Category Archives: Writing

by | May 17, 2013 · 8:30 am

Person, place, or thing

By Michele Callaghan, manuscript editor

I was in elementary school when I first learned about nouns. The teacher said that a noun was a person, place, or thing. Flipping this around, you can say that people are nouns. You might think this is obvious, even in an era in which grammar has been sidelined to some extent. But in my line of work, we frequently encounter authors who think that people are adjectives.

We have all seen this on television or read in the newspaper: law enforcement agents describe a “black male in his twenties” or a “white female in her fifties.” Another category in which this is prevalent is the scientist or doctor using an adjective to categorize a person, for example, “the subject was a depressive.” What these professions have in common is their emphasis on facts. There is the misconception, perhaps, that you are letting your emotions run away with you if you refer to a person as a noun. It lends an air of objectivity to what can really be subjective interpretation of facts.

A puzzling corollary to this is the recent phenomenon of using “woman” as an adjective but not “man.” We have “woman doctors” and many hope that Hillary Clinton will be the first “woman president.” But we wouldn’t call Jimmy Carter a “man president” and my father a “man professor.” I can only guess that this confusion of nouns and adjectives is because in days past being a female anything signified to some people inferiority, if not being downright laughable.

Who cares? Does it matter to anyone but editors and others who uphold the laws of grammar whether we use nouns or adjectives to describe people? I think it should.

In the first case of the misplaced adjective, calling a person an adjective—a diabetic, a schizophrenic—limits his or her humanity. It literally depersonalizes and also views someone through the lens of illness alone. The current trend in consumer health and psychology is to get away from this approach and say a person has schizophrenia or diabetes but is not equated to it.

In the second case, using a different turn of phrase for women and men doesn’t help grammar or equality. I shouldn’t need a different part of speech—woman editor—from that of a man in my profession. I am a woman (noun) and an editor (noun). When you combine these two elements, I am a female editor (noun and the adjective that modifies it) not a woman editor (noun noun).

I like the certitude and exactitude of adjectives and noun being in their rightful places. Years ago, a group formed to promote what it saw was the uplifting value of people was called simply Up with People. While I may not adhere to its beliefs on political matters, I share the idea that people should be celebrated. And so should places and things. In other words, up with nouns!

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by | April 24, 2013 · 11:17 am

Unraveling the linothorax mystery, or how linen armor came to dominate our lives

Guest post by Alicia Aldrete

As the wife, research assistant, and sometimes coauthor of an ancient historian who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, I had expected to spend many hours in libraries, wandering through foreign museums, and climbing around ancient sites. However, I had not foreseen large groups of weapon-wielding students in our yard, or my husband, Gregory Aldrete, shooting arrows at them.

When one of Greg’s students—our coauthor, Scott Bartell—decided to make himself a replica of the armor that Alexander the Great is shown wearing on the famous “Alexander Mosaic” from Pompeii, none of us realized that the next six years of our lives would be dominated by the quest to understand and evaluate that armor. Known as the linothorax, it was a popular form of armor from at least the time of Homer through the Hellenistic period. Apparently made primarily out of linen, the armor had been afforded little attention by scholars because no extant specimens have survived. In order to appreciate how the linothorax might have been constructed and its effectiveness on the battlefield, we worked on reverse engineering it after extensive study of ancient images of linothorax-wearing warriors depicted in vase paintings, reliefs, sculptures, and tomb paintings. I spent countless hours in libraries examining every page of the hundreds of oversized volumes of the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, which catalogs the Greek vases in museums around the world; I’m sure that the students assigned to reshelving duties during those weeks dreaded my arrival every morning. Every time we visited a museum, we kept our eyes peeled for possible linothorakes; and while one expects to find plenty represented in the museums of Greece and Italy, we were pleased to find them in Kansas City and Odessa (in the Ukraine) as well.  Suddenly, as so often happens during research, the linothorax was everywhere.

We encountered some special challenges when constructing our linothorakes. At first, like fashion designers, we made numerous patterns out of paper and then cardboard, until we achieved our optimal design. Then came the tricky part. Because we wanted to employ only materials that would have been available in the ancient Mediterranean, we had to get a hold of handspun, handwoven linen. Since most linen these days is machine-made, we couldn’t just go to the local fabric store. However, we soon discovered that even linen purporting to be handwoven was still typically machine-harvested and processed using modern methods, such as treatment with chemicals. To achieve as much historical authenticity as possible, we needed linen made from flax that had been grown, harvested, and processed by hand as well, using only traditional methods. As we discovered, not many people have the dedication to do this. After much searching, we managed to find a woman who actually grew and harvested her own flax and then spun and wove it into linen, practically in our own back yard—in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Rabbit glue, which sounds more challenging, was actually easier to acquire, since artists who paint using traditional methods still prime canvases with it; we ordered it from an art supplies catalog, and merely needed to rehydrate and heat the rabbit powder in a double boiler.

Three versions of reconstructed linothorakes. The one on the left is modeled after the linothorax worn by Alexander the Great in the "Alexander Mosaic" from Pompeii.

Three versions of reconstructed linothorakes. The one on the left is modeled after the linothorax worn by Alexander the Great in the “Alexander Mosaic” from Pompeii.

Another challenge was perfecting the construction process. By trial and error, we discovered the ideal tools: a turkey baster to squirt the rabbit glue onto a piece of linen and a putty knife to spread it evenly. We also figured out—the hard way—that the ancients probably cut each layer of linen to the proper shape before gluing them together. For our first linothorax, we glued together 15 layers of linen to form a one centimeter-thick slab, and then tried to cut out the required shape. Large shears were defeated; bolt cutters failed. The only way we were ultimately able to cut the laminated linen slab was with an electric saw equipped with a blade for cutting metal. At least this confirmed our suspicion that linen armor would have been extremely tough. We also found out that linen stiffened with rabbit glue strikes dogs as in irresistibly tasty rabbit-flavored chew toy, and that our Labrador retriever should not be left alone with our research project.

While we subjected our laminated linen patches to hundreds of carefully measured arrow tests, we also engaged in some less scientific testing of their durability. Greg’s students enthusiastically stabbed, hacked, slashed, and pounded them with various maces, axes, spears, and swords, helping us to demonstrate what kind of protection laminated linen armor would have provided. While all of this mayhem (both scientifically controlled and free-form) convinced us that our linothorax was ancient-battlefield-ready, we still felt compelled to try a real-life scenario, so Scott donned the armor and Greg shot him. And while we had confidence in our armor, our relief was still considerable when the arrowhead stuck and lodged in the armor’s outer layers, a safe distance away from flesh.

The aim of our research had been to go back in time, reconstruct something over a millennium old, and experience what it would have been like to use it. The process of doing so certainly led to some memorable and unexpected experiences for all of us.

aldreteAlicia Aldrete is coauthor, with Gregory S. Aldrete and Scott Bartell, of Reconstructing Ancient Linen Body Armor: Unraveling the Linothorax Mystery. The website of the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay’s Linothorax Project contains more behind-the-scenes information on this unparalleled effort, including an eight-minute mini-documentary and additional images.

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by | April 23, 2013 · 9:30 am

Chapter and Verse: Putting my short stories to the test in Baltimore’s public schools

Chapter and Verse is a series where JHU Press authors and editors discuss the literary landscape of poetry and prose, whether their own creative work or the literature of others.

Guest post by Jean McGarry

My relationship with the Baltimore public schools began last year, when, out of the blue, I received an invitation from the PEN/Faulkner Foundation to jump-start a writers in the schools program in a new city: mine. As is often the case, I felt so honored (and touched) that high-school students might read my stories, that I failed to ask some key questions: why was I chosen, what kind of class was it, what did they want me to do? I did glean a few, critical details: when to appear, and the name of the school.

So, one day last year, shortly before Thanksgiving, I showed up at Western High School and met an AP English class of about 20 students, all girls, in blue uniforms. I had supplied them with copies of my story collection, Home at Last, and I was to be dazzled by the grip these mostly African-American young women had on the life imagined in the opening story, “The Raft.” The hardship of a depression childhood, coupled with my 9-year-old character’s first-hand experience of his father’s suicide, followed by the hurricane of all time (September, 1938), that turned the city of Providence into a bathtub, did not daunt these readers. Things like this could happen, and they could happen in a series—which is exactly the conclusion drawn by the protagonist, Jimmy McGinness. Terrible things could happen, they do happen, and a child’s job is to enlarge his understanding: not just to cope with such blows, but to master them. What a thrill it was to witness a work of fiction that harked back to my long-deceased father’s time, being channeled, through me, to these eager (and sympathetic) readers.

I heard nothing after this initial venture and visit, so assumed the program had folded, and hoped I hadn’t contributed to its demise.  Then, this year, I got another call from PEN/Faulkner to visit Friendship Academy in East Baltimore. This time, though, the foundation bought enough copies of my newest book, Ocean State, to give each of the students a hardcover copy, at $25 a pop. The liaison, Nate Brown, a novelist living in D.C., delivered me personally to this school. Nate and I waited in the principal’s office until a bell went off, and then mounted the stairs to Sean Martin’s class of about 20 students. I had been forwarded a very good question to ponder. These students—or at least one of them—had never imagined that a single person could write so many different stories, and wanted to know how that was done.

This time, I read “Family Happiness,” the opening piece in Ocean State. The story is set in in the mid-1960s, although it fetches back to the 40s and ahead to the 70s. It is organized around certain red-letter days in the lives of a mother and daughter: two weddings and a funeral. I wanted these students—in their late teens—to imagine what life would be like for Dolly Bergstrom (the mother), married just after World War II, and forced to live with her interfering mother-in-law. As the story opens, Dolly is preparing her own daughter for marriage. Did the students understand that for this wartime generation, there was not much space or time between childhood and adulthood for teenage life? That the old country—Ireland, Sweden, wherever it was—still imposed all of its customs, comforts and constraints? And that Dolly was baffled by the marital (and life) prospects faced by Donna, her soon-to-wed only daughter? That, in fact, Dolly’s only way of coping with Donna’s immaturity and “back talk” was to clean the tenement flat the newlyweds were moving into, until it reeked of Ajax and ammonia, and gleamed with fresh wallpaper and paint? To clean and clean; and then, to clean again, about ten years later, when the marriage founders, and Donna returns to the flat, heartbroken, to live with her own two daughters; and to clean once again, when Donna remarries. What was this feverish housework all about?

I described the literary device—stream of consciousness—that I had used, and told the students that Dolly was a lonely woman, with no one to listen to her, so she talked to herself. I felt it necessary, somehow, to identify moments of happiness—real happiness—recorded in a story where mother, father, and daughter are often at odds, or at least unable to understand each other. Once again, these young readers got it. When class was over, a couple of them walked me out of the building, and recommended Lifetime TV as an option for me, a place where my work might get more attention. A few weeks later, I received a packet of letters, hand-written thank-yous for my visit. I had also signed all their books.

Jean McGarry, surrounded by Meredith Maddox's English class at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Baltimore. Photo by Nate Brown.

Jean McGarry, surrounded by Meredith Maddox’s English class at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Baltimore. Photo by Nate Brown.

The third visit, about a month ago, was to Paul Dunbar High School, a stone’s throw from Johns Hopkins Hospital. The Dunbar students, supplied with fresh copies of Ocean State, with its bright-blue cover (a shot of Lido’s Beach on Narragansett Bay), were more diverse. This was an English class taught by Meredith Maddox, a teacher in her first year who was about to have her first baby. She was nervous, they were nervous, and I was nervous, and there were about 50 of us, all squeezed together in a circle of blonde-wood chairs.  To my astonishment, these students had been assigned all the stories, from the realist stories of old-time Providence to the quirky tales about too many wedding gowns, Poe-like treasure hunts, dates between octogenarian fathers and middle-aged daughters. They had read them all, and they had questions. Which stories were about me? Where did I get my ideas? How long did it take to write them all down? How did I get them published? What was I trying to say?

The hardest query of all was aimed at “Dream Date,” a story of teen-age infatuation, centered on a Catholic high school’s over-chaperoned dance night. The question was: Had I had such a date? When? And, when I seemed to dodge the question, the young man shot back: What was my idea of a dream date?

I spent about an hour under heavy interrogation, and emerged, that day, exhausted and drained, but I also felt that never in my whole writing life had I had such a great audience for my work. They put it to the test. Did it pass? Who knows, but these kids were so engaged that, at the very least, I felt the rare satisfaction that I had indeed written some stories, and by God, some of them were intelligible, they added up, they were a message in a bottle from my long life to these fresh, blossoming lives.

Will I go back? As soon, and as often, as they ask me.

mcgarryJean McGarry teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Ocean State is her eighth book of fiction. Dream Date, Home at Last, and Airs of Providence have also been published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Her short stories have appeared in, among other publications, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, Boulevard, and The Southwest Review.

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by | April 17, 2013 · 8:30 am

Expectations, surprises, and creative liberation

Guest post by Daniel Kilbride

I suppose that every historian approaches a research subject, even a new one about which he or she might know very little, with certain expectations. Some of us do much more: several years ago, a young historian shocked me with his very ambitious itinerary for research, writing, and publication. When I asked him how he expected to conduct his research so quickly, he replied that he knew what he wanted to find; not worried about finding contrary evidence that would contradict his preconceptions, he would simply record what he needed to confirm his thesis and move on to the next collection, the next library. Few historians, one hopes, are so mercenary (or, as my students like to put on their resumes, “goal-oriented”), but certainly it is the rare researcher who approaches a new project with no preconceptions.

I had some of my own assumptions when I began work on Being American in Europe. I feared that I might be very bored. More than one person has asked me if reading the letters, diaries, and travelogues of early Americans isn’t unlike watching the interminable slide show of your niece’s Disney vacation. Thematically, I knew that the spread-eagled nationalism of the pre-Civil War era makes our era’s sometimes cringe-worthy patriotism seem mild by comparison. I thought the paradoxical combination of excessive self-regard and sense of inferiority vis-à-vis the Old World would produce among Americans abroad a positively belligerent attitude toward Europe.  Sometimes I was right on both counts. In my worst moments with the sources, I pined for something as banal as an album of photos with Mickey, Minnie, and the Princesses. There is nothing that makes an afternoon seem quite so endless as a folder full of dull travel letters. I also came across quite a few figures that in a later era would be described as “ugly Americans.” Being American in Europe opens and closes with such a figure, Philadelphian Harry McCall, who sat in cafés across Britain and the Continent, writing letters that shot venom at the men and women who passed by his table.

More often, though, I was wrong (and was delighted to find myself mistaken). Many of my sources were not only vividly descriptive of European scenes, but marvelously opinionated—and opinions are a cultural historian’s bread and butter. Additionally, apropos of my second fear, these opinions were also surprisingly self-critical. Travelers, it turned out, did not solely venture abroad on a mission to vindicate the United States against the corrupt Old World. They were certainly anxious to justify their young republic, but they were eager to do so on Europe’s terms: they wanted not to separate themselves from western civilization, but to situate themselves within it.  The central theme of Being American in Europe is how travelers navigated the tension between the nationalist impulse to define a distinctive American identity against the secular and religious despotisms of the Old World and the post-colonial wish to orient the United States within western civilization.

This brings me back to the question of expectation. The discovery that Americans were not implacably hostile to Europe set me free. It forced me to abandon the hypothesis that had governed my early research. It compelled me to allow the sources to determine my thesis—a commonsensical orientation, I know, but one (see the anecdote above) that historians oftentimes resist, to their peril. Admittedly, I should have known better. I came to the topic of travel by way of my first book, An American Aristocracy, in which I studied southern travelers to Philadelphia in the era of the sectional conflict. Then, following the scholarship, I expected to find planter women and men interpreting Philadelphia through a haze of prejudices culled from proslavery literature. Instead, I found cosmopolitan people who thrived amidst the energy of America’s second-largest city. I suppose that experience should have cautioned me against putting too much stock in preconceptions. But, when preconceptions fall, they fall hard—and the result can force a writer to let the sources speak candidly to him or her. As a result, I was able to see that the task of being American in Europe was a lot more complicated than I had imagined it to be.

kilbrideDaniel Kilbride is an associate professor of history at John Carroll University in Ohio. He is the author of An American Aristocracy: Southern Planters in Antebellum Philadelphia.

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by | April 3, 2013 · 8:30 am

Why Bother?

Guest post by Mark A. Largent

Four years ago, I set out to do what I had long promised I would once I had the security of tenure: start writing for a broader audience. Over the previous decade, I had met all the expectations of a mainstream academic scholar. I had published a book with a university press, as well as a half-dozen peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals. I had organized conferences and served as the book review editor for my field’s journal of record. I had taught my classes, served on committees, and even edited a book series. Now, I could finally start publishing works that would be much more widely read and that (hopefully) would have an influence far beyond the ivory tower.

I had strong support for my plan. I had taken a position in a public policy college at a land grant university that prides itself on civic engagement. My dean encouraged me to start thinking of myself as a public intellectual, and I spent several years editing dozens of my colleagues’ writings and thoughtfully developing my own writing style.

In the summer of 2008 I set to work on a new project, one that everyone seemed to believe had obvious appeal far beyond the academy. I wanted to write a book that explored the ongoing debates about the alleged link between vaccines and autism, and I wanted it to appeal to the average American reader. I hoped to write a book that “New York Times-reading parents” could pick up to help them sort through the confusing mess of claims about the modern vaccine schedule. Four years later, Johns Hopkins University Press released Vaccine: The Debate in Modern America.  I am intensely proud of the book, but almost as soon as it hit the shelves I began to ask, “Why bother?”

Why bother trying to write to an audience beyond my relatively narrow academic discipline? There are few incentives and many disincentives, especially for someone who publishes a book about something controversial enough to be of interest to a general audience. For example, I was reminded of what a harsh and uncivil environment the Internet is. I found out that even well-written books on timely subjects are not easy to sell. I learned that a reasoned and moderate position on a controversial subject leaves the author with few allies and twice as many enemies. Finally, I was reminded by some of my colleagues that “accessible” is oftentimes an insult in the mouths of academics.

Writing for broad audiences is not a bother; it is a duty. Unfortunately, relatively few scholars are encouraged or feel compelled to enter the public square. I still remember hearing Ken Alder’s acceptance speech for the 2003 Davis Prize, which is given annually by the History of Science Society to the best book published in the history of science for a general audience. Alder enthusiastically described why he wrote The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error that Transformed the World, his history of an 18th-century expedition, in such a way as to be widely appealing. He explained that it is often erroneously said that if professional historians didn’t write readable histories, someone else would do it. “Well,” he said, “someone else is doing it, and it’s not being done very well.” He finished with an appeal to all of us to continue our scholarship and to take up the responsibility for helping translate some of our research into accessible, useful work.

Alder was right. Scholars ought to feel compelled—and they ought to compel one another—to consider applications for their research and writings. This is not easy work. It will open our work to criticism, misuse, and distortion. But, unless we are to admit that our methods and our conclusions are interesting or relevant for only a tiny percentage of the reading public, we ought to find ways to do extension work that applies our expertise to broader public problems and appeals to broader audiences.

largentMark Largent is a historian of science and associate professor at Michigan State University’s James Madison College .  His work focuses on the role of scientists and physicians in American public affairs, and he has published on the history of evolution, eugenics, and the vaccine-autism debate.  He is the author of Breeding Contempt:  The History of Sterilization in the United States (Rutgers 2008) and Vaccine:  The Debate on Modern America (Johns Hopkins 2012).  He is currently working on a history of Reye’s syndrome.

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by | March 25, 2013 · 8:30 am

Kill Your Darlings: Michele Callaghan’s stages of poetry

During the Association of Writers & Writing Programs annual conference earlier this month, we challenged our JHU Press authors to write on the theme “Kill your darlings.” We asked: What poem, line, stanza, or piece of brilliant work have you sacrificed for the greater good? Has this piece or well-turned phrase found its way into another poem, short story, or into your subconscious to use at another time? Inspired, we turned to our own talented staff and posed the same questions. Read on to see what they had to say. And check our archives to learn how poets Peter Filkins and X. J. Kennedy responded. 

By Michele Callaghan, manuscript editor

In response to this call for “darlings”—lines of poetry that we loved but had to let languish or even kill because we could not find a home for them—I went through decades of poetry ideas. Some have stood the test of time. Others—scribbled on old papers, envelopes, and notebooks of all sizes and typed on onion skin—are better left to the ages. I realized that my poetry has gone through stages, including the teen-heart-on-a-sleeve phase, the faux-e.e.-cummings phase, and the beginning-of-finding-my-voice-in-the-classics phase.

Here are two “darlings.” If you can finish them, let me know!

From my classics phase (which I annotated with “first verse good but what the hell am I trying to say?”):

O, glib Odysseus
weaver of words
wearer of disguises
Talk is a tool to mask your face.

The second, a few lines after I lost a baby on April Fools’ Day:

O cruelest of jokes on the cruelest of days
Twice the first has fooled me
Twice it has taken from me.

Although I never finished the poem, the story has a happy ending. Within a year of penning these lines, I gave birth to my daughter, Emily, who is a darn good poet in her own right.

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by | March 20, 2013 · 8:25 am

Writing Reimagining Business History by reimagining writing

Guest post by Phil Scranton

When a scholarly book is finished, and before readers and critics decide what it means and what use it might have, an author (or in this case, coauthor) might well ask what’s been learned in the process. Academics write to communicate with and influence others, to be sure, but “doing the writing” usually remains an intensely personal and private affair. Whatever my work may deliver, at base I write for an audience of one, me.

Perhaps, though, the preceding sentence should be recast in past tense. Why? Because in writing Reimagining Business History, I learned how to write for and with a colleague and friend. This was new and invigorating. And let me suggest that, when entering your mid-sixties, there’s not a lot that’s new and invigorating (rather than new and disconcerting).

In 2007, Patrick Fridenson and I outlined the forty-plus topics we imagined discussing, but we spent virtually no time devising the process that lay ahead. Like so many other team-built projects, we just sorted our subjects into piles: yours, mine, and ‘later.’ We thought he and I would individually draft some texts to share for revisions. ‘Later’ meant those sections about which we both knew something. These we’d write together – although we worked and lived 4,000 miles (6400 km) apart.

The ‘plan’ was a bit sketchy yet straightforward. We thought we could create some 43 ‘entries’ in two years, perhaps a bit longer. Of course, this was silly. After a shared 80 years doing academic research, we should have known that such planning was futile. Indeed, each of us wound up confronting unexpected challenges and demands in work and life, making forward movement impossible.

Then the penny dropped. About 2009, we realized that we needed to talk with each other in a sustained way, so as to develop the ideas first broached on a park bench in Umbria, as the book’s Preface notes. I had some research and travel funds annually from Rutgers, so we agreed that I would come to Paris periodically for a week or ten days. Patrick would clear his schedule as much as possible and we would explore what we were doing and how best to attempt it.

These one-on-one seminars, mornings and afternoons, day after day, with a fine Parisian lunch in between, provided the most intellectually exciting experiences of our professional lives. In the first two series, we outlined each of the pieces in a very rough fashion, listing key concepts and questions, noting possible secondary works, identifying blank spots where we needed to read and digest new materials. I took voluminous notes and copied them to Patrick.

With these jointly created outlines, writing began to move along, not least because we knew that we each were writing for the other. Patrick’s schedule at EHESS, however, intensified, then the Ecole moved house from Boulevard Raspail to Avenue de France, and finally, his aged aunt, for whom he was the only surviving relative, grew ill and ever more frail. Given this squeeze, we recognized that the only way to complete the entries was to write them jointly, again in Paris.

Thus we convened a second series of face-to-face sessions, this time sitting together in Patrick’s office, writing section after section, before and after our proper lunches (though some featured the Ecole’s cafeteria, not a nearby bistro). This process involved intense and sustained improvisation and speculation, rapid on-line fact-checking, and far more laughter than I recollect from any other scholarly enterprise. In these weeks I learned how to write with a spontaneity I still treasure and which rarely had surfaced in earlier projects.

If memory serves, we undertook three sets of writing boot camp two-a-days, each a week or longer, separated by months in which we reframed drafts, filled in holes, and exchanged notes on sources and questions. In sum, the process by which we got this book to the JHU Press and to readers was more than memorable. Those Paris collaborations remind me of the tension and the joy that practicing for performance brings, and of the rich creativity that arises when gifted composers and lyricists, playwrights and directors, complete something that neither could achieve without the other. Would that there could be more of this in the practice of history.

scrantonPhil Scranton is University Board of Governors Professor, History of Industry and Technology, at Rutgers University and editor for the JHU Press series Studies in Industry and Society. His book with Patrick Fridenson, Reimagining Business History, is now available from the JHU Press. Attendees of the 2013 meeting of the Business History Conference will have the opportunity to meet Professors Scranton and Fridenson and purchase signed copies of their book for just $15.00 on Saturday, March 23, between 3 and 3:30.

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by | March 11, 2013 · 8:30 am

A momentary pause or apples, and oranges

By Michele Callaghan, manuscript editor

All too often people take a perfectly good idea and then use it for all sorts of occasions for which it doesn’t apply. One example is having a right lane for slow drivers and a left one for fast drivers. This works well—most of the time—on the highway. But then drivers in the city try to run you off the road if you want to turn left into the local shopping mall. But I digress. Today, I am thinking of the comma.

Commas are extremely useful but, to my mind, they are the most singularly misunderstood punctuation mark. People leave commas out when they are supposed to be there and use them when they are not needed.

First let’s imagine that we are walking along a path, trudging along with one foot in front of the other. You are not likely to stop with one foot up in the air and the other supporting your full weight. Yet, we do this to the comma all the time.

I was born in San Francisco, California in the late 1950s.

The comma after San Francisco is your right foot doing its bit to advance your journey forward. But then the left foot—the comma that should be after California—just hangs there in midair.

Now, let’s imagine that we are looking at the proverbial apples and oranges and that we are weighing them on an imaginary scale. We have something (apples) on one side of the scale and another (oranges) on the other. They are in balance. The word “and” is the pole that keeps them in balance. But, possibly from a misguided sense of drama, people keep wanting to add a comma before “and” and other conjunctions.

The Rover scraped the Martian soil in a search for evidence of water, and of life.

Sure, adding the comma forces the reader to stop briefly and does give added weight to the end of the sentence. But this can be done with dashes or with another short sentence just as well, without offending the grammar gods.

The Rover scraped the Martian soil in a search for evidence of water—and of life.

The Rover scraped the Martian soil in a search for evidence of water. It also searched for life itself, hoping to find the remains of some ancient civilization in the red dust.

Well, maybe that went overboard with the drama! But you get the idea.

We give fiction writers poetic license to use the comma for suspense and to heighten excitement by pausing with a comma. Here is an example from Bram Stoker’s Dracula:

He saw my hesitation, and spoke, “The logic is simple, and no madman’s logic this time.”

That comma before “and spoke” is not needed but, to advance the tension in such a story, we allow the rules to be thrown by the wayside.

So, remember these two rules of thumb: use a comma when splicing together two complete sentences to make one (two subjects and two verbs) and use one in place of repeating “and” in a list (apples and oranges and bananas equals apples, oranges, and bananas).  Otherwise, let some other type of punctuation have a turn or use none at all.

As for me, I will use plenty of commas—when needed—and stay in the left lane when turning left no matter how often you honk at me.

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by | March 6, 2013 · 8:30 am

Kill Your Darlings: The X. J. Kennedy Edition

With the Association of Writers & Writing Programs annual conference underway, we challenged our JHU Press authors to write on the theme “Kill your darlings.” We asked: What poem, line, stanza, or piece of brilliant work have you sacrificed for the greater good? Has this piece or well-turned phrase found its way into another poem, short story, or into your subconscious to use at another time? Read on to find out what they had to say.

Guest post by X. J. Kennedy

the-owlstone-crownIn writing the first draft of a poem and then paring it down, I murder little darlings all the time. None is especially memorable, nor is it any loss. But I once went through the agony of killing a beloved piece of prose some 20,000 words long. In writing a first novel for children, I was throwing in every idea I had, resulting in a manuscript of cumbersome length. The editor, Margaret McElderry, saw that it would gain from removing several chapters in which the protagonists, a boy and his sister, pilot a blimp to an island inhabited by a bunch of practical jokers. I loved that section fiercely, but recognized the wisdom of making the cut. The outcome was The Owlstone Crown, which Margaret published under her imprint at Atheneum in 1983 (still in print, by the way, as a Front Street paperback). And the deleted darling? It became the center of a sequel, in which it grew a new head and a tail: The Eagle as Wide as the World (McElderry Books / Simon & Schuster, 1997).

kennedy.prominentAward-winning author X. J. Kennedy has written poetry, children’s verse, and fiction, as well as textbooks on writing and literature. Three volumes of his poetry, Dark Horses, The Lords of Misrule, and In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus, are available for perusal and purchase throughout the AWP at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars / Hopkins Review booth (#2805).

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by | February 26, 2013 · 8:30 am

Chapter & Verse: The Iliad’s Civic Community

Chapter and Verse is a series where JHU Press authors and editors discuss the literary landscape of poetry and prose, whether their own creative work or the literature of others.

guest post by David F. Elmer

When I first had the idea for my new book, The Poetics of Consent: Collective Decision Making and the Iliad, the United States was in the midst of the worst phase of the war in Iraq. In hindsight I can see more clearly than ever how the politics of those years shaped my view of the ancient Greeks’ great martial epic.

I took as my subject the ways in which the Iliad depicts politics, which I understand broadly as the project of collectively determining common values, goals, and actions. I became fascinated by the ways in which a poem that focuses so relentlessly on the competition for prestige among powerful individuals (Agamemnon, Achilles) simultaneously projects consensus as the ultimate political ideal. The tension that emerged from my readings resonated, for me, with my misgivings about what I perceived as the unchecked growth of executive power in the American polity. Presidential signing statements and military tribunals prompted me to incorporate Giorgio Agamben’s chilling vision of constitutional crisis (State of Exception) into my interpretation of Agamemnon’s willful disregard for both the established procedures and the express wishes of his people.

My book is an exercise more in literary interpretation than in political theory, so I do not claim to have any prescription for bringing about a renewed commitment to public deliberation and consensus. In fact, my interpretations might seem, at first glance, to be surprisingly apolitical. I claim that the Iliad’s depiction of politics has in fact very little to do with any historical practice of politics—in the strict sense—among early Greeks. (The notion of a historical “Homeric society” has become an increasingly untenable fiction.) Instead, I view the poem’s vision of consensus as a reflection of the dynamics of the poetic tradition that produced our Iliad.

That poetic tradition, however, has an essential political dimension. The Iliad as we know it is the product of a long process of development. Over the course of centuries, traditional stories and heroic poems about the Trojan war circulated as oral compositions. Gradually, in the context of large, regional festivals that drew audiences from across the Greek-speaking world, a standard version of the Troy story arose; that standard version is represented for us by the Iliad and the Odyssey. These poems are in a very real sense the product of consensus, a consensus among the performers and audiences that shaped the poems. And this consensus was political in the broadest sense: it reflected a variety of trade-offs among Greeks from diverse local communities as they negotiated over an articulation of the heroic past that could be meaningful to them all as an expression of collective identity.

Of course, the achievement of this consensus did very little to alleviate the endemic political problems of the Greek world: unstable governments and constant warfare between neighboring states. But I do not think it would be too naïve or idealistic to suggest that the consensus represented in and by the Iliad offers an important—and hopeful—lesson for those who feel dissatisfied with our prevailing political culture. In an age of niche media, when opportunities for truly inclusive conversations are fewer and fewer, it is useful to be reminded of the potential of literature and art as focal points for collective discussion and debate. Great works of literature, such as the Iliad, have the potential to draw citizens of diverse backgrounds and political orientations into constructive conversations about questions that we must confront together, as a civic community.

elmerDavid F. Elmer is an associate professor of the classics at Harvard University and author of The Poetics of Consent: Collective Decision Making and the Iliad, published by the JHU Press.

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