February 2006
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When The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948, the word "naked" still had shock value. Mailer's novel was followed by books with such titles as The Naked Society, The Naked Ape and the moderately oxymoronic Naked Lunch. It wasn't long before shock devolved into cliche. The publishing world has now transformed itself, at…
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J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is an anti-bildungsroman — a "novel of education" without the least shred of moral, intellectual, or spiritual growth. Holden Caulfield, the novel's naive yet jaded narrator, learns absolutely nothing either about himself or about life. Unable to profit from his various encounters, he dismisses almost everyone he…
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Reduplicatives, sometimes called "echo words," or "echo phrases" are formulations such as hobnob, pell-mell, herky-jerky, hoity-toity, itsy-bitsy, niminy-piminy. In English, there are two principal classes of reduplicatives. Category one consists of rhymes such as hodge-podge, willy-nilly, helter-skelter, kowtow, harum-scarum, jeepers-creepers, okey-dokey, heebie-jeebie, gang-bang, hocus-pocus (reputed to derive from the words of the Latin mass: hoc…
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In Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Abducted by Aliens (Harvard, 2005), Susan Clancy recounts interviews with fifty or so "abductees." Each person's experience is unique, but the various stories can be melded into a composite narrative. "I was having problems with anxiety and depression. I was at Fenway Park with my buddies watching…
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Here's the description of a project posted on a literary website by (I'm guessing) a young Shakespeare scholar: "I want to create a comprehensive XML schema for Shakespeare's plays, and then apply the schema in an online prototype. The schema will conform to TEI standards where possible and appropriate, and exceed them where necessary. Creating…
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We were in California tending the grandchildren (a girl, 6, and a boy, 4) while "the daughter" and her husband were on a sun-and-sand vacation down in Baja. The children are in the habit of coming into their parents' bed when they have trouble going to sleep. We're in the habit of reading aloud before…
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The latest New Yorker reports the discovery of a long-lost manuscript by Beethoven. It's not a new piece, but an arrangement for piano, four hands, of the composer’s “Grosse Fuge,” or “Great Fugue,” — which is one of the most exciting and challenging pieces of music in the known universe. The manuscript was sold at…
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In my daughter's basement I found a dried-up, stained, pages-hanging-out 1959 paperback edition of William Golding's Lord of the Flies. On the cover: "Copyright 1954." "Over 4,450,000 copies in print." "Sixty-second impression." "Now Available For Students And Teachers: the Casebook Edition containing the full text of the novel, critical essays, notes, and bibliography." Lord of the…
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I was at Peet's Coffee in Alameda, California this morning, drinking hot chocolate and reading Lord of the Flies. There were three retired guys a couple of tables away, chatting. I overheard the following story: "He was a lawyer for an intellectual property firm–a big-time litigator. He met this woman and fell in love with…