Nonsense Verse

Choices: Alice Munro

I’m back.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to resurrect this blog without its becoming totally redundant. I toyed with making it a lit blog, but there are so many good ones out there already, why even bother competing? I follow those sites. If they write something nifty and I want to point it out, maybe I’ll link to it. But come on: Have you seen Maud Newton’s link collection? Why in god’s name would I want to try to replicate that?

So. Best to make this a more personal site, then. The thing is, books are pretty much my life now, so Nonsense Verse can’t help but dip into the lit-bloggy world. How to differentiate between the blogging I’ll do here versus the blogging I’ll do over here, for instance? And how much should those two worlds communicate?

I’ll be figuring it out as I go along.

I’m leaning toward making this site about the tiny readerly things I get super-obsessed with — stuff that you may read about here and just go, “Huh? Whatever, lady,” but which gets yours truly extra excited. (I did this before, of course. I’m just going to try to do it more often.)

For example: I’ve been reading Alice Munro’s Progress of Love. Many awestruck things to say about it. But here’s a micro detail that made me dog-ear one of the pages: In the title story, bottom of Page 10 in my edition, Munro shifts strikingly from past tense into the present, and then back:

The shadow was a rope, a noose on the end of a rope that hung down from a beam overhead.

“Mama?” says Marietta, in a fainter voice. “Mama, come down, please.” Her voice is faint because she fears that any yell or cry might jolt her mother into movement, cause her to step off the chair and throw her weight on the rope. But even if Marietta wanted to yell she couldn’t. Nothing but this pitiful thread of a voice is left to her — just as in a dream when a beast or a machine is bearing down on you.

“Go and get your father.”

That was what her mother told her to do, and Marietta obeyed.

Munro could have stayed in the past tense throughout. Yet the choice she made, to bring us suddenly into the world of Marietta’s disturbing present, was perfect. Understated, but oh so shrewd. It’s an easy enough detail to read right over, but when I got to this part, it knocked me out. I had to go back and read it again, and again.

Wild Things

My review of Graeme Gibson's anthology The Bedside Book of Beasts: A Wildlife Miscellany, for The New York Times Book Review.

A Century of Bugaboos

Language may change, but pedantry is forever. And as Jan Freeman demonstrates in Ambrose Bierce’s Write It Right: The Celebrated Cynic’s Language Peeves Deciphered, Appraised, and Annotated for 21st-Century Readers, so too is the tradition of modern-day pedants’ picking apart the outmoded irritants of the quibblers who came before them. Here's the full blog post.

Style and Alchemy

My review of Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, for The New York Times Book Review.

Buzzy Book

I wish I’d had the chance to read Lorrie Moore’s new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, before heading to the Boundary Waters area of Minnesota in July. I spent most of the vacation flailing wildly and slapping at my body and squealing and crying in the woods, and feeling altogether ridiculous — all because of bugs! Ms. Moore would have understood, I think. Here's the full blog post.

The Copy Editors' Survival Guide

The Subversive Copy Editor. What a title! It brings to mind all sorts of wickedness, does it not? The rogue editor inserting illicit language, or botching grammar, or wittingly misplacing punctuation out of spite toward some demon writer. But it’s not what you think. Read the full blog post.

Reading Dance

My review of Robert Gottlieb's anthology Reading Dance, for The New York Times Book Review.

From Break Dancing to Ballet

My review of Carlos Acosta's memoir, No Way Home, for The New York Times Book Review.

Words, Glorious Words

A blog post about Foyle’s Philavery, a book featuring hundreds of examples of “overlooked gems” in the English language — selections obscure, euphonious and quirky, including one of my favorites: crapulence.