monday punch-in-the-face blogging

i was prepared to march back into the new yorker's copyediting department this week and start rapping the staff upon their knuckles with their red pens, which they seem to have lost interest in striving to be worthy of. some errors i can compel myself to make peace with—inappropriate spacing, dropped hyphens at word breaks at the ends of lines (oh yes, it's happened), things of that ilk, which would perhaps only be present in the final proof—but other things i can't overlook. take, for instance, this sentence on page 74 of the july 31 issue (i did mention, didn't i, that i have fallen a little bit behind?):

But a determined old woman decided to give him the water he was begging or and cleaned his face with her skirt.

DO YOU SEE??????? for shame! for shame! there's no excuse for that one. and then there's this, from hertzberg's "talk of the town" piece in the august 7 & 14 issue:

It defines "Democrat n" as "A Democratic Party member" and "Democratic adj" as "Of, relating to, or characteristic of the Democratic Party," but gives no definition for—indeed, makes no mention of—"Democrat Party n" or "Democrat adj".

was the united states under british rule for a brief period this past summer? because the end of that sentence certainly was.* and while i officially approve of the magazine's apparent decision to stop italicizing punctuation marks immediately following italicized text, on page 68 of the same issue there is an italicized semicolon following "the atlantic monthly"—and then, farther down on the same page, a non-italicized comma following the same title. what am i to think, people, of such chaos? is it a surreptitious reference to the anarchy overseas? was the hot summer sun creating a blinding glare on the office's computer screens and printed matter for two or three straight weeks? is there a method to this madness that is simply not cognoscible by my feeble, daylight-starved brain? believe me, i'd be thrilled to learn that the only problem is that i don't get it, and there are plenty of things that leave me purely confused. walk backwards through time with me so that we may revisit the july 31 issue and explore this sentence on page 83:

Its undulating glass-and-steel swoops and swells as if it were not a solid mass but a billowing length of fabric.

what is happening with those hyphens? a bit melodramatic, aren't they? are they really necessary? really? really? i just don't know anymore.

so i gnashed my teeth and rent my garments, but in the end those dozens of knuckles were spared; i am still kicking an issue of the new yorker back and forth across my apartment, but, i suppose thankfully, my rage is directed at an idea and not a technicality.

listen, i dig john updike. i do. i bought a paperback copy of marry me for a quarter at a library sale when i was in high school, and i've been collecting his titles like baseball cards ever since. i dig him so much that when the early stories came out a few years ago, i bought a hardcover copy for my cousin instead of for myself, because my cousin loves great stories but had never read anything by updike, and that made me a whole lot sadder than not owning that book ever could have. i was working at david r. godine, inc., the parent publisher of the black sparrow imprint, when the golden west: hollywood stories—a work updike wrote the introduction for—was in the final stages of its production, and one day the editor handed me a packet addressed to updike and asked me to drop it in the mailbox on my way out. i scribbled the address down on a scrap of paper and carried it around in my pocket for weeks, thinking maybe i would sneak out to his house in the dead of night and leave some sort of present on his lawn to thank him for all he'd done for me and the rest of the world. i'm a fan, right down to the tips of my tippy little toes.

today, though, i have no choice but to let him have it. i don't think i can bring myself to hit him actually, you know, in the face, but i am going to hit him somewhere about the face, or at least once very soundly on the back of the head. in a minute. i'm winding up.

in his july 31 review of sara gruen's water for elephants, a book about a depression-era traveling circus (which is more than enough to hook me; i *heart* carnies), updike says some pleasant things about the author and her firm grasp on 1930s-sideshow vernacular, and that's all well and good. but then he says . . . i mean, maybe i shouldn't be bothered, probably i shouldn't be at all surprised, but after all of the terrible things that have happened in the recent history of our world, after all of the unspeakable things that have been happening without pause since the world became a world, to say a thing like this:

Recalling, near the end of his life, his work as a veterinarian for the circus and his love for a colleague's wife, [Jacob Jankowski, the novel's narrator and protagonist] comes off as so relentlessly decent—an unwavering defender of animals, women, dwarves, cripples, and assorted ethnic groups—that he ceases to be interesting as a character.

maybe, given all the updike characters i've crawled into bed with over the years, it is exactly what i should have expected—but i still hate it. nobody likes a cloyingly sweet goody two-shoes, and a character with one earnestly altruistic dimension might be unbelievable, but there's a problem when we start viewing "relentlessly decent" individuals as unreadably dull. an unwavering defender of the weak and disenfranchised isn't tedious, he's, you know, jesus—or bahá’u’lláh or guru nanak dev, choose your path, they're more or less all rooted in those ideals. rooted; they get twisted, sometimes, up toward the branches, where people who are not relentlessly decent are able to get their hands on them. but those are lasting characters, wouldn't you say? captivating enough to have kept people turning the pages for the past couple of centuries, or millenia. i know i wouldn't die of ennui if a few more people started emulating those characters, those thoroughly decent characters. you know who wasn't an unwavering defender of cripples and assorted ethnic groups? hitler. and he was a hell of a character, sure, but not one i want to read any more stories about. ever. if my choices are "morally conflicted/challenged" and "Not Interesting To Writers," well, i guess it was for the best that i never sat up all night tying a perfect bow on the perfectly wrapped gift i never left in a certain wordsmith's front yard. *sniff*

*smack*

there, i've done it. now you sit in that corner, john updike, and think about what you've done.

oh, and, um, when you're finished thinking, um, do you think maybe you could sign my copy of pigeon feathers? that part toward the end, where david's mother is trying to make him see that the earth isn't any less a gift from god if god is an invention of humans, when she's talking about forcing yourself to pay attention to the evidence . . . it just kills me. she was a good woman, wasn't she, that elsie kern? so worried about the fertilizer hurting the earthworms . . . i could read about her forever.


* i do love the pun, i truly do, and you can't take that away from me.


update, 1/12/07, 1:11 PM: i am not alone in my love/hate/love/love/hate affair with updike; jared young has just recently offered up a beautiful work of sardonically loathesome adulation. oh, johnny boy; we're huggin' ya . . . but we're hittin' ya!