The lifespan of my interest in The Lifespan of a Fact

John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s The Lifespan of a Fact has called to me from bookstore shelves on several occasions. The book purports to be the record of seven years of back-and-forth between a writer (D’Agata) and a fact-checker (Fingal). Publisher W. W. Norton calls the book “a brilliant and eye-opening meditation on the relationship between ‘truth’ and ‘accuracy.’” Notice the quotation marks.

Now that I have the book from the library, I am glad that I resisted the call. What to make of a writer who claims to have changed a seemingly factual “thirty-one” to “thirty-four” because “the rhythm of ‘thirty-four’ works better in that sentence”? Nothing, because that detail alone (on page 16, the second page of the text) made it easy for me to suspect that this book is not worth my time. Some further dipping clinched it.

But wait: there’s more. A piece by Craig Silverman of The Poynter Institute makes clear that the book is not even what it purports to be, a record of a seven-year fact-checking process.

Me, I believe in truth and accuracy in nonfiction, no need for quotation marks around either word. Oh, and no need for made-up quotations from Bob Dylan either.

A related post
George Orwell on historical truth

Gilbert Highet on relevance

On how to make a subject relevant:

The best way to do it is for the teacher to make himself relevant. Nine thousand times more pupils have learnt a difficult subject well because they felt the teacher’s vitality and energy proved its value than because they chose the subject for its own sake. If a youth, sizing up the professor of medieval history, decides that he is a tremendous expert in the history of the Middle Ages and a deadly bore in everything else, he is apt to conclude that medieval history makes a man a deadly bore. If on the other hand he finds that the man is filled with lively interest in the contemporary world, that he actually knows more about it because, through his training, he understands it better, that the practice of intellectual life, so far from making him vague or remote, has made him wise and competent, the youth will conclude without further evidence that medieval history is a valuable asset.

The good teacher is an interesting man or woman.

Gilbert Highet, The Art of Teaching (New York: Knopf, 1951).

I’d add: being interesting need not be a matter of attempting to prove to “the kids” that one is “hep” or “with it.”

[Thank goodness Highet added “or woman” to the last sentence. The language of he and man makes me grind my teeth.]

Nabokov on working in the library

Vladimir Nabokov, in his 1967 Paris Review interview:

A first-rate college library with a comfortable campus around it is a fine milieu for a writer. There is, of course, the problem of educating the young. I remember how once, between terms, not at Cornell, a student brought a transistor set with him into the reading room. He managed to state that one, he was playing “classical” music; that two, he was doing it “softly”; and that three, “there were not many readers around in summer.” I was there, a one-man multitude.

Forward.

The Wall Street Journal reports on a tizzy over the period at the end of the Obama campaign’s slogan “Forward.” Have you been thinking about this period? Me neither.

Here, as quoted in the article, is one popular grammarian’s take:

“It would be quite a stretch to say it’s grammatically correct,” said Mignon Fogarty, author of Grammar Girl’s 101 Troublesome Words You’ll Master in No Time. “You could say it’s short for ‘we’re moving forward.’ But really it’s not a sentence.”

But really it is a sentence. The Oxford English Dictionary covers this use of forward:



I hear the campaign slogan “Forward” not as a command but as an elliptical form of the hortatory subjunctive: “Let us go forward.”

A related post
Hortatory subjuctive FTW (Yes, it’s for reals.)

[Do you get the feeling that no one quoted in the WSJ article bothered to look up the word?]

Chris Marker (1921–2012)

From the New York Times: “Chris Marker, the enigmatic writer, photographer, filmmaker and multimedia artist who pioneered the flexible hybrid form known as the essay film, died on Sunday in Paris. He was 91.”

Our son Ben introduced us to La Jetée (1962) several years ago. The Criterion Collection calls it “one of the most influential, radical science-fiction films ever made.” It’s worth seeking out.

Recently updated

E. B. White, the fact that Now with speculation about where the missing words might have appeared in proof.

[At least I think they’re missing.]

E. B. White, the fact that

Argosy Book Store has an unusual copy of The Elements of Style for sale:

The book bears the ownership signature of Edith Oliver, the drama critic of The New Yorker, together with a slip reading “with the compliments of the author.” Enclosed is a typed letter from White, signed “Andy,” Brooklin, Maine, 8 May, 1959, promising to have the book sent to her for her “liberry.” In part — “One thing that tickles me about the little book is that I managed to use the phrase ‘the fact that’ (p. 40) after blasting the daylights out of it in two separate places (‘It should be revised out of every sentence in which it occurs.’) Ha.” In a holograph P.S. he writes “The smelts are running. What are you doing in New York when the smelts are running?”

Price: $2500.

But where is the mistake to which White refers? I checked the first edition, first printing, and there’s no the fact that on page 40. Nor does the phrase appear in error elsewhere in the book. In White’s The Points of My Compass (1962), a postcript to the memoir “Will Strunk” also mentions a mistake:

One parting note: readers of the first edition of the book were overjoyed to discover that the phrase “the fact that” had slid by me again, landing solidly in the middle of one of my learned dissertations. It has since disappeared, but it had its little day.

I can think of three possible explanations of what’s going on: 1) my reading skills are not what they used to be; 2) White is referring to readers who read the book in proof; 3) there’s some strange inside joke playing out. I think that 2) is the likeliest explanation.

In the introduction to The Elements of Style, White writes about his tendency to miss the fact that:

I suppose I have written “the fact that” a thousand times in the heat of composition, revised it out maybe five hundred times in the cool aftermath. To be batting only .500 this late in the season, to fail half the time to connect with this fat pitch, saddens me, for it seems a betrayal of the man who showed me how to swing at it and made the swinging seem worth while.

We all miss, but we keep swinging.

Looking at The Elements of Style again made me notice anew details that mark the book as an artifact of the dowdy world. My favorite: “Is it worth while to telegraph?” I would like to see Maira Kalman illustrate that sentence.

[Page 40, first edition, first printing. Thanks, library. Click for a larger view.]

*

An afterthought (7:07 p.m.): I wonder whether the fact that might have appeared on page 40 in the entry on interesting:

Perhaps this sample sentence first read: “In connection with the forthcoming visit of Mr. B. to America, it is interesting to recall the fact that,” &c. This entry of course cautions against relying on the word interesting.

Related reading
All Strunk and White posts (via Pinboard)

[The telegraph sentence appears, still, in the 2009 fiftieth-anniversary edition of The Elements, three years after Western Union’s last telegram. As of this morning, The Elements of Style, fourth edition, hardcover, is #164 of all books at Amazon.]

VDP, “Letters from the Road”

At Bananastan Records, Van Dyke Parks’s “Letters from the Road,” written during his recent European travels. The letters begin with a Berliner: a madeleine in disguise.

[There are eleven pages: click on the trucks to move forward.]

Nancy + Sluggo = Perfection

[Zippy, July 30, 2012.]

The answer checks out.

Bill Griffith is one of Ernie Bushmiller’s many admirers. In an essay on Nancy, Griffith writes:

Bushmiller creates his own reality, where everything is wholly his and the world as we know it has been reduced to its essentials. Only the purest ingredients are used. You can feel the air in a Nancy strip. Objects aren’t merely drawn, they exist. The thing in itself!

Yes, das Ding an sich.

Other Nancy posts
Charlotte russe
The greatest Nancy panel?
Nancy is here
Nancy meets Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo)
Nancy meets Billy Wilder (The Seven Year Itch)
Nancy meets Stanley Kubrick (The Shining)

Life at Merriam-Webster

“A powerful culture of silence in the office”: a report on life at Merriam-Webster. With great photographs of the citation files and of the editorial floor in 1955. Shhh!