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Tony Miksak

WORDS ON BOOKS by Tony Miksak for KZYX&Z-FM, 90.7 Philo CA
Airs Sunday, June 17, 2007 at 10:55 am, repeated Wednesday, June 20 at 1 pm

Title: That's Not That, So What Is That?

(MUSIC UP) This is Tony Miksak with a few Words on Books.

The other day I noticed it had became Spring, and I took the opportunity to clear out my home office of what turned out to be more than eight cartons of books. This left space for more books, a space I am filling as quickly as possible.

When the eight cartons of books were duly carried down to the garage I had the first chance in years to actually get to my bookshelves and look around.

I found "The Secret Life of Lobsters," living next to "The Sex Lives of Cannibals," neither book yet read, but living together quite nicely.

In a bookstore books tend to clump mostly by subject. On my bookshelves Amy Goodman's "Static" is next to "An Incomplete History of The Art of Funerary Violin." Bertrand Russell's "A History of Western Philosophy" stands next to "Learn Weight Training in a Weekend" – a wonderful juxtaposition of the erudite with the impossible. I figure I'll get around to all of these one day, and in the meantime they can mumble things to each other.

Sure enough, in addition to a kitchen stuffed with cookbooks I also have several shelves of them in my office, all Italian, and other bookshelves crammed tight with history and historical novels. Books on music, computers and travel are mixed with so far unread biographies, pop science tomes, and "Gulliver's Travels."

What truly did surprise me is how many books I seem to have collected on writing and the English language. These books now make a pile on my desk almost two feet high. Randomly on top is "Shelf Life: How Books have Changed the Destinies and Desires of Men and Nations."

The pile continues beyond "Neatness Counts: Essays on the Writer's Desk" "Nabokov's Butterfly" "The Elephants of Style" "The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop" "The Genius of Language" "Rereadings" "Dictionary Days" and "Heavy Words Lightly Thrown" to, all the way at the bottom, Bill Bryson's now classic "The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way."

After postponing reading "The Mother Tongue" for 17 years (it was published in 1990) as of today I have blue and yellow notes sticking out of it in various places to mark interesting passages.

I've been a dedicated fan of Bill Bryson for years. Joselyn and I once laughed painfully, out loud, on a French train, while reading about Bryson's misadventures on a French train. Maybe it was an Italian train. It was a train, anyway, and gradually we grew semi-hysterical. Everyone stared cooly at us.

Must have been a French train. Italians don't stare like that.

"Consider... these instructions gracing a packet of convenience food from Italy: 'Besmear a backing pan, previously buttered with a good tomato sauce, and, after, dispose the cannelloni, lightly distanced between them in a only couch.'

"Clearly the writer of THAT message," Bryson says, "was not about to let a little ignorance of English stand in the way of a good meal."

The other day I heard this radio station announce that "The Board of Directors of Mendocino County Public Broadcasting are meeting..." and I just about resigned on the spot, until I realized that would be really, really, petty and, anyway, I like the current members of our Board of Directors very much.

A "board," whether lumber or personages, is a singularity, not a plurality, and agrees with verbs in the singular. Pul-eeze. And while we're kvetching: No thing can ever be "very" unique. It either is unique, one of a kind, or it is not unique. And when you lie down you are not laying down, but when you place something you lay it down and I guess I have to admit I have become one of those crotchety, smelly old men who in retirement pester editorial pages and radio shows with their persistent insistence on getting grammar right, at least getting it right the way they learned it, a long time ago, all the while acknowledging that a language such as English is a fluid and changing thing, you can't step in the same river twice, and where it used to be bad form to write run-on sentences good writers do it all the time and even though "light" "night" and "right" are spelled with a "ght" it has become common usage to spell them "lite" "nite" and "rite" and while I don't like this at all, I am getting used to it as no doubt so are some of you.

And to sum up this diatribe, fulmination, rant, or screed, and did you know that according to Bill Bryson no other language needs to have something called a "Thesaurus," to sum up, I copied down this passage from an old Seinfeld episode on TV:

(MUSIC UP) Jerry: "Well, so that's that."
George: "No, that's not that."
Jerry: "That's not that?"
George: "No."
Jerry: Well, if that's not that, what is that?"

(MUSIC) As always, transcripts of Words on Books are available through the KZYX web site.

Notes:

If you think I'm going to research and copy down the titles, prices, publishers and prices of all the books I just mentioned, many of them not at all new, no I won't. But you always can write me for details, or contact Gallery Bookshop. The highly trained and motivated independent booksellers there, if they will turn their gaze away from the lovely ocean for just a moment, will undertake to deliver one or more of these interesting books to you.

What's unread on your bookshelf, and why? Let me know.

Tony Miksak
Words on Books: http://www.gallerybooks.com/bkm/index.html
personal home page: http://amiksak.googlepages.com/home

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