Book Whimsy

Saw this in The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain:

A woman was once introduced to Mark Twain at a Christmas party. Feeling obliged to discuss literature, she asked him if he thought a book was the most useful gift one could give. He replied:

“Yes, but of course it depends on the book. A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat [without hitting the creature, of course! -cjj].”

Now I’ve an addition to Twain’s list. This morning I played the book game that’s been traversing the Internet for a few years. It works like this:

Turn to page 52 of a book near you. Scan down to the fifth sentence and write it out.

I saw some examples that were intriguing, and a collection of examples that made a surreal little story. I reasoned that because I read several books at a time, I should be able to create a nice mash-up of fifth sentences.

How wrong I was. Nearly every sentence was a bore and hardly representative of the books I’m reading.

Marilynne Robinson’s poetic first novel Housekeeping, for example, contains precious little dialogue; instead, she writes long descriptions and ruminations about loss and identity. The book deserves to be read slowly and thoughtfully. So imagine my surprise to copy this as the fifth sentence on page 52:

“Nope.”

That’s it! A one-word sentence. And the sentences from the other books weren’t any more interesting.

So I tried a workaround—the sixth sentence of page 66. This time Marilynne Robinson’s exquisite writing gave me:

“Now?”

I give up. Maybe the trick is combining sentences from a variety of readers rather than from one reader’s variety of books. Why don’t YOU try this game and share your results on Lull. Or, if you prefer, you may e-mail me your sentences and I’ll include them in a future post.

[Photographer unknown; found on Spine Facing Out.]

The Blue Jay Chronicles: An Addendum

“There’s more to a blue-jay than any other creature. … You may call a jay a bird. Well, so he is, in a measure—because he’s got feathers on him, and don’t belong to no church, perhaps; but otherwise he is just as much a human as you be.”
—from “Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn” in A Tramp Abroad, by Mark Twain

After reading up on Jays, I started putting out one of their favorite foods—raw peanuts in their shells. I hoped I was feeding Stubby in addition to The Trio, but I could never be sure. (Did you know that a Blue Jay can carry up to 5 acorns in his/her mouth and throat?)

Since the hawk incident, during which the juvenile Trio behaved like hooligans, the birds have flown under the radar. The week we had The Visitor was apparently a week of transformation in our yard and at the feeders, and we missed it. Once The Visitor left and we resumed our routine of nature-gazing out our front windows, we realized the mad industriousness of collecting and storing food for the winter had subsided. Even activity at our feeders had declined. Not only had The Trio departed, also absent was The Stubster—as well as dozens of sparrows and cardinals.

Then one morning I found Blue Jay feathers scattered under the feeder. I don’t know who made the attack, but my bet is on one of the many felines our neighbors allow to roam. I haven’t seen The Trio since.


Until yesterday! Of course, I don’t know if it’s the original members of The Trio or The Trio with a replacement, but it was great to hear them again in the backyard.

(The cat—or, rather, the cat’s person—is still on my grudge list, though.)

[Photo by J. Andrzej Wrotniak; art by Charlie Harper.]

Who Knew?

“You may say a cat uses good grammar. Well, a cat does—but you let a cat get excited, once; you let a cat get to pulling fur with another cat on a shed, nights, and you’ll hear grammar that will give you the lockjaw. Ignorant people think it’s the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain’t so; it’s the sickening grammar they use.”
—from “Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn” in A Tramp Abroad, by Mark Twain

Adaptability

“In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four-and-twenty hours.”

—Mark Twain

[Photo by Carol Spears.]

SH-HHH-HH… A Mainstream Press Mistake Might Just Save Tigers from Extinction

Earlier this week, these were the appalling numbers released in the news about the Asian tiger population:

In 1990, there were an estimated 100,000 tigers in the wild. Today, only 3,200 exist.

Last month on Lull, I gave you the dire stats on the lion population. And I warned you about the tigers’ plight as the CITES convention drew near. But this is worse than I thought. Whereas it took 50 years to eliminate 95 percent of the world’s lions, it took only 20 years to do similar damage (97 percent) to the world’s tigers.

Was this really true?! The numbers were so catastrophic I felt compelled to investigate. And guess what?

I couldn’t verify all those numbers through any animal conservation Web site or through the U.N., the organization that allegedly released the numbers to the press.

Somebody somewhere made a mistake that news media are now disseminating around the world. At least, I think that’s what happened. I’m waiting to hear from Time magazine’s editor on the subject.

“Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.”
—Attributed to Mark Twain*

The real numbers are still grim. It’s true that there are only about 3,200 tigers left in the wild. And it’s true that at one time the population was around 100,000—in the early 1900s. But before you sigh a breath of relief, consider that in the early 1990s, there were a maximum 7,500 tigers in the wild. In the last 20 years, we’ve cut the creature’s population by about half.

Though depleted habitat is partially to blame for the tiger’s situation, Eastern traditional medicine practices are the bigger culprit. The black market for products derived of tiger parts is especially lucrative in China, where an expanding middle class can afford tiger-based delicacies and remedies. The Environmental Investigation Agency estimates that at least one tiger is killed daily for this market—even pregnant tigers.

This is the Year of the Tiger, according to the Chinese Zodiac. By the next Year of the Tiger in 2022, there may not be any tigers left in the wild.

“[M]an is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. … I think we’re challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”
—Rachel Carson

* Note: Quotations are pliable, too. I couldn’t verify this one, but it’s most often attributed to Twain. Yet Twain was actually riffing on John Adams, the originator (supposedly) of “Facts are stubborn things.”

[Photo above by Craig Kasnoff.]

Everything New Is Old: The State of Spelling

I’ve developed a habit of writing down ideas, overheard comments, interesting news, films to see, and reminders on the nearest piece of paper. I carry teensy notebooks in my pockets and have unused page-a-day calendars around the apartment for this purpose.

Today, the clumps of papers cluttering tabletops, journals, and books confronted my brief but victorious decluttering agenda. On one scrap of paper was this:

light spelled “lite” in Victorian collage album

Ah yes. I saw this at the Art Institute in an exhibition called “Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage.” It stood out to me because I’ve listened to so-ooo-oo many people bend my ear about the appalling influence advertising and lazy writers have had on our language, especially during the Hippie ’60s era. Yet contrary to the etymology given in dictionaries, here was a variant spelling used, with perfect penmanship, by an educated, well-read noblewoman of the Victorian era.

Another scrap of paper held this piece of a speech (“The Alphabet and Simplified Spelling”) by humorist Mark Twain:

“[S]implified spelling is all right, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far.”

He was addressing industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who at the time was a proponent of a movement to reform our spelling to match our pronunciations: “enuf” for enough, “bizness” for business. Carnegie was even willing to fund it. But Twain took him to task, calling it a piecemeal approach. He proposed, instead, an entire overhaul of our alphabet—which he believed was the source of our confounding language.

You see? Our language is ever-shifting. Some people want it to stand still, while others can hardly wait to reshape it into alignment with their own interpretations of language principles and societal needs. The “Mad Men” of mid-century America weren’t the first to play around with spelling.

Carnegie would have appreciated today’s texting/IMing culture and the practical truncation of words. He wouldn’t have had to fund the change much today; it’s happening on its own.