How to improve writing (no. 28)

Joe Manley passed along these sentences, lifted from a bottle of E&J Brandy. He finds them “pretentious” and “vacuous” and amusing:

One of the most distinctive qualities of E&J Brandy is its remarkable character. This is accomplished by a vertical blending of brandies of different ages from the finest white oak barrels which we personally have selected. This expensive and time consuming aging process also develops the full and natural brandy flavor of E&J Brandy.

What’s wrong here?

Character would be the sum total of a thing’s qualities, not one of them.

“This is accomplished”: There’s no clear referent for this. Character cannot be accomplished.

“Vertical blending”: Meaning that the brandies are poured in from above? I can find no evidence that “vertical blending” is a term generally used in brandy-making. It seems to be used only by E&J.

“Which we personally have selected”: Silly: the brandies cannot be blended without being selected. (Here are some fries. They are made from potatoes which I personally have selected.) But it may be the barrels that have been selected. Before they were filled? Afterwards?

“This expensive and time consuming aging process”: This second this is ungainly. (A good way to improve almost any piece of writing: reconsider every sentence beginning with this.) “Time consuming aging process”: redundant and repetitious [sic], and missing a hyphen.

“Also”: Also?

“The full and natural brandy flavor of E&J Brandy”: Yes, brandy should taste like brandy. The phrasing here reminds me of the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

With the pretension and awkwardness removed, the E&J label might read like so:

Blended from brandies aged in white oak barrels, E&J is a brandy of distinction. Careful selection and aging develops E&J’s full, natural flavor.

I find plainness and understatement much more convincing. But I’m not about to buy a bottle of E&J and test the truth of my sentences. I like red wine (and sometimes beer, and sometimes bourbon).

Thanks, Joe, for this label.

[This post is no. 28 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

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Lemonade and lies

J.D. Salinger puts on his socks

In a 1968 photograph, now in Newsweek.

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Nelson Riddle on the Blackwing pencil

Composer and arranger Nelson Riddle liked the Blackwing:

Pencils should be of very soft lead, so that a minimum of pressure is needed to convey the marks to the paper, but the lead should be dense enough to be able to carry a sharp point, since clarity is essential. My favorite pencil is the Blackwing #602, by Eberhard Faber, but there may be many brands equal or superior to the Blackwing. Another important feature of a pencil is its eraser. It should be firm, though not dry, and since soft lead is quite easily blurred, it should be an eraser that makes a clean sweep. Some arrangers prefer a mechanical pencil with a refillable reservoir for lead, but I find that the lead in these pencils is quite often brittle, and the eraser wears out after a couple of packets of lead have been expended.

Nelson Riddle, Arranged by Nelson Riddle (Van Nuys, CA: Alfred Music Publishing, 1985).

Here’s a photograph of Nelson Riddle holding a pencil that shows the distinctive Blackwing ferrule. (Squint.)

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Van Dyke Parks, getting things done

As Director of Audio-Visual Services for Warner Bros. Records:

“I was directly under Mo Ostin at WB Records (both architecturally and on the Corporate Organization Chart. I answered to only one man. That was Mo). I had memos printed: ‘From the Director of Audio-Visual Services — re: ———,’ and ‘Yes     ’ or ‘No     .’ It got things done, that memo.”

Quoted in Richard Henderson’s Song Cycle (New York: Continuum, 2010), a volume in the “33 1/3” series devoted to Van Dyke Parks’s 1968 album Song Cycle. Here’s a brief review.

Need worked

Signage on a store’s stock cart. Like a couple three and pop (for soda), “need + past participle” is a familiar element in downstate-Illinois speech. And it’s the one of those three that I like. (Omit needless words and all that.)

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Song Cycle and “That (In)famous Line”

I’m honored to find myself so mentioned in Richard Henderson’s Song Cycle (New York: Continuum, 2010), a brand-new volume in the “33 1/3” series devoted to Van Dyke Parks’s 1968 album Song Cycle.

The reference is to an essay that I wrote in 2004 about a line from Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks’s “Cabinessence,” a song from SMiLE, the album abandoned by the Beach Boys in 1967 and finished as a Brian Wilson album in 2004. The line in question: “Over and over the crow cries uncover the cornfield.” Beach Boy Mike Love is said to have demanded from lyricist Parks an explanation of this line’s meaning, which demand Parks was unable to honor. Thus the line has come to represent the alleged obscurity of Parks’s lyrics. “Acid alliteration,” Mike Love called it.

Richard Henderson has written a terrific book. He begins by recounting his first acquaintance with Song Cycle as a thirteen year-old in 1968 Detroit. He goes on to track Van Dyke Parks’s youthful work in music, film, theater, and television; his entry into studio work and the folk-music scene in California; the rise of Warner Bros. Records; the varieties of “psychedelic” music; the critical success and commercial disappointment of Song Cycle; and Parks’s subsequent endeavors, among them, a stint at Warners’ Audio-Visual Services, where Parks devised the idea of making short promotional films of the label’s performers: “music television,” he called it. The heart of the book, a song-by-song meditation on Song Cycle, offers no code-cracking: the album remains a beautiful, ineffable work of art (thank goodness). Henderson is especially helpful in identifying Song Cycle’s specific inspirations: among them, the rural American poet Will Carleton and Misha Goodatieff, a Russian violinist who played at a Los Angeles restaurant. Goodatieff’s cousins brought the balalaikas that are heard on the album.

If you’d like to read what I wrote about “Over and over the crow cries uncover the cornfield,” here it is: “That (in)famous line.” I stand by every word.

[The Beach Boys’ recording, which appeared on the 1969 album 20/20, is titled “Cabinessence.” Brian Wilson’s 2004 recording is titled “Cabin Essence.”]

Get back the old Google Image Search

If the new Google Image Search — what with its endlessly loading page of images — no, wait, more images — no, wait — is driving you slightly crazy —

In Firefox, install the Greasemonkey extension. Then install the Google Images direct links script. Adding these two items to Firefox will take a minute or two at the most. Now when you do an image search, the crowded, endlessly loading page will switch almost instantly to the old Google Image Search.

If you’d rather skip Greasemonkey, here’s what to do: do an image search, scroll down and click on “Switch to basic version,” and bookmark the resulting page. An image search for a hyphen gives a nice blank page to start with: like so. Adding a keyword to your bookmarked page — e.g., images — makes it easier to call up Image Search.

You can use the bookmark trick in any browser. There’s also an extension for Safari 5, with which I have no first-hand experience.

One annoying thing about the new Google Image Search is that switching to the old (“basic”) version requires scrolling down and clicking a box at the bottom of a page that’s endlessly loading images. A poor, poor choice of design: it’s like having to turn the volume up to eleven before pressing mute. Still worse is that the scroll and click are required (at least for now) with each new search: there’s no defaulting to the old image search. So it’s extensions and tricky bookmarks to the rescue.

The all-in-one room

[Illustration by James Kingsland. Click for a larger view.]

Mary and Russel Wright:

Our main thesis here is that formality is not necessary for beauty. It shows not less, but more, respect for the good things of life to plan an easier, smoother-running meal in a setting that suits its purpose — and to have more time in which to enjoy the meal and its setting.

We look forward to the day when living room, dining room, and kitchen will break through the walls that arbitrarily divide them, and become simply friendly areas of one large, gracious, and beautiful room. We think that day is not too far away.

Guide to Easier Living (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950).

The above two-page spread of the “all-in-one room” follows these two paragraphs. Servantless living at its best!

The parenthetical numbers (35, 36, 37) point the reader to an appendix listing manufacturers and distributors. 35: General Electric. 36: Chambers Range Company. 37: St. Charles Manufacturing Company. As I have just learned, old Chambers ranges are highly prized. (Rachael Ray uses one.) And St. Charles Cabinetry is alive and well.

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Word of the day: artificer

I woke up this morning from a dream of teaching the first three episodes of James Joyce’s Ulysses to a room of utterly unprepared English majors. Things were pretty bad. At one point I had to run from the room to bring back a student who herself had fled when a peer mocked her poor grammar. Yes, pretty bad: so bad that I never got to mention the name of Stephen Dedalus. But that was okay: I too was unprepared.

I want to say that I wouldn’t dream of attempting to teach three episodes of Ulysses in one class meeting, but of course I just did.

And now the word-of-the-day from Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day is artificer. That word means James Joyce. Stephen Dedalus’s friends are calling to him, spinning Greek variations on his name:

— Stephanos Dedalos! Bous Stephanoumenos! Bous Stephaneforos! —

Their banter was not new to him and now it flattered his mild proud sovereignty. Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy. So timeless seemed the grey warm air, so fluid and impersonal his own mood, that all ages were as one to him. A moment before the ghost of the ancient kingdom of the Danes had looked forth through the vesture of the hazewrapped city. Now, at the name of the fabulous artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

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Easier living with Mary and Russel Wright

In the New York Times this morning, Alexandra Lange writes about Mary and Russel Wright’s 1950 book Guide to Easier Living. Elaine and I borrowed this book from the library several years ago and in an instant understood that the people who designed our house in the late fifties must have had the Wrights’ ideas in mind. Said the Wrights,

We look forward to the day when living room, dining room, and kitchen will break through the walls that arbitrarily divide them, and become simply friendly areas of one large, gracious, and beautiful room.

Well, that’s our downstairs, gracious as ever.

The twenty-first-century name for this layout appears to be “open concept kitchen/dining/living area.” But our kitchen/dining/living area is an open secret, as our house is built into a hill and looks like a one-story house from the street.

[Note: Comments at the Times seem to be mistaking what the Wrights described for the so-called great room. The great room, with its raised ceiling, is a much later development.]

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