All Things Considered meet After Due Consideration

This is Tony Miksak with a few Words on Books...

"All things considered" is a news show. It's also a cliche, "a hackneyed phrase which refers to the ultimate summing up of something when all aspects of it have been taken into account..."

I found "all things considered" alongside 1499 other cliches in Betty Kirkpatrick's 1996 book Cliches, Over 1500 Phrases Explored and Explained. Until I found the phrase between "all systems go" and "all things to all men" I hadn't realized the title of my favorite national news program was a soldier in the army of ideas that have "lost originality, ingenuity, and impact by long overuse."

Kirkpatrick believes the phrase "all things considered" first became popular about 125 years ago. It may have sounded fresh and newsy at NPR headquarters, but the successful overuse of the phrase now makes it sound rather passe.

Before a phrase becomes a cliche it has to be used widely and often. It may start life as a fresh way of expressing a well-known thought. "Once Upon a Time" it felt good to say "Have a nice day!" to strangers in a store; now when we use that cliche people throw up, or cover their ears with shopping bags, or pass laws against it.

"Have a nice day" grates like a lemon, and if I've just invented a new phrase, please use it until that becomes just another cliche.

I became intensely aware how much of our daily speech is expressed in cliched form when learning to speak Italian. We "have a nice day" and they – well they enjoy something along the lines of una bella giornata – not exactly a cliche, just a way of speaking. Not that Italians don't use cliches -- of course they do – but to transform ours into theirs – well, "reinventing the wheel" is "a hard act to follow." Actually, it's usually impossible.

We are "on the wagon" when we suspend drinking. Italians don't have that phrase – they have the words for "on" and "wagon" but not the phrase. They simply say sobrio or sober. It's much more fun to look for original Italian cliches – or more politely, idioms.

In Rome it rains buckets (catinelle), not cats and dogs. Here you "look like the cat that swallowed the canary." In Italy that would be putting on a foxy face (furbina). Either way, you're a bit smug, aren't you? In Italy to "put your hand on the fire" is to speak for someone; "a flower on the lips" is to speak confidentially.

Language is nothing more than an agreed-upon arrangement of sounds and letters that communicate thoughts. If our words and phrases always were new, language would fail us. We are forced to use the well-known tropes of everyday speech. What's new is how we arrange those familiar sounds and letters.

A professor once told his class, "If it's you, it's true. If it's you, it's new." When you speak for yourself you can't help being fresh and different. You lose your way when you only inhabit other people's thoughts. It's damn hard work to be fresh and authentic.

It's "an open secret" and "part of life's rich pattern" "from the cradle to the grave" "in the fullness of time." I certainly "hope we will always be friends." "I'll be in touch" because "a rose by any other name" is either "a fate worse than death" or "a feather in one's cap." Or not. We'll have to "wait and see" about that one.

NOTES

"Have a nice day!" explicated...

Cliches: Over 1500 Phrases Explored and Explained by Betty Kirkpatrick. St. Martin's Griffen paperback $16.99. ISBN 0312198442. This edition published January 15, 1999.

From the publisher: Betty Kirkpatrick is a writer and lexicographer. Editor of both the Bloomsbury Thesaurus and Roget's Thesaurus, she was formerly editor of the Chambers Twentieth-Century Dictionary. She lives in Scotland.

Here -- try on some business-style cliches for size.

Twelve Desperate Miles

In this week's New Yorker magazine, a restaurant review begins:

"Remember that grilled cheese? The one you had when you were ten?... and you've never lost hope of stumbling upon that one delicious grilled cheese again?" And so forth, until this: "Well, you won't find it at the Bowery Diner..."

That is how I feel about Twelve Desperate Miles, the Epic Voyage of the SS Contessa by Tim Brady. It's a cheese sandwich alright, but not the one I'm craving.

My father, Joe Miksak, took part in Operation Torch, the invasion of French North Africa. He was there in November, 1942, as the US and British armies fought their way across  Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, then across Sicily and onto the Italian mainland.

A boy's favorite question in the 1950's had to be the one my brother and I asked over and over: What did you do in the war, daddy? Joe made it clear he never was any kind of hero, just an obscure first lieutenant "in charge of washcloths." He watched antiaircraft guns light up the night sky. That was it for war stories.

Joe returned with beautiful tiles decorated in Arabic calligraphy, but kept his memories to himself. So when I heard about Twelve Desperate Miles I was hoping for some kind of insight into that time. What was it like to be there? What was it like for my father to be there?

The invasion tale is fully told in books such as An Army at Dawn and The Day of Battle by Rick Atkinson. Twelve Desperate Miles focuses on one small part of that immense operation.

The SS Contessa was a classic "banana boat" owned by Standard Fruit Company. "Her shallow draft and good size... allowed her to gather large loads of fruit from riverside plantations without getting trapped in stream muck." This would turn out to be crucial in the coming invasion. In addition to sweet-scented fruit she carried well-to-do passengers in considerable comfort. Brochures said she was "not too large to permit delightful social relationships with fellow vacationists."

The Contessa started out carrying troops and supplies to England through dangerous U-boat filled waters. She made a number of trips before someone figured out she would be the perfect boat to carry volatile barrels of aviation fuel and live bombs across the Atlantic and up the shallow Sebou River to a French airfield. Her cargo would supply P-40 fighters in support of General Patton's invasion of Casablanca and help control the air above northwest Africa. Success could be crucial to the entire invasion.

An anti-Nazi French river pilot provided the needed expertise. His story is the story of this book. Tim Brady's account is engaging, complete and apparently very accurate.

Rene' Malevergne was the only man in the world able to pilot past every twist, turn and hidden sandbank in the Sebou. British spies smuggled him out of Morocco to England. Malevergne's identity was doubted, his worth underestimated. He journeyed to Washington, then back to Morocco where he had left his wife and two sons. The Contessa missed the convoy it was supposed to accompany and crossed the ocean completely alone. It was a harrowing journey, start to finish.

The supplies were landed but the fighter planes were not there to use it – just one more irony of that war. Malevergne later received both the US Navy Cross and the Silver Star. We know what he and others accomplished, but that's pretty much all we know. A careful reader will miss the emotional connection a better writer might provide.

NOTES

Twelve Desperate Miles, The Epic WWII Voyage of the SS Contessa by Tim Brady. Crown hard cover $26. ISBN 9780307590374. 

An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943 (Liberation Trilogy #01) by Rick Atkinson. Henry Holt & Company paperback $17. ISBN 0805087249.

The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (Liberation Trilogy #02) by Rick Atkinson. Henry Holt & Company paperback $17. ISBN 080508861X.

the 1920 earthquake erased from memory

Contrary to worldwide news reports, the earthquake on Sunday (20 May 2012) centered in the Italian region Emilia-Romagna about 40 km. north of the city of Bologna was not what it's being described in every news report I can locate – not "...a first for the region in centuries."

Nor should it have been "fairly surprising to seismologists."

Ninety-two years ago, on September 8-9, 1920, the New York Times reported "500 DIE IN ITALY, 20,000 HOMELESS AS QUAKES RECUR"... The paper reported the series of earthquakes took place in "The Emilia district... the communities suffering most today were Reggio, Ospedaletti, Bussana, Toano, and Cavola."

The article explained, "The Emilia embraces the district between the Apennines and the River Po and is dived into the eight provinces of Piacenza, Parka, Reggio, Modena, Bologna, Ferara, Ravenna and Forli. It covers an area of some 7,920 square miles and has a population of approxmately 2,500,000 persons."

So why are contemporary reporters in 2012, reporting the new quakes in the same region saying things such as:

"The strong quake rocked an area with a long history of earthquakes, yet one that has kept relatively quiet for hundreds of years."

"'There has not been a whole lot of action in that area,' Caruso said. 'The fact that they do have records of earthquakes going back a couple thousand years shows this area hasn't been seismically active for a long time,' he said.

and this: 

"Part of the problem is that the region around the epicenter of the quake (between the cities of Modena and Ferrara) is not as accustomed to earthquakes as in other parts of Italy, such as the North-East, Sicily, or the Apennine region (where l'Aquila is located). Until 2003, it was not even included in seismic hazard maps. 'The buildings which collapsed were mostly built before then, with no antiseismic measures at all,' says Calvi. 'In such cases, prefabricated buildings such as sheds and supermarkets are more at risk than houses, because of their weak structure.'

"In 2003, though, seismologists introduced a new map of seismic hazard across Italy, and the area of Sunday's earthquake was reclassified as one of medium risk. 'We were estimating a 10 per cent probability of an earthquake of this kind in that area over the next 450 years,' says Gianluca Valensise, a research director at INGV. 'This earthquake was a rare event, but not a surprising one.'"

Even Italian reports don't mention the shock of 1920. For example:

"Per quanto riguarda gli altri terremoti che possiamo considerare 'grandi' in Italia, quello del 1976 in Friuli e' stato di magnitudo 6.2, quello dell'Irpinia (1980) di magnitudo 6.8, quello di Umbria e Marche (1997) di magnitudo 5.6." (Regarding the other earthquakes that we consider 'big' in Italy, that of 1976 in Friuli , and was magnitude 6.2, the Irpinia (1980) with a magnitude of 6.8, that of Umbria and Marche (1997) with a magnitude of 5.6.)

It's as if the earthquake and aftershocks of 1920 in this part of Italy never happened!

Words on Books Does Not Exhaust the Classificatory Possibilities

I recommend everyone go visit your local hospice thrift store and pick up a copy of the 1995 Cambridge Encyclopedia of The English Language by David Crystal.

You'll find it up near the cash desk, under glass, with the other valuable but vastly underpriced books. I don't remember what my copy cost, but it was not much for five pounds of scholarship and a lot of pretty charts and pictures.

This book was printed in Italy, which helps to explain its heft and quality; also that Cambridge University Press no doubt subsidized its publication with some left-over funds found in one of the colleges frequented by Erasmus of Rotterdam or someone very much like him.

Everywhere one browses one finds oneself entranced, as we like to say in Better English. Right now I'm peering at the section on Lexical Differences. These are the differences between aeroplane and airplane, oesophagus and esophagus, buses with one "s" and busses with two. The scholarship never intrudes entirely on the pure fun of discovering so many things you kind of knew, but didn't know for sure you knew, or didn't know, if you know what I mean.

Take one example: "This set of categories does not exhaust the classificatory possibilities, but it should be enough to suggest caution when working through an apparently simple list of equivalents..." Fussy paragraphs are balanced by maps and graphs. One of these makes clear why it is dangerous to drive on either side of the beltway, I mean ring road, in Britain.

Where we step on the gas, they press the accelerator. Our gas gauge is their petrol gauge. Side mirrors are wing mirrors and our fender is their wing, but attempt to fly with these wings and your car will end up on the verge, I mean in the ditch. Parking lights are sidelights, hoods bonnets, mudflaps splash guards. Some things don't change across the Atlantic, however. Steering wheels and speedometers are exactly the same words either side.

It's twenty of four here, but twenty TO four there. She's in heat here, and ON heat there. Californians have a new lease on life. The Brits have a new lease OF life.

Our popsicle is their ice lolly; and your everyday friendly crossing guard here becomes the lollipop man/woman over there. In Australia and other strange places the big stop sign carried across the street in front of a pack of snarling juveniles is called a lollipop, because it looks like one, although if I ever saw a lollipop that size I'd probably go into anaphylactic shock or something.

These "parallel prepositions" and "equivalent lexical items" (as we pseudo scholars will call them) remind me of an amusing group of faux language guides published in great numbers by Workman Press. These so-called guide books take you through a typical foreign language situation – in a café, meeting someone, fending off unwanted advances, tasting an odd smelling cheese – and as you read down the page and study the words you discover the phrases are telling a story. Very funny, at least it was funny the first time I figured it out.

In Wicked Italian, as an example, a plausible set of phrases about checking in to your hotel, translated into modern Italian, becomes something else again:

"We made these reservations six months ago."

"Then we will sleep here in the lobby."

"We reserved a room with a view."

"The sheets are still damp."

"What is that smell?"

"Something is living in the bathroom."

"There is no hot water. The cold water is brown."

"Is this a towel or a postage stamp?"

... and, finally, "Four stars my ass! More like four dogs, I'd say!"

This passage is titled You Can Win at Hotel Negotiation. Most of the "Wicked" Language guides remain in print. You can find their absurdities not only in Italian, but also Wicked French, Greek, Irish, Japanese and Wicked Spanish.

NOTES

Now in a revised second edition, and not at all expensive for what you get:

Cambridge Encyclopedia of The English Language published by Cambridge University Press. paperback $45. ISBN 0521530334. Revised edition published 2003.

Categorized under Foreign Language, Humor, and for some reason also Guidebooks:

Wicked Italian: For the Traveler by Howard Tomb (sic), illustrated by Jared Lee. Workman Publishing paperback $4.95. ISBN 0894806173.

What an Astonishing Thing a Book Is

This is Tony Miksak with a few Words on Books...

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."     - Carl Sagan

These days easily before breakfast we can read an excerpt from Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, read the account and see photographs of a trip to Fukushima, Japan, where radiation and tsunami have devastated the lives of children, be sent a Carl Sagan quote by a friend on Facebook, read tributes to the late children's author Maurice Sendak, and be invited to a meeting of Expatriate writers in Rome, even though you currently are located 4,559 miles from Italy.

My parents' lives began in the final days of horse-drawn conveyances and the early days of automobiles. They both were teenagers in the Great Depression that followed the stock market crash of 1929. They lived through two World Wars, the advent of radio, then TV and then the Internet, the booming 50's, and well into the our present age of 24-hour news anxiety.

I was born months before two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, and continued through the terror of unstoppable polio and smallpox epidemics and their virtual eradication, the Joe McCarthy-led anti-Communist hysteria, wars in Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan, global terrorism and the overreaction to it, the assassination, impeachment and resignation of Presidents, the decline of public education, the rebirth of electric cars, the melting of the ice caps, the end of the Soviet Empire and our first black President, now personally in favor of the concept of same sex marriage.

Peering from space at those arcs of life you could easily imagine a sort of ever faster downward spiral into ignorance and conflict. Or you could look out the spaceship window to find the sun still shining, the air breathable, pets and friends happy most of the time, at least around here.

For me the adventure continues – skills to sharpen, things to learn, places to visit, people to meet. As I get older my world only gets larger. Since retirement a few years ago my wife and I have spent time in South America and Easter Island, in France, England, Ireland, Italy, Denmark, Norway; soon we will visit Turkey, Crete and Croatia and Italy again. Plus Hawaii for fish and Arcata for chamber music.

Another arc of life began last August when granddaughter Nora arrived, a new perfect human. Along with Nora came a renewal of love and friendship with my daughter.

And throughout all these lives, new and not so new, are the books we've read and will soon read. Our various books are windows into other worlds, but more than that, the best of them ARE in fact other worlds. Each book on our shelves or stacked nearby glows with potential or radiates memories, awaits only one more open mind in order to speak again.

Before breakfast I spotted a cartoon that got me started on this essay today. Two gentlemen are conversing in a private library somewhere. One man is peering at a tall stack of empty bookshelves. Perched at eye level amid all the emptiness are several small metal things.

"Nook, Sony Reader," the first gentleman intones. "I say, Hardwick, this sure is an impressive library."

The cartoon was posted on Facebook, and has elicited dozens of comments and 90 shares – among additional sets of friends. One comment stood out:

"A home without books is like a garden without flowers. It is like a place without sunshine in your heart. Electronic books will never replace the BEAUTY of a well designed book, of the joy holding its making and creation in your hands and enjoying a feast for your eyes."

No matter how beautiful a book may be, how big, how small, how the paper feels and the cover looks – reduced to an E book any book is the same size, shape and feel as all the others. No subtlety, no heft and weight, no beautiful paper or well-stitched binding. No physical difference from one reading unit to another.

The words remain, and you can make them yours. Civilization has been rendered more portable, but perhaps not more beautiful or useful.

Books? or Gossip About Books?

We have our choice of topics for today's broadcast. Review and discuss (yes, Ms Yatsa, this WILL be on the test) these two excellent novels by espionage writer Joseph Kanon; or gossip from the perilous world of bookselling.

Books or gossip? OK – gossip first.

ITEM The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression is holding an auction to raise funds to publicize efforts against banned books. Items include the mockup of a children's book, a hand-sewn dress, and a three-foot high Wimpy Kid. Get your paddles ready. I wish them luck, but these are same things found in any bookstore's back closet, leaning up against torn flyers, sweat-soaked costumes and Curious George paperweights.

ITEM Target stores will stop selling Kindles from Amazon.com, but keep on selling all the other book-reading devices. Does Target see Amazon as an enemy rather than a partner? asks the Christian Science Monitor.

"After all, everything sold in Target is also offered by Amazon," one news report noted. "Target is trying to distance themselves from Amazon as much as possible because they recognize they are losing sales to them... Amazon's practice of undercutting the prices of traditional retailers certainly can't help their case, either."

ITEM Another long-term beef with Amazon concerns the collection – or more specifically the willful failure to collect – state sales taxes. It appears that Amazon is beginning to lose the argument, and that's a good thing for suffering state treasuries everywhere. The latest development is a new agreement between the state of Texas and Amazon.

"The deal... will require the online retailer to begin collecting and remitting sales tax to the state for purchases by Texas residents beginning July 1, 2012. The agreement also calls for Amazon.com to create at least 2,500 jobs and to make at least $200 million in capital investments in the state... In other states where Amazon.com has facilities, the online retailer has managed to score extended sales tax exemptions of two or more years by threatening to close down facilities or not opening up new ones... Texas would have none of it. Comptroller Susan Combs (said) she 'was very emphatic and insistent' that Amazon get its computer system up within 60 days to begin collecting sales tax."

Amazon also reached a deal to collect sales tax in Nevada, beginning January 1, 2014, or sooner (be still my heart) if Congress enacts a national sales tax reporting requirement.

ITEM We continue to read about people opening new bookstores, or second stores. This flies in the face of the common sense consensus that bookstores are dinosaurs. Any time I walk into one of those delightful dinosaurs, I find happy people happily browsing – even buying – real books from real booksellers.

In Ottawa, Canada, David Robbins of Octopus Books is opening a second location. "I prefer 'bold' to 'crazy,'" he said.

ITEM Broadway Books in Portland, Oregon, celebrates 20 years in business... And in failed-chainstore news, the vacant headquarters of Borders Books & Music is on the market for $6.9 million... a new store named Let's Read in Spanish has opened in San Jose, California... the Mystery Lovers Bookshop in Oakmont, PA, has been sold after 22 years, and will continue under new ownership... Left Bank Books in Searspoint, ME, is moving and expanding... In Minneapolis, Boneshaker Books, a volunteer-run progressive bookstore, has successfully completed a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to expand... 

Although you can find gloomy publishing and bookselling news, it's much easier to find the uplifting and happy news. There is a lot of it.

And on the OTHER topic – you know, actual books, let me recommend writer Joseph Kanon with a "K". He writes with authority and "vivid sensory detail" as it says on the cover of Istanbul Passage, his latest. Kanon ranks with great spy novel authors such as John LeCarre and Alan Furst.

Scenes and characters linger in the mind long after closing the final pages. And that's one good way to judge a novel such as Kanon's Stardust, set in 1945 Hollywood. Do the characters last longer than spun sugar on a hot day? These books linger on the tongue.

Kanon's latest novel, Istanbul Passage, also set just after World War Two, begins:

"The first attempt had to be called off. It had taken days to arrange the boat and the safe house, and then, just a few hours before the pickup, the wind started, a poyraz, howling down from the northeast, scooping up water as it swept across the Black Sea. The Bosphorus waves, usually no higher than boat wakes by the time they reached the shuttered yalis along the shore, now churned and smashed against the landing docks. From the quay, Leon could barely make out the Asian side, strings of faint lights hidden behind a scrim of driving rain. Who would risk it? Even the workhorse ferries would be thrown off schedule, never mind a bribed fishing boat."

Gotta keep reading after that...

NOTES

The CSM on Target and Amazon...

Kickstarter and the Boneshaker project...

Alan Furst's home pages... And the same for Joseph Kanon ("where did you eat in Istanbul? and more)...

Stardust by Joseph Kanon. Washington Square Press paperback $15. ISBN 9781439156322.

Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon. Atria Books hard cover $26. ISBN 9781439156414.