I picked up David Bowie’s latest, Blackstar, on Friday—the day of its release—and the missus and I spent the better part of the weekend listening to the “unpredictable jazz solos and spirited vocals meeting timeless stories of blunt force and destruction,” as Ryan Dombal described it in his Pitchfork review, published last week.

Of course, the listening experience went from the sublime to the surreal when we learned of Bowie’s death this morning, particularly in light of lyrics like:

Look up here, I’m in heaven
I’ve got scars that can’t be seen
I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen
Everybody knows me now

Much will be written about Bowie over the next few days—most of it, I imagine, about how he left such an indelible mark not only on music, but also on fashion and art. (On that, in fact, Dombal was eerily prescient. “[The] tortured immortality is no gimmick,” he wrote. “Bowie will live on long after the man has died.”)

But for me, it’s always been about the music: exploratory, enigmatic, and transgressive. And beautiful—always beautiful.

There will never be another quite like David Bowie. There can’t be.

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

Pamela, Lady Campbell, to Emily Eden, January 7, 1821:

“I cannot bear Scotland in spite of every natural beauty, the people are so odious… Their hospitality takes one in, but that is kept up because it is their pride. Their piety seems to me mere love of argument and prejudice; it is the custom to make a saturnalia of New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day they drown themselves in whisky. Last New Year’s Eve being Sunday, they would not break the Sabbath, but sat down after the preaching till twelve o’clock; the moment that witching hour arrived, they thought their duty fulfilled, seized the whisky, and burst out of their houses, and ran about drinking the entire night, and the whole of Monday and Monday night too. This is no exaggeration, you have no idea the state they are in—men lying about the streets, women as drunk as they—in short, I never was more disgusted.”

From The Folio Book of Days (Folio Society, London: 2002).

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

Kudos to the Spokesman-Review‘s Stefanie Pettit, who sounds the alarm over the “declining into banality” of language. Here’s the money quote:

We need better words, sometimes more poetic words, sometimes words we need to look up if we can’t figure them out on their own. We need all the beauty and complexity of language to communicate well, to tell the story, to verbally paint a beautiful picture or maybe just a clear picture.

Preach it, sister! Plus, look at it this way: Even if we eventually lose the fight, “manning the barricades against the barbaric descriptivist hordes” can totally go on your résumé.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  comments(1)

Great reminder from June Casagrande that your dictionary is good for more than just definitions:

Here are just a few of the seemingly baffling grammar and usage questions the dictionary can answer: Is it “I have drank tea many times” or “I have drunk”? What’s the plural of cactus? Why does “smart” have “smarter” but “intelligent” doesn’t have “intelligenter”? What do I do when my spell-checker flags a word like “unfun” or “neighborhoodwide”? How do I choose between “donut” and “doughnut”? Can I use a noun as an adjective, like by saying “It’s a bagel day” or “It’s a guy thing”?

It’s true. I could easily do my job without Strunk & White, Fowler, and The Chicago Manual of Style. But no dictionary? As the kids say, I can’t even.

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

No other typeface stirs up such divergent viewpoints as Swiss-born Helvetica. According to Wolfgang Weingart—the father of Swiss Punk typography—it’s “the epitome of ugliness.” On the other hand, Massimo Vignelli is a little more reflective. “I’m trying to think of drawbacks of Helvetica,” he said. “I hardly know one.”

And then there are those who equate the use of Helvetica with lazy design. Amsterdam’s Experimental Jetset has some thoughts about that:

To suggest that the way we use Helvetica is an easy way out typographically is ridiculous. We spend an enormous amount of time spacing, lining, and positioning type. The fact that we use only a small variety of typefaces demands a certain discipline, a skillful precision, a focus on the finer details. It’s certainly not a-different-typeface-for-every-occasion attitude. Now, that would be an easy way out.

As for us, well…you know where we stand.

posted by: CK Anderson  |  category: the design life  |  make a comment

This is from David Foster Wallace’s handout on five common usage mistakes, which he gave to students taking his Fall 2002 section of English 183A (an advanced fiction writing class) at Pomona College:

For a compound sentence to require a comma plus a conjunction, both its constituent clauses must be independent. An independent clause (a) has both a subject and a main verb, and (b) expresses a complete thought. In a sentence like “He ate all the food, and went back for more,” you don’t need both the comma and the and because the second clause isn’t independent.

For a guy like me—that is, someone who writes and edits by instinct more than anything else—this is eye-opening. I mean, I could’ve told you that the comma doesn’t belong there, but for the life of me I wouldn’t have been able to explain why. Nor would I have had the slightest clue as to how to find out.

You can see the original handout here.

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

FRAMING
Jorie Graham

Something is left out, something left behind. As, for instance,

in this photo of myself at four, the eyes
focus elsewhere, the hand interrupted mid-air by some enormous,
sudden,
fascination.

Something never before seen has happened left of frame,
and everything already known
is more opaque for it.
Beyond the frame is why

the hydrangea midsummer will go no further, though it continues,
why this century, late and turning,
turns away; beyond
is where the story goes after all the knots are tied, and where

the insects meet in order to become
the grand machine they are the perfect parts of; beyond
is what the wind
leans towards, easy as can be, the sheep

we have already counted,
the world too large to fit.
Within, it would have been a mere event,
not destructive as it is now, destructive as the past remains,

becomes, by knowing more than we do.

(1980)

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

From James Wood’s How Fiction Works (2008):

Nietzsche laments, in Beyond Good and Evil: “What a torment books written in German are for him who has a third ear.” If prose is to be as well written as poetry—the old modernist hope—novelists and readers must develop their own third ears. We have to read musically, testing the precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening for the almost inaudible rustle of historical association clinging to the hems of modern words, attending to patterns, repetitions, echoes, deciding why one metaphor is successful and another is not, judging how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals a sentence with mathematical finality.

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