Fritinancy

Why Writers Like Scrabble

Judith Thurman writes in this week's New Yorker:

Scrabble is both mindless and cerebral, which may account for its appeal to writers—it gives you a chance to push words around without having to make them mean something.

Exactly.

Thurman's article, "Spreading the Word," is available online only to subscribers (the link above is to a summary, and doesn't at all convey the flavor of Thurman's writing). There's a certain aptness  there (or is it irony?), because the story is mostly about Scrabble's online revival and the copyright battle over Scrabulous, recently reborn as Lexulous. So you'll have to buy or borrow a copy of the magazine, or subscribe to the digital edition, to read it. Not such a bad idea. Meanwhile, here's a passage I liked so much I copied it for you:

Scrabble is enjoying a second heyday. The first was in the early nineteen-fifties, when demand for sets outstripped production. (In 1954, an advertisement in this magazine showed a wedding party stampeding from a church; the bride explains to the baffled clergyman that the toy shop next door has a new shipment.) Between one and two million sets are sold yearly; one in every three American households is reported to own one; and thirty thousand new games are said to begin, somewhere in the world, ever hour. Players of note are a heterogeneous confraternity that includes Barack Obama, the Queen of England, Madonna, Igor Stravinsky, Rosie O'Donnell, Duke Ellington, Nora Ephron, Meadow Soprano, Dustin Hoffman, Justin Timberlake, Chris Martin, Maya Angelou, Carol Burnett, Richard Nixon, and Ludacris, who plays "hip-hop" Scrabble, using words like "crunk," "hizzo," and "pajawa"—a version of the "dirty" Scrabble that was popular with Hollywood swingers fifty years ago. (I heard one of their ancient jokes at the tournament: "'Cervix' is my favorite opening.'")

Three-quarters of that paragraph is quintessential New Yorker: the scholarly use of statistics, the arcane vocabulary ("confraternity"), the long list, the lavish use of commas and semicolons. (In his marvelous book The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing, Ben Yagoda quotes E.B. White, who said the New Yorker was the publication in which "commas ... fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.") Then, in the final two sentences, Thurman winks, cracks her knuckles, and talks dirty. Bingo.

The Rationale

Cintra Wilson, the New York Times's Critical Shopper, extolling the versatility of a $3,290 olive sharkskin party dress she tried on at Oscar de la Renta:

[I]t was a dress you could wear to an illegal drag race, dinner with Henry Kissinger and a gay cruise-ship wedding, all in the same night.

Even if you think you don't care about fashion, you must read Cintra Wilson's columns in the NYT's Thursday Styles section. She's a dazzling, laugh-out-loud hilarious writer and one of the most perceptive social critics around. Fashion may be her beat, but that's like saying Tolstoy covered military strategy. Read what I wrote about her 2007 Times debut.

P.S. And read Cintra's blog, too.

Doing the Right Thing

I'd been nibbling at the edges of a couple of blog posts about language and names, but last night I read an essay by one of TheAtlantic.com's bloggers, and it stopped me in my tracks. So I'm going to send you over there to read what Ta-Nehisi Coates has to say about Barack Obama's Kansas grandparents. Take a minute to study the photo of them, taken (I'm guessing) in the late 1940s, just an average young white couple in the middle of the century, in the middle of the country.

Think about that country's history. About families. About race. About what doing the right thing means.

Think about the fact that it wasn't until 1967 that the U.S. Supreme Court, in its Loving v. Virginia decision (yes, Loving was the plaintiffs' surname), struck down the "anti-miscegenation" laws that prohibited interracial marriage. (California was slightly more advanced. Our state's Supreme Court made such unions legal in 1948.)

Coates writes:

What should be remembered is that, though our racial history is mired in utter disgrace, though the deep cowardice of post-reconstruction haunts us into the 21st century, at any point on the timeline, you can find ordinary white people doing the right thing.

Ordinary people of all colors, I would add.

Be sure to read all the comments, too.

Since he posted it yesterday, Coates's short essay has been flying around the Internet. Read what Orange Tangerine and Too Sense have had to say.

Here's my own take. Unlike most of the adults I associate with today, I went to a high school (large, public, big-city) in which white kids were the minority group. Most of my classmates were African-American; many were Asian-American. Some classmates spoke heavily accented English. I knew guys who looked a lot like Barack Obama and who, like him, went on to law school and public-service careers. One of my closest friends was a light-skinned black girl whose darker-skinned father, a doctor, sometimes accepted chickens as payment from his patients. In homeroom I sat behind a mocha-skinned boy who shared my surname; at a class reunion years later I asked him about it, and he told me the name came from a German-Jewish ancestor named Friedman who had immigrated to Louisiana, where he bought a plantation and took a slave "concubine," as my classmate put it.

I would never presume to know what it's like to live in the United States as a dark-skinned person. But I do know what it's like to live around people of all skin colors and all kinds of family stories. And I know a bit about racism. I had white friends whose parents lied about their street addresses so the kids could attend the mostly white high school in the next district. (Those oh-so-genteel parents referred to the black kids at my high school as "the element," as if they were argon or calcium rather than actual people.) I also had black friends whose parents warned them not to accept invitations to parties at white kids' houses. (My black friends ignored the warnings. We had some excellent parties.)

So when I think about Barack Obama and his ordinary extraordinary life, I don't think in abstractions. I think about people I've known and cared about. And I am pretty damn excited about what this country just might be on the verge of. Or, in fact, has already achieved.

The Word Haters

The October 13 New Yorker—the politics issue—just arrived, and it's full of articles I can't wait to read. (Plus: two cartoons by the magnificent Roz Chast. I could find only one online, though.)

I'm saving the longer articles for later. But a two-page essay by James Wood, who teaches at Harvard and is the author of How Fiction Works, wouldn't let me go. Its title is "Verbage"; the subtitle is "The Republican war on words." I urge you to read it, because it goes a long way toward explaining many of the bizarre campaign tactics we've been witnessing.

Wood suggests that the McCain campaign's attacks on Barack Obama as "just a person of words" reflect "a deep suspicion of language itself ... as if Republican practitioners saw words the way Captain Ahab saw 'all visible objects'—as 'pasteboard masks,' concealing acts and deeds and things—and, like Ahab, were bent on striking through those masks."

To those of us who "just work with words" in the service of commerce, this paragraph has special resonance:

Or take McCain’s slogan “The Original Maverick,” now attached to many of the campaign’s ads. It cynically stipulates that politics is just merchandise, by sounding as close to a logo or a brand name as possible. But it also understands that consumers trust brands that sound like “quality.” Thus “Original,” which has the reassuring solidity of something like “Serving Americans of discernment since 1851,” or, indeed, “Levi’s 501: Original Jeans.” In such formulations, “Original” means eccentric, strange, unusual, and also first, best, belatedly copied by others. Better still, the phrase sounds like the tagline from a movie poster; not for nothing has McCain taken to announcing that “change is coming soon, to a district near you.”

Read the entire essay, which takes its title from Sarah Palin's (deliberate?) mispronunciation of verbiage. Wood writes: "It would be hard to find a better example of the Republican disdain for words than that remarkable term, so close to garbage, so far from language."

While you're on the site, check out the magazine's endorsement of Barack Obama. It hardly comes as a surprise, but that doesn't make it any less eloquent and compelling. 

Cruz-a-palooza

My neighborhood movie theater has been screening Penélope Cruz vehicles on two of its three screens, and I've finally seen them both. (Just in time, too: they're both going bye-bye tomorrow.) In Elegy, adapted from Philip Roth's novel The Dying Animal, Cruz plays a 24-year-old graduate student with a mysteriously thick accent for a character who supposedly emigrated from Cuba when she was 11. In Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona, she's a pistol-packing Spanish painter with beeg crazy hair and beeg crazy temper. Stereotype? ¿Qué es ésto?

Several items of note:

1. Elegy's director, Isabel Coixet, is from Barcelona. Elegy is her first movie set in New York.

2. Woody Allen is from New York. Vicky Cristina Barcelona is his first movie set in Barcelona.

3. Patricia Clarkson plays supporting roles in both movies.

4. Each movie has an erotically charged scene set in a photographic darkroom, apparently for no other reason than to bathe Ms. Cruz in red light. I mean, who the heck uses a darkroom nowadays? (Both movies are set in the present day.)

What are the odds?

P.S. You want reviews? Elegy is watchable; it stars Ben Kingsley, who's never less than interesting, and Dennis Hopper has a nice turn. (Don't blink or you'll miss Debbie Harry—yep, from Blondie—looking sad and unglamorous in a small part toward the end.) As for VCB, what a waste of celluloid and Gaudí architecture. I haven't liked anything of Allen's since Mighty Aphrodite; my favorite of his films remains the underseen Sweet and Lowdown, with Sean Penn. (My name is Nancy, and I'm not an AnnieHallic.) I think I'll just turn the microphone over to GQ film critic Tom Carson, who retitled the movie Vicky Cristina Barcalounger and whose review is titled "A Woody for Scarlett"—as in Johansson, one of the stars (the blonde one):

What you may or may not share is [Allen's] ardor for Johansson, whose performance has left some luckless inflatable toy collecting unemployment. Fond as I was of her in Lost in Translation and Ghost World, the sad truth is I’ve dealt with telemarketers who had better command of their vocal moues and overall dramatic presence. Yet that’s clearly just why Woody’s smitten with her. He doesn’t treat her as a professional, and by now only the IRS would beg to differ.

Electile Dysfunction

Is there a 12-step program for campaignoholics? If there is, don't tell me about it. I'm having too much fun with stuff like this:

Schnaufblog parses the Bristol Palin pregnancy announcement, in particular this sentence: "We have been blessed with five wonderful children who we love with all our heart and mean everything to us."

The relative clause after children contains a coordination structure. What causes the ungrammaticality (at least I think the sentence is ungrammatical, not just odd) is that who is an object pronoun in the first part of the sentence, i.e. one could also say whom ("...five wonderful children whom we love"), and a subject pronoun in the second part of the sentence, i.e. one could not say "...and whom mean everything to us".

Conjugate Visits points out that although Sarah Palin's husband, Todd, works in "blue-collar" fields, he ain't "working class":

He's an oil production manager and a commercial fisherman. But class-wise, his income helps put the family well outside the group that's often called "working class" and that struggles to get by in today's economy.

Over at Slate, Paul Collins examines why John McCain can't stop saying "my friends":

Is this a doctrine of pre-emptive friendship—immediately declaring crowds won over with an oratorical "mission accomplished"? Perhaps, but McCain's friending is a strategy that hearkens back to classical rhetoric.

Or maybe just to mid-20th-century musical theater.

OMG, Sarah Palin has a blog! Well, "Sarah Palin" does. And she has so much to share:

I just have to say that I love the comments! :)  Outside of my rock (hi- todd!) there is no one else offering me this kind of support as I set out on this journey to become the second most powerful person in the world.  Keep it coming, it is great!  In alot of ways, I feel like Tom Joad in that movie East of Eden.  I am out there for you.  When there is stuff that is bad, I will be there to help. 

Something tells me she isn't talking about this comment from someone named Hillary: "Get over yourself, chiquita, and don't give up your day job." (Via Very Short List.)

There's a link from "Sarah"'s blog to "Bristol and Levi's wedding registry" at JCPenney.com. I totally have dibs on that awesome Bowler Camo Diaper Bag.

Previously on the Palin Channel.

Profile THIS

I hate filling out those chirpy "My Interests" profiles for social-networking sites. What am I, Playmate of the Month? Usually I just ignore them. Would that I had the wit of The Assimilated Negro, who subverts the whole exercise and turns it into a poem of protest.

I admire that blog title, too. The author ("a moneylancing writer," according to his more straightforward profile) frequently refers to himself by its initials, TAN, which works perfectly. In fact, it's one of very few acronyms this anti-acronymista feels good about endorsing.

And the blog itself? Very nice indeed. Good stuff on "the negro hipster," Claire Huxtable, the mysterious whitening of Beyonce Knowles, and the music of Nas and Common. And do not miss An Open Letter from a Black Guy to His Average-Sized Penis. I started to quote from it here, but then I couldn't figure out when to stop quoting. Or laughing. Just go over there and read it yourself. (Okey-dokey pokey! Had to get that in.)

Discovered in Orange Tangerine's blogroll.

Quote of the Day

"It's hard to get rich on grammar, though you can get thin trying."

-- Martha Brockenbrough, SPOGG* blog

___

* Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar

Quote of the Week

"I'm feeling more than a bit xenophobic these days," writes Roy Peter Clark in Poynter Online, "and I'm blaming it on the movement to outsource newspaper copy editing services to India."

I need copy editors to know that Eva Longoria is not the wife of Tampa Bay Rays baseball phenom Evan Longoria.  I need them to know that a Florida cracker is not something you eat, and that it may or may not be offensive to some readers. I need a Rhode Island copy editor to know that you don't dig for clams; you dig for quahogs, a word of Indian origin -- American Indian. I need copy editors who know that Jim Morrison of The Doors went to St. Pete Junior College, that beat writer Jack Kerouac died in St. Petersburg, Fla., but is buried in Lowell, Mass. I want them to know that Lakewood High School is different from Lakewood Ranch High School. I want them to know that 54th Avenue North in St. Petersburg is 108 blocks north of 54th Avenue South. ...

I need copy editors who are more than comma catchers. I need them to be language masters, the last line of defense, the standard bearers of what my newspaper stands for, my safety net. I want to be able to walk up to a copy editor's desk and say "great catch, thanks for saving my ass." Must I now learn the Hindi word for ass?

For a slightly different opinion of the usefulness of copyeditors, see Times (U.K.) restaurant reviewer Giles Coren's letter to the subeditors who--horrors!--removed a vital indefinite article without checking first with His Authorship. (In the U.K., copyeditors are called subeditors or "subs.") Via Editrix, who, like Clark, invokes the "saving your ass" argument and adds: "What those copy editors need isn't a lecture from you. What they need is a raise and an attaboy now and then."

What We Write About When We Write About Fashion

From the chapter titled "Fashionspeak" in The Meaning of Sunglasses: And a Guide to Almost All Things Fashionable, by Hadley Freeman:

"Homage" is probably the most well known bit of fashionspeak. A conveniently trussed-up word for "blatant copy," it can be used without the niggling fear of litigation, and it has a soothing sheen of intellectualism, suggesting that the designer spent long, noble hours in some dusty library, studying the technique of his forebears and then respectfully weaving it into his own work, as opposed to desperate plagiarism due to a dearth of new ideas. So, for example: "Marc Jacobs's homage to Courrèges was perhaps a little over-literal." Thus, it becomes a criticism in a compliment inside a totally daft remark, showing the kind of linguistic ingenuity that would make Derrida bow down in respectful awe.

It's overstating just a tad to say that Freeman rips the lid off the fashion industry, exposing the seamy side of the pretty-peddling biz, but she does have a merry time making shish kebab out of sacred cows. Cast an eye over some of the other chapter titles in this slim, witty book:

Accessories: going to hell in a handbag

Blouses: not so librarian now, are they?

Coats: stuck at the nexus between dull and stressful

Get: fashion that girls do and boys don't

Jacobs, Marc: genius or what?

Ruffles: from French ingénue to Bozo the Clown

Vanity, and the joys thereof

Freeman is deputy fashion editor London's Guardian newspaper, where she writes a fashion advice column whose tone of brisk authority--not to mention her command of the dependent clause--is seemingly belied by the author's photograph, in which she appears to be about thirteen and a half.

(Post title: homage or what?)