THE HOURS, MRS. DALLOWAY, AND OTHER BOOKS INVOLVING DEATH

I felt like it was time I read a book by Michael Cunningham, so I got The Hours from my library. And I loved it, even though it's "not necessarily" Cunningham's favorite among his novels.

I remember liking the movie well enough, but not a second of this trailer seems familiar to me now, 16 years later. I like the fact that Meryl Streep is a potential character in the book and in the film plays the character who thinks she might have spotted Meryl Streep (or possibly Vanessa Redgrave) momentarily peeking her head out of a trailer on a movie set in her New York City neighborhood.

That latter character would be Clarissa Vaughan, whose chapters are titled "Mrs. Dalloway." The novel tells the stories of three women: Clarissa, a bisexual woman whose ex-lover, Richard, who's dying of AIDS, had started calling her the name of the title character in Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel when they were in college; Woolf herself, who's writing Mrs. Dalloway and whose chapters are titled "Mrs. Woolf"; and Laura Brown, a pregnant housewife and mother living in Los Angeles in 1949 who's reading Mrs. Dalloway—and contemplating suicide—and whose chapters are titled "Mrs. Brown." (The novel's tripartite structure was referenced in a Jeopardy! answer last month. The contestant who came up with the correct question was the one named Jeffrey, not Virginia.)

I love Cunningham's way with words:

  • The boy sets about eating with a certain tractorish steadiness that has more to do with obedience than appetite. (page 48 of the 2002 paperback edition with Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman on the cover, about Laura's son)

  • Here again, surprisingly, are the faded yellow-beige walls, more or less the color of an arrowroot biscuit; here is the fluorescent panel on the ceiling emitting its sputtering, watery glare. (page 53, about Richard's depressing apartment)

  • Virginia's eyes meet those of one of the pugs, which stares over its fawn-colored shoulder at her with an expression of moist, wheezing bafflement. (page 82, about a dog Virginia encounters on a walk around town)

  • His old beauty, his heft and leonine poise, vanished with such surprising suddenness almost two decades ago, and this Louis—white-haired, sinewy, full of furtive, chastened emotions—emerged in much the way a small, unimposing man might jump from the turret of a tank to announce that it was he, not the machine, who flattened your village. (page 124, about another of Clarissa's longtime friends)

There's a remarkable scene in which Virginia's young niece prepares a final resting place for a dying thrush her older brother has found in Virginia's yard. "Before following [her sister Vanessa and Vanessa's children into the house for tea after the bird's funeral], Virginia lingers another moment beside the dead bird in its circle of roses. It could be a kind of hat. It could be the missing link between millinery and death." (page 121)

There's much about death and contemplation of death in this book. Thankfully, there are also some moments of quiet beauty about the simple joys in life: "[Clarissa's partner] Sally hands the flowers to her and for a moment they are both simply and entirely happy. They are present, right now, and they have managed, somehow, over the course of eighteen years, to continue loving each other. It is enough. At this moment, it is enough." (page 185)

***

I decided I should next read Cunningham's inspiration for The Hours, but I ultimately figured I ought to go for something simple and fun instead as a reprieve from the heaviness of TH and Mrs. D. (I knew enough about the plot of the latter to know it also included a death by suicide.) I checked out this murder mystery set in New York and Provincetown that I thought might be a breezy read and good for some laughs, but I couldn't make it past the second chapter; the writing was pretty bad and the characters were clichés that generated no interest for me whatsoever.

So I started on Mrs. Dalloway. Getting through the book required some effort because many of Woolf's sentences are so complex, they need to be read twice. Or thrice. Consider this doozy: "That was her self when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world only into one centre, one diamond, one woman who sat in her drawing-room and made a meeting-point, a radiancy no doubt in some dull lives, a refuge for the lonely to come to, perhaps; she had helped young people, who were grateful to her; had tried to be the same always, never showing a sign of all the other sides of her — faults, jealousies, vanities, suspicions, like this of Lady Bruton not asking her to lunch; which, she thought (combing her hair finally), is utterly base!" (page 40 of the 1993 [sexist!] "Everyman's Library" edition from Knopf)

Elizabeth Dalloway and the other characters take a lot of parenthetical actions while going on in their heads about something else. And I sometimes got confused as to which character was the antecedent of a pronoun, especially the hims and hes in the final scene involving Septimus, a troubled World War I veteran, and Rezia, his Italian wife.

After Septimus and Rezia have a great time joking around and making a goofy, tiny hat for their landlady's daughter, whom they dislike, they share a moment like Sally and Clarissa: "They were perfectly happy now, [Rezia] said suddenly, putting the hat down. For she could say anything to him now. She could say whatever came into her head." (page 164)

I needed that moment of contentment for Rezia, a great character. Septimus's internal monologues and spoken and written bits of madness are difficult to read.

I didn't find Elizabeth Dalloway to be as interesting as her contemporary counterpart, Clarissa, and I enjoyed TH a lot more than I did Mrs. D.

Because this is an editing blog, and not a literary appreciation blog, I'll point out that, nowadays at least, we would ideally start the following sentence with "Far were": "Far was Italy and the white houses and the room where her sister sat making hats, and the streets crowded every evening with people walking, laughing out loud, not half alive like people here, huddled up in Bath chairs, looking at a few ugly flowers stuck in pots!" (page 24, Rezia thinking about the country she grew up in)

And there seems to be something left out in this sentence, at least a punctuation mark, in the part where it jumps from page 162 to 163: "But directly he saw nothing" (new page) "the sounds of the game became fainter and stranger and sounded like the cries of people seeking and not finding, and passing farther and farther away." (Septimus in bed, going madder) If you can make sense of that sentence, please explain it to me. I searched for the passage online and found many references to it, so if there is a mistake in it, it's not unique to this edition of the book.

***

Before I went to the library on Saturday, I asked Tony for a recommendation of a novel he'd read that was interesting and not depressing. He suggested The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. I found it and read the jacket copy: "Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. ... And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy. ... It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark." Sigh.

The blurb from Erin Morgenstern on the back cover convinced me to give it a shot: "I read The Ocean at the End of the Lane in one sitting. It is soaked in myth and memory and salt water and it is so, so lovely. It feels as if it was always there, somewhere in the story-stuff of the universe."

When I got home, I read to Tony what I quoted two paragraphs above, and he said he’d forgotten this book also involved a suicide. He remembered it being a feel-good book. We'll see; I haven't started it yet.

Tony also suggested something by David Sedaris, and because it's been quite a while since I've read a collection of his essays, I picked up Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls.

I also put in an interlibrary-loan request for Final Viewing: A Bill Hawley Undertaking, the first in a series of four mid-1990s mystery novels by Leo Axler about a funeral director with my name who's an amateur detective. That should be fun to read.

Some Thoughts on Uncle Tom's Cabin

In this post, I wrote that I was reading Uncle Tom's Cabin and I linked to this essay from the journal Humanities that argued, starting in the title, that it was "The First Great American Novel."

I admire Harriet Beecher Stowe and her book for helping to bring about the Civil War and the end of slavery, but it's not a great achievement as a work of art. (There are a couple of SPOILERS ahead about major plot developments.) It was written to convince white Americans that people of color were every bit as human as white people and that the North, because of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, was as complicit as the South in the horrors of slavery. Its characters, though, are, for the most part, broad stereotypes, and Stowe regularly makes pronouncements about the characteristics of an entire race of people as if they were indisputable fact. And for a century or so, the novel has largely been viewed by African-Americans as accommodationist and its title character as a sellout to his race. Little Eva, the daughter of Uncle Tom's second master, Augustine St. Clare, is a perfect angel whom we're told will die fairly soon in a chapter called "Foreshadowings." And chapter 43, "Results," starts with the unliterary, direct-to-the-reader declaration "The rest of our story is soon told."

There are some fun bits of language here and there, and I learned a couple of new words. In the chapter in which Eva dies, called "Death," setness is used in the plural when speaking of St. Clare's highly efficient New England cousin Ophelia: "They who had shrugged their shoulders at her little peculiarities and setnesses, so unlike the carelesss freedom of southern manners, acknowledged that now she was the exact person that was wanted [for taking care of Eva on her deathbed]."

And I learned perhaps can be a noun. It's also used in the plural, in the chapter titled "An Authentic Ghost Story," in a passage about the trials of the soul an evil man like Simon Legree, Tom's third and final master and murderer, must endure:

After all, let a man take what pains he may to hush it down, a human soul is an awful ghostly, unquiet possession, for a bad man to have. Who knows the metes and bounds of it? Who knows all its awful perhapses,—those shudderings and tremblings, which it can no more live down than it can outlive its own eternity! What a fool is he who locks his door to keep out spirits, who has in his own bosom a spirit he dares not meet alone,—whose voice, smothered far down, and piled over with mountains of earthliness, is yet like the forewarning trumpet of doom!

Oatmeal–Chocolate Chip–Dried Cherry Cookies

As one of their Christmas gifts, I gave my nephews Matt and Mike cards promising to make them a baked treat and mail it to them sometime this spring:

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(In this post from August, I wrote about mailing them chocolate chip cookies for their birthday and their return to college.)

I didn't want to make plain chocolate chip cookies again, so two Sundays ago, in making good on my promise, I made Oatmeal–Chocolate Chip–Dried Cherry Cookies. Years ago, before I met Tony, I regularly made a bar version of that cookie with traditional ingredients like gluten-containing all-purpose flour and butter. (The link above goes to my personal blog, which is private. Email me if you'd like the log-in and password.) I based these gluten- and dairy-free cookies on the Oatmeal Cookies recipe in BabyCakes Covers the Classics, a baking book I referenced in that previous post about making cookies for the 'phews and the book on the cooking and baking shelves of my bookcase that gets the most use.

The cookies turned out wonderfully ...

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... but I see room for improvements the next time I make them.

The recipe called for 2 tablespoons of ground cinnamon, which sounded like an awful lot. I wanted only a hint of cinnamon flavor, and I decided I wanted some ginger too, so I used 2 heaping teaspoons of each ground spice in a double batch of cookies. And I think that was about right. Here's a photo of the dry ingredients whisked together:

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As you can see, there aren't a lot of oats visible; the recipe specified 1/2 cup of oats for every 1 3/4 cups of gluten-free flour and 1 cup of sugar. I will add more oats the next time.

And I believe the book's recipe could easily handle another 1/2 cup of oats without getting too dry. Here's a photo of the batter with the dried cherries and chocolate chips waiting to be stirred in:  

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For liquids, Erin McKenna listed 1 cup of melted refined coconut oil or canola oil and 1/2 cup of unsweetened applesauce (and 2 tablespoons vanilla extract). As you can see in the photo, the oil is puddling a bit, especially around the edges. In my double batch, I used just under 1 cup of melted coconut oil (I melted what I thought would be about 1 cup by eyeballing what seemed like the right amount of the solid stuff) and used canola oil to top off that cup plus fill one more cup. The other ingredients in the batter couldn't absorb that much oil, and, consequently, the batter was unpleasant to work with and most of the cookies spread out more than I would have liked. Next time, I will cut back on the oil a bit, and I think with the additional oats, the batter should have a texture more to my liking.

Here's a photo of a later tray of cookies that, for whatever reason, didn't spread out as much as some of the earlier ones and didn't get as lacy around the edges:

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The texture of the cookies overall was a little more oily-moist than I would have preferred but certainly not off-puttingly so. And the taste was spot-on. The combination of hearty oats, bittersweet dark chocolate chips, sweet-tart dried cherries, and the notes of ginger and cinnamon was a winner.

A Fine Collection of Short Stories with Two Little Errors

I just finished reading Touchy Subjects by Emma Donoghue. It's a collection of 19 short stories separated into five categories that can be touchy subjects—Babies, Domesticity, Strangers, Desire, and Death—and there's also a story by that name, in which a man tries to help his wife's best friend conceive a child by making a sperm donation in her hotel room (not directly inside her) while she's visiting their city.

Donoghue is a lesbian, and several of the stories have LGBT1 characters. The stories tend to end rather abruptly yet decisively. I enjoyed most of them a good deal, though that title story ultimately didn't seem credible: I can't imagine a woman allowing her best friend to raise a child who would be a half sibling to her own children. Nor a man being willing to father his wife's best friend's child. Nor a woman asking her best friend to let her husband be her sperm donor.

Two of my favorite stories were found in the Desire section: "Team Men," about a romance between two high school jocks, only one of whom wants to come out of the closet, and "Speaking in Tongues," about a whirlwind fling between a lesbian poet and a much younger woman told alternatingly from each of their perspectives.

The thing I found most impressive about the collection was the wide variety of characters whose viewpoints Donoghue presented. I'm inclined to read one of her novels at some point, perhaps Frog Music, which I saw was at my local library when I returned Touchy Subjects today. But I'm still reading another novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, so I picked up a collection of short stories instead: Lucky Alan and Other Stories by Jonathan Lethem.

I'm now going to point out two little errors I found in Touchy Subjects, because that's one of the things I tend to do on this blog. My usual disclaimer remains in effect: I don't claim to be perfect, and I'm pointing out these errors in a spirit of helpful criticism, not know-it-all-ness. And these really are tiny mistakes.

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In the story called "Oops," which is in the Babies section, in the third line from the bottom in the photo above, "insisting" should be "insisted."

And in the story called "Pluck," from the Domesticity section, the following problematic sentence appeared: "It turned out that a hair was a filament or a filamentous outgrowth that grew from the integument of an animal or insect." Insects are animals, so mammal is a better word to use than animal.

1There's a SPOILER for the story "The Welcome" in this footnoted gripe: The book jacket summarizes that story thusly: "A roommate's bizarre secret awakens a repressed young woman." That's poorly worded both because the young woman in question is turned on by her roommate before she learns what the roommate's secret is and because the woman she is attracted to turns out to be transgender and being transgender shouldn't be described as "bizarre." I will acknowledge that this book was published in 2006, before many of us, including me, were educated about what it means to be transgender. And I should note that the story itself doesn't present being transgender as bizarre.

Who Versus That and Whose Versus ... Thatses?

I noticed a couple instances in The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb where a who was needed instead of a that: 

  • She said there were a few more people they still needed to reach, and a few THAT felt they had to decline, but that most of the eyewitnesses had agreed to assist them. (page 267)

  • "The woman THAT sat across from me in the bakery on our first date." (page 315)

That latter sentence was spoken by someone who may be forgiven for not always speaking perfect English, but the character was an English teacher, so I expected more of him. 😄

Not long after I got a new boss at my previous full-time gig, she questioned the use of whose when modifying a thing, not a person, in a sentence I don't recall in full. It was a legitimate question, and the legitimate answer is, our language doesn't have an accepted alternative for the possessive pronominal adjective whose when dealing strictly with things. See this post by Bonnie Mills (or Bonnie Trenga?) over at Grammar Girl's blog that uses the following two examples: "The car whose windshield wipers weren't working was driving in the fast lane." and "The tree whose leaves were falling seems to be dying."

For whatever reason, a word like thatse or maybe thats or even thatses, which would clearly show we're dealing with a thing, not a person, never took off as the logical possessive to use in such instances: The car thatse windshield wipers weren't working was driving in the fast lane. The motel thats sign was spray-painted didn't look like a place I wanted to stay. The novel thatses plot was getting too depressing for me is now back at the library, half-read.

That last example pertains to me and The Hour I First Believed. I couldn't bring myself to continue reading it once the author foreshadowed an even greater tragedy the narrator's wife was going to have to deal with after having already survived the taken-from-real-life massacre at Jefferson County, Colorado's Columbine High School, where she was a nurse. I didn't want to go where it was clear Lamb was going—to a chapter thatses next plot twist was too emotionally devastating.

A Gorgeous Novel From David Leavitt and a New Sorbet That's a Riff on an Old Favorite

I finished reading The Two Hotel Francforts by David Leavitt over Thanksgiving weekend and was blown away by the quality of the writing. I want to highlight these two sentences that reference the sun and the moon, two much-written-about entities it's difficult to say anything fresh about:

  • All this came back to me as I sat outside the Suiça, and the sun resumed its posture of perennial bored sovereignty, like a lifeguard on his high chair, and the pigeons gathered, on the lookout for any new customers who, out of gratitude at finding themselves, after so many months, in a city with bread to spare, might give them some crumbs. (page 97)

  • The moonlight, though dull, held intimations of sharpness, as if shards of the noonday sun were embedded in it. (page 189)

The novel is set in the summer of 1940 in Lisbon and revolves around two married couples who are planning to escape to New York from Nazi-occupied Paris. The narrator of the story is Pete Winters, a car salesman whose wife, Julia, doesn't want to return to the U.S. because of her troubled relationship with her American family. Pete has an affair with Edward, a writer who has a complex, codependent partnership with his wife, Iris. The plot takes unpredictable but always true-to-life turns, and the dialogue sparkles. You should read it, even though the adjective half-shod appears on page 210. ;-)

Tony had been hinting he'd really like a batch of a frozen dessert I hadn't made for him in far too long: Blood Orange and Bittersweet Chocolate Sorbet. His friend Nancie, whom I referenced in my Comparing Billions to Billions post, sent him the recipe, from Sunset magazine, in February 2016 and said it was enough to inspire her to get an ice cream maker. As I wrote in this post1 on my long-running personal blog, Hawleyblog (log-in and password required; email me if you'd like them), "this sorbet was fantastic, thanks in no small part to the Campari, which gave it an extra air of sophistication." If I'd come up with this flavor, I would have called it Blood Orange–Campari Sorbet With Bittersweet Chocolate because the Campari was more essential to its enjoyment than the chocolate and Tony and I discussed at the time whether the chocolate was even necessary or wanted. "My final decision is that it's a fine addition but I'm sure it would also be scrumptious without it," I wrote in my Hawleyblog post.

I'd been finding (and purchasing) blood oranges at our local supermarkets for several weeks, but, of course, once I'd decided to make a batch of BOCSWBC, they disappeared everywhere. I had a bag of clementines in the fridge that I had planned to use for our Thanksgiving turkey breast, in this preparation from Food & Wine. I'm sure the clementine-and-garlic combo would have been magical—I trust F&W's recipes not to suck—but I started to have my doubts and decided I'd rather serve a more-traditional, herb-infused turkey. So the clementines were available to make Clementine-Campari Sorbet on Sunday.

I needed 3 pounds of clementines to produce the 3 cups of juice. As I often do, I substituted brown rice syrup for the corn syrup. And I left out the chocolate because clementine and chocolate seemed like a less-winning combo than blood orange and chocolate.

The processed sorbet base was a pretty, apricot-like color ...

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... that grew paler after it finished solidifying in our freezer:

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It tasted pretty good, but I'm not craving this sorbet anywhere near as much as I did the BOCSWBC.

Tony and I tried this sorbet with a sprinkling of bittersweet chocolate chips. We both agreed it's better without the chocolate element. And by the way, for the blood orange version, I throw chocolate chips into my ice cream maker toward the end of churning rather than go through the timely process of melting bittersweet chocolate, pouring it onto a sheet pan, freezing it, and breaking it into fragments.

1That post also included the announcement that Tony and I were getting married nine weeks later. The post about the wedding itself is here.

A Pre-Thanksgiving Hodgepodge Post

There were two issues that grabbed my attention in a single paragraph in this story about glamping1 at a Japanese resort that appeared in the November issue of Food & Wine. I decided the best way to resolve the first issue was to remove the parenthetical sentence altogether. And I ultimately realized the other issue wasn't problematic after all. Here's the paragraph in question:

  • Glamping, on the other hand, is the illusion of work and ruggedness. (Think of it as like transferring prepared foods into your best serving dishes and adding a sprinkling of cut chives on top before guests arrive.) Essentially you're playacting, with an emphasis on props. Sure, I'm wearing a headlamp, but it lights the wooden staircase back to my climate-controlled room, where a deeply compliant Japanese toilet with a heated seat awaits. I might chop wood or paddle a canoe or hike among the trees, but only under the gently watchful supervision of a "glamping master" who has just delivered a 20-minute safety lecture on the topic.

The first thing that took me aback was the as like in the second sentence. We're used to seeing either one of them being used to make a comparison, not both of them in a row. I considered whether adding being between them would be helpful or overkill. I leaned toward helpful, though the presence of three other -ing words in the sentence gave me pause. I finally concluded that if I'd been the editor or copy editor of this story, I would have made the case for taking out the entire sentence. This particular example makes sense as far as the illusion of work goes, but it has nothing to do with the illusion of ruggedness—unless, maybe, you harvested the chives with an axe. I think it's better to go right from the illusion bit to the part about playacting.

At first, second, and even third reads, I didn't like the use of the topic to refer back to the three things the writer might have been doing in the last sentence. But after further reflection, I decided that since she's considering doing only one of the three at a given time, the singular topic works just fine.

Once I started seriously analyzing the minutiae of this paragraph, I discovered one more, rather small, thing I'd have changed: I'd have made it "Essentially it's playacting," so as to avoid the shift from second person ("you're playacting") to first person ("I'm wearing").

By the way, the expression "deeply compliant Japanese toilet" is brilliant. 😄

Speaking of two things you don't expect to see together, I was flummoxed by multiple instances of the consecutive use of a comma and a dash in the last novel I read, The Professor's House by Willa Cather. The combination came up pretty regularly, sometimes singly and sometimes in pairs within a sentence:

  • To the new generations of country and village boys now pouring into the university in such large numbers, Langtry had become, in a curious way, an instructor in manners,—what is called an "influence." (page 1302)

  • Just as, when Queen Mathilde was doing the long tapestry now shown at Bayeux,—working her conronicle of the deeds of knights and heroes,—alongside the big pattern of dramatic action she and her women carried the little playful pattern of birds and beasts that are a story in themselves; so, to him, the most important chapters of his history were interwoven with personal memories. (page 158)

I haven't found a compelling explanation online for why these punctuation marks would have been used consecutively. Tony suggested "the comma is grammatical, and the dash is rhetorical," meaning the latter indicates a greater pause. He also said to look at Wordsworth poetry for other examples of this phenomenon, and I found a bunch of them. This poem contains comma-dashes as well as period-dashes and colon-dashes. If any of you readers can offer further insight into these punctuation combos, I'd welcome it. For now, I'll conclude that I see no need for anything but a dash in my first example. The second sentence is so complex, it almost makes my head ache, but I would have gone with (only) commas after Bayeux and heroes as well as after action. I think the semicolon after themselves is justified by all the commas that preceded it and to remind us of the Just as that began this big ol' mess of a sentence.

I'm generally mellow about diction, and so I don't have a long list of words I despise. If a word is used correctly, who am I to say it offends me? Two exceptions to this mellowness are shod and clad, when used to mean wearing shoes/shoed and wearing clothes/clothed respectively. Nobody ever uses the first word (or shoed) conversationally. Nobody! And if somebody is saying the second word, she's probably referring to metal, not clothes.

This bugaboo of mine came to mind because shod was used in the fourth paragraph of this Bloomberg story I read the other day about an estate sale at Grey Gardens, the former home of "Big Edie" and "Little Edie" Beale, the mother-daughter pair who were the subject of a Maysles brothers documentary of the same name and, later, a terrific Broadway musical and an outstanding HBO movie.

1In case you don't want to bother reading the entire article, but obviously don't have a problem scrolling down the screen for footnotes 😆, I'll tell you the writer is dismissive of the term glamping—a combination of glamour and camping—even while having enjoyed her glamping experience.

2The page numbers refer to Willa Cather: Later Novels, which was published by Literary Classics of the United States in 1990 and which I checked out of my local library a few weeks ago. The Professor's House is the second novel in the six-book collection and Tony's favorite later work of fiction by Cather. I had never read anything by Cather. I really enjoyed TPH and wished for a longer third segment back in the world of the St. Peter family after the (also enjoyable) digression into "Tom Outland's Story" for the middle part of the novel.

A Friend Suggested I Edit The New York Times' Review of Stranger Things 2. So I Did

An UPDATE on Nov. 5: We watched episode 7 of Stranger Things 2 tonight, so I now get the "apocalpyse-chic street-punk gang" reference. It was an unusual episode in that it focused strictly on only one of the regular characters, who got caught up in the gang in question. If you recall the very begining of the first episode of this season but haven't yet gotten to episode 7, you'll probably have a good guess which character I mean. But that's all I'll say.

We also watched the first episode of The Big Family Cooking Showdown on Netflix. I enjoyed it. The competition between the two families held my interest, and it was fun seeing Nadiya Hussain, one of my favorite Great British Baking Show contestants, as the co-host. Tony thought the show(down) was only OK but held out hope it would get better.

My friend Stacy texted me a link to this, in her words, "sloppily written" New York Times review of the second season of Stranger Things on Saturday and suggested I use it as the basis for a post on this blog.

I concur that the piece, written by James Poniewozik, has some issues. I emailed Stacy a list of what I'd found that bugged me and asked her what she'd seen that had gotten her riled.

We both found some annoying repetition: I pointed out that season was used three times in two sentences in the sixth paragraph, and two of those times, it's preceded by the word first. "That's a mite too repetitious for me," I wrote. Stacy was worn out by all the uses of it, which appears 32 times in the story, including in its possessive form. (See what I did there? Do bloggers still ask "See what I did there?"1) The third and final paragraphs are especially it-heavy, with five apiece.

In the sixth paragraph, Stacy thought this sentence was poorly constructed: "Will is back in our world, but tormented by visions of the Upside Down, which, as the first-season epilogue suggested, still has a hold on him." (I don't think we need the comma after world.)

We both called out the seventh paragraph: "Eleven, who went missing at the end of Season 1, is still in hiding. So Will's D&D buddies—Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo)—find a new cool girl to be group-infatuated with, Max (Sadie Sink), and a new creepy-crawly menace to battle. As a new extradimensional threat arises, Mr. Modine's conspiracist scientist is replaced by Dr. Owens (a credibly straight-faced Paul Reiser)." (Actor Matthew Modine's full name had been given earlier in the story.) Stacy called the first two sentences of that passage "messy." I wrote in my email:

  • I would have connected the second sentence with the first and made a new sentence about the creepy-crawly menace (and lowercased the first s in Season 1): "Eleven, who went missing at the end of season 1, is still in hiding, so Will's D&D buddies—Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo)—find a new cool girl to be group-infatuated with, Max (Sadie Sink). Given that Eleven defeated the Demogorgon in the final episode of the first season, it shouldn't exactly be a spoiler to mention there's a new creepy-crawly menace to battle. And Mr. Modine's conspiracist scientist has also been replaced, by a doctor played by a credibly straight-faced Paul Reiser."

Since I wrote that email, Tony and I have started watching the show, so I now realize Reiser's character is also a scientist, with a Ph.D., and not a medical doctor, as my wording would tend to imply.

In the fifth paragraph from the end, I would have added the 2 in the show's name, like we see again in the penultimate paragraph. Earlier in the review, Poniewozik had made a point of noting the correct name of the show is now Stranger Things 2—"like a movie rather than a season of TV." And I would have put an an in front of apocalpyse-chic in "complete with apocalypse-chic street-punk gang." That phrase comes up in a reference to the classic 1980s film The Outsiders, which was directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starred a bunch of young men who went on to great success as actors: C. Thomas Howell,2 Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, and Tom Cruise. The writer mentioned that film in the context of providing a list of movies ST2 cribs from, including two childhood favorites of mine: Gremlins and E.T., which, to be hypercorrect for a moment, should officially be called E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial at first reference. (And the NYT piece gives that full name at its first reference to the film, in the first paragraph, in an interesting tidbit about a horrific-sounding potential E.T. sequel that, thankfully, never saw the light of day.)

In my email, I added:

  • I don't quite understand what's meant by "an apocalypse-chic street-punk gang." Maybe I will after I watch the episode in which it appears.

In the penultimate paragraph, I would once again lowercase the first s in Season 1. And I would put a comma after and for several episodes in this sentence: "I'm not sure 'Stranger Things'3 creatively needed a second season, and for several episodes it seems like 'Stranger Things 2' isn't convinced of it either."4

Stacy was annoyed by what she saw as an overuse of parentheses and specifically called out this sentence, in the penultimate paragraph, as one that shouldn't have been made parenthetical: "(The ingenious device of having Will speak from the Upside Down via Christmas lights is replaced by—well, you'll see.)"5 (That particular use of parentheses doesn't bother me, though I would note I tend to use them a lot. Like right now.)

My final catch, in the last paragraph, was:

  • There's one two many a's in "But it's a still a good time."

Tony and I are very much enjoying ST2, but we were both disappointed in episode 4, the one we watched last night. Tony felt that several of the characters' actions weren't realistic or keeping in line with their motivations (even while, of course, acknowledging we're talking about a show with supernatural elements). I won't give any more details for fear of providing spoilers, but I'll say that I agree with his assessment. I didn't like that there wasn't much in the way of comedic or uplifting moments to offset the tension in this rather heavy episode (even while acknowledging ST2 is first and foremost a horror/suspense show that was bound to get really heavy eventually).

1At one point, I added a second question mark here, after the end quote mark:

  • Do bloggers still ask "See what I did there?"?

But I ultimately stuck with my initial inclination that that would have been excessive.

2I left Howell off that list at first because he doesn't have the name recognition the rest of that crew has, but I see from his IMDB page that he's worked steadily ever since that film.

3Newspapers understandably tend to use quote marks in lieu of italics for TV and movie names because italics are harder to pull off on a printing press than on the web. I don't think I can use italics in headlines in the theme I'm using in Squarespace, so The New York Times and Stranger Things 2 are in roman in this post's headline. (There were five in's in that last sentence, but they're all totally justifiable. 😛)

4At one point, I added a second period here, after the end quote mark, like so:

  • And I would put a comma after and for several episodes in this sentence: "I'm not sure 'Stranger Things'3 creatively needed a second season, and for several episodes it seems like 'Stranger Things 2' isn't convinced of it either.".

But I decided it was pretty obviously excessive. And that decision led me to delete the second question mark referenced above, in note 1.

5Here's another place a second period could maybe, possibly, be justified, especially given the closing parenthesis:

  • Stacy was annoyed by what she saw as an overuse of parentheses and specifically called out this sentence, in the penultimate paragraph, as one that shouldn't have been made parenthetical: "(The ingenious device of having Will speak from the Upside Down via Christmas lights is replaced by—well, you'll see.)."

But I think it looks ridiculous before the quote mark and like a mistake after it:

  • is replaced by—well, you'll see.)".

So I'm leaving it alone.

Comparing Billions to Billions

A dear friend of Tony's lives in Santa Rosa, one of the communities in Northern California that were devastated by wildfires earlier this month. Thankfully, Nancie; her husband, Frank; their beloved standard poodle, Cosmo; and their home are all safe and sound.

Yesterday, I read a good story at all-things-alcoholic website Punch about the effects of the fires on California's wine industry. This sentence stood out for me because of the monetary figures in it:

  • It’s not simply that economic losses are projected at anywhere from $3 to $6 billion, but also that the fires came during Napa and Sonoma’s busiest time of year, when the small restaurants and shops that rely on tourists finally start to turn a profit.

Another billion is absolutely needed after $3. Otherwise, that sentence is literally saying the economic losses could be as low as $3. Sure, readers could logically assume once they get to the billion that the word applies to both $3 and $6, but it's much better to use the word twice and not require readers to make that assumption.

Editing Talking to Animals and an SFGN Headline Flub

My current nonfiction read is Jon Katz's Talking to Animals: How You Can Understand Animals and They Can Understand You. I like what I've read so far, but I haven't gotten too far into it. That's mostly because I'm more in fiction mode right now and so am spending more time with Steve Martin's An Object of Beauty, a book recommended by my husband, Tony.

The second chapter of Talking discusses using visualization techniques to develop a closer relationship with a companion animal. Here are some fixes I would have made if I'd been tasked with editing that chapter:

On page 41: "I had never had a dog like that or really heard anyone speak about that kind of relationship with a dog beyond Lucky, but I was very young, and she had not lived long." Katz is referring to the relationship between Caroline, an artist and poet who lives in the same town as him, and her yellow Labrador retriever, whose name is Jade. We learned about Lucky in the previous chapter. He was a puppy the author adopted from his school's janitor when he was a young boy. Katz told the bittersweet story of wanting this dog so much, struggling (with a bully and a somewhat reluctant parent) to make the adoption happen, taking him home, and ultimately not having him in his life for very long. I don't know what the antecedent of she in that sentence would be other than Lucky, and since Lucky was male, that should be "he had not lived long." I'm thinking the she may have mistakenly ended up there because of the multiple references in the previous paragraphs to Jade, who's female.

And because I think less isn't always more, I also believe that passage would read better with a few more words and split into a couple of sentences: "I had never heard anyone speak about that kind of relationship with a dog, and I had yet to have my own such relationship. Lucky didn't count because I'd been so young and he hadn't lived for very long."

On pages 42 to 43: "During [walks with my Lab, Julius] I would often speak aloud of new characters, story ideas, and plots twists." That should be plot, singular.

On page 45: "At the time, I knew little about dogs, I avoided the growing shelves of dog books in the bookstore, I thought the dog love I saw often seemed excessive, overly emotional." That's a doozy of a run-on sentence. I would put a yet before I avoided and a period after bookstore.

On page 47: "In our world, a good dog is a dog who abandons most of the natural behaviors of a dog—having sex a lot, digging holes in yards, running off after strange smells, eating revolting things, fighting with other dogs, chewing up garbage, pillows, and table legs, stealing food off counters." Because of the multiple chewable things that are separated by commas, some semicolons are in order throughout the part of the sentence that follows the dash: "having sex a lot; digging holes in yards; running off after strange smells; eating revolting things; fighting with other dogs; chewing up garbage, pillows, and table legs; and stealing food off counters." And because I'm generally not a fan of asyndeton—and particularly not in a sentence like this one that's already got so much going on—I added the and before stealing.

On page 48: I have no problem, however, with the asyndeton in this sentence: "Most important, I said, you need to begin imagining how you want this dog to be with you—calm, quiet, responsive." Later in that paragraph: "He'd always had big, easygoing dogs, never a dog quite like this." A dash would do a better job than the comma after dogs of setting off the final thought.

On page 52: "Red watched closely." That sentence shows up in the seventh paragraph of a story about the difficult labor of Katz's rescue sheep, Ma. Up to that point, Katz had given us no indication that any other animal besides Ma was in the barn with him. And he hadn't mentioned Red at all since the list of animals he'd been able to have a "wondrous dialogue" with over the years that appeared in the book's introduction, on page 5. I would have found a way to bring up the dog's presence before this point in the narrative.

On page 53: "Two years after Julius came into my life, I went back to the breeder in Ramsay and brought Stanley home. He was a Lab from the same place I got Julius." Even if I hadn't read the account earlier in this chapter of how Katz came to purchase a yellow Labrador retriever named Julius from a breeder in Ramsay, New Jersey, I think that second sentence would still seem overly repetitious.

And, finally, on page 54: "These might have been difficult things for city dogs to adjust to, but they were not farm dogs." Earlier in this chapter, Katz established he had been living in the "beautiful suburban town of Montclair," New Jersey, when he'd bought both Julius and Stanley. Then, five paragraphs before the one in which the above sentence appears, he wrote about packing up the dogs and moving for a year to "a cabin on the top of a hill in the Upstate New York town of Jackson." It was a wilderness-type experience, with deep woods to explore and howling coyotes to be wary of. So, given that he moved from the suburbs to a cabin in the woods, what is the purpose of that sentence? Julius and Stanley were neither city dogs nor farm dogs. I don't know what Katz is trying to say there.

I would also lowercase the U in Upstate because that adjective isn't capitalized in my dictionary of choice and I think it's too broad of an area (everything in the state of New York except New York City and its suburbs) to be considered a proper region.

***

This is the cover of the Oct. 4 edition of the South Florida Gay News, a tabloid newspaper that (as you no doubt would have guessed, even if you're not in the publication's prime demographic) covers LGBT issues and is distributed in the south(east)ern part of Florida:

100617sfgnpuertoricocover.jpg

There's one big problem and, I would argue, one lesser issue in the main headline. Do you see the same things I'm seeing? (I also would make it "PAGES 7, 13" instead of PAGE.)

First, the lesser issue: I think LGBTs should be used when speaking of people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender. LGBT, to me, is, first and foremost, an adjective describing these people, who are my people. Adding the s transforms that adjective into a plural noun.

The bigger problem is that my people have banded, not banned, together to help the (U.S.) citizens of Puerto Rico in their time of need, so the verb should be BAND.

My First Freelance Job in Florida, a New LLC, Chocolate-Blackberry Sorbet, and the Finest Chocolate Chips Available at Grocery Stores

I'm happy to report that I recently landed my first freelance editorial job since we moved to Florida, and it promises to be an ongoing, many-months-long gig. I'm still in the onboarding1 and training stage, but I'm very excited to be working with this first corporate client.

With my husband Tony's help, I've created a Florida limited liability company that will be the entity through which I'll offer my editorial services to this and future clients. Its name isn't terribly clever: Bill Hawley Editorial Services LLC. I had considered some more-interesting names but ultimately went with one that included my own name because I already owned this domain with billhawley in it. I plan to add a landing page here that describes my business in the next day or so.

I considered calling my company either Big Hyphen or Huge Hyphen or Golden Hypen Editorial Services because I always used to joke at my previous full-time gig that what I mostly did was insert and—only occasionally—remove hyphens. That was far from the truth, but I would nonetheless make that joke because, well, I was actually quite proud of my ability to hyphenate and I'm a self-deprecating kind of guy. The first two options would also have been homages to Huge Hound Frozen Desserts LLC, the sweet-frozen-treat company I successfully started up in New Jersey last year, before we decided to give subtropical living a whirl.

I also pondered calling my business Punctual Punctuation LLC, because I love alliteration, but Tony said it could seem like all I was capable of doing was correctly—and quickly—punctuating copy. "I'm sorry. I can't find misspellings or subject-verb disagreement. But I moved that comma from there to here." Much like the names with Hyphen in them, it also seemed too self-parodying. And I really should be serious about my editorial skills, because they're seriously good. And so, Bill Hawley Editorial Services it is.

092817chocolateblackberrysorbet.jpg

I made my first batch of Chocolate-Blackberry Sorbet (which I previously wrote on this blog may be my favorite frozen dessert ever) in a little over a year last week. The previous occasion was the production week for Huge Hound in which I made both that sorbet and Beet-Nutmeg Ice Cream.

This batch turned out nicely, though it wasn't as high in quality as other iterations of this sorbet I've made. The biggest issue was that I used mostly frozen blackberries supplemented with a couple ounces of nonfrozen ones that had been shipped to Florida from California, and neither of those sources of berries was going to compare with fresh-picked fruit from a local farm like I could easily get in Hunterdon County and New York City.

For part of the chocolate component, I used dark chocolate morsels from Enjoy Life, the allergen-free-food producer I mentioned in my blondie recipe post. I utilized Enjoy Life chocolates in my Huge Hound desserts because they never contain even a trace of the most common allergens, including dairy, and that's terribly important to people who have severe health reactions to cows' milk or who avoid all animal-derived food products on moral grounds.

Although Tony can't eat dairy in any significant quantity, his body is able to handle the trace amounts that might have been left behind as a contaminant when a production line was switched from milk chocolate to a dark or semisweet chocolate. That means I can buy brands whose labels indicate they were made on equipment that also produces milk chocolate but not items containing gluten.

Which brings me to Guittard, maker of the finest brand of chocolate chips that's pretty widely available in grocery stores and that Tony and I generally eat straight from the bag, though I do occasionally bake them into cookies. We hadn't been able to find Guittard chips locally since we moved here, and we were leery of having them shipped to us given the Florida-summer heat we're still experiencing.

On Thursday, I was thrilled to find two kinds of Guittard chocolate chips at the new Lucky's Market in Oakland Park that's a short drive from our apartment complex. I texted Tony a photo of the chips with the exclamation "Squee!" Lucky's didn't have our two absolute favorite kinds of Guittard chips—the Akoma Semisweet Chocolate Chips in the pink bag or the Super Cookie Chips in the bright-yellow bag—but I will cajole the grocery manager to please start offering them.

Anyhow, back to the sorbet, the majority of whose chocolate flavor actually comes from cocoa powder. I used Guittard-brand cocoa Tony had bought a while ago from Atlantic Spice Co., and I nearly plotzed just now when I saw the gluten warning on that linked page. Tony assures me he spoke with someone at Atlantic, a company that takes allergen issues very seriously, before making this purchase and was convinced the cocoa is perfectly safe for him. 👍

You might say the secret ingredient in this sorbet is water ...

092617cocoaandwater.jpg

... because the first step in making the chocolate component is to boil cocoa and sugar in water.

Tony said he liked the hint of earthiness the brown rice syrup I'd used as an additional sweetener lent to the sorbet.

I adapted my recipe from two that appeared in my trusty copy of Williams-Sonoma Kitchen Library: Ice Creams & Sorbets: Crimson Plum–Raspberry Sorbet and Rich Chocolate-Orange Sorbet. I basically made a fruit sorbet base and a chocolate sorbet base, combined them in a single pot, chilled the resulting purplish-brown mixture, and processed it in my ice cream maker. Because the fruit sorbet recipe produces a little more than a quart of finished product and the chocolate sorbet a little more than half a quart, I ended up with more than 1 1/2 times the volume of a typical sorbet base and so had to churn it in two batches. I considered trying to combine the two recipes into one by, say, adding the blackberries to the boiled cocoa mixture, but I didn't. Maybe next time.

Chocolate-Blackberry Sorbet

Makes almost 2 quarts.

1 3/4 cup sugar, divided

3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa (preferably Guittard)

1 1/2 cups + 2/3 cup water

3 ounces bittersweet chocolate chips (preferably Guittard) or coarsely chopped pieces from a bittersweet chocolate bar

4 tablespoons brown rice syrup, divided

2 pounds blackberries, fresh or thawed frozen

In a medium saucepan, combine 3/4 cup sugar and the cocoa. Gradually whisk in 1 1/2 cups water. Place over medium-high heat and bring to a boil, whisking constantly, about 4 minutes. Remove from the heat, add the chocolate and 2 tablespoons brown rice syrup, and whisk until combined. Pour into a large pot and set aside.

In a clean medium saucepan, combine 1 cup sugar, 2/3 cup water, and 2 tablespoons brown rice syrup. Cook on high, stirring constantly until the sugar and syrup are dissolved into the water. Bring to a boil and then remove from the heat.

In a blender or food processor, purée the blackberries until smooth. Strain into the saucepan, pressing firmly on the solids with a rubber spatula. Discard the remaining solids. Stir the berries and syrup together. Then transfer the berry sorbet base to the large pot. Stir to thoroughly combine the chocolate and berry bases. Cover and refrigerate until chilled, at least 1 hour.

Process the base in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer's instructions, working in two batches if necessary. Transfer the sorbet to a container and freeze for at least 4 hours before serving.

1I usually am turned off by business-speak like onboarding. But for some reason, I like that word.

A Few More Brief Items, Including a Tricky Sentence About Eating Avocado Toast as an After-School Snack

Before I present my latest collection of nit-pickings (picked nits?)—including some less-than-ideal punctuation on our bottle of safflower oil—I want to begin with a statement similar to the one I wrote for my third post: I don't claim to be perfect, and the points I'm making here are given in a spirit of helpful criticism, not know-it-all-ness.

***

The August issue of Bon Appétit—whose overall theme was simplicity, because BA was launching a new basic-cooking-skills website called basically—included a feature story that serves as a cultural study of avocado toast, the much-loved-but-much-mocked dish that's still a big hit in restaurants on both coasts. Writer John Birdsall gives the credit/blame for the somewhat-recent resurgence of avocado toast here in the States to Australian chefs, but he shows that Californians have been spreading mashed avocado on toasted bread since at least the 1930s.

Birdsall hangs out—and eats avocado toast—with Richard Parks III, "a 35-year-old food writer and filmmaker." RPIII is the son of Van Dyke Parks, a composer and music producer who was born in 1943. The younger Parks reminisces with Birdsall about being tasked with collecting the avocados that had fallen from the 100-year-old tree in his family's backyard "before the squirrels got to them." VDP would make "avocado toast on English muffins as a snack for Richard and his siblings." He would toast the muffins, spread on the avocado, sprinkle on some Cavender's All Purpose Greek Seasoning, and retoast the muffins under the broiler.

A couple more references to the younger Parks follow, and it's clear we're talking about him (and not his father) even though he's called only Parks because it had been established earlier in the story that Birdsall was hanging out with him at a restaurant in Los Angeles's Beverly Grove neighborhood called Goldie's and the writer is still there.

Birdsall later moves on to Sqirl in Silver Lake. "I'm meeting a couple of food people: the writer and producer Gillian Ferguson and Evan Kleiman, host of KCRW's Good Food radio show," he writes. "Like Parks, Kleiman knew avocado toast as the default after-school snack in the 1950s and '60s, not far from here, in the days when Silver Lake was strictly blue-collar."

Birdsall told us the younger Parks ate avocado toast as an after-school snack. But he was born in 1982, so he certainly didn't know it as his default snack during those two previously mentioned decades. Either the writer is now talking about Van Dyke Parks or, more likely, the writer and his editors have erred in lumping together Richard Parks and Kleiman not only in terms of what they did but also when they did it. I would have proposed the following simple fix: "Like Parks, Kleiman knew avocado toast as her default after-school snack. She ate it regularly in the 1950s and '60s, not from far here, in the days when Silver Lake was strictly blue-collar." (Yes, Kleiman is a woman with a traditionally male name.)

***

I think the first line of this recipe found in that same issue of BA and also here online ...

091917driedstrawberriesrecipe.jpg

... would be better as "strawberries, hulled and halved (or quartered if large), and ...." None of the berries in the photo is whole. At minimum, they should be halved, so let's make it clear to the reader she should cut them at least once. Then, parenthetically, tell her to cut them again if they were really big to start with. By the way, the online version is even less pleasing to me because the "or" has been eliminated.

***

I'm not loving this headline in the August/September issue of The Advocate:

092017natgeocoverandadvocatehead.jpg

I'm fairly certain the editors' motivation for plainly stating you're about to read old news is the "JANUARY 2017" that's clearly visible in the photo above the headline. But I still think the head, which practically shrugs at the reader, does the short piece that follows it ...  

092017incaseyoumisseditstory.jpg

... a disservice. The lede hangs on a new, or at least newer, angle than a months-old magazine, though the supporting evidence for its timeliness is presented only parenthetically: This documentary about gender you might be interested in is now broadly available for viewing.

I would have proposed something like "NAT GEO TACKLES GENDER," even though I realize GENDER looms large in the photo as well. I don't think there's a suitable synonym.

***

There's a SPOILER about, well, an almost-two-decades-old work of fiction in the lines below.

I just finished reading John Irving's A Widow for One Year, and I mostly wish I hadn't bothered. I thought the ending was a major cop-out. Marion, the woman who had abandoned her daughter 37 years earlier, when Ruth was only four, gets to have the last line. And she's telling Ruth not to cry! I want to know what Ruth—the novel's main protagonist—has to say back to her mother after all these years. *creates my own conclusion in my own head, which I reckon is what Irving would tell me to do*

I have only two more things to say about this book: Irving is clearly wayyyy into boobs. And on p. 165, it should say "And the Gomezes' granddaughter," not "the Gomez's granddaughter," because the passage is referring to a husband and wife with the last name of Gomez, which would be made plural by adding es and made possessive by adding only an apostrophe.

***

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This label on our bottle of safflower oil presents an opportunity to riff on hyphenation—and I really love riffing on hyphenation. Almost as much as John Irving loves writing about boobs!

Is this oil a fat food that isn't hydrogenated? Or is it a food that consists of fat that isn't hydrogenated? The latter makes more sense, right? Because of that—and because all of the reference works I'm likely to consult when checking spelling say that words beginning with the prefix non are hyphenated only in rare cases1—I would have changed that phrase to "A NONHYDROGENATED-FAT FOOD." Some might say that "NON-HYDROGENATED-FAT FOOD" is more aesthetically pleasing. And I wouldn't argue they're wrong.

1Those cases are: when preceding a proper noun—for example, "non-American"—and, per the Associated Press Stylebook, when "awkward combinations, such as non-nuclear," occur. I don't think nonnuclear looks all that awkward, so I would be inclined to make that word hyphenless.

A Few Brief Items, Including Two That Involve Martha Stewart

An UPDATE on Sept. 9: I heard back from Rahul Mehta yesterday regarding the second item below. He gave me permission to reproduce his email here on my website:

Dear Bill,

Thank you so much for these very kind words about my novel NO OTHER WORLD. It means so much to me to know that you were moved by it. I'm also grateful to you for pointing out the error on page 207. The book is getting ready for reprint as a paperback, so perhaps it is not too late to make this correction.

Thanks again for getting in touch. All best wishes to you.

Sincerely,

Rahul

***

This sentence appears in the September issue of Bon Appétit, in an article titled "Tools of the Trade," which tells you the very low-tech things (including slotted spoons, ice, and a food mill) you need in your kitchen to enable you to cook like "a restaurant pro":

  • That doesn't mean that in order to make decent food at home you need a fully outfitted showroom (like what I imagine Daniel Boulud or Martha Stewart have at their houses) or a state-of-the-art professional setup (like the basement of the big fancy restaurant in Manhattan where I toiled away subterraneanly until not so long ago).

I kept going back and forth as to whether a comma or two was needed to set off "in order to make decent food at home." My final judgment is that the sentence would read better if it were recast to start with "That doesn't mean you need" and end with "to make decent food at home," with the "in order" discarded.

I would have said "like what I imagine Daniel Boulud and Martha Stewart have at their houses" because 1) both of them no doubt have sweet kitchens and 2) the or needed a singular possessive pronominal adjective, not the plural one we were given. I realize the writer/editors may have been purposefully going for a singular, gender-neutral use of their here, but it's so much easier and, I would argue, more accurate to use and ... their than or ... their.

Subterraneanly looked odd to me at first, but both Merriam-Webster's and Webster's New World give it preference over subterraneously.

***

No Other World, by first-time novelist Rahul Mehta, is the most emotionally compelling novel I've ever experienced. The characters, especially main protagonist Kiran Shah, whom we see age from a socially awkward child to an ill-adjusted, young gay man, were amazingly vividly drawn.

Enjoying the book tremendously didn't stop this *ahem* sharp-eyed editor from noticing what I believe is a mistaken character name. I just sent the following email to Mehta through his website:

  • I want to first tell you how very much I enjoyed No Other World. It packed more of an emotional punch than any other work of fiction I've read. Because I'm an anal-retentive copy editor, I also feel a need to point out what I think is a mistake on p. 207.  "Shanti's mother found occasional work—when they needed her—carrying rocks from one part of the site to another, and Prakash found work fetching tea during breaks." Shouldn't that be "Prakash's mother"?

Shanti is Kiran's mother and had no direct connection to Prakash/Pooja, a transgender girl whom Kiran befriends while visiting relatives in India.

I'll update this post if/when I hear back.

***

Here's a corner of the cover of the September issue of Martha Stewart Living:

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I think some lines, or rules, are wanted between the three headlines at the top so they don't read like one continuous bit of text, given that the three blurbs are all in the same-size type and the same font, with no color variation.

I'm also not loving the em dash in the teaser copy, but I realize I would be in the minority among editorial professionals in that opinion. Ever since I wrote my first post here at BillHawley.net, because I've been on the lookout for them, I've been seeing what I consider to be em-dash faults every-freaking-where.

I also, at first, thought it would be better to have four periods after COVERED, but since periods aren't used at the end of any blurb on the page, it wouldn't make sense to use one to end the sentence there and lead into the ellipsis, even though it clearly is a complete sentence.

***

While I'm critiquing magazine covers, here's the latest one for Game Informer:

083117gameinformercover.jpg

The space between the first E and the I ought to be bigger than the space between any other two letters.

A Fascinating Article About Lichens That Would Have Benefited From My Editing

Before I tell you about that very interesting article about lichens from The Atlantic and what I would have done to improve it, I first want to acknowledge that everything I write or edit could also benefit from someone else's editing and/or copy-editing.

At my previous full-time-with-benefits gig, pre–Huge Hound, my main job was overseeing a group of copy editors, but I also edited (as opposed to copy-edited) pieces by wine and spirits expert Elin McCoy. Whenever I'd route my edit of one of Elin's stories to a copy-editing colleague for her/his review, I always hoped it would come back with nothing corrected or questioned, but, of course, there were always at least a couple things that needed improving or fixing. Producing stories that are worth reading takes a lot of effort, and the more brains and pairs of eyes that are being utilized, the better the stories usually are.

I clicked on "How a Guy From a Montana Trailer Park Overturned 150 Years of Biology" because it was one of the suggested stories at the bottom of Christopher Orr's review of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Tony and I had watched that movie on Netflix Saturday night, and I went in search of reviews on Rotten Tomatoes on Sunday morning. I agreed with a good deal of what MTV's Amy Nicholson wrote in this review, which took the movie to task for emphasizing fan service at the expense of new ideas.

By the way, I didn't see any of the original-trilogy movies in theaters. My parents didn't make it a habit to take my older sister and me to science-fiction movies because sci-fi wasn't their bag, though I do remember catching E.T. in the theater with my mother when I was in 8th grade. If I remember correctly, I actually saw The Empire Strikes Back before I saw Star Wars, at my Aunt Lorene's house in Bridgeton on a Sunday evening. Unlike the Hawleys, my aunt sprang for HBO. I also saw only the first film in the second trilogy because I thought The Phantom Menace was so poorly directed. I couldn't get over how awful such usually terrific actors as Natalie Portman and Ewan McGregor came across in that movie, and I had to conclude it was George Lucas's fault.

Now back to our lichen story:

  • He was raised in a Montana trailer park, and home-schooled by what he now describes as a “fundamentalist cult.” At a young age, he fell in love with science, but had no way of feeding that love.

I see no need for a comma after either "park" or "science." There's no change in subject and no obvious reason to pause there. *shrugs*

  • His missing qualifications were still a problem, but one that the University of Gottingen decided to overlook.

There's a bit of a pause after "problem," so I can kinda sorta see a comma there, but I probably wouldn't have bothered with one. That's the end of my comma quibbles. And I swear all of the remaining points I'm going to bring up will be more interesting. 😄

  • You’ve seen lichens before, but unlike Spribille, you may have ignored them. They grow on logs, cling to bark, smother stones. At first glance, they look messy and undeserving of attention. On closer inspection, they are astonishingly beautiful. They can look like flecks of peeling paint, or coralline branches, or dustings of powder, or lettuce-like fronds, or wriggling worms, or cups that a pixie might drink from. They’re also extremely tough. They grow in the most inhospitable parts of the planet, where no plant or animal can survive.

That paragraph is a beautiful, imaginative collection of sentences, so kudos to the writer, Ed Yong, and his editor(s). And extra props for using the new-to-me word coralline.

The first time I read this passage, I didn't have a problem with the multiple ors, but they bother me more now, on closer inspection. And I take exception to the last two sentences because: 1) I think of lichens, not inaccurately, as fragile organisms that are susceptible to air pollution, so I believe the "extremely tough" description needs to be qualified. And 2) I'm really curious to learn what's meant by these inhospitable places "where no plant or animal can survive." I immediately thought of lichens' ability to grow on bare rocks, but that's not a "part of the planet." I next thought of the Arctic tundra. Although it's not terribly hospitable, with a growing season of two months or less, some plants and animals do live there. A couple concrete examples of these harsh parts of the globe would be helpful.

  • The backlash only collapsed when Schwendener and others, with good microscopes and careful hands, managed to tease the two partners apart.

I prefer "collapsed only when" to "only collapsed when," and I would have made that change if I'd been the editor or copy editor. The altered wording recognizes the more-correct placement of the adverb only—modifying when rather than collapsed—and it still reads fine. Sometimes moving an only (or a just) to its more-correct location causes a sentence to seem stilted and not like how people really talk/write. For instance, I wouldn't change "I'm only going to tell you this once" to "I'm going to tell you this only once," even though the latter is really what's meant. The former sentence is basically an idiom, and I've got better things to do with my time than fight for the second sentence's superiority.

  • Schwendener wrongly thought that the fungus had “enslaved” the alga, but others showed that the two cooperate.

My previous employer discouraged its writers and editors from using the word but. I use but regularly in my own writing, but I take issue with its inclusion in the sentence above. The wrongly already told us the idea of the fungus enslaving the alga is inaccurate, so the supposedly alternative (as signaled by the but) idea that follows (it's really a cooperative arrangement) in no way contradicts the first part of the sentence. I would either 1) delete wrongly or 2) put a semicolon after alga and lose the but.

  • Two Germans, Albert Frank and Anton de Bary, provided the perfect one—symbiosis, from the Greek for ‘together’ and ‘living’.

Why is it so important to note that those two dudes were German, so much so that it's the only characteristic used to describe them? And why is that stubby description more important (based on its placement first in the sentence) than these distinguished scientists' names? I would have started the sentence "Albert Frank and Anton de Bary, two German scientists who studied both plants and fungi, provided... ," and I would have turned the single quote marks into double quote marks and put the final double quote mark after the period, where it belongs. Actually, scratch that part about the quote marks. I would have put together and living in italics, as I've been doing throughout this post when I've used words as words. My go-to example of using a word as a word—that also uses a letter as a letter—is "Banana has three a's."

  • When we think about the microbes that influence the health of humans and other animals, the algae that provide coral reefs with energy, the mitochondria that power our cells, the gut bacteria that allow cows to digest their food, or the probiotic products that line supermarket shelves—all of that can be traced to the birth of the symbiosis as a concept.

The the before symbiosis isn't wanted.

  • Whenever they artificially united the fungus and the alga, the two partners would never fully recreate their natural structures.

I'm a fan of hyphenating the word that means to create again to distinguish it from the word we associate with exercise or playing a game out on the blacktop behind the elementary school after lunch.

  • He has shown that largest and most species-rich group of lichens are not alliances between two organisms, as every scientist since Schwendener has claimed.

A the is needed before largest. And I would have made it "has shown that the lichens in the largest and most species-rich group are... ." Otherwise it definitely reads like subject-verb disagreement to me, with the group calling for an is, not an are.

  • To find out, Spribille analyzed which genes the two lichens were activating. ... But when Spribille removed all the basidiomycete genes from his data, everything that related to the presence of vulpinic acid also disappeared.

How does one determine which genes the lichens were activating? And what does the writer mean by activating? And how does our friendly scientist remove genes from his data? I don't follow. Maybe you do.

  • Throughout his career, Spribille had collected some 45,000 samples of lichens.

Holy shit! That's a lot of lichens.

  • Unless you know what you’re looking for, there’s no reason why you’d think there are two fungi there, rather than one—which is why no one realised for 150 years.

Where did that British spelling of realized materialize from? The American spelling is used six paragraphs earlier.

  •  Lichens are alluring targets for ‘bioprospectors’, who scour nature for substances that might be medically useful to us. And new basidiomycetes are part of an entirely new group, separated from their closest known relatives by 200 million years ago.

There's another unwanted set of single quotes. And the last sentence should have either the by or the ago, not both. My assumption is that "an entirely new group that separated from its closest known relatives 200 million years ago" is the way to go, but I would have conferred with the writer before making that change.

  • That’s a theme that resonates throughout the history of symbiosis research—it takes an alliance of researchers to uncover nature’s most intimate partnerships.

And my last nitpick: I would replace the em dash with a colon because this is a textbook example of what a colon is used for: indicating an explanation or an expansion of what precedes that punctuation mark. And since it appears the style of this publication is to not capitalize the first letter in the first word of a complete sentence that follows a colon, I would retain the lowercase i in it.

Chocolate-Mint Vegan Frozen Dessert

The other day, I made my first frozen dessert in South Florida: a vegan one that incorporated the essence of fresh mint ...

... from our apartment complex's community herb garden:

The mint, of unknown variety or varieties, completely fills the middle bed. Several other types of herbs, including rosemary, dill, parsley, and basil, reside in the other beds.

When my husband, Tony, and I lived in Hunterdon County, New Jersey—for about a year and eight months, after having left Manhattan in August 2015—I started up a company called Huge Hound Frozen Desserts LLC. (The website, which I put together myself, is here.) By that time, I'd been whipping up dairy ice creams for more than 15 years, first using the kind of ice cream maker that utilizes a chemical-filled metal canister you have to store in the freezer and then using the more-advanced, self-contained kind that needs only to be plugged in.

My friend Dan once referred to me as an "ice cream maven." I'm using a variation of that description above in the tag line for this website.

I began making dairy-free FDs after I met Tony, because he can't eat milk or cream (or gluten or legumes). The first year we dated, I focused on sorbets. My favorite was Concord grape, but I also remember making (two) very good ones from mint and watermelon. Later, I whipped up some delicious FDs using coconut milk as the base, including one flavored with lime basil.1 (Like I wrote in my first post and will no doubt write in many more posts here, if you want the password to my other, long-running, personal blog, which would allow you to read the two linked posts above, just shoot me an email at bill@billhawley.net.)

I've never been the hugest fan of coconut (though I'm not a hater), and I didn't necessarily want that flavor mixed in with the chocolate or lemon verbena or whatever I intended to be my primary flavoring ingredient(s), so when I started Huge Hound, one of my main goals was to create a vegan-frozen-dessert base that was as neutral tasting as possible.

And I did it. My ingredients were hemp and flax milks; refined coconut oil, which had had its coconut flavor removed during processing; agave syrup; and small amounts of lecithin, xanthan gum, and arrowroot, which thickened and emulsified the fatty-and-sweet mixture. Plus a pinch of salt. On principle, I would have preferred to avoid using the much-trifled-with RCO, but I found I really needed the boost of fat it provided; the nondairy milks on their own weren't rich enough to produce a creamy-textured product.

After I'd been selling my VFDs and ice creams for a while, I began thinking about ways to cut costs, so the last time I made a Huge Hound VFD, which was flavored with chocolate and ginger, I used only flax milk, because hemp milk is significantly more expensive. Hemp milk is also more strongly flavored than flax milk, so eliminating it as an ingredient improved the neutrality of my base.

I was somewhat sorry to ditch the hemp milk, though, because I think hemp is an amazing plant that we should be using in many different ways, including in foods, paper, and plastics. But I just learned when I was buying my ingredients to make my Chocolate-Mint VFD that I have another good reason for giving it up: One of the two major makers of hemp milks, Pacific Foods, is now putting a warning on its labels telling its customers that its hemp-based nondairy beverages shouldn't be considered gluten-free:

I had been using Living Harvest's Tempt-brand hemp milk for my Huge Hound VFDs, and its packaging contains no such warning. Maybe Living Harvest is confident in its ability to prevent cross-contamination with wheat, but I didn't want to take that chance, so when I made this latest VFD a couple weeks ago, I again used only flax milk.

I applaud Pacific Foods for erring on the side of caution at the risk of losing customers. People like Tony who have serious dietary issues need and appreciate candor from manufacturers and restaurants so they can make informed decisions.

Once at the Union Square outpost of Whole Foods, a woman standing near me complained that the package of dried fruit she was holding was labeled as being gluten-free. "How stupid do they think we are?" she asked. I just wanted to get in and out of the store and wasn't really in the mood for a teachable moment, so I didn't explain to her that manufactured foods can be contaminated with things like tree nuts, peanuts, dairy, and gluten based on how they're processed, not only by the ingredients they obviously contain.

A case in point: Tony and I just got back from our local supermarket, and we had to go with the third brand of walnuts we picked up because the first two said they could contain traces of gluten. (He's making Chicken With Walnut Sauce for dinner tonight.)

The other day, at the same store, I put a bag of pine nuts back on its hook because the packaging said the PNs were "produced on shared equipment with peanuts, tree nuts, milk, wheat, soy & egg." The only things missing from the list of the big eight food allergens were fish and shellfish.

OK, let me reel myself back in *sound of fishing line being respooled* and post a photo of my finished VFD:

Our dinner guests three nights later—Tony's longtime friend Marchéta and her wife, Uli, who live in the next county north of here—went back for seconds or thirds. I hadn't lost my touch. 

1In that same linked post, you can see I still made dairy ice creams for my own enjoyment, including the Gooseberry With Gooseberry Swirl that was one of my favorites of all time. And I kept experimenting with sorbets, culminating in the Chocolate-Blackberry that may be my favorite FD ever.

An UPDATE the next day:

That's the out-of-this-world dinner Tony made last night, with the chicken-and-walnut stew served over GF pasta with additional, chopped walnuts. The herb on top is cilantro—from the grocery store, because there's none growing in the community garden.

An UPDATE two days later: My friend Desirée sent me a link to this New York Times story about vegan frozen desserts, which has a sidebar on a VFD base that uses hemp (or cashew) milk, coconut cream or milk, and agave (or corn) syrup.