“By the Book” for the rest of us

I’m beginning to suspect that the “By the Book” people at The New York Times are never going to call. Perhaps it’s because of my snarky posts about Michiko Kakutani’s too-frequent use of the word messy. Sigh. So I’m making my own “By the Book” column, or post, with questions pulled from a couple of Times columns. Why should such questions be the province of the well-known alone?

What books are on your nightstand?

As Gertrude Stein might have said, There ain’t any nightstand, there ain’t going to be any nightstand, there never has been any nightstand, that’s the nightstand.

But I have many books yet to read on shelves or in piles. A few: James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain; Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight; W.G. Sebald, A Place in the Country; Gabriele Tergit, Käsebier Takes Berlin.

What’s the last great book you read?

Robertson Davies, Fifth Business, the first novel of The Deptford Trilogy. Elaine has been praising these novels for years. Now we’re reading them together, and I second her emotion. I’d say that if you like Steven Millhauser’s fiction, you’ll love Robertson Davies.

Describe your ideal reading experience.

A printed book. A chair or sofa that’s comfortable enough but not too comfortable. (Zzz.) A cup of coffee or tea nearby. A pencil. Post-it Notes. My iPhone for looking up words on the fly.

What’s your favorite little-known book?

Many of my favorite books are little known. I’ll pick one: Ted Berrigan’s A Certain Slant of Sunlight, late poems written on postcards, published posthumously. Berrigan’s use of the postcard has a lot to do with the way I’ve come to think of the blog post: a small but extremely flexible space.

Another: Works and Days, an several-hundred-page issue of the Quarterly Review of Literature devoted to the poet David Schubert: all his poems, published and unpublished, and a running commentary on his life and work by those who knew him.

Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?

I think highly of Roger Angell, Rae Armantrout, Clark Coolidge, Bryan Garner, Steven Millhauser, and Alice Munro, among others. But most of my reading is of the dead, and really, any writer whose work is being read is working today. John Ashbery and Toni Morrison are working today.

What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?

The story of the Bollandists, an association founded by Jesuits and devoted to hagiography. The work of the group is part of Fifth Business.

How do you organize your books?

Not as well as I once did. There’s one bookcase of ancients. Another with works running from Gilgamesh to Thomas Hardy. Two more with modern poetry. Another with modern fiction. Another with art and music. Two more with non-fiction prose and reference works. Two more with books recently read and books on tap. As my reading interests have expanded, it’s not as easy to find things as it used to be.

What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?

I have almost two dozen books by or about Thomas Merton. What can I say? I am a devout non-believer and Thomas Merton fan. I admire his humanity, his humor, and his ability to change his thinking: having found the answer, he discovered that there were others. Reading Merton’s journals has taught me a lot about my own world of work. An academic department, with people (mostly) in for the long haul, is in some ways much like a monastic community. Better hope you can get along with your abbot (chair).

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

I read mostly comic books, How and Why books, and the World Book Encyclopedia. The book that made a reader and re-reader of fiction: Clifford Hicks’s Alvin’s Secret Code, which I borrowed again and again from the public library. I still re-read it once a year (now as an ex-library copy of my own). The only “classic” I can recall reading in childhood is Treasure Island, in sixth grade, for school.

[March 13: A “classic” I forgot: Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. I also bought A Tale of Two Cities, but I don’t think I ever read it. I bought these books in a department store, 45¢ each.]

How have your reading tastes changed over time?

My formal eduction was almost entirely about Anglo-American lit. Now I read more and more in translation from French and German and Spanish. I am back to my high-school self in a way, when I was reading Borges and Kafka. And I’ve become much more generous toward the nineteenth century. Not everything needs to be modernist.

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

I’m sorry, but I really have no reason to think that anyone I might invite would show up. I’d rather spend an evening with true friends. But I’d give anything to speak, through an interpreter, with Homer and Sappho, whoever they were.

What do you plan to read next?

The Manticore and World of Wonders, the next two novels of The Deptford Trilogy.

An invitation in the spirit of the open Internet: Reader, why not post your own responses to such questions? Add some, omit some, make up your own. If you write such a post, let me know, and I will link to it here.

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March 4: At 30 Squares of Ontario, J.D. Lowe offers what he calls a tongue-in-cheek “By the Book”: “By the Book” — Miniature Buildings Edition.

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March 11: At Traingeek, Steve Boyko offers “By the Book” — Railfan Edition.

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May 4: Pete Anderson offers his responses to The Guardian ’s “Books that made me” prompts. And, inspired by Pete’s effort, Elaine Fine offers her responses to those prompts. (I think I prefer those prompts to the NYT questions.)

Michiko Kakutani, messy watch

New York Times book-reviewer Michiko Kakutani is known for her frequent (some might say too frequent) use of the verb limn. Far more frequent is her use of the adjective messy. In February 2011 I wrote a post that tracked Kakutani’s use of messy from 1979 to 2010, from drizzle to steady rain to downpour and back to drizzle. The word appeared just once in 2011 and once more in 2012. The year 2012 also brought a conspicuously inappropriate use of the verb mess up. And now messy is back. From a review of NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel We Need New Names:

Once she is a teenager, she quickly adopts the habits of friends from school, even if she doesn’t exactly care for them — listening to Rihanna, trying on armfuls of clothing at the mall (and leaving them in huge messy piles in the dressing room) and watching pornography online.

Here messy seems to function like a tic: given the context, is there really a difference between piles of clothes and messy piles of clothes? If one leave clothes in huge piles, is neatness ever involved?

[Since 2011 and 2012 brought one messy each, it’s reasonable to speculate that this review might offer the only 2013 sighting.]

Michiko Kakutani, messy watch

From a February 2011 post:

New York Times book-reviewer Michiko Kakutani is known for her frequent (some might say too frequent) use of the verb limn. Nearly as frequent is her use of the adjective messy.

I made my case by collecting appearances of messy and mess, from 1979 to the then present.

The first mess of 2012 appeared in Kakutani’s tactless paraphrase of a line from Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse”: “They mess you up” for “They fuck you up.” This past Sunday’s Times has the first messy of 2012. It appears in a review of Nicholson Baker’s The Way the World Works, a book of essays Kakutani calls a “hodge-podgy collection”:

He even gives himself little rules concerning his annotation of books: no messy underlining or highlighting in yellow or pink, just a discreet little dot in the margin next to something he approves of — dots so discreet that they “could almost be a dark fleck in the paper” — and, also, no more than 10 or 15 dots per book.

Look at “Narrow Ruled,” the essay in question, and you’ll see that “messy underlining” reflects Kakutani’s sensibility, not Baker’s. Yes, Baker prefers making dots to underlining, but what he says about “the dot method,” as he calls it, is that it is “unobtrusive.” And making dots is not a matter of “little rules”: it’s just the way he likes to mark passages in his reading for later hand-copying. That’s why “it’s best” (Baker’s words) to make ten to fifteen dots: there’s no rule involved, aside from the narrow-ruled notebooks into which Baker copies.

This review seems to mark the first appearance of hodge-podgy in Kakutani’s prose. Hodge-podge though has appeared often.

Related posts
Michiko Kakutani, messy
First messy of 2011
“They mess you up”

Words I can live without

A spontaneous list: delve, -flecked, get (as in “So-and-so gets it,” meaning that So-and-so sees things as you do), helm (as a noun or verb, unless you’re at sea, literally), limn, the planet (as in “on the planet”), tome. These words are tired. Let us allow them a rest.

Delve often becomes a slightly pompous substitute for examine, go into, or look at. But the primary meaning of delve (“reach inside a receptacle and search for something”) makes the word best reserved for figurative use that suggests a genuine search. It makes no sense to describe, for instance, a letter-writer as refusing to “delve into specifics”: if those specifics are available to the writer, no search is needed. Better to say that the letter-writer is refusing to go into specifics, and give delve a rest. The use of -flecked to form phrasal adjectives also needs a rest: I cringe when I read that a new film is “laugh-flecked.” And when told that someone is at the helm of a committee, I want to abandon ship, even if the person helming gets it.

Michiko Kakutani’s overuse of limn has created problems for the word, which seems to lend itself to misuse anyway, as when an art critic writes that lines on graph paper limn a portrait. No, they form one. Here is the portrait in question. See?

Referring to the planet is silly. The greatest tenor saxophonist on the planet is the greatest tenor saxophonist, period. (That would be Sonny Rollins, I’d say, or David Murray.) One might say greatest living. But “on the planet” will make sense only when there are saxophonists on the moon. For now, “on the planet,” like “of all time,” suggests the American penchant for grandiose statement.

As for tome, the New Oxford American Dictionary notes that use of the word is “chiefly humorous”: tome as a substitute for book sounds a bit absurd. If the novel you’re reading is “an interesting tome,” you’d better be speaking archly. My friend Aldo Carrasco and I used tome as a joke with reference to letters, some of which ran for — think of it — several pages.

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More words I can live without
That said,

[All examples are drawn from journalism or life. The definition of delve is from the New Oxford American Dictionary. Michiko Kakutani’s overuse of limn got me noticing her overuse of mess and messy, which I wrote about here, here, and here. I like extra details in brackets and hope that you do too.]

“They mess you up”

For the first time in a long time, the word mess has appeared in a Michiko Kakutani book review. From a review of Philip Larkin’s Complete Poems:

Many American readers know Larkin chiefly from his more darkly funny lines: “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (Which was rather late for me) — / Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban / And the Beatles’ first LP” (from “Annus Mirabilis”). Or: “They mess you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you” (from “This Be The Verse”).

“This Be the Verse” begins like so: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” If the New York Times refuses to print fuck, couldn’t the reviewer have used asterisks to suggest the word? “They mess you up” is an exceedingly decorous and misleading paraphrase.

“This Be the Verse” may be read in its entirety at the Poetry Foundation.

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All instances of mess and messy in Kakutani’s writing for the Times, 1979–2010
One mess and one messy from 2011

First messy of 2011

Earlier this year I tracked the many appearances of the word messy in Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times book reviews. Today comes the first messy of 2011, in a review of Teju Cole’s novel Open City:

This outlook, combined with Julius’s solemnity about himself, make him a decidedly lugubrious narrator. And Mr. Cole’s failure to dramatize his alienation — or make it emblematic of some larger historical experience, as Sebald did with his displaced characters — impedes the reader’s progress while underscoring the messy, almost ad hoc nature of the overall narrative. What stands out in this flawed novel — so in need of some stricter editing — is Mr. Cole’s ambition, his idiosyncratic voice and his eclectic, sometimes electric journalistic eye.

Yes, that’s an agreement error in the first quoted sentence. In need of some stricter editing, yes.

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Michiko Kakutani, messy

[One mess in 2011, in a review of Bill Clinton’s Back to Work: “Mr. Clinton lays out various ideas for increasing bank lending and corporate investment, unwinding the mortgage mess and amending tax laws to give corporations incentives to bring more money back to the United States.”]

Michiko Kakutani, messy

New York Times book-reviewer Michiko Kakutani is known for her frequent (some might say too frequent) use of the verb limn. Far more frequent is her use of the adjective messy. Indeed, it was the appearance of the two words in close proximity in Kakutani’s review of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom — “limning their messy inner lives” — that made me wonder whether messy appears with any frequency in her writing. It does. And how.

Messy first appears in 1979, in a description of the Gotham Book Mart: “a messy profusion of literary magazines, journals and booklets arranged in alphabetical heaps and rows.” Then, a slight drizzle:

“Ruth Gordon was apologizing for her messy apartment.” [1979]

“[T]he messy ambiguities of life.” [1980]

“[A] messy sexual tryst,” “messy lives and aimless talk.” [1982]

Then, a steady rain:

“[T]his messy affair,” “a noisy, somewhat messy interruption in their daily lives,” “the messy fortunes of four young people coming of age in a small, unnamed English town,” “declaring on the witness stand that their house is very messy.” “Whereas fictional events may be orchestrated and shaped into a pleasing pattern, real events tend to be messy and resistant to the tidy, idealized designs favored by the imagination.” [1983]

“[L]ots of messy relationships and compromising positions,” “increasingly messy,” “messy wisps of ‘maybe’s.’” [1984]

“[M]essy entanglements,” “the messy entanglements and conditional values of humdrum daily life.’ [1985]

“[M]essy coincidences,” “messy convolutions,” “messy narrative,” “messy human emotions.” [1986]

“[A] messy affair,” “messy affairs,” “messy housekeeping.” [1987]

“[A] messy seduction scene,” “messy to begin with,” “messy private life,” “small, messy lives.” “If this sounds messy, things are to get considerably more complicated as the novel proceeds.” [1988]

“[M]essy life,” “bizarre three-way relationships and messy complications.” [1989]

“Julie's messy life,” “the messy world of human emotions,” “messy dangling ends.” [1990]

“[T]he messy facts of his father’s life,” “the messy facts of Poe’s life.” [1991]

Then, a downpour:

“[A] messy hodgepodge of a book,” “incongruous and messy relationships,” “messy relationships with men,” “the messy, often incomprehensible facts of life,” “change, confusion and messy emotion.” [1992]

“[A] messy maelstrom of emotions,” “messy moral dilemmas,” “Naomi Wolf’s messy new treatise.” [1993]

“[T]his lax, messy book,” “the random, messy business of life,” “a messy hodgepodge of familiar complaints and hyperbolic assertions.” [1994]

“A Novel About a Novelist and His Messy Life,” “messy involvement,” “the messy details of real life,” “a messy series of adventures,” “a finely observed but messy novel.” [1995]

“[Howard] Stern’s messy, free-associative new tome,” “messy, entangled lives,” “this messy and prosaic book.” [1996]

“[A] messy tangle of contradictions,” “messy human emotions,” “this otherwise messy, discursive novel,” “so messy that its refusal of closure feels less like an artistic choice than simple laziness.” Time itself becomes a big hot mess: “The solar year is made up of a messy 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 45.96768 seconds; the moon takes an inconvenient 29 1/2 days (or to be more precise, 29.53059 days) to circle the earth.” [1997]

“[T]he messy process of artistic creation,” “the messy, spoiled world of civilization,” “this messy, discursive book,” “a messy, shaggy-dog tale.” [1998]

“[T]his messy volume,” “the messy world,” “the messy fallout of an art forgery scam,” “messy romantic entanglements.” [1999]

“[M]essy confirmation hearings,” “messy emotions,” “the messy ingredients of life,” “a messy hybrid of a book,” “a messy adventure.” [2000]

“A messy hodgepodge of styles and ambitions,” “a messy kitchen sink of a book,” “messy and wildly ambitious epics,” “disclosures about Luke’s messy life,” “the messy web of extortion, payoffs and election fraud that afflicted Jersey City and its neighbors in Hudson County,” “a scintillating, if messy, tapestry.” [2001]

“[A] messy hodgepodge of ideas, experimental dream sequences and leaden leitmotifs,” “simultaneously schematic and messy,” “a messy, unconvincing assemblage.” [2002]

“[T]he messy 2000 election standoff in Florida,” “a messy one,” “lazy craftsmanship and a messy, improvised story.” [2003]

“[T]he messy cacophony of city life,” “a messy pastiche,” “a messy, musically structured hodgepodge of a novel,” “his own messy, even felonious inner life,” “messy and predictable at the same time.” [2004]

“[A] messy love triangle,” “a messy hodgepodge of case studies,” “the whole messy story,” “the whole messy sprawl,” “their own messy stew of emotions.” [2005]

Slowing to a drizzle:

“[A] messy, doomed affair,” “a smart, saavy [sic] but messy hodgepodge of a book.” [2006]

“[B]ig, messy, controversial issues,“ “the useful if messy new book.” [2007]

“[A] messy agglomeration,” “his messy, increasingly implausible plot.” [2008]

“This messy, longwinded [sic] volume,” “an entertaining, if messy and long-winded, commentary on the fiction-making process itself.” [2009]

“[A] messy divorce,” “limning their messy inner lives.” [2010]

And the new year is thus far tidy. You can literally eat off the floor, figuratively speaking.

Every writer has stock bits of diction and phrasing. It’s good to become conscious of them, lest they develop into writerly tics. Me, I have to watch out for wonderful, which I’ve used fourteen times in Orange Crate Art posts — it’s probably a Van Dyke Parks influence.

[All quotations from the New York Times. I’ve rearranged some material within individual years for cadence.]

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