Garner’s modern American music

From Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day, on rock ’n’ roll , rock-’n’-roll , rock’n’roll , rock and roll , rock-and-roll , and rock & roll :

Each of these is listed in at least one major American dictionary.

“Rock ’n’ roll” is probably the most common; appropriately, it has a relaxed and colloquial look.

“Rock and roll” and “rock-and-roll” are somewhat more formal than the others and therefore not very fitting with the music itself. The others are variant spellings — except that “rock-’n’-roll,” with the hyphens, is certainly preferable when the term is used as a phrasal adjective [the rock-’n’-roll culture of the 1960s].

Fortunately, the editorial puzzle presented by these variations has largely been solved: almost everyone today refers to “rock music” or simply “rock.” Increasingly, “rock ’n’ roll” carries overtones of early rock — the 1950s-style music such as “Rock Around the Clock,” by Bill Haley and the Comets.

Garner must have had fun writing this entry.

[Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly site.]

Illinois political geography

The New York Times breaks it down for you: Cook County, “collar counties,” and “downstate.”

[It’s primary day in Illinois.]

Achilles in Afghanistan

In a PBS NewsHour discussion last night of the recent atrocities in Afghanistan, Jeffrey Johns, a former U.S. Air Force psychiatrist, mentioned Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam (1994):

[T]here’s a phenomenon known as berserk or going berserk that has been reported throughout time in almost all wars. Homer wrote about an episode about in which Achilles went on a rampage and committed several atrocities following the death of his friend. So while this is a rare phenomenon, it has been reported. Jonathan Shay writes about his patients experiencing something similar in Vietnam.

What Dr. Johns didn’t explain is that Achilles in Vietnam focuses on a pattern of experience that culminates in berserking, a pattern Shay finds in the Iliad and in the accounts of Vietnam veterans. The pattern begins with a betrayal of “what’s right,” an act that violates the codes by which a community lives and fights. In the aftermath of that violation, the soldier’s “social and moral horizon” shrinks: his loyalty now lies not with the community or the cause but with a small number of trusted comrades. The “death of a special comrade” leads to feelings of “guilt and wrongful substitution”: I wasn’t there for him; it should have been me. And what follows is the berserk state, in which a soldier loses all restraint, becoming at once animal and god.

There’s no exact correspondence between what happened in Afghanistan and what happens in the Iliad. But details in a New York Times article about Robert Bales take on particular significance for anyone who’s read Shay’s work:

A year ago, according to a blog written by his wife, he was denied a promotion to sergeant first class, a rank that would have brought not just added responsibility and respect but also money at a time when his finances seemed stretched.

*

That next phase, the Baleses hoped, would take them to Germany, Italy or Hawaii. But the Army did not move Sergeant Bales from Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Nor did it allow him to become a recruiter, though he was in training for the job. Instead, he was told he would go with the Third Brigade to Afghanistan in December.

*

About a week ago, Mr. Browne [John Henry Browne, Bales’s lawyer] said, Sergeant Bales saw a friend lose a leg to a buried mine. Soon after, according to Mr. Browne, he sent his wife a short message: “Hard day for the good guys.”

*

About a day later, Army officials said, Sergeant Bales walked out of the outpost and headed toward the nearby village.

The subtitle of Achilles in Vietnam — Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character — makes a point that some readers want to resist: that good character provides no sure defense against the experiences of war, that good character can be destroyed by circumstance. Achilles, who embodies best character (caring for the whole community, sparing the lives of prisoners, respecting the enemy dead), is destroyed as a result of what Shay calls “catastrophic moral luck”: a betrayal by his commander and the loss of the beloved comrade who wears Achilles’ armor and fights in his place.

Robert Bales seems to have exhibited at least good character in the military. From an NPR report:

Early indications are that Bales was a good soldier. He signed up soon after Sept. 11, 2001. In the decade since, he served three times in Iraq, earning medals for good conduct and meritorious service.

In 2007, Bales took part in the battle of Najaf, an intense engagement later written up in a Fort Lewis newspaper called the Northwest Guardian. In the article, Bales is quoted saying he was proud of his unit, because “we discriminated between the bad guys and the noncombatants.”

One officer who was there says Bales distinguished himself; he told the Seattle Times Friday night that when he learned the name of the alleged shooter in Afghanistan, “I nearly fell off my chair and had a good cry.”

The names of the dead in Afghanistan, missing from New York Times, NPR, the PBS NewsHour, and the Seattle Times:

Mohamed Dawood, son of Abdullah
Khudaydad, son of Mohamed Juma
Nazar Mohamed
Payendo
Robeena
Shatarina, daughter of Sultan Mohamed
Zahra, daughter of Abdul Hamid
Nazia, daughter of Dost Mohamed
Masooma, daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Farida, daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Palwasha, daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Nabia, daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Esmatullah, daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Faizullah, son of Mohamed Wazir
Essa, Mohamed son of Mohamed Hussain
Akhtar, Mohamed son of Murrad Ali

And the wounded:

Haji Mohamed Naim, son of Haji Sakhawat
Mohamed Sediq, son of Mohamed Naim
Parween
Rafiullah
Zardana
Zulheja

Related reading
No one asked their names (Al Jazeera, found via TPM)
U.S. Soldier May Have Gone “Berserk” (Huffington Post, with a brief comment from Jonathan Shay)

The Interrupters

[Ameena Matthews, Cobe Williams, Eddie Bocanegra.]

The Interrupters (dir. Steve James, 2011) spans a year in the work of the men and women of CeaseFire, a Chicago-based organization that intervenes to de-escalate conflicts that threaten to turn violent. CeaseFire’s Violence Interrupters, all of whom bring a criminal history to their work, keep tabs on the doings in their Chicago neighborhoods, tracking the petty and not so petty disputes and grudges that so often precipitate violence.

The film focuses on the work of three Violence Interrupters — Ameena Matthews, Cobe Williams, and Eddie Bocanegra. We see them speaking to the camera about their lives and speaking to others in an effort to avert violence by the power of persuasion: cajoling, challenging, empathizing, flattering, reasoning, shaming. The film is at once a cause for despair and a cause for hope. The fatalism of so many of the film’s young people, captured in the words “I am next,” written on a wall of the dead, seems straight from the Iliad: “I know I will not make old bones,” as Achilles says. Yet the Violence Interrupters themselves have learned to live beyond criminality and violence, and we see them, armed only with words, convincing others to do the same. Perhaps the most powerful scene: Williams accompanying Lil’ Mikey as he apologizes to the beauty-shop owner he robbed two years before.

The Interrupters is available on DVD. Or watch online at PBS’s Frontline.

During this past weekend, ten people were killed and thirty-nine more wounded in Chicago. One of the dead was a six-year-old girl.

[“I know I will not make old bones”: from Christopher Logue’s War Music, a reimagining of the Iliad (1997). Images from the film’s Facebook page and press materials.]

David Allen in the New York Times

David Allen, author of Getting Things Done , writing in the New York Times :

How do you think most workers would respond if you asked them, “Do you feel more productive now than you did several years ago?” I doubt that the answer would be a resounding yes. In fact, even as workplace technology and processes steadily improve, many professionals feel less productive than ever.

It may seem a paradox, but these very tools are undermining our ability to get work done. They are causing us to become paralyzed by the dizzying number of options that they spawn.

Is there a way out of this quandary?

Short answer: yes. Allen’s article is a crash course in the practices described at greater length in Getting Things Done .

[I don’t have forty-three folders, and my label-maker has gathered dust for years, but Getting Things Done has helped me greatly in getting stuff done.]

Happy St. Patrick’s Day

What Irish capitol city (a dea o dea!) of two syllables and six letters, with a deltic origin and a nuinous end, (ah dust oh dust!) can boost of having a) the most extensive public park in the world, b) the most expensive brewing industry in the world, c) the most expansive peopling thoroughfare in the world, d) the most phillohippuc theobibbous paùpulation in the word: and harmonise your abecedeed responses?

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939).

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day. I’m half Irish. Represent! Partly!

[Answers: a) Delfas, b) Dorhqk, c) Nublid, d) Dalway.]

“Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory”

This American Life has retracted its story “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” The short explanation: “many of Mike Daisey’s experiences in China were fabricated.” Or in the active voice: he lied.

CAUTION: BREAKDANCE ZONE

If I were Mitt Romney

If I were Mitt Romney, I’d announce a listening tour:

“You know, everyone’s talking as if these primaries and caucuses are about me, and Rick, and Newt, and Ron. But they’re not about any of us. They’re about you, about your hopes and dreams. And I want to prove that to you, not by getting up here and talking, not by making speeches, but by listening to what you have to say,” &c.

What might follow: Romney in conversation with so-called ordinary people, listening, commiserating, explaining how his policies would make things different. He could use Phil Dunphy’s line (from Modern Family): “I know, that’s so frustrating.”

Would it work? The picture of the rich man humbling himself in the company of the common folk might move some voters in Romney’s direction. But he’d have to stay on task (“I know, that’s so frustrating”) and not remind voters that he too is unemployed.

Other Mitt Romney posts
Mitt Romney and Mark Trail
Mitt Romney at Bain
Mitt Romney: the soul of a poet

[“As if these primaries and caucuses are”: my script avoids the subjunctive, which is not for red-blooded Americans. “Listening tour” for me means Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign, but the term seems to be everywhere: Google returns over a million results. I corrected Phil Dunphy’s line after checking the episode “Two Monkeys and a Panda.”]

Domestic comedy

Waiting in line at our friendly neighborhood multinational retailer, we wondered about the doings in the nail salon beyond the registers:

“Do they wash them first?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never set foot in one of those places.”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts