What was Beijing really like?

I lived there a year but have always felt that I got to know the tiniest corner of it. This despite fluency in Chinese, a fine bicycle, plenty of time and money, friends at BTV, the film studio, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, The Asian Wall Street Journal, and many students born and raised in the capital. I need to know more about Beijing's temples.

Those the brokes

The emotional topography has not changed, the riffs are much the same, but by a sort of layering, The Magic Numbers have made a second album that has a kind of aural filigree that the first album lacked. And the songs are longer, more playful. It's like listening to the first album after a really gifted arranger added strings and overdubs galore.

Roles

What sort of role do I want to play in the lives of others? Do I want to change how my friends feel and think? Do I want to be someone they admire and long to see? Do I want to be invited to their parties? Do I want them to dedicate their novels to me and have me to their children's bar and bat mitzvahs? Do I want to serve as their conscience? Do I want them to trust me? Do I want them to remember things that I say, write them in their diaries, claim them as their own? Do I want them to make dinner for me? Do I want them to think me good or strong or uplifting or wise? Do I want them to trust me? What sort of role do I want to play in my own life?

風與花

Today it is windy here. The tress bend, their branches whipping. And the Romneya coulteri I planted in the fall has grown terrifically tall, taller than I, so it is bent and whipped too by the wind, its tissue white flowers sadly clinging to the stalks they crown. Inside I listen to music, loll, braise kabocha.

Michael G. Belanger, you are such a drip.

Dear Sam,

It is not often that I am genuinely embarrassed when an error is pointed out to me, but in this case the embarrassment is genuine and deep. I regard Mary Cassatt as a great painter (with no regard to gender), and a few years ago it was with great pleasure tha [sic] I attended a major exhibit of her work. At the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, "Mary Cassatt" attracted record-breaking crowds. The year of her birth must have been prominently displayed, and I never thought to check if any of our books got it wrong.

As much as I am chagrined by the incorrect birthdate for Cassatt, it pales in comparison to the horror I am experiencing upon learning that Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary has an incorrect date for Caravaggio. Mary Cassatt is a geat American painter. Caravaggio is one of the giants of art. On my list of all-time favorites, Caravaggio--or, 'Cary' as you casually call him--is outranked only by Rembrandt and Vermeer. (Artistic genius aside, you have to admire someone responds to an insolent French waiter by shoving a platter of hot artichokes in his face.) Who knows how many times I have encountered the correct birthdate for this enfant terrible in books and museum exhibits--and never thought to check to see whether all of M-W's references got it right.

Our online dictionary is based upon the hardback "Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition." The errors involving Cassatt and Caravaggio--I don't think that I can bring myself call him 'Cary'--go back through several editions of the Collegiate Dictionary to an out-of-print biographical dictionary that we used to publish decades ago. Judging from the entries for artists in that biographical dictionary, I would say that the editors had no knowledge of, or interest in, art. The entry for Howard Chandler Christy is much longer than the entry for Picasso.

Fortunately, not all of our publications are so artistically illiterate. The single-volume "Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Encyclopedia" not only has the correct dates for Cassatt and Caravaggio, it also has an article on Picasso that sounds like it was written by someone who had heard of the guy. Alas, Howard Chandler Christy did not make the cut; in his place is an entry for Christo.

Amazingly, you are the first person to notice the misinformation for Mary Cassatt and Michelangelo Merisi. Congratulations on your sharp eye, and shame on everyone else for missing it.


Michael G. Belanger
Associate Editor
Merriam-Webster,Inc.
Springfield, MA 01102
mbelanger@Merriam-Webster.com
http://www.Merriam-Webster.com