Edward Koren had the best way to explain ‘cross-writing’: he drew it

 

Like so many of his fans, I knew Edward Koren as a cartoonist for The New Yorker. But I also got to know him a bit better when he illustrated two small books for a new specialty-publishing imprint I had been put in charge of.

It was 1999; the 20th century was about to become the 21st. But the books were from the 19th-century, a reprise of two little-known works by Lewis Carroll.

This was back when, if geography prevented you from doing business face to face, you did it voice to voice. When Ed picked up the phone at his home in Vermont, he had a voice befitting someone who could create curious little creatures that poked gentle and astute fun at human foibles. It was warm, engaging, instantly at ease in the conversation. And quick to laugh.

He would be delighted to illustrate the little books, he said. Then he startled me. He told me how conscious he was that he would be illustrating works by an author whose Alice in Wonderland featured the drawings of the great John Tenniel.

I couldn’t imagine why someone as accomplished as Ed would even give that a thought. What I came to realize was that describing Ed as a cartoonist was only half the story: he was an artist who was a master cartoonist.

Then he startled me again.

I told him what the modest budget was and asked if xx number of illustrations would be acceptable. Yes, but with a caveat. If he felt the book required a few more illustrations, then he would do them.

An artist who was a master cartoonist and a generous professional.

He never heard it

In some ways, Lewis Carroll’s century was made for Ed. He did not create on a computer—he drew his illustrations by hand. He would mail them to me in batches, which I would circulate around the office. It was easy to track them: all you had to do was follow the laughter.

I would then call him with any feedback, which was mainly to tell him how much everyone loved them and thanked him for the laughs. That was good to hear, he told me. But surely, I said, he must be used to that. No.

Working alone at home, creating those New Yorker cartoons, he said, “I never hear the laughter.”

Only the truly cross would do

One of the works Ed was illustrating was Lewis Carroll’s Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing. It was filled with Carrollesque counsel, and Ed was illustrating each piece of advice. Among them was “Cross-Writing Makes Cross Reading.” Neither Ed nor I realized at first that cross-writing was a thing. In fact, the term still isn’t in the online version of Merriam-Webster.

Ed sent the drawing but wasn’t completely satisfied that he had captured Carroll’s meaning. After more research (Google was a new kid on the block then), we discovered that cross-writing was a way to save paper while testing the reader’s patience and eyesight. Correspondents would fill the page with their pen, then turn the paper at a 90-degree angle and write some more in cramped, small letters.

The drawing that Ed had sent would probably have worked, given the book’s small size. But it didn’t work for Ed. I would need to send the drawing back to him so he could change it.

Had he created the illustration on the computer, this would have been a fairly easy fix. Instead, Ed excised the portion he wanted to redo with an X-ACTO knife, replacing it with his new, spot-on illustration of cross-writing.

Maybe it was easy for him to do, but I couldn’t imagine the kind of surgical forbearance it required to replace it so smoothly that even on the original, you couldn’t tell.

I know that for a fact, because after the books were published—to great success—Ed gifted me with the original. Every time I look at it, I chuckle. I hope that in the next world that Ed passed on to on April 14, he hears the laughter.

40 years of sanctuary at Books & Books

 

“I claim sanctuary!”

In medieval England, there was no more powerful a cry. The social station of the person was of no consequence; what mattered was that they were fleeing a pursuer and had arrived at the door of a church. Lift the wooden knocker on the door, utter the three words, and you would be granted asylum within its walls for 40 days.

Sanctuary derives from the Latin sanctus, meaning sacred. It is the same word that gives us sacrosanct. We don’t use these solemn terms much anymore and yet, who doesn’t want a place that we know will shelter us?

Refuge and ritual

Although there is no wooden knocker on the door of Books & Books, for 40 years now this Miami bookstore has been a sanctuary for readers lucky enough to live in, or visit, South Florida. Most of us are not likely to be fleeing pursuers (although this is Miami…). We are seeking refuge of another sort: a refresher for our minds, a respite for our souls.

We come, ostensibly, for the books and for the ritual that entails. Browsing shelves, lingering at tables, turning pages, treading on wooden floors whose reassuring creak signals a certain permanence. But we also come for the community.

Invariably there is someone to talk to, even if we’ve just met. The café and courtyard practically assure this, as they serve up fellowship as deftly as delicious fare. The cohort of hyper-readers—the staff—is equally adept at practicing the ancient rite of independent bookstores, guiding you from one room to the next, each its own literary ecosystem, to the books that seem to have been waiting for you.

Mecca and safe space

And always (even though he might be at another Books & Books location) there is Mitchell. Founder, owner, visionary—Mitchell Kaplan has always understood that despite what early skeptics said, South Florida was a mecca for readers. Or maybe he simply knew how to make it that mecca, cofounding the Miami Book Fair at almost the same time he opened Books & Books.

When the stores had to close temporarily during the pandemic, it meant they could no longer set out their rows of wooden chairs for their continual author events. But the staff quickly pivoted, bringing us authors remotely, night after night, as we sat in our own chairs. During those grim and fearful days, the virtual Books & Books became our safe space, allowing us, for a short sweet time, to escape the incessant worry.

We are accustomed these days to having bird sanctuaries and wildlife sanctuaries, so why not a reader’s refuge? We may not be extinct or even endangered but we are…grateful. Books & Books is where the exploration of ideas, so sacrosanct in a democracy, finds space to be free. You don’t need to knock on the door. Just come in, and you will find sanctuary.

May those wooden floors forever creak.

 

Some Words for David McCullough's Biographer

Several years ago I had the chance to interview David McCullough. Like many other Americans, I had long been under the spell of his voice and his books. I knew I would need to rein in my desire to listen to him for—oh, hours. So I promised him I would ask just five questions, and ended up asking only four.

As well-versed as he was in giving interviews, the last one took him by surprise.

Of all the people he had written about, I asked him, whom would he like to write the story of David McCullough?

No one had ever asked him that before, he told me. But he had a ready candidate: the 19th-century British writer Anthony Trollope. “He’s really good,” David said—and then remembered he hadn’t written about him. He paused for a few moments and then announced his choice.

“She was a wonderful writer, a good judge of people, and would have been a wonderful novelist,” he said. “She was pretty judgmental, but I guess I can take that.” He added jokingly, “I’d tell her to go easy.”

“She” was Abigail Adams.

Instantly I found myself thinking, Oh, what I wouldn’t give to be Abigail Adams.

We will, of course, never know what words this determined woman, whose correspondence with her husband David McCullough held in his hands when he was researching John Adams, might have brought to his biography. But here are some words from my interview that Abigail might have approved of—thoughts David McCullough shared that help to illustrate why he was, as The New York Times described him, a “spellbinding author.”

“I don’t think of myself as a historian or biographer.” Surprising words, don’t you think, for a writer whose histories and biographies earned him two Pulitzers (Truman, John Adams) and two National Book Awards (The Path Between the Seas, Mornings on Horseback)? But then he explained:

“I’m a writer who’s chosen to write about real people, and events that really happened.” He viewed history as his “terrain.”

“It was a particularly powerful summons, especially for young people. It affected my wife and me very much.” The summons was from John F. Kennedy, who in his 1961 Inaugural Address famously exhorted Americans to “ask what you can do for your country.”

David McCullough answered that summons, leaving a secure job in New York City for Washington, D.C.

Eventually, he would receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom for what he did for his country: helping readers bear witness to its history through those “events that really happened.” But first he worked for the U.S. Information Agency.

“I was in way over my head,” he said. “But that’s how you learn to swim.”

(These many years later, on the weekend that David McCullough passed away, there was a second, unexpected intersection with JFK. That Sunday, Caroline Kennedy was on the Pacific island of Guadalcanal in her role as US ambassador to Australia. She was marking the 80th anniversary of the World War II battle her father famously fought in as captain of the PT-109 torpedo boat.)

“Studying painting helps me to observe more closely.” So close was the juxtaposition of painting and writing for David McCullough that he sometimes captured in watercolor a setting he was writing about. It’s also why he was particular about certain prepositions: “When I write, I work in a book, not on it,” he told me—just as you do a painting.

“They were not perfect—perfect and human are contradictory. Nor did what they achieve result in perfection, especially when declaring all men to be created equal.”  David was referring, of course, to Adams, Jefferson, and the others who hammered out the Declaration of Independence and the path this country would take. He continued:

“What they did was to give us the ideal to strive for. They didn’t attain equality. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn't keep trying. Each generation of Americans tries to carry the torch of that ideal.”

Somehow it seemed an easier torch to carry when we knew David McCullough was among us, his words and his voice there to ground us.

Oh, what I wouldn't give to have asked him more questions.

 

On This July Fourth, Let’s Say Farewell to This Word

Now that the US government has done a word purge of “alien” from its immigration policy manual, replacing it with “noncitizen” and “undocumented individual,” it may be time to toss out its frequent companion as well.

Let’s say farewell to “foreign.”

“Foreign” stems from the Latin foris, meaning outside in the physical sense. A close etymological cousin is “forum,” originally a public place—i.e., outside.

So far, so good—and, you may be saying, so what? After all, dictionaries still start their list of meanings for “foreign” with such benign explanations as “situated outside a place or country.” This is the first definition in Merriam-Webster.

But keep going down the list and you’ll soon come to a very different meaning, of “alien in character: not connected or pertinent” (Merriam-Webster’s fourth entry). And there we are, back once again to “alien.”

Freighted and fraught

I vividly recall being described as a foreigner the year I lived in England. And yet, I didn’t feel like an alien, or that I was not pertinent. I just felt like an American who was in another country—not a foreign one, just a different one.

The problem with “foreign” is that it’s freighted. Fraught with negative connotations—stranger, outsider, unknown to the point of being suspect—it has a circle-the-wagons sentiment to it.

So why do we continue to call the familiar “foreign”? Our planet is a globalized, world society now, and in many ways has been for millennia. (In the year 1000, for example, there was a brisk Persian Gulf-China trade route that also connected to East Africa.)

Yet diplomats continue to engage in foreign relations, when the goal is to find connections with other countries. And would a foreign language be less intimidating to those of us who don’t know it if we thought of it as a world, or a global, or simply another language instead? Ditto for its native speakers.

Fight vs. facilitate

“Foreign” has its place, of course, as Veterans of Foreign Wars can attest. These soldiers were fighting enemies whose essential values threatened to undermine our own: that were alien to our national character. The debt we owe them is huge.

But when we don’t need to fight, let’s use words that facilitate tolerance rather than fight against it, however unconsciously. When we can swap “us-versus-them” language for words that instead suggest “we,” let’s do it. It’s just the kind of thing worth thinking about as we head outside to celebrate on this Fourth of July.                                                                     

Image by Tom Walsh, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

What is this thing called ‘hug’?

 

(Wikimedia Commons photo by Todorov.petar.p)

Have you hugged…somebody today? (The expression began as “Have you hugged your kid today?” Now it’s gone so far as to ask, as an Etsy selection does, “Have you hugged your burrito unicorn?” Um, why?)

Thanks to a shot, or two, in the arm of a Covid-19 vaccine, many of us now feel safe using our arms to clasp, cradle and cuddle one another. No longer will expressions like “bear hug,” “bro hug” and “group hug” seem like quaint artifacts of a pre-pandemic world. Calendar note: January 21st is National Hugging Day; might as well start gearing up now.

Humans have been hugging since the 1560s—actually, far longer than that, but that’s when the meaning of wrapping your arms around someone became wrapped around the word hug. In Old Norse, people engaged in hugga, or comforting. The word evolved from hugr, which meant courage, and which is worth pondering. Old English weighed in with hogian, to care for.

The French, who like to linger over lunches and other pleasing things, stretched the pleasure of hug to the four-syllable embracier in Old French. Yes, that would be our modern “embrace.” The “brace” reaches back to the French, Latin and Greek words for arm, for the obvious reasons. Spanish makes it clear: el brazo is an arm; el abrazo is a hug.

“Hug” has its own brand of onomatopoeia. If you can sigh, you’re halfway to saying it.

And so we sigh—with relief, with unrestrained emotion, with no longer having to long to hug. We’re living high on the hug, and loving it.

 

                                             

‘Civil’ comes back in flower

Among its many other triumphs, Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem was a disarming, uplifting reminder that in our words lie powerful incubators of our deeds. One such word that her poem summoned for me was “civil.”

Some of the strongest buttresses of our democracy are bound up in that word. Civil discourse. Civil liberties. Civil society. Civil rights.

“Of or relating to citizens,” Merriam-Webster tells us about the word, presenting its first meaning. The Romans gave it to us in the form of civilis, deriving from civis, or citizen.

For the Romans, so strongly was the idea of civis connected to one’s identity that to utter Cicero’s pronouncement of Civis Romanus sum—“I am a Roman citizen”—was to immediately command respect. It’s no accident that some of this country’s foundations as a republic trace back to the ideas and ideals of Cicero. Even though not in Rome, Americans have been known to do as some of those ancient Romans did when it comes to government.

From civis to civilis is just a few short steps, as civilis speaks to public life and the civic order: both the rights and the duties of a citizenry. Walk with that concept a little farther and it’s not long before you arrive at the familiar, everyday meaning of civil: polite.

Civil discourse is how democracy works best because it means we listen, politely, before deciding a course of action. So to once again practice civility is more than a nice gesture, the kind thing to do. It’s also to be an American citizen. It’s our democratic way to both command respect, and show it.

 

A comforting phrase pandemics can’t touch: ‘like a balm’

When this is over, we will emerge changed in many ways, and our language will not be immune. Perhaps “pre-pan” and “post-pan” will enter the lexicon. Or “pre-covid” and “post-covid.”

Already we have additions to Merriam-Webster, “social distancing” and “self-quarantine” among them. But the terms, though necessary, do little to console.

So let’s dig into that vast trove of English words and phrases and find something comforting we can use right now. One that sounds right to me is like a balm. “Balm?” you’re probably thinking. “Isn’t that something you rub on your lips?”

Well, yes. It’s any healing ointment, actually, and usually fragrant. Something soothing, in other words. It harks back to the Latin balsamum, which gave us the aromatic balsam.

Why balm works

The beauty of balm is that it’s linked to the physical, to touch. And reassuring touches are what we crave right now, as we don’t hug, huddle, gather or otherwise affirm one another’s physical presence. Solace is soothing, too, as it seeks to console us, but not in a physical sense.

Like a balm floated into my consciousness recently as I read one of the emails from Books & Books. Owner Mitchell Kaplan and his dedicated team have taken their physical spaces—the various Books & Books venues in Miami—and turned them into a devoted community of readers.

At the moment, those physical spaces are closed. But the messages that Books & Books is sending customers are like a balm. Here’s part of the one I received on Friday…

None of us knows what the future will bring, but we know we have a shared community that is planning to emerge from these dark times into a brighter day. Stay calm and read on. We will meet in that land that readers inhabit. It's a safe space, a life-giving space, a space unlike any other. We all know it and now take shelter there -- together. 

Beautiful, don’t you think?

And there are other things that act like a balm right now. One, for me, was reconnecting with a friend from so long ago it seems like yesterday. Another has been the emails and texts and phone calls (phone calls!) checking in with relatives and friends and colleagues.

The lovely watercolor you see here is by Renee Reese.  She shared it with her friend Andrea, a dear friend who shared it with me. The daffodils offer solace. The fact that my friend took the time to virtually share them with me is like a balm.

The philosopher Joseph Campbell encouraged us to follow our bliss. That may be too distant at this particular moment. But I hope you’re finding those special, small gestures and kindnesses right now that act like a balm.

Perhaps the oddest New Year’s resolution yet: give cursive a(nother) chance

If the story in the New York Times a few weeks ago is any indication, cursive writing might just be making a comeback, modest though it may be.

Contrary to what those who shun, eschew, lament, rail against, and run from cursive might think, the word does not derive from “curse.” But the running from is actually close. “Cursive” is from the Latin currere, to run. Letters in cursive writing flow, or run, together.

I think we should seriously consider a cursive revival. I say this even though my own cursive writing is cacographic—a fancy way of saying borderline illegible.

It’s not because I think that people will always have to sign their name the way we do now; I doubt that we will. It’s because cursive can be a potent tool when you're seeking transparency. 

For a good example, just read Lincoln.

“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here,” intoned President Abraham Lincoln at the memorial service for Union soldiers on November 19, 1863, “but it can never forget what they did here.”

Lincoln was right on the second point but wrong on the first. We do, indeed, remember what Lincoln said at Gettysburg. In fact, the Gettysburg Address is set in stone on one wall of the Lincoln Memorial.

But is that really what he said that day?

The reporters who were there didn’t get it right. It’s not that Lincoln talked fast, but he talked short: a mere 270-odd words in under three minutes. Nobody was expecting that.

But while we may not know verbatim what Lincoln said, we do know what he wrote in his own hand at various times, and for different reasons. Five extant versions of the Gettysburg Address demonstrate Lincoln’s neat, highly legible cursive.

Therein lies my argument for why we should learn how to write cursive: so we will know how to read it.

In cursive courses truth

Source documents like Lincoln’s five versions of the Gettysburg Address allow us to see what Lincoln really wrote, and by extension, what he was thinking at the time. It’s the same with Jefferson and the draft of the Declaration of Independence that contains the 80-plus edits of John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. 

And with JFK, whose determination to put Americans on the moon was in his mind well before his galvanzing, "We choose to go the moon" speech at Rice University in 1962. In gathering his thoughts for topics for his 1961 Inaugural Address, the first word Kennedy scrawled on the front of an envelope was "space."

So let’s resolve this year to keep cursive alive as a way to more fully partake of our country's past. The ability to literally read our history through the hands of some of those who made it means we better understand what they were seeking. 

That kind of truth without filter is a powerful tool to possess. Let's run with it.

The word is bereft: remembering Peter Mayer

In the space of just a few weeks this spring, the world of readers lost three of the great ones—Tom Wolfe, Philip Roth, and Peter Mayer, a publisher unlike any other who passed away earlier this month at the age of 82. Peter's passing has left me feeling bereft. I had always considered him one of The Immortals.

If Peter’s name is unfamiliar, here’s my favorite way to introduce him: the first time I met Peter, I served him a slew of eighteenth-century insults…and he loved them.

At the time I had recently and somewhat improbably licensed an (abridged) edition of Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary to George Gibson, then the owner of Walker Publishing. You need to meet Peter Mayer, George advised. He will have ideas for you.

I needed some. I was the editor of a small specialty-publishing imprint that was a sideline business to a larger company in Florida. I was tasked with publishing books that would not be sold anywhere else but would still sell.

Put another way: I was nobody in particular in the publishing world, and I was going to meet someone who was legendary.

At that point Peter was in the last chapter of his extraordinary publishing career, after his time as CEO of Penguin in Britain, and after he had published Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses despite the death threats. Peter was by then running Overlook Press out of his very-downtown Manhattan office, whose squeaky wood floors and lively hum signaled to visitors that this was no corporate bland land of publishing.

Peter's preposterous idea

Peter and I met at the London Book Fair, in 2003. I wanted to take him something for our first meeting, but what? A book was superfluous. As a line extension to the Johnson dictionary, we had created a set of magnets that each sported one of the more colorful insults from the book—slubberdegullion, fopdoodle, and the like. So I took Peter a tin of Samuel Johnson’s insults.

And that was how our friendship began. The consummately shrewd Peter immediately grasped what I was trying to do with this small imprint and, just as George promised, had an idea. He would reprise some of the more expensive, out-of-print books he had published in years past, and we would publish new versions of them as high-end, limited-edition books.

The only way I could successfully sell them, though, was if I sold them exclusively, not jointly with Overlook. For anyone else, this would have been a deal breaker. For Peter, it was barely a shrug. He would wait until I’d sold through my stock and then bring out a slightly different version for Overlook.

The word bubbling up in the head of any publisher reading this is most likely: preposterous. Who does this? Who sits on inventory until somebody else sells through their stock?

The word is generosity

I never did fully understand why Peter was so uncommonly generous to me. He was a savvy businessperson, evident in his commanding presence. He punctuated it with a voice that was unmistakable—a Cary-Grant-on-steroids voice, but with more of a New York accent, his home for most of his life (although he was born in England). It was a voice that spoke of keen intelligence, to say nothing of experience.

Most of all, Peter really didn’t need this idea of his for his own imprint.

But he was of his own era and mind, a book man who believed in the near-alchemistic powers of books. Even more—and more simply—Peter was kind.

He and I published some stunning books together: Jerusalem, The Saga of the Holy City; The Grimani Breviary; The Sarajevo Haggadah. I confess that when Peter proposed the last one to me, I didn’t know what a Haggadah was. Aren’t you Jewish? he said incredulously. Half-Lebanese, I assured him.

It was only the second time I knew Peter to be (momentarily) nonplussed. The first was when I told him, between tears, that I could never repay him for what he’d done for me.

The last book we published together was a collection of Redouté’s famous flower paintings. We produced it as an “unbound book,” an idea that I suggested and Peter enthusiastically endorsed. If anyone actually beams with pride anymore, I did when Peter said he liked the idea.

There was another, bigger project afterwards that we planned to collaborate on. But then the sideline-business imprint got sidelined. I wrote Peter to let him know. He immediately wrote me back, distraught. When he called me shortly after that, I could hear the concern in his voice. I was to come see him anyway, when I came to New York.

I never got that chance. But Peter had given me a much larger chance—the opportunity to do, at least for a short time, the work I loved best.

I was a small, insignificant speck in a world where he was a giant. There was really no reason for him to help me the way he did. But that was the way Peter Mayer lived.

When books become sanctuary

Two remarkable events for readers and word lovers occurred back to back just a few days ago—the National Book Awards dinner and the Miami Book Fair. The Book Awards’ elegant function was black tie. The Book Fair’s ebullient weekend street fair was awash in tank tops. Different as they were, both reminded me that in books, we find not just knowledge and ideas and the power to transport. Not only wisdom and solace. But also, sanctuary.

Sanctuary: from the Latin sanctus. A holy place, a sacred place. A place that offers asylum and immunity.

A refuge.

For those of us who feel whipsawed by the often dystopian (dystrumpian?) world we’ve inhabited this past year, both these events offered a reassurance that yes, things are not at all as they should be, but there are people who can give voice to this in ways that just might give hope to us.

Annie Proulx, in her acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation’s lifetime achievement award, railed against the “Kafkaesque time” we lived in. But she also said this:

“Somehow the old discredited values and longings persist. We still have tender feelings for such outmoded notions as truth, respect for others, personal honor, justice, equitable sharing.”

The word of the weekend

Perhaps it was just the happenstance of the sessions I chose to attend at the Miami Book Fair (there are hundreds), but even so—the word of the weekend seemed to be empathy.

“What we lack is empathy for real people,” Chris Matthews told his audience. Norman Ornstein alluded to the need for it when he reminded his audience that true patriotism is “not negative nationalism.”

George Saunders, who also spoke of empathy, cautioned that “the enemy right now is despair.” To George Saunders belongs the prize-winning book, Lincoln in the Bardo. The term “bardo” draws on the Buddhist concept of a transitional state, which perhaps inspired this observation from the author: “I’m convinced our country is on the brink of a beautiful breakthrough.”

Please oh please, George, be right.

Joe Biden joined in…and Charles Dickens, too

To George Saunders also belonged the conversation with former Vice President Joe Biden. “You learn empathy,” the Vice President said, talking about his childhood. From his mother he learned this: “You’re defined by your courage and redeemed by your loyalty.” And from Joe Biden, we in the audience learned this: “Silence is complicity.”

Book Fair audiences also got a behind-the-scenes look at the new film, The Man Who Invented Christmas. It’s based on Les Standiford’s book, which found a book-to-film champion in Mitchell Kaplan.  Mitchell is the impresario behind the 33-year-strong Miami Book Fair, along with Dr. Eduardo Padrón, the president of Miami Dade College. He is also the owner of Books & Books, and now a film producer as well.

The Man Who Invented Christmas is its own backstory, of how Charles Dickens came to write A Christmas Carol.  Lots of us at the fair “got pinned” with one of the big campaign-style buttons promoting the film. It featured a Dickens quote…but not the Tiny Tim one that would have been too easy.

Instead, it was in keeping with the E-word: 

“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.”

Or who offers sanctuary to mind and spirit.

In the root of “sanctuary” is also a verb, sancīre: to hallow. These two sacrosanct events for readers reminded me in the most uplifting of ways that one thing we can do is hallow our books.

But let’s give the last word to Annie Proulx, and her acceptance speech.

 “The happy ending still beckons,” she told us, “and it is in hope of grasping it that we go on.”

For those of us who can’t say “Happy Father’s Day” today

Well, of course we can say it to someone we know. I can say it to Jeff and Mike and new-dad Thomas, and to plenty of other men who wear the mantle of fatherhood with their own kind of tenderness.

But for those of us whose own fathers are no longer with us, Father’s Day is one that reminds us of what the word bereft means. It’s been 11 years for me—since I could last extend that greeting, in person, to the man who was my father.

I consider myself lucky, though, that five years ago I was given the chance to write an essay about a meaningful object in my life for the book Holding Dear: The Value of the Real. I chose an object that was my father’s. Here is what I wrote:

The Reliquary Cap

It is a word I have long admired. Reliquary. There is a fullness to it, a smoothness, like water gliding, sliding, over stone. Just enough syllables to slow you for a moment, a split-second pause to reflect and remember. It is a word that helps you observe the memories of what it holds.

Ever since work on this book began, I have asked myself what, should someone ask, my object of reflection/attention/affection would be. A pencil, perhaps, because I still compose the first words on paper. A white stone from one of the outer beaches that my husband and I head to, Mecca-style, early of a Cape Cod morning nearly every summer. The books I’ve had the joy of working on.

But these are objects of the present, things that speak of what’s possible, what will still be here tomorrow (or so one prefers to think). I realize that my object hold no such possibility. Just memories. A reliquary.

It is the corduroy cap that my father wore most days to work. When he came home I would often take it from him and hang it on the three-pronged hook in the room just off the kitchen.

“Country Gentleman” is the label sewn inside. The gentleman part is right but the “country” is laughable. My father was a city boy, Boston-born and –bred, a product of Boston Latin and B.U., the immigrant kid who was perfectly at home walking the streets of the South End at three o’clock in the morning. He ended up in a small town in western New York where you never knew what kind of creature (a squirrel! a chipmunk!) might jump out at you at three o’clock in the afternoon.

He doted on his daughters and I doted right back. I adored him for all the reasons girls love their fathers. But I also admired him, especially because I worked for him.

My father wore two hats: head of the school of business at St. Bonaventure University, and owner of an accounting practice. I worked for him in the latter, starting in junior high. I learned how to prepare financial statements and tax returns from him. I also learned that you never talked about a client outside of the office and that a deadline really was.

In later years, as I wised up a little, I appreciated how extraordinarily smart my father was—far more conceptual and analytical (and shrewd) than I could ever be. Much more logical, and yet so empathetic.

We were close. After he’d retired from Bona’s but still had his practice, I took to calling him at the office every week, from my home office in Florida. We would just chat. It was usually a Tuesday when I called. Our own Tuesdays with Morrie.

When he died, he was 91 and still doing tax returns and what did it matter that I knew it was his time, I was crushed. I helped my mother close his office, and I didn’t mind going through the files but the shoes were just too painful. He kept a pair there that he could slide into when he took off his winter boots. Now they looked forlorn and vulnerable. Empty. I couldn’t bear to look at them and still don’t remember what we did with them.

But his cap was there at my parents’ house, hanging on the three-pronged hook, and I told my mother I wanted it. I’ll have it dry cleaned for you, she said. No, I replied. I want it just as it is.

Because if I buried my face in the lining of it, beyond the Country Gentleman label, I could smell wisdom and love.

My father’s cap now hangs on a single hook in my house, on the side of a bookcase I face when I’m sitting in the large green chair, composing with my pencil.

Can I fully articulate why this object is the one that is most meaningful to me? No. But that’s the beauty of reliquary. It’s a word that holds mystery.

  

It took me five years after my father’s death before I could write that. I still don’t feel that I’ve done him justice. But I know that I miss him, not just on Father’s Day but on most days. Maybe that’s how we truly honor our fathers.

Cuba, Obama, and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address

Whatever gifts President Obama may be bringing to his hosts in Cuba this week, it’s pretty certain that he’s not giving them one of the handwritten copies of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. And yet, in a roundabout way, America has Cuba to thank for it.

Lincoln wrote five copies of the Gettysburg Address that we know of, and not all of them before the dedication ceremony at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863. In fact, the last one that Lincoln wrote was a kind of do-over, in March 1864. A Colonel Alexander Bliss was collecting manuscripts for a facsimile volume of Autograph Leaves of Our Country’s Authors and wanted the Gettysburg Address to be among them. But alas, the first version Lincoln sent was missing a signature and a heading, among other elements, so would he mind penning another?

The ever-patient president obliged (proceeds from the book were going to a charitable organization to help the Union soldiers). Not only did he sign it but dated it, as well. This one made the cut for Bliss’s book.

Bliss’s descendants sold Lincoln’s original at auction in New York City, in 1949. A former Ambassador to the United States purchased it. His name was Oscar B. Cintas, and he was a businessman from Havana, Cuba. 

When he died, he willed that the copy become the property of the people of the United States. The aptly named Bliss Copy of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address now resides in the Lincoln Room of the White House.

Bless Jon Meacham’s Heart

Jon Meacham was relaying an amusing anecdote to the overflow crowd that had come to hear him speak at the Miami Book Fair last weekend. He concluded it with, “Or as we would say in the South, bless her heart.” The story had been a warm-up to something larger: his discussion on his new book about George Herbert Walker Bush. That’s what the audience had come for.

And something larger still.

A few holdouts who have to be from out of town still do a bit of a head snap when they hear “Miami” and “book” in the same breath, bless their hearts. But readers know otherwise. Mitchell Kaplan and Eduardo Padrón, the two visionaries behind the fair—Mitchell the impresario of Books &Books, Eduardo Padrón the president of Miami Dade College—have been orchestrating this better-than-Woodstock-for-readers event for 32 years now. Each year, it grows larger.

Bring 600 authors together for two days, and in any given hour there are as many as 18 concurrent sessions taking place. O, the word choose. And oh, the many books.

“Have Half”

And so if you are a reader, you come for the books and the talks. But you come, too, for the moments of transformation, the ones you put your own stamp on—the moments when a stillness comes over you as the words of the author, and sometimes those of the audience, go beyond intellect to a deeper, larger place.

You could feel it as Jon Meacham spoke—of a former president who, as a youngster, was nicknamed “Have Half” because of his empathy. Of a father whose heart broke when his young daughter died. Of an imperfect leader who always knew that the office was larger than the person holding it.

As Jon spoke, you could all but feel the audience, many of whom would never describe themselves as Republicans, succumb to the larger story that Jon was telling. The one that went beyond passing judgment and that instead spoke to tolerance, and civic duty, and compassion.

Sharecroppers and sinners

It was much the same with Congressman John Lewis. He spoke with the kinetic power of a preacher and the quietude of one who has witnessed both compassion and its flip side. He described the five-dollar suit he bought when he joined the Civil Rights movement (and still has). Sharecropper: that is what his father was. The word startled with its many implications, and his story took us deeper.

When Gerald Posner relayed the many sins of the Vatican bank, there was neither malice nor triumph in his voice. Instead, there was hope that on some level, there could be redemption.

Darkness visible

Stacy Schiff spoke in her elegant way of how absolute the darkness was in Salem in 1692, solid and terrifying and fraught with dire consequence. That same darkness, Antony Beevor would tell us, descended upon the soldiers who fought in the frozen forest during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944.

And it is darkness that clings to many soldiers of any war, in the form of PTSD. In one of the most emotion-charged events of the fair, the actors Paul Giamatti and David Strathairn performed readings from Sophocles, the ancient Greek tragedian—searing, agonizing, gut-wrenching readings—the kind that can reach into that deeper place where suffering lies and become a way to climb out of the darkness.

The Rabbi’s thanks

Rabbi Harold Kushner also invoked the ancient Greeks in his talk. Among the audience members who went to the microphone after his presentation was a woman who didn’t have a question, only a message.

She told the Rabbi how, years earlier when her young child had died, his books had been her single salvation. She never thought she would get a chance to thank him. But now here, in this room, she could.

Only a few stalwarts managed to hold back tears. The rest of us didn’t really care that we couldn’t.

“Proofreading Woman”

Not every moment at the book fair, of course, is so tearful. There was the smile of sheer joy that first-time author Rebecca Rego Barry had when for the first time she set eyes, and hands, on her book—it had come directly from the printer to the fair at the last possible moment.

And then there is the catharsis known as the Rock Bottom Remainders, the band of writers—as in musical band—where Dave Barry, Amy Tan, Mitch Albom and other authors let loose with exuberant, raucous abandon.

Where else can you hear the song “Proofreading Woman”? And with the immortal lyric, “She never says ‘between you and I’.”

Okay, so you had to be there. But that is, in fact, the point. We lovers of books come to the Miami Book Fair to be among fellow pilgrims, to seek and bear witness to the larger stories, to recognize ourselves in each other, and to dwell, however fleetingly, in that deeper place.

Bless our hearts. 

Are you a true bi-tech-tual?

There are those who will tell you that “bitechtual” means one who uses both Android and Apple products (I’m one). But I think we logophiles can do better when it comes to using and defining this playful word.

Think of bilingual and bicoastal: they both assume a pronounced division between a commonality. For bilingual, it’s two different languages; for bicoastal, two different coasts. Has anyone ever confused Urdu for English, or the Pacific for the Atlantic?

So let’s give “bitechtual” the same clean dichotomy: a pronounced division between high technology and low, fast tech and slow, digital and old-fashioned. When we define it this way, that makes a lot more of us bitechtual.

I keystroked this blog on a desktop, but first I wrote it on paper. I count on the Breaking News alerts from the New York Times that come through on my smartphone and tablet, but I still savor the rustle and fold of the Sunday paper version. My husband and I dip into different sections, folding them back and swapping them out as the Sunday afternoon progresses, sharing the singular act of reading in a way that only the actual newsprint allows. (Then we recycle it.)

My young friend Sofia (who is bilingual) watches with rapt attention as her older sister swipes across images of antelopes on the iPad. But her little three-year-old hands also reach eagerly for the Beatrix Potter books on my bookshelf.

I fact-check through Google any number of times through the day. It’s fast, efficient and, provided you pull from reputable sources, accurate. But these are discrete and often disparate items I’m checking. There is still something to be said for seeing forest as well as trees, so please don’t try to take away my print edition of Word Menu and the context it provides.

Being bitechtual in this way lets us adapt technologies to the circumstances. Despite the dichotomy between paper and pixel, “bitechtual” as we’ve now defined it carries the suggestion of coexistence as well. Even though my mother had to remind me the other day to check my old and tattered address book for the number that wasn’t programmed into my phone, I think I will always be bitechtual.

 With one exception.

I’ve realized that, when it comes to geography and directions, I am utterly a-techtual. It’s almost as if the GPS Lady knows I can’t read a paper map, so she feels free to send me off anywhere but where I wanted to be. Well, there’s always the sun.

So long to the skeuomorph? (Apple takes a bite)

The story in today’s New York Times (a front page story at that, in the Business section) that Apple may do away with skeuomorphs should prompt word lovers to take quick action.


Before skeuomorphs disappear, and with them the word, let’s have a last fond look at this linguistic concoction of the Greeks. This mouthful of a word is a combination of the Greek skeuos (vessel or implement) and morph (form). In essence, a skeuomorph uses visual or aural cues from an earlier object to help define a newer object.

An icon of an analog alarm clock signals to us that this is the clock or timer function on our digital appliance. The image of the alarm clock is the skeuomorph for the digital timer.

Skeuomorphs are not just pictures. They’re also sounds and movements. Click! goes the digital camera, brrringg goes the smartphone. The “page” turns in an electronic “book.”

Skeuomorphs have helped familiar objects of old make the new look familiar. Given a physical form, the virtual seem less virtual.

But such skeuomorphs may well vanish from Apple products—the legal pad icon for the iPad’s notes app; the wooden bookshelf on which e-books are displayed.

Which brings up this skeuomorphic question (I’m trying to get the most out of this word while I still know how to spell it): if the graphic trappings used to symbolize an e-book disappear, should an e-book even be called a “book” anymore?

Throughout bookdom’s history, certain words have signaled biblio events. Scroll. Tablet (of the kind that Julius Caesar popularized). Incunabula. Codex. Perhaps book should be reserved for those three-dimensional objects made of paper and, for a good part of their existence, pre-bound by the printer or publisher.

What we read electronically, then, is no longer an e-book. It’s an e-------[to be figured out].

One more thing: the very icon that symbolizes Apple is itself skeuomorphic. It’s that object we know to be a fruit and that makes a crunching sound when we take a bite out of it. Will the apple in Apple vanish as well?

Something to chew on—skeuomorphically, that is.

The Florida Congresswoman is all cattle

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Congresswoman from Florida’s 20th District, was talking on one of the news shows last week about some of the goings-on in Washington. For an idea being proposed that she did not agree with, she pronounced that “that dog will not hunt.” A few seconds later, she made a reference to someone being “all hat and no cattle.”

For a nanosecond or two, I thought that she must have just run out and bought my new book, Wicked Good Wordshttp://www.amazon.com/Wicked-Good-Words-Johnnycakes-Regionalisms/dp/0399536760/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1313251128&sr=1-3 . It’s a collection of America’s regionalisms—those things we say that signal we’re from here and not there. Then I got a grip and realized that the Congresswoman was simply well attuned to the expressions that Floridians—some of them, at least—use.

“That dog will not hunt,” or as it’s more commonly heard, “that dog won’t hunt,” is an expression familiar to many Southerners. (Yes, even in South Florida, Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz’s district, you can still find some Southerners among the many Northerners like me who have come here.) Folks in the Ozarks were among the first to use this expression as a way of saying “that won’t work,” but saying it more colorfully.

You’ll also hear the inverse, “that dog’ll hunt,” although not as frequently. (And these days, almost never when it comes to goings-on in Washington.)

“All hat and no cattle” is how many in the southern part of the country say that someone is full of hot air, or doesn’t follow through: an imposter. Just because you can put on a cowboy hat doesn’t mean you know to rustle cattle.

Okay, you may be thinking, makes sense for Texas. But Florida? Yep. Florida does, indeed, have some cattle ranches. Go figure.

The new watchword for Wal-Mart: strafe

“Wal-Mart Strafes Amazon in Book War” blares the page one headline in today’s Wall Street Journal. “Strafe” would have sent me running for cover, had I known its meaning. Instead it sent me scurrying to the dictionary.

As it turns out, strafe has a very specific—and rather lengthy—meaning. To quote American Heritage: “To attack (ground troops, for example) with a machine gun or cannon from a low-flying aircraft.” Like trench coat, strafe is a vestige of World War I. It’s from the German strafen, to punish, which is what Germany wanted to do to England at the time.

That war is over. Now it seems Wal-Mart and Amazon will engage in their own punishing campaign to see who can go lower on the price of a book. (Mainly it’s authors who will get punished.)

Strafe is what I call a one-syllable wonder: one of those economical words in our language that says in one sound what might otherwise take a sentence to explain. Add it to your arsenal of words that pack a powerful punch. And if someone threatens to strafe you, take cover.