http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Tue, 2 Nov 2004 14:26:26 EST http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/11/02/142626.php Hilary Caws-ElwittIt took me a long time to digest this book, which is jam-packed with quoteable insights, new perspectives on familiar ideas, and inspiring thoughts. Reading this collection of essays, which were written as periodic email columns over a span of seven years, felt like trying to eat a rich, dense dessert in one sitting. This is a book that should be savored slowly--by everyone who has any connection to technology. It's an amazing work.I can't think of any book that's quite like Islands in the Clickstream--it doesn't fit into any established categories. Syngress Press, the publishers, describe themselves as providing "Career Advancement Through Skill Enhancement," and say it should be shelved in "Computers/General." But what this book actually contains is a collection of secular sermons. They fill the niche of an idealized homily--a short talk that reconnects its listeners to a larger context for their daily lives, inspires them to be better people, and makes them think about deeper issues than the everyday grind--but without any religious context, and addressing technology specifically. Thieme says ...these are sermons...in the sense that sermons form and inform a community that chooses to gather to hear them. It's not too surprising, then, that Thieme tells us he was an Episcopalian priest for sixteen years. These essays do have a few flaws I associate with a genre like sermons, ie basically ephemeral and not designed to be read en masse--sometimes there's a palpable stretch for the inevitable clever final sentence, and we get some repetition of favorite concepts and quotes like "sanity is contextual." There's also a hint of bombast, not exactly pretentiousness, but a weakness for over-stated metaphors and over-heated symbolism. Thieme's got a liberal hand with buzzwords: nexus, fractal, cyborg, panoptic, granular, convergence, paradigm, morphing, etc. I also think he's barking up the wrong tree in one or two essays where he talks about UFOs and remote sensing, but he's not credulous by any means.These are minor quibbles. To give an idea of how much this book impressed me: I typically collect a quote or two from a book I read. A great book will yield four to six. I copied down about FIFTY quotes from Islands in the Clickstream--new ideas, brilliant encapsulations of thoughts that have vaguely crossed my mind, inspirational statements. Here's just a small sampling:"The edge is the new center. The center of a web is wherever we are." "When things are going well, accountability diminishes. Then when things don't go well, there's chaos." (written in 1997, with a prescient reference to the financial tech bubble) "'Out of the box' thinking is just a name for climbing out of one box into a little bit bigger box.""Good tools work regardless of why we say they work. Technical tools and spiritual tools alike.""That's the problem with oracular truth: the opposite is nearly always just as true. Oracular truth is more like a mobius strip than a yes/no binary system."If you're someone who's been involved with computers long enough that "hacker" doesn't sound like a dirty word, you'll feel like Thieme is speaking directly to you. If you ever wonder about the effect of technology on how we think and communicate, you'll find a lot of food for thought here. If you're professionally involved with the Internet in any way (as a techie or in business), you ought to read this book. If you're looking for inspiration to be a better person, without being expected to believe in a personal god, check this out.I would love to hear Thieme speak. He seems like a truly amazing person. Thieme's website can be found at www.thiemeworks.com. Books21772@blogcritics.org Tue, 2 Nov 2004 14:26:26 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/10/29/105002.php Hilary Caws-ElwittI used to read lots and lots of science fiction. Now I basically just re-read a few favorites (LeGuin, Heinlein, Vance, the short stories I loved as a teen). But I still like reading about science fiction from time to time, in the same way I enjoy most books about books and reading; I like the feeling of possibility, all those books I could read. The sense of wonder that was my main draw to SF I now get from non-fiction. I think that's partly why I didn't like the Franzen essays; where Wallace has sheer exuberance and Baker revels in the quiddity of the world, Franzen had only crankiness to offer. Anyway, I enjoyed flipping through this for the memories it prompted, but the only real highlight was "Ten Characters Who Have Promoted the Consumption of Coffee in Improbable Quarters of Space and Time" by Nick Lowe (as in Jesus of Cool Nick Lowe, I wonder? How many could there be?) He doesn't even mention the Pern "klah," which joined redfruit in my list of Anne McCaffery's bogus earth substitutions (later lamely explained in the lousy tail-end of the "Dragonrider" series.) Books21587@blogcritics.org Fri, 29 Oct 2004 10:50:02 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/10/28/214304.php Hilary Caws-ElwittSatellite radio is addictive! We bought the Roady about 6 months ago and it's been an absolute delight. It's a tiny little thing (and the new Roady2 is even smaller). Jonathan uses it in the car for his commute, listening to techno and fusion, then brings it inside where we have the home kit set up, and I turn to whatever strikes my fancy--mostly the new wave and alternative channels. Now I'm thinking of getting a second unit so I can have one in my car, and when J. is out late.XM and Sirius are the two major satellite radio networks. It wasn't hard to choose--Sirius is $3 a month more, and even XM's $9.95 (less if you buy a year or two at a time) already seemed tough to swallow. But boy, is it worth it. No ads (on the music stations)! 80+ music channels plus tons of others! (a station that's just audio books; another of old-time radio; a couple of humor channels; etc.) Cool specials and features, like "IT," which runs on the decades channels (40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s). IT plays ALL the songs in the library chronologically, switching channels when the next decade is reached (it takes about a week). It's amazingly nostalgic to listen to the music of your high school years in that depth.My very favorite thing, however, is a hardware feature: the artist/track display. If you hear something you like, you know what it is--no more waiting and waiting for a station break on the off chance that the DJ will identify the track intelligibly. You can press a button to store the track in memory, if you're in the car or elsewhere and can't jot down the info. Best of all, you can preview what's playing on other channels without interrupting what you're listening to--just turn the jogwheel to see what's on adjoining channels, and press it in to change the channel (or let go if you don't want to change). There's even a way to store up to 10 tracks & get an alert when they are playing on any other station. I find myself learning more about music just by seeing the information--I might not care enough about a song to make a point of jotting it down, but when I see who the artist is I make mental connections/comparisons. Or I'll see a song on the display that I've read about & change channels to check it out. I always liked having the track listing at hand when listening to records or CDs, and missed that about radio--not any more!The one drawback of the Roady versus the older SkyFi is that the screen is too small to hold all of the information (station, artist, track) at once and you have to pick two of the three (although it's easy to switch). They've tried to make up for that by letting you pick a color scheme for the display--trivial but kind of cool (the buttons light up in that color too). Oh, there is a limit of 16 characters per line, so stuff is often cut off (or abbreviated strangely). The user interface is very well designed--it's a snap to learn, even though the buttons are tiny. You can preset 30 channels for quick access, or enter the station number directly.I just recently got hooked on XM411's live channel listing, where you can set up your favorite channels and monitor what's playing right on your desktop. You can even set up alerts (haven't gotten them to work yet), so that you can search for the song ahead of time (rather than having to catch it in order to set the Roady's alert feature, a catch-22 pain).The sound is awesome (to my admittedly non-audiophile ears) with headphones plugged directly into the unit. You will have to choose ease versus sound quality to get that digital signal to most car stereos, however. Direct connection is the best, if you have access to RCA inputs. I understand that the cassette adapter sound quality ranks next, but if you only have a CD player/radio combo, the easiest thing is to use the FM modulator and pick up the signal on your radio. This is a separate piece from the original Roady, but combined with a power adapter (it was a freebie when we bought ours, and the home kit was a bargain which seems to have been discontinued). The modulator is built right into the Roady2. You will notice some sound degradation if your car interior is quiet--with road noise, it's barely noticeable.Delphi/XM's literature makes a big deal about putting the antenna (which is a tiny magnetic lump) on the exterior of the vehicle. I checked out many, many opinions at XMFan.com and just put it on the dash. We do get dropouts (especially since we live in a very rural, forested, hilly area) but it's not too bad. If it weren't such a pain to thread the antenna wire from the outside to the inside of the car, I would try the antenna on the roof to see how much difference it really makes.I'm just scratching the surface of how cool this is. It's not perfect by any means--you do start to hear some repetition because the library is deep but not infinitely so, and there aren't enough stations to satisfy every specialized desire--but for about 30 cents a day (after hardware costs) it's fantastic. Sci/Tech21496@blogcritics.org Thu, 28 Oct 2004 21:43:04 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/10/24/094628.php Hilary Caws-ElwittThis is avowedly aimed at people for whom Suze Orman and Charles Schwab are too heavy going--for people who are just starting out with financial self-help and need a workbook they can digest in a weekend. On those terms, it's a very useful book.Laura recognizes that one of the biggest stumbling blocks in typical personal finance books is estimating expenses and creating a budget. It's time-consuming, usually inaccurate, and becomes a source of discouragement when the inevitable unexpected expenses creep in. I've read a ton of financial self-help books and that has always been a problem for me. To this day I've never had a budget that really worked, and the only way I've found to get a real handle on our expenses is to use software to track them and analyze them after the fact. (Now that we've been using Quicken for 14 years, we've got a lot of data--and STILL patterns can be difficult to discern, because of those "unexpected" differences.) So Laura's approach is very refreshing. He tells us to focus on the financial decisions we make and to start changing the direction of our "financial karma" by trying to line up our expenditures with our values and goals.Laura assigns one big, time-consuming exercise related to expenses, but instead of an estimate of amounts, it's a worksheet to identify which are basic needs versus lifestyle choices, which match values or goals, and which are in excess. The other exercises and examples in the book are pleasingly brief and simple.There are some great concepts here. For example, this is one of those obvious-once-you-think-about-it insights that I don't remember hearing anywhere else: "Just as you buy a house, a car, or groceries, you must also buy financial security." And he distills an interesting idea from a life-insurance salesperson's talk, The Common Denominator of Success: the habits of financially successful people did not come naturally to them, and they don't like doing those things any more than regular people do! That's a very liberating thought.Financial Karma has a number of features that would work for beginners in frugality, but are essentially useless for those of us who have been serious about saving money for years. My late friend Valerie and I used to compare notes on all the "500 Money-Saving Tips" books which we'd check out when they came through the library, and we hardly ever found anything helpful because the recommendations involved stopping things we would never dream of doing in the first place. Laura's example of getting money at the office ATM ($2 charge) to buy an afternoon coffee reminded me of those books. I've only used a for-fee ATM a couple of times in my life, in emergencies, and I kicked myself for lack of foresight. If you're looking for ways to save money, read something by Amy Dacyczyn. Similarly, I've been lucky enough never to "get" the difference between cash, checks, and credit cards, a common pitfall which Laura tries to combat. (It's all money--to me it feels the same to charge a $20 purchase as to fork over a bill. If it feels different to you, getting over that may be helpful to you.) So if you are like me, parts of this book will seem obvious or even silly. But for someone who's had difficulties realizing where their money goes, it should very helpful. One of the neatest ideas along those lines is the credit card envelopes included in the book. Since you have to open the envelope to use the card, it's a great opportunity to catch yourself before you make a financial decision you might regret. One is for your emergency card--you write down the specific conditions under which you'd use it. The other, for a regular expenses card, invites you to list the financial goals you've developed with the aid of the book on one side, and has "Is this a basic need or a lifestyle choice?" on the other. Very cool!I do question Laura's choice of the word "karma" to describe his concept. My objection is three-fold. First, karma as a religious term is ideologically unappealing to me personally, for reasons I don't have room to go into here (essentially, I think it's a blame-the-victim rationalization of the ways life is unfair). Secondly, karma as a popular concept is very vague and can mean whatever you want it to mean; Laura does his best in the second chapter to nail down his own meaning for the purposes of the book, but it's very easy to lose track of his own particular interpretation. Finally, I'm not sure it's a word that much of his potential audience will be familiar or comfortable with, yet he assumes that readers have a basic understanding of the term and doesn't even start with an overview of what it means.Financial Karma is independently published, and aside from a bunch of spelling/grammatical/punctuation mistakes which I understand will be fixed in future editions, it's very nicely produced (not always the case with such books). There's an accompanying website, www.financialkarma.com, which offers customized versions of the credit card envelopes, among other features. Books21345@blogcritics.org Sun, 24 Oct 2004 09:46:28 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/08/27/093219.php Hilary Caws-ElwittI love essays by David Foster Wallace and Nicholson Baker, so Franzen seemed like a good bet (similar demographic, similar niche). I did read this collection all the way through and enjoyed some of it. But overall, I was disappointed. Franzen writes well but not with the awe-inspiring mastery of Wallace and Baker, nor with the clear-as-water unobtrusive skill of the more common run of good essay writers. My main source of dissatisfaction, however, was Franzen's grumpy, depressive personality. He just doesn't seem to have much fun; he doesn't like the world, and he doesn't like himself. The most pathetic passage is where he reveals how he "doesn't consider himself a smoker," and yet finds "a small collection of cigarette butts" in a saucer at the end of every workday. Poor guy. I did sympathize with his depiction of exhaustion and foolishness causing the Oprah ruckus, and his embarassment at his younger self's self-righteousness. But somehow I feel a misasma of unhappy snobbery and self-regard mixed with self-loathing, and it's uncomfortable to read. (He also says idiotic things about the Internet, which is not unusual but is still annoying.) I still plan to read The Corrections someday, although the one scene I've heard the most about (the guy stuffing the salmon down his pants) does not fill me with anticipation. Books19129@blogcritics.org Fri, 27 Aug 2004 09:32:19 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/08/24/224029.php Hilary Caws-Elwitt"Have you read it yet?" I always hate that "yet"-- as if, by being members of a specific demographic (college-educated humanists?), we're all somehow obligated to ingest whatever the publishing industry, seconded by our peers, designates -- regardless of our individual tastes and interests. Personally, I haven't read most of them yet. But I did recently read Eats, Shoots & Leaves, by Lynne Truss. I began writing a "mixed review" after an initial skimming of Truss's book. When I went back to read it more carefully, I discovered the book to be both better and much, much worse than I'd realized. I confess that I still did not read every word, but I think I've done it justice.The book is better than I first realized in that there really is quite a bit of engaging, intelligent, self-effacing wit to it -- in certain sections. But after my second reading, I find that its conceptual shortcomings amount to a fatal ridiculousness. And an immensely popular book on language that blurs a rich enthusiasm for the delicacy of good usage with a confused attack on everything from true mistakes to trendy trademarks to email emoticons is worse than ridiculous. It's destructive.I care a lot about clear expression. I treasure punctuation. I spend a lot of my time thinking about the best way to say things, whether it be orally or in writing. But I think that Lynne Truss is an irresponsible, half-baked alarmist. She's a self-described "Stickler" for correct punctuation and good style. So what? I'm not, personally, prepared to rush up and congratulate her simply for insisting on correct use of the apostrophe -- though I do favor that policy myself and wince when I see it done wrong by others. And though she likes to present herself as a sage and stalwart champion of the English language, as far as I can tell she's more an unfocused, unsubstantiated kvetcher than an impassioned expert user.I've had it "up to here" with people who extrapolate from a justified scorn for the ever-present eyesore of bad writing to an apocalyptic lament that literate culture is spinning rapidly down the drain. The fact that each generation of intelligentsia -- if I'm not mistaken -- includes loud exponents of this viewpoint should in itself render it suspect. Eats, Shoots & Leaves is intelligent where it's about things regarding which the author seems to have personal expertise (e.g. the map of the punctuation aficianado subculture) or where she's really done her homework (e.g. the colorful, often surprising, and sometimes controversial history of various punctuation marks). But the work is beyond embarrassing where it attacks (in both senses of the word) subjects that the author is stubbornly obtuse about -- mainly the culture of email and instant messaging. Personally, I find it implausible that email and IM are threatening to destroy conventional written discourse. It seems to me the theory behind this perception would imply, erroneously, that email and IM are cognate with older, more formal uses of writing (and could thus risk supplanting them); while the unscientifically-presented empirical basis of this paradigm here just smells to me like the latest round of scapegoating in the perennial pastime of Deploring The Poor State Of Our Young People's Writing Skills. Okay, maybe today's high school and college students bring IM conventions into their lousy term papers. Well, if all they're writing outside of school is IM -- the logical implication -- then I would suggest that a generation ago they weren't writing outside of school at all. Was that better? And weren't the term papers just as lousy, even without eschewed capitalization and "u" for "you"? To me, it would seem obvious that email, IM and chat are, loosely speaking, filling roles previously filled by telephone conversation or passing secret notes in class or gabbing on a park bench (or on the street corner or at the market or around the water cooler or over the back fence). They do not, by and large, occupy the niches of scholarly writing; literary writing; or even humdrum, mediocre expository writing (e.g. journalism and business reports). Nor do they usually seem to fill the niche -- in either content or form -- of personal letters, which began to go out of fashion long before the cyber age. (And when an email does resemble an old-fashioned longhand letter, I venture to say that it reads no worse than the longhand letter that would have been composed by the same author -- and not because the email habit has ruined anyone's letter-writing skills.)Why should spontaneous, casual emails be held to the standards of published prose, rather than the standards of ephemeral, private dialogue? Goodness, if one is going to deplore the use of ellipses and run-on sentences in email, one might as well criticize one's friends for saying "um" at one across the café table and trailing off when the server arrives. Though some of us do craft beautiful electronic correspondence suitable for publication or framing, we are the exception. And that reality is, in turn, a reflection of what defines the most common ad-hoc purpose of these media: casual conversation. It is not a case of the medium ruining literary values; that is an irrelevant paradigm, not merely a flawed one.Does the author think that if email and IM did not exist, all those teenagers and not-very-literary adults would be writing New Yorker essays instead? They would be doing no such thing, of course. Most of those people limit their formal writing to what's absolutely required of them by school, work, or the occasional social obligation. Most of the "voluntary" formal writing in the world is left to the few who have a special aptitude for writing. But people who are accomplished, comfortable writers do not own the realm of writing. Published writing is their special province -- or should be. If technology now makes it easy and appealing for non-writers to type their personal conversations instead of picking up the telephone, it is ridiculous to expect them to write like writers just because they're using a keypad. Truss even stumbles on this realization herself, though I think she misses the point: "I keep thinking that what we do now, with this medium of instant delivery, isn't writing . . . . " Well, exactly.When Truss is tearing her hair out at the semi-literate standards of online self-publishing (e.g. public user reviews on book and film websites), she might have a case -- were she to develop it like a proper scholar. (And yet I ask: Are rambling, inarticulate, ignorant user reviews online really that different from rambling, inarticulate, ignorant phone calls to talk radio hosts? I think the fact that it's in writing is of some significance; but it's not necessarily of great significance. More significant perhaps is the fact that the online user review, unlike the radio call-in, is on the order of a mass phenomenon.)But when Truss is referring to personal electronic communication, she has no case at all. And I think she provides far from adequate differentiation, either in her book or in her mind, between these -- and among other -- distinct uses of the Internet. For example, she claims that the "non-case-sensitive internet" (she evidently chooses to ignore the distinction between URL's that get you to a web page and the vast assortment of online prose content you might find there) is confusing young people about capitalization -- as if they can't distinguish domain names from the formal sentence-writing they learn in school! (I'm not disputing that some school kids, as well as some semi-literate adults, use aberrant capitalization; I'm just doubting Truss's suggestion that this is a new problem, and one attributable to the Internet.) Granted, there are grey areas as to what constitutes "personal". Are Usenet postings published discourse or just conversation? (I would answer that this is mostly determined by the approach and attitude of the individual user.) But the fact that there are grey areas only makes it more important to tackle this subject with sophistication and nuance, rather than sputtering in a blind panic.. . . . Unless perhaps one's goal is simply to catch the cheapest, fastest route to the Best Seller List. Truss expresses astonishment at her book's success. I'm not surprised at all. The demographic that sustains the Best Seller List Industry includes many people who would like nothing better than to be given facile license to roll their eyes at what they're sure is the general barbarism of popular culture, youth culture, and contemporary culture. Don't get me wrong - there's plenty of barbarism out there (and there always has been). But a good critic is a fair critic, one who can discriminate among various phenomena that may or may not be related, may or may not be new, may or may not be significant, and may or may not be insidious. This is where the hard work of the scholar comes in, and I don't see Truss rolling up her sleeves. It's probably indisputable that well-tempered opinions don't have the commercial "grab" that overstated, oversimplified diatribes and posturing do. Hence the runaway success of Lynne Truss, who is as sensationalistic, in her way, as any number of superfluous exclamation points. I do happen to think that the world would be a much better place if people - all people -- took more care over their interpersonal communication. But that's mostly about choosing one's words carefully, avoiding hasty assumptions, cocking an ear toward how one's discourse might sound to one's interlocutor . . . not about whether to replace "for" with "4" or whether it's good style to habitually end sentences with ellipses. (I am partial to good style, too, but I know the difference between things that substantially improve human relations and things that just spruce up the aesthetics.) And the qualities that enable people to communicate well - whether orally or in writing - are good thinking first and good expression second. One has to bring maturity, sensitivity, and judgment to a situation before one can expect to communicate with delicacy and grace. Horse; cart. Muddled writing does often reflect muddled thinking (and has always done so, not just since the advent of the personal computer). But let's keep the cause and effect straight. Poor-quality thinkers - whether they happen to be teens, adults with no higher education, or degree-heavy academics - can indeed betray themselves (in various ways) by their prose. And, yes, learning to use language expertly will help people who think cogently express themselves clearly. And, at a certain point, masterful use of language becomes essential, if one is to express nuances without ambiguity or misunderstanding (which, however, is never guaranteed, no matter how labored and perfect one's writing, as there's always that subjective element). One might go so far as to claim that every close personal relationship could benefit from adroit language-use skills. Yes, yes, and yes. But inexpert writing does not cause shabby thinking (or the decline of civilization)! And while it is true that sloppy, confused writing often feeds the prevailing-bogus-ideology machine, I don't think that the people who build their "ideas" by absorbing ideological mush would be thinking any better merely by being conduits for more skillful prose. If they could think better, they would reject the mush in the first place, right? I believe that clear thinking is a necessary but not sufficient prerequisite to clear writing, not the product of clear writing (though writing can certainly be an incomparable, if sometimes limiting, tool for working out one's ideas). It is here that Truss goes perhaps most significantly astray. She actually seems to believe that conforming to punctuation rules will lead to cogent thinking: "Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking." Would that it were so simple! Meanwhile, in leading up to the above, she posits that "All our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places." Funny - I am a meticulous punctuator myself, and yet I have occasionally found the goal of "absolute clarity" to my intended reader to have eluded me. Your thoughts must be of a different grade than mine, Lynne. Truss is half-right much of the time. She's right that punctuation is important to clear writing and good writing (but is anyone saying otherwise?). She's wrong to imply that its misuse -- and more general problems of bad writing, muddled expression, etc. -- are a woe of our age in particular. People who think that things like television and the Internet are killing language need to be reminded that not so many generations ago (and correct me if I'm wrong here), the majority of people -- even in affluent countries -- were literally illiterate. To imply that there was once a golden age of expert, elegant writing among the population is therefore either elitist or ignorant. I'm fed up with that kind of "good old days" mythologizing. Moreover, the author herself debunks the "golden age" school right on page 39, at least in one specific context. She also acknowledges somewhere in her argument that TV used to be the scapegoat. If only she could follow through on these insights. In fact, I found on my second reading that a number of the points I'm trying to make here seem to be acknowledged, in some form, somewhere in the book. The problem is that Truss can't seem to maintain a judicious perspective. It's almost as if, when she gets excited, she forgets her own best insights. Where was the editor, I wonder. Meeting with the marketing team?Truss's sloppy thinking, unscientific methods, and irrational logic make me distrust even the portions of this book that I enjoyed, and which I would have liked to praise as authoritative and interesting. Oh yes, there is an extensive bibliography; but slipshod college term papers have extensive bibliographies, too. Truss writes much, much better than the typical undergrad. But does she think better? And bearing all this in mind, I hesitate to credit, without further documentation, her claim that editors fail elementary punctuation quizzes on television. Likewise: "There is a rumour that in parts of the Civil Service workers have been pragmatically instructed to omit apostrophes because no one knows how to use them any more . . . . " A rumour, you say? Don't wear yourself out with the basic research, now. Further examples of the idiotic things I found in this celebrated book for literate people:1) Truss wildly describes the current state of written English as characterized by "the disappearance of punctuation". 2) Similarly, she describes -- out of whole cloth, unless I missed something -- a "dangerous drift back to the scriptio continua of the ancient world, by which words are just hoicked together as 'all one word" with no initial capitals or helpful punctuation". She really seems to believe it's just a short step from trendy alloneword band names and function-driven dot-com run-togethers like "allmusic" to an entire written culture that looks like Finnegans Wake. 3) She blithely attributes the growing (if it really is growing) misuse of question marks after indirect questions to the youth-culture vocal inflection known as "upspeak". In other words, Truss seriously, and confidently, proposes that the mannerism of lilting one's voice on the word "store" in the clause "So, I was at the store" [my example] causes one to write question marks after sentences like "I was wondering if it would rain today" [my example again]. To which I reply: "Like, excuse me?" (as an upspeaker might express it). 4) She proclaims that "[T]he naming of [pop group] Hear'Say in 2001 was . . . a significant milestone on the road to punctuation anarchy." And yet, idiosyncratic corporate/institutional punctuation (e.g. Lloyds TSB and HarperCollins) are to be accepted as givens, respected as de facto proper form, and generally put up with, according to Truss. Culture war, anyone? Granted, a blatantly gratuitous apostrophe is more bizarre than an elided apostrophe or word space . . . but if a pop group can't adorn its name a little more bizarrely than a bank, what are things coming to?5) Then there's this:"I have heard that people with double-barrelled names are simply unable to get the concept across these days, because so few people on the other end of a telephone know what a hyphen is." My wife and I have had hyphenated names for about twenty years. The average interlocutor has never processed that very well or been likely to write the correct punctuation mark when we say "hyphen". It is not any worse now than it was then, nor do I believe it would have been better forty years ago than it was twenty years ago.If I may return to the theme of things lumped together that should be considered separately: It is true that complicated sentences with absent or faulty punctuation can cause puzzling, hilarious, or even fatal misunderstandings, as Truss amply demonstrates. Whereas a mispunctuated sign that reads "APPLE'S FOR SALE" causes only annoyance. But this distinction seems, at least at times, to be lost on Truss. And let us consider her bugbear, the aforementioned pop music group with the counterconventional use of punctuation in its band name. Dumb? Yes. Pernicious? No. Contagious? Undoubtedly, but only within a certain sphere of things that are frequently dumb anyway. National Book Award winners are not going to start misusing the apostrophe just because some band did. Teens don't need a band to make them punctuate wrong. So why all this alarm and urgency? Whom are we trying to protect from this disease? Other pop groups? Snack foods? Banks?Yes, I'd rather see everything punctuated correctly because I find it more aesthetic and it's just as -- well, almost as -- easy to get it right. In print, there's really no excuse for getting it wrong. But to leap from "APPLE'S FOR SALE" and "c u @ the movie's" to the breakdown of written language is an example of -- well -- shoddy thinking. Yes, let's continue to teach good writing. (And teach good thinking first, while we're at it.) Make it a priority to give all citizens the tools to express themselves clearly in writing when they need or want to (and who, after all, would argue against this?). Not everyone profits from such efforts, but many can (and do). Get editors and proofreaders back on the job for stuff that's going to press. Go door to door teaching use of the apostrophe to greengrocers, if you must. But don't make mountains out of "molehill's". Finally, I draw your attention to the following (you might want to clip it out as a defense if someone is trying to coax you to read the book):"Despite all the opportunities to 'interact', we read material from the internet (or CD-roms [sic!], or whatever) entirely passively because all the interesting associative thinking has already been done on our behalf [she's talking about links, I believe, judging from the larger context from which I'm excerpting] . Electronic media are intrinsically ephemeral, are open to perpetual revision, and work quite strenuously against any sort of historical perception. The opposite of edited, the material on the internet is unmediated, except by the technology itself. And having no price, it has questionable value."Wow! It's hard to know where to begin with a series of patently absurd generalizations like that. Actually, it makes me sort of regret I ever began with the book. I can't believe Truss is genuinely unaware of such things as online editors and moderators; or that she seriously thinks no one does any first-order associative thinking in his or her very own brain while using an electronic interface, or that the entire Web is devoid of any discourse that offers "historical perception" . . . or that she is really so infantile or decadent as to regard anything that is free as being of dubious value. No, I don't think she could possibly be this stupid. So why is she wasting our time with such stupid statements? Best-Seller, that's why.The author would like to dismiss her detractors as a bunch of apathetics who tell her to "Get a life!" instead of promoting correct punctuation. Well, I'm not telling her to "Get a life!"; what I'm telling her is closer to the opposite of that. For whereas "Get a life!" implies that the subject matter which fascinates Truss is not worthy of anyone's time and energy, my opinion is that Truss's treatment fails to do a worthwhile subject justice -- not because it's brief, witty, and readable, but because it's sloppy, unfocused, and at times completely crackpot. I don't say "Get a life!"; I say that if you're going to critique, do it like a professional, not an amateur. Don't just give us a garbled stream of impressionistic truisms. Do some real research. Make some substantive comparisons. Who knows -- maybe you'll learn something worth writing about.--guest review by Jonathan Caws-ElwittMore Jonathan writing can be found hereIf you'd like to read yet more criticism of this book -- by a much more eminent writer -- try Louis Menand's piece.I think Menand's advantage over me is that he is smart enough to not take Truss too seriously -- perhaps in part because he picked up on how shaky her own grasp of punctuation is, which I did not. (If I had, I might not have bothered to write about her book at all.) Where I treat her book like a loud, clattering noise whose presence warrants a detailed, earnest response, he gives the impression of completely and successfully dismissing her without even really needing to lift his attention from the other article he's trying to write (which seems, through typesetter oversight, to have been printed in the same column as the one about Truss). This poise I greatly admire. I imagine Menand suave, probably cradling a glass of red wine in his hand. (I must remember to cradle red wine when next I review a book.)-- jc-eOther BlogCritics reviews: Books on Books "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" Books19030@blogcritics.org Tue, 24 Aug 2004 22:40:29 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/08/09/081218.php Hilary Caws-ElwittThe resilience of kids is a byword, but at the age of eight Kevin Sweeney came up with a novel way of dealing with the loss of his father. He decided to choose three men to be his surrogate dads--without telling them, he'd observe and emulate them. A terrific premise, but alas this book doesn't deliver quite as much as it promises. It's still an occasionally touching look at a hardscrabble San Francisco Irish childhood.Sweeney explains in the introduction that the book grew out of an essay he wrote for Salon in 2001. (The original essay says he was 7 when he came up with his plan; presumably he subsequently found the correct age in the journal he kept.) The deaths of many young fathers on 9/11 prompted him to think about his coping strategy, and he wanted both to reassure families left fatherless and to encourage other men to be role models. I just read that essay, and it's wonderful. Unfortunately, the book doesn't very succesfully flesh out the essay, and what's been added to pad it out to full length is just not as compelling as the original.Memoirs are as thick as dandelions these days. If the author's not a household name, doesn't have a truly compelling and unusual story to tell, or doesn't write like an angel, it's tough for yet another autobiography to stand out. The Sweeneys are averagely interesting people with an averagely interesting story; what's compelling is Kevin's idea, but we don't learn much about what prompted him to come up with it. He describes being eight years old, lying in bed and worrying that he won't know how to be a good father, a good man, because he doesn't have "the classic reference point--my old man." Isn't that in itself a rather remarkable train of thought for an eight-year-old? But as an adult, Sweeney has difficulty reconnecting enough with his child self to explain it to us. "My scheme had a formality and simplicity that makes me wonder now about why I felt this need so clearly," he says. The idea was his first journal entry, but reading one's old journals can sometimes be like reading that of a stranger's--it isn't always possible to reconstruct the self who wrote them.After describing his family--how his father died when Sweeney was three, leaving six children, how his mother worked tirelessly and his oldest brother became the male head of the household--Sweeney goes on to introduce the three men he chose to be his subsitute fathers, but that only takes a few pages for each. The rest of the book is taken up with Sweeney's youth: inheriting his brother's paper route, playing baseball, pranks and mischief (he and his friends used to collect gunpowder from used casings at the Navy base and use it to blow things up), learning to drink in high school, and so forth. We hear a little bit about his interactions with his chosen fathers, notably the one "man to man" talk which got him off the path towards excessive drinking. But until the conclusion, which briefly analyses what he learned from each of the three, it's not really much about them. There's some insight into the damage repression of grief does; the family doesn't talk about their dad and his death until the kids are grown. As a side note, Father Figures has an arrestingly hideous cover--extreme closeup of a boy sitting and holding an enormous orange balloon(?) in front of him, cropped so that all you see is one dirty scabbed knee, ugly shorts, a bit of T-shirt and arm, and one quarter of an orange circle taking up most of the cover. It's unsettling in a way the book absolutely isn't, and I think it might make people who might enjoy the book hesitate to pick it up, while suggesting some dark tale of child abuse to others who would then be disappointed. Books18426@blogcritics.org Mon, 9 Aug 2004 08:12:18 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/08/03/223714.php Hilary Caws-ElwittLerner is among the best of the self-help authors--she's pragmatic, insightful, funny, literate, and avoids one-size-fits-all/magic pill claims. (Of course, the downside of realism is missing the excitement of "this will solve ALL my problems!"--which is what drives bestsellerdom.) Lerner gives a brief overview of the book's layout in the first chapter, which ends: ...the brief epilogue reveals the six secret, simple, specific steps you can take to banish unwanted anxiety, fear, and shame from your life forever. Just kidding, but yes, that would be nice.This book is a good exploration of emotions that fuel unhappiness, with some practical exercises, though it's not as structured as the most detailed self-help books. Lerner's primary technique is to weave anecdotes and reflections together into a narrative. It's a more philosophical approach than most, and more enjoyable to read and think about.Lerner draws interesting distinctions between behaviors in the face of stress, like underfunctioning and overfunctioning (I can see that I do both in different circumstances). She does describe a sort of "magic" solution which is pretty cool. A man was terrified of asking a co-worker out on a date. Lerner asked him to go to a shopping mall in a city he was visiting and collect 75 rejections in a row by asking women out to coffee. The process helped him realize that it would be easier to just ask out his co-worker than to finish!The chapter on public speaking, and how its principles can apply to difficult private situations, is especially good. I also found the section on dealing with anxiety in organizations particularly novel and useful. But my favorite aspect of Fear and Other Uninvited Guests is Lerner's bracing and refreshing realism. When she shows people talking to their parents about sensitive topics, for example, there's no "Honey, you're right--thank you for pointing that out!" conclusion. Instead, the parents storm out and the adult child is left shaking with nerves. But the focus is on having the courage to speak up respectfully and constructively, and the participants end up feeling better even if there's no huge breakthrough. The epilogue is titled "Everyone Freaks Out," which encapsulates the whole approach. Anxiety, fear, and shame won't go away, but facing them with courage and calm can help. Books18244@blogcritics.org Tue, 3 Aug 2004 22:37:14 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/07/27/133633.php Hilary Caws-ElwittAn assortment of essays, mostly quite good, about commitment & relationships. It's sort of a sequel to The Bitch in the House, which I haven't read, and similarly marketed as "representatives of the opposite sex reveal the TRUTH about how they feel." As I say, these are good essays, some even brilliant, but if they strike you as containing any earth-shattering revelations, you haven't been paying enough attention to the aforesaid opposite sex as people, instead of stereotypes. Which leads to the most striking passage (to me), in the foreward, where Cathi Hanauer (editor of Bitch in the House) describes the reactions people had to the concept for this book: I was told, "It'll never work." "Men don't think." "Men have no interest in self-exploration or revelation." "Men don't feel things." "Men won't say anything negative about their wives." "Men have no interior lives." "Men just want to watch TV and read the paper." I didn't believe it. Okay, I believed some of it. But not all of it, not really. Now take those sentences & replace "men" with "women," "blacks," "Asians," "gays," or any other group, and add whatever negative stereotypes you think of. (Although it's kind of tough to imagine something more sweepingly insulting than "don't think" and "don't feel things!") Can you see the new paragraph appearing as-is in a book issued by a major publisher, with no more emphatic commentary than the last bit? I can't say I'm surprised by this, unfortunately, but it bothers me a lot. It's a symptom of why on the whole I prefer to identify myself as an egalitarian (all humans deserve the same rights and access to opportunities) rather than a feminist (since that focuses specifically on women's rights, although I don't discount the importance of the feminist movement in the 20th century). Would the world be a better place if it were run by women? I doubt it; I think it would be bad in different ways (just like when any previously-oppressed group comes to power). We're all human beings, after all, basically monkeys with language and culture, and we struggle with similar problems and tensions. Nevertheless, certainly in American culture there are some generalizations that can be made about the roles of men and women (keeping in mind that no generalization should be used to predict an individual's behavior or attitudes). Over the past 40 or 50 years, there's been an enormous change in the expectations--both women's and men's--of how a man could and should act. The essays in Bastard on the Couch don't shed any blinding light on this topic, but they do offer some interesting, poignant, and thought-provoking flashlight beams on a few areas. The twenty-seven essays are divided into four sections: "Hunting and Gathering" (sex/monogamy/adultery), "Can't Be Trusted With Simple Tasks" (household responsibilities in marriage), "Bicycles for Fish," (a grab-bag, but mostly about role reversals), and "All I Need,"(sad endings). They're all interesting the way any honest self-revelations are (except Anthony "Jarhead" Swofford's essay, which feels narcissistic and fake). Daniel Jones says in "Chivalry on Ice:" The gestures of chivalry may have been inherently patronizing and obsolete, but my liberation from having to perform them had the side effect of dulling my caretaking instincts, of turning me into someone who would cheer my wife on in one breath ("You can do it yourself!") only to brush her off in the next ("You can do it yourself'). This touches on a problem many of these essays dance around: in the absense of traditional gender roles, it's easy to flail around instead of doing the work of figuring out how to be kind and helpful and supportive to each other based on what each individual needs and wants.Funny but fundamentally very sad (how do relationships evolve into this awful dynamic?) is Christopher Russell's "My List of Chores," where he shares his wife's daily harangues and general distrust of his competence, which he passively resists, causing her to go even more over the top. In "Ward and June R Us," Rob Spillman describes how he and his wife put an end to constant bickering over chores by switching traditional roles each week, so that they take turns being "June" (in charge of all parenting and domestic duties) and "Ward" (come home, relax, and play with the kids guilt-free). Robert Skates shows the fallout from divorces around him (his own marriage long over) in "The Hole in the Window: A View of Divorce." At the end, he generously allows his son and his son's ex-stepfather to hang out together, commiserating over the shock of that second divorce which has split them apart.Other standouts are Steve Friedman's "A Bachelor's Fears," funny and finally touching; Rob Jackson's heartwarming "My Life as a Housewife;" and Trey Ellis, "Father of the Year," funny and poignant. Books17928@blogcritics.org Tue, 27 Jul 2004 13:36:33 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/07/16/134951.php Hilary Caws-ElwittAn unforgettable memoir of Patchett's friendship with writer Lucy Grealy. Of course it's beautifully-written, as one would expect from the author of Bel Canto, and of course it's sad, since Grealy died young and suffered physically and emotionally all her life. It's also an honest, funny, evocative, involving story that is impossible to put down, whose central character is neither Ann nor Lucy but the friendship itself. Patchett uses the metaphor of the ant and the grasshopper throughout the book; she the ant, valuing stability and middle-class values, Grealy the improvident grasshopper, cavalier about money and obligations. And sure, maybe the ant was warmer in the winter and the tortoise won the race, but everyone knows that the grasshopper and the hare were infinitely more appealing animals in all their leggy beauty, their music and interesting side trips. What the story didn't tell you is that the ant relented at the eleventh hour and took in the grasshopper when the weather was hard, fed him on his tenderest store of grass all winter. Patchett brilliantly shows the evolution of this friendship, where each found in the other something she craved, and the contrast between their characters. Twelve years of Catholic school had taught me that I would be held accountable not only for what I did, but for everything I considered doing. Twelve years of beating cancer had taught Lucy that she was invincible and that nothing, none of it, was ever going to catch up with her. Truth & Beauty brings the charming, exasperating Grealy fully back to life; her bottomless loneliness and neediness, her enormous charisma and endearing quirks (like her love of being carried), her zest and zaniness, all make her an unforgettable character. Most of us have probably known someone like her in tone if not in volume. She was the author of Autobiography of a Face, which I read a long time ago and don't remember much about except that it was good; it's about her disfiguring bout with cancer as a child that resulted in loss of much of her jaw. Patchett heart-breakingly chronicles Grealy's many failed surgeries in the quest for a mouth that would work properly. Patchett herself seems like a rarer find--her unstinting generosity to her friend (primarily emotional, but financial too) is remarkable. She's creative about it; Grealy avoids her mail by tossing it all in a Hefty bag, and Patchett finally convinces her to ship it to Nashville so that Patchett can deal with it for her. Not long before she dies, Grealy says: "But at least I can make you feel like a saint. That's what you've always wanted." Patchett responds, "That's a terrible thing to say," but it crystallized for me something I'd been feeling through the book; Patchett is such a good friend, such a tower of strength and patience, that I can't help realizing how in the same situation I would probably fall short of the standard she sets. But by way of explanation, she says early on: I decided that night I would take all the hours of my life that could so easily be spent worrying and instead I would try to help her. I had been raised by Catholic nuns who told us in no uncertain terms that work was the path to God, and that while it was a fine thing to feel loyalty and devotion in your heart, it would be much better for everyone involved if you could find the physical manifestations of your good thoughts and see them put into action. The world is saved through deeds, not prayer, because what is prayer but a kind of worry? I decided then that my love for Lucy would have to manifest in deeds.A philosophy to live by, no matter what your belief system. It's a very thought-provoking book, full of beautifully expressed insights and anecdotes small and large, and I copied down a dozen passages I'm tempted to quote. Ultimately the ant couldn't save the grasshopper, who felt the ant life was a stifling one. In the last section, Grealy's early death starts to feel inevitable. We join Patchett in her grief. After reading Bel Canto (in which dozens of people with no common language rely on a translator), this passage was especially meaningful: Even when Lucy was devastated or difficult, she was the person I knew best in the world, the person I was the most comfortable with. Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't even realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker. It's also a fascinating window into the literary writing world, including the round of writing colonies and fellowships. One of the best books I've read this year! Books17518@blogcritics.org Fri, 16 Jul 2004 13:49:51 EDT