In the early months of his presidency, as the pandemic dragged on with its stifling restrictions, President Biden often delivered a favorite monologue to aides: He was worried about young people’s mental health, he said. High school seniors were missing prom and graduation. He wanted to know how college students went on dates.
Specifically, Biden wondered how young people could “make love” under the circumstances, according to two aides who heard the president use that phrase multiple times during his first year in office. Biden’s fixation on loneliness among young people, the aides said, grew out of his near-daily conversations with his grandchildren.
Writes Giles Coren, in "Our love affair with Europe is over, at last/They don’t want us to visit or buy their houses, and now they’ve dressed Harry Kane up as a Bavarian beer-hall bully" (London Times).
Alcott, we're told, "used the names Lou, Lu or Louy." And:
Wrote Charles Caleb Colton in "Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words : Addressed to Those who Think," in 1820:
That's quoted at the OED definition for "etiolate," which means "To lessen or undermine the strength, vigour, or effectiveness of (a quality, group, movement, etc.); to have a weakening effect upon."
That's the second meaning. The oldest meaning is about plants: "To cause (a plant) to develop with reduced levels of chlorophyll (esp. by restricting light), causing bleaching of the green tissues, elongated internodes, weakened stems, deficiencies in vascular structure, and abnormally small leaves."
You take the plant out of the sun to etiolate it, but the woman needs to be kept out of the sun, lest she etiolate. So said Colton, anyway. He was one of the "boys" referenced in the more recent aphorism: "Some boys take a beautiful girl and hide her away from the rest of the world/I want to be the one to walk in the sun...." The sun, Colton.
But C.C. Colton is long gone. He died in 1832 — forever excluded from the sun — died of suicide, committed because, we're told, he had an illness that required surgery, and he dreaded surgery.
I'm reading about the word "etiolated" because I used it yesterday: "I'm collecting examples of this avoidance of the word 'woman' and the resultant etiolation of speech."
Even as wine, beer and more flows, the Beatles stay disciplined, working and reworking lyrics and arrangements until they get them right. “To wander aimlessly is very un-swinging,” Mr. McCartney says. “Unhip.”
I'm so fascinated by the insight that there's hipness and swing in discipline and order, and that chaos — wandering aimlessly — is what's really uncool. It's a great hypothesis. Who knows if it's true, but where did it come from in Paul? Without context, one is left to theorize that Paul criticized chaos because the other Beatles weren't rising to the level of organization he wanted, that came naturally to him.
Googling, I found this transcript of the whole conversation (published a few years ago). There's audio too, and it's crisper than the mix in the documentary. It's January 14, 1969 (in Twickenham Film Studios):
I follow Jake Tapper on Twitter, but I do not appreciate getting spammed by his "liking" phony-baloney statements from celebrities, like this:
It's one thing to have to see junk like this on Facebook, where I encounter various nice people I know who unthinkingly pass along inspirational "quotes" that would cause an educated sensible person to question whether that celebrity could have said that.
Every task seems like more fun than the subject I regard as the ripest of the week, Andrea, Jennifer, and The 2 Williams.
What is wrong with me? I just got up to make my 5th cup of coffee!
Did William Shakespeare drink coffee? Did William Faulkner?...
"He didn't have coffee, he didn't have vanilla, he didn't have cocoa. Imagine writing Hamlet without a cup of coffee. That's amazing."...
Faulkner drank, but not so much coffee.
"Jeezus Christ! Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You’re thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes—and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he’s had his first one"
So, yes, the "2 Williams" are Shakespeare and Faulkner. They were in the news last night because Andrea — Andrea Mitchell, the NBC News chief Washington correspondent — tweeted something so mind-bogglingly stupid — stupid, evil, and hilarious — and Jennifer — Jennifer Rubin, the WaPo columnist — lunged horribly after Andrea's tweet. These people — Mitchell and Rubin — are supposed to be the elite, but they are not even elite enough to keep from stumbling over a high-school level literary reference or even to think of making sure — with the quickest Google — they're not making a gaffe.
Andrea saw what looked like it might be an opportunity to mock Ted Cruz.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, Sinclair Lewis’ Arrowsmith, Aldous Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves, Agatha Christie’s The Secret of Chimneys....
More here, at Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain:
The BBC’s Culture website suggested that 1925 might be “the greatest year for books ever,” and with good reason. It is not simply the vast array of famous titles. The stylistic innovations produced by books such as Gatsby, or [Kafka's] The Trial, or Mrs. Dalloway marked a change in both the tone and the substance of our literary culture, a broadening of the range of possibilities available to writers....From that BBC article:
Top 7 Warning Signs In a Man's Bookshelf:
— Jess McHugh (@MchughJess) August 24, 2020
1. A Dog-eared copy of Infinite Jest
2. Too Much Hemingway
3. Any amount of Bukowski
4. AYN. RAND.
5. Goethe
6. "Lolita is my favorite book."
7. "'Fathers and Sons' Is my favorite book."
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: So many people are saying that the boogaloo is about to kick off in Virginia.Interesting that all 3 of those persons were talking about those other people over there.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: When the boogaloo happens, these are the people that you're going to have to watch out for.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: Do not think for one second that there aren't people that would love to see this thing to get started, that would love to see this boogaloo start rolling. Personally, I do not want to see that. I don't want it to come to that....
ALLAM: For a subset of the far-right, the fringe of the fringe, civil war isn't enough. They're spoiling for a race war. Decades later, boogaloo is no longer about music, but about menace - a word coined by black and brown people now used by some who envision a country without them.Here's the Urban Dictionary page for the word. There's a graph showing a big spike in May 2019:
Here's the Ringo song from 1971, "Back Off Boogaloo" — "Back off boogaloo/What do you think I'm going to do?/I got a flash right from the start/Wake up, meat head/Don't pretend that you are dead." Get it? The walrus was Paul, and "Boogaloo" was Paul. No. Wait. That's the rumor...
Several commentators have interpreted the lyrics as an attack on Paul McCartney, reflecting Starr's disdain.... Ringo Starr identified his initial inspiration for "Back Off Boogaloo" as having come from Marc Bolan... Over dinner one evening at Starr's home... Bolan had used the word "boogaloo"... "[Bolan] was an energised guy. He used to speak: 'Back off, boogaloo ... ooh you, boogaloo.' 'Do you want some potatoes?' 'Ooh you, boogaloo!'"ADDED: It's funny that Ringo's story has Marc Bolan saying "Ooh you, boogaloo." I'd say that reinforces the theory that the Boogaloo was Paul, because one year before that pass-the-potatoes conversation between Ringo and Marc Bolan, Paul put out a song, "Oo, You":
The researchers found that a “vast majority” of their respondents believed they were poorer, relative to others, than they actually were. The people who thought they were right in the middle of the income distribution – perfectly middle class, you might say — were, on average, closer to the 75th percentile. And as a group, respondents whose incomes actually resembled the true median thought they were closer to the bottom fourth....People are looking at outward manifestations of wealth and thinking about their own capacity to buy things. The perspectives are different. Also, we think about social class, and in that view, "The Rich" are those other people. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said "The rich are different from you and me," and some people like to think that Ernest Hemingway retorted, "Yes, they have more money," and that "they have more money" is the right answer and also what they'd have retorted if they'd been there at the time.
[The] idea seems to be that there's a special harm in exposing yourself to things that are only somewhat good. Better to read outwardly trashy things than trash that has been inflated. And then there's also the idea that those who inflate trash are dead.It was Gertrude Stein (as presented by Hemingway) who said "You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad." And she characterized Aldous Huxley as "dead" because his writings were not truly good but trash "inflated" to seem somewhat good. ("Why do you read this trash? It is inflated trash, Hemingway. By a dead man.") So I'm thinking about that.
I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.Aldous Huxley was not actually dead at the time. Huxley had the distinction of dying on the same day JFK was assassinated. Hemingway, who died in 1961, did not live one single day when Huxley was not also alive.
To keep my mind off writing sometimes after I had worked I would read writers who were writing then, such as Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence or any who had books published that I could get from Sylvia Beach’s library or find along the quais.
“Huxley is a dead man,” Miss Stein said. “Why do you want to read a dead man? Can’t you see he is dead?”
I could not see, then, that he was a dead man and I said that his books amused me and kept me from thinking.
“You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.”Stein's idea seems to be that there's a special harm in exposing yourself to things that are only somewhat good. Better to read outwardly trashy things than trash that has been inflated. And then there's also the idea that those who inflate trash are dead.
“I’ve been reading truly good books all winter and all last winter and I’ll read them next winter, and I don’t like frankly bad books.”
“Why do you read this trash? It is inflated trash, Hemingway. By a dead man.”
We (Americans) have had many talented wordsmiths in the White House. I see no connection between such talents, and adopting & putting into effect substantively sound policies. Woodrow Wilson—a university academic—comes to mind. But very few can explain precisely why the U.S. entered WWI or offer any justification for Wilson's allowing the federal civil service to be (re)segregated by race. He was good with words.That was linked by Glenn Reynolds, who writes:
Your article amounts to a non-instrumental claim that elites who share your specific skill set should have power and those who do not share that skill set should not.... It is certainly better for the President to spell "forest" with a single R rather than two Rs. But ... it is probably more important that better policies be put in place to stop similar future disasters....
Good writing, like good shooting, is a valuable skill. Neither has a moral component. The Supreme Court’s best writer was Oliver Wendell Holmes, who told us — eloquently — that it was okay to sterilize people society didn’t like.Let me add that there's a big difference between good writing and good spelling! Some great writers have had bad spelling — notably William Faulkner:
One of Faulkner's editors at Random House, Albert Erskine, said, "I know that he did not wish to have carried through from typescript to printed book his typing mistakes, misspellings (as opposed to coinages), faulty punctuation and accidental repetition. He depended on my predecessors, and later on me, to point out such errors and correct them; and though we never achieved anything like a perfect performance, we tried."...And Ernest Hemingway:
Whenever his newspaper editors complained about it, he'd retort, "Well, that's what you're hired to correct!"And John Keats:
In a letter to his great love Fanny Brawne, Keats spelled the color purple, purplue. This generated a longer conversation between the two, as Keats tried to save face by suggesting he'd meant to coin a new portmanteaux [sic] - a cross between purple and blue.And Jane Austen:
She once misspelled one of her teenage works as "Love and Freindship" and is infamously known to have spelt scissors as scissars.And F. Scott Fitzgerald:
The original draft of The Great Gatsby contained literally hundreds of spelling mistakes, some of which are still confounding editors. These include “yatch” (instead of “yacht”) and “apon” (instead of “upon”). One of his most famous gaffes, which occurs toward the end of the novel, inspires debate to this day.Here's that gaffe:
After Fitzgerald’s death, Edmund Wilson changed the spelling from “orgastic” to “orgiastic” in the famous closing line: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.”So many great writers were bad spellers that I've got to wonder whether bad spelling goes along with great writing. Maybe there's something about the brain of a bad speller. Have many Spelling Bee winners gone on to write great books?
You must remember that it is permissible for spelling to drive you crazy. Spelling had this effect on Andrew Jackson, who once blew his stack while trying to write a Presidential paper. “It’s a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word!” the President cried.
When you have trouble, think of poor Andrew Jackson and know that you’re not alone.
And remember what’s really important about good writing is not good spelling. If you spell badly but write well, you should hold your head up. As the poet T.S. Eliot recommended, “Write for as large and miscellaneous an audience as possible”--and don’t be overly concerned if you can’t spell “miscellaneous.” Also remember that you can spell correctly and write well and still be misunderstood. Hold your head up about that, too.
"If your friend says she wants to cut off every dick in a five mile radius, let her!"I had suggested that Meade could avoid attracting language/anatomy pedants by using the word "amputation" instead of "castration."
And then tell her: Only five miles? "No artificial limits as to time or [distance] should be imposed on this [mass amputation]."
And then run, old man. Run like hell.
Two physicians sit in the Emergency Room of a Kansas City hospital on Christmas Day.... The doctors are telling the narrator of their most interesting encounter of this holiday season: a distraught adolescent, in a religious frenzy, had come in requesting castration for his "awful lust." The two docs managed to blunder the encounter so sufficiently that the boy left, only to return a few hours later bleeding dangerously from his penile self-amputation. The self-centered conversation returns to verbal ego-play between the two physicians, without a hint that either has considered the magnitude of the medical malfeasance against the boy.
This review didn't begin so negatively because I hate the author and the kind of person who's attracted to his style; on the contrary, I've read his entire oeuvre, more or less, and enjoyed a decent majority of his works. The criticisms of Murakami's style are well-known at this point: he has a bag of narrative or aesthetic tricks, and there isn't a single thing in one of his stories he hasn't repeated somewhere else....Ha ha. That was well written, and I don't think it will hurt my enjoyment of Murakami's writing... until (I guess) the moment I realize I hate him.
He's a casual read, uncomplicated but mostly superficially pleasing, like the bland emotionless sexual encounters in 95% of everything he writes. There's only so many times one can read about a relatively handsome Japanese man, in his late-thirties or maybe middle-age, who likes jazz and cooking and being a milquetoast zombie at once content and uneasy with his vapid life, without thinking that maybe Murakami isn't writing about some aspect of the human condition, or the plight of men, or something like that: maybe he's just putting himself into every novel, adding a weird dream or two, a cat, some sort of mundane fantastical event that goes unexplained, and repeating until the publishers phone up and say it's time for him to make them more money.
I became interested in Murakami's writing as a teenager because I was a big manga and JRPG nerd, and wanted to continue obsessing over Japan while gaining some sort of literary foothold that put me above the unwashed nerdy masses. He was an easy read while channeling an ineffable sensibility, and he was big into Anglo-American culture so I could understand most of his references. I might reread The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle sometime down the line and discover that there's still a lot in Murakami's style I enjoy.
For the most part, I can only conclude I've outgrown him. He didn't change; I did. By that line of thinking, maybe I shouldn't be making a value judgment of his work, if I've just come to a change of taste, right? Well, no. His prose is clunky at best, profoundly meaningless at its most infuriating. This is still a pretty bad short story collection, but if you like it, you're in luck! You'll like everything Murakami's ever written right up until the moment you realise you hate him.
One other project I’m involved in now is translating Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and things are going well. I’ve finished the first draft and am revising the second. I’m taking my time, going over each line carefully, and as I do so the translation gets smoother and I’m better able to render Fitzgerald’s prose into more natural Japanese. It’s a little strange, perhaps, to make this claim at such a late date, but Gatsby really is an outstanding novel. I never get tired of it, no matter how many times I read it. It’s the kind of literature that nourishes you as you read, and every time I do I’m struck by something new, and experience a fresh reaction to it. I find it amazing how such a young writer, only twenty-nine at the time, could grasp— so insightfully, so equitably, and so warmly— the realities of life. How was this possible? The more I think about it, and the more I read the novel, the more mysterious it all is.I can't imagine translating Gatsby, because the sentences are so weird. Do you translate literally to preserve the weirdness, or do you make it sound natural and idiomatic so people won't say you don't know how to translate, or can you find similar ways to be weird that fit the translated-to language?
“Mr. Kino, you’re not the type who would willingly do something wrong. I know that very well. But there are times in this world when it’s not enough just not to do the wrong thing. Some people use that blank space as a kind of loophole. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
पोस्ट्स
