December 2009 Archives
Snow falls gently, the sky grows light;
the town awakes like a yawning child.
I'm kind of a traditionalist so I followed the rules—17 syllables, a seasonal reference, and two juxtaposed parts. The cat was sitting on the piano a minute ago, watching the snow plows go by; now he's sitting on me. I'm letting him for the moment but I have to make another cup of tea and get about my business, because the town is waking up and I should too.
the town awakes like a yawning child.
I'm kind of a traditionalist so I followed the rules—17 syllables, a seasonal reference, and two juxtaposed parts. The cat was sitting on the piano a minute ago, watching the snow plows go by; now he's sitting on me. I'm letting him for the moment but I have to make another cup of tea and get about my business, because the town is waking up and I should too.
I might have mentioned we had a good snowstorm for these parts a week or so back, 15 inches of light, fluffy snow. The world was transformed: nothing but crystalline purity everywhere you looked. No hard edges, no darkness, nothing was old or worn or tawdry.
Then came a couple of days of heavy rain that wore most of that purity away. One murky morning I sat at the piano, looking out at the street, and there were just a few smears of snow here and there, like the slime that might be left if a giant slug oozed its way across town. They were flecked with dead leaves and stained with mud. It wasn't all that inspiring, to be honest.
And then the other morning, the sun came up in a clear sky, and I couldn't help noticing that one of those smears of snow from the other day was lit with a bright, hard-edged light, as if I might be looking at an island in the Aegean or the Arctic, with the sun rising on it, making dramatic highlights and shadows on the vast peaks and valleys. Can you see it? Not a strip of grass on a small-town sidewalk, but the sea, and not a raggedy remnant of a heavy snowfall, but a mountainous island, rising from the sea on a bright morning.
At least, that was how I was reacting to it. And I would hardly say there was any kind of point to that, like "It's all in how you look at things." That's really not always true. Many things are pretty much always good, and many pretty much always bad. In the middle, yes, there are things like remnants of plowed snow that could depress or inspire as your viewpoint dictates. But I'm not sure that the important thing is how you see it, all the time. Sometimes I think the main thing is to be looking and reacting, however you might, in the first place.
Then came a couple of days of heavy rain that wore most of that purity away. One murky morning I sat at the piano, looking out at the street, and there were just a few smears of snow here and there, like the slime that might be left if a giant slug oozed its way across town. They were flecked with dead leaves and stained with mud. It wasn't all that inspiring, to be honest.
And then the other morning, the sun came up in a clear sky, and I couldn't help noticing that one of those smears of snow from the other day was lit with a bright, hard-edged light, as if I might be looking at an island in the Aegean or the Arctic, with the sun rising on it, making dramatic highlights and shadows on the vast peaks and valleys. Can you see it? Not a strip of grass on a small-town sidewalk, but the sea, and not a raggedy remnant of a heavy snowfall, but a mountainous island, rising from the sea on a bright morning.
At least, that was how I was reacting to it. And I would hardly say there was any kind of point to that, like "It's all in how you look at things." That's really not always true. Many things are pretty much always good, and many pretty much always bad. In the middle, yes, there are things like remnants of plowed snow that could depress or inspire as your viewpoint dictates. But I'm not sure that the important thing is how you see it, all the time. Sometimes I think the main thing is to be looking and reacting, however you might, in the first place.
I can make a fairly short list of the things that I wanted to get this year that I didn't get. Trivial things, really. Upgraded models of computers and cameras and such, although I already have everything I need to get the job done. Trivial, as I say.
Here's what I have that I wanted and got:
Friends near and far, old and new.
Music, art, literature.
A beautiful world.
Progress on the things that matter.
A little cat who might have died two years ago but didn't, and will come downstairs any minute to jump on my lap and curl up in peaceful happiness.
I've known lots of rich people in my life. Millionaires, billionaires—all that. It must be nice to have so much money—if I did myself, I'd travel more, and have nicer things than I do. But you know what? Cross my heart and hope to die, the things I listed above, I wouldn't take any money for. You couldn't buy them from me no matter how much money you had. The cat is on my lap right now, purring, and I wouldn't sell him for any price. He's my cat, see? He belongs to me, and I belong to him. That's just how it is. If you understand that, well, then, Merry Christmas to you. The cat is purring. Music is playing. And I'm a rich man, in the ways that matter to me.
Here's what I have that I wanted and got:
Friends near and far, old and new.
Music, art, literature.
A beautiful world.
Progress on the things that matter.
A little cat who might have died two years ago but didn't, and will come downstairs any minute to jump on my lap and curl up in peaceful happiness.
I've known lots of rich people in my life. Millionaires, billionaires—all that. It must be nice to have so much money—if I did myself, I'd travel more, and have nicer things than I do. But you know what? Cross my heart and hope to die, the things I listed above, I wouldn't take any money for. You couldn't buy them from me no matter how much money you had. The cat is on my lap right now, purring, and I wouldn't sell him for any price. He's my cat, see? He belongs to me, and I belong to him. That's just how it is. If you understand that, well, then, Merry Christmas to you. The cat is purring. Music is playing. And I'm a rich man, in the ways that matter to me.
If I have a Christmas tradition, other than just feeling the holiday, the way you feel spring has arrived, it's watching Alastair Sim in the 1951 adaptation of A Christmas Carol titled Scrooge. Most films fail to do novels justice: there's much more in most novels than could ever be put on the screen, so you feel that a lot is missing. But the rare film does, in fact, not only do justice to the novel it is based on but actually takes it further, and this is one of those rare ones.
I've watched the film and read the book any number of times, and frankly, the film does a better, tighter, richer job of making Scrooge a person we can understand. For the most part, the book presents him as a nice young fellow who becomes avaricious, as if avarice were a sort of free-floating virus you could catch and be transformed by. I've read a lot of Dickens, and his people are mostly nice or naughty by nature. Scrooge has gone a long way down a bad road, but he's actually presented as sympathetic in any passage where his inner self is revealed.
With the Sim characterization, the story and the acting give us more. Scrooge becomes embittered for specific reasons—his father consigns him to a bleak boarding school because he blames him for his mother's death in childbirth. The father softens over the years, and Scooge's near-angelic sister Fan intercedes for him and gets him returned home. She herself dies in childbirth, and Scrooge is embittered and rejects his nephew because of it.
Scooge's fiancé eventually rejects him too—another angel, who loved him when they were both poor "and content to be so," but who realizes he now covets money and values it more than her love. Scrooge and his partner (in the legal, not the contemporary, sense) Marley increasingly turn to shady, underhanded, ruthless dealing with the world. For Scrooge, the motivation is clear: attachment is pain.
So far, so good. But the amazing thing that Alastair Sim does is to present us with a performance that's both a Dickensian caricature and a deeply insightful look into the psyche of a person in deep pain, afraid of connection and caring, who repels people because it's the path of least resistance. He's not simply mean and irascible—Sim could have stopped there, but no. Again and again, when confronted with something that might awaken his memories of how it felt to care about people, he reacts with a kind of squeamish distaste, the way neurotically inhibited people are conflicted about sex. There's a deeply submerged part of him that is drawn to other people, but he doesn't consciously remember, understand, or want that connection any more, and he reacts to the desire with an offputting, mistrustful scowl that reminds me of Richard Nixon.
In the end, of course, he's cured, he knows on which side the bread of his new life is buttered, he will rejoin the human race. But he's sadly aware that he has a long way to come back from. The manic glee of the Christmas morning scene is touching, even gleeful, but the awareness of how wrong he's been in most of his life is never far. His trepidation when he goes to his nephew's to see if the invitation to dinner still stands is the fulcrum of the entire film.
Let's give Dickens and the original version credit: he says at this juncture, "He passed the door a dozen times before he had the courage to go up and knock. But he made a dash and did it." Fair enough. But look at Scrooge when he approaches the door in this segment from the film. He's guilty, sad, and scared; he knows he may be courting a well-justified rejection from the only person in the world with a real connection to him. And it shows on his face, as a trace of the old scowl shows that he has not entirely lost the long-ingrained cowardly preference for sour solitude. And the snow of the London winter still sticks on his coat—coldness and warmth are metaphors in this story, and we see, literally, that Scrooge isn't yet free of his fears and pain. But a young maidservant welcomes him to the foyer, and encourages him with a smile as he hesitates by the door. The nephew greets him with hearty delight, and the nephew's wife rises, beaming with joy at how happy the uncle has made her husband. The piano player strikes up a polka, and guess what? The skinny-shanked old fellow can still caper about with the best of them.
The book is wonderful, and short enough to read in one quick sitting. But the film—sorry, Charles—the film from 1951 is better. Merry Christmas, gang, and whatever gods may be, I hope they will bless us, every one.
I've watched the film and read the book any number of times, and frankly, the film does a better, tighter, richer job of making Scrooge a person we can understand. For the most part, the book presents him as a nice young fellow who becomes avaricious, as if avarice were a sort of free-floating virus you could catch and be transformed by. I've read a lot of Dickens, and his people are mostly nice or naughty by nature. Scrooge has gone a long way down a bad road, but he's actually presented as sympathetic in any passage where his inner self is revealed.
With the Sim characterization, the story and the acting give us more. Scrooge becomes embittered for specific reasons—his father consigns him to a bleak boarding school because he blames him for his mother's death in childbirth. The father softens over the years, and Scooge's near-angelic sister Fan intercedes for him and gets him returned home. She herself dies in childbirth, and Scrooge is embittered and rejects his nephew because of it.
Scooge's fiancé eventually rejects him too—another angel, who loved him when they were both poor "and content to be so," but who realizes he now covets money and values it more than her love. Scrooge and his partner (in the legal, not the contemporary, sense) Marley increasingly turn to shady, underhanded, ruthless dealing with the world. For Scrooge, the motivation is clear: attachment is pain.
So far, so good. But the amazing thing that Alastair Sim does is to present us with a performance that's both a Dickensian caricature and a deeply insightful look into the psyche of a person in deep pain, afraid of connection and caring, who repels people because it's the path of least resistance. He's not simply mean and irascible—Sim could have stopped there, but no. Again and again, when confronted with something that might awaken his memories of how it felt to care about people, he reacts with a kind of squeamish distaste, the way neurotically inhibited people are conflicted about sex. There's a deeply submerged part of him that is drawn to other people, but he doesn't consciously remember, understand, or want that connection any more, and he reacts to the desire with an offputting, mistrustful scowl that reminds me of Richard Nixon.
In the end, of course, he's cured, he knows on which side the bread of his new life is buttered, he will rejoin the human race. But he's sadly aware that he has a long way to come back from. The manic glee of the Christmas morning scene is touching, even gleeful, but the awareness of how wrong he's been in most of his life is never far. His trepidation when he goes to his nephew's to see if the invitation to dinner still stands is the fulcrum of the entire film.
Let's give Dickens and the original version credit: he says at this juncture, "He passed the door a dozen times before he had the courage to go up and knock. But he made a dash and did it." Fair enough. But look at Scrooge when he approaches the door in this segment from the film. He's guilty, sad, and scared; he knows he may be courting a well-justified rejection from the only person in the world with a real connection to him. And it shows on his face, as a trace of the old scowl shows that he has not entirely lost the long-ingrained cowardly preference for sour solitude. And the snow of the London winter still sticks on his coat—coldness and warmth are metaphors in this story, and we see, literally, that Scrooge isn't yet free of his fears and pain. But a young maidservant welcomes him to the foyer, and encourages him with a smile as he hesitates by the door. The nephew greets him with hearty delight, and the nephew's wife rises, beaming with joy at how happy the uncle has made her husband. The piano player strikes up a polka, and guess what? The skinny-shanked old fellow can still caper about with the best of them.
The book is wonderful, and short enough to read in one quick sitting. But the film—sorry, Charles—the film from 1951 is better. Merry Christmas, gang, and whatever gods may be, I hope they will bless us, every one.
A couple of weeks ago, I noticed a fringe of frost in my frost-free freezer. Concerning, yes, but not an obvious situation until a few days later, when the bacon in the fresh-food compartment—you know, the big one—in my refrigerator felt wigglier than it should have. I felt around and the walls felt warm. So I got a thermometer, and found that the temperature in that compartment was about 60 F. when it should have been 40.
Damn.
A refrigerator should not be a cool fall day inside its fresh-food compartment when it ought to be a warmish winter day. I had nightmare visions of new refrigerators costing hundreds of dollars and, far worse, the hassle of arranging for the new refrigerator to arrive. Somehow, they've got it arranged so that spending hundreds of dollars doesn't put you in the driver's seat. No, it makes you a supplicant—they tell you when they'll be pleased to arrive, and it's in a huge swathe of the day, "between 10 and 4," that sort of thing. If you don't want your food to rot, you'll jolly well sit home and wait for them. Getting a repair person to your house is a similar hassle and you don't know what you'll have to pay. There are not many other options.
Every single one of my friends told me to get a new refrigerator. But something in me clung to hope. I didn't want to spend the money or the time. So I did some frantic googling, not knowing what exactly to hope for. I had no expectation of a Christmas miracle in which my refrigerator would be resurrected from the dead. But I fixed my own dryer a couple of years ago after it stopped getting hot, and I thought I would at least make an effort here. So, after a moderate amount of googling, I find instructions on replacing parts and a decision tree about what to replace in what situation. Fair enough. Then I get the model number of a plate in the warm and balmy fresh-food compartment and googled again. And what to my wondering eyes should appear but a page about how this particular model of Kenmore Coldspot tends to do this thing where it dribbles water under the vegetable bins. And I thought, *my* refrigerator does that exact thing! And it turned out it does that because some condensation drainage thingy gets clogged with ice. Eventually it conks out the fresh-food bit. This guy told you how to basically strip everything down to expose the clogged area and unfreeze it with a blow-dryer.
I had no blow dryer. But I did have an idea. We were expecting a 36-hour cold snap where the outdoor temperature wouldn't go above freezing. So I put all my frozen food, all the spaghetti sauce from that summer's tomatoes, the venison donated by hunter friends, and just regular food that I didn't want to lose and I put it all in the shed out back. Then I pulled the refrigerator out of its little alcove, unplugged it, propped the doors open, and waited.
The next afternoon, there was a bunch of water in the bottom of the refrigerator. The water, I assumed and hoped, came from the drain, like the guy said. I mopped it up and turned the refrigerator back on with faith in my heart. An hour or two later, the temperature in the fresh-food compartment had fallen to 40 F. and stayed there, right where it ought to have been. The temperature in the freezer was freezing. It was like the refrigerator, in a coma two days before, was now sitting up in its bed and joking with the nurses. A miracle recovery, in other words.
That was a week or so ago, and I'm still marveling. To be sure, a refrigerator is not the same as a pet, or a friend, or a family member or other creature you care about. But the imminent death of an appliance is still a bona fide problem. It's especially a problem if you don't enjoy wasting money or having burly strangers wrestle large objects in and out of your house. And to solve any substantial problem simply by an act of unpluggage—well, it's something, isn't it? It's quite rare. It's not the same order of miracle as nature reawakening each spring, or a comatose person sitting up one day and asking what happened, completely recovered. I think we feel a certain reverence and awe when things like that happen, like we've seen a miracle occur. I know a refrigerator is a mere mechanical object. But everyone wrote it off, and with a day's rest it was perfectly cured. Rationally, I know it's simple luck that someone suggested thawing as a solution, and it worked. But just a little, it feels like a mini-miracle, something to shake your head over, like when a nickel falls on its edge and stays upright. Is it wrong and bad to think your refrigerator was cured by a miracle, a tiny little one anyway, if that's how you happen to feel?
Damn.
A refrigerator should not be a cool fall day inside its fresh-food compartment when it ought to be a warmish winter day. I had nightmare visions of new refrigerators costing hundreds of dollars and, far worse, the hassle of arranging for the new refrigerator to arrive. Somehow, they've got it arranged so that spending hundreds of dollars doesn't put you in the driver's seat. No, it makes you a supplicant—they tell you when they'll be pleased to arrive, and it's in a huge swathe of the day, "between 10 and 4," that sort of thing. If you don't want your food to rot, you'll jolly well sit home and wait for them. Getting a repair person to your house is a similar hassle and you don't know what you'll have to pay. There are not many other options.
Every single one of my friends told me to get a new refrigerator. But something in me clung to hope. I didn't want to spend the money or the time. So I did some frantic googling, not knowing what exactly to hope for. I had no expectation of a Christmas miracle in which my refrigerator would be resurrected from the dead. But I fixed my own dryer a couple of years ago after it stopped getting hot, and I thought I would at least make an effort here. So, after a moderate amount of googling, I find instructions on replacing parts and a decision tree about what to replace in what situation. Fair enough. Then I get the model number of a plate in the warm and balmy fresh-food compartment and googled again. And what to my wondering eyes should appear but a page about how this particular model of Kenmore Coldspot tends to do this thing where it dribbles water under the vegetable bins. And I thought, *my* refrigerator does that exact thing! And it turned out it does that because some condensation drainage thingy gets clogged with ice. Eventually it conks out the fresh-food bit. This guy told you how to basically strip everything down to expose the clogged area and unfreeze it with a blow-dryer.
I had no blow dryer. But I did have an idea. We were expecting a 36-hour cold snap where the outdoor temperature wouldn't go above freezing. So I put all my frozen food, all the spaghetti sauce from that summer's tomatoes, the venison donated by hunter friends, and just regular food that I didn't want to lose and I put it all in the shed out back. Then I pulled the refrigerator out of its little alcove, unplugged it, propped the doors open, and waited.
The next afternoon, there was a bunch of water in the bottom of the refrigerator. The water, I assumed and hoped, came from the drain, like the guy said. I mopped it up and turned the refrigerator back on with faith in my heart. An hour or two later, the temperature in the fresh-food compartment had fallen to 40 F. and stayed there, right where it ought to have been. The temperature in the freezer was freezing. It was like the refrigerator, in a coma two days before, was now sitting up in its bed and joking with the nurses. A miracle recovery, in other words.
That was a week or so ago, and I'm still marveling. To be sure, a refrigerator is not the same as a pet, or a friend, or a family member or other creature you care about. But the imminent death of an appliance is still a bona fide problem. It's especially a problem if you don't enjoy wasting money or having burly strangers wrestle large objects in and out of your house. And to solve any substantial problem simply by an act of unpluggage—well, it's something, isn't it? It's quite rare. It's not the same order of miracle as nature reawakening each spring, or a comatose person sitting up one day and asking what happened, completely recovered. I think we feel a certain reverence and awe when things like that happen, like we've seen a miracle occur. I know a refrigerator is a mere mechanical object. But everyone wrote it off, and with a day's rest it was perfectly cured. Rationally, I know it's simple luck that someone suggested thawing as a solution, and it worked. But just a little, it feels like a mini-miracle, something to shake your head over, like when a nickel falls on its edge and stays upright. Is it wrong and bad to think your refrigerator was cured by a miracle, a tiny little one anyway, if that's how you happen to feel?
I totally missed the solstice today. It was at 12:47 p.m., but I didn't know that—all I knew was that lunchtime had come so I warmed up some soup and ate it. The solstice as an event just doesn't do much for me. Some people think it's a time of mystical revelation, and they make a big deal out of it. Me, I'm not going to make a big deal out of it. It's the first day of winter, there's 15 inches of snow on the ground, and the only thing I'm going to make right now is more soup.
One of the leaders of this writers group I belong to is a very upbeat, cheerful person, and she suggested the other day that we get together and go caroling for Christmas. I thought that was kind of fun- and charming-sounding, so I agreed, and even offered to play this little portable keyboard that I have. You blow into it, so you can't sing while you're playing it, and I figured the music would add to the caroling and myself not singing would add even more.
But when it came down to who's going to show up and who's driving and all the actual decisions, I started thinking. It's going to be a busy weekend anyway, and beyond that I honestly just didn't feel like caroling. I put myself in the position of the carolee, instead of the caroler. Here you are, just relaxing in your house, reading a book, talking to the cat, killing space aliens on your computer, whatever, and suddenly there's a knock on your door and you say "What th-" and get up to answer it and here's this group standing there and they start singing. Perhaps you're charmed, or perhaps you're annoyed and stand there with a strained smile, pretending to be charmed, or perhaps you set the dogs on them or whatever. The point is, it's kind of like when strolling accordionists take aim at your table, or a mime walks up on the sidewalk and starts getting all mimey on you: something is being done to you that you didn't ask for.
I think we should use the consenting-adult standard here. Some people like having hot wax poured on them, but I'm personally one of the majority who doesn't actually see the point, and if you poured hot wax on me, thinking I would like it, you'd be making a mistake. And maybe music is the same way. A couple of groups of people were singing Christmas songs on the street in town here here during the last townwide arts stroll, but they stood still, and you could get away from them if you wanted. That was fine. They didn't come clumping onto my porch and knock on the door, and I appreciated that.
Caroling is a nice tradition, and makes an excellent image for Christmas cards, but maybe things would be even nicer if we first asked people if they wanted to be caroled at, and left them in peace of an evening if we didn't know one way or the other. Maybe one good way to love thy neighbors is to keep your charming, musical, tradition-minded self the hell off their porches if you haven't been invited? Well, that's how I feel about it, at any rate.
This non-caroling decision gives me a warm feeling, actually. In my mind I can see literally billions of porches around the world, still and peaceful in the starry night. And I'm not there, in an overcoat, getting ready to knock on the door. And thus the peace and tranquility will endure, and the occupants within pass their evening just as they intended and wished, all because I gave it some thought, searched my heart, and decided, in the end, that I cared enough not to carol.
But when it came down to who's going to show up and who's driving and all the actual decisions, I started thinking. It's going to be a busy weekend anyway, and beyond that I honestly just didn't feel like caroling. I put myself in the position of the carolee, instead of the caroler. Here you are, just relaxing in your house, reading a book, talking to the cat, killing space aliens on your computer, whatever, and suddenly there's a knock on your door and you say "What th-" and get up to answer it and here's this group standing there and they start singing. Perhaps you're charmed, or perhaps you're annoyed and stand there with a strained smile, pretending to be charmed, or perhaps you set the dogs on them or whatever. The point is, it's kind of like when strolling accordionists take aim at your table, or a mime walks up on the sidewalk and starts getting all mimey on you: something is being done to you that you didn't ask for.
I think we should use the consenting-adult standard here. Some people like having hot wax poured on them, but I'm personally one of the majority who doesn't actually see the point, and if you poured hot wax on me, thinking I would like it, you'd be making a mistake. And maybe music is the same way. A couple of groups of people were singing Christmas songs on the street in town here here during the last townwide arts stroll, but they stood still, and you could get away from them if you wanted. That was fine. They didn't come clumping onto my porch and knock on the door, and I appreciated that.
Caroling is a nice tradition, and makes an excellent image for Christmas cards, but maybe things would be even nicer if we first asked people if they wanted to be caroled at, and left them in peace of an evening if we didn't know one way or the other. Maybe one good way to love thy neighbors is to keep your charming, musical, tradition-minded self the hell off their porches if you haven't been invited? Well, that's how I feel about it, at any rate.
This non-caroling decision gives me a warm feeling, actually. In my mind I can see literally billions of porches around the world, still and peaceful in the starry night. And I'm not there, in an overcoat, getting ready to knock on the door. And thus the peace and tranquility will endure, and the occupants within pass their evening just as they intended and wished, all because I gave it some thought, searched my heart, and decided, in the end, that I cared enough not to carol.
I have a long, still-unwritten post about the fascinating subject of my refrigerator that I'm procrastinating on. So while I muster the energy to do that, here's another quick list of pet writing peeves, things that make me wince when I see them used in copy:
On Steroids: This was really kind of tired the first time it was used to mean something that looks like something else but bigger. There are so many ways to say that one thing is bigger than another. Do we really need to keep flogging this particular phrase?
The New Black: This is, or was, a trendy way to say "trendy." I suggest saving the keystrokes and just saying "trendy."
X is the new X-10 You've heard this one—fifty is the new forty, and so on. But nothing has changed, it's pretty much the way it's always been—some people age very gracefully, others hit a wall early, and the rest of us tend to look, and act, our age. An acquaintance of mine was sitting around once with friends, and the subject of looking one's age came up. The whole group averred that they did not, themselves, look their age. The acquaintance, who was and is extremely bright and amusing but not always equally tactful, became impatient with the implications of this. "That's crazy!" she said. "Somebody has to look their age! You!" she said, pointing at one friend. "You look your age!" But she might as well have pointed at all of us. Strive to be vibrant, by all means. But except for a very lucky few, your age is pretty much your age, and magazine articles fishing for overoptimistic readers by claiming otherwise won't change it. Wish it did, but no.
In Specific: The opposite of the phrase "in general" is "in particular." You hear "in specific" fairly often—I just read it in something by the best living journalist on the planet (that would be James Fallows). But saying things like "Wombats in general, and this wombat in specific," always sounds to me like a clinker in a piano piece. "This wombat in particular" just sounds better.
Food Faux Pas: Why is it that people drinking wine at a social occasion are always described as "sipping" it? The term gets overused and sounds a little precious, like they're butterflies gathering nectar. All sorts of people drink wine, and not always in a decorous manner, so if the occasion was ritzy, there just have to be other ways to get that idea across. At least let the attendees actually drink the wine, occasionally, or just hold the glasses in their hands if they feel like it. They can't spend the whole evening sipping. The same for "munching" hors d'oeuvres. They're human beings, not rodents. Munching implies continuous and often audible jaw motion. If you're blasting through a piece of writing and not thinking hard about it, you might feel it adds a touch of breeziness to say "munching," but it's been worn out for decades now and breeziness is overrated. Last and least: "veggies." I have many dear friends who use this term, but it always sounded like baby talk to me and I can't be the only person who feels that way. Why? Why why why? Why say veggies? How does that make life better? Let us put away childish things and not say "veggies."
Enter: As a way to introduce a new, situation-changing element in a story, this has one advantage—brevity—and a whole bunch of drawbacks. "Waterloo Falls had always been a sleepy Midwestern town." (Add two or three proofs of its sleepiness.) Then the next paragraph begins like this: "Enter Franz McGillicuddy." This is a breezy and kind of lazy way to say that Franz is going to shake the town up. But it interrupts the flow of the story—it makes us about a million times too aware of the writer's stage-managing the events in the piece, since it literally is a stage direction. If you're not writing a play, I think it's best that things not enter that way. Let Franz show up in town in some normal manner.
The Kind of Small-Town America That Doesn't Exist Any More: Speaking of so-called "sleepy" towns, I've read this confident assertion many times over the years, and once is too many. Yeah yeah yeah, postwar demographic trends, all that. But as it stands, the statement is a bit sweeping. It gives the impression to people who mostly live in cities and their suburbs that all of the nation's smaller communities are abandoned, shutters banging, doors hanging off hinges and such like those ghost towns in the California gold country. I assure you, Urban Writer People, that small towns still exist. I live in one, and so do people of all ages including those of the young persuasion. I've been to about a million others. I have a friend who actually moved, Urban Writer People, from suburban Philadelphia to a town in Montana called Hamilton. Hamilton literally has one stoplight. There's a trout river right there, and mountains in the windows. It's peaceful, if chilly in the winter. My friend likes it there a lot. He's a jazz-guitar-playing science dude, by the way, just to swirl a swizzle stick in your stereotypes for you. There's a small division of GlaxoSmithKline near Hamilton, and a job opened up and he jumped at it. At any rate, when someone says small-town America doesn't exist any more, I turn the page and find somebody to read who gives evidence of getting out of the city now and then and getting the facts. There are kajillions of small towns still in this country, and the reports of their nonexistence have been greatly exaggerated.
Well! That'll do for today. Until next time, strive to your utmost to write good and so will I.
On Steroids: This was really kind of tired the first time it was used to mean something that looks like something else but bigger. There are so many ways to say that one thing is bigger than another. Do we really need to keep flogging this particular phrase?
The New Black: This is, or was, a trendy way to say "trendy." I suggest saving the keystrokes and just saying "trendy."
X is the new X-10 You've heard this one—fifty is the new forty, and so on. But nothing has changed, it's pretty much the way it's always been—some people age very gracefully, others hit a wall early, and the rest of us tend to look, and act, our age. An acquaintance of mine was sitting around once with friends, and the subject of looking one's age came up. The whole group averred that they did not, themselves, look their age. The acquaintance, who was and is extremely bright and amusing but not always equally tactful, became impatient with the implications of this. "That's crazy!" she said. "Somebody has to look their age! You!" she said, pointing at one friend. "You look your age!" But she might as well have pointed at all of us. Strive to be vibrant, by all means. But except for a very lucky few, your age is pretty much your age, and magazine articles fishing for overoptimistic readers by claiming otherwise won't change it. Wish it did, but no.
In Specific: The opposite of the phrase "in general" is "in particular." You hear "in specific" fairly often—I just read it in something by the best living journalist on the planet (that would be James Fallows). But saying things like "Wombats in general, and this wombat in specific," always sounds to me like a clinker in a piano piece. "This wombat in particular" just sounds better.
Food Faux Pas: Why is it that people drinking wine at a social occasion are always described as "sipping" it? The term gets overused and sounds a little precious, like they're butterflies gathering nectar. All sorts of people drink wine, and not always in a decorous manner, so if the occasion was ritzy, there just have to be other ways to get that idea across. At least let the attendees actually drink the wine, occasionally, or just hold the glasses in their hands if they feel like it. They can't spend the whole evening sipping. The same for "munching" hors d'oeuvres. They're human beings, not rodents. Munching implies continuous and often audible jaw motion. If you're blasting through a piece of writing and not thinking hard about it, you might feel it adds a touch of breeziness to say "munching," but it's been worn out for decades now and breeziness is overrated. Last and least: "veggies." I have many dear friends who use this term, but it always sounded like baby talk to me and I can't be the only person who feels that way. Why? Why why why? Why say veggies? How does that make life better? Let us put away childish things and not say "veggies."
Enter: As a way to introduce a new, situation-changing element in a story, this has one advantage—brevity—and a whole bunch of drawbacks. "Waterloo Falls had always been a sleepy Midwestern town." (Add two or three proofs of its sleepiness.) Then the next paragraph begins like this: "Enter Franz McGillicuddy." This is a breezy and kind of lazy way to say that Franz is going to shake the town up. But it interrupts the flow of the story—it makes us about a million times too aware of the writer's stage-managing the events in the piece, since it literally is a stage direction. If you're not writing a play, I think it's best that things not enter that way. Let Franz show up in town in some normal manner.
The Kind of Small-Town America That Doesn't Exist Any More: Speaking of so-called "sleepy" towns, I've read this confident assertion many times over the years, and once is too many. Yeah yeah yeah, postwar demographic trends, all that. But as it stands, the statement is a bit sweeping. It gives the impression to people who mostly live in cities and their suburbs that all of the nation's smaller communities are abandoned, shutters banging, doors hanging off hinges and such like those ghost towns in the California gold country. I assure you, Urban Writer People, that small towns still exist. I live in one, and so do people of all ages including those of the young persuasion. I've been to about a million others. I have a friend who actually moved, Urban Writer People, from suburban Philadelphia to a town in Montana called Hamilton. Hamilton literally has one stoplight. There's a trout river right there, and mountains in the windows. It's peaceful, if chilly in the winter. My friend likes it there a lot. He's a jazz-guitar-playing science dude, by the way, just to swirl a swizzle stick in your stereotypes for you. There's a small division of GlaxoSmithKline near Hamilton, and a job opened up and he jumped at it. At any rate, when someone says small-town America doesn't exist any more, I turn the page and find somebody to read who gives evidence of getting out of the city now and then and getting the facts. There are kajillions of small towns still in this country, and the reports of their nonexistence have been greatly exaggerated.
Well! That'll do for today. Until next time, strive to your utmost to write good and so will I.
It's fun to think about criminals who are cunning and bold, the kind who can foil security systems and make off with the precious metals and jewelry, art, what have you. Actually I wish they would leave the art alone, but still, you're talking skills here.
And then there are the people who steal corpses. If you want to make money or demonstrate some political point or achieve any goal and you can't think of a better way to do it than stealing a body, then I think you're someone who just doesn't have what it takes to be a constructive person. People who do it should be locked up in rockets and shot the hell off into space. I hope I've made myself clear about this.
And then there are the people who steal corpses. If you want to make money or demonstrate some political point or achieve any goal and you can't think of a better way to do it than stealing a body, then I think you're someone who just doesn't have what it takes to be a constructive person. People who do it should be locked up in rockets and shot the hell off into space. I hope I've made myself clear about this.
I was out earlier with the Sierra Club people I volunteer with for our annual holiday dinner at this Vietnamese restaurant in Philadelphia. We all have our holiday traditions, right? It's awesome, if you're within striking distance, go. So anyway, the subject of the holidays comes up, as it will when the holidays are two weeks away, and this one fellow of Teutonic persuasion mentioned that he gives everyone he knows a very traditional gift: a bowl of oranges and nuts. And I was struck by that, thought it was charming. Sure, you could give a person a car, or real estate, or some special thing the person would not give to him- or herself. But most people in developed countries have everything they could ever possibly need and way too much more. On the other hand, a bowl of oranges and nuts—well, it's all there, isn't it? Tradition, by all means. And opulence—oranges are among the most delicious things on the planet, and so are nuts, in a different way. Both are a little special—not staples, not ordinary. And yet in our world today, they're not exactly luxuries either. They're a treat, I suppose you could say. At any rate, I was struck for a moment by the charm of the idea. Let's put it this way: I would like, at least in my imagination, to give a bowl of oranges and nuts to everyone I've ever cared about. A little something extra in your life, to please you, because you deserve it. I'm not Santa, and can't give you a bagful of presents, everything you've ever wished for. But I'm well aware that you're more nice than naughty, and the imaginary oranges and nuts are sincerely offered in gratitude for your awesomeness. I wish I had more to give. But the peeled and sectioned orange, so piquant and juicy, the cracked nut, so rich and savory—I want that for you, my friends. Hearth and home, life and love, oranges and nuts, the so-called simple pleasures. For some reason, on this bitterly cold, starlit night, I'm thinking about my true friends in this wide world, and wishing all that for you. Oranges and nuts, and all the rest.
This has become a regular feature by now: things that make me suspect that despite what some say, the Fifties in the United States was not necessarily or exclusively a time when everyone conformed slavishly to the blandest stereotypes we imagine today. Case in point: Little Richard Penniman.
He was raised by churchgoing people but his father was a bootlegger. His music came straight from African American gospel roots, and one of his favorite singers was Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a unique performer if there ever was one. He began making "jump blues" records in 1951. He recorded "Tutti Frutti" in 1955, after changing the impromptu lyrics that originally went, "Tutti Frutti, good booty," and it went to the top of the R&B charts. He made sixteen more hit singles in three years, and appeared in three films. He was huge, in a word. People went insane at his concerts, and had to be held back from throwing themselves off balconies. Women threw their underwear at him.
In the Fifties, don't forget.
Personally he had wild parties and bisexual orgies and then gave it up and became a preacher, and he's kind of been shuttling back and forth between God and the devil, or at least the devil's music, ever since. At his height, performers ranging from Elvis Presley to Pat Boone, of all people, covered his tunes—a form of conforming, you might say, but it was the crazy guy that everyone wanted to conform to. Was there anyone who influenced rock music more? Hard to say. But he was huge. Once in the Sixties, he toured England and his opening act was The Beatles. He hired Jimi Hendrix as a guitarist. And I hate to keep harping on this, but he was really one of the biggest names in show business ever. He was so big that it seems inevitable at this late date, and maybe we fail to see how improbable it was that this bundle of seething contradictions from way over on the wrong side of the tracks became a superstar in 1955 and had bisexual orgies and wore eyeliner. Where is music as orgiastic and bacchanalian coming from today, I'd like to know? Now that we're not such conformists any more?
He was raised by churchgoing people but his father was a bootlegger. His music came straight from African American gospel roots, and one of his favorite singers was Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a unique performer if there ever was one. He began making "jump blues" records in 1951. He recorded "Tutti Frutti" in 1955, after changing the impromptu lyrics that originally went, "Tutti Frutti, good booty," and it went to the top of the R&B charts. He made sixteen more hit singles in three years, and appeared in three films. He was huge, in a word. People went insane at his concerts, and had to be held back from throwing themselves off balconies. Women threw their underwear at him.
In the Fifties, don't forget.
Personally he had wild parties and bisexual orgies and then gave it up and became a preacher, and he's kind of been shuttling back and forth between God and the devil, or at least the devil's music, ever since. At his height, performers ranging from Elvis Presley to Pat Boone, of all people, covered his tunes—a form of conforming, you might say, but it was the crazy guy that everyone wanted to conform to. Was there anyone who influenced rock music more? Hard to say. But he was huge. Once in the Sixties, he toured England and his opening act was The Beatles. He hired Jimi Hendrix as a guitarist. And I hate to keep harping on this, but he was really one of the biggest names in show business ever. He was so big that it seems inevitable at this late date, and maybe we fail to see how improbable it was that this bundle of seething contradictions from way over on the wrong side of the tracks became a superstar in 1955 and had bisexual orgies and wore eyeliner. Where is music as orgiastic and bacchanalian coming from today, I'd like to know? Now that we're not such conformists any more?
Only an inch or so, but it's been swirling all day, and making me happy. Snow does that to me, and I don't know why. I've loved falling snow, actually, as long as I can remember. If you like a thing, it can be relatively easy to list the reasons why. But love? Much more challenging. Why do you love one person, and only like another? Can you say, with any degree of acuity? And why do you love the falling snow, or the greens and blues of tropic water, or the way horses look when they're running across a field, or, well—whatever it is you love? Liking and loving are different animals, and you have to respect the mystery of the latter. But I love the falling snow, I know that much.
A couple of pet peeves regarding word usage I'd like to mention. (Claps hands like coach.) Come on, now people, let's get this right!
Misnomer: It's a name that's wrong, not something wrong in itself. Nine times out of ten, when people say misnomer they mean misconception, and that's what they ought to say.
Quash: It's an awfully nice and useful word that means to suppress or extinguish. You don't squash a rumor; you quash a rumor. You squash a grape. Please—let's not say squash when we mean quash.
Misnomer: It's a name that's wrong, not something wrong in itself. Nine times out of ten, when people say misnomer they mean misconception, and that's what they ought to say.
Quash: It's an awfully nice and useful word that means to suppress or extinguish. You don't squash a rumor; you quash a rumor. You squash a grape. Please—let's not say squash when we mean quash.
