Last night in bed I was reading Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, an amusing book by Benjamin Dreyer, a Random House copy editor. I happen to be two weeks into my final six-week course for Simon Fraser University’s Editing Certificate, so my late night reading aligned with the language-focused mood I’m in. I was enjoying Dreyer’s humour when I read this sentence, which made me sit up in bed:

“You might—or might not—be surprised to learn that many copyeditorial man-hours have been expended over the decades as to the correct construction of the common vulgarity—and an enchantingly common vulgarity it is—used to describe an act of fellatio.”  After the term “man-hours” was an endnote: “I know I’m supposed to prefer and use ‘person-hours’ or ‘work-hours.’ I can’t, so I don’t. Please forgive me.”

It wasn’t the discussion of whether or not to use a hyphen with blowjob (Dreyer’s preference is no hyphen) that bothered me. I’m no prude (I hope). It was the insistence on “man-hours” without even trying to find an alternative. 

What about just writing “many hours have been expended by copy editors over the decades”? Such an easy way out of “man-hours,” a term that makes the labour of fifty percent of the world’s population disappear. I wonder if Dreyer is just paying lip service to the requirement of conscious editing, editing that does not harm or marginalize. Karen Yin created The Conscious Style Guide, such a useful resource. Countless other editors and writers have worked to use language carefully and critically as a force of good in the world. Dreyer has power, privilege, and pull, and he could use these forces for good by making some small adjustments. 

So, there I was, lying in bed, irritated by “man-hours.” What about the millions of “man-hours” women spend breastfeeding? And that started me thinking of breastfeeding, women feeding their infants and toddlers with nourishment produced from their own bodies. Once I started to think of breastfeeding, scenes from two novels came into my mind, one from John Updike’s 1968 Couples and the other from John Steinbeck’s 1939 Grapes of Wrath. In both scenes, an adult man is sucking at the breast of a lactating woman. Updike’s scene is highly erotic (or at least, I found it so when I read it in my twenties), whereas in Steinbeck, the character Rose of Sharon is offering her breast to a starving man, an image I find disturbing. I’ve forgotten so much from the thousands of books I’ve read in my life. But those two scenes have stayed with me throughout the years. 

In our new house, we have a bookshelf at the top of the stairs, so every time I ascend to the main living space, a patchwork of book spines meets me like an old friend. The elongated blue U on the thick spine of James Joyce’s Ulysses always catches my eye. My mind likes to repeat itself, going back to well-trod memories, and so I return over and over—with nostalgia—to the summer in grad school when I studied that great modernist novel. It was an intense, six-week seminar course. A small, intimate group of students, mostly women, met for three hours, twice weekly. Each student had to present several times on chosen topics. I was working hard. Add to my hard work and yearning for an A, the presence of a provocative, flirtatious professor who created a highly charged atmosphere in the hot seminar room.

I was immersed in the complexity of Joyce’s schema for the novel, based on Homer’s Odyssey, and by turn delighted then confused by his fresh, arcane, mysterious writing. I could slide down rabbit holes every day, trying to parse meaning. 

One day, I took the boys to the beach at Thetis Lake and brought the novel with me. We went in for a swim, and as we came up to our beach blanket where I had laid Joyce’s novel, my six-year old son, who was learning to read, said to me, “Why are you reading a book called Useless?” I laughed. I could see how his mind’s eye read useless; so many of the same letters as Ulysses. I reported this to my professor next class, and he couldn’t stop laughing. He thought what my son said was inadvertently profound, the title Useless pointing to the modernist idea of the inutility of art: art for art’s sake. 

In the mornings, I’ve been trying to not grab my phone immediately, but instead, to read and write. I’m reading Jessica Dore’s Tarot for Change: Using the Cards for Self-Care, Acceptance, and Growth. I first discovered Dore when my husband, Michael, told me about her newsletter, Offerings, on Substack. I love the way she thinks about books and tarot and life, so I borrowed her book from the library, and it’s on the coffee table, ready to dip into whenever I sit down for a spell. It’s funny, the actual tarot card she is writing about (and she writes about all 78) doesn’t matter much—each page has some nugget of wisdom, wisdom from her life experience, and from theology, psychology, literature; wisdom drawn from C.G. Jung, D.W. Winnicott, and newer therapists like Marsha Linehan and Steven Hayes. I enjoy the nuggets. 

Here’s an example of a Dore nugget—this is from her comments on the Empress:

“The Empress represents nature and is, in my experience, one of the most misunderstood arcana in the tarot. People love her but can’t put a finger on why. I think it’s that we long to be in our bodies but have forgotten how, and she shows us what it would feel like if we could. Many of us think of the wild as something ‘out there,’ and I think that’s sad for us. It shows how cut off we are from the fact that somewhere deep down and old we are still the wild, and the body—with all its cycles and rhythms and ebbs and flows and generation and degeneration—is proof.” (pp. 47–48) 

Folk Embroidered Felt Birds: 20 Modern Folk Art Designs to Make & Embellish by Corinne Lapierre. I took this book out of the library and promised myself I’d make two birds before it was due back. I like embroidering at the end of the day, after my mind has been busy with thinking, editing, word stuff. Nice to just sew coloured thread in pretty designs. I met my modest goal—I made a wonky robin and a not-bad pigeon. Then I got a notice the book was due and couldn’t be renewed, as somebody else wanted it. I made a heart for a friend’s birthday, then another heart with a favourite quotation on it, “still, flowing water” from Ajhan Chah, which is to remind me of the paradox that mind is both still and flowing. I don’t entirely understand his talk on this topic, but I still find it inspirational. Then I took out another book by Lapierre, Fabulous Felt, and I made some fish. But I realized what I really want to do is to make all of those twenty birds from her felt birds book, so eighteen more. And it seems that everybody wants the library book, so I ordered a copy and it arrived today. Lots of birds to come!