You Say It's Your..?

“Gloria, you’re just like your Uncle Johnny. Your birthday is a national holiday.”

I’ll be hearing that annual refrain from my Mom tomorrow because it is, in fact, my birthday!

Light the sparklers! Fling the confetti! Toss back a toast! Hell, I’d even urge you to take the day off from work if it wasn’t a Saturday.

I’m one of those people who think birthdays are a big deal and deserve to be fussed over. I never mind getting a year older (the way I’ve lived my life, I’m lucky to have made it this far) and believe they’re New Years, Christmas and Fourth of July rolled into one personal, gift-wrapped package.

How I celebrate my birthday has changed over the years. When I was in the single and early double digits, it was all about sugar overload and how many gifts I could amass. I particularly remember a tradition we had in grammar school, where your friends would make “corsages” out of tin foil-covered cardboard, bows and ribbons, covering them with Bazooka, Tootsie Rolls and other “penny” candy. Not only would the number of corsages you received reflect your popularity in the pecking order, you became the most sought-after person in class as your fellow students treated you like a walking, talking Pez dispenser.

I hit eighteen during those golden years when that was the legal drinking age. Sugar was replaced by shots and ear-bleeding hangovers for the next two decades or so, but I still had my cake and ate it, too, thanks to that universal workplace tradition known as the office party.

Truth be told, nobody gave a rat’s ass whose birthday it was, as long as we had an excuse to get away from our desks at three o’clock and fill our faces with cake. The only angst surrounding the celebration was the passing around of the birthday card. Suddenly, I became the most popular person on the premises and not because I was clothed in candy.

“Say, Glor. Think you can help me write something here?” miffed co-workers would ask while waving the card in my general direction. When I’d tell them that writing their own sentiment would be just fine, miffed turned to alarmed.

Inevitably, there’d always be one colleague who’d ask the question that never failed to leave me speechless. “Is there another way to say ‘Happy Birthday’?”

You will find no bigger iconoclast than yours truly, but some things are sacred and the words “Happy Birthday” are one of them. It’s simple, it says it and it shouldn’t be screwed around with. Add on “many happy returns” if you must, or “how old are you now?” if you’re suicidal, but there is no substitute in the vast language we call English for those two little words.

Last year, I had one of those milestone birthdays that stretched out to a three-day free-for-all. For a change, I’m keeping it on the down low tomorrow. The sparklers, confetti and other festive trappings can be shelved until next year.

A simple “Happy Birthday” will do it for me.

Book 'Em

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Some book title, eh? Just the sort that makes my eyes skittishly dart around the shelf, looking for a read with a little more, shall we say, heft.

But tough times combined with unrelenting boredom make a woman do strange things. It was the tail end of last summer when my 84-year-old mother fell on her tail and sustained a slight fracture to one of her ribs. What followed was a month of the matriarch being confined first to the hospital, then a physical rehab facility and, finally, back to the old homestead. Over my strenuous objections, the rest of my clan hatched an ill-conceived plan to give my Mother 24/7 care until she was able to stand on her own two feet. The scheme lasted exactly one week before we were at each other’s throats but, in the meantime, yours truly was on duty during daylight hours, ping ponging between the stress of playing nurse to a cantankerous patient and the malaise of having zilch to do when said patient was asleep.

That’s when I finally gave in and picked up the above-mentioned best seller, which one of my sisters left on the kitchen table. Maybe it was the circumstances but, much to my pleasant surprise, it wasn’t half bad -- a bit contrived, somewhat mawkish, yet not without a certain lighthearted wit. But what the hell is with that title?

A quick blow through Amazon’s 50 Best Sellers of 2009 tells you today’s writers need to brush up on the three “Cs” – clear, concise, compelling.

Is it really necessary for Stephen King to include the words, “A Novel,” in the title for “Under the Dome”? Surely the “Master of the Macabre” doesn’t believe that we believe a sinister clear dome has actually cut off the residents of a New England town from the rest of the world. Or that the vampires, zombies, werewolves and other crazy-assed creations that make up his prolific bibliography are walking among us. Granted, I’ve met a few dogs that could give Cujo a run for his Milk Bones, but really, give your readers some credit.

Take out the utterly unnecessary “a novel” and at least King kept his title down to three well-chosen words. It’s the non-fiction writers who need to invest in a carton of red Sharpies and delete the subtitles to their titles. How’s this for verbiage that rolls off the tongue: “Fans, Friends and Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age.” Or this: “Popes and Bankers: A Cultural History of Credit and Debt, from Aristotle to AIG.” And finally: “Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan.” With a title this all-encompassing, who needs to read the book?

At the moment, I’m hunkered down with Martin Amis’ novel, “London Fields.” Before the story begins, Amis includes a note explaining how he came to title his book:

“The first kind of title decides on a name for something that is already there. The second kind of title is present all along: it lives and breathes, or it tries, on every page. London Fields is the second kind of title.”

In future, let’s hope all writers, like Amis, go with option two.

Hail a Holy Hellraiser

Long before it became the home for battling chefs and bitchy housewives, Bravo was cable’s cultural bastion for opera, dance, classical music, theater performances and foreign films.

I should know. At the time, I held the now antiquated title of Secretary to the Manager of Bravo’s Program Acquisition Department. Between answering phones (voice mail wasn’t even a twinkle in Ma Bell’s eye) and pounding out letters on an IBM Selectric typewriter (clickey-clack, clickety-clack), I was exposed to all this high-falutin’ fare. The opera, ballet and symphonic stuff left me cold, but it was here that I discovered the exotica of global cinema. For a kid brought up on Disney’s animated saccharine and Cinemascope’s bloated epics, it was a reel smorgasbord. From the French New Wave to the Italian Neo-Realists and the Chinese Fifth Generation, I could feast on a broad array of movies that were way more compelling, insightful and thought-provoking than anything ground out by the Hollywood film factory.

Also unlike the studios, where movie titles are dictated as much by the storyline as the marketing department, foreign filmmakers have the same mastery with a moniker as they do over the medium. Some of my fave titles include Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well, Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (aka Dick Tracy on Mars), Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Lina Wertmuller’s Everything Ready, Nothing Works and Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God.

There’s one foreign writer/director/actor who belongs in the Film Title Hall of Fame and that’s Herzog’s compatriot, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Completing an astonishing forty feature films in less than fifteen years (not to mention two television film series, three short films and twenty-four stage plays), Fassbinder was a bundle of creative energy and a self-destructive libertine who died from an overdose of sleeping pills and cocaine at the age of thirty-seven. Never one to shy away from controversy, he made front page news in his native Germany as much for his tortured personal relationships with both men and women as the provocative political content of his works, pissing off feminists, gays, conservatives, Marxists and Jews.

It’s no wonder he became known as the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema and that his film titles reflect both the turbulence of his work and, ultimately, his life:

Love is Colder Than Death

Gods of the Plague

Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?

Beware of a Holy Whore

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven

Whether Fassbinder ultimately joined Mother Kusters or is hanging in hell with a holy whore, his films and film titles can best be summed up in his own words: “I let the audience feel and think.”

A Sense of En-Title-Meant

Shortly after the New Year, I had an interview with one of the head honchos at a small advertising agency out on Eastern Long Island. Right from the get-go, my gut told me this meeting wasn’t going to be kosher. I applied for a copywriter job posted by this agency two months prior to the meeting and, every couple of weeks or so, would get an e-mail from The Honcho inquiring about things like creative samples and salary requirements. When he finally pulled the trigger and set up a meeting, I agreed only because it was the dead of winter and would have met Dick Cheney at Hooter’s if it would get me out of the house.

In short order, The Honcho admitted my advertising background (mostly entertainment) wouldn’t translate well to his main client base (mostly academic). As I silently calculated how much money I just blew in fossil fuel to make this fruitless, fifty-mile round trip, he began to pick my brain about my past employer, a media company that programs and distributes several national cable networks. Then the truth came out. Seems The Honcho had been shopping around a pilot script to a number of cable television outfits and was looking to me for expertise and contacts.

Talk about a sense of entitlement! I should have made a smoldering beeline for the exit, but I admired The Honcho’s chutzpah and, ashamed as I am to admit it, his good looks didn’t hurt, either. Not only did I give him a contact, I even agreed to take on the ultimate writing challenge of brainstorming a title for the series.

To a non-writer, scribbling out a full page of words must seem infinitely harder than coming up with a brief title for a movie, book, TV show or CD. More words = more work, right? Nay. I can bang out a paragraph in a tenth of the time it takes me to encapsulate a brand in a tight headline. Titles are even trickier.

Take Iggy Pop’s latest release, “Preliminaires.” After “being our dog” for decades, the Igster decided to take a laid back lounge approach on this CD, even growling some of the songs in French (ohh-la-la!). Problem is, “preliminaires” is the French word for the English “preliminaries,” which is how most of Iggy’s fans pronounced it. Merde!

One album title that hit the bull’s eye was Marvin Gaye’s “Here, My Dear.” While going through a bitter divorce from his first wife and Motown founder Berry Gordy’s sister, Anna, Gaye found he didn’t have the scratch to pay her alimony and child support demands, so agreed to give her half the royalties from his follow-up to the smash, “Let’s Get it On.” The resulting album was a raw, sometimes vicious disc that one reviewer called “the sound of divorce on record.” Not only did it take a critical and popular drubbing, generating little money for the ex-Mrs. Gaye, but she even considered suing for invasion of privacy. Take that, my dear.

On the other end of the spectrum, the album title that trumps all for sheer killer appeal yet absolute misrepresentation is by a barely-remembered British prog rock group of the late Sixties/early Seventies called Spooky Tooth. Their fifth album, “You Broke My Heart, So I Busted Your Jaw,” had many an unsuspecting music fan forking over their cash for what the title promised would be a balls-to-the-wall smash-up. What they got instead was a half-dozen so-so blues tracks, rounded out with a couple of piano ballads. As one peeved customer reviewer on Amazon put it, “They give the album that title and don’t write a song to go with it? What a letdown!”

For creative works that really live up to their billing, next week “The Bite” will extend the title search by focusing on the movie titles of Germany’s most prolific, provocative and debauched filmmaker.

Brother, Can You Spare a Click?

I’ve been advised by two of my nearest and dearest, who are also fellow bloggers, that I should consider monetizing this site by allowing Google to post click-through ads. On the one hand, I lost my full-time job over two years ago (thanks, you Wall Street bastards!) and earning my daily bread through freelance writing gigs is slim pickins. On the other hand, you, my faithful readers, would have to click on these ads a ridiculous number of times in order to generate even a few coins for this ink-stained wretch, so I’m not sure it’s worth the trade-off.

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with the advertising game, even more so because I’m one of the players. If you’ve ever watched “Mad Men” and seen the granite-jawed creative director Don Draper artfully cram a campaign down a client’s throat, I can tell you that never happens in today’s ad world. (And neither does all that drinking, smoking and screwing. If only!)

In fact, advertising in America seems to have hit a nadir since those heady days of the suit-wearing, martini-swilling Madison Avenue boys. Ad creatives have simply become a “pair of hands” for clients who have taken a few college English courses, taught themselves Photoshop and been exposed to a relentless stream of advertising since emerging from the womb, so think themselves more than qualified to mess up my job as well as their own. When faced with these creative cretins, my standard response is: “I can balance my checkbook. That doesn’t mean I can prepare your taxes.”

The worst blow against “out of the box” advertising, though, is the “herd mentality.” Let one brand execute a campaign that generates water cooler buzz, and you can bet that ten other brands will unleash a pale imitation of the original. Mark my words, Betty White was the first but will not be the last octogenarian actress to take a severe body blow. I can just see the disclaimers now: “No elderly actresses were harmed in the making of these commercials.”

For really creative advertising, hit the streets of any down-and-out urban area (not hard in these rag-tag times) and turn your eyes downward from the billboards on the skyscrapers to the panhandlers on the sidewalks. Out of the box? Hell, these folks take the damned box, a black magic marker and turn out the kind of compelling, imaginative, hilarious taglines that make me want to retire my keyboard. Then again, they do have the one advantage of not answering to a nitwit client:

Why Lie?? I Need a Cold Beer

I’ll Bet you $1.00 You’ll Read This Sign

Homeless Bill Needs Rich Woman

Wife Has Been Kidnapped! I’m Short 98 Cents for Ransom

Ninjas Killed My Family! Need Money for Kung-Fu Lessons

Betcha Can’t Hit Me With a Quarter

Say, that gives me an idea. Why share the wealth with Google? I could post my own click-through “tin cup.” How’s this for a tagline:

My 2 Cents for Your Two Bits

Jonesin' For The Ocean

I’m not a fan of Billy Joel’s music, but I’ve seen “The Piano Man” interviewed a couple of times and he’s a damned good ranconteur. We’re both born and bred Long Islanders and he sums up the class difference between our two shores with the following clever assessment:

“If you wanted to date a rich girl, you went to the North Shore; if you wanted to date a cool girl, you went to the South Shore.”

I’m not wealthy by any stretch of the purse strings, so you can guess which side of our LI Mason-Dixon line I inhabit. There’s another great distinction between the shores besides what’s in (or not in) our wallets and it can be boiled down to the word “beach.”

If a resident of the North Shore tells you they live by “the beach,” don’t believe it for a second. What the Northies live on, or near, is the Long Island Sound. This notoriously polluted body of water washes up on rock-strewn spits of land that make even the thought of a barefoot stroll an exercise in pain. And you can forget about spreading a towel to catch some rays, unless stretching out on a bed of nails is your thing.

For the real white sand deal, you need to pack up your sunscreen, sunglasses and suds and point your ride south until you hit the Atlantic Ocean. I’ve done my fair share of traveling and can honestly say that the beaches on LI’s South Shore are some of the most beautiful in the world. I’ve parked my bikini-clad butt on many of them – Long Beach, Atlantic Beach, Point Lookout, Gilgo, Tobay, Overlook, Cedar, Smith’s Point, Hot Dog, Robert Moses – but none beats the crown jewel, Jones Beach State Park.

I couldn’t have been more than four or five when my Dad took a passel of us Brady kids and cousins for a dip at Jones’ Zach’s Bay. Dubbed “Diaper Beach” because of its toddler-friendly nature (shallow, no waves), it’s where many an Islander got their first dose of salt water up the nose and serious sunburn on the shoulders. By the time I was in high school, hitching down Wantagh Parkway to reach the teenage wasteland of Field 4 with its blasting radios and bodies baking like human Tater Tots was a regular summer activity. And it goes without saying that my first summer job was at Jones during my college years. If I had a dime for every cocktail I downed in the Field 2 lifeguard shack, I could have been a North Shore girl.

But the paramount reason I love Jones is, perversely, the crowds. With an average of six million people sprawling across it sands during a typical summer season, any idea of spending a peaceful idyll lulled by the soft sound of ocean waves is crushed by a tsunami of humanity, and that’s just the way I like it. If all the world’s a stage, then Jones is a non-stop theater of comedy, drama and farce, with the players parading around half-naked, which adds to the absurdity.

It’s not until I open my ears, though, that this native realizes Jones isn’t a Long Island or even a New York playground but a world-wide tourist attraction. It’s not unusual to hear Japanese being spoken to my left, Spanish to my right, Swedish to my fore and some strain of Slavic to my aft. Master builder Robert Moses got it right when he modeled the Jones Beach Water Tower after St. Mark’s Campanile. Like that Venetian landmark, it still knocks me out that that the beach I consider just another part of my ‘hood is on some foreign traveler’s itinerary.

Let the North Shore keep their riches and their Sound. For my two cents, it’s all about keeping up with the Joneses.

Rage Against the Machine

A couple of weeks ago, a friend sent an e-mail urging me to write an article dispelling the notion that Baby Boomers are a bunch of navel-gazing, hippy-dippy boobs. I wish I could give you his original quote, but I’m scrupulous when it comes to deleting e-mails so this will have to do.

I have no idea what set off his mini screed, but I can tell you his request was met with a somewhat tepid reception on my end. Defending a generation is not the mission of this blog or its writer. I see the world as a level playing field, so you can be an asshat or an arhat whether you’re eight, eighteen or eighty. And although sociologists put me at the tail end of the Boomer generation, I’ve never really felt a part of that vast Sixties subculture. Yeah, I was weaned on The Beatles, The Stones and all the other groovy vibes of that tumultuous decade, but my real allegiance is to the punks of the late Seventies and early Eighties. Besides, the Boomers are like any generation in that they have as many marks in the minus column as the plus column, including being the first “helicopter” parents, for which I will be eternally ungrateful.

But this past Sunday, I heard a feature story on NPR’s “Weekend Edition” which, in light of the current national malaise, made me rethink my position and put fingers to keyboard in praise of an infamous Sixties-era event for which the Boomers deserve a major shout-out.

Tuesday, May 4th, marked the 40th anniversary of the shootings at Kent State. For those who weren’t around for what has to be one of the most heinous criminal acts of a so-called democracy against its own citizens, let me give you a brief rundown:

On April 30th 1970, Richard Nixon, who had promised to end the war in Vietnam during his presidential campaign, announced that he was expanding the war into nearby Cambodia. The response was widespread protests on college campuses across the country, including Ohio’s Kent State University. During the night of May 1st, a crowd of about 120 people – students, bikers and out-of-town kids – rioted on the streets of downtown Kent, causing Governor James Rhodes to call in the National Guard to keep order on the campus. On the morning of May 4th, with about 2,000 students gathered for a protest rally, the Guard made two attempts to disperse the crowd, throwing tear gas canisters and getting pelted with rocks in return. The crowd had now broken up into scattered groups with some of them leaving the area as ordered. At 12:24 pm, with no direct threat of any kind, 29 of the 77 Guardsman abruptly opened fire, sending a volley of 67 bullets across the campus. Four students were killed – two of them non-protestors who were walking from one class to another – and nine were wounded, one of them suffering permanent paralysis.

As appalling as this tragic event was, the aftermath stands as one of the ballsiest moments of the Boomer generation. Running the real risk of getting their brains blown out, four million students went on strike, closing down 900 universities, colleges and high schools across the country. A banner hung out of a window at New York University read, “They Can’t Kill Us All.”

No, but they could, and did, kill two more students just ten days later at Jackson State University, and under very similar circumstances to what went down at Kent State. And yet, the protests continued.

Forty years later, I think we need to take a page out of this particular chapter in our American history, not to mention paying closer attention to the on-going and valiant protests against the regimes in Tehran and Thailand where, believe me, no photographers will be present to document the carnage like the iconic photo from Kent State that accompanies this week’s blog. The next of kin will be lucky to recover the bodies.

To quote Bill Maher, “I’m angry that people aren’t angry.” I’m especially angry that the generation who risked life and limb forty years ago aren’t leading the charge against a financial system that’s now become our greatest domestic threat and a political system where the players are more interested in keeping their jobs than serving their fellow citizens.

Some people believe that hitting the barricades is a job best left to the young, and I tend to agree, but those helicopter parents I mentioned before should be setting the example in word and deed instead of being so tightly wound about their kids’ SAT scores or college GPAs. Maybe if President Obama instituted the draft to fight our two overseas wars (remember those?) that would get the Boomer ball(s) rolling again.

Or, as that Sixties chestnut goes, “Teach your children well.”

Foreign Exchange

It seems like another lifetime, but I once said “I do” and was married for seven years. The relationship foundered for the usual reason – we couldn’t stand the sight of each other anymore – and were delighted to go our separate, happily ever after ways.

I was recently reminded, though, of the one thing I miss about my lawfully wedded life when I overheard my neighbor speaking Italian. My ex’s Mama and Papa were from the same small town in Italy’s Friuli region, so I was heavily exposed to this bella lingua for as long as our imperfect union lasted.

I never approached being fluent, but it got so I could pick up the general gist of a conversation. As with most languages, there were a few words I’d hear constantly, including ecco. Early in our marriage, after another gut-busting Sunday dinner, I asked for a literal translation of ecco and stumped every Italian speaker around the table.

“Does it mean, ‘There you have it?’”

Um, not exactly.

“How about, ‘What else did you expect?’”

Nope, that wasn’t it, either.

The idiomatic inquisition lasted for a few more minutes until I realized the futility of my quest and dropped it for good.

It wasn’t until years later I discovered this is what’s known as a lexical gap. That is, there is no one-to-one word, expression or turn of phrase from the source language to the target language.

For instance, an English word that has a hard time breaking the language barrier is “have.” Vernaculars as far-flung as Arabic, Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish and Welsh don’t have a specific verb to describe this form of all-encompassing possession and, instead, rely on a combination of words. “I have a gun” in English would literally translate as “My gun exists” in Turkish or “There is to me a gun” in Hebrew and “By me there is a gun” in Russian. Our Russian brethren do have a word for “to have” but it’s very rarely used because it can backfire like that gun and be construed as a rude term for getting it off as in, “Do you have a wife?” Get the drift?

All of this native tongue-twisting can get pretty funky when you’re an English-speaking tourist traveling abroad. Being understood verbally isn’t a problem, since body language does a lot of heavy lifting in a face-to-face confab, but reading signs and directions translated into English can be a mind-blowing experience. Some of the more hilarious head scratchers collected by intrepid trekkers over the years include:

On a faucet in a Finnish bathroom: “To stop the drip, turn cock to right”

In a Bucharest hotel lobby: “The lift is being fixed for the next day. During that time we regret that you will be unbearable.”

In a Tokyo bar: “Special cocktails for the ladies with nuts.”

Ad for donkey rides in Thailand: “Would you like to ride on your own ass?”

In a Swiss inn: “Special today – no ice cream.”

In 2004, the BBC polled 1,000 linguists as to which is the world’s most untranslatable word. And the winner is…”ilunga” from the Tshiluba language spoken in the southeastern Congo. Roughly translated, it means “a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time.”

Wonder if those same linguists could help me with ecco.

IMH(N)O

This past Ash Wednesday, I did a penance of sorts in the form of an eight-hour phone conversation with, well, let’s just call him “Mr. Character” and leave it at that.

We’re both Geminis, so keeping the conversation rolling for all those hours wasn’t much of a stretch. Since we’re also both creative types (me, writer; he, musician) talking about the arts took up a fair portion of those 480 minutes. He did throw me a curveball, though, when he asked what I’d choose as “The Great American Novel.” I tried to deflect the question by opining for a few minutes about how I didn’t believe in that particular designation, but Mr. C. is a stubborn man and he kept pressing me for an answer, which I reluctantly gave him.

It’s not that I’m afraid to give an opinion. On the contrary, and usually whether you want to hear it or not. But recommending anything – a movie, a restaurant, a TV show – is a minefield and never more so then giving the thumbs up on a book. I’ve learned this from hard experience because I’m usually the one trawling for a recommendation and have invariably been disappointed. It makes me wonder whether the person who gave me the title knows my taste at all or, worse, if they have any taste themselves. Unlike a movie, TV show or meal, reading a book is a major investment of time, patience and imagination, and one I expect a spectacular return on. Besides, I don’t like to think badly of my family and friend’s aesthetic palate and I don’t want them thinking badly of mine.

One of the most egregious recommendations came my way from my niece and sister who gushed over Wally Lamb’s “I Know This Much is True.”

I’ll tell you what I know is true: When the “Oprah Book Club” seal of approval appears on the cover of a book, it’s the literary kiss of death, at least as far as myself and Jonathan Franzen are concerned. In the dedication, the author himself refers to the bloated, 928-page novel as “a shaggy dog story,” but this mutt is flea-ridden, cross-eyed and lumbering around on three legs. Full of endless repetition, useless digressions and way too much back story, I thought his editor ran out of red ink and then decided only a well-honed machete would do the job. “Lamb’s (book) to the slaughter” indeed.

I’ve also been shamefully seduced by the siren song of the “buzz” book. Case in point: “The Da Vinci Code,” which was nothing more than a screenplay with the technical direction removed. I have to applaud Dan Brown, though, for turning a slight whodunit into two bodacious cash cows – bestseller and box-office smash – proving once again you’ll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the average audience. Rule of thumb: If you’re at the beach and notice that practically every sunburned patron is squinting through the same paperback, cross it off your list.

You’d think I would have learned my lesson by now, but I’m finishing up yet another recommended tome, this one called “This is Where I Leave You” by Jonathan Tropper. I was told it was “hilarious” and, to give the author his due, there are a few guffaw-inducing lines, but the story is numbingly rote: Protagonist loses wife, job, self-esteem and father in quick succession and is forced to sit shiva for seven days with his (you guessed it) hugely-dysfunctional family. No surprise, then, when I turned to the back flap to read about the author and discovered he’s currently adapting the book to the screen. Dan Brown has a lot to answer for.

And now I'm going to break my own rule:

If you’re wondering about my answer to Mr. Character’s query, it's “Gilead” by Marilynne Robinson.

Go. Read. Then give me hell for it.

Freedom to Fail

Surely the most dubious distinction I (under)achieved during my sixteen-year academic career was scoring the lowest recorded grade in the history of my parochial high school on my geometry Regents.

I got a twelve.

Yes, you read that right.

Honestly, I don’t even know how I received a dozen points, unless you’re awarded that for printing your name correctly on the test paper.

You’ve probably put two and two together by now and figured out that math is not my strong suit. I did fine with basic arithmetic and managed to wing it through fractions, but after that I might as well have been deaf to the “language of the universe.” I spent countless hours, on the verge of tears or a major brain aneurysm, trying to count, calculate, measure and generally crack the code of mathematics, but it never added up to me. I clearly remember barging in on one of my brothers during his morning shaving session, begging him to help me with a particularly knotty equation, only to have him slam his razor into the sink’s shaving cream-clouded water as he tried, for the third frustrating time, to explain the answer to Little Miss Knucklehead.

At least that spectacular failure of a Regents score wasn’t due to a lack of instruction, as my brother’s fit of pique and a long line of equally vexed math teachers will tell you. So you can imagine my complete horror when, listening to a call-in show on NPR one afternoon, I heard the father of a fourth grader complain that English grammar was no longer being taught in his child’s public school. According to this dumb-founded Dad, his son’s teacher defended this non-practice by remarking that the kids would learn it “as they go along.”

By that insane logic, not only should I have been able to ace geometry and advance onto trigonometry, calculus and quantum mechanics simply by staring at equations on a blackboard, I would have been the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, and not Stephen Hawking. (Who, by the way, wrote a little tome entitled “A Brief History of Time” which topped the British “Sunday Times” best-sellers list for a record-breaking 237 weeks. I’ll bet English grammar was part of his school curriculum, eh?)

Strange how we correctly believe that mathematics is a complex system of quantity, structure, space and change that needs to be actively taught, but don’t give the rules, morphology and syntax of grammar the same respect. With seven major word classes – noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, determiner – and a few minor ones like interjectors and ejaculations (naughty!), you don’t have to be Einstein to understand these are difficult concepts that are not going to be learned through osmosis. All I’m advocating is that kids be given the same shot at ringing success or spectacular failure with grammar as I was with geometry.

Who knows? Maybe they’ll set a school record of their own.