WHY ISN'T PALINDROME A PALINDROME?:

Doubling in the Middle: Barry Duncan Is Quite Possibly the World's First Master Palindromist, and He Refuses to Cede Control to the Alphabet (Gregory Kornbluh, September 2011, Believer)

Palindrome-writing in itself is nothing new. Bill Bryson, in his history of the English language, The Mother Tongue, puts the form at at least two thousand years old, citing our knowledge of Greek and Roman palindromes. The word itself derives from the Greek palindromos--"running back again"--and Bryson dates its English debut to 1629. He even claims to have found the first recorded palindrome in English, by the poet John Taylor ("Lewd I did live, & Evil did I dwel"), though, as Bryson points out, the ampersand is a bit of a disqualifier.

Palindromes are just one form of wordplay among many. There are anagrams (transpositions of the letters of a word or phrase into a new word or phrase using exactly the same letters), tautonyms (words or phrases of two or more identical parts), isograms (words containing no more than one of any letter), pangrams (groups of words using each and every letter of the alphabet exactly once), bigrams, trigrams, tetragrams, and on we go. Many of these forms of wordplay have been around for quite a long time, but A. Ross Eckler, former editor of Word Ways magazine, dates a "renaissance of interest in recreational linguistics" to the mid-1960s. The growing interest in palindromes themselves can be tracked, indirectly, by the exponential increase in length of the Guinness-recognized world's longest palindrome: from 242 words in 1971; to 11,125 in 1980; to 44,444 in 1984, sometime after which they seem to have stopped keeping the record.

Despite the form's long history, Duncan says that what he's doing with palindromes is really a step forward. He is aware of various published books of palindromes, but they mostly leave him unimpressed. "Every once in a while you see a good combination and you think, Oh, that's an interesting thing, but you see a lot of people who double in the middle, you see people who use all upper case, you just see all kinds of bad examples. I don't really see that anyone is doing cutting-edge work in reversibility." That Duncan doesn't see it doesn't mean it isn't out there, of course. (As I learned later, the comedian Demetri Martin, for example, has written at least one long, coherent palindrome, but has also impressively trained his body to perform palindromic feats like drawing mirror images with both hands simultaneously. To see his outstretched arms trace reciprocal birthday cakes is most definitely to witness cutting-edge work in reversibility.)

When I asked Duncan how hard he's looked for his "competition," he confessed to not having exhausted himself. "I'm sure there are many, many people who write palindromes," he said. "I don't see anybody doing what I'm doing, but that doesn't mean nobody's doing it. And you have to remember this: People who write palindromes are not the kind of people who are going to call attention to themselves. I think they're very much people who are comfortable being behind the scenes, practicing the invisible craft." When Duncan uses that last phrase on me for the first time, he just throws it out as a matter of fact. He's not being ironic, using air quotes, or even smiling.

Roger Angell, a writer for the New Yorker since the 1940s, once described palindromes as "a literary form in which the story line is controlled by the words rather than by the author." My sense is that Duncan would probably say that's a description of other people's palindromes. Because part of what makes him a master is his refusal to cede control. When things are going really well with a Barry Duncan palindrome, when he's really in a zone, he thinks to himself, I'm making these letters do my bidding. Sure, he'll have fun with word combinations, and he pens countless short palindromes that probably ought to be considered as coauthored by the words themselves. In fact, during one of our meetings, at a coffee shop in Cambridge called Simon's, he grabbed my notebook to riff on the café's name, leaving me empty-handed, anxiously unable to document what looked like magic before me. He arrived almost immediately at "stars simons no miss rats," which, with a little punctuation, could conjure a lovely absurdist scene in which a few same-named chaps help a poor, confused woman tell rodents from the night sky. He refers to this kind of quick palindrome play as "writing in real time."

However, Duncan's virtuosity really comes through when he writes topical palindromes, intentional constructions whose degree of difficulty is often lost on an untrained audience. "I always say to people, the easiest thing in the world to do is write a palindrome. The hardest thing to do is write a palindrome on a particular subject." The palindrome that Duncan released last April, the one that had made him sick and so consumed the month before, was commissioned (in the sense of "asked for," but not in the sense of "paid for") by the Cambridge eco-boutique Greenward, whose owners are Duncan's close friends. The occasion was the store's third anniversary, and the palindrome made its debut as the fourth item in Greenward's April e-newsletter. Humble origins, to be sure, but the Greenward palindrome is a strange kind of amazing. It's over four hundred words--nearly three times the length of this paragraph so far--and about one thousand three hundred characters. In composing it, Duncan had as many as six legal pads going at once, and the ninety-some crowded pages of notes he kept look like the sort of scribblings you might find in someone's case file.

The Greenward palindrome is, ostensibly, a conversation between Ben Nelson, the Democratic United States senator from Nebraska, and James Inhofe, his Republican counterpart from Oklahoma, that is initially about climate change but that becomes a discussion of the store, its owners, staff, inventory, patrons, and spirit. The thing is, though, it's not really a dialogue, and it's not really prose. As far as standard literary forms go, it actually most closely resembles a poem; it requires some effort to be deciphered, let alone understood, but if you try you can see its beauty. Parts of it stand out clearly as clever writing, regardless of the form, such as the stand-alone line "Go, ecotopia!" Other parts, like the bit including the reverse of that ecotopian battle cry ("A IPO to CEO? Greed, sir!"), are tougher to appreciate without an understanding of the internal plumbing involved in a long palindrome. According to Michael Donner, author of the reversibly titled palindrome trove I Love Me, Vol. I, palindromes are perhaps best thought of as "a sort of cultivated dyslexia." As a description of the Greenward palindrome, that sounds about right.

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