I would buy "But I Digress" so I could quote the part about "Let Him Dangle," but though Amazon shows 13 Kindle books titled "But I Digress," none are by John Lennard. I did find a hardback edition, but it's $239.00 and out of stock. So I can't tell you precisely what it has to say about the parentheses.
So here's Elvis, doing his song, which is about Derek Bentley, who did dangle (for having uttered the ambiguous words "Let him have it"):
Did you notice the parentheses? It's a song! We'll have to look up the lyrics. The parentheses are in the bridge:
(String him up)
When there's a murder in the kitchen that is brutal and strange
(String him up)
If killing anybody is a terrible crime
(String him up)
Why does this bloodthirsty chorus come 'round from time to time?
(String him up)
Then comes the chorus, with the repeated words, the song title, "Let him dangle." "Let him dangle" and "String him up" mean the same thing, so I guess Lennard's question is why is only "String him up" in parentheses? (Did Elvis Costello even do this punctuation?)
I see it now. The parenthetical "String him up" is sung by background singers. In fact, you'll need to listen to the album version to hear it, because it's missing from that solo performance above. Here (at 2:45):
That explains the use of parentheses — it designates the voice of the background singers — but I have to think John Lennard teased out something far more subtle... in his unreachable book.
***
I happened to run into the topic of hanging in another book I was reading yesterday, Nell Zink's "Sister Europe: A Novel" (commission earned). A character is speaking: "You know how they hang people by opening a trap door so they fall and break their necks?... So I go into this building... where the Nazis hanged a thousand political prisoners, and I’m like, Wait, how did they get a scaffold in here? The ceiling’s so low, you can almost touch it. And I asked the park ranger, and he’s like, 'See those hooks?' There’s this row of hooks screwed into the ceiling. They put piano wire around people’s necks and slowly raised them off their feet." The author tells us the character says he felt "surprise that Nazis were worse than he thought" and that another character sees that guy as having "just vocalized possibly the dumbest thoughts ever thought by anyone in the whole history of the world."
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27 टिप्पणियां:
Not only does Costello not sing the "string him up" part on most recordings, that lyric transcription is missing the nonsense syllables he does sing after "let him dangle" all the way through the song: "Doo-doot, doo-doo-doot, doo-doo-doot doo." Not sure what that's supposed to mean, but it is kind of catchy.
You'd think after all the attention Lennard gave the parenthetical, Costello would sing it.
How do singers generally handle solo performances of songs that have a back-and-forth with a chorus on the studio version?
I find the lawyerly amusement at the language that led to a person being hanged to be in appallingly poor taste, although still funny.
I think you can read or download a PDF version of But I Digress for free:
https://www.academia.edu/5117336/John_Lennard_But_I_Digress_the_exploitation_of_parentheses_in_English_printed_verse_Oxford_UP_1992_
Parentheses are a second narrative voice, hence generally to be avoided. Recast and put it in the single voice.
Nah, you can’t download it. And the little trashcan has disappeared so I can’t delete my comment.
Stanley Cavell in The Claim of Reason uses parentheses throughout as a second voice that he can argue with. Wittgenstein did the same thing with em dashes.
``It may be that the sense of falsification comes from the way I understand the phrase ``have a body.'' It is really a mythological way of saying that I am flesh. But I am not satisfied with this myth, for it implies that I also have something other than a body, call it a soul. Now I have three things to put together: a body, a soul, and me. (So there are four things to be placed: I plus those three.) But I no more have a soul than I have a body. That is what I say here and now. People who say they have a soul sometimes militantly take its possession as a point of pride, for instance William Ernest Henley and G.B.Shaw. Take the phrase ``have a soul'' as a mythological way of saying that I am spirit. If the body individuates flesh and spirit, singles me out, what does the soul do? It binds me to others.''
Cavell _The Claim of Reason_
I thought maybe, just maybe, AA had mistyped Lennard for something else, like Leonard. There used to be a NYT writer named Leonard and maybe he had written such a book. He was rather peculiar in a couple respects.
No, I was wrong. John Leonard never wrote a book called "But I Digress," even though he did tend to digress considerably. Which may be how he got to the slivovitz story.
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/02/02/archives/private-lives.html
Great song!
Well, we all have differnent tastes in music. After listening to about 1 minute of both them, I say "String me up. Put me out of my misery".
The Bentley case is an interesting one. It was used by Anti-Death penalty advocates in the UK and you can see why. Its as if the law and prosecution went out of their way to make the worse possible execution so as to give them anti-death pentalty advocates ammo.
3 British men killed a policeman, but 2 couldn't be executed because they were under 18. One of those actually pulled the trigger. The guy executed didn't have a gun, he just shouted "Give it to him, Chris" and was an accomplice.
It reminds me of Gov Brown refusing the commute Carl Chessman's death sentence in Calf. Since Brown was social liberal (dad of Jerry Brown) I've wondered if he did it deliberately.
BTW in 1953 England and Wales there were only 141 murders. This is out of a population of over 40 million. In 2023 England/Wales had 571 homocides. Chicago had 623 murders in 2023.
When the Dems call ICE, CBP or Republicans “Nazis” they betray how little they know.
How do singers generally handle solo performances of songs that have a back-and-forth with a chorus on the studio version?
I'd think the best way would be to sing both parts. 2nd best - not sing the song. 3rd best - have the audience sing the chorus. Chicks love that.
Michael row your boat ashore
Audience: Halilujah
Michael row your boat ashore
Audience: Halilujah
I would not have thought that Elvis Costello could write anything so lugubrious.
So apparently there are essay writers who are so good that they can charge $239 for their books and they are sold out! even though none of us plebes have ever heard of them. So nobody but the very wealthy know how incredibly good their essays are. (As a parenthetical, I learned from the earlier thread that the existence of one does not prove the existence of another, so I should probably amend this sentence, but nah).
I don't think things work this way. How does this John Lennard guy get to charge $239 for his book, and it sells out?
My guess--he's a University professor, and it's on the syllabus.
I have never warmed to Elvis Costello, and had to bale out early.
Elvis no Diana Krall however...
For me Elvis Costello was one of those musicians who I rarely liked when I first listened to an album (and yeah, it was mostly LPs for me), but soon came to love the new work. It helped that he started out new new wave-ish in 1977 and then moved on to country and Burt Bacharach and New Orleans brass bands (the album this song is from), so his tragectory worked for me. He's a political leftist nitwit, but he did manage to piss off Sinead O'Connor enough to get punched out in a pub, so I give him credit for that. She was a dreadful woman entirely. His actual name is Declan McManus. Having known many Declan's in Ireland, I find this very amusing.
Was it capital or capitol punishment? Due process or, for example, Planned Personhood?
He scalped tickets exclusively at Elvis Costello concerts? How many concert goers bought from him and how much did they pay? It seems to me that not only would the author NOT have been able to put himself through graduate school on the proceeds, he would hardly have been able to eat.
True fact about my home state (Arkansas): when they stopped hanging people in 1913, they used wood from the gallows to build their electric chair.
Oh I just don’t know where to begin…
Will Cate said...
"when they stopped hanging people in 1913, they used wood from the gallows to build their electric chair."
A decent premise for a supernatural thriller.
"He scalped tickets exclusively at Elvis Costello concerts? How many concert goers bought from him and how much did they pay? It seems to me that not only would the author NOT have been able to put himself through graduate school on the proceeds, he would hardly have been able to eat."
I originally read the text the way you did, as saying that Lennard actually had that particular job. On rereading, I eventually saw that wasn't the case. Nicholson writes very long sentences that you have to work at reading. Here's the whole sentence with the part I quoted:
"Until now, readers have had to fulfill their need for the historical particulars of this engrossingly prosaic subject with narrow-gauge works of erudition such as E. Otha Wingo’s sober Latin Punctuation inthe Classical Age, or John Lennard’s extraordinary recent monograph on the history of the parenthesis, But I Digress (1991)—a jewel of Oxford University Press scholarship, by the way, gracefully written and full of intelligence, decked out with a complete scholarly apparatus of multiple indices, bibliographies, and notes, whose author, to judge by the startling jacket photo (shaved head with up-sticking central proto-Mohawk tuft, earring on left ear, wilted corduroy jacket, and over-laundered T-shirt bearing some enigmatic insignia underneath), put himself through graduate school by working as a ticket scalper at Elvis Costello concerts. (A discussion of Elvis Costello’s use of the parenthesis in “Let Him Dangle” figures in a late chapter.)"
Key words: "whose author, to judge by the startling jacket photo... put himself through graduate school by working as a ticket scalper at Elvis Costello concerts."
It's a way of saying how he looked, not what he actually did. He just looks like someone who'd do those things. And then he really does write about Elvis in the book, but not because he did anything in real life that was Elvis-related.
Note that the topic is punctuation and punctuation is really designed to help us read more easily, but Baker himself isn't a fan of easy reading. He's sorting through perplexities of marking up reading with the various marks. Why help the reader read more quickly? Why not force them to meditate and deeply engage with the text, dig the meaning out, fend off lightweights, etc.?
I understood it the first time.
"Michael row your boat ashore
Audience: Halilujah
Michael row your boat ashore
Audience: Halilujah"
And the audience is invariably half a beat slow. Audience sing-alongs are the worst. And the worst of the worst may be the Pearl Jam live album where Vedder sings Black. He slows the song way down but the audience still can't keep up. Excruciating.
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