But, does it even matter? And who’s to say what’s right or wrong anyhow? One of the most fascinating things about language is its dynamic nature. By necessity, it evolves to reflect how the world is changing. So do shifting habits regarding apostrophe use just mirror more general developments in language?
You, the professor, are aware your students are taking notes. Usually, this is a dull awareness—perhaps you make a mental note that student X appears to be very engaged in note-taking. That might please you. Or—
perhaps it troubles you. Here you are, speaking about a book, let’s say a book-length poem (or, as Anne Boyer declares, an “anti-poem”) called The Hermit by Lucy Ives, and student X is taking notes—is taking note—of what you say in her notebook, and this gesture puts a pressure on what you’re saying. (When students don’t appear engaged—when they doze, when they look at their phones, or they just sit there—well, that’s easy. You, the professor, don’t care about students who don’t care. At the end of the semester, they vanish, and you never give them another thought.) Or—
perhaps the idea that people are writing down what you’re saying amuses you. Who are you? Yes, yes, you’re the professor. But what does that mean? Why does student X take you seriously? Is it because of something you earned, or simply because you’re in front of the room?
Hours of each day pass where I encounter nothing truly memorable on my computer or phone. What was I just reading five minutes ago? I genuinely couldn’t tell you. My little rat brain glances upon a screen, processes a tweet and tosses it straight into my mental paper shredder.
But when I read a physical book for fun, things slow down. I hear the words in my head, visualize the scenes being described, pause to contemplate the paragraph I’ve just consumed. It takes forever, but it’s an almost luxurious change of pace.
Viola Roseboro’ (apostrophe intentional), the larger-than-life fiction editor at McClure’s, haunted magazine offices from the 1890s to the Jazz Age. A reader, editor, and semiprofessional wit, she discovered or mentored O. Henry, Willa Cather, and Jack London, among many others. Today she is nearly completely forgotten.
She could often be seen walking through downtown Manhattan alone, recognizable from her preoccupied step, thick dark hair, gray eyes under arching brows, and her purported resemblance to George Sand. She declined to wear corsets and loved cigarettes, and insisted on getting as much fresh air as possible. Instead of occupying a desk, she liked to pack manuscripts into a suitcase and take them to a bench in Madison Square Park, where in all seasons she could be found smoking, reading, and strategizing about how to develop a protégé.
Dezső Kosztolányi’s 1924 novel, Skylark, translated from the original Hungarian in 2010 by Richard Aczel, has all the makings of a pleasant diversion. Its location is provincial, its date historic, and its concerns no greater than one week in the lives of the Vajkay family, a tidy clan whose existence seems as neatly arranged as their “daily walks: Mother to the right, Father to the left and Skylark in between.” It appears unlikely that anything of significance will take place in seven days in such a setting and with such company, but Skylark makes a point of subverting expectations. Within the novel, actions as outwardly mundane as packing, eating, and walking become fertile ground to investigate the discrepancy between how things look and what they are.
Melchor has said that she originally conceived of Hurricane Season as a nonfiction investigation, à la Truman Capote, of a real‑life murder that took place in a village near her hometown of Veracruz, changing tack once she reconsidered the hazards of poking around a narco-inhabited locale as a stranger. If she has any ethical doubts about the project, she keeps them to herself; this is fiction with the brakes off. Not an Oprah book club pick, one suspects, but not a novel to be missed – if you can steel yourself.
“Lurking” doesn’t just highlight the internet’s problems, it also voices her hope for an alternative future. In her final chapter, titled “Accountability,” McNeil compares a healthy internet to a “public park: a space for all, a benefit to everyone; a space one can enter or leave, and leave without a trace.” Or maybe the internet should be more like a library, “a civic and independent body … guided by principles of justice, rights and human dignity,” where “everyone is welcome … just for being.”