Diary of a Mad Editor

Cindy Rosmus in this month’s Amsco Extra blog takes on puns. It’s an article on a most hated/most beloved subject. She doesn’t fancy them and while it’s true that most puns are groan-worthy, I’m not inclined to lump all puns into the same big pile of steaming, corn-infested horseshit. I make a huge distinction between the puns most of us use in everyday life — which are usually clichés in addition to being puns (the fact that they’re clichés is a big part of why we hate them). Take the example Cindy gives: "Thank mew very much." I can’t tell you how many times someone’s used that one on me this year alone. And here’s a pun I overheard some guy say to another guy at the DMV: "U.S. money is tainted — it ‘taint yours and it ‘taint mine." Yeah, right? Corny, sure, but it’s true enough to be at least momentarily smirk-worthy before it settles into groan-worthiness.

Cindy says the definition for the pun has been around since 1662. I’d say it was around since maybe a century or so prior to that, but okay, that’s neither here nor there. The point is puns have been around a long time. Even before the pun got it’s name it was part of human language, spanning many cultures and countries. Puns have been around — oh hell, since the Neolithic Age probably. As a literary device it dates back to Gilgamesh the King, the epic poem from Mesopotamia. There is an almost endless list of writers throughout history who’ve used puns in their writings: Aristotle used puns (he called them "paragrams" if I recall), the Latin poets Virgil and Ovid, and Catullus was rather infamous for his sexual puns. The Metaphysical poets loved puns. The Japanese poet, Basho, fer Christ sakes! Mark Twain used puns — even Sam Clemens’s pen name is a pun. Chekhov and Pushkin used puns. In more contemporary literature: Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck,Nabokov, Vonnegut,Joseph Heller,Tom Robbins, Douglas Adams, etc., etc., and so on.

And let’s not forget Shakespeare, the mac daddy of all literary punsters. Cindy isn’t a fan of the Bard or his puns. (Say it ain’t so, Cindy!) How could one not appreciate Willy Shakespeare’s wordplay:

"She made great Caesar lay his sword to bed; / He plowed her, and she cropped" — Anthony and Cleopatra

HAMLET Are you fair?

OPHELIA What means your lordship?

HAMLET That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.

OPHELIA Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?

HAMLET Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness: this was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did love you once.

OPHELIA Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.

HAMLET You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it: I loved you not.

OPHELIA I was the more deceived.

HAMLET Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. Where’s your father?

OPHELIA At home, my lord.

HAMLET Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool no where but in’s own house. Farewell.

OPHELIA O, help him, you sweet heavens!

HAMLET If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, go: farewell. Or, if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool; for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them. To a nunnery, go, and quickly too. Farewell.

Of course, in Elizabethan times, "nunnery" in addition to it’s obvious reference was also a slang term for a brothel. See, not all puns are bad or unsophisticated. And what can we do about puns anyway? They are as human and as ubiquitous as farts. And who doesn’t love a good fart?

Ellis Weiner posted something in the Shout & Murmurs section of the The New Yorker this morning that made me snicker like a child. It’s a nifty satirical piece on the decline of book marketing at major publishing houses — a theme I discussed the other day in a post about a new vampire novel being buzzed about online. What makes this funny is that it’s essentially true. More and more, authors are forced to do the job of marketing their own books. Don’t get me wrong, it was always a good idea for writers to help promote their own books, but nowadays with most of the marketing budgets going to writers like Dan Brown, authors are having to do more than making appearances and signing autographs — they now have to wear the hat of a marketing expert and do a lot of what marketing and publicity departments used to do. I’m not saying that there’s necessarily anything wrong with this. I think the rightness or wrongness of it is beside the point.

Point one is that many writers are ill-equipped to do this work. Point two is that technology, no matter how useful, cannot replace the support and confidence of having a real flesh and blood team of people out there working on a writer’s behalf — I don’t care how many people follow you on Twitter, if they are not buying your book, it doesn’t help you. Point three is that I’m wondering, as writers are forced to serve themselves more and more without the clear support of the publishing houses who contract with them, when does all publishing start to become some form of self-publishing? Now, I realize that by posing such a question, I risk fueling that old argument between self-publishers and those writers who have book deals (although that argument always sounds like an argument between a house slave and a field slave if you ask me). Because, let’s face it, traditional publishing houses still have status. Even if you’re a failed writer who’s one book was published by a major publisher and quickly consigned to the dust bin, you still have a credibility that self-publishers don’t and simple pride would preclude the former from admitting to the latter that traditional publishing houses aren’t the shiny cities on the hill they once were and that self-publishing may not be as bad a thing as it once was, that the lines between them are blurring, that traditional publishers may, in effect, be phasing themselves out of existence.

Last night, it was raining. I have a dial-up connection at home, and when it rains my Internet service is even worse than usual. I can barely connect if, at all and it’s generally impossible to complete even the smallest task online when this happens.

So, I found myself at loose ends. No money to go anywhere, not able to get online, nothing on television and no good books to read. And, since I haven’t received my latest Netflix offering, there wasn’t even a DVD to watch.

I entertained myself by playing the Sims 3 last night. The patriarch of my active Sims family has the “handy” trait and has maxed-out his tinkering skill, which allows him to make quick repairs to broken appliances and do “upgrades” to them. Anyway, there was an option to “boost channels”. I thought this was funny because it seems even the Sims’ virtual world is affected by the digital conversion. I don’t know if giving sims the upgrade gives them cable or Direct TV, but I remember in Sims 1 there used to be a satellite dish you could add to your Sim family’s home to give them extra channels. There are no DirecTV satellite dishes in S3 unfortunately and no extra channels — I think the upgrade just convinces the Sims that watching DirectTV or cable or whatever is more fun than it actually is. Just like real life! I just thought that was funny. On the other hand, I was desperate for amusement so I may have convinced myself that playing this game last evening was more fun than it actually was.