About Richard Bowker

Author of the Portal series, the Last P.I. series, and other novels

Why “Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies” is a better title than “Dover Beach”

Posted on July 1, 2012 by Richard Bowker

I’m not the best guy to offer advice on titles, so I won’t. Most of my titles are single-word descriptive titles: Senator is about a senator; Pontiff is about a pontiff. Shorter is, I think, better than longer, but then again, I really like the title The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The problem with shorter titles is that they can tend to mislead. Pontiff is about more than a pontiff; Summit is about more than a summit. But, when combined with the cover, they do the trick.

Titles get easier if the book is part of a series, like A is for Alibi. Funny books should have funny titles. The best title I’ve ever been involved with is Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies by the great Craig Shaw Gardner. I recall a good bit of discussion about just what adjective should be applied to those bunnies. Having arrived at fluffy, I can’t imagine what other words could possibly have been considered.

Titles serve two purposes. The obvious purpose is to make a reader want to buy the book (or read the story, or click on the blog post). Like the cover, they’re part of the way you market the thing. Who wouldn’t want to read a book called Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies? (Well, if that’s not the kind of book you want to read, the title will do a great job of steering you away from it.)

But titles are also part of the aesthetic experience of the text, if I can get high-falutin’ for a minute. The title Gravity’s Rainbow means nothing by itself; its significance grows out of the novel to which it’s attached. Same with Ulysses. Same with A Canticle for Leibowitz. You don’t come up with titles like that to sell books. You come up with them because they grow organically out of the story you’re telling.

This brings us to Dover Beach, which is going to show up as an ebook before very long. The title was suggested by my editor at Bantam, and I loved it. The novel is about love and loyalty in a grim world after a limited nuclear war, and I liked the way the title brought out the connections with the themes of Matthew Arnold’s famous poem.

Which is to say, the title works really well in the “part of the aesthetic experience” department. But Dover Beach was a mass-market science fiction paperback. The title also needed to move product, as they say. And that product didn’t move–at least, not compared to its predecessor Replica. I think the title must have had something to do with it. If the average science fiction reader read Arnold’s poem at all, it was probably because he was forced to in sophomore English class, and who wants to be reminded of sophomore English class?

For good or ill, the title is Dover Beach, and I’m sticking with it.

Here is the last stanza of “Dover Beach”, which is still moving a hundred and fifty years after first publication:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

In regards to the language wars

Posted on June 30, 2012 by Richard Bowker

So a woman is applying for a writing job, and we ask her for additional samples. She sends an email that begins:

In regards to your request . . .

I wanted to pound my head against my monitor. She’s a graduate of an Ivy League university, with years of experience in the writing biz. But she never got the memo that in regards to is nonstandard. Of course, plenty of other people haven’t gotten the memo. The usage started taking off around 1990; it’s still in the statistical noise compared to in regard to, but maybe that’s in the process of changing.

Language changes. People who get too far out in front of the changes may sound illiterate; people who don’t keep up with the changes may sound like pedants. At work we have our own style guide, where we have to make judgments about this sort of thing. We certainly wouldn’t allow in regards to, but we’d probably deprecate in regard to as sounding too stuffy and prolix; why not just say concerning or about? Every company I’ve worked for has preferred data is to data are, in spite of the grammarians’ insistence that data is the plural of datum. Data are still wins the Ngram Viewer war, but the trend is clearly in favor of data is.

Anyway, what are we to make of The Language Wars, which is clearly on the descriptivist side of the prescriptivist/descriptivist divide? The New Yorker writer slams the book, but I have a hard time following her argument. At times, she seems to have read a different book from the one I read. She says, for example, that Hitchings deplores Modern English Usage, but he does nothing of the sort. Here is his nuanced judgment:

But while some parts of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage possess an air of both Oxonian grandeur and sub-molecular pedantry, others manifest a striking reasonableness. He is much more flexible in his thinking than many of his admirers have seemed to imagine…. Many would demur, but Fowler enjoyable comments that ‘good writing is surely difficult enough without the forbidding of things that historical grammar, & present intelligibility, & obvious convenience on their side, & lack only–starch.’

He also quotes at length from Fowler’s wonderful discussion of split infinitives. His judgment of Strunk & White seems equally apt.

My judgment of Hitchings: his book gives a useful historical perspective on usage debates, and his opinions seem reasonable (although see my strongly worded dissent here). My problem with the book is that it was often too detailed for my taste, or talked about stuff I already knew; so I ended up skimming a lot.

Hitchings is a descriptivist, in the reductive sense that he is describing something. But theNew Yorkerwriter accuses him of some kind of hypocrisy because he knows and uses the rules he describes:

Having written chapter after chapter attacking the rules, he decides, at the end, that maybe he doesn’t mind them after all: “There are rules, which are really mental mechanisms that carry out operations to combine words into meaningful arrangements.” We should learn them. He has. He thinks that the “who”/“whom” distinction may be on its way out. Funny, how we never see any confusion over these pronouns in his book, which is written in largely impeccable English.

Why is this “funny”? The rules of English usage are historically contingent; many of them will disappear over time, and new rules will take their place. But that hardly means that a professional writer can ignore the current state of play.

Do you really want to offend my lovely wife and that nice Irish guy at work?

Posted on June 27, 2012 by Richard Bowker

My first poll is included below. Your vote matters!

I agree with much that Henry Hitchings has to say in The Language Wars, but I’ll leave that discussion for another time. Here I want to talk about a point on which I disagree with him: political correctness in language usage. Here’s some of what he has to say:

The inherent problem of PC was, and is, that it seeks to extend people’s rights while at the same time curbing their freedoms. Instead of fostering respect for variety (of people, of cultures, of experiences), it stresses differences: we are not to think of the common good, but instead must recognize a growing number of special social categories. This contributes to the increasing atomization of society: shared experiences and values are regarded not as things to cherish, but as reflections of constraint, evidence of the oppression of the individual and his or her particularity…. [N]egative attitudes precede negative names, and reforming language in the interest of equality is not the same thing as accomplishing equality.

I have to admit that I am unable to see what’s so problematic about political correctness in language. (Political correctness in other areas, such as education and scientific inquiry, raise much more vexing issues.) I wish Hitchings had given some examples of usages that advocates of political correctness would deplore but that he would find acceptable.

Here’s a case to consider. My lovely wife is of Irish extraction. She finds the term paddy wagon to be offensive. And she’s not alone. So does this nice Irish guy at work. So do lots of Irish people. The actual etymology of paddy wagon is unclear. Does paddy refer to the Irish policemen who used the wagon? Or the Irish drunks they threw into the wagon? But whatever. Rightly or wrongly, some Irish people find the term offensive.

So, would you use the term or not? Here’s my first attempt at a poll. Let’s find out what the blogosphere says!

To my mind, political correctness is just good manners. If you want the right to use the term paddy wagon, knowing that you are offending people who aren’t in general hypersensitive and who aren’t out to score political points, go ahead. Strike a blow for your freedom to act like a jerk! Avoiding the term will do nothing to redress real evils, as Hitching puts it. Too bad! The jerk who is forced by cultural norms not to act like a jerk will will decide he is the victim of oppressive language orthodoxy. And he’ll still be a jerk. But he won’t annoy my lovely wife, and that’s worth something!

Self-plagiarism: mortal sin, venial sin, or huh?–who cares?

Posted on June 26, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Jonah Lehrer of the New Yorker has been caught recycling old material for his new blog Frontal Cortex. The New Yorker has had to add editor’s notes to all the blog entries in which they “regret the duplication of material.”

I haven’t read Lehrer’s books, but his blog shows him to be a fine writer working the Malcolm Gladwell vein — giving an entertaining layman’s spin on findings from social psychology, neuroscience, and the like. Good stuff!

The Slate writer seems to have put his finger on at least part of Lehrer’s problem: it’s just to hard to keep coming up with new material.

Given that continuous cycle of creation and reuse, blogging seems to have been a bad idea for Jonah Lehrer. A blog is merciless, requiring constant bursts of insight. In populating his New Yorker blog with large swaths of his old work, Lehrer didn’t just break a rule of journalism. By repurposing an old post on why we don’t believe in science, he also unscrewed the cap on his brain, revealing that it’s currently running on the fumes emitted by back issues of Wired. For Lehrer and The New Yorker, the best prescription is to shut down Frontal Cortex and give him some time to come up with some fresh ideas. The man’s brain clearly needs a break.

That sounds about right. Between June 5 (when the blog apparently started) and June 13, Lehrer put up five blog posts — each of which was the equivalent of a nicely crafted magazine-quality column. It’s not surprising that he cut some corners.

Part of the problem has to be that Lehrer is trying to make a living from his blog (among other things). Blogs have no deadlines (unless the New Yorker imposes them), but there are expectations associated with them. There are plenty of blogs that I don’t frequent any more because the author updates them too infrequently. If you want traffic, you need content. Lehrer was trying to feed the beast and decided he needed to use leftovers.

And what kind of sin has Lehrer committed? Mostly a sin of stupidity, I’d say. You can’t expect to get away with self-plagiarism on the Internet, and you can’t expect some people not to gloat at a misstep from a young hotshot. A little note at the end of each post saying what the editor’s note now says at the top of the post would have sufficed, I think.

But wait! This blog is about me, not Jonah Lehrer! Please note that today is my six-month blogging anniversary, and I haven’t been caught self-plagiarizing once! (I’ve quoted extensively from my novels, but I believe blogging etiquette allows this.) I’ve tried to follow my own writerly advice and make blogging a habit, so I’ve averaged about a post a day — although, granted, some of them consisted mainly of YouTube videos. I guess I cut corners, too.

Anyway, advice about how to improve the blog would be gratefully received.

The other Pennsylvania sex abuse trial

Posted on June 24, 2012 by Richard Bowker

I have lived in my bucolic Boston suburb for twenty years. Not much happens. The police report in the weekly newspaper features OUIs and shoplifting charges. People worry about zoning changes and the naming of schools. Everyone gets along.

It turns out that the two worst people who have lived in my town in recent memory were priests at the Catholic church just down the street from me.

One of them, who doesn’t merit a Wikipedia article, was the pastor of the church; he is currently serving a life sentence in prison for sexual abuse of minors.

The other priest, the infamous John Geoghan, was strangled and stomped to death in prison.

In both cases, there is strong evidence that the Archdiocese of Boston knew what was going on and hid the information from the police and potential victims. But no one in a position of power in the archdiocese was ever charged with a crime. Cardinal Bernard Law was pulled back to safety in Rome, where he remains influential. Reports suggest he was behind the recent crackdown on American nuns who were too interested in stuff like, you know, social justice and helping the poor.

But now we have this:

In the first conviction of a high-level Roman Catholic official in the nationwide priest sexual abuse scandal, a monsignor in the Philadelphia Archdiocese was found guilty Friday of child endangerment for covering up allegations of abuse of children.

Msgr. William J. Lynn, who supervised priests for the archdiocese, was accused of reassigning pedophile priests in an attempt to protect the church’s reputation and avoid lawsuits. A jury acquitted him, however, of conspiracy and another endangerment charge.

The Sandusky trial and conviction had a higher profile, but he’s just a guy, and Penn State is just a place. Lynn is a representative of one of the most powerful institutions in the world. His conviction matters.

After the Church sex abuse scandal exploded in the early 2000s, we took the kids to New York City and popped into Saint Patrick’s Cathedral to take a look. Turns out Mass was being celebrated, and the priest was giving a homily about the scandal. And of course he blamed the media. WTF? Hollywood has been glamorizing pedophilia? But he’s not alone. Here is Pope Benedict’s insightful analysis of the problem:

But in his festive speech – which he traditionally uses to impart key messages to senior Vatican figures – he insisted the abuse scandal should be placed in a wider social context. “We cannot remain silent about the context of these times in which these events have come to light,” he said, citing child pornography, “that seems in some way to be considered more and more normal by society.”

Sexual tourism in the third world was “threatening an entire generation”, he added.

Returning to a theme he had discussed in the past, Benedict said the modern world’s moral relativism was at fault. “In the 1970s, paedophilia was seen as a natural thing for men and children,” he said, arguing that the Catholic church had the task of taking on and defeating relativism.

In what universe is child pornography considered “more and more normal by society”?

I enjoy disputations about theology and science, but let’s face it: religion isn’t going away anytime soon. But can’t we hope for a religion that is better than this? The depressing thing is that Bernard Law once represented that kind of religion:

Law was a civil rights activist. He was a member of the Mississippi Leadership Conference and Mississippi Human Relations Council. For his civil rights activities and his strong positions on civil rights in the Mississippi Register, of which he was editor, he received death threats. The newspaper lost many subscribers for whom his civil rights stance was repugnant.

Charles Evers, activist and brother of Medger Evers (activist assassinated in 1963), praised Law and said he acted “not for the Negro, but for justice and what is right.”

If we had more priests like that, it would be harder to make the case for atheism.

Life is stupider than fiction: The Pope’s butler did it; Fox news reporter hired to help Vatican improve its image

Posted on June 24, 2012 by Richard Bowker

I have alluded to this Vatican scandal before: The pope’s personal butler has been arrested for passing secret documents to some journalist. The head of the Vatican bank has been fired:

The Holy See’s travails became clearly evident on May 17, with the publication of a book, Your Holiness: The Secret Papers of Benedict XVI, in which the Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi reproduced dozens of leaked letters, memos and cables, many of them from within the office of the Pope. Then came the ouster of the head of the Vatican Bank, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, who on Thursday received a vote of no confidence from the bank’s overseers, in part because he was suspected of passing on confidential documents. Finally, there was the arrest the next day of one of the men closest to the pontiff, his personal butler, Paolo Gabriele, who was caught with sensitive papers in his possession.

And this all presumably has to do with a power struggle within the Vatican:

Many Vatican watchers have speculated that the drama is the fall out of a struggle for power between Pope Benedict XVI’s second-in-command, Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, and rival cardinals and the Vatican’s veteran diplomatic staff, which has resented him since his arrival. “Bertone is effectively under fire,” says Magister. “If the government of the church is in such disastrous condition, then it’s clear that the head of the state needs to answer for these.”

So yesterday the pope came up with a strong response to the scandal: he hired someone from Fox News to be the Vatican’s media adviser. Smart move! The Vatican will become fair and balanced! It reports, you decide! Here are the other kinds of things this guy will deal with:

Benedict’s now-infamous speech about Muslims and violence, his 2009 decision to rehabilitate a schismatic bishop who denied the Holocaust, and the Vatican’s response to the 2010 explosion of the sex abuse scandal are just a few of the blunders that have tarnished Benedict’s papacy.

Of course, there is no indication that the Vatican will actually change its beliefs or practices as a result of this move. The Vatican will do what it does; Benedict will believe what he believes; things will presumably just be messaged more smoothly.

Here, by the way, is an exhaustive Wikipedia article about Benedict’s speech that caused such problems with Muslims. Good job promoting religious dialogue, Benedict!

Anyway, let me just remind folks that Pontiff numbers among its many characters the Vatican secretary of state, the head of the Vatican bank, and the pope’s butler (really, his personal aide). Plus scenes of Fenway Park! And it’s currently available for the astonishingly low price of $0.99!

Where should you write?

Posted on June 23, 2012 by Richard Bowker

I was reminded of this question when I viewed this troubling video from John Klobucher, who has started an interesting writing project at his very fine blog Lore of the Underlings:

If I correctly understand this video, he writes his novel while he’s driving his car. How does he pull that off? Does he encounter a lot of red lights? Or empty stretches of highway? Should we find out what his route is so we can avoid it?

So that’s deeply concerning from the perspective of automotive safety. But on the other hand, good for him! This is one man’s approach to following Rule 0. If the only time you have to write is while you’re driving, just make it work. I wrote a good chunk of Senator while commuting on a subway train. If I couldn’t find a seat, I would stand at the end of the car so that I could lean against the emergency door and have both hands free to hold my notebook and scribble. I remember reading about Joseph Conrad finishing Lord Jim or some other novel while watching over his daughter as she recovered from a disease. I’ve heard of people writing while waiting for their kids to finish soccer practice. You do what you have to do.

So now on to Aristotle. (I don’t know where he wrote, but he sure managed to write a lot.)

Readers of this dispiriting blog may recall that while I drive I listen to online courses downloaded from iTunes University. Lately I’ve been listening to an Open Yale course called The Philosophy and Science of Human Nature. I recommend it! The professor is currently doing a deep dive into Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. (I don’t know much about the Nichomachean Ethics, but I love saying the words out loud.) Anyway, one of Aristotle’s points is that virtue is a matter of habit. If you want to be just, get in the habit of doing just things. If you want to be a harpist, practice playing the harp — over and over again. As Wikipedia puts it:

People become habituated well by first performing actions which are virtuous, possibly because of the guidance of teachers or experience, and in turn these habitual actions then become real virtue where we choose good actions deliberately.

Seems to me that this applies to writing, too. (Whether writing itself is virtuous is a whole nuther question.) You become a writer by writing; everything else (reading, research, note-taking, making up great stories in your head, talking to your friends about those great stories) is beside the point. In my long-running writing group, we once had a come-to-Jesus meeting to try to help the folks in the group who weren’t producing anything to get started. This had the predictable effect of making some people feel really bad about themselves. One of them said, “You know, my whole life I’ve thought of myself as a writer, but I’ve never really written anything.” This has always struck me as a desperately sad statement. What, after all, was stopping him? It wasn’t like he wanted to become an astronaut. All he had to do was pick up a pen and start writing. This wouldn’t have made him a published writer, but none of us have much control over that.

So don’t be like him. Be like John Klobucher instead. Get in your car and start writing!

What makes me happy (baseball edition)

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Let’s face it: baseball is boring. Nothing much happens in the course of a game. For every minute of action, there are five minutes of crotch-scratching and sunflower-seed-spitting. The Red Sox this season have been particularly boring: win a game, lose a game…

And then something like this happens….

Tie game, bottom of the eighth, Ryan Kalish on first. Bobby Valentine puts on a hit-and-run. Kalish takes off with the pitch. Mike Aviles bounces a ball to first. Kalish reaches second — and keeps running! He beats the tag at third. Daniel Nava hits a single to center, and Kalish scores the go-ahead run. The Red Sox win. How did that happen?

The Red Sox don’t look like they’re going anywhere this year: too many injuries, too many stars underperforming. Tonight Jon Lester is underperforming yet again. But just for that one moment, they were exciting.

Now back to the crotch-scratching.

In which the All’s Well That Ends Well brouhaha continues

Posted on June 20, 2012 by Richard Bowker

I’m thinking that no one but me cares about this brouhaha, but as the sole proprietor of this very fine blog, I’m the only one that matters.

When last we checked in, two Oxford professors had written an article published in the Times Literary Supplement proposing that Thomas Middleton had a hand in writing Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well. In response, Brian Vickers and Marcus Dahl produced a scathing rebuttal. (By the way, it is the official position of this blog that, no matter who wrote it, the play kinda sucks. But it doesn’t come within miles of the badness of Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.)

Now the two Oxford professors, Emma Smith and Laurie Maguire, have responded in the TLS. I can’t find the response online, but here is a taste of what they have to say:

Vickers and Dahl are flat-earthers. They cling to an old date for AWEW (1604 rather than 1607) or later); they do not endorse revision in Measure for Measure or Macbeth; their appeal is to “lovers of Shakespeare”. It is these ideological idées fixes that underlie their article. Unlike us, however, they do not make their subjective positions clear. We accept this new scholarship and build on it; these Canutes try to stem the incoming tide.

Ouch! But wait! Online we find a response from Vickers to the response by Smith and Maguire to the response by Vickers and Dahl to the article by Smith and Maguire. Here is their concluding paragraph:

Smith and Maguire, abreast of ‘new scholarship’, claim that we ‘cling to an old date’ for All’s Well. It may well be that Gary Taylor in 2001 was ‘inclined to put it’ in 1607, and that others have been inclined to follow him. But contrary evidence cannot be dismissed. In Taylor’s own Textual Companion (1988) to the Oxford Shakespeare seven pages of tables listing various types of linguistic evidence place All’s Well after Measure for Measure and Othello, and before Timon and King Lear, thus in the period 1604-5. If Taylor now flirts with the idea of placing it after Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Pericles then he will have to disown the data collected in these tables. Writing from a literary critic’s standpoint, Barbara Everett has given some strong reasons for not lumping All’s Well with Shakespeare’s late plays, and these can be supplemented with Marina Tarlinskaya’s prosodic studies, which place All’s Well before King Lear. In the humanities, as in the sciences, the truth or falsity of a proposition can only be established by a consensus among those qualified to judge. Time will tell.

Both sides have a good bit to say about “anal fistulas,” which has its own Wikipedia article, but I’m going to advise you not to go there. The discussion of fistulas (anal or otherwise) in All’s Well That Ends Well is one more reason to avoid the play.

I am incompetent to judge between these adversaries. But I’d be disinclined to mess with Brian Vickers on matters Shakespearean.

Did Shakespeare revise his plays?

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Richard Bowker

We should all revise our work. And we shouldn’t spend too much time feeling sorry for ourselves because Shakespeare didn’t have to revise his work. His plays, we are told, are all inspired first drafts. At least, that’s what Heminge and Condell said in their “Epistle to the Great Variety of Readers” of the First Folio:

His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarse received from him a blot in his papers.

This has become part of the enduring image of Shakespeare — so supreme a genius that he he didn’t even have to labor over his masterpieces, like Mozart interrupting a game of billiards to jot down a movement in a string quartet. And, of course, this image is always paired with Ben Jonson’s envious comment:

“The Players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out line. My answer hath been, ‘would he had blotted a thousand.'”

There was only one Shakespeare, and we’re not him. And neither was Ben Jonson.

This image is under attack from modern critics. Here is Stephen Greenblatt, interrupting his writing of The Swerve to write in the Wall Street Journal:

A number of Shakespeare’s plays survive in both the small quarto editions, inexpensively published during his lifetime, and in the first folio. Comparing versions of the same play, I and other scholars have concluded that many of the differences are probably due to Shakespeare’s own obsessive fiddling.

The Quarto

A particularly significant amount of fiddling occurred in King Lear, where there are extensive changes between the quarto edition and the First Folio. As a result, some modern editions include both versions, instead of presenting a single edition that conflates both versions. The Arden edition I own is of the conflated school. It uses F and Q superscripts to indicate words that are only found in one version or the other. Lear’s final line in the play, spoken over the dead body of Cordelia, appears only in the folio version:

Do you see this? Look on her; look, her lips,
Look there, look there! He dies.

Does he die joyfully, thinking Cordelia is really alive? What was Shakespeare up to when he added the line? Who knows?

Of course, there is no real evidence of revision, just of differences. Maybe both the quarto and the folio are simply different versions of a lost original manuscript. Maybe some of the differences are due to lines that were added by actors during rehearsals. Greenblatt and others are convinced that Shakespeare fiddled, but that’s based on interpretation, not evidence. The next generation of scholars may come up with some other interpretation — or decide that Heminge and Condell knew what they were talking about.

Still, it’s nice to think that Shakespeare was like the rest of us, adding words and taking them out and moving them around, trying to achieve some kind of perfection that is always just out of our reach.