Toomer & Roth

It's curious that we're reading Toomer now, towards the end of the semester, after we've spent so much time analyzing prose, prose, and more prose. Toomer's prose feels nothing like prose, mostly because it reads as though it was more to do with oral tradition, poetry, and jazz. It takes on the "Signifying Monkey" tone of Ellison's more poetic passages in Invisible Man that, indeed, read like excerpts and not like driving components of the plot. The tone is characterized by an obvious performative quality, and a higher regard for the sonic effects of words and phrases as they're delivered, quite rhythmically, before an audience. Words and phrases repeat, as they do in poetry and song, subjects and proper nouns are omitted from sentences, and there's an underlying feeling that his audience understands his writing, despite the occasional missing pieces, because they've heard it all before in the oral tradition, in jazz, or in anything. The jazzy moments are sometimes at odds with the more "written" moments because of a conflict of language and style. In "Becky," he consciously addresses his audience in presuming that certain questions have been asked (not unlike Nabokov) about Becky's one Negro son, but adopts the precise language and dialog of those who would likely gossip about it, i.e. "Who gave it to her? Damn buck nigger, said the white folks mouths." He doesn't attribute the insult to the white folks themselves, but instead has a go at their "mouths," as though their mouths aren't attached to the rest of them. Same goes for, "Low-down nigger with no self-respect, said the blak folk's muths." Unless this was a typo, the white impersonations he does get increasingly lazy, disinterested, angry, and so on. It could just be a typo, though, because there are a few in this paragraph already. "Muths" would be a funny slang for "mouth," or at least a funny way to articulate the sound of oral indolence.

Not all of his excerpts feel quite so talky. This excerpt, from Bona and Paul, has a much denser narrative quality:

"A strange thing happened to Paul. Suddenly he knew that people saw not attractiveness in his dark skin, but difference. Their stares, giving him to himself, filled something long empty within him, and were like green blades sprouting in his consciousness. There was a fullness, and strength and peace about it all. He saw himself, cloudy, but real. He saw the faces of the people at the tables round him. White lights, or as now, the pink lights of the Crimson Gardens gave a glow and immediacy to white faces. The pleasure of it equal to that of love or dream, of seeing this."

The sentences are fairly straightforward as they explain Paul's epiphany, and are fairly unconcerned with feeling spoken rather than written. The simple diction makes the passage especially poignant, as in the case of "He saw himself, cloudy, but real." It's a loaded statement of self-perception, and yet its terms are seemingly simple. He saw this, he saw that. The final sentence similarly speaks plainly, but qualifies itself at the end in being specific about what the pleasure of it really is.

The interesting thing about Harlem Renaissance writers, or so I've noticed, is the distinction between what is written and what is spoken in their prose. There are moments that clearly pulled from actual conversation or performances, and there are those that have been written out for a reader's sake. These moments are characteristically more profound, in Toomer's case, and feel much differently in the scattered scheme of his story telling.

* * *

Roth's writing feels like good writing to me, though it's not especially easy to decide what good writing even feels like. I suppose he is clear and thorough in the same way that Bellow is (perhaps in the grand tradition of Jewish-American writers). Roth's appeal, I think, is in his well-crafted long sentences, or his drawn-out questions that are answered over a paragraph or so.

"And how did this affect him-the glorification, the sanctification, of every hook shot he sank, every pass he leaped up and caught, every line drive he rifled for a double down the left-field line? Is this what made him that staid and stone-faced boy? Or was the mature-seeming sobriety the outward manifestation of an arduous inward struggle to keep in check the narcissism that an entire community was ladling with love?"

The suspensive questions begs for a dramatic reading of pretty basic athletic maneuvers like a hook shot or a pass. Thus, he glorifies what is so standard by elevating the style, elongating his method of describing the Swede's moves to make it seem like more than they really are--because in fact, the Swede is probably less than he is made out to be. The later questions reveal the narrator's blunt skepticism of his revered subject, quite thoroughly diagnosing the entire community's psychological misconceptions about the Swede, and his direct effect on all of them. It takes on a passive, hands-off voice (i.e. "that an entire community was ladling with love") during a moment in which there is unabashed judgment fixed into the narrative. This seems to be the fun of Roth. His observations of particular moments and characters are astute and beautifully written without ever being deceptive or unaccessible.

Uncanny

What struck me most about Freud is how remarkably considerate he is of his unknowing audience. That is to say, he holds firm beliefs about his topic, but is also deeply attuned to a reader who is facing it for the first time, or to a reader who generally is skeptical of psychoanalysis, and of him. He only spends a brief amount of time lingering on semantics before he has moved on to imaginative literature as a medium through which anybody can access the uncanny, and comprehend difficult distinctions between the uncanny and the ordinarily frightening. Freud sustains his arguments by reiterating points and making them accessible to those unfamiliar with the intricacies of psychoanalysis, and does so by making these discoveries, or the process of understanding them, a collective, group effort. Hence, Freud will seldom use "I" and instead opts for "we," as if he is--quite affectionately--holding our hands while he walks us through his expansive theory. Stylistically, Freud's tone is authorial and sophisticated without ever really being alienating.

Curiously, Freud also holds a certain skepticism towards his theories--one that we can't be certain is genuine or contrived--in his transitional or broader topic sentences:

"Now, however, it is time to turn from these aspects of the matter, which are in any case difficult to judge, and look for some undeniable instances of the uncanny, in the hope that an analysis of them will decide whether our hypothesis is a valid one."

This sentence doesn't quite feel suspensive, but is certainly divided in such a way in which we can see how cautious Freud needs to be in relaying his information. With that, his sentences are often loaded with qualifications and details that are, perhaps, meant to console the reader or have them understand that this topic is reasonably farfetched beyond the boundaries of psychoanalysis. It is also peculiar that Freud uses "in hope," as though his theory's success rides on belief, coincidence, fate, or some other abstraction.

It appears as though Freud's semi-humble tone is put-on in some places to ensure that reader that he is not necessarily pompous or haughty, but in other places, he is less concerned with seeming cautious.

"It may be true that the uncanny [unheimlich] is something which is secretly familiar [heimlich-heimisch], which has undergone repression and then returned from it, and that everything that is uncanny fulfils this condition. But the selection of material on this basis does not enable us to solve the problem of the uncanny. For our proposition is clearly not convertible. Not everything that fulfils this condition — not everything that recalls repressed desires and surmounted modes of thinking belonging to the prehistory of the individual and of the race — is on that account uncanny."

As he oscillates between what specifically is and is not uncanny, we can see how the style of argument takes a very conventional form, or one that we often see in persuasive writing. Again, he qualifies a separate truth of the uncanny that might ultimately obstruct his argument, but only to immediately counter it by stating how one notion is capable of disabling him, or "us" from solving "the problem of the uncanny." His voice then hardens up with a passive, suspensive statement that again ensures what isn't uncanny.

I found his arguments in part III to be the most exciting and fathomable.

"We have clearly not exhausted the possibilities of poetic licence and the privileges enjoyed by story-writers in evoking or in excluding an uncanny feeling. In the main we adopt an unvarying passive attitude towards real experience and are subject to the influence of our physical environment. But the story-teller has a peculiarly directive power over us; by means of the moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current of our emotions, to dam it up in one direction and make it flow in another, and he often obtains a great variety of effects from the same material."

It's no easy feat to explain what happens to us as readers when we read fiction, and yet Freud accomplishes this pretty well. Freud begins his point by stating what it is that we don't do, as if to appease a reader in opposition, and then moves on to quite generally state what it is that we actually do: adopt a passive attitude towards reality. The final, most convincing statement adopts the uncharacteristically metaphorical language of a flowing river. The phrases themselves don't hit us hard because of how gradually they are delivered, but the slow, elaborative quality of the cumulative sentence is actually very powerful in piling on evidence that substantiates his insights.

Woody Allen.

I found it amazing how many times I had to stop and look up words while reading Woody Allen (at least three times). Allen tends to use lofty, scientific diction while talking about mundane annoyances of his privileged life. Quite like he does in his films, in "Nanny Dearest" he has made it so that everybody speaks in the same voice (which is, essentially, his own), despite the characters' obvious socioeconomic differences. That is, unless it is a coincidence that his "pleasant drone" of a nanny would think to call someone a "motormouthed little proton." Is it possible for a pleasant drone to be so writerly? I guess that's the joke.

I don't find Woody Allen as funny in his writing as I do in his films. His prose is often verbose and hard to access, especially when it is loaded with weird jargon and pop culture references. He goes out of his way to distinguish his wife as his "better half" or "the Immortal Beloved," expressing his ironic contempt for marriage cliches and consciously distancing himself from normalcy by saying things that are all too normal. Since he is famously neurotic, it seems he's using the language of doctors:

"A twitching in my cheek began its arrhythmic calisthenics, and drops of perspiration began emerging on my brow with audible snaps."

For whatever reason, the twitching and the perspiration drops have agency here. Woody Allen refuses to tell us that his cheek twitched and he was sweaty, and instead offers us the passive voice mixed with the voice of the directions/information on a prescription drug labels. It's as if he doesn't really want us to know what he's talking about, or, by using elevated language, he is differentiating his sweating and twitching from the kinds that regular people experience, because he has been formally diagnosed, and therefore uses drawn-out, medical terms.

He also makes uses of suspensive sentences as means for his jokes. It's his own very special way of delivering a punch line.

"Her successor, a nineteen-year-old French au pair named Veronique, who was all wiggles and cooing, with blond hair, the pout of a porn star, long tapered legs, and a rack that almost required scaffolding, was a far less truculent type. "

From the beginning of the sentence, we are awaiting his formal diagnosis of the bad nanny's successor, and gradually come to realize that the au pair was absurdly desirable based on his descriptions, yet she is diagnosed as "a far less truculent type," or someone who is less combative or difficult than the previous nannys, even though she was equally problematic. As he goes through his list of old nannies, we anticipate that each anecdote will be more awful and absurd than the next. Allen, then, is forced to squeeze his jokes into a single sentence, for pacing's sake.

Mark Steyn's Big Fat Canadian Essay + Holmes' Book Review

The structure of Mark Steyn's essay feels like catchy, culturally-specific examples (many of which feel like digressions) supporting his argument that the youth of Islam will prevail, and all of which are annoyingly dispersed throughout the long, dragging essay. Despite this piece not really qualifying as a rant, it has rant-like tendencies. The rant quality is brought about by his conversational techniques which employ the second person, along with images that are pretty fresh in our minds and experiences (baseball teams, "My Big Fat Greek Wedding", Sony, and so on). A lot of his examples that he uses to depict birth and population rates are distinctly As-Seen-On-TV. They're well chosen examples, all effective in getting his point across, and yet, regardless of their accessibility, they seem kind of dumbed-down and fleeting. By the time the essay closes, he has beat the point to death.

Some of the essays more outwardly intelligent moments are undermined by his borderline funny (or perhaps "punny") moments:

"And why leave it at that? Is it likely an ever smaller number of young people will want to spend their active years looking after an ever greater number of old people? Or will it be simpler to put all that cutting-edge Japanese technology to good use and take a flier on Mister Roboto and the post-human future? After all, what's easier for the governing class? Weaning a pampered population off the good life and re-teaching them the lost biological impulse or giving the Sony Corporation a licence to become the Cloney Corporation?"

Well, it is without a doubt that Steyn believes in the unyielding power of consecutive rhetorical questions, so much so that he spends half of a large paragraph asking them to his reader. There's something within his questioning here, as they are the kinds of questions that he already has answers to, that seems enormously phony (ha, more like the Phony Corporation). In the last sentence of the above excerpt, he adopts the language of maternal childcare and offers the ambiguously vulgar image of a population feeding off of the figurative breast of "the good life," and then tosses it up with the name-brand pun of the century! The power of these questions as well as the weird cuteness inside of them ultimately feels very strange in his stylistic scheme. This is the sort of essay, written for publication, that doesn't feel very stylish. It's written to captivate an audience and to argue a point, but the former incentive proves more valuable, as is clear in the writing. With that, he is writing for a widespread, middle-class audience that isn't concerned with deep historical research and explanations supporting claims about the rise of Islam in Europe, but instead is concerned with the social and cultural implications of his argument, or the ideas that will resonate with the readers whose attention spans are, presumably, ever-shrinking. His diction is low and colloquial, and he uses contractions like "you'd" instead of "you would" to pick up the pace, make it sound more spoken.

Holmes' book review is devoid of any distinctive style, and his incentives don't pour out until he's well into his essay. Perhaps this is because book reviews are not conventional mediums in which reviewers express their political beliefs--though this kind of review might be more symptomatic of The American Prospect. When he takes the time to lay out his ideas independently of his direct discussion of the books, his tone stays pretty much the same. This style of writing feels loftier that Steyn's, perhaps written in a middle style. Something about it feels fair, balanced, diplomatic, and neutral (just as plenty of non-fiction/journalism strives to appear, despite ulterior motives), and yet he is expressing his ideas fairly straightforwardly:

"One might even argue that, in today's Europe, the Enlightenment ideal of universal citizenship is already dead. Europeans are becoming increasingly habituated to living in dual states, where "real" citizens live side by side with poorly assimilated immigrants who (in the minds of the majority) will never become full-fledged members of the community. This may not be a clash of civilizations destined to evolve into violent confrontation, but it is a profoundly disquieting moral crisis, which these two original and stimulating books invite us to ponder."

It's so odd reading this kind of polite essay writing after Steyn's punchy piece where he addressed me, the reader, as "you." Now I am referred to as "one," and there's no saying that I am even sure to argue that, in today's Europe, the Enlightenment ideal of universal citizen ship is already dead. I might argue it. It's especially peculiar because this is essay writing of college students; it's reasonable and argues a point without being the least bit presumptuous.

Henry James Takes his Sweet Time

For me, the greatest challenge of reading Henry James is keeping alert--staying with him--the whole time. He, of course, makes this very difficult with his exhausting suspensive sentences that meander a whole lot and eventually settle on what feels like a thankless detail. In the scheme of James, however, I can see how his sentence endings have deeper resonance in relation to the whole story. As we discussed in class a few weeks ago, James is representing a sort of hands-off stream of consciousness, portraying thoughts as they come and go from his characters' minds, typically at a leisurely pace. In the confines of this short story, he tends to go back and forth between longer sentences explaining thoughts or feelings, and every now and then he slips into a mode that feels like regular fiction prose that just lays out the plot for you (through dialogue, a comparatively short sentence, and so on). If it weren't for these seemingly "faster" moments in the writing, I don't think we could get through it in one sitting.

The suspension bears a blatant rhythmic quality that, for whatever odd reason, when read, reminds me of the way we recite the Pledge of Allegiance:

"They met her eyes for the first time, but in a moment, before touching them, she knew them as things of the theater, as very much too fine to have been, with any verisimilitude, things of the vicarage. They were too dreadfully good to be true, for her aunt had had no jewels to speak of, and these were cornets and girdles, diamonds, rubies and sapphires. Flagrant tinsel and glass, they looked strangely vulgar, but if, after the first queer shock of them, she found herself taking them up, it was for the very proof, never yet so distinct to her, of a far-off faded story." (85).

James takes the time to explain to us the precise moment in which Charlotte understands the jewelry's sentiment. This particular realization of jewels being of the theater and of a marriage, after all, fuels the whole story. The beginning and ending sentences are structured similarly, both with seemingly anti-climactic yet sentimental points waiting at the end of all the qualifications and crucial details.

His nearly-one-paragraph-long sentence also has many of the same symptoms:

"Charlotte was conscious of a mind divided and a vision vaguely troubled, at once more she took up two or three of the subjects of this revelation; a big bracelet in the form of a gilt serpent with many twists and beady eyes, a brazen belt studded with emeralds and rubies, a chain, of flamboyant architecture, to which, at the Theatre Royal, Little Peddlington, Hamlet's mother, had probably been careful to attach the portrait of the successor to Hamlet's father." (86).

It's remarkable that James thought it was to his advantage to keep these varied thoughts as a single sentence in this scene, and yet his ideas come across pretty clearly, despite the amount of time it takes for them to be fully realized. It's as if his sentences, loaded with both mundane details and big ideas, are often times meant to capture the entirety of a thought, starting at the psychological connections that the character makes, then heading to the physical sensations of the moment, and ending up with something relating to social rank or status. With that, James gives us the fullness of an experience by stretching it out over the length of a suspended sentence that is motivated to express something meaningful.

Persuasion!

Reading through the first section of the Communist Manifesto, I was reminded of the kind of writing we have always been taught is "good" writing. For instance, the way that each paragraph begins with a "new" idea that takes up the rest of the paragraph is a true mark of the organization that teachers want students to have when writing a persuasive essay, or something like it. What happens is, I think, the completion of one single thought before heading on to the next makes it read more like a text book, which devotes a certain amount of space to the entirety of a concept or event, and then moves on to what is chronologically next. Text books, often times, are historical, well-documented, and irrefutable. In having an manifesto feel as thorough and accurate as a text book, Marx makes it easier for readers to understand that his arguments are crucial, honest, and incontestable.

As far as persuasion is concerned, the language--in addition to the organization--is easily digested, though not colloquial or even the language of the bourgeoisie. It's actually written in a high, technical style. Robin mentioned two separate times in class that those writing in a high style are often untrustworthy, and perhaps manipulative. It's a curious issue, because as far as communism is concerned, there is always a severe imbalance/gaping black hole between dictators and the rest of society, so it's very telling that the philosopher who is writing on behalf of the proletariat isn't writing like the proletariat. Instead, it would seem he's writing for highly ranked intellectuals.

However, some of his diction, while accessible on the whole, has a universal appeal. He writes:

"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation."

In this moment, Marx makes use of the ever-effective listing method. Most notably, in the pairings of "religious fervor, chivalrous enthusiasm, philistine sentimentalism," it's as if he's creating compound words out of these virtuous cliches. His topic sentence is mildly suspensive, and takes the time to break up the thought with a qualifying phrase ("wherever it has got the upper hand") that actually does use the language of the people. He also uses scientific, clinical diction that could perhaps be used to describe natural or technological disasters, i.e. "the icy water of egotistical calculation," "It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies," "substituted naked," and so forth. The final line is kind of a gut wrenching, with his piling on the adjectives, "naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation." It's moments like these in the manifesto when it's most clear how he gets across to his readers. They're perfectly apt, punchy words that accurately get at the notion of exploitation in their society.

Looking at the excerpt from David Foster Wallace's "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men," we can see how DFW expresses the futility of words and language, nowadays, in portraying a romantic connection. He doesn't quite lay out the courting process like Jane Austen would, but instead seems to say, "You've heard this before, haven't you? I'll spare you." He's saving us a lot of time on the matter, using images like, "with the very same twist on their faces" to perhaps tell (not show) us that they had some kind of familiar facial glow or contrived facade that we've seen before (maybe in the movies?) and don't need to see again. For DFW, a face with a "twist" is more readily recognized (or subjectively interpreted) by the reader. His final sentence, frustratingly, amounts the whole paragraph to a kind of slaughtering of regular language. It's incredibly perceptive to human experience because we've all had moments in which words sound weird because we've said or thought about them so much. It's like saying your name over and over again until it feels foreign, ugly, and uncomfortable. Again, he's getting at the futility of words, both in experiencing a familiar story, and in writing it down.

Grostesques

Anderson's peculiarly insightful third person narrator explains grotesques by means of a grotesque who dreams of other grotesques. His style is meandering and hypotactic, explaining things in a story-telling quality. I couldn't help but to think of O'Connor the entire time I read this, not necessarily because of the similarities, but because of how his explanation of grotesques seems to work well with how things play out in her highly interpretable short stories. Some of his own tactics are similar to O'Connor's--for instance, the deliberate naming of certain characters over others is typical of O'Connor (in "Paper Pills" the old man is named Doctor Reefy and the girl remains the girl). Of course, Anderson's narrative is told with all of the vital information in the beginning, so we know of everything that will happen, and the excitement is in the details. O'Connor's stories, contrarily, have climactic and often frightening endings. His narrator seems to pass mild judgment on his characters and their situations, but very vaguely, as in the case of: "The story of Doctor Reefy and his courtship of the tall dark girl who became his wife and left her money to him is a very curious story." He then goes on to supply us with a curious tale of twisted apples that, in their improbable sweetness, are certainly meant to be emblematic of Doctor Reefy himself (or at least his weird knuckles).

Anderson depicts his characters as vague silhouettes with big, pop-out features, like "a white beard and a huge nose and hands," or simply "with a white mustache." Facial hair seems to be of some unknown relevance, as it is one of the few physical attributes we're offered. He has deliberately given his character limited depth in the first paragraph, only to zoom in on more specific details. Perhaps this means to bring our attentions to the sentiments, the curious moments, and the profound details that create a grotesque character, rather than the mere plot of his life.

Hemingway Just Knows Things

Quite like the rest of Hemingway's great material, "Hills Like White Elephants" manages to say very little and mean a whole lot. He has manipulated the story so that the context is relatively obvious, and the content has us wondering what the hell anybody is talking about before we're able to piece together that Jig is uncertain about her procedural abortion while the Man is all for it. In the end, we'd like to think, "Uh-oh" about a pregnant girl (specifically not a woman, and with a childish name like Jig) downing beers and absinthe, and yet there's something about the terse, abstract dialogue that is too distinctly recognizable and real in its casual delivery. We are left with some curiosity as to what will come of their situation--especially when we don't know how convoluted it truly is. The story ends with Jig in what sounds like a huff, but our concern is limited based on a lack of intimacy between the readers and the characters. Similarly to listening in on a stranger's conversation, we are listening in on their conversation without being offered any insight to either character from the Narrator. He delivers the dialog almost journalistically, as though he'd heard it and jotted it down. There are lengthy exchanges during which we're not even offered a "the man said" or a "said the girl." The conversation stands by itself--we are merely eavesdropping. For instance, we can consider what it would be like to sit at a bar and suddenly over-hear something like this:

"It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig,' the man said. 'It's not really an operation at all."

The girl looked at the ground the the table legs rested on.

"I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig. It's really not anything. It's just to let the air in."

Our ears would be open to the conversation the entire time, despite the abortion language being very subtle throughout their exchange. The promise of an operation, or a human dissection equipped with a vacuum, is Hemingway's most disconcerting detail. The bulk of their argument, oddly enough, stems from the tiniest mention of an operation.

Hemingway's low style functions with the sole purpose of getting information across quickly, no fuss. His many conjunctions squeeze in details conversationally, recalling details as if they came to mind the second he wrote them down, without restructuring thoughts or ideas for suspensive purposes. The diction, too, is quick and colloquial.

Before:

The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.

After:

The girl flexed her legs from the sitting position and pressed the firm ground upon which she walked directly towards the station's end. Plentiful fields of grains and tall trees followed the industrious banks of the Ebro on the opposite side of the bustling station. In a far off distance that exceeds the river, as we've seen it earlier, there is tremendous landscape of white mountains. The cloud's densely cast shadow progressed forward throughout the vast fields of grain that she had witnessed mere moments earlier through the scope of the trees.

Mary Explains It All in a Low Style

Christopher Durang's play is as delightfully absurd as the religious content within it. The discussion of Sister Mary's oratory bears an interesting connection to what Lanham speculates about hight and low style--especially as a matter of public vs. private--and how public renditions of speech (quite like Mary's Q&A-style sermon) tend to vary in terms of sincerity. Sister Mary, a genuine nun despite her ignorance, speaks in a low style which is, to use a few of Lanham's words, informational, plain, transparent, comic, sincere, everyday, natural, etc. Mind you, there is much to be said about the play format enabling Durang to write in this lower style, in part because the concepts she discusses are deliberately low in taste, but also because the occasional stage direction inadvertently aids the reader in understanding the tone, regardless of it being there for the actor/director. There are considerably few stage directions, but when they do appear, they do something peculiar: "(Sudden joyful energy:) Yes, they are! What people who ask that question often don't realize is that sometimes the answer to our prayers is

"no," and later, "(Full of faith and joy:) But every bad thing that happens to us, God has a special reason for. God is the good Shepherd, we are His flock." (390). This is an interesting facet to reading a play rather than ordinary dialogue situated within the narrative, in that it lets an outside authority explain how the text is to be read (or acted), when we are ordinarily left to interpret the text as it is, with no guidance. It would be fairly difficult to register the emotions behind Sister Mary's obnoxious teachings without these various tips. We are told in the writer's notes that Sister Mary is to be portrayed as innocent and mildly lovable, particularly in her relationship with Thomas. I noticed the insubordinate doggie-master situation pretty clearly, but it seemed only a matter of wild degradation and not of love.

Sister Mary's dogmatic teachings are smooth and easy to digest, despite their occasional emotional ambiguity: "When he speaks ex cathedra, we must accept what he says at that moment as dogma, or risk hell fire; or, now that things are becoming more liberal, many, many years in purgatory." (382). This sort of preaching isn't exactly suspensive. It feels very much to the point, even though it's lengthened by a conversational "or." Many of the other statements follow suit in this fair, diplomatic, straight-forward approach. Curiously, the casually honest style conflicts with the disingenuous (or simply ridiculous) thoughts she has. She is devoutly faithful to her God and her teachings, but she is more so faithful to her wonderful self, her wretched personal experiences, and her authority before the highly passive audience. The four ex-students show up merely to embarrass her, and yet she is not the least bit embarrassed.

They allow her to contradict herself in such a way that is beyond embarrassment territory, and falls straight into dark, absurdist humor. Throughout, we trust her to be consistently absurd in her teachings, and yet the final scene is beyond our expectations (I would think), and yet it's still not an earth shattering result. Often times in literature we are offered a foreshadowing, or a great sense of impending doom (take, for instance, D.H. Lawrence's "Rocking Horse Winner") that builds to disaster. Lawrence's higher style makes it all the more clear, whereas the simple style in Durang's play is, while seemingly casual and sincere, actually very deceptive in terms of plot progression. A pensive sermon quickly turns homicidal, and we never even saw it coming.

Poor Minnie?

Faulkner’s prose is almost profoundly clear and digestible throughout the whole story. Its paratactic structure makes use of nearly every kind of sentence. Lengthy cumulative ones, highly suspensive ones filled with prepositional and qualifying phrases, and occasional short pithy sentences as well. It’s curious that in a work deeply concerned with shifting its point-of-view for effect, the sentences themselves frequently do their own sort of shifting via strong verb style and prepositional phrases. “Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days, it had gone like a fire in dry grass---the rumor, the story, whatever it was. Something about Miss Minnie Cooper and a Negro. Attacked, insulted, frightened: none of them, gathered in the barber shop on that Saturday evening where the ceiling fan stirred, without freshening it, the vitiated air, sending back upon them, in recurrent surges of stale pomade and lotion, their own stale breath and odors, knew exactly what had happened.” (Section I). There’s something about his account of action that reads like stage directions—quickly uttered and to the point, especially when he’s writing live action. “The barber went swiftly up the street where the sparse lights, insect-swirled, glared in rigid and violent suspension in the lifeless air. The day had died in a pall of dust; above the darkened square, shrouded by the spent dust, the sky was as clear as the inside of a brass bell. Below the cast was a rumor of the twice-waxed moon.” (Section III). His expository moments are marked by careful details that are somehow positioned specifically in space—either through, above, or below something else. The overall structure is customized accordingly with the subject matter.

The scenes with the men noticeably thrive off of the dialogue, differently from the descriptive moments that spend time portraying Minnie Cooper and her feverish temperament. The true action plays out within the conversational disputes of the men. On a basic level, we know that some of them adhere to Southern etiquette, like Mr. McLendon, whereas others, like the barber, have mercy on the alleged criminal. The first section is probably the only place in the story in which we can understand how these people are thinking, the weight of the situation, the characters involved, the latent cultural mentality of the time, and so forth. We can see how harsh and stubborn McLendon is whenever he comes up because he is allowed to move around, respond to people, and eventually freak out.

Contrarily, there’s very little said about the inner-workings of Minnie. We learn through lengthy descriptions of her haggard appearance, her socioeconomic status, her age (mind you, Faulker has a weird way of dodging specificity with this and with other things. Why doesn’t he know if she’s 38 or 39? Or whether she has 3 or 4 voile dresses? He knows plenty of other specifics—why not these?) and we also learn a limited amount about what has happened to her. The only implication of her thoughts is in her hysteria, or her fever. We can assume that, affected by both illness and a potentially traumatic rape incident (one that is never proven true) she’s probably gone mad. Laughing really loudly throughout a movie is atypical behavior. Still, while she was traumatized by the rape, there is something about her character as it is described by Faulkner in the narrative that is so blindingly mysterious and inaccessible. It’s interesting that he spends the most time describing her as she appears to society. It seems to say something about the sort of damaged woman she always was in the eyes of others, an old maid hiding behind colorful dresses. The incident, whatever it truly is, sparked something unusual in her, but we don’t have access to it. All we see are the reactions of others, the “Shhhhhhhh”s and the “Poor girl! Poor Minnie!”

Stranger in the Village

James Baldwin wrote this essay around the time that Ralph Ellison grappled with similar content in his novel, Invisible Man. They are both concerned with the competing senses of whiteness and blackness, and particularly with the black man's suggested behavior towards white men in a time when there was slight obligation to prove themselves to be civil and agreeable. Ellison writes, "Overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you til they vomit or bust wide open." He installs this mindset in his narrator for a decent chunk of the novel, and it is later tested by a number of contending ideals. Baldwin writes, "This smile-and-the-world-smiles-with-you routine worked as will in this situation as it had in the situation for which it was designed, which is to say it did not work at all." (160). It's curious that, for the non-fiction writer like Baldwin, it's not so easy to hide these incredibly fragile sentiments behind dialogue or contrived circumstances. Baldwin can use only what his experience/observations offer him, and with that, his approach contrarily uses a more philosophical tone in the thick of the essay to argue what he figures to be at the core of these racial disputes: America's unyielding (and at times self-deprecating) concern with the race problem . This is mixed in with anecdotal moments (without them, this essay would be maybe 70% less effective) that show a clearer context than the other historical circumstances mentioned within. Despite the rich language and personal manner through which he presents his arguments, the piece is essentially a case study, and yet the case is presented at first as something to hook us with imagery, and later is juxtaposed with with bizarre treatment of blacks in America. One of the difficulties of this essay has to do with the philosophical/anthropological approach's occasional lack of precision. I trust Baldwin's claims, but the lack of specificity in places might weaken his argument for those who'd beg to differ.

The most enticing thing about Baldwin's writing is his heavy sentence management. With that, it looks as though each sentence is tightly packed, could stand on its own, or has enough content and inherent meaning to serve as a "topic sentence" of sorts. There's something about these loaded, suspensive sentences that offer a sense of diplomacy, and at times take the tone of the inaugural addresses we looked at. The proof is in the chiasmus: "People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them." We know exactly what he means, based on the evidence he supplied before that statement, but he's managed to put a lid on--or categorize--the particular feeling (like Joyce describes) of an inescapable history (161). His ability to pinpoint immense historical abstracts, or even feelings that people have, is remarkable. The sentences are handled with care and sensitivity towards his argument, and also with a self-conscious ear towards his own sophisticated language and content.

Similarly, he writes, "I tried not to think of these so lately baptized kinsmen, of the price paid for them, or the peculiar price they themselves would pay, and said nothing about my father, who having taken his own conversion too literally never, at the bottom, forgave the white world (which he described as heathen) for having saddled him with a Christ in whom, to judge at least from their treatment of him, they themselves no longer believed." (161) This is one of many, many sentences in which Baldwin takes his sweet suspensive time laying out the facts that are not to be missed or saved for the next sentence. It's exhaustive, but seemingly necessary for him to tie in his father's experience with conversion in the very same sentence that discusses him digesting the notion of paid religious conversion--a concept his father knew something about, and with that, manages to explain how his father was tied to a cause that people no longer believed in. Throughout the whole, Baldwin has an arsenal of these incredibly thick, argumentative sentences that are chock full of details that support his claim, all within a single breath, as if there's no time to waste on the matter.

I couldn't determine whether or not, throughout the entire course of the essay, he has maintained the same tone, or even what exactly the tone is. Is it strictly philosophical or contemplative? Angry and bitter? Pained and sentimental? It reads like a weird amalgamation of them all.

Goodbye To All That

Didion's prose is lucid, elegant, and makes use of both conversational and descriptive techniques. As far as the entire piece is concerned, I will say that the content wore me down a little. I never really know what to make of personal essays like this, or ones that have an explicit moral to them but go out of their way to make it ambiguous to the reader, with hopes that maybe they'll relate or agree under its unidentifiable terms. The sentiment is stuffed inside of moment after moment of vivid descriptions and vague anecdotes, all usually delivered within long sentences.

Her introductory paragraph has a few polysyndetic sentences that successfully bundle together her abstract ideas of youth: "When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off at DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again." (1) The sentence is marked by its conjunctions and additional thoughts, cramming into one sentence the fullness that first impression--marked by familiar sensations of something unknown to her. The short sentence ("In fact it never was.") that follows is the kind of conversational additive that Nabokov employs in Lolita. Curiously, Didion tends to do this throughout the piece, giving it a more conversational feel in places. I can almost hear her reciting it to a 'new face' at a party she she attended when she was 32, or something like that. It happens when she isolates thoughts in parentheses, offering information that isn't vital, but that deepens her description on a personal level, as in the case of: "I was making only $65 or $70 a week then ("Put yourself in Hattie Carnegie's hands, I was advised without the slightest trace of irony by the editor of the magazine for which I worked)..."(2).

Didion occasionally uses the second person to strengthen her argument, which I believe to be something along the lines of: We are all idealistic when we're young and then we grow out of it and that is that. She assumes that her audience has some sort of relationship with the experiences she mentions: "I do not mean "love" in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again." I wonder if she's using the second person to imply that many of us feel these same sensations (I, for one, do not love the first person who ever touched me and I think the same goes for many people I know--unless we're talking about nurturing mommy touches), or if she simply got tired of using "I."

The question of her intended audience for this piece is curious, because while it's worth reading the piece for its astute moments like, "I liked the bleak branches above Washington Square at dawn, and the monochromatic flatness of Second avenue, the fire escapes and the grilled storefronts peculiar and empty in their perspectives" (5), there's an underlying implication that there she has in incentive in telling us about her experiences in New York as a genuine West Coast person. The essay begins abstractly with the mention of beginnings and endings. Is she trying to say that life is not like it is in the movies, with a clear beginning and end? Reading it now, it all seems a little too obvious. But perhaps it was less so when it was published.

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath's prose seems to take the verb style more than anything we've read so far. The curious thing about it is that, in showing how insane her narrator is, she writes sentences that demonstrate the narrator either doing this, or processing things as they happen. Quite like with Joyce, objects have a sense of agency, and we continue to watch them perform a variety of tasks, "Pale green loopy ferns and spiked leaves of a much darker green filled the ceramic pots on teh end table and the coffee table and the magazine table." (127). This sentence seems to contain all of the techniques that Plath uses the demonstrate the observant eye of a crazy person. The repetition of certain words and conjunctions has an exhausted quality, drawn-out and tired.

Since this chapter is meant to demonstrate Esther's plunge into insanity, the writing tends to follow suit, and it does so pretty ironically. When Esther is revealing something crucial to her condition, the sentences shorten up: "I was still wearing Betsy's white blouse and dirndl skirt. They drooped a bit now, as I hadn't washed them in my three weeks at home. The sweaty cotton gave of a sour but friendly smell. I hadn't washed my hair for three weeks, either. I hadn't slept for seven nights."The sentences become more simple as her thoughts continue, and yet the thoughts get more complex. Most the sentence-length variations occur around the word sleep, which is increasingly absent in the narrator's story.

The sentences aren't generally suspensive, and tend to work so that the narrator is doing something directly, or something else is doing something. This works differently from Nabokov, whose inner monologue dwells in thoughts and anecdotes, cries out to things that aren't present, and revolves around himself. Ester describes things flatly, just as she sees them,

perhaps to get across some sort of triviality or distaste for mundane details--or any of the things that drive her insane. The straight forward sentences are Plath's most prevalent device in expressing her character's disillusionment.

I Agree with Orwell

I find Orwell to be entirely persuasive, and part of that has to due with his self-conscious avoidance of the sort of pretentious language he dislikes so much.

His essay has a political message of its own, slamming the state of the English language as it was used in politics at the time. It's interesting when I look back on the inaugural addresses we discussed earlier, all of which were fully loaded with useless cliches and figurative language that may or may not mean anything to people. Better yet, because the language is so recognizable, the use of ready-made phrases aids in bringing about a certain kind of mindless approval, or a lazier approach at understanding political messages.

Orwell's language is mostly straightforward. He occasionally feeds into the sort of language he's opposing, especially when he uses metaphors like tea leaves clogging up a sink or sending worn-out, useless phrases (verbal refuse) "into the dustbin where it belongs." However, when he lists his pretty simple provisions for avoiding pretentious writing, it would seem that using similes, metaphors, and figurative language where it is effective and useful is different from using it when it's expected or when it's covering up for a lack of information or understanding of a topic. He's arguing for a resurgence of purity of the English language, or a fresher approach. For the most part, he's dodged a lot of the techniques that he criticizes in his essay, and that alone is an incredible feat (a lot of this tactics are so common in persuasive writing/speechmaking). I feel like it's easier to trust him, or that he has a stronger case, since he has done the work that he suggests his readers to do.

I'd read this essay a couple of years ago and thought of it more in terms of what happens in journalism today as opposed to political writing (or at least that is how the professor who assigned it wanted us to think about it). Looking at it that way, I began to notice meaningless fluff appearing left and right in all sorts publications. The writing that Orwell targets as political seems to have manifested other forms of writing, perhaps because ready-made phrases, though not encouraged, are not exactly rejected either. They're the perfect vice for busy writers with deadlines and pressing assignments. I find it extremely difficult to dodge cliches and figurative language in general, but considering Orwell's guidelines is helpful in trying to reform.

James Joyce

Stylistically, Joyce's Grace appears to be governed by dialog more so than in what we've looked at so far in class. The story has three episodes: the first in the bar, the second (and lengthiest) at home, and the third at church. This alone holds some thematic depth, considering how Joyce seems to be commenting on the working-man's religion, how inaccurate and farfetched it has become, and how christianity has a way of dumbing itself down. With that, we see a transition from near-suicidal incident at a bar to the men "washing the pot" at church. The thick of the story occurs in dialog among the men, during which they exchange an assortment of misconceptions about catholicism and general religion, with hopes of restoring Mr. Kernan's faith.

Honing in on the prose, his style is most prominent in passages that profile individual men entering the scene:

"Mr McCoy had been at one time a tenor of some reputation. His wife, who had been a soprano, still taught young children to play piano at low terms. His line of life had not been the shortest distance between two points and for short periods he had been driven to live by his wits. He had been a clerk in the Midland Railway, a canvasser for advertisements in The Irish Times and The Freeman's Journal, and a town traveller for a coal firm on commission, and he had recently become secretary to the City Coroner. His new office made him professionally interested in Mr. Kernan's case."

This passage is marked by shorter opening and closing sentences with lengthy ones sandwiched between them. The first sentence is simple, straightforward, and concise. The second, taking the time to sort out that his wife is also a singer of sorts, isolates the soprano between commas, making it an internal series of modifiers (or in this case, just one modifier). The third sentence, as the crux of the paragraph, starts to exude a more particular style characterized by a negative qualifier, and a sort of chiasmus in "shortest distance between two points and for short periods..." offering logical balance to the sentence. The following sentences are typically conventional and balanced with neatly placed conjunctions.

Joyce has a very pragmatic way of narrating, in that paragraphs start plainly, then progress towards an arousing sentence or two, and eventually close with another plain sentence. When it comes to profiling characters, he lists (with conjunctions) each man's duties and qualifications, attempting to render him useful in enlightening Mr. Kernan.

Lolita, 9/16

“All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do. After one wild attempt we made to meet at night in her garden (of which more later), the only privacy we were allowed was to be out of earshot but not out of sight on the populous part of the plage. There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start on a long cautious journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted us sufficient concealment to graze each other's salty lips; these incomplete contacts drove our healthy and inexperienced young bodies to such a state of exasperation that not even the cold blue water, under which we still clawed at each other, could bring relief.”(12)

In this scorching three sentence passage, Nabokov kicks things off with the use of sentence type #14, the prepositional phrase before the subject and verb, and follows it up with sentence type #4, a series without a conjunction, which lets him exercise his frequent desire to list the many odd ways in which he and Annabel were in love with each other. What follows the semicolon, “hopelessly,” though not technically a new sentence, seems to fall within the interrupting modifier between subject and verb sentence style, or at least that’s how it looks to me. Almost every time he isolates a part of a sentence by using parentheses, the sentence switches to interrupting modifier mode. For example, “After one wild attempt we made to meet at night in her garden (of which more later)…” displays how his parentheses, though seemingly supplemental, contain important contents from the future. It’s as if to say, quite conversationally, “Don’t you worry, you’ll hear all about it in time.”

The second half of his paragraph again features the prepositional phrase before the subject and verb, later combined with what I think looks like sentence type # 7 or 7a, the internal series of appositives or modifiers, or a single appositive or pair. He uses prepositional phrases to qualify much of the actual action that occurs in this passage, and all through a long winded sentences, carefully punctuated with semicolons to the point when it becomes too easy to forget that the whole thing was ever just one big fat sentence to begin with. His sentence styles vary for the remainder of the passage, but together offer an extended, twisted, meandering effect.

This particular passage doesn’t offer the relief of an occasional, ironically placed short sentence (unlike other moments in the first few pages), but it’s interesting to consider that, in describing the height of his passion with Annabel, he chooses to draw out his description and pile on as much detail, physical and emotional, as he could comfortably compress into three sentences. His consistent use of alliteration throughout, while always lovely to the eyes and ears, has even greater rhythmic qualities in this passage. I especially like his use of “p” words, like “populous part of the plage” and “petrified paroxysm.” There’s something very sensuous and intense about the harsh PUH sound, especially when in sequence. His use of “h” words like in “her hand, half-hidden in the sand” contrarily have a softer sound, quite befitting his softer, feminine subject matter.

9/14 The Inaugural Address

It amazed me how frighteningly different the experiences are of watching/listening to Clinton’s first inaugural address, and then reading it. Something about the tone of his voice and the atmosphere proves to be manipulating in this circumstance, especially since, while reading through it and exploring its syntax and “sense,” it becomes clear that he’s saying a whole lot of nothing at all. The speech’s tactics are reminiscent of what Lanham discusses in chapter 3, and makes decent use of a periodic structure. Pacing is a technique that comes through both sonically, when he speaks, and also when it’s flat on the page.

“Not change for change's sake, but change to preserve America's ideals—life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Though we march to the music of our time, our mission is timeless.”

As Lanham mentions on page 51 regarding the tangible ingredients for a periodic style, the above quote seems to contain suspension, parallelism, balance, and climax. The four combined make for a sentence that we know from first few words is going to reveal something climactic, but it will do so gradually. The climactic moments within these two sentences are the ones that reiterate clichés, or fulfill our expectations within the inaugural address’ context. He suspends the arrival of the cliché by stating what is not to happen (with a well-balanced cliché, nonetheless) and follows up with a paratactic list.

While playing the address video and reading it simultaneously, I can also see what Lanham means when he describes virtuoso display, indeed, the “so that the information reaching the eye coincides perfectly with the rhythms reaching the ear, you begin to wonder whether the diagrammatic layout might be more suitable than the conventional linear one to what is said and how.” (52). With that, he asserts that we’re often times more comfortable with or well adjusted to statements that read like a diagram, instead of those that read linearly or straightforwardly. Suspense matched with instant gratification is popular in all art forms, from television, to music (classical and pop styles alike) and, evidently, also in public speaking. Perhaps it’s because it offers a certain level of specificity, and a differentiation between what feels wrong from what feels right. A sentence’s suspension, just like “Not change for change’s sake, but…” feels wrong and dissonant until it is met with what is right and tonal: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

“Though our challenges are fearsome, so are our strengths. And Americans have ever been a restless, questing, hopeful people. We must bring to our task today the vision and will of those who came before us.”

This works even more simply and directly in the sentences above. Just as you think he’s going to dive into our fearsome challenges, he quite naturally counteracts them with prospect of “fearsome strengths” (whatever those may be). The second two sentences build off of each other, seeing as the first qualifies the second, and demands the fast, yet vague solution that follows.

Assignment #2: A Silver Dish

"There were Woody’s two sisters as well, unmarried, in their fifties, very Christian, very straight, still living with Mama in an entirely Christian bungalow. Woody, who took full responsibility for them all, occasionally had to put one of the girls (they had become sick girls) in a mental institution. Nothing severe. The sisters were wonderful women, both of them gorgeous once, but neither of the poor things was playing with a full deck. And all the factions had to be kept separate—Mama, the Christian convert; the fundamentalist sisters; Pop, who read the Yiddish paper as long as he could still see print; Halina, a good Catholic. Woody, the seminary forty years behind him, described himself as an agnostic. Pop had no more religion than you could find in the Yiddish paper, but he made Woody promise to bury him among Jews, and that was where he lay now, in the Hawaiian shirt Woody had bought for him at the tilers’ convention in Honolulu. Woody would allow no undertaker’s assistant to dress him but came to the parlor and buttoned the stiff into the shirt himself, and the old man went down looking like Ben-Gurion in a simple wooden coffin, sure to rot fast. That was how Woody wanted it all."

The most remarkable characteristic of Bellow's sentences (in the above paragraph and throughout the story) is his flair for making lists that don't necessarily feel like lists. Parallel to Lanham's notes, he is contributing to the asyndetic world, which is described as "a world where connections cannot be made." I find this definition curious in terms of Bellow's usage, if only because his listed items do seem to be connected despite the absence of conjunctions. Instead, his lack of "and" formats his list items in such a way where they don't stand completely alone, but they do exude a subtle vibe of isolation. In describing the two sisters, the tersely presented list serves as a method of simplifying the subject matter, making it seem matter-of-fact, casual, and quite common. Within his narrative, it seems like these details are expected and unsurprising to the reader.

Quite like with Lanham's explanation of Caesar's "I came; I saw; I conquered," Bellow is placing different essential character descriptions on the same syntactic level. Another representation of parataxis in this excerpt is his use of short phrases and clauses that embody very isolated, definitive thoughts. Like he says, these abrupt sentences feel emotionally charged and more potent in their ambiguity. For instance, "That was how Woody wanted it all" serves as a perfect understatement concluding a descriptive paragraph about a quirky situation. It also has a particular rhythmic value in sounding contrary to all that came immediately before it. This stylistic treatment works well with the story itself, which is an elaborate recollection of contradictory happenings and personalities.

"Bell-battered Woodrow’s soul was whirling this Sunday morning, indoors and out, to the past, back to his upper corner of the warehouse, laid out with such originality—the bells coming and going, metal on naked metal, until the bell circle expanded over the whole of steelmaking, oil-refining, power-producing mid-autumn South Chicago, and all its Croatians, Ukrainians, Greeks, Poles, and respectable blacks heading for their churches to hear Mass or to sing hymns."

Along the lines of Bellow's successful uses of form-follows-function, the listing in the above paragraph (or sentence, rather) has obvious musical qualities which reflect those of a bell's. The lone sentence functions as a single ring of a large bell, going back and forth, back and forth, over and over again, "coming and going, metal on naked metal," repeating similar word endings like "making," "refining," and "producing" all to create the kind of sentence that you can bop your head to. Its resonance is half charming and half excessive, and functions in Lanham's terms, as "a chorus-like ritualistic repetition combined with list-making," and further, that this kind of sentence has a "parallel construction"

Assignment #1: Noun and Verb Styles

I'm still having a tough time distinguishing the two styles in news writing, but I'll get the hang of it soon enough.

The following excerpt is from the New York Times online:

The closing of schools was one of the most contentious issues in the spring, as many parents criticized the city for keeping schools open even when large numbers of students were absent.

In New York and around the country, health officials have said they will be even more reluctant to shutter schools this fall because doing so caused disruptions to families and work schedules and did little to stop the spread of the virus.

But the mayor, who is running for re-election in November, took care to explain what steps the city would take in education settings. The city will provide free vaccinations, through nasal spray or shots, beginning in October at every public and private elementary school. The vaccinations will go to students whose parent gives permission, most likely in two vaccination sessions about four weeks apart.

I believe the above excerpt to be mostly verb-oriented in that writer is using verbs to highlight the actions involved in the paragraph instead of using nouns for rhythmic purposes. This may be a shot in the dark, but based on Lanham's verb style qualifications, it would seem that a sentence that expresses a complete thought without the use of prepositional phrases is more verbal. I get the feeling that a lot of newsy writing is on the verbal side because, as he points out, verb-style translations of a paragraph tend to cut the size in half, and news writing often strives for brevity.

It looks as though the first sentence of the second paragraph actually uses the noun-style, with its use of a preposition, and it's audibly drawn-out rhythmic qualities, and yet it kind of shifts back to verbal when it reads, "doing so caused disruptions to families and work schedules and did little to stop the spread of the virus." (Is it possible for individual paragraphs to read and feel as though they contain both styles? I'm not entirely sure.)

The final paragraph appears to be verbal, concisely stating what the city will do sequentially: it provides vaccinations, through a certain method, at this particular time, and the vaccinations will to go these people, at about this time. In examining the excerpt, its difficult to identify any particular tone or voice within, if only because this kind of neutral news is serving up facts. It is fairly concerned with rhythmic qualities, but not enough to concern itself with extra prepositions and lengthier sentences that might appear in a noun-style passage.

Second excerpt from the LA Times online:

In July, the House approved legislation that would give the Food and Drug Administration broad new powers and place new responsibilities on food producers. The bill would speed up the ability of health officials to track down the source of an outbreak and give the government the power to mandate a recall, rather than rely on food producers to voluntarily pull tainted products from the shelves.

The Senate is expected to take up its version in the fall, and the issue has become a high priority for the White House.

It is impossible to say whether new laws and tougher enforcement would have prevented the contamination of the Nestle cookie dough, which the company voluntarily pulled from stores hours after the government linked it to the outbreak.

The instant appearance of a preposition in the first paragraph later followed by "that would give" seems more reminiscent of noun style writing. The reoccurrence of "would" and "which" seem to lengthen the sentences, making it seem somewhat lengthier, especially when it takes on a "rather than" situation. The final paragraph flows nicely, and is marked by "contamination of" which, as Lanham suggests, makes the action disappear into the nouns. The prevention of contamination, being placed before the Nestle cookie dough, sounds like it's of lesser importance within that sentence alone.

An Extended Greeting

A few thoughts about this past summer in relation to this class:

I'd once figured that interning at a Random House Inc. (more specifically Knopf-Doubleday) would perhaps involve a few hours of tedium and terror (photocopying manuscripts, mailings books) each day, followed by however-many hours of reading already published books by their many fantastic authors. Sadly, internships are designed to pull our dreamy heads out of the clouds and put us on the right track.

With that, I spent half of my summer reading unimaginably bad writing. In the beginning, writing malicious reader's reports on manuscripts and consequently crushing the hopes and dreams of various unknown authors was all too fun. The novelty of critiquing poor writing wore off in a week's time, leaving me sad, guilt-ridden, and doubtful that I'd ever be dealt reading material that I'd actually like.

It occurred to me that, while an editor's job isn't entirely characterized by running books to the ground, that is apparently untrue of an editorial intern's job, which is marked by slush piles and unlikely candidates, all who deserve no less than the kindest rejection letter.

Thinking about what's good in writing is entirely more pleasant than thinking of what's awful. That is why I am especially happy to be taking this course.

As of now, my favorites in the realm of non-fiction/criticism are Pauline Kael (for her clever diction, sharp wit, and her arsenal of film facts ) and Roland Barthes (Mythologies is beyond brilliant).

In fiction, I'm interested in Nabokov's writing for obvious reasons (it is beautiful, for one). I'm interested in breaking it down much, much further, because when I'd read Lolita a few years ago, I felt too consumed by how musical and pretty the prose was to ever stop and fully realize what was going on inside of it.