Number 95
Thanks to Pat S., SBS, for telling me about Daniel Rice's manuscript on auction at Ebay. Rice has written a book that he has no doubt would be a best seller if, well, if he could sell it. He's decided that an already-successful writer, like Stephen King or John Grisham or J. K. Rawlings, could make a killing by buying his manuscript and selling it with his (King's, Grisham's, etc.) name on it, and they could share the profits. A big name would have no problem selling a new book to his publisher, unlike Rice, no matter how fascinating his work. No one took him up on his first offer, asking for an opening bid of $150,000, so he has relisted the book.
Rice says a couple of english teachers as well as his family have read the manuscript and couldn't put it down, "all of them giving me thumbs up on the fascinating thought processing fiction, I put into this story" [sic on capitalization and comma]. I couldn't put down his auction description, which includes photos of the manuscript and a teaser paragraph. Rice has a family and wants to make enough money to get them out of an apartment into a real house. But he can't spell or punctuate, his grammar is iffy, and his literary voice combines pride and naivete. Half the people you see every day think they "have a book in them". Actually, anyone's life could make a good book ~ but only if written by a good writer. It's not enough to have suffered and be sincere.
Coincidentally, the day before Pat sent me the Rice link, I'd been thinking about a magazine review of a new book by Joyce Carol Oates, The Falls. I've never read much of her work ~ whatever I read in college didn't move me to read more of her work ~ and I didn't care much for the extracts in this review. It sounded a bit soap-opera to me, but of course life is so often like a soap opera. So I started thinking, what if a reviewer got books without the author's name on the cover? How might that affect the review?
Doris Lessing published a couple of books under an alias to see what kind of reviews she'd get without her famous name attached. She was rejected by all but one publisher, but eventually did sell under the name Jane Somers (discussed, also coincidentally, by Oates in an article called "Pseudonymous Selves"). The publishing world seems to feel this sort of thing is unfair, and it's true, of course, that a well known name has a value in itself to a publisher.
As for Daniel Rice, I think he'd better keep his day job.
Regarding "vice grips" (PO 94), Tim S. writes:
"Och, nay, woman, the clue is right on the money. Or at least it used to be. Maybe not in a world in which Bob Vila hawks some new gimcrack wundertool from Sears at intervals coinciding with every conceivable national gift-giving holiday (and always priced at that corporately determined $19.95 sweet spot). I have always been intrigued by those tools but always resisted buying them. I know that all such novelties would eventually wind up in that dead-zone drawer in my workshop that serves as a dump for clutter, because if I ever found myself in a context in which they might be useful, I would not remember that I had them. But anybody who has once used the vice grips never forgets it. In my father's day, the vice grips was a miracle tool in the way that sulfa was a miracle drug. Properly adjusted, the vice grips holds an object with more force than a human hand can ~ like a vice ~ and in doing so it frees up a hand in all sorts of repair situations in which an extra hand is essential. Well, try to think of any repair situation in which you could not make good use of an extra hand. The home I grew up in had three vice grips: a big expensive one downstairs in the workshop, a slighter model upstairs in the kitchen tool drawer, and a beat-up old veteran out in the garage. All were in constant use. My father would never have been so imprecise as to ask one of his children to 'Go get me the tool,' but if he had, I think there would have been a good chance that any one of us would have returned with the vice grips."There was a time ~ and I'm not entirely sure that it has passed ~ when 'vice grips' was a registered trademark and was properly treated as such in edited copy, with caps and the little circled R hanging on either the Vice or the Grips. At the very least it has moved into that gray zone occupied by dumpsters, kleenex, jello, band aids, and kitty litter, which is a testament to its ubiquity and utility."
First ~ "vice grips was"? I think of it like "scissors" ~ "Where are the scissors?" Don't you say that?
I've mislaid Tim's original e-mail so can't find the URL, but Tim also sent a picture clearly titled "vice grips." It was the spelling that threw me, not the tool. I know what a vise grip is. I've had them, I've used them. My dictionary says "vice" can be an alternative spelling of "vise" but it's just not right.
Who's a legend ~ Lauren Bacall or Nicole Kidman? Unlike the media flack who proffered Kidman as legendary, I think you ought to be old or dead to be called a legend. Lauren Bacall is old and she was married to Humphrey Bogart so she qualifies in my program. However, 55% of the www.yourdictionary.com Usage Panel disagrees:
"Today a legend can also be a person or achievement worthy of inspiring such a story ~ anyone or anything whose fame promises to be enduring, even if the renown is created more by the media than by oral tradition. Thus we speak of the legendary accomplishments of a major-league baseball star or the legendary voice of a famous opera singer. This usage is common journalistic hyperbole, and 55 percent of the Usage Panel accepts it."
Nevertheless, this kind of hyperbole defeats its own ends eventually, because it is unbelievable.
While explaining "breed" and "breeder" to a student the other day, I remembered when I first heard "breeders" used to insult heterosexuals. I used to be friends with a married couple who'd decided not to have children. They were rather angry about a Steve Martin movie, Parenthood, a simple family comedy, which they thought was promoting, well, breeding, and by implication, denigrating childlessness. I thought they were being a bit rude about it since I had two kids. Long before, a guy I knew in college referred to a girl he didn't admire as a future "baby factory." Talk about your ad feminem and hominem attacks.
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