Posts tagged fully booked

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
by Lynne Truss

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
     “Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
     “I’m a panda,” he says at the door. “Look it up.”
     The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
     “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

This joke, which appears right at home as a filler on a page of Reader’s Digest and hardly calls for a round of badum tish, has become a classic illustration of the importance of correct punctuation since the publication of the bestselling book that made it famous several years ago. The book in question is Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. “So, punctuation really does matter,” the book says, “even if it is only occasionally a matter of life and death.”

I’m a self-styled grammar and punctuation stickler, but I’ll be the first one to admit that the chances of a black-and-white, primarily herbivorous bear-like animal entering your business establishment or even your home, eating your burger and fries, firing gunshots in the air, then exiting as though what it just did was perfectly normal on account of an extraneous comma in a reference book that transformed a pairing of a simple present tense transitive verb (eats) and its noun-phrase direct compound object (shoots and leaves) into a series of simple present tense habitual verbs (eats, shoots and leaves) are practically nil. Translation: Don’t panic. Unless pandas stop being complacent and go beyond cutely eating bamboo shoots and leaves and cutely sneezing to their mothers’ surprise in YouTube videos by developing the advanced facility to read and the even more advanced ability to recognize ambiguities caused by grammatical faux pas, we don’t have to worry about them taking our favorite food and endangering our precious lives. But I stand firm like the sarcasm-denoting temherte slaq (although I’m in no way being sarcastic) in supporting Truss’s (yes, that’s an apostrophe and an s) proposition that we pay attention every now and then if not ideally all the time to proper grammar and punctuation. I told you I’m a stickler.

“Sticklers, unite!” is Truss’s battlecry, and its reverberations are felt throughout the book. She is, of course, calling for grammatical sticklers like her to band together and counter the decline of punctuation, which may or may not be the decline of civilization itself. For those who don’t know what a grammatical stickler is, Truss gives a pretty accurate definition:

Grammatical sticklers are the worst people for finding common cause because it is in their nature (obviously) to pick holes in everyone, even their best friends. Honestly, what an annoying bunch of people.

Indeed, Truss, not unlike her stickler friends (myself included), can be so annoying and ruthless as to say,

To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as “Thank God its Friday” (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive “its” (no apostrophe) with the contractive “it’s” (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a simple Pavlovian “kill” response in the average stickler.

Apparently, I’m no average stickler, or else I’d be guilty of multiple homicide. Thank God.

With playful chapter titles like “That’ll Do, Comma” and “Cutting a Dash,” Truss puts forth both a brief history of punctuation and a straightforward punctuation guide in Eats, Shoots & Leaves. She considers, not without humor and self-reference, the versatile apostrophe (which greengrocers tend to violate in their signs for “FRESH FRUIT AND VEGETABLE’S”), the ubiquitous comma (whose appearance has been likened by Nicholson Baker to “the pedals of grand pianos, mosquito larvae, paisleys, adult nostril openings, the spiralling decays of fundamental particles, the prows of gondolas”), the intoning question mark (of which Gertrude Stein was not a fan), and the snooty semicolon (which Donald Barthelme thought was “ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly”), among other common punctuation marks. She also mentions the rise of the punctuation mark-based emoticon and, in the manner of Roger Ebert pointing the finger on the growing popularity of e-books for what he perceives as the present generation’s underappreciation of The Great Gatsby and 10,000 Jokes, Toasts and Stories (It took me great restraint not to put an Oxford comma between Toasts and and.), says that the Internet—you know, that place with all the grammatically challenged but deadly cute feline creatures—and text messaging are partly responsible for the widespread mistreatment of the subtle art of punctuation.

Truss is a prolific print and broadcast journalist hailing from England, and Eats, Shoots & Leaves is decidedly British, retaining its British English conventions in its American edition. But Truss, rather scathingly, makes sure to point out a few important differences between American and British English punctuation terms and rules, with which the very British Lord Voldemort himself agrees:

You say “parentheses” while we say “brackets”—but to people who call an apostrophe “one of them floating comma things” it doesn’t matter very much. They are unlikely to spot that American usage interestingly places all terminal punctuation inside closing quotation marks, while British usage sometimes “picks and chooses”. (Like that.)

All the same, whether you’re on this side of the Atlantic or that, whether you’re inclined to write, “A woman, without her man, is nothing,” or “A woman: without her, man is nothing,” and whether you uphold the Oxford comma or not, there’s something to like about and plenty to learn from Truss and her trigger-happy panda.

Light Boxes
by Shane Jones

It’s not discombobulating so much as overwhelming. In Shane Jones’s debut novel slash fable slash collection of fragments, February not only refers to a month but also to a man, not only to a man but also to a mental state, not only to a mental state but also to a multitude of other similar metaphors. Often, it’s all of these at once, and the effect is not discombobulating so much as overwhelming.

February—in this sentence or in any of the succeeding sentences or in any of the many sentences in the book that succeed at effecting in the reader simultaneous confusion and amazement, whether the word specifically means a month, a man, a mental state, or a multitude of metaphors, is in the long haul not a matter of utmost import—has outstayed its welcome for at least three hundred days in a town that by Jones’s sporadic direct descriptions appears to be a cross between a Seussian village and a set straight out of a Henry Selick production. The town would have had its “mountains on top of mountains” blanketed with arcadian contentment and its idiosyncratic inhabitants filled with the most simple joy of, among many others, flying kites were it not for February’s cruel decision to overstay. But what’s the deal with February anyway? He wants to stay a while longer, and by “a while” it means three hundred days or more. So what? The town, you see, is also very likely located in the Northern Hemisphere, that part of the world where February is synonymous to winter, and now you see February take on another form: not an entire season so much as a climate, one of cold and darkness, one of gloom and desperation.

If winter is indeed nature’s way of saying, “Up yours,” then in the novel February is practically giving the townspeople the finger. He is something of a meteorological tyrant. He loathes anything that flies and hates the very idea of flying with a passion so burning, obviously from being phenomenally cold, that he wants anything that flies banned and the very idea of flying eliminated. He enlists a band of residents obsequious enough to help him enforce his law: “They confiscated textbooks, tore out pages about birds, flying machines, Zeppelins, witches on brooms, balloons, kites, winged mythical creatures. They crumpled up paper airplanes the children had folded, and they dumped the pages into a burning pit in the woods. […] Some of the priests felt tears roll down their cheeks but didn’t feel sadness.” Such horrifying deeds must be at least explained if not completely justified. Surely February has his reasons for enlisting priests, of all people, for his army of law enforcers and above all for punishing a town where people just want to fly kites?

February does have his reasons. Jones just chooses not to divulge them right away because February chooses not to divulge them right away (hint, hint), and it’s not until just past the halfway point of the novel that a straightforward clue about February’s intentions for cursing the town with never-ending winter as well as about the why and wherefore of the novel itself is given in the form of a list of “Artists Who Created Fantasy Worlds to Try and Cure Bouts of Sadness,” which includes J.K. Rowling and the creator of MySpace as well as postmodern literary heavyweights such as Richard Brautigan, author of one of the novel’s obvious inspirations, In Watermelon Sugar, and Italo Calvino, author of the seminal If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (again: hint, hint).

Suffice it to say that following February’s commandment is a war effort aimed at putting an end to the unpleasant combination of frigid weather conditions and more frigid personal dispositions brought about by February, led by an intrepid husband and father named Thaddeus and a group of bird-masked former balloonists who call themselves, whether appropriately or not remains to be seen, the Solution. What takes place thereafter is a deceptively beautiful and poignant story of family and community, of strange sentences (“I vomit ice cubes.” “Thaddeus faced the Solution, holding his basket of apples tight against his chest.”) and precious phrases (“an iceberg melting in her folded hands,” “the girl who smelled of honey and smoke”), of strife and resistance, of multiple narrators and zero quotation marks, of hope and resilience, of poetic digressions and typesetting tricks (some prefer the somewhat pejorative term, gimmicks), of yearning and loss, of creation and re-creation. It is a fairy tale playfully hiding behind a façade of metafiction (Oops. Sorry, I slipped.) supposedly about the horror of seasonal affective disorder. Hence the title, Light Boxes.

A Visit from the Goon Squad
by Jennifer Egan 

There are two paragraphs in Jennifer Egan’s new book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, that heavily hint on its fundamental theme but were not at all written by the author. One is the book’s epigraph, taken from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: “Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.” The other is a note at the back of the book regarding the typeface used, supposedly written by the book’s typesetter: “The text of this book was set in Electra, [a face that] cannot be classified as either modern or old style. It is not based on any historical model, nor does it echo any particular period or style. It […] attempts to give a feeling of fluidity and power.” These two extraneous blocks of words could not be more apt in drawing attention to the single intrinsic element of the novel contained between them that, already, unrelentingly makes its authority over the characters known to the reader page after mesmerizing page. That element is none other than time, the cruel visitor of the title as referred to in an aphorism half remembered (or perhaps wholly invented) by a character in the twilight of his life and career. “Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression?” he asks. “I’ve never heard that,” another troubled character answers. “Would you disagree?” “No.” 

In Goon Squad, time is also a prankster complicit in an elaborate trick masterminded by the book’s author herself, who goes as far as naming one of her characters after the personification of time in Greek mythology, Chronos. Egan’s novel is certainly not of the time travel science fiction sort, but its clever use of a nonlinear timeline of all-too-real events is evocative of one that is. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five quickly comes to mind. Like poor Billy Pilgrim in Vonnegut’s novel, the characters in Goon Squad are also, in a manner of speaking, “unstuck in time.” However, given that Goon Squad is decidedly non-science-fictional, they are not by nature predisposed to travel through time and randomly jump from one event in their lives to another as Billy Pilgrim insists he is. It’s Egan who does the unsticking. Although her abrupt transitions to different events, one of which happens in 1973 while another takes place in the 2020s, occasionally generate obvious and disruptive seams in the narrative, she still effectively and eloquently tells her characters’ mostly tragic stories out of sequence and convention and generously gives paragraph-long glimpses of their past and future selves. 

The novel swoops back and forth through time as it focuses on certain events in the lives of a bevy of major and minor characters created by Egan. But lest a potential reader be turned off by this unconventional chronology which some may interpret as nothing more than another unessential postmodern gimmick that requires more effort than usual, it should be noted that Egan is both considerate and smart enough to drop one or two temporal clues within each chapter of her novel, so that when, say, the central character of one chapter is said to lie about her age in her online profiles, one learns almost instantly that that chapter is set around the time of Facebook and so-called social media, i.e., the present. Most of these clues are easy enough to decipher in a jiffy, while others are less straightforward, requiring a bit of mental arithmetic and recognition of allusions to characters and occurrences in earlier and even later chapters/years. 

Among the story’s long dramatis personae, a few characters stand out and appear in two or more chapters although each is made the focus of only one. There’s Sasha, introduced in the very first chapter as nothing short of a mess: in a session with her therapist in New York City, she relates how she, while on a casual date, succumbed to another episode of kleptomania and stole a wallet in a restaurant bathroom. There’s Sasha’s boss, Bennie Salazar, divorced and all but estranged from his son, impotent and inclined to look at her assistant’s breast as some sort of a barometer for his erectile dysfunction. There’s Bennie’s brother-in-law, Jules Jones, a struggling writer imprisoned for attempting to rape a Hollywood starlet. They are but three of the twenty- or thirty-odd interconnected characters that inhabit the novel, which for all one knows is actually a short story collection that happens to employ a number of recurring characters. 

But to dismiss Goon Squad as merely a squad of short stories is to strip it of its underlying theme of redemption and reconnection. True, many of the chapters here would be right at home in the pages of The New Yorker and other high-end literary publications. Also, one is free to read the stories in no particular order, similar to putting a digital album or playlist on shuffle, perhaps cracking the book open in the middle and proceeding to read another story a couple of chapters away from the previous one, thus compounding the obliqueness of the novel’s storyline. But so long as the book is completely traversed, its grip should be easily felt and its message appreciated. 

It’s no wonder then that the book’s format resembles that of a record album. Its chapters are divided into parts A and B, clearly inspired by the A and B sides of vinyl records and audio cassettes, the analog music storage media of yore. Indeed, music, like time, plays a major role in Goon Squad. Here it serves as a sort of sanctuary to the characters. Often, it affords them, beyond the desultory trips down memory lane, a strong sense of being. Sasha writes on her list of realistic goals, “Find a band to manage” and “Practice the harp,” sandwiching “Understand the news” and “Study Japanese.” Bennie, who is in fact a record producer, is transported back to when he and his high school friends were carefree sixteen-year-olds after listening to a couple of his old favorite bands in his car. Jules gets a new lease in life and gets to cover a musician’s last tour. 

Whereas time is a goon, here (and presumably elsewhere) music is an ally, even as the latter is nothing if not for the former. Don’t records, cassettes, and CDs normally play clockwise as though to indicate the passage of time? Doesn’t the timestamp on a digital music player continue to increment even when there’s a considerably long pause in the currently playing track? And when one is made to think of a certain period, isn’t the kind of music that thrived during that period among the first things that come to one’s mind? Conversely, when one listens to an old favorite song, doesn’t one immediately think of the important events in one’s life that occurred around the time that song was released? 

Goon Squad doesn’t necessarily pose these seemingly trifling questions. Rather, what it does, after telling the stories of Sasha, Bennie, Jules, and the other musically inclined characters through a polyphonic pastiche of styles that include first-person narration, journalistic reportage, and most notably PowerPoint (yes, PowerPoint), is to make one ask oneself an important question so that one may be encouraged to take stock of one’s life so far and maintain or regain one’s purchase on it. This question echoes a line from a famous Radiohead song: “What the hell am I doing here?”

Hardcover, 288 pages. Knopf, 8 June 2010. ISBN 9780307592835. Available at Fully Booked.

It’s been a while since I last fired a series of bullets in this godforsaken Cormac McCarthy-esque landscape of a book blog, so I figured I’d post one now. Not that anyone actually noticed that it’s been a long while since nor that anyone wondered why my last couple of posts were about films based on books and not about books, period. The last unordered list I posted was of the books that I fortunately rescued from the deluge that was our fourth-floor apartment’s bathroom faucet’s totally unexpected four-in-the-morning wake-up call; the one before that was of the books I rescued from the bargain bin of Powerbooks on the first day of the bookstore chain’s crazy-amazing month-long sale; and a list before that was of the books I got from a Fully Booked branch up north where I sought refuge after I rescued myself from a literal daylight robbery near to where I usually eat fried chicken and fries. Apparently, I’m great at rescuing. And this past week saw me rescuing more books, from book sale tables and long-forgotten spots on bookstore shelves, and—again—myself, from the claustrophobic cubicle of boredom. Enter: another stack of bullet points.

• Light Boxes by Shane Jones. A slim but not inexpensive novel, which I finished while lining up for An Education at Cine Europa last Saturday night, about former balloonists waging war on the month of February. Go figure.
• Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. When I’m not busy incriminating myself on Twitter, I may be power-searching for and bidding on books on eBay. This one, purportedly containing one of the longest sentences in Western literature, is my latest catch.
• The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace. Included in the Penguin Ink series of reprints featuring cover illustrations by famous tattoo artists, this is the amazing first novel by the author of the more amazing Infinite Jest.
• The Hundred Brothers by Donald Antrim. A novel about a hundred brothers. Postmodern hilarity ensues.
• Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn & David Levithan. I first read this on my office computer, by way of a pirated e-book version which I, being an electronics engineer in a company chiefly concerned with electronics engineering, cleverly renamed, Voltage and Current Calculations. Of course I had to get the “real” version.
• Thumbsucker by Walter Kirn. A novel about “the King Kong of oral obsessives” by the author of Up in the Air.
• Money by Martin Amis. One of the two books I got for only Php50 at the National Book Store stall at the Manila International Book Fair at the SMX Convention Center in SM Mall of Asia last Saturday.
• The Tent by Margaret Atwood. The other book I got for only Php50 at the National Book Store stall at the Manila International Book Fair at the SMX Convention Center in SM Mall of Asia last Saturday.
• V. by Thomas Pynchon. V is for very rare. Also from the aforementioned book fair, but purchased at well over Php50. V is for very expensive.
• A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. A significant portion of this novel is told through a series of PowerPoint slides. Also, Egan is significantly sexy.
• The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman. For weeks I practically had to pester Fully Booked to carry copies of this book. Evidently, my pestering has come to a satisfactory conclusion.
• C by Tom McCarthy. Imported from Singapore by the lovely Ysa. Tom McCarthy, I’d like you to meet Man Booker.

Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey Through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire
by Leslie Carroll

Notorious Royal Marriages, as its mouthful of a subtitle articulates, offers a trip through almost a millennium’s worth of scandalous true stories populated by royal husbands and wives. And, boy, what an exciting trip it is. It is a book which owes its spine to the less than lovely love stories of thirty-two royal marriages told in chronological order by wedding date and marked by varying levels of spicy controversy, beginning with the ill-fated pairing of Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 1100s and concluding with the love triangle of Princess Diana, Prince Charles, and Camilla Parker Bowles, the subjects of many a paparazzi photo and much tabloid tittle tattle during the last couple of decades.

History asserts that most marriages amongst European royalty and nobility were less concerned with love than with the prospects of expanding territories, which fueled the matrimony of the above-mentioned twelfth-century couple, and prolonging dynasties, which motivated Napoleon Bonaparte to divorce Josephine when she failed to bear him a male heir. Historical nonfiction author Leslie Carroll, armed with an assortment of well-researched facts and a knack for entertaining and not at all yawn-inducing storytelling, makes good cases of this in Notorious Royal Marriages, as she reveals that although the unions of most royal couples were celebrated with grand fairy tale wedding ceremonies, their perfunctory “I do’s” actually heralded a series of unfortunate marital and extramarital events.

Quite delightfully, Notorious Royal Marriages lends weight to the lamentable and reductive age-old reflection that everyone loves a royal wedding… Everyone except for the royal couple, that is.

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Notorious Royal Marriages is available at Fully Booked, Bonifacio Global City, Taguig City.