This is an ironic cowboy. Image credit: Ric Szopa
Every year about this time, the good people at Lake Superior State University produce a list of words that ought to banished from the English language for at least a year. Longer, in some cases. This year’s list is helpful, certainly, even though it includes at least one word that I didn’t realize was in the English language to begin with. (Do people really say “trickeration”?)
All told, they have modestly limited themselves to a scant dozen words and phrases that deserve banishment. I am in favor of a more thorough purge, and as we all know, a good linguistic purge begins at home. So here is the list of words that we (by which I mean, principally, I) really really need to stop using this year. And probably forever.
1. irony/ironic/ironically: Alanis Morissette killed it once in 1996. It has recently enjoyed a revival at the hands of everybody who lives in Brooklyn, and/or Portand, and/or wishes that they did. Alas, the time has come for it to die again for a while. Adios, compadre. Read more »
Photo credit: franks anger
My wife and I are in the process of moving. This means that, while she is engaged in productive and worthwhile activities like organizing the pantry and securing one of those baby gates at the top of the stairs, I’ll be busily about one of my favorite nerdy avocations: arranging books.
There are countless wonderful ways in which you can arrange books on your bookshelves. Beyond this modest list, I am open to reader suggestions. If I like your suggestion, I’ll arrange my shelves accordingly and invite you over so that you can see your handiwork.
- You can arrange them by genre. In the heady days of my youth, this was my approach. There was a section for novels, one for short stories, one for theatre, one for memoir, etc. Each genre was arranged alphabetically by author. This seems a bit obvious.
- You can arrange books by historical period/literary movement. The great 19th century Russians can lead into the Euro-American modernists of the early-mid 20th century, into the great post-war literary upheaval, into the postmodernists. But this stumbles both in its inability to account for the various branches of the literary tradition and in its placement of writers who, like Georg Büchner or William Maxwell, do not fit easily within a given literary milieu.
- You can, alternately, abandon any such universal organizational apparatuses and see the whole of literary history as a long, winding sequence that points inevitably to you and your writing. (Isn’t this how we normally see literature?) Read more »
Year-end best-of lists are always confined to that year, but that’s not how most of us read. If you’re like me (read: poor), you won’t catch up with 2010 until it’s in paperback—and there are so many other books to catch up on, besides. So my year-end lists are never about the year that’s ending; they’re mostly about me. Isn’t that always the way?
Here are 20 great books I read this year.
All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays by George Orwell (2008)
I’ll quote myself: “Orwell is so damn smart that reading him makes me feel smarter, and everything he writes about—dirty postcards, Tolstoy’s hatred of Shakespeare, the disappointment of T.S. Eliot’s later work, and of course, socialism—is made fascinating and important.”
The Complete Peanuts: 1950 to 1952 by Charles M. Schulz (2004)
Before Snoopy (or even Linus) could talk, before the characters were shilling for Hallmark and MetLife, long before the introduction of the life-sucking Peppermint Patty, Peanuts was maybe at its funniest: a frequently absurd examination of the adult neuroses of four- and five-year-olds.
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With the end of 2010 approaching, I’m frantically trying to finish up a few last minute books so that I can add them to my reading totals for this year. This is the fifth year I’ve both set goals for yearly reading and tracked my progress, and it looks to be the fourth year running that I’ll fall short of hitting the number of books I set out to read (but only the second year I’ll miss my goal of total pages). Assuming I finish the three books I’ve been working on, I’ll finish 2010 with 42 unique books: 10 books shy of my goal of a book each week. (As a bit of an obsessive rereader, I won’t count a book twice if I happen to read it twice in one year, which I did with some of my thesis books. Instead, I usually plan my rereads so that they fall in successive calendar years for the sole purpose of being able to count them twice on my list. There are three books I currently have on hold for this exact reason. Obsessive much?)
My pages goal was maybe even more ambitious, coming in at 20,000 pages. I’m anticipating missing this by around 1500 or so. According to the fancy spreadsheet I set up way back in the day, this is still something around a 93% success rate, which I figure is a high 3.5 at worst, so I’m trying not to feel too poorly about this.
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So the stakes are coming up, and within a couple of days the Lilac City will be a dust-colored speck in the rearview. But before I leave Spokane to return to the birthplace of Letterman and Vonnegut, it’s time to reflect the only way I know how: in list form.
Top 5 foods I’ll miss
1. Irish Nachos at The Globe
A pile of thick waffle fries covered in cheese, bacon, and sour cream will shut your heart right down, but you will not care.
2. Maytag Blue Fries at Zola
More fries? Sounds right to me. But these are crispier and smothered in a ridiculous blue cheese sauce. I never said it was the top 5 healthiest foods.
3. Biscuits and Gravy at Frank’s Diner
Case in point. I’ve had biscuits and gravy in a lot of breakfast places, but this is the only place in Spokane I will still order them.
4. Curry Fried Rice at Thai Bamboo
I could swear that what makes this so good is the curry, but Rachel insists the pineapple is its secret weapon, so I will defer.
5. Orange Watermelon from the South Perry Farmers’ Market
I only ate it a couple of times, and I still think about it way too much.
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next week the new yorker will publish their list of top 20 novelists under 40, which, as you can imagine, has stirred up the little tempest in a tea pot that typically accompanies such lists.
the rumpus has dug up ward six‘s response: 10 over 80 that you should go back and read.
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