Spanish King Juan Carlos holds two volumes of "New Grammar of the Spanish Language"

This report by the Associated Press asks, “Can a Barcelona truck driver be expected to speak like a Buenos Aires banker? Can rules be imposed on a language spoken by 400 million people stretching from Madrid to Manila?” Apparently, yes: “The academic overseers of the language of Cervantes have taken an ambitious stab at it, unveiling their first Spanish grammar guidelines in nearly 80 years.”

And it is 4,000 pages spread over 3 volumes — the first two of which were unveiled yesterday at the Spanish Royal Academy’s headquarters in Madrid. According to the AP, “The book is billed as a sort of linguistic map that painstakingly documents today’s Spanish in all its richness — there are nearly 20 ways to say ballpoint pen, for instance — and how it varies from country to country, or within one, or from one social class to another.”

At the ceremony for the book, Victor Garcia de la Concha, president of the Spanish language academy, said,”Here are all the voices, all the ways of speaking, coming together in a grand polyphony. This book comes from the people, and it is to the people that it reaches out.”

Well, those people are going to have to be pretty strong to hold that 4,000 page tome up. Though there are two smaller versions: a 750-page manual geared toward students and teachers of Spanish, and a simplified 250-page version aimed at the general public.

But even at full length, the jumbo pack is far from exhaustive. La Concha explained to the AP that “including everything is impossible. The language does not fit in just a few pages.”

Demonstrably.

On Friday the world received the latest email newsletter from Oprah’s Book Club. Just under the invitation to watch the webcast of  Oprah with Uwem Akpan and Anderson Cooper, I found “Books Men Want” edited by former Publishers Weekly editor-in-chief, Sara Nelson. The teaser reads, in part, “Find out more about these and other books that the men in your life are sure to be asking for this holiday season.”

As we all know, the question, “What do men want?” is thought to be much easier to answer than is the same question of women. Nowhere, apparently, is this more true than in the book section where, it appears, men don’t want much.

Each of the books selected by Oprah has its own page. After clicking through three pages, I found that I was being directed to other features. I tried this several times, thinking that I must have made a mistake, but, after all, it seems that only three pages are needed for the Books Men Want: Open, by Andre Agassi; True Compass, by Edward M. Kennedy; and Where Men Win Glory, by Jon Krakauer.

For men, by men, about men.

66.6 % of the titles have to do with an athlete. Zero percent, it almost goes without saying, are fiction. All are biographies of public, accomplished men, although the subject of Krakauer’s book, Pat Tillman, the professional football player turned soldier, was not so well-known until he was killed in the war in Afghanistan.

If anybody knows who’s reading what, it’s got to be Oprah and her crew (Sara Nelson must have a pretty good idea, herself). After all, Oprah regularly decides just what that will be –- for millions of people. A feature like Books Men Want, I have to think, must be close to the mark. On such anecdotal evidence as this, then, it looks as though uncoupling gender stereotypes from reading is a lost cause.

This makes last week’s flap over Publishers Weekly’s list of the best books of 2009 even stranger. If PW’s list had consisted entirely of books written by women, as could easily have been the case — see this list, for example — is it possible that no man would have protested?

In June, Ron Charles, Deputy Editor of the Washington Post’s Book World posted a review that included this cheerful facing up to facts:

Back in olden days, before we started worrying about the survival of novels, we used to worry about the survival of novels for men. But that battle was lost so long ago that we should declare the field a national park and open a visitors’ center (Look, kids — Norman Mailer published right on this spot!).

Who the “we” is that worried about the survival of novels is hard to say. Most American men don’t seem to have missed them. As indefatigable Harvard historian Jill Lepore wrote last year, in one of her frequent essays for the New Yorker,

By the end of the eighteenth century, not just novel readers but most novel writers were women, too. And most historians, along with their readers, were men. As the discipline of history, the anti-novel, emerged, and especially as it professionalized, it defined itself as the domain of men. (Women might write biography, or dabble in genealogy.) Eighteenth-century observers, in other words, understood the distinction between history and fiction not merely and maybe not even predominantly as a distinction between truth and invention but as a distinction between stories by, about, and of interest to men and stories by, about, and of interest to women. Women read novels, women wrote novels, women were the heroines of novels. Men read history, men wrote history, men were the heroes of history. (When men wrote novels, [William] Godwin suggested, this was regarded as “a symptom of effeminacy.”)

A lively, if scattered, discussion of whether men read fiction can be found on the web. Among the assertions I gleaned: we have only 80,000 reliable readers of fiction in this country and 75% of them are women. The exactitude of the numbers may be disputed but the dispiriting conclusion has become folk wisdom. (In more than one online conversation — such as this one — reader’s comments invoke genetics to explain men’s love of killing and disdain for such fiction as is being forced on their male children by misguided educators.)

Even Oprah has thrown up her hands.

Volunteers for Books Behind Bars program sorting books.

A Washington Post report says that state prison officials in Virginia have reversed a recent decision to ban the popular Books Behind Bars program. The ban had been in effect for one month, and was meeting with great protest among inmates and advocates for the program.

According to the Post, “The 20-year-old effort, run by the Quest Institute in Charlottesville, was halted last month after prison officials said that security risks were too great and that the influx of books created too much work for busy corrections officers.” An earlier Post report said prison guards had found a paper clip and a CD in books sent to prisoners, arousing fears that the book program posed a risk.

But, says the Post, “after protests from supporters, Corrections Department Director Gene M. Johnson said he will allow Books Behind Bars — which has put as many as 1 million books in prison cells statewide — to resume. In a Sept. 15 letter to Kay Allison, the program’s founder, Johnson said each inmate could request up to three books a month. Allison has promised that volunteers will take extra care in making sure no contraband items are sent along with the books, assuaging Director Johnson’s fears.

Inmates write to Quest with their book requests. According to the Post, “Dictionaries, Bibles and the Koran are the most frequent requests. African American literature, self-help books and novels are also popular.”

The New York Times is watching you ....

“If The New York Times ever strikes you as an abstruse glut of antediluvian perorations, if the newspaper’s profligacy of neologisms and shibboleths ever set off apoplectic paroxysms in you, if it all seems a bit recondite,” says Zachary M. Seward, you have cause for hope: The Times is surveiling word definition searches conducted by its readers and may be using the resultant data to dumb down or up — I can dream, can’t I? — accordingly.

As Seward details in a report for the Nieman Journalism Lab, the Times has recently added a feature whereby, in its online edition, if you highlight a word, you can get a pop-up definition. “[I]t turns out the Times tracks usage of that feature,” reports Seward, who has gotten hold of a memo about it circulated to Times staffers by deputy news editor Philip Corbett. It charts the 50 most looked-up words and cautions reporters to “avoid the temptation to display our erudition at the reader’s expense.” As Seward observes, it’s “a reminder that news sites are sitting on a wealth of data, from popular search terms to click rates, that can help them adjust to reader preferences.”

Seward’s post includes the full chart of the 50 most looked-up words, but here at least is the top 10:

1. sui generis
2. solipsistic
3. louche
4. laconic
5. saturnine
6. antediluvian
7. epistemological
8. shibboleths
9. penury
10. sumptuary

Dave Eggers

Earlier, MobyLives reported on a speech Dave Eggers gave in which he gave out his email address and said, “if you are ever feeling down, if you are ever despairing, if you ever think publishing is dying or print is dying or books are dying or newspapers are dying …. If you ever have any doubt, e-mail me, and I will buck you up and prove to you that you’re wrong.”

Let’s just say the lad got a lot of email. 

So, he had to write a one-size-fits-all response, that someone sent to Gawker: “Dear Person Needing Bucking Up,” it begins. “I feel honored that you would take the time to reach out and in many cases tell me your very real struggles with writing and work and the future of the printed word.” And he goes on to reiterate his belief in a growing literacy amongst youth as well as the persistence of actual books and newspapers.

And now this speech, too, is a hot item making the rounds, perhaps because of Eggers’ relentless, “if you print it, they will read” optimism, and because he’s putting his money where his mouth is and making a newspaper — you know, one of those things that’s supposedly dying before our eyes — as the next McSweeney’s project.

Here’s the heart of his statement: 

“As long as newspapers offer less each day— less news, less great writing, less graphic innovation, fewer photos— then they’re giving readers few reasons to pay for the paper itself. With our prototype, we aim to make the physical object so beautiful and luxurious that it will seem a bargain at $1. The web obviously presents all kinds of advantages for breaking news, but the printed newspaper does and will always have a slew of advantages, too. It’s our admittedly unorthodox opinion that the two can coexist, and in fact should coexist. But they need to do different things. To survive, the newspaper, and the physical book, needs to set itself apart from the web. Physical forms of the written word need to offer a clear and different experience. And if they do, we believe, they will survive. Again, this is a time to roar back and assert and celebrate the beauty of the printed page. Give people something to fight for, and they will fight for it. Give something to pay for, and they’ll pay for it.”

I’m currently on a beach in Zanzibar. This place has everything — crazy beautiful ruins, coconuts falling into our hands, pristine coral reefs… There’s even a puppy! Poor me, stuck in a tropical idyll.

It’s something of a culture shock after recent experiences. We spent ten days volunteering at an orphanage in Kibaha, a small town north of Dar es Salaam. The kids of La No Che Camp live in a half finished house whose roof doesn’t meet in the middle and where there is no electricity. Until a month ago, the nearest running water was over 1 km away; now there’s a standpipe to augment the rainwater butts and life is a little easier. Not that easy, however - one of the first thing I learned was just how time consuming poverty is. From the long trudge up dirt tracks to buy groceries to the lengthy cooking process, done over hot stones, everything entails an effort.

Hardships notwithstanding, the children are amazing - no moaning, no arguments, no tantrums, even at times when the average English adult would be weeping on the floor like a baby. A week last Sunday, we took a bunch of them back to boarding school after the Easter half term. This may seem a little fancy in this context but Tanzania doesn’t work like Western countries. First and most annoyingly, children can’t simply switch between government schools if they move to a different region; they have to start in the first grade again, no matter how old or advanced they might be. Mad, but there’s no gainsaying the regulations. The orphans have come from around the country (easier to discourage them from going back to the streets if they are far away from home) at different ages, so they have to go to private school, sponsored by international donors.The cost is between 900 and 1200 dollars a year, a hell of a lot when you consider that a good wage here is 5 dollars a day. A lot of kids slip through the net.

Back to the story. Six little boys and girls, all dressed up in their Sunday best, walked 3 km in the pouring rain, wildly excited about going back to class the next day. (That’s another thing. They love learning and books and anything to do with knowledge. They’ll read the same story over and over if that’s all they have. I could seriously do a Madonna with all of them!) We arrived at school at 5 pm, only to be turned away. Seriously. The Headmaster had set a new “registration policy” with a strict 8 - 4 schedule and neglected to let any of the parents know.

Johnson, the orphanage director and a truly good man, argued for half an hour but to no avail; bureaucracy here is even more intransigent than in a Japanese Post Office. We would have to come back the next day. I was stamping my feet in fury by now - everyone was soaked, they were exhausted (Emmy and Victor are only six) and they’d had their dreams trampled to boot - but there wasn’t the faintest simmering of a hissy fit to be seen anywhere else.

The plot thickens. When we took them back on Monday morning, the teachers tried to send them away again! This time, Johnson was told that none of their fees had been paid, despite written guarantees from the donors, who pay direct into the school bank account. While we played football in the playground and Asma looked longingly towards her classroom, Johnson made his case. He produced the receipts that had been given to him by the last accountant but was told that there were no records of any payments having been received, either in the computer system or in the bank statements. (Did somebody say “embezzlement”?) It was only when he reminded the Headmaster of his close friendship with the District Commissioner that they grudgingly agreed to let the children stay. However, there would be a few
additional charges…

It would be nice to dismiss this as an isolated incident; nice, but complacent. Last year, the orphans were registered at a different school where the situation was even worse. The fees for an entire year were paid up front but the Headmaster refused to allow the children into the school. Letters were sent by Johnson, the donor (who was mightily pissed off), the District Commissioner and even someone from the Ministry of Education, but the Headmaster sat on the cash and refused to budge. The kids stayed home. There is no system for reprisals. Perhaps fittingly, both of these schools are religious institutions.

The temptation when hearing this kind of tale is to wash your hands of the whole affair. Why give your money to a minor despot? But as I’ve said, these kids are motivated, hard working and seriously bright. They are in school (if no thanks to the authorities) and Johnson is determined to keep them there. He is a man of so much energy that I believe him. His reasoning is that education is the only chance they have. Only if they continue to be taken off the streets will Tanzania and countries like it escape the vicious aid-corruption cycle in which they have been mired for fifty years. Who could argue with that?

My clever boyfriend is going to build a website for the orphanage when we get home and I’ll put up a link when it’s done. If anyone wants more info before that, please email Me. Sponsoring a child through school is one of the best things you can do, even if it’s only a small contribution. Just make damn sure you keep the receipts!

The future of library funding?

The Connecticut Times reports that local libraries are running out of money for new acquisitions, “There is no money left in the book fund,” Sandra Long, Library Director of the Scranton Library told the Times. “We receive about 85 percent of our overall budget from the town and the rest comes largely from fund raising. That includes for the purchase of books and other materials. The economy had its effect on us. We raised several thousand dollars less than last year.”

All those new bestselling hardcovers that folks go to the library for will not be there this year. And Long is making a special fund raising effort to try to fill the budget gap. She is going beyond their yearly December fund raising appeal and reaching out now, to the public, patrons, and previous donors to contribute to their new book fund.

We’ve all seen the news story about how more people are using their public library due to the economic downturn. (The New York Times runs that one every month or so.) But sadly, public funding hasn’t yet recognized the added drain on libraries’ resources. And, private fund raising is not closing all those budget gaps.

But, it’s not all doom and gloom for new books in the library. In Canada, the government of Ontario has given their libraries an extra $15 million dollar boost, as Quill and Quire reported back in February. And the city of Toronto has dedicated it’s piece of the pie to acquiring new books for public school libraries.

Hey, wait a minute. They’re gonna get smarter than us up there. Bake sale anyone?

David Kipen, just before learning he would not have to eat somebody else's words

The man who threatened to eat a copy of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird if everyone on Kelleys Island in Ohio didn’t read it (see this earlier MobyLives report) has avoided having to carry out the threat. Melville House author and translator David Kipen, the Director of Literature for the National Endowment for the Arts and head of the NEA’s Big Read program, treated everyone in Kellys Island — population 131 — to pizza late last week to celebrate the first-ever instance of 100% participation by a community in the program.

As J.C. Reindl reports in a story for the Toldedo Blade, “Of about 400 communities that have taken part in a Big Read effort since 2006, none managed total participation” before.

So how did they do it? Peer pressure, says Elaine Lickfelt, a volunteer at the local library. “Everywhere that we went, we’d discuss the book. So if you didn’t know about the discussion, then we knew you weren’t reading the book.”

Definitions of reading may have been loosened up a little, too, reports Reindl: “About a dozen adults listened to audio book versions … which Mr. Kipen said count.” (Explains Kipen, “My preference, I suppose, would be for reading on paper, but I’m not about to be a snob about it.”)

The report does not say if there was 100% participation in the pizza party Kipen hosted.

Walter Scott: Brits can skip him now

What literature should be studied in schools? I remember doing Romeo and Juliet three times, which pissed me off, although the hilarious school trip to the local playhouse –- where Juliet, who had adenoid troubles, screeched so loudly from her balcony that Romeo nearly fell off the stage in panic –- did make up for a lot. We also read Ballard, Golding, Ian McEwan, Sylvia Plath, Salinger, Steinbeck, Yeats and a bunch of other people I can’t remember.

I went to a dull provincial private school where the teachers were not renowned for their imaginations but nonetheless we managed to read books by Scottish, Irish and American writers. In fact, we were forced to –- the creaky mandarins who set the curriculum thought that reading outside one’s own culture could be broadening. Kids today may not get the chance.

Shakespeare: Scots can skip him now

As Alison Flood reported in the Guardian yesterday, the new English Literature GCSE guidelines are a bit more lax than in my day. To be precise, literary merit is to be decided on the grounds of nationality: of six compulsory texts, three must be written by writers from the country. For the purposes of these rules, the UK does not exist. What that means is that as of September 2010, Shakespeare will only be mandatory in England: the Scots and the Irish can ditch him if they please. Likewise, Robbie Burns and Walter Scott may from now on stay north of the border. The idea is to “guarantee access to [students’] literary heritage”.

This is more than a little dodgy. We use the same passports, share the same TV programming –- and therefore the same cultural references -– and endure the same posturing politicians. It’s safe to say that, North-South divide notwithstanding, people within the UK have as much if not more common ground as, say, people from North Dakota and people from Hawaii. But I can’t imagine any of the US states trying to impose a similar law: the jeers would be too loud. So why have our lot gone for it? Is it a sneaky segue into full devolution?