Writing Life

The popular NBC sitcom “The Office” chronicles the working lives of the people employed at the Scranton, Pennsylvania, branch of a fictional paper company known as Dunder Mifflin, Inc. The show gets a lot of things right about the contemporary American workplace. In particular it does a good job of demonstrating how people who are confined to an insular setting such as an office for 40 hours a week often end up creating a unique lexicon of work-inspired words and phrases. In the opening scene of tonight’s episode, office suck-up Andy Bernard (actor Ed Helms) was scolded by his boss Michael Scott (Steve Carell) for talking like a baby. The baby talk is driving Andy’s co-worker’s crazy. They are especially annoyed by the way he replaces his Rs with Ws, so that, for instance, “Rhode Island” sounds like “Whode Island.” An unrepentant Andy, channeling Elmer Fudd, tells Michael, “I’m sowwy.” He then points out that Michael’s frequent lapses into Elvis-speak are as annoying to the employees as Andy’s own Elmer-speak. This type of hyper attention to the way ordinary Americans use language is a hallmark of the program. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, at a used-book store in Davis, I found a beautiful copy of Carlo Collodi’s “The Adventures of Pinocchio.” It caught my eye because its front and back covers were free of the usual promotional verbiage – no blurbs, no plot summary, no text at all except for the title and the author’s name. I picked up the book and discovered that, though it was an English translation of “Pinocchio,” it had been published in Italy, by a company called Giunti Gruppo Editoriale. When I opened the front cover I found the following inscription: Read the rest of this entry »

For decades, whenever Julie and I have visited the South Bay Area, we have driven past the eerie-looking “ghost fleet” that lies anchored in Suisun Bay, a shallow estuary between the San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta area. The 52 ships afloat in the estuary include the USS Iowa, a battleship with a tumultuous history. For most of World War II, she served in the Atlantic Fleet as a presidential shuttle. It was the Iowa that took Franklin Roosevelt to and from the historic Tehran Conference in late 1943. The following year, with the German threat rapidly diminishing, she was transferred to the Pacific Ocean, where she was used to shell beachheads in the Marshall Islands in advance of Allied landings there. She gained notoriety in 1989 when, during a training exercise, an explosion in one of her gun turrets killed 47 of her crewmembers. She was decommissioned in 1990 and towed to her present home in Suisun Bay in 2001. Nowadays her biggest threats aren’t mines or missiles but rust and bird poop. She sits surrounded by dozens of other retired ships that served their country admirably in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and other conflicts. Julie, the daughter of a Navy NCO, has always been fascinated by the fleet. Every time we drive across the bridge that spans the Carquinez Strait she expresses a wish that the government would conduct guided tours of the ships in the ghost fleet. I always nod my head in agreement, but secretly I am creeped out by the sight of those ships and have never had any desire to set foot on one of them. Those ships served some good causes (the Allied effort in World War II) and some lost ones (the Vietnam War), but for me they are reminders of death and destruction and, if the Navy can’t use them any more, I’d just as soon see them dismantled and recycled for some peacetime purpose. And according to a story in today’s San Francisco Chronicle, that is finally about to happen. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I mentioned that visiting a place where antiquities are sold can be like taking a tour of one’s own past. But the experience can also provide one with an opportunity to tour a lot of other people’s pasts as well. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve said before that Julie and I enjoy browsing antique shops because it allows us to wander through our own pasts. We’ve spent the last three days doing exactly that. On Friday we drove to Placerville, where we whiled away the day visiting six or seven antique shops along Main Street. On Saturday we attended the Sacramento Rare Book Show and Sale at the local Scottish Rite Temple, where we inspected not just rare books but also old posters, postcards, letters, maps, and more. And on Sunday we strolled through an antiques flea market held in the parking lot of a Carmichael strip mall. It was at the Carmichael event that I witnessed a perfect example of how an antique store or flea market can work as a collective memory repository for the community it serves. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I promised to write an entire essay about “1066: The Year of the Conquest,” David Howarth’s short history of England’s most tumultuous year. Today I shall fulfill that promise. I read the book not so much for the history but for the prose. I was told by a local bookseller that Howarth, who died in 1991, was a writer of graceful, unpretentious sentences, which is exactly what I aspire to be. The bookseller did not lie. Read the rest of this entry »

This past weekend I read a book called “1066: The Year of the Conquest.” I read it not because I had any strong interest in William the Conqueror’s invasion of England but because I had been told (correctly, as it turned out) that the author, the late David Howarth, possessed an admirably clear and elegant writing style. I hope to comment on Howarth and the Conquest in a future installment of this blog. Today, however, I wish to focus on just a single thing that Howarth mentioned briefly in his book – the nautical strategy known as either the deliberate error or the deliberate miss. Read the rest of this entry »

The Style section of yesterday’s New York Times contained a story about a New Jersey school librarian named Jim Brozina and his daughter Kristen. On November 11, 1997, Brozina sat down with Kristen at bedtime and read to her from one of L. Frank Baum’s books, “The Tin Woodman of Oz.” Their goal was to read together every night for 100 nights in a row. The project was conceived as a father/daughter bonding exercise as well as a way of encouraging Kristen, who was a fourth-grader at the time, to take an increased interest in books and literature. But once the twosome had achieved their goal of 100 consecutive nights of reading together they realized they had set their sights too low. At that point, they decided to shoot for 1000 consecutive nights of reading together. But even that goal proved a bit too modest. In the end Jim and Kristen Brozina read together for 3,218 nights in a row, concluding on September 2, 2006, Kristen’s first day of college. This stupendous accomplishment is known in Brozina family lore simply as The Streak.

As it happens I began a streak of my own in the same year that the Brozinas’ streak began. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve always been envious of writers who have partners. Lennon and McCartney, Kauffman and Hart, Julius and Philip Epstein (who co-wrote Casablanca and other classic movie scripts), Richard Levinson and William Link (who co-created Columbo, Mannix, and other TV shows), Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (who co-wrote Inherit the Wind and dozens of other successful plays) – the list goes on and on. My idea of a great writing gig was nurtured in my youth by The Dick Van Dyke Show, a situation comedy in which a trio of impossibly witty people gathered every weekday in a small room to play darts and write skits for a TV variety show. To me, that appeared to be the ideal job – cranking out creative work in collaboration with a friend or two. Alas, I have never had a writing partner. I have been fated to do all my writing alone. Still I can’t help fantasizing about what it would be like to have a collaborator. Read the rest of this entry »

Many classic fairy tales employ a principle known as “the rule of three,” wherein various elements of the story come in threes: three wishes, three blind mice, three billy goats gruff, and so forth. According to the Wikipedia, “things that come in threes are inherently funnier, more satisfying, or more effective than other numbers of things…A series of three is often used to create a progression in which the tension is created, then built up, and finally released.” This is not merely a conceit of western literature. Read the rest of this entry »