Don't Shoot the English Teacher: Notes on the Collective Creation of Language by John Kilgore This essay forms part of Don't Shoot the English Teacher: Notes on the Collective Creation of Language. Don't Shoot is a book of linked essays growing out of my two decades and more as a college English teacher, and more specifically, out of the column, "Shibboleths," which I have been contributing to The Vocabula Review since January 2004. The essays aim to entertain, and the tone throughout is personal and informal, but each discussion makes a serious point about language, literature, or culture. Of special interest to teachers of English, Speech, and Drama, the collection also has plenty to offer the general reader. My core idea is that language is "a great collective work of art" (in Edward Sapir's phrase), and that the labor of contributing artists — all of us — can be observed in all kinds of interesting and amusing and oddly gratifying ways. Restless and impulsive and innately creative, we are remarkably adept at catching new and unexpected meanings with the ancient equipment of the existing language, adapting and straining the structure in the process. No language ever lacks for neologisms, and every generation and coterie contributes its own body of expressive slang. Yet I argue that a countervailing push for order and regularity, an essential conservatism in our basic feelings toward language, serves equally to build up and maintain the grand structure. In particular, I mount a recurrent, good-humored polemic in favor of the critical reflex in language, that oddly fussy penchant we all have for insisting that words be used one way and not another. The point needs making because our populist, anything-goes culture tries to repress and deny the reflex, seeing grammatical rules as arbitrary impediments rather than necessary conventions. Even scientific linguists, while vastly increasing our understanding of the inner workings of language, have tended to endorse a dogmatic relativism in matters of usage, confining themselves to "description rather than prescription," treating controversies about better and worse, right and wrong, as trivial and somehow uncharacteristic. Such a stance is understandable in view of the inglorious record of traditional grammar, which in its decidedly unscientific zeal has too often defended class shibboleths and created incoherent, falsely generalized rules that even its adherents cannot follow. Crusades to "defend the language" have often been bizarrely restricted in focus, running aground on their own pettiness and a fatal proclivity for resisting changes that have already occurred. And yet for all that (so I argue), linguists err in ignoring a chief aspect of the thing they describe: the constant undercurrent of critical activity, the drive for grace and correctness far in excess of the needs of any particular communication, that is implicit in even the most unreflective speech. The urge to tinker, to fuss and revise and legislate, is an irresistible instinct and a completely necessary one, for languages are massive, non-accidental systems that require continual upkeep. Our concern for the aesthetics of speech should therefore be respected for its essential altruism and usefulness, rather than derided as peevish snobbery. The English teacher who should not be shot is oneself, all of us insofar as we care about language and its offspring, culture. If you are an editor, publisher, or agent interested in hearing more about this book, email . Email: John Kilgore Top A Circus of Words by Clark Elder Morrow Clark Elder Morrow offers to the publishing world a book made up of the finest, hand-picked essays from his column in the Internet periodical you are currently reading. A Circus of Words is a collection of his monthly columns for the prestigious and highly stimulating web publication The Vocabula Review. As you can see, this e-zine deals with all the vagaries and adventures of contemporary English, as well as providing a model for how the language should be used. The monthly column is titled "The Elder Statesman." The essays — averaging 1,500 words each — range from the hilarious ("Oscar Wilde Meets the Cartoon Network") to the deeply penetrating ("The Bawd and the Ballerina"). But all of them strive to live up to Morrow's stated aim of marrying the odd bedfellows of Philology and Fun, while dealing with how English continues to be the most fascinating language in the world. These columns have been acclaimed by The Vocabula Review readership with terms like "witty," "learned," "eloquent," and "brilliant." One of these columns, "Mr Goldentongue," was published in 2004 in a compilation called Vocabula Bound, put out by Marion Street Press. These columns and essays have been published over the last four years. I believe these articles will make an immensely rewarding volume, but one that will be just as much fun as it will be instructive. The entire manuscript is ready for your perusal. If you are an editor, publisher, or agent interested in hearing more about this book, email . Email: Clark Elder Morrow Top You Know What You Should Do? by Robert Bové A few months ago, one of my students suggested I write a book about — you guessed it — my students. Not a bad idea, I replied, and left it at that. Or so I thought, until, on the train home I began musing on all the book ideas that have been suggested to me over the years, the people who made the suggestions, and the times in which they were made. Not all the suggestions have been as self-referential as that student's; some were interesting, as interesting as the people who made them, if not more important to me than the people themselves were. Rich territory. My book, the one that will be written, as a consequence, is both memoir and homage, to those well-intentioned folk and to our imaginations. For samples of my prose, photos, and poems as well as bio notes, see my website. Email: Robert Bové Top Arab Contributions to the Cuisine of the Latin-Speaking World by Habeeb Salloum From the 8th to the 13th centuries, the Arabs developed an opulent cuisine in their lands — from the borders of China in the east to the Iberian Peninsula in the west. Proud of their culinary creativity and adventurous in their borrowing of foods and dishes from the pluralistic societies whom they encountered and with whom they lived, the Arabs, for the sake of posterity, transcribed their culinary delights and wrote cookbooks glorifying the art of cooking and the use of a multitude of ingredients. The authors of these compendiums, usually trained as doctors, cooks, or just historians of the time, explained, comprehensively, the benefits of the various herbs, spices, and greens used in Arab cuisine. In many cases, they detailed the method of presentation and the aesthetics of the display of a meal on the table, and they would include in their praise of certain recipes, poems lauding their taste and beauty. After the Arabs were defeated in the Iberian Peninsula and Sicily, the presence of the conquered in the kitchen remained. The Iberian Peninsula and Arab Sicily served as the pivots of this change in the culinary history of the world. It is mainly from Spain, Portugal, and Sicily that the foods of the Arabs spread to the Latin-speaking nations and eventually became part and parcel of each country whose linguistic origin derived from Latin. Today, Spain, Portugal, Sicily, Malta, France, Latin America, and the islands of the Caribbean all can claim a part of this culinary history. How it happened and the net results are a fascinating chapter in the tale of international culinary development. Arab Contributions to the Cuisine of the Latin-Speaking World provides the evidence of historical migration of the cuisine of the Arabs to those corners of the globe where especially the empires of Spain and Portugal took reign. I present a study of a unique subject virtually unknown in the kitchens of the world. Without doubt, the Arabs should be given their due in the field of cuisine. As a people with a civilized history going back at least 10,000 years and coming from lands to which trade caravans and merchants from Persia, India, and China in the East traveled to the world's of the Greeks and Romans, the Arabs, in their long history, have encountered the foods of all the ancient civilizations. This is a study in the history of culinary transmittal and Arabic linguistic contributions to the cuisines of the Latin-speaking world. In addition to the historical evidence, recipes are profuse in this compendium. The result is a detailed study of how the foods of the Arabs crept into the kitchens of all the Latin-speaking lands. The book retraces the history of some of these dishes, especially those found in Spain, Portugal, and Sicily. The objective is to revive the original recipes prepared by the Arabs of history, especially in the 8th to 15th century province of Andalusia (al-Andalus), which represented the epitome of haute culture and cuisine in its time. In this book, I tell this story and include recipes showing Arab touches in all the foods of the Latin-speaking world. Email: Habeeb Salloum Top Ethics in Criminal Justice: Tough Issues, Tough Questions by Ken Bresler This book consists of perennial questions in criminal justice ethics (such as "Do an actor's motives or the act's consequences matter?") and questions that I haven't seen posed elsewhere. "Assume that you prefer a criminal justice system that lets all innocent people go free and lets some guilty people go free too. Why should you be outraged when a jury acquits a defendant you believe is guilty, such as O. J. Simpson, the police officers who beat Rodney King, or an example of your own choosing? Isn't the verdict in accord with your preference?" "Should a police force be required to buy nonlethal restraining equipment as it is developed? If you were a police chief with $70,000 in your budget, would you buy nonlethal equipment or hire two new officers?" (Sample questions are copyrighted 2001, Ken Bresler.) This book is a compilation of classroom and review questions in a graduate course that I teach, "Criminal Justice Ethics." The format is inspired by Gregory Stock's The Book of Questions: Business, Politics and Ethics, which is often sold in bookstores near the cash register. Email: Ken Bresler Top

Back to Where We Once Belonged by David R. Williams Back to Where We Once Belonged is not another nostalgiac history of the sixties nor a neo-con attack on radicalism; it is a nonfiction, scholarly but personalized account of why the 1960s search for answers led us baby-boomers so far outside of traditional structure and why it is time, especially in the wake of 9/11, to let the pendulum swing back. Because the approach is scholarly but the voice personal, it falls into that crack between trade and academic. Written in a voice comparable to Camille Paglia's, it can be read as a response to Paglia's call for "a spiritual history of the Sixties." The basic theme: breaking the traditional boundaries of structure in its search for spiritual freedom, the generation of the 60s repeated the pattern of antinomian excess that is a the heart of American history. My use of Emily Dickinson's poem "Finding is the First Act" as a device to structure the eight chapters is meant to convey a sense of the continuity of the themes of the sixties not just to Dickinson's day but even before then. As a Harvard Divinity School graduate, I explore American religion and try to explain its inner sensibility to my secular friends. In doing so, I challenge the interpreters of the sixties like Todd Gitlin who want to keep sixties scholarship political, but I also challenge the religious conservatives who do not seem to know how their own spiritual roots gave rise to this rebellion against them. I interpret the sixties within the ongoing tension between orthodoxy and romanticism, between a fearful need for structure and a hopeful quest for freedom, between a masculine need to maintain control and a feminine desire to flow with the emotions, between Nurse Ratched's belief that the self is a socially constructed problem to be fixed and McMurphy's assumption that the self is an encaged soul to be freed. One section of the book, that dealing with Kesey's Cuckoo's Nest has already appeared in print in a collection published in Spain called Anarchy and Dissent in American Literature. Another, titled "Back to the Garden," is due to appear this spring in a collection published in Germany. The chapter on Manson was read at the Popular Culture Association's national conference last Spring. The concluding chapter on Bob Dylan and Emily Dickinson appeared in On The Tracks. Email: David R. Williams Top The Techie Versus The Touchy-Feely by David Isaacson In The Techie Versus the Touchy-Feely: Meditations on Trendy Language, I explore the conflict between technology and human values in a series of alphabetically arranged essays on key words and phrases reflecting this conflict. My main idea is that the "hard" jargon used by nerds and other techies rubs against and rubs off the "soft" jargon of pop psychology to create frequently ironic, humorous, paradoxical, and sometimes ethically troubling juxtapositions. I argue that we wouldn't so frequently use expressions such as having a nice day, knowing where we are coming from, getting in touch with our feelings, knowing our inner selves, thanks for sharing, being ok with that, self-esteem issues, are you comfortable with that, if we were not also preoccupied with parameters, interfaces, paradigms, software, programs, web surfing, downtime, uploading, multitasking and other high-tech and computer terms calling attention to the frightening impersonality and alarmingly fast pace of our lives. Sometimes merging with and sometimes mediating between the touch-feely therapeutic and the techie jargon is some wonderfully evocative popular slang such as whatever, like, hellooo, get a life, it isn't rocket science, just what is it about 'no' you don't understand, road rage, going postal, awesome, give you a head's up on that, learning experience, on my case, get real, there's good news and bad news, get a life, bummed out, and so on, which reflect the tension between machines and people, faceless bureaucracies and individuals, violence and helplessness. Each language type — technical jargon, popular psychological jargon, and general colloquial, and slang talk — will have its separate alphabetically arranged section in this dictionary. The book will include an introductory essay and an index of all the terms explored in the essays. My essay published in The Vocabula Review is an example of entries in the book. I am the author of numerous articles in library journals as well as numerous book reviews for radio station WMUK, the NPR affiliate of Western Michigan University. Email: David Isaacson Top Getting It All Together — A Cooking Book by Richard Carter I have shown Getting it All Together to the owner of the largest cookbook store in Baltimore, and she found it very good and entirely original. The premise of this book is so obvious that no one seems to have done it before: write a cookbook that recognizes the difference between a recipe book and a cooking book. There are scores of very good books full of fine recipes that ignore the fact that recipes don't cook themselves. I have done the following to compose a true cooking book with a number of good recipes and how to cook them. Cooking a meal involves: 1. Listing the ingredients — something all do 2. Detailing how to cook these to produce a tasty meal — something they all have to do 3. Positioning the directions of how to cook the various side dishes in a given meal so that the cook doesn't have to flip all over the book to find their recipes — something very few do, but that my book does very efficiently 4. And finally, what my book does that, as far as I know, no other does, tell the cook precisely when to start cooking each ingredient of the side dishes so that all are done at the same time As to how to present the cooking so that the cook doesn't have to flip all over the book to find the way to cook the various side dishes, I simply present 10 short chapters, each of which presents a different main course together with four different combinations of side dishes to go with them to make different meals. Each chapter begins with how to cook the main course, say, chicken. Then, I arrange the recipes of the four combinations of side dishes in sequence so that the cook doesn't need to flip around to see how to cook the different side dishes. But the piéce de résistance of my book is on the odd page facing each of the four recipes for the side dishes given on its facing even page, I present a time chart telling the cook precisely when to start cooking the ingredients of each side dish so that everything is ready to put on the table precisely when the main course is done. I call these charts Eat-Time Charts since, by using them, everything is ready to eat at the same time. In each case, the charts face the page where the cooking directions are given. Email: Richard Carter Top The Land of Why Not: An Appreciation of America by Marylaine Block As American correspondent for a British magazine, I explained the oddities and contradictions of American life to the Brits; later, as a columnist for Fox News Online, I explained Americans to Americans instead, telling them why we love self-help books, use our technologies to talk back, and pick up and move more often than any other people on earth. In this collection of essays, I explain how America has been indelibly shaped by the energies and failings of young men, who believe they can do anything if people and governments will just stay out of their way. I talk about London Bridge plunked down in the middle of an Arizona desert, the Luling Watermelon Thump, and attitude — "Sez Who? Sez ME!" I ruminate on the meaning of icons like Norman Rockwell, Miss America, and the Field of Dreams, and wonder out loud about our contradictions — how we worship individualism, but form organizations whenever we want to accomplish anything, how we encourage our kids to go into safe, boring careers when the people we revere are the impractical dreamers and inventors who gave us Mickey Mouse, music videos, and Windows. I muse about our secret lives, as told in our personalized license plates, e-mail monikers, and t-shirts (our customizable, wearable philosophies of life). And as a public service, I reveal to men the secret of buying presents for women, and how to understand what women want (easy: read romance novels). To read an outline for the book and sample columns, click here. Email: Marylaine Block Top Writing: The Democratization of American Letters by Christopher Lord Thesis: that the combination of the creative writing industry and the Internet is bringing about a fundamental change in the production, processing and consumption of writing, which can now overpower traditional literature in the same way that a new form of poetry has already overpowered the traditional forms of verse. Chapter 1. A Double Edged Sword  It is clear that the technological and organizational changes in recent years have done much to help writers. The Internet has not merely created an outlet for frustrated and unpublished writers: it has called large new bodies of work into existence. Chapter 2. Hara Kiri In the state of American poetry, we can see a presage of what is to come. In poetry, a similar explosion of activity predated the computer revolution. Much new poetry is not reader-directed. A low point is represented by the American haiku, which has established itself as an easier kind of limerick: the occasional verse of a generation incapable even of doggerel. Chapter 3. The Professionals  This raises the question of professional structures, and of what it means to be a professional writer. As in poetry and in academic life more generally, published literary books are now seen as qualifications to teach as much as reading matter. Chapter 4. A Question of Style  Once canons are abandoned, and peer pressure elevated to the status previously enjoyed by professors and learned critics — namely, to that of ultimate arbiter of taste — a new style of writing emerges. This simplification of the literary project is not being imposed from outside. The internal needs of the non-reading writer are behind it. This can be demonstrated by sampling the un-fettered writings on the web. Chapter 5. So Long Suckers  One particularly unattractive feature of the new ways is the growth of new kinds of parasites: people masquerading as literary agents or publishers, operating through the web to fleece the young, the greedy, the desperate and the stupid. Chapter 6. The Death of Allusion  Writing that does not allude to the literature of the past is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is difficult to describe it as a continuation of that literature. Chapter 7. The Sweet Smell of Success  The system works in favour of some, and it would be useful to hear what they have to say about it. Chapter 8. Out There  The effect of computers, the so-called New Economy, and the Internet in particular on the publishing industry has provoked a good deal of comment. Many otherwise unpublished writers have been drawn to e-books, print on demand companies, and of course to straight web publication, all of which serve the theme of democratization well. Chapter 9. Mass Production  The upshot of all this complicated development is that writing is becoming, almost like reading, a mass activity, undertaken with the help of the sophisticated equipment of mass communication. Email: Christopher Lord Top

Legendary Misbehavior: Sketches, Conversations, and Counterattacks by Ernest Hilbert Compiled from regular columns, interviews, and articles written from 2000 to 2002 for Random House's online literary magazine Bold Type, nowCulture.com, spike.com, The Contemporary Poetry Review, and other publications, Legendary Misbehavior covers a wide variety of literary subjects of interest to readers of contemporary literature. The book is divided into four sections: "Bold Type Sessions," "Unperturbed by Zeus's Bolts: Contemporary Poetry Review," "nowCulture.com," and "Occasional and Perennial: Other Writings." Bold Type boasts an average of 500,000 page views monthly, and my reviews have proved to be often the most popular portion of the site. Random House developed a section devoted entirely to my contributions, titled Poets and Poetry, which is currently being redesigned for a greater promotional campaign. Likewise, The Contemporary Poetry Review is one of the most widely read literary websites in the world since its inclusion in Web Del Sol. nowCulture.com, in addition to many regular online readers has a monthly HTML newsletter that is sent to 12,000 active readers. Subjects included in Legendary Misbehavior: 1. Interviews with Gustaf Sobin, Jennifer Egan, Kenneth Koch, Eric Pankey, Mark Strand, Joe Wenderoth, Benjamin Anastas, John Colapinto, Jay Parini, and Matthew Kneale. 2. Articles on the Beats in Paris, Kenneth Koch, Eric Pankey, Mark Strand, Billy Collins, James Merrill, Stephen Spender, Anne Carson, Alex Shakar, and Jay Parini. 3. Commentary on the recordings and lives of John Ashbery, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Edna St. Vincent Millay, Louise Bogan, Muriel Rukeyser, Anne Sexton, and Randall Jarrell. 4. Occasional and art writings, including Richard Feigen and the contemporary art world, John Richardson on Sacred Monsters and Sacred Masters, PS1/MoMA's Greater New York Show, writings for Blue Gallery (SoHo, New York), KGB Bar Book of Poems Release Party, and Jonathan Franzen's battle with Oprah Winfrey. 5. Also writings on Gustaf Sobin, Patrick Rambaud, John Colapinto, Michael Ondaatje, Michael Schmidt, John Updike, Franz Wright, Joan Silber, W. G. Sebald, Benjamin Anastas, Arthur Bradford, Barry Yourgrau, Lawrence Krauser, Josef Skvorecky, A. R. Ammons, Louise Glück, Czeslaw Milosz, Ezra Pound, Wislawa Szymborska, Jennifer Egan, Manil Suri, Allen Ginsberg, Jane Hirshfield, Matthew Kneale, and Alexander Hemon. Email: Ernest Hilbert Tel: (215) 726-5843 Top The Writer's Directory of Short Fiction and Poetry Publications by Brian Kimberling A slender edition of The Writer's Directory exists online at www.writingdirectory.net, listing approximately 500 literary publications in an attractive, writer-friendly format. With a clear layout and comprehensive information, The Writer's Directory is an unrivalled asset for anyone intent on seeing their short fiction or poetry published. Over 330 Creative Writing programs are now offered in U.S. colleges and universities alone, producing tens of thousands of short story writers and poets each year. Hundreds of thousands more scribble at home, and millions elsewhere around the globe. The Writer's Directory provides all the essentials for submitting to literary publications: in addition to editorial names and addresses, reading periods and submissions policies are indicated where applicable. Links for ordering back issues are given where possible. Many online publications are listed as well as English language publications outside the USA. A special section is devoted to annual contests. Editors of every publication listed in the The Writer's Directory have been asked for further notes. Often these notes provide a writer-friendly perspective on a given publication that can't be had elsewhere. The Writer's Directory won a devoted online following overnight, but greater success awaits a larger print edition. Email: Brian Kimberling Top The Critical Body by Carey Harrison and others, including Robert Kelly, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Michael Ives The aim of our project, in the form of a series of essays, is to redress the very locus of textual criticism by getting it back into the body — the reader’s body — where it belongs, and where, we contend, it still lives in the form of somatic reactions to any material we read. The history of "somatic reading," of reading with an awareness of our body, no less than with an awareness of our mind, traces reading back to its most ancient junction with speech. A connection was once maintained, and still persists, in the murmuring of prayers, murmured not for a listener (not even for a higher, notional Listener), but to engage body and spirit in the rehearsal of language. At a vivid and seemingly decisive moment in the history of somatic reading, Saint Augustine traveled to Milan to meet its bishop, the no-less-to-be-sainted Ambrosius, and came upon Ambrosius sitting in a bower and reading without moving his lips, a novel and extraordinary act. For Augustine, to whom the role of the body was always a vexing issue, this detachment of reading from subvocalizing launched literature, whether sacred or profane, into a new realm. The text before the reader could be enclosed within the reader, purely as the word; the Word had been made flesh, and was now made word again. But whether or not we "subvocalize" as the devout still feel called to do when reading a sacred text, or read in silence like Saint Ambrose, don’t we still hear the words? What would the aesthetic component be (one could say, the sacred or sacralizing component) in a piece of writing if the force of its argument were not sheathed in evocative consonants and vowels whose very music we hear even when reading without lip-synching? Doesn’t our body react in expressive ways to different texts and different authors? Shouldn’t we be more aware of this holistic, and arguably holy, aspect of the way we read? Our essays will seek to explore this ground-breaking thesis, long forgotten but lying fallow under the snows of an alienated reading culture, and awaiting revival. We need to be verfremdet from our Verfremdung. The text is a dance, we shall argue, and we should be dancing it. Email: Carey Harrison Top

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