Enteries (for Entries)

What do you say when someone knocks on your door? (Someone, that is, whom you want to see, not a bill collector or Jehovah's Witness or what have you.) Most English speakers respond: "Come in" or "Come on in" or maybe "Enter." En français it would be "Entrez." (Although French eateries are also known for other kinds of entrées.) Certain folks like to spice up their replies with a cheery "Welcome!" or a cautious "Who's there?" Others might chide: "Don't stand out there in the hallway." Or, depending on who it is, urgently hiss: "Get in here!" Literary types may even jokingly issue the dire-sounding advisory: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here" (the inscription on the Gates of Hell from Dante's Inferno). The thesaurus isn't much help in this regard, although you could try telling your visitor to "make an entrance" and then see what happens. The mathematician Paul Erdős liked to tell a story about calling on a schizophrenic colleague who timidly opened his door a crack and said: "Please come another time and to another person." Today's blog entry managed to enter into OhioLINK four times, and WorldCat forty-four more.

(A door knocker in Orléans, France, 2004, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Vaudv* (for Vaudev*)

Acrobatic contortionists Harry and Friede DeMarlo were a "twisted couple," says Jennifer Lemak, senior historian at the New York State Museum, where she gave a lecture about the pretzel-shaped pair on October 13, 2010. Dr. Lemak used photos, costumes, scrapbooks, and other artifacts to describe the death-defying life of this creative vaudeville duo who toured the world from 1910 to 1928. By 1912 the DeMarlos had become famous for a bucolic bout of "bending" that featured husband and wife dressed in skintight, sparkly green satin and papier-mâché, and was set amid a woodland scene including "worms and bugs lit by tiny light bulbs." Over the next five years they would enact "Frog's Paradise" to great acclaim, and even gave command performances for the King of Siam, the Queen of Holland, and the Czar of Russia. Separately, Harry dazzled audiences as the "Devil on a Trapeze," while Friede awed the crowd with her ethereal "Symphony in a Box." Friede also once bit off a bit more than she could chew in the first-ever aerial trapeze act that involved hanging by one's teeth. Although badly injured, she almost literally bounced back after a month-long hospital stay, whereupon she continued to hone her stunt and strengthen her jaw. The two spent many years traveling with Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey, and later played smaller venues in cities such as Rochester and Buffalo. The DeMarlos retired to a farm in Walton, New York, in 1941 and spent the next several decades coming down to earth and training dogs for various circus acts. In 1987 a museum curator stumbled upon a lot of their costumes and props at a circus auction, and the remaining papers (which were on their way to the trash) were then donated to the State Museum. We discovered 13 instances of Vaudv* (for vaudev*) in OhioLINK today, and 217 in WorldCat.

(Friede DeMarlo, in "Frog's Paradise," holding the head that Harry made her, courtesy of the New York State Museum.)

Carol Reid

Magaret* or {Magaret* + Margaret*} (for Margaret*)

Spoiler alert: Don't read the hotlinks if you don't want to know how it ends...

"Little is known," says Wikipedia, about the author Gregory Casparian, but what is known is frankly astonishing. A Turkish officer who fought in the Armenian army, emigrated to the United States in 1877 with a "price on his head," and eventually settled in Brooklyn, New York, where he became an artist, painter, photoengraver, husband, and father—Casparian also wrote, illustrated, and self-published what has been called the "first lesbian science fiction novel" in 1906. (Which is not a typo.) Set in the year 1960, more than half a century after the time it was written, An Anglo-American Alliance: A Serio-Comic Romance and Forecast of the Future is the author's only published work, and as such deals with two rather outré topics, according to an article by Jess Nevins on the blog io9. Firstly, it's got such scientific gains as prenatal sex determination and suspended animation; the discovery of "vegetation and moving objects" on Mars and Venus; an astronomical "ice lens" leading to a race of furry, telepathic, electric-wheel-riding aliens; and a "germicide" to cure laziness, something, the author adds, that would be beneficial to "the negroes of the Southern States." (Which, as one reader of the blog comments, it probably would be, seeing as how then maybe white people would have to start doing their own chores.) And secondly ... it's got lesbians. Our two heroines, the blonde and British Aurora Cunningham and the dark-haired American, Margaret MacDonald, meet while attending the Diana Young Ladies' Seminary in Cornwall, situated on the Hudson River. Their homosexual romance takes off from there. In a remarkably sensitive and accurate portrait of the real deal, it even anticipates certain modern advances only dreamt of by a few Victorian women with "passionate friendships" or "Boston marriages." Some may say the story is marred by Margaret's surprising turn at the end; others, however, will see it as liberating. We found 80 examples of today's typo in OhioLINK (17 when also combined with the correct spelling) and "too many records found for your search" (or 712 for the two words together) in WorldCat.

(Aurora and Margaret, An Anglo-American Alliance, from Wikimedia Commons. Click here to peruse a digital copy.)

Carol Reid

Romam* (for Roman*)

Fifty Shades of Grey, which I blogged about on Friday, is basically a classic romance novel, despite its kinky content, and this got me thinking a bit about the genre in general. Up to this point, I had read exactly two manifestations of the type, variously called, as I recall, "Harlequin romances," "gothic romances," or simply "romance novels." Despite their seeming similarity, it seems that some of these are steamier than others (Fifty Shades), while others are more esteemed (like the books of Mary Stewart, for example). The pair of pulpy paperbacks that found their way into my hands, if not quite my heart, were consumed one day while I was locked (not literally) in a closet (literally) somewhere in the Deep South. I had discovered them tucked inside the drawer of a little table at which I labored lazily to sell mediocre magazines to resistant targets over the telephone. "Romance" may or may not be a euphemism for sex in these books, but it's always an over-the-top fantasy. Nevertheless, they (at least the ones that don't manage to rise above the limits of the form) are so formulaic, so reductionistic, so silly, and so sexist, it's pretty hard to take them seriously. Given all of that then, it's nothing short of a minor miracle that filmmaker Julie Moggan was able to make such a truly touching, funny, and affectionate film on this very subject. Recently shown on PBS's documentary series P.O.V., Guilty Pleasures features an aging British pensioner who finds his joy in writing romance novels; a young Japanese housewife who takes up ballroom dancing just so she can see what it's like to be swept off your feet by the perfect partner; a gorgeous but goofy Harlequin male cover model; and other unreconstructed fans. We got 65 hits on Romam* in OhioLINK and "too many records found for your search" in WorldCat. (A look in the latter for Romamc* got 40, and Romamt* 22.)

(Fayaway, the heroine of Typee by Herman Melville, "Spreading it out like a sail," from the book Typee: A Real Romance of the South Sea by A. Burnham Shute, 1892, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Christain* (for Christian*)

Okay, I'll admit it. I just read Fifty Shades of Grey. (Please don't spank me.) It's just that I became curious after all that love followed by all that hate (kind of like the plotline of the book itself) currently flooding the airwaves and blogosphere. (E.L. James's runaway bestseller/fanfic ripoff has reportedly outsold the Harry Potter franchise in Britain during the short time it's been out on both bookstands and nightstands, and has inspired the normally straight-laced Newsweek to come up with the icky moniker "mommy porn.") It isn't just snarky hipster bloggers, though, who seem offended that a middle-aged, married mother of two should have dared to take the world of kinky sex by the horns. (Or is that horny sex by the kinks?) Naysayers also include the likes of Dr. Drew Pinsky, earnest TV therapist, and writer Erica Jong, famous for her own sexual coming-out story, Fear of Flying, which came out almost forty years ago. (They both see Fifty Shades as being "bad for women" and regard it as less of a harmless fantasy than a male-female "paradigm" for abuse.) On the other hand, the irrepressible Dr. Ruth Westheimer has said that if Christian Grey "were available and I would be much, much younger and not married, I would also go for a night with him." Not, she hastens to add, "because of the sadistic elements—that’s not for me. But because he has a plane; he has a helicopter; he knows how to deal with women and he knows how to make love." Christian also has red satin bedsheets (to help hide possible blood stains?) and is further stained by some maltreatment in his own childhood (which implied equation is bound to make healthy-minded BDSM aficionados a little angry as well). I was warned (in some cases by those who, by their own admission, wouldn't be caught dead actually reading the damn thing, but were eager to join the online chorus of Worst. Book. Ever) that it contains a great many typographical errors and that the writing was execrable. I only noticed a handful of typos (pretty much par for the course these days, in any case) and personally found the work to be exactly like most porn and/or romance novels: rather too repetitious with the vocabulary (both erotic and not); a bit too corny; and in need of a better editor. On the other hand, it was surprisingly funny in parts, and Anastasia Steele (the would-be "submissive") was a lot more articulate, sarcastic, and downright contrary than one might have expected. (See The Story of O, etc.) Today's typo crops up (sorry!) 116 times in OhioLINK, and gets "too many records found for your search" in WorldCat. Be a good girl (or boy) now and get cracking on this one right away.

(I couldn't find any pictures of the book or author that weren't potentially subject to copyright, so here is another depiction of "fifty shades of grey." Use your imagination, or Google, to see more. Photo captioned Playa de Janubio, LZ-703 in Yaiza, Lanzarote, Canary Islands, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Grafitti, Graffitti (for Graffiti)

A friend, having read my blog post from yesterday, sent me the following story about the one occasion he recalls being tempted to participate in graffiti, which he generally detests:

There it was, scrawled above the urinal in the bookstore men's room: seven digits, followed by the directive, "Call me."

In the idle moment at hand, I reflected that the advertiser might have risen above the level of the mundane by having signed his work, "—Ishmael."

A fishing expedition called up 27 cases of grafitti and 14 of graffitti in OhioLINK, along with 660 and 391 apiece in WorldCat.

(Barry Moser illustration of Herman Melville's text. Click to enlarge.)

Carol Reid

Corport* (for Corporat*)

A buddy of mine came upon a bricks-and-mortar spelling debate the other day on a stroll through the streets of Great Barrington, Mass. A disaffected graffiti artist had scribbled the words "Public ignorance is corporte bliss" on the side of a building, to which a second person replied: "Your misspelling of corporate weighs towards public ignorance." Another pedantic pedestrian then crossed out one of the s's in the word misspelling and wrote, "Also mispelled." Whereupon a fourth one put it back in, pointing out: "No, actually they were rite." I'm not sure where all these people got all that chalk, but I suppose that's a story for another time. (I suspect the first person found some there and left it on the windowsill, until the owner of the building wised up and threw it out.) This editorial exchange eventually wound down when an exasperated passerby stated that they had dropped out of school and simply didn't care, and quickly devolved into what I assume was the final postscript, which somehow seems to capture the relative absurdity of it all: "Brooklyn sucks." The little arrows pointing every which way also afford a nice if slightly ironic touch, making it look like an outdoor office staff meeting complete with mind-numbing flow chart. In any case, public ignorance is corporate bliss, and the handwriting is certainly on the wall. Causing it to be, at least momentarily, a bit more compelling than a lot of misspelled comments tossed off on yet another political blog. Today's typo was seen 74 times in OhioLINK and 1,115 times in WorldCat.

(Photo by Anon. Click to enlarge.)

Carol Reid