P R
E S S
Words Are, Like, So...
How The Evasion English Dictionary
can make you a better person
by JULIE ALBRIGHT
I've often had to talk myself
out of informing gas station attendants that "Please Pre-Pay
Before Pumping" is an annoying redundancy, so it's no wonder
that I found The Evasion English Dictionary appealing:
It's picky and potentially obnoxious to those who don't care
about the finer points of the English language, but for someone
who is it's very amusing and refreshingly intelligent -- and
in the end completely right.
The dictionary is an 87-page
guide examining the misleading, vogue throwaway words and phrases
that are part of contemporary speech. Maggie Balistreri, whose
day job copyediting the less linguistically sensitive must throw
her into fits of frothing rage, points out the weaknesses in
those seemingly insignificant extra words that pepper everyday
conversations. Instead of adding flavor, she points out, those
words actually deaden the meaning of what we're trying to say
and expose our frequent inability to articulate the truth. From
conjunctions like "because" all the way to the promiscuous
use of "you," this slim reference guide challenges
readers to say what they actually mean.
"Think of plants,"
Balistreri writes. "The plant is green because out of all
the colors in the spectrum, green is the only color that the
plant cannot absorb. In other words, it exhibits what it can't
possess." This is followed by the entry "sensitive=insensitive"
and the hilarious example, "I think that's so great that
you volunteer. I couldn't do it; it would make me cry. You have
to understand; I'm really sensitive."
Similarly, she points out how
people substitute "should" for "won't" and
gives an apt example: "Oh, you're a poet? Yeah. You know,
I really should read more poetry." Similarly, "does"
is often substituted for "doesn't": "Where I'm
from, I can leave my baby in a baby carriage outside of restaurants
and not think twice about it. I just didn't think it would be
such a problem to do the same here. I didn't know. Does that
make me a bad person?"
Balistreri theorizes that people
engage in such backward, convoluted speech because they are trying
to elicit "reassurance or sympathy about behavior that the
listener might consider stupid or unwise or even appalling."
When we're sitting eyeball-to-eyeball with a person we no longer
want to date, we just might be too wimpy to confess doubts or
place blame. That's when we'd use what Balistreri terms "the
relationship=you." As in, "Honey, we need to talk about
the relationship."
And no book of this sort would
be complete without an extensive entry devoted to the ubiquitous
"like," which Balistreri parcels into 10 separate specious
usages. There's the Undercutting Like: "Translation:
I'm not smart: I'm cool. I don't know where I picked up that
knowledge. 'That's like, an umlaut. Or something.'" There's
the Apology Like: "Translation: Sorry, I'm inarticulate.
'And I was like, wow.'" And there's the Filler Like:
"Translation: I finished my sentence. 'How could you do
that? I mean, I went out of my way to meet you there, and then
you didn't show, and you didn't even call, and it was like'..."
This book is a fun read and
Balistreri is insightful and right on target. I'm going to show
her book to my junior high writing class, specifically the musings
on the word "Duh." They'll like it, we'll laugh and
for a few minutes we'll be extra conscious of saying what we
mean. And by the time lunch is served in the cafeteria, we'll
have slipped back to our evasion English, because everyone knows
that language is too large a beast to get right every time. We
do our best, but it's like...
The
Conversation
Interview by CHRISTOPHER
DREHER
For someone who's a copy editor
by trade and a finicky linguist by nature, compiling The Evasion
English Dictionary could be a high-water mark for a career
-- a unique and humorous volume identifying and analyzing the
many useless and deflective words that make their cursed way
into our everyday speech. It's, like, in its fourth printing
now.
But for Maggie Balistreri,
seeing her avocation printed between book covers was just the
beginning. Shortly after the October 2003 publication date, she
was invited to speak on National Public Radio about the manifold
uses of the word "you" and became instantly popular,
with her book briefly climbing as high as number 19 on the Amazon
bestseller list. The Brooklyn born and bred author was invited
to do more NPR and other radio performances and suddenly people
would approach her to explain which words and phrases bothered
them, confirming her suspicion that pointing out such mal
mots is important.
Between radio appearances and
culling material for a second book on the linguistic peculiarities
of politics or media, she spent a few minutes answering some
droll questions from Pulp, which were rigorously scrutinized
and cleansed of any possible offending words or phrases beforehand.
How did you choose the words
and phrases you dissect in the book?
Different occasions suggested
different words to focus on. An interminable commute on public
transportation one morning left me no choice but to eavesdrop
on a conversation that was more than peppered with the word "like."
It was brain-numbingly MSGed with the word "like."
I got to work and squandered company time thinking about "like."
I wrote sample sentences and found that certain types of "like"
were easier for me to imitate than others, so I broke down "like"
into categories, thinking I would write about those categories,
but I love lists and figured maybe others do too. I wrote the
taxonomy of "like." It looked sufficiently absurd on
the page and sounded even sillier. I sent it off to a public
radio station here in New York, and before you know it, I was
reading the "like" piece on air.
After I read the "like"
piece in a radio studio, the producer, Gene Bryan Johnson, suggested
I check out an open mic. I did, went up there, bombed but good
and yet I liked it. I liked having three minutes to do well or
atrociously. I got a bit better eventually.
Did all this begin with
some childhood skewing of sentences and words?
I'm the kid of immigrants.
I grew up in a house full of books. Most were nonfiction, reference
books. A dictionary is still my favorite way to start studying
any subject. I primarily want to know the language of that subject.
And it makes sense that I now earn a living proofreading, since
that keeps me hunched over a dictionary for the better part of
the day.
A warped conception of Wittgenstein
in college?
I took an analytical philosophy
class at the end of my college career. When I got to the Tractatus,
my head exploded and I need to grow a new brain case. It wasn't
that I understood what I was reading. I was fascinated by the
form of the Tractatus. I loved reading what looked like a math
proof.
I worked in a bookstore during
college. I read through the modest philosophy section, pretty
much reading whichever Penguin paperback looked most fetching.
Schopenhauer, Plutarch, Epictetus, Aristotle. Then I moved on
to psychology. Adler, William James, Thomas Szasz. And I can't
not mention Erving Goffman.
Bored at a stuffy job and
pondering the real meaning of communication?
I managed to avoid the stuffy
jobs by resigning myself to near-penury. I don't sit in meetings.
That's just where I draw the line. And few people care to meet
with the proofreader. Proofreading is a great trade, honest industry.
How long did the book take
you to write? Was there a lag-time between finishing it and publication?
How did you find your publisher, Melville House?
It's hard to say how long it
took to write it because there were two rounds: writing the first
dozen entries, and then expanding the book for Melville House.
The first round was extracted from the longer manuscript, which
took a few months to write. So I wrote the manuscript, left it
alone for a couple years, and then went back and took a look
at the entries that would eventually make up the EED.
I self-published the first
dozen entries in a chapbook that I sold after readings and performances
I gave around town. After selling about 500 copies of the chapbook,
I thought I had a chance in hell of getting somebody to publish
an expanded version of the book. But it's an odd book, hard to
categorize in bookstores, so I didn't know whom to approach.
I was a daily reader of the
website MobyLives.com, and one day I realized that the MobyLives
people had begun a publishing company, Melville House. Turns
out I already owned and loved their second book, B. R. Myers's
A Reader's Manifesto. Melville House's first book was
a collection of poems about 9/11. I figured, a publishing house
that starts with a poetry book and follows it up with a well-argued,
passionate rant against pretentiousness in literature? And I've
read and heard a lot about both books? Who are these people?
So I sent Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians a copy of the
chapbook and heard back from them and the rest is a blur.
Your book seemed to garner
the type of media attention that most authors dream of. What
was your trick?
Eye of newt. That and the fact
that Dennis and Valerie are unparalleled promoters. I've worked
in publishing long enough to know that editors and publishers
have so many books to promote. Their attention is spread thinly.
I lucked out. Valerie and Dennis devote so much time to promoting
the book that I am overwhelmed with gratitude to the extent that
I find it difficult to make eye contact with them.
What advice would you give
fledgling authors, especially those that are trying to put out
creative books like yours?
Support the independent publishers.
Buy their books. Go to their author's readings. Work for them.
Read math and science books.
Read widely in a field seemingly unrelated to yours. If the writing
is precise, it's related. Write the same thing four different
ways: as a haiku, as a speech, as a young person's monologue.
Since there's plenty of advice saying, "Write what you know,"
I'll toss out an alternative: "Write to know." Make
it up. Lie to me.
And most of all, stop taking
advice. You're going to do what you're going to do.
The language of evading the issue
by BO EMERSON, February 27, 2004
Every jilted suitor who has heard the
phrase, "It's not you, it's me" knows
that it is, indeed, you.
To Maggie Balistreri, this sort of doublespeak threatens to swallow
American conversation whole.
She comes to the rescue with her book, "The Evasion-English
Dictionary" ($12.95/Melville House Publishing), a dose of
Round-Up for the kudzu-like spread of euphemistic claptrap.
"Purge from your speech that Creole of English, that pop-culture
patois, that American dodge of a dialect I call Evasion-English,"
Balistreri writes, in a man-the-barricades forward.
Yes, there is a presidential campaign under way, with its attendant
hype and mendacity. Yes, Georgia's leading educator recently
tried to replace the word "evolution" with "biological
changes over time." But Balistreri bemoans the more commonplace
evasion that saturates our everyday speech.
For example, the boss who approaches you to say "This is
hard for me, I'm going to have to let you go," begs the
question, "let me go where?"
It's not hard for her, and even if it is, who cares?
In an attempt to act concerned, the boss only can muster concern
for herself, a classic example of a formulaic phrase that signals
the opposite of its true meaning.
"I have to deliver bad news, I'm a boss, I learn the euphemism
to make it go down easier," said Balistreri. Much better,
she said, to just have out with it. "I'd rather hear the
bad news. I'm a rip the Band-Aid off gal."
Our weasely way with words is not a component of the language
itself, said Balistreri. It's more a function of our fear of
language. "When we use language to evade, what we are evading
is the language itself."
For example: Substitute the word "you" for the words
"the relationship," in the phrase "There seem
to be a lot of problems with the relationship." Then you've
gotten to the crux of the matter. The problems are with you.
"Relationship" can also mean "me," as in
"You owe it to the relationship." (Meaning:
You owe it to me.)
"I can't believe I did that. I feel so guilty," really
means, "I can't believe I did that. I am so guilty."
Balistreri's slim volume is devoted to the short words that we
typically misuse.
She finds 10 different forms of "like" --self-effacing,
cowardly, undercutting, betraying, filler and the like--and 11
forms of "whatever."
She even manages a sort of grudging respect for this Valley Girlism:
"[O]ut of all the evasions, whatever has the most
attitude. It's the Fonzie of the bunch," she writes.
In her day-job as a proof-reader, Balistreri sees plenty of quarterly
reports, medical journals and advertising copy. She often comes
away scratching her head.
An ad for a camera, for example, included the term "focus
free." Focus free, she found out, means "you are free
from worrying about focus, because it doesn't do it."
Balistreri, 32, runs the language and poetry webzine CafeMo.com.
She also is co-creator of the annual Emily Dickinson marathon,
during which a revolving crew of pronouncers take over a coffee
house and recite Dickinson's poems for 24 hours straight. She
was born in Brooklyn and now lives in Manhattan
In her "About the Author" note, she describes herself
as a "rock climber, a dirt-bike racer, and a biography embellisher."
Are we admitting to our own petty mendacity here?
"I didn't know that bio would be printed," Balistreri
claimed. "I love speed, I love motorcycles, but I promised
loved ones that I would stop."
That's not evasive, that's prudent.
by NEAL SCHINDLER, January 28-February 3, 2004
Making a name for yourself as a stickler
requires unusual style-or uncommon restraint. Miss Manners would
be nothing but an irritating nag without her legendary wit; Randy
Cohen of The New York Times "Ethicist" column
might seem a condescending prig without his unwavering neutrality.
Avenging grammarian Maggie Balistreri
is hardly short on style, but I'm not sure I'd call her Dictionary
restrained. At least her scolding rests on the soundest of ideas-like
Orwell, Balistreri contends that the decline of language degrades
us. "Change your words, I believe, and you change your deeds,"
she declares. An example: Saying "I feel unproductive"
constitutes passive whining, whereas "I am unproductive"
acknowledges behavior that needs to be remedied. Amidst the mealy-mouthed
verbiage she terms "evasion English," Balistreri reveals
a multitude of other sins that also need correcting.
For instance, here's how she parses
this (seemingly) simple sentence: "I couldn't stop crying
but I had a really good support system of friends who sat with
me and listened without judging." "Judge" has
become a dirty word, Balistreri claims, because "weighing
both sides of an issue" (its actual denotation) has been
supplanted by an accusatory, negative connotation. In the same
way, "support system" puts a positive spin on codependent
behavior-what used to be called "neediness" or "clinging"
before evasion English came to the rescue. As a result, Balistreri
suggests, one finally ought to substitute "because"
for "but"-your friends are implicitly encouraging your
tears, with nary a blunt "Snap out of it!" to be found.
Dictionary
is a slim work of sociolinguistic muckraking-a leaner, meaner
iteration of the Deborah Tannen line of self-help books. There's
something noble in Balistreri's attempt to confront us with our
everyday evasions, and her taxonomies of "like" and
"whatever"-each of which has, like, 13 different usages
these days-are good, haughty fun for the well-spoken reader.
Case in point: Among the many misuses
of "like," Balistreri translates one as: "Sorry,
I'm inarticulate" (e.g., "I was like, wow").
No doubt Nabokov is, like, rolling in his grave. Or whatever.
Montreal
Gazette
My slang was, like, so ... whatever
by LISA FITTERMAN, Monday, January 26,
2004
"Language is being passed up
from children to parents yearning to be cool."
Like, mea culpa.
I was so totally wrong when I suggested
in a recent column that my stepdaughter would have uttered the
phrase, "That is so yesterday."
She took issue with that because she'd
never say something so passé. I felt like Ted in recent
strips of Sally Forth comics, as he tries to relate to his daughter
by using outdated, embarrassing slang such as "What's up,
dawg?"
But I also feel that, this still being
a new year and all, we should try to communicate better with
the people around us, albeit sans slang. So I draw your attention
to a slim book by Maggie Balistreri called The Evasion English
Dictionary (Melville House Publishing, $19.95).
Balistreri, a performance artist, poet
and freelance proofreader, takes on the tics of contemporary
speech in both teenagers and adults, and she pens an effective
plea for a return to plain talk stripped clean of insincere blather.
In one fell and hilarious swoop, she skewers everything from
the word "whatever" to phrases such as "I see
where you're coming from" and "That's a good point,"
both of which tend to be covers for sentiments much less flattering.
Then there is her pointed deconstruction
of the word "like," which provides the centrepiece
of the volume. For she was inspired to write the book after she
overheard a teenagers' conservation on a train so replete with
the L word, it might as well have been a language all its own.
It is, she says, the English language's
very own Cuvier's bone (a reference to the theory that scientists
can construct from a single bone an entire animal) in that it
is our culture's own singular object from which "the less
sterling aspects of our character can be constructed."
And she categorizes no less than nine
different kinds of "like" that aren't recorded in any
official dictionary.
According to Balistreri, the new "like"
lexicon includes the vague like, as in "This was back in,
like, November," the self-effacing like, as in "I,
like, care about what pollution is doing to the ozone layer,"
and the insincere like, which can veer into the sarcastic like,
as in "This is, like, so not a problem."
There is the undercutting like, in which
one is reluctant to play up one's knowledge, as in "Those
are, like, the Egyptian hieroglyphics for 'Take me to your leader.'
" The inarticulate like, as in "I was, like, wow!"
is an obtuse apology for speechlessness, while the stalling like,
aka Think, Brain, Think!, could be characterized as "You're
from Canada? There's, like, snow there, right?"
And, like, it drives Balistreri up the
proverbial wall.
"Whether daft or deft, we use these
words to duck the truth," she writes.
"There is a tendency in our culture
to avoid arguing or disagreeing. It doesn't come from politeness,
it comes from vanity, or arrogance. We never want to be wrong.
And, in the process, we avoid saying anything."
Consider the following, also included
in the book: when one says "I'm not getting what I want
out of the relationship," wouldn't it be so much more effective
and honest to replace the "relationship" with "you"?
(It smacks of the birthday card I got
from He Who Must Obey, which billed itself as my "very own,
handy-dandy husband translation guide." For example, when
he says "The game's just about over," he really means
"... in about three hours." And when he says, "I'll
get right to it," he really means "... now that you've
reminded me.")
And Balistreri says the sins just keep
on coming. "Should" is often used as an evasion for
"won't," as in "I should really read more poetry,"
while "feel" is often used in place of am, as in "I
feel so responsible."
Honey, you are.
In the end, she notes that society is
being infantilized, with language passed up from children to
parents yearning to be cool in the eyes of their kids, rather
than the other way around.
"I think it is corrupt and pathetic,"
she says in no uncertain terms.
Like I said, mea culpa.
Paperback roundup by
Robert Armstrong, November
16, 2003
Maggie Balistreri offers a word lover's
guide to reality in "The Evasion-English Dictionary"
(Melville House, $12.95). She devotes 11 pages to the various
uses of the word "like," including the staller like
("Poetry? Yeah, me too. I love, like, Robert Frost")
and the betrayer like ('I was so upset I cried for, like, three
days"). She does the same for "whatever" in 12
pages. She also expounds on the use of "but" when one
means "because," as in "They drive me crazy but
my parents are very involved in my life."
My minireview, by Alex Beam,
November 13, 2003
Is Christmas inevitable? I am told that
it is. If that is the case, then you could do worse than to buy
Maggie Balistreri's ''The Evasion-English Dictionary'' as a stocking
stuffer.
Her purpose, she explains, is to translate
euphemistically evasive speech into English. Here are two examples
of the word ''should'' used as an evasion for ''won't.'' ''Oh,
you're a poet. Yeah. You know, I really should read more poetry.''
Or, ''I know I am always complaining about it. You're right.
I should look for a new job.''
Balistreri wittily suggests that the
adverb ''unfortunately'' really means, ''um, fortunately.'' Examples:
''We can't get married yet because unfortunately the band we
had our heart set on is booked solid that week.'' Or, ''I would
try for that job in a heartbeat, but unfortunately I know someone
who works there, and we do not get along at all.'' Another common
evasion is substituting the word ''feel'' for ''am.'' Her examples:
''It was all my fault. I feel so responsible.'' Or, ''I hate
myself when I do that. I can hear myself saying it, and I think,
`Oh, my God! I feel so fake.' ''
I wish only that she had included my
pet adverb ''arguably,'' the now-universal evasion for ''not.''
My example: Nicole Kidman is arguably the best actress in Hollywood.
It's, like, official: like it or not,
adults now talk more and more like their kids. Whatever
Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles,
30 November 2003
A few years ago, Maggie Balistreri
overheard a conversation on a train so ludicrously over-peppered
with the word "like" that she started taking notes.
Not "like" as in, "I like you", but rather
the irritating filler that, since the advent of the Valley Girl
in the 1980s, has become prevalent in American speech patterns.
You know, like, whatever.
Since Ms Balistreri is a performance
artist -- as well as a gifted and witty poet - she tried to reproduce
the conversation out loud once she got home, but found that some
uses of "like" were easier to emulate than others.
Soon she was categorising
different types and came up with no fewer than nine of them.
For example, the vague like ("This was back in, like, October");
the self-effacing like, where the speaker does not want to sound
too virtuous ("I, like, care about the environment and stuff");
or the betrayer like, a signpost to utter insincerity ("Oh
this is, like, so not an imposition!")
There is the undercutting
like, used to introduce some modestly uncommon piece of knowledge
without making the speaker sound too pompous ("That's, like,
an umlaut. Or something.") The apology like, where the word
acts as an admission of complete inarticulateness ("I was,
like, wow!"). Or the staller like, the verbal equivalent
of a thought bubble reading "Think, brain, think!"
(Example: "You're from Belize? That's, like... south!")
These and other uses have
just been collected in Ms Balistreri's book The Evasion English
Dictionary, which serves as a deliciously revealing catalogue
of the tics of contemporary chit-chat and also as a personal
manifesto pleading for plain, literate talk stripped of "shibboleths
of shamming ... that American dodge of a dialect I call Evasion-English".
To her, the Valley Girl talk that has now become alarmingly prevalent
among adults as well as teenagers is not just an indication of
linguistic sloppiness, but actually something more underhand.
"Whether daft or deft, we use these words to duck the truth,"
she wrote.
Again and again in the workplace - by day she is a freelance
proofreader and copy editor - she has encountered insincere blather
in the form of phrases like "I see where you're coming from",
or "It's a good point", which are just a cover for
something less flattering. "There is a tendency in our culture
to avoid arguing or disagreeing," she says. "It doesn't
come from politeness, it comes from vanity, or arrogance. We
never want to be wrong. And, in the process, we avoid saying
anything."
In her book, Ms Balistreri
identifies 11 different uses of "whatever", running
the gamut of concealed emotion from jealousy to apathy by way
of scepticism, impatience, self-pity and disapproval masquerading
as indifference.
And she has enormous fun replacing
various evasive words with ones more properly conveying the emotion
at hand. When couples refer to "the relationship",
for example, they would almost always be more honest to say "you".
As in: "I just don't feel like I'm getting what I want from
the relationship".
Her brilliant exegesis of
the word "like" remains the centrepiece of the book.
She has even performed it in public, in bars and poetry clubs
in Manhattan where she lives -- quite possibly making her the
first person to turn a dictionary into a piece of comic theatre.
She cites Cuvier's theory that from a single bone a scientist
can construct an entire animal, and suggests that "like"
is the English language's very own Cuvier's bone, "our culture's
telling trifle... from which the less sterling aspects of our
character can be constructed".
You could call her a word
shrink, someone capable of unmasking whole layers of hidden meaning
in a seemingly trifling interjection. It's a description she
relishes, because she loves to rail against the psychobabble
of self-help books and contemporary therapy which, in her view,
validate many of the linguistic evasions instead of exposing
them.
It is all part of what she
sees as the infantilisation of American society, in which linguistic
habits - along with much else -- are passed up from children
to parents, rather than the other way around. "We have a
cult of parents who want to be cool in the eyes of their kids,
so they copy the speech of the kid," she said. "I think
it is corrupt and pathetic. And with it comes inarticulate speech
because a kid isn't fully formed ... To overvalue the way a kid
speaks is a lie in itself."
by Darren Reidy, December
1016, 2003
Language barrier: Like, whatever you
say, Ms. Balistreri
Maggie Balistreri is like, mad about
the bowdlerization of American English. Think lunchroom put-down:
"I hate to say she's fat." Translation: I have to say
she's fat. Or blame ritual: "I feel so guilty," viz..,
I am guilty. Call them verbal tics, colloquialisms, or "bu(llshi)t,"
as Balistreri argues in The Evasion-English Dictionary, they
have a singular purpose: "to duck the truth." Reading
EED can be a withering experience. You (that's a "presumptuous
you") find yourself culpable every few pages. Take the ubiquitous
and polysemous like: "That was by like, Beethoven"
("the undercutting like"); "I cried for like,
three days" ("the betrayer like"). Often, the
less conspicuous dodges are the most incriminating: "Young
men are drawn to violence because Hollywood glorifies it."
Try replacing that "because" with so ("effect
turns out to be cause"). But Balistreri's not a complete
hardass. She admits that evasion can be OK when it spares someone's
feelings, and her launch party won't be a dry primer in unlearned
grammar for the "Like, Whatever" Generation. The book
itself originated in her spoken-word performances, as she sought
to imitate the telling, and often comical, banalities of speech.
Both lucid and useful, EED is also very funny. And scary. "I
was looking out the window and saw a truck pass by," she
says. "I thought it advertised what it was carrying--but
it was just a guy driving a sign around. I think the same thing
has happened to language."
 Out
There
3 Questions for Maggie Balistreri
Author, bullshit detector
1. In The Evasion-English
Dictionary, you examine the ways people manipulate language
to mask their true thoughts and motives. Why are we more likely
to say, "I'm not satisfied with the relationship"
than "I'm not satisfied with you," or "I
feel responsible for hurting you" rather than "I
am responsible for hurting you"?
We lie, we evade, and we use all of
these little niceties, but it's not as though we stop imposing
on people. We just couch it in passive-aggressive terms. We give
a speech of Ciceronian proportions apologizing for something
we did, but it doesn't mean we stop doing something wrong. We've
become so adept at the apology that it's license to continue
fucking up.
2. Would it really be
a better world if we stopped saying, "I didn't want you
to think your opinion doesn't matter" and started
saying, "I didn't want you to know your opinion doesn't
matter"?
Well, I wouldn't recommend we say whatever's
on our mind if it means incivility or selfishness. "I can't
help it, that's how I feel" is another one of my pet peeves.
Just say whatever's on your mind in the most loving way possible;
reporting a feeling isn't as important as considering what feeling
that will evoke in the listener.
3. Is it even possible
to eliminate evasion from our everyday interactions?
Sure. Some of the entries I came up
with because I would talk to somebody, walk away and think, That
was a wonderful conversation! What is it about the way he speaks?
And I realized--no evasions! And that made me understand how
many evasions there are in conversations. It's similar to the
experience of being in a restaurant, and someone switches off
the air conditioner, and it's only when you hear the switch turning
it off that you realize it had been a din all along.
--Joe Grossman
(Issue No. 424 November 1320,
2003)
Author photo © Carol Balistreri 2003
Watch what you read: C-SPAN2's weekends
belong to Book TV
Sunday, January 18, 2004
Riddle me this:
When Al Franken and Bill O'Reilly traded
insults at the booksellers' convention in Los Angeles last summer,
I was there.
When Anne Lamott encouraged writers
at a literary festival in Peoria to carry an index card in their
back pockets so they could capture those fleeting bits of overheard
dialogue, I was there.
When the ebullient author and educator
Esme Codell showed adults how to get children to love reading
-- and held her audience spellbound with her dramatic reading
of the children's book "Here Comes the Cat!" at an
Illinois bookshop -- I was there.
So, who am I, Zelda Zelig?
No, just another happy devotee of Book
TV, which for the past five years has brought the world of nonfiction
books into my living room, kitchen and bedrooms. I have cooked
dinner with Robert Caro, sorted socks with Joan Didion, painted
the woodwork with Camille Paglia.
I'm a little agog at the number of friends
and acquaintances who still respond with blank looks when I start
babbling about the bounty that is Book TV, even though it celebrated
its fifth anniversary last fall. There is intelligent life on
television, I assure them, and its name is Book TV.
From 8 a.m. Saturday until 8 a.m. Monday,
C-SPAN2 becomes Book TV, the magic carpet that has taken me to
book festivals in Miami, Harlem, Austin, Nashville, Seattle,
Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. I have sat in on rare-book auctions,
visited for hours at a time with authors whose work I've long
admired and been introduced to many more.
Like lots of working mothers with full-time
families, I can't devote as many hours to reading as I did when
I was a teenage bookworm. For me, Book TV has been the perfect
solution: a way to keep up with the world of ideas and stay on
track at home. It also helps me make decisions about what books
might be worth my time and money.
Lamott's "Bird by Bird: Some Instructions
on Writing and Life" made the cut; O'Reilly and Franken
didn't, but that hasn't kept them off the top of The New York
Times bestsellers list -- no doubt propelled in part by the fracas
covered on Book TV. It had the only cameras there when Franken
called O'Reilly a liar, O'Reilly called Franken an idiot, and
Molly Ivins tried gamely to referee.
"We got a lot of response from
that," said Book TV executive producer Connie Doebele, "and
that's the last thing we had planned."
Most Book TV events are way more civilized
and contribute mightily to the rolling national conversation
begun by its parent network.
Book TV was the brainchild of C-SPAN
founder Brian Lamb and Susan Swain, who are the company's co-chief
executive officers. Lamb, a former cable industry trade reporter,
saw the system's potential early on. In 25 years, C-SPAN has
given Americans unprecedented, unfiltered access to Senate proceedings
and also, through its travels, to town meetings and to the historic
sites associated with dozens of American presidents and writers.
Book TV, you might say, is a logical
extension.
"I believe it is the only television
network-within-a-network that was born out of frustration,"
Doebele said. "All of these books were being published every
year. Reporters and authors were spending years on one book,
and we only had one avenue to put 52 books a year on the air,
and that was 'Booknotes.' "
Lamb's one-on-one, hourlong "Book-notes"
sessions with authors, begun in 1989, are revelatory, thanks
to his persistence, skepticism and such disarmingly simple questions
as "What were your parents like? What did they do?"
Now, "Booknotes" is just one
part of the Book TV lineup, which also includes "History
on Book TV," "Public Lives" (featuring biographies
of public figures) and "In Depth," a live, monthly,
three-hour interview with a single author. Call-ins are encouraged,
putting writers in touch with their readers.
Book TV features about 2,000 authors
annually, speaking at bookstores, book festivals, campuses, private
clubs and other venues. Most are on book tours, promoting newly
published work.
"A lot of the people we put on
are not household names," Doebele said. "We enjoy having
David McCullough on several times a year, but there are other
people who need to be looked at."
On occasional Saturday mornings, Book
TV also covers children's books.
"Of everything we started doing,
that was probably the biggest experiment," Doebele said.
"It's been a much bigger challenge for us than I thought
it would be," because so much depends on the reaction of
the children, who may or may not be engaged by the author.
"My job is also to make sure this
is good television," she said, and with children's books
"it's just a little bit more of a crap shoot."
Even the children's books featured on
Book TV are nonfiction, in keeping with the public affairs nature
of C-SPAN's programming but "much to the chagrin of some
of our viewers," said Doebele, who grew up on a cattle and
wheat farm outside Hanover, Kan., population 900. The family
moved to town when she was 17, and her mother eventually became
Hanover's mayor.
When Doebele is listening to her staff
pitch books, it's her mother who often pops into her head as
she decides which to cover. When she asks herself "Would
Mom like this?" Doebele said, she's thinking about "a
group of people who are smart and interesting and don't have
a lot of access to these kinds of books."
As C-SPAN's coverage is weighted toward
government, politics and history, so are the books on Book TV.
But the topics also can be wide-ranging: Last weekend, the schedule
included books about Henry Ford and the genealogy of Greek mythology.
And at Manhattan's Zinc Bar, the very cool Maggie Balistreri --
whose talk on "The
Evasion-English Dictionary,"
in which she decodes the use and abuse of words and phrases like
"like," "whatever" and "oh well"
-- was an "SNL"-worthy stand-up gig.
It also featured Pittsburgh native and
Waynesburg College history professor Todd DePastino, who discussed
the cultural influence (and definitions) of tramps, hobos and
bums in a talk about his new book, "Citizen Hobo: How a
Century of Homelessness Shaped America," in Waynesburg.
And at 11 p.m. Jan. 31 and 8 p.m. Feb.
1, Book TV will feature Franklin Toker's illustrated talk about
his book, "Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E.J.
Kaufmann and America's Most Extraordinary House." Book TV
will videotape him Jan. 28 at the Smithsonian.
"The choice of the venue is the
key thing that we do," Doebele said. "It's where we
can make a difference. The quality of the venue can change everything
because it changes the Q & A."
Doebele looks for the location that
will attract a knowledgeable audience likely to ask the most
pointed, informed questions. For Caroline Alexander's talk on
her book "The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the
Bounty," for example, Book TV went to the Explorer's Club
in New York City.
But it passed up the big cities where
Canadian journalist Jack Todd discussed his first-person book,
"Desertion: In the Time of Vietnam" to tape him in
Scottsbluff, Neb., the hometown he hadn't been to in more than
five years.
"My biggest regret was that we
only sent one camera," Doebele said. "We needed two
cameras, to catch the faces."
Most of Book TV's single-author events
are shot with one camera by freelance crews. Doebele and her
staff of six -- two producers, an associate producer, two production
assistants and a photojournalist -- stretch their $600,000 annual
programming allowance with such frugalities.
Book TV's photojournalist is longtime
C-SPAN employee Richard Hall, who grew up in Friedens, Somerset
County. Recently he took viewers on a tour of the unparalleled
H. P. Kraus Reference Library in Manhattan before it was sold
to Sotheby's.
Hans Peter Kraus started his rare book
business in Austria in 1932. Six years later it was seized by
the Nazis. Kraus arrived in America on Columbus Day 1939; it
also happened to be Kraus' birthday, which he took as a good
omen. Of course, it didn't hurt that he carried with him a small
book written by Columbus and printed in the 15th century, which
helped launch his new business.
After Kraus died in 1988, his wife ran
the shop until her own death in January 2003. Hall interviewed
their daughter, Mary Ann Folter, as well as Sotheby's Selby Kiffer
and Joshua Lipton, who worked as Kraus' bibliographer for 24
years. Book collectors will appreciate that when Lipton displays
and discusses a book, the price it sold for at auction is seen
on the screen. The program repeats today at noon.
Since 1999, Book TV has produced more
than 13,250 hours of original programming. That includes 80 hours
of live programming, such as last weekend's panel discussion
from the 118th annual meeting of the American Historical Association
in Washington, D.C.
Attorney Annette Gordon-Reed (whose
book on the Sally Hemings-Thomas Jefferson relationship led to
DNA analysis that proved what the Hemings family had been saying
for decades) and historian Joseph Ellis (who for years took the
view that Jefferson wasn't the father of Hemings' children) had
a polite and enlightening exchange. But Ellis couldn't resist
calling Christopher Hitchens a son-of-a-bitch when his name came
up on a different topic, then quickly amended it to "intelligent
son-of-a-bitch," and almost as quickly apologized.
C-SPAN, a nonprofit network, doesn't
rely on Nielsen ratings, but a 2001 survey showed 14 million
Americans have watched Book TV. At least one of them keeps an
index card in her back pocket, for all those memorable, telling
and often unscripted Book TV moments.
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