10.8.2021 – relentless, grotesque

relentless, grotesque
debasement of language
search for type of grace

Came across this quote the other day:

And I began to wonder if just the decision to be free on his own terms isn’t, in itself, defiantly political. And I wonder if his search for some type of grace – and his celebration of beauty where he can find it – is not also deeply political. Particularly now, and at the time when we were making this film, when in the US there was this relentless, grotesque debasement of language, of thinking, of journalism, specifically of writers. I wonder if the celebration of those things is not, in some ways, a manning of the barricades in and of itself. Maybe it’s one of the most powerful things we can do, when faced with as much vulgarity as we’ve been faced with in the last few years.

It is a quote from the actor, Jeffrey Wright.

Mr. Wright was commenting on the role he plays in the upcoming movie, “The French Dispatch.“

The movie is reported to be a look at the workings of the New Yorker Magazine in the 1930’s.

(I am really looking forward to this movie.)

Mr. Wright plays a character modeled after writer James Baldwin.

James Baldwin is the HIS in the above quote, ‘free on HIS own terms.’

I have so many thoughts about this movie and the people in it and Mr. Baldwin and everything else that there may be 10 or 20 posts for this quote.

But for today it is the thought on language that I want to focus on.

Today makes the 1st anniversary of the day I ended my 20 year career in television news.

In the world of Journalism I was a technician who worked to make the news available online.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t care about the content.

I wanted GOOD stories and more than that, I wanted them written well.

Often I felt I was a lone voice in the overwhelming babble of words spilling out of news rooms.

I will long remember talking to another staff member who came out of a meeting with a news director with a big smile.

“I just got this great tip!” he said, “SVO!”

SVO I said to myself.

LOL, IMHO, SMH but SVO?

So I asked,

SVO?

“SUBJECT, VERB, OBJECT!”, he replied.

Hours little I was still at my desk with tears coming down my cheeks.

Tears of pain, laughter and frustration all at once.

I think back to Professor Henry Higgins and why can’t we learn to speak.

I fought this battle for 20 years.

I totaled up nothing but losses year after year.

Not only was I fighting our education [sic] system.

I was fighting online news (FAST and FIRST) as well as the inventions of texting and tweeting and saying everything in 140 characters.

Spelling and grammar didn’t even make into the life boats.

The line of Mr. Wright’s that says “in the US there was this relentless, grotesque debasement of language.”

Was?

IS!

Often I love to reading someone’s writing just for the way it is written as much as what was written about.

Often I love to watch movies just to watch the acting in the movies as much as what the movie is about.

It is a craft.

I remember this story told by Winston Churchill.

I want to say it was John F. Kennedy who said (which means it was speech writer Ted Sorensen who wrote) that Churchill, “Armed the English Language and sent it into battle.”

Not to pick on JFK for using other writer’s stuff.

FDR is reported to listened to a speech of Mr. Churchill’s and said, “He is great. Find out who writes his stuff.”

Thinking about stuff got me to thinking about stuff.

Back in the day I worked at bookstore named Waldenbooks in North Kent Mall on the North End of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

After many years, I actually made it to being the store manager.

My dear friend Denise was the store manager at the Waldens in Woodland Mall on the south end of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The two malls were as different as the airports at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson and the one on Hilton Head Island.

One Christmas season I was told that to send someone on my staff out to the Woodland store to help out.

If you worked at North Kent Mall your biggest challenge might be staying awake to the end of your shift.

If you worked at Woodland Mall you had to be nuts.

Well, maybe you did not have to be, but it helped.

When I was told that I had to send some of my staff to Woodland, I had to tell my District Manager that I asked but no one on my staff would do it.

He then told me that I would be working at Woodland.

Which was okay with me.

Most folks will agree I WAS a bit nuts.

And after years in working in a mall retail bookstore I liked to think that I had developed a high level of customer service along with the ability to ‘read my audience.’

I had got to the point that I enjoyed the holiday rush.

Yes, I WAS nuts.

I could keep a line of customers moving, keep an eye on my staff and maintain an entertaining (well at least to me) course of continuous banter with the people in line.

I had an apt comment about the purchase, the season, the weather and the time of day.

It was like a long string of one liners that I could recycle over and over as the audience constantly changed.

I was able to involve the customer who was leaving, the customer currently being waited on and the next customer in line in a rolling show that lasted as long as my shift.

I was happy to take my show on the road and try it out on the Woodland Mall folks.

As I remember it the time I spent at Woodland Mall that Christmas was a lot of fun.

As I remember it, the staff at the Woodland Mall Waldenbooks had never worked with someone quite like me before and they were both amused and amazed at what I could get away with in my sales desk banter.

I clearly remember working with the manager, my friend Denise (who was a high level professional bookseller in her own right – as an accolade from me, they don’t come much higher) and we got to a lull.

We stepped back from the counter and she said something along the line that working with me was … an experience.

“You know what?’, I said, “I am using my best stuff and only the customers in line get to hear it.”

Denise looked at me for a second or two and started laughing and shaking her head.

“You,” she said, “are the only sales clerk I ever heard of with ‘STUFF’.”

But I digress.

Mr. Churchill was a lot of things, some acclaimed and some not.

For his writing, (Dear Winston, Thank you for your latest book. I have put it on the shelf with the others. Sincerely, King George V), I think there is universal admiration for his craft.

How did Mr. Churchill acquire this craft?

Mr. Churchill himself wrote that while in school at Harrow:

“being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys.

They all went on to learn Latin and Greek and splendid things like that.

But I was taught English.

We were considered such dunces that we could learn only English. Mr. Somervell — a most delightful man, to whom my debt is great — was charged with the duty of teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing — namely, to write mere English.

Teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing.

Namely, to write mere English.

QED.

*[SIC] used in this case with the meaning, ‘as it is understood‘. I adapted this from the student publications of The Georgia Institute of Technology who, to this day, embrace this usage in print with such terms as ‘The University [SIC] of Georgia‘

**Please honk if you get the wit here

*** … don’t worry of you don’t honk. Along with the debasement of language, I also mourn the decline of true wit in America. One of the last known uses of wit I am aware of concerns, to my dismay but giving credit where credit is due, the Michigan State University [SIC] Basketball Band. Back in the FAB FIVE era, Michigan’s Fab Five, depending on the story you read, was accused of ‘taking beer from a store without paying’ and ‘stealing beer’. The next time Michigan played at MSU, as the team ran out on the court, the MSU Basketball band played ‘Roll Out the Barrel’. To this day, I wonder who thought that one up for them.

10.6.2021 – from professional

from professional
discussion confused private
imperative task

Adapted from the book, The Architecture of Happiness (2009, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton, and the passage:

What is a beautiful building? To be modern is to experience this as an awkward and possibly unanswerable question, the very notion of beauty having come to seem like a concept doomed to ignite unfruitful and childish argument. How can anyone claim to know what is attractive? How can anyone adjudicate between the competing claims of different styles or defend a particular choice in the face of the contradictory tastes of others? The creation of beauty, once viewed as the central task of the architect, has quietly evaporated from serious professional discussion and retreated to a confused private imperative.

According the The New York Review of Books, this is “A perceptive, thoughtful, original, and richly illustrated exercise in the dramatic personification of buildings of all sorts.”

What I find irrestible in reading Mr. de Botton is his use of language.

I get the feeling that if you made a spread sheet of all the words, adverbs and adjectives used by Mr. de Botton, you just might find that he used each word just once.

Neat trick in writing a book.

If I knew how to do that, I would.

10.3.2021 – moral messages

moral messages
no power to be enforced
offer suggestions?

For some reason, with all the noise about bills and infrastructure and entitlements and progressives and what else you might have contributing to the static, William Magear Tweed has been on my mind.

Better know as ‘Boss’ Tweed, notable for being the “boss” of Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party political machine that played a major role in the politics of 19th-century New York City and State according to Wikipedia.

He is the feller who said, “As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?”

Offer suggestions?

Today’s haiku is adapted from the book, The Architecture of Happiness (2009, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton, and the passage:

Architecture may well possess moral messages; it simply has no power to enforce them. It offers suggestions instead of making laws. It invites, rather than orders, us to emulate its spirit and cannot prevent its own abuse.

According the The New York Review of Books, this is “A perceptive, thoughtful, original, and richly illustrated exercise in the dramatic personification of buildings of all sorts.”

What I find irrestible in reading Mr. de Botton is his use of language.

I get the feeling that if you made a spread sheet of all the words, adverbs and adjectives used by Mr. de Botton, you just might find that he used each word just once.

Neat trick in writing a book.

If I knew how to do that, I would.

10.2.2021 – sadness we would face

sadness we would face
left ourselves open beauty’s
many absences

Adapted from the book, The Architecture of Happiness (2009, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton, and the passage:

It is to prevent the possibility of permanent anguish that we can be led to shut our eyes to most of what is around us, for we are never far from damp stains and cracked ceilings, shattered cities and rusting dockyards. We can’t remain sensitive indefinitely to environments which we don’t have the means to alter for the good – and end up as conscious as we can afford to be. Echoing the attitude of Stoic philosophers or St Bernard around Lake Geneva, we may find ourselves arguing that, ultimately, it doesn’t much matter what buildings look like, what is on the ceiling or how the wall is treated – professions of detachment that stem not so much from an insensitivity to beauty as from a desire to deflect the sadness we would face if we left ourselves open to all of beauty’s many absences.

According the The New York Review of Books, this is “A perceptive, thoughtful, original, and richly illustrated exercise in the dramatic personification of buildings of all sorts.”

What I find irrestible in reading Mr. de Botton is his use of language.

I get the feeling that if you made a spread sheet of all the words, adverbs and adjectives used by Mr. de Botton, you just might find that he used each word just once.

Neat trick in writing a book.

If I knew how to do that, I would.

10.1.2021 – sense fragility

sense fragility
of achievement few such days
comes before the grief

Adapted from the book, A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary (2009, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton, and the passage:

Still, I recognised the fragility of the achievement behind the lounge. I sensed how relatively few such halcyon days there might be left before members of the small fraternity ensconced in its armchairs came to grief and its gilded ceilings cracked into ruin. Perhaps it had felt a bit like this on the terraces of Hadrian’s villa outside Rome on autumn Sunday evenings in the second century AD, as a blood-red sun set over the marble colonnades. One might have had a similar presentiment of catastrophe, looming in the form of the restless Germanic tribes lying in wait deep in the sombre pine forests of the Rhine Valley.

Part of the series of Haiku inspired by from A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary (2009, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton. I discovered this book entirely by accident. When searching for books online, I will use the term ‘collections’ and see what turns up. I figure that someone who has taken the time to gather together the etexts of any one author to create a collected works folder is enough for me to see what this author might be all about.

In this case I came across the writing of Alain de Botton. I enjoyed his use of language very much. Much of the words he strings together lend themselves to what I do.

As for his book, I recommend it very much though written in 2009, it misses the added layer of travel under covid but still the picture of the modern airport is worth the read.