Mike Shea on the month’s new releases
Chelsea Marie
Togi Entertainment
(Read an excerpt)
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“i think/i am going to die tonight./and some-thing inside me/looks forward to it./and something inside me/is twisting my intestines around,/trying to make letters out of them,/trying to spell the word/NO.” When sixteen-year-old Chelsea Marie wrote those chilling words a little over a year ago, she had also composed a suicide plan, seven farewell letters, and nearly half of the 301 poems that now make up her pseudonymous memoir, What Gives The shy and artistic Oklahoma City high schooler (who was raised in and has recently returned to a town—unnamed for privacy’s sake—in Texas) originally used her journal as “someone to talk to,” and to a reader, the diary initially seems to chronicle merely a virulent strain of high-IQ, rebellious-teen malaise: Chelsea plays in a band and paints, loves her friends, and hates herself.
But as the tales of self-loathing and self-destructive behavior pile up one on the other, it becomes obvious that something is profoundly wrong. (She writes, with a lockerful of ironic self-awareness: “when mom is getting ready in the mornings/i pour pure vodka into my lion king thermos.”) Chelsea’s parents finally clue in when they read “the plan” on her computer, and they hospitalize her for treatment and observation. The week of suicide watch passes at a mental hospital, an institution not unlike a hard-edged high school with tougher kids, weirder cliques, and more-dire consequences for failure.
This is serious stuff. Teen suicide is the third leading cause of death for 15- to 24-year-old Americans, and What Gives? is a strikingly voyeuristic peek into that abyss. But more than just a blueprint for a movie of the week or an after-school special, it is an introduction to an author—inexperienced and raw but with real chops—who is somehow guileless, smart, and creative in the face of her paralyzing desperation. We plunge from page to page not because of the young diarist’s despondency—depression is not especially attractive or compelling— but because we are fascinated to see that while she is fending off demons with the one hand, she is writing verse with the other. Chelsea Marie has performed an act of literary bravado worthy of that archetypal angst-ridden 16-year-old Holden Caulfield—but hers is more real by far. Togi Entertainment, $26.95
SERIAL THRILLERS: Our PIs return.
In a case of coincidental plot devices, two of Texas’s favorite fictional gumshoes recently swore off the detecting business because of an unfortunate tendency to call down death on their nearest and dearest. But quitting the private-eye racket is easier said than done, and the summer reading pile finds both Harry Hunsicker’s Lee Henry Oswald and Rick Riordan’s Tres Navarre sucked back into the life. In Crosshairs (Thomas Dunne, $23.95), Dallasite Oswald must protect a research doctor with a stalker problem; along the way, he befriends some colorful Irish travelers (rovers, not tourists) and goes mano a mano with the Professor, a shadowy figure who leaves a trail of corpses in his wake. Meanwhile, on the Gulf Coast, Navarre and his pregnant new bride, Maia, get trapped on Rebel Island (Bantam, $25) during their honeymoon while a hurricane and a killer wreak havoc on their resort hotel. Navarre tries his damnedest to keep the body count in the single digits while the storm blows itself out.
Michael Erard
Michael Erard
Photograph by Wyatt McSpadden
The Austin journalist and linguistics expert ponders the nature of speech imperfections and what verbal gaffes reveal, or don’t, in Um…Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean.
What qualifies as a “verbal blunder”?
It can be a slip of the tongue or any moment where something we’ve planned to say goes awry. It can also be what is known as speech disfluency: “uh” or “um,” restarted sentences, or silent pauses.
Some people might point out that slips of the tongue and speech disfluencies have separate and distinct causes. Isn’t it confusing to put them into the same category as verbal blunders?
The two are different—slips result from a mental plan gone awry, while disfluencies represent a delay or interruption in planning. However, I grouped them because they share a number of properties: Both present undesired if inevitable instances of failing to get things in order in time, and they both can damage social performances.
Why study these blunders?
Slips and disfluencies are windows into how the brain perceives sounds, selects words, constructs sentences, and monitors an utterance before a speaker says it.
So when did you first take an interest?
During the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush’s malapropisms and other verbal blunders were called abnormal. The criticisms made for fun reading, but from a scientific perspective, they weren’t accurate.
Where does the Freudian slip fit into the study of verbal blunders?
To Freud, all slips were the result of an unconscious desire trying to make itself visible. But most speech errors aren’t very sexy at all.
Has western society maintained a consistent attitude toward verbal blunders over the years? Is it different in other cultures?
All languages have slips and disfluencies. Interestingly, slips of the tongue always follow the basic rules of the language itself; there are things that happen in English that don’t happen in, say, Hindi. All languages also give their speakers ways of signaling a delay. “Um” is a near-universal word.
Has George W. Bush earned his reputation as a verbal stumblebum?
George W. Bush has certainly earned his reputation as someone who is inarticulate and unable to lead with his language. But in terms of true speech errors, his reputation as a verbal blunderer, someone who was to language what Bill Clinton was to marital fidelity, was thrust upon him. A couple of factors were important: The faster news cycle meant that organizations needed more content, which means he was quoted more. Campaigns with strong message discipline make any deviation more informative, hence more valuable to journalists. Journalists and their audiences were in a mood for the verbatim. Dan Quayle, who was already the country’s linguistic punching bag, quit the race. So when Bush made a number of choice slips of the tongue very early on, he walked into a perfect storm.
Are people overly-concerned about what their verbal tics might reveal?
I think they don’t know much about what their tics do reveal. The disfluencies are pretty good indicators of states—emotional states, momentary responses to situations, mental load. But they’re not reliable indicators of traits—personality, intelligence, moral values.
Did you uncover any misconceptions about verbal communications that you’d like to expose?
There’s a level of disfluency that is normally present in speaking which doesn’t impede communication. We don’t hear most disfluencies, and in fact, the human language abilities have evolved to deal with these moments. Communication isn’t the unimpeded flow of information; it’s not perfect fluency. Anyone who wants to get better as a public presenter should do improv comedy classes.
One surprising one is that increased anxiety doesn’t actually correlate with increased “uhs” and “ums.” People who are anxious will repeat more words and restart more sentences, so if you want to gauge someone’s anxiety level, you should pay attention to those other corrections on the fly.
Can you single out any well-known person as the worst verbal blunderer of modern times?
Politics is full of instances where a person makes a single error that ruins a career or defines an age. But the Reverend Spooner, who gave us the “Spoonerism” (as in “half-warmed fish” instead of “half-formed wish”), typifies to me the modern verbal blunderer. Here’s someone who was highly educated but who wasn’t in full control of his language. He was also someone who came along as mass media was going global, so what he said was spread far and wide. But how many Spoonerisms did he actually make himself and how many were made up and attributed to him? Who knows.
What are you working on now?
I’m finishing an article on slip research for Science; then I hope to get started on a book that will be the linguistic equivalent of the search for Big Foot.
Um…Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean., published by Pantheon.
