Roger Angell FTW

Roger Angell’s essay “This Old Man” has won a National Magazine Award for The New Yorker in the category of Essays and Criticism.

I read much of “This Old Man” again last night. It’s a great essay.

“Comprised of”

Sounds like something from The Onion: Man’s Wikipedia Edits Mostly Consist of Deleting “Comprised Of.”

Word of the day: quotidian

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day is quotidian (it’s a word in the previous post).

I like the word quotidian. The word dailiness too. I associate both words with the poetry of the (so-called) New York School. “It is 12:20 in New York a Friday / three days after Bastille day, yes.”

A page-ninety test

The page-ninety test, applied to Joanna Rakoff’s My Salinger Year (New York: Knopf, 2014). The book is about Rakoff’s year working as an assistant at the dowdy literary agency that represented J. D. Salinger, identified only as “the Agency” (in truth, Harold Ober Associates):

And yet my boss — and all the older agents — still regarded me as something akin to a piece of furniture, perhaps even more so than when I’d first started. Parked in front of my desk, Carolyn and my boss could while away an hour discussing the quotidian details of their lives: the roasted chicken at such and such restaurant; Carolyn’s attempts to quit smoking by putting her cigarettes in the freezer so they wouldn’t taste as good; the rerouting of the bus that ran through their neighborhood; the perennial troubles of Daniel, who was still adjusting to some new medication. One day in the middle of May — I turned twenty-four the week before with little fanfare — as I typed and typed, Carolyn began talking about friends of hers named Joan and John, and their daughter, who had an odd name, an odd name that sounded oddly familiar to me. I’d heard her discuss Joan and John before, but now I realized, with a jolt, that she was talking about Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. These were Carolyn’s intimates, the people whose pedestrian travails — bathroom renovations and missed flights — she chattered about. “Who is she?” I asked James the next day. “What’s her story?”

This first paragraph of page ninety at least has the virtue of being about life at the Agency. (The first paragraphs of ninety-one, ninety-two, and ninety-three are about bills, student loans, and credit-card debt, respectively.) But I find nothing here that would make me want to read this book. The writing is sometimes wobbly: I don’t know what it would mean to regard someone “even more so” as a piece of furniture. “First started” should be ”started,” and “quotidian details of their lives” could just be “quotidian details” or “details of their lives,” no? What I find more offputting is a tone of self-regard (turning twenty-four “with little fanfare”) and faux-naïve surprise: “an odd name that sounded oddly familiar to me.” (That name would be Quintana, and it is difficult to imagine the name not being instantly recognizable to Rakoff, who tells us early on of her interest in Didion’s work.) And why the jolt anyway? When you’re working at a literary agency, it should be no surprise that people there might be close to a writer or two. This contrived scene smacks of something written for the movies (and yes, the rights have been sold). And speaking of the faux-naïve and contrived: it strains credibility to think that Rakoff had never ever read a word of Salinger before taking a job at the Agency and answering his fan mail.

Someone who comes to this book for its Salinger content will be disappointed: a few telephone conversations, one brief meeting. The Salinger who appears here is courteous, genial, fairly deaf. Someone who comes to this book for a picture of a dowdy work-world — IBM Selectrics and carbon paper — will likely be disappointed as well. A third of the way in, I ended up skimming for the scant Salinger details, pretty sure that I wouldn’t be missing much. Whoever this book’s intended reader might be, it wasn’t me.

And yes, it is page-ninety, not ninety-nine. The first paragraph on page ninety-nine of My Salinger Year is an inventory of credit-card debt.

[Thanks, interlibrary loan.]

AdBlock Plus and corporate money

Another reason to use µBlock: Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are paying to get around Adblock Plus (The Verge).

There’s nothing wrong with creating an adblocking extension that whitelists advertisers of the coder’s choice. But charging companies to get on that whitelist is another matter. John Gruber likens AdBlock Plus’s business model to an extortion racket.

[AdBlock Plus does give the user the choice to block all ads. But the whitelist is on by default.]

Hank and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, February 3, 2015.]

Context: Thirsty just bought Hi a beer.

The only person I can think of who would call a glass of wine “a wine” is Charles Bukowski: “Back at my place, I undressed, climbed onto my cot, leaned against the wall, lit a cigarette and poured a wine.” “I walked back to my room and poured myself a wine.” “I walked over and sat in a chair, poured a wine.” “We sat down and had a wine.”

Sunday’s trip to the “bowling alley” seems to be ending up in the gutter.

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)
Read Charles Bukowski 4 what?
Zippy and Bukowski

[Henry Charles Bukowski went by “Hank.”]

New Yorker singular and plural forms

A sentence from an article in The New Yorker:

On test days, I sat next to Bob Isner or Bruce Gelfand or Ted Chapman or Donny Chamberlain — smart boys whose handwriting I could read — and divided my attention between his desk and the teacher’s eyes.

There are four singular nouns (Bob, Bruce, Ted, Donny), a plural appositive (smart boys whose handwriting I could read), and a singular pronoun (his). Because the antecedent of his seems, if only for a moment, to be boys, the sentence is mildly confusing. (Confusing enough that I read it again and again and decided to write this post.)

Can a singular appositive help? Not really:

On test days, I sat next to Bob Isner or Bruce Gelfand or Ted Chapman or Donny Chamberlain — a smart boy whose handwriting I could read — and divided my attention between his desk and the teacher’s eyes.

The sentence still sounds off, and now it might seem that smart boy refers only to Donny. Better would be a slight rewriting:

On test days, I sat next to Bob Isner or Bruce Gelfand or Ted Chapman or Donny Chamberlain — any smart boy whose handwriting I could read — and divided my attention between his desk and the teacher’s eyes.

Any avoids the plural while making it clear that all four boys were worthy assistants. Problem solved.

In college there was a guy who had me pegged as one of the “smart boys.” He would sit behind me and nudge and nudge. I would inch my desk forward and hunch over my exam booklet, thinking Leave me the . . . .

[By the way, the article, about a mathematician, is worth reading.]

A joke in the traditional manner

What did the plumber do when embarrassed?

No spoilers here. The answer is in the comments.

More jokes in the traditional manner
How did Bela Lugosi know what to expect?
How did Samuel Clemens do all his long-distance traveling?
Why did the doctor spend his time helping injured squirrels?
Why did Oliver Hardy attempt a solo career in movies?
Why was Santa Claus wandering the East Side of Manhattan?

[“In the traditional manner”: by or à la my dad. Lugosi, Clemens, Hardy, and this one are his. I have to take credit for the doctor and Santa Claus.]

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, February 1, 2015.]

I would prefer “Neither of our teams is playing.”

Bryan Garner’s Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009) explains:

As a pronoun, neither is construed as a singular. That is, it should take a singular verb, and any word for which neither is an antecedent should also be singular. Thus, neither of the offers was a good one is grammatically better than neither of the offers were good ones.

GMAU acknowledges that some sentences can be tricky: the plural form in neither of my parents worked for themselves avoids a certain awkwardness. Garner’s suggested recasting: neither of my parents was self-employed.

But Thirsty’s sentence gets a pass from two grammarians. Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum, A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar (2005):

Subjects with any, no, and none occur freely with either singular or plural agree­ment. With neither, and even more with either, singular agreement is usual; plural agreement is informal, and condemned by prescriptivists.

For Huddleston and Pullum, Neither of them seems valid and Neither of them seem valid are both valid.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1994) advises the reader to just be (cough, cough) themselves:

If you are writing something in a highly formal style, you will probably want to use formal agreement throughout. Otherwise, follow your own inclination in choosing singular or plural constructions after neither.

Such guidance seems to me only to muddy the waters. Is an essay for a freshman comp class likely to be written in “a highly formal style”? I doubt it. Would it be smart in writing that essay to use singular forms with neither? Absolutely.

Even Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style (2014) pulls back from okaying plural forms:

Neither means “not one of the two,” and it is singular: Neither book was any good, not Neither book were any good. The same is true of either, even when it picks one item from a pair: Either of the candidates is experienced enough to run the country, not are.

It’s interesting to see Pinker agreeing with Garner and not with Pullum. But it is impossible to imagine any of these observations as useful to Mr. Thurston. When you’re a comic-strip character, subject-verb agreement is out of your hands.

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Artwork labels

At Oscar’s Portrait, an exhibition of artwork labels.

[This cartoon makes me remember an exhibit at the Whitney some years ago. Among the art objects on display: a bathtub filled with printer’s ink. The ink on the walls was getting more attention.]