I'm not good at being contrite, so let's open this mea culpa with a barrage of excuses: I was slammed. There was a deadline crisis. I seem to recall ninjas. For whatever reason—and I'm sensing your skepticism about that "deadline crisis" biz—I didn't make a needed correction on Chuck Twardy's Culture Club column last week. He'd described a book as a quickie paperback when, in fact, it was a novelty hardcover. He asked me to change it and I said I would, then didn't. Slammed, you know. Crisis. Ninjas.
No biggie, you'd say. A book description—minor flub. It happens in the fast-paced, late-breaking, honey-get-me-rewrite world of professional newspapering. You're right, too, it does, and because I hate lavish apologies, that's all the culpa you're getting from mea. But the point is, small errors do matter; a novelty hardcover is not, in fact, a quickie paperback. Chuck, a longtime contributor, has worked diligently to make his biweekly Culture Club a zone where small distinctions are important. (Ditto for his art reviews, which run on the weeks Culture Club doesn't.) As if in demonstration of that very point, he recently wrote a column extolling the virtues of nuance, taking the president to task for saying he doesn't do nuance.
That meticulous quality is particularly evident in the elevated diction and learned textures of his prose—regular Culture Club readers won't be surprised to learn that Chuck has a degree in 18th century lit. Shooting pool with him not long ago, I said, "You know, you're the only guy keeping certain English words alive." I was thinking specifically of glairy. Who but Chuck and Merriam Webster would know there's an adjective meaning that something has the consistency of egg white?
"I've tried to write in a different way," Chuck answered, probably sinking a triple bank shot—it's shameless, really, the way I let him win all the time—"but this is just the way I think."
And I wouldn't have it any other way. The appeal of Culture Club is that it's about ideas—the way Chuck flushes an idea from its hiding place at some crossroads of culture and politics, and chases it for 800 words, trying to corner it with his elaborate and singular writing voice.
I recall reading somewhere a maxim for critics: Write as smartly as you can for the dumbest person in the room. Not a bad guideline, on the whole, but it does beg the question: What about the smartest person in the room? Culture Club is one of our answers to that—an unabashedly intelligent column for people who don't fear the dictionary. It's a necessary high note in the chorus of different, distinctive voices that comprise this publication.
So, sorry again about the correction, Chuck; the ninjas made me not do it. You can exact revenge at the pool table.