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warren-therealg-harding · 7 months

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Balder and Dash

The Baltimore Sun | H.L. Mencken | March 1921

On the question of the logical content of Dr. Harding’s harangue of last Friday, I do not presume to have views. The matter has been debated at great length by the editorial writers of the republic, all of them experts in logic; moreover, I confess to being prejudiced. When a man arises publicly to argue that the United States entered the war because of a “concern for preserved civilization,” I can only snicker in a superior way and wonder why he isn’t holding down the chair of history in some American university.

When he says that the United States has “never sought territorial aggrandizement through force,” the snicker arises to the virulence of a chuckle, and I turn to the first volume of Gen. Grant’s memoirs. And when, gaining momentum, he gravely informs the boobery that “ours is a constitutional freedom where the popular will is supreme, and minorities are sacredly protected,” then I abandon myself to a mirth that transcends, perhaps, the seemly.

But when it comes to the style of a great man’s discourse, I can speak with a great deal less prejudice, and maybe with somewhat more competence, for I have earned most of my livelihood for twenty years past by translating the bad English of a multitude of authors into measurably better English. Thus qualified professionally, I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and half a dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.

But I grow lyrical. More scientifically, what is the matter with it? Why does it seem so flabby, so banal, so confused and childish, so stupidly at war with sense? If you had first read the inaugural address and then heard it intoned, as I did (at least in part), then you will perhaps arrive at an answer. That answer is very simple. When Dr. Harding prepares a speech he does not think of it in terms of an educated reader locked up in jail, but in terms of a great horde of stoneheads gathered around a stand. That is to say, the thing is always a stump speech; it is conceived as a stump speech and written as a stump speech. More, it is a stump speech addressed to the sort of audience that the speaker has been used to all of his life, to wit, an audience of small-town yokels, of low political serfs, or morons scarcely able to understand a word of more than two syllables, and wholly unable to pursue a logical idea for more than two centimeters.

Such imbeciles do not want ideas—that is, new ideas, ideas that are unfamiliar, ideas that challenge their attention. What they want is simply a gaudy series of platitudes, of sonorous nonsense driven home with gestures. As I say, they can’t understand many words of more than two syllables, but that is not saying that they do not esteem such words. On the contrary, they like them and demand them. The roll of incomprehensible polysyllables enchants them. They like phrases which thunder like salvos of artillery. Let that thunder sound, and they take all the rest on trust. If a sentence begins furiously and then peters out into fatuity, they are still satisfied. If a phrase has a punch in it, they do not ask that it also have a meaning. If a word slips off the tongue like a ship going down the ways, they are content and applaud it and wait for the next.

Harding carries his stump manner into everything he writes. He is, perhaps, too old to learn a better way. He is, more likely, too discreet to experiment. The stump speech, put into cold type, maketh the judicious to grieve. But roared from an actual stump, with arms flying and eyes flashing and the old flag overhead, it is certainly and brilliantly effective. Read the inaugural address, and it will gag you. But hear it recited through a sound magnifier, with grand gestures to ram home its periods, and you will begin to understand it.

Let us turn to a specific example. I exhume a sentence from the latter half of the eminent orator’s discourse: “I would like government to do all it can to mitigate, then, in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, our tasks will be solved.” I assume that you have read it. I also assume that you set it down as idiotic—a series of words without sense. You are quite right; it is. But now imagine it intoned as it were designed to be intoned. Imagine the slow tempo of a public speech. Imagine the stately unrolling of the first clause, the delicate pause upon the word then—and then the loud discharge of the phrase in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, each with its attendant glare and roll of the eyes, each with a sublime heave, each with its gesture of a blacksmith bringing down his sledge upon an egg—imagine all this, and then ask yourself where you have got. You have got, in brief, to a point where you don’t know what it is all about. You hear and applaud the phrases, but their connection has already escaped you. And so, when in violation of all sequence and logic, the final phrase, our tasks will be solved, assaults you, you do not notice its disharmony—all you notice is that, if this or that, already forgotten, is done, “our tasks will be solved.” Whereupon, glad of the assurance and thrilled by the vast gestures that drive it home, you give a cheer.

That is, if you are the sort of man who goes to political meetings, which is to say, if you are the sort of man that Dr. Harding is used to talking to, which is to say, if you are a jackass.

The whole inaugural address reeked with just such nonsense. The thing started off with an error in English in its very first sentence—the confusion of pronouns in the one-he combination, so beloved of bad newspaper reporters. It bristled with words misused: civic for civil, luring for alluring, womanhood for women, referendum for reference, even task for problem. “The task is to be solved”—what could be worse? Yet I find it twice. “The expressed views of world opinion”—what irritating tautology! “The expressed conscience of progress”—what on earth does it mean? “This is not selfishness, it is sanctity”—what intelligible idea do you get out of that? “I know that Congress and the administration will favor every wise government policy to aid the resumption and encourage continued progress”—the resumption of what? “Service is the supreme commitment of life”—ach, du heiliger!

But is such bosh out of place in stump speech? Obviously not. It is precisely and thoroughly in place of stump speech. A tight fabric of ideas would weary and exasperate the audience; what it wants is a simple loud burble of words, a procession of phrases that roar, a series of whoops. This is what it got in the inaugural address of the Hon. Warren Gamaliel Harding. And this is what it will get for four long years—unless God sends a miracle and the corruptible puts on incorruption…Almost I long for the sweeter song, the rubber stamps of more familiar design, the gentler and more seemly bosh of the late Woodrow.

#warren g harding #politics #us politics

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autodaemonium · 10 months

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bɑrlduɪɪtnktərpsnɛʃr

Pronounced: bahrlduiitnktuhrpsnayshr.

Pantheon of: incorrectness, seriousness, inattentiveness, pass.

Entities

Aɪiɛnaɪzəmækɛɛtʊnəɪəsr

Pronounced: aiiaynaizuhmakayaytoonuhiuhsr Pass: defile. Incorrectness: erroneousness. Inattentiveness: carelessness. Seriousness: graveness. Legends: spanking, rat-a-tat-tat, modulation, lateral thinking. Prophecies: baseball play, rounding, consolidation, honor killing. Relations: mðædbnʒrʌəəudðsvtʃəɪf (hyaluronic acid), ztŋnəənlðvzwənʃnæuəv (granadilla wood), dpviəʃɛrvŋsəətmʌnkɪə (refresher), ndntəkirrɪrnɪktaɪɒnnu (styrofoam).

Dpviəʃɛrvŋsəətmʌnkɪə

Pronounced: dpviuhshayrvngsuhuhtmunkiuh Pass: defile. Incorrectness: erroneousness. Inattentiveness: carelessness. Seriousness: graveness. Prophecies: tax credit, cranberry culture. Relations: aɪiɛnaɪzəmækɛɛtʊnəɪəsr (ouzo), nsnməʃhnniəʃðdpnmrər (angular velocity), əipəimətutneɪrzzmɪri (personal property).

Mðædbnʒrʌəəudðsvtʃəɪf

Pronounced: mthadbnzruuhuhudthsvtshuhif Pass: saddleback. Incorrectness: erroneousness. Inattentiveness: carelessness. Seriousness: sedateness. Legends: calling into question, barrage, tirade, back door. Prophecies: backing, battue. Relations: ɪæɪzesəðəvwaʊɑbposwvo (lemonwood).

Ndntəkirrɪrnɪktaɪɒnnu

Pronounced: ndntuhkirrirniktaiounnu Pass: saddleback. Incorrectness: erroneousness. Inattentiveness: carelessness. Seriousness: sedateness. Relations: tʒɛɪɛləəisdætɛdaɪʃhmy (raw milk).

Nsnməʃhnniəʃðdpnmrər

Pronounced: nsnmuhshhnniuhshthdpnmruhr Pass: saddleback. Incorrectness: erroneousness. Inattentiveness: carelessness. Seriousness: committedness. Legends: collaboration. Prophecies: interaction, fives.

Nʃlnɑltmnndbɑigteʌsi

Pronounced: nshlnahltmnndbahigteusi Pass: saddleback. Incorrectness: erroneousness. Inattentiveness: carelessness. Seriousness: sedateness. Legends: religious ceremony, bane, lodging. Prophecies: locking, reclamation, self-denial. Relations: pvrʌɑhgðtektrəidpʌəs (voice), əipəimətutneɪrzzmɪri (dower), nsnməʃhnniəʃðdpnmrər (maltose), tʒɛɪɛləəisdætɛdaɪʃhmy (slip).

Pvrʌɑhgðtektrəidpʌəs

Pronounced: pvruahhgthtektruhidpuuhs Pass: col. Incorrectness: erroneousness. Inattentiveness: carelessness. Seriousness: sedateness. Legends: race, dawn, city planning, phytotherapy. Prophecies: embrace. Relations: aɪiɛnaɪzəmækɛɛtʊnəɪəsr (premium), mðædbnʒrʌəəudðsvtʃəɪf (paste), nʃlnɑltmnndbɑigteʌsi (sour milk), dpviəʃɛrvŋsəətmʌnkɪə (recombinant deoxyribonucleic acid).

Rsæisəŋnzrdisstaɪfətr

Pronounced: rsaisuhngnzrdisstaifuhtr Pass: defile. Incorrectness: erroneousness. Inattentiveness: carelessness. Seriousness: committedness. Legends: catcher, obstruction, scrape, interception, conscription. Prophecies: flying start, anticlimax, repair, counterrevolution. Relations: pvrʌɑhgðtektrəidpʌəs (bank card), əipəimətutneɪrzzmɪri (rate of depreciation), ndntəkirrɪrnɪktaɪɒnnu (carbonate), nʃlnɑltmnndbɑigteʌsi (pyroligneous acid).

Tʒɛɪɛləəisdætɛdaɪʃhmy

Pronounced: tzayiayluhuhisdataydaishhmy Pass: saddleback. Incorrectness: erroneousness. Inattentiveness: carelessness. Seriousness: graveness. Prophecies: annulment, crash, stratified sampling, nonstop flight. Relations: dpviəʃɛrvŋsəətmʌnkɪə (demerara), nsnməʃhnniəʃðdpnmrər (urea-formaldehyde resin), rsæisəŋnzrdisstaɪfətr (zinkenite), ndntəkirrɪrnɪktaɪɒnnu (tyrian purple).

Ztŋnəənlðvzwənʃnæuəv

Pronounced: ztngnuhuhnlthvzwuhnshnauuhv Pass: defile. Incorrectness: erroneousness. Inattentiveness: carelessness. Seriousness: sedateness. Legends: naprapathy, foreign direct investment, rendition, beginning. Prophecies: homestretch, academic requirement, cliffhanger.

Əipəimətutneɪrzzmɪri

Pronounced: uhipuhimuhtutneirzzmiri Pass: saddleback. Incorrectness: erroneousness. Inattentiveness: carelessness. Seriousness: sedateness. Prophecies: adoration, visiting. Relations: nsnməʃhnniəʃðdpnmrər (polysyllable), dpviəʃɛrvŋsəətmʌnkɪə (installment plan), aɪiɛnaɪzəmækɛɛtʊnəɪəsr (alluvial soil).

Ɪæɪzesəðəvwaʊɑbposwvo

Pronounced: iaizesuhthuhvwowahbposwvo Pass: saddleback. Incorrectness: erroneousness. Inattentiveness: carelessness. Seriousness: committedness. Legends: scheduled fire, rallying. Prophecies: occupancy. Relations: dpviəʃɛrvŋsəətmʌnkɪə (tourmaline), tʒɛɪɛləəisdætɛdaɪʃhmy (negus), rsæisəŋnzrdisstaɪfətr (kronecker delta), nsnməʃhnniəʃðdpnmrər (quarter stock).

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arscomputra · 1 year

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No original thoughts here, only pseudo intellectual bullshit and reaching grasps at polysyllables.

#satire

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seaseariverriver · 2 years

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An interval (by David Foster Wallace)

January 22, 1995

Both House Director Pat Montesian and Don Gately’s A.A. sponsor like to remind him how the new Ennet House resident Geoffrey Day could be an invaluable teacher for him, Gately, as Staff.

“So then at forty-six years of age I came here to learn to live by clichés” is what Day says to Charlotte Treat right after Randy Lenz asked what time it was at 0825. “To turn my will and life over to the care of clichés. One day at a time. Easy does it. First things first. Ask for help. Thy will not mine be done. It works if you work it. Grow or go. Keep coming back.”

Poor old Charlotte Treat, needlepointing primly beside him on the old vinyl couch that just came from Goodwill, purses her lips. “You need to ask for some gratitude.”

“Oh no but the point is that I’ve already been fortunate enough to receive gratitude.” Day crosses one leg over the other in a way that inclines his whole little soft body toward her. “For which, believe you me, I’m grateful. I cultivate gratitude. That’s part of the system of clichés I’m here to live by. An attitude of gratitude. A grateful drunk will never drink. I know the actual cliché is ‘A grateful heart will never drink,’ but since organs can’t properly be said to imbibe and I’m still afflicted with just enough self-will to decline to live by utter non sequiturs, as opposed to just good old clichés, I’m taking the doubtless hazardous liberty of light amendment. Albeit grateful amendment, of course.”

Charlotte Treat looks over to Gately for some sort of help or Staff enforcement of dogma. The poor bitch is clueless. All of them are clueless, still. Gately reminds himself that he too is probably still mostly clueless, even after all these hundreds of days. “I Didn’t Know That I Didn’t Know” is another of these slogans that look so shallow for a while and then all of a sudden drop off and deepen like the lobster waters off the North Shore. As Gately fidgets his way through daily a.m. meditation he always tries to remind himself daily that this is all an Ennet House residency is supposed to do: buy these poor yutzes some time, some thin pie slice of abstinent time, till they can start to get a whiff of what’s true and deep, almost magic, under the shallow surface of what they’re trying to do.

“I cultivate it assiduously. I do special gratitude exercises at night up there in the room. Gratitude-ups, you could call them. Ask Randy over there if I don’t do them like clockwork. Diligently. Sedulously.”

“Well it’s true is all,” Treat sniffs. “About gratitude.”

Everybody else except Gately, who is lying on the old other couch opposite them, is ignoring this exchange, watching an old movie whose tracking is a little messed up so that staticky stripes eat at the picture’s bottom and top. The Ennet House Director, Pat M., encourages new Staff to think of residents they’d like to bludgeon to death as teachers of patience, tolerance, self-discipline, and restraint. She can always tell when Gately’s exercising tolerant restraint, because of the slight facial tic that betrays his effort of will, and makes it a point to praise his willingness to grow and change when the cheek starts to spasm.

Day isn’t done. “One of these exercises is being grateful that life is so much easier now. I used sometimes to think. I used to think in long compound sentences with subordinate clauses and even the odd polysyllable. Now I find I needn’t. Now I live by the dictates of macramé samplers ordered from the back-page ad of an old Reader’s Digest or Saturday Evening Post. Easy Does It. Remember to Remember. But for the Grace of God. Turn It Over. Terse, hard-boiled. Good old Norman Rockwell–Paul Harvey wisdom. I walk around with my arms out straight in front of me and recite these clichés. In a monotone. No inflection necessary. Could that be one? Could that be added to the cliché pool? No inflection necessary? Too many syllables, probably.”

Poor old Charlotte Treat, all of nine weeks clean, is looking primmer and primmer. She glances again over at Gately, lying on his back, taking up the living room’s whole other sofa, one sneaker up on the sofa’s square worn-fabric arm, his eyes almost closed. Only House Staff get to lie on the couches.

“Denial,” Charlotte finally says, “is not a river in Egypt.”

“Hows about the both of you shut the fuck up,” says Emil Minty.

Geoffrey (not Geoff, Geoffrey) Day has been at Ennet House eight days. He came in from Roxbury’s infamous Dimock Detox, where he was the only white person, which Gately bets must have been broadening for him. Day has a squished blank smeared flat face, one requiring great effort to like, and eyes that are just starting to lose the nictitated glaze of early sobriety. Gately tries to remind himself that Day is a newcomer and still very raw. A red-wine-and-Quaalude man who finally nodded out in late October and put his Saab through the window of a Malden sporting-goods store and then got out and proceeded to browse until Boston’s finest came and got him. He’d taught something horseshit-sounding like social historicity or historical sociality at some Jr. college up the Expressway in Medford and came in saying in his Intake interview that he also manned the helm of a scholarly quarterly. Word for word, the House Manager had said: “manned the helm” and “scholarly quarterly.” His Intake indicated that Day’d been in and out of a blackout for most of the last several years, and his wiring is still as they say pretty frayed. His detox at Dimock, where they barely have the resources to slip you a Librium if you start to D.T., must have been real grim, because Geoffrey D. now alleges it never happened: his story is he just strolled into Ennet House on a lark one day from his home five-plus miles away in Malden and found the place too hilariously egregious to want to leave.

It’s the newcomers with some education that are the worst, according to Staffer Eugenio M. They identify their whole selves with their head, and the Disease makes its command headquarters in the head. Day wears chinos of indeterminate hue, brown socks with black shoes, and shirts that the House Manager had described on the Intake form as “East-European-type turtleneck shirts.” Day’s now on the vinyl couch with Charlotte Treat after breakfast in the Ennet House living room with a few of the other residents who either aren’t working or don’t have to be at work early, and with Gately, who’d pulled a night shift down in the front office till 0400, then got temp-relieved by Johnette Foltz so he could go to work down at the Shattuck Shelter till 0700, and then came and hauled ass back up and took back over so Johnette F. could go off to her N.A.-convention thing with a bunch of N.A. kids in what looked like a VW bus without a hood over the engine, and is now, Gately, covering Johnette’s half of the day shift until somebody else gets here, and is trying to unclench and center himself inside by tracing the cracks in the paint of the living room ceiling with his eyes. Gately often feels a terrible sense of loss, narcotics-wise, in the a.m., still, even after all this drug-free time. His A.A. sponsor over at the White Flag group says some people never get over the loss of what they’d thought was their one true best friend and lover; they just have to pray daily for acceptance and patience and the brass danglers to move forward through the grief and loss, to wait for time to harden the scab. The sponsor doesn’t give Gately one bit of shit for feeling bad: on the contrary, he commends Gately for his candor in breaking down and crying like a baby and finally telling him about it one a.m., the sense of terrible loss. It’s a myth no one misses it. Their particular Substance. Shit, you wouldn’t need to give it up if you didn’t miss it. You just have to Turn It Over, the emptiness and loss, Keep Coming, show up, pray, Ask for Help. Gately rubs his eye. Simple advice like this does seem like a lot of clichés—Day’s right about how it seems. Yes, and if Geoffrey Day keeps on steering by the way things seem to him, he’s a dead man sure. Gately’s already watched dozens come through here and leave early and some of them die. If Day ever gets lucky and breaks down, finally, and comes to the office late at night to clutch at his pant cuff and blubber and beg for help, Gately’ll get to tell Day that the clichéd directives of recovery are a lot more deep and hard to actually do. To try and live by instead of just say. But he’ll only get to say it if Day comes and asks. Personally, Gately gives Day like a month at the outside before he’s back tipping his hat to parking meters. Except who is Gately to judge who’ll end up getting the Gift of the program v. who won’t, he needs to remember. He tries to feel like Day is teaching him patience. It takes great patience and tolerance not to want to punt the guy out into Commonwealth Ave. and open up his bunk to somebody that really wants it, desperately, the Gift. Except who is Gately to think he can know who wants it and who doesn’t, deep down. Gately’s arm is behind his head, up against the sofa’s other arm. The VCR is on to something violent Gately neither sees nor hears. He can sort of turn his attention on and off like a light. Even when he was a resident here, he’d had this pro housebreaker’s ability to screen input, to do sensory triage. It was one reason he’d been able to stick out his nine residential months with twenty-one other newly detoxed housebreakers, hoods, whores, fired execs, subway musicians, beer-bloated construction workers, vagrants, cirrhotic car salesmen, bunko artists, mincing pillow biters, North End hard guys, Avon ladies, pimply kids with nose-rings, denial-ridden housewives and etc., all jonesing and head-gaming and desperate and grieving and basically whacked-out and producing non-stopping output 24/7.

At some point in here Day says, “So bring on the lobotomist, bring him on I say!”

Except that Gately’s counsellor when he was a resident here, Eugenio Martinez, one of the volunteer alumni counsellors, a one-eared former boiler-room bunko man and now a cellular-phone retailer who’d gone through the House under the original pre-Pat founder and now had about like ten years clean, Eugenio M. had lovingly confronted Gately early on about his special burglar’s selective attention and about how it could be dangerous, because how can you be sure it’s you doing the input screening and not the Spider. Eugenio had called addiction the Spider instead of the Disease, and dispensed his advice in terms of like for example “Feeding the Spider” v. “Starving the Spider” and so on. He’d called Gately into the House Manager’s back office and said what if screening his attention’s input turned out to be Feeding the Spider and what about an experimental unscreening of input for a while. And Gately had said he’d do his best to try and had come back out and tried to watch a Celtics game while two resident pillow biters from off the Fenway were on the couch having this involved conversation about some third fag having to go in and get the skeleton of some kind of fucking rodent removed from inside his butthole. The unscreening experiment had lasted half an hour. This was right before Gately got his ninety-day chip and wasn’t exactly wrapped real tight, still. Ennet House this year is nothing like the freak show it was when Gately went through. Gately has been Substance-free for four hundred and twenty-one days today.

Charlotte Treat, with her carefully made-up, ruined face, is watching the static-striped movie on the VCR while she needlepoints something. Conversation between her and Geoffrey D. has mercifully petered out. Day is scanning the room for somebody else to engage and piss off so he can prove to himself he doesn’t fit in here and stay separated off isolated inside himself and maybe get them so pissed off there’s a beef and he gets bounced out, Day, and it won’t be his fault. You can almost hear the Spider of his Disease chewing away inside his head. Emil Minty, Randy Lenz, and Bruce Green are also in the room, sprawled in spring-shot chairs, lighting one gasper off the end of the last, their posture the don’t-fuck-with-me slouch of the streets that here makes their bodies’ texture somehow hard to distinguish from that of the chairs. Nell Gunther is sitting at the long table in the doorless dining room that opens out right off the old donated VCR and monitor’s pine stand, whitening under her nails with a manicure pencil amid the remains of something she’s eaten that involved serious syrup. Joe S. is also in there, way down by himself at the table’s far end, trying to saw at a waffle with a knife and fork attached to the stumps of his wrists with Velcro bands. A long-ago former C.P.A., Joe Smith is forty-five and looks seventy, has almost all-white hair that’s waxy and yellow from close-order smoke, and finally got into Ennet House last month after a summer in the Cambridge City Shelter. Joe S. is making his fiftieth-odd stab at some kind of durable sobriety in A.A. Once devoutly R.C., he’s had crippling trouble with Faith in a Loving God ever since the R.C. Church apparently granted his wife an annulment in ’91 after fifteen years of marriage. Then for several years a rooming-house drunk, which in Gately’s view is like one step up from a homeless-person-type drunk. Joe S. got jumped and rolled and beaten half to death in Cambridge in the storm on Xmas Eve of last year and left to freeze in an alley, and ended up losing his hands and feet. Whenever residents Doony Glynn and Wade McDade are together in a room and Joe S. comes teetering in on his blocky prosthetic shoes, G. and McD. will stand up and shout together: “Hail Joe, Asleep in the Snow!” Repeated threats of Restriction and worse have not broken them of this practice. Doony Glynn’s also been observed telling Joe Smith things like that there’s some new guy coming in and moving into the Disabled Room with Joe who’s totally minus arms or legs or even a head and communicates by farting in Morse code. Which sally earned Glynn three days’ Full House Restriction and a week’s extra House Chore for what Johnette Foltz described in the Staff Log as “XSive Crulty.” There is a vague intestinal moaning in Gately’s right side. Watching Joe Smith smoke a Benson & Hedges by holding it between his stumps with his elbows out like a man with pruning shears is an adventure in fucking pathos, as far as Gately’s concerned. And forget about what it’s like trying to watch Joe S. try to light a match.

Gately, who’s been on Live-In Staff here four months now, believes Charlotte Treat’s devotion to needlepoint is suspect. All those needles. In and out of all that thin sterile-white cotton stretched drum-tight in its round frame. The needle makes a kind of thud and squeak when it goes in the cloth. It’s not much like the soundless pop and slide of a real cook-and-shoot. But still. She takes such great care.

Gately wonders what color he’d call the ceiling if forced to call it a color. It’s not beige and it’s not gray. The brown-yellow tones are from high-tar gaspers; a pall hangs up near the ceiling even this early in the new sober day. Some of the drunks and trank-jockeys stay up most of the night, joggling their feet and chain-smoking, even though there’s no movies or music allowed after midnight. Don G. has that odd House Staffer’s knack, already, after four months, of seeing everything significant in both living and dining rooms without really looking. Emil Minty, a hard-core smack-addict punk here for reasons nobody can quite yet pin down, is in an old mustard-colored easy chair with his combat boots up on one of the standing ashtrays, which is tilting not quite enough for Gately to tell him to watch out, please. Minty’s orange Mohawk and the shaved skull around it are starting to grow out brown, which is just not a pleasant sight in the morning at all. The other ashtray on the floor by his chair is full of the ragged new moons of bitten nails, which has got to mean that Esther Thrale, who Gately ordered to bed at 0230, was back down here in the chair having at her nails again the second Gately left to go mop up shit at the Shattuck Shelter. Another gurgle and abdominal chug. When he’s up all night Gately’s stomach gets all acidy and tight, from either the coffee, maybe, or just the staying up. Emil M.’s been sleeping in the streets since he was maybe sixteen, Gately can tell: he’s got that sooty complexion homeless guys have where the soot has insinuated itself into the dermal layer. And the big-armed driver for Leisure Time Ice, the quiet kid, Bruce Green, a garbage-head all-Substance-type kid, maybe twenty-one, face very slightly smunched in on one side, wears sleeveless khaki shirts, used to live in a trailer in that apocalyptic Enfield trailer park out near Allston; Gately likes Green because he seems to have sense enough to keep his yap shut when he’s got nothing important to say, which is basically all the time. The tattoo on the kid’s right tricep is a spear-pierced heart over the hideous name mildred bonk, who Bruce G. told him was a ray of living light and a dead ringer for the late lead singer of The Fiends in Human Shape and his dead heart’s one love ever, and who took their daughter and left him this summer for some guy who’d told her he ranched fucking longhorn cows east of Atlantic City, N.J. He’s got, even by Ennet House standards, major-league sleep trouble, Green, and he and Gately play cribbage sometimes in the wee dead hours, a game Gately picked up in jail. Joe S. is now hunched in a meaty coughing fit, his elbows out and forehead purple. Gately can see everything without moving his eyes at all.

And then Lenz. Randy Lenz is a small-time organic-coke dealer who wears sport coats rolled up over his big forearms and is always checking his pulse on the inside of his wrists. It’s come out that Lenz is of keen interest to both sides of the law; this past May he’d apparently all of a sudden lost all control and holed up in a Charlestown motel and freebased most of a whole hundred grams he’d been fronted by a suspiciously trusting Brazilian in what Lenz didn’t know was supposed to have been a D.E.A. sting operation in the South End. Having screwed both sides in what Gately secretly views as a delicious fuckup, Randy Lenz has, since May, been the most wanted he’s probably ever been. He is seedily handsome in the way of pimps and low-level coke dealers, muscular in the way certain guys’ muscles look muscular but can’t really lift anything, with complexly gelled hair and the little birdlike head movements of the deeply vain. One forearm’s hair has a little hairless patch, which Gately knows all too well spells knife owner, and if there’s one thing Gately’s never been able to stomach it’s a knife owner, little swaggery guys who always queer a square beef and come up off the ground with a blade so you have to get cut to take it away from them. Lenz is teaching Gately a restrained compassion for people you pretty much want to beat up on sight. And it’s obvious to everybody except Pat Montesian—whose odd gullibility in the presence of human sludge, though, Gately needs to try to remember, was one of the reasons why he himself had got into Ennet House—that Lenz is here mostly just to hide. He rarely leaves the House except under compulsion, avoids all windows, and travels nightly to the required A.A./N.A. meetings in a disguise that makes him look like Cesar Romero after a terrible accident; and then he always wants to walk home solo afterward, which is not encouraged. Lenz’s leg never stops joggling; Day claims it joggles even worse in sleep. Lenz is seated low in the northeasternmost corner of an old fake-velour love seat that he’s jammed in the northeasternmost corner of the living room. Randy Lenz has a strange compulsive need to be north of everything, and possibly even northeast of everything, and Gately has no clue what it’s about but observes Lenz’s position routinely for his own interest and files.

Second-month resident Charlotte Treat has violently red hair. As in hair the color of like a red crayon. She doesn’t have to work the usual outside menial job, because she has some strain of the Virus or maybe A.R.C. Former prostitute, reformed. Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It’s like long-repressed librarian ambitions come flooding out. Charlotte T. has a cut-rate whore’s hard, half-pretty face, her eyes lassoed with shadow around all four lids. Her also with a case of the dermal-layer sooty complexion. The thing about Treat is how her cheeks are deeply pitted in deep trenches that she packs with foundation and tries to cover over with blush, which along with the hair gives her the look of a mean clown. The ghastly wounds in her cheeks look for all the world like somebody got at her with a woodburning kit at some point in her career path. Gately would rather not know.

Don Gately is almost twenty-nine and sober and just huge. One shoulder blade and buttock pooch out over the side of a sofa that sags like a hammock. Lying there gurgling and inert with eyes half shut and a tolerant if ticcy smile. Gately looks less built than poured, with the smooth immovability of an Easter Island statue. It would be nice if intimidating size weren’t one of the factors in a male graduate’s getting offered the male Live-In Staff job here, but there you are. He has a massive square head made squarer-looking by the Prince Valiant-ish haircut he tries to maintain himself in the mirror, to save money. Room and board aside—plus of course the opportunity for Service—he makes very little money as an Ennet House Staffer, and is paying off restitution schedules in three different district courts. He has the fluttery white-eyed smile now of someone who’s holding himself just over the level of doze. Pat Montesian isn’t due in until 0900, and he can’t go to sleep until she shows, because the House Manager has driven Jennifer Belbin to a court appearance downtown and Gately’s the only Staffer here; Foltz, the other Live-In, is at a Narcotics Anonymous convention in Hartford for the long weekend. Gately personally is not hot on N.A.: so many relapses and unhumble returns, so many drug stories told with undisguised bullshit pride, so little emphasis on Service or serious Message; all those people in leather and metal, preening. Rooms full of Randy Lenzes, all hugging each other, pretending they don’t miss narcotics. Rampant vulnerable-newcomer fucking. There’s a difference between abstinence and recovery, Gately knows. Though who is Gately to judge what works for who. He just knows what seems like it works for him, today. A.A.’s tough Boston love, the White Flag group, old guys with suspendered bellies and white crewcuts and geologic amounts of sober time who’ll take your big square head off if they sense you’re getting complacent or chasing tail or forgetting that your life still hangs in the balance every fucking day. White Flag newcomers so crazed and sick they can’t sit, and have to pace at the meeting’s rear, like Gately when he first came. Retired old kindergarten teachers in polyresin slacks and a pince-nez who bake cookies for the weekly meeting and relate from behind the podium how they used to blow bartenders at closing for just two more fingers in a paper cup to take home against the morning’s needled light. Gately, albeit an oral-narcotics man from way back, has committed himself to A.A. He drank his fair share, too, he figures, after all.

House Director Pat M. is due in at 0900 and has application interviews with three people, 2 F and 1 M, who better be showing up soon; and Gately will get up and answer the door when they don’t know enough to just come in and will say Welcome and get them a cup of coffee if he judges them able to hold it. He’ll take them aside and tip them off to be sure to pet Pat M.’s dogs during the interview. The dogs’ll be sprawled all over the front office, sides heaving, writhing and biting at themselves. He’ll tell the applicants it’s a proved fact that if Pat’s dogs like you, you’re in. Pat M. has directed Gately to tell applicants this, and then if they do actually pet the dogs—two hideous white golden retrievers with suppurating skin afflictions, plus one has grand-mal epilepsy—it’ll betray a level of desperate willingness that Pat says is just about all she goes by, deciding.

A nameless cat oozes by on the broad windowsill above the back of the fabric couch. Animals here come and go. Graduates adopt them or they just disappear. Their fleas tend to remain. Gately’s intestines gurgle. Boston’s dawn this morning was chemically pink. The nail parings in the ashtray on the floor are, he sees, way too big to be fingernail bits. These bitten arcs are broad and thick and a deep autumnal yellow. They are not from fingers. He swallows hard.

Gately’d tell Day how even if they are just clichés, clichés are: (a) soothing, and (b) proclaim a common sort of common sense, and (c) license the universal assent that drowns out silence. And fourth, silence is deadly, pure Spider-food, if you’ve got the Disease. The older White Flaggers say you can spell the Disease “dis-ease,” which sums the basic situation up nicely. Gately should probably also tell him that the only real ultimate relief from the Disease is God, as in finding and cultivating some kind of personally comfortable and worshipable Higher Power; but Gately still can’t bring himself to say this kind of thing out loud. Pat has a meeting at the Bureau of Substance Abuse Services in Government Center at noon she needs to be reminded about, since she can’t read her own handwriting. Gately envisions going around having to find out who’s biting their fucking toenails in the living room and putting the disgusting toenail bits in the ashtray at like 0500. House Regs prohibit bare feet anyplace downstairs.

There’s a pale-brown water stain on the ceiling over Day and Treat the exact shape of Florida. Randy Lenz has issues with Geoffrey Day because Day is educated and a teacher and mans a journal’s helm. This threatens the self-concept of Lenz, who sees himself as a kind of hiply sexy artist-dash-intellectual. Small-time dealers never think of themselves as just small-time dealers. For Occupation on his Intake form Lenz had put “free lance writer.” And he makes a big show of the fact he reads. For his first sober week here in August he’d sat all day smoking and joggling in the northeast corner of the living room, holding open a gigantic medical dictionary and pretending to be reading medical words until Glynn and McDade started busting his balls about never turning the page. At which juncture he quit reading and started talking, making everybody nostalgic for when he just read. Johnette F. had put in the September Log that Lenz would, quote, “get on your very last nerve,” which Gately had underlined in a different-color ink. Plus Geoffrey D. has issues with Randy L., too. The dislike is mutual. There’s a certain way they don’t look at each other. And so now of course they’re mashed in together in the tiny three-man bedroom, since last week three guys in one night missed curfew and came in without one normal-sized pupil between them and all refused Urines and got discharged on the spot, and so Day got moved up in his first week from the five-man newcomers’ room to the three-man. Seniority comes quick around here. Lenz and Day: a beef may be brewing. Day’ll try to goad Lenz into a beef that’ll be public enough so he doesn’t get hurt but does get bounced out, and then he can leave treatment and go back to Chianti and ludes and make out like the relapse is Ennet House’s and never have to confront himself or his Disease. To Gately, Geoffrey D. is like a wide-open textbook on the Disease. One of Gately’s jobs is to keep an eye on what’s possibly brewing among residents and let Pat or the House Manager know and to try to smooth things down in advance if possible.

The ceiling’s color could be called dun, if forced. Someone has farted; no one knows just who, but this isn’t like a normal adult place where everybody coolly pretends a fart didn’t happen. Here everybody has to make their little comment.

Time is passing. Ennet House reeks of passing time. It is the humidity of early sobriety, hanging and palpable. You can hear ticking in clockless rooms here. Gately changes the angle of one sneaker, puts his other arm behind his head. His head has real weight and pressure. Randy Lenz’s obsessive compulsions include the need to be north, a fear of disks, a tendency to take his own pulse, a pathological fear of every form of timepiece, and a constant need to know the time with great precision.

“Day man, you got the time maybe real quick?” Lenz. For the third time in half an hour. Patience, tolerance, reserve, compassion. Gately remembers his own first few straight months here: he’d felt the sharp edge of every second that went by. And the freak-show dreams. Nightmares beyond the worst D.T.s you’d ever heard of. One reason to have a night-shift Staffer down in the front office is so somebody’s there for the residents to talk at when—not if, when—when the detox nightmares ratchet them out of twisted sheets at like 0300. Nightmares about relapsing and getting high, about not getting high but having everybody think you’re high, about getting high with your alcoholic mom and then killing her with a baseball bat. Whipping it out for a court-ordered Urine and starting up and flames come shooting out. Getting high and bursting into flames. Having a waterspout shaped like an enormous syringe suck you up inside. A vehicle explodes in a bloom of enhanced flame on the VCR, its hood up like an old pop tab.

Day is making a broad gesture out of checking his wristwatch. “Right around eight-thirty, fella.”

Randy L.’s fine nostrils flair and whiten. He stares straight ahead, eyes narrowed, fingers on his wrist. Day purses his lips. Gately hangs his head over the arm of the sofa and regards Lenz upside down. “That look on your face there mean something there, Randy? Are you like communicating something with that look?”

“Does anybody maybe know the time a little more exactly is what I’m wondering, Don, since Day doesn’t.”

Gately checks his own cheap digital, head still hung over the sofa’s arm. “I got eight-thirty-two and fourteen, fifteen, sixteen seconds, Randy.”

“Thanks a lot D.G. man.”

And now Day has that same flared narrow look for Lenz. “We’ve been over this, friend. Amigo. Sport. You do this all the time with me. Again I’ll say it—I don’t have a digital watch. This is a fine old antique watch. It points. A memento of vastly better days. It’s not a digital watch. It’s not a cesium-based atomic clock. It points, with hands. See, Spiro Agnew here has two little arms: they point, they suggest. It’s not a fucking stopwatch for life. Lenz, get a watch. Am I right? Why don’t you just get a watch, Lenz. Three people I happen to know of for a fact have offered to get you a watch and let you pay them back whenever you feel comfortable about poking your nose out and investigating the work-a-world. Get a watch. Obtain a watch. A fine, digital, incredibly wide watch, about five times the width of your wrist, so you have to hold it like a falconer, and it treats time like pi.”

“Easy does it,” Charlotte Treat half sings, not looking up from her needle and frame.

Day looks around at her. “I don’t believe I was speaking to you in any way shape or form.”

“Peace,” Gately says softly, his head still hanging over. Joe Smith, upside-down, is having another coughing fit over in the dining room.

Lenz is staring blackly at Geoffrey Day. “If you’re trying to fuck with me, brother.” He shakes his fine shiny head. “Big mistake.”

Day puts his hands up to his cheeks. “Ooh I’m all atremble. I can barely hold my arm steady to read my watch.”

Lenz points his cigarette. “Big big big real big mistake.”

Emil M.’s contorted way forward in his chair in the way of somebody communicating that he’s trying to watch TV around a distraction. “Hows about I give you both a beating if you don’t shut up.”

A time-killing fantasy Gately has lately is in the middle of bullshit squabbles like this he all of a sudden picks Geoffrey D. up bodily and swings him by his dress shoes and uses him as a bludgeon to beat Randy Lenz’s over-groomed head in, freeing up two bunks at once. His progress consists of just entertaining such thoughts now instead of acting on them, which Pat M. reassures him is almost the same as patience. The Ennet House living room has no clock. Gately likes that his cheap watch counts off the seconds: sometimes he just sits and watches the seconds on his big wrist tick digitally off, to remind himself that an interval of time is passing, will pass.

Day has crossed his legs and laced his hands over the knee, a posture they all know Lenz detests for some reason. “So let me get this straight. We’re engaged in an argument about whether it’s appropriate for you continually to harass innocent watch wearers for the exact time in lieu of buying your own watch, and you win the argument by claiming that my argument is an attempt to quote fuck with you, and by threatening me with physical harm if I don’t acquiesce to your argument. This, to you, is winning.”

Lenz says, “I ain’t got time for this shit.”

Charlotte Treat slaps at her needlepoint frame to indicate she’s exasperated. “He didn’t threaten you.”

Emil Minty suddenly stands, making the ashtray topple. “I’m fucking serious.”

Gately twists on the couch to catch Minty’s eye. Past Minty, down at the dining-room table’s end, Joe S. is still coughing, still hunched over, his face a dusky purple; and Nell Gunther is behind him pounding him on the back so hard that it keeps sending him forward over his ashtray, and he waves one stump vaguely over his shoulder to signal her to quit. Gately locks eyes with Minty until the kid sits back down, running a hand over his Mohawk and wearily asking when he can get the fuck out of here.

“I’m just trying to get clear on what’s being said here,” Day is saying.

Only a couple months ago Gately would have stood up and stood over Minty and physically intimidated him to get him to sit down. Charlotte T. is trying to catch Gately’s eye as Lenz sits there joggling and telling Day all he’s saying is Day better hope to Christ he doesn’t make Lenz have to get up out of this chair right here. Minty is making no move to start cleaning up the ashtray’s mess. Gately has no idea where he’ll live or what he’ll do when his term as Live-In Staff is over.

Day joggles his own foot and asks Gately for his feedback on what’s transpiring here, whether Staff can confirm hearing a, how shall we say, he says, menacing aspect to Lenz’s tone and/or content. Joe Smith’s coughs have taken on your serious cougher’s deep slow searching aspect, like he’s trying to pronounce something.

“Easy Does It!” shrieks Treat, holding out her absurdly tiny needle, brandishing it.

“Peace on earth good will toward men,” says Gately, back all the way on his back, smiling up at the cracked dun ceiling, not even a hint of a tic to betray anything but a tolerant willingness to let it all pass, for the moment. To work itself out, seek its own level, settle, blow over. Die of neglect. He’s pretty sure he knows who farted.

#David Foster Wallace #1995

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manwalksintobar · 2 years

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Poem for My Father // Quincy Troupe

for Quincy T. Trouppe Sr. father, it was an honor to be there, in the dugout with you, the glory of great black men swinging their lives as bats, at tiny white balls burning in at unbelievable speeds, riding up & in & out a curve breaking down wicked, like a ball falling off a table moving away, snaking down, screwing its stitched magic into chitlin circuit air, its comma seams spinning toward breakdown, dipping, like a hipster bebopping a knee-dip stride, in the charlie parker forties wrist curling, like a swan’s neck behind a slick black back cupping an invisible ball of dreams & you there, father, regal, as an african, obeah man sculpted out of wood, from a sacred tree, of no name, no place, origin thick branches branching down, into cherokee & someplace else lost way back in africa, the sap running dry crossing from north carolina into georgia, inside grandmother mary’s womb, where your mother had you in the violence of that red soil ink blotter news, gone now, into blood graves of american blues, sponging rococo truth long gone as dinosaurs the agent-oranged landscape of former names absent of african polysyllables, dry husk, consonants there now, in their place, names, flat, as polluted rivers & that guitar string smile always snaking across some virulent, american, redneck’s face scorching, like atomic heat, mushrooming over nagasaki & hiroshima, the fever blistered shadows of it all inked, as etchings, into sizzled concrete but you, there, father, through it all, a yardbird solo riffing on bat & ball glory, breaking down the fabricated myths of white major league legends, of who was better than who beating them at their own crap game, with killer bats, as bud powell swung his silence into beauty of a josh gibson home run, skittering across piano keys of bleachers shattering all manufactured legends up there in lights struck out white knights, on the risky edge of amazement awe, the miraculous truth sluicing through steeped & disguised in the blues confluencing, like the point at the cross when a fastball hides itself up in a slider, curve breaking down & away in a wicked, sly grin curved & posed as an ass-scratching uncle tom, who like old sachel paige delivering his famed hesitation pitch before coming back with a hard, high, fast one, is slicker sliding, & quicker than a professional hitman— the deadliness of it all, the sudden strike like that of the “brown bomber’s” crossing right of sugar ray robinson’s, lightning, cobra bite & you, there, father, through it all, catching rhythms of chono pozo balls, drumming, like conga beats into your catcher’s mitt hard & fast as “cool papa” bell jumping into bed before the lights went out of the old, negro baseball league, a promise, you were father, a harbinger, of shock waves, soon come

#poetry #Quincy Troupe #America #baseball poems #Satchel Paige #Sugar Ray Robinson #bebop #Charlie Parker #Negro League Baseball #curveball #Black America #Cool Papa Bell #the blues

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enemyofrome · 4 years

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Savonn pulled away first, because all good things had to be dispensed in limited quantities. It was a universal principle of drama, economics, and love.

lads, I went digging in my old files and found so. many. goblin outtakes from eggy & swanny, it’s hilarious.

#magpie ballads #sxd #fuck... 22 year old val did love her polysyllables

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englishlistwords · 3 years

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polysyllable

n. A word of more than two and usually more than three syllables.

n. A word of several syllables; usually, a word of four or more syllables, words of one syllable being called monosyllables, those of two dissyllables, and those of three trisyllables.

n. A word of many syllables, or consisting of more syllables than three; -- words of less than four syllables being called monosyllables, dissyllables, and trisyllables.

#polysyllable #p

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vital-information · 2 years

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Without missing a beat Heath [a MacArthur Fellow, a linguistic anthropologist, and a professor of English and linguistics at Stanford,] replied: “Yes, but there’s a second kind of reader. There’s the social isolate — the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him. This is very, very difficult to uncover in an interview. People don’t like to admit that they were social isolates as children. What happens is you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. But that world, then, is a world you can’t share with the people around you — because it’s imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read. Though they aren’t present, they become your community.”

...

According to Heath, readers of the social-isolate variety (she also calls them “resistant” readers) are much more likely to become writers than those of the modeled-habit variety. If writing was the medium of communication within the community of childhood, it makes sense that when writers grow up they continue to find writing vital to their sense of connectedness. What’s perceived as the antisocial nature of “substantive” authors, whether it’s James Joyce’s exile or J. D. Salinger’s reclusion, derives in large part from the social isolation that’s necessary for inhabiting an imagined world. Looking me in the eye, Heath said: “You are a socially isolated individual who desperately wants to communicate with a substantive imaginary world.”

I knew she was using the word “you” in its impersonal sense. Nevertheless, I felt as if she were looking straight into my soul. And the exhilaration I felt at her accidental description of me, in unpoetic polysyllables, was my confirmation of that description’s truth. Simply to be recognized for what I was, simply not to be misunderstood: these had revealed themselves, suddenly, as reasons to write.

By the spring of 1994 I was a socially isolated individual whose desperate wish was mainly to make some money. After my wife and I separated for the last time, I took a job teaching undergraduate fiction-writing at a small liberal arts college, and although I spent way too much time on it, I loved the work. I was heartened by the skill and ambition of my students, who hadn’t even been born when Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In first aired. I was depressed, though, to learn that several of my best writers had vowed never to take a literature class again. One evening a student reported that his contemporary fiction class had been encouraged to spend an entire hour debating whether the novelist Leslie Marmon Silko was a homophobe.

Another evening, when I came to class, three women students were hooting with laughter at the utopian-feminist novel they were being forced to read for an honors seminar in Women and Fiction.

The therapeutic optimism now raging in English literature departments insists that novels be sorted into two boxes: Symptoms of Disease (canonical work from the Dark Ages before 1950) and Medicine for a Happier and Healthier World (the work of women and of people from nonwhite or nonhetero cultures). But the contemporary fiction writers whose work is being put to such optimistic use in the Academy are seldom, themselves, to blame. To the extent that the American novel still has cultural authority — an appeal beyond the Academy, a presence in household conversations — it’s largely the work of women. Knowledgeable booksellers estimate that seventy percent of all fiction is bought by women, and so perhaps it’s no surprise that in recent years so many crossover novels, the good books that find an audience, have been written by women: fictional mothers turning a sober eye on their children in the work of Jane Smiley and Rosellen Brown; fictional daughters listening to their Chinese mothers (Amy Tan) or Chippewa grandmothers (Louise Erdrich); a fictional freedwoman conversing with the spirit of the daughter she killed to save her from slavery (Toni Morrison). The darkness of these novels is not a political darkness, banishable by the enlightenment of contemporary critical theory; it’s the darkness of sorrows that have no easy cure.

The current flourishing of novels by women and cultural minorities shows the chauvinism of judging the vitality of American letters by the fortunes of the traditional social novel. Indeed, it can be argued that the country’s literary culture is healthier for having disconnected from mainstream culture; that a universal “American” culture was little more than an instrument for the perpetuation of a white, male, heterosexual elite, and that its decline is the just desert of an exhausted tradition. (Joseph Heller’s depiction of women in Catch-22, for example, is so embarrassing that I hesitated to recommend the book to my students.) It’s possible that the American experience has become so sprawling and diffracted that no single “social novel,” a la Dickens or Stendhal, can ever hope to mirror it; perhaps ten novels from ten different cultural perspectives are required now.

Unfortunately, there’s also evidence that young writers today feel imprisoned by their ethnic or gender identities — discouraged from speaking across boundaries by a culture in which television has conditioned us to accept only the literal testimony of the Self. And the problem is aggravated when fiction writers take refuge in university creative-writing programs. Any given issue of the typical small literary magazine, edited by MFA candidates aware that the MFA candidates submitting manuscripts need to publish in order to obtain or hold on to teaching jobs, reliably contains variations on three generic short stories: “My Interesting Childhood,” “My Interesting Life in a College Town,” and “My Interesting Year Abroad.” ...

The value of Heath’s work, and the reason I’m citing her so liberally, is that she has bothered to study empirically what nobody else has, and that she has brought to bear on the problem of reading a vocabulary that is neutral enough to survive in our value-free cultural environment. Readers aren’t “better” or “healthier” or, conversely, “sicker” than nonreaders. We just happen to belong to a rather strange kind of community.

For Heath, a defining feature of “substantive works of fiction” is unpredictability. She arrived at this definition after discovering that most of the hundreds of serious readers she interviewed have had to deal, one way or another, with personal unpredictability. Therapists and ministers who counsel troubled people tend to read the hard stuff. So do people whose lives haven’t followed the course they were expected to: merchant-caste Koreans who don’t become merchants, ghetto kids who go to college, openly gay men from conservative families, and women whose lives have turned out to be radically different from their mothers’. This last group is particularly large. There are, today, millions of American women whose lives do not resemble the lives they might have projected from their mothers’, and all of them, in Heath’s model, are potentially susceptible to substantive fiction.

In her interviews, Heath uncovered a “wide unanimity” among serious readers that literature “‘makes me a better person.’” She hastened to assure me that, rather than straightening them out in a self-help way, “reading serious literature impinges on the embedded circumstances in people’s lives in such a way that they have to deal with them. And, in so dealing, they come to see themselves as deeper and more capable of handling their inability to have a totally predictable life.” Again and again, readers told Heath the same thing: “Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive—my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity. ‘Substance’ is more than ‘this weighty book.’ Reading that book gives me substance.” This substance, Heath adds, is most often transmitted verbally, and is felt to have permanence. “Which is why,” she said, “computers won’t do it for readers.”

With near-unanimity, Heath’s respondents described substantive works of fiction as, she said, “the only places where there was some civic, public hope of coming to grips with the ethical, philosophical and sociopolitical dimensions of life that were elsewhere treated so simplistically. From Agamemnon forward, for example, we’ve been having to deal with the conflict between loyalty to one’s family and loyalty to the state. And strong works of fiction are what refuse to give easy answers to the conflict, to paint things as black and white, good guys versus bad guys. They’re everything that pop psychology is not.”

“And religions themselves are substantive works of fiction,” I said.

She nodded. “This is precisely what readers are saying: that reading good fiction is like reading a particularly rich section of a religious text. What religion and good fiction have in common is that the answers aren’t there, there isn’t closure. The language of literary works gives forth something different with each reading. But unpredictability doesn’t mean total relativism. Instead it highlights the persistence with which writers keep coming back to fundamental problems. Your family versus your country, your wife versus your girlfriend.”

“Being alive versus having to die,” I said.

“Exactly,” Heath said. “Of course, there is a certain predictability to literature’s unpredictability. It’s the one thing that all substantive works have in common. And that predictability is what readers tell me they hang on to — a sense of having company in this great human enterprise.”

“A friend of mine keeps telling me that reading and writing are ultimately about loneliness. I’m starting to come around.”

“It’s about not being alone, yes,” Heath said, “but it’s also about not hearing that there’s no way out — no point to existence. The point is in the continuity, in the persistence of the great conflicts.”

Jonathan Franzen, “Why Bother?”

#litblr #literature #jonathan franzen #this ought to be required reading before getting on tumblr lol #reading #writing #shirley brice heath

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