Mark at TEV has posted the first installment of his interview with John Banville, whose book The Sea has recently been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. This is the first of four installments that will appear weekly. Mark did a great job on this interview and I highly recommend it – it’s interviews like this, thoughtful and unpretentious, that show the true promise of book blogs.
Essential Interview
New Work from Kapuscinski
The Paris Review has published some work by Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died last year. The essay (not available online) covers more of Kapuscinski’s travels through Africa, a familiar subject to those who have read his books. What’s notable is that this issue also includes some of Kapuscinski’s photography, which nicely augments his writing – though those who have read Kapuscinski’s work know that he is more than able to conjure up images with his writing.It’s a good time for Kapuscinski fans because in addition to The Paris Review essay, a new book by Kapuscinski is on the way. I noted Travels with Herodetus at the end of my “most anticipated books of the year” post, but there were few details available at the time. Now we have a cover (as you can see), as well as the book’s description, which tells us that Kapuscinski has written about his years as a young reporter.From the master of literary reportage whose acclaimed books include Shah of Shahs, The Emperor, and The Shadow of the Sun, an intimate account of his first youthful forays beyond the Iron Curtain.Just out of university in 1955, Kapuscinski told his editor that he’d like to go abroad. Dreaming no farther than Czechoslovakia, the young reporter found himself sent to India. Wide-eyed and captivated, he would discover in those days his life’s work – to understand and describe the world in its remotest reaches, in all its multiplicity. From the rituals of sunrise at Persepolis to the incongruity of Louis Armstrong performing before a stone-faced crowd in Khartoum, Kapuscinski gives us the non-Western world as he first saw it, through still-virginal Western eyes.The companion on his travels: a volume of Herodotus, a gift from his first boss. Whether in China, Poland, Iran, or the Congo, it was the “father of history” – and, as Kapuscinski would realize, of globalism – who helped the young correspondent to make sense of events, to find the story where it did not obviously exist. It is this great forerunner’s spirit – both supremely worldly and innately Occidental – that would continue to whet Kapuscinski’s ravenous appetite for discovering the broader world and that has made him our own indispensable companion on any leg of that perpetual journey.Bonus Link: Google video has Kapuscinski’s appearance in 2000 on The Charlie Rose Show. (You may need to turn the volume all the way up to hear it.)
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Oscar Wao Author Helps Inaugurate New Online Series
Pulitzer winner Junot Díaz talks with his fellow “Year in Reading” contributor Meghan O’Rourke in the debut episode of the online video series Open Book, co-sponsored by Slate and my alma mater. I’m thrilled that the producers elected to keep the same zany voice-over guy who reads Slate’s audio podcasts. Future interviews, we’re told, will include John Ashbery, Charles Simic, and Jonathan Safran Foer.
The Millions is a Little Irritating
I was looking at the list of “Top 10 Most Irritating Expressions in the English language,” which was linked to in our recent Curiosities installment (and which is culled from a new book, A Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare), and a thought occurred to me. The Millions has been around for nearly six years. Over our exactly 1,800 posts (not including this one), just how annoying have we been?Hoping for the best, but fearing the worst, I performed some searches. Here’s what I found:At the end of the day – We’ve used this clunker just three times, including way back in 2004 when it crept into a post called “Books of the Boom“. In my defense, I was referring to an actual day, and not the hypothetical one that is the target of those Oxford wordsmiths’ ire.Fairly unique – I’d never thought about it, but that is a fairly silly phrase. Thankfully, we’ve never used it at The Millions.I personally – Another redundancy, and this time I am guilty. I’ve used it twice, though not since 2004 when it crept into this roundup. I blame Kakutani.At this moment in time – That one hurts my ears, and indeed it has thankfully never made it into print at The Millions.With all due respect – A classic, used but once in 1,800 posts. The guilty party is Garth who was clearly struck briefly mad by a slight against his beloved Bolaño.Absolutely – This one, in that it is not a phrase, strikes me as a bit unfair, pernicious as this adverb may be. We’ve used it 41 times over the years, and I feel absolutely no guilt about that.It’s a nightmare – No nightmares here.Shouldn’t of – That’s just bad grammar, and we’ve never used it. Phrases like that keep us up at night.24/7 – We’ve used this one twice. Contributor emeritus Patrick gets a pass because he used it as part of this phrase: “24/7 mingle mode.” I can think of no better way to describe BEA in LA.It’s not rocket science – we’ve never used this one, but “rocket science” was used in one of my all-time favorite Millions posts, Andrew’s “Distinguished in a David Niven Mustache.”
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New books: Clark, Cusk, Dermansky
As the Amazon review says, “it takes a world of confidence to name your debut novel The Great Stink,” but that’s just what Clare Clark did. Clark’s novel is set in the sewers of Victorian England as it follows the lives of William May, who has been hired to overhaul the decrepit system, and Long Arm Tom, who makes his living scavenging in the filth. According to a recent New York Times review, Clark is quite explicit in her descriptions of the vile sewer, but “Clark’s triumph is that she makes us see and smell everything we politely pretend not to, and she even manages to give the miasma its own kind of beauty.” The book has been shortlisted for the British Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey Memorial Dagger Award for first time authors. You can read an excerpt here.Rachel Cusk’s Booker longlister In the Fold comes out in a few days. Despite the Booker nod, reviews have been mixed. Says Louise France the Guardian: “Cusk has a knack for scene-setting and handles certain setpieces with an unflinching eye for anything pretentious or fake; but throughout the novel, tediously little happens,” a sentiment echoed in the Independent: “at the novel’s heart there’s not very much going on.” An excerpt is available for those who’d like to see for themselves.The Village Voice compares the twin protagonists of Marcy Dermansky’s Twins to those of the Sweet Valley High books, but Dermansky’s twins “have acquired a fearsome host of modern ills: pill habits, self-injury, bulimia, a penchant for juggling.” Twins is getting good reviews on lots of blogs, as well, including at Collected Miscellany where Kevin describes it as “oddly compelling.” And Dermansky herself recently recommended a book at Moorish Girl. If you want to know more, Dermansky’s got her own Web site, and an excerpt of the book is available as well.
Even David Foster Wallace Nods
While working on an essay, I found myself needing to use a word that meant “related to the study of proper names.” I knew exactly the word I wanted, because I’d just come across the same usage while re-reading David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. In the essay on tennis player Michael Joyce, Wallace has this really cool throw-away paragraph about how the Association of Tennis Professionals’ weekly world rankings “constitute a nomological orgy that makes for truly first-rate bathroom reading.” He goes on to celebrate such names as Mahesh Bhupathi, Jonathan Venison, Cyris Suk (!), Leander Paes, Udo Riglewski, and Martin Zumpft — and that’s just like a fifth of them. It truly is good reading.
Except it isn’t “nomological.” That was the word I went looking for, but I found this definition of it instead: “relating to or denoting certain principles, such as laws of nature, that are neither logically necessary nor theoretically explicable, but are simply taken as true.” For instance, the idea that two parallel lines will run forever and never touch is nomological, at least within Euclidean geometry.
But that really doesn’t sound like what Wallace was trying to say. It’s pretty clear he meant to say “the rankings constitute an [adjective related to the study of proper names] orgy.” A quick search indicated that the word Wallace was probably looking for was “onomastic,” which means “of or relating to the study of the history and origin of proper names.”
Where Wallace probably went wrong was in confusing the Greek nomos, meaning “law,” with onoma, meaning “name.” Consider that a variation of onoma was onuma; the switch from omicron to upsilon — the latter of which tends to enter English as a Y — helps form the root “-nym,” as in “synonym,” “antonym,” and “homonym.”
So the clause should read, “and the rankings constitute an onomastic orgy that makes for truly first-rate bathroom reading.”
I guess we should all take comfort in the fact that a titan like Wallace could make a mistake like this. On the other hand, it’s a testament to the late master’s genius that any of us even care.