And another

Here’s something I wrote in the dark night of the grammatical soul, from which I have since emerged, thankfully.  No more commas for me.

FULL STOP

When I was studying grammar, many years ago in school,

I studied very hard at it, to soak up every rule.

When the teacher wrote things down, I snapped them up like that,

I memorized them all, so I could have them pat.

But I did even more; I studied on my own;

I thought, this way, by following rules, my writing I would hone.

I didn’t want to be like all the other silly fools,

Who couldn’t write a sentence without breaking all the rules.

So I learned about the comma and the period (or full stop);

When I was writing English, I became a grammar cop.

But the rules are, oh, so tricky, and I need to feel assured;

So, now, I, stick, a, comma, after, every, single, word.

More poetry

Well, light verse perhaps.

This one I wrote soon after I started working for the Alma Mater Society at UBC, when I realized that different people pronounced Alma Mater differently.  Thinking I could resolve this inconsistency, I embarked on some research, only to discover that there was no resolving the problem.  The dictionaries record various pronunciations.

This poem was the result:

Does it Mater?

 Now, would you say that Alma Mater

                    Rhymes with “Later, alligator”?

                    Or should we seek a rhyme with otter

                    When pronouncing Alma Mater?

                    Or maybe choose a rhyme with chatter

                    For our dear old Alma Mater?

                    Chatter, otter, otter, ‘gator--

                    Which one rhymes with Alma Mater?

                    And is it “Al-muh” we should say?

                    Or maybe “Awl-muh” is the way.

                    The whole thing seems like quite a mess--

                    We’ll have to stick to A-M-S.

Busing

You get on the bus and look for a good seat.  Avoid the groups of people chatting together and the person on their cellphone.  If it’s at night, you’ll need the seats where there’s proper lighting.  Preferably find a seat at the end of a group of three, so if someone else gets on they can find a seat without having to sit beside you.  You want your space.

You also want quiet.  This is hard to find in this city now that the bus company has committed itself to assaulting the senses with dings and bells and, worst of all, stop announcements: “Next stop, Thunderbird Boulevard.”

Earplugs are useful, but only against non-verbal noise, that iPod playing music or the rattles and hums – well, not so good about the rattles, and not good at all blocking out voices.  The only solution is to ride only on express buses, where the stop announcements are blessedly few and far between.

Settled in, you open your book or your paper.  A book on the way in to work when you’re fresh.  The newspaper for after.  All around are people reading on electronic devices; you certainly use such devices, at least the older generation of them, the desktops and the like, but mobile ones, no.  You are behind the times, or it’s just your preference to stick to paper, or both.

You open your book; perhaps it is the French classic you’re reading for a French literature course.  Or a biography of Cyril Connolly for an article you’re writing.  You take out your pen and your paper notebook.  You’re old school on that too.  And you read and make notes.  You stop when a thought strikes you.  Perhaps you get an idea for a different sort of article altogether, an article on how you read and write while on the bus.

All the while you have your old-style black attaché case on your lap, serving as a sort of desk.  Emily Brontë used to have something like that.  You’re not really like Emily Brontë.  Or maybe you are.

Life is good.

On Aristotle

I mentioned Aristotle's Rhetoric yesterday and how out of character it seems because of its use of examples.  It's also out of character because of his moral stance, or should I say his lack of a moral stance.

Elsewhere in Aristotle, and I've read a lot of him now after ten years in this seminar, he is the careful pursuer after truth.  Not that he always succeeds in his pursuit, not that he's even going in the right direction all the time, but what you get in most of Aristotle is an exhaustive attempt to explain everything, from the reason Zeno is wrong about his paradoxes of movement to the way the senses operate.

(By the way, he is hilariously wrong about the senses.  Did you hear the one about Aristotle and the mirror?  But I digress.)

Wrong though he may be at times, elsewhere Aristotle is devoted to truth.  Not so in Rhetoric.  If you can win an argument via a falsehood, he says, go for it.  Now if I ever won an argument by a falsehood, I'd be very uncomfortable.  I'm very uncomfortable if I win an argument without resorting to falsehood.

What a responsibility, winning an argument.  Then you've changed someone's beliefs, and well, what if you were wrong?  Then they believe something wrong, and it's your fault.

I remember a colleague of mine years ago on the student newspaper we both worked at letting herself be convinced by me about some silly grammatical rule: don't say "snuck," say "sneaked," I said, or something like that.

Years later when she mentioned this, I just shrugged, and she was, like, "But Sheldon, you said ..."

Oh, well.

Examples

Today I read an interesting article on Hemingway, interesting eventually, that is, once it got past its opening obsession with examples.  Hemingway liked to use specific nouns, the writer of the article said, for example when talking about drink: for instance, he would never just say someone had a drink, it had to be a grappa or a cognac, a Cinzano or a chianti, a brandy, some vermouth, a … well, you get the idea.

On and on the article went, listing examples of the specific types of drinks Hemingway might refer to, and providing excerpts from his novels to show the examples.  Enough already, I thought; I get the point.

When I was teaching English, back in another century, the textbooks told me to tell the students to use examples.  And examples of course can be a fine thing.  I take part in an Aristotle seminar these days – fine man, Aristotle, even when I disagree with him, maybe especially when I disagree with him, but he can be cryptic at times.  What does he mean, I sometimes say?  If only he would give an example.

That’s when an example would be useful.  Or even two.  To elucidate, explain, make clear.  Not to hammer home the point that’s already crystal clear.  Not to prove something.

How deadly it is to try and prove something you already know.  I had to give up a master’s thesis once, because all it was going to be was a collection of evidence to prove what I already knew about Cromwell and the English Civil War.  How boring.  (Also disconcerting when it turned out I couldn’t find the evidence, and in fact found evidence disproving my theory; but my point is that even if all the evidence had been there, what a waste of time to just pile it up in support of something, letting it sit lifeless in a pile, not stimulating you to find new theories, just very carefully proving the simple point you began with.)

This is why I couldn’t stand the five-paragraph essay formula I was also supposed to teach.  I did draw the line there; one has to have some standards.  The five-paragraph formula is actually egregious for all sorts of reasons, but the one relevant here is that it asks the budding writer to frontload his thesis and then spend the rest of his essay proving it.  This formula unfortunately has infected a good deal of academic writing; every learned article these days begins by saying, “In this article I will demonstrate that blue cheese is blue,” or something like that, and I think, Well, if that’s all you’re going to do, why do I need to read past your thesis sentence?

I like to write essays and articles that don’t necessarily know where they’re going, like this one, for which I don’t seem to have an ending.  I could refer to Aristotle again, though, who in the section of his Rhetoric on using examples while making a speech actually provides examples.  Fitting, I suppose, but totally out of character.  So much so that the leader of our seminar said, This doesn’t sound like Aristotle at all.  It was certainly much clearer, and as I said, an example can be great to make things clear.  But please don’t burden us with long lists of them after you’ve made your point; go on to other things.

On Seinfeld

There are lots of things one could say about Seinfeld, but I want to pick up on my thoughts on the Treaty of Utrecht and pigeon-holing.

There was an episode in which Jerry was very upset that a girl he had just begun dating wore the same outfit on the first two dates.  He and George developed elaborate theories to account for this (perhaps the laundry cycles had just worked out a certain way, etc.), all in the hopes of proving her normal, so that she wouldn’t have to be discarded as a weird Woman Who Always Wears the Same Outfit.

In fact, Jerry usually found something weird about the women he dated, the point being to escape commitment.  But here I am more interested in his drive to pigeon-hole, to deduce from some tiny piece of information something essential about another human being.  Or not just something essential, but the very essence.

How we must yearn to be able to know others, and know them quickly.  So we take one characteristic for the whole, as if the world was some giant synecdoche.  Or is it metonymy?  I always get those two mixed up.  In any case, as if one thing could stand for everything about some person – or city, in the case of Utrecht.

I once knew someone who, ironically, used to criticize essentialism; that is, he took the post-modernist approach of denying one can know the essence of anything.  That was in theory.  In practice, he was one to say of me after he’d known me a short while, Oh, he’s the one who wears brown (because I’d worn a brown outfit one day).

This struck me as painfully reductionist.  I was not just The Person Who Wears Brown.  (In any case, I more commonly wore blue, and was only wearing brown because someone else had once reproached me for always wearing blue.  It’s like the fable about crossing a stream with a mule; if you try to please everyone … but I digress.)

So we don’t like to be reduced, but how much we like reducing.

On the Treaty of Utrecht

I once met a girl from Utrecht (it’s in Belgium, I think), and trotted out the only thing I know about it. 

“The Treaty of Utrecht,” I said.

She’d never heard of it.

“You know,” I said, “the War of the Spanish Succession.  Or was it the Austrian Succession?”

But what was any of that to her?  She grew up in a real city with all its complications, realities, nuances.  I just knew a historical fact, a label, a pigeon-hole.

The other day I read a review of a new biography of Castlereagh.  I’ll trot out my one bit of knowledge about that too: Shelley’s lines on Peterloo:

“I met Murder on the way/He wore a mask like Castlereagh.”

Great lines.  They’ve stuck in my head for decades, I don’t know why.  Marvellously unfair to Castlereagh, it turns out.  He wasn’t just Murder; he was a complicated human being.  As we all are, I suppose.