The New York State Writers Institute has hosted hundreds of distinguished authors at SUNY Albany over the last 25 years. While Hunter S. Thompson, Frank McCourt, Saul Bellow and Richard Russo have been among them, Lynne Truss has not.
Truss, regular readers may recall, is the author of "Eats, Shoots and Leaves,'' a book about the deterioration punctuation use and, therefore, the decline of the English language.
I have no inside information about this, but I suspect that were she to be invited, one of the first things Truss would have mentioned is that the name of the organization should be the "New York State Writers' Institute." How can "writers'' be anything but possessive, and therefore how can the title not include that all-important apostrophe?
This was brought to mind last night when we attended the institute's 25th-anniversary celebration. The ceremony was pretty thoroughly botched, with malfunctioning microphones and too-long speeches by the people who run the institute and not enough time for the two stars of the evening, Mario Cuomo and Doris Kearns Goodwin (a Colby College graduate as well as a Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer).
Both were still worth listening to in the limited time they were allotted. Cuomo, New York governor from 1983 to 1994, pulled the classic stunt to those who are familiar with him of discarding a question he didn't want to answer (why weren't you president?) substituting one of his own (how should Barack Obama handle Afghanistan?) and answering it (make Congress either declare war and get the country behind the endeavor, or leave if Congress won't do it, since the war is unwinnable without the support of the country.)
Goodwin had the best answer I've heard on why Congress doesn't work any more: most members now go home weekends to raise money for TV ads to get re-elected and don't develop across-the-aisle friendships like they used to. Plus the splintered media encourages extreme positions.
What's been lost: the ability of politicians like Lyndon Johnson to get Republicans to cross party lines to pass important bills like the voting-rights act in 1965.
Even if it is punctuation-challenged, the institute has brought lots of interesting people to the area. Maybe its name will be fixed and Truss will come next year.
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Why does it have to be an institute owned by writer's? Can't it just be an institute for multiple writers? I hope you enjoyed the event in spite of you grammatical disapproval.
ReplyDeleteI was there too, Jay - sorry I didn't see you. Like you, I was struck by Goodwin's explanation of why Washington doesn't work anymore because politicians leave town on weekends rather than hang around and schmooze.
ReplyDeleteHer tale of dancing with LBJ brought back memories of my mother, who also danced with him while in Washington attending one of my father's editors' conventions. She said LBJ was a super-friendly dancer - his hands were all over her.
I enjoyed the Writers Institute evening despite its flaws. One thing they didn't stress enough was the open-to-the-community workshops. I was in a six-week short story workshop with James Lasdun last winter and it was great.
I'm afraid I agree with the first blogger. I don't think the intent is possessive. Rather, the 'Writers' functions adjectivally. The trick is figuring out, when it's necessary to do so independently, which is used when.
ReplyDeleteBut I share your general malaise about the state of writing and punctuation. From teaching graduate level classes at Rockefeller College, in which a small minority of students couldn't have passed a high school English course, back in the day that is, to the annual parade of interns at my office that nearly always elicits some serious eyebrow-raising, the scope of the decline is reliably confirmed.
But, alas, I was not at this celebration, but at a meeting across the way at our church, which tested my credulity in other ways.
On another note, it took a long time to catch up with the blog postings after another protracted absence. But I’m delighted with your good news, as well as with the reassertion of your not always inner (or not-always-inner…how do you come down on the double hyphen?) curmudgeon. And I feel pretty well caught up with your regular bloggers too.
Patti Jo
P.S. My punctuation irritant can be found in The New Yorker. I just can’t fathom the absurdity of the magazine attempting to reintroduce the umlaut into the English language, from its very limited usage in the first place. Jeez.