Trump’s ghostwriter

Tony Schwartz wrote The Art of the Deal for Donald Trump:

If he were writing The Art of the Deal, today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, The Sociopath .

*

If Trump is elected President, he warned, “the millions of people who voted for him and believe that he represents their interests will learn what anyone who deals closely with him already knows — that he couldn’t care less about them.”

Read it all at The New Yorker : Jane Mayer, “Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All” (The New Yorker).

AHD on singular they

The American Heritage Dictionary has an updated its usage note for singular they .

My thinking about singular they changed in 2009 — a conversion experience — and has remained unchanged since. I think the pronoun is best used sparingly, and best avoided when one’s writing is subject to formal evaluation. Recasting a sentence can be a better choice than a singular they or a cumbersome he or she .

The most interesting part of the AHD note:

The recent use of singular they for a known person who identifies as neither male nor female remains controversial; as of 2015 only 27 percent of the Panelists accepted Scout was born male, but now they do not identify as either traditional gender. With regard to this last sentence, the Panel’s responses showed a clear generational shift: the approval rate was 4 percent among Panelists born before 1945 and 40 percent among Panelists born later.

Singular they as a pronoun for a person who identifies as neither he nor she seems to me to be inherently confusing. As I wrote in a comment on another they post, “If I were not a he and were making this kind of decision for myself, I’d choose singular pronouns.”

Cursive Sluggo

[Nancy , April 2, 1953. From Random Acts of Nancy .]

Nice cursive, Sluggo, or Tony.

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Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois , July 19, 2016. Click for a larger, emptier view.]

In Lois and Chip’s absence, Hi has sold most of the furniture to pay for a.) college or b.) living-room expansion or c.) both. I’m not sure which.

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It’s plagiarism

The New York Times headline is so tactful: “Melania Trump’s Speech Bears Striking Similarities to Michelle Obama’s in 2008.” Striking similarities, yes. It’s plagiarism. The Trump campaign denies it, saying that Ms. Trump’s speech was a matter of “common words and values.” Common words, one after another after another.

Barring sabotage by a disgruntled speechwriter, I can think of three possible defenses:

Ms. Trump (or her speechwriter) had been so moved by Ms. Obama’s speech that whole sentences somehow stuck in memory, to be reproduced as if original.

Because she was giving a speech, Ms. Trump was quoting and paraphrasing without quotation marks or endnotes.

Ms. Trump (or her speechwriter) doesn’t understand persnickety academic or journalistic protocols when working with sources.

Please understand: I have heard some extraordinarily far-fetched defenses of plagiarism. “I read the Cliffs Notes, but I didn’t buy them!” “I was taught to memorize whole pages from this intro text on literary theory!” The three defenses I have imagined here seem to me wholly implausible.

A possible explanation (not defense) of this plagiarism: it’s the Dunning-Kruger effect at work. Many plagiarists lack the competence to understand how easy it is for a discerning audience to detect their plagiarism.

The Times quotes a statement from a Trump spokesman:

“In writing her beautiful speech, Melania’s team of writers took notes on her life’s inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking.”

“Included fragments”: well, that’s plagiarism.

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About last night

Our trip to hear our state representative speak on funding for our university turned out to be an interesting waste of time. We arrived about ten minutes late — Google Maps gave two locations for the venue, miles apart, and we chose the wrong one first. What we missed: all but a minute or two of someone from state government explaining how to create a household budget. (Metaphor? Parable?) She gave up, saying that she felt that she was lecturing. But we heard every word of our rep’s presentation, a meandering, ill-organized combination of plain-folks talk, high dudgeon, and cynicism. Though the event had been advertised as a discussion of university funding, that subject came up only briefly. The main purpose of our rep’s presentation seemed to be to run down the clock — he even joked that he was leaving about “one minute” for questions. Ha ha.

Key words: billion , billions . Yes, Illinois spends billions and billions of dollars (which, really, are no laughing matter). Our rep failed to mention though that Illinois has one of the lowest rates of per capita spending of all states. Other key words: Chicago , Democrats , them , they . The last two words referred to Democrats.

Low point: our rep holding up and then thumbing through a binder-clipped, printed version of a stack of PowerPoint slides. (He was not using a computer or projector.) As he explained at another point in his presentation, he is “not yet technically savvy.”

I was disappointed to see so few members of my university community in attendance. Perhaps they had concluded that they would be wasting their time. I did my bit by talking (at some length) about our rep’s dubious arithmetic and about public higher education and the national attention that our state’s manufactured budget crisis has drawn. One older man stared at me angrily when I mentioned a recent Daily Show skit and its advice for students: “Get the fuck out of Illinois.” I left the fuck out: I respect decorum, at least at public meetings. This man had turned around angrily at my mere mention of The Daily Show .

Elaine and I had ice cream and strawberries when we got home.

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Work advice

Roger Rosenblatt:

You are likely to work for some company or other, but keep a safe distance. There is no contempt as bitter as that felt by compromised minds for the independent ones that have joined them. Grin broadly at the water cooler, and go home to where you live.

“Speech for a High School Graduate,” Time (June 9, 1997).

Years ago I clipped these sentences and pasted them into a commonplace book. I think they offer good advice for any worker, despite the scornful tone (“compromised minds”), despite the possible absence of a water cooler. It’s necessary to have a life apart.

It just occurred to me that the economy of television storytelling often makes co-workers and social circle just about identical. Think, for instance, of The Mary Tyler Moore Show . You work all day, and who comes over to your house? Mr. Grant, or Ted. Life should be larger than television.

Creative accounting

Our representative in the Illinois General Assembly, a local mogul turned statesman, is proclaiming that he has helped bring to our public university ninety percent of its state funding. Ahem.

For FY 2016, the school received thirty percent of its funding.

For FY 2017, the school has received a little more than sixty percent of its funding.

Thirty plus sixty: ninety! As Elaine observes, this logic would allow a tenant renting from our mogul to pay half the rent one month, half the next, and be all paid up.

Our rep has scheduled a public meeting to discuss university funding. The meeting takes place in a town forty miles away. But guess what? People know how to drive! It should be an interesting time.

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How to improve writing (no. 65); or, CBS, sheesh

From a CBS This Morning story about Ken Burns:

Fittingly, Burns also released his first children's book this week called Grover Cleveland, Again!: A Treasury of American Presidents , featuring illustrations and “fun facts” about past American presidents. The idea began when he used to drill his daughter, Sarah, now 33 years old, on the commander-in-chiefs.

Make that commanders-in-chief . But notice too that commander-in-chiefs appears in this passage only because its writer, in an effort to avoid repeating the word presidents , has succumbed to the lure of what H. W. Fowler called “elegant variation” (which Bryan Garner has renamed “inelegant variation”). Why not rethink the entire passage? My best shot:

Fittingly, Burns also released his first children's book this week: Grover Cleveland, Again!: A Treasury of American Presidents , an illustrated book of “fun facts.” The idea for the book took shape years ago, when Burns would quiz his daughter Sarah, now 33, on the presidents.

I’ll leave all but one of my changes to speak for themselves: Burns has four daughters, so no comma after daughter .

Thanks to Sean at Contrapuntalism for alerting me to this passage.

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[Garner’s Modern English Usage points out that commanders-in-chief  is nineteen times more common than commander-in-chiefs . Of course, as The Onion reminds us, the effort to get plurals right can lead in the direction of the daffy. This post is no. 65 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

David Foster Wallace, Pokémon Go, Trump-Pence

It feels like the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, or the Year of Something . In other words, it feels like we’re living in DFW Time. The Pokémon Go fad makes me recall Wallace’s idea of the “spect-op.” In the world of Infinite Jest , ninety-four percent of all entertainment is consumed at home. It’s a world of “Total freedom, privacy, choice”:

Hence the new millennium’s passion for standing live witness to things. A whole sub-rosa schedule of public spectation opportunities, “spect-ops,” the priceless chance to be part of a live crowd, watching. Thus the Gapers’ Blocks at traffic accidents, sewer-gas explosions, muggings, purse-snatchings, the occasional Empire W.D.V. with an incomplete vector splatting into North Shore suburbs and planned communities and people leaving their front doors agape in their rush to get out and mill around and spectate at the circle of impacted waste drawing sober and studious crowds, milling in rings around the impact, earnestly comparing mental notes on just what it is they all see.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).

But now it’s a matter of standing live witness to virtual creatures on a screen.

*

The Trump-Pence logo seems like icky icing on the cake of a strange and awful week. In its hilariously crude absurdity, the logo seems to have made for the world of Infinite Jest . (I can imagine an editor: “But David, don’t you think it’s a little far-fetched?”) Trump strongly resembles the novel’s Johnny Gentle, entertainer, germaphobe, and president of the United States, “first U.S. President ever to say shit publicly,” president of “a new-era’d nation that looked out for Uno.” Of course in the novel, the border that concerns the president is the one to the United States’ north.

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A brief explanation of Subsidized Time