Who knew Alcatraz, the former prison in the San Francisco Bay, would be in the news, like so many other improbable and repellent items entering our consciousnesses these days? Alcatraz, at least, has two (nearly) redeeming features: one, the name has an interesting derivation, and, two, it coincidentally appears on my list of possible words to write about.
If you’ve ever seen the 1962 classic film starring Burt Lancaster, The Birdman of Alcatraz, you’ll appreciate the word’s irony. The movie’s a highly fictionalized bio-pic of an inmate named Robert Stroud, played by Burt Lancaster, a convicted murderer who became a self-taught ornithologist while in prison. The birds that Stroud studies symbolize, of course, freedom. What most viewers don’t realize is that the prison itself is named for birds. How about that?
Alcatraz is a earlier form of the word albatross. The prison-island is named for the birds who lived there, who were actually pelicans. Okay, pelicans and albatrosses are different species, but they’re similar and often confused.
The Spanish or Portuguese word albatros is an alteration of the earlier alcatraz, originally meaning a web-footed sea bird, or pelican. This name might come from the Arabic al-ghattas “sea eagle” or from Arabic al-qadus, which meant “jar.” This term, referring to an object that could hold water, might refer to the pelican’s pouch.
Follow my example. Next time you’re distracted or troubled by the news, turn your distress into something good. Or at least harmless. Ignore the moral and economic ramifications of disturbing dispatches. Instead, explore some etymologies.
Tricia Springstubb’s new novel tells a true story, only in fictional disguise. Her heroine Amber, a sixth grader, is smart but ordinary, cute but not gorgeous, and quietly funny. She has two best friends. Lottie is brainy, and Mariah is a soccer superstar. Amber’s beloved older brother Gage is beginning to grow away from the family. Minor characters, like little sister Clancy, the popular kids, and Amber’s Aunt Noreen, weave in and out, behaving plausibly and entertainingly. Their story, intended for middle schoolers, challenges any reader to think about the importance of telling the truth, and of kindness, and of honest communication within families. (Tricia is a friend and lives in Cleveland Heights.)
A disaster sets the plot in motion: Amber’s house burns to the ground. The community rallies around the family, but mysteries hover over the action. How did the fire start? How will the family rebuild? Will Amber’s parents, Gus and Meg, be able to bridge the worsening rifts between them? And on top of everything else, Amber faces everyday middle-school questions, such as where she’s going to sit in the cafeteria.
Bigger, heavier issues dog Amber and her brother Gage. They face hard choices about telling the truth and keeping secrets. Hard truths abound, and the kids behave like real kids–sometimes heroes and sometimes falling short. Like Tricia’s previous books (Every Single Second and Looking for True, for example), How to Tell a True Story provides an emotionally true and satisfying story for the young person in your life.
I wrote about another enjoyable YA novel last year, The Kings of B’Moreby R. Eric Thomas (March, 2024). Have you read any books created for young people? What are your favorites from the near or distant past?
Hydrogen’s chemical symbol is H, and oxygen’s is O. This sensible state of affairs makes Chemistry 101 a little easier (for us English speakers) than it might otherwise be. The periodic table is not always so self-explanatory, however. You probably already know that the chemical symbol for iron is Fe, from the Latin word for iron, ferrum. Similarly, Ag stands for silver, which in Latin is argentum. Tungsten is a similar outlier, with its symbol W.
W stands for wolfram, an old Germanic synonym for tungsten. Wolfram‘s derivation is problematic, but it might mean “wolf-raven,” a German name. Wikipedia devotes an entire page to people named Wolfram. I have never met such a person, but the name has a dignified ring. And what red-blooded American boy would not like to be named Wolf Raven?
The word’s history is fuzzy, though. W0lfram might instead derive from “wolf-soot,” a derogatory term for an ore less valuable than tin. Part of the tin is lost when the tungsten-tin ore is smelted. Apparently, in this scenario, miners were pissed off by wolfram.
More straightforwardly, tungsten combines the Swedish words for “heavy” and “stone.” If you’re guessing tungsten is a heavy metal, you’re right. It’s in fact the heaviest. The website of the company Xometry gives tungsten this encomium: “As the heaviest known engineering metal, tungsten has earned the crown for strength, weight, and conductivity.” Yay, tungsten! It’s truly a heavy stone!
Tungsten lent its name to an entertaining 2001 memoir by Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. Sacks’s Uncle David acquired the nickname based on the company he worked for, Tungstalite, which made light bulbs with tungsten filaments. This charming and sometimes sad book reveals Sacks’s extreme precociousness and scientific passion. And, get this, Oliver Sacks’s middle name is Wolf.
Who knew this English major would have two chemistry books to recommend? The other is The Periodic Table by Primo Levi, a chemist, memoirist, and survivor of Auschwitz. This 1984 collection consists of about twenty essays, each nominally devoted to an element, but wandering into personal reminiscences. The Royal Institution of Great Britain, I just read, voted it the best science book ever written in a 2006 poll. You will probably want to read the Best Science Book Ever.
We’ll have to forgive Levi, who–with essays on tin, arsenic, argon, titanium, and others–overlooks tungsten altogether.
Let us know in the comments. What’s your favorite science book? What’s your favorite element?
Now and again, classical derivatives and mythological allusions arise in the news cycle. Regarding the case of New York mayor Eric Adams, the sword of Damocles keeps recurring in pundit parlance.
First, to review the news story so far, Mayor Adams, a Democrat, was indicted in September of last year, during Joe Biden’s administration, on charges of bribery, fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. To be clear, being indicted means that a federal grand jury, consisting of 16-23 citizens, heard evidence presented by prosecutors, and at least 12 of them found the evidence sufficient for the prosecution to go forward.
As you no doubt know, there are new wrinkles. The Trump Justice Department has moved to dismiss the case “without prejudice,” meaning that the charges could be refiled at any time. Prejudice, a Latin derivative (of course), means “judgment in advance.” So a dismissal without prejudice means that the judge is not deciding guilt or innocence, but rather is dismissing the case without that judgment, leaving open the possibility that the charges can be resurrected. As you may also know, Mayor Adams is now requesting that the case be dismissed instead “with prejudice,” which sounds like a bad thing, because isn’t prejudice a bad thing? Not for Mayor Adams. With prejudice means his charges would go away, i.e., with advance judgment, meaning it’s over and done with, naturally preferable for the accused mayor.
A dismissal without prejudice, as proposed by the Trump Department of Justice, would place a sword of Damocles over Mayor Adams’s head. Anyone can decipher the meaning of the phrase, which calls to mind that expression about having an ax over one’s head. Adams would be free from prosecution only as long as his behavior (meaning enforcing immigration policy) pleases the Trump DOJ. If he steps outside the lines, he could be facing prosecution once again.
So who was Damocles anyway, and why did he have a sword hanging over his head? The stories come from various sources, including Cicero. They’re probably largely apocryphal.
Dionysius was a 4th century BCE king of Syracuse in Greece. Damocles, a member of his court, attended a royal dinner, where he proceeded to flatter his king’s power and prestige. Dionysius offered his throne to Damocles for a momentary thrill, so that he could see how it felt to wield such power. But Dionysius hung a sword, suspended by a horsehair, over Damocles’s head, and said something in Greek along these lines: “How’s it feel now, buddy?” The ax could fall at any time. The sword of Damocles evokes a feeling of dread and imminent peril.
Cicero wrote that Dionysius, known for his brutality, feared to have a barber come near him with a razor and so taught his daughters to cut his beard and his hair, because he knew people wanted to kill him. As Shakespeare put it in Henry IV, “uneasy is the head that wears the crown.”
Mayor Adams wants the sword, the ax, to be permanently removed. Can he convince a judge? Is his promised cooperation with the Administration a valuable enough bargaining chip? In the meantime, a sword of Damocles hangs over the heads of Internal Revenue accountants, employees at the National Parks, secretaries and office workers and other federal employees. It hangs, more literally, over the heads of President Zelenskyy and his people.
In fact, although none of us wears the crown, we’re can sense it, at least some of the time–a sword over our heads, hanging there by a thread.
I wrote this review for our area monthly paper, The Heights Observer, to spread the word about Deb’s book Lost Found Kept and to invite people to our talk together on Saturday. Comment below with your wisdom, insights, and difficulties regarding dealing with a family member’s mental illness.If you live in Northeast Ohio, hope to see you at Mac’s Backs.
In 2016, Deborah Derrickson Kossmann was living her own episode of “Hoarders,” emptying junk from her mother’s house in suburban New Jersey. It had been almost twenty years since anyone was allowed inside, and nothing, not even a PsyD. in psychology, had prepared Kossmann for what she found. She writes,
“(T)here hadn’t been trash put outside for the last fifteen years. All that garbage is here, not only her own excrement but containers filled with leftovers like a liquified turkey club sandwich. There are chicken bones, apple cores, empty milk cartons, and a half-eaten jar of peanut butter, all of it just thrown on top of piles. She’s made her life a literal dump. Why is she unable to part with her own trash?”
In the newly published Lost Found Kept: A Memoir (Trio House Press), Kossmann reveals her mom’s mental illness and her stepfather’s abuses. It shows Kossmann’s contending with her memories, her anger, and her grief over infertility. The memoir’s vivid writing conveys not only the shocking detritus in her mom’s home, but also the strength and humor she passed on to her daughters. Amidst the junk, it movingly portrays the profound love of her family. During the cleanup, Kossmann and her husband Marc hold each other, clean each other up, and sometimes dissolve into dark, hysterical laughter.
A mutual friend (and blog subscriber), Fran Lissemore, brought me and Deb together, because my 2016 memoir, Missing: Coming to Terms with a Borderline Mother (Red Giant Books), shares many of Deb’s themes: a mother’s mental illness, a challenging childhood, and our attempts as adults to, as much as possible, “part with (our) own trash.”
Deb and I will appear together at Mac’s Backs-Books on Coventry, 1820 Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights, on March 1 at 5:00 pm, to read from our books, answer questions, and talk about mothers and writing. Earlier that day, Deb will read and sign books at Fireside Book Shop at 29 North Franklin Street in Chagrin Falls at 1:00 pm. Come see us, and check out our websites: www.lostfoundkept.com and www.kathyewing.com.
Upon a friend’s recommendation (thank you, Doreen!), I read Judi Dench’s Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent. Over four years, Dench’s buddy and fellow Shakespearean thespian, Brendan O’Hea, interviewed her about all the Shakespearean roles she has played, numbering close to thirty in all. These performances include many media. She’s appeared at Stratford-upon-Avon, the Old Vic, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and dozens of theaters around the world. On TV, she portrayed Lady Macbeth and Cecily, mother of Richard III, in the BBC series The Hollow Crown. Her Shakespearean film credits include Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Mistress Quickly in Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V, and she appeared in the Shakespeare-adjacent film Shakespeare in Love.
How charming is Judi Dench? Let me count the ways. Now 90 years old, she’s funny as heck and irreverent. She sometimes breaks up laughing on stage and likes to pull pranks on her cast members. (You can see her prank her Richard III costar Benedict Cumberbatch in this ad.) Her language is salty. Her memory is prodigious. In some interviews, she recites speeches that she learned decades ago, sometimes even speeches of other characters.
Extremely hardworking, she repeatedly cites the importance of “doing your homework,” that is, preparing for a role before the first rehearsal. The book is filled with Dench’s delightful drawings from her scripts, where she doodled impressions and costumes. She can be acerbic about actors and directors who haven’t done their homework, but she’s never gossipy. She speaks fondly and admiringly of, for example, Kenneth Branagh, Vanessa Redgrave, and Daniel Day-Lewis, and directors Trevor Nunn and Peter Hall. She refers frequently and fondly to her fellow actor and husband Michael Williams, who died in 2001.
She provides down-to-earth, relatable analyses of Shakespeare’s characters. About Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, she says,
She has no interest in marriage. She’s down on her knees every night praying it’ll never happen. Who needs a man? . . . (Beatrice advises her young cousin Hero) to think for herself, to make her own decisions, and not to let anybody push her around. . . It shows Beatrice to be an unconventional heroine–non-conformist, modern, very forward-thinking.
Dench made me want to read plays I’m not familiar with, such as Measure for Measure (she played Isabella), The Merry Wives of Windsor (Mistress Quickly), and The Winter’s Tale (Hermione). She hates The Merchant of Venice, calling it “an ugly play” for its obsession with money and its anti-Semitism.
For a memorable taste of Judi Dench, watch this excerpt from the Graham Norton show, where she was promoting this book and recited, spell-bindingly, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29.
Do you have a favorite Judi Dench film or appearance? Favorite (or least favorite) Shakespeare? Comment below.
In my previous post, I mentioned having read a number of good books recently, so here are two more.
Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play Our Town could be a companion piece to the two volumes about near-death experiences in that post. Read it if you haven’t, or if you haven’t read it since high school, or watch it on YouTube. My friend, Sarah, a theater director, recommends the Paul Newman version (referring to the actor playing the Stage Manager). After rereading it last month, I watched the Hal Holbrook production, partly because I like Robby Benson’s and Sada Thompson’s performances. Or, like Sarah, you could travel to New York to see the well-reviewed current production with an interracial cast starring Jim Parsons.
My book group discussed Our Town because it’s the backdrop for Ann Patchett’s most recent novel Tom Lake, largely set in a Michigan summer stock theater. The novel is also set in a cherry orchard. (Get it? A Cherry Orchard?) And Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love is in there, too. I like a book with a lot of literary references, but you could enjoy the novel without an intimate knowledge of those works.
Patchett wants you to read the play. Her Author’s note reads,
I thank Thornton Wilder, who wrote the play that has been an enduring comfort, guide, and inspiration throughout my life. If this novel has a goal, it is to turn the reader back to Our Town, and to all of Wilder’s work. Therein lies the joy.
Edward Albee called Our Town “the greatest American play ever written.” So you have two pretty powerful recommendations, in addition to mine, of course. Both Patchett and Wilder urge us to look around, see each other, and try to appreciate how strangely miraculous life on earth is, even an ordinary boring life like most of us are living. Near the end of the play, Wilder’s Stage Manager tells us that “everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.” Even skeptics like NDE writers Sebastian Junger and Bruce Greyson suspect this is true. Might as well take some comfort.
As it happens, I’ve been reading some excellent books and want to share them with you. I’ll start with two on the provocative topic of near-death experiences (NDEs).
Sebastian Junger is probably best known for his 1997 book The Perfect Storm: A True Story ofMen against the Sea, a gripping account of a tempest off Massachusetts in 1991 and the destruction of a fishing boat. It became a hit movie starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg. Junger’s new book, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife, displays the same action-scene virtuosity. The book begins with a harrowing youthful surfing adventure, when Junger nearly drowned, and proceeds to a more recent meeting with mortality, “face to face,” when he almost died in the emergency room after suffering an aneurysm.
Junger is a hard-boiled reporter and staunch atheist. He relies on facts and science. These characteristics make him a trustworthy witness when he’s reporting other-worldly experiences. No woo-woo here. Instead, Junger confronts his own skepticism, questioning everything. One section of the book explores particle physics (much to the dismay of some of my book group members), in order to show that the world is really a very, very weird place, where bewilderingly non-rational stuff goes on routinely. Similarly, despite his efforts, Junger can’t explain some aspects of his NDE, hence maintaining some openness to the possibility of an afterlife.
I loved this book. I moved on to one of Junger’s sources: After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (2021) by Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist. In more workmanlike prose, Greyson shares his decades of surprising research with patients who’ve had NDEs. Sticking to the facts, like Junger, Greyson remains open-minded, questioning all his assumptions about the human body. He closes with a fascinating discussion of recent thought about the distinction between the mind and the brain.
After a painstaking and critical examination of the evidence, this conscientious scientist writes,
The evidence that under extreme conditions we can perceive beyond what our physical senses see and hear, and that we can remember things our physical brains have not processed, comes not just from NDEs but from a variety of research avenues. So it makes sense to me to live our lives as if this is really the way things are–that we are more than our physical bodies, that some part of us may continue after our bodies stop working, and that we may be intimately connected to something greater than ourselves. And that has tremendous implications for how we live our lives, and for what makes our lives meaningful and worthwhile.
If you’re skeptical, I understand. I also suggest you give these two brave skeptics a chanceand check out their challenging books.
A Guardian reviewer once wrote that one could probably get a Masters degree in New Yorker lit, i.e., books about the legendary New Yorker and its dramatis personae. I’ve been dipping into that canon recently, though I have a way to go before earning a degree.
I started a few weeks ago with The World She Edited: Katharine White at The New Yorker, a recent biography by Amy Reading. Like a lot of women, Katharine White is known to many based on her relationships; her husband was novelist and humorist E.B. White, and her son, Roger Angell, was a writer and another legendary New Yorker editor. And, as with a lot of women, her accomplishments merit more recognition than she usually gets. She worked tirelessly as a fiction editor at the magazine from 1925 (starting merely six months after its founding) to 1960, when she retired. She nurtured and edited such writers as Jean Stafford, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Nadine Gordimer, Marianne Moore, William Maxwell, Ogden Nash, and John Cheever. She also pretty much kept the magazine going.
Reading presents a complex and sympathetic portrait. If you’re interested but don’t feel like tackling 500 pages, check out this graceful 1996 portrait by New Yorker writer Nancy Franklin.
I moved on to her son Roger Angell’s 2007 collection of autobiographical essays, delightfully titled Let Me Finish. Known in later years as a peerless baseball writer, Angell took over his mother’s office as an editor at The New Yorker in the 1950s. (Katharine worked from home after she and E.B. White had moved to Maine.) Angell provides witty, affectionate, graceful anecdotes about all the usual New Yorker characters, including Harold Ross and E.B. White, as well as his father, Ernest Angell, Katharine’s first husband. These pieces appeared in the magazine in the early 2000s. Angell died in 2020 at the age of 101.
Lastly, at Roger Angell’s recommendation, I read Gardner Botsford‘s memoir A Life of Privilege, Mostly. I’d never heard of Botsford, who died in 2004 at the age of eighty-seven, and who, it turns out, was one of the stalwart characters in those hallowed offices.
He led a remarkable life, growing up in remarkable wealth, especially after his mother married Raoul Fleischmann, heir to the yeast company and, as it happens, a longtime funder of The New Yorker. After graduating from Yale, Botsford was drafted in 1942 and took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944, which he describes vividly. He was wounded and received combat medals for his service. After the war, he bummed around the world with a buddy, romanced many women, slammed down gallons of alcohol, and tried newspaper reporting after he was fired from The New Yorker the first time around.
He eventually returned to the magazine and spent forty years editing such nonfiction luminaries as A.J. Liebling, Janet Malcolm (who became his wife), and Roger Angell. Handsome, witty, and charming, Botsford produced a worthy, beautifully written memoir.
As a footnote, I’ve read a few other New Yorker books over the years, including James Thurber’s My Years with Ross and Brendan Gill’s Here at the New Yorker. Up until now, they provided my view of the magazine’s inner workings. I learned in The World She Edited that Gill’s catty book almost did Katharine White in, and everyone seems to agree that Thurber’s portrait of editor Harold Ross is an inaccurate caricature. The three writers above give fairer (I think) and more nuanced views.
The word fascism is newsworthy right now, and its history is fascinating (no relation) and illuminating.
A Roman fascis (plural fasces) was a mere bundle of sticks, often with an ax sticking out of the middle. This mere bundle took on a weighty significance, coming to symbolize a leader’s power to punish his subjects. Birch rods would serve to enforce magisterial commands. In the Roman official hierarchy, a low-level guy, such as a praeter, might be called the six fasces, and a more powerful consul the twelve fasces. A consul could really whup you.
You can see that the fasces symbolized absolute authority of the state. Rome and its representatives did not shy away from flaunting power, the power to flog you into submission. Processions featured officeholders with accompanying lackeys carrying fasces, just to make the point.
An unbidden memory. In my high school, the coaches who used to monitor study halls strode up and down the aisles bearing large wooden paddles. Huh. Don’t know why that suddenly came to mind.
Anyway, Mussolini and other twentieth-century authoritarians found found this symbol cool. They adopted the fasces, reveling in a kind of Make Italy Great Again nostalgia. Fascists such as Mussolini and Hitler maintained absolute power, not governed by the rule of law. A fascist believes in the ultimate power of the state to control its perceived enemies. He/she carries the big sticks and can wield them against the perceived enemy, unrestrained mere laws.
America’s Mercury dime, produced from 1916 to 1945, bears a fascis on one side, softened somewhat by an accompanying olive branch, signifying peace. Our mint dropped the design because of the image’s sketchy associations with world dictators.
I recall the time that my dad carefully explained to me the political meanings of right and left, and the associated connections of fascism with the right wing and communism with the left wing. He gestured in a kind of circle to demonstrate that the far right and the far left wing meet up at some point. Fascism and communism are not the same thing, but communism can become fascistic when the government becomes all powerful.
Advocating for staying somewhere between the extremes, relying on the power of the vote and the authority of the governed, as opposed to the dominance of a single person, will preserve a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal.
