Poetry and difficulty

Poetry: it's difficult. Thus Mark Bauerlein turned to Dana Gioia's "Summer Storm" to interest his students. The first stanza:

We stood on the rented patio
While the party went on inside.
You knew the groom from college.
I was a friend of the bride.

No course on modern painting or music would avoid what's "difficult" — cubism, abstract expressionism, atonality. But in English studies, accessibility often trumps other considerations.

Granted, one cannot ask students to read what they simply cannot read. But in my teaching, I've found that asking students to read beyond their means can sometimes create genuine excitement. Poems with a significant element of opacity and mystery (one form of "difficulty") are sometimes the best choices: they can create a more level playing field, or, to switch the metaphor, a playing field with so many unpredictable spots that teacher and student together are maneuvering with attentive uncertainty. I once taught Guillaume Apollinaire's "Les Fenêtres" [The Windows] to an introductory poetry class whose students dazzled me with the attention they brought to the poem. They knew that while I had ideas, I didn't have "the answer," which seemed to give them permission to come up with ideas of their own (very good ones). Opacity and mystery are, I would suggest, what made the closing lines of Frank O'Hara's poem "Mayakovsky" so compelling when they turned up in Mad Men. Removed from the context of a classroom, these beautiful lines became an occasion of feeling. In that context, "What does it mean?" is not an anxious request for an answer but a reverent acknowledgment of enigma.

The problem with turning to something like the Gioia poem quoted above is that it tells students that they're right, that poetry should be simple and transparent, that it shouldn't resist the intelligence, that it shouldn't touch upon possibilities of thinking and feeling that might exceed one's present abilities. Some words from the poet Kenneth Koch are helpful here, from Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry (New York: Touchstone, 1999):

Reading a poem includes knowing and not knowing. Uncertainty, shock, and surprise, as well as music and knowledge, may be a part of what the reader gets.

There are, it should be added, poems that are deliberately and perhaps permanently unclear. . . . Poets may wish to give, and readers be interested in the experience of getting, shocks of intellect, emotion, and sensation without entirely knowing where they are coming from.

It's important for teachers to acknowledge that.

A related post
Frank O'Hara and Mad Men

Hardly (adverb) convincing (adjective)

One more post on Geoffrey K. Pullum, William Strunk Jr., and E.B. White:

I wrote a few days ago that Geoffrey Pullum's Chronicle piece on The Elements of Style exhibits "a significant degree of distortion and plain misreading." I want to offer two more examples of such distortion elsewhere, not because I'm a great fan of Strunk and White but because I think it's important to consider the ways in which Pullum criticizes their work. Here's Pullum in 2005 on Strunk, White, adjectives, and adverbs:

One of the sternest strictures delivered in Strunk & White's stupid little book is the prohibition on the use of adjectives and adverbs. Simply do not use them, they say: "Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs" (The Elements of Style, p. 71).

Pullum repeated this claim three days ago, responding to a caller on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation (at 8:57):

You mentioned that we should omit needless words, Strunk's famous injunction — "Omit needless words" — and that in a hasty manner is verbose where hastily would be better. Yes, they do say that. They also say don't use adjectives and adverbs at all; write with nouns and verbs; and that would rule out hastily, wouldn't it? Some of the advice is just cuckoo.

Don't use adjectives and adverbs?! At all?! That advice would be cuckoo indeed. Talk of the Nation host Neal Conan let Pullum's claim go unquestioned.

Here's what Strunk and White say (on pages 71-72 in the 4th ed.):

Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place. This is not to disparage adjectives and adverbs; they are indispensable parts of speech. Occasionally they surprise us with their power, as in

        Up the airy mountain,
           Down the rushy glen,
        We daren't go a-hunting
           For fear of little men . . .

The nouns mountain and glen are accurate enough, but had the mountain not become airy, the glen rushy, William Allingham might never have got off the ground with his poem. In general, however, it is nouns and verbs, not their assistants, that give good writing its toughness and color.

Pullum not only represents Strunk and White as saying about adjectives and adverbs what they don't say; he represents them as saying something utterly absurd. What Strunk and White would like their reader to avoid is dopey overwriting: "cold, round doorknob," "wept sadly," "said humorously" (my examples). But as Strunk and White also recognize, adjectives and adverbs can be powerful stuff. Proust, for one — he's never far from my mind — strings together well-chosen adjectives in wonderful, unexpected ways.

In the 2005 item I quote above, Pullum tallies the adjectives and adverbs in a passage from a White essay and pronounces its author a "linguistic hypocrite" for failing to follow his own "rules" against adjective and adverb use. There are no such rules. I think that Pullum's disdain for The Elements of Style, the "stupid little book," often leads him to distort and misread the plain sense of the text. None of us are perfect, not Pullum, not Strunk, not White. And not me.

Related posts
Pullum on Strunk and White
More on Pullum, Strunk, White
Strunk and White and wit
The Elements of Style, one more time

Dr. Bronner, productivity guru

We haven't had a bottle of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap in the house for many years, but reading about "hyperbolic Bronnerianism" in label design brought me to a scan of the label for 18-in-1 Hemp Peppermint Pure-Castile Soap. I was surprised that the first bit of text to catch my attention was this bit of productivity messaging:



Imagine if Dr. Bronner had teamed up with David Allen: ALL- ONE! GETTING-THINGS-DONE!

[Update: We now have a bottle of Dr. Bronner's in the house.]

Domestic comedy

"I tell you, that ad really worked."

"What ad?"

"The artesian cracker ad."

"Artisanal cracker ad." [Self-correcting pause.] "Artisan."

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"[S]imply a controlled acute episode"

From page eleven of a memorandum from Jay S. Bybee, Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, U.S. Department of Justice, to John Rizzo, Acting General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency, August 1, 2002.

The "subject's body" — not the person. No "actual physical harm," although four pages later, the writer acknowledges that "the waterboard constitutes a threat of imminent death." But if we haven't really killed you, we haven't harmed you. And a sentence that is frightening in its calm logic: "The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering." Because it's only for a few seconds at a time that we've made you feel that you're going to die, we haven't really made you suffer. I suspect that "controlled acute episode" will join "enhanced interrogation techniques" as historical shorthand for the George W. Bush administration's utter corruption of language, moral reasoning, and democratic principles.

The American Civil Liberties Union has downloads of the four Office of Legal Counsel memoranda released today.

Van Dyke Parks on music

Now available on DVD from Endless Sky, an interview with Van Dyke Parks, wherein he talks about his musical childhood, early California years, collaboration and arranging, influences (among them, J.S. Bach, Spike Jones, Les Paul), film scoring, records, and the role of music in his life:

That's all I do. I have no real hobbies. I play a very hostile chess game with my wife occasionally — that clears the air. But other than that, it's just music that interests me. If I go to a movie, I think about the music, much more than I think about the words or the emotional content on the screen. I'm touched by the sound. That's just the way I'm built.

My favorite Parksism in this interview: "expensive Italian timber" — i.e., strings.

Mixed metaphor of the day

From Public Radio International's otherwise excellent The World:

With so many pressing issues on his plate, Mr. Obama is engaged in an astonishing juggling act.

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Pullum on Strunk and White

[Welcome, Daring Fireball readers.]

[Note: There are links at the end of this post to four more posts on Pullum, Strunk, and White.]

"Fifty Years of Stupid Grammar Advice," Geoffrey K. Pullum's recent piece on William Strunk and E.B. White's The Elements of Style, is snarky and sensational enough to appeal to a reader suspicious of a dos-and-don't s approach to writing. How refreshing to be told — by a grammarian no less — that Strunk and White are "grammatical incompetents," "idiosyncratic bumblers," purveyors of "uninformed bossiness" and "misbegotten rules." Pullum's professional indignation shines in this slightly funny sentence: "Certainly White was a fine writer, but he was not qualified as a grammarian."

True enough. But Pullum's take on Strunk and White involves a significant degree of distortion and plain misreading. For example:

Pullum characterizes some of Strunk and White's recommendations as "vapid." Pullum's example: "Be clear." By itself, yes, vapid. In context, "Be clear" prefaces some common-sense advice about sentence revision:

When you become hopelessly mired in a sentence, it is best to start fresh; do not try to fight your way through against the terrible odds of syntax. Usually what is wrong is that the construction has become too involved at some point; the sentence needs to be broken apart and replaced by two or more shorter sentences.

Pullum labels "Do not explain too much" "tautologous." In context, this seemingly unhelpful recommendation appears more useful, as it's followed by advice to avoid adverbs after said when writing dialogue. "Let the conversation itself disclose the speaker's manner or condition," say Strunk and White. Again, reasonable and potentially useful advice.

Pullum says that "many" of Strunk and White's recommendations are "useless," citing "Omit needless words" as an example. On its own, this advice is no more helpful than telling a musician to avoid playing wrong notes. But "Omit needless words" doesn't appear on its own; it's accompanied by sixteen examples of how to improve cumbersome phrasing (e.g., "the fact that") and a demonstration of how six choppy sentences can be revised into one.

Even the recommendation "Do not inject opinion," which Pullum calls "truly silly," makes sense in context, as a reminder not to bring hobbyhorses and pet peeves into contexts where they're irrelevant:

If you have received a letter inviting you to speak at the dedication of a new cat hospital, and you hate cats, your reply, declining the invitation, does not necessarily have to cover the full range of your emotions. You must make it clear that you will not attend, but you do not have to let fly at cats.

Pullum's summing up — "Following the platitudinous style recommendations of Elements would make your writing better if you knew how to follow them" — seems to forget that The Elements of Style is, after all, a book, with examples and explanations to help the reader to put its recommendations into practice.

Pullum's greater ire concerns what he calls Strunk and White's "grammar stipulations," which have "degraded" "American students' grasp of English grammar." Strunk and White: menaces to society! I'm not convinced. I teach many students who have never been taught to look at their writing with any degree of care for clarity and concision. (Indeed, student-writers, encouraged by "vocab"-loving teachers and word-counts, often value the ponderous prose that Strunk and White disdain.) In college composition classes, Strunk and White's minimalism seems passé, replaced by what's called a "handbook," typically a hardcover book of 1,000+ pages. My evidence is anecdotal, but I have never had a student mention Strunk and White as a significant part of her or his writing education. The Elements of Style now seems far more popular outside the world of English instruction, particularly among tech types, whose work writing code would foster respect for clarity and concision.

And speaking of tech stuff, I'm so glad I switched to a Mac. But there I go, injecting opinion. Back to grammar.

Pullum devotes almost a quarter of his essay to Strunk and White's advice to "Use the active voice." After granting that Strunk and White acknowledge appropriate use of the passive voice, Pullum blames them for what others have made of their work:

Sadly, writing tutors tend to ignore this moderation, and simply red-circle everything that looks like a passive, just as Microsoft Word's grammar checker underlines every passive in wavy green to signal that you should try to get rid of it. That overinterpretation is part of the damage that Strunk and White have unintentionally done.

By this logic, the Tate-LaBianca murders are part of the damage that the Beatles did in creating the White Album. Pullum goes further:

What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don't know what is a passive construction and what isn't. Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses.

Pullum again ignores context: Strunk and White do not present these sentences as examples involving the passive voice. Here is the passage preceding these sentences in The Elements of Style:

The habitual use of the active voice, however, makes for forcible writing. This is true not only in narrative concerned principally with action but in writing of any kind. Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as there is or could be heard.

The three examples that Pullum cites as mistakes all have sentences with forms of to be, all then revised with active verbs. Pullum here is misreading the plain sense of the text.

What Pullum says of The Elements of Style — "The treatment of the passive is not an isolated slip. It is typical" — might be said of "Fifty Years of Stupid Grammar Advice": Pullum's treatment of "Use the active voice" is not an isolated slip. It is typical. Pullum consistently decontextualizes Strunk and White's recommendations, turning them into commandments that offer no real guidance.

I'll leave most of Pullum's other points for you, reader, to consider. They involve a fair amount of harumphing and, as Matt Thomas points out, at least one missed joke. And citing "classic texts," as Pullum does, as guides to usage can be tricky. Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and Lucy Maud Montgomery give us one picture of the language. Laurence Sterne and James Joyce would give us another.

In a comment on an earlier post about Strunk and White and a sentence from the New York Times, I wrote that "I've long thought that many of Strunk and White's precepts ('Omit needless words') are less than helpful to a developing writer." Looking back at The Elements of Style, which I hadn't read in years, has made me rethink that comment.

More:

Last week on NPR's Talk of the Nation, Geoffrey Pullum claimed that Strunk and White prohibit the use of adjectives or adverbs. Host Neal Conan let the claim go unquestioned. I've written about it here: Hardly (adverb) convincing (adjective).

A sampling of other comentary: More on Pullum, Strunk, White.

On Strunk and White's mistakes: Strunk and White and wit.

A final word on Strunk and White: The Elements of Style, one more time.

Hard-boiled Proust

Vivian Sternwood Rutledge (Lauren Bacall) has been waiting for Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) in the reception room outside his office:

Marlowe: Good morning.

Mrs. Rutledge: So you do get up. I was beginning to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust.

Marlowe: Who's he?

Mrs. Rutledge: You wouldn't know him. A French writer.

Marlowe: Come into my boudoir.

From The Big Sleep (dir. Howard Hawks,1946)

This exchange (in a screenplay by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman) is drawn from Chapter Eleven of Raymond Chandler's 1939 novel, in which Mrs. Rutledge adds that Proust is "a connoisseur in degenerates" and Marlowe prefaces his invitation with a "Tut, tut."

Related reading
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Strunk and White and Seidel

After reading a long, unsparing piece on The Elements of Style this morning, I found myself hung up on a sentence in a long, reverent New York Times profile of the poet Frederick Seidel. The context for this sentence: whether poems ought to include references to expensive hotels and restaurants and rare motorcycles:

The poetic propriety of such inclusions has, by a certain kind of commentator, been questioned.

That's the sort of sentence to which Strunk and White's (overly simple) rules apply: "Use the active voice." "Keep related words together." Possible revisions:

Some critics think poems should not refer to such things.

Some critics think such things have no place in poetry.

Or if you want the alliteration (which to my ear sounds stilted):

Some critics have questioned the poetic propriety of such references.

I'm not sure what the fuss is about: poetry long ago made room for Achilles' shield, an object far grander than any motorcycle. The question is not whether motorcycles belong in a poem but whether the poem is good.

And if you're wondering: I'm no fan of Seidel's work, which I find, well, boring. (It's funny how quickly shocking turns boring.) Some years ago I turned down an invitation to review Seidel's My Tokyo (1993). I wish I had a copy of the letter I sent back, which quoted a few choice bits of the poems.

[This post is no. 24 in a very occasional series, "How to improve writing," dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Two posts on The Elements of Style
Hardly [adverb] convincing [adjective]
Pullum on Strunk and White

All "How to improve writing" posts (via Pinboard)