“The Rot of Fake News”

“Doc, you’re gargling with Coke. And it’s bad for you”: “The Rot of Fake News,” an essay by Todd Zwillich (WNYC).

A related post
The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year: post-truth

“Oh yes, of course, art simplifies”

Willa Cather, from a letter to Ida Kleber Todd, December 28, 1934:

People are always writing me (people I don’t know) that I have “influenced” their lives. I wonder if you know that you have influenced mine? Once, long ago, in some discussion, you said, half under your breath, “Oh yes, of course, art simplifies.” I had never thought of that before; I have been trying to live that remark ever since. It was the way you spoke, carelessly and yet as if there could be no doubt about the matter; and because I felt a kind of authority in you — didn’t try to explain it, just felt it.

I have read thousands of pages that did not say as much to me as that sentence rather lightly dropped by a living voice — a very individual voice with a tempo and timbre distinctly its own. The sentence went home like an arrow — because of something in you and something in me. As I said, I’ve been trying to live it ever since.

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather , ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (New York: Knopf, 2013).

Ida Kleber Todd (1858–1946) was the daughter of Henry Kleber (1816–1897), who was a major figure in Pittsburgh musical life. The Selected Letters has no information about Todd, and the information in the preceding sentence is all that I have been able to find. From 1896 to 1906, Cather lived in Pittsburgh, working as a journalist, editor, and teacher.

Cather, in a 1921 interview: “I’m trying to cut out all analysis, observation, description, even the picture-making quality, in order to make things and people tell their own story simply by juxtaposition, without any persuasion or explanation on my part.” And in her essay “The Novel Démeublé” (1922): “The novel, for a long while, has been over-furnished.” Cather’s novel The Professor’s House (1925) begins with a man walking through the empty rooms of a “dismantled house.”

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

[The novel démeublé: the novel stripped of its furniture, the novel with its furniture removed.]

Zippy Cleaners

[Zippy , November 17, 2016. Click for a larger view.]

The obscure reference? Not “three rocks.” Martinizing.

This Zippy Cleaners is was located in Manhattan at 149 Elizabeth Street. Look at what Bill Griffith did with the fire escape.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts, Nancy and Zippy posts, Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Todd VanDerWerff on progressive politics and rural America

Todd VanDerWerff, writing about a communication gap between progressive urbanites and conservative ruralites:

I say “racism” and mean “a system, built up over centuries of American history, that privileges white people over everybody else.” Many rural whites hear “racism” and think it means, “You’re a bad person who hates black people,” when they believe they’re not actively discriminating against anyone because of race.

That single sentence jumped out: it’s the perfect characterization of a mindset that prevails in my immediate environs. “I treat everyone the same,” &c.

VanDerWeff is not apologizing for or excusing oppression or bigotry. But he is suggesting that people need to do a better job listening and speaking to one another across a political and cultural divide.

[In today’s local paper, a letter calls “liberals” “fat, lazy, slobs” who will now have to “get their fat little butts off the couch and get a job.”]

A Word of the Year

For Oxford Dictionaries, it’s post-truth :

After much discussion, debate, and research, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 is post-truth — an adjective defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

notebin.cc

A reader recommends notebin.cc, an online text editor, and successor to the defunct notepad.cc.

Three good sentences

At the OUPblog, Edwin Battistella writes about how to write a good sentence, with three sample sentences. The sample sentences are from Oxford University Press books. Total cost: $238.95. But you can ponder the sentences for free.

Somewhat related
A review of Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence

Sixteen writers on the election

Online (no subscription needed) and in the November 21 New Yorker , the one with a nearly finished brick wall on the cover: “Aftermath: Sixteen Writers on Trump’s America.” Among the sixteen: Toni Morrison and George Packer.

How to improve writing (no. 69)

[Mark Trail , November 15, 2016.]

Two things to consider. One is the importance of choosing the right word: Mark means to say impending . Garner’s Modern English Usage explains the distinction: “What is pending is awaiting an outcome”; “what is impending is imminent (in the literal sense of the word, ‘hanging over one’s head’) and harmful.” Volcanic eruptions are always harmful.

The second thing to consider: writing that represents speech should resemble speech. (And here I remember the English teacher who took off points when my daughter used contractions in a story’s dialogue.) Writing that represents the speech of someone fleeing an erupting volcano should exhibit greater terseness, greater urgency. A possible revision:


[Mark Trail revised.]

Or better yet: just keep your mouth shut and run, Mark, as Abbey Powell is doing. Run, Mark, run.

Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts : “How to improve writing” and Mark Trail posts : Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

Please imagine the links in the form of a Venn diagram.

[I wrote a note to the teacher about the contractions but, as you might guess, I got nowhere. This post is no. 69 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

From an old notebook

And he got inside and he got out. And he goes back. And the people are there now. And all the balloons come all around and all the colors. And the boy was so happy. And the ones flew away and two twins have two red coats and they have balloons and then they popped it. And now he got it now. And he was under it. And he was holding the strings. And then he goes up to the sky. And then the boy was a string.

Ben, four years old, narrating The Red Balloon.

*

“The speaker buys an apple and stuffs a rotten spot in it with rat pellets.”

Jonathan Holden, in The Fate of American Poetry .

*

The teacher’s seriousness is supported by the proximity of other serious teachers, just as the seriousness of the student is nourished by the presence of other serious students. . . . The maintenance of intellectual integrity is not only a matter of strength of character, but it is also a function of the immediate environment of the teacher. . . . Consciences reinforce each other in intellectual matters as well as in others.

Edward Shils, The Academic Ethic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

Also from an old notebook
Alfalfa, Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, metaphors : Alfred Appel Jr. on twentieth-century art and literature : Barney : Beauty and the Beast and kid talk : Eleanor Roosevelt : John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch : Plato, Shirley Temple, vulgarity, wisdom, Stan Laurel : Square dancing, poetry, criticism, slang