Given my heritage, I’m willing to bet five bucks that I never had an inner housewife. If I did, she up and left years ago — see evidence above — maybe during the converted motel period, when I usually ate off of napkins to avoid doing dishes. (The water I covered them with started to stink after a week . . .
From Ron Powers’ Mark Twain: A Life: Twain became a stickler for grammar. Perfect grammar was “the fourth dimension,” he said, constantly sought but never found. (“I know grammar by ear only, not by note,” he confessed.) He was appalled by the subjunctive: “It brings all our writers to shame.” He valued brevity…. “An average English word is four letters . . .
In Sorry, Not Buying, the ever-astute ZZ Packer (Drinking Coffee Elsewhere) perceives the forked tongue with which modern-day Republicans utter the “soothing code words of ‘compassionate conservatism’ that have replaced the now-unfashionable racist rhetoric of decades past.” Not long ago, William Bennett — former education secretary, self-styled moralist, and gambler — philosophized, “If you wanted to reduce crime, you could, . . .
Discovering Mark Twain’s nonfiction in the last month has been like meeting the sharp-witted, no-bullshit uncle I always dreamed of having. So I was pleased to see Roughing It, which I’ve yet to read, on a Guardian top ten list devoted to books about cults and religious extremists. This is one of Mark Twain’s more neglected works, but it’s one . . .
Spending too much time with Gustave Doré’s drawings almost makes me wistful for my childhood terror of demons. Back then, because of my mom’s obsession with possession and exorcism, and the impromptu deliverance sessions that would spring up in our living room, the spirit world seemed immediate and ever-threatening, a place the Devil could emerge from with his scythe . . .