Privacy, schmivacy-- Hey, Pandora, Netflix, Scribd, Facebook, my buds, my soul mates, thank you for caring and sharing, for always being there whether I am or not, for knowing me better than I know myself, for offering
unasked, in the brimming-over of your algorithmic comprehension of my predilections and predispositions, your suggestions about music I might want to hear, movies and TV shows I might want to see, books I might want to read, people I might want to befriend
or, if already befriended, wish happy birthday to. I "created" (that's your flattering hyperbole for what I did, Pandy, you charmer), a station for the Bee Gees and you stepped in to say you'd be glad to open your entire box of disco, which turned out
to be just what the proctor ordered for music to lift weights by. Uncomplicated, driving stuff to stimulate more, and more explosive, reps, culminating in the exultation of the burn. Who knew? Well, you did. Gracias, goddess.
Nettie, while I watched Orange is the New Black and Arrested Development, you, Big Sis, were watching me. Thanks for not hesitating to say I should take a look at Lilyhammer, because I really enjoyed that quirky blended
spoofing of mafia morality and Norwegian socialism. And because I watched Bletchley Circle, you pushed me toward Last Tango in Halifax, where I landed softly and happily. Scrib, old boy (unjustified gender assumption, I concede,
but I think you'll forgive me. You've no doubt transcended gender, but some of us aren't there yet. I'm sure you'll incorporate that fact into your next recommendation. [At this point the generative grammar of Internetese almost demands the
insertion of an LOL, but that low I can never stoop. Of course, you were already aware of that, for which I'm grateful, pal.]). You saw me reading Brain Wars and insouciantly offered me The Mind and the Brain; when I
read The Rational Optimist, you stepped forward with Being Wrong. And so on: Me The Agile Gene, you The Magic of Reality; me The Language Instinct, you Empires of the Word. Please,
please, do continue to read over my shoulder. I like your comforting presence there. FB, I admire how you seem to know everyone in the world and unhesitatingly seek to connect me, like a good party host, an electronic Elsa Maxwell
(though her, I'm guessing, you don't know, as she was well before your time), with friends or (never mind how tangential) friends of friends or (never mind how transient) old classmates and old colleagues or as-of-yet unmet residents of my senior housing community.
Now, as you know all too well, poring 24/7 as you do over your list of all the Facebookers in the world, I have never taken you up on any of your suggestions, and for that I apologize. I'm sure you're disappointed, but I hope you're not dismayed.
You see, there's one thing you don't know about me: I can't do that. Even after your prompting, your seeming certainty that we'd be a match, to ask anyone to be my friend is just too direct and embarrassing. What if they say no and make me feel
worthless and ashamed? What if they say yes and make me feel needy and ashamed? I have, however, accepted the proffered friendship of others, and I thank you for that opportunity. I am indeed fortunate to have four such someones to
watch over me.
*****
Thou Shalt Not Kill--"Murder Your Darlings," said Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his The Art of Writing, but I, Leary of that admonition, say "No, no, no, no, no." When writing fiction, letters,
memoirs, and blog pieces, cherish your darlings and spawn as many of them as your material can possibly support. Those critics who sneer at your unbridled rhetoric? Go all Catholic and Mormon on their sasses. Go forth and multiply.
"Please releash me, don't let me go" is not the song of a siren. Eschew the plain style advocated by Strunk and White. Don't make Lipton's plain pekoe your cup of tea. Instead, turn to black chai and set your imagination free. Spice
the chai with varying combinations of cinnamon, anise, fennel, peppercorn, nutmeg, cloves, cardamom, ginger, saffron, mace, chili, coriander, and rose hips. Enrich with condensed milk or almond milk. Sweeten to taste with sugar, syrup, or honey.
Peel off the hair shirt of prosaic prose and slip into something sensual and colorful, something expansive that gives you room to grow. Nabokov had it right. In Pale Fire, the poet John Shade says, on the subject of teaching Shakespeare
at the college level: "'First of all, dismiss ideas and social background and train the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not with his skull." Says his interlocutor, narrator Charles Kinbote:
"You appreciate particularly the purple passages?" Replies Shade: "Yes, my dear Charles, I roll upon them as a grateful mongrel on a spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane."
Certainly, place and purpose should be taken into account. Accuracy,
perspicuity, and propriety matter. Nobody wants "fine" writing: florid diction, archaisms, forced figures of speech. However, a mere modest standard of linguistic decorum is not something to strive for but something to surpass. When I read
Faulkner, Proust, James, Melville, Roth, Updike, Salinger, I become more absorbed in the style than in the story. The journey matters more than the destination. The language is its own excuse for being. The real Adventure of Huckleberry
Finn is the adventure of the language, from Huck/Twain's "You don't know about me without you've read" to "a tree toad white, a fish belly white" to deciding "to light out for the Territory." Through his style a writer should say, unabashedly,
"Look at me." He should boldly post verbal selfies. One marvels at both Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, a lush, lyrical story of a lush, and Samuel Beckett's Molloy, told in the spare, jagged, jangling, demotic language
of a lost soul. Whether Bill Evans or Thelonius Monk, whether Lowry or Beckett, what matters is not so much the tune but what the artist does with it.
Nurture, and proudly parade, your darlings.
*****
Sports Off-Center--I
admit that I listen to way too many sideline and postgame interviews with sports figures. I admit that I shouldn't let myself get annoyed by the linguistic choices of either the interviewer or the interviewee. After all, neither of them wants to
be there; both are just grudgingly doing their jobs. The interviewer is generally a jayvee sportscaster trying to work his/her way up the sportscaster's ladder, the interviewee a coach or player preoccupied with self and game fervently wishing that the
questioning would come to a speedy end. Still, when a beautiful young female reporter, Bobbie Woodward, say, or Carla Bernstein, sticks her microphone into her subject's face and says, "Jocko, what was the problem out there in the first half?" I really
wish Jocko wouldn't say, as Jocko so often does these days, "I mean, we need to cut down on the turnovers." Starting a sentence with "I mean" implies that you wish to clarify or elaborate upon something you said in the preceding sentence. But when
there has been no preceding sentence, "I mean" is a semantically empty and syntactically unconnected space-filler and time killer like "Um" or "Well" or "You know" that provides the speaker with another second or two to think of an answer but that is much
more annoying than those locutions because it purports to be significant. In answer to the reporter's question, Jocko could appropriately say "Our offense sucked. I mean, we only gained 50 yards in the whole half. I mean, that's what happens
when you turn the ball over three times." Here, at least, "I mean" serves its purpose of announcing that an explanation, no matter how trite or feeble, is on its way. Jocko, forsake the pretentious "I mean" when you are asked a question and
settle for a humble "Um" or "Well" or "You know." Furthermore, Jocko, please stop saying--which you do at least once in every interview--"I'm not going to lie to you" or "I'd be lying if I said" or "To be honest with you" or "To tell the truth."
Such protesting-too-much remarks do not lend your comments additional credence. If anything, they call into question your veracity, raising the suspicion that you are lying any time you do not say "I'm not going to lie to you." They imply that
lying is your default mode. When you say "I'm not going to lie to you," in our mind's ear we also hear "this time, that is; usually I do." When you say "To be honest with you," we also hear "which is unusual for me." When you say "To tell
the truth," we also hear "which I'm about to do only because a lie would be so patently obvious." When you say "I'd be lying if I said," we also hear "what I really would prefer to say."
And Bobbie and Carla, I wish you would refrain from asking
those unproductive "how does it feel" questions that simply embarrass yourself and your viewers. "Jocko, how does it feel to set the record for pass completions in a season? "Pretty darn good." "How does it feel to win this championship
tonight?" "Pretty darn good." In addition, I wish you would not let Jocko skate when you ask him what, after a couple of losses in a row, he and the team can do to "turn things around." When he replies "We just gotta get better," "We just
gotta work harder," "We just gotta get this thing figured out," "We just gotta get things cleaned up," "We just gotta go back to the old drawing board," ask him what those bromides mean. More reps? More physical practices? More conditioning?
More film study? Personnel changes? Changes in offensive and defensive schemes? When you go back to the old drawing board, what are you going to put on it, Jocko? Bobbie and Carla, I don't care how they feel; I just want some insight
into how they think.
*****
Sit-Com Update--A while back I wrote a piece called "Sit-Com Countdown," presenting my favorite TV sit-coms in ascending order. Since then, several new shows have caught my fancy. The following
are definitely in my top 15: The Big Bang Theory, Modern Family, 30 Rock, Samantha Who, and Silicon Valley. And Veep, in which Julia Luis-Dreyfus is marvelous, shoves its way clear into the top 5.
Finally, America has produced a strong political satire.
*****
Hashtags--FYI, Tweeters can now reach me at #tictactoe, #lbs, #THC, #Dinty Moore, and #30.