"Because Murder is More Fun Away From Home"
Labels: New Zealand, newspaper reviews, off-site reviews, Paul Cleave
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 1:52 PM
This blog is a proud winner of the 2009 Spinetingler Award for special services to the industry and its blogkeeper a proud former guest on Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth. In civilian life I'm a copy editor in Philadelphia. When not reading crime fiction, I like to read history. When doing neither, I like to travel. When doing none of the above, I like listening to music or playing it, the latter rarely and badly. Click here to find an independent bookstore near you.
18 Comments:
Nice piece. I hate 'referenced' too, but few others would.
Thanks. After reading the piece, a wiseass colleague of mine left a photocopied a dictionary entry that traced "reference" as a verb back to 1898. Happily, he did so with tongue in cheek.
One reporter here uses "reference" as a verb, and it sometimes gets in the paper that way if someone other than me is the story's copy editor. Happily, he's a good reporter and writer, and that is his only flaw that comes to mind.
Great piece. I always enjoy reading your newspaper pieces. They're a different style than your blog writing, of course. You mentioned David Peace -- he's another author I've bought and not yet read. (At work we call that "glomming." I know it has other meanings, but we mean obsessively collecting the books of someone you have not yet read.
Glomming is a great word,Kelly. Unlike referenced.
Is that an idiosyncratic use of "glomming"? It seems to me that I've read the word in 1950s crime novels meaning "fasten onto," as in "My eyes glommed onto the jewels that floated on her graceful white neck. Precious! The jewels were nice, too."
Thanks for the compliment. I enjoyed writing this piece, and I hope that showed.
Seana, what do you know about glomming in either of these senses? I will glom into Confessions of Ignorance to find out.
Glom will be a good one to do, though I have a few to do ahead of that...
I would agree that no particular urgency surrounds glom of glomming.
Peter, we just made that meaning up. Rather like Humpty Dumpty ("When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.") I can't remember who started it, but it's a handy word to have at the bookstore. ("Did you glom all the Murakamis yet?" "Wasn't someone here glomming Padgett Powell?" And then, the ever-popular, "Oh, I haven't read any. Just glomming.")
It's a good coinage and, in your first example, not far from the earlier meaning. Your comment reminds me of an old Jewish joke:
"Why is kugel called kugel?"
"Because it looks like kugel."
Origin of KUGEL
Yiddish kugl, from Middle High German kugel ball — more at cudgel
First Known Use: 1846
Your throw-away question about kugel reminds me of a question that I frequently ponder: who decided what things might be edible? For example, consider the first person who saw an oyster--what on earth possessed that fellow actually to eat the damn thing! And how many people made mistakes with the wrong kinds of mushrooms before the list of edible mushrooms was refined?
See, you mention kugel, and the mind starts spinning.
Alas, I wish I could have some kugel now. But in my neck of the woods, I am more likely to be served something like road-kill than Jewish food. There is, BTW, a restaurant near me called "The Road Kill Restaurant." But they do not serve kugel!
And that reminds me of my old theory that there is only one fruitcake that circulates widely and has been doing so for centuries.
That cannot be true. I have actually eaten fruitcake at different times in my life, so that would have broken the "chain letter" theory.
On a related note, which maybe folks outside of the south cannot understand, I wonder why armadillos are so damned suicidal? (The Road Kill discussion prompted that off-the-wall--er, off-the-pavement comment.)
Why did the chicken cross the road?
Because it was a lot smarter than those idiot armadillos.
What a great insight, Peter. Until you have mentioned it, I never gave this much thought: I have never seen a chicken pancaked on the pavement.
Happy New Year. Be safe. Be careful crossing the road later tonight.
I guess your momma never told you where Chicken McNuggets ® come from.
Or maybe armadillos, at least in Texas, giving the lie to their atate's reputation for intellectual shallowness are wracked by suicidal indecision, finding long, straight prairie roads disappearing into nowhere too grim a metaphor for life.
When I was a child in the care of my momma, Chicken McNuggets did not exist. So, she had very little to say on the subject.
Of course, the chickens I raised in my backyard had a destiny that included batter, frying pans, and knives and forks.
Batter, frying pans, and other deadly utensils instilled in chickens an instinct for self-preservation that gets them across the road damn quick.
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