Ask A Book Club Veteran

Dear Book Club Veteran,

I am a relative newcomer to my book club, but the others have been going strong for years.  I’m not about to rock the boat, but what do you do when nobody seems to want to spend much time actually talking about the book? I mean, we touch on it, but most of the time we’re sidetracked on a seemingly limitless range of topics. Any hints on how to tighten this up a bit?

Mandy S, Portland, OR

Dear Mandy,

This is a known phenomenon, and it’s called “book club.” In other words, par for the course. If members really wanted to knuckle down and focus on the book, they’d go to college. The reality is, people need an excuse to get together and this is one of them. As for your desire to keep things on track, just watch for opportunities to drag the book back into the discussion. For example, when someone is talking about her dog, you can say something like, “Did anybody else think it strange that all the dogs in this book are male?”

Dear Book Club Veteran,

I am thinking about starting a book club, and even have five or six members lined up. But I’ve never done this before. Can you suggest a few rules that have served you well in your years at this? I don’t want to be draconian but there are probably pitfalls you’ve learned the hard way…

Rhonda V, San Antonio, TX

Dear Rhonda,

My book club has just two rules, and we generally follow at least one of them. The first rule is: every book we choose must be available in paperback. This obviously makes it cheaper for those buying it, and also increases the chances we can get it from the library, vs. newer releases that have like fifty people ahead of you on the hold list. The second rule is: nobody has to finish the book if they don’t like it, but we’re supposed to hang on for at least 70 pages. (Why 70? I can’t remember.) Once in a while I dislike a book so much I break this rule, as do others, but at least most of us try. (There’s also an unspoken rule that spoilers are totally allowed during our discussion, even if it’s a mystery novel and a member is only 20 pages from the end. I mean, that’s their problem for not finishing, right?) 

Dear Book Club Veteran,

Help! We had a guy join our book club about six months ago who totally dominates the discussion. He wasn’t so bad at first but now that he’s comfortable in the group, he acts like he’s like a professor or something. Nobody knows him well enough to confront him; ironically, the person who invited him has since quit (coincidentally or not). Is there some accepted protocol for kicking a member out?

Sarah V, Denver, CO

Dear Sarah,

I don’t know of any tactful way to ask a member to leave, and the question of who should tell him would be really tough. Plus, if you saw the guy around town afterward it would be super awkward. But I do know a workaround, which my mom’s book club resorted to: though it had been around for over 15 years, its founding members announced that the book club had run its course and would disband. This they did, or pretended to do; once the loudmouth was gone, they quietly reassembled (coordinating via clandestine emails) except for the one unwanted member. You could give that a try!

Dear Book Club Veteran,

How do you hold up a heavy hardback with those limp wrists of yours?

Clint B, Topeka, KS

Dear Clint,

Since you presumably know nothing about my wrists, I’m guessing you’re trying to be funny, insinuating that there’s something gay about a man being in a book club. Maybe you’re some kind of Manosphere cretin. If so, this isn’t the first time my masculinity has been impugned based on my book club. I was once playing poker with a bunch of men (as part of a fundraiser for my kids’ school) and was betting low and folding a lot, so I wouldn’t have to ante up a second time. Finally I got a great hand and bet big, and someone said, “He must have a good hand to bet that high.” Another said, “Maybe he’s just got balls.” A third said, “No, he’s in my wife’s book club, so I know he doesn’t have any balls.” The difference between what that guy said and what you wrote me is that he was actually funny.

I don’t know why book clubs tend to be female, other than the fact that many book clubs only allow women. Here’s an idea: as your first step in rehabilitating yourself, you should start an all-male book club … if you’re man enough to risk it.

Dear Book Club Veteran,

We’re all pretty busy people in my book club, so we only meet for an hour and a half. Of this short time, it seems like we always spend at least half an hour picking the next book. The host selects five, and prints out synopses and reviews and such, and we pass them around and then vote on little slips of paper and it’s just so inefficient. Any suggestions on streamlining this?

Angie W, New York City

Dear Angie,

My book club used to pick our books that way, but then during COVID, perhaps because so much else in our lives was going digital, we switched to everybody submitting a suggestion and then voting on them via SurveyMonkey. This gives everyone time to peruse the options at their leisure, and nobody has to print anything out. The only issue is that it’s a lot of work for whoever gathers the suggestions and produces the survey, not to mention tabulating the results. Chances are you can’t all take turns running the survey because not everyone would have the patience or math chops to get it done. (I award three points if somebody votes for a book as his or her first choice; two points for second choice; one point for third. It’s simple arithmetic but requires  a very methodological approach.)

There are benefits to taking on the work, though, if somebody wants to a) be helpful, b) save money, and c) never have to read a book he or she really doesn’t like. How? Well, as the survey master you can game the system a bit. For one thing, you’ll be the first to know which book won, so if there aren’t many copies at the library you’re first in line. Second, you can vote last, and if there’s a book you really detest, you can figure out what other book has the best chance of beating it, and throw your first-choice vote at that one instead of your own. It’s worked so far: I’ve never had to read the amateurish sci-book about the young, misunderstood video gamer who gains extraordinary power, saves the world, and gets the girl.

Dear Book Club Veteran,

My book club isn’t doing it for me anymore. How do I gracefully resign? I don’t really want to lie; for example, I’m not going to claim I don’t have time because honestly I totally do. But I also don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Any ideas?

Megan A, Ventura, CA

Dear Megan,

I’ve only ever been in one book club (for something like 20 years now!) so I don’t have any experience resigning. One of our members was very candid when leaving, saying something like, “I’ve come to dread these meetings.” I thought that was a bit harsh—so I totally get your point. So here is one idea, that worked great for my wife. She was in a book club that hadn’t announced itself as being feminist-themed, but every single book the members chose were in this category. (She once asked me to buy the book for her, since I’d walk by a bookstore on the way home from work, and I couldn’t remember the author. So I asked the staff if they had Eight Bald Chicks. The bookseller hadn’t heard of it and asked, “Do you have any idea what it’s about?” I replied, “It’s probably some feminist thing.” At his he laughed and said, “Oh, you must mean 8 Ball Chicks!” Which turned out to be correct.)

Eventually my wife wanted out of the club but didn’t want to look unsympathetic to the cause. At the same time, since the club had never said they wanted to focus on feminist literature, she was free to choose any book when it was her turn. She chose Remembrance of Things Past by Proust, and wouldn’t back down when they protested its length. For this she was summarily kicked out of the club on the basis of it “being a poor fit” for her. Fair enough, and at least they made that judgment.

Dear Book Club Veteran,

My book club is mostly great but there’s this one member who’s always sneaking smut into our reading list. She’ll describe something as, say, a historical romance so we’ll go ahead with it, and then fifty pages in there’s this jump scare smutty bit and we’re all like whoa, enough! 

Alicia C, Los Angeles, CA

Dear Alicia,

Evidently you’re not getting anywhere letting this person be the judge of smuttiness; you’ll need to rely on a wider, crowdsourced reading community to help police this. Platforms like BookStagram and BookTok employ an informal rating system based on chili pepper emoticons (🌶️). Decide as a group whether two peppers (i.e., explicit scenes being relatively brief, infrequent, and not very graphic) or three (steamy, highly detailed) should be the cutoff. Leave it to the offending party to delve into all this, as one reader’s three could be another’s five and you don’t want to be guinea pigs.

Dear Book Club Veteran,

My book club’s members take turns hosting. Whenever I host, my husband wants to participate. I wish I could tell him it’s a women-only book club, but it’s not—we do have men. The fact is, I love my husband but get plenty of him every day without him being a part of book club, too. What can I do to, frankly, exclude him without making him feel, well, excluded?

Francine B, Boston, MA

Dear Francine,

That’s a real tough one, but I do have one idea based on my wife’s writing group meetings. They invite spouses to come—not to all of the meetings, but to some—and the spouses form a “splinter group” and watch a movie or go bowling together. With this arrangement your husband wouldn’t feel singled out, and it would keep him from sulking in his room and/or making little trips to the living room on one pretense or other. Talk to your club’s members and see if they like the idea!

Dear Book Club Veteran,

What do you do when your book club is meeting and the talk turns political? This happens occasionally in my club—especially around election time—and though we all basically agree on our politics, I find it really tedious nonetheless. It’s usually one or two troublemakers initially, but then the blathering catches fire and is hard to snuff out. Recommendations?

Mark T, Boulder, CO

Dear Mark,

I’m really sorry to hear that … political talk could ruin a book club (not to mention a friendship or a family, in this day and age). And you’re right, even when people have similar views, it’s still a drag, because it’s usually a stupid little game of one-upmanship. Besides, what point is there sitting around agreeing about something, particularly when it probably has nothing to do with books and reading? 

Once again, my book club hasn’t had this problem to any great degree (and when it has, quick-thinking members led the discussion in a gonzo direction that made sincere political discourse impossible). For your group and others caught in this situation, I recommend something a Berkeley area breakfast club implemented decades ago: a formal prohibition against talking about politics, punishable by a $2 fine (which could go toward refreshments or something). See if enough members support this idea to make it an official rule!

Dear Book Club Veteran,

One of our longtime members had a history of neglecting to read the book, but in the last year or two he has always seemed prepared—but his insights seem pretty simplistic and a little too pat. I strongly suspect he’s resorting to AI summaries just so he can (try to) sound smart. How can I “out” this person?

Kate R, Seattle, WA

Dear Kate,

I admire your fighting spirit … if you’re right about this guy, he needs to go down, hard! I think you can test your theory and expose his fraudulent ways at the same time through a two-step approach. First, respond to one of his insights by delving deeper and bringing something really arcane into the dialogue; for example, “I’m interested in what you said about Pnin being a spiritually complex character, revering life, memory, and beauty rather than any specific deity. But what would you  say about the ‘dazzling Greek-Catholic cross’ he wears when sunbathing?” If this kind of specificity doesn’t cause an incriminating level of visible discomfort, employ the second step: ask about something that categorically is not in the book to see if he fakes having noted it. For example, you could say, “Good point about Clarice’s anxiety. Do you think it was realistic, though, that she ended up fearing her neighbor was  a vampire?” If this member says anything other than, “Honestly, I have no recollection of that,” you can prove (at least to yourself, or publicly if you’re feeling feisty) that he’s an AI-synopsis-reading fraud!

Dear Book Club Veteran,

I don’t know how else to say it, but my book club is pretty nerdy … nobody ever suggests anything lighthearted or fun, it’s always serious stuff like a presidential biography, nonfiction like Guns, Germs, and Steel, or some socially responsible novel about wretched oppressed people. How can I inject something exciting and novel (no pun intended)?

Jill M, Omaha, NE

Dear Jill,

I’m going to reach out to another reader, Alicia in Los Angeles, to see if she’ll put you in touch with the member of her book club who is always sneaking smut into their reading list, disguised as mainstream literature. That person might just become your book club mentor!

A Book Club Veteran is a syndicated journalist whose advice column, “Ask a Book Club Veteran,” appears in over 0 blogs worldwide.

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Can We Unplug Our Kids? - Part II: Mea Culpa

Introduction

I just read a very distressing New Yorker article, “Has Social Media Fuelled a Teen-Suicide Crisis?” which made me remember an essay I posted here a few months back. In “Can We Unplug Our Kids?” I referenced a new book about the epidemic of mental illness among teens, which cited social media as a main cause, and then I made the case that ahead of any societal interventions to protect teens on social media, parents can help fight the tide by setting appropriate boundaries. I cited my own family’s experience to support this position. Looking back, I realize that my post—by focusing only on my own history—neglected to consider how thorny the issue really is across the spectrum of American families. Now I have a sheepish feeling that my essay, if not outright smug, was naïve and incomplete, with air about it of “let them eat cake.” So I’m revisiting the topic here, to do it better justice.

A bit of background

Having just trashed my first post a bit, I won’t expect you to go (re-)read it now. To summarize, I explained how I guessed that some parents are somewhat complicit in teens’ dependence on smartphones, since the parents can use them as digital leash (i.e., keep tabs on their kids). In return the kids get basically unfettered access to everything these phones bring, including a steady stream of social one-upmanship and algorithm-driven news and gossip. Meanwhile, I asserted, parents themselves often set a poor example with these devices, erring on the side of embracing the always-online culture for fear of missing out. Then I explained the draconian online policies my wife and I enforced to good effect, such as no social media, no gaming, no phone until high school, no smartphone until college, and limits on video streaming and time online. My post explained how this kept my kids from getting sucked too far into the online world, and had the added (and unexpected) benefit of possibly making them more autonomous and resilient as young adults.

Looking back, and especially in light of the recent New Yorker article, I realize my focus was too much on parents and what they can control, without enough examination of the size and complexity of the challenge they’re up against. Sure, my family was up to the challenge, but I didn’t fully grasp how much my own privilege and luck played into that. I hope to shed more light on the larger problem, so that parents who happen to read this can a) cut themselves some slack, and b) understand how important it is that society better regulate this profit-driven online world to take some of the burden off of parents.

Privilege

It’s embarrassing mistaking one’s own privilege for a just, merit-based society. Decades ago I applied for a job and the branch director, who had the final say in hiring me, was the last to interview me. He stood about six-foot-five, and the first thing he said to me was, “You’re tall … I like that!” Obviously he was joking, and I took the joke as a harmless ice-breaker, but over time I’ve come to appreciate that affinity bias is a big deal, and the fact that this director and I could laugh about it really underscored how unfair it was. If I’d been short and he’d joked, “You’re short, but I’ll try to look past that,” I wouldn’t have found it funny at all. I’m reminded of a great New Yorker cartoon (click here and advance to cartoon 10) where a small fish is thinking, “There is no justice in the world,” and a larger fish about to eat him is thinking, “There is some justice in the world,” and an even larger fish, about to eat him, is thinking, “The world is just.”

The ability my wife and I had to set limits on our kids’ online life had everything to do with privilege. If these girls were raised by, say, a single mother working two jobs to make ends meet, they wouldn’t have benefited from nearly as much oversight. My wife was able to stay home with the kids, and thus have all kinds of time and energy to build rapport with them, and read to them, and never needed to use a TV or computer as a babysitter.

Meanwhile, I worked from home part of the time, so I could help set the right example, and have more time with the kids, and (since our one shared family laptop lived down in the home office) could even supervise them somewhat. I had the luxury of requiring them to log, on paper, their online time, and could police this. Moreover, through my job I had a solid understanding of how tech companies market online services, and how concepts like page views, dwell time, and share/forward metrics are used in designing and “improving” their products. I also had enterprise-grade firewall and WiFi equipment, and the know-how to use it, which made it possible to shape and limit my kids’ Internet access.

Obviously not every family enjoys this kind of privilege. This really hit home for me when I read, in the recent New Yorker article, about a couple who lost a daughter to suicide after her torturous experience online, culminating in Instagram’s algorithm sending her suicide-related content. Her mother lamented:

“In the Black community, low-income, where I teach, parents are not educated enough on any type of technology … We [parents] thought we were two well-educated people. I want to educate the parents first and then the students: What’s an algorithm? What do these sites do?”

Here’s an analogy. Suppose the sidewalk between your home and your kids’ school were littered with broken glass, razor blades, and used syringe needles. If you have the time to walk your kids to school, you’d see this for yourself and would take immediate action. If you don’t walk your kid to school, but you’re a connected and concerned parent, perhaps you’d hear about this problem from other parents. Meanwhile, even a totally overworked parent who doesn’t have time to talk to other parents would benefit from the overall community’s awareness of the problem. But social media, unlike my simplistic sidewalk scenario, features threats that are invisible. Addictiveness is built into these products by design, for profit; the algorithms driving teens’ behavior are opaque to anyone outside the industry; and these algorithms care only about increasing dwell time and shares, even if this means sending suicide-themed videos to depressed kids, instead of the phone number for a suicide hotline. How could a typical parent grasp this threat? It is a sad state of affairs that only a parent who has a background in tech, and who has time to read news articles like the one in The New Yorker, knows he needs to inculcate his kid practically from birth on the downside of the online world.

Luck

In my previous post on this topic I also failed to appreciate the role that blind luck played in my family’s navigation of the Internet and social media. For one thing, we got an early start, simply because my brother has kids a fair bit older than mine and I got to learn from their experience. One incident comes immediately to mind. Decades ago, because I wanted personal email with no ads, I bought a service with at least a dozen mailboxes on my own private domain. I used this for my own address, my wife’s, my mom’s, and my mother-in-law’s, and offered it to my brothers and their kids. One of them eventually came to me asking to be set up because, to her great anguish, Google had abruptly shut off her Gmail, deleting her address book and all her stored emails, because they decided nobody under the age of thirteen should have it. (This was probably because of their AdSense context-based ads.) The wrinkle was that Google never know any user’s age until and unless that user tried to sign up for Google+, their fledgling (and ultimately unsuccessful) social media platform that featured an age limit, hence the suddenness of the Gmail lock-out. This abrupt change caused quite a stir on the Internet, and I read—with fascination—the comments that parents put below one of the articles. One outraged parent, lamenting the disruption this caused his daughter, ranted, “My daughter practically lives online!” I couldn’t detect any irony in this statement, so I guess he saw no problem with her behavior, and I found this more than a little spooky.

I was also surprised, although I perhaps shouldn’t have been, that my young niece would blithely sign up for a social media account without thinking to ask her parents, and that if Google+ had accepted her, her parents might not have even known she had the account. This episode got me thinking generally about the ramifications of kids being online, before my own kids were even old enough to participate, which was a really helpful head start. Had I happened to be the firstborn instead of the last, I’d have been blindsided like so many parents.

I also got lucky, as a parent, based on my own approach to popularity and the regard of my peers. My parents were oddballs, and we grew up largely without TV, and my father in particular had an air of superiority which unfortunately rubbed off on me, the upshot being that in elementary school I was nerdy and mostly shy but also a bit arrogant. For example, I was outspoken about hating football, and pooh-poohed other kids for wearing sweatbands on their wrists like their favorite players and for collecting little toy NFL helmets. My shy-plus-slightly-arrogant personality came across as total arrogance, which (in combination with my nerdiness) irritated people and made me an obvious target for bullying. Being a pariah, and then rising above it when I was older, taught me a lot. More than other kids, I think, I realized how tenuous and ultimately pointless popularity was and is, the result being that instead of suffering from FOMO (fear of missing out) like a lot of adults, I have FONMO (fear of not missing out) or perhaps, as one of my nieces puts it, FOFI (fear of fitting in). Thus, I was able to easily model opt-out behaviors for my daughters; my strict policies would have chafed a lot more if I hadn’t walked the walk.

But wait, there’s more. It likely wasn’t just circumstance that biased me against putting very little stock in the feedback loop of social media. I’ve been reading lately about inborn differences in personality around how people respond to social rewards. As detailed here, reward dependence (RD) has been correlated with very specific neurotransmitter system, and “individuals with high RD personalities have a disposition to recognize salient social cues which in turn facilitates effective communication, warm social relations, and their genuine care for others, but these individuals are then disadvantaged in being excessively socially dependent.” My wife self-identifies as being very low-RD, and experience bears that out; she dislikes being the center of attention to the extent that I had to practically beg her even to have a wedding. I’m not much different (for example, I’m perfectly content to labor over this blog even though I receive very little indication that people are even reading, much less enjoying, my posts). So by random chance, we both appear to be predisposed by our brain chemistry to avoid online likes and smileys, which has given us a concerted parenting approach that includes, for example, disallowing social media on our WiFi. Many high-RD parents might naturally assume that the positive feedback their kids get online could be an unalloyed good thing.

On top of all this, reward dependence is thought to be innate and moderately heritable, and indeed my kids strike me as fairly low in RD, just like my wife and me. Thus, the success we’ve had with our restrictive policies may have as much to do with genetic traits as it does with our ability to explain and justify our position on phones and social media. Other parents, with higher-RD kids, might not have it so easy.

My final examination of luck involves the love my wife and I have for reading. We both have had a lifelong appreciation of books that so far nothing—not Netflix, YouTube, podcasts, or social media—has been able to compete with. This made parenting easier because we could enjoy, right alongside our kids, the books that had to stand in for other forms of entertainment. I can honestly and sincerely tell you that I enjoyed all the books I read to my kids, even the earliest ones made of fabric so the hapless kid couldn’t accidently whack himself with it and dent his forehead. It is without exaggeration that I can say I actually looked forward to reading Clifford’s Bathtime —a board book so basic and simple I had it memorized after only like the twentieth reading—every time one of my daughters asked for it. I combed the online used bookstores to buy up the books I’d enjoyed as a boy, like Cowboy Sam, the Moomintroll books, and the William Pène du Bois Otto books, so I could relive them with my kids. While other dads were watching sports on TV or manning the grill, I was sitting in the La-Z-Boy with one or both kids reading Bridget and the Gray Wolves or Hepcat. I realize this behavior is not normal, and in fact (though I probably shouldn’t admit this), half the reason I even wanted kids was to get to read to them from whatever book struck their fancy. I look forward to having grandkids for this very reason, and in the meantime here’s a recent photo of me reading to my great-niece.

In contrast, I once saw a dad reading to his kid in a doctor’s office waiting room, and he was skipping words and even entire sentences, apparently figuring his kid couldn’t tell the difference so why not get through the book faster? I was scandalized and my impulse was to drag the guy outside and beat him. And yet I realize not all parents are that into books, especially kids’ books, and thus they may have a harder time keeping their kids entertained without resorting to laptops, tablets, or a phone. What a random gift, this love of reading. I highly suspect that the sting of a non-digital life was made easier to bear for my children when they could curl up in my lap for a dose of not just dopamine but serotonin, or (later in their childhood) a good discussion of dramatic irony, or a debate about which translation of Nikolai Gogol is superior.

In conclusion

I hope you, too, love reading, since I admittedly rambled a bit just now. Suffice to say, if you are a parent struggling to compete with the endless barrage of images, videos, and messages flooding your kid(s) through their devices, and with this nonstop virtual party they’re attending that you weren’t invited to, just do your best. And, as a voter and a concerned citizen, please also do what you can to help reign in these tech companies who clearly are putting profit above any sense of social responsibility. I realize now that not all parents are in the same position I have been to impose strict limits on their kids’ activities online, and I apologize if my earlier post implied that it all comes down to responsible parenting. The problem is much, much larger than that.

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The Oxford Comma

Introduction

A friend of mine asked me recently, “Hey, did you blog about the Oxford comma?” This was basically entrapment. Having posted 690 times to albertnet, I feel like all the easy topics (e.g., bike gearing, pasta, flatulence, cycling, the spelling of “kindergartner”) have been exhausted, so I struggle to come up with new ones. Thus, an inquiry like this is basically an assignment.

Herein I will explore the raging debate around the serial, aka Oxford, comma: what is it, who uses it, should it be used, should we care, and why do we care?

What is the Oxford comma?

When a sentence includes a list of things, the Oxford comma is the one placed before “and,” as in this example:

“I bought some gum, a lighter, and a knife.”

Opponents of the Oxford comma would omit that final comma:

“I bought some gum, a lighter and a knife.”

Opponents assert that this final comma is redundant because “and” gets the job done by itself. Proponents cite the lack of clarity that can result if this comma is omitted, as in this classic example:

“We invited the strippers, J.F.K. and Stalin.”

Had the Oxford comma been used in the above sentence, nobody would be wondering if J.F.K. and Stalin were strippers. Obviously you could dodge the grammar and say clarity is achieved by knowing that neither world leader looked good naked, but that’s cheating.

Strong opinions

I emailed three of my wife’s former newspaper colleagues (the “recovering journalists,” I call them) to get their take. Ed immediately wrote back, “I don’t like the Oxford command [sic] anyway [sic], shape or form!” Rachel opined that “the Oxford comma is redundant and ungrammatical,” gave some rationale for her position, and concluded, “I will die on this hill.” The third, Monique, was the most emphatic of all, declaring, “I literally included this line in a [résumé] cover letter: ‘Colleagues know me as positive, trustworthy, calm in a crisis and always ready to battle the Oxford comma!’”

Oddly, when I inquired with my bike team email group, most of the responses were the opposite. Seven supported the Oxford comma, one didn’t care, and one wrote “depends.” My friend Pete, who started this whole thing, and is also a cyclist, is strongly for it. And this article in Bicycling mentions that American pro cyclist Chad Haga is a big fan of the Oxford comma. So why are cyclists different from journalists? I’ll get to that. But first…

Should we use the Oxford comma?

I favor the Oxford comma, for the simple reason that many writers don’t have the judgment to decide, on a case-by-case basis, whether that final comma is needed. A journalist might pause to consider the matter, and would understand sentence structure well enough to make the right call, but so many people wouldn’t. Therefore, we should have a simple rule that can be applied every time. The comma in “apples, bananas, and pears” isn’t hurting anything.

I suppose the recovering journalists would argue that the “extra” comma slows things down—and journalists are all about speed. Their greatest fear seems to be that the reader will lose patience and stop reading. I suspect this is somewhat inaccurate, because the traditional audience for newspapers has all but evaporated, and those (like me) still willing to pay for a home subscription actually love to read, and aren’t in a constant panic about it taking too long. (Never mind that the doomscrollers end up reading a tremendous amount, though in tiny bite-sized pieces.)

Meanwhile, not all text is news, and when clarity is lost in certain contexts, such as law, the effect can be disastrous. Long ago, when I was working my first corporate job, our office split off from the parent company, very acrimoniously. I was charged with reviewing the split-off agreement, which included language around how long our consultants could continue using software that had been developed in-house. Due to the lack of an Oxford comma, it wasn’t clear whether all six software applications could be used, or just the last one in the list. I almost spoke up about this, but for some reason I just didn’t. (Maybe I was just tired after a futile debate with my boss over apostrophes.) Well, lo and behold, the former parent company ended up suing us for continuing to use all six apps, and though we eventually prevailed, the lawsuit wasted well over a month, cost gobs in legal fees, and was a massive distraction. I should have spoken up … but if the Oxford comma had been the law of the land, I wouldn’t have had to.

This kind of thing surely happens a lot. Some years ago, as described in this New York Times article, a Maine dairy company had to pay $5 million to drivers because the overtime policy, as written into Maine law, wasn’t clear about what types of work were exempted. The lack of clarity opened the door to the (ultimately successful) overtime claim. As if the $5 million wasn’t bad enough, Maine revised the law very crudely. You see, they couldn’t just add the Oxford comma, because they were dead set against it. As described here, “the Maine Legislative Drafting Manual … specifically instructs lawmakers to not use the Oxford comma.” So they came up with a grotesque new construction: “The canning; processing; preserving; freezing; drying; marketing; storing; packing for shipment; or distributing of” is how they arranged their sequence. They just replaced the Oxford comma with a semicolon, understanding that punctuation is required before the “or” but refusing to make it a comma. I think anyone who cares about words and grammar would agree that’s a monstrosity, and that this overly zealous adherence to the anti-Oxford-comma stance is absurd.

Of course the anti-Oxford-comma group would say fine, use it when it’s truly necessary, but omit it the rest of the time, because it’s jarring and slows the reader down. An essay in the Daily Californian states, “As readers, our brains are trained to pause when we see commas.” Well, yes, but when reading a sequence, we pause at each comma (which is what they’re for) and we also pause for the implicit comma suggested by “and.” If we didn’t, we’d get tripped up. Frankly, I think the lack of comma slows me down because I find it jarring—it’s like being clotheslined.

That this lack trips me up, but doesn’t bother the recovering journalists, suggests I’m reading different stuff, such that this serial comma seems normal to me. My favorite magazine, The New Yorker, famously defies the Associated Press Stylebook in always employing it. (Mary Norris, their “comma queen,” explains her rationale here.) The Oxford comma is also employed by most of the novelists I read. (I just spot-checked the last one, Tana French, and have confirmed she’s indeed in the pro-comma camp.) On a hunch, I searched the index of Vladimir Nabokov’s Strong Opinions to see if he weighed in on this matter, and while there’s no entry, the opening sentence of the book happens to employ this comma: “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.” As for the absence of serial commas in the Times, I don’t exactly read that paper anyway … I usually just skim it.

So why do cyclists seem to promote the Oxford comma? My wife’s theory is that more of us are engineer-types, and I will say that the loveliness of bicycles as mechanical objects is a big part of the sport’s allure, whatever our background. Moreover, anyone who has to properly dial in spoke tension, brakes, and indexed shifting generally has a healthy respect for being methodical and precise, even at the expense of time and effort. I will go one step further and suggest that road cycling is a good way to learn patience. I rode up Mount Diablo yesterday and was acutely aware how long that takes … halfway up the climb I thought, “Cool, only half an hour to go” and then realized, wait, that’s a long time to suffer in 90-degree heat. (And then it’s two more hours riding home.) To me, the kind of brisk, comma-avoidant sentences favored by journalists are aesthetically at odds with the experience of long-distance cycling, which is so often a slog. I don’t spin the pedals like a hamster … I like to stand up and mosh away at a low cadence … shove, shove, shove. The brief lull at the top of each pedal stroke is a bit like a comma.

Should we care about the Oxford comma?

Two things have stood out for me in researching this post. First, the responses to my inquiry—not just those that supported my position, but also the ones that didn’t—were a joy to read. Well, actually, not all of them. The one who replied “Who gives a f—?” didn’t please or inspire me. (Another replied with that comment but only to direct me to this Vampire Weekend rock video.) Apathy toward language bothers me in this era of STEM-obsessed non-readers who prefer podcasts and YouTube over the written word. My second observation is that reading various articles about the Oxford comma has been an extremely pleasant way to pass the time. (In addition to what I’ve quoted from, several other articles, like this one, greatly amused me). Readers and writers who get fired up about linguistic minutiae are my people. What side of the fence we’re on is less important.

Case in point: my friend Trevor took me to task, years ago, for using two spaces after a period. While I debated this heartily at the time, I have now conceded that he’s right … not because two spaces was never helpful, but because lots of modern software doesn’t handle a pair of spaces correctly. It’s just not worth fighting modern convention. But what I didn’t expect, when I conceded this point, is that now, years later, seeing two spaces looks wrong to me. My taste has adjusted, which is a reminder that opinions can be malleable … but apathy is absolute. 

Why do we care?

Where the Oxford comma debate is concerned, one thing is perfectly clear: those with an opinion hold it strongly. But why should this be, when the matter hinges on such a subtle point, and the English language is so convoluted to begin with? I suppose that once you’ve made up your mind what’s right and what’s wrong, every instance of the “wrong” usage feels like an affront. Perhaps it’s the same way we respond to fashion: once we’ve decided fanny packs are dorky, we wouldn’t be caught dead wearing one, even though a whole lot of people (mostly tourists, it seems) just love them.

The Oxford comma, then, could be considered a matter of fashion, just like anything else. In his New Yorker essay “A Tale of Two Cafés,” Adam Gopnik examines the phenomenon of two perfectly good neighboring cafés in Paris, the Flore and the Deux Magots, one of which is always preferred and the other shunned—even though their popularity flip-flops over time, according to the whims of Parisians. Gopnik quotes a “dour friend” who sums up the matter as intrinsic to human nature:

The relationship between the modishness of the Flore and the unmodishness of the Deux Magots isn’t just possibly arbitrary. It’s necessarily arbitrary… The reason that, when you place any two things side by side, one becomes chic and the other does not is that it’s in the nature of desire to choose, and to choose absolutely.

I think that’s a big part of it, anyway. Beyond that, the Oxford comma is just plain correct. I mean, isn’t that obvious?

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Ode to Cat

Introduction

If you are a cat person, you might be predisposed to like the following poem … unless, of course, you decide it fails to do cats justice, though judging me harshly might also be enjoyable. If you’re a dog person, perhaps this poem will help you to see the light and change your ways before it’s too late.

The Poem

Ode to Cat

“To be or not to be,” that’s just BS.

“To do or not to do?” is what I ask.                          2

Are weekends best for resting, to de-stress,

Or time to chase down countless little tasks?

I ponder this and then I see my cat.

As if to taunt me, all she does is nap.                       6

She looks so wise … could this be where it’s at?

I pick her up and put her on my lap.

The cruel, accursed beast—she never stays!

A rescue cat, she’s skittish as they come.               10

To run for cover’s just how she allays

Her fear (though nothing’s what she’s running from).

Some weekend mornings, I will rise at dawn

In quest of precious, peaceful writing time.           14

I creep downstairs and put the kettle on.

The stars line up: the moment feels sublime.

Warm mug in hand, I settle down and start

To gather up my thoughts—but what is this?        16

My kitty’s joined me … bless her little heart!

She kneads my lap … O what a treat this is!

But now I can’t get any writing done.

I can’t disrupt my cat, she needs this lap.              20

My little plan will have to be postponed.

I must hold still throughout this creature’s nap.

By chance I find a novel close at hand

And just like that, my morning plan’s recast.        24

Before I’d had such grand, ambitious plans

But now I want to make this moment last.

    To do or not to do: my cat knows best.

    With help from her, the matter’s put to rest.     28

Footnotes & commentary

Title: Cat

I could have written this for my cat in particular (i.e., Ode to Freya), but I want to give a shout-out to housecats in general. (Note to Berkeleyites: I know that by city resolution, the term “pet” is out in favor of “companion animal” and “owner” has been replaced by “human guardian,” so the phrase “my cat” may startle you. Yeah, yeah, I know you can’t “own” an animal. I’m tempted to apologize, but then Freya just feels like “my cat” and I refuse to be disingenuous about this. I also gather that in some quarters “Berkleyan” is strongly favored over “Berkeleyite” so I’m tempted to apologize for that, too—but haven’t you folks derailed this commentary long enough?)

Line 1: BS

Is it verging on blasphemy to call BS on Shakespeare? Hey—not so fast. I’m actually calling BS on Hamlet, not his creator. Why does Hamlet consider suicide, when he’s such a bright guy he can spew perfect iambic pentameter off the cuff? Okay, fine, his dad died and his mom is marrying an asshole … boo hoo hoo. Get a backbone, Hamlet, would you please? I can answer his hand-wringing “to be or not to be” quandary in one word: be. It’s too bad Ophelia couldn’t take a page from Paloma Faith’s playbook (well, songbook) and tell Hamlet, “Don’t say nothing/ Just sit next to me/ Don’t say nothing/ Sshhh/ Just be, just be, just be.”

Line 3: resting, to de-stress

The phrase “de-stress” irks me a bit, summoning as it does the cliché-ridden lingo of corporate America. But that’s exactly what I need to connote here, because working in this realm is what tires and stresses me out so much.

Line 4: countless little tasks

I feel like during the week, I can barely keep my head above water on the home front. This means anything extra—fixing my bike, organizing the garage, mailing a package—can feel like a really big deal. If I dig deep and take on this kind of crap, I head into the next work week more tired than ever and gradually start to augur in. On the other hand, if all I do all weekend is rest and recover, I feel like I don’t have a life outside of work. It’s an ongoing dilemma.

Line 6: as if to taunt

No, I don’t think cats are actually sophisticated enough to taunt anybody. Conversely, I’m sure they aren’t attuned to sarcasm, which is why I feel completely free to say to my stretched-out, luxuriating cat, “Freya, you really need to slow down—you can’t keep burning the candle at both ends like this.”

Line 7: looks so wise

Would we love our pets so much if we didn’t project positive traits onto them? Just like dogs appear to smile, or to have thoughtful, penetrating eyes, cats surely look wiser than they are. It’s an illusion I enjoy, so I let myself believe it most of the time.

Line 8: put her on my lap

In my experience, there are two kinds of cats: the kind that love to jump onto your lap and do so freely, and the kind who generally avoid your lap. I have yet to encounter a cat who is blasé or ambivalent about this, so it’s pretty pointless to put a cat on your lap and expect him or her to stay.

Line 9: cruel, accursed beast

Given what I just said, isn’t it totally unfair to deride my cat this way? Of course it is, but frankly, as foolish as my behavior is, everyone in my household feels affronted, every time, when Freya bounds away. I never said humans were wise either.

Line 10: rescue cat

What, you haven’t heard the term “rescue cat”? Well, I haven’t either. But we all hear the phrase “rescue dog,” usually spoken with just a whiff of self-congratulation. Not that I would take anything away from someone kind enough to rescue an unfortunate homeless dog. But I got this kitten from the pound … isn’t that a rescue, too? Not according to the Pet Adoption page on Wikipedia on which the phrase “rescue dog” appears six times  but “rescue cat” not once.

Here’s the Frey when she was very young:

Line 10: skittish as they come

As a tiny kitten, Freya was a stray, and this has left its mark. A car door slams a block away and she races across the room and hides. A shoe drops upstairs and she stiffens, eyes wide, threat level orange.

As a tiny kitten she liked to climb into this tiny basket. It’s amazing she even fit. I suppose she felt secure there, perhaps almost like being swaddled.

Line 12: nothing’s what she’s running from

Sometimes Freya is just bored and pretends there’s danger, just to have an excuse to race across the house. After five minutes of this she’s ready to sleep it off, of course.

Here she is in a playful moment.

Line 12 would be near the end of a standard sonnet (just before the rhyming couplet at the end). I’m not a good enough poet to condense all my content into so few lines, so I just kept going.

Line 17: bless her little heart

Though I’m not real clear on the details, I’m vaguely aware that “bless your heart,” at least in the South, isn’t exactly a compliment. That’s about right, because the first moments, when Freya has decided to try out my lap, mean nothing. This is her nervous period when I’m expecting her to suddenly change her mind and leap off my lap, so this seemingly loving expression could well be followed immediately by “you little shit.”

Line 18: kneads my lap

I have a little claw trimmer that I use to keep my cat’s claws from getting too sharp … thus, it is neither painful nor ruinous to my clothing when she does this classic pet trick.

Note how her tail is hooked around her front leg there.

Line 20: needs this lap

You might accuse me of using this phrase just for a nice poetic shimmer so soon after “kneads my lap.” After all, I’ve made the case that Freya is on the antisocial side, and it’s commonly theorized that cats only sit on us for the heat. But in this case, I had the heater going! Nine times out of ten she’ll take a heater vent over a lap, but that tenth time? Remember, this cat had a traumatic kittenhood. It just might be that some modicum of feline-human connection is actually important to her. Maybe she also treasures this particularly quiet time when she can finally relax enough to succumb to a  lap.

Line 21: have to be postponed

So often, postponing writing for even twenty minutes during this enchanted morning time means losing that twenty minutes forever. When the family is up and around, I kind of want to be distracted. When my daughter says, “Dad, let’s get a bagel!” I wouldn’t even consider saying, “I’m busy [needlessly] writing [endless prose that nobody will ever read], sorry [but not sorry enough to get over my self-importance].” Full disclosure: we’ve gone for bagels only like twice, but it’s a matter of principle. (It sure isn’t a matter of gastronomy; I’ve come to accept that you can’t actually get a proper bagel outside of NYC.)

Line 22: must hold still

Do I really have to hold so still that I can’t even type on my laptop? Most of the time, yes … especially when I’m juggling a coffee cup as well. Plus, early in the morning before the caffeine kicks in, I’m still pretty vulnerable to sloth and the cat plays a big role in that … she’s a terrible influence. If she were the kind of cat who always wanted to be on my lap, it wouldn’t be special and I’d probably make her leave so I could work.

Since I’m a sucker for “the exception that proves the rule,” here’s a photo of Freya sitting on me without preventing me from writing. In fact, here’s a bit of irony: if you zoom in, you’ll see she’s sitting on me even as I compose the very poem you just read.

That said, it’s a terrible photo, which attests to the rarity of this scenario. If this happened a lot, I’d have a lot better photo of it.

Line 23: by chance … a novel

Well, it’s not actually random chance that there was a novel within arm’s reach. My wife and I were both English majors and our house is filled with books. I read a lot—not nearly as much as I should, actually, and I could easily imagine spending whole weekend reading. The problem is, this would feel extravagant, almost profligate, since reading—for all its value and ability to improve my mind and soul—is still a form of consumption, and everything I consume dies with me. The impulse to write constantly competes: shouldn’t I be creating something, even if it’s only an amateur record of an ordinary life, that will probably be casually deleted shortly after my death when my kids neglect to pay the Internet server bill?

Line 25: grand, ambitious plans

You’re not allowed to laugh at me over my assertion that blogging represents a grand, ambitious plan. I was making fun of myself, so you’re required to laugh with me or not at all.

Line 25: make this moment last

I refuse to strike or modify this line because it happens to exactly capture what I’m doing here: I expect this time with the cat to last only a little while, and I do want to extend that as much as possible. That said, I concede that this phrase sounds pretty cheesy, like a Kodak ad. So now you can laugh at me.

Line 27: to do or not to do

This return to my opening salvo would be punchier if my poem didn’t drag out to twice the length of a regulation sonnet. What can I say? I’m no Shakespeare.

Line 28: to rest

This last word, rest, seems like the perfect way to end a poem about a cat, doesn’t it?

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