The Departed

Famous people keep dropping like flies.  This seems to be the worst year for celebrity death in quite some time, perhaps since the year that John Denver and Sonny Bono died young and needlessly.  Of course, not all of the celebs who shuffle off this mortal coil are on the level of a Michael Jackson or a Patrick Swayze.  Some are known for other things than performing and are really only celebrities in the loosest definition of the word.  Two of those who have recently died are Larry Gelbart and Jody Powell.

Gelbart was a writer and more specifically a comedy writer and more specifically than that an immensely skilled comedy writer.  In death as in life, he is best remembered for creating, or, rather, adapting from the movie of the same name, the sitcom M*A*S*H.  there was more to him than that, though, and he wrote movies and plays and other TV shows.  Some of those are pretty damn good, too, such as the play Sly Fox and the TV movie Barbarians at the Gate.  He started out in radio at the age of 16 when his father, who was a Hollywood barber,  got him a job writing for Danny Thomas.  that led to a stint working on Duffy’s Tavern which led to writing for Bob Hope for a while.

In the ’50s, he worked for Sid Caesar on Caesar’s Hour and some specials.  He is represented by the character called Kenny in Laughter on the 23rd Floor, and I want to go further off to the side on that and say that the character of Lucas is not Neil Simon’s presentation of himself, but is, in fact, his take on the young Woody Allen.  It’s not about Your Show of Shows, which is what Neil worked on.  It is about Caesar’s Hour, which was where Woody came on board.  In fact, there is a legendary story about Woody being brought to the writer’s room by Milt Kamen, who you probably don’t remember, but should.  Kamen had found Allen when Woody was writing sketches at a resort in the Catskills and convinced Caesar to hire him.  On the appointed day, Kamen collected Allen and ushered him into the writer’s room with the introduction, “I have with me the young Larry Gelbart.”  To which Gelbart, who had been a top comedy writer for about ten years, responded, “The young Larry Gelbart is sitting right here.”

But that’s how young he was when he started.  He was maybe 26 or 27 at the time and seemed like an old pro.

Gelbart was best known as a writer of clever dialogue in the spare, unsentimental tradition of George S. Kaufman.  As the guy who wrote most of the best episodes of the first four seasons of M*A*S*H and who also had a hand in all the others from that period, his influence on me was enormous.  His characterization of Hawkeye showed that he could have been a good writer for Groucho, had Groucho still needed top-notch film writers in the later decades of his career.  for many years, my true ambition was to be the young Larry Gelbart.  For a while, it was to be the middle-aged Larry Gelbart.  A person could do worse.

The second person I wanted to bring up was Jody Powell.

Now, I can’t say that he was any particular influence on me, although I’m sure he would have been had I actually known him. ( At least that’s what I got from the tribute that Hendrick Hertzberg wrote about him on The New Yorker website.)  I just wanted to note that I saw him once when I lived in Washington.  He crossed K Street in the opposite direction that I was, and I recognized him.  He gave no indication of knowing me, as shocking as that might seem.  I didn’t stop him, didn’t follow him, didn’t pester him, just took note of him.  “That’s Jody Powell,” I thought.  “Cool.”  He certainly didn’t look like a guy who would die, unexpectedly, of a heart attack at age 65.

You just never know.

Notes, Comments, and Hatchets, Part 1A

There’s so much wrong with Malcolm Gladwell’s hatchet job on To Kill a Mockingbird that I’ve had to actually write a second blog post just to cover all the nonsense.  Here goes.

In yesterday’s post, I deconstructed the basic ideas that underpin Gladwell’s contentions concerning the book.  Today, I’m just going to quickly go over a couple of smaller points.

One of Gladwell’s later tactics is to draw a comparison between To Kill a Mockingbird and criticisms that George Orwell made of Charles Dickens.  First, he fails by assuming that simply because George Orwell said something that it is automatically true, that Orwell–who I think would have been disgusted by being used in this manner–was Christ returned.  The real problem that Gladwell encounters, though, is that when Orwell criticized Dickens for attacking “the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places” and for showing “no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown,” he is not attacking Dickens the novelist, he is attacking Dickens the social satirist.  Again, To Kill a Mockingbird was not, is not, and was never intended to be a satire, social or otherwise.  The comparison is not valid.  Orwell, had he lived may have loved, hated, or ignored To Kill a Mockingbird, but he certainly would never have confused it for satire.

Next, as raised in a comment in my previous post, Gladwell’s interpretation of the sequence at the end of the book concerning Boo Radley is just plain wrong.  To Kill a Mockingbird is, at its heart, a meditation on some basic teachings of Jesus, such as “do unto others” and “turn the other cheek.”  Boo Radley, who is not merely “shy,” as Malcolm Gladwell would have it, but is either mentally retarded or just plain crazy, defends Scout and Jem not as a matter of civic duty, but in response to a series of small kindnesses.  He would derive no benefit from notoriety–a concept which leaves the well-known Mr Gladwell aghast–and would only, in the long term, suffer harm from it, probably ending up being institutionalized.  Since Mr Gladwell appears to be incapable of absorbing anything other than the most surface elements from a story, he takes the Sheriff’s reference to “angel food cakes” quite literally, and does not interpret it as a metaphor for the invasion of Boo’s privacy and the harm that can be done by the well meaning.  It means that Boo Radley sought no glory and deserves the right to have no glory thrust upon him.  In other words, good works are their own reward.

Finally, Mr Gladwell excoriates the book for presenting what his own research shows was a fairly realistic depiction of conditions in the South in 1936.  Harper Lee’s mistake, in his view, is in telling us the truth simply because that truth is uncomfortable and ugly.  He wants Atticus Finch to be something he was unlikely to be, a person who stood outside the society he lived in, immune from the values he was raised with and surrounded by, some sort of Nietzschian Superman, who is exactly the sort of person I’ve never come across in real life.  Mr Gladwell’s problem is that he doesn’t want a novel, he wants a fable, a fairy tale, in which things work out the way we want them to rather than in the way they actually happen.

It is true that Atticus Finch tends to get placed on too high of a pedestal, however, that is the fault of neither Harper Lee or To Kill a Mockingbird.  That is the fault of readers who tend to romanticize their heroes and wrongly so.  Atticus Finch was a good man, but not a great one, a person who sought justice where none was likely, but not a revolutionary.  And yet, when all is said and done, is there not something to be said for a book that preaches understanding and compassion as virtues?  Are these not, in fact, the same sort of virtues that Dr. King so often preached?  Why should Malcolm Gladwell and The New Yorker be so against compassion?  It’s because it is hard to find room for compassion when you are planning a hatchet job.

Notes, Comments, and Hatchets, Part One

This is the first in at least a two-part series concerning The New Yorker and the various hatchet jobs that it does on established literary figures and works.  For a place that’s continually published crappy fiction throughout my adult life, they like to get awfully uppity.

Today’s installment concerns Malcolm Gladwell’s knifing this week of the classic book To Kill a Mockingbird in honor of its 50th anniversary.  Gladwell’s approach to the novel is social rather than artistic.  In fact, even though it is a work of art and not a treatise on race relations, he makes no assessment of either the merits or demerits of the text.  His problem with it is that it does not make any attempt to overthrow Jim Crow and end racism as it was known in one fell swoop.  He attacks it for fostering what he calls “[o]ld style Southern liberalism,” an approach to Jim Crow and politics in the South that was destroyed in the battle between the Civil Rights movement and diehard segregationists in the late ’50s and early ’60s.  He calls old style Southern liberalism “gradual and paternalistic,” which seems accurate.  Further, he claims that Atticus Finch’s approach to race relations and dealing with justice in the South at the time of the novel was too namby-pamby, too paternalistic, too forgiving of people, and not committed enough to true equality between blacks and whites, and this is probably true too.

The problem is that the novel is not, in its essence, about race relations and was never meant to be a kind of manifesto.  Harper Lee set out to tell a story about certain people in a particular time-and-place.  She was trying not to change the world, but to describe it, as it was, as best she could.  Oh, she could have portrayed Atticus in the hero mode of the average boy’s adventure novel, righting wrongs and always following the true moral path.  Instead, though, she attempted to draw a portrait of a man. As someone who could have actually existed in space and time.

The primary mistake that Gladwell makes is a classic one.  He assumes that the point of art is to change the world, which it most assuredly is not.  In fact, he attacks both the novel and the character of Atticus for using the “hearts and minds” method, which is seen as being too slow, too incremental, too otherworldly.  The truth is that this is how all art works.  Art is about evolution rather than revolution, and anybody who thinks that the shackles of oppression will be broken and abandoned because of a book is out of his or her tree.  People have tried to do that and never has a one accomplished, at the end of the day, a damn thing.  In fact, most ended up being worth nothing more than recycling.  Pedantic and self-important books tend to end up in the dust bin, with the possible exception of Ayn Rand’s.  And, fortunately, most people, mainly boys, who grow enamored of Ms Rand eventually outgrow her.  Her work is juvenalia for juvenile minds.

No, the best that a novel can do is to get the reader to understand another person’s suffering and thereby increase the reach of that person’s compassion just a jot further.  And that is what To Kill a Mockingbird is on about:  compassion.

When Gladwell complains that Atticus is too forgiving of Walter Cunningham, the “poor, white farmer” who leads a mob in an attempted lynching, he misses (and so does the scholar he quotes) the entire point of the episode.  Here.  Let me let Malcolm explain his point of view for himself:

The mob eventually scatters, and the next morning Finch tries to explain the night’s events to Scout. Here again is a test for Finch’s high-minded equanimity. He likes Walter Cunningham. Cunningham is, to his mind, the right sort of poor white farmer: a man who refuses a W.P.A. handout and who scrupulously repays Finch for legal work with a load of stove wood, a sack of hickory nuts, and a crate of smilax and holly. Against this, Finch must weigh the fact that Cunningham also leads lynch mobs against black people. So what does he do? Once again, he puts personal ties first. Cunningham, Finch tells his daughter, is “basically a good man,” who “just has his blind spots along with the rest of us.” Blind spots? As the legal scholar Monroe Freedman has written, “It just happens that Cunningham’s blind spot (along with the rest of us?) is a homicidal hatred of black people.”

First, is it true that “Cunningham’s blind spot . . . is a homicidal hatred of black people”?  Is Walter Cunningham, in fact, going about killing blacks as he comes across them or is his leadership of this mob more specific than that?  Does he in fact lead “lynch mobs against black people” or lead one mob against one particular black person?  Are members of any mob a collection of psychopaths or are they groups of people who are under the sway of mass hysteria?  Do people quite often do things in groups that they wouldn’t dare do alone?  And shouldn’t the renowned writer on sociology be aware of that?

Cunningham’s blind spot is not “a homicidal hatred of black people,” but rather an unquestioned belief in an evil social system.  Again, Harper Lee could have painted him as merely a monster, a villain, but that would have taken her story in the fantasyland of melodrama.  In the real and complex world, good men can do evil things, quite often because they have invested their identities in a rotten system or because they get swept away in the hysterical moment.  Is it better to understand that person and their frailties or to condense them into a caricature of their real selves, all the better to hate them with?   For both Malcolm Gladwell and Professor Monroe Freedman are guilty of stereotyping.  They have to if they want to construct that straw man where the character of Walter Cunningham used to be.

As Jean Renoir said in The Rules of the Game, “The terrible thing about life is this:  Everyone has his reasons.”  This is not to imply a kind of leveling of reasons and actions, but to open the possibility in one’s mind that we are all human and fallible.  It is to imply that compassion is a virtue and that blind judgment is not.

As part of Gladwell’s attack, he says that To Kill a Mockingbird is “a novel set in mid-century Alabama,” and while I cannot carp about it being set in Alabama, I must complain about the “mid-century” part.  The purpose, of course, is to make sure that your straw man is set in the proper straw setting.  The meaning that Gladwell wants the reader to take away from “mid-century” is that the novel is set in the 1950s, the decade that saw the rise of the Civil Rights movement and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, just so that he can show how out-of-step the book was with the times that it sought to portray.  Which is nonsense.  The novel is set in 1936, a very different time in Southern history.  This “mid-century” business is misleading, just the kind of trick used when the author has few legitimate arguments to make.  And so much for The New Yorker’s fabled fact-checking department.

Attack To Kill a Mockingbird if you must, but at least attack it for what it is, not what it isn’t.  To do so should be beneath a writer of Malcolm Gladwell’s stature, and to print it should beneath a publication such as The New Yorker.  Unfortunately, as further entries in this series will show, the hatchet job is an accepted part of The New Yorker’s ethic.

UPDATE:  I have added a part two to this argument.

The Haiku Form

Over the last few weeks, I have started writing poems in the haiku form on Facebook not quite every day, but most days.  I don’t claim that they are good or even true haikus (the subject matter is wrong and they lack the depth necessary), but I am having fun with it.  I’m using is as a little game to work on my mental acuity.  Just trying to delay mental decline as long as possible.

Since Facebook is such an impermanent thing, I’ve decided to collect the haikus, probably on a weekly basis, here.  The following are all the haikus I’ve harvested from Facebook so far.

Suicide squirrels/arrayed across the pavement/awake from the dream.

Stress levels rising./Self-imposed tensions are worst/when I am thinking.

Teams of aliens/burnishing middle class lawns./The status quo lives.

A woman’s blowout/occurs up at the corner./A stranger fixes it.

Haiku destroy’d by/camp scheduling error./Must now write anew.

A random lazy day/occurring because of kid./Will I handle it?

I am back at work./Watch the videos below./Excellent pieces.

(The videos referred to are here, here, and here.)

Haiku exercise/meant to keep the brain active./Not merely insane.

Think of Orson Welles,/not as a stereotype,/but a baritone.

No inspiration./Cloudy thoughts in a clear mind./Work is the problem.

Creative drive is/flickering back on today./Words appearing now.

You cannot go back./The same self is different./Time is quite tricky.

Now I’m on Twitter./I never would have thought so/in my days of youth.

We’re off to Greenville/for fun and also baseball./Good times are ahead.

Two pale pickup trucks,/one one place, the other another./ Were they related?

That’s all until next time.

The Elements of Style, Not Steel

In reading an article in The Times this morning concerning the 50th anniversary edition of The Elements of Style, I reflected on a blog post I wrote a little over a year ago in which I discussed the effect the so-called “little book” had on me as a writer.  It was a small stroll down memory lane inspired, at the time, by a slight detour.  I had read a blog post by Paul Krugman in which he danced a piroette on the wonders of George Orwell’s essay about clarity in writing, “Politics and the English Language,” and I ventured the opinion that not only might Orwell’s essay perhaps not have been “the best essay on writing ever written,” but was, at least in my case, one of the best sleep aids I had ever encountered.  Some days later, I noticed on the dashboard for this blog that there was a link incoming to that post.  It connected to some website devoted to Orwell, and the author of the link added one of the “rules” from The Elements of Style in which E.B. White enjoined the nascent writer to not “affect a breezy manner.”  Apparently my lack of enthusiasm had struck a nerve, and someone who lacked the courage to identify himself had constructed what he thought was a witty rejoinder to my slander against his hero.  That’s how things are done in the digital world.

Unfortunately for our Orwell-loving sniper, my piece, while playful in spots, was not written in a breezy manner, and he (or she; idiocy is not gender-specific) missed the point of a section that White referred to in the book as a selection of reminders.  This point was also missed in a recent article published in The Chronicle of Higher Learning by a professor from the University of Edinburgh called Geoffery Pullum, although, in fairness, Professor Pullum has more reasonable, compelling, and useful ideas to put forth.  Both seem (although I might be misinterpreting Professor Pullum) to be under the misapprehension that The Elements of Style is anything other than a collection of guidelines for the beginner and is not–especially after E.B. White got through with it–a polemic or manifesto.  Of course, they are not alone.  Too many thousands, including the folks who created the grammar wizard in Microsoft Word, have taken the Little Book too seriously.  They treat it as if it were holy writ, not merely some quick ideas that put forth the notion–the same one as put forth by Orwell, by the way–that clarity in the writing of English prose is a virtue.

Because Professor Strunk followed his own advice concerning the making of definite assertions, the early sections of the book do read like an extension of the Ten Commandments, but this can be overcome.  And the second section, the one dominated by White, is far less proscriptive, although, I guess, by the time that people get that far, they have been conditioned enough to jump when commanded that they unconsciously omit White’s advice to season one’s taste of his reminders with a pinch or two of salt.  It is long past time for everyone to relax a little and to remember that The Elements of Style is not a sacred text.  It began its life as a guidebook for college freshmen and not as a learned disquisition on the English language in all its complexity.  It is a style guide, and a decent one, I think, and entertaining to boot.

Now, two more things before I go.

First, I want to make it clear that I am not anti-Orwell.  1984 and Animal Farm are two of the best novels I’ve ever read, extraordinary in every way.  What I failed to make clear previously was that it was that one essay that put me to sleep.  If it is truly as great as Professor Krugman had it, then the fault is mine.

Second, Professor Pullum’s essay should be read by anyone who is infatuated with The Elements of Style and his words heeded.  I think he is right in just about everything he says except in his insistence on taking the book sooooo seriously.  It also seems to me that some of his notions, such as that “[t]he students who know which words are needless don’t need the instruction,” are logically flawed and detract from his overall argument.   (Not that he’s arguing with overalls.  Whoops!  There’s that breezy side of me rearing its ugly head again.  For shame!  For shame!)  I think it would be great to see his essay published with the standard text as an afterword or something.  Everyone would benefit from a bit of scoffing, for there is no animal duller than a sacred cow.

Apprentice Work, Part 2

My twenties were a fallow time for me as a writer.  From the time that I moved out of my parents’ home in 1983 until I started working for Ernst & Young when I lived in the DC area in 1988, as I recall it, my total output was three short stories, each quirky and experimental in its own way.  The most conventional of them was a story I wrote in 1986 called “Dreg of the Wildebeest.”  The story of a Neanderthal who has a midlife crisis, it was inspired by my reading of about a page-and-a-half of the second book of Jean Auel’s Earth’s Children series, Valley of the Horses.  The scene in question featured the heroine of the piece, a young and beautiful (they’re always young and beautiful in melodrama) Cro Magnon, who is about to be deflowered by a Neanderthal whose band she has fallen in with.  (And don’t chicks, even paolithic ones, always go for guys in bands?)  Now, this ever-expanding pool of absurdity was instantaneously metastasized when the Neanderthal’s thoughts were presented for our viewing pleasure.  It turned out that not only was getting it on with a hot chick–possibly of a related yet still different species–not his only concern, but it wasn’t even near the top.  His main concern, an absurdity written with such a straight face that my mind reeled when I read it in the file room at Fannie Mae, was that he be gentle with her since it was her first time.  In the 23 years that have elapsed since I read this revelation, I have still not been able to wrap my head around the idea of your average Neanderthal being a sort of neolithic Cary Grant, suavely seducing the ladies and always making sure that they finished first.

And so I wrote the story, almost in a fever.  And here it is, in pdf format that shows edits I made in pencil for a subsequent draft.

(Click on the link below and then click on the link on that page in order to get the pdf.  Thanks for making it so damn easy, WordPress.)

Dreg of the Wildebeest

Say What?

Let me start off by saying that no one holds Stephen Fry in higher esteem than I do.  In fact, even though he’s only a year-and-a-half older than I am, I still want to be him when I grow up.  And yet, despite my admiration and abstract sort of affection, I do not think him a deity and feel completely comfortable in disagreeing with him when the occasion calls for it.  And, unfortunately, this is one of those times.

In the most recent installment of Stephen’s podcast, entitled “Language,” he makes some statements concerning language and correct usage and such subjects that, while well-intentioned and well-argued, are wrong. This is not to say that he is completely wrong or that he doesn’t make reasonable points, however, the conclusions he draws are, I believe, mistaken.

Stephen’s main point is that language is changeable and malleable and that some are often too strict in approaching language.  It is not a compilation of rights and wrongs, and those who would nitpick every perceived error need to take up ballroom dancing or Parcheesi or perhaps even sex.  And I agree with this.  I, too, used to be an absolutist, but found over time that my absolutes didn’t always apply and weren’t always as solid as I had supposed.  However, Stephen goes on to assert a kind of feel-good doctrine in which all words and usages are equal and are merely an expression of the exuberance of language itself.  In truth, as in most facets of life, ignorance often trumps exuberance and many usages that gain currency are, to use the horse racing terms, by stupidity and out of laziness.

We’ve all heard a person, usually young, say something on the order of “he like said, you know, whatever,” and I would argue that this is not truly speaking.  It’s semi-organized grunting.  Just this morning, I read a blog post on The New Yorker’s website in which a young woman who works for The New Republic was quoted as saying,

“It was, like, ‘Do you want to take Monday off work to drive in Obama’s motorcade?’ ” Lear recalled. “I went, ‘Yes, absolutely. But who is this?’ ”

This was a presumably college-educated person talking to a reporter.  Is saying “went” instead of “said”  any more efficient a way of expressing the idea of communicating?  No.  The same number of letters and syllables.  Is “went” somehow clearer or even as clear?  No, because that leaves us with this as a possible sentence:  “She went, ‘She went.’”  No, it is mere dribbling, a childish lingo forged in the furnace of laziness.  When we consider the elegance and subtlety available to human expression, should we accept such palaver as being as good as anything else?  Nonsense.

Now, Stephen relies heavily on the ideas that language is innate in humans and on the Chomskian idea that thought and language are separate.  Now, both these notions are true.  As he points out, where no language is provided, new languages evolve.  And anyone who has ever observed a cat or a dog has seen clear evidence of thought.  Animals consider and anticipate, both of which must constitute a thought process of some sort.  In this he is correct.  However, Stephen does not take the process far enough.  For while thought can exist without language, reasoning cannot.  And reasoning is shaped by words and one’s use of them.  Let us consider, in the shadow of his brutal tenure, the administration of George W. Bush.  Has there ever been a better example of a person who spoke poorly and reasoned as well as he spoke?

This is not to say that everyone who is well spoken is also reasonable and of a like mind.  All the swirling influences of society and temperament affect such things.  But to send someone into that maelstrom without the weapon of well-honed language is to send them defenseless to be buffeted and drowned by information they cannot process and leaders they cannot interpret. While I am not a fan of George Orwell’s essay on language–it’s soporific effects made it almost impossible for me to drive after reading it–I do agree with the main point he makes.  He says, “Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”  And people who do not use language with subtlety and skill have no chance of cutting through the forest of propaganda that the average citizen finds himself in every day of his life. The young lady I quoted earlier went through the experience of driving a vehicle in the Obama motorcade on Inauguration Day without a scintilla of insight.  Her main concern was the celebrity of the people she drove, and that she spends her free time texting people instead of reading The Mill on the Floss, which she brought with her, is, I think symptomatic of this entire problem.

Stephen assails the language purists–and some of them are downright Puritans–by questioning their abilities with words.  He claims to know that they have no poetry in their souls, but I do not know how this can be proved.  It is a moment of bigotry in a remarkably unbigoted person, but we all have our faults.   In fact, I would dare say that the people who, by traditional standards, misuse the language are less likely to have poetry in them and that their misuse is liable to degrade any language to a point at which poetry is no longer possible.  Members of the military and politicians and football coaches are the leaders of an assault on language.  It is they who have given us “impact” and “reference” as verbs, two examples of a myriad of lead balloons that pose as speech.

Now, Stephen defends the verbing of nouns, and he has a point.  He points to Shakespeare, but Shakespeare is an example extreme in relation to the rest of us.  And however much Shakespeare liked to verb, he still did so selectively and strategically.  This is why he was capable of tabling, but not dooring.  And this is my problem with “impact” and “reference” as verbs.  In the case of the former, it is a disingenuous attempt to sound important and manly.  It has the same meaning as “affect,” only with a thick coating of pretension.  It is a strutting Spanish Captain of a word, veneered in braggadocio but empty inside.

“Reference,” on the other hand, is just plain unnecessary.  It has come to replace the verb the noun originally derived from (for we can noun verbs as easily as we verb nouns), the humble word “refer.”  I have yet to see what advantage “reference” offers.  It takes just as many syllables to reference something as it does to refer to it, and in the past tense, it actually adds a syllable more.  And there is something clumsy and clunky about it.  Meanwhile, “refer” is lovely in its short five letters.  The reason why “reference” has gained so much currency of late is that it sounds officious and pretentious, not because it is a better or easier word to use.  The person who references must be important, or so the speaker would have us think.  Since words should lead us toward reality rather than away from it, I can’t admit the usefulness of “reference.”

This is the problem with declaring all words to be “good.”  Linguistic egalitarianism hides the fact that some words are better than others.  They are less pretentious or more precise or more apt.  They reveal rather than hide.  Some soar and others waddle.  Some illuminate while others snuff out the light.  Simply because the language evolves through usage doesn’t mean that each mutation is a good one.  Some will survive and others won’t.  Some deserve to be euthanized.  It’s really best for all.

He also criticizes those who are forever on about punctuation and grammar.  Now, in terms of grammar, he just might be right.  In spoken language, grammar is more a matter of the ear than the mind, and in written language, we are often weighed down by rules that have no basis in practice.  Two of the more notorious examples are the prohibitions on split infinitives and in ending sentences with prepositions.  Both are rules devised by people in the 18th Century who were trying to make English work like Latin.  Which it doesn’t.  In Latin, infinitives are single words.  In English, they are two-word forms, such as “to split.”  and, in English, infinitives often beg to unequivocally be  split.  It’s a matter of ear.

Ending sentences with prepositions is another such nostrum and is foolish and prissy.  Sometimes a preposition just wants to make its way to the end of a sentence and if it doesn’t get there you end up with something along the lines of Winston Churchill’s famous (and perhaps apocryphal) parody, “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.”  Again, the ear is the guide.

However, in his insistent railings against people who are consumed with the proper use of apostrophes, he misses the point of punctuation and why it matters whether one tiny little squiggle mark is present or missing.  Punctuation is an aid not to the writer, but to the reader.  It has evolved over an expanse of time, and the point is to make comprehension easier and not just to give a bunch of self-satisfied prisses a means for feeling superior.  Let us take, since Stephen so furiously has, the lowly apostrophe.  It exists in three states:  before the final “s,” after the final “s,” and in place of missing letters in the middle.  Let’s start with its use with possessives.  As readers, it tells us one of three things.  If it comes before the final “s,” it means that the noun is singular, which can be of some use to know.  If it comes after the final “s,” the noun is plural, which can also be of use on occasion.  If it does not appear at all, then we know that the noun is plural and precious moments are relieved of the burden of trying to parse noun/verb agreement.  Its absence or misuse may not constitute a tragedy, but it is a help, both to the reader who wishes to not be confused and the writer who wants the reader flying through his or her work instead of having to puzzle over every possessive.

That people can get carried away with these rules of punctuation is undoubtedly true.  There are martinets in every field of human endeavor.  And there are those who confuse matters of style–such as in the use of serial commas–with the basic rules of punctuation, which exist only to aid us.

Here in the U.S., I’ve noticed a puzzling fashion in which people have signs made that use quotation marks quite wrongly.  For example, there is an auto repair place near us that has a sign hanging prominently that says “‘English’ spoken here.”  Now, quotation marks around a word in such a context usually denotes irony, if not downright sarcasm.  Were these folks implying that their English was not very good or a mere facsimile of English?  Or did they mean to have the word either underlined or italicized in order to indicate emphasis?  It may be pedantic to note the difference, but a difference there is.  And it doesn’t make me superior to those who made the mistake, merely more knowledgeable.  If there are, as Stephen would have it, no wrong words, is there no wrong knowledge?  Is all knowledge the same and those who would espouse a greater knowledge on a given subject pedants?  I think not.

There is a certain kind of snobbery that attaches itself to the apron strings of language.  Of course there is.  It is a human product.  And wherever humans go, there is pride and snobbery and ignorance and foolishness.  There is also knowledge and insight and reason and thoughtfulness.  We are strange creatures filled with loves and compulsions, interests and indulgences.  It is not, in my view, a burden to ask people to use language well–as well as they can.  It is a shame, however, to expect the least of them, to banish them to a land called Ignorance, to shield their eyes from the light of reason.  To write well, to speak well, to use the full vigor, power, and beauty of English is not a vice, and to ask the best of others is not a crime.

Chrysalis, Part III

Furthermore.

Yesterday evening while I was driving to get the kid from the afterschool program, I realized what the real problem is with holding down a regular job while trying to create art.  And this speaks to a counterargument that I get, and I’m pretty sure most people who identify themselves as being artists get, whenever the subject of why I hate having to work for a living comes up.  The most popular counterargument runs along the lines of “Can’t you just pursue it as a hobby?  On the side?  Aren’t the ultimate satisfactions involved in the doing rather than in succeeding?”  And that can be something of a poser, because it is true that the satisfaction resides in the making rather than the selling.  I write because something very deep in my being impels me to rather than because of a pursuit of riches or fame.  In fact, if riches or fame were in any way the point, I would have switched to making crappy works long ago.  As H.L. Mencken said, “Nobody ever went broke from underestimating the American public.”

And this is where the paradox comes in.  In order to survive in as fiercely economic a society as this one, you have to have income.  In order to have income, most of us have to work.  In my particular case, I am limited by my uselessness as a student.  Had I had more facility as a student, I could have taken the more accepted modern route for an artist and collected degrees, grants, and fellowships instead of an ever-lengthening resume.  However, in the words of Felix Unger, “we are what we are,” and no amount of wishing or griping is going to change that.  The classroom brings out the rebel in me, and usually ends with both me and the teacher frustrated beyond reckoning.

And so, I’ve had to work for a living.

I always thought that the main problem involved with this system was that the forty hours or more given over to an employer each week were simply hours of labor misdirected.  And that is true.  However, the far more profound problem, as I realized last evening, is that it takes away from the time available for thinking about whatever it is that I am writing at any given time.  My employers quite rightly assume that my mind will be taken up mostly with competently completing my assigned tasks, and I do try to do at least a marginal job in whatever position I’ve found myself in over the years.  And the problem is this:  In order to do the best job possible of writing a story or a novel or a play or anything, for that matter, I have to immerse myself in it.  In my ideal working conditions, I try to live the characters and to exist inside the situations.  I picture the locations and productions in my mind’s eye and lose myself inside the project.  It’s hard to do that while composing emails or meeting with coworkers or clients.  It’s hard to do while fighting traffic.

Now, there might be those who advocate taking the time needed away from my time with my family, but the problem there is that my family life actually nourishes my art.  It keeps alive those emotions–love, empathy, and compassion–that make my art possible.  Whatever the weaknesses in my work, my life with my wife and son makes it stronger, more supple, more alive.

No.  It’s the job that must go.  Unfortunately, the only way I can do that is by replacing the income my job brings in with income from writing.  In order to do that, I need to achieve some level of success.  And I’m trying.  I have some things out now and have decided to try to market more of what I have in stock.  I’m asking the universe to help me make the transition in as seemless and painless a way as possible.  Prayers and good wishes from others accepted and encouraged.  I just need to get there.

Chrysalis, Part II

So anyway.

It is not the artist’s job to assess; his (or hers or its, let us, after all, be inclusive) is only to create.

There are many ways to create, but not everyone wants to see that.  There’s no money in it.  And the idea that The Iowa School for Famous Writers and other bastions of academia that try to turn a calling into a profession exist on is that artistry can be deconstructed, dissected, analyzed, and understood by the mind.  They rely on the misconception that creativity can be distilled into a method, into something that can be taught.  However, they are wrong.  Artistry cannot be learned.  It must be discovered.

I am not an expert on the work methods of great artists.  There are a few that I know about, and what the work methods of these few have in common is not method as much as a reliance on instinct and serendipity.  Index cards never seem to play a role.  Which is not to say that it is impossible for index cards to play a role; we are securely in “to each his own” territory here.

Throughout my creative life, my method has evolved haphazardly into no method at all.  I blunder forward and suddenly stop.  I step back and rewrite and revise.  I look for places where the writing is skimpy and try to fill it out, fatten it up.  And then I go forward a bit, and look back and write anew and revise and blunder forward again in blindness.  I look for the happy accidents, which are all markers, and try to follow their lead.  I try to keep in mind the Taoist wisdom that says that he who makes breaks.

I look, again and again, for the unnecessary word in order to remove it.

This approach is now infecting the way that I write essays.  I started out blogging some four years ago.  I started out relying on the traditional five-paragraph form of essay, and everything proceeded in a linear, sequential, logical fashion.  However, as the years have worn on and worn me down, I’ve found myself writing, more-and-more, in a nonlinear way.  Instead of following one idea, instead of writing from a proposition to a conclusion, I’m combining thoughts and letting the essay tell me how to get written rather than me imposing a structure on it.

This post and the previous one are steps in that direction.  I wonder how the next one will turn out.

Chrysalis, Part I

Back in the mid-90s, I hit hard times.  A job disappeared suddenly, and I found myself having to break the lease on my apartment and stay with some friends because I could no longer pay the rent.  Things had been hardscrabble for some time, and I had suffered some bad luck and made some bad choices, endured heartache and once again tasted of disappointment.  The night before I was going to shove my belongings into a U-Haul and end a chapter of my life, I lay on my futon in the bedroom dark and tried to sleep.  Anxiety, however, trumped sleep, and I struggled for a way to quiet my brain and calm my nerves.   As I lay there, I formed the image of me hanging from a rope over a gaping abyss.  And then some words of Joseph Campbell’s came to me from his interview with Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth:  “You know the rule.  If you’re falling, dive.”

And in my mind, I let go of the rope.

In the years since, I have gotten more jobs, paid rent again, gotten married, and fathered a son.  I’ve grown, deepened, and learned.  I have been slandered and praised, been wronged and wronged others.  I’m a different person than I was then, older and wiser in the sense that I now understand a smidgen of how much I don’t understand.  I’m wiser because I now know that I am not wise.

Like everyone else, I have been on a journey, part of which has been artistic.  In fact a huge part of it has.  I suppose that this makes me, in these years at least, a journeyman.  That’s fine.  I can accept that.  Perhaps it’s all just a journey, and most artists are only ever journeymen.  The further along I’ve gotten, the less that mastery seems possible, which is not to say that I think that I’m a lousy artist who produces lousy works.  I have no idea how good I am or what the value of the works I create are.  I don’t think that’s my function.  I just put the pieces together as best I can and hope it works out.