On their way to Austin, my parents stopped in Michigan to see my 93-year-old grandmother, who read the first few pages of my book manuscript, which my parents were toting along. The book, which my parents were reading too, is now on my kitchen table. On the title page, underneath the disclaimer, she wrote a single comment that sums up not only this week (as I try to juggle wedding plans with book logistics) but a lot of the tensions and joys of much of my life:

When and where do you have any time for romance?

That'll make you sit up and listen.

UPDATE: My agent writes: "I think I love your grandmother."

No milk. No bread. No eggs. Thirty unopened bottles of champagne, five gallons of tequila, and a case of red wine. Lilies, leftover from the bride’s bouquet, in a new crystal vase on the kitchen table. Remnants of a bouquet from a shower. In the refrigerator, aluminum tray of barbecue brisket and chicken. Aluminum tray of potato salad. Two large bags of frozen hushpuppies. Microwave. Coffee maker. Ten yard bags filled with leaves and twigs, raked by uncle. New dishes stacked on couch. Bicycle in living room. Food processor in box in living room. Food processor, out of box, on kitchen table. Half unpacked suitcase in bedroom. Bag of books from three day getaway on a lake – we never cracked a single one.

And that’s the physical aftermath, or some of it, anyway. The emotional aftermath: imagine a storm that whips through but instead of breaking windows and dropping branches, it sprouts things and coaxes the flowers out. A love storm. That's what it was like.

The novelist in me likes to imagine that Ken Lay, newly innocent, is not really dead, but that he paid to fake his death and escape. The conspiracy theorist in me, who reflexively pimps the novelist's plot, wonders if he's alive and well in Paraguay under the care of friends.

As Papillon liked to say, Viva la cavale!

Got a phone message from a reporter at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, said he's doing a story on Johnson Smith Co., a mail order company that since 1914 has sold "novelties": whoopee cushions, plastic dog turd, fake vomit, exploding cigarettes, garlic gum, etc. Now, I just happen to know something about Johnson Smith, because as a college freshman I took a pop culture course with Bob Jackall, who later introduced me to Erving Goffman and suggested I send my term paper -- let's call it a cultural history of the whoopee cushion -- to a journal. (In 1991 the Journal of Popular Culture published it. No, don't go looking for it. Please don't feed the juvenilia.

Turns out that Johnson Smith is based in Sarasota, so Billy Cox, the reporter, gets the assignment to write about them as a Halloween-themed feature.

This is how Cox quotes me:

Also among those countless young hordes enamored of JSC's comic-book ads peddling garlic gum and X-Ray Specs was Michael Erard, who wrote an undergraduate essay precocious enough to rate a spread in the "Journal of Popular Culture" in 1991.

Now a freelance journalist who doubles as an editor at the University of Texas school of nursing in Austin, Erard grew up in rural areas of Colorado and New Hampshire and says JSC provided him with an idealized link to another life.

"Novelties are sort of like prosthetics or crutches that allow you to break the social frame if you're not gifted in storytelling or joke-telling," he says. "I never went to those urbane parties in the city, and the adults in my family weren't into practical jokes. So I have these vague memories of saving my quarters and fantasizing about how great it would be to hang around adults, with that kind of humor, and bust up parties with phony blood and things of that nature."

A couple of things: I like the novelties-as-humor-technologies thesis, which I developed in my paper, better than I like the crutch thesis -- a whoopee cushion is sometimes the better way to get a laugh; and if I use a hammer to nail nails, it's not because my hands are too soft. The frame notion I didn't discover until later, reading Goffman and then Gregory Bateson (whose essay, "A theory of play and fantasy," has been a touchstone).

In Um... there's a chapter about Kermit Schafer, the blooper empresario, who grew up with Allan Funt in Brooklyn; blooper humor works partly because they break the audience's expectations. (Not all audiences catch instances where their expectations aren't met, which is where Schafer stepped in to save the day -- in the book I argue that the bloopers are mini lessons in how to scout for such frame breaks.)

Lo, Newark mayor Cory Booker walked his city, sworn to reducing crime, finds time to correct the language of schoolchildren, too:

Sitting in a conference room with the boys and their parents, Mr. Booker asked the teenagers, Duwon Diggs and Sean Bennett Leboo, about their dreams, peppered them with quotations from Frederick Douglass and Nelson Mandela, and scolded them for their muddled diction and messy hair. He has since taken the boys on as a sort of project, escorting them over the past few weeks to suburban bookstores and first-run movies like “Fearless” and “Gridiron Gang,” treating them to paella in the city’s Portuguese Ironbound section and arranging for tutors from Rutgers University.

The mayor has set ground rules for their relationship: the boys must read books and, when in his company, wear collared shirts and speak thoughtfully constructed English. “People will judge you by the way you look and talk,” he told them. “You’re only 16 and it’s not fair, but that’s how life is.”

All that, even when Diggs and Leboo were caught spray-painting "Death to Cory Booker" in their high school.

The profile mentions how Booker has found governing Newark difficult, in part because race matters more in city affairs than he realized or wanted to acknowledge. His candidate for police director met resistance because he's white; Booker's been criticized as "not black enough." But I find the language moment very telling, as well. Let's suppose that Diggs and Leboo's "muddled diction" is actually African American Vernacular English -- that is, a dialect and not (as Labov and a million other sociolinguists have shown in the last 30 years) bad English. It follows from this that Booker wants the boys to speak more of a standard dialect -- that is, stereotypically white. So Booker doesn't realize how class matters, either: the environment in which "speaking white" is an asset is one in which upward mobility is possible and available.

If such mobility isn't possible -- then, well, Diggs and Leboo probably understood Booker's point before he came along: "People will judge you by the way you look and talk."

I wrote this for the Texas Observer back in 2000, back in the days when an editor could tell you to walk around and write about what you saw and then publish it. That judicious editor was Nate Blakeslee.

It begins like this:

Around 2 o’clock that afternoon, the protesters filed loosely up the Capitol ground’s main drive, and that’s when the Texas Book Festival started to get spicy. It was Saturday, day of rest and leisure, we were there for books, and they were mounting the Capitol steps, about 300 strong, waving signs and clapping their hands. What they were protesting wasn’t immediately obvious (the death penalty? the drug war?), and mixed among tourists, bewildered festival-goers, and men in military uniforms standing near Veteran’s Day wreaths, they seemed out of place–until I heard their chants, led by a woman with a bullhorn: "Every vote counts! Every vote counts!"

This is one of my favorite paragraphs:

The morning after the election I’d felt gray and choked and a little shaky, as you might if you’d mixed beer, cigarettes, and election returns at the Horseshoe Lounge, though only when I went to get the newspaper did I realize bigger headaches than mine had blossomed overnight. At 1:20 a.m., when they called Florida for Bush, I’d gone to bed, hoping that sleep would soothe my heart and make it its own thing again, something I’d recognize–only to wake up and discover that sleep had undone the stitches of the world. It was cold and rainy; the day felt like Christmas Day gone awry. Where the hell is Santa Claus?

Woke up to wind and cold in the morning and pieces of white paper blown around the backyard into drifts along the fence and into the flower beds. I puzzled for a moment about what it was: someone's recycling trying to escape? Then I remembered. Yesterday afternoon I took the manuscript to the patio to read (the version my grandmother read and wrote on). So Misty and I spent a small part of the morning picking up the pages. I half-expected to see that the garden gremlins had rewritten the prose or at least marked it up. No such luck. These aren't shoemaker's elves, after all. Then again, maybe throwing pages around was the favor -- it's the commentary the prose deserves.

Don't use Google as a verb, especially to refer to any info-searching on any other search engine, says the Google police. I won't even go into how futile this is -- do you really imagine that if generations of schoolmarms haven't been able to keep writers from splitting infinitives or finishing sentences with prepositions that lawyers will be able to halt this semantic expansion? Language has a force that Google can't stop. No, not even Google.

What they should do instead is, actually, the point I want to make. Google should encourage people to use other brand names (Yahoo!, etc.) into their own verbs. Don't want to be evil? Then don't constrain the creative productivity of language--encourage it! This isn't a zero-sum game, people.

I've used "friendstered" and "facebooked" to refer to looking someone up on those sites. Not that I'm a pioneer or anything, but the extension comes naturally, and people pick up the neologism quickly. Google could argue that specifying the search tool you used is, actually, meaningful information. An analogy: We say "I forked the meat/spooned the sauce/knifed the mugger." If you don't make this argument, you leave unanswered the question, Well, what verb am I supposed to use when I use another search engine?

Because I'm reading Yochai Benkler, it also strikes me that my solution is the open-source solution: put the creative power of language in other people's hands to protect your brand. What Google wants to do is impose proprietary restrictions on a process it can't have control over -- it will fail, and in ten years the jokey cliched ledes of newspaper articles (if there are newspapers) will recall this moment as one of the great corporate language follies, along with selling the Chevy "Nova" in Latin America.

(If you think about it, this may be Ask.com's branding strategy.)

From an interview with Clive Thompson:

Martha Henry:...Does Collision Detection help alleviate your frustration about not having the time to write about things that you find cool and interesting?

Clive Thompson: Yes, it does. I've seen so many writers get frozen because they become attracted to a story and they can't move on until they get that story out there. Either it's too weird, or it's too kooky, or the time peg is off, whatever. Nobody wants to take it. They will lose months of work, pitching and repitching and repitching.

That happened to me when I first started writing. But the blog helps me get past that. So now when I get an idea about something as I'm walking down the street, I think, "Okay, is The New York Times Magazine going to want that? No. Wired? No. Wired News? No. Details? No. Discover? No. New Scientist? No." And I think, "Okay, then I'm going to blog that." Five minutes of writing. Four hundred words. It gets it out there and it's out of my system. And it feels wonderful!

I liked that; I'm going to use this space in that way more frequently. But as I was wrapping up my earlier post about Google, I thought: You know, I should clean this up, make the argument stronger, and put it somewhere. Its shiny new version will appear on Design Observer probably on Sunday.
My blog: where things stick first.

Ten years from now, jokey newspaper articles about corporate follies will mention why the Chevy Nova didn't sell in Latin America, the hilarity that ensued when company names (e.g., Pen Island) became URLs, and how Google waded into the mighty river of language one day and drowned.

Read the rest of the piece here.

As I reiterated in the comment thread:

...If brand dilution in the vernacular is the aggregate effect of instances where the brand's name is spoken or written in a generic sense, then reducing the number of generic instances protects the brand. (It also provides less fodder for the other companies' lawyers, who will certainly want to argue that your name is now generic.) You can reduce the frequency of generic uses via letters from lawyers & lawsuits, but given all the examples of brand names (Xerox, Thermos, Kleenex, etc.) turned to generic words, this doesn't seem promising. What does seem promising (and unexplored) is reducing the frequency, not by discouraging the generic use, but by encouraging the specific, so that Google says, hey, you yahoo on Yahoo, you ask on Ask, but you only google on Google.

It seems to me that Google has a sustainable, cheap resource for protecting its brand from dilution in a certain non-proprietary solution called linguistic creativity.