I’m a writer. I write novels, books of nonfiction, mini essays, random thoughts, and occasional pieces. I’ve published more than 40 books, so I’ve been around for a while, in bookstores, at book festivals, in literary mags, a few anthologies. But this is my first venture into Substack, so please bear with me.
My most recent book is Pandexicon, a nonfiction book about the pandemic. It is subtitled How the Language of the Pandemic Defined Our New Cultural Reality, and is a collection of 73 short essays, each prompted by a word or phrase that has appeared in newspapers, magazines, novels, books, conversations, etc., to describe the pandemic. I explore how we use these words not only when we talk about Covid, but increasingly when we talk about things unrelated to Covid. That’s what I mean when I say Covid terms have entered our language the way Covid itself has found a permanent place in our lives, whether we actually got sick or not..
For example, take the word “uptick.” Not being a trader on the floor of the Toronto Stock Exchange, I had not heard the word used in normal conversation before Covid. Now we hear it everywhere. For example, in his book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders tells us that when our sense of the main character in Chekhov’s story “In the Cart” changes from that of a blameless victim to that of someone partially responsible for her own unhappiness, “the result is an uptick in our attentiveness.” Would Saunders have used that metaphor before Covid? I suspect not.
That’s the kind of pondering I like to do. Since the pandemic has been and still is a moving target, and since my book went to the printer’s last December, a few (not nearly enough) things have changed, and I’ll be writing about some of those changes.
I also like to draw, so you’ll see some of my cartoons here, too. Here’s one:
I’m also a translator, from French to English, and I think a lot about what translation is and what it does to us and to the books we read, or think we read.
I write about things I know, but I’m also interested in the things I don’t know but want to know. Writing is a form of exploration, and explorers generally like to have company when they disappear into unknown (to them) territory. Language is an vast field of interconnected rabbit holes. Just this afternoon, for example, I was talking to a friend here in Mexico, where my wife Merilyn Simonds and I spend six months of each year, and we began pondering the word peso. My friend, who lived in India for many years, says he keeps wanting to say paisa instead of peso: in India and Nepal, a paisa is one-hundredth of a rupee. Having lived in Quebec, I mentioned that a dollar in that province is called un piastre, often pronounced pièce, which made me wonder if it was related to the old Spanish coin “piece of eight.” So I dug out my OED and found that piastre is indeed cognate with piece of eight (but not peso, which is cognate with paisa).
In the course of looking up piastre, I came across the word “perissology,” which means “a redundance or superfluity of speech.” Which is what this Substack is in danger of becoming, and so I will stop for now. But I hope you will join me for future peregrinations. The German poet and translator Michael Hamburger once wrote that writing an essay is more like wandering around in a large field than being on a forced march along a straight road. Come wander with me.
I am looking forward to the wanderings and ponderings!