Rebecca Lee

This has a bit too many bland generalities, instead of digging into the details, especially the human details. The best anecdotes are usually tucked away in footnotes. (Why?)

> on Georges Simenon, creator of the legendary sleuth Maigret and author of more than five hundred novels: ‘Simenon’s productivity is legendary: he wrote one chapter a day, without interruption, and if he had to stop working on a book for more than 48 hours, for example through illness, he threw it away. He completed most of his novels in ten or eleven days, editing them only to “cut, cut, cut” anything that he deemed too “literary”. It’s reported that Alfred Hitchcock once telephoned him only to be told that Simenon was incommunicado as he had just begun a new novel. “That’s all right,” said Hitchcock, “I’ll wait.”’

> John F. Kennedy won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1956 book Profiles in Courage, but the book was mostly written by Ted Sorensen, one of his speechwriters

> Although often styled as e e, The Chicago Manual of Style states that: ‘E. E. Cummings can be safely capitalized; it was one of his publishers, not he himself, who lowercased his name.’ Cummings legally changed his name to e e cummings (according to his biographer), but his widow claimed that the biographer was incorrect

> ‘Stet’ is what’s known as an obelism. That’s the word for annotating manuscripts with marks in the margin

> I don’t think there is a word in the English language for the bubble of satisfaction you get when you’re editing a book and are able to correct the spelling of the name of the cyclist who was the fourth British wearer of the yellow jersey in the Tour de France from ‘David Miller’ (INCORRECT) to ‘David Millar’ (CORRECT), but there should be one

> One of the heavyweight clashes between American and British punctuation is that in the UK most publishers and publications use ‘spaced’ en rules (i.e. there is space both before and after the dash – like that), whereas in the US ‘closed-up’ em rules are used.

> we all know that we should use the ! sparingly. In this, follow F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said: ‘Cut out all these exclamation points … An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.’ Someone has crunched the numbers on Fitzgerald’s use of ‘!’ for us. He used 356 per 100,000 words over the course of four novels. The most parsimonious user of the ‘!’ studied was Elmore Leonard – a mere 49 per 100,000 words in the course of forty-five novels. Just below him is Ernest Hemingway at 59 per 100,000 (over ten novels). Down at the other end James Joyce couldn’t get enough of exclaiming (as we’ll see later, it was one of the few punctuation marks he seemed able to tolerate), managing to use 1,105 per 100,000 words in just three novels. All this analysis was done by Ben Blatt in Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve: The Literary Quirks and Oddities of Our Most-Loved Authors

> Until the 1970s, the exclamation mark didn’t even have its own key on a keyboard. To produce one, you had to type a period, backspace and then finally an apostrophe

> ‘I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn’t need them, they were fly-specks on the page,’ wrote E. L. Doctorow. Another believer in a minimalist quote-mark style is Vladimir Putin. As two Brookings Institute scholars noted when they analyzed Putin’s dissertation for his advanced degree (awarded by the St Petersburg Mining Institute), there were sixteen plagiarized pages, no footnotes and no quotation marks. In 218 pages of text.

> The final chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses is more than 24,000 words long (roughly forty printed pages), yet contains just one comma and two full stops. In many ways this is the pinnacle of Joyce’s aversion to punctuation: he never used quotation marks in any of his books

> historically proofreaders marked corrections on proofs in red or blue pen. A red correction meant that the typesetter had introduced the error as part of the setting process, and a blue correction meant that the suggested correction was one that perhaps should have been picked up at an earlier stage (i.e. by the copy-editor and author) and was therefore not the responsibility of the typesetter. The distinction was important as red corrections could be charged back to the typesetter, whereas blue ones could not.

> some writers take exception to proofreaders – especially Mark Twain. ‘Yesterday [my publisher] wrote that the printer’s proof-reader was improving my punctuation for me, & I telegraphed orders to have him shot without giving him time to pray.’

> ‘atomic typos’ – the ‘atomic’ in the name comes about because these typos are very small mistakes that lead to very big differences in meaning. ‘Pubic’ and ‘public’, ‘dairy’ and ‘diary’, ‘fight’ and ‘eight’.

> 2005. ‘The Sudanese government had a nasty shock this week, when it read on a US Congress website that the Americans had conducted nuclear tests in the country,’ the piece continued. More prosaically, what had actually happened was that Ellen Tauscher, a Democratic member of the House of Representatives from California, had used the Sedan explosion as an example of a nuclear test that led to excessive radiation fallout. The name ‘Sedan’ was incorrectly transcribed in the Congressional Record as ‘Sudan’.

> ‘I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don’t seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings’

> after writing La Disparition in 1969, Perec then wrote a novella in 1972 called Les revenentes, where the only vowel used was the letter ‘e’. La Disparition is a lipogram, which comes from ancient Greek and means ‘leaving out a letter’. Les revenentes, on the other hand, is antilipogrammatic (what a word!) – which describes constrained writing that only uses a single vowel. These types of ‘constrained’ writings are known as Oulipo.

> In 1989 the James Bond film Licence to Kill also suffered a US-induced title change. It had originally been called Licence Revoked (which describes the film’s plot – M revokes Bond’s licence to kill, making him a rogue agent), but the name was changed during post-production. Apparently, American audiences thought it referred to Bond’s driving licence. Sorry, license. In the US you can use the one word for both noun and verb.… (plus d'informations)

Beautiful and interesting with just a touch of mystery. Each story revolves around a first-person narrator and a unique person that stands out to them from their lives. Those characters were "full to the brim" with life, sometimes "overflowing." They all seem to be told from the perspective of some distance, and all but one have a female voice. Each is so carefully researched and crafted, I sometimes wondered why the author took the time! Despite, or maybe because of, that I found each one very immersive, and I felt a sense of disappointment when they ended. At first I didn't like how similar each story felt, but the more I think about it the more intentional it feels. A author like this wouldn't leave a single detail un-crafted.… (plus d'informations)

Rebecca Lee has a strong collection in Bobcat. I was particularly struck by the unique perspective of her narrators as they navigate significant, but not earth-shattering, emotional situations. The myriad of perspectives of the college campus for instance, The Banks of the Vistula told from the perspective of an undergraduate student versus World Party, narrated by a professor of Roman Antiquity. Lee seems to effortlessly construct these complex narrators, some without much history as in Fialta, but brings them to life in their present circumstances, not an easy feat. I would have liked to have gotten more out of Slatland, the middle felt a bit thin given the bulk bookending the material, and the landscape, a significant feature of Saskatchewan, seemed almost absent though the protagonist travels widely through the province.… (plus d'informations)