Homeless rifle dumpsters

"Homeless rifle dumpsters..."

How do you parse that?

Homeless can be an adjective or a noun. Rifle can be a noun or a verb. Dumpsters is a plural noun (like hipsters), but when preceded by nouns one might be tricked into believing the -s suffix signifies a verb in the third-person present tense.

But here's the full sentence:

"Homeless rifle dumpsters but so slowly, so leisurely, that poverty might be a pastime."

It's from Break-up, by Joanna Walsh, which disappoints me in exactly the way Sludge Utopia didn't. (Expectations.)

It's so fucking writerly. (Pretentious.)

Is it beautiful? Maybe. I'm just past the novel's half-way mark, and I find the prose almost unbearable. (Thematically, however, the novel is compelling. Required reading in the context of my year of love and loss.)

Subject, collective noun = "homeless." Typically an adjective, it's been nouned by abbreviating "homeless people." No article. (You couldn't substitute just any collective noun and achieve the same effect.)

Verb = "rifle." In the greater context — an urban post-Soviet landscape — the noun may be more expected.

But my brain doesn't yet categorize these words as subject and verb. My brain is still exploring the potential of the adjective-noun reading and wondering what qualifies as a "homeless rifle," until it realizes that "dumpsters" can't function as a verb. Try "rifle dumpsters" (dumpsters reserved exclusively for rifles?) that are homeless only to be left hanging verbless. Start over.

My psycholinguistic faculties take many milliseconds to understand that homeless people are rifling through dumpsters.

It may be beautiful, but it's unnecessarily demanding. The payoff isn't worth the effort. It's the kind of sentence I might have aspired to write myself some 20 years ago, for its gymnastic economy. Today when I read it I roll my eyes and scribble profanities in the margin.

Break.up in my head sounds like it was written to be the sort of thing writers read at readings, as performance, all pompous and breathy, even though it could be more satisfyingly and meaningfully read in an easy, natural manner. I wish I could find another tone in which to read Break.up; nothing about it sounds real. (Is literature performance?)

Millions of beautiful words

I'd been copyediting for a few years when I landed a dream job, at a very hip ad agency. Designers and copywriters were clamoring to work there. I didn't know anything about advertising (this is well before Mad Men came to tv), but I did know a little something about editing, about publishing, and about how language works.

What's nice about working for an agency is the variety: print ads to websites to custom reports, one-offs and multi-phase campaigns, across all media. This job had me fixing grammar, checking proofs, and touring print facilities, but also acting as sounding board for creative. Editing as end-to-end quality control.

But the best thing about that job was my boss, my mentor, from whom I learned the value of a holistic approach to editing. Editing is less about spelling, grammar, and punctuation than it is about listening, hand-holding, and ego-stroking.

Early on, she loaned me her copy of Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, by A Scott Berg — a biography of he who edited the greats: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wolfe. I got myself my own copy shortly thereafter. Every editor should read it.

Now it's been adapted for film.



Genius opens June 16th, and I'll be watching it. It looks like it takes quite the turn for the melodramatic, but hey, that's life, I'm living it.

Thanks, Edie, for everything.

Just let it go

The Subversive Copy Editor, by Carol Fisher Saller, it turns out, is less a handy desk reference than it is an all-round morale booster, encouraging me in my daily grind. Yes, I am the best editor I can be, my decisions are sound, and my writers/contributors respect that. Or so I tell myself. And this book makes it a little easier to believe.

What's key, in my work these days, is to leave behind the copyediting, subediting, and to think in terms of big picture editing. I'm a capital "E" Editor now.

An assigning editor at a famous children's magazine told me of her exasperation after one of her staff had copyedited the same text in three revisions and kept finding errors. "Stop looking for mistakes!" she yelled. "Think like an editor and just let it go!"

I believe I've discovered my new mantra: Just let it go.

Prompt editors to be always truthful

Today, January 31, is the feast day of Saint John Bosco, patron saint of illusionists, stage magicians, and editors.

Admirable apostle of youth, founder of religious Congregations, catechist, educator, writer, and a light that shone brightly in our time, you know that one of the greatest powers today is the power of the Press. Prompt editors to be always truthful and to work for the good of human beings, thus serving the greater glory of God. Amen.

Economy of words

Last week I found a near-pristine copy of a 1974 editon of Words into Type.

I paid $10, at Cheap Thrills.

On December 27, 2004, someone bought this same book, used, at the Barnes & Noble in Burlington, Vermont, for $7 (USD), with a gift card, according to the receipt I found inside.

In 2000 (or was it a year or two earlier?) I saw the book, new, in a bookstore in New York City (or was it Washington, DC?), leading me to believe that in fact it wasn't so hard to find in the United States. I didn't have $48 (USD) to spare that weekend. I left the book on the shelf.

I have been looking for this book since 1996.

A quick search shows me that this book is more widely available (affordably) than once I thought (I swear I looked high and low when I first got Internet access in 1996, but I guess I gave up on that avenue of pursuit too early; I have carried this title over from one list to PDA to another over the years, and pulled the list out for reference in countless used book stores), but this does not lessen the joy I take in my great find.

Lots of grammar! Great indexing! Definitions of useful things like "apposition" and "cognate object"! Twenty-two pages devoted to the comma! What all those copyeditors said was true! This is the greatest reference ever!

How much is this book worth?!