One could pass from heavy-set young men with a full chop of beard and a fifty-pound pack on their back to young adolescent poetesses, pale as Ophelia, prim as Florence Nightingale, from college boys in sweaters with hints of Hippie allegiance, to Madison Avenue types in sideburns, straw hats, and a species of pill-taking panache; through decent, mildly fanatic ranks of middle-class professionals—suggestion of vitiated blood in their complexion—to that part of theater and show biz which dependably would take up cause with the cleaner cadres of the Left.That's from Norman Mailer's "Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968," which I'm reading again, not because the conventions are coming up but because — as you can see from the previous post — I've been thinking about journalism in relation to violent protests. I've been asking for better investigative journalism and thinking about how much the journalism we're seeing today is a devolution of the "new journalism" that Mailer participated in creating. I had a long off-blog conversation this morning about how the article discussed in the previous post compared to Mailer's writing about the riot outside the Democratic convention in 1968 (and how today's riots aspire to attain the reputation of the 1968 riot, which is that it was the police who rioted).
Anyway, that long sentence — which my readability calculator tells me is on the 20.4 grade level — comes from a description of the crowd that had gathered to welcome Eugene McCarthy:
[T]he crowd of 5,000 at Midway waiting for Gene McCarthy were remarkably homogeneous, young for the most part, too young to vote, a disproportionate number of babies in mother’s arms—sly hint of middle-class Left mentality here at work! (The middle-class Left would never learn that workingmen in greasy dungarees make a point of voting against the mother who carries the babe—the righteous face of any such mother reminds them of schoolteachers they used to hate!)"Too young to vote" back then meant under 21.
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You could not get 50,000 people next to Midway Airport in 1968.
If you were here at Meadhouse, you would have heard me singing "You're old enough to kill but not for votin'/You don't believe in war, but what's that gun you're totin'" and Meade singing "Though your brother's bound and gagged/And they've chained him to a chair/Won't you please come to Chicago just to sing?/In a land that's known as freedom/How can such a thing be fair?/Won't you please come to Chicago/For the help that we can bring?/We can change the world/Rearrange the world/It's dying to get better..."
The historical point of creating the narrative that the police were the ones rioting is interesting. Back then it might have been true. Today it seems progressively wishful. Tomorrow it could be true again.
For that song alone Graham Nash should've been deported in 1971.
Here’s a photo of McCarthy at Midway.
People are dressed nicely. Even the scruffy guys have coats and ties.
Meade,
The first song referenced by your wife was performed by Barry McGuire.
I was at a Gene McCarthy rally in Winnetka in 1968. I have a simple sentence to describe it.
The lavish suburban estate was the perfect setting for the extremely boring candidate.
The voting age should be returned to its proper place: 21.
People are dressed nicely. Even the scruffy guys have coats and ties.
It was Clean for Gene.
From almost the same page (the "he" is the author, writing about himself in the third person):
"If there had then been little to make him glad in the abrupt and unhappy timing of Bobby Kennedy’s immediate entrance into the race for nomination, he had, nonetheless, remained Kennedy’s man—he saw the battle between the two as tragic; he had hardly enjoyed the Kennedy-McCarthy debate on television before the California primary; he had not taken pleasure in rooting for Kennedy and being thereby forced to condemn McCarthy’s deadness of manner, blankness of affect, and suggestion of weakness in each deep pouch beneath each eye."
He follows that with a couple good short sentences: "The pouches spoke of clichés—eyes sitting in sagging brassieres of flesh, such stuff. He knew that McCarthy partisans would find equal fault somewhere in Kennedy."
"eyes sitting in sagging brassieres of flesh" — I was going to say that killed me... but Bobby dies on the next page.
"The historical point of creating the narrative that the police were the ones rioting is interesting. Back then it might have been true. Today it seems progressively wishful. Tomorrow it could be true again."
But the mainstream media will help as much as they can. They want it to be true. Even when the rioters trash their own offices.
By some supernatural good luck, my family moved from one town before they taught me diagramming to a second town long after the school did it. So, I am fortunate never to have learned it, and the diagram are gibberish to me.
Those are his notes. Sloppy. Lazy
Tom Wolfe--people still read Tom Wolfe, so far as I know--because he had wit and style and saw things others could not even dimly perceive. Wolfe famously flubbed an assignment to cover a hot-rod convention and sent his editor his zany notes. And that made his reputation.
Mailer is grim and full of himself. Trying reading his 1980ish historical novel "Ancient Evenings" about Egypt in the day. Impenetrable.
I get as far as diagramming: One/could pass (subject/auxiliary verb phrase). After that I picture the drawer of the diagram as standing before an enormous blackboard and having at it like a mad scientist.
"Clean for Gene."
...young for the most part, too young to vote...
There ain't no cure for the Summertime Blues.
If rioters are trashing their own offices it should be easy to ID them. It would take a 20.4 grade-level writer like Mailer to explain it all, but they don’t make ‘em like that anymore.
I don't have time to diagram it and wouldn't want to get bogged down trying that on a grammatical and punctuational mess like that paragraph anyway. Mailer could have done some boning up on semicolons, commas, and singular/plural agreement.
As long as we're fooling around with the grammar of Mailer's paragraph:
"Chop," "pack" and "back" should be plural.
Semicolon instead of comma after "Nightingale" as he correctly did after "panache."
No comma after "allegiance."
Weird, this guy made his living writing and he had editors!
@Birkel
I agree about the voting age, but left to me you wouldn't be able to vote unless you paid taxes (excluding sales tax).
Too draconian probably, but how about all elections must take place on April 16th? I'd settle for that.
I had to come out of blog commenting retirement to say this.
Anyone who was there at the demonstration/riot on Balbo Ave. in front of the Hilton and tells you it wasn't sexy and fun is is a liar. Even if you got clubbed on the head and arrested, it was sexy and fun. Maybe especially if you got clubbed on the head and arrested -- and, better still, if there was blood running down your face. SEXY. FUN. Any guy who had a girl with him, I guarantee he got laid.
That's what it's all about, always. Nothing else.
The guy could write...
Mailer entered Harvard in 1939. That was when they offered a classical liberal education (western authors, latin, etc.), instead of today's curriculum of left-handed lesbian handi-capable transgendered indigenous basket-weaving 101.
18 years old
too young to drink
too young to smoke
too young to gamble
too young to rent a car
THERE IS NO DRAFT
Old enough to vote?
How the hell did Noman Million know who the greasy-overalled mechanics voted against, and why?
Did he talk to them about why they were there, and what they hoped to accomplish?
Probably the most overrated writer and thinker (ahem) of his era.
(I was at the George Wallace rally here in '68 . . . it was pretty boring.)
Narr
Diagramming sentences, the most overrated literary parlor trick
Every time I see "dungarees" it brings to mind Herb Tarlek.
Greater love hath no man than this: Mailer's love for the sound of his own voice.
Does packing all those words into a sentence make it a better sentence?
Better than: "It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen"?
Better than: "He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish."?
Better than "Once upon a bye, there was a mischievous boy named Tom Sawyer, who was always getting into trouble, getting off on danger."?
All authors Normal Mailer wasn't fit to lick the boots of. Overstuffed narcissist.
" heavy-set young men with a full chop of beard and a fifty-pound pack on their back ..."
This is typical of Mailer's unwillingness to backtrack when his lyrical gift gets him into trouble. It took him a while to come up with that "full chop of beard", and he likes it. He doesn't want to let it go. But he has already settled on the plural for "young men". He doesn't want to shift to "full chops of beard", that sounds like a platoon of identical zombies in a Popeye cartoon, so he retains the singular for the fifty-pound pack, but then he has a problem with where the pack is located. There can't very well be one fifty-pound pack on several backs, but neither is he comfortable with "young men" having a fifty-pound pack on "his back", so ...
He was smoking a lot of dope in those days, too.
Voting was originally restricted to adult male taxpayers.
The adult male taxpayers gradually allowed others to vote.
They should return to the old ways; things ran better then.
“ "Chop," "pack" and "back" should be plural.”
Wrong.
Each has only one. The better rule is to use the singular. I follow that on this blog.
I was taught this in high school. I remember the teacher’s example: the students should use their head.
To say heads would mean that each had more than one.
We’re having the time of our life.
Not: we’re having the times of our lives.
Xhe are having the chop of xis lifes.
Narr
Diagram that!
The verb is were. The subject is crowd. The crowd were big.
"One could pass from heavy-set young men with a full chop of beard and a fifty-pound pack on their back to young adolescent poetesses, pale as Ophelia, prim as Florence Nightingale, from college boys in sweaters with hints of Hippie allegiance, to Madison Avenue types in sideburns, straw hats, and a species of pill-taking panache; through decent, mildly fanatic ranks of middle-class professionals—suggestion of vitiated blood in their complexion—to that part of theater and show biz which dependably would take up cause with the cleaner cadres of the Left."
I have forgotten the proper terminology for the different parts, but with apologies for being lazy and not reminding myself of that terminology, here is the structure:
subject verb from object1 to object2, from object3 to object4; through object5 to object6
The subject of the whole sentence is one
The verb for the whole sentence is could pass
Almost all the words in the sentence are in the six different objects and they all quite ordinary in how each of them individually is put together.
The issue is whether
One could pass from object1 to object2, from object3 to object4; through object5 to object6
is well-formed English.
The semi-colon is replacing an and.
Replacing the semi-colon with an and, we get:
One could pass from object1 to object2, from object3 to object4, and through object5 to object6.
which is perhaps a little easier to decode.
But I think the author worked hard on this sentence and maybe the semi-colon emphasizes the parallels slightly better and maybe we are supposed to also stack the objects in a mental spreadsheet and reorder them.
>>Ann Althouse said...
“ "Chop," "pack" and "back" should be plural.”
Wrong.
Each has only one. The better rule is to use the singular. I follow that on this blog.
I was taught this in high school. I remember the teacher’s example: the students should use their head.
To say heads would mean that each had more than one.<<
To say head would mean that they were all using one head. Same logic.
I looked further into this and it is debated, though the plural object(s) with plural subject are clearly preferred. It was also repeatedly stated that there is no grammar rule on subject and object agreement in regard to singular/plural.
This is an unsettled matter of opinion and your teacher shared her opinion with you.
The purpose of Hoffman and Rubin in 68 is the same as antifa today, goad police into a new Kent state, then they win. Trump is too smart for them, it won’t work. Wait for the new Dorn and Ayers, more bombs than Al Quida.
"I was taught this in high school. I remember the teacher’s example: the students should use their head."
This is what I mean about "unwillingness to backtrack". If you are standing and listening while your mouth says things at other people, there really isn't much you can do about the silly crap you hear yourself saying. But the writer does not suffer that disability. He can revise his prose. Mailer's essential problem here is that he has a particular, striking young man in mind, and that young man had a beard and a heavy back-pack. Pondering on that image, he came up with "full chop of beard", and he really liked it. But he had decided to use the young man as typical of a type found in the crowd, and that required the plural. Difficulties ensue. The problem is not so much one of correctness as of elegance. There are multiple ways to try to resolve it, but none really works. "Young men with full chops of beard" could work, but when you add in "and fifty-pound packs on their backs", it sounds like their mother dressed them all the same this morning. The reader will understand that is not the case, but it is better to eliminate the unwanted suggestion than to require the reader to edit your prose. Mailer at his best would have done the hard work of recasting the sentence, even the whole paragraph, to find something that worked. But Mailer was not at his best, as he makes clear. He was stoned, and getting old, and Nixon had won. Just type it up, send it in, and cash the check. Maybe there'll be a good-looking woman to have an affair with at the party tonight.
"There are multiple ways to try to resolve it, but none really work."
I like that better, so there.
Prescriptionist grammar is so White and 20th C.
Narr
Also, the rule against 'split infinitives' is a pretentious Latinate affectation up with which I shall not put
Looking back at Norman's work is like stirring a cold fire where vast amounts of verbiage were burned so he could hold up a mirror and see his face.
My attempt at parsing the Mailer sentence is here. I conclude that the sentence is nice but could use some improvements, given several mistakes and an overall choppy, self-consciously florid style.
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