“Nothing is permanent. Everything changes. That’s the one thing we know for sure in this world,” Calvin says to Hobbes in the first panel of a two-panel strip that ran in more than two thousand newspapers on Monday, July 17, 1995. The two friends are in a wagon, plummeting perilously forward into the unseen—a common pastime for them. Outside the world of the cartoon, it’s less than half a year before Bill Watterson, thirty-seven at the time, will retire from producing his wildly beloved work. “Calvin and Hobbes,” which débuted in 1985, centered on six-year-old Calvin and his best friend, Hobbes, a tiger who to everyone other than Calvin appears to be a stuffed animal. Six days a week, the strip appeared in short form, in black-and-white, and each Sunday it was longer and in color. The second panel of the July 17th strip is wide, with detailed trees in the foreground, the wagon airborne, and Calvin concluding his thought: “But I’m still going to gripe about it.”
Many people, not only in Britain but around the world, were eagerly awaiting the appearance of the first part of the Dictionary, and Murray particularly wanted Ellis’s opinion on the draft Introduction, which he knew he had to get just right. It all read perfectly to Ellis except for one section. “The Dictionary aims at being exhaustive,” Murray had written. “Not everyone who consults it will require all the information supplied; everyone, it is hoped, will find what he actually wants.”
Is it really exhaustive? Ellis wondered. What about slang and coarse words? He scribbled to Murray in the margin (and the page with the scribble still survives today in the archives), “You omit slang & perhaps obscenities, thus are by no means exhaustive. Though disagreeable, obscene words are part of the life of a language.” Feeling satisfied with his contribution to Murray’s landmark first part of the Dictionary, and admiring of the project as a whole, Ellis placed the corrected draft into an envelope and placed it by his front door, ready for the morning post.
In short, a complex and evolving system — whether that’s a flock of gold finches or a nebula or the English language — will produce ever more diverse and intricately detailed states and configurations of itself.
And here, any writer should find their breath caught in their throat. Any writer would have to pause and marvel.
One limitation of this modern-day resistance spread across a globalized system is that its wins can feel like pacifications. The effects of automation are managed piecemeal, and continuing harms pushed out of sight or displaced to somewhere else. Merchant holds the weapon just out of our view—suggesting that workers “might just reach, once again, for the hammers”—but leaving us in suspense. Which raises an age-old question: Can you be a Luddite without smashing anything?
As soon as the last word of my story’s punchline left my lips, David Sedaris erupted in a fit of laughter. Eyelids clenched, mouth agape, he cackled at the ceiling of the posh lobby abutting the colossal hall where he had just performed a near-sold-out show.
A surge of satisfaction washed over me. I had just put Sedaris, a master humorist, on the other side of the laughs after he had held a couple thousand people rapt in their seats. But my joy turned to panic when Sedaris pulled out a notebook and pen and began writing down everything I had just told him, repeating it back to me—as if talking to himself, looking right through me—to get the tone and wording right.
One remarkable tool in Washington’s repertoire is his use of space and time; both are fundamentally important in this novel, though rooted in his finesse with characterization and voice.
“Opposable Thumbs,” a lively accounting of the men and the various versions of their show, makes the author’s admiration for his subjects clear. But the book isn’t just a fan’s note. Incorporating thorough reporting and research, including hundreds of hours watching clips on YouTube, Singer gets at what made their partnership unique and far ahead of its time.
Still, “Opposable Thumbs” is a welcome reminder of an era when film criticism actually mattered, from the theoretical debates between Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris to pioneering print-to-TV critics like Judith Crist. But it was Siskel and Ebert who, in Singer’s words, “democratized criticism, turned it into mass entertainment.”
The triumph of this book is that it’s quite rare in the self-help canon – or what publishers now term personal development – to not make a cynic such as myself roll their eyes, and this one doesn’t. It’s a shame that whoever was responsible for the jacket blurbs takes a shoving-a-finger-in-your chest approach that isn’t replicated by the variable tone inside, which is sometimes dogmatic but often reflects the genuine kindness and enthusiasm of its author. Be Useful, it turns out, is very helpful.