Summer Reading Update II: Snotty, City of Dragons, Um, and Tillamook 1952

Posted on July 13, 2011 by Ed Battistella
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Snotty Saves the Day

Imagine if your name were Snotty. What kind of a kid would you be? In Tod Davies’s fictional world Snotty is an “ugly boy,” inside and out. Snotty’s from Megalopolis, and he’s the kind of city kid who “knows nature when he sees it” and doesn’t much like it. The title Snotty Saves the Day tells you what happens—or does it? What exactly does Snotty save when he falls down a hole and ends up in Arcadia?

The ostensible fairy tale has a parallel story—told in introductions and in footnotes written by imaginary scholars in the land of Arcadia, whose great Queen was Sophia the Wise. In the main story, Snotty becomes Sun God of the Garden Gnomes and, later, leads an army of Teddy Bears against them. He is tempted by devilish Luc and saved when Lily (later to become the first queen of Arcadia) appears. The story-in-footnotes—told through Arcadia’s Professor Devindra Vale provides a running commentary on the traditional mythic themes in Arcadia and Megalopis (bad smells, dog messengers, sun gods, the loss of a finger, the turning of treasure-to-trash, selective blindness, and transformation of frightening creatures into helpful ones). The story-in-footnotes teases us with the history of Arcadia and Megalopis and the main story even asks questions about the meaning of meaning. Imagine Lewis Carroll with footnotes by Jonathan Swift. Snotty Saves the Day is, like all good fairy tales, an optimistic book for children of all ages. It’s also an origin story, steeped in real cultural myths.

The History of Um

I bought Michael Erard’s book Um: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean a few years ago and for some reason have put off reading it until now.

There is the expected recounting of the Reverend Spooner and Sigmund Freud, but Erard digs deeply and comes up with new insights and tells the story of Um through the stories of those who have studied it. I’m fascinated by the cleverness too of some of the researchers like the one who used Kermit Schaffer’s old blooper albums as data for example. Erard writes well, and even the digressions (such as the one about prison chapters of Toastmasters) are interesting. Some of this will be familiar ground to linguists but some is less well-known and Erard has done some nice first-person interviewing (and naturally reports in the speech of his interviewees).

I’m glad I waited and glad too that I’ve gotten to it. I’ll be teaching an introduction to linguistics in the fall and will want to incorporate some of Erard’s observations into (it’s too late to add another book, but maybe I’ll add Um as a supplementary reading…). Here are some of the discussion questions I’ll try to shape into the class:

    What’s the difference between uh and er and haw?

    What’s the difference between uh and um?

    Are there uhs and ums in sign language?

    What do malapropisms, like “strawberry” for “library” tell us about the organization of our mental dictionary?

    How come the Reverend Spooner made errors like “You have hissed my mystery lecture?” but not “You have misstory by hissed lecture?”

    Who was the first writer to collect speak errors?

    Do uh and um occur more often at certain places in the sentence?

    Who uses more uhs and ums—humanities scholars, social scientists or natural scientists?

    When (and why) did public-speaking teachers and start to think that uh and um were a problem, rather than something natural?

    Why does Erard consider Kermit Schafer’s radio and television bloopers to be a kind of dialect humor?

    What’s the relevance of speech errors for Noam Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance?

As the book progresses, Erard gets the feel for talking to his readers about the prescriptive-descriptive debate. That’s always a tricky balance for writers whose audience includes linguists and scolds. And there are a few funny errors in the book (like substituting [Ben Franklin] for [Victoria] Fromkin), which is what you’d expect given the subtitle.

City of Dragons

I’m reading Kelli Stanley’s City of Dragons in anticipation of visit to the Rogue Valley this week. City of Dragons introduces 1940s private investigator Miranda Corbie, who is trying to solve a handful of murders in pre-war Chinatown. Corbie is an intriguing character–her father is a drunkard college professor, she has a love-hate relationships with some cops (in one case, a hate-hate relationship), and she’d been a Red Cross nurse in a Spain and a paid escort in San Francisco before becoming a private detective. She 33 years-old and she subsists on whiskey, Chesterfields, and aspirin.

We get glimpses of a sad past, smacking into an uncertain future. It’s the eve of World War II. Miranda’s never been a member of the go-along to get-along boys club so she’s sensitive to outsiders and when she sees a Japanese teenager killed the in the middle of the 1940 Chinese New Year in celebration, she takes up his cause. She’s also contacted by a scheming widow who wants her to look into a husband’s death and missing step-daughter. And soon, Miranda’s up to her pearls in Italian gangsters, drug smuggling, human trafficking, and pre-war international politics.

I’m ready for a trip to San Francisco.


Tillamook 1952

Tillamook 1952 is the story of Lou Kallander, the youngest son in an Oregon gothic family. Kallander returns to Tillamook for his mother’s funeral, and discovers both her diaries and the diary of her brother Verlin. Verlin had been a fire-fighter, disfigured when a flaming tree trunk slammed into his face during the Tillamook fire of 1933. He hid, Shadow-like, from the world for nearly a year before dying in a gunshot accident. Or was it? Kallander digs in and scratches at his uncle’s death until things begin to unravel. He learns about his family, his town and himself in the process.

Verlin’s death makes for a good, in some ways spooky, mystery. And Lou Kallander is the opposite of the traditional postwar hero. He fits into society (as an insurance agent, ironically) but is dead inside from his family not the war. Kallander grows into his own life as he unravels his uncle’s last months.

I realized that I’ve read George Byron Wright’s Oregon trio out of order—I started with Baker City 1948 and moved on to Roseburg 1959. With Tillamook 1952, I seem to have saved the best for last.

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Young Adult Literature isn’t What You Think

Posted on July 10, 2011 by Ed Battistella
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A guest post by Jennifer Marcellus

The genre people enjoy shouldn’t determine whether or not others consider them intelligent. I always try to keep an open mind when people tell me they like a book or genre I don’t. Adults, especially academics, often struggle to withhold judgment when anyone mentions young adult literature. As someone who reads YA, I never understood what they find wrong with these books. Obviously, there are books like Gossip Girl and Sweet Valley High to put a bad taste in anyone’s mouth but I also realize these books are not all young adult literature offers its readers. James Frey, author of I am Number Four, started a company to churn out poorly written and predictable, assembly-line YA novels, perhaps for the sole purpose of proving my last statement wrong, but I haven’t given up hope. How can I when so many of my favorite novels live in the YA section?

Many books included in young adult fiction address serious social and personal issues like gang violence, coping with loss, sexual assault, depression, and physical abuse. However, young adult literature doesn’t just preach on social issues. They also teach youth how to handle certain situations and problems they face. Readers identify with these books because they connect more fully with the story and see they aren’t the only ones who might have to deal with certain issues.

To me, though, the role models YA offers readers—typically girls—are the most important aspect of the genre. I’m certain I’m not the only one hoping the owl with my Hogwarts letter got lost and will show up nearly ten years late. Many readers like me become so invested in these books that they gain not only an escape from their own life, but also find characters to admire. We become friends with Hermione from Harry Potter; Deryn in Leviathanteaches us how to live on an airship; we fight with Katniss and Peeta in The Hunger Games. And then, when these books end, we search for more books like them. Readers become dedicated to literature by discovering other similar books, both in and outside YA.

The lines between genres are blurred to begin with though. Bookstores and publishers change what section consumers find books based on the reactions of readers. When I went looking for The Perks of Being a Wallflower, I found it in general fiction instead of YA despite being set in high school and the numerous awards it received in the teen genre. The fact of the matter is critics overlook what YA offers when they make the blanket statement that adults shouldn’t read YA. These books spark serious discussions regardless of the audience’s age. When adult fiction is too artsy to bear, it’s nice to dive into YA where plot is the pilot and characters are emotionally realistic. Scholars need to revise their attitude against YA to exclude only poorly written books in the genre. They do this with every other genre, so why not YA?

Jennifer Marcellus majors in Professional Writing at Southern Oregon University and reads young adult novels between writing papers and reading classics.

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An Interview with Lisa Brackmann

Posted on July 5, 2011 by Ed Battistella
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Lisa BrackmannLisa Brackmann’s debut novel, Rock Paper Tiger, (Soho, 2010) sets an ex-military expat on the margins of the Chinese art world. The New York Times said it “gets off to a fast start and never lets up.” Rock Paper Tiger was listed as one of Amazon’s Top 10 Mystery/Thrillers and was nominated for the Strand Magazine Critics Award for Best Debut Novel. Her second novel, Getaway, is a literary thriller set in Mexico, will be published by Soho Press in early 2012.

A southern California native, Brackmann has worked in the film industry and as a singer/songwriter in an LA rock band. She took her first trip to China in 1979 and still spends a lot of time there.

Brackmann visited Ashland, Klamath Falls and Medford, Oregon, recently for readings sponsored by Ashland Mystery.

EB: During your recent visit to Ashland, you mentioned that you always wanted to be a writer. Have you always written? When did you decide on the suspense genre?

LB: Pretty much always. I tell the story on my website, and it’s true, that my first attempt at a novel came when I was five years old and wanted to write an epic about cats who went camping. The problem was, I didn’t know how to spell “tent.”

I may have had stretches of years where I was in denial about it, like the period when I wanted to go into the Foreign Service, but eventually my true nature won out. I wrote my first long project (a screenplay) while living in China, started taking creative writing classes in college, got some encouragement from a couple of really great professors, and though I still had a few detours to go through over the decades, I wrote a lot and eventually settled down and got serious.

As for suspense, I‘m a huge mystery reader. Mystery is a genre that has a lot of practitioners operating at a high degree of literary skill—I mean, “literary” and “genre” can be a pretty arbitrary distinction, and there are just a lot of great writers writing mysteries. Mysteries offer a set of elements that give them an inherent structure, which not all strictly “literary” fiction has in my opinion (the kind where it’s often mainly about the quality of the prose above anything else). So while what I’m doing isn’t really mystery, I’ve always been drawn to genre fiction that sort of straddles that literary line.

Also, I’ve long had an interest in politics, and suspense in particular offers a lot of opportunities to deal with politics and “big” issues. Plus it’s fun to write!

EB: Rock Paper Tiger features Iraq war veteran Ellie McEnroe. Where did the idea for the story and for Ellie come from?

ROCK PAPER TIGER by Lisa BrackmannLB: Ideas are always kind of mysterious, but in this case, a big chunk of it was a blatant commercial consideration. I’d written a ton of stuff before tackling Rock Paper Tiger, but virtually none of it with the idea that I would write something that actually might have a shot at selling—I always pretty much wrote what I felt like writing without thinking of market realities ahead of time. So I examined what I knew about that might interest people, and I came up with “China,” specifically, modern China, for a setting. I hadn’t seen today’s China written about much in fiction by Western authors. I’d had some friends who were active in the art world there, and I’ve hung out on the periphery of the art scene in Los Angeles for years, so I thought that would be an interesting element as well, particularly when you look at the frequently political nature of contemporary Chinese art.

Finally I was angered by the Iraq invasion and the War on Terror, so I wanted to deal with that somehow. I was interested in what happens when a very powerful country like the United States abandons its Constitutional principles and rule of law. In my opinion, you end up with power that is poorly restrained and authority that can be arbitrary, which is what you see in China.

The trick was getting these very disparate elements to somehow work and play well with each other. So that’s where Ellie came from—a young woman and accidental Iraq War vet who finds herself adrift in Beijing, hanging out with a Chinese artist who suddenly disappears, leaving a lot of questions in his wake and a lot of scary guys chasing after Ellie for answers.

EB: You called it an existential thriller. How so?

LB: Aside from the more conventional thriller elements—“Will Ellie outwit her opponents and survive this bad situation?”—a lot of her dilemma is about whether she’ll survive her own self-destructiveness, come to some kind of terms with her past and find a home in the world.

EB: You’ve been visiting China almost since it opened to Westerners. How did you get interested in China?

LB: Complete coincidence! A high school friend of mine’s parents were among the first group of Americans to teach English in China since the founding of the People’s Republic, and my friend asked me if I wanted to go with him to visit them. I was at the age where my response to a lot of things was, “Sure, sounds like fun,” so I went. I ended up staying six months. This was in 1979, and the experience had a profound impact on my life. I think my first few visits back were a sort of excavation of my own past, trying to understand how the experience affected me. After that, I think it’s because I feel comfortable there, and more importantly, engaged. China is many things, but “boring” isn’t one of them.

EB: What sort of research was involved in Rock Paper Tiger? I imagine that it must be difficult to research some things ? Did you visit the sort of sketchy locales that Ellie finds herself in?

LB: I have been in both karaoke bars and in a candidate for the dive-iest Internet café in Beijing, so in terms of sketchy places in China that are in the book, I’ve been in at least rough equivalents of most of them. I also deliberately set the book in China locations with which I was familiar.

Iraq was another story. Obviously it wasn’t the kind of place I could just pop in on in the middle of a war and a civil war. I do have a friend who had been there both before and after the invasion, however, and I’d done some editing of pieces that she’d written about her experiences. During that process I would ask her for specific sensory details, to make the pieces more visceral for readers. All that came in handy a couple of years later when I was working on Rock Paper Tiger.

For the rest of it, I just did a lot of research: many, many articles, books, blogs, documentaries…I started very broad, because I was trying to portray a world with which I was not personally familiar, and I didn’t always know what it was that I needed to know. After I’d immersed myself in it, it was easier for me to target specifics. I hope I did a decent job. I have had a few vets ask me if I’d been in the military, including one army medic who asked if I’d been one, so that made me feel good. On the other hand, one woman who was an army officer read the book and was absolutely furious, claiming I’d set back the cause of women in the military by ten years. So there you go.

EB: You worked in the LA film industry and as a songwriter. How have those experiences influenced your writing?

LB: Creatively, the film stuff led me to focus on something I already naturally focused on in writing, which is how to set the scene using relatively sparse prose—you have to keep the narrative very tight in screenwriting. I work very visually; place is important to me, and I also see characters as people I’m observing. I don’t generally sit down and write out character sketches/motivations until well into the process, it’s more like I’m watching them and trying to figure out what they’re like. Also, screenwriting is great training in writing dialog that captures different characters’ voices. Writing dialog isn’t about reproducing realistic speech; it’s about giving the illusion that you’re doing so.

With the songwriting, it encouraged me to focus on the more rhythmic aspects of the prose. I’m not a poet, and I don’t think my lyrics were brilliant or anything, but I do like to think that there’s a certain musicality to my writing that comes through.

Also, both of these experiences were really good preparation in the more collaborative aspects of publishing. One of the reasons that I wanted to write novels instead of screenplays was that I had more control over the work—a screenplay is a blueprint for a film; a novel is its own end result. That said, if you’re going to work in traditional publishing, you have to accept that you don’t have total control over the process. Agents and editors are going to have input into the writing and the story, you don’t get to choose your own cover, you really have to be open to working with other people as a part of a team. Being involved in film/TV and seeing how that process works and being in a band where other people are adding their own creativity to your songs and you’re playing them together is pretty good training for that.

EB: You’ve got a story in Akashic Books’ San Diego Noir? Which is more noirish, China or San Diego?

LB: Definitions of “noir” vary, but I went with “Man/Woman meets Man/Woman who is not good for him/her, and things go terribly wrong.” I think you can find noir in both China and San Diego—wherever you have people who are self-destructive, possibly down on their luck and in over their head, you have a setting for noir.

EB: You next book is a standalone set in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Can you tell us a little about that?

LB: Well, speaking of noir, my working title for that book was Puerto Vallarta Noir—I never considered that to be a candidate for the actual title, but that’s how I thought of the book. And in it you have an American woman whose real estate financier husband has died, and she discovers that he was running a financial scam and has lost all their money, so she’s at a crisis point in her life on multiple levels. She takes an already paid-for vacation in Puerto Vallarta to get her head together, meets an attractive guy on the beach, they go back to her hotel, and yes, things go terribly wrong. The story is also about the intersection of drug cartels, political power, and corruption on both sides of the border. It’s called Getaway, and it will be published in May 2012.

EB: And will Ellie McEnroe be back in a future book?

LB: I’m working on an Ellie book now—a lighthearted romp through political crackdowns, environmental apocalypse, religious cults and GMOs. You finally get to meet her mother, among other things.

Keep up with Lisa Brackmann on her website, blog, and on Facebook, or Twitter.

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Summer Reading Update

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Ed Battistella
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In an earlier post, I mentioned some of the books I’m looking forward to reading this summer. Here’s an update on my summer reading.

The Pink Tarantula
Want to spend an enjoyable week? Pick up Tim Wohlforth’s new book The Pink Tarantula. It’s a series of nine connected short stories about an unlikely pair of detectives.

Tom Bateman is a California private investigator in a wheelchair. (I had originally typed “confined” to a wheel-chair, then considered “wheelchair-bound,” but realized that Bateman is anything but confined. Think of him as Hammett’s Continental Op in a racing wheelchair.) Bateman was injured in Vietnam and he has a postwar outlook, with plenty of countercultural connections and no illusions. Bateman’s trickster assistant is a woman named Henrietta (really). She calls Bateman “Crip.” I think of her as Lisbeth Salander, without the computer skills or self-control (or you could think of Salander as a blend of Henrietta and Carol O’Connell’s character Kathy Mallory). Often, it’s Henrietta, with her drug dealer boyfriend, who brings the trouble to Bateman’s door. I have to admit, I’d be less tolerant of Henrietta than Bateman is.

I had intended to read a story a day, but got hooked and kept reading ahead. Wohlforth offers muscular prose (with, like Bateman, a lot of upper body strength and surprising agility), action, noirish California settings, and even at one point an homage to Dashiell Hammett. And the title story is based on a true incident, a 1997 murder at a San Francisco hair salon.

Wohlforth, by the way, is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a devotee of short form writing with over 70 short stories to his credit. His last novel Harry was set in the kind of mythical Jefferson City, an artsy Oregon town with a theatre festival. He’s also written nonfiction about cults, and there’s a solo Bateman story in The Pink Tarantula about cults too.

Forgetting English and The Language Archive
Literary Ashland is filled with serendipity. I began reading Forgetting English on the same day that I finally saw The Language Archive at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The Language Archive is Julia Cho’s play about the loss of language and the way we lose interpersonal language when give ourselves over to other projects (yes, I know, I’m guilty). In the play, English is the language of anger and half-truths and the ending question touches on the emotional value of ambiguity–a hug that mean both the same thing and different things to the main characters.

Reading Midge Raymond’s Forgetting English in the context of The Language Archive helped me to see the stories as about our limited vocabulary not just as travelers but as individuals—siblings, spouses, lovers, friends, and colleagues. Forgetting English is a collection of poignant stories with realistically drawn characters and detailed, exotic scenes: Melanie is in Tonga after losing her advertising job, Dan and Julie are in Tokyo after losing a baby, Deb in Antarctica fails to save a suicidal tourist, Sue learns about her husband’s affair on an anniversary trip to Hawaii, Karey, a nanny, nearly losed a child to the Pacific riptides, Lise lets her dissolute brother find his own way in Australia, and in the title story Paige in Tapei reclaims her life after a suicide attempt. Characters face adversity—death, defeat, displacement—and they gain insight from ephemera of life a misplaced ring, a standby ticket, a jade pendant, or someone else’s phone message.

And for me, the stories were about language and people: the signature call of the Emperor Penguin, the digital translation memory that fuzzily matches previous content to new experiences, the need to forget English to understand another tongue, the language barrier among new lovers that “helps more than hinders.”

Forgetting English was the perfect complement to The Language Archive.

Midge Raymond’s Forgetting English received the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, and her work has in TriQuarterly, American Literary Review, Indiana Review, North American Review, Bellevue Literary Review, the Los Angeles Times magazine, and the Bellingham Review. She has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes.

Strunkenwhite
I’m reading Stylized by Mark Garvey. As the subtitled says, it’s “a slightly obsessive history of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style.” It’s more than that though. It’s a biography of Cornell professor William Strunk and (his student) New Yorker writer E. B. White.

I should disclaim. In high school I was very taken with The Elements of Style, but eventually I soured on it. I came to prefer James Sledd’s wonderful appendix to A Short Introduction to English Grammar and Joseph Williams’s meaty Style: Toward Clarity and Grace. And I’m endlessly annoyed with nostalgists who yammer that “All you need to do to get students to write well is have them read Strunkenwhite.” I should confess too. My most notorious typo was referring to Strunk and White as Stunk and White. And it was a typo. I swear.

All that said, Mark Garvey gave me a new appreciation for the little book and for the way in which it is both a product of and a reflection of New Yorker style and waspy noblesse oblige. He tells the wonderful tale of how the book came about, quoting from the correspondence between Macmillan editor Jack Case and E. B. White. The correspondence between Case and White is literate and even charming. Garvey fleshes out the book with comments from other writers (Ian Frazier, Adam Gopnik, Frank McCourt, etc.) and with the correspondence between White and his readers. Most enjoyable, for me, were the depictions of Strunk and of White and the snippets from other writers—Gopnik, Frazier and the like. I especially enjoyed reading about White’s idyllic Maine existence and Strunk’s trip to Hollywood as a Shakespeare consultant.

Less enjoyable was the author’s whining about English Departments and his lumping together of descriptive linguistics and post-modernists. And I would have enjoyed a bit more fleshing out of the discussion of the updating of the eternal truths of grammar from edition to edition. But I’ve got a new appreciation for Strunk and for White and even for Strunkenwhite.

Parker Redux
My book group just read Robert B. Parker’s Double Play, which caused me to a take a fresh look at Parker. I had read his early books when I was in college (when I should have been reading other things, I suppose) and then off and on for about a dozen years. Then I got bored with Parker or Spenser or both and mostly gave him up. Reading Double Play, has caused me to reassess my Parkerlessness. Double Play is a 1940s period piece featuring Jackie Robinson and a fictional bodyguard named Burke (whom I kept mentally blending with Andress Vachss’s character of the same name). It’s got the familiar Parker tough guy themes of honor and duty, but also some ennui and period detail and personal memory and social commentary. I think I’m ready to try more Parker, and I’m interested to see that the Spenser series will continue, now to be written by Ace Atkins. (Thanks, Rick.)

All of a Sudden Influence
I’m reading Mike Rousell’s Sudden Influence: How Spontaneous Events Shape Our Lives . It has been on my mental I-should-read-this list for a while, until one day when I ran into Mike in the restroom. Literally. I was walking out and he was walking in and, as I turned away to watch the trajectory of my paper towel toss, we collided. I pulled my elbow out of his solar plexus, he made a hockey joke, and I rushed off to an appointment. The next day I picked up a copy of Mike’s book, pleased with the irony that a spontaneous event would guide my behavior.

Rousell (now that I’m talking about the book, we’re on a last name basis) is a psychologist and counseling professor at Southern Oregon University. But he doesn’t write like typical professor and Sudden Influence doesn’t read like a dissertation. It’s academic in the good sense—well supported and having a comprehensible theoretical framework while for the most part avoiding a professorial style (of nominalizations, convoluted sentences, technical jargon, intrusive overcitation, and so forth).

The basic idea is that at emotionally charged instances our otherwise rigid frames of mind become open to new ideas and perceptions. Often such new ideas are about our potential and thus guide our lives. There is some discussion of the rigidity of our intellectual frameworks, how we rationalize new experiences to frames, and how that rigidity can lessen.

Rousell explains how Elevated Suggestibility States (moments in which our emotions or confusions disarm our rationalizations) permit Spontaneous Influence Events which flash us toward new beliefs. He illustrates with examples from clients he has worked with and with anecdotes from athletes, artists, and even his own family—looking at the words that change lives and the moments in which those changes are sparked. There is some good discussion of the neurobiology of thinking, of hypnosis, and of classroom applications. Rousell also suggests how to help people recover from earlier negative sudden influence events. (An example—not in the book–that occurred to me as I was reading this was the 1930s Monster Experiment in which speech researchers told fluent orphans that they were beginning to stutter. A small suggestion by a figure in authority…)

Sudden Influence certainly caused me to rethink the cliché of the teachable moment and the advice that “if you don’t have something good to say, don’t say anything at all.” Another effect is that readers will think about the sudden influences in their lives. I won’t bore you with mine.

The book is directed to teachers and counselors mostly, but there are some intriguing ideas for people interesting in cognitive science—potential connections with the linguistics of George Lakoff and others and even to the Sapir-Whorf ideas or Elizabeth Loftus’s work on courtroom testimony. And for those interested in rhetoric, the book raises the question of how sudden influences might be a tool to deal with the conceptual bias and echo chamber reinforcement that we find in much public policy debate.

More summer reading updates as they happen…

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