Accouplement, or Conjugium

I recently read Mating, a National Book Award–winning novel by Norman Rush that is set in Botswana in the early 1980s and was published in 1991.¹ I was immediately drawn in by the voice of the hyperarticulate narrator, a grad student in nutritional anthropology who is never named. The book is a recounting of a love affair she had with a renowned anthropologist named Nelson Denoon, written with the help of a journal she keeps and frequently refers to. The novel takes place mostly in Tsau, a largely self-sustaining but still somewhat experimental village led by women that Denoon has established.

The narrator re-creates conversations she had with Denoon that include interesting discussions on a wide variety of topics—anthropology, economics, politics, history, literature, art, religion, philosophy, science—and the book is filled with 50-cent words in English and turns of phrase in French and Latin.² Both of the main characters are supersmart and well-read, and they show it constantly in how they communicate with each other and, for the narrator, in her writing. She drops the French word "enfin" instead of "finally" and writes "cum grano salis" instead of "with a grain of salt." I'm glad I read Mating on Tony's Kindle, so I could easily look up words like etiology, labile, proleptic, douceur, gravamen, omphalos, and idioverse.³

Those last two words were used in the phrase "the omphalos of my idioverse," which is probably Rush's high-water mark for pretentiousness in diction.

I mostly didn't mind the constant reminders that I wasn't as erudite as these fictional characters. But constantly being confronted with unknown words made me take notice when they were repeated.

I enjoyed Rush's new-to-me figurative use of unhorsed to describe Denoon when he was worked up about something. But then he used unhorse as a verb not so many pages later: "But then he would unhorse me by reminding himself of dead undertakings he was going to revive—promoting sauerkraut and croquet were two of them."

And he used bolus in a figurative sense—it's literally a ball of chewed food or a large pill to be swallowed—six times throughout the book. To be fair, at the second mention, he has the narrator acknowledge bolus is "a word I owe to Denoon and that seems to have become indispensable to me." Yes, I'd say so.

Nugatory comes up three times—once in the context of organized exercise being "slightly nugatory" in the village of Tsau, where everyone does lots of physical labor, walking, and hill climbing. The definitions that popped up on the Kindle were "of no value or importance" and "useless; futile." Something can't be "slightly of no value" or "slightly useless," so I thought I'd caught a vocabulary error in Rush's verbal SAT test of a book. Merriam-Webster.com, however, says nugatory may involve gradations: "of little or no consequence."

The middle of the book bogged down a bit for me, with the lovers getting to know each other better and creating their mutual idioverse. I'm glad I held on and came to a point with more action and less talk, which led to another stretch of more talk and then a satisfying conclusion. Of course, I had to look up the translation of a short French sentence to be able to understand what that conclusion was.

¹I highly recommend this 30th-anniversary review of Mating by Scott Sherman in The Point, but I suggest clicking on that link only after you've read the novel, because the essay reveals some plot details and wonderful lines you should experience for the first time in the book itself.

²If the French and Latin translations of the book's title I used in the title of my post aren't accurate, please let me know. Based on what I found online, ueneris amare lasciuiam may be a better translation than conjugium, but I went with the one-word option.

³That last word isn't recognized at Merriam-Webster.com, my go-to online dictionary. M-W also doesn't consider oaves—used in the sentence "My celibacy is known and is highly exciting to certain oaves on my periphery."—to be a legitimate plural of oaf.

Growthier Missy Moonlight

I’ve had difficulty finding enough time or energy to write a blog post for several months. I’ve been really busy with work and also with preparing for and celebrating the fall and winter holidays. So really all positive reasons. I know a lot of people have lost employment or their small business during the pandemic, and I am grateful for the steady work I’ve had.

I recently came across the word growthier in a piece I was reviewing for a client. “There’s no way that’s a word,” I thought. But it actually is a word, according to Merriam-Webster, which the first copy chief I worked with after college convinced me is the best dictionary to consult because it’s the true heir to the groundbreaking linguistic work of Noah Webster.

That linked entry says growthy and its comparative and superlative forms—growthier and growthiest—apply only to livestock. My client was referring to stocks, not cattle or hogs, so I might have suggested an alternative, such as more growth oriented. But part of the job of being a helpful editor—and a helpful copy editor, in particular—is knowing when not to question something.

I still have a bit of learning to do about when to query and when not to query with this client, but I knew he wasn’t going to be swayed by a livestock-only argument. He chose and, I bet, enjoyed using that word—and would have probably argued it’s commonly used in his business—and I figured he wasn’t going to let it go quietly, so I let growthier stay put. And I saved both of us time and energy.

***

This winter has been the coldest in South Florida since 2010–11, so we haven’t gotten Missy’s hair cut in about five months. That meteorological fact is really just an excuse to post a picture of our girl from when she last got groomed.

Our groomer always puts a bandana around Missy’s neck. I wanted to see what she would look like with it around her head. Adorable, of course.

***

I started off the new year in a great way—by finishing Michael Chabon’s Moonglow. It was phenomenal.

I had avoided reading any of Chabon’s works because I associated him with magic realism, and I’m not a fan of that genre. Chabon calls Moonglow a “fake memoir” that is only very loosely based on the deathbed stories of his maternal step-grandfather.

What a fascinating character Chabon’s grandfather is. He’s got war stories, Nazi- and python¹-hunting stories, prison stories, and stories of love, sex, and devotion. A writer named Michael Chabon is also a character in the book, but he’s far less of a presence than his mother, grandmother, and great-uncle, all of whom come spectacularly alive.

And Chabon’s writing is almost preternaturally good. Here he is describing the bombed-out German town of Vellinghausen:

The Germans were in retreat north and east, and the general feeling was that they would not be returning to Vellinghausen anytime soon. The town was held by some bone-weary somnambulists from the 7th Armored Infantry and a few bewildered-looking sappers from the 53rd Combat Engineers. Troops were few and scattered, and to a passerby it might appear that the invasion had been carried out by clouds of smoke, the gray sky pouring into the roofless houses, and a hunger so profound it had gnawed the houses to their foundations and the trees to stumps. Here and there a baker or a butcher had opened for business, but this apparent optimism or bravado was nothing more than the robotics of habit. There was nothing to buy, nothing to sell, nothing to eat. Smoke had left the eye sockets of houses with black eyebrows of astonishment. Cats hugged corners leaving brushstrokes of ash on the stucco.

An additional, small reason I enjoyed the novel so much was the large number of places I shared in common with the characters, starting on page 1 with a reference to “deepest Bergen County,”² the New Jersey county where my sister and her family live. In their older years, Michael’s grandparents live in Riverdale, in the Bronx; my husband’s BFF owns an apartment in Riverdale. I used to work in Princeton, at a newspaper, not the university. Up next was a throwaway mention of Trenton, where I lived for many years on and off after college, including when I worked in Princeton, across the county (of Mercer) and a world away. Then there’s Coconut Creek, Florida, where another friend of Tony’s lives. And that was only through page 47.

I’m going to read much more Chabon, and I’m encouraging Tony to crack open Moonglow while I still have it on loan from the library.

¹I don't know whether Chabon is aware of this fact, but there's an albino variety of python in the pet trade called moonglow.

²The town in Bergen County is later revealed to be Ho-Ho-Kus, which gets my vote for the North Jersey-est place name of all.

Fish Parasites, Tuatara, and the Biosphere

I just finished reading Turtles All the Way Down, a young-adult novel by John Green. It’s written from the perspective of a high school student named Aza who has obsessive-compulsive disorder and who specifically obsesses about the bacteria that are in and on her body.

Green, who deals with an OCD-related obsession that’s similar to his protagonist’s, uses some inspired biological metaphors to show what it’s like to have thoughts you struggle to prevent yourself from thinking. GROSSNESS ALERT! One extended metaphor involves a parasite that spends part of its life cycle in the eye of a fish and greatly influences the fish’s behavior—making it slower moving and more cautious—to increase the odds the parasite will survive until it’s sexually mature. Because the parasite reproduces only in the digestive tract of a fish-eating bird, once it’s ready to have sex, the parasite makes the fish swim closer to the surface and with less caution, thereby increasing the odds its host will get consumed by a piscivorous bird. Aza compares herself to that fish: incapable of controlling her behavior and feeling “like my whole story was written by someone else” (page 106).

Aza also uses an invasive species metaphor to characterize her obsessive thoughts:

I have these thoughts that [my therapist] Dr. Karen Singh calls “intrusives,” but the first time she said it, I heard “invasives,” which I like better, because, like invasive weeds, these thoughts seem to arrive at my biosphere from some faraway land, and then they spread out of control.

In the Fresh Air interview I linked to above, Green said he misheard “intrusives” as “invasives” when he was younger, and he still has questions about how much sovereignty he has over his own life.

If I had read TATWD before it was published, I would have suggested changing “biosphere” to “ecosystem” in the passage above, which is on page 45. The biosphere is “the portion of the planet capable of supporting life,” according to The Dictionary of Ecology and Environmental Science. An ecosystem is a smaller entity: “a functioning unit of nature that combines biotic communities and the abiotic environments with which they interact.” Metaphorical “invasive weeds … from some faraway land” would have come from the same metaphorical “biosphere” as Aza but a different metaphorical “ecosystem.”

Ecology, by the way, is “the branch of biology that studies the relationships among living organisms and between organisms and their environments.” Like the word economics, ecology is derived partly from the Greek word oikos, which means house.

And speaking of living organisms, Aza spends some time in her narration talking about the tuatara, a fascinating reptile native to New Zealand that is lizard-like but is classified as the only surviving member of its own distinct order, Sphenodontia/Rhynchocephalia. Tuatara can live for at least 150 years. And tuatara is both the singular noun and its plural (page 36). Tuatara can be a host for parasites without being sickened by them (page 175). Based on the fossil record, they don’t seem to have changed much in the past 200 million years. They aren’t fully grown until they’re 30 years old. Females lay eggs only every four years. And they have a slow metabolic rate but a faster rate of mutation than any other animal that’s been studied (page 177).

I recommend TATWD. The mystery aspect of the story was pretty weak and basically just involved figuring out what a missing man meant by a cryptic phrase he conveniently left in a note on his abandoned mobile phone. But the relationships between the characters were what mattered to me, and they were so skillfully described, I’d gladly read a sequel.

A Copyediting Post About Babbitt and Captions for Magazine Spreads

Because I haven’t done a copyediting-focused post for a while—and I’ve got some new material—I’m going to point out some errors I found in the Signet Classic paperback edition of the novel Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis and some inconsistencies in caption-placement descriptions in the latest issue of Food & Wine magazine. As always, I’m not doing this in a spirit of know-it-all-ness or so I can smugly say “Gotcha.” I’m just trying to demonstrate that copyediting is among my best word-related talents.

***

I really enjoyed Babbitt, a satire of a crooked, social-climbing, middle-aged real estate agent who thoughtlessly conforms with the political, social, and religious views of his fellow businessmen in the midwestern city of Zenith until he begins to doubt whether he’s truly living.

There were quite a few mistakes toward the end of the book, which was published in 1998, as if the final proofreader ran out of time to do the job. On page 309, there’s a misplaced dash in a quote from Tanis Judique—Lewis came up with the best character names—a client whom Babbitt has an affair with:

“Oh, do! And shall I call you George? Don’t you think it’s awfully nice when two people have so—much what shall I call it?—so much analysis that they can discard all these stupid conventions and understand each other and become acquainted right away, like ships that pass in the night?”

The first dash should come after the first “much,” so that “what shall I call it?” is set off by the dashes. “Much what shall I call it?” doesn’t make sense as a separate clause.

And on page 327, the colon and the space after it in this quote from coal dealer Vergil Gunch must have been accidentally input:

“You know during the war we had the Undesirable Element, the Reds and walking delegates and just the plain common grouches, dead to rights, and so did we for quite a while after the war, but folks forget about the danger and that gives these cranks a chance to begin working under: ground again, especially a lot of these parlor socialists.”

There’s a “then” instead of a “they” four pages later in a quoted internal monologue in which Babbitt tries to justify dumping his lover without even a telephone call:

“Oh, damn these women and the way then get you all tied up in complications!”

Four pages after that, “Georgie” is misspelled as “Gerogie.” And on page 343, the name of a client of Babbitt’s goes from “Lyte” to “Lyre” and back to “Lyte.” And finally, before this exercise gets tedious (too late? 😁), there’s a nonsense sentence on page 352 in a quote from Colonel Rutherford Snow, a newspaper publisher who’s trying to strong-arm Babbitt into joining the Good Citizens’ League:

“I’m not sure, my boy, but what if you put if off it’ll be too late.”

***

In the May 2020 issue of Food & Wine, one of the few paper magazines I still subscribe to, the captions for the beautiful opening photos of a story about Adelaide, Australia, appear on the next page, …

… no doubt to leave these two pages, with all of their purposeful white space, as uncluttered as possible:

The intro to the captions should really say “PREVIOUS SPREAD” or “PREVIOUS PAGES” instead of the singular “PREVIOUS PAGE.”

In an article about new styles of sake, the intro to the caption for the opening spread that is found on the next page says just “PREVIOUS”:

And for the last opening spread in the issue, which leads readers into a story about Italy’s Friuli region, the intro to the caption on the next page says “PREVIOUS SPREAD”:

A New Formula for My Vegan Frozen Desserts and a VFD Cookbook in the Works

When I heard our local Lucky’s Market was closing as a result of the parent company’s bankruptcy filing, I was bummed for the workers and for Tony and me. It was a good store with friendly employees and generally reasonable prices. Its produce offerings especially stood out, though the quality had declined noticeably in the weeks prior to the announcement.

Lucky’s had also been my source for the Good Karma Flaxmilk I use in my Vegan Frozen Desserts. No one nearby sells the plain, unsweetened variety; our local Whole Foods carries only two kinds, and they both contain pea protein, which Tony shouldn’t eat. So a little while ago, I tried making a tangelo-flavored VFD—or as I was inclined to call it, Tangelo Vegan Sherbet—with rice drink instead ...

… and Tony raved about it.

Then I made Chocolate-Ginger VFD, the flavor I make most often, …

… and Tony called it “pure chocolate heaven.” He said it was probably the best dessert I’d ever made and certainly the best VFD.

Tony said he sometimes got a floral note from the flax milk in a VFD; he found the rice milk to be more neutral, a quality I had been aiming for with the flax milk. (If Tony were able to eat most anything, he could become a professional food taster.)

Tony also liked the texture of the rice drink–based VFDs better than those I’d made from flax milk. And I agree; these VFDs freeze smoother and melt easier and creamier.

Rice drink is also generally a little bit cheaper than the flax milk, and it’s more widely available.

So what I’m saying is, the loss of a key ingredient set me on a course for making a major improvement in my VFDs, which brings me to the second point of this post: I’m excited to say I’ve been compiling my VFD recipes with the goal of creating a book. I’ve been fine-tuning flavors and shrinking down the size of VFD batches I created for Huge Hound so they can be produced in a countertop-size frozen dessert maker.

I now need home cooks with a frozen dessert maker to test my recipes. I’m looking to make sure they’re reproducible and will live up to my future readers’ expectations. I welcome feedback on processes, clarity of instructions, or anything else.

If you’re interested in being a recipe tester, please email me at bill@billhawley.net. And if you’re not but know someone who would be, please share this post with her or him. Anyone who tests at least two recipes for me will get a thank you in the cookbook and a free copy.

---

One final note: Unless you’re a vegan and gluten-free cook and baker, you’ll probably need to purchase a number of ingredients you won’t already have on hand, including xanthan gum, arrowroot, and sunflower lecithin.

A Good Novel That I Don't Think Should Have Been All Epistolary

The other night, I finished reading a young adult novel that contained some amazing writing but whose 100% epistolary format, in my view, caused major problems for its credibility.

We Contain Multitudes is the work of a talented writer, Sarah Henstra, whose previous (unread-by-me) novels are Mad Miss Mimic and The Red Word. The former is categorized as YA fiction, while the latter is adult fiction.

Earlier this year, I completed the Editorial Freelancers Association's Introduction to Line Editing Fiction and Creative Nonfiction course. I have a good deal of experience as a line editor of nonfiction, but I'd never line-edited fiction. The exercises we were given were challenging, especially because, like several of my fellow students, I was tempted to fix some copyediting mistakes our instructor said we should ignore.

A big takeaway I got is, above all else, to be respectful of the writer's voice because writing is really damn hard and her words shouldn't be changed except to make them more in keeping with that voice. I've always prided myself on not overediting—changing something just because I would have worded it slightly differently. But I gained knowledge about how to better work with writers so they can feel my contributions made their creations more like how they would have wanted them to turn out, not less.

If I were Henstra's editor, I would have had lots of praise for her writing, but I would have said I didn't think the book worked as (just) a series of letters. There were too many recountings of events the two protagonists were both present for—with exact dialogue. People don't write letters describing situations the recipient already knows everything about: "Saturday night, schnitzel night! You arrived at our house tonight laden with shopping bags, embarrassed, apologizing for not asking ahead of time, saying you'd planned to cook at home but your uncle Viktor wasn't feeling well, and your mom had decided to go visit your aunt Agata at the nursing home."

The book starts out as exchanges of letters for a seemingly legitimate reason: Jonathan Hopkirk, an out-as-gay high school sophomore who wrote the passage above, and Adam "Kurl" Kurlansky, a former football player who is repeating his senior year, have been made pen pals by their mutual English teacher. The first letters, before they start interacting in real life, work as they're intended: to give us glimpses into their personalities, show us how they fit into the school's culture, and let us see them beginning to understand and even like each other.

The assignment itself doesn't make much sense, however: The teacher makes it clear she's never going to read the letters, so writing them seems like only so much busywork. Nonetheless, Kurl's failure to write any letters the previous year was one of the reasons he didn't graduate. So it's a crucial but ungraded project. That doesn't track.

Both Jonathan and Kurl are great writers, which brings up a problem that's almost always present in first-person fiction: How did this person telling the story come to write as well as a professional novelist? In the case of WCM, a guy who didn't bother writing any letters a year ago is now writing lots of letters, even more than required, and with great eloquence. Jonathan is a big fan of Walt Whitman—the title references a line from "Song of Myself"—and of poetry in general, so it makes sense that he has a way with words, but he's a far better writer than a kid his age is reasonably going to be.

One reason Kurl is inspired to write after a while is because he and Jonathan have become a couple. That's not a spoiler because the book jacket says they develop "a friendship that eventually grows into love." I really enjoyed their love story, which, naturally, had a ton of complications, one of which I saw coming ahead of time. If I were Henstra's editor, I would have asked her whether it might be better to leave out one of those hardships; it felt like one too many.

I would have loved to have had the chance to help turn the novel in its present state into a partially third-person and partially epistolary novel. There are whole sections of the letters that could be converted into the third person and placed before the letters they came from, to explain ahead of time what Jonathan and Kurl are referencing in their shortened-and-now-less-expository missives.

Actually, a better solution might have been to switch back and forth between third-person explication in roman type and fragments of letters in italics (or vice versa). Henstra and I could have experimented with that format, and I believe we could have made it work—together.

An Exclusive Club

I’ve heard of an exclusive club before, but this is ridiculous! 😆

This building is a rentable space managed by the city of Wilton Manors. It’s right near our new apartment complex—Tony and I moved in May—and I’ve seen multiple women going into and coming out of the building for yoga and Jazzercize classes. The building has had that name since the ‘50s.

When I started typing “Woman’s Club of Wilton Manors” into Google, some other South Florida options came up: Woman’s Club of Coconut Grove (which is in a neighborhood in Miami) and GFWC Woman’s Club of Homestead (which is in a city near Miami).

GFWC stands for General Federation of Women’s Clubs, which correctly uses the plural possessive that should really be in the clubs’ names.

Gluten Free & More Is No More

Tony and I are disappointed that Gluten Free & More magazine has come to an end. The editor’s note from longtime editor-in-chief Alicia Woodward in the April/May issue had the headline “I’m Retiring.” But there was no indication of the fate of the rest of the magazine.

We learned that it had been “merged” into Simply Gluten Free when Tony got an issue of that magazine with a note explaining that his subscription to GF&M had been converted into one for SGF. It doesn’t seem like a single person from GF&M was taken onto the staff of SGF. That’s a shame. I will miss that informative magazine that offered wonderful recipes and a friendly, understanding voice for the GF community—and especially the contributions of food editor Beth Hillson.

I don’t know what will become of GF&M’s online presence. I hope it will linger for some time to come, and it very well may. But I’m bummed there will be no new issues and presumably no new online content.

A Post About Out

The February issue of Out magazine had lots of problems in it—so many problems, I decided to write a post about them. This issue was the first one under a new editor in chief, Phillip Picardi, who wrote in his editor's letter that the magazine was "put together by a brand-new team of editors, photographers, stylists, journalists, and designers."

The trouble starts in that editor's letter, when the new boss's title is capitalized in this sentence: "As your new Editor in Chief, that's my pledge to you." Picardi put ", EIC" after his name at the bottom of the column, and some people think the expanded version of abbreviations should take initial caps. But we capitalize abbreviations to make it clear they're abbreviations and not regular words; making an abbreviation doesn't automatically convey proper noun status on the words used to form it. I, of course, don't know if that was the rationale for capitalizing Picardi's title, but I think it's a good guess.

By the way, these stories aren't available on the web at this time, so I can't link to the online versions. I don't claim this is a definitive list of all the problems in the magazine; I didn't set out to scour the whole issue for every error I could find. And as you may have already guessed from my tone thus far, this post is going to get a mite pedantic. So if you're not up for that right now, go listen to this gorgeous, decade-old song by David Mead¹ I've been singing to myself a lot lately and come back some other time to read my post.

On page 36, in an article called "The Queer Canon," "It's" should be "Its" in "It's central characters are warriors fighting a battle that will change the course of our history." That's regarding the movie the magazine calls Beats Per Minute but whose actual title seems to be the (to my thinking) pointlessly more complex BPM (Beats Per Minute).

On page 41, a story about actor Andrew Rannells has the headline "PLAY IT STRAIGHT," which reads like a command; "PLAYING IT STRAIGHT" would make more sense because, as the story mentions, Rannells, who's gay, is playing a heterosexual Wall Streeter in his latest television project.

In that story, the following sentence shouldn't have a comma after "list": "His luck would quickly run out sometime in between noticing Wilson Cruz of My So-Called Life was also on the audition list, and being asked about his 'mix' by the casting director, who mistakenly thought he was part Asian." In between is acting as a compound preposition (aka a phrasal preposition) there, and noticing and being are the beginnings of gerund phrases that act as objects of that compound preposition and so shouldn't be separated with a comma.

The article also asserts that Rannells and his fellow cast members of the Broadway musical Hamilton won a Best Musical Theater Album Grammy. Rannells was part of the cast of The Book of Mormon that won that Grammy in 2012. Jonathan Groff was the original King George III in Hamilton and so was part of the cast that won the Grammy in question in 2016. Rannells filled in for Groff in that role for only a few weeks and didn't appear on the album.

Later, there's a reference to a scene in his new TV show, called Black Monday, in which a bag of cocaine explodes "all over the floor of the Stock Exchange." Since that's not a reference to a specific exchange, like the New York Stock Exchange or the Australian Securities Exchange, the S and E should be lowercase.

Finally, it's noted that Rannells is taking a role from a straight actor, the opposite of what often happens in Hollywood. Then we read, "For Rannells, it's a refreshing—but nerve-racking—change of pace." The quote that follows should explain why working on this new show is nerve-racking yet refreshing and also somehow tie in with the gay-man-playing-a-straight-man theme. Instead there's a quote about the time when he was working on the TV show Girls and he had to block out (meaning, establish the positions and movements of the actors in) a sex scene because "nobody knew how gay sex worked." That paragraph is a mishmash of ideas that don't flow in a comprehensible fashion.

Next up is a story about drag queens with a deck (aka a subhead) with a repeated "TO THE":

Both IMDb and Wikipedia give Rent: Live as the name of that TV special. And that's definitive enough for me. 😄

The headline further up the page is laid out in a clever way:

If you don't get the reference, Lady Gaga says "Don't be a drag. Just be a queen." a few times in her be-yourself anthem "Born This Way."

On the second page of the story with running text: "And even then, the most prominent roles cast cisgender, heterosexual men to dawn drag." I would argue cast doesn't work there; the roles don't cast themselves. And of course, it should be don, not dawn. And, incidentally, don is one of those words, like shod and clad, that I object to seeing in print because no one uses them conversationally. Have you ever heard anyone use don in a sentence like, for instance, "I should don my Halloween costume now so we're not late to the party."? No, you haven't.

On the last page of text: "Predictably, she is portrayed not by an actual queen, but by the cisgender, hetrosexual actor Harold Perrineau." The editors at Out are so queer, they can't even spell heterosexual. 😆 I would also argue the comma after queen isn't needed.

And on the last page of the article, there's an issue in this caption accompanying a photo of Bianca Del Rio, who won the sixth season of RuPaul's Drag Race and is well-known for her biting sense of humor:

The first B in Big Brother should be in italics.

My favorite Bianca Del Rio quote, addressing fellow contestant Adore Delano, whom everyone in the sixth season made fun of for being not so bright: "I know what you got on your SATs. Ketchup."

The final article I'm critiquing is a profile of Steven Canals, who's the first of four "Hollywood go-getters making tangible change for LGBTQ+ representation" presented in a feature called "Scene Stealers." Here's the first paragraph:

Working class should be hyphenated. Both co-executive producer and Golden Globe-nominated should have en dashes instead of hyphens because co modifies executive producer, not just executive, and the latter is a classic example of a two-or-more-word proper noun starting a compound modifier that precedes a noun or noun phrase. A comma should follow producer because the serial comma is used elsewhere in the magazine. And the comma after show is unnecessary because Golden Globe–nominated show is simply a description of Pose and Pose isn't the only show that description could apply to, so we shouldn't be treating that show title as a nonrestrictive appositive.

Here's the third paragraph in the story:

I think something like "in a movie" needs to be added to the sentence starting with "The documentary." I was going to say that really shouldn't be broken after the re, but after consulting the dictionary, I stand corrected on that.

Here are the last two paragraphs:

The word know is repeated in the sixth line. "As one of only five people in the Pose writers' room ... his new industry voice is equally as important as everyone else's." That reads odd to me: the small number of writers doesn't necessarily mean all voices are equally important. Canals is also a co–executive producer of the show, so his voice is presumably more important than his fellow writers'. And finally, the quote marks between shut and My should be eliminated or, if there were words in between that the writer didn't want to quote, replaced with an ellipsis like the one I used above.

¹I read, elsewhere on YouTube, that Mead's mother is the woman on the train with him and he's thinking about life without her once she's passed on. I couldn't find an interview with him online confirming that, but given the lines in the chorus "But now you're fast asleep / And I am so alone," the reference to "the orphanage," and the countdown of the stations until there are "no more stops to go," that explanation makes sense. I've been a huge fan of Mead's for many years, but his latest album, Cobra Pumps, isn't clicking with me. It's more guitar driven than his music usually is, and the melodies aren't as pretty. By the way, New Jersey Transit's Morris & Essex Line serves the Oranges, Chatham, Morristown, and Convent Station but not the Caldwells and Somerset.

UPDATE on March 5: My friend Stacy, who used to live in one of the Oranges, commented on Facebook: "Caldwell is close to the Montclair-Boonton Line, and Somerset, really!?!?" Caldwell is in Essex County, a bit west of the terminus of the Montclair-Boonton Line, and its biggest claim to fame is being the birthplace of Grover Cleveland, the only president born in the state I hail from. West Caldwell is *drum roll* west of there. Somerset is a county. And also a neighborhood in Ewing, the township where the college Stacy's husband, Hal, and I graduated from is located, and a community within Franklin Township in Somerset County. No trains go to either of those Somersets.

How I'd Rewrite an Article About Restoring Voting Rights to Convicted Felons

It’s been a while since I’ve dissected an entire article on the blog, so I’m going to do that now to an important story from South Florida Gay News about a ballot initiative that was supposed to reinstate voting rights to those who had completed their sentence for a felony crime but that left in place impediments that will make it difficult for many people to actually get their right to vote restored.

In addition to my usual caveat—I don't claim to be perfect, and I'm pointing out these errors in a spirit of helpful criticism, not know-it-all-ness—I’m going to add this one: Community journalism is a thankless and difficult job that generally pays very little and requires sitting through endless meetings (of the school board, town council, planning board, and, oy, maybe even the zoning board) on weekday evenings when you’d rather be stretching out and seeking inner peace at yoga class or watching The Good Place.¹ I respect people who do this work, though I'm thankful I'm no longer one of them.² 🙏

Let's start with the article's headline, which in the paper version of SFGN was "AMENDMENT 4 RESTORED THE RIGHT TO VOTE TO FELONS BUT THERE'S A CATCH!" The subhead was "Some LGBTQ ex-felons will never get to cast a ballot." The head doesn't tell the reader as much as it might, and the subhead is almost a restatement, given that "BUT THERE'S A CATCH!," which is in much larger type than the first part of the head, strongly implies—well, actually, SHOUTS—the restoration is a no-go. I'd have gone with something like "DESPITE AMENDMENT 4 PASSAGE, MANY LGBTQ EX-FELONS WILL NEVER GET TO CAST A BALLOT." The subhead could give the missing main reason: "Restoration of right to vote requires paying high court fees."

The reader doesn't learn about those court fees, which might be in the hundreds of dollars or as much as tens of thousands of dollars, until the ninth paragraph. That's because the first eight paragraphs are mostly taken up with an interview with Latrice Royale, a beloved drag queen who lives in the Fort Lauderdale area and is currently appearing on the fourth season of RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars.³

I would have divided this article into two separate stories: the newsier one that gives the facts behind the "catch" and a large (and in charge) sidebar that focuses on Latrice, who, before her first appearance on Drag Race, in season 4 of the regular (non-All Stars) version of the show, served about a year in prison for possession of cannabis and Klonopin without a prescription and who advocated for passage of Amendment 4.⁴ If there were room, I'd include the quotes from Trinity "The Tuck" Taylor, who's also in All Stars 4 and is currently going by the name Trinity the Tuck (because she's really good at hiding her male parts). But Trinity lives up in Orlando and doesn't have a personal connection to the issue, so I wouldn't feel a need to keep her in the story, even though I think she's a fierce queen.

Splitting the story into two parts would prevent readers from having to wait until paragraph 14 to learn that sleeping in public is a felony crime(!) in Florida and until paragraph 24 to learn 1) Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who opposed Amendment 4 prior to the election, has said the state legislature must pass "implementation language" before his administration will allow the change to go into effect and 2) the next legislative session doesn't begin until March 5.

In the previous paragraph, there's a verbless nonsense sentence that implies county election supervisors are another potential barrier to voting rights reinstatement without explaining the why of that situation: "But the implementation of Amendment 4 faces other roadblocks apart from lingering court fees. Election supervisors in the state's 67 counties for restoring former felons' voting rights." The link in the online version of the SFGN story doesn't work, but I think it may have been going to this Tampa Bay Times article from early December about how election supervisors were unsure how to act, having been given unclear guidance from the state.

The 25th paragraph starts out with this sentence: "Some felons may not realize that they need to finish their probationary sentences or pay court fees before re-applying to vote." The reader didn't know about the probation issue before this point either; this is the first mention of it in the story.

The next sentence says the amendment can act as a trap for those who incorrectly think they've done everything necessary to be able to vote again: "As such, if they check the box on the voter registration forms which said 'I affirm that I am not a convicted felon, or if I am, my right to vote has been restored,' they could be found guilty of another felony." That's messed up!

I would have worded the first part of that sentence this way: "As such, if they check the box on their voter registration form that says 'I affirm ....'"

Back to the 17th paragraph, the as should be an are: "Because felons are regularly excluded from employment opportunities and public benefits, Greenberg said the current legal consequences for felons as punitive enough without adding extra penalties." I'm betting the said used to be sees. Greenberg is Scott Greenberg, executive director of the Freedom Fund, "a non-profit fighting the mass jailing of LGBTQ people." Nonprofit is usually spelled without a hyphen.

And back to the fourth paragraph: "After being released, Wilcots"—Latrice's given name is Timothy Wilcots—"discovered he could no longer participate in elections thanks to a 1868 state constitutional amendment specifically designed to reduce the number of black voters. The amendment disproportionately affected black Floridians as they make up 46 percent of the state's prison population despite being only 16 percent of the general population." The article before 1868 should be an, not a. And the switch from the past tense to the present should be handled differently: The amendment (currently) disproportionately affects black Floridians because of the staggering 30-percentage-point difference between black representation in the prison population and in the general population.

Also, if I were the editor, I would have asked the writer for his source and its time frame. I'm not doubting the figures' legitimacy; I just think it's important to say where the numbers came from and to show how recent they are.

Actually, hold on: I just looked back at the digital version of the story, and there's a link that shows the source is the Prison Policy Initiative and the data are derived from the 2010 U.S. census, so they're not incredibly recent.

Finally, some clarity is needed about the proportion of prisoners who identify as LGBT.⁵ Here's paragraph 19: "In fact, [Greenberg] said that LGBT people should take a particular interest in this issue since they're three times more likely to be incarcerated than the general public." Is that in the U.S. or only in Florida? I assume that's for the entire country.

Here's paragraph six: "Amendment 4 seemed posed to benefit the estimated 5 percent of male prisoners and 33 percent of female prisoners who identify as LGBT, and to majorly overhaul the state's old way of restoring convicts' voting rights, a process that could take anywhere from 15 to 38 years with no guarantee of approval." Three things in regard to that: 1) Posed should be poised. 2) I see no need for the comma after LGBT. And 3) According to the most recent data I could find online, 5.1% of women and 3.9% of men (to use the source's binary terms) in the U.S. identify as LGBT. That's per a Gallup poll that was written up in May 2018 but was described as representing the year 2017. Those figures suggest the proportion of LBT-identified prisoners in women's facilities far exceeds the proportion of women who identify as LBT in the general population. With men, it seems like GBT-identified people make up slightly more of the prison population than they do the general population.

¹If you're not watching that show, you should be. It's the smartest TV comedy I've ever watched and reliably hilarious. And last night's episode, "Pandemonium," the season 3 finale, was heartbreaking and heartwarming, too. But more heartbreaking. 😭

²For almost a year and a half in the late '90s, I was a municipal reporter who covered West Windsor Township and the West Windsor–Plainsboro Regional School District for a twice-weekly newspaper based in Princeton, New Jersey.

³I'm also a huge fan of RuPaul's Drag Race. I picked it up at season 2 (and later caught up on season 1), and when I started dating Tony, he began watching it with me a few episodes into season 2 and immediately got hooked. Like many fans, I hated season 1 of All Stars—which, I must point out, should be hyphenated—because it required the queens to compete in teams and not shine individually. And I'm still bitter about the outcome of the third season of All Stars. #shangelawasrobbed Maybe All Stars is going to be like the original Star Trek films and only the even-numbered ones will be worth watching. 😜 I really enjoyed season 2 of All Stars, though bringing back two of Alaska's drag besties was an obvious way to make her inevitable path to the crown that much easier. My favorite seasons of the regular version of the show are 5, featuring Jinkx Monsoon, perhaps the most-multitalented queen of all time, and season 3, with its incredibly strong top three: Raja, Manila Luzon (who's also back in RPDR AS 4), and Alexis Mateo.

⁴I voted yes on Amendment 4 in November. To me, it was an issue of basic fairness—of not further punishing people for a crime in their past.

⁵LGBT is used throughout the story even though LGBTQ was used in the subhead. The Q can stand for either queer or questioning. It seems to me that non-binary is becoming the more widely used term for gender queer or bigender, which you'll see defined in the first linked article in this footnote.

A Post With Some Errors I Caught in Magazines and Novels

I'm back with an all-editing post that includes a chance for you, my loyal readers, to spot mistakes in a book by a Man Booker Prize–winning novelist.

Let's get started, but first, here's my usual caveat: I don't claim to be perfect, and I'm pointing out these errors in a spirit of helpful criticism, not know-it-all-ness.

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I finished reading Final Viewing, the first in the series of mystery stories with a funeral director protagonist who's also named Bill Hawley that I mentioned in a prior post. It was all right, but I'm not in any big hurry to read the second book.

The murder mystery was resolved in a somewhat-satisfactory manner, but the story ended up being more of a mob caper than the more-standard whodunit I was expecting.

The book was pretty well edited; I didn't find too much to complain about in it. But on page 125, there's an awkward switch from verb to noun in a grisly passage in which Hawley reminisces about the first body he had to pick up, at the age of 16, after having landed a job at a private ambulance company.

The guy had died in a motorcycle accident in which his right leg had been cut off at the hip. "The guys at the morgue had posted him (vernacular for postmortem, or autopsy), sewn him back up, more or less, and placed him in the drawer with his severed leg lying in its proper place." I would have put "meaning, they'd done their postmortem, or autopsy" inside the parentheses so as to get a verb in the explanation, since posted is a verb but postmortem and autopsy are nouns. (Well, autopsy can be a noun or a verb, but here it's being used as a synonym for postmortem, which can be a noun or an adjective and I would argue is a noun here.) I also would have wanted to put those two nouns in italics, as I've done in the prior sentence, because they're being used as words, though that might have been deemed too fussy for a paperback mystery.

On page 80, there's a reference to buying toys at "Kids R Us." That retailer, whose name was usually styled with the R in quotation marks, was a division of Toys R Us that sold children's clothing, not toys (or kids).

And on page 84, this sentence should have a comma after jar:

She rinsed out a jelly jar which she placed on the table in front of me, saying, "Belly up to the bar."

Actually, I would change that sentence to:

She rinsed out a jelly jar and then placed it on the table in front of me. "Belly up to the bar," she said.

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In the November issue of Sky, Delta’s in-flight magazine, I read the following passage in an article about the changing economics of restaurants:

Will future folk look back on the way we tip the same way we look back at “room and board” as primitive and odd?

Some kind of punctuation mark is needed after the quote mark after board, either a colon or a dash. I’d go with the colon.

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In "The Pursuit of Happiness," an article in the December issue of Martha Stewart Living that isn't available online yet, Ralph De La Rosa is described as a "mediation teacher." The context, a passage about "mindfulness meditation," suggests that job title ought to be meditation teacher, and De La Rosa's self-description on his website confirms it.

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In this article about cocktails created by Paul Child—husband of Julia—from the November issue of Food & Wine, another hyphen and two en dashes are needed in the last sentence of the second paragraph to link all four of those spirits, not just vermouth, to the word based. The sentence should look like this:

And before dinner, they often entertained with gin-, dark rum–, rye whiskey–, and vermouth-based cocktails, a custom they continued when they returned to the U.S.

I thought about changing the and before vermouth to an or. The three recipes the story links to each contain only one of the four types of alcoholic beverage, but Child may have made more than one kind of cocktail at a given dinner, so I figured it was safer to leave the conjunction alone.

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I enjoyed The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst, who's one of my favorite authors. I wouldn't put it up there with The Swimming-Pool Library, which I consider to be his best novel, or The Line of Beauty, which was also terrific, but it was mighty good.

Johnny Sparsholt was a great protagonist, starting in the second chapter of the book as a 14-year-old. But I longed to read more about his father, David, who was involved in the title affair. (Hollinghurst might tell me that he wanted David to remain as much of an enigma to the reader as he was to Johnny.) And I didn't find Evert Dax, another major character, to be all that compelling.

The punctuation in the book was idiosyncratic and, at times, what I would consider incorrect, like the comma after evasive, the dash after the question mark, and the semicolon, instead of an and, after desk in the following excerpts:

Ivan was cheerful, but evasive, he went ahead, unusually alert for things to comment on; while Johnny was caught almost at once in the strange lulled swoon of each warm step to step: he saw how his footprint flattened the new growth and crunched the soft stubble inseparably. (page 259)

Did his father even notice the things that sank on Johnny's spirits here?—perhaps, yes: at a level beneath thought, he was reassured by the clusters of maroon armchairs and sofas, the thin Georgian pretensions of the pastel-coloured panelling, the table lamps, the fake mahogany desk; was cheered by the tied-back chintz curtains and brightly lit portrait of the Queen. (pages 344-345)

The sentence before that one was: "A party of three got up, Johnny hovered and bagged the table, sat down in the low armchair looking blankly at their sudded half-pint mugs and the glass beaker of toothpicks." I haven't been able to find a definition of sudded. Assuming sudded is the correct word—and my best guess is that Hollinghurst intends it to mean containing suds—I would have rewritten that sentence as "A party of three got up, and Johnny hovered, bagged the table, and sat down in the low armchair looking blankly at their sudded half-pint mugs and the glass beaker of toothpicks."

Even this simple sentence is punctuated more complicatedly than is necessary:

"Oh, yes," said Johnny: "what's that?" (page 310)

Why is that colon there? I would have put a question mark after yes and a period after Johnny and would have capped the w in what's because the quoted words read like two questions to me. Johnny said those words in response to a declaration by his daughter's friend that the two of them had been reading Mary Rose, a play by J.M. Barrie that was unfamiliar to Johnny.

It happens again on page 323:

"I know," said Lucy: "I just don't know what I'll feel when the time comes."

Earlier in the book, quotes are punctuated in what I would call the usual way:

"We'll go straight to the Mitre," he said. "I need to press on with an article for Sweden." (page 81)

"Well," said Norma, "I suppose they grow out of things at that age." (page 134)

Finally, there are four things I would fix in this passage on page 294:

There's one thing that's definitely wrong and three other things I think are better changed or left out. I'll put my answers at the bottom of this post.

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I hadn't seen such odd punctuation since I read The Professor's House by Willa Cather about a year ago. My current read is Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, which is Tony's favorite Cather novel.

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In the sixth line, being should be changed to been; that's the definite mistake. I would also have moved only (in the fourth line) before at Cranley Gardens, because that better conveys what's meant: these friends would never see her anywhere but at Cranley Gardens. I would also remove both commas after Arabella. The first one isn't needed because we're continuing on to an essential, not a tangential, part of the description of Arabella. The second one isn't needed because there's been nothing more than a simple change in verb; no punctuation is called for there to aid the reader.

Chocolate-Galangal Vegan Frozen Dessert

On Sunday, I made Chocolate-Galangal Vegan Frozen Dessert. And it’s terrific.

I like to say it “Chocolate Galangal!,” with lots of excitement on the Galangal, because of something my Dad said years ago. I had made pasta with a homemade sauce that included summer squash for my friends who lived in my building in Brooklyn and a friend who was visiting from New Hope, Pennsylvania. I talked to my Dad, who has never been the biggest fan of most vegetables, on the phone about this meal, and he said “Squash!” As if squash in a pasta sauce was sooo out there.¹

Anyway, let me get back to my Vegan Frozen Dessert. I haven't posted on here about a VFD for more than a year. That one was also a flavored-chocolate dealie: Chocolate-Mint. For Huge Hound, one of my most successful VFDs was Chocolate-Ginger, which I made with fresh ginger from a farm just down the road from our house: Sandbrook Meadow Farm.³

My husband, Tony, loves purchasing and experimenting with different dried herbs and spices from Atlantic Spice Company and Penzeys Spices, which seems like it ought to have an apostrophe. We use dried galangal fairly regularly when we cook. To me, the dried stuff, from Penzeys, smells peppery and earthy, with a slight mustardy quality.

Our local Lucky's Market had some fresh galangal on Sunday. I bought a piece of it, on the left below, and a piece of fresh ginger:

Our big reference book on herbs and spices includes galangal under the Citrus Spices category. The author, Jill Norman, lists two types, greater (Alpinia galanga) and lesser (A. officinarum), and notes the lesser variety is "pale red inside" and "seldom seen in the U.S." So I know the fresh rhizome I bought was greater galangal, and I suspect our dried galangal is as well.

"The aroma of greater galangal is mildly gingery and camphorous; the taste has a lemony sourness with a flavor resembling ginger and cardamom mixed," Norman writes. "Lesser galangal is more pungent, with a hint of eucalypt; its taste is piquant, suggesting a mix of pepper and ginger."

The fresh stuff smelled a little like mustard when I cut into it, and I was afraid the combination of chocolate and galangal would be a bust. I considered using some of the fresh ginger alongside the galangal to hedge my bets, but I stuck with my original plan, and I'm glad I did: chocolate and galangal are lovely together. The combo was somewhat reminiscent of the chocolate-ginger one but prettier and less bold.

Here's a photo of the churned product in my ice cream maker:

And here's my recipe:

Chocolate-Galangal Vegan Frozen Dessert

2 cups unsweetened flax milk

A 1-ounce piece of fresh galangal, peeled and coursely chopped

2/3 cup melted refined coconut oil

1/2 cup agave

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 teaspoon arrowroot

1 1/2 teaspoons xanthan gum

3/4 teaspoon sunflower lecithin powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

3 1/2 ounces bittersweet or semisweet chocolate chips (I used semisweet)

1) Place the flax milk and galangal in a saucepan and bring just to a boil. Remove from heat, add the coconut oil, stir to combine, and let steep, covered, for a half hour.

2) Pour mixture through a strainer to remove the galangal pieces. Return it to the pan and add the agave, vanilla extract, and dry ingredients.

3) Whisk thoroughly. Heat the mixture at medium-low temperature and continue whisking until it thickens, about 5 minutes.

4) Remove from heat, add the chocolate chips, and stir to combine.

5) Strain the custard into a clean pan or bowl, stirring as you go with a spoon or whisk to push the thickened mixture through the mesh.

6) Let cool in an ice bath and/or the refrigerator until it's thoroughly chilled and then process in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer's instructions.

7) Transfer to a container and store in the freezer until it's completely solidified or enjoy right away for a soft serve–type texture.

Makes about 1 quart.

I made a double batch, so that's 2 teaspoons of arrowroot, 1 tablespoon of xanthan gum, etc., in the photo of dry ingredients above, and this is 7 ounces of Guittard semisweet chocolate chips in the photo below:

Here's Tony completing the straining process for me after I'd poured the custard into the sieve:

He added ice cubes around the pan to cool the custard quickly, so I could process it while he made dinner.

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I actually made a very successful VFD at the end of July, but I didn't write about it here because I failed to keep track of the amounts of ingredients I used and so couldn't reproduce the recipe. It was Blueberry–Key Lime VFD, using Florida-grown key limes:

It had a very good balance of flavors, with the lime coming through nicely but not running roughshod over the berries.

¹My Dad's grandfather on his mother's side was also a picky eater, so genetics may play a role in his fussiness. I like to poke fun at my Dad for his food issues, but I want to make it clear I'm laughing with him and not at him. And I give him credit for trying the most offbeat and only veggie-centric (and, not terribly surprisingly, weakest-selling) ice cream I made for my frozen dessert business: Beet-Nutmeg. You can read about it here² and here, in posts from my Huge Hound Frozen Desserts blog.

²I wrote about Dad's eating habits in that post, too. Poor Dad.

³Tony and I joined SMF's CSA, and it was an incredibly positive experience. The farm, farmer Alex and his crew of workers, and their amazing produce and flowers are among the top things I miss most about living in Hunterdon County, New Jersey.

Gluten-Free Brownies, 'Dazzle Camouflage,' and Some Other Things I've Been Meaning to Write About

Three weeks ago today, I made gluten-free, vegan brownies for my nephews, who are now back at their respective colleges for their junior year and who turned 20 that day. The weekend before, I had tried adapting a traditional (containing butter, eggs, and all-purpose flour) Fudgy Brownies recipe from Martha Stewart Living because I had decided I wanted to send brownies to the guys this time (instead of the usual chocolate chip cookies) and I wanted to make it safe for Tony. And I'm glad I did that trial run, because those brownies didn't turn out that well at all.

The recipe, which I clipped from the September 2015 issue, was paired with a Cakey Brownie recipe. In the magazine, it was set up as the answer to a reader about how to turn his recipe for a cake-like brownie into a fudgier brownie. Online the question is gone, and there's a Kitchen Conundrums video featuring Thomas Joseph, who—along with his producers, Samantha Schutz and Greta Anthony—won a James Beard Media Award last year for Best Video Webcast.

A note to the web people at marthastewart.com: You might want to make it easier to locate these prestigious-award-winning KC videos. Unless you know to search for them by name, your best chance of finding one is to just stumble across it because it happens to be on a topic you're researching; there's no separate page for videos in general or these ones in particular. (The Mad Genius videos of Justin Chapple, who plays a similar, though apparently bigger, role at Food & Wine than Joseph does in Martha's company and who's a James Beard nominee in his own right, are very easy to find at foodandwine.com.)

Back to me and my brownies: I took a chance on not using xanthan gum, because they contained a good deal of cocoa and cocoa can act as a binder like gluteny flour (or xanthan gum) if there's enough of it in the recipe. There apparently wasn't enough. And my three vegan eggs didn't help much. The brownies were flat and chewy and not that reminiscent of fudge. Or brownies.

The next weekend, I opted for tweaking the Cakey Brownies recipe. I again used three vegan eggs (and I'm glad I did because Mike asked me in a text message whether the resulting, successful brownies were vegan because a friend of his who wanted to try them is vegan) and added 3/8 teaspoon of xanthan gum. Advice on how much xanthan gum to use per cup of gluten-free flour varies widely on the Internet and, of course, depends on what you're baking. Cinnamon rolls, for instance, need a good deal more than snickerdoodles. But the websites of King Arthur Flour and Bob's Red Mill were in agreement that 1/4 teaspoon per cup works for cookies, so that's what I went with.

I also added 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla to the recipe because vanilla is good at bringing out the flavor of chocolate. And I used coconut oil in place of unsalted butter. I placed the jar in the refrigerator hours before I started making the brownies and then microwaved it briefly so the coconut oil would be soft enough to easily measure but still decidedly solid.

All of the measurements above are for a single batch. I doubled everything to make two pans.

Here are the final products, which were ultimately more fudgy than cakey: 

And here I am packaging them for the 'phews, with a few bits left over for me and Tony, who took the pic:

Next time I make these brownies, I will bake them for at least 35 minutes, and probably for 40, to see if I can get them in that sweet spot where they're more like a bar cookie but not overly cake-like. The timing was difficult to determine because of the substituted ingredients and because I have 9-inch square pans rather than the 8-inch square pans called for.  

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I've been hesitant to write this item in a way because I fear looking like more of a killjoy than I normally do on this blog, because I'm pointing out errors in logic in one of my favorite songs from a musical. But I'm going to do this writeup because it gives me a chance to show off my critical-thinking skills. And my usual disclaimer remains in effect: I don't claim to be perfect, and I'm pointing out these errors in a spirit of helpful criticism, not know-it-all-ness. 

One of my favorite Broadway shows I saw when I was living in New York was [title of show], and, pre-Tony, I had a crush on Hunter Bell, the show's co-star and Tony Award–nominated book writer.

Bell and Susan Blackwell, who also co-starred in [tos], wrote the book for Now. Here. This., an Off-Broadway show Tony, some friends, and I saw in April 2012. (That's a link to my private blog, Hawleyblog. Let me know if you want the log-in and password info.) The music and lyrics for both shows were written by co-star Jeff Bowen, who didn't really have a big number to call his own in [tos]. In N.H.T., he stepped into the spotlight with "Dazzle Camouflage," an amazing song about his attempts to hide his gayness when he was younger by playing the class clown or straight boy, among other disguises. Listen to it here.

I've played that song a lot over the years, and I've noticed two inconsistencies in the lyrics, one that's pretty big to me and I caught pretty quickly and another one that's more subtle and may be easily explained away.

The costume for Bowen's Ed Grimley character, whom Bowen is portraying at the Suncoast Middle School's annual PTA pancake supper, is first described as "perfect: a collared shirt buttoned to the top and high-waisted pant with just a hint of moose knuckle." Later, after his performance, he says, "We get home, I peel off my sweaty, makeshift costume, take a shower, go into my room, and lock the door." The costume is either perfect or thrown together in a good-enough-to-get-by manner; it can't be both.

We also have Bell, as a fellow student, telling Bowen early in the song "You made Shane Fessler laugh so hard Gatorade came out his nose." Later, after Bowen hatches his plan to dazzle everyone with his multiple personalities so they won't question his sexuality, he says, "Then, maybe I would hear Shane Fessler say 'Dude, you're funny' instead of 'Dude, you're a faggot.'" That seems contradictory, though it's possible Shane Fessler would laugh at Bowen's shenanigans but wouldn't acknowledge he found him to be so funny.

Anyhow, please enjoy that song; "Archer," my other favorite song from N.H.T.; and "Nine People's Favorite Thing" and "I Am Playing Me" (featuring Heidi Blickenstaff, the fourth member of the cast for both shows and the best singer among them) from [tos].

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I liked Tales of the City an awful lot (see my previous post), but it got too soap opera–ish at the end for me. At some point, I'll read the next book in the series, More Tales of the City, but my local library doesn't have it, so I'll need to get it through other means.

And speaking of which, I finally gave up on borrowing the Bill Hawley mysteries through an interlibrary loan (see my previous post again; the second attempt was no more successful than the first), so I asked for them for my birthday, which is coming up this Thursday. My sister, Tracey, bought them for me, and the last two arrived in the mail yesterday:

I'll start on Final Viewing after I finish Christopher Isherwood's The World in the Evening, which I'm about two-thirds through. I know it's not fair to judge a book by how it differs from your expectations of it, but I was disappointed it took such a very long time, more than 100 pages, before the protagonist, Stephen Monk, even acknowledged he'd previously had a same-sex attraction. I mean, Isherwood doesn't seem to have had a heterosexual moment in his entire life, which began in 1904 and ended in 1986.

Anyway, there's been a lot of flashing back to Monk's life with his deceased first wife, and the dialogue between them is filled with overly polite protestations and refusals to tell each other what they're truly thinking. I'm finding it all pretty dull. I think it was the wrong Isherwood book to start exploring his body of work with.

Much of this book has been set at a home on Boundary Lane in fictional Dolgelly, Pennsylvania, while Tales of the City revolved around the tenants in a home on the similar-sounding, fictional Barbary Lane, which was inspired by Macondray Lane in real-life San Francisco.

A Post With What I Declare to Be the Quintessential Use of a Hyphen

UPDATES on July 28: I want to note that I finished reading the other book I had mentioned in my previous post, Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane. I didn't find it to be all that special. I also added a mention of Armistead Maupin's amazing gift for writing dialogue below.

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I never got my Bill Hawley mystery from the library. (See the previous post.) After not hearing anything for many weeks, I called to see what the deal was, and the woman who usually handles interlibrary loans investigated and said the result had came back while she was on vacation: At one library, it was checked out, and none of the other libraries owned it. She said she would try again.

In the meantime, I had finished the David Sedaris book, which was a fun read, and started on what I'd hoped would be a mindlessly entertaining novel set in gay Hollywood: Tricks of the Trade. It was just mindless, with no laugh-out-loud or even short-chuckle moments. It was fat-shaming and age-shaming, and the characters were all unrelatable jerks, even the two who are intended to be our heroes and will obviously be a forever-in-love couple at the end.

I stopped reading it about halfway through, but I'm glad I made it far enough to come across some examples of what I consider to be bad punctuation, including a stellar example¹ of when a hyphen should have been used to aid the reader.

And here it is: One of our "heroes" is talking about the guy he's inevitably going to end up with at the conclusion of the novel; that guy has whored himself out to a once-huge television star whose career is now in the toilet because of a kinky-gay-sex scandal in the hope that this fallen star will help him sell one or more of his screenplays to a studio. Why a hot and pretty intelligent guy like Rod, who could theoretically whore himself out to any man in Hollywood who likes men, would attach himself to a fallen star instead of a rising star or a powerful executive wasn't explained. Anyway, here's Bart, who thought he had something good going on with Rod before Rod hooked up with the not-in-shape former TV star, evaluating Rod's future with that guy²: "Even though Rod's used to tricking with flabby gut relics who have to pay for sex, I give this 'relationship' six months, no more."

Do you see where the hyphen should go? Between "flabby" and "gut" to indiciate we're talking about relics who have flabby guts and not about gut relics who are flabby. I don't know what a "gut relic" would be, but that's just my point: Throw in that hyphen, and there's no mystery to the reader what you're talking about; leave it out, and you've got people pondering what the hell "gut relics" are.

There are some other incidences of bad punctuation in these passages from the book:

"In the end, Rod decided on the jeans (sans belt and underwear), his work boots, a tight-fitting, white muscle-revealing tank top that was specially tailored to reveal the contours of his body, and a Shell service-station mechanic's shirt, unbuttoned." A comma is wanted after "white," because it's another adjective in the list of things describing "tank top." Without it, it seems like the writer might be calling Rod's muscles white. Also, because of the internal commas in the sequence about the tank top, I would have used semicolons rather than commas after the end parenthesis, "boots," and "body." And I would have inserted a hyphen between "Shell" and "service." Because why not?

That was on page 101. On the next page, we've got this sentence with a comma where a hyphen was wanted: "At three-thirty, behind the wheel of his dull, green Dodge Dart, Rod was trying to remember the exact location of Jim's place." The comma after "dull" implies his car is both boring and green. "Dull-green" would have made it clear the green color wasn't vibrant. I also would have used numbers and a colon to indicate the time: 3:30.

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A billboard that overlooks the parking lot of the office I work in³ includes the following language: "LARGE 3-TOPPING FOR $7.99." The advertisement is for a national chain that, well, has terrible pizza. I'm mentioning the ad because of the hyphen. Is it warranted even though there's no noun after "TOPPING"?

I would argue it's justified. "LARGE 3 TOPPING" looks weird, and I think it's sometimes appropriate to hyphenate for a noun that's only implied in the words (but shown in the giant photo of a tempting pizza that looks nothing like the one you would actually get).

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Last night, I read the first 50 pages of Tales of the City in what felt like only 5 minutes but which actually took significantly longer, because I never studied with Evelyn Wood.⁴ Armistead Maupin's writing isn't very showy, at least not so far; it's matter-of-fact and light on simile and metaphor. But his dialogue is perfection, and I'm falling in love with many of the characters — and I'm giddy at the prospect of being able to read eight more novels set in this same world.

¹I wanted to add a "Most" before "Quintessential" in the headline, but it's already there in the Merriam-Webster's definition: "the most typical example or representative."

²I know that was an awful lot of exposition for one measly sentence.

³I haven't previously mentioned it on this blog, but I've had a full-time job since January. I'm still doing freelance work on the side, but I'm enjoying having health insurance through an employer and a steady paycheck for a while at least.

⁴My husband, Tony, did take a speed-reading course back in the day, and that's another example of how our marriage is a merger of opposites: He reads only the first and last letters of most words, and so sometimes asks me how to spell certain everyday words, and my jobs often involve making sure every letter of every word is correct.

THE HOURS, MRS. DALLOWAY, AND OTHER BOOKS INVOLVING DEATH

I felt like it was time I read a book by Michael Cunningham, so I got The Hours from my library. And I loved it, even though it's "not necessarily" Cunningham's favorite among his novels.

I remember liking the movie well enough, but not a second of this trailer seems familiar to me now, 16 years later. I like the fact that Meryl Streep is a potential character in the book and in the film plays the character who thinks she might have spotted Meryl Streep (or possibly Vanessa Redgrave) momentarily peeking her head out of a trailer on a movie set in her New York City neighborhood.

That latter character would be Clarissa Vaughan, whose chapters are titled "Mrs. Dalloway." The novel tells the stories of three women: Clarissa, a bisexual woman whose ex-lover, Richard, who's dying of AIDS, had started calling her the name of the title character in Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel when they were in college; Woolf herself, who's writing Mrs. Dalloway and whose chapters are titled "Mrs. Woolf"; and Laura Brown, a pregnant housewife and mother living in Los Angeles in 1949 who's reading Mrs. Dalloway—and contemplating suicide—and whose chapters are titled "Mrs. Brown." (The novel's tripartite structure was referenced in a Jeopardy! answer last month. The contestant who came up with the correct question was the one named Jeffrey, not Virginia.)

I love Cunningham's way with words:

• The boy sets about eating with a certain tractorish steadiness that has more to do with obedience than appetite. (page 48 of the 2002 paperback edition with Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman on the cover, about Laura's son)

• Here again, surprisingly, are the faded yellow-beige walls, more or less the color of an arrowroot biscuit; here is the fluorescent panel on the ceiling emitting its sputtering, watery glare. (page 53, about Richard's depressing apartment)

• Virginia's eyes meet those of one of the pugs, which stares over its fawn-colored shoulder at her with an expression of moist, wheezing bafflement. (page 82, about a dog Virginia encounters on a walk around town)

• His old beauty, his heft and leonine poise, vanished with such surprising suddenness almost two decades ago, and this Louis—white-haired, sinewy, full of furtive, chastened emotions—emerged in much the way a small, unimposing man might jump from the turret of a tank to announce that it was he, not the machine, who flattened your village. (page 124, about another of Clarissa's longtime friends)

There's a remarkable scene in which Virginia's young niece prepares a final resting place for a dying thrush her older brother has found in Virginia's yard. "Before following [her sister Vanessa and Vanessa's children into the house for tea after the bird's funeral], Virginia lingers another moment beside the dead bird in its circle of roses. It could be a kind of hat. It could be the missing link between millinery and death." (page 121)

There's much about death and contemplation of death in this book. Thankfully, there are also some moments of quiet beauty about the simple joys in life: "[Clarissa's partner] Sally hands the flowers to her and for a moment they are both simply and entirely happy. They are present, right now, and they have managed, somehow, over the course of eighteen years, to continue loving each other. It is enough. At this moment, it is enough." (page 185)

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I decided I should next read Cunningham's inspiration for The Hours, but I ultimately figured I ought to go for something simple and fun instead as a reprieve from the heaviness of TH and Mrs. D. (I knew enough about the plot of the latter to know it also included a death by suicide.) I checked out this murder mystery set in New York and Provincetown that I thought might be a breezy read and good for some laughs, but I couldn't make it past the second chapter; the writing was pretty bad and the characters were clichés that generated no interest for me whatsoever.

So I started on Mrs. Dalloway. Getting through the book required some effort because many of Woolf's sentences are so complex, they need to be read twice. Or thrice. Consider this doozy: "That was her self when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world only into one centre, one diamond, one woman who sat in her drawing-room and made a meeting-point, a radiancy no doubt in some dull lives, a refuge for the lonely to come to, perhaps; she had helped young people, who were grateful to her; had tried to be the same always, never showing a sign of all the other sides of her — faults, jealousies, vanities, suspicions, like this of Lady Bruton not asking her to lunch; which, she thought (combing her hair finally), is utterly base!" (page 40 of the 1993 [sexist!] "Everyman's Library" edition from Knopf)

Elizabeth Dalloway and the other characters take a lot of parenthetical actions while going on in their heads about something else. And I sometimes got confused as to which character was the antecedent of a pronoun, especially the hims and hes in the final scene involving Septimus, a troubled World War I veteran, and Rezia, his Italian wife.

After Septimus and Rezia have a great time joking around and making a goofy, tiny hat for their landlady's daughter, whom they dislike, they share a moment like Sally and Clarissa: "They were perfectly happy now, [Rezia] said suddenly, putting the hat down. For she could say anything to him now. She could say whatever came into her head." (page 164)

I needed that moment of contentment for Rezia, a great character. Septimus's internal monologues and spoken and written bits of madness are difficult to read.

I didn't find Elizabeth Dalloway to be as interesting as her contemporary counterpart, Clarissa, and I enjoyed TH a lot more than I did Mrs. D.

Because this is an editing blog, and not a literary appreciation blog, I'll point out that, nowadays at least, we would ideally start the following sentence with "Far were": "Far was Italy and the white houses and the room where her sister sat making hats, and the streets crowded every evening with people walking, laughing out loud, not half alive like people here, huddled up in Bath chairs, looking at a few ugly flowers stuck in pots!" (page 24, Rezia thinking about the country she grew up in)

And there seems to be something left out in this sentence, at least a punctuation mark, in the part where it jumps from page 162 to 163: "But directly he saw nothing" (new page) "the sounds of the game became fainter and stranger and sounded like the cries of people seeking and not finding, and passing farther and farther away." (Septimus in bed, going madder) If you can make sense of that sentence, please explain it to me. I searched for the passage online and found many references to it, so if there is a mistake in it, it's not unique to this edition of the book.

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Before I went to the library on Saturday, I asked Tony for a recommendation of a novel he'd read that was interesting and not depressing. He suggested The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. I found it and read the jacket copy: "Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. ... And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy. ... It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark." Sigh.

The blurb from Erin Morgenstern on the back cover convinced me to give it a shot: "I read The Ocean at the End of the Lane in one sitting. It is soaked in myth and memory and salt water and it is so, so lovely. It feels as if it was always there, somewhere in the story-stuff of the universe."

When I got home, I read to Tony what I quoted two paragraphs above, and he said he’d forgotten this book also involved a suicide. He remembered it being a feel-good book. We'll see; I haven't started it yet.

Tony also suggested something by David Sedaris, and because it's been quite a while since I've read a collection of his essays, I picked up Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls.

I also put in an interlibrary-loan request for Final Viewing: A Bill Hawley Undertaking, the first in a series of four mid-1990s mystery novels by Leo Axler about a funeral director with my name who's an amateur detective. That should be fun to read.

A Post About My Favorite Word, Which Gives Me a Good Excuse to Run Cute Photos of Missy

Tony and I like to talk for Missy—ask her questions and then answer them in "her" voice. There's nothing weird about that, right?

The other day, I was eating a muffin I'd bought from Lucky's, or as we like to call it, because it's more fun, Slutty's. 

Tony: "What kind of muffin did you get, Missy?"

"Missy": "Kibble."

I cracked up. I loved the idea of a muffin for dogs with kibble in it, and kibble is my favorite word. It's fun to say and seems to fit perfectly with what it describes.

I wish there were an interesting story behind such a cool word, but its origin is unknown.

I took the photo above earlier today.

I posted the photo below on Facebook back in April with the description "Our baby girl is cuter than Paul Rudd carrying a koala bear that's cradling a kitten in its arms." And she is.

Some Thoughts on Uncle Tom's Cabin

In this post, I wrote that I was reading Uncle Tom's Cabin and I linked to this essay from the journal Humanities that argued, starting in the title, that it was "The First Great American Novel."

I admire Harriet Beecher Stowe and her book for helping to bring about the Civil War and the end of slavery, but it's not a great achievement as a work of art. (There are a couple of SPOILERS ahead about major plot developments.) It was written to convince white Americans that people of color were every bit as human as white people and that the North, because of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, was as complicit as the South in the horrors of slavery. Its characters, though, are, for the most part, broad stereotypes, and Stowe regularly makes pronouncements about the characteristics of an entire race of people as if they were indisputable fact. And for a century or so, the novel has largely been viewed by African-Americans as accommodationist and its title character as a sellout to his race. Little Eva, the daughter of Uncle Tom's second master, Augustine St. Clare, is a perfect angel whom we're told will die fairly soon in a chapter called "Foreshadowings." And chapter 43, "Results," starts with the unliterary, direct-to-the-reader declaration "The rest of our story is soon told."

There are some fun bits of language here and there, and I learned a couple of new words. In the chapter in which Eva dies, called "Death," setness is used in the plural when speaking of St. Clare's highly efficient New England cousin Ophelia: "They who had shrugged their shoulders at her little peculiarities and setnesses, so unlike the carelesss freedom of southern manners, acknowledged that now she was the exact person that was wanted [for taking care of Eva on her deathbed]."

And I learned perhaps can be a noun. It's also used in the plural, in the chapter titled "An Authentic Ghost Story," in a passage about the trials of the soul an evil man like Simon Legree, Tom's third and final master and murderer, must endure:

After all, let a man take what pains he may to hush it down, a human soul is an awful ghostly, unquiet possession, for a bad man to have. Who knows the metes and bounds of it? Who knows all its awful perhapses,—those shudderings and tremblings, which it can no more live down than it can outlive its own eternity! What a fool is he who locks his door to keep out spirits, who has in his own bosom a spirit he dares not meet alone,—whose voice, smothered far down, and piled over with mountains of earthliness, is yet like the forewarning trumpet of doom!

Oatmeal–Chocolate Chip–Dried Cherry Cookies

As one of their Christmas gifts, I gave my nephews Matt and Mike cards promising to make them a baked treat and mail it to them sometime this spring:

(In this post from August, I wrote about mailing them chocolate chip cookies for their birthday and their return to college.)

I didn't want to make plain chocolate chip cookies again, so two Sundays ago, in making good on my promise, I made Oatmeal–Chocolate Chip–Dried Cherry Cookies. Years ago, before I met Tony, I regularly made a bar version of that cookie with traditional ingredients like gluten-containing all-purpose flour and butter. (The link above goes to my personal blog, which is private. Email me if you'd like the log-in and password.) I based these gluten- and dairy-free cookies on the Oatmeal Cookies recipe in BabyCakes Covers the Classics, a baking book I referenced in that previous post about making cookies for the 'phews and the book on the cooking and baking shelves of my bookcase that gets the most use.

The cookies turned out wonderfully ...

... but I see room for improvements the next time I make them.

The recipe called for 2 tablespoons of ground cinnamon, which sounded like an awful lot. I wanted only a hint of cinnamon flavor, and I decided I wanted some ginger too, so I used 2 heaping teaspoons of each ground spice in a double batch of cookies. And I think that was about right. Here's a photo of the dry ingredients whisked together:

As you can see, there aren't a lot of oats visible; the recipe specified 1/2 cup of oats for every 1 3/4 cups of gluten-free flour and 1 cup of sugar. I will add more oats the next time.

And I believe the book's recipe could easily handle another 1/2 cup of oats without getting too dry. Here's a photo of the batter with the dried cherries and chocolate chips waiting to be stirred in:  

For liquids, Erin McKenna listed 1 cup of melted refined coconut oil or canola oil and 1/2 cup of unsweetened applesauce (and 2 tablespoons vanilla extract). As you can see in the photo, the oil is puddling a bit, especially around the edges. In my double batch, I used just under 1 cup of melted coconut oil (I melted what I thought would be about 1 cup by eyeballing what seemed like the right amount of the solid stuff) and used canola oil to top off that cup plus fill one more cup. The other ingredients in the batter couldn't absorb that much oil, and, consequently, the batter was unpleasant to work with and most of the cookies spread out more than I would have liked. Next time, I will cut back on the oil a bit, and I think with the additional oats, the batter should have a texture more to my liking.

Here's a photo of a later tray of cookies that, for whatever reason, didn't spread out as much as some of the earlier ones and didn't get as lacy around the edges:

The texture of the cookies overall was a little more oily-moist than I would have preferred but certainly not off-puttingly so. And the taste was spot-on. The combination of hearty oats, bittersweet dark chocolate chips, sweet-tart dried cherries, and the notes of ginger and cinnamon was a winner.

A Fine Collection of Short Stories with Two Little Errors

I just finished reading Touchy Subjects by Emma Donoghue. It's a collection of 19 short stories separated into five categories that can be touchy subjects—Babies, Domesticity, Strangers, Desire, and Death—and there's also a story by that name, in which a man tries to help his wife's best friend conceive a child by making a sperm donation in her hotel room (not directly inside her) while she's visiting their city.

Donoghue is a lesbian, and several of the stories have LGBT¹ characters. The stories tend to end rather abruptly yet decisively. I enjoyed most of them a good deal, though that title story ultimately didn't seem credible: I can't imagine a woman allowing her best friend to raise a child who would be a half sibling to her own children. Nor a man being willing to father his wife's best friend's child. Nor a woman asking her best friend to let her husband be her sperm donor.

Two of my favorite stories were found in the Desire section: "Team Men," about a romance between two high school jocks, only one of whom wants to come out of the closet, and "Speaking in Tongues," about a whirlwind fling between a lesbian poet and a much younger woman told alternatingly from each of their perspectives.

The thing I found most impressive about the collection was the wide variety of characters whose viewpoints Donoghue presented. I'm inclined to read one of her novels at some point, perhaps Frog Music, which I saw was at my local library when I returned Touchy Subjects today. But I'm still reading another novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, so I picked up a collection of short stories instead: Lucky Alan and Other Stories by Jonathan Lethem.

I'm now going to point out two little errors I found in Touchy Subjects, because that's one of the things I tend to do on this blog. My usual disclaimer remains in effect: I don't claim to be perfect, and I'm pointing out these errors in a spirit of helpful criticism, not know-it-all-ness. And these really are tiny mistakes.

In the story called "Oops," which is in the Babies section, in the third line from the bottom in the photo above, "insisting" should be "insisted."

And in the story called "Pluck," from the Domesticity section, the following problematic sentence appeared: "It turned out that a hair was a filament or a filamentous outgrowth that grew from the integument of an animal or insect." Insects are animals, so mammal is a better word to use than animal.

¹There's a SPOILER for the story "The Welcome" in this footnoted gripe: The book jacket summarizes that story thusly: "A roommate's bizarre secret awakens a repressed young woman." That's poorly worded both because the young woman in question is turned on by her roommate before she learns what the roommate's secret is and because the woman she is attracted to turns out to be transgender and being transgender shouldn't be described as "bizarre." I will acknowledge that this book was published in 2006, before many of us, including me, were educated about what it means to be transgender. And I should note that the story itself doesn't present being transgender as bizarre.

Who Versus That and Whose Versus ... Thatses?

I noticed a couple instances in The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb where a who was needed instead of a that: 

• She said there were a few more people they still needed to reach, and a few THAT felt they had to decline, but that most of the eyewitnesses had agreed to assist them. (page 267)

• "The woman THAT sat across from me in the bakery on our first date." (page 315)

That latter sentence was spoken by someone who may be forgiven for not always speaking perfect English, but the character was an English teacher, so I expected more of him. 😄

Not long after I got a new boss at my previous full-time gig, she questioned the use of whose when modifying a thing, not a person, in a sentence I don't recall in full. It was a legitimate question, and the legitimate answer is, our language doesn't have an accepted alternative for the possessive pronominal adjective whose when dealing strictly with things. See this post by Bonnie Mills (or Bonnie Trenga?) over at Grammar Girl's blog that uses the following two examples: "The car whose windshield wipers weren't working was driving in the fast lane." and "The tree whose leaves were falling seems to be dying."

For whatever reason, a word like thatse or maybe thats or even thatses, which would clearly show we're dealing with a thing, not a person, never took off as the logical possessive to use in such instances: The car thatse windshield wipers weren't working was driving in the fast lane. The motel thats sign was spray-painted didn't look like a place I wanted to stay. The novel thatses plot was getting too depressing for me is now back at the library, half-read.

That last example pertains to me and The Hour I First Believed. I couldn't bring myself to continue reading it once the author foreshadowed an even greater tragedy the narrator's wife was going to have to deal with after having already survived the taken-from-real-life massacre at Jefferson County, Colorado's Columbine High School, where she was a nurse. I didn't want to go where it was clear Lamb was going—to a chapter thatses next plot twist was too emotionally devastating.