America’s lingering literary and linguistic attachment to England is nowhere so evident as in the nation’s pervasive ambivalence toward Samuel Johnson and his great dictionary, published in 1755, which many call the first major dictionary of the language. He was the great sage of English literature, brilliant essayist, moralist, poet, lexicographer, and biographer, the “Colossus of Literature” and “Literary Dictator” of the second half of eighteenth-century England, a figure thoroughly synonymous with Englishness. Throughout his career as an author, Johnson advertised his multilayered and complicated dislike of America and Americans. In 1756, the year after he published his famous dictionary, he coined the term “American dialect” to mean “a tract [trace] of corruption to which every language widely diffused must always be exposed.” He had in mind an undisciplined and barbarous uncouthness of speech. With typical hyperbole on the subject of Americans, he once remarked, “I am willing to love all mankind, except an American … rascals—robbers—pirates.”
Yet Americans could not get enough of him. They devoured his books, which libraries held in great numbers. His influence on American thought and language was vast.
Only a precious few chefs get the chance to work on a cookbook. And of the hundreds of cookbooks written and published each year, only a few can hope to be considered for, let alone win, a Beard. Other authors may be fortunate enough to land on the New York Times best-seller list. Of course, awards and sales aren’t always the goal. For many young chefs who land a book deal, success can simply mean gaining the experience of publishing a cookbook, or creating a new source of revenue for their small business.
It was February 2000 and the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen was sitting in a meeting room in Cuernavaca, Mexico, stewing quietly. Five years earlier, Crutzen and two colleagues had been awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry for proving that the ozone layer, which shields the planet from ultraviolet light, was thinning at the poles because of rising concentrations of industrial gas. Now he was attending a meeting of scientists who studied the planet’s oceans, land surfaces and atmosphere. As the scientists presented their findings, most of which described dramatic planetary changes, Crutzen shifted in his seat. “You could see he was getting agitated. He wasn’t happy,” Will Steffen, a chemist who organised the meeting, told me recently.
What finally tipped Crutzen over the edge was a presentation by a group of scientists that focused on the Holocene, the geological epoch that began around 11,700 years ago and continues to the present day. After Crutzen heard the word Holocene for the umpteenth time, he lost it. “He stopped everybody and said: ‘Stop saying the Holocene! We’re not in the Holocene any more,’” Steffen recalled. But then Crutzen stalled. The outburst had not been premeditated, but now all eyes were on him. So he blurted out a name for a new epoch. A combination of anthropos, the Greek for “human”, and “-cene”, the suffix used in names of geological epochs, “Anthropocene” at least sounded academic. Steffen made a note.
Jonny Gerkin, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, says that both airport arrival styles are likely just vastly different ways of approaching the same emotional problem: the extreme anxiety of air travel. “One person is hyper-efficient and over-prepared, and another is someone who doesn’t manage their anxiety that way,” Gerkin says. It’s not that late people don’t find the airport as stressful as early people, in other words, but that their coping mechanisms indicate a fundamentally different approach to the negative parts of life.
“They distract and procrastinate, and next thing you know, they can’t do what they need to do to get there on time,” Gerkin says. “It’s not quite self-harm, but it’s in the same arena. It changes your feeling state and gets you out of that place that’s uncomfortable and into this place of excitement.” That can mean that even for people who experience higher risks from airport lateness—those who can’t afford rebooking fees, or those from ethnic groups more likely to be stopped for additional security checks—the siren song of lateness can be just as tempting. In some individuals, the additional stress of those factors might make lateness an even more attractive coping mechanism.
What I love in Alex — that ability to not care what other people think — is something I want for myself. I have experienced that utter lack of self-consciousness only three times in my life: When I fell in love 25 years ago, the months I had untreated postpartum psychosis, and the two-and-half minutes of the eclipse. Three times reality flipped.
“Original Prin,” Randy Boyagoda’s third novel, is an original animal, a comedy of literary and cultural references, with wordplay involving unfunny matters like cancer, a crisis of faith and Islamic terrorism, as well as easier comedic subjects like juice-box fatherhood and academic power plays.
Though dark and, at times, quite brutal, Cape May, as a reading experience, is every bit a seduction in and of itself, and the novel, among its many delights, announces the arrival of a blistering new talent. Chip Cheek brilliantly explores the limits of marriage, of monogamy, and of a certain kind of staunch and superficial American masculinity that still persists today, more than half a century later.
“Strange Cures” is a punk poem to a forgotten Los Angeles. And like all good poems, its heart is full of tragic beauty. It chronicles the coming of age of a young man who wants so little to do with established society and the accepted norms of living that he doubles down on self-sabotage. Despite almost dying from a heroin addiction that torpedoes nearly everything he holds dear, including his successful alt-rock band Possum Dixon, Zabrecky’s spirit proves indomitable.
We hold up people who become famous for something (even if it’s just for being famous) as being better than us regular folk, and often the case can be made that those who reach the heights of their chosen profession and do so in the public eye deserve our acclaim. Often, we associate athletic gifts with character, success with contentment, and fame with happiness. But that’s not always the case. Indeed, it’s rare to read a profile about a happily content celebrity unless they’re selling something. The truth is that the people with God-given gifts are often themselves anything but gods.
When a book manuscript has been revised and approved by the editor, it goes to a copy editor, someone who, in the words of Random House copy chief Benjamin Dreyer, “is to prose what a cobbler is to shoes: a mender”. The relationship between author and copy editor can be a testy one: emotions can boil over about the necessity or otherwise of certain commas, let alone word choices and sentence structure. Veterans of such skirmishes on both sides will enjoy learning of the spectacularly prima donna-ish writers Dreyer mentions (anonymously) here: one responded to the copy editor’s suggestions by writing “It’s called style” in the margin; another simply scrawled in red: “WRITE YOUR OWN FUCKING BOOK.”
Well, he has, and it’s already a bestseller in the US. Dreyer promises to reveal “some of the fancy little tricks I’ve come across or devised that can make even skilled writing better”, and does so with accuracy, style, and a humour that is slightly relentless.