Lots of laughs help the grammar hints go down!

How long has it been since I was able to post book reviews? Too darn long, for sure, as I’ve been knocked off my feet by a flood of family and health issues. Now, I feel the reading/reviewing mojo return, beginning with two aimed directly at writers:

Review of: Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

Author: Mary Norris

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Grade: B

Source: Dallas Public Library

In Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, Mary Norris spreads a feast for grammar nerds, word addicts and writers (or anyone else) who's ever wondered what really goes on in the world of publishing. The longtime copy editor for The New Yorker untangles the ins and outs of punctuation and grammar with equal amounts of humor and panache while parading a cast of fellow magazine employees in all their eccentric, conscientious and sometimes maddening variety.

Norris discusses her book's eponymous grammar error while urging readers to deal gently with its perpetuators. "(They) are all humbling themselves by putting another person first. . . if they were not so f***ing polite, if they occasionally put themselves first, they would know they had it wrong. No one would begin a confidence with ‘Between I and you. . . ’”

(Yes, Between You & Me includes a chapter to the use of profanity in writing. "You cannot legislate language," she writes, while admitting a fondness for "the blessed euphemism: the asterisks standing in for the vowels are interior punctuation, little fireworks inside the words.")

I got a bit tangled in Norris's discussion of transitive verbs and linking verbs (for she prefers the racier term, "copulative verbs"). This is to deal with the conundrum of "who vs. whom," although the short answer is when in doubt, use "who" -- at least you'll never sound pretentious. She also tackles gender-neutral language, and the proper usage of other punctuation marks -- commas, hyphens, dashes, semicolons, colons, and apostrophes, the last of which may be going the way of "whom." 

Norris also relieves the grammar hammer with discussions of writing instruments (for copy editing, she favors #1 pencils), a tour of the world’s only pencil-sharpener museum, and other personal tidbits. (Warning, this book is not for those without humor.)

Finally, she offers an appendix of books she has found useful, and for which she provides often-hilarious notations such as: "not for use in an emergency," "useful . . . if you need to know how to address a baronet," and "defines Internet abbreviations . . . for oldsters, and debunks many a myth while promoting many another." 

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Review of: Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen

Author: Mary Norris

Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company

Grade: A

Source: Dallas Public Library

No word nerd can fail to be intrigued by Mary Norris's memoir of her alphabetic adventures in Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen. Add that this longtime copy editor of The New Yorker's alphabet of choice is Greek -- preferably ancient, that it inspired her to enact Euripides (in the original language), find her feminist role model in the goddess Athena, and ditch her clothes to swim in the reputedly-beautifying waters of Aphrodite's bath, and Norris is guaranteed to charm lovers of mythology, literature and all things Greek as well.

And to think it all began with Sean Connery. . . or at least a showing of the Terry Gilliam movie Time Bandits.

"One scene, set in ancient Greece, featured Sean Connery in a cameo as Agamemnon," Norris writes. "He was dueling with a warrior who wore the head of a bull and looked like the Minotaur. The landscape was so stark and arid, and so enhanced by the mighty figure of Sean Connery in armor, that I wanted to go there right away." Overlooking "the screenwriters' twist of mythology" (and that the scenes purportedly in Greece were actually shot in Morocco), Norris took up the study of modern Greek to aid her travels, only to find herself falling headlong into the language's ancient version. 

Along the way, she will trace the origins of the English alphabet through the Greek, reconsider her own family's trials in the light of classical playwrights’ interpretations, sympathize with builders of a Parthenon reconstruction in Tennessee, and fend off (or not) the advances of men toward a woman traveling alone. Finally, the appendix of Greek to Me lists the letters of the Greek alphabet with their English equivalents to aid readers like me who delight in transliterating the multiple examples of the language sprinkled throughout the book.

Adventure classics -- Some pig! Some spider!

Charlotte’s Web

by E. B. White

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In 1952, Elwyn Brooks (E.B.) White gave his editor the manuscript for what would become one of the best-loved children’s books of all time, Charlotte’s Web. At the time, the decision of the veteran New Yorker essayist to write children’s books must have seemed as inexplicable as his oddball choice of characters. Or as the “small voice. . . rather thin, but pleasant,” White used to introduce the most famous spider in literature, Charlotte. Make that Charlotte A. (for Araneus) Cavatica. The common -- in this case, very uncommon -- barn spider.

Charlotte introduces herself to Wilbur the pig, who lives in farmer Zuckerman’s big barn and longs for a friend. Even though Wilbur doesn’t yet realize his destiny is to be turned into ham and sausages, a creature who kills other creatures for a living initially appalls him.

The little spider does her best to reassure the innocent young pig. “‘I don’t really eat them. I drink them -- drink their blood. I love blood.’ said Charlotte, and her pleasant, thin voice grew even thinner and more pleasant.”

“‘Well,’ (Wilbur) thought, ‘I’ve got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is! Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty -- everything I don’t like. How can I learn to like her, even though she is pretty and, of course, clever?’”

Before the end of the story, Wilbur will need all of Charlotte’s cleverness (as well as the aid of the amoral barn rat, Templeton) to avoid becoming the centerpiece of the Zuckermans’ holiday dinner. And as Charlotte spins ever more intricate webs to assure, first the inhabitants of the Zuckerman farm, then the entire county, of Wilbur’s intrinsic value, the little pig learns the lessons of a lifetime about friendship, sacrifice, love and death.

The story of the improbable friendship wasn’t White’s first foray into writing for children. Perhaps with his small son, Joel, in mind, he published Stuart Little, the story of a mouse boy born to human parents, in 1945. Although now recognized as a classic, the book received a tepid initial reception. Seven years later, White tested the waters of children’s literature again with Charlotte, Wilbur and Templeton.

“The story had taken me two years to write, working on and off,” White said in a later interview with The Paris Review. “But I was in no particular hurry. I took another year to rewrite it, and it was a year well spent.”

Prior to Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web, White had been better known for his essays and commentary for The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine. (He would later become famous in every American writing class for The Elements of Style, co-written with his former college English professor, William Strunk, Jr.)

“Is there any shifting of gears in writing (children’s books)?” The Paris Review interviewers George Plimpton and Frank H. Crowther asked White in 1969.

“Anyone who shifts gears when he writes for children is likely to wind up stripping his gears,” White replied. “Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth. They accept, almost without question, anything you present them with, as long as it is presented honestly, fearlessly, and clearly. . . In Charlotte’s Web, I gave them a literate spider, and they took that.”

White’s children’s books, including his last, The Trumpet of the Swan, are widely available. For his complete interview with The Paris Review, now introduced with a posthumous tribute from his stepson, Roger Angell, see "The art of the essay," 
www.theparisreview.org/interviews/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues a February of animal adventures with Enid Bagnold’s tribute to her horse-loving childhood, National Velvet.)

Adventure classics -- Far green hills of Mars?

The Martian Chronicles

by Ray Bradbury

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“I would go out to (my grandparents’) lawn on summer nights and reach up to the red light of Mars and say, ‘Take me home!’” Ray Bradbury wrote, explaining his debt to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ stories in an essay The New Yorker prophetically titled “Take Me Home,” published the day before his death.

“I yearned to fly away and land there in the strange dusts that blew over dead-sea bottoms toward the ancient cities. . . I know that ‘The Martian Chronicles’ would never have happened if Burroughs hadn’t had an impact on my life. . . .”

Like the Mars of Burroughs’ hero John Carter, Bradbury’s Mars was a land still unknown enough to harbor adventures. There‘s more than a touch of fear for the future and nostalgia for a simpler time somewhere in the past lurking in the pages of both writers. A nostalgia, in the case of The Martian Chronicles that Bradbury pinpoints in the remembered green American Midwest of his childhood in the 1920’s.

He was born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920 and spent much of his childhood there. In The Martian Chronicles, the Waukegan of Bradbury’s childhood would resurface under the name “Green Bluff,” reconstructed by telepathic Martians for a rocket crew from Earth, in the chapter “The Third Expedition.”

“This town out here looks very peaceful and cool, and so much like Green Bluff, Illinois, that it frightens me,” Captain John Black of the ill-fated expedition explains to his men (Bradbury taking for granted in his 1950 story, that space crews would be all-male). Black, like Bradbury, knew you can’t really go back home again.

Ultimately, the defeat of the Martians occurred not through armaments or atomics, but with the scourge of a childhood disease as lethal as terrestrial bacteria had been to the Martians of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. And finally, the invaders from Earth would live to see their own civilization destroyed by the atomic weapons the world had learned to fear by the date of Bradbury’s writing.

That the Mars of Bradbury bore little resemblance to the planet, pictures of whose dusty pink skies and barren landscapes he saw transmitted from robotic rovers long before his death, bothered him not at all. He even resisted being labeled a science fiction writer. “Martian Chronicles is not science fiction -- it’s fantasy,” he insisted. “That’s the reason it’s going to be around a long time -- because it’s a Greek myth, and myths have staying power.”

Even a scientist could agree with that assessment. “Mars,” astronomer Carl Sagan wrote, “has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our Earthly hopes and fears.”

For more about Bradbury, who died June 5 at the age of 91, see his official site,
www.raybradbury.com/.

(Next Wednesday -- an all-Martian month at Adventure classics concludes with one of Phillip K. Dick’s greatest works, Martian Time-Slip.)