Gonzalo Barr

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the most authoritative dictionary of the English language.  It is also, by far, the biggest.  Yet even with all those words, neologisms make their way in only after the editors are convinced that the word is being used.  So what happens with those neologisms that are not included?

They are stored in a vault owned by the Oxford University Press, publisher of the OED.

Fiona McPherson, senior editor of the OED’s new words group, […] said they have every chance of being printed in the future.  […]  “They are not yet considered suitable for the dictionary because there’s not enough evidence that people are using them.  […]  We read newspapers or novels and have readers who read through them looking for new examples of existing words or completely new ones.  […]  The thing with the OED is anything that goes in never comes out.”

Some of the words stored in the vault –

Dringle – the watermark left on wood caused by a glass of liquid.

Headset jockey – a telephone call center worker

Museum head – feeling mentally exhausted and no longer able to take in information; Usually following a trip to a museum

Nonversation – a worthless conversation

Peppier – a waiter whose sole job is to offer diners ground pepper, usually from a large pepper mill

Sprog – to go faster then a jog but slower then a sprint

Stealth-geek – someone who hides their nerdy interests while maintaining a normal outward appearance

Wurfing – the act of surfing the Internet while at work

Wikism – a piece of information that claims to be true but is wildly inaccurate

The entire article is here.
Photo: WinonaSavingsBankVault (2009) by Jonathunder in the Wikipedia article, “Bank vault” (accessed Aug. 10, 2010); Source: “Secret vault of words rejected by the Oxford English Dictionary uncovered,” The Telegraph (Aug. 4, 2010)(accessed Aug. 15 2010)

Acknowledgments in books have only recently blown up to heroic lengths, what with the author making sure to thank everyone and everything who had any role, no matter how remote, in the composition of the novel.  Dedications, on the other hand, have always been a part of books in the West and they are not limited to novels.  (I specify “the West” because dedications are not customary in Japan, for example.  More on that below.)

The most common kind of dedication is that made to the person or persons closest to the author and those are usually spouses, children, and parents, with spouses taking the lead.  The thing with spouses, as opposed to other relations, is that while books are made to last, at least one hopes they will, marriages can come apart.

Nigel Farndale looks at the dedications to spouses more closely –

Nearly all of Julian Barnes’s 16 novels are dedicated to the same person, the agent Pat Kavanagh, his late wife—which shows either admirable devotion or imagination fatigue. […] Peter Carey—two-time Booker winner and one-time divorcé—asked his Australian publishers to remove the dedications to the ex-Mrs. Carey from future editions of his work. Saul Bellow, meanwhile, went through five wives, and his dedications reflect his ever-changing muses. His novel Ravelstein even contains an attack on his fourth wife and a dedication to his fifth. Norman Mailer dealt with the “which wife” problem with typical style, dedicating The Presidential Papers to “some ladies who have aided and impeded the author in his composition.” F. Scott Fitzgerald tended to write “Once Again to Zelda.” And with hindsight—his marriage was not a happy one—that “once again” is rather melancholy. […] Before Graham Greene left his wife, Vivien, in 1948 for Lady Catherine Walston, he dedicated The End of the Affair to “C.” By the time the American edition came out he could afford to be less coy. The C was replaced by “Catherine.”

The entire article is here.

I mentioned that in Japan it is not customary to dedicate a book and one example of a non-dedication, more of an epigram, comes to mind.  Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood has been translated to English twice.  The first time by Alfred Birnbaum, a version that was published in 1987 by Kodansha, the second by Jay Rubin, published in 2000 by Harvill in the UK and Vintage in the US.  The Kodansha edition contains no dedication or epigram.  The later Harvill and Vintage editions, though, include this at the front, on its own page –

FOR MANY FÊTES

What is that?  It isn’t a dedication because there is no dedicatee.  Is it an epigram?  Is Murakami, by apparently adopting a Western custom, provoking traditionalists in Japan who already accuse him of being too Americanized, of forsaking jun bungaku?

Murakami did not write a dedication, but an epigram of sorts, which are like keys to a work.  When you take into consideration that he has translated F. Scott Fitzgerald to Japanese, the resonance with another novel becomes clearer.

Fitzgerald dedicated Tender in the Night to Gerald and Sara Murphy, Americans who lived on the French Riviera in the 1920s.  Fitzgerald’s dedication went like this –

To
Gerald and Sara
MANY FÊTES

It is no secret that Fitzgerald modeled his characters in Tender is the Night, Dick and Nicole Diver, on the Murphys.  So is Murakami’s non-dedication a key to the source of Norwegian Wood?

A post on Gustave Flaubert and his dedication of Madame Bovary to his lawyer is here.

Photo:  Gerald and Sara Murphy, Pauline Pfeiffer, and Ernest and Hadley Hemingway in Pamplona, Spain (1926), photograph in the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston; Sources: Nigel Farndale, “This Book’s For You: The Thinking Behind Dedications,” Publisher’s Weekly (Aug. 9, 2010)(accessed Aug. 15, 2010); Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood (1987, translated by Alfred Birnbaum), Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood (2000, translated by Jay Rubin), Alfred Birnbaum, “Introduction,” Monkey Brain Sushi (1991, Alfred Birnbaum, editor), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night (1933)

If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or, as it were, fondle them—peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on their shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you will at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances.

– Winston Churchill

Image:  Artist unknown, woman said to be Sappho, fresco from Pompeii (AD 50), Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples, Italy, from the Wikipedia article on the Book; Sources: Letter from Anthony Mirabile to The Wall Street Journal, Editors, Wall Street Journal (Aug. 11, 2010), at A14, col. 3, in response to an essay by Sven Birkerts, “Bye-Bye Bookstores,” Wall Street Journal (Aug. 6, 2010)(by subscription, accessed Aug. 12, 2010)

Soon after the long list for the 2010 Booker prize was announced, bookmakers in the UK started taking bets on who will win.  William Hill has David Mitchell and Tom McCarthy at 9/2, and Peter Carey and Christos Tsiolkas at 6/1.  Alan Warner and Lisa Moore have the longest odds, both at 16/1.

Ladbrokes has similar odds — David Mitchell and Emma Donoghue at 4/1, Peter Carey and Tom McCarthy at 5/1.  Alan Warner and Lisa Moore have the longest odds 14/1 and 16/1, respectively.

The odds change daily. And there is nothing remotely scientific about predicting the winner.

Meanwhile, The Paris Review has an interview of David Mitchell –

Is there such a thing as overreading? Just because it wasn’t part of my grand design doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Things do happen in books that the writer is too submersed in bringing the narrative to life to notice. To put it a little pretentiously, Cloud Atlas is a novel about whose echoes, eddies, and cross-references even its author possesses only an imperfect knowledge. That’s not unique—many writers can say the same about many books.

Image: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Cardsharps (about 1594), Kimbell Art Museum, Ft. Worth, Texas, uploaded by Hugh Manatee, from the Wikipedia article on gambling; Sources:  William Hill website (accessed Aug. 4, 2010), Ladbrokes website (accessed Aug. 4, 2010), David Mitchell, The Art of Fiction No. 204, interviewed by Adam Begley, The Paris Review Summer 2010 (accessed Aug. 4, 2010)

Edith Grossman is one of the finest translators of literary works from Spanish to English.  She has translated Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others. In 2003, her translation of Don Quixote received acclaim from writers and critics alike.

In a recent interview, she detailed her method of revision [my translation to English follows the original quote in Spanish] –

Algo que me ayuda mucho es leer en voz alta porque el ojo perdona todo pero el oído no perdona nada.

***

Something that helps me a lot is reading [my work] out loud because the eye forgives everything but the ear forgives nothing.

Image:  Gustave Doré, “A world of disorderly notions, picked out of his books, crowded into his imagination” (1863) in Miguel de Cervantes, The History of Don Quixote (1906, J.W. Clark, ed.), from the Wikipedia article on Don Quixote; Source:  Emma Restrepo, “Conversación con ‘Edie’ Grossman,” El nuevo Herald (Apr. 11, 2010)

An arresting passage from Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of The Odyssey –

The three sages bowed before their sovereign and with a flourish presented a heavy book bound in tarnished silver containing a thousand thick, densely written pages.  When opened the book released a waft like hot iron in a winter forge.  Within Agamemnon read of many things:

The history of his ancestors the Atreides.

The detailed plans of the castle on the highest peak of Mount Olympus, and what dolorous event will transpire there on the day the engines of the world shudder, hesitate and begin their slow deceleration.

The mathematics underlying the populations of herring in the sea, the evolution of the stars and the fencing style of a certain little-known sect of Sicilian masters, and how these disparate things are secretly rules by a single idea.

A survey of the many layers of the Earth and the currents and tidal schedules of its vast seas of magma.

A lexicon of the hidden language of cities, in which buildings are nouns, the inhabitants verbs, and empty spaces adjectives in an endlessly changing narrative.

Image:  Unknown though sometimes attributed to Piero della Francesca, Città ideale (1480-1490), Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino, Italy, Wikipedia article on the painting; Source: Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of The Odyssey (2007, 2010), at 25-26

The judges of the 2010 Man Booker literary prize announced their longlist of 13 books. The longlist is comprised of –

Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America

Emma Donoghue, Room

Helen Dunmore, The Betrayal

Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

Andrea Levy, The Long Song

Tom McCarthy, C

David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Lisa Moore, February

Paul Murray, Skippy Dies

Rose Tremain, Trespass

Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap

Alan Warner, The Stars in the Bright Sky

The short list of 6 books will be announced on September 7 and the winner on October 12, 2010. The winner receives GBP 50,000. The Man Booker is arguably the most prestigious literary prize awarded to authors who are citizens of the Commonwealth countries and Ireland. The judges this year are poet and chairman of the judges, Andrew Motion, journalist Rosie Blau, Creative Director of the Royal Opera House, Deborah Bull, author Tom Sutcliffe, and author Frances Wilson.

Recently, I wrote about David Mitchell and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet here and here. Tom McCarthy, author of C, last week published an essay entitled, “Technology and the novel, from Blake to Ballard” in The Guardian.

Sources: Man Booker prizes website

The Irish Times reported that UNESCO Director-General, Irina Bokova, today awarded Dublin, Ireland the permanent designation, “City of Literature.”  The campaign to be designated by UNESCO was launched last year by Irish officials as a means of increasing tourism to the capital.  The article quoted Mary Hanafin, Irish Minister of Tourism, Culture, and Sport, as stating –

Being one of only four cities in the world to achieve the status of Unesco city of literature, will enable Dublin to increase its market share of tourists and attract more people to both the city and the island of Ireland.

Mary Cloake, director of the Arts Council, took a higher-minded view.  She said –

Literature has the unique power to distinguish us as a culture and as a people. It helps us understand what it means to be human. In Dublin, the city has been defined by its writers, and continues to be remade and discovered through their words.

The other three cities to have been awarded the designation are Edinburgh, Melbourne, and Iowa City.

Photo:  Title page of the first edition of Dubliners by James Joyce, published in 1914, from the Wikipedia article on Dubliners; Sources:  Steven Carroll, “Dublin named ‘city of literature,’” Irish Times (July 26, 2010); UNESCO website; Irish Arts Council website

Last week, I finished reading a copy of David Mitchell’s fifth and latest novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.  Mitchell is the author of Ghostwritten, Number9Dream, Cloud Atlas, and Black Swan Green.  Cloud Atlas is brilliant and Ghostwritten is not far behind. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, however, is different from all his previous work in more than one way.

From The Economist –

His new novel is structurally his most conventional; a linear narrative, it is the first book Mr Mitchell has written wholly in the third person. It opens with the story of a Japanese midwife, Orito Aibagawa, who in 1799 thwarts a senior adviser to the emperor to save the life of a newborn princeling and his concubine mother. Just six pages long, it is a virtuoso piece of writing, full of oddities and magical phrasing. But it also serves to confuse the reader. […] The book’s main focus, it turns out, is not the Japanese midwife at all, but a priggish Dutchman, Jacob de Zoet, who has left behind a fiancée in Holland to make his fortune with the Dutch East India Company on an island off Nagasaki. […] Catching sight of the magnificent Miss Aibagawa, de Zoet falls passionately in love. […] When the hero and heroine are separated, the book still has 300 pages to go. Mr Mitchell fills the gap with a number of clever, if somewhat disconnected set pieces. The result is uneasy. As so often happens with his writing, the reader is left feeling more seduced than satisfied.

I’m not sure what the reviewer means by “clever, if somewhat disconnected set pieces.”  Waving aside the hedging language, could he be referring to scenes?  They are, after all, the stuff that make up all traditional dramatic novels.  Some scenes in Mitchell’s book could withstand being published on their own, but surely that doesn’t, by itself, make them disconnected.  Most of them contribute to the overall arc of the story.

No one claims that criticism is a precise science, Sainte-Beuve’s views of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary being one of the most notorious examples where a renowned critic got it wrong.  Though subjectivity plays a major part of every review, that should not give critics license to examine a book through the lens of preconceived notions.  It is a difficult task — to compare one work with the author’s previous works, at the same time taking the work being reviewed on its own terms, as if it stood alone.  Yet the last sentence I quoted in the excerpt above makes me wonder what exactly is being reviewed there.

The first job of a traditional dramatic narrative is to tell a story, of course.  That’s as old as Aristotle.  But novels, because of their length, have the unique ability to take us somewhere we have never been, to place us there, even if that somewhere is our own backyard seen anew through the writer’s selective eyes.  Mitchell tells a story, at least two and fairly speaking more than that.  He also takes us to life on Dejima Island, Japan at the turn of the nineteenth century.  That’s no small feat.

The novel stands on its own, in spite of a few minimal quirks that call attention to themselves.  It is an accomplished work, the kind that made this reader think, “I wish I had written that.”  Seen against his other works, it’s clear that Mitchell can write something new and unexpected each time.  Long after the book is read and back on the shelf, I am still thinking about it.  If that isn’t satisfying, if that isn’t what I, as a reader, should expect from a book, what is?

The entire review in The Economist is here.   My post quoting Mitchell on how he wrote the novel is here.

Image:  View on Dejima, Nagasaki Bay, Philipp Franz von Siebold, from the article in Wikipedia about Dejima; Source: “Edge of the world: A historical tale of a Dutchman and a Japanese midwife,” The Economist (May 6, 2010)(accessed June 3, 2010)

The Brooklyn brownstone at 70 Willow Street, where Truman Capote rented two basement rooms from 1955 to 1965 and where he wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s, is for sale by Sotheby’s. The asking price is USD 18 million.

According to an article that appeared recently in Le figaro, Capote rented the rooms from Broadway stage designer, Oliver Smith, who created the sets for West Side Story.  Capote plied Smith with martinis on the porch and argued that twenty-eight rooms were rather a lot for one man and that he should rent a couple of them to him.  A few martinis later, Smith agreed.  When Smith was absent, Capote took his guests on a tour of the entire house and pretended that it belonged to him.

Besides “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Capote also wrote “In Cold Blood” while living there.

Photo: 70 Willow Street in 1936, photographer unknown, Brooklyn Heights Blog (May 10, 2010)(accessed June 1, 2010); Sources:  Adèle Smith, “La maison où vivait Truman Capote est à vendre,” Le figaro (May 12, 2010)(accessed May 25, 2010), Sotheby’s International Realty website listing of the property, Alison Flood, “Brooklyn home where Truman Capote wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s goes on sale,” Guardian (May 11, 2010)(accessed May 28, 2010)