If Al Franken drawing a map of the United States from memory can’t bring us all together as a nation, I’m honestly not sure what could.
This is—using one of Courtney’s favorite adjectives—simply delightful.
If Al Franken drawing a map of the United States from memory can’t bring us all together as a nation, I’m honestly not sure what could.
This is—using one of Courtney’s favorite adjectives—simply delightful.
“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.
Shot: “I sometimes wonder if there have not been two great disasters in the history of modern letters: the first when literature began to be a full-time profession, with writers like Dryden and Lesage, instead of remaining a by-product of more sanely active lives; the second, when the criticism of literature became likewise a profession, and a livelihood for professors.” – F. L. Lucas, Style: The Art of Writing Well, 1955
Chaser: “[I]n all my years in and out of university English departments I never met a freelance reviewer who couldn’t give a better sense of the average novel in 800 words than an assistant lecturer at the University of Uttoxeter.” – Anonymous, “Who Let the Dons Out,” The Critic, September 2020
“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.
I may have mentioned that I’m reading my way through The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro’s (currently) four-volume biography of our 36th president. The fifth and final volume, which will deal with LBJ’s actual presidency, is apparently in the works, with 600 typed manuscript pages completed as of January of this year.
In an era in which purity reigns supreme—when ignorant thugs are toppling statues of famous people who once had Bad Thoughts—we would do well to recall that Johnson, a lying, cheating, opportunistic dirtbag who apparently believed that the end justifies the means, rammed through some of the most important and effective civil rights legislation ever enacted in this country. And he had to go against his own party to do it.
All this is not to say that politicians are corrupt—they are, obviously—but that people are complex, and that the motives of even the worst of us can sometimes be honorable. Something worth remembering.
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.
Speaking of music (see yesterday’s post for some of the year’s notable recordings), winners of the 2019–20 Ernst Bacon Memorial Award for the Performance of American Music have been announced. First place in the college/university ensemble division went to William B. Drury and the New England Conservatory Symphonic Winds for their performance of Whitman Tropes by Richard Toensing.
Sharp-eyed readers will no doubt recognize that piece as part of the album Night Songs: The Music of Richard Toensing, which I recommended back in 2018 (I received an advance copy) promising “not only satisfaction and edification, but also spiritual fulfillment.”
The reason I mention this today is not to say “I told you so”—even though I most certainly did—but to point out that, in addition to being a long-time friend and former bandmate, Bill is a proud Hillyard native, Rogers High School grad, and Gonzaga University alum. And because, well…I told you so.
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
“Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.”
Rebecca Solnit
from Wanderlust (2001)
“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.'”
My brother-in-law sent this, from Wikipedia, via email this morning…
…with a question: “Is Donald Campbell the son of Malcom and Dorothy,” he writes, “or does Donald hold speed records in cars and boats and also in his second wife?”
I understand the confusion. Apart from the clumsy writing, there exists a rather large dangling modifier (that’s what she said!). And it’s all the result of the writer trying to communicate too much information in a single sentence. Here’s what I would recommend instead:
Donald Campbell was born at Canbury House, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, to Malcolm Campbell and Dorothy Evelyn née Whittall. Donald’s father Malcolm, later Sir Malcolm Campbell, held 13 world speed records in the Bluebird cars and boats in the 1920s and 1930s.
By breaking the original up into two sentences, deleting extraneous information, and ensuring clarity at the risk of repetition, we now have a description that’s actually useful—and a whole lot less risqué.
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.)
Not sure how I landed on this video—Twitter, maybe?—but after watching it I found myself on the Ant Lab YouTube channel and under the spell of the charmingly nerdy Dr. Adrian Smith.
Which, of course, led me to still more videos about hopping, flying, attacking, slime-eating, stinging, fighting, foraging, squirming, hatching, hunting, biting critters. Next thing I knew it was time to punch out for the day.
Side note: Maybe it’s just me, but the older I get the kookier this world becomes. When I was a kid, bugs were just…bugs. Now, I can’t help but wonder at the weirdness of it all.
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.
From Scientific American, folks: “‘Oumuamua—a mysterious, interstellar object that crashed through our solar system two years ago—might in fact be alien technology.”
I dunno, man. First a pandemic, then a plague of locusts, then a hurricane lands in—of all places—Iowa. Now a real-life Harvard astrophysicist is suggesting that the best explanation for the sudden appearance of a “cigar-shaped” object “tumbling end over end” and, um, accelerating “as if something were pushing on it” is…aliens?
Think I’ll just tap out now. You know, before the probing commences.