Alter Ego, A Myriad of Tongues, & High Desert, Higher Costs

Posted on March 28, 2025 by Ed Battistella
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Alter Ego by Alex Segura

Last summer I read the author’s Secret Identity, about women in the comics industry and the fictional Carmen Valdez, who created The Legendary Lynx for the minor-league comics company, Triumph Comics. She secretly teamed up with the artist to create the short-lived series, hiding her contributions from the editor and publisher. That was the 1980s.

In this sequel, three decades later, the protagonist is Annie Bustamante, a struggling filmmaker who grew up loving the Lynx. She’s given an opportunity to write and draw the reboot, but her artistic integrity runs afoul of the publishers’ attempts to cash in on the intellectual property. Questions arise about who owns the rights to the Lynx and before long Annie and her teenage daughter are trying to track down Carmen Valdez. It’s fast-paced, heart-warming story about grit and love for the comics medium, with plenty of inside comics lore and allusions.

A Myriad of Tongues: How Languages Reveal Differences in How We Think by Caleb Everett

I’d been wanting to read this for a while and it was worth the wait. It’s an erudite but accessible tour of language diversity and linguistic ideas. Part of the book’s point is that scholars have often dismissed some of the features of less studies languages in favor of the languages of Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democracies (ironically dubbed WEIRD languages, to use anthropologist Joseph Henrich’s term). In doing so, linguistics missed much of the diversity of linguistic phenomena and of language itself. The writing is lively, with Everett introducing points through familiar situations. His discussions, draw from both his own work and recent studies by a variety of linguistics and anthropologists, show how the structure of language matches up with the structure of culture and in turn with factors such as geography, environment, and more. He is careful not to overreach with sweeping conclusions and thus readers come away with renewed excitement to explore some of the topics and sources further.

The other main takeaway, for me, was the way in which some ideas that had once seemed marginal are given new life by looking at diverse phenomena: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is one of course, but also the proposal of Charles Hockett connecting agricultural societies and a preference for labiodental sounds, as well as Zipf’s Law and its further elaboration by Steven Piantadosi and colleagues.

Among other things, Everett discussed the ways in which languages conceptualize time, space, and geography, the organization of kinship terms, color terms, and words for smells, evidentiality, sound symbolism, idioms and constructions as drivers of grammar, and the familiar topic of recursiveness.

A Myriad of Tongues will interest both linguists and general readers.

High Desert, Higher Costs: Bend and the Housing Crisis in the American West by Jonathan Bach.

This book, by a Portland Business Journal writer on the housing and real estate beat, is timely, well-researched, and evocative. Bach begins with a personal tale of his parent settling in Bend, Oregon, and finally buying the house of their dreams. But it is a dream now denied to many. He draws on the stories of housing activists, political leaders, developers, and ordinary folks and to explore the political legal, cultural, and economic issues around housing in the central Oregon city of Bend. Bend was once a relatively underpopulated recreation paradise and has quickly transitions to typify the housing crisis of the West: it’s a story of stagnating wages, increasing prices, a housing market that is hostile to the working middle-class, and of vacation rental investors, corporate greed, and gentrification from “amenity workers.” It’s also the story of Oregon’s land use policy, NIMBY attitudes, , and the shortage of developable land. Bach’s work is important and not just for Oregon: Bend is not alone in this; it is among the many Zoom towns populating the West—places like Boise, Bozeman, and Boulder, so the narrative he describes is a cautionary tale that is important to attend to.

 

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Rebel Queen: The Cold War, Misogyny, and the Making of a Grandmaster

Posted on March 18, 2025 by Ed Battistella
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Rebel Queen: The Cold War, Misogyny, and the Making of a Grandmaster. By Susan Polgar (Grand Central, March 2025)

Susan Polgar with Mikhail Gorbachev and Anatoly Karpov at the Chess for Peace event in Lindsborg, Kansas.

Susan Polgar’s Rebel Queen is a sparking memoir by the oldest of the famous Polgar sisters, the Hungarian siblings who changed the public face of chess. Arriving just in time for Women’s History Month, the story begins with an educational experiment carried out by their father, Laszlo Polgar, who thought he could stimulate genius by training children from a young age in something the child enjoyed. Susan enjoyed math and chess—but liked chess more ever since she stumbled across a chess set thinking the pieces were toys.

With his wife Klara’s help, Lazlo trained young Susan, coaching her systematically with puzzles and at the age of 4 she was off to the chess club, beating all manner of players and winning the first of many tournaments.

The book recounts the many difficulties she and her family faced—and faced down—in competing not just with other players but with the rigid ideologies of the communist system, with the Hungarian chess establishment, with antisemitism, and with sexism. The government of Soviet-dominated Hungary did not take to Susan’s being homeschooled by her parents, even though they were licensed teachers. The chess establishment did not think she should be allowed to complete in boys’ and men’s tournaments, and Women’s Grandmaster Zsuzsa Verőci, once Hungary’s top female player, tried to stymie young Polgar’s career. But by 1984 Susan became the top ranked women player in the world, at the age of just 15. The international chess association FIDE was often unhelpful, once awarding all women players except Polgar 100 bonus rating points, their twisted logic being that Susan had gained her points playing men so had already benefitted from their higher ratings.

Susan Polgar persevered, remaining ranked in the top three for the more than twenty years. In 1986, she became the first women in history to qualify for the Men’s World Chess Championship cycle, she won the World Blitz and Rapid Championship in 1992, and was the Women’s World Chess Champion from 1996 – 1999.

She was also a chess teacher and coach. When her younger sisters Sophia and Judit came along, she helped train them as well, and the trio  came to dominated chess Olympiads (the Olympics of chess), beating the Russians. She recounts the bad behavior of some male players, when they lost to her, but also some whose attitudes about women in chess were changed by her success.

Polgar eventually emigrated to the United States, found her life partner, Paul Truong, and her passion to be a chess coach, first at Texas Tech University, where a new administration did what academic administrations do (cut the funding), and later at Webster University where she enjoyed a nearly ten-year run as head of the Susan Polgar Institute of Chess Excellence (or SPICE) and led her teams to seven consecutive Final Four Championships. We learn about her coaching style and techniques, and about her interests in travel, languages (she is an Esperantists), fitness, and fashion.

Polgar with Boris Spassky

It’s not just about her. Along the way, Polgar also treats readers to glimpses of some of the chess greats of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Mikhail Tal (who showed her “nothing but warmth and kindness” at an early age and “peppered [their blitz] games with jokes and funny observations,” Boris Spassky (who exhibited “wry, knowing humor”), Victor Korchnoi (who told her not to let the chess authorities destroy her), and Bobby Fischer (who introduced her to his Fischer Random chess and became a good friend until his antisemitism drove them apart). Also featured in anecdotes are Anatoly Karpov, Viswanathan Anand, Wesley So, and more, but there is not so-much inside chess as to get in the way of the story and Polgar does a nice job a narrating her games as dramatic sporting events, without the clutter of games scores and diagrams.

I would have liked a bit of a postscript on sisters Sofia and Judit Polar, the younger siblings who became Susan’s first pupils. Bit it turns out they have autobiographies as well, so I’ll have to check them out. In all, Rebel Queen is the engaging story of a trailblazer who changed the face of chess.

 

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What I’m Reading: Sandlin, Stephenson, Šipka, and more

Posted on March 3, 2025 by Ed Battistella
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Sweet Vidalia by Lisa Sandlin

When Eliza Kratke arrived home one die, she finds her husband, a railroad man, clutching his chest near his car. After a harrowing car ride to the hospital, he dies. Then it turns out that he has been living a double life and has drained their accounts to support a second wife. Eliza’s 30-year marriage is over and she’s determined to make her own way, selling her possessions, renting out her house, and rebuilding her life. She moves to a low rent motel called the Sweet Vidalia Residence Inn, which will take her dogs as well, and enrolls in business college, becoming a stand in mom for a cast of neighbors and fellow students. It’s a briskly-paced tale of a woman for doesn’t just cope when her life is turned up-side down, but finds her true strengths and thrives. Sweet Vidalia a coming-of-age-novel about a woman in her fifties, with engaging characters, crackling dialog, and a protagonist you won’t forget.

We’re all suspects on this Train by Brian Stephenson

An homage of sorts to Murder on the Orient Express, Stephenson’s novel is set on an mystery book festival that takes place on a train travelling across the Australian outback, where struggling writer Ernest Cunningham is working on his second book, a sequel to his (and Stephenson’s) Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone. As luck would have it, one of the writers, a surly drunk, winds up dead, and Ernest and the others investigate. It’s partly a send up of publishing and full of mystery novel tropes which Ernest invokes as metacommentary as he tells the story. There’s both direction and misdirection and plenty of fun. I’m going back to read Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone.

Water, Whiskey, and Vodka by Danko Šipka

Šipka’s book is an introduction to Slavic linguistics for general readers, which is a bit of an oxymoron. But the book is as accessible as possible requiring a minimum of background in linguistics or Slavic languages (but some). Šipka’s treats the history of the Slavic languages, from Indo-European fotward, the sound system, including the complex palatalizations and yer-vowels, morphology, borrowing from language to language, literacy, orthography., and more. There is even a chapter on celebrity Slavic linguists. In the chapter on “language wars,” the author steers clear of the relationship between Ukrainian and Russian though he gets into some of the other political issues of language and identity. As for the titular water, whiskey, and vodka, in case you were wondering, refers to the etymological connections among the three. All are from the Indo-European root. You can raise a glass to Šipka’s story of the Slavic languages.

The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress by Ariel Lawhon

I grew up hearing references to the missing Judge Crater (mostly, I think, in comic strips—he was the Jimmy Hoffa of his day). Ariel Lawhon offers a fictional retelling of Crater’s disappearance, with prominent roles to a trio of women: his long-suffering spouse Stella, his mistress Ritzi, and the Craters’ maid Maria, who is the wife of a police detective and has a second job as a seamstress. There are gangsters, crooked politicians, crooked cops, and showgirls. Lawhon builds the story by tacking back and between the present and past events, keeping the reader a bit off balance. In the present days, Crater’s widow Stella is finally revealing the whole story to retired detective Jude Simon, Maria’s widower. In the past narrations, we get the story though the eyes of Stella, Maria, and Ritzi. An engaging bit of historical fiction, but I was a bit underwhelmed at the ending.

Down Cemetery Road by Mick Herron

It’s starts with a contentious dinner party interrupted by house exploding down the block. Sarah Tucker, a young housewife who is bored and at loose ends as a wife, becomes obsessed with the missing child who survived the attack. With the help of a local private detective she sets out to find the missing girl, running into roadblocks and cover ups. When the detective is killed, she joins force with a mysterious Eventually she joins force with a mysterious ex-military man dying after being exposed to secret military testing, and the two of them, together with the detective’s partner, track down the girl. It was a good story, but I was hoping for something a bit more in the vein of the Slough House series, though Gerard Inchon, the unlikable client of Sarah’s feckless husband, feels like a prototype for Jackson Lamb. I’ll continue the series, but won’t rush off to buy them.

The Bear Went Over the Mountain by William Kotzwinkle

This was a bit of a disappointment, except pt for some of the dialogue. The satire seemed a bit over the top. A bear finds a novel buried in the woods by a hapless English professor and passes it off as his own, creating the persona Hal Jam and getting an agent and publisher and the attention of Hollywood. The professor meanwhile hibernates in the Maine woods, eventually emerging to sue to reclaim his work. I got a bit bored with it but it reminded me of the later novels, The Plot (and its sequel The Sequel) as well as Yellowface.

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An Interview with Michael Erard, author of Bye, Bye, I Love You

Posted on February 10, 2025 by Ed Battistella
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Michael Erard

For the last five years, writer Michael Erard has been working on a book about the first words of babies and the last words of the dying. His latest book Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words, published by MIT Press (February 2025) offers a cultural history of both phenomena, bringing them together in a way that sheds new light on two important cultural rites. His work has been supported in part by the Max Planck Society, the Sloan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which awarded him a Public Scholars Fellowship in 2022.

Michael Erard has an MA in linguistics and a PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin, and he has worked as a senior researcher at the FrameWorks Institute, where he helped create a method for designing and testing metaphors for use in strategic communications. In 2017, he was the first-ever writer-in-residence at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands, and is now a researcher at the Centre for Language Studies at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands.

Erard is the author of Um…: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean (Pantheon; 2007), and Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners (Free Press; 2012. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Aeon, The New York Times, New Scientist, Science, Down East, the European Review of Books, the North American Review, Texas Observer, and other magazines.

He lives in the Netherlands.

Ed Battistella: I really enjoyed Bye Bye I Love You, and the way that you linked the two phenomena. How did you first make the connection of studying first and last words together?

Michael Erard: The seed was holding my first child and observing him explore the world with his voice for the first time, while realizing that my linguistic powers were certainly fading. There’s also the way that his first words implied his last ones–all of the things of new life, including early communication behavior, serve as memento mori. Maybe that’s an unusual response, but for me it felt veyr natural.

I was also intensely aware that for all of my interest and attention to his early vocal explorations, I wasn’t going to witness his final ones, at least if things went conventionally the way that we hope.

EB: Are children first words always words, in the traditional sense? Are the last words always words?

ME: Their first words aren’t always adult-like forms. Sometimes they’re idiosyncratic productions that still capture an important feature of wordness: that they mean something, and that meaning is independent of a context. I would call those words. Other linguists haven’t wanted to.

And a last word, meaning a “final articulation of consciousness,” aren’t always words–they can be exclamations or interjections, as well as hand gestures, facial expressions, and even silence.

EB: Early on you say that first words are “interpersonal artifacts” (p 25). What do you mean by that?

ME: I mean they are artifacts of relationships and the slices of time in which they occur. Words don’t just happen–we produce them for each other, to each other. There is a way that the “first word” is a monumental thing, happening outside of relationship and circumstance, put on a pedestal and sent around on social media. But the first word is deeply relational. (There is always someone out there who wants to bring up talking to one’s self, or inner voices, or praying, in order to show that words do happen outside of social interaction, but I think we can agree that those are peripheral cases.)

EB: You mention your son’s first word. What was that? Did it seem important at the time?

ME: The thing we call his first word is “round-round,” which he used to describe a ceiling fan. It was immensely important at the time because it resolved itself out of his babbling. Which is to say, he was vocalizing repeatedly, then my attention shifted a bit, which is when I realized he was trying to tell me something. I repeated the word, and he responded happily to my recognition.

So not only was there a phonological form, semantic coherence, and symbolic autonomy (three criteria of wordness set out by the linguist Lise Menn), but there was a mutual recognition by him and me that some threshold had been crossed.

However, as I wrote in the book, there were some earlier productions that should have qualified, such as this utterance “ka” that he always used to say, while pointing to something he found interesting. We puzzled for a long time about what it was. It seemed important but we couldn’t figure out how.

EB: When did American culture start getting so interested in—or anxious about–first words? It seems to be somewhat culture specific.

ME: It started in the late 19th century and the emergence of “scientific motherhood,” the idea that mothers could be enlisted to observe their babies in order to track their developmental progress. That’s when commercial baby books, many of which had spaces to write first words, became popular. It really takes off in the period where doctors, psychologists, and parenting experts are telling parents what to pay attention to.

EB: I had never heard of the Roman god Farinus, the god of first words. What did the Romans think of first words?

ME: The Romans must have thought they were pretty important, but they credited Farinus for instilling a certain style or spirit to a baby’s language, as opposed to a specific word or phrase. I was disappointed that no statue or depiction of Farinus exists, but I was excited to find out that the ancients cared enough about child language to celebrate it this way.

EB: You discuss the ways in which the reception of both first and last words in western societies has become less ritualistic and more sincere. Why has that occurred?

ME: I argue that it’s because societies have become more individualistic, and there’s no better way to mark the unique existence of a person than through their own specific first word and some singular final utterance. Here “sincere” references the truth of reality, the way things actually are. So a sincere first word is what the baby really says, not what a parent’s cultural overlay is.

EB: What would a linguistics of last words look like?

ME: It begins first of all with an ethics of care–it’s not extractive or exploitative. It also engages with the notion that dying is a social and physical process that everyone will go through, though we will bring all aspects of our racialized, enculturated, and gendered lives to the experience.

It understands the language at the end of life in terms of interaction and multimodality, and it engages with the idea that we come to our dying as embodied selves and enculturated organisms. So in the same way that child language studies tries to comb apart the self and the organism and determine which contributes to developmental outcomes, a linguistics of the end of life would help us understand what is happening both in terms of cultural expectations and the physiological and cognitive realities of dying. It would deal frontally with the challenge of what disability studies scholar Jonathan Sterne calls “normal impairment.”

It has to take into account the experiences of signers as well as talkers, and the experiences of multilinguals as well.

EB: What was the most challenging thing about writing this book?

ME: Keeping from generalisations that were too broad for the evidence that I had and worried that I had generalised anyway. From time to time I encountered a story about a death that was incredibly moving, but the immersion in the death literature wasn’t challenging in itself. As I write in the book, another seed was trying to cope with finding human remains, which sent me to the anthropology of death and dying. So I had been immersed in that for years before I began writing about language at the end of life specifically.

EB: What was the research like for this book? It seems that you’ve consulted a number of sources, archives, and little-known historical studies and a wide range of interviews. How did you find your way through the material?

ME: Once I had the basic framework about the four styles of first words, and once I had the phenomena described iin the Osler study, it became fairly easy to organize searches and go looking for materials that would fill the holes. I lucked into the archival sources and know there’s potentially much more out there to consider.

EB: What are your hopes for this book and your potential audience?

ME: I hope that the book gives people permission to re-narrate their personal stories around these linguistic milestones. I also hope it helps people to see that their cultural models around early language and language at the end of life may not contribute as positively as they think. This is especially the case with language at the end of life, where there seems to be a persistent notion that we retain our linguistic powers all the way to the last breath, which just isn’t the norm. There is also a fantasy that being present at someone’s final moment is somehow required, but in terms of bereavement outcomes, that’s not the case. So I hope the book gives people a simple idea about what language at the end of life is actually like, in the same way they have a basic idea of what babies’ language is like.

EB: I spend a bit of time overthinking your title. Did you intend “Bye Bye I Love You” as both first and last words?

ME: Me too! It’s a very challenging book to title! I actually chose one phrase as a first word and the other as a last word, but perhaps not the way you think. “Bye-bye” has been documented as a frequent first word (or one of ten first words) by English-speaking babies, and “I love you” is a frequent last word, in both anticipated and unanticipated deaths.

EB: Thanks for talking with me. Good luck with Bye Bye I Love you. It was a terrific read.

ME: Thanks!

 

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