Harper’s Notes (4/21/25)

Man of distinction: Have you ever wondered what distinguishes a troll from a goblin? What about the subtle differences between a hermit and an anchorite? Do you have trouble keeping track of your second, third, and fourth cousins? Do you flub the definitions of wharf, dock, and quay at critical junctures? Do you struggle to make sense of the seemingly opaque particularities of meaning that lend color and richness to everyday language? If so, fear not! Eli Burnstein, in his 2024 book Dictionary of Fine Distinctions: Nuances, Niceties, and Subtle Shades of Meaning, has your back.
Covering everything from emojis and emoticons to civil law and common law, Dictionary of Fine Distinctions is a pocket-sized compendium of the small differences that make language fun—if occasionally vexing. It is a great time killer for linguaphiles of every stripe and an arsenal of knowledge for any pedant, prescriptivist, or partisan in the campaign against misapprehensions, mondegreens, and malapropisms. More than that, it is a handy resource for anyone seeking to improve the accuracy (my bad, precision) of their language.

Poetic justice: Iranian American author Kaveh Akbar released his debut novel, Martyr, to critical acclaim last year. It’s easy to see why. With a poet’s eye for rhythm and diction, Akbar writes sentences that alternate between disarming directness and expansive, mural-like metaphors. The novel follows Cyrus Shams, a burnout with poetic aspirations, who seeks advice from a terminally ill performance artist and tries to understand the tragic deaths that stalk his family. As the story unfolds, Akbar hops from year to year and perspective to perspective to slowly lay out the story of Shams’ family. It’s a dialogue-heavy narrative, peppered with conversations between Cyrus and a wonderful supporting cast in dream sequences featuring his childhood heroes, centered around finding meaning in death.
It can be hard for poets to create prose that is accessible and approachable while maintaining a distinctly lyric quality. Akbar does so with flying colors, all while centering his story on a character who, in the hands of a lesser writer, would come across as hopelessly dour and self-serious. The only flaw with Martyr lies in its third act. After so many profoundly bleak digressions and mini-character portraits, the novel’s conclusion, read as a celebration of the interpersonal love that makes life worth living, comes across as overly saccharine. But it’s the journey, not the destination, that makes Martyr worth picking up.

Object permanence: Betye Saar first encountered the Bamum chieftain’s robe in 1974 at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Fifty years later, the human hair-covered ensemble lies alongside some of Saar’s earliest creations in the Neubauer Collegium’s gallery exhibition, “Let’s Get it On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar.” The exhibition effectively communicates the early formation of the artist’s style through a lineage of objects—those formed in the artist’s imagination and those that formed her imagination. The robe, a piece of artistry that felt foreign to Saar upon first encounter, propelled her work in a more personal direction, as she began experimenting with African symbols to interrogate American racism and femininity. In addition to the context it provides for Saar’s artistic development, it pays homage to a museum’s capacity to introduce visitors to new, transformative realities beyond their local environment. The exhibition is part of the Neubauer Collegium series Panafrica: Histories, Aesthetics, Politics and will remain on view until April 27.