Recommended Reading

With so much schlock on bookstore shelves, it is often difficult to find a book that has a readable pace, yet won’t insult your intelligence. Books can be like food, ranging from the empty-calorie offerings to the dense high-fiber versions that are good for you yet not always palatable. Somewhere in between lie the well-balanced tomes that offer the mind something both tasty and satisfying.

One such book that I’ve recently come across is The Professor and the Madman. In truth, I don’t know that I would have picked this one up on my own. I received it as a present, which makes me wonder if the gift-giver might not know me, in this sense, a little better than I know myself.

Subtitled “A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary,” it might have languished on the bookstore shelves as one of the “high-fiber” options that I feel like I should read, but just never get around to doing so. In this case, the gift-giver’s enthusiasm convinced me to dive right in.

And I am so glad I did. Author Simon Winchester takes a topic that could easily be dry and academic, but instead paints a fantastic historical perspective in which the events take place. His descriptions of 19th century England are vivid and insightful, painting an incredible backdrop to a truly bizarre tale.

His look into the creation of the renowned Oxford English Dictionary points out that creating this first English language dictionary was one of the most ambitious literary projects ever undertaken. In a quest to document and track changes to the English language, the first OED was slated to take a decade to complete. Seventy-one years later, the project would finally be published for the first time, its founding father dead for three decades.

The Oxford English Dictionary has continued to evolve, adding words to its pages as we add them to our vocabularies. This enormous undertaking today stands at twenty volumes, 145 pounds, and a staggering price tag to match.

But Simon Winchester’s book isn’t merely about words. It’s about the strange collaboration between Professor James Murray, head of the OED’s oversight committee, and Dr. W.C. Minor--an American, a Civil War Veteran, an expatriate living in England.

When Professor Murray set off to finally meet the good doctor with whom he had been corresponding for the previous twenty years, he found yet another moniker to add to the list, which becomes the basis of this remarkable book.

In the foreward of this book, the Professor sets off on a journey to visit Dr. Minor, and is met at the railway station by a coachman who ushers the guest into a carriage. They pass through rural English countryside, and arrive at an imposing mansion. Professor Murray is shown into a study where he meets a regal man he naturally assumes is Dr. Minor.

“There was a brief pause, a momentary air of mutual embarrassment. A clock ticked loudly. There were muffled footsteps in the hall. A distant clank of keys. And then the man behind the desk cleared his throat, and he spoke:

‘I regret, kind sir,that I am not. It is not at all as you suppose. I am in fact the Governor of the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Dr. Minor is most certainly here. But he is an inmate. He has been a patient here for more than twenty years. He is our longest-staying resident.’”

The author finishes this section of the foreward by telling readers that “Although the official government files relating to this case are secret, and have been locked away for more than a century, I have recently been allowed to see them. What follows is the strange, tragic, yet spiritually uplifting story they reveal.”

Simon Winchester’s lively narrative makes this a page-turning book that winds up being a fairly quick read. Thankfully, he’s produced another novel on the same topic. While I have not yet read this follow-up to The Professor and the Madman, I am excited about the prospect of reading this next book as well.

The Meaning of Everything takes a closer look at what actually went into the creation of such an ambitious publication. We learn about the difficulty in tracking this voluminous creation, in the hands of hundreds of volunteers spread across thousands of miles.

In creating the OED, some sacks of documents were lost in transit after being nibbled by mice. Others were simply misplaced. Once the tens of thousands of documents arrived to their destination at the tin shed deemed the “Scriptorium,” they were hand-sorted into pigeonhole slots. J.R.R. Tolkien was just one such volunteer on the project.

While summertime reading often drifts off into the mindless, Simon Winchester is an author who writes with a vivid, well-paced style. His works offer readers the opportunity to learn about a deeply wonky topic without ever adopting the approach of a textbook. In other words, perfect reading for a quiet evening on the porch with a glass of something cold

Busted!

Casey Serin's little media spree this week has had some funny consequences all around. On Monday, for example, his technical (in)abilities were on full display, as C|net readers found, alternately, a "File Not Found" page or even better, a search engine list of related "hater" sites.

I got my own taste of it this morning, when I was woken up by a phone call from an ex, suspiciously chipper considering the ungodly time of day.

"I just read a quote of yours on MSN!" the ex giggled. At any other time, this would not be cause for hilarity. After all, I've given plenty of interviews and been quoted countless times. I could smell the ex had an agenda...I waited through the interminable pause before the one-two punch was delivered.

"Nice fucking mouth on you!"

Aaaargh!!! I knew instantly.... "So I'm reading this article about the world's most hated blogger, on some level fully expecting the article to have something to do with you. After all, you're so precious!" The ex stops to gasp for air through the laughter.

"Then I read this: '"Casey and Galina Serin's story isn't one of 'Young couple tries to make it in the cold, cruel world,' one critic wrote. 'These two are f****g Bonnie and Clyde. What they're doing is bank robbery, without the gun.'" Before I even clicked on the link, I knew it was you who had said that! I shot coffee through my nose!"

So before the ex (who is still a close friend, although skating on thin ice after this morning's call) can crow to our mutual friends that I'm now the girl being shot around the internet for saying "fuck" in international media outlets, I'm going to put the opening shot out there.

I will say that, for as humorous as I find Twelve Years' inclusion in the Casey Serin, World's Most Hated Blogger story, I do cringe a bit about the quote. I say a lot of things in these pages that I wouldn't utter in a more, say, professional environment. And now I'm the chick screaming "fuck" in the media.

I said some semblance of that through the phone this morning, as my coffee-deprived brain waited for the drip to brew and fog to lift. Sensing that a nerve had been struck, the antagonistic ex dialed it down a notch. "Hey, that's cool...you're like Erica Jong this way. She got a lot of attention for taking that word and shining a spotlight on other things. Plus, she was dirty!" the ex leered.

Yeah, I'm the Erica Jong of the blogosphere. Hardly.

Erica Jong's mastery of the English language produced lines and phrases so buttery that readers chewed over her words, letting them melt in their mouths like caramel. As readers rode that happy high, she punctuated her creamy prose with the hard consonants of the word "fuck."

Her writing is as sensual as the topics she covers, as you can see from her poem "We Learned". Jong's writing in the groundbreaking book Fear of Flying produced the indomitable phrase Zipless Fuck, which changed the way American women thought and spoke of sex.

The woman even turned cooking into a food fetish that has never quite been duplicated...although Nigella might come close.

I'm absolutely certain that nothing produced within these pages achieves a similar excitement. Nor as lofty a circumstance. In other words, I don't know that my fuck had a purpose (making it "zipless" in its own right, I suppose.) Certainly, had I known that it would be reprinted for thousands to consume, I would have found more apt language.

I fully expect, over the course of the coming weeks, that as I speak to and go out with friends that, just as I am comfortable, someone will slide a one-liner into the conversation. No one will ask about a recent major coup on the professional front, or the unexpected holiday on powdery white sand beaches and turquoise waters.

No. What they'll say is "So you're the one who basically shouted FUCK in a crowded theatre, huh?"

Yep. (sighs) That's me.

The Human Zoo

I received a funny email today. The friend who sent it informed me that he was reading an online text of H.L. Mencken to ward off work boredom. I found this funny because I was forced to read Mencken's Chrestomathy as a part of sixth-grade literature.

So I find it difficult, again funny, to think that someone was reading Mencken to stave off boredom. I jotted off a note that maybe he might want to consider Dante's Inferno for his next bit of light reading, then thought about my own knee-jerk response.

(A brief sidenote: I highly recommend clicking on the Inferno link. Sit through the flash intro and all to see the product of a truly twisted mind. I almost revoked my loathing for this novel, until I was reminded that "There are four rings of the frozen lake of Cocytus: 1)Caina, 2)Antenora, 3)Ptolomea, 4)Judecca." Ugh...it's an eigth-grade blue book test all over again.)

Looking back there is certainly a danger in having young people read advanced topics as a basis for education. Certainly, texts such as this helped develop my reasoning and logic, but I surely never understood anything other than the mechanics of the writing back then. Consuming an author like Mencken for content could only come later; but to folks who were force-fed the rants at an early age, the likelihood of revisiting such authors at a later stage is severely diminished.

So I took a few precious minutes out of my day to read the link my friend had included in his email. It proved to be a timely topic, as you will see. I was mildly surprised to be amused by this selection from "Damn!" and believe I will have to rethink the lifetime ban on Mencken.

I often wonder how much sound and nourishing food is fed to the animals in the zoological gardens of America every week, and try to figure out what the public gets in return for the cost thereof. The annual bill must surely run into millions; one is constantly hearing how much beef a lion downs at a meal, and how many tons of hay an elephant dispatches in a month. And to what end? To the end, principally, that a horde of superintendents and keepers may be kept in easy jobs. To the end, secondarily, that the least intelligent minority of the population may have an idiotic show to gape at on Sunday afternoons, and that the young of the species may be instructed in the methods of amour prevailing among chimpanzees and become privy to the technic employed by jaguars, hyenas and polar bears in ridding themselves of ice.

So far as I can make out, after laborious visits to all the chief zoos of the nation, no other imaginable purpose is served by their existence. One hears constantly, true enough (mainly from the gentlemen they support) that they are educational. But how? Just what sort of instruction do they radiate, and what is its value? I have never been able to find out. The sober truth is that they are no more educational than so many firemen's parades or displays of sky-rockets, and that all they actually offer to the public in return for the taxes wasted upon them is a form of idle
and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to Congress or a state legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.

Education your grandmother! Show me a schoolboy who has ever learned anything valuable or important by watching a mangy old lion snoring away in its cage or a family of monkeys fighting for peanuts. To get any useful instruction out of such a spectacle is palpably impossible; not even a college professor is improved by it. The most it can imaginably impart is that the stripes of a certain sort of tiger run one way and the stripes of another sort some other way, that hyenas and polecats smell worse than Greek 'bus boys, that the Latin name of the raccoon (who was unheard of by the Romans) is _Procyon lotor_. For the dissemination of such banal knowledge, absurdly emitted and defectively taken in, the taxpayers of the United States are mulcted in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. As well make them pay for teaching policemen the theory of least squares, or for instructing roosters in the laying of eggs.

As I mentioned, I found this timely. Because the immediate parallel that I drew was to Casey Serin. As taxpayers, we will pay for the care and feeding of Casey Serin in one way or another for years to come.

As for the educational benefit of watching the Casey Serin trainwreck from the sidelines, what benefit is there, really? Who can learn anything from Casey Serin? Much in the same way that Mencken points out the tiger's stripes, so too have we determined the shallow value of the Casey Serin.

Really...re-read the above paragraphs, and in lieu of 'zoo' or 'animals', insert "Casey Serin" or "Galina Serin." It's amazing how accurate the text becomes.