Writing Life

Archive for April, 2010

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 »