RECENT ENTRIES
May 29, 2008
What's so bad about chickens coming home to roost?
I come from a non-rustic background, so maybe I'm missing something really obvious here. But I simply can't see the point of this metaphor. If you're a farmer, don't you want your chickens to come home to roost? In fact, wouldn't you do your utmost to make sure they never went away in the first place? As far as I can tell, chickens can serve only two possible purposes: either you behead them and eat them, or else you keep them for egg-production. Either way, I can't see why it should be considered such a disaster if, having gone away, they should suddenly come back again.
Or is the metaphor taking the fowl's point of view - i.e. are we supposed to put ourselves in the position of a hard-working hen who, having raised her chickens and attempted to send them out into the world, is appalled that they're all still mooching around the pen Matthew McConaughey-style?
May 25, 2008
In doomed defence of Falkner
A few days ago I mentioned a forum thread devoted to the thesis that Stephen King should win the Nobel Prize. Last time I eavesdropped on it, somebody who spelt Faulkner "Falkner" was arguing that he - Falkner - was precisely the kind of over-rated and unread elitist that King ought to win such prizes instead of; and somebody else had weighed in with the immortal observation that "Hemingway was a hack." True, a few discerning voices took the other position. But there's something I'm starting to notice about philistines: far from being ashamed of their rampant ignorance, they tend to take smug delight in broadcasting it, loud and proud, like Sid Vicious singing "My Way". The web, for all its virtues, exacerbates this. Now anybody can feel part of a community, even people who would greatly profit from being shunned and ostracized: milf-hunters, bukkake enthusiasts, suicide-dieters - and not-very-literate booklovers.
[A footnote: dropping by Wikipedia to check on my spelling of "Bukkake" - yes, I really am that scrupulous - I encountered this amusing Wikibox: "It has been suggested that this article be merged with "Pearl necklace."]
May 18, 2008
Tasty rage
Radio journalist describing a pissed-off crowd: "Their anger was almost palatable."
May 14, 2008
She just about escaped
Until quite recently, I wouldn't have wasted much time wondering what the above phrase meant. It means - does it not - that she almost escaped, but didn't quite make it?
Well, now I'm not so sure. About a year ago I started to notice, while watching matches from the English Premier League, that the commentators had started using the phrase to mean something quite different.
If Jimmy Bullard curled one into the top corner, for example, the commentator would go: "Look at that. He just about finds the top corner of the net." If a goalie made a successful lunging save, they'd say: "And Jenkins just about scrambles it off the line." In other words, they seemed to think that "just about" means what I think "only just" means.
I used to believe that this odd usage was confined to the small speech community of English soccer commentators, who had perhaps all been infected by just one semantically confused patient zero. But then, last night, I witnessed a telling exchange on the British reality show "Ladette to Lady," which I swear to God I don't normally watch. It came at the end, when a panel of posh ladies was called on to identify the least worthy slapper and eliminate her from the cast.
Posh Lady to second-least-worthy slapper: "Nicole [or whatever her name was], you just about survived this week."
At which Nicole immediately beamed, having surmised (correctly) that the posh lady meant that she had survived, if only by a small margin.
So this interpretation of the phrase is apparently quite widespread in Britain. But I'd swear, as someone who has always watched a shedload of British TV, that it's only sprung up in the last few years.
I also maintain that my understanding of the phrase is right, at least in the Australian context. If you're an Australian, and you're standing at your front door waiting to go out somewhere, and you yell out to someone who's dragging the chain in a remote part of the house "Are you ready?", you don't want to hear the response "Just about."
Also, perfectly valid phrases like "I'm just about to go," or "I'm just about to make some tea, would you like some?" turn into nonsense if you accept the match-callers' interpretation.
Wikidicks
Ever notice that the online environment has encouraged the evolution of several new subspecies of human tool? You've got your spammers, obviously; your anonymous site-vandals; your forum flame-artists; and so on. I've recently identified a new genus of cybertwat: the guy or gal who cruises round Wikipedia flagging articles as substandard on grounds of style or grammar, without troubling to say exactly what these supposed defects are, much less taking the time to actually correct them.
I say "supposed" defects because in my experience online experts on anything turn out in about 70 to 80% of cases to have no fucking idea what they're talking about, although quite often they'll be equipped with a kind of murky, primordial half-knowledge that is depressingly hard to combat. Hence I was once emailed by a helpful cretin who informed me that the non-publication of my book didn't really surprise her, because I had committed such barbarisms in it as beginning sentences with the word "but" and using commas in front of the word "and" - practices that anyone who's so much as skimmed a book printed in the last two centuries will recognize as perfectly sound.
Here's a related story from the offline world. An editor once hired me to proof-read a compilation of academic papers. In one of them, a Professor X made reference to "a colloquia" held at a certain university. I converted this, correctly, to "a colloquium."
Meeting with the editor at some later stage, I happened to notice the typescript on her desk and saw that she had reinstated the blazingly wrong "colloquia."
I gently queried this.
"Colloquia is the plural of colloquium, you see," she explained very slowly, as if walking me through something I didn't know. "It's Latin."
"I know that," I said. "But I think that if we're talking about a colloquium, just one, the plural is not appropriate." Or something like that.
Her reply, which I wish I could remember word-for-word, went along the following lines. In order to know for sure whether the singular or the plural was called for, we needed to know if there had been more than one colloquium i.e. we had to know whether the event in question had been a one-off thing, and hence "a colloquium," or one of a series, and hence "a colloquia." Claiming that she had no time to ring X up and check on this point, and strongly implying that such an eminent fellow would be unlikely to have made such a mistake in the first place, she thought we'd better trust him and go with the original text.
I declined to point out that such logic would also make "I ate an apples" an acceptable sentence. In fact I declined to say anything at all. I've always found it socially awkward to put people right when they're unequivocally and fantastically wrong. So I took the cheque, and she's never hired me again, and no doubt she believes to this day that I'm a bit of a dunce.
May 11, 2008
Kingsley Amis, in his Memoirs, on the subject of his Grandmother's cheapness: "It may or may not have been true, for instance, that she would leave out two matches for the maids to light the gas in the mornings: one match might plausibly break, so the reasoning was imagined, while more than two would be an inducement to some sort of pyrotechnic revel."
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition
Except me, every time I walk into a chemist's. I suffer from frequent rip-roaring headaches, and although there is no known pill that will get rid of them entirely, there are a couple of medications that take off some of the edge. Unfortunately these compounds must also be popular with the kind of customers who grind things up in backyard labs and turn them into illegal stimulants, because getting the chemist to hand them over is like submitting to an oral examination for a PhD. I have seen people in documentaries buy Uzis with less difficulty than I have in getting these drugs.
A typical transaction goes like this.
I ask for the pills.
Chemist: "What do you take them for?"
Me: "Headaches."
Chemist, with one eyebrow raised: "I've never heard of them being taken for headaches." Looks long and sceptically at the box. Sees the phrase about their being fully recommended for headaches. Then - not humbly, but with redoubled hostility:
"And do you find that they 'work'?"
Bear in mind that I usually have, by definition, a staggering headache while these dialogues are taking place. To date I haven't had one bad enough to reply to this question with "Not at all, that's why I keep buying them." But I've been close. I also wonder if any actual proprietor of a backyard drug lab would, even if fully ripped, be likely to be caught out by this query.
And so on. How often do you take them? How many of them do you take? Do you use your right hand or your left hand to put them into your mouth? So far I've never actually been denied the stuff. But always the chemist hands it over grudgingly, as if we both know I'm a guilty lowlife who's getting away with it only through lack of admissible evidence.
From the sublime to the shite
"Literature is, as no other, a field in which any fool can have an opinion" Kingsley Amis. Funnily enough, I came across this sentence on the same day that I stumbled on a forum thread devoted to the proposition that Stephen King should win the Nobel Prize. Now, I have nothing against King, AS I'VE SAID BEFORE. He has his merits. But I wish his admirers would be content just to like him. Isn't that enough? To argue that he deserves to win prizes is to argue that there are no other writers around who deserve to win them more. It's to argue that King is as good as it gets. This trend is absurd, and must be resisted.
KING'S WIKIPEDIA ENTRY gives a good run-down of the brouhaha that attended his preposterous receipt of the National Book Award. It quotes Richard Snyder's verdict that King's stuff is "not literature", and then quotes the riposte of one Orson Scott Card: "Let me assure you that King's work most definitely is literature, because it was written to be published and is read with admiration. What Snyder really means is that it is not the literature preferred by the academic-literary elite."
I'm not about to let Mr Card assure me of that. But I'll say one thing for him: he at least comes clean on what he thinks the word "literature" means. Granted, his definition is so broad as to include just about every book ever written: but that's what happens when you discard any notion of quality. We all know the drill: quality, or "quality", is subjective, arbitrary, difficult to define: so why not just ditch the very word, and accept that one man's definition of literary excellence, even if he hasn't read very many books, is just as valid as any Professor's? (By the way, I don't see why Card thinks that the "academic-literary elite" isn't on his side on this point - he can't know much about the post-modern academy.)
Well, I maintain that there is such a thing as objective literary merit, and that it can fairly easily be demonstrated. Here's exhibit A:
"When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her. She was smiling, the sun on her lovely face tanned by the snow and sun, beautifully built, her hair red gold in the sun, grown out all winter awkwardly and beautifully, and Mr Bumbly [their son] standing with her, blond and chunky and with winter cheeks looking like a good Vorarlberg boy."
This comes from the second-last page of Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. Of course it has far more power in its proper context: we know that the book's about to end; we know that Hemingway's been away in Paris with the woman he's fallen in love with; and so on. Still: it stands up pretty magnificently on its own, don't you think? It's not just that writers like King aren't in the same league as this - they're not even playing the same game.
First you have the excellence of the physical evocation: the risky triple use of the word "sun", the entirely unexpected "awkwardly" making you see that mussed 1920s rug in a way that no cliché ever could. But physical evocation the description of a scene is something that genre writers at least attempt, and sometimes even pull off. It's the stunning preceding phrase - "I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her" that gets us to the heart of what separates literature from pulp.
There are a couple of things to say about this phrase. First, what an inspired move it is to put it up front, before the description of the wife and son. A lesser writer might have put it after that, where it perhaps more logically belongs. But Hemingway opens with it, so that its effect hangs over everything else: so that the more vividly he makes us see the wife and son, the sadder the whole sunny scene becomes.
Also, look at how much meaning is crammed into those few words. If this phrase moves us, it's because it gets a very complex and universal emotion into a remarkably short string of words. This is a different kind of evocation: the evocation of a state of mind.
Here's what I mean. Imagine you're Hemingway on that train. What exactly are you feeling? Whatever it is, it's pre-verbal - we don't feel in words. It's a highly complicated throb of emotion. Now you're Hemingway at your desk. You have to convert that elusive little throb into language. You need to recall it, analyse it, work out precisely what it consists of, and then find words for it that will make the reader feel the same thing. You're now engaged in a kind of mental labour that the genre writer never even attempts: partly because it's not expected of him, and partly because he probably couldn't do it anyway. It's fiendishly hard to do justice to such a feeling in words. "I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her." He's not quite wishing that he still loved just his wife; he's not wishing he wasn't in love with the other woman; and he's not wishing he was dead now. Somewhere between these alternatives there's a difficult truth that Hemingway perfectly snares. It's such a simple-looking phrase, like a quick wiggle of a calligrapher's hand; but I'd be surprised if Hemingway arrived at it without a lot of thought and hard work. And craft. Sometimes you'll hear people take the fall-back position that writers like King are at the very least great craftsmen. Not compared to real craftsmen they're not. Where is the passage in King that is a tenth as well crafted as the one above? Hemingway cares an awful lot about about his product and works extremely hard to get it right. Surely that sort of commitment is the secret behind excellence in anything: cooking, sport, music, criticism. Really there's no need to invoke nebulous elite-defined notions of "art." I'm just talking about simple conscientious hard work. There's no substitute for it. Or maybe there is: don't bother with it, and wait till there are no critics left who can tell the slapdash from the sublime.
May 6, 2008
On people who don't clear their crap off the tables after eating in food courts
Who are these people? Were they raised by wolves?
On the decimation of meaning
The other day, rewatching the excellent documentary The Fog of War, I noticed that its subject, the supremely articulate Robert McNamara, uses the phrase could care less instead of the obviously correct couldn't care less. This is a slip that a lot of Americans make; but when someone as literate as McNamara makes it, we might as well concede that it is no longer a slip at all, and that the wrong version of the phrase has effectively driven out the right one. This is worth deploring, because like most illiteracies it creates unnecessary ambiguity. For example: say I happened to find myself discussing, with McNamara, the life and works of Paris Hilton. And say I declared that I "couldn't care less" about her. Would McNamara, thinking that to "care less" about something is not to care about it, therefore suppose that I do care about Paris? Not quite, but we're getting there. With certain other errors we're there already. For example: even if the right opportunity came up, which it probably never will, I would never bother trying to use the word "decimate" in the correct way. On that one, the battle's already lost. Even Jared Diamond, in his polymathic Guns, Germs and Steel, uses the word as if it meant "to wipe out entirely, or almost entirely." In fact it means - or used to mean - SOMETHING QUITE DIFFERENT. But if you tried to make it mean that now, you'd be more likely than not to be completely misunderstood. Another one that gets my goat: "how big of a deal are we going to make of this?" Or: "how big of a house does he own?" The of is superfluous, but the people who insert it seem to think they're triumphantly adhering to some esoteric law of grammar. And one more, which is spreading like a weed online: to pay your do's .