Month: September 2013

Meet Madeleine Morel, a literary agent who specializes in ghostwriters:

[W]hat I have now is a talent agency. I have hundreds of different writers to whom I have access, but I would say that at any given time I have 100 to 150 writers who I’m in touch with on a semi-regular basis. So when anybody’s looking for a writer, I always give them four to six different writers to choose from, all of whom have been published multiple times by the major houses and many of whom have put books on the bestseller list. They all specialize in particular areas: sport, politics, popular culture, health and fitness and diet. Whatever you see on the bestseller list is what I do.

How she describes a “typical” ghostwriter:

[Ghostwriters] fall into three rubrics: former magazine writers; former book editors who couldn’t stand the corporate life any longer, or who were laid off; and what we used to call in the old days mid-list writers—that is, writers who wrote perfectly nice books and got advances of $5,000 to $15,000. But those books can’t be sold any longer, because they don’t have a platform. So they started writing for other people.

Dan McQuade investigates his favorite training montage from the Rocky films – the run through Philadelphia in the second movie:

What’s always amused me about this scene is how absolutely little sense Rocky’s route makes: South Philly becomes North Philly becomes the Italian Market becomes North Philly again, and so on. Obviously, the montage isn’t mean to be taken seriously as an actual workout; it’s just a few scenes strung together so “Gonna Fly Now” can play and Rocky can finish at the top of the Art Museum steps.

But, I wondered, what if this roadwork were treated as one actual run? How far would Rocky go? Well, I decided to find out.

After breaking down the scene neighborhood by neighborhood, he calculates an answer:

Over thirty and a half miles. Rocky almost did a 50K. No wonder he won the rematch against Apollo!

Brad Leithauser ruminates on writers’ favorite words:

I sometimes wonder what could be responsibly deduced about a poet whose work you’d never actually read—if you were supplied only with a bare-bones concordance providing tables of vocabulary frequency. A fair amount, probably. You might reasonably postulate that Housman was homosexual upon learning that “lad,” “lads,” and “man” together surface roughly two hundred times in his poetry, as opposed to something like twenty appearances of “woman,” “women,” “girl,” and “girls.” Or you might—a deeper challenge—presuppose the existence of an essential temperamental and creative schism between two giants upon learning that “tranquil” and its variants (“tranquility,” “tranquilizing,” etc.) materialize more than fifty times in Wordsworth’s poetry and about a dozen in Byron’s. Doesn’t this statistic present, in stark relief, the posed polarities of the poet as contemplative and the poet as a man of action?

At the end of the day, when darkness falls, a concordance turns out to be a sort of sky chart to the assembling night. It shows how the poet’s mind constellates. Even if we’d never read Milton, we might surmise something of his vast, magisterial temperament on being told that “law” emerges some fifty times in his complete poems. We might surmise something further on discovering that “Hell” surfaces nearly as often as “love.”

Christopher Booker criticizes Edward O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth for failing to acknowledge it:

What marks out humankind as unique is the degree to which we have broken free from the dictates of instinct. We may in terms of our individual ‘ego-instincts’, such as our urges to eat, sleep, live in social groups and reproduce our species, be just as much governed by instinct as other creatures. But in all the ways in which we give expression to those urges, how we build our shelters, obtain our food, organise our societies, we are no longer guided entirely by instinct. Unlike any other species, we have become free to imagine how all these things can be done differently. Whereas one ant colony is structured exactly like another, the forms of human organisation may vary as widely as a North Korean dictatorship and a village cricket club.

It is our ability to escape from the rigid frame of instinct which explains almost everything that distinguishes human beings from any other form of life. But one looks in vain to Wilson to recognise this, let alone to explain how it could have come about in terms of Darwinian evolutionary theory. No attribute of Darwinians is more marked than their inability to grasp just how much their theory cannot account for, from all those evolutionary leaps which require a host of interdependent things to develop more or less simultaneously to be workable, that peculiarity of human consciousness which has allowed us to step outside the instinctive frame and to ‘conquer the Earth’ far more comprehensively than ants.

Ralph Keyes explores the American talent for neologisms – itself a word first used by Thomas Jefferson:

What literate person hasn’t dreamed of staking a claim to verbal posterity by coining a word? Some, such as Gelett Burgess, become virtual mints of coined words. Though little remembered today, the early-20th-century San Francisco humorist and folk lexicographer was a prolific generator of neologisms. In a 1906 article, Burgess repurposed the chemical term bromide to refer to clichés. The cover of his 1907 book  Are You a Bromide ?  featured an effusive woman named Miss Belinda Blurb, whose surname Burgess suggested we use for book endorsements, ones “abounding in agile adjectives and adverbs, attesting that this book is the ‘sensation of the year.’ ” Blurb caught on and stuck around, partly because it named a new phenomenon heretofore unnamed, partly because it felt good in the mouth. So did another Burgessism: goop. These neology hits were the exception, however. Most of Burgess’s verbal inventions were misses. Like all determined word coiners, Burgess had far more splooches than successes. (Splooch was his word for “a failure.”) Among the humorist’s many creations that died with him were huzzlecoo (“an intimate talk”), igmoil (“a sordid quarrel over money matters”), and wox (“a state of placid, satisfied contentment”).