Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I love the smell of napalm in the morning.

I *did* bring up Proust. Little did I know an unremarkable reference
to a universally conceded hallmark of Proust's style would invite the
alarmingly illiterate allegation that Proust was "crazy," a piece of
breaking news that would come as something of a shock to the authors of
the Proust bios I've read.

Mike Godwin, a nation turns its lonely eyes on you.
  

    
(Whoa, lots of slippage)

<108> (fom) Felicity, what a wonderful sentence:


<The Hemingway/Strunk&White approach has dumbed writing down and has 
<popularized habits that lead to poor comprehensibility by people for
<whom English is not the primary language, and to poor translatability.

We do seem to have forgotten how to think, or at least want it in
simple doses.  Style arguments aside -- e.e. cummings, sherwood
anderson, allen ginsberg are also not easy reads -- I did have to go to
the dictionary to look up 'chthonic' and 'epater', and hope never to
use them both in the same sentence again:)

Mark reads like bebop jazz in a philosophy of lit class on speed --
fascinating rhythm, but I can only do it in small doses. His book is 10
years of essays all at once, which is a lot to take in. But he makes
me think, and that's what I want from a good book.

He also makes me uncomfortable. I thoroughly enjoy his torching
various zanies and subcultures "Tea Party know-nothings,
head-in-the-sand birthers, and Bible-thumping flatheads..." and then he
almost tags me completely with something like "white bread, no-logo
clothinged liberal" or something close to that. Mark you left out
'closet preppy'. 

So he catches me in the mirror too, and I need that.
  

    
Ted: Thank you for this intellectually generous response, and for your
lightly worn wisdom, more generally. When you get to the book's
closing essay, "Cortex Envy," at once a cultural critique of I.Q.
tests, a social history of its coziness with eugenics, and a painfully
revealing meditation on my relationship with the test when I was a
child, you'll see, I hope, that I turn the pitiless eye of critique on
myself, too---and more scarifyingly, I'd argue, than I do anywhere
else.
  

    
Typo:a social history of *THEIR* coziness with eugenics...
  

    
I did, I do, and I appreciated the honesty. BTW your book became
birthday presents for two people I know are going to thoroughly enjoy
it.

I'm going to have to send them the link to this conversation as well,
as a postscript, and hopefully not a post mortem :)
  

    
We're steering into the weeds a bit, let's get back to our discussion
of your collection of "drive-by" essays, Mark. The piece I found most
interesting was "When Animals Attack," and I wondered how you found
your way to that subject? The essay itself is a revelation. We've been
wrangling about this or that culture - the grizzlies would eat hip-hop
culture for breakfast with nary a burp, I imagine.
  

    
   >We're steering into the weeds a bit, let's get back to our discussion
    of your collection of "drive-by" essays, Mark. 

(Did you notice the last 3 or 4 posts? They're about the book.)
  

    

Speaking as a Proust fan, I can say with some certainty that Proust's long
sentences are never riffs -- whether in French or in any of the English
translations, Proust's sentences are thoughtful, nuanced, subtle, and
precisely crafted. Proust's prose holds up because it is, in some large
sense, not dependent on cultural or topical allusion -- a passage sent in
1870 could just as easily be set in 1770, for all it matters to the narrator
or to the reader.

(There is, of course, the occasional topical reference in Proust, but the
narrative of In Search of Lost Time never depends on these.)

With regard to Frankfurt ON BULLSHIT, I think the reader sees a similar
degree of independence from mere topicality, although the author does
present BULLSHIT as an acutely current issue substantively. Stylistically,
one sees in Frankfurt the kind of clarity, economy, and precision I find
myself wishing that all cultural critics would employ.
  

    
Re: #133 (mnemonic): 

I'm not sure I understand the distinction between "riffing" and
writing, but I gather it's something like Capote's distinction, in his
feline swipe at Kerouac, between typing and writing. More charitably,
riffing (as its name suggests) might consist of jazzy improvisation on
a theme, with all the false starts and dead ends that implies. Riffing
embraces an aesthetic of orality (in the Walter J. Ong-ian sense); it
strives to capture, on the page, the syncopated beat of spoken word. It
champions the Beat ideal of orality ("composed on the
tongue"---Ginsberg) and spontaneity ("first word, best
word"---Kerouac). Thus, Lester Bangs, William Burroughs, Hunter S.
Thompson, and the Beats would, presumably, be riffers; Luc Sante,
Christopher Hitchens, J.G. Ballard, Edmund Wilson, George Orwell,
Graham Greene, Joan Didion, and Susan Sontag, presumably, are not.

(Sorry, I had to iron out the wrinkles of that idea, in my mind,
before getting to the heart of your question.)

We're talking about riffing, I assume, because I said I was riffing on
the starchy syntax of the 18th-century gentleman---to comic effect,
I'd hoped. In retrospect, I probably used the term too loosely, since
what I was doing was alluding, not riffing, which to my mind implies
theme-and-variations extrapolations of a theme or image, or forensic
attempts to tilt with an idea from every angle.

Proust is decidedly *not* a riffer. As Edmund White's marvelous little
biography of him makes clear, Proust was a lapidary stylist---for
once, an entirely accurate use of that done-to-death adjective. I
heartily agree that Proust was a fastidious craftsman, always in search
of le mot juste. My point was simply that his sentences are *LONG*---
exquisitely wrought, perfectly parsed, breathtaking in their apparently
effortless mastery of complex syntax, but *LONG*. And *LONG* sentences
are frowned upon by modernist style, starting with Strunk, and
positively reviled in our day, at least in journalism and popular
nonfiction. Web "usability" experts and corporate motivational gurus
and branding experts admonish us to write in brief, easily gulped
blips. 

The cultural critic in me was simply saying that politics sometimes
masquerades as aesthetics. In fact, much cultural criticism is founded
on the assumption that Everything is Political, in some sense. (We're
talking *cultural* politics, here, as opposed to inside-the-beltway
politics in the popular sense.) Happily granting your point that
clarity, concision, and precision are essential to good writing, I'm
arguing that writing can be all of those things *without kneeling to
the aesthetic diktats handed down from Machine-Age modernism and now
enshrined in every style guide for undergrads*: received truths of
contemporary style such as Shorter is Better (in words as well as
sentences) and plain speech is preferable to the sesquipedalian. 

This obsession with "demotic" language---confining oneself to the
vocabulary of Joe the Plumber, and never daring to send one's reader to
the dictionary---is very much historically located and culturally
bounded, a symptom of the cherished American belief that we're all
middle-class in some ineffable spiritual sense unrelated to income;
equality means everyone in Lake Woebegone is above average. (This, by
the way, is precisely why an unrepentant elitist like Buckley uses
jawbreakingly polysyllabic words without apology: because he's
addressing the elite, and feels no compunction to pretend otherwise.
Most Americans, by contrast, would rather go to the guillotine than be
tarred with the brush of elitism, and thus police their speech and
writing accordingly.) 

Likewise, Strunk's obsession---and Hemingway's---with paring writing
down to its bare-bones, Platonic essence is at least partly a product
of its age, the age of streamlining in industrial design and Fordism
and Taylorism in the workplace and top-down managerial theory in the
executive suite. 

As well, it has to do with Anglo-American notions of terse,
tough-talkin', g-droppin', skip-the-bullshit "masculine" speech and
prose, culturally valued (academics would use the specialized
"valorized," which would mark them as mealy mouthed, evasive, less than
truthful, and foppish/effeminate to boot) as closer to the Truth than
the refined, "epicene" speech of the upper-class and/or well-educated
man. (Hence American presidents' affectation of a g-droppin',
common-man style of speech as a way of telegraphing not only their
common-man credentials but also their "masculine" plain speech,
shorthand for "I'm telling you the truth, no matter how tough.")
Hofstadter has some thoughts, in _Anti-Intellectualism in America_, on
the gender and class politics of our deep-dyed suspicion of Big Words
and Highbrow Allusions and Complex Sentences. 

As it happens, Proust argues my point: his sheer length of his
sentences would give Strunk a myocardial infarction, yet he is, as you
point out, a model of clarity and precision. Incidentally, Queer Theory
advocates have some thoughts on what is increasingly called "lavender
linguistics"---what makes gay speech and even writing gay. Some would
argue that Proust's style is a queer style, in part, and that the
repression of certain stylistic/aesthetic attributes in Anglo-American
style is, again, about American notions of what constitutes "manly"
speech and writing, which is to say sturdy, wholesome prose. My
argument, at its heart, is a plea for the rigorous interrogation of
unconsidered notions such as "clarity, economy, and precision," which I
believe are less value-neutral, and more culturally and historically
embedded, than you suggest.
  

    <scribbled by mark-dery>
  

    
((Let me say, again, how much I regret the WELL's lack of an EDIT POST
button. For instance, that should've been "*the* sheer length of his
sentences..." I'm composing on the fly, here, rather than offline, and
I find the bathysphere window-sized textbox eye-crossingly
user-unfriendly. Maybe that's just me?))
  

    
This is the improvisors room.  Composers are down the hall.
  

    
Heh.
  

    

It is an unfriendly interface, and there are workarounds, but
it takes more than 2 weeks to get comfortable with them.

This is all interesting stuff, thanks for bringing it up.
I have lots of small comments, like maybe Joe the Plumber 
isn't the best example for the kind of language I think you're
calling plain language.  My imperfect memory of Joe is that 
his ramblings would send a curious listener to the dictionary
for words that didn't exist.  

Which is typical speech, even common speech, and it communicates
confusion.  I think that's the direction of speech and language
in the immediate future.  Spreading confusion is job one for 
public speakers.  I think clear thinking and writing are
elite skills.  It's quick and easy and correct within an order
of magnitude to say that 1% of the domestic population have 
those skills.  It's not an exact match with the top 1% in income,
but there is a lot of crossover.   
  

    
>>#131 of 136: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Thu 17 May 2012 (08:30 PM)

We're steering into the weeds a bit, let's get back to our discussion
of your collection of "drive-by" essays, Mark. The piece I found most
interesting was "When Animals Attack," and I wondered how you found
your way to that subject? The essay itself is a revelation. We've been
wrangling about this or that culture - the grizzlies would eat hip-hop
culture for breakfast with nary a burp, I imagine.<<

A brain-tickler, Jon; thanks for that. "When Animals Attack" had many
midwives. It was nominally a review of Gordon Grice's latest book,
_Deadly Kingdom_, although I used the assignment as an opportunity for
Applied Ballardianism. One thing I learned from Ballard's book reviews
(many of which are collected in his _User's Guide to the Millennium_)
is that a book review need only passingly be about the book at hand;
using that book as a springboard into the Intellectual Beyond, or as a
prism for refracting the reviewer's obsessions, is infinitely more
interesting than the thumbs-up, thumbs-down school of
"service-oriented" book reviewing. I'm a devout fan of Grice's work,
which I discovered when I stumbled on his _Red Hourglass: Lives of the
Predators_, a sui generis book that virtually created its own genre:
Gothic Naturalism. (I reviewed it on Amazon, where I called Grice "a
Jean-Henri Fabre for literati who drive pickups with rifle racks.")
Thus, I knew I wanted to get to grips with Grice's book. At the same
time, I wanted to use it as a jumping-off point for some thoughts on
one of the current vogues in critical-theory circles, what's known as
The Posthuman Turn. When I wrote the chapter in _Escape Velocity_
(1996) called "The Perils of Posthumanism," posthumanism meant: Hans
Moravec's visions of downloading our minds into machines, transhumanism
(a New Age techno-libertarian gloss on the human potential movement),
and cyberpunk dreams of engineering Darwinian evolution along more
cyborgian lines. These days, "posthuman" means post-anthropocentric;
it's informed by the academic discourse known as Animal Studies (which
the waggish critical theorist Dominic Pettman likes to say has jumped
the shark) and by cognitive ethology---research into animal behavior
and cognition that is eroding the longstanding claim that humans are
unique among, and by extension superior to, other animals. And the last
piece of the puzzle was Werner Herzog's exercise in gothic naturalism,
"Grizzly Man," which I read as a parable about Wild Nature as Utterly
Other, inscrutable to man the signifying monkey who insists on seeing
nature as culture, which is to say: as his own reflection. 

I'm fascinated by the interlocked philosophical notions of the
posthuman, the nonhuman, and the inhuman. I'm especially taken with
"poetic postmodernism" (my term, coined right here) that attempts a
kind of "theoretical fiction" (Steven Shaviro) in which nonhuman
phenomena are theorized as lifeforms, i.e., regarded As If (the
science-fictional, alternate-world leap of faith) they were creatures.
Manuel DeLanda, following Deleuze's lead, points the way in _War in the
Age of Intelligent Machines_, where he uses chaos science and
complexity theory to reimagine natural phenomena as self-assembling
machines (punning on Linnaean taxonomy, he locates them within the
"machinic phylum"). Examples include tornados as turbines, fast-moving
rivers as primitive computers (because they sort stones according to
size, "filing" them in respective sections of the riverbed). Going
further, Delanda imagines various geologic phenomena as "creatures of
the lithisphere" with specific "behaviors." Likewise, fire ecologists
talk about fire "behaviors," and firefighters talk about the infernal
(forgive pun!) intelligence of forest fighters, which in their
anecdotal experience seem to anticipate strategies to foil them,
routing around firefighters and, lethally, executing pincer movements
familiar from military strategy. Of course, all of this invites the
charge, ironically, of anthropomorphizing---Ruskin's "pathetic fallacy"
come back to bite the posthumanist. And it will sound, to the
tough-minded positivists in the crowd, like an object lesson in the
lunacy of taking metaphor literally. All that said, I find these ideas
fascinating, and hope to elaborate on them in some future essay that
picks up where "When Animals Attack" leaves off.
  

    <scribbled by mark-dery>
  

    
>>#139 of 140: david gault (dgault) Fri 18 May 2012 (08:43 AM)

>>typical speech, even common speech...communicates
confusion.  I think that's the direction of speech and language
in the immediate future.  Spreading confusion is job one for 
public speakers.  I think clear thinking and writing are
elite skills.  It's quick and easy and correct within an order
of magnitude to say that 1% of the domestic population have 
those skills.  It's not an exact match with the top 1% in income,
but there is a lot of crossover.<<

Well, it was always ever thus, I suspect. It's sobering to realize
that---I'm quoting from glitchy memory, so please set me straight if
I'm wrong---that only 25% of Americans have college educations, and
that's an all-time *high*. Illiteracy is lower than ever, in the U.S.
(unless I'm mistaken, but that's a stat I've heard bruited about).
We're up to our eyebrows in unemployed semiotics majors from Brown,
which is why NYC is awash in Chautauqua-style lecture series and
pop-up
classes taught by overeducated, underemployed college grads. 

From the Saul-Steinberg-cartoon vantage point of New York, at least,
America looks Bizarro-World paradoxical, and the gap you note takes the
measure of that educational divide. The social reality no politician
dares question, for fear of being pilloried as an elitist, is the
possibility that some of the evils bedeviling our fair republic are the
result of a Cognitive Gap---i.e., the critical-thinking skills and
respect for verifiable, empirical truth supposedly inculcated by a
liberal-arts education, one hand, and the flat-earth fundies and
wetbrained conspiracy theorists (of the Tea Party right and
anti-vaccine left and 2012-rapture New Age fringe).

Economic inequity---the income gap, by any other name---is inarguably
corrosive to American notions of fair play, the level playing field,
one-man-one-vote, and all that---but Jefferson's dream of a democracy
founded on an informed and reasoning electorate is imperiled, too, by
the widening chasm between Enlightenment and Old-Testament values;
between those who rally 'round the banner of skeptical inquiry, the
scientific method, and secular humanism and those who devoutly believe
they have God on their side, that blind faith is a virtue, that the
Devil was Darwin's ghostwriter and global warming is a tree-hugger's
fabrication and Reaganomics is sanctioned by scripture. Education, it
turns out, is an effective disinfectant.
  

    
That last post reminded me of a point in a talk I attended earlier
this week by academic/activist Robert Jensen
(http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html), who mentioned studies
showing that believers, confronted with facts opposing their beliefs,
tend to become even more entrenched, not less so. However, he
suggested, you can change someone's head with a good story, as opposed
to straight facts.
  

    
(It's a shame that inkwell guests have to use the web interface with that 
tiny text box. Or is a choice offered? I'm addressing that question to the 
hosts here.)
  

    
(I suspect they use a web interface because it's easier. I don't have
any problem editing my posts before I post them, or, in an emergency,
copying the post, scribbling the old one, and editing it again in the
box. I don't understand what Mark's problem is, unless it's pulling the
trigger before he's reread the post to make sure it says what he wants
it to.) 
  

    
   >they use a web interface because it's easier

Easier for some, much more difficult for others.
  

    
This isn't the place for this discussion. 
  

    
You can change the size of the text box.

Settings | Options | Topic and Response Options | Post box size

Set the box where you compose responses to a height of x lines.
  

    
It's also draggable, at least in Firefox.
  

    
But Ed is right.