Turn the page

I spent yesterday evening talking with a friend about the first draft of his Sherlock Holmes-inspired novel. We had gone over some stuff about adverb nervousness, why the villain drops out of the story part of the way through, and whether the British Library has open stacks. Finally I got to the end of the pages I had dog-eared and asked about the ending: "The final sentence doesn't sound like anything else in the book," I said.

"That's not the final sentence," my friend said. "Are you missing the last page?"

"Maybe?"

"Wait, you're missing the last page of a mystery novel? You think my villain is cliche, but you're somehow missing the final page of a mystery novel?"

So he e-mailed it to me as we spoke, and indeed many things looked different with a few additional paragraphs.

My mom reads so many mysteries that she often forgets whether she's read them. Sometimes, she reads the last few pages to remind herself... but of course that method of checking has its own perils.

More checking needed in hockey

Great WSJ story about engraving errors on the Stanley Cup (the graphic history of the typos is especially cool--you can roll over the image of the winners to see the engraved errors corrected):

This iconic silver trophy, which is handed out each year to hockey's champion, carries with it the marks of another, quieter history -- decades of botched spellings, spacing gaffes, repeated words and the unsightly results of attempts to fix them.

Over the years words like "Ilanders" (Islanders), "Leaes" (Leafs) and "Bqstqn" (Boston) have found their way onto the cup, while more than a dozen players and coaches have had their names butchered. Former Montreal Canadiens goaltender Jacques Plante had the misfortune of having his first name spelled four different ways in the span of five years.

(thanks to Neil for the link)

Tom Hanks' inimitable sentences

I could listen to Tom Hanks enthuse all day--about anything except symbology. His speech patterns have carried over to his writing in the latest letters section of the New Yorker, where he has a great letter about his electric car. He's got a real talent for the long sentence, and you can hear his voice so clearly:

Peter J. Boyer, in his otherwise spot-on piece about the car industry, assumes that I once leased G.M.’s sadly fated EV1 electric car and, like other drivers of that twin-seat rocket of a vehicle, watched the emission-free car be wrested from my garage, towed away, and busted up into pieces of metal, glass, and rubber smaller than razor blades (“The Road Ahead,” April 27th). Luckily, I did not.

I like the pacing of these sentences:

It had four doors, a rear hatch, room for my family, including a dog in the back, power windows, A/C, a great sound system, and the fastest, most effective windshield defroster known to mankind. When the car companies collectively, and, to some, diabolically, decided to take these cars back, the electric vehicles disappeared. But not mine. I have the pink slip. I own that car, and it is still driven every day, albeit by one of my crack staff of employees. My electric car recently crossed fifty thousand miles on the odometer with its original battery but without so much as a splash of gasoline.

I've listened to Tom Hanks' amazing tribute to the Dave Clark Five at the 2008 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony several times (Thomas Kyd gets name-checked?!) and smile every time. I assume he wrote it. So so good!

The torture creative class

Devastating column from Katha Pollitt:

I should have been a torturer. You too, reader. Well, maybe not an actual physical torturer, because then there'd be a small chance I'd go to prison like Lynndie England or Charles Graner. My picture might be in the paper doing nasty things to naked men with a goony smile and a thumbs-up. I might even have disturbing memories and bad dreams, because surely, unless one is a sociopath, throwing people into walls and hanging them from the ceiling all day is likely to have its troubling moments. What I mean is, I should have been a member of the torture creative class--a conceptual torturer, a facilitator of torture, perhaps an inventor of torture law, an architect of the torture archipelago, a dissimulator, concealer, denier, rationalizer, minimizer and pooh-pooher of torture. As a word person, I could have come up with circumlocutions to confuse the media, bureaucratic phrases like "special methods of questioning" and "enhanced interrogation techniques." According to New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt, just figuring out whether to call a given action "harsh" or "brutal" has kept editors busy for years! Or I could have written copy for the CIA. For example, I could have suggested they call putting people in coffinlike boxes full of insects "studio picnics," because studio apartments are small and picnics have bugs, and I could have nicknamed waterboarding "drinking tea with Vice President Cheney," although come to think of it, waterboarding is a euphemism already.

Whitby jet, vulcanite

Ben's and my friend Tove has a great blog, Thread for Thought, about the history of fashion. I was particularly moved and interested by her post about mourning:

Queen Victoria’s obsession with the public mourning of Prince Albert resulted in a great demand for fashionable and affordable black jewelry, and jet became a popular material for jewelry and buttons. It is an incredibly dense, dark mineraloid derived from decaying wood, appropriately enough. It has been imbued with a religious significance too, as it is a traditional material for monks’ rosaries. Queen Victoria sported and popularized Whitby jet, which initially created a boom in the industry but hampered its long term usage as people associated the stone with death. Vulcanite was another material of similar properties commonly used for mourning jewelry.