Author Archives: oook

Madding Gerunds

It’s hard to imagine any lover of words who wouldn’t be susceptible to Far from the Madding Gerund and Other Dispatches from Language Log (by Mark Liberman and Geoffrey K. Pullum), just delivered by USPS today. Flip it open at random and forget about whatever you were doing before… The first chapter is titled “Random monkeys & mendacious pontificating old windbags”, enough right there to justify the purchase. It’s all from the Language Log blog, to which I’ve pointed repeatedly, but there’s definitely value-added in the printed form, not least in the index and the many interesting callouts sprinkled here and there. It’s simply ideal bathroom (or bedtime) reading. Example, from the penultimate entry, one of several on Dan Brown’s ways with words:

The simple fact is that if you are ever mentioned on page 1 of a Dan Brown novel you will be mentioned with an anarthrous occupational nominal premodifier (“Renowned linguist Geoff Pullum staggered across the savage splendor of the forsaken Santa Cruz campus, struggling to remove the knife plunged unnaturally into his back by a barbarous millionaire novelist”), and you will have died a painful and horrible death by page 2, along with several curiously ill-chosen clichés and mangled idioms.
(pg 341, and Nov 7 2004 for the whole thing)

Run right out and buy multiple copies, and place them with those most in need.

Plundergraphia

Mark Liberman’s comments and linkage to Nick Montfort’s take on l’affaire Viswanathan gets me interested in the whole plundergraphia thing (Jason Christie’s Sampling the Culture: 4 Notes Toward a Poetics of Plundergraphia and on Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day is perhaps the essential instantiation).
What’s desperately needed, academically and otherwise, is a suite of tools to HANDLE attribution –the infrastructure to underwrite real 21st century bibliography for the world of ReMix, so that the trails through the jungles of Influence and Source can be made clear, kept clear, seen as the long-run stigmergy that they surely are. The print-oriented apps like RefWorks, EndNote and so on are geared to bibliography construction more than toward management and exploration of one’s hoards of interlinked Information…
This needs thinking about.

Barking seals

While visiting my sister-in-law and combing her library for something to read before sleeping, I ran across a book I remember by its distinctive dust jacket as a Christmas gift, given somewhere in the family in the early 50s. James Thurber’s The Thurber Album (1952) is a collection of prose portraits of people from his youth in Columbus OH, most of them originally published in the New Yorker. Thurber starts a profile of his father (“Gentleman from Indiana”) with this object lesson in storytelling (especially felicitous phrases in bold):

One day in the summer of 1900, my father was riding a lemon-yellow bicycle that went to pieces in a gleaming and tangled moment, its crossbar falling, the seat sagging, the handle bars buckling, the front wheel hitting the curb and twisting the tire from the rim. He had to carry the wreck home amidst laughter and cries of “Get a horse!” He was a good rider and the first president of the Columbus Bicycle Club, but he was always mightily plagued by the mechanical. He was also plagued by the manufactured, which takes in a great deal more ground. Knobs froze at his touch, doors stuck, lines fouled, the detachable would not detach, the adjustable would not adjust. He could rarely get the top off anything, and he was forever trying to unlock something with the key to something else. In 1908, trying to fix the snap lock on the door of his sons’ rabbit pen, he succeeded only after getting inside the cage, where he was imprisoned for three hours with six Belgian hares and thirteen guinea pigs. He had to squat through this ordeal, a posture he elected to endure after attempting to rise and bashing his derby against the chicken wire across the top of the pen.

Time to quarry the Complete New Yorker for more Thurber…