Distracted by the bad news this weekend, I forgot to mention that my review of “txting: the gr8t db8” by David Crystal was in the LA Times on Sunday.
I looooove writing for the LA Times and this book was much fun. It’s pop-linguistics, if there is such a thing, lots of interesting factoids without the burden of too much research.
But sometimes the paper makes decisions that baffle me. After the last version of the review that I saw, every bit of copy that I had put in txtspeak — those that they hadn’t already converted to words, like “text” for “txt” — was italicized.
The whole point of the book is that using text messages is a natural part of our engagement with language. That it is a part of English, not something to be treated as a foreign language. Here’s an unitalicized paragraph, which I include here to relieve the knot forming near my left shoulder.
Text messages are not the fearsome products of limber-thumbed, anti-literate teenagers but an extension of long traditions, Crystal argues. He connects logograms like “2day” with rebuses, which date back to ancient Rome. Initialisms like IMHO (“in my humble opinion”) and JK (“just kidding”) owe a debt to, of all things, IOU. Recorded in 1618, it’s one of the earliest found in English. And while xtrctngvwlsfrm wrds may be unusual in English, it’s not in Arabic and Hebrew.
Mark Sarvas, who is a litblog friend, has published his first novel (Harry, Revised); it was reviewed in Sunday’s New York Times. Gawker characterized the review as “extraordinarily mean-spirited,” and if anyone knows mean-spirited, it’s Gawker.
I maintain that reviewers should call ‘em as they see ‘em — lord knows, someone is bound to take issue with one of my reviews some day — but I think this review was kinda cheaty.
The reviewer never quotes any passage at length, instead using itty-bitty snippets (the longest is 8 words). This can hardly represent a novel fairly. At one point, the reviewer lists seven words that he claims Sarvas uses “despite his not knowing their precise meanings.” Now since I know Mark to be an erudite man, I find this unlikely; but why not let the work speak for itself? If “enormity” is misused, please, show us how.
What’s omitted from the review is that the novel has a farcical side, and that the style — as much as it might annoy the reviewer — serves that component of the story.
A more thoughtful review is here; more comments here. And Mark answers questions from the LA Times here.
On the fair west coast, the LA Times runs my review of The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta today. The New York Times is all over this book, with a hefty (cover?) review by Liesl Schillinger, another review — by Michiko Kakutani — that ran Tuesday, plus a Perrotta profile last weekend. I admit, I wasn’t looking forward to the comparisons, but I think I came out OK here — I say The Abstinence Teacher is “a kind, gentle satire” while Michiko Kakutani calls it “sad-funny-touching.” Has she begun writing for the Lifetime TV set?
(Schillinger, on the other hand, calls Perrotta “the strong, silent type on paper.” Now that I wish I’d written.)
In other book review-laden news, Ellen Litman read here in Pittsburgh on Thursday in Squirrel Hill, the neighborhood at the center of her book The Last Chicken in America (my LA Times review). Petite and soft-spoken, she struggled to read loudly enough to satisfy the elderly audience. When one attendee’s cell phone rang the woman took it to the front of the room, answered, and carried on a leisurely conversation as Litman continued bravely reading from her story “Dancers.” Yikes. It made later questions like “Where did your sister go to middle school?” and “You speak English so well!” seem polite. But there were a few seasoned literary types in the crowd — Irina Reyn, who reviewed the book for the Moscow Times, and the legendary Bob Hoover, the man who writes about books for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Today the New York Times runs their review of Litman’s book — “warm, true and original” — by the most excellent Maud Newton.
