Nanny Dearest

Woody Allen’s piece from Mere Anarchy references the smoky voiced narration of noir detective films and stories, notably of Sam Spade. The sarcasm is apparent from the opening lines that quote the radio program “The Shadow”. This was a program that little boys listened to and emulated in Cold War imaginations. He follows this with the language of the obsessively educated and excessively insecure. This language, which speaks of “crepuscular winter light of my progenitor’s gloomy digs” and is also a noir reference, not just a characterization of snobby Park Avenue types. By mixing words like “digs” with words that made me roll my eyes and keep a dictionary handy, Allen calls up the images of people stuck in seedy underbellies of society while mixing with the upper classes- gangsters, bored wayward women who get themselves in trouble, and people who run the back room politics of high society. “The woman’s usually steady timbre jiggled like quantum particles, and I could tell that she had gone back on smokes” shows that these people know about physics enough to toss it around in witticisms, but still have not cleansed themselves from the infamous smoke-filled rooms. He barely avoids calling his wife a broad or a dame when he mentions that he got a call from “the better half”- at one dehumanizing and ostensibly praising her, later, she takes it further and calls him ‘sugar’ and ‘lover boy’. (Which induces a shiver in some readers if their mental image is still of Woody Allen himself.) The juxtaposition of low dialogue, the silliness of nannies named after cheese products and French maids doing just what we think French maids do, and the distance-producing narrative filled with obscure references of the expository history of what came before, all add to the high-drama style of a detective story, and even ends with a murder gone awry. Yet Allen really does no detective work here, no back alleys are patrolled and no one turns out to be a dirty double crosser. Here, the style tells the story more than the story is able to, and indeed tells a different one, perhaps making up for the lack of substance in the actual events themselves.

The Secret Sharer

In Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, many parallels and opposite concepts are presented through parallel language. The most thematic of these may be the “strangeness” of the captain, a stranger in what is essentially his own home among his own people, and the familiarity he finds in a true stranger, his double. But I would rather look at the language of one of the first of these distinctions, the one between the stillness of the sea as described in the first few pages, and the storm as related by the fugitive. The captain describes the atmosphere as “very still in an immense stillness”, the ship floating in a vast expanse, and uses “solid, so still and stable” and “smoothly” to create the hiss of the silence. “There was not a sound in [the ship]”, and the hissing silence is “breathless” and in it “nothing lived”. This is a lifeless, lonely, static sea, as is the captain who observes it.

The words used in regard to the storm described by the fugitive are not so smooth and similar, they are instead jagged and violent, “furious”, “anxious”, “fierce”, and use verbs of direct action to emphasize the heightened situation, “rushed”, “gripped”, “running”, “yelling”, “shaking”. The language is conversational, “You understand the sort of weather”, “Terrific weather… terrific, I tell you”. The speaker exclaims repeated phrases in his distress, and speaks incomplete, abrupt sentences. In contrast to the eternally quiet breathless sea in the captain’s eyes, the storm of the fugitive can scream Murder and is alive so much that it, and the fugitive’s victim, can be killed. Life is only appreciated once death has become an option.

Discussions of Islam

Alright, so I succeeded in reading about half of the article by Mark Steyn until he started talking about “Injuns” and then I had enough. Complete with everything from racial and sexist stereotypes of Italians, Greeks, Native Americans, Germans and Muslims, to pandering faux-scientific formulas of age and youth, and every clichéd little trick in between, Steyn’s piece served to annoy the hell out of me and not really convince me of anything. He meanders from nation to nation, spinning half-fleshed out theories and wandering far from his core point: that, presumably, “The Future Belongs to Islam”.

The first paragraph did bode well for him in my opinion. He took a phrase indoctrinated into the mythos of September 11, 2001, “The day everything changed”, and in fact close-read it. The end of this passage sparked my annoyance, when he personified the metaphor of an iceberg, and had used that inhuman abstraction to “topple the Twin Towers.” Oh that’s cute, some alliteration as well. Toppled, like a children’s tower of blocks. Why doesn’t he write about Hitler’s Horrible Holocaust as well? The dead metaphors reviled by Orville appear, such as “dead as the dinosaurs”. Perhaps Steyn uses these for their comic, sarcastic effect; however, this detracts from his efforts to appear scientific in his methods and arguments.

Stephen Holmes’ review of “Infidel” By Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and “Murder in Amsterdam”, by Ian Buruma, is targeted towards an audience familiar with high style as well as political complexities. At least a portion of this audience is also able to buy and read two books on the same subject- a niche demographic who are interested in these specific events and debates, or the immaculately educated. Hirsi Ali, though presented as complex and questionable, is nevertheless compelling, and Holmes gives us her background in a narrative as dramatic as the plots of the books that Ali credits with inspiring her decision to run away.

Holmes basically presents three viewpoints here: Hirsi Ali’s, Buruma’s, and his own. In sentences such as, “Indeed, he worries, not unreasonably, that her version of the Enlightenment has been brazenly converted into a weapon of the racist right, which opportunistically paints its xenophobia with a veneer of universalism”, he represents all three, with his own snuck skillfully into the two words of “not unreasonably”. As a good critic, he stands out of the direct spotlight, but in closely examining his subjects the light must reflect onto him.

Montaigne

Montaigne does not avoid putting himself into his essay, yet in the first few sentences he keeps it more impersonal, talking about “a man” and “his soul”. Almost sounds like a straightforward philosophical piece. But then he gives up the act and throws all the “I”’s that he wants at you. Many teachers tell you to leave out the “I”’s and to at least disguise expression of what is your own opinion and not fact. In the first paragraph he tells us a good deal about himself and his present state, and we wonder where he is going. Does this lead to something, or is he like an old man on the bus who decides to tell you his life story out of loneliness or senility? But yet we still hang on, waiting for a reason.

Next he starts speaking in Latin. The crazy old man on the bus has just started singing some song from his youth that OF COURSE I don’t know, and it’s a little weird that he just started singing. His sentences are long, rambling, and running, leading us around and affording no chance for interruption, and definitely no opportunity for distraction or inattentiveness, lest we completely lose his train of thought. If you start counting his commas out of amazement at his shameless use of them, you will realize with a jolt that you have no idea why he’s talking about cob-nuts or whip tops, and before you know it he’s in Latin again.

Attentiveness pays off when his observations stick with us, “I had rather be a less while old than be old before I am really so.” Chiasmus strikes us in the head out of the rambling.

His long and explorative sentences show us that he can, indeed, talk forever, and is wise and well-lived enough to be able to sustain this, pulling knowledge and references from every corner. But it remains a batty sort of wisdom that is confident enough in itself as to not care about structures that would make it easier for a reader to follow.

Montaigne has proven that he’s worth hanging on and deciphering. I wish I could stay on for the whole bus ride, but unfortunately, my stop comes. The crazy old man doesn’t even mind, but just keep talking. In Latin.

Short pieces

I want to write about the Lydia Davis selection and get into some Meisner Technique, or remind myself of that joke about “Mississippi- how do you spell it? I-T” (or re: my last post, how do you spell bourgeoisie, yes I did it). I read these pages again then, because I told myself I shouldn’t blog about the Mississippi joke. And then I think I got it! (Not the joke, the theme of these selections.) Lights lights lights hoping to be liked the baby the baby the baby killed killed killed all the rabbits! (And it’s the first day of the month, so rabbit rabbit rabbit!) The do it with mirrors, with funny mirrors. And then you wonder what’s really reflected, repeated back at you. Raymond Carver’s baby mantra made me wonder how he could sit there chanting and humming about the baby while its screaming and he’s gonna hurt the baby!

These pieces are so short that theoretically I am torn between the advice stuck in my head about eliminating unnecessary words so why waste them on repetition, and the reasoning that its not wasting because if you only have a limited amount of space time and words to get your point across, then what better way than to say it over and over? I like the latter because I tend to like unnecessary words sometimes. But it’s not unnecessary if its necessary to say it twice.

Or more than twice.

Gimme a B! Gimme an O! Gimme a U! Gimme an R! ok thats enough...

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigor in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

I wanted to concentrate on this rather long passage because of the finger-pointing repetition of “The bourgeoisie”, and I believe that by the end of this post I’ll finally remember how to spell it. Not only does the first line of all of these paragraphs, but the insistent “it has pitilessly torn asunder”, “it has drowned out”, “it has substituted”, “it has converted”’s never let you forget who you are reading about, and forcibly keeps your eyes focused on them. It starts off with a single, understated, ominous sentence, followed by a severe outpouring, a torrent of indictments, that halfway through, claim to be able to be summed up in one word. The anger of this text is clear when that very one word of “exploitation” is almost immediately amended to “brutal exploitation” surrounded by numerous qualifiers.

The last paragraph of this passage lets go of the pointed accusatory style and starts to actually explain the workings of the bourgeoisie. All of a sudden it seems more reasonable and relaxed and less incendiary. The isocolon that begins the last sentence begins to sound like poetry, and we hear “at last” with a sigh of relief and a sibilant hiss, “last compelled to face with sober senses”. After the storm we are let down easy, with “sober senses”, faced with a calm statement confronting our predicament, our condition, and our kind.