An Interview with John McWhorter, author of Talking Back, Talking Black

Posted on July 18, 2017 by Ed Battistella
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photo by Eileen Barroso

John McWhorter teaches linguistics, Western civilization, music history, and American studies at Columbia University. A New York Times best-selling author and TED speaker, he is a columnist for Time and regular contributor to the Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post and the host of Slate’s Lexicon Valley. His books on language include The Power of Babel, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, What Language Is, The Language Hoax, and Words on the Move.

John McWhorter earned his B.A. from Rutgers University, his M.A. from New York University, and his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University.

We talk about his latest book, Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America’s Lingua Franca.

EB: Thanks for writing this book. You’ve managed to show both the complexity of African American Vernacular and the complexity of the issues surrounding public attitudes about vernacular language and correctness. As writer, how did you choose the material to discuss—which goes far beyond the usual textbook treatment?

JM: What moved me was two things – 1) that I don’t think we linguists have made a dent in the public’s reception of the dialect in pointing out that it is systematic in its grammar (and I really mean “we,” as I wrote a book on Black English in the 90s and have written on it fairly often since), and 2) that I don’t think racism is the only thing keeping people from understanding.

So, I decided to approach Black English from the perspective I have seen laymen to have, rather than trying to give them a kind of “Linguistics 101,” which is the foundation of the “systematicity” argument – you’ve taken some phonology and syntax and you want to talk about GRAMMAR, but the public hasn’t had those courses and can’t hear what you’re saying in any real way. I gathered the kinds of questions the public usually has and frankly, the misimpressions they often so earnestly insist upon (that Black is “minstrel,” that there’s no such thing as a black “sound” except that black men have deep voices, and so on) and address them head on. That meant showing how the dialect is COMPLICATED, not just “systematic,” addressing what minstrel speech actually was and how there was a delicate, but real, intersection between that and how black people in the nineteenth century actually spoke, and also getting at something that we linguists can forget that the general public in America does not readily understand: diglossia. Most laymen think you speak one way, and that how you talk in your kitchen signifies how you talk when giving a speech. I’m not sure there is a pop source that teaches the public what diglossia is and how common – even universal – it is in how people speak. I tried to help out with that.

EB: I was particularly fascinated by the intimacy marker up, as in your example “We was sittin’ up at Tony’,” which I had heard used but never understood before. When did you first figure out the nuance to that?

JM: I’m not sure when that occurred to me, actually – sometime in the 90s, I think – probably in 1999 when the person I mentioned said “There was buck naked people up in my house.” That person was, as it happens, a white guy doing a fond kind of imitation of black speech (in the vein today often called appropriation although, as I have written, I find that analysis strained when it comes to speech). I was struck that his mimicking was good enough that he used that “up” – it struck me as especially authentic and then the “linguist hat” goes on and I thought “He is using that UP spontaneously but really, what is the function of it?”

I always have my ear cocked to vernacular constructions and am always trying to figure them out – I think it’s part of my being first, hardwired to be a linguist sort and second, black, such that I grew up hearing a certain variety of speech styles. An example would be that, as I describe in the book, when I was a kid and heard my cousins using the narrative HAD, my natural impulse was to quietly try to figure out how that usage made SENSE, rather than just dismissing it as “slang” that “they” use.

EB: What the significance of the title? I have to admit, when I mention the book to people I have to stop and think about the order of the words BACK and BLACK.

JM: Honestly the publisher thought that one up and I have rarely given it much thought! I had a different title – “How Do You Sound Black and Why?” That probably wasn’t good enough – book titles don’t come easily to me.

EB: You also describe Black English as America’s Lingua Franca. What do you mean by that?

JM: That since the nineties especially, ASPECTS of Black English have become a part of the speech repertoire of people beyond black America. First, Latinos, but now even many Asians and finally whites, especially young men. Pragmatic markers (yo, naw for no, etc.), aspects of inflection, and associated gestures are now so embraced by such a wide variety of people that to many young people the idea of Black English as specifically “black” sounds off. Now, as a linguist I specify that it isn’t that people beyond blacks (and Latinos) are actually using the full blown phonology and syntax of Black English. However, a lot of white kids, using a certain amount of the slang and intonation, consider themselves to be using “Black English,” which was all but unheard of until the 90s. It’s been part of the browning of the culture, as some have called it.

EB: Why do you think Black English is so difficult for Americans—Black and White—to wrap their heads around? Because of the complexity of race or the obscurity of linguistics, or both?

JM: Obviously both, but I honestly believe that the linguistic aspect dominates. It rankles some for me to say that – our moment encourages academics to stress racism over all, and at times that’s necessary. But the general public finds rural white Southern speech quite absurd, often, as well, and if there had ever been a push to use it as a teaching tool Fox News would have had a grand old time with that as well. Americans, because English is RELATIVELY homogenous here compared to England where it has had longer to differentiate, have a hard time processing that English can come in assorted flavors and still be legitimate. There is also an Anglophone First World bourgeois obsession with grammatical “correctness” in general – people are quite vicious about supposed grammatical errors. Does the viciousness step up some when black speech is involved? Perhaps, the race part is, in itself, just one part.

EB: Are there some common misconceptions about Black English shared by Black and White speakers?

JM: Certainly. Most people think Black English means slang, which makes any discussion of its “legitimacy” seem absurd. Linguists talk about the grammar of the dialect, but to laymen, “grammar” is a matter of things people do WRONG, not all of the complex ways that we put words together otherwise. So Black English seems to be slang and mistakes to most.

EB: You mention the Blaccent, as your call it, and that there are several different levels of the African American accent. Can you tell our readers a little about that?

JM: Most black Americans have vowel colorings that are subtly different than other Americans’, which is much of what we hear as the “black sound.” Then, some black people do not have those colorings, but still produce their speech with a slightly different “timbre,” in the sense we usually use re singers, than others. That signals another aspect of the black “sound.” These differences are internalized quite subconsciously from infancy on, and have nothing to do with right or wrong, anymore than the different vocal “placement” of British English is. I was struck by how absent from public writings this interesting aspect of black speech is beyond a certain point, and one of the things I most wanted to get across in this book was that there IS a such thing as sounding black and that there’s nothing wrong with it in any way. If the book leaves any shred of difference in public perception I hope it is that.

EB: Thanks for talking with us. Congratulations on a fine book.

JM: Thank you!

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My Dinner with Harlan

Posted on July 15, 2017 by Ed Battistella
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When I was in high school two of my favorite books were Harlan Ellison’s The Glass Teat: Essays of Opinion on Television and The Other Glass Teat. They were feisty books of cultural criticism based on Ellison’s weekly column for the Los Angeles Free Press in the late 1960s. The title vision of TV viewers fit my high school mindset (along with Herman Hesse and Franz Kafka, you know the type), and the books sent me to the dictionary every other page so I was convinced they were a serious read.

I read more Harlan Ellison, graduating to the Dangerous Visions collection and Again Dangerous Visions, with their equally abrasive introductions. I was cheering from the sidelines when Ellison wrote “City on the Edge of Forever.”

College and grad school intervened, with linguistics taking the place of speculative fiction. But I still kept an eye on Harlan’s career, enjoying a wonderful Comics Journal interview where he confesses to sliding down a conference table to deck Irwin Allen, the producer of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Because why not.

Year later—maybe a dozen—I was surprised to learn that Harlan Ellison would be speaking at the university where I was teaching—the University of Alabama in Birmingham His visit was cosponsored by the Honors Program and Ada Long, the chain smoking honors director, was looking for an English professor to chaperone (as it were) the honors students who would go to dinner with Harlan after his talk. As it turned out, of the 25 or so English professors in the department, I was the only would who would admit to knowing who Harlan Ellison was, so it was on me.

The dinner, which included Harlan, my wife and me, and a half dozen students went pretty much as you might expect. Harlan argued with the students about just about everything. I sat at the far end, sipping a beer and keeping my head down. I remembered the story about Irwin Allen.

After dinner as we walked back to the cars, we heard a shout and saw a man running with a purse. The students took off after the purse snatcher, and I took off after the students. It turned out that the runner with the purse was trying to return it to a woman who’d left it behind in a restaurant.

We got back to Harlan, who was waiting with my wife, and shaking his head ever so slightly. I never asked why, but I always imagined that we had all expected something dramatic to happen at a dinner with Harlan Ellison—a crime, a brawl, the apocalypse, whatever. Harlan, it seemed, knew better.

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What People Are Reading This Summer

Posted on June 19, 2017 by Ed Battistella
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It’s almost summer and graduating students get a little time to finally read what they want, professors have an opportunity to read things they do not have to grade, and even professional writers get some summer reading in the extra daylight.

It’s been an exciting year for books in southern Oregon—James Anderson’s The Never-Open Desert Diner and Midge Raymond’s My Last Continent came out in paperback, Macmillan released Victor Lodato’s Edgar & Lucy and Sandra Scofield gave us Swim: Stories of the Sixties.

For those of you who have been falling behind on your reading, those are all great choices for the summer.

Also on my list are Kory Stamper’s Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, John McWhorter’s Talking Back Talking Black, Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, Brian Doyle’s Chicago, and Andre Dubus III’s House of Sand and Fog.

What are others looking forward to?

Tod Davies says she is “Rereading everything I can get my hands on by Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. LeGuin.” She also plans on catching up with on Neil Gaiman’s books and is going to reread Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization.

Diana Maltz too is planning to read everything she can by Margaret Atwood to choose novels for the single-author class in the fall. “It might,” she says, “be a grim summer.”

Allegra Lance, soon to be in grad school at PSU says she is hunting down a copy of The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet right now, and rereading the Tiffany Aching series, A Night in the Lonesome October, and a few other books. She also just bought Roxane Gay’s Difficult Women, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, and a bunch of Sarah Waters books.

Bill Gholson is going to read lots of poetry this summer, and, he adds, “I am also planning to read The Book of Joan by Lidia Yukanavitch, because “I like a good dystopian novel to take the edge off of summer happiness.” Also on Bill’s list: two novels by Don DeLillo–Falling Man and The Body Artist.

Allie Sipe is heading off to Teach for America in Rhode Island. She says: “I keep trying to read 1984, but it gets too realistically discouraging. So I switch to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for comic relief, but I can’t seem to finish that, either. I’m also reading a short story collection full of iconic authors to try and narrow down the list of authors I probably should have read as an English major but somehow never did.”

Alma Rosa Alvarez says she is planning on reading some books connected to her teaching, like Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees but is also planning to finish Amy Stewart’s The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms.

Dante Fumagalli writes that “It feels pretentious to say almost, but I’ve been trying to read Infinite Jest on and off for a few years now, so I’m hoping to use this summer to finish that!” [Good luck!] Also on his list more by Colson Whitehead.

Nicole Eichsteadt is going to dig into The Chemist by Stephanie Meyer and Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver. And she is working on a novel of her own.

Laura Payne is planning to read Teach: Two Years in the Mississippi Delta by Michael Copperman and The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See. She adds: “I figure Copperman’s book will be good for me since I’m about to travel to do a couple of years of teaching away from home and I’m interested in See’s book because it has to do with tea making and I’ve been working at a specialty tea shop for about a year now. On top of that, I really want to finish Stephen King’s, It, because the movie is coming out soon and I want to geek out about it with my dad.”

Margaret Perrow is tackling Straight Man by Robert Russo, Thin Blue by Johnny Steinberg, about the unofficial ‘rules’ of policing in post-Apartheid South African townships, The Republic of Imagination by Azar Nafisi, “because she writes about the importance of literary fiction to freedom and democracy,” The Wisdom of Tich Nhat Hanh by Tich Nhat Hanh, “to slow me down and put things into perspective,” Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris, because he’s funny and smart at the same time, and he knows how to ‘write short.’ And she’ll be dipping into How to Write Short by Roy Peter Clark.

What are you reading?

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An Interview with Sandra Scofield

Posted on June 12, 2017 by Ed Battistella
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Sandra Scofield is the author of seven novels, including Beyond Deserving, a finalist for the National Book Award, and A Chance to See Egypt, winner of a Best Fiction Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters.

She has written a memoir, Occasions of Sin, and a book of essays about her family, Mysteries of Love and Grief: Reflections on a Plainswoman’s Life. She is also the author of The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer and in the fall Penguin will release her book The Last Draft: A Novelist’s Guide to Revision.

We sat down on the internet to talk about her new book of short stories, Swim: Stories of the Sixties, just released by Ashland’s Wellstone Press.

EB: Swim is a trilogy of stories about a twenty-something woman who negotiates dangerous travel—hitching, crashing at the ranch of a bullfighter in Mexico, and with two young soldiers on leave in Mykonos. How did you come to write the stories?

SS: Each one began in a different way. All took years of brooding, sketching, writing, fussing. Still, I think a story always starts with an image or impulse you can’t escape. In the case of these stories, those images became part of who I am, and as I slipped into old age I saw my young self with great empathy; I wanted to figure her out. A friend had saved my hundred+ letters to her during the 60’s, and in 2005 she gave them to me. (I’m going to be posting some on my website starting in July: sandrajscofield.com) They are packed with detailed observation and also with a naive, passionate, earnest scavenging for stories. In my letters–and they are long–everything is a story. I was keeping a journal, writing those letters, and, I think, memorizing a lot of life as I lived it. I can’t say what a gift her stewardship and generosity is.

More specifically, I’ll tell you that “Swim” began as an extension of my Mykonos notes that I brought back; I worked on them in 1968, when I was studying theatre in Illinois. Some years later I tried a story. But it wasn’t until a few years ago that I picked up those old efforts and saw what the story was, and that the soldiers’ stories were the vehicle for it.

“An Easy Pass” was clearly an outgrowth of the dozens of letters from Mexico, full of detailed observations, and also an almost hysterical fascination with bullfighters (especially the young beginning ones). I had done a lot of what I think of as “younger” Mexico stories. They are archived. I did one a few years ago for Image, too.

“Oh Baby Oh” was in a way the most personal of the stories, because it arose not just out of some experience (none of the stories are “true”) but some thread of resentment toward a whole string of young men who wanted to advise me on how to be a better person.

In the last couple of years I found myself going back to the stories, fussing with them, and, if I can say this, falling in love with them in a way I never have with a story before. I longed to see them between covers, and I asked Jonah to read them and tell me what he thought. His enthusiasm was such a relief!

EB: The main character, who is called Baby, keeps a writer’s journal and carries a copy of The Stranger. It makes me wonder what pieces of your own experiences might be reflected in her stories—and how she is like the younger you?

SS: Well, sure, I kept a journal and carried Camus around. (I just read Alice Kaplan’s Searching for the Stranger, a kind of biography of The Stranger; it’s a marvelous read.) And I had a “fall” when my hair was growing out. (Ouch.) I hitchihiked from NYC to SF. I don’t think I was capable of just being, just doing; I always had to interpret life, day to day. At the heart of all my ruminations was my conviction that no one understood me, which is probably true, since I didn’t either. Guys either liked me or couldn’t stand me, based, I think, on my own attraction to them. If I didn’t like a guy–jocks, slick guys, big shots, etc.–I was snotty. I felt that all relationships, friendships, however short or long, were my choices. I didn’t think I was pretty but I could get a guy talking about things he’d never thought about before. And I was joyful, eager. I didn’t expect anything in return; sex was never a negotiation in my mind. I suspect I shocked a lot of boys–well aren’t they boys, in college?–because I also brought a lot of joy, a sense of fun, a freedom to sex and friendship. I was never seduced; nobody could make me do what I didn’t want to do before they even thought of it. I felt superior but on the other hand I was kind of generous. I wasn’t looking for any kind of attachment. I lived with someone in Chicago because I was broke, but regretted it. I wouldn’t say I had a real boyfriend, a real lover, until I met my first husband in a crazy sort of accident in Ithaca NY. I was in an acting troupe at Cornell, and Al had come to see an old Coast Guard buddy who lived in my house. We were like magnets. My whole life went off-track and it was years before I had any kind of stability, but those years with him were the electrical storm of my life. I wrote about him in Mysteries of Love and Grief, which is made up of essays, and he’s the basis for “Fish” in my novel Beyond Deserving, which was a NBA finalist, but mostly I’ve kept him to myself. For one thing, I’ve been happily married since 1975 to a man I wouldn’t dream of writing about. I wouldn’t want to analyze us or betray his privacy. And I think my stories are all far in the past. My present life is totally mundane, happily so.

EB: Many of the characters—not all, but many, seem on the verge of losing their innocence and learning to make their way in the world. For me, Baby seems most aware in the middle story, “An Easy Pass.” What trajectory did you in mind for the order of the three pieces?

SS: I knew “Swim” was last because I wanted its ending to end the book. The other two? I agree about your assessment, but I had “An Easy Pass” first until Jonah suggested we switch the first two stories. I took his advice and came to agree completely.

EB: The prose of the stories is taut—and especially the sentences, which ironically reminded me of Hemingway. Your sentences create a unique, almost aerobic, pace to the stories and I found myself wondering about the craft of these. Do you sometime revise a sentence several times until it feels just right?

SS: I think the story is in every sentence. And every sentence leads to the next. It’s slow work. Deliberate, and largely aural. Remember I’m of an age of reader who grew up on long novels with beautiful prose, lot of winding sentences in some, taut in others. I would never think of Hemingway as kin to me, but I adored James Salter’s work and feel he had an influence on me. As did Camus. Mavis Gallant. Jane Bowles. Jean Giono. Robert Stone. Rebecca West. And remember I grew up Catholic–boarding school Catholic–and language was a huge part of the practice of Catholicism, and of expectations of Catholic school students.

EB: I was intrigued by the stylistic choice you made not to signal dialogue with quote marks or italics. That seemed to signal remembered speech to me, or some attempt to disorient the reader. Did you have something particular in mind?

SS: You seem to have identified my intention well. In a way, everything is a dream, a fiction; the stories are outside of time; in another way, Baby doesn’t connect with anyone, and dialogue is connection. I certainly wasn’t trying to be precious or anything; it just felt inevitable and right.

EB: The nineteen sixties seems to be perpetually interesting to readers—both those who lived them and those who know them from history. What is the attraction of the sixties?

SS: It’s wild, isn’t it! All of a sudden, SIXTIES books–from the New Yorker, from the New York Times, and others. I just got the New Yorker one and am reading James Baldwin, whose great essay, “Letter from a Region in My Mind” blew the lid off the staid New Yorker. I guess there are lots of us with roots in that time. I also think something about the awful politics right now sends us back to the conflicts and inventions of the sixties. It was exciting to be young then, and scary, too. Baby, of course, isn’t involved.

EB: Looking at the cover art. “The Weight of Water,” by southern Oregon artist Abby Lazerow reminded me that you are also a painter. Is your painting like your writing?

SS: Ed, that is a wild question. I’ve never considered it. Maybe. I don’t follow many rules, but I spent a couple of years learning them. I’m more interested in color than in form. I like certain kinds of precision, and then I love wildly free gestures, too. Every painting is a discovery. I have an idea, I might even be working from a photograph, but no painting ever turns out like something I imagined or planned. Don’t misunderstand: I consider myself to have a lot of deliberateness, of control, but I like to break it open at some point. I’m much influenced by British Modernists like Ben Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Joanna Carrington, Mary Fedden, Margaret Mellis. Lots of wit and freedom and interpretation of what is apprehended. I’m making a second trip to St. Ives to paint in October, and will do a workshop on the Modernist landscape.

I started so late, I had to make a choice: settle on a style and try to get deft at it; or widen my range, and reach for discovery, luck, freedom. So now that I think about it, I’d say I’m a hell of a lot more controlled as a writer than as a painter. But as a writer, I’m still not willing to follow many rules. And by the way, one thing I love about painting is that THERE ARE NO WORDS.

EB: You are also coming out with a book The Last Draft about revision. Can you tell us a little about that?

SS: December, from Penguin. It would have been dead in the water if I had called it: Sandra’s Poetics of the Novel, but that’s a lot of what it is. It’s what I’ve learned the hard way. Nobody taught me to write a novel. I never took a novel workshop or class. I don’t have an MFA. I learned to write by reading, by writing, by revising. So I decided that if the world needed anymore writing books, one would be on revision of the novel. I think of myself as speaking one to one to the reader, a kind of coach and cheerleader; I mean to be encouraging and demystifying, but I’m also serious. There’s a lot in that book. It’s really step by step how to describe what you wanted to do in your first draft, and how you tried for it; how to analyze what’s strong and what’s not in that first effort; a deepening of your vision and your sense of direction; a plan for redoing or integrating old material with new writing. It all comes from my teaching and analysis of how my instruction and exercises and guidance worked. Kisses to my students! Someone could sort of whip through the explanations and exercises and do a revision. Or someone who really wants to be a writer could use it as a guide to a whole journey of learning. Janet Burroway very generously said of it, “We need this book.” I guess that’s what I thought, after over twenty years of working with aspiring novelists. Now I’m trying to write a new novel and all I write rings in my ears! It’s helpful, yes; it’s also humbling. Writing a novel is huge and hard.

EB: Any final words of advice for writers?

SS: I don’t know that this is advice, but I want to say that not everyone is going to write a bestseller and even a big house paying a lot can’t make it happen very often. The work of writing is going to be happy if it makes you happy to do it. What happens next is a big duck shoot. With “Swim” I knew I wanted to work with Jonah because I knew he loved my writing and these stories and I knew we would be a great team. I chose to publish with a small press without trying for a big one, and it’s been more fun, more productive, happier than any experience I’ve had in publishing. I hope readers will buy my book and tell others about it but I’m not putting a kid through college on the proceeds. If we made a little money I’d probably do another book this way. More Stories from the Sixties, anyone?

EB: Thanks for talking with us. It’s good to have you back in the area.

SS: This is so nice. I think what a writer really really wants is for someone to want to talk about her stories!! So here we are.

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