“The old man the boats.” “The prime number few.” “Fat people eat accumulates.”

There’s a clever linguistic term for these sentences, which, though grammatically correct, are deliberately constructed so as to mislead the reader: garden-path. (My personal favorite? “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”)

The key to a good garden-path sentence, in other words, is intentional ambiguity through shrewd wordplay. It’s a puzzle.

Bad writing, on the other hand, is just…bad writing. And it usually comes from strict adherence to imagined rules.

A lot of folks, for instance, eschew the use of that in sentences such as “I know [that] you love me.” They believe it’s understood and therefore redundant. (That these are the same barbarians who refuse to employ the serial comma is probably not a coincidence.) But in a sentence like “I know the words to that song about the queen don’t rhyme,” you end up with what amounts to an accidental garden-path sentence. What was thought to be implied—that before “the words”—turns out, in this case, to be quite necessary.

When you understand that the rules of grammar, whether real or imagined, are a means of ensuring not consistency but clarity, it’s easier to know when and how to break them.

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“Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is one of classical music’s most famous works,” tweeted one of the mouth-breathers at Vox this morning. “But to many, it’s also a symbol of elitism and exclusion.”

Forget, for a moment, the lazy and amateurish “to many” construction, which can be applied to any particular axe the writer wants to grind. Like, I dunno, “To many, CK is a merciless tyrant.” See what I did there? I led you to believe that CK is a terrible person without actually having the courage to say that he’s a terrible person—and without any evidence whatsoever.

This isn’t journalism. This is projecting.

But even if it were true—even if there existed a nontrivial number of self-absorbed a-holes who see a piece of music as “a symbol of elitism and exclusion”—so what? That’s their problem, not the music’s. Any idiot can, in the amount of time it takes to type “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony” in the search field, find literally hundreds of performances on YouTube. FREE.

Who, exactly, is being excluded here? Only those who want to be culturally illiterate. (And those, like Vox writers, who want in on the intersectionality racket.)

So. Want to experience transcendent beauty? Give Beethoven a listen. Rather listen to “WAP”? That’s your prerogative. But for God’s sake don’t go blaming the white patriarchy for your benightedness. That’s just dumb.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

According to Open Culture, Ursula K. Le Guin had the best work schedule:

I don’t know the degree to which this routine “fueled her imagination” so much as it simply afforded her nearly five hours of uninterrupted time every day to actually write. And that’s not nothing.

With that in mind, I’ve come up with my own work schedule, which I’ll be submitting to the suits upstairs for approval and immediate implementation.

5:30 a.m.—wake up and lie there and think.
6:15 a.m.—get up and drink coffee (lots).
7:15 a.m.—arrive at the office and get to work writing, writing, writing.
Noon—constitutional.
1:00-3:00 p.m.—reading, music.
3:00-5:00 p.m.—email correspondence, tea, maybe meetings.
5:00-8:00 p.m.—Netflix and chill dinner.
After 8:00 p.m.—walk the dog and retire with a good book.

My back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that this schedule will increase my productivity by a factor of 3 and the quality of my output by a factor of, well…it’s already pretty much optimal, so I don’t want to make any promises.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment

I think we can all agree that, by and large, 2020 has sucked wet dog fur.

BUT.

There’s been some brilliant music released so far this year, so it’s not all bad. I mean…yet. It could always get worse, right?

Herewith, then, ten recommended albums—released over the last eight months or so—to remind you that beauty and creativity still exist. Or, if nothing else, to help take your mind off the coming hellstorm.

• Ambrose Akinmusire, on the tender spot of every calloused moment
• Mino Cinelu & Nils Petter Molvær, SulaMadiana
• Bob Dylan, Rough and Rowdy Ways
• Yair Elazar Glotman & Mats Erlandsson, Emanate
• Roger Eno & Brian Eno, Mixing Colours
• The Necks, Three
• Pantha du Prince, Conference of Trees
• The Pineapple Thief, Versions of the Truth
• Max Richter, Voices
• Gil Scott-Heron, We’re New Again: A Re-Imagining by Makaya McCraven

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

“Rather than a neat evolutionary line,” writes Florence Hazrat, “imagine punctuation developing as a rhizome, a horizontal mesh of practices, explorations and loosely understood conventions whose overlapping branches sometimes do the same thing but look different.”

Turns out Francis Fukuyama was right all along, argues Aris Roussinos: “Where Huntington and Kaplan predicted the threat to the Western liberal order coming from outside its cultural borders,” he writes, “Fukuyama discerned the weak points from within, predicting, with startling accuracy, our current moment.”

Speaking of “weak points within,” Graeme Wood has some thoughts on Vicky Osterweil’s In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action. “Easily my favorite line in the book,” he notes, “was written not by the author but by her publisher, right under the copyright notice: ‘The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property,’ it says. ‘Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.'”

Christopher Bray reminds us that now has no objective meaning: “If you’re talking to a friend across the room, you see him not as he is at this precise point in time but as he was a moment ago — to be precise, at that moment when the light you are seeing bounce off him began travelling from him towards you. However infinitesimally different, that is, your ‘now’ is his ‘then.'”

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Sure, things are weird right now. But it wasn’t all that long ago that they were—arguably, I suppose—even weirder. I’m speaking of the 1970s in general, and Synanon in particular. Hillel Aron has the details on the “drug rehab-turned-violent cult.” (Fun fact: I’m precisely three degrees of separation from one of the dudes who put the rattlesnake in Morantz’s mailbox. Buy me a beer and I’ll tell you all about it.)

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According to the fine folks at the Oxford English Dictionary, there are 171,476 English words currently in use. And not one of them is sufficient to describe this:

But wait! There’s more. Check out another track from Shatner’s forthcoming album—somewhat optimistically titled The Blues—featuring the great Harvey Mandel and Canned Heat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DR8V2I9SZg

The Blues is set to drop October 2.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  comments(1)

Just when I was starting to think that maybe—just maybe—millennials have been unfairly maligned, more evidence emerges that this generation is quite possibly the worst that has ever inhabited our planet.

At the very least, any cohort that truly believes that a period at the end of a sentence is “a triggering form of aggression” has successfully unseated boomers as the most self-absorbed in history.

So…congratulations, I guess?

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