Errata and Marginalia

All my life, I have genuinely and unforcedly enjoyed no writers so much as those who happen to be sarcastic, coldly ironical, bleakly sardonic British people. So much so that I am occasionally seized with panic at the thought that I may one day run out of them. After all, how many can there have been, in recorded history? 

I take some comfort in the fact that, despite my stated preference, I have not yet chipped the merest shaving from the mordant iceberg that is Ivy Compton-Burnett. I seem, by a kind of subconscious prompting, to be saving her for later. When I know I will need it. Irony is a dish best served cold. 

Oh, right, but I take even more comfort from the fact that, each time I think I may be approaching the bottom of the pile of ironical Britishers, I uncover another. And, strangely, it is lurid biographies of narcissistic male creative types that, in the most recent instances, always seem to yield these discoveries. Perhaps because to tolerate life with men fitting this description, it takes a certain coating of sarcasm. 

Anyway, there was the Lucian Freud biography that pointed me toward the acid pen of Caroline Blackwood. And now, the tale of V.S. Naipaul’s (somewhat exaggerated) misdeeds, Patrick French’s The World is What It is, has introduced me to Diana Athill. And I want to read no one else again. 

Diana Athill was V.S. Naipaul’s editor. And the editor of a lot of other famous people. And a wonderful and maybe more entertaining author in her own right. And as a result, it appears she knew everybody. Her short book Make Believe: A True Story – about her friendship with Hakim Jamal, a would-be cultist who believed himself to be God, and whom Naipaul also wrote about – can without effort be connected to just about any “Radical Chic” wacko of the Nixon era who achieved any degree of notoriety. 

Did Hakim Jamal – like Jim Jones – try to build a commune in Guyana? Check! Was he eventually involved in sordid murders? Check! Did he have an affair with Jean Seberg? Check! A sort of Sixties degrees of separation.

(Side note: Seberg’s cuckolded French novelist husband, Romain Gary, would write a sensible and humane book, White Dog, about Seberg’s involvement with this cast of characters, which I read and loved in my tormented radical youth. I would recommend it to any young Leftist who is just waking up to the fact that people on their own side can be awful nutters too)

Athill’s book captures certainly the flavor of the age. It was a time when there was somebody so utterly awful in the White House, doing such terrible things to children and innocent people (napalming villages in Southeast Asia, in that case) that many started to falsely assume that the Left must be wholly virtuous and incapable of moral error by comparison. 

Could we say that Athill’s memoir may still be a salutary one to read? Not, surely, that I see anything in common with our own time. Perish the thought. 

It is slightly ironic, however (speaking of that trait), that the work of this great editor should be marred by typographic errors. What’s more, I hold in my hand a 2012 Granta reprint of the 1993 original, so it’s not like nobody has had a chance to notice and fix these things in the years since. 

Thus, once again, I am forced to render my services free of charge. In the interests of literature. 

p. 64. Okay, this one’s not an error, just wanted to quote this part: “[Romain] Gary came round to the house on several occasions, only to be confounded by Hakim’s ‘debating’ (a scene I could clearly envisage).” I have a vague memory from Gary’s White Dog of a scene where he crouches behind a door frame listening to some loud-mouth house guest and jotting down his increasingly outlandish utterances. Could it have been Jamal?

p. 95 “I’d seen for myself how calmly she had taking [sic.] his fucking Libbie[.]” A charged sentence, to be sure, but one still needs to proof read

p. 96 “pulled the blanket back and [sic.] inch or two”

p. 118 “Halé and Charlie were staying with Herbert G. Herbert [Patrick French in the introduction describes this aptly as a wonderful “Nabokovian name”] was the drop-out son of a rich German family[.]” Should be a “who” before the “was.”

p. 122 “What I asked, was the latest shape taken by the Guyana project?” Missing comma.

p. 127 “Had he ever shown signs of wanted [sic.] to be rid…”

p. 134. “[N]o one could learn from what Hakim said the truth about…” Missing a “was” or something after the “said”

That is all. Otherwise, I love this book. And, in fact, I loved the errors. They gave me an excuse to write this tribute. 

Avid Reds

Without contest, the best random marginalia I’ve ever personally discovered in a Google books scan. Check it out for yourself here.

The Gambia

True story:

I have a friend who is an ESL teacher, and one day in his lesson plans he reached the thankless task of having to explain the correct application of the definite article to proper nouns in English. 

Generally speaking, of course, we leave it off. The purpose of the definite article is, as one would guess, to define. Which is to say, to distinguish. To separate out. We say “I want the egg,” when we have just been offered a choice between an egg and a muffin. But we don’t say this when we really just want someone to run to the store and pick up an egg, and any egg will do.

Proper nouns, meanwhile, already differentiate. They distinguish and define. So we don’t need any definite articles in front of them. We say “The Pope” to signal that we mean this, the current pope, as opposed to any old Leo or John – but when we say “Pope Francis,” we’ve already distinguished him – we’ve boiled him down to one likely candidate – so we can drop the “The.”

“That’s why we say ‘I’m from Russia,’” said my friend the teacher to his class. “Not ‘The Russia.’”

Despite these clear instructions, however, one student in his class still refused to drop the definite article when speaking of his country. My friend corrected him several times over, and still the guy wouldn’t budge. 

My friend fumed about this. He explained to me the situation.

“Where’s the guy from?” I asked.

“Gambia,” said my friend. 

–

You really do have to wonder at the absolute rottenness of the luck of this. How many students have you encountered from The Gambia ever, let alone in a context involving the correct application of definite articles to the names of countries?

Literally the only other way in which this disagreement could possibly have arisen – and in which my friend would in fact have been wrong – would be if his student had been Bahamanian. 

Large Tuna

Gradually surmounting page after page of that unpardonably over-long Norman Mailer novel, Harlot’s Ghost, I reach p. 909 (still only about three-quarters of the way through) and find there some small compensation for my efforts – a stray reference to a mafia don with the nickname “Big Tuna.” 

Now, Mailer’s novel has the semi-Gumpian trait of mixing – not always felicitously – real historical figures in with its made-up characters. So I had to look up whether there actually was such a person as this Big Tuna. And lo – there was! Tony Accardo, aka “Big Tuna.” 

What’s more, Wikipedia has yet to take notice on his entry of the other most famous Big Tuna in history – Jim Halpert. No reference is made to The Office in the “Pop Culture” section of Accardo’s article.

Is it possible that Andy Bernard made, all those years ago, so abstruse a reference to a mid-century mafioso that it has escaped the vigilance even of the Wikipedia editors? 

In which case, they must be teaching people something at that Cornell (y’ever heard of it?)

Errata and Marginalia

Phoebe Hoban’s Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (London, 2015 paperback ed., 2008 second ed., 1998 original): Great, great book. In need of a final proofreader. I offer my services free of charge. 

p. 7. Not an error, since the author correctly adds a “sic” to the quotation from the Langston Hughes poem “Genius Child”: “Free [sic] him and let his soul run wild.” In case you’re curious about the original line, though: it’s “kill him and let his soul run wild.” More apt wording for Basquiat’s tragic fate – but would no doubt have been out of place in the memorial service.

p. 23. Says “Gerard Basquat,” rather than “Basquiat.” Sadly, will not be the last Basquat misprint.

p. 78. Marring the otherwise felicitous phrase: “She was also the Mudd Cub’s [sic – should be “Club’s”] unofficial den mother.”

Not blaming Hoban. I make typos all the time. I will probably leave several in this post before I’m through, and the gods of irony shall heap scorn upon my head. No, I accuse the editors. They are the ones whose job it is to catch these things.

p. 83 “use to go dance.” Admittedly, a person is being quoted here. So maybe it’s just a quirk of their speech? But there’s no sic. 

p. 125 “Basquat’s former home.” Gah! Basquat again! Who’s he?

Also on this page, there’s a reference to “An art-world Trump, he has perfected the art of the art-deal.” No error here. I just had to observe that a thrill of horror passes through me every time I see a reference to Trump, pre-2015. It’s like suddenly stumbling upon, say, the innocent-seeming late-19th century school records of a promising young seminary student named Jughashvili.

p. 214. “Andy would says to me.” Again, it’s a person speaking. Could be an odd verbal tic. But there’s no sic. 

p. 222 “Call Robert Mnuchin.” No error here, just another thrill of horror. Had to look this up, and yes, it turns out that the  “Mnuchin” here who’s a famous art dealer is in fact the father of Trump administration figure Steve Mnuchin. Yes, it would in fact seem that the world of 1980s Manhattan consumerist excess translated directly into our post-2016 ruling class. Government by American Psycho.

p. 250 “looked like a crown prince disdaining his bave new world.” Should obviously be “brave”– unless the author intended a reference to “basement raves,” in which case this book would be truly ahead of its time. 

p. 275. “Money was the fit priority.” Come on, editors! Wake up!

Blogging every single episode of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps S1E1

As befits the first episode of a series, we have on display here an ideal type of THE FORMULA in action. We have a RED HERRING in the first 30 seconds, as we should. And it is the most basic and essential red herring for it to be, the red herring from which all future red herrings will evolve: namely, The monster has NOT just appeared, it was actually just HIS BIG SISTER TRYING TO SCARE HIM. And not only do we have THE TWIST, we then right after have THE TWIST UPON THE TWIST. As in: “the parents are the monsters after all!” Followed by: “So is the protagonist!” And as is suitable in the first installment of this sub-”The Outsider” series, the twist in this episode is in fact the original, the primordial twist, the twist that started it all: the one in which THE HERO WAS THE MONSTER ALL ALONG!

Also, this being the first episode, it seems like they are trying just a little bit harder on the writing. Just a little bit. We have endearing flashes of wit. Here and there. 

Also, already in this first episode we are starting to see one of the things that makes this show actually kind of admirable, for all its unevenness and laziness: namely, its total lack of awkwardness and self-consciousness around the possibility of female/male friendship. The show totally normalizes this for kids, and never tries to hint that there must be some incipient romantic interest at the heart of it. Few have done the same, before or since.  

Also interesting – and out of character, as the series will develop (if that’s the word) – that someone appears to actually die at the end of the episode. And, in fact, to be ingested. That took stomach. 

No OOTS this time, that I could see (or hear). But they are coming.

Blogging every single episode of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps

Is it genius? No.

Is it inspired? No.

Is it passable? Not even always.

Is it something you vaguely remember from your childhood, and therefore able with every sight and sound to set off deep and slumbering soul forces within you? Yes.

Is it available for streaming on Netflix? Yes.

Is it secretly Canadian? Yes.

Let’s do this.
–
A few preliminaries though.

I mean, sure, those Goosebumps books ain’t Proust. Yeah, I didn’t actually read them, and just collected them for the covers.

But, I will defend unto my last breath the great “It Came from Ohio: My Life as a Writer”, Stine’s delightful memoir, which I read multiple times in childhood, and which helped me to learn that real life is more interesting than made up things, that the idea of being a writer is at least as interesting as writing, and that all authors are at their best when they are essentially writing about themselves.

Plus, the show, if not always the books so much, betrayed a clever understanding of the instincts of childhood, from the opening shots on. Here, in the intro to every episode, we see a faceless character with his back to us holding a briefcase that flutters open. This chilling figure, we see from the nametag, is none other than  R.L. Stine himself.

And somehow, you just know all at once that R.L. Stine is an undeniably SCARY name.
Why is it a scary name though? Why why?

Ah…
It’s because the first experience of every American (or Canadian) child with the syllable “Stine/Stein” (and they are the same, remember – children think phonetically) is not with Einstein. Still less with Eisenstein. Or Feinstein. It is with Frankenstein.

So of course R.L. Stine must be a writer of horror fiction. One’s child-logic is fully satisfied by this.
I was hearing on NPR the other day that apparently a statistically significant number of people seem to be drawn to enter professions suggested by their names. Waterses are pulled toward plumbing; Carpenters work with wood. (Unless they turn to directing). As a child, I went to see an orthodontist who was named, indelibly, Dr. Stitch.

So wouldn’t you know it? Stine writes monster fiction.

Anyway, this show.

Things to keep in mind, as we watch every single episode together:

This is R.L. Stine, so we must be on guard for THE FORMULA. This is the ironclad law of plot from which no goosebumps product can ever be said to deviate. It involves a series of GOTCHAS, or, if you prefer, RED HERRINGS, just before the chapter endings or commercial breaks, in which you THINK a monster has shown up, but it hasn’t. Then, in the last of these, the monster actually DOES show up. After that, various things happen, and the monster is apparently defeated. And about three minutes before the end of the episode, it turns out that maybe it wasn’t so defeated after all, or maybe, in this sub-Lovecraftian vein, it turns out that THE HERO WAS THE MONSTER THE WHOLE TIME! This, as you know, is THE TWIST, and its occurrence is the greatest and most unbreakable of all the rules of THE FORMULA of Goosebumps.

I’ll also be looking out for what I call the “OOTS,” that is, the secret Canadianisms – the subtle tips of the hat that we could not possibly have picked up on as kids, which reveal that, in fact, while the children in these episodes look and dress and act something like we do, they are in fact wholly and utterly other, they are in fact nothing short of CANADIAN!

Episode 1 coming along

Real Books Read by Fake People, vol. 1

While life often fails to reward our deepest desires, there are at least those exquisite moments in which one discovers that a book being read by a character in a fictional work also exists in real life, and can be obtained. This series seeks to honor that experience.
–
To begin, S. 3, Ep. 2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Dead Man’s Party,” Rupert Giles is reading a tome in which he finds a picture of the tribal mask that Joyce Summers has just purchased, and he says “good lord” or something since he realizes that this mask raises the dead. “Look at my mask, isn’t it pretty? It raises the dead. Americans!”

A pause, a close look at the screen, and some dedicated guesswork reveal that the title of the tome in question is “The Picture Museum of Sorcery, Magic, and Alchemy” – and the specific chapter is “Pacts with Demons.”

Well, this book actually exists. The picture of the mask that Giles finds, tragically, does not. They superimposed that image. But everything he sees on the rest of that page and the one facing is real.
I know this because I bought and briefly possessed the book. After reading the first few chapters, I got slightly genuinely creeped out. The French author takes a bit too-ghoulish pleasure in his subject matter – people being hauled away into darkness after consigning their souls to the devil, and all that.

After a while, I began to feel semi-convinced that the book was somehow casting a pall over the room. The reasonable explanation for why things were not going perfectly in my life was obviously the presence of M. Degivry’s book. So I donated it to the Salvation Army. Which doesn’t sound very admirable, now that I think of it, but I didn’t mean it that way at the time.

Tagalo(n)g

Back in my innocent youth in suburban Texas, I was partial to girl scout cookies known as Tagalongs. As in, Tág-alongs, with the accent on the first ‘a’.

At some point in late high school – browsing, I believe, the internet’s helpful trove of recordings of the Communist ‘Internationale’ in various national languages– I realized that there is such a thing as Tagalog, spoken by a lot of people in the Philippines. 

And, no matter how closely I peered at this new word, my brain invariably wanted to insert an extra ‘n’ in there, or at the very least to keep that accent on the first ‘a.’

But then, in college, at least if my learned-seeming colleagues were to be believed, it transpired that it was pronounced Tagálog, accent on the second ‘a’, and that I had been doing it wrong the whole time. 

And so, after that, every time I saw the girl scout cookies, I would accidentally pronounce it Tagálongs in my head, forgetting all I once knew. 

But now I live in New England, and they are called “Peanut Butter Patties,” and all has come to darkness.