New biography by Brad Gooch, reviewed at the NY TImes.

I stumbled onto this blog post this morning, an angry review of Twilight, a book I have not read and thus have no grounds to comment on. Some excerpts of the review:

The problem with this book is it sums up exactly what it is to be a teenage girl, and teenage girls are callow and dumb. I know, I was one. I had intense crushes on numerous guys, all of whom seemed perfect at the time, and some of whom are now married to roller-derby queens or to the chicks they knocked up after we went out. Made of win, I tell you. Because the book appeals to the lowest common denominator, though, the stupid teenage girl in the book resonates with the former stupid teenager in all of us (or at least the women).
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Basically, this book makes it sound like marrying the guy you had a baseless crush on in high school is a good thing (just don’t have sex with him until then!). It encourages young women to make irrevocable, life-altering decisions based on the sensation of being seventeen and in love and reinforces a sick, patriarchal view of sexuality. Like The Fountainhead, it should probably not be read by young people.

Though I haven’t read Twilight, this review probably sums up what my reaction would be, were I to read it and put much thought into it. (Call it an instinct; call me a literary snob, if you will.)

Some thoughts: If I had a kid, I’m sure I’d be groaning and griping about them reading what I considered trash. Why oh why couldn’t I have raised them to read something more sophisticated? But I think I’d also grudgingly approve because reading is reading, and at least the kid is taking a break from Facebook. Is any reading, no matter how passive, necessarily better than not reading at all? Are the Twilight books at least written competently enough that the kid would be learning what it sounds like for subjects and verbs to agree, for instance? Would a parent have a responsibility to set the kid down and say, “Look here, little Claudia, I’m glad you’re reading, but let’s play a game called deconstruct-this-argument”? Also: How much do we fault the author? Do you really want to blame a writer for cashing in with the lowest common denominator? (I could see someone saying, after a few years of writing good stuff and not getting published, saying, “Screw it. I’ll just give people what they want.”)

The unacknowledged beauty of this song is that it spells out Fla. in the opening line:

Greg Mankiw points to this article that gives one explanation for why our economy is in shambles. Apparently, people just didn’t take into account problems with the Gaussian Copula function when they were taking huge risks. Idiots!

I don’t have enough math in my life, so I picked up this book yesterday, a mathematician’s introduction to the entire history of math and physics. Vector calculus, Riemann’s sums: I remember that stuff, I remember it. (Plus Einstein turns 130 in March, so you got to do something science-related, right?)

Tomlinson’s new book of short stories is due out in early March, though from his website it looks like the book is already shipping out. You can check out one of the stories in the current issue of Freight Stories, which I’d highly recommend. Many congratulations to Jim on the new release.

Mxrk had an interesting post this week that showed an old-fashioned diagram of one of Obama’s sentences. Following the links back, you can see where someone tried to diagram some Sarah Palin sentences a while back. What interests me here isn’t that Palin’s language is inelegant (a cliche at this point) or even that Obama’s sentences are elegant (he DID write two books, and he reads Derek Walcott, so of COURSE he’d be elegant). What interests me is simply the idea of diagramming sentences, something I haven’t considered since elementary school, when I didn’t have the linguistic acumen to diagram much more than a few easy sentences.

First, check this out, a handy guide for how to diagram sentences. Then consider how the following interesting sentences might diagram out. (I actually wrote out the diagrams, and if I can get my hands on a scanner or some diagramming software, I might upload them here. I am taking a furlough day Monday. But no promises.) First, a sentence from “Moby-Dick,” a book I’ll be rereading as soon as I finish listening to some lectures I stumbled on at UC Berkeley the other day:

As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooners wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.

Hint: This is an elegant complex sentence with four dependent “as” clauses leading up to the independent clause–the Pequod seemed the counterpart to Ahab’s soul. Then, consider this sentence from the opening of “Child of God”:

They came like a caravan of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians in chairs on the truckbed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with guitar grinning and gesturing to others in a car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face.

Whereas the Melville sentence is periodic, and builds to the independent clause, the McCarthy sentence is cumulative. The main clause is simply, “They came.” Happy weekend.