Kids Are Dumb and Therefore Funny

Babies are dumb. Little kids aren't much better. And what are adults at the end of the day but tall kids with bumps and more hair. But as we grow and learn and try to make sense of things, we can come up with some bloody funny things.

Intelligent Design, for example.

Or The Bush Doctrine.

I was reminded of this when someone told me a story about his introduction, at the age of about 10 or 11, to a woman named Naomi.

"Hi, I'm Naomi," she said.

"Naom-you?" he responded. He thought that when she said her name to someone it was Nao-me, and when someone else said her name to her it was Naom-you.

I myself am guilty of such leaps in logic. In kindergarten, I loved to bring in record albums (those were the days) for Show-and-Tell. It made me popular for a day if I chose the right record. There was the Grease soundtrack on one hand, and a reading of "The Three Little Pigs" on the other. Guess which one won me respect and admiration among my peers. Lord knows I can't remember.

I forget which one it was — probably Grease — but a substitute teacher once forced me to hand over my record. My favorite song at the time was "Greased Lightning," which contained a sexual reference or two in its lyrics that my young ears were too green to comprehend. I imagine she was trying to save me from myself, or to have a word with my mom or some such thing.

She was on a relatively long assignment, filling in for our regular teacher. Those were the days of Miss Nelson is Missing!. We did not like teachers, but a sub was the Devil incarnate. So naturally, I thought she was using her bully powers of adulthood (Oh, I couldn't wait to grow up!) to steal it from me forever.

As I recall, I got it back by pouting at the end of class. Whether she had intended to give it back then or not I can't say. I hated her and feared her. But I had no idea what would soon happen to the poor woman.

One day she wasn't in class and we had a different sub. I asked what happened to Miss What's-her-name, and someone (a student? my memory!) told me breezily that she had been fired.

I'd never heard of such a thing, and naturally I was horrified. They burned her to death? Just for taking my Grease album? Word got around, I guess. Maybe she had been mean to other kids at other schools. I felt vaguely responsible. I didn't hate her that much. But also I felt vindicated, like a reign of terror had ended.

Unbearable

When a gay man reaches a certain age — say thirty-something — he may begin to wonder what category he falls into. It's all about categories in this gay world. What you look like: twink, chicken, bear, cub, otter, wolf. What you do: gym bunny, muscle daddy, leather daddy. Who you do: top, bottom, chubby chaser, chicken hawk, rice queen.

We revel in these labels. We build identities and bars and communities and Web sites and publishing companies around them.

Some of us revel in not fitting into one of these categories.

Until we do.

I have never felt like I fit a label. Never was a twink. Not headed toward anything in particular, so I thought. Maybe I could be a cub if I could grow a beard worth a damn. But today I was startled to learn that there are at least two people I work with who think I am a bear. Or at least bearish.

It was further revealed that one of them (I don't know who; I didn't ask) said so as a compliment, i.e., my apparent bearishness is an attractive quality. And this did lessen the shock. I'll take anything label if it means someone thinks I'm cute.

A quick flip through any bear magazine should disabuse anyone of these notions of bearhood. I am as pink and hairless as a newborn kangaroo. But, taken with another word someone else at work applied to me — cuddly — I have little choice but to conclude that I just need to lose weight. No euphemism for "fat" — even if it means someone thinks I'm cute — can leave me feeling very good about myself.

I Want my OED (or "Etymology for Nothing and Web Access for Free")

Video never did kill the radio star, but there may be a very serious casualty in the smackdown between the World Wide Web and what we old timers call the "durable media."

Of all the great crushes in my life — Chris in 5th grade, the subject of my first boy-on-boy dream (complete with, no joke, a roaring fireplace); Justin in 7th grade, who I would surreptitiously photograph at Camp Tamarack; Paul in high school, my little brother's YMCA swimming instructor, who I never missed sight of changing in the locker room — the one that stands out above all others is the one I met in college. An English professor introduced us. I was at once captivated by his plain language and vast knowledge; his masculine, somewhat earthy scent; his perfectly straight spine; his thin, delicate pages; his minuscule, seemingly boundless print.

What hope did I have? How could I possibly resist this true, this pure, this urgent love? I was hopelessly lost from the moment I parted those covers to examine "gun" and "hangnail" and "nickname" and other marvels.

Yet there will come a time when those hardcover multi-volume memories are all I have left. I fear that I will never see the great love of my life — the Oxford English Dictionary — in its third edition in printed form.

Oh, for how long have I dreamed of wrapping myself bodily around its two dozen volumes! Of running my fingers along its stiff, bony edges. Of digging the sharp corners of its perfect, tight binding into my softly pliant flesh! Of inhaling the musky perfumery of inks on thousands upon thousands of translucent leaves!

A recent visit to the OED Web site rudely wrestled me from such dizzying passions. Intending to confirm the third edition's publishing date, I was shocked instead to learn that plans had changed dramatically since my last visit. The FAQ stated unmistakably that the revisions currently underway for the third edition will not be completed until 2037.

Two thousand.

Thirty-seven!

I will turn 61 years old that year.

The OED contains the history of the meaning of every blessed word in the English language, which includes by default a fair number of words from other languages, traced all the way back to their first recorded usage. It is the bible of my sacred tongue. An essential (and significantly large) part of the history of human thought itself. Few have anticipated the Second Coming with as much fervor as I have waited for this edition.

The second edition contains more than 300,000 words. Apparently more than 4,000 words are added every year. The OED will effectively double in size by the time the third edition is complete. There is no dictionary more well-endowed.

But the second edition is riddled with supplements and additions, a Frankenstein's monster of cobbled volumes.

Bugger!

The complete CD-ROM edition is not available for Macintosh.

Bollocks!

And a subscription to the online service, perhaps the most bearable option, is unaffordable. Libraries in the UK and Ireland offer remote access for free, but the New York Public Library does not. (So much for one of the greatest knowledge institutions of the world.)

Rat bastards!

Unthinkably, there may not even be be a printing of the third edition! Can you imagine a 40-volume dictionary? In type too small for my old ass to read? What is the point of literacy? What is the point of living?

B CRFL W YR TXT MSGS

For the ultimate in introverted passive aggression, you can't beat text messaging. Who knew the technology would become so indispensable to me?

But be careful. When too hastily thumbing a note to someone, it's far too easy to muddy the message with entirely the wrong word. If you can train your phone well enough, that word-suggestion feature can be handy — for proper nouns and unusual spellings, especially. I, on the other hand, still can't find the quotation marks or parentheses on my phone. There is little hope for me.

For instance, I can't really use those abominable abbreviations so common among nearly everyone younger than me. (The title of this post is somewhat misleading, then.) I have to teach my phone almost any abbreviation. It can backfire, though. I taught my phone the abbreviation "VM" for "voice mail."

Clever, eh?

Not when you're trying to type "to" ... a word that comes up, I have found, an awful damn lot.

There is some comfort at least in knowing that my phone expects something closer to Standard English from me.

Worse, I have somehow managed to program in some completely ridiculous substitutions. Whenever I type "at," the number 28 appears. Instead of "can," I get "226" — which is considerably less useful.

Often the effect is just comical. Once while thumbing out the word "pimp" I got "shop." (I forget the context. Does it matter?) Clicking through the substitutions was almost almost poetic:

Shop
Sins
Pins
Pimp

Here are a few more interesting accidental substitutions I have come across recently:

• Hate yields have


• Male: make


• Save: rate


• Season: reason


• Soon: room


• Note: move


• Go: in


• Fat: eat


• Doll: folk


• Brian: asian


• Home: good


• Stick: quick


• Saloon: salmon


• Kind: line


• Of: me


• If: he


• Mine: mind


• Much: ouch


• And my favorite... Pew: sex

The Emperor's Children

	I can't say I don't recommend it. Just be prepared to take some time with it.

Messud's writing style is dizzyingly parenthetic. I lost count of the sentences I had to read over two or three times before I could disentangle the syntax. It's like a photocopy of exact thought at times: It may have made perfect sense to her, but not everyone can follow along. I accepted it early on as a stylistic quirk, but often it seemed gratuitous, a mishmash of clauses that could have existed happily as separate sentences, whose unholy union only complicated and obfuscated rather than providing any deeper meaning.

She uses several turns of phrase that just don't parse for me. And I think she hit the thesaurus a few too many times. I am not an unintelligent reader, and I have my own fondness for good words, but what's the point when it obscures rather than reveals meaning? It's inexcusable, especially considering her consistent misuse of the very simple word "comprise" throughout. Sometimes it's not so much the fault of the writer as it is her editor.

That said, the novel is engaging. Each chapter is written from the perspective of a one of the principle characters, yet the voice is a consistent coherent narrator. The variety keeps the story from getting too dull.

The one thing that binds all of them to each other is their tremendous self-indulgence. (I'm sure her own self-indulgent writing style was not nearly as intentional.) I recognized people I dislike in these characters. And isn't it always the case — I recognized qualities I dislike about myself in them. It kept me from liking them too much to remain objective, yet it made them familiar enough to keep me paying attention.

What drew me to this book was my curiosity about the new spate of novels and short stories that have come out in recent years in which 9/11 plays a significant part. It annoyed me at first that anyone would reduce that day and its aftermath to a plot point — even if it was done well. Six years on, it can still be a ballsy proposition. But like all such events, it is a plot point. It is our history, our story, our plot. I admire the way Messud uses it at the end as a means of releasing &$8212; shattering — the characters out of their illusions, while still capturing the horror, panic and disbelief of those days. I think it had a similar effect on all of us, however short- or long-lasting it may have been.

Is this what Michael Tolliver calls living?

Armistead Maupin may be indispensable for gay men of a certain generation, but he is not a good writer. There. I said it. May I burn forever in the fiery pits of hell.

What made him famous — no, what made him essential was his ability to encapsulate a city and a decade and a moment in gay history, American history, within the pages of his original novels.

Michael Tolliver Lives rides on the coattails of an important literary achievement. But it need not have been written. It reads like an extended epilogue, neatly placing all the characters in their uninteresting fates, betraying the imagination of readers the world over who thought they knew what happened to the inhabitants of 28 Barbary Lane. It's like one more season of Absolutely Fabulous that gets yet farther away from the characters and the audience and, while it may get the auteur some brief attention and a bit of money, ultimately does a disservice to the original phenomenon of the work that inspired the most recent re-visitation in the first place.

To start with, there's not much of a plot. It is one of the fastest reads of my life, and the book is kind of boring because, really, nothing happens. Upon turning the last page, I thought: Is that it? The title Michael Tolliver Lives says more than the whole collected 277 pages. If Maupin is trying to make a statement about life — full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? — no thank you. I will just live my own and leave Michael Tolliver's alone.

The Tales of the City series was at least notable its convoluted plots and excellent character studies. And part of their charm was Maupin's insistence on placing them in time with very specific cultural references. This time around, however, it is clear that it is he, and not his characters, who are behind the times. There is too much laborious explanation of things that are already quite clear. His dialogue is wooden. Night Listener was a marvelous little novel. This one fell far short of the mark. Maupin would have done better to have left the inhabitants of 28 Barbary Lane back in the late '80s, where they were relevant and interesting and significant. These days, unfortunately, Michael "Mouse" Tolliver is nothing more than a slightly bitter, self-indulgent, over-sentimental, unfunny, but loquacious shadow of himself.

But at least we know he lives.

A Bad Case

Today's English lesson:

As painful as it may be, watch it to the end.

Wouldn't this song make an excellent mash-up with Deniece Williams' "Let's Hear It For the Boy"?

Feel the burn.

People

The ad says something like "People who need people. People who know people. People who know people who need people."

Something like that.

It's a subway poster for the Freelancer's Union, and before I even comprehend the message, I react mainly to the number of times the word "people" appears. Of course, they want to focus on people: It's a union. But when it's repeated, like, 10 times in a single ad, it makes the word look weird.

Look at it:

people

That "eo" combination is just bizarre. Stare at printed English long enough and the words begin to look as foreign as another language. (Maybe because most of them are.) At the same time, they are totally familiar.

Say it over and over: people, people, people. Pee-pull. It just sounds weird. I'm embarrassed to say it. Do people (ahhh!) really say that word?

I don't know if the ad makes me think about people, but it sure does make me think about "people."