Woody Guthrie centennial

[“Folk singer Woody Guthrie playing guitar w. sign on it reading THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS.” Photograph by Eric Schaal. New York, New York, 1943. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

Woody Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, one hundred years ago today. His songs were made for you and me.

Taco Bell’s Canon

Halfhazard work, Ivory League school : just-retired professor James Courter writes about the spelling habits of some of his students, the ones who would appear to do little reading: Teaching “Taco Bell’s Canon” (Wall Street Journal ).

Some of the more startling errors I’ve seen of late: and for an (from several writers), beast for best , retail for retell , scarface for sacrifice . The final item in this series might be the result of the Cupertino effect.

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No job too small
On “On the New Literacy”

(Thanks, Van Dyke.)

Norman Sas (1925–2012)

The New York Times reports that Norman Sas, the inventor of electric football, has died at the age of eighty-seven. I like this comment from Mr. Sas’s wife Irene: “It wasn’t just something you turned on and it vibrated. It was something you did with your little men.”

I remember spending a small part of my early adolescence attempting to play electric football. It was a total waste of time, not even exasperating enough to be funny. This thirteen-second clip from The Simpsons gives an accurate picture of the “game.”

[That last set of quotation marks are for what Garner’s Modern American Usage calls “so-called-but-not-really.”]

Molly Dodd, Molly Dodd, Molly Dodd

“Are you ever gonna learn how to land this machine?”

“Oh, don’t transfer your anger — it’s immature. Just bend your knees.”

At YouTube, all five seasons of The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd (1987–1991), starring Blair Brown as a beautiful soul lost in New York. Elaine and I share a great affection for this television show, which captures like no other the lonely pathos and sudden surrealism of life in the city. The uploader, who seems to be in a position to know, writes that “the corporate stars and legal planets have aligned to keep Miss Dodd out of the digital age.” Perhaps someday that will change: we have been waiting for years for the series to appear on DVD. The YouTube transfers are from videotape, tracking problems and all. I’m not complaining, only stating a fact. I’m grateful as all get-out for the chance to see this show once more.

Above, Miss Dodd and Davey McQuinn (James Greene) discuss elevator operation. Davey has just offered a frank appraisal of Miss Dodd’s latest poetic effort, which she has described as “part one of a trilogy, tentatively entitled ‘Empty Rooms.’”

I adore Miss Dodd, though she is a lousy, lousy poet.

*

November 2016: The show is long gone from YouTube.

[Note to Slywy: this series affords many opportunities to see a mail chute.]

Hortatory subjuctive FTW

I was sitting in on a course in seventeenth-century poetry, many years ago. The professor was an obdurate character: there was a right way to read poetry, and there was everything else. You can guess whose way was the right way. Anyway: the discussion turned to the words “let us” in a poem. “I’ve always wondered,” the professor mused, “what that verb form is called.”

And me: “It’s the hortatory subjunctive.”

A defensive personality might have heard in my quick response a trace of accusation: “Goodness me, doesn’t everyone know that?” I intended no such accusation. But as I recall, the professor made no reply beyond a weak smile. Victory, for about three shining seconds, was mine.

The hortatory subjunctive is indeed for reals. I learned about it when studying T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” with Jim Doyle, who mentioned it in passing: “Let us go then, you and I.” I of course was writing it down.

My response when a student tells me something I don’t know: gratitude, plainly expressed.

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Forward.

[The best-known instances of the hortatory subjunctive in seventeenth-century poetry might be these three: “Let us possess one world” (John Donne, “The Good Morrow”), “So let us melt, and make no noise” (Donne, “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”), “Let us roll all our strength, and all / Our sweetness, up into one ball” (Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”).]

CROWN PRICE TAGS

There’s something very meta about this box. If I have it right: Salesman meets with store representative and shows sample items tagged with Crown Price Tags. Salesman then attempts to sell not only sample items but also a supply of Crown Price Tags.

That’s one dowdy upsell.

The instructions on this box seem to me to make sense only if “your customer” is a store representative. Let us hope though that the customer’s tags come in a different box. I found this box in an antiques mall (or an “antiques” “mall”) with, of course, a price tag attached.

[The shift from “sell him” to “sell them” makes for a slight stumble in reading, or at least it did for me. You too?]

Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day

It’s no more than coincidence that on Proust’s birthday, Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day concerns sentence length. An excerpt:

What is the correlation between sentence length and readability? No one knows precisely. Rhetoricians and readability specialists have long suggested aiming for sentences of varying lengths, but with an average of about 20 to 25 words. And empirical evidence seems to bear out this rough guideline.

In 1985, three authors calculated figures for several publications, using extensive samples. Average sentence length ranges from about 20 (Reader’s Digest ) to 24 (Time ) to 27 (Wall Street Journal ). They arrived at a provocative conclusion: “Varying your sentence length is much more important than varying your sentence pattern if you want to produce clear, interesting, readable prose.” (Gary A. Olson, James DeGeorge & Richard Ray, Style and Readability in Business Writing 102 (1985)). If you’re aiming for an average sentence length of 20 to 25 words, some sentences probably ought to be 30 or 40 words, and others ought to be 3 or 4. Variety is important, but you must concern yourself with the overall average.

Ted Berrigan once said in an interview that a little man in the back of a poet’s head manages rhyme and meter. I think that the little man’s little brother manages sentence length in prose. In other words, I find it difficult to imagine variety in sentence length as the product of conscious effort.

The averages that Garner cites made me curious enough to look at sentences of my own. In a review of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King that I wrote last year (for World Literature Today, a print publication), the sentences average 28.1 words. The longest sentence: 47 words. The shortest: 12. The little man’s little brother was hard at work: the shortest sentence comes right after the longest. In a review of Christopher Lasch’s Plain Style that I wrote as a blog post last month, the sentences average 28.6 words. The longest sentence: 74 words. The shortest: 4. And in a post last week on Alan Paton’s Too Late the Phalarope , the sentences average 18 words. Once again, the longest sentence (33) and the shortest (9) appear one next to the other.

Student writers are often wary of long sentences, sometimes because of uncertainty about punctuation (any longish sentence must be a “run-on”), sometimes because of poor teaching. And short sentences seem even more dangerous (because short must equal “dumb”). But variety in sentence length is of course a good thing. Even Proust has short sentences. One of them begins Du côté de chez Swann: “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.”

[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. The first sentence of Swann's Way in Lydia Davis’s 2002 translation: “For a long time, I went to bed early.” The free Mac app TextWrangler made the work of counting sentences and words no work at all.]

Joyeux anniversaire, M. Proust

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871.

You have strange compatriots. An American girl who assures me she is very beautiful, twenty-seven years old (since she lives in Rome, the Villa Wolkonsky, I have forgotten her name, I don’t give a hang, anyway) writes me that for three years she has done nothing night and day but read my books. I shouldn’t repeat what she said (because I never repeat this sort of thing) except for the conclusion which, if it doesn’t belittle her, humiliates me: “And after three years of uninterrupted reading, my conclusion is this: I understand nothing, but absolutely nothing. Dear Marcel Proust, don’t be a poseur, descend for just once from your empyrean. Tell me in two lines what you wished to say.” Since she didn’t understand it in two thousand lines, or rather since I didn’t know how to express it, I decided it was useless to reply. And she will find me a poseur. Do you know who she is (although it is of no importance)?

Marcel Proust, in a letter to Walter Berry, December 9, 1921. From Letters of Marcel Proust, translated by Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx Books / Books & Co., 2006).

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Cheating at Stuyvesant High School

The New York Times reports on a cheating scandal at Stuyvesant High School, one of the city’s best schools.

A 2010 editorial from the school newspaper (cited in the Times article) suggests that cheating is pervasive at Stuyvesant. Yet a search of the Stuyvesant website turns up nothing in the way of a school-wide policy concerning academic integrity. The school’s code of conduct covers cell phones and iPods, clothing, elevators, extracurricular activities, hallways and lockers, and lunch. Not a word about cheating or plagiarism. I think I hear a blind eye, turning.

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Prune shake

Inquiring minds want to know: what made you think this ad blogworthy?

First, its comedic value. Second, its comedic value. Third, I have to go with “comedic value.”

Haha. Is there a fourth reason?

Yes. This ad is relevant to a previous blog post.

You mean this one?

No, this one. I’m surprised to see that the prune shake served at the House of Toast in Bob and Ray’s Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife has some basis in reality, or at least a basis in some copywriter’s imagined reality. I mean, there’s no reason to think that anyone beyond this ad ever drank a prune shake, is there?

[Awkward silence.]

Is there?

Could a fifth reason for choosing this ad be the strange resemblance that the mother in the middle bears to Joan Crawford?

I hadn’t noticed that before. But I did notice that the guy and gal at the top seem to running into each other trying to get to a bathroom in time. That could be a fifth reason. Or that coy phrasing could be a fifth reason: “Sunsweet’s delicious — and does something for you.” Kapow! But, hey, wait a minute — you didn’t answer my question.

Sorry. The “C-L Process” is new to me. Or me to it. I gotta go.

[Awkward silence.]

See you soon.



[This ad appeared in Life, April 24, 1950.]