Some Gorey rocks

[Edward Gorey, “The Stones.” 4 3/4″ × 2 1/2″. A card from The Fantod Pack (Portland, OR: Pomegranate, 2007). Border added.]

Re: fantod : George Bodmer mentioned Edward Gorey’s Fantod Press and Fantod Pack. Which made me remember that I have the pack, or at least the 2007 reproduction of the 1995 Gotham Book Mart publication. The Fantod Pack consists of twenty cards and a tiny book explaining the use of the deck and the meanings attached to each card, as “interpreted by Madame Groeda Weyrd.” For “The Stones”: March, loss of teeth, a forged letter, paralysis, false arrest, falling sickness, evil communications, estrangement, a sudden affliction, anemia, strife, distasteful duty, and misconstruction.

Photographing this card was difficult: the card is slightly warped and printed off-center; its surface is glossy. The photographer’s equipment and ability are sharply limited. What matters, as my mom and dad would point out, is that I did the best I could. I picked this card from the deck for obvious reasons.

Thanks, George, for thinking of the Gorey connection.

*

Department of Wow!: George Bodmer appears in Mark Dery’s recent biography of Gorey, Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey (New York: Little, Brown, 2018). He’s on page 202, commenting on Gorey’s alphabet books.

Word of the day: fantod

Before the day is done: Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day is fantod. The dictionary speaks:

“You have got strong symptoms of the fantods; your skin is so tight you can't shut your eyes without opening your mouth.” Thus, American author Charles Frederick Briggs provides us with an early recorded use of fantods in 1839. Mark Twain used the word to refer to uneasiness or restlessness as shown by nervous movements — also known as the fidgets — in Huckleberry Finn: “They was all nice pictures, I reckon, but I didn't somehow seem to take to them, because . . . they always give me the fantods.” David Foster Wallace later used “the howling fantods,” a favorite phrase of his mother, in Infinite Jest. The exact origin of fantod remains a mystery, but it may have arisen from English dialectal fantigue — a word (once used by Charles Dickens) that refers to a state of great tension or excitement and may be a blend of fantastic and fatigue.

Here’s an Infinite Jest example, spoken by the French-Canadian terrorist Rémy Marathe: “‘The U.S.A. fantods are meaning fear, confusion, standing hair.’” Yep.

A related post
From Edward Gorey’s Fantod Pack

A review of Dreyer’s English

Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style. New York: Random House, 2019. xviii + 291 pages. $25.

The first two sentences of the book’s introduction made me wonder what I was in for:

I am a copy editor. After a piece of writing has been, likely through numerous drafts, developed and revised by the writer and by the person I tend to call the editor editor and deemed essentially finished and complete, my job is to lay my hands on that piece of writing and make it . . . better.

That second sentence: shouldn’t we expect better of a copy editor? I see several problems: The break between “been” and “developed” makes the sentence difficult to navigate. “Developed and revised”: already implied in “numerous drafts.” “Essentially finished and complete”: also redundant, and “essentially” is, essentially, an empty modifier. And besides, if a writer and an editor know that the manuscript is going to a copy editor, how can it be finished? It’s ready for the next step toward publication.

I am not a copy editor, but I began rewriting, first in my head, then on paper:

I am a copy editor. After a writer and an editor have seen a piece of writing through numerous drafts, my job is to take that writing and make it better.

Or:

I am a copy editor. After a writer and an editor have seen a piece of writing through numerous drafts, I take that writing and make it better.

I think I just did.

Dreyer’s English is a disappointing and not especially useful book. Its design finally became clear to me when I hit the chapter “Notes on Proper Nouns,” devoted to the proper spelling of several dozen proper nouns — “the germ of the book,” as Dreyer, copy chief at Random House, calls it. Dreyer’s English is something of a chatty in-house style guide. Dreyer writes about non-rules (yes, you can begin a sentence with and or but); the rudiments of punctuation; the proper handling of numerals, foreign words, and titles; a few points of grammar; and a few points for fiction writers. He offers a Twitter-sourced array of pet peeves, and he lists words that are often confused and misspelled. And then there’s that list of proper nouns: Stephenie Meyer, Froot Loops, &c. There’s no vision here of what constitutes good prose, only a miscellany, made, mostly, of technicalities.

As a reference, the book fails. Imagine that you’re a true naïf who needs to know how to render a title. The details appear in passing, in a discussion of quotation marks in a chapter about punctuation. If the title is that of, say, an art exhibit or symphony, you’re out of luck. And if it’s the title of a play? Plays are in a footnote, separate from books, recordings, and television series, all of which take italics. (We’re now quite a ways from quotation marks.) A movie title? Movies, for some reason, aren’t mentioned, but the treatment of television shows suggests italics. Or imagine that you’re trying to find what Dreyer says about changing a capital letter to a lowercase letter at the start of a quotation. The index won’t help. (This answer too is in the chapter about punctuation.) Or imagine that you’re trying to recall whether it’s “Brussel sprouts” or “Brussels sprouts.” There too, the index won’t help. Nor is the answer in the chapter about words often confused or the chapter about words often misspelled. The answer is in a chapter called “The Miscellany.”

But no reasonable reader would check on the sprouts by going back to this book. That’s what a dictionary is for. And a reader who is serious about the work of writing would do far better to buy and refer to what Dreyer calls (four times) “big fat stylebooks.” (He names The Chicago Manual of Style, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, and Words into Type.) Such books wear their authority easily and un-self-consciously. Dreyer, in contrast, plays his authority down and up, telling us at one point that he hates “grammar jargon,” at another that “hopefully” is a “disjunct adverb.” He has several moments of Lynne Truss-like indignation: “For a modest monthly fee I will come to wherever you are, and when, in an attempt to pluralize a word, you so much as reach for the apostrophe key, I will slap your hand.” And: “Only godless savages eschew the series comma.” “Series comma,” by the way, is Dreyer’s name for what’s better known as the Oxford or serial comma. Why? Because Dreyer is “a patriotic American” and because “serial” makes him think of “killer.”

Dreyer would do well to consider a maxim from E.B. White’s “An Approach to Style,” a chapter in The Elements of Style (a book that, according to a blurb, Dreyer’s English is about to replace):

Place yourself in the background.

Write in a way that draws the reader’s attention to the sense and substance of the writing, rather than to the mood and temper of the author. If the writing is solid and good, the mood and temper of the writer will eventually be revealed and not at the expense of the work. Therefore, the first piece of advice is this: to achieve style, begin by affecting none — that is, place yourself in the background.

In Dreyer’s English, the writer is everywhere, in the kidding/not kidding subtitle, and most insistently in 208 footnotes that digress in all directions. The first note, for instance, refuses to name a famous name from a party on the Upper East Side: “It’s not name-dropping if I don’t drop the name, right?” The second footnote names the name and recommends the name’s “svelte little memoir.” “Seek it out,” Dreyer says. A little of this stuff goes a long way. And Dreyer’s English is going right back to the library.

Here are some books that do more than this one to further the possibilities of writing. For general inspiration: Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences about Writing and Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. For revision: Claire Cook’s Line by Line: How to Edit Your Own Writing and Bruce Ross-Larson's Edit Yourself: A Manual for Everyone Who Works with Words. For authoritative and extensive guidance in usage: Bryan Garner’s Garner’s Modern English Usage. These are books that a writer can read and learn from again and again.

“Th’ Nancy ’do”

[“Low-Budget Horror Film.” Zippy, April 2, 2019. Click for a larger view.]

“It strikes when you least expect it,” says today‘s strip.

Venn reading
All OCA Nancy posts : Nancy and Zippy posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Pocket notebook sighting: The Small Back Room

[The Small Back Room (dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1949). Click for a larger view.]

Sammy (David Farrar) wonders why he and Sue (Kathleen Byron) “trouble to come out at all.” She suggests that they start “an economy campaign” and “stay in for a few weeks.” Sammy checks his datebook: “Hello, I say, our last economy campaign’s not finished yet.” It’s all a little hard to understand without the rest of the movie.

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Cat People : City Girl : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Time Table : T-Men : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Walk East on Beacon! : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once

More rocks

[Nancy, April 1, 2019. Click for a much larger view.]

Today’s Nancy, by Olivia Jaimes, has 1. truth (the “some rocks” trope), 2. fantasy (an origin story and squelched experimentation), 3. an image that has become a meme, and 45. rocks. Count ’em.

But what I like most about today’s strip is the care with which Jaimes has created a faux-Bushmiller panel. Notice the off-white background.

Here’s a 1961 Bushmiller panel with eight rocks.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)
All “some rocks” posts

Track

On the route that Elaine and I walk in the morning is a street about a third-of-a-mile long, running straight and curving sharply to the left at one end. Cars slow down — a lot — as they near that end and go into the curve. Watching that happen from the other end of the street always fascinates me. And I finally realized why: it’s like watching the enormous HO track in the hobby shop of my youth, a controller in my hand, my little car in the distance slowing down to take a curve.

[Yes, involuntary memory meets the slot-car craze. And now I finally know what “HO scale” means.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

First there was Garrett Estrada. Now, with today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, Ernesto G. Prada: another name with no crossword history — another pseudonym, no doubt, for one or more terrific constructors. The same ones? After all, Estrada and Prada rhyme.

Like the Estrada puzzle, the Prada puzzle feels difficult, though it took me only half as long to solve. I saw 3-Down, seven letters, “Old school setting,” right away. I saw 5-Across, ten letters, “Literally, ‘nose-horned,’” right away. And then 6-Down, five letters, “Southeast Asian people.” But I could never say, with 13-Down, seven letters, that I was “Crushing it.” I wandered about, here and there, and likely spent as much time on the southeast corner as on the rest of the puzzle. But “‘Why not?’, these days.” That’s 42-Across, four letters.

Clues that let me say, Man, is this clever: 16-Across, ten letters, “Semi-pro.” 24-Across, four letters, “Jam ingredient from India.” 66-Across, ten letters, “Perches on the edge.” A clue whose answer I still don’t understand: 44-Down, seven letters, “Ball part.” I see what it’s about, but I don’t get it.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

[Twitter says that Garrett Estrada is a clever pseudonym for Brad Wilber and Erik Argard. I finally get it: Garrett, as in Brad Garrett; Estrada, as in Erik Estrada. But why Ernesto G. Prada? Grandpa Stereo?]

“Noisy and shiny”

Euphemia describes her aunt Beryl:


Alice Munro, “The Progress of Love.” In The Progress of Love (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986).

Also from Alice Munro
“Rusted seams” : “That is what happens” : “Henry Ford?” : “A private queer feeling” : “A radiance behind it” : Opinions : At the Manor

“Twelve chatty letters”

[Zippy, March 29, 2019.]

In today’s Zippy, an outage of cellphone service has left most Dingburgers struggling to read newspapers: “I’m swiping, but th’ page doesn’t change!” Zippy, though, is quite at home with the printed (or handwritten) page. There’s nothing like a chatty letter.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[Outage in? Outage of? Of, I think.]