Fritinancy

Book review: “Writing with Style”

It’s Independence Day here in the US, and how better to celebrate our divorce from the colonizers than with a book written by an American expatriate for reporters at a British publication?

 

June linkfest

A quick audiobook recommendation: I thoroughly enjoyed So Many Steves: Afternoons with Steve Martin, a series of conversations between Martin and his longtime friend the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik. (Gopnik is everywhere, isn’t he? He was also “in conversation with” the fictional Lydia Tár in last year’s Tár.) Martin, who will turn 78 in August, has spent more than 60 years plying his various trades: magician, musician, comedian, actor, novelist, librettist. Gopnik elicits charming stories and surprising revelations, and gently nudges Martin toward a discussion of craft and motivation. The book—audio only, with some delightful banjo music—is available from Pushkin Industries and the usual online merchants. Or, if your public library supports the Libby app, you can borrow it free for three weeks. (By the way, the title is a twist on the E.E. Cummings poem “So Many Selves.” Martin is a big fan of Cummings, it turns out.)

*

 

Word of the week: Thrutopia

“We need a literature of winning,” author and creative-writing professor Aya de León tells California, the alumni magazine of the University of California at Berkeley (my alma mater). The theme of the spring/summer issue is “optimism,” and de León is talking about her new venture, Fighting Chance Books, which will publish books that “inspire you that hope and optimism are not only possible, but critical to changing the ending of our story as human beings.”

There’s a name for this optimistic future, says De León: 

There’s a movement out of the U.K. called “thrutopia.” It’s not dystopian. It’s not utopian. It’s a thrutopia where people fight through the obstacles to get to the future that we want. That’s the idea behind Fighting Chance Books.

I had never heard of thrutopia, so I did some research. A portmanteau of through and utopia the word was coined by the British ecological philosopher and Green Party activist Rupert Read (b. 1966), who wrote about it for Huffpost UK in 2017:

What are desperately needed, but as yet barely exist, are what I term thrutopias. Thrutopias would be about how to get from here to there, where 'there' is far far away in time. How to live and love and vision and carve out a future, through pressed times that will endure. The climate crisis is going to be a long emergency, probably lasting hundreds of years. It is useless to fantasise a shining sheer escape from it to utopia. But it's similarly useless, dangerously defeatist, to wallow around in dystopias. We need ways of seeing, understanding, inhabiting, creating what will be needed for the very long haul. Visioning the politics and ecology of getting through.

May linkfest

On the occasion of the death of R&B singer Billy “The Kid” Emerson, at 97, Ben Zimmer applied his lexicographical lens to a term immortalized by Emerson: “doodly-squat.” Did you know that doodly-squat is what linguists call a “vulgar minimizer” or—I love this—a “squatitive”? (Strong Language)

*

Ramped up, amped up, ratchet up, gin up, up the ante: a long and poetic list of clichés. (Gift article)

*

 

If any non-Jews out there are starting a business, I am available to consult on whether your proposed brand name means “butt” in Yiddish pic.twitter.com/SnSXBTeem2

— Dan Berger (@dnbrgr) May 22, 2023

Name in the news: Hadada

On the evening of April 4, the American writer Vivian Gornick received the Paris Review’s Hadada Award for lifetime achievement. Gornick, 87, is the author of the memoir Fierce Attachments and of many essay collections. Previous recipients of the award include Jamaica Kincaid, Richard Ford, N. Scott Momaday, and Lydia Davis.

I recognized Gornick’s name because I’ve read her work for years. But “Hadada”? That word—name?—stumped me. Other Paris Review prizes are named for writers: George Plimpton (the publication’s founding editor), Terry Southern. Is there a literary Hadada I wasn’t aware of?

No, but there’s an avian hadada.

Paris Review logo designed by William Pène du Bois, the magazine’s art editor from 1953 to 1960. 

Paris Review logo designed by William Pène du Bois, the magazine’s art editor from 1953 to 1960. 

Paris Review logo designed by William Pène du Bois, the magazine’s art editor from 1953 to 1960. 

February linkfest

I’ve started listening to the “Tech Won’t Save Us” podcast, expertly hosted by Canadian tech critic Paris Marx, who’s joined each week by an expert who critically examines “the tech industry, the powerful people who helm it, and the products and services it unleashes on the world.” Separating tech from politics, says Marx, “has consequences for us all, especially the most vulnerable.” I’m looking forward to reading books by two recent guests, Malcolm Harris (Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World), and Edward Niedermeyer (Ludicrous: The Unvarnished History of Tesla Motors). Niedermeyer introduced me to the useful word autonowashing, “the practice of making unverified or misleading claims which misrepresent the appropriate level of human supervision required by a partially or semi-autonomous product, service or technology.” (More -washing compounds here.)

 

“Tech Won’t Save Us” logo tee

 

*

 

Book Review: "The People's Tongue"

My family didn’t own many books when I was growing up. That was what public libraries were for, declared my father, who laid down the law in such matters. Why spend money on a book you’d read only once?

He made one big exception: Somehow, he’d learned that the Los Angeles public school system gave away books that were no longer fit for classroom circulation, and he’d go to those giveaways and come home with an armful of free, slightly battered textbooks.

I still own, and cherish, one of the books he salvaged: Adventures in American Literature, published by Harcourt, Brace & Company.*

It was intended for long-ago high school English classes, but I was probably only 10 or so when I started picking my way through it, oblivious to its out-of-date-ness, choosing whatever seemed exotic (“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” by the Puritan cleric Jonathan Edwards, filled me with delicious terror, as did Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game”—the very first selection in the book!) or accessible (“Sixteen,” by Maureen Daly, a huge success when it was originally published in 1938) or funny (“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” “Gleanings from the Devil’s Dictionary”). The book even includes the complete text of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which I read over and over, imagining how the characters looked and sounded. The questions and prompts and the end of each entry nudged me toward deeper appreciation, but mostly I read for simple pleasure. The book was aptly titled: American literature was indeed a terrific adventure.

Now a new book, The People’s Tongue: Americans and the English Language, brings a similar sense of discovery and delight to new generations of readers.

 

Disclaimer: I received a review copy of The People’s Tongue from the publisher, Restless Books (nice name!).

Word of the week: Catch-22

You don’t need me to explain catch-22: It’s been part of our vocabulary for more than 60 years. A catch-22 is “a paradoxical situation from which an individual can’t escape because of contradictory rules or limitations.”

Catch-22 comes from Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel of the same name, published in 1961 and set during World War II; it was made into a 1970 movie (directed by Mike Nichols) and a 2019 miniseries (starring, among others, George Clooney). The novel has never been out of print.

In the novel, Doc Daneeka, an army psychiatrist, explains that “anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy” and therefore can’t plead mental illness as grounds for discharge:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.

January linkfest

Do hobos still ride the rails in America? Indeed they do, and City of the Rails, a new podcast from journalist Danelle Morton, gives you a firsthand look at their lives. Danelle had a personal reason for her quest: Her daughter left home to hop freight trains as soon as she received her high school diploma. Between attempts to locate “Ruby” (yes, nerds, Ruby on rails), Danelle investigates the history of the railroads, talks to current and former hobos, and seeks answers from train engineers and rail cops. New episodes drop on Wednesdays; prepare to listen to a couple minutes of ads before the podcast begins. A personal note: Danelle and I go way back, to the beginning of our journalism careers, and she got in touch a couple of years ago when she was brainstorming a title for the podcast. I’m delighted at the result! Available wherever you get your podcasts.

*

Have you read my latest story for Medium? It’s about my attempts to use Chat GPT and other AI tools to create brand names and taglines. This friend link will bypass the paywall.

 

*

Word of the week: Crixa

Happy Lunar New Year! It’s the Year of the Rabbit, so I’m digging deep into the archives to bring you a bunny-related* word I originally wrote about 15 years ago.

Watership Down, by Richard Adams (1972)