Last month ktschwarz quoted Alison Bechdel’s use of obtunding in her widely praised graphic memoir Fun Home, adding:
Fun Home is in the genre of in-direct-conversation-with-Ulysses (her father’s favorite book), with the last chapter drawing multiple parallels between her/her father and Stephen/Bloom as relationships that are profoundly connected yet incomplete. Also in direct conversation with Fitzgerald, Camus, Colette, and many others including the Merriam-Webster and American Heritage dictionaries—look out for the appearance of the Appendix of Indo-European Roots in a sex scene.
When I expressed interest, kts was generous enough to send me a copy for the holidays, and having just finished it, I enthusiastically second all the praise and recommendations — it’s certainly one of the best books I’ll read all year, and of course its use of dictionaries makes it prime LH fodder. But in the note that accompanied the book ktschwarz wrote: “Can you spot the [dictionary] where she used artistic license and did *not* copy it exactly as it is?” Alas, the edition of the unabridged Websters in the book is neither the Third International that occupies a majestic place on my shelf nor the out-of-copyright one that’s available in full at Google Books, so I can only hope someone will enlighten me. And thanks again, kts!
2¢: Fun Home is great. Didn’t read Are You My Mother? And, The Secret to Superhuman Strength is quite a letdown.
A few years ago* a translation of Ulysses was published in Bulgarian.
* 18? O.K… Time flies.
Didn’t read Are You My Mother?
I’m hoping I get a chance to do that.
I admit it was one of my favorite books when I was young, but…
(The plot summary in the wiki contains significantly more words than the book.)
Glad you enjoyed it! See also Stan Carey’s post on “eighty-six”, with the page where Bechdel passes on the story deriving it from a bar at 86 Bedford Street in Manhattan, which is not true; can’t blame Bechdel, though, since she is just quoting the American Heritage Dictionary (*they* should have known better). As I commented at Stan’s post, I love how every written word quoted in the book is a material object, with typefaces and handwriting traced, linebreaks reproduced exactly, and often with pages curved and hands holding the book in frame. You can tell from the linebreaks that she is indeed reading her father’s old copy of Ulysses, not the corrected and re-set edition that was in bookstores when she was in college.
The “mammoth” family dictionary is, as you guessed, Merriam-Webster’s Second Unabridged; on Bechdel’s own blog, she tells how she once met AHD’s Patrick Taylor and Steve Kleinedler, who “were able to ascertain with a few questions that it was the Second.” I’m sure it was the prominence of dictionaries in this memoir that got her invited onto AHD’s Usage Panel.
(The Second Unabridged is from the 1930s, at a nadir of text availability. Fortunately, I live near a university library that has it, so I could confirm the page. Seven more years until it’s out of copyright.)
So where was the artistic license? I’m all ears!
By that I meant the third featured dictionary, Merriam-Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate from the 1960s, which is where the shorter definitions come from. Like the others, this one is drawn with absolute fidelity, except for one panel: the definition of lesbian, where the caption narrates, “I first learned the word due to its alarming prominence in my dictionary,” drawing it as a guide word at the top of the page — but in that edition it wasn’t, it was almost a quarter of a page down from the top. It *was* a guide word in M-W’s previous Collegiate edition, from the 1950s, but with a different definition. Maybe she had a strong memory of the older one, but only had the 1960s one for visual reference?
(Dictionaries do make slight changes between printings — Kory Stamper’s podcast has the ugly details — but changes to pagination would be extremely unlikely. I searched for any other printings of the Seventh to see if there were any differences, but all the ones I could find were the same.)
And this is a great caption to another panel drawn from the same dictionary:
She may not have known phonetics as a teenager, but she does now: all 6 technical terms there are correct!
Thanks!
ktschwarz’s Jan. 17 post prompts me to ask the denizens of the Hattery a practical question. I am in possession of my father’s purchased-as-an-undergraduate (late 1950’s) copy of Ulysses, which I read of my own volition in high school and then took away with me to college where it was on the syllabus for a class I took freshman year. Its binding has recently collapsed. I am thus interested in recommendations for any artisan in the NYC metro area who might competently re-bind it (enough to be functional, not necessarily to look pretty or good-as-new), recognizing up front that this would almost certainly cost more than the cost of the nicest currently-in-print copy I could find and would thus be an expenditure motivated purely by sentimental concerns. I feel like 20-odd years ago there was a place fairly high up Lexington Ave. that looked like it did that sort of thing but I would not bet much money on it still being in business at the same location.
Good lord, the world is chock full of coincidences. Forty years or so ago I myself had a purchased-as-an-undergraduate (late 1960’s) copy of Ulysses, whose binding collapsed after being thrown in anger by a person other than myself, who then repented and had it rebound. Alas, I fear whatever NYC artisan did the job is likely no longer practicing. But surely there is such another…
i feel like i should know an nyc bookbinder to recommend, but i don’t. however, the need for one came up in another context entirely recently (reassembling a book that was unbound to be scanned for a reprint edition), so i’ll be asking around, and will do my best to remember to report back in here if i find someone!
Once again the Hattery hangs together to promote the greater good.
A friend-of-a-friend recommends Judith Ivry, 25 East 4th St., 5th floor, just around the corner from me. The contact page says: “By appointment only. Phone: 212-677-1015, Email: ivryblock@gmail.com“
thanks, JC!
I’ve been reading The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, and have a word-related observation and a question.
The observation is that at some point, Bechdel stopped using expletives and started using grawlixes (grawlices?). I was a bit surprised because Raffi’s first word was, memorably, “fucks!” (comic 190, (c) 1994) (Raffi was echoing Clarice, who had just said that people were “too jaded to care if Bill fucks his cat.”) It’s tricky to figure out exactly when things changed, because DTWOF is not given to having strong language in every episode. But once I noticed grawlix, I remembered actual curse words having been printed not that long before.
I suspect that Bechdel toned things down once DTWOF was on the web and in front of more eyeballs. The amount of explicit nudity and sexual interactions also decreased.
The question has to do with comics 93 & 94 (titled “Fightin’ Words” and “The Cloudburst” respectively, both from 1990). Mo calls Harriet a “complacent carnivorous yuppie”; Harriet retaliates by calling Mo a “sniveling self-righteous . . . LIBERAL!”
And that term enrages Mo to the point where she flings a tomato. And she absolutely denies it, and furiously rejects being called that.
And I guess I’m baffled as to what implications “liberal” had back in 1990 that would have so enraged someone like Mo. I understand that she would prefer to identify as a progressive, politically, but I would have thought that progressivism would be a subset of liberal politics, as opposed to conservative politics.
What have I forgotten, or never knew, about the term “liberal”?
Yes, “liberal” is still used insultingly by progressives, much as Marxists used to hurl “bourgeois” at people. It implies “you claim to be on the side of good but in fact complacently go along with the conservatives unless your personal ox is gored” (or at least that’s how I’d interpret it).
And now I’m wondering whether J.W. Brewer ever got his copy of Ulysses rebound.
I thought the word “liberal” was skunked in overall Middle American during the 1988 presidential campaign, when GHW Bush attached it disparagingly to Dukakis, who foolishly ran away from it. Before that it was used disparagingly only by conservatives (noting especially “limousine liberals” and “lily-livered liberals”). I’m surprised that it was used like this by early 1990s leftists.
That’s the odd thing about “liberal” — it’s used by both sides!
And of course in Europe it means something else entirely (a Quarter Pounder with cheese).
in the u.s., self-described “liberals” almost invariably treat everyone to their left as misguided people who would actually agree with them if only they thought things through “properly”, and vocally oppose them while collaborating wholeheartedly with almost anyone to their right*. those to their left look at self-described liberals’ actual practice rather than their abstract stated principles, and so see them as either active opponents or potential allies. generally, those who’ve held the latter position have fared a lot worse in the end, since it leads them to form coalitions with people who will eventually abandon them to attacks from the right (and often join in themselves).
while that’s been true since at least the 1930s**, the classic statement on this is from martin luther king jr., in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail – written in 1963, early in his definitive turn towards a more consistent left position. the passage, which is worth reading all of, begins:
First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
later that same year, malcolm x (similarly at the start of a turn towards more consistent leftism) said much the same thing in several speeches (also well worth reading), in punchier terms:
The white liberals from both parties cross party lines to work together towards the same goal. And white conservatives from both parties do likewise. The white liberal differ from the white conservative only in one way; the liberal is more deceitful, more hypocritical, than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro’s friend and benefactor.
i suspect that king’s use of “moderate” rather than “liberal” was meant to on the one hand make it easier for self-identified liberals to listen to what he was saying without immediate defensiveness, and on the other to push self-identified liberals decide whether they wanted to do things that got them lumped in with “moderates”. malcolm x, who did not see liberals as potential allies, was not interested in reaching out to them.
nina simone’s Mississippi Goddam takes a similar approach to king’s, with the self-described liberals’ axiom “go slow” never attributed to a particular speaker besides “you”. that model has a long history, with what’s implicit in, for example, the Almanac Singers’ Ballad of October 16 only receiving a name 25 years later in phil ochs’ Love Me I’m a Liberal (with a helpful explanatory introduction in this live recording).
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* see for example gavin newsom’s recent anti-gay rhetoric, kamala harris’ attacks on trans health care and sex workers while california Attorney General and on immigrants while running for president, and (less recently) the ACLU’s refusal to represent paul robeson against the mccarthyite decision to deny him a u.s. passport and permanent enthusiasm for representing nazis.
** i don’t think the debates between “immediatist” and “gradualist” Abolitionists in the 1830s, or between craft-unionists and IWWs in the 1900s, used the word, though the same dynamics apply. similarly, the german Social Democratic Party’s legitimation and deployment of the Freikorps against the revolutions of 1918-19 wasn’t carried out in the name of “liberalism”, but the 1920s-30s german left’s “social fascist” label for the SDP describes the same dynamic in that contest (and accurately describes the SDP’s function throughout the weimar republic’s history).
(@hat: long comment with links held for moderation – just in case you see this before a mod notification)
The great Phil Ochs was using liberal derisively all the way back in 1965:
Yes, “libertarian”, or the pale imitations thereof we actually get. Javier Milei gets called ultraliberal sometimes.
In rarefied political discourse, people can be linksliberal (Austria’s current president identified his – Green – party thus, “with emphasis on liberal“, when he was its, uh, Federal Speaker and also a professor of economics some 10 years before he became president), and the Right can be subdivided into rechtsliberal, rechtskonservativ* and the more widely used term rechtsextrem.
* I haven’t encountered linkskonservativ, which is of course a contradiction in terms outside the aforementioned rarefied discourse; I imagine it applied to Brezhnev within the Soviet context.
I used to be friends with a Berlin sociologist who studied “die Rechtsextremen.”
The classic definition is “A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.”
I will add to the maelstrom of philosophical definitions of Liberalism Foucault’s take from The Birth of Biopolitics. Roughly paraphrased: “Liberalism is that ideology which holds the market to be the supreme arbiter of truth.”