How to improve writing (no. 34)

Signage: “Reserved for Visiting Guests.”

Better: “Reserved for Guests.” Or “Reserved for Visitors.”

Omit needless words!

[This post is no. 34 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Related reading
All How to improve writing posts (via Pinboard)

Across the wide Missouri Pacific

Last week our son Ben participated in a hyper-present improvisation on “Shenandoah” that joined musicians in Urbana, Illinois and Melbourne, Australia. The project is the work of composer and violinist Benjamin Day Smith, who explains it in this lecture.

Pocket notebook sighting

Union Station (dir. Rudolph Maté, 1950) stars William Holden and Nancy Olson in a story of kidnapping, surveillance, and enhanced interrogation techniques. Holden plays William Calhoun, a railroad detective intent upon protecting the sacred space of Los Angeles’ Union Station. Olson is Joyce Willecombe, a secretary who sees something suspicious on her train and does her civic duty by reporting it. It’s odd how little chemistry there is between these two: in Sunset Boulevard, released in the same year, they’re sexy peers, smoking and writing in the deep of night. Here Holden’s character is crankily middle-aged, and Olson’s is more or less a former Girl Scout. Very strange. Stranger still that the film turns into a love story.

I’m not joking about “enhanced interrogation techniques”: Union Station has a scene of police brutality that fits any reasonable definition of torture. How did it get past the censors? There are also long and quietly suspenseful episodes of surveillance in the train station, with plainclothes men sitting, standing, pretending to read.

Oh, and there’s a good scene with a notebook too.

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Cat People : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Extras : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The House on 92nd Street : The Lodger : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : The Sopranos : Spellbound

A Pale King event

Babbitt’s Books in Normal, Illinois, had a reading on Friday night to mark the publication of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. There are few more appropriate settings for such an event: Wallace taught at Illinois State University in Normal from 1993 to 2002, and he was a regular customer at Babbitt’s, which he once called his favorite bookstore. The setting for the reading was fittingly modest: a table with a small lectern, a dozen or so folding chairs, and aisles filled with people sitting and standing. (They included a Peoria Journal Star reporter.) Nine people read, from “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” “Good Old Neon,” Infinite Jest, and The Pale King. The readers included three of Wallace’s ISU friends, one of his ISU students, two of my students, and me. This event offered one of the plainest and best pleasures: listening to words read aloud.

Much kudos and gratitude to Brian Simpson and Sarah Lindenbaum for their hospitality.

[The world of The Pale King is an IRS office in Peoria, Illinois. Kudos is a singular noun. Brian’s last name is not Babbitt.]

The Pale King, dullness

Former IRS examiner David Wallace on dullness:

To me, at least in retrospect,¹ the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like “deadly dull” or “excruciatingly dull” come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us² spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly . . . but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airports’ gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called “information society” is just about information. Everyone knows³ it’s about something else, way down.

¹ (which is, after all, memoirs’ specialty)
² (whether or not we’re consciously aware of it)
³ (again, whether consciously or not)

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (Boston: Little, Brown, 2011).

The Pale King is a novel in the form of “basically a nonfiction memoir” by former IRS examiner David Wallace, “with additional elements of reconstructive journalism, organizational psychology, elementary civics and tax theory, & c.” This passage is from the Author’s Foreword. The footnote numbers are 26, 27, and 28. Ellipsis in the original.

[Cf. Blaise Pascal’s Pensées 139 (trans. W.F. Trotter): “They have a secret instinct which impels them to seek amusement and occupation abroad, and which arises from the sense of their constant unhappiness.”]

“Share Curiosity. Read Together.”

I couldn’t resist.

[With apologies to H.A. Rey, Margret Ray, and the gummint.]

Fine Austrlian wine

A misspelling in the news:

Hundreds of fake bottles of best-selling Australian wine Jacob’s Creek have been seized by trading standards officers in England and Wales. . . .

The bottles appear identical to the real thing, apart from a tell-tale misspelling on the label on the back, where Australia is spelt Austrlia.

Fake Jacob’s Creek wine seized (BBC News)

Most frequently challenged books

The American Library Association has released its Top Ten List of the Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2010. Number one: Justin Richardson’s and Peter Parnell’s And Tango Makes Three,

an award-winning children’s book about the true story of two male Emperor Penguins hatching and parenting a baby chick at New York’s Central Park Zoo. The book has appeared on the ALA’s Top Ten List of Frequently Challenged Books for the past five years and returns to the number one slot after a brief stay at the number two position in 2009. There have been dozens of attempts to remove And Tango Makes Three from school and public library shelves. Those seeking to remove the book have described it as “unsuited for age group,” and cited “religious viewpoint” and “homosexuality” as reasons for challenging the book.

The logic of book-banners would seem to dictate that the Penguin House itself be closed to children, no? If a story about the penguins is “unsuited for age group,” how much more so the penguins themselves.

The Wikipedia article on And Tango Makes Three includes this passage from a court ruling:

[I]f a parent wishes to prevent her child from reading a particular book, that parent can and should accompany the child to the Library, and should not prevent all children in the community from gaining access to constitutionally protected materials. Where First Amendment rights are concerned, those seeking to restrict access to information should be forced to take affirmative steps to shield themselves from unwanted materials; the onus should not be on the general public to overcome barriers to their access to fully protected information.

Amen.

ML on DFW at Broadcastr

To mark the arrival of The Pale King, Broadcastr has invited readers to record brief appreciations of David Foster Wallace’s work. If you’d like to listen, here’s mine. You’ll need Flash, and you should put the volume up high:

Allston, Brighton, East-Central Illinois (Broadcastr)

[I’m up to page 104 in The Pale King. Making slow progress!]

Billy Bang (1947–2011)

Sad news: the violinist Billy Bang has died. WKCR-FM is playing his music all day.

Thanks, Richard.