The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Mechanics

  • As You Like It: Rules for Writing

    Back in February 2010, the Guardian posted an article titled “Ten rules for writing fiction.” Celebrated authors had been invited to submit ten of their writing rules. But rules often break down under pressure, we might find writers breaking their own, or the examples held up for adulation contain so many exceptions that the rule is nullified early in the game. Take Jonathan Franzen’s rule regarding using then as a conjunction, for example.

    Franzen gets pretty worked up about it. Over at the FS&G “Work in Progress” blog, he expounds on his “Comma-Then” rule. Basically, Franzen frowns on the use of then to connect, particularly when the intent is to avoid using and. Fine, I thought, but unmoved, as usual, by this kind of nitpicking, then thought to check his examples.

    Franzen explains why he dislikes “comma-then,” and cites Dickens and the Brontes in support. Is it a rule? Should it be? The OED gives this example of the use of then as a conjunction: “The president spoke and spoke well, then sat down.“ The OED example would appear to violate Franzen’s rule. But Franzen didn’t say the “comma-then” construction was ungrammatical. His argument is stylistic and idiosyncratic. But he cited Dickens and the Brontes as examples of writers who avoided “comma-then.” So l took a look at some Dickens and two of the Brontes, but what I found does not seem to support Franzen’s argument:

    From Dickens’s “David Copperfield”:

    “Uriah threw the ball to Mrs. Heep, Mrs. Heep caught it and threw it back to Uriah, Uriah kept it up a little while, then sent it back to Mrs. Heep, and so they went on tossing it about until I had no idea who had got it, and was quite bewildered.”

    “But I looked so serious, that Dora left off shaking her curls, and laid her trembling little hand upon my shoulder, and first looked scared and anxious, then began to cry.”

    From Dickens’s “Bleak House”:

    “Jo searches the floor for some time longer, then looks up for a moment, and then down again.”

    “My Lady turns her head inward for the moment, then looks out again as before.”

    From Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights”:

    “I listened doubtingly an instant; detected the disturber, then turned and dozed, and dreamt again.”

    “Pausing in her lamentations, she surveyed him with a glance of awe and horror, then burst forth anew.”

    “He took the book from his hand, and glanced at the open page, then returned it without any observation.”

    “He laid them on the table, looked eagerly towards the window, then rose and went out.”

    From Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre”:

    “I walked to the window, across the room, then close up to her.”

    “I stood and warmed my numbed fingers over the blaze, then I looked round.”

    “Half-an-hour’s recreation succeeded, then study; then the glass of water and the piece of oat-cake, prayers, and bed.”

    “He scrutinised the reverse of these living medals some five minutes, then pronounced sentence.”

    Not all of the rules in the Guardian article mentioned above are about the mechanics of writing. Some of the rules are about the behavior of the writer, rules to improve productivity or efficiency. The Guardian list opens with Elmore Leonard, whose first rule speaks to writing strategy: Don’t open with the weather, Leonard says. But that’s exactly how Jonathan Franzen begins his novel, “The Corrections,” his first paragraph reminding me of the opening to Dickens’s “Bleak House,” bad weather and sentence fragments. Dickens opens with “Implacable November weather…Fog everywhere,” Franzen with “an autumn prairie cold front…Gust after gust of disorder.”

    Implacable, too, the rules of writing. Speaking of fog, rules for writing often fog the glasses of our desire, streak the windows of our prose, our fingers go blind, then despondency.

    The Seven Ages of the Writer Amid Rules

    Maybe the rules of writing are like Shakespeare’s seven ages of man, found in the play “As You Like It.” In the first stage (of a modified Shakespeare, the seven ages of the writer), the writer is an infant, and there are no rules. In the second stage, the infant grows into grammar school, fidgeting against the rules. The third stage, he’s in love with the rules, whatever he determines them to be. Then a soldier of rules, the professor, or the professional writer looking for an easy gig between novels. Then wisdom sets in for a spell. Then his time passes, and a new generation of writers watches him slip on the banana peels of his rules. And in the end, “mere oblivion” is the rule, “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

  • Ticker Tape Sentence

    A new sentence, ahoy, begins to move along the horizon, words crossing on the horizon like ticker tape, words like ships at sea, ship-sat sea, a sentence a fleet of words, but quiet, so far out, out to sea, but futile, our following them, their passage, so why not just limit the sentence to one word, a single word, stop, for example, stop these ships before it's too late, before we cross the point of no return, but no, I'm not worried about running on, I'm more concerned with running aground, so I'm running with the wind while the wind's in my sails, running with this new sentence, running with the wind, for a spell, a run-on sentence, tilting and lilting with comma splices, funny term, comma splice, like tacks, like sailing tacks, the comma splice, to cut off, pause, we learned in grade grammar elementary school while the period was a full stop pull over go to sleep, compared to the comma, where you had to leave the car running, riding the clutch (but wait, we didn't drive cars in grade school, can't use that comparison - too late), quick breath, come around, though, we got that, just enough time to glance up, look at the teacher, visage, what was she thinking, and did she have hair under her habit, she had thick bushy black eyebrows, like punctuation marks underscoring the white cardboard starched forehead, big black dashes, but that's to digress, to veer from course, deviation from planned course, stay on tack, on tact, too, and on track, for the railroad is like a run-on sentence, too, too, too, but the run-on sentence is like a chase scene, like a chase at the end of a Keystone Cops adventure, a chase that runs on and runs on, like a run-on sentence, sometimes called a comma splice run-on sentence I should caution good reader there is no end in sight to this run-on sentence, so if there's somewhere you need to be, you might want to mark where you are, just grab a piece of tape, or something, a felt marker, and make a mark on your screen, not a period though, a comma, mark your place, where you are in the sentence, mark the word just above where the little blue bubble marker is now located below this run-on sentence, mark it with a caret, like this ^ or with an upside down y or keep going no reason to stop unless you need to be somewhere but still give them a call, call in, and tell them you are in the middle of a run-on sentence you can see that we are in the middle of this run-on sentence by checking the blue bubble, if the blue bubble is in the middle of the ticker line, then we are midway through this run-on sentence you don't need to mark your screen when you get back just slide the blue bubble over to the middle of the ticker tape-like rectangular oval below the sentence nice feature that blue bubble where I got the idea actually for this run-on sentence thinking why bother having to tab down read down always down the page why not just keep moving sideways this is how new things are invented by questioning the status quo and a book could be written like this why not run the sentence to the end of the page, turn the page, continue sentence on the back side, reach the end again, continue the sentence onto the next page, not down, straight across, until you reach the end of the book, then go back to page one before you tab down to the next row, the next line, and off you go again, until the book is full what would each page read like then a complete surprise futile though the perspicacious reader will note the influence of John Cage here, here on this run-on sentence, so maybe this idea of the ticker tape run-on sentence is somewhat Cagean, but then again, maybe not, maybe Cage has nothing to do with this, but Cage embraced the futile and in doing so crossed the horizon of doubt and I keep coming back to Cage even after all these years and new things to look at and read and listen to, and reading Cage's books, "Silence," for example, or "A Year From Monday," might suggest more ideas for new forms of composition of posts, though Cage preferred the mosaic to the linear the ticker tape sentence (I think the name might stick) is certainly an exercise in linearity if nothing else for it resembles a line, a line sliding, a line of words, sliding horizontally, like ships on a horizon, words like a fleet of ships, ships though that never come any closer, and whose purpose remains, at best, ambiguous, or worse, simply silly, but it takes a long time to stop a ship, and still, there they are, out to sea, floating above the blue bubble in the long oval, and they stay on the horizon, sliding across the horizon until they are out of view and we are left to go our own way.

  • Rows sans end

    El Porto, 1969A sentence, this one, for example (though another might do), the one you are now reading, backlit, for some purpose, presumably (your body like a house in disrepair, suit fraying, limbs sagging, glasses missing one temple, pads bent, joints crooked, hair crinkled dry moss, green going grey, a bird’s nest), late summer as the sentence gets started, lolling, dozing, without antecedent, no foreshadowing, no shadows at all, no dashes, noon, then, the beach clear, the water shipless and shapeless, but shiftless still, then suddenly awakening and rising, like a quick second wind, and just as quickly a third wind, the afternoon slop now upon the coast, the water rougher than it looked from the beach, sudden, swell upon swell following the sleepy noon lull, and you are not ready for this, each new wave an and, followed by another and, and another and, until, caught now in a riptide, a rebuttal that has the stylish lifeguards proofreading for drowning readers, and when they find one, they click on the swimmer and go, click and go, click and go, sweeping the sentence down to the water clear of this sort of thing, fragments, wave fragments, ripples from where they sit high in their tower

    A row is a row is a row is a row,
a row a row a row a row.
A paddle is a paddle is a paddle is a paddle,
and we are out past the break,
out to sea,
so to speak
is to speak is to speak is to speak.

No matter      what we do (rules)      where we go (directions)
there are margins,                                            edgeswe come up against.
                        The world is flat
after all,
                  the flat earth squaring us in,
switchbacks,               zigzags              away from intuition. 
For the world wants style:
                  8 & ½ x 11, 3 hole punched,
the thin red vertical line creating a margin,    a double edge.

    “Sometimes a thing is hard because you are doing it wrong” (Don DeLillo, “Point Omega, p. 27).

  • A Year From The Use and Misuse of English Grammar

    We learn grammar when we learn to speak, we know grammar, we pause where we want, when we want, pulling words like fish from our Pond of Vocabulary and stringing them on the line, one after another, one to a hook, using commas instead of periods when we don’t want to be interrupted, YELLing when someone is so rude as to keep on talking when we are trying to interrupt – we fall silent, dashed, a period of rigour-tunge follows (our tongues rigged with rules), then we bounce awake, trim our sails, for we’re surrounded in the Bay of Prescription, the murky waters of communication, with boats of advice all bopping this way and that (there goes the “Do This,” firing across the bow of the “Don’t Do That”), the pond stormy on a storm swept night if there ever was one.

    In Wendell Johnson’s “You Can’t Write Writing,” (The Use and Misuse of Language, 1962, S. I. Hayakawa, ed.), we learn that bad grammar, baby, ain’t our problem: “The late Clarence Darrow, while speaking one day to a group of professors of English and others of kindred inclination, either raised or dismissed the basic problem with which his listeners were concerned by asking, ‘Even if you do learn to speak correct English, who are you going to talk it to?’ Mr. Darrow was contending…the effective use of the English language is more important than the ‘correct’ use of it, and that if you can speak English ‘correctly,’ but not effectively, it does not matter very much ‘who you talk it to’” (101).

    This has implications for those who would aspire to teach writing, and Johnson continues, “The teacher of English appears to attempt to place the emphasis upon writing, rather than upon writing-about-something-for-someone. From this it follows quite inevitably that the student of English fails in large measure to learn the nature of the significance of clarity or precision and of organization in the written representation of facts” (103).

    Grammar is the least of our worries, argues Johnson: “So long as the student’s primary anxieties are made to revolve around the task of learning to spell, punctuate, and observe the rules of syntax, he is not likely to become keenly conscious of the fact that when he writes he is, above all, communicating…his first obligation to his reader is not to be grammatically fashionable but to be clear and coherent” (103).

    Hayakawa, in his introduction, has already explained his interest with regard to how people talk: “We are not worrying about the elegance of their pronunciation or the correctness of their grammar. Basically we are concerned with the adequacy of their language as a ‘map’ of the ‘territory’ of experience being talked about” (vii). And, ultimately, for the reader interested in more than mere prescriptions on how to write, emphasis is placed “not only on what the speakers said, but even more importantly on their attitudes towards their own utterances” (vii).

    Hayakawa sums up his concerns as follows: “What general semanticists mean by ‘language habits’ is the entire complex of (1) how we talk – whether our language is specific or general, descriptive or inferential or judgmental; and (2) our attitudes toward our own remarks – whether dogmatic or open-minded, rigid or flexible” (vii).

    Whenever I hear some self-appointed cop of language (or worse, someone with the badge of a degree), attempting to arrest a speaker’s tongue, putting it in the handcuffs of some prescriptive rule, I think about Hayakawa’s The Use and Misuse of Language.

    But, unforlorn, I’m inclined toward and recline with an infuzen of John Cage, who sums the problem up nicely in his A Year From Monday (1969), which begins with “DIARY: HOW TO IMPROVE THE WORLD (YOU WILL ONLY MAKE MATTERS WORSE) 1965

            I.               Continue; I’ll discover where you

                                sweat  (Kierkegaard).            We are getting

    rid of ownership, substituting use.

    Beginning with ideas.            Which ones can we

    take?            Which ones can we give?

    Disappearance of power politics.            Non-

    measurement.”

    Related:

    “You Can’t Write Writing”
    Baseball and the Parts of Speech
    Stanley Fish, Full of Ethos
    Kicking E. B. White When He’s Down
    The Bare Bodkin of the English Major
    How to Teach College Writing to Nonreaders

  • Problems, Inventions, and Implications

    Inventions are usually a response to a problem. A problem is something that limits or impairs access to needs, wants, or values. An invention solves the problem, granting or improving access. An invention might be a machine, an idea, or a new value. Inventions alter our environment and often present side effects, good or bad, that may or may not have anything to do with the original problem, and may or may not have been anticipated. Inventions can create new problems, and changes in our environment can change us, often in unexpected ways, change our response to our environment, change us externally or internally, physically, mentally, or emotionally, change our behavior and the way we think of ourselves. Inventions can change culture and change the direction of societal development. Sometimes, as in the case of synthetic biology, an invention takes on “A Life of Its Own” (Michael Specter, New Yorker, 28 September 2009). This “life of its own” we might call implications. Invention shares with experiment, discovery, and creation what it means to be human.

    As machines, inventions have a shelf life, for they are subject to entropy, wear and tear, as well as obsolescence created by changes in the environment or by other inventions. It was Socrates, in Plato’s Republic, talking about the creation of the State (which begins as an idea), who said, “…the true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention” (Jowett, V-128, Book II, p. 60). What happens to the old machines when we no longer perceive the necessity? And if inventions are a response to a problem, what problem did the automobile solve?

    Imagine life today without the automobile – not that you simply give up your car, but that the automobile was never invented.

    According to Google Patents, the oldest patent using the word Automobile was filed in 1809, but not issued until 1902. The patent, by J. Ledwinka, “subject of the Emperor of Austria-Hungary,” but, “residing in Chicago,” was a design allowing for the independent functioning of the four wheels of the carriage. The patent improves the efficiency of the automobile, making it easier to operate. The terms Motor-car and Auto-car will fetch other, equally old patents from Google Patents.

    The word “automobile” suggests a self-moving vehicle. A US patent for L. Bollee, of France, providing improvements for a “self-propelling vehicle,” was filed in 1896 and issued in 1898. This patent involves improvements to “…five principal parts: first, the motor; second, the frame; third, the transmission gear; fourth, the brake; and, fifth, the mechanism for engaging and disengaging the motor, for changing the speed of the vehicle, and for actuating the brake.” There’s no mention of a radio or radar detector.

    Many of the patents surrounding automobiles suggest that most patents are inventions of improvement. The automobile itself, as an invention, isn’t a new machine as much as an improvement on older machines. The idea of a wheeled vehicle is very old, and may be said to leverage the underlying general principle of the circle, its latent energy (as Fuller’s piano top life preserver illustrates the underlying general principle of flotation, and his magic log illustrates the underlying general principle of the fulcrum, or leverage). Humanity’s first observations of round things rolling, seemingly of their own volition, perhaps needing a kick to get things going, seems to have set off a chain of inventions in what we now call a “snowball effect.” Society seems to be a tower of inventions, not all necessarily designed to improve our humanity.

    Imagine life today without the automobile – not that you simply give up your car, but that the automobile was never invented. This is increasingly difficult to do because we may have lost sight of the original problem the automobile was designed to solve, and the automobile has itself created new problems for which it is the invention that appears to be the solution. This is why Fuller said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

    Related:

    All Stung Over By Links of Googled Grace

    Earth-Glass Half Empty or Fuller?: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

    Progress Report: Our Disappearing World

  • A Short Treatise on the Writing Virtues

    When the New York Times tells us “consistency is a virtue,” we wonder, but they probably have a point, for “…stubbornness isn’t”; nevertheless, the Times is “willing to consider revisions [to its style manual] when a good case can be made.” But at the risk of being stubborn, is consistency a virtue? Is it virtuous of one to consistently make the same error? And has our modern habit of valuing consistency as a characteristic of good writing infected our reading with an obsessive tendency to look for errors, and when we look for errors, are we not inclined, indeed, duty-bound, to find them? As usual, we are late to the party, but we still read with interest that the Times “recently [Feb. 2009] revised two longstanding rules in The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, the newsroom’s style guide. They were very minor changes, involving simple matters of capitalization and spelling.”

    In Andrew Comte-Sponville’s A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues, consistency doesn’t make the cut. Still, the Times offers solid backing for considering consistency in writing a virtue: “We continue to favor clarity and consistency over a hodgepodge of idiosyncratic preferences. We prefer established usage over change for change’s sake. And we put the needs of the general reader over the desires of any particular group.” In other words, the values of the Times editorial voice are uniformity, tradition, and democratic taste. These are the values created by the printing press, but it’s a stretch to call them virtues. Comte-Sponville does include fidelity as a virtue, and perhaps consistency is a kind of fidelity, but fidelity to what?

    For Comte-Sponville, thinking of virtues should give us “to understand what we should do, what we should be, and how we should live, and thereby gauge, at least intellectually, the distance that separates us from these ideals.” Yet the second half of this stated purpose begins to sound like the formulation of a rubric. But Comte-Sponville goes on to say that he does not “believe any more than Spinoza did in the utility of denouncing vice, evil, and sin. Why always accuse, why always condemn? That’s a sad ethics indeed, for sad people.”

    We know from the study of Old English manuscripts that consistency of punctuation and capitalization was not considered a virtue. What causes virtues to change over time? What are the writing virtues that make good habit?

    Comte-Sponville picks up Aquinas’s question of the relative value of the virtues – can one virtue be considered better than another? Here are the chapter titles of Comte-Sponville’s book, their order a matter of “intuition,” he tells us, rather than prescription; still, one wonders where consistency might be placed:

    1. Politeness
    2. Fidelity
    3. Prudence
    4. Temperance
    5. Courage
    6. Justice
    7. Generosity
    8. Compassion
    9. Mercy
    10. Gratitude
    11. Humility
    12. Simplicity
    13. Tolerance
    14. Purity
    15. Gentleness
    16. Good Faith
    17. Humor
    18. Love

  • El Porto Waltz

    We found ourselves last night dancing at the ballroom again. We lost interest in the lesson quickly though, and chose to sit down, though our partner danced on, promenading around the dance floor, celebrating the dance community’s values. We thought of E. B. White’s dictum “Omit needless words.” Adapted for dance, it reads “Omit needless steps.” The lesson last night featured the waltz. We liked the country-western waltzes best: “The Tennessee Waltz,” “Waltz across Texas,” “Zydeco Waltz.”

    We had used too many steps to express our personal El Porto Waltz, and sat at a corner table, nursing a cup of coffee, thinking of a post, writing notes on our handy pocket card with ball point pen, our favorite, the BIC Ultra, blue, glides like Danny Kaye (in our hand) across the worn tongue and groove, waxed maple floor of our imagination. But alas, without a reader for a partner, we are a single on that dance floor, a sometimes-discouraging feeling.

    How is dancing like writing? Consider the forms, or styles. Dancing and writing both employ basic steps necessary for the partner-reader to recognize the form. The writer must learn to lead the reader, and not step on the reader’s toes, and, ultimately, discover the right combination of moves that allows grace to descend. One can improvise, but one improvises on the theme; drift too far, and the improvisation loosens anarchy upon the dance floor. The reader-partner must at least have some encouragement to follow the writer’s lead. Without that encouragement, one dances across paper solo.

  • The weightlessness of existentialism

    Early yesterday, reading Nick Paumgarten on “The lives of elevators” (New Yorker, April 21), about a person stuck in one for forty-one hours, we were reminded of the weightlessness of reading and writing. The video, from the Kafkaesque security tape, is a work of art Warhol could have made; or Becket might have written a one-act play, but would have omitted the piano score, though the tempo is perfectly counterpointed to the Chaplinesque speed of the fast forwarded film. Of course, we also thought of John Cage: “It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else” (“Lecture on Nothing,” Silence, p. 119).

    Later, at the Triple-A baseball game in a cold, near empty ballpark, a woman in the row in front of us turned around and asked if we had a pen. She seemed surprised when we said yes, and pulled the pen out of our jacket pocket, handing it out to her. She was a few seats away, down the row in front of us. There was no one else around. She was bundled up for the cold day of the game, in wool cap, and she had brought a full pack of incidentals to the game, to help pass the time, the way some people do at a ballgame, but no pen. She got up and walked over, smiling, and took the pen.

    The person stuck alone in the elevator is essentially weightless, can neither rise nor fall, cannot change seats. There is no exit. He pries open the doors to find a cement wall. He is a character in Sartre’s No Exit, sans the other people.  

    Take a piece of blank typing paper. Fold it in half, then in thirds. Place the folded paper in a pocket with a pen. You never know when you might get stuck – in a station at the metro, waiting anywhere – and it will not be nearly so irritating thinking you might like to be somewhere else. Pen and paper provide one with a play against the angst of any existential waiting game.

  • Baseball and the parts of speech

    Opening day of baseball should be declared a national holiday. Today’s the big day. In our area we’ve experienced snow flurries, rhubarbs of hail, and sleet, wind, and everyday rain this past week. But now the sun is supposed to make an appearance. Yet we know everything remains imperfect. We know the sun will not shine on every game. And we’ll let Malcolm Gladwell worry about baseball and drugs. We’re concerned about baseball and the parts of speech.  

    E. B. White encourages us to write with nouns and verbs: “The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place” (p. 71). William Zinsser agrees, admonishing, “Most adverbs are unnecessary” (p. 69); and “Most adjectives are also unnecessary” (p. 70). But sage advice can mislead. Francis Christensen, in his book “Notes Toward a New Rhetoric,” views the game differently, quoting from John Erskine’s “The Craft of Writing”: “‘When you write, you make a point, not by subtracting as though you sharpened a pencil, but by adding.’ We have all been told that the formula for good writing is the concrete noun and the active verb. Yet Erskine says, ‘What you say is found not in the noun but in what you add to qualify the noun…The noun, the verb, and the main clause serve merely as the base on which meaning will rise…The modifier is the essential part of any sentence’“ (p. 4). 

    We may not catch the parts of speech as they fly over our head or roll between our legs, yet they are always visibly in play. From most seats, a fan can’t tell if a pitch, upon delivery, is a fastball, a curve, a slider, a splitter, a cutter, a knuckler, a screwball, or a changeup, not until we see what the batter does with it, and even then we’re often unsure. Yet knowing the pitches and observing how the pitcher-catcher battery mixes them up against the batter is the best way to watch a game. Pitches are like words. There’s hardly time for a sentence from the ball leaving the pitcher’s hand to crossing the plate, but from windup to swing is a complete thought.  

    We had the opportunity a couple of years ago to speak with Dave Niehaus, the voice of the Mariners. We wondered how he was able to call each pitch: “Freddy taking his time, now ready, shakes off a sign from Wilson, reads another, gets set, and here’s the pitch – fastball on the outside corner for call strike one.” Or it could have been a slider, or any of the other eight basic pitches of baseball. Niehaus delivered his answer in an anecdote: when he was broadcasting with the Angels, he said, owner Gene Autry came into the box one night after the game. “You called a great game tonight, Dave,” Gene Autry said; “I’m just not sure it was the same game that I saw.” 

    Another time we were invited to watch an inning up in the broadcast booth. We sat next to Ron Fairly, LA Dodger first baseman of the 1960’s, who was keeping box score with a pencil, in a thick, oversized scorebook. There was a laptop in the booth, and a stats expert who worked it, feeding Niehaus and his sidekick Rick Rizzs notes and numbers they might fit into their commentary, but Fairly was keeping score the old-fashioned way, one pitch at a time, marking essentially the effects of each pitch. The broadcast booth framed a particular view of the game. The open window framed the field like a camera, directly behind and up from home plate, omitting the fans down the first and third base lines, thus forcing a sharpened focus onto the field of play. The broadcast booth afforded an enhanced view of the field, a very different view from any other seat we’ve occupied in the ballpark. 

    We write for an audience, even if imaginary, but if you are going to call a game, you must block out the game the fans are watching, and call your own. Some coaches encourage pitchers to stick to the fastball and curve. Others admonish avoiding screwballs and changeups. Most pitchers specialize in only a few pitches they use repeatedly, mixing the rotation so the ball comes at the batter with surprise, and modifying with location and speed, depending on the age and condition of their arm – fastballs often lose their pizzazz as the arm ages.  

    In the 1960s, in Los Angeles, roofed in blue, Dodgers fans often took their transistor radios to games to listen to the play by play by Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett. One learned some of the tricks of the game. A homerun flies quickly out of a ballpark. “Homerun” adequately describes the hit, in the time it takes the ball to clear the fence, yet Vin Scully knew, as Christensen and Erskine did, that writing is “essentially a process of addition” (p. 4). For Vin Scully could be heard on the radio still talking about a long fly ball to deep right center field, Mays going back, way back, to the wall, it’s gone! – the ball having flown over the fence some time ago, the slugging Dodger already rounding second base. So it goes with writing as with baseball. There are tricks built into the skills. But now it’s time to call it quits for the day, quit writing, that is, because there’s a whiffle ball game starting up out on the block, and we don’t want to miss the first cut – it’s opening day!    

  • The way in is the far out

    John Cage opened the windows of the music room. He incorporated unintended as well as intended but unconventional sounds into music composition, thus acknowledging a modern electrocution of music that alters the sensorium. Music became an extension of our wired ears. The way in was the far out.

    Cage created performance lectures, utilizing a multi-media approach that combined sound, text, and oral lecture with non-linear arrangement and movement of ideas, words, sentences as musical phrases, and anecdotal asides (his short-short stories approximating the Zen koan). Bulleted lines, multiple columns, and a variety of font characteristics permeate the text versions. The lectures are collected in the books “Silence” (1961) and “A Year From Monday” (1967). Cage’s initial attempts were an effort to incorporate his musical ideas into different modes of argument, so that the listener could “experience what I had to say rather than just hear about it” (“Silence,” Foreword). The lectures are measured compositions. The composer provides time values, tempo markings, directions for rhythm and pitch, and textual arrangements serving as bars and measures. Chance and indeterminacy informed Cage’s composition process:

    “At Black Mountain College in 1952, I organized an event that involved the paintings of Bob Rauschenberg, the dancing of Merce Cunningham, films, slides, phonograph records, radios, the poetries of Charles Olson and M. C. Richards recited from the tops of ladders, and the pianism of David Tudor, together with my Juilliard lecture…The audience was seated in the center of all this activity” (“Silence,” Foreword).

    Not everyone in the audience may have enjoyed the attempt to rearrange their sensorium. Cage relates, of his “Lecture on Nothing,” “One of the structural divisions was the repetition, some fourteen times, of a single page in which occurred the refrain, ‘If anyone is sleepy let him go to sleep.’ Jeanne Reynal, I remember, stood up part way through, screamed, and then said, while I continued speaking, ‘John, I dearly love you, but I can’t bear another minute.’ She then walked out.”

    We may feel a similar response to some of today’s pervasive PowerPoint presentations. They are not written, or composed, but put together, as in “I put together a PowerPoint for today’s meeting.” The use of PowerPoint is itself a value assumption (warrant). Yet for organization and presentation of an argument for today’s reader (who has not the time, inclination, or patience for linear modes – a reader now beyond the Guttenberg Galaxy, outside the margins of McLuhan’s marginal man, a mosaic man), the persuasive possibilities of the PowerPoint slide show are hard to beat.

    For a consideration of the potential ill effects of PowerPoint, see Ian Parker, “Can a Software Package Edit Our Thoughts?” The New Yorker, May 28, 2001.

  • Sister Maryquill’s Style Guide: An APA/MLA etc. Primer

    When McCluhan wrote, in “The Gutenberg Galaxy,” “…the scholar in print culture can have acceptance for his accuracy even though he has nothing to say,” he may have been thinking of Sister Maryquill’s class, in Los Angeles, circa 1957.  

    Sister Maryquill’s requirements led the young scholar down a straight path toward accuracy, clarity, and conciseness before he even contemplated the writing of words or numbers. These requirements included clean, white, three hole punched, wide margin, ruled folder paper. For a page ripped from a spiral notebook, one subtracted points, minus 10%. If from the ripped page dangled hanging chads, or if chad confetti littered the floor around one’s desk, one subtracted more points, minus an additional 10%. One used red and black pencils, #2, both, for Arithmetic, blue ink pen for English. There were no other subjects. A single, 12 inch ruler, 3 hole punched, completed every student’s toolbox – no borrowing allowed.

    Samples from Sister’s Guide: “In Arithmetic, divide the width of the paper from the left margin line to the right edge in half, measuring 3 inches from the top of the paper and 3 inches from the bottom, making a tiny dot with red pencil to mark your measurements. Hold your ruler vertically aligned against the dots to get plumb. Using your red pencil, draw a straight line from the top ruled line to the bottom of the page. Hold your ruler horizontally across the first ruled line. Draw over the line with your red pencil.” 

    “At the top of every page write in capital letters without punctuation JMJ. On the first page, in the top, right hand corner, write your name. Under your name, write the date. Under the date, write the subject. Under the subject, write the assignment. On subsequent pages, in the same top right hand corner space, write only your name, but under your name, write the page number, only the number.”

    The classroom stapler was reserved for special occasions. For regular, daily work: “When submitting work of multiple pages, fold the top left hand corner down, creating an equilateral triangle, rip the paper inward from the center of the outside edge, and double back the top side.”  

    In Sister Maryquill’s English class, thesis stated, theme explored, but within the confines described above: blue ink on proper, white folder paper; writing aligned neatly against the left, red margin; double-spaced, cursive – all under the watchful eyes of JMJ. But there was more preparation required of the English paper, for every sentence required diagramming, properly, to avoid its being stricken. One used red pencil and ruler for the lines of the diagram, and blue ink pen for the words. Of course, there were many violations other than improper diagrams that warranted striking sentences, and many paragraphs starting with a dozen sentences or more ended with none.

    Time for recess.