name. Coleridge suggested, when sending a copy of his poem ‘The Nightingale’, that ‘you’ll tell me what you think my Bird’s worth.’ And Byron, less politely, liked to refer to the poet as ‘Turdsworth’.

So, not sure if this is crossing your radar if you’re not in St. John’s, but we’ve been basically buried since Friday morning. Nearly a meter of snow in a short window, accompanied by winds gusting to 160km/h. It’s been ugly. That said, the army is here and the town is in a state of emergency to get things cleared, so I’ll be in and out all day, trying to update posts between bouts of shovelling of the car and crying in lower back pain.

I’m pretty sure news of the situation has travelled beyond our borders, because this wee post by my wife seems to be getting shared a lot.

HT to Bookninja reader CS for this interview that should be encouraging but just makes me sad. I have seen first hand the death of book coverage. My fourth book back in 2007 got 17 reviews/interviews/profiles; my fifth in 2010 got 12; my sixth in 2012 got 8; seventh in 2015 got 6; and eighth in 2017 got 4.

Now an assistant professor of sociology at McMaster University in Ontario, Chong researches how fiction book reviews come to fruition, trying to solve the puzzle of why some books get reviewed and why so many more are ignored. Her new book, Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times makes the case for the persistence of old-guard professional criticism even in the Internet age.

Now, in fairness, there are probably some extenuating circumstances for my diminishing returns, chief among them that I’m now a straight, old, white guy and people are finally and properly interested in perspectives other than mine.