I WAS feeling pretty down the other day. In fact, on a scale of 1 to Adele, I was truly miserable. Unlike the angst-ridden singer, for me it wasn’t a case of love gone wrong, though. It was far worse – I’d been beaten by a word.

That doesn’t happen to me very often. Actually, I can’t remember it ever happening so to say it was traumatic is an understatement.

In spite of the arsenal of reference books at my elbow – not to mention that word-wide resource, the internet – I just couldn’t find out what it meant. Not even in my brand-spanking-new 1,904 page, 620,000-word definition Chambers Dictionary!

It was all the fault of fellow word nerd, and regular reader of my newspaper column, Doug Williams. Challenged by his American friend Brice – they do this kind of thing to one another apparently – Doug passed the puzzle over to me.

“This is a test,” wrote Brice to Doug.  “I want to know how skilled you really are.  And don’t you dare Goggle [sic], although it probably wouldn’t produce a result.”

Doug’s mind-goggling test was to come up with the meaning of the word “quillen”.

Instead, he came up blank – and turned to me.

“Are you sure the word isn’t ‘quillon’,” I asked Doug. “That’s the name for either arm of the cross-guard on a sword handle and also on some knives.”

It wasn’t. Reluctantly – after much searching – I threw in the towel, too.

“Okay. I give up. Please enlighten me,” wrote Doug to a doubtless very happy Brice, who wasted no time with his response.

“It relates to train whistles or, more appropriately, horns,” he wrote. (Well, of course it does!)

“Considerable effort and pride are invested in these devices. Many rail companies have their own distinctive sounds. And engineers have their own distinctive methods of ‘playing’ these instruments.  An engineer’s horn signature is his quillen.”

Someone who really loves the sound, explained Brice, is Dan, another old friend of his – so old they go back as far as pre-school. Dan’s a marine engineer specialising in the repair of old diesel engines, and a musician with a master’s in music ethnology.

“He also is involved in a small local rail link here in Seattle,” writes Brice.  “A couple of years ago he acquired a five-horn train whistle, which he promptly mounted on the roof of his shop [Brice is referring to a workshop here, I reckon] together with an automatic device to blow it every day at noon.

“The neighbours complained.  It was very, very loud.  Cops arrived, end of train whistle.

“Dan likes loud.  He once got his hands on a steam calliope [that’s a kind of keyboard fitted with steam whistles, in case you’re wondering] and damned near everyone in Seattle heard it.”

Now all of this is all very well, but reading it through I’ve decided I won’t concede defeat after all. Not until I see formal proof.

What kind of a word is it that has no documentation, no written definition – and can’t even be “Goggled”?

No word at all.

Suddenly, I feel so much better. — Stevie Godson

(A version of this column first appeared in the Daily Dispatch)

Wonderful typos in today’s MailOnline in a caption under a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II on a visit to London’s underground (in yet another of those pointless PR exercises):

“Queen Elizabeth stands next to plague with her named on it on platform 1 of the Northern-bound Metropolitan Line”

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2296186/Pregnant-Kate-Middleton-laughs-handed-Baby-On-Board-badge-Tube.html#ixzz2O6BTnV00

I ALWAYS have music playing on the radio while I write – it has a comforting presence and yet the songs don’t usually impinge on what I’m doing.

At a low level, they’re enough to keep any intermittent and unexpected background noise from disturbing my train of thought and yet, surprisingly, I’m able to tune in (and that pun really wasn’t intended – only noticed it as I wrote it) if a favourite song comes on, in which case I take a three or four-minute break and crank up the volume.

The only other time I tune in is when indecipherable words give me a mental hiccup, which is how I found myself having a chat to a world-famous singer the other day.

“Open your mouth, Annie,” I heard myself crossly telling Ms Lennox.

Well, it was the third or fourth time I’d mentally sung along with her, repeating “softly circumcision”, which was definitely what she seemed to be singing.

I couldn’t get the ludicrous oxymoronic phrase out of my head, and it wasn’t helping what I was trying to write one little bit.

There was nothing else for it – I had no choice but to break off and look up the lyrics.

Thank heavens for the internet. In the “olden days” I’d be turfing books from shelves in a desperate attempt to answer such a niggle, and I’ve even been known to phone a local librarian if my own reference library didn’t come up with the answer.

Impatient? Moi? Perish the thought.

I found the Love is a Stranger lyrics after skirting my way around half a dozen websites trying to sell me songs for my cellphone ringtone.

Love’s not only a stranger, “it’s savage and it’s cruel and it shines like destruction”, according to the not-entirely-unintelligent words.  “It distorts and deranges, you too,” continues the Eurythmics hit – which is just what the unintelligible bit was doing to me.

It turned out to be much more prosaic, (probably why Annie mumbled it): “And I want you, And I want you, So it’s an obsession”.

Relief at last, and my own obsession over.

Still, my musical misinterpretation wasn’t as bad as one of my late mother’s. She was horrified years ago to find out that while she’d been happily singing “Lady Elaine”, along to a Bob Dylan track, the words were actually “Lay, lady, lay (lay across the big brass bed)”.

In a flash, what had been her absolute favourite turned into “that disgusting song”! — Stevie Godson

(A version of this column first appeared in the Daily Dispatch)

(… which may or may not be related to the Christmas comma!)

(Pic taken by Stevie Godson at Retail Park, Beacon Bay, in South Africa’s glorious Eastern Cape)

Reviewed for New York Journal of Books

by Stevie Godson

IT’S been said that writing something down can be cathartic. I can only fervently hope that’s true for Richard Russo. For while the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist’s memoir is being marketed as “hilarious”, as well as moving, Elsewhere is anything but.

Russo’s writing style might make it an easy read, but his subject matter is emotionally gruelling.

Overall, though perhaps unintentionally, Elsewhere: A Memoir is an indictment of a mother who demanded and received her long-suffering son’s attention whenever she wanted it, right up until her death and often at the expense of his marriage and family.

From the time Russo’s mother insisted on joining him when he went to college from Gloversville (“a place that’s easy to joke about unless you live there”), until she died, her yearning was always to be “elsewhere.” And her too-devoted-for-his-own-good son was always there to pack, ferry, and make it happen for her. He was even her regular grocery-shopping chauffeur. Because, as she constantly reminded him: “There was only one person in the whole world who really cared about her, who understood and could help her, and that was me.”

Unfortunately, what’s clear in this memoir—but what its author never quite seems to grasp—is that there was only one person in the world she cared about. Herself.

From early on, he wondered how much of a burden he was to his mother, who, he suspected, “if she hadn’t been saddled with me,” would much rather be out having fun.

Apart from foisting all of her neuroses onto her overly devoted son, she was, he says, forever misjudging “not just distance and direction but the sturdiness of the barriers erected between her and what she so desperately desired. I should know. I was one of them”.

How the author’s wife, Barbara – despite her own forebodings — put up with it all beats me.

At one time, early in their marriage, the couple were living in a cramped mobile home in a trailer park and still this selfish woman imposed herself on them.

“Each night there were three of us at the dinner table, but mostly my mother talked to me as if Barbara wasn’t there. It was almost as if she’d forgotten I was married . . . ,” he writes.

Bull.

She hadn’t forgotten at all.

In case readers misunderstand, Russo assures us (himself?) that his mother didn’t dislike Barbara; in fact, he explains, she often thanked her for sharing her home.

“It was my wife’s existence she couldn’t account for, as if she were a hologram.”

As for the author: “Ricko-Mio,” his mother would tell him. “Always there. Always my rock.”

Far from being helpless, she seems to have been a mistress of manipulation, pulling the strings of her own parents when they were alive, controlling her son through her mind games.

Russo’s (absent) father was the only one who seemed to have her measure. She’s crazy, he told the author when he was 21. Initial anger turned to relief, he recalls, “and, finally, I felt guilty. That I’d come to the same heartless conclusion as my father was a terrible betrayal, surely.”

By then I wanted to slap the blinkered wimp.

“Over the years, as she wove herself more deeply into the fabric of our married lives, my wife also came to understand that I was aiding and abetting her demons. In fact, she warned me of this repeatedly, for all the good it did her.”

Even when he finally recognises himself as her principal enabler — far too late in his mother’s life and his, too, I’d say — it’s pretty clear he’d do it all again.

His memoir, Russo admits, is far more his mother’s story than his. Unfortunately, her overwhelming anxieties and demands, forced on to him during her life, seem to consume him still, even after her death.

Moving?

At times.

Hilarious?

Never.

Elsewhere: A Memoir by Richard Russo is published by Knopf

Stevie Godson is a columnist for South African newspaper the Daily Dispatch, a copy editor and a former books page editor.

Reviewed for New York Journal of Books by Stevie Godson

AN ELDERLY actor explores the nature of memory as he reminisces about the two great events of his life: his seduction at age 15 by a 35-year-old housewife, and the loss, by suicide, of his only daughter.

Sadly, the most extraordinary aspect of Man Booker prizewinner John Banville’s latest book—its pungently honest sex scenes—are ruined by what they actually portray. For as refreshing in their difference as the down-to-earth descriptions would have been had they taken place between two adults, there is no escaping what they actually are: paedophilia wrapped up in fancy words. Or rather, as the somewhat pretentious Mr Banville would probably term it, hebephilia.

And just because being seduced by an older woman is probably the dream of many – if not most – 15-year-old boys, that doesn’t make it right. The fact that he’s only a year away from the age of consent doesn’t, either—otherwise we may as well say 14 doesn’t matter because 15 is just around the corner. And then, at 13, surely 14 is only a hormone-ridden hop away?

There is a legal line and this tale, with absolutely no angst or apology, crosses it.

Apart from the shame of being found out, the legality of it all seems of not much consequence to the protagonists except once, when the now-adult Alex asks himself: “Was she guilty of rape, if only in the statutory sense?” And “Can a woman be a rapist, technically? By taking to bed a 15-year-old boy and a virgin, to boot, I imagine she would have been legally culpable to a serious degree.”

That Mrs Gray, as the boy refers to her throughout their “affair”, realises what she’s doing cannot be in much doubt, either: “What am I going to do with you,” she murmurs at one point. “—You’re not even shaving yet!”

To Alex’s (adult) embarrassment, he even seems to recall crying out “Mother” during the throes of their passion.

As for him, “I thought her quite old—she was the same age as my mother, after all.” He wondered what she could possibly see in him, a “maculate, ill-barbered and far from fragrant” boy.

There is no titillation to be found here, though, in spite of the book’s main theme.

If, on the other hand, the awkward truths of coupling are of interest, rather than the airbrushed, perfect bodies of pornography, they’re told with an often aching honesty:

“I would lie with my cheek resting on her midriff . . . and in my ear the pings and plonks of her innards at their ceaseless work of transubstantiation.”

There’s no gloss or improbable glamour: “A memory of her, a sudden image coming back unbidden . . . A thing she used to wear, called a half-slip, I believe . . .would leave, when she had taken it off, a pink weal where the elastic waistband had pressed into the pliant, silvery flesh of her belly and flanks, and, though less discernibly, at the back, too, above her wonderfully prominent bum with its two deep dimples and the knubbled, slightly sandpapery twin patches underneath, where she sat down.”

Apart from the paedophile subject matter, pretentiousness is Banville’s other major sin, especially the use of what author and professor of English Ben Yagoda describes as needlessly obscure adjectives, or “NOAs” (When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It). It’s a device so overused by Banville that, in the end, it simply smacks of an apparent need to show his audience how very smart he is.

So Alex the boy has “horrent” hair; a story weaves a “mephitic” spell; there is an “imbricated”  array of banana sandwiches; children stand around in “leporine” uncertainty; the little town in which they live is a “panopticon”; the boys are “homunculoid”; Alex remembers “caducous” leaves; and yet it was a “tumid” summer; and on and on, ad nauseum.

Apparently, Banville writes crime novels under the nom de plume Benjamin Black because, he told Britain’s Guardian newspaper: “. . . being John Banville I absolutely hate” as it is Banville’s stated ambition to give his prose “the kind of denseness and thickness that poetry has.”

“On a good day, Banville can’t write more than 400 words, but they are all in more or less the right order. With Black it’s 10 times more,” he says.

I’m not surprised.

Ancient Light by John Banville is published by Knopf.
(Stevie Godson is a columnist for South African newspaper the Daily Dispatch, a copy editor and a former books page editor.)

… How to Avoid Unplanned and Unwanted Grammar Errors
by Jenny Baranick

Reviewed for New York Journal of Books by Stevie Godson

With the current upsurge in popularity of salacious fiction, thanks largely to the stratospheric sales of “mommy porn” series 50 Shades of Grey — not to mention its myriad copycat offspring all skulking around like perverts at a hookers’ convention — the timing probably couldn’t be better for a “sexy” grammar book.

It’s a subject that has been, up to now, only sexy — if that could ever be the right word — for a relatively few word nerds (like this reviewer!) So few, in fact, that it seems even author Jenny Baranick isn’t seduced by it, despite her attempts to prove otherwise.

“My students think I love grammar,” she explains. “That just says one thing to me: I chose the wrong profession — I should have been an actress. I don’t love grammar. Loving grammar is like loving oatmeal. It’s no three-cheese omelette, but it’s good for us.”

And perhaps that’s why her efforts just don’t work. As far as this book goes, Ms Baranick’s a self-confessed imposter — and it shows.

A teacher of English composition, critical thinking, and a remedial English class called Writing Skills at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, the author says she is consistently shocked at the poor grammar of her students, which is apparently why, in January 2010, she started her popular Missed Periods and Other Grammar Scares blog.

As she points out: “…our writing is our first impression. People read our resumés, cover letters, proposals, and e-mails, and that’s the basis on which we are judged first. If our writing is full of grammar and punctuation errors, even though the content may be great, it’s like wearing a beautifully made Prada dress that has deodorant stains.”

The book covers the grammar basics and not much more, and that’s okay — it makes no claim to do more — but where it falls apart completely is in the author’s dogged adherence to her shaky premise.

The result is embarrassing.

First up are confusing words, and Baranick lists what she calls “The Dirty Dozen”. First of those are the words “lose” and “loose”.

“What do Arnold Schwarzenegger, Anthony Weiner, Tiger Woods, David Letterman, Jesse James, Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Jon Gosselin, Ryan Phillippe, Mel Gibson and Hugh Grant have in common,” she asks.

“They’re all men and they’re all cheaters.”

But females must cheer up, she entreats, “the gender cheating gap is closing. Women are reportedly cheating almost as much as men. Isn’t that great news? I love equality”.

Not only that, she explains at length, it all helps to understand why people mix up the two words, more particularly why they overuse “loose”.

“Now it makes sense. Because everyone is so sexually loose, they are subconsciously  expressing it when they write.”

Really?

I don’t think so.

Apostrophes, em dashes, ellipses, and all the other basic grammatical stumbling blocks get the same tacky treatment as Baranick contrives one cringeworthy analogy after another.

“If I could change one thing about myself, what would it be,” she asks at one point, and then chastises herself for choosing green eyes, longer eyelashes and a flawless complexion ….

“Wait a minute! I should be ashamed of myself. All of these changes are so superficial. If I could change something on the inside, I would remove the part of my brain that can’t help but associate Richard Gere with gerbils.

“For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, several years ago there was a rumour…You know what? Never mind. I am not going to tarnish your Richard Gere experience….He deserves more than being known as the gerbil guy.”

And then (lest you still didn’t get it): “When I think about Richard Gere, I can’t help but simultaneously think about the colon.”

Come on! Does Baranick seriously expect us to believe that this is a constant, embedded thought that she’d have excised if she could, rather than just a pathetically weak excuse to link the punctuation mark to its anatomical namesake and give readers something to snigger about?

The book’s marketing material describes it as edgy and entertaining . . . in the spirit of the bestselling Eats, Shoots & Leaves, and adds that grammar has finally let its hair down, giving us laugh-out-loud, “dare we say, a little risqué” advice:

“By spreading her remarkably user-friendly and hilarious approach to grammar, she hopes everyone will experience the satisfaction of a properly placed comma, a precisely used semicolon, and a correctly deployed en dash.”

A worthy aim, but Baranick would have been better off using a softer approach: a feather to tickle our funny bones instead of a sledgehammer to batter her message home.

Reviewer Stevie Godson is a columnist for South African newspaper the Daily Dispatch, a copy editor and a former books page editor.

A novel by Carolyn Wall

Reviewed for New York Journal of Books by Stevie Godson

Lies, lust, and betrayal form the backbone of this Southern story.

More Fried Green Tomatoes than Gone with the Wind, Playing with Matches is, of course, neither. But it is a quintessentially Southern novel populated by quintessentially Southern people who somehow manage to make their “sins”—as universal as they are—seem quintessentially Southern, too. And therein lies much of the book’s magnetism.

When we discover, right at the start, that Miss Jerusha Lovemore, who lives on Potato Shed Road in the Mississippi town of False River, once worked for a chicken circus, the bait—for those of us who love this colorful genre—is already cast.

But of course, it can’t be tied to just any old Southern hook. The writing must flow, the characters must resonate and there must be enough believable quirks and idiosyncrasies to summon up the authentic rhythms of a small town somewhere south of north. It’s something author Carolyn Wall, whose first novel, the equally Southern Sweeping Up Glass won all sorts of accolades and awards, manages masterfully.

By the time, only a few pages in, we learn that the main character, Clea Shine, was born on her mama’s kitchen table “so as not to ruin the sheets upstairs”, we’re already noodling for catfish.

Clea, she tells us herself, only lived in her maternal home for an hour and 10 minutes. It took that long for her mama to get off the table, clean herself up and step into her high heels. “Then she carried me, in a wicker basket, over to Jerusha’s.”

Not that Clea’s mama was too weak and helpless to look after a baby. Fact is, she was so tireless she could drink, dance and laugh all night, and did - mainly with the prison guards from across the way.

That Clea is loved by her stern, black surrogate mother is never in doubt, but the proximity of her “glamorous” white trash birth mother at times puts an almost unbearable strain on her loyalties.

Growing up, “when I felt truly lost—which was most of the time”, says Clea, “I went out to the narrow lot and sat down in the weeds. From there I could observe both houses. After all, I had two eyes, didn’t I? Two nostrils, two arms, two knobbly knees.

“The trouble was, I had only one heart.”

It’s a situation ripe for a tragedy which can only be solved as a grown-up Clea seeks to find her way out of one betrayal too many and back into the life of the one person who truly knows her.

… by Ami McKay

Reviewed for New York Journal of Books by Stevie Godson

“I am Moth, a girl from the lowest part of Chrystie Street, born to a slum-house mystic and the man who broke her heart.”

So begins Ami McKay’s absorbing and occasionally distressing tale of a 12-year-old battling to survive in the filthy tenements of 19th century lower Manhattan.

Neglected by a mother whose own life has been a litany of sorrows, Moth is sweetly sly, though chaste, and while urchins are easy pickings, “… I hadn’t given up anything to anyone yet. I hadn’t had my first blood or my first kiss … I understood (as most girls in my circumstances did) that I could, if careful, get quite a lot from a man  ….”  For a stroke from his rough hand across her cheek, for example, Mr Godwin the grocer would, on occasion, give her half-a-dozen eggs instead of the three or four her mother’s pennies would buy.

Eventually sold into servitude by her mother, the physical cruelty Moth suffers at the hands of her sadistic mistress forces her to run away. Unable to return home, she’s rescued from the streets by 15-year-old “almost whore” Mae and introduced to Miss Everett, whose “Infant School” she is soon invited to join.

But Moth is no infant – and this is no regular school.

According to an article in New York’s Evening Star of October 15, 1871, such “Infant Schools”, with girls as young as 11 living in them, are springing up all over Gotham City. Raised by worldly matrons, the girls are pampered and groomed until — certified “virgo intacta” – their services are sold to wealthy “gentlemen”.

In Miss Everett’s school, the wealthy clients are monitored, too. There’s no chance, insists Miss Everett, that any of her girls will fall prey to someone seeking the shocking so-called “virgin cure.” In any case, she avers, “the notion that a man can be cured of French pox or any other disease by laying with a virgin is preposterous. And it’s nothing but a thorn in the sides of all who wish to protect young girls and raise them up right … I keep my girls safe.”

As does Dr Sadie, a physician who takes Moth under her wing as she tries to  persuade her to leave the relative safety of Miss Everett’s whorehouse before it’s too late.

Despite such sensitive subject matter, the tale of Moth and her friends, whose only sin – as well as their only chance of escape from the mean streets – is that they are girls, is told with elegant restraint.

Stevie Godson is a columnist for South African newspaper the Daily Dispatch, a former books page editor, and a copyeditor. In South Africa, where she lives, the myth of the “virgin cure”, especially as a “treatment” for Aids, is still known to exist.

WELL, I’ll be darned. While I thought Kindles and other e-readers were all about convenience, space and portability, others are not so high-minded. In fact, I’ve just discovered the devices could well be the reason for the sudden upsurge in what’s been called “mommy porn” – with one book in particular leading the charge.

Fifty Shades of Grey, a gasping tale of badly written S&M “erotic romance” by one EL James, is apparently such a runaway success with middle-aged moms that it’s about to be made into a film, according to America’s National Public Radio. And, apparently, it’s mostly thanks to the advent of devices like the Kindle, which mean no one can see what you’re reading ….

Having taken a peek on amazon.com to see what all the fuss is about, I can tell you the writing’s truly dire – “the real heart-fail is that I don’t know if he is truly capable of love”, etc – the names are corny, with a “heroine” called Anastasia Steele whose lover is named Christian Grey (get it?), but the tale is apparently really rude.

I decided to see if this secret side of e-reading really was a trend or just a marketing ploy for the book, only to discover that, according to the Guardian’s Antonia Senior, phenomenal e-book sales are definitely being driven by “downmarket” fiction.

“Kindle-owning bibliophiles are furtive beasts,” avers Antonia. “Their shelves still boast classics and Booker winners. But inside that plastic case, other things lurk. Sci-fi and self-help. Even paranormal romance, where vampires seduce virgins and elves bonk trolls …. There is a literary snobbishness at play here, clearly. Reading has always been a competitive  sport. Why else would anyone have read Ulysses?”

Good grief! It could make for a whole new way of vetting potential friends or lovers, couldn’t it? No longer is a furtive scan of their bookshelves enough to check out whether they’re right for you. You’ll have to demand to see what’s on their e-readers.

My own Kindle collection must make for very dull reading by these new standards. Typical of the 76 titles stowed on my favourite toy are The Man Who Planted Trees; Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the 20^th Century’s Biggest Bestsellers; and Madame Bovary.

The “raciest” — only in the sense that one of the characters races around in a Cadillac — is probably Elvis and the Dearly Departed, a silly but strangely absorbing murder mystery which I bought because of its quirky title and first line: “Elvis has just peed on my shoes, which is my life in a nutshell.”

Elvis, in case you’re wondering, is a dog.

Of course, now that I think about it, there are other unexpected consequences of the advent of the e-reader, too.

As website cracked.com points out, you can’t hide a gun in a Kindle, you can’t doodle on it while you’re reading, and you can’t perform other important tasks with it, like stabilising a table, killing a spider or breaking up a cat fight. – Stevie Godson

 (A version of this column first appeared in the Daily Dispatch)