MISCELLANEOUS

1. Miranda Ionson has started a great little flower company in Toronto called MirandaBlooms. If you need to order flowers, I highly recommend her services. You can contact her at 416.686.6547 or mirandablooms@sympatico.ca.

2. The Toronto International Film Festival schedule is out. Can't wait to use my ten film pass.

3. The Red Sox are barely hanging on.


Cottage season is almost over.

WORDS
from The New Yorker

Turn to page 1,850 of the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia and you’ll find an entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a fountain designer turned photographer who was celebrated for a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes titled “Flags Up!” Mountweazel, the encyclopedia indicates, was born in Bangs, Ohio, in 1942, only to die “at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.”

If Mountweazel is not a household name, even in fountain-designing or mailbox-photography circles, that is because she never existed. “It was an old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect your copyright,” Richard Steins, who was one of the volume’s editors, said the other day. “If someone copied Lillian, then we’d know they’d stolen from us.”

So when word leaked out that the recently published second edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary contains a made-up word that starts with the letter “e,” an independent investigator set himself the task of sifting through NOAD’s thirty-one hundred and twenty-eight “e” entries in search of the phony. The investigator first removed from contention any word that was easily recognized or that appears in Webster’s Third New International; the remaining three hundred and sixty words were then vetted with a battery of references.

Six potential Mountweazels emerged. They were:

earth loop—n. Electrical British term for GROUND LOOP.
EGD—n. a technology or system that integrates a computer display with a pair of eyeglasses . . . abbreviation of eyeglass display.
electrofish—v. [trans.] fish (a stretch of water) using electrocution or a weak electric field.
ELSS—abbr. extravehicular life support system.
esquivalience—n. the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities . . . late 19th cent.: perhaps from French esquiver, “dodge, slink away.”
eurocreep—n. informal the gradual acceptance of the euro in European Union countries that have not yet officially adopted it as their national currency.

The six words and their definitions were e-mailed to nine lexicographical authorities. Anne Soukhanov, the U.S. General Editor of Encarta Webster’s, was the first to weigh in. “Ess-kwa-val-ee-ohnce—I want to pronounce it in the French manner—is your culprit,” she said. Six other experts also fingered “esquivalience,” citing various rationales. “It’s just trying a little too hard,” said Wendalyn Nichols, the editor-in-chief of the newsletter “Copy Editor” and a onetime editorial director of Random House Reference. “If it’s derived from esquiver, it wouldn’t have that ending. Nothing linguistically would give rise to the ‘l.’ ” The Times’ crossword-puzzle editor, Will Shortz, explained, “I simply can’t believe such a thing goes back to the nineteenth century.” Steve Kleinedler, a senior editor of the American Heritage Dictionary, said, “The stress pattern is strange.” The most personal of the rationales belonged to Eli Horowitz, an editor of the literary anthology “The Future Dictionary of America,” who complained, “I had to read it a few times, and I resent that.”

There were two dissenters among the experts. “ ‘Esquivalience’ is too elaborate,” said Sidney Landau, the author of “Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography” and the editor of the Cambridge Dictionary of American English. “If someone made that up, they’re nuts.” Landau chose “ELSS,” he said, “for the simple reason that it’s short. A dictionary wouldn’t want to waste more than a line or two.” Meanwhile, Garret Thomson, a self-described “code monkey,” or programmer, for Pseudodictionary.com, a site that calls itself “the dictionary for words that wouldn’t make it into the dictionaries,” picked “electrofish,” calling it “clunky-sounding.”

A call was placed to Erin McKean, the editor-in-chief of the second edition of NOAD. Upon being presented with the majority opinion, McKean confirmed that “esquivalience” was a fabricated word. She said that Oxford had included it in NOAD’s first edition, in 2001, to protect the copyright of the electronic version of the text that accompanied most copies of the book. “The editors figured, We’re all working really hard, so let’s put in a word that means ‘working really hard.’ Nothing materialized, so they thought, Let’s do the opposite.” An editor named Christine Lindberg came up with “esquivalience.” The word has since been spotted on Dictionary.com, which cites Webster’s New Millennium as its source. “It’s interesting for us that we can see their methodology,” McKean said. “Or lack thereof. It’s like tagging and releasing giant turtles.”

As for “esquivalience”’s excesses, McKean made no apologies. “Its inherent fakeitude is fairly obvious,” she said. “We wanted something highly improbable. We were trying to make a word that could not arise in nature.” Indeed, “esquivalience,” like Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, is something of a maverick. “There shouldn’t be an ‘l’ in there. It should be esquivarience,” McKean conceded. “But that sounds like it would mean ‘slight differences between racehorses.’ ”

MUSIC

Some excellent records have come out recently:

The Super Furry Animals
New Pornogrpaphers
Sufjan Stevens

Look for the Iron & Wine/Calexico EP, Broken Social Scene, and Band retrospective too.


Model airplanes...Union Station. Chicago, Ill.


Power farming displaces tenants...Texas Panhandle. 1938.


Farmer and sons...dust storm, Cimarron County, Oklahoma. 1936.

RECOUP

I apologize for the delay. The hot summer cycle of work --> play sports --> go to the cottage has had a deleterious impact on my blog output. I am hoping to relaunch this page with more mp3s and photographs and a new address, but that won't be until the fall.

In the meantime,

Favourite Songs of the Summer 2005

Box of Rain - Grateful Dead
Broken Drum (Boards of Canada mix) - Beck
7/4 (Shoreline) - Broken Social Scene
Dead Man's Will - Iron&Wine/Calexico
Escarpment Blues - Sarah Harmer
Gong Endir - Sigur Ros
Ring of Fire - Johnny Cash
The Outsiders (alternate mix) - REM
We will become silhouettes - The Shins
4% Pantomime - The Band
Mr. Ambulance Driver - Flaming Lips
The Sound of Settling - Death Cab for Cutie
Fix you - Coldplay
Cold Wind/Brazil - The Arcade Fire
Casimir Pulaski Day - Sufjan Stevens
Pressure Point - The Zutons
Without Rings - Neil Young

Reading List

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Liars and Saints by Maile Meloy (Tolstoy was wrong. Happy families are not all happy in the same way, and unhappy families do not necessarily live out their lives in finely nuanced, but fascinatingly differentiated, morsels of misery. Most families, as Maile Meloy demonstrates in this powerful first novel, swing between one state and the other in a tangled knot of pleasure, pain and disappointment.)

Films Seen and Enjoyed

Read reviews here. I actually haven't seen many this summer, but look forward to the Film Festival.

Look at Me
Wedding Crashers
Broken Flowers
The Aristocrats
Grizzly Man

(New yorker) In “Grizzly Man,” which opens August 12th, the indefatigable Werner Herzog has made a brilliant documentary about an American saint and fool—a man who understands everything about nature except death. This innocent is one Timothy Treadwell, a college athlete from Long Island who dropped out of school after an injury, failed as an actor, and became a California surfer who drank too much. He was a routine product of American dislocation—a washout, even—until the moment in 1989 when he had an epiphany in Alaska. Up there in the wilds, Treadwell fell in love with the enormous grizzlies that come down from the mountains in the warm weather, when the salmon are running. Starting in 1992, and for a dozen summers after that, he lived among the animals in the Katmai National Park and Preserve, almost always alone, and always without a weapon. His special province was a densely shrubbed plot of land—the Grizzly Maze, he called it—which he turned into a private petting zoo. He gave the animals—many of them weighing seven or eight hundred pounds, and outfitted with claws like yellow scythes—such names as Mr. Chocolate and Aunt Melissa, stroked their noses with his hand, and reigned in this peaceable kingdom as a kind of benevolent god. In his own eyes, he was protecting the bears from poachers and from the indifference of the park service. Treadwell was a fearless man, who could face down an enraged animal with a pointed finger and the words “Don’t you do that. I love you.” He was also an implacable cornball and sentimentalist, a celebrator of nature and of himself, who was capable of rhapsodizing over a steaming pile of bear droppings, which he insisted on calling poop. His Dr. Doolittle act worked extremely well, right up to the moment when it stopped working at all. In October, 2003, Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were attacked and devoured by a hungry long-nosed grizzly that either came down from the mountains late or lingered after the other bears had left.

We know all this because Treadwell, a media-type guy, had a digital video camera with him during his last five summers in Alaska and shot a hundred hours of footage, which, after he died, fell into the eager hands of Werner Herzog. The great German filmmaker interviewed some of Treadwell’s adoring friends and ex-girlfriends; he also talked to a variety of local naturalists and park-service officers, most of whom thought that Treadwell “stepped over the line” that separates humans from animals. Herzog then wove the “found” footage into a startling meditation on innocence and nature. Narrating in his extraordinary German-accented English, Herzog is fair-minded and properly respectful of Treadwell’s manic self-invention. He even praises Treadwell as a filmmaker: as Treadwell stands talking in the foreground of the frame, the bears play behind him or scoop up salmon in sparkling water; in other shots, a couple of foxes leap across the grass in the middle of a Treadwell monologue. The footage is full of stunning incidental beauties.

In a way, “Grizzly Man” is the ultimate nature documentary, for it chronicles the nature of man as well as the nature of animals. Herzog, investigating Treadwell’s earlier life, interprets him as a spiritually chaotic outcast from civilization, an impatient misfit who relieved his misanthropy with neurotic protestations of love in the wilderness. As Herzog frames it, the entire movie is a very dark joke. Yet there’s an element in the comedy which Herzog may not have intended: the contrast between the self-dramatizing American, with his naïve egotism and optimism, and the hyper-cultivated European, who brings his own burden of despair to nature. Whereas the tormented Treadwell longs for harmony and doesn’t seem to understand that death is at the center of any ecological balance, Herzog sees nothing but death. Looking into the eyes of a bear that comes close to Treadwell’s camera, he discerns cruelty and mercilessness rather than hunger. Neither man, it seems, is willing to admit that a bear is a bear is a bear.

What else is great about the summer?

Corn on the cob
Baseball on the radio (Jerry Howarth in particular)
Swimming in the lake ("Have you done this lately? It's just like jogging, except in water, basically horizontal, arguably more refreshing, more tiring, wetter, there's that, often requiring eye protection, and leading to the possibility of Marco Polo. You can't listen to your iPod, but you can lean on the side when you're finished and look up at the sky and shake the water off your face and float. Different density than air. That's nice.")
Tennis outside
White wine
Canoeing
Kayaking
Reading on a deck chair
Naps