Mark Steven Morton
Mark Steven Morton | |
|---|---|
| File:MarkStevenMorton.jpg | |
| Born | December 31, 1963 Weyburn, Saskatchewan, Canada |
| Education | PhD Early Modern English Literature |
| Alma mater | University of Toronto, PhD 1992 |
| Spouse | Melanie Cameron |
| Website | |
| https://markmorton.notion.site/ | |
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Mark Steven Morton is a Canadian author best known for non-fiction books and articles on language, history, and food culture. He is also the co-founder of the Winnipeg International Writers Festival[1] and former writer and broadcaster for CBC Radio One.
Morton was born in Weyburn, Saskatchewan and grew up on a small grain and cattle farm in that province. He attended the University of Regina for a BA and then the University of Toronto for an MA and PhD in Early Modern English literature, focusing on The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser. He currently lives in Waterloo, Ontario with his wife and four children.
Awards
- Nominee for the 1997 Julia Child Awards in the Food Reference/Technical category (Calphalon Award)[2]
- Recipient of the 2003 Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction[3]
Publications
Morton has written four non-fiction books on topics pertaining to language, history, and food culture: Cupboard Love; The End; The Lover's Tongue; and Cooking with Shakespeare. From 2001 to 2012, he was also a regular contributor to Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, in which he published more than 50 articles.[4] Morton has written one novel: The Headmasters.
Cupboard Love
Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities (Bain & Cox, 1996) explores the etymological origins of more than 1000 English words pertaining to food, cooking, and eating. The entry for "pomegranate," for example, explains how that word derives from the same Latin source as "grenade" and "granite," while the entry for "souffle" shows how that word is related to "flatulence" through a shared Proto-Indo-European root that meant "to blow."
In 2003, Cupboard Love was translated into Czech and published by Volvox Globator (Prague) as Nadívaný pštros.[5] A second and expanded edition was published by Insomniac Press in 2004. It was one of three books nominated for a 1996 Julia Child Cookbook Award in the Food Reference/Technical Category (Calphalon Award).[6]
The book received favorable reviews:
- The Atlantic: "Morton lays out the histories of hundreds of food-related terms as deftly and completely as any casual reader could wish."[7]
- The Globe and Mail: "A whimsical, side-splitting, erudite and sometimes cheeky book."[8]
- Choice Reviews: "Morton has brought together terms from 'a la' to 'zuppa Inglese' that occur in the history of cuisine. Worldwide in scope and reaching back hundreds of years, the book reveals how food words came about and how they influenced other words and phrases.... Thoroughly researched, well presented, fascinating, and a wonderful addition to reference collections, especially for libraries supporting interest in culinary arts or etymology."[9]
The End
The End: Closing Words for a Millennium (Bain & Cox, 1999, co-authored with Gail Noble) draws from hundreds of primary sources such as newspaper articles, letters, diaries, poems, plays, and sheet music to explore how people living at the ends of previous centuries celebrated or thought about the end of their own century (or the beginning of their new one).
- The Toronto Star (12 September 1999): "Although most of The End is a sort of narrated anthology of centuries-old newspaper articles, letters, diaries and the like, Morton and Noble's introduction is a short history in all things millennial. As the authors point out: 'Centuries don't exist, and yet we act as if they do. We treat them like they dropped down from heaven along with cherry pie and hot dogs. But they're actually just a product of our imaginations, an arbitrary construct.' Sensible enough. But Morton and Noble go one step further in providing the historical goods to back this up, just as good scholars should."[10]
- The Toronto Star (3 August 1999): "The later chapters of the book are among the most interesting. They deal with how people viewed the century just passed and the century newly born. It seems the 19th century was viewed a lot more favourably by people present at its passing — books with titles such as The Wonderful Century and Grandest Century In The World's History were common around 1899 — than the 20th century is viewed today."[11]
The Lover's Tongue [Dirty Words in the UK]
The Lover's Tongue: A Merry Romp Through the Language of Love and Sex (Insomniac Press, 2003) explores the origins of English words and phrases pertaining to love and sex. In the UK it was published by Atlantic Books as Dirty Words: The Story of Sex Talk.[12] The book received positive reviews:
- The Guardian: “Morton has done an admirable job combing through the available literature on 'indecent' words — shelfloads of dictionaries, thesauruses, histories, and specialist studies — and collating the results in a single volume. While there are websites such as sex-lexis.com that list all the terms in Morton's book and more, there is, to my knowledge, no other book that offers such a compendious and up-to-date trove of erotic etymology.”[13]
- The Times (London): "Sampling Mark Morton's tasting menu of these is something akin to planning a romantic meal at a well-regarded restaurant. Absolutely correct and without fault, beautifully prepared and presented and, alas, denuded of the diacritics beloved of geeky academics, while somehow missing the base titillation of the truly dirty."[14]
- The Globe and Mail: "Mark Morton spent nine months researching the origins of English words about sex, he tells Michael Posner, to come up with that rare kind of academic treatise that people might actually read. Other books on language, of course, have taken titillating aim at the subject of sex. There are densely academic three-volume sets to be digested on sex in English literature under the Stuarts, for example, as well as myriad titles taking a popular approach to sexual slang. But The Lover's Tongue may well be the most comprehensive etymological treatment. Anal, oral, body parts — it's all here in what amounts to a linguistic history of smut."[15]
- The National Post: "The book, scholarly in subject but not in tone, is organized by anatomical part or sexual function, so there is no intimate knowledge of ancient Greek, Catullus or Ovid's Amores required. Polyglots who crave a little erudition with their dirty talk will find the book fascinating, but so will curious neophytes who just want to know why male proper names like Roger, Thomas, Dick, Peter and Willie are so often given to the male member."[16]
Cooking with Shakespeare
Co-authored with Andrew Coppolino, Cooking with Shakespeare (Greenwood Press, 2008) is part of Greenwood Press's "Feasting with Fiction" series. The introduction explores food culture in Shakespeare's England: what was eaten, how it was cooked and served, how different classes ate different foods, customs at the dining table, and so on. Each of the subsequent 18 chapters is devoted to a different category of food, such as beef and veal, eggs and dairy, pies and tarts, beverages, and so on. Sixteenth-century recipes are included in both fascimile form and modern renderings. Relevant passages from Shakespeare's plays and poems are integrated into the text.
- Choice Reviews: "This book ventures beyond literature and cookery into history, etymology, and sciences. Thorough, exemplary, logical, and unflinchingly authentic, the volume is a labor of love and thoughtful scholarship. Offering 189 recipes (some delicious), the book features a 67-page introduction on period ideology, dietary theory, law, pharmacology, etiquette, and economics.This wonderful book joins such titles as Francine Segan's Shakespeare's Kitchen: Renaissance Recipes for the Contemporary Cook (2003)."[17]
- Gastronomica: "Cooking with Shakespeare is packed with information that will interest culinary historians, lovers of Shakespeare, and foodies alike."[18]
The Headmasters
The Headmasters (Shadowpaw Press, 2023) is a young adult, dystopian novel set in northern Ontario. It is scheduled for publication in February 2024.[19]
Broadcasting
Between 1993 and 2005, Morton wrote and broadcast more than a hundred columns pertaining to language and pop culture for CBC Radio One, initially on CBC Winnipeg's morning show and later on the national weekly program Definitely Not the Opera. He also wrote and broadcast an hour-long documentary about the last day of the nineteenth century.[20]
References
- ↑ "Winnipeg International Writers Festival", Wikipedia, 2023-05-13, retrieved 2023-06-27
- ↑ "33 Nominees in running for this year's Julia Child Cookbook Honors", Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, pp. C6, 20 March 1997
- ↑ Riegel, Christian (2007). Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twenty-First-Century Canadian Writers. Thomson Gale. p. 316. Search this book on
- ↑ ""Mark Morton" | Page 1 | Search Results | Gastronomica | University of California Press". online.ucpress.edu. Retrieved 2023-07-02.
- ↑ Morton, Mark (20 October 2003), "Nadívaný pštros", Volvox Globator, retrieved June 25, 2023
- ↑ "33 Nominees in running for this year's Julia Child Cookbook Honors", Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, pp. C6, 20 March 1997
- ↑ Kummer, Corby (January 1997). "Corby's Table". www.theatlantic.com. Retrieved 2023-06-27.
- ↑ Roberts, David (1996-12-21), Stories of trake and ermal will make readers catillate, Globe and Mail, p. D14, retrieved June 26, 2023
- ↑ Miller, P. (July 1997). "Cupboard love: a dictionary of culinary curiosities". Choice Reviews. 34 (11). doi:10.5860/CHOICE.34-6031.
- ↑ Robertson, Ray (12 September 1999), "This is The End — A scholarly pair ditch the tweed in an entertaining look at millennial and centennial madness through the ages", The Toronto Star, p. 1
- ↑ Marchand, Philip (3 August 1999), "Words from past centuries for millennial reading", Toronto Star, p. 1
- ↑ Morton, Mark. "Dirty Words: The Story of Sex Talk (hardcover)". amazon.com.
- ↑ Faber, Michel (30 July 2005), "L if for lalochezia", The Guardian, retrieved 25 June 2023
- ↑ de Jour, Belle (30 July 2005). "I love it when you talk dirty". The Times (London). p. 10. Retrieved 30 June 2023.
- ↑ Posner, Michael (20 October 2003), "A scholar's linguistic history of smut", The Globe and Mail, pp. R3, retrieved 30 June 2023
- ↑ Atkinson, Nathalie (14 February 2004), "Erotica of the mind from A to Z", National Post, pp. RB06
- ↑ Gilbert, N.L. (September 2008). "Cooking with Shakespeare". Choice Reviews. 46 (1). doi:10.5860/CHOICE.46-0062 – via Choice Reviews.
- ↑ Bell, Ilona (1 August 2009). "Review: Cooking with Shakespeare". Gastronomica. University of California Press. 9 (3): 87. doi:10.1525/gfc.2009.9.3.87.
- ↑ Morton, Mark. "The Headmasters". Shadowpaw Press.
- ↑ Morton, Mark. "Mark Morton: Publications". Mark Morton: Publications. Retrieved July 3, 2023.
External Links
- Mark Morton at The Writers' Union of Canada
- Mark Morton at the Library of Congress with three catalogue records.
- Language columns and documentary broadcast on the CBC radio program Definitely Not the Opera.
- Mark Morton personal web page
- Interview with Matt Fidler on the podcast Very Bad Words, regarding the history of the word "faggot."
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