Umbrage, high dudgeon, the taking of offense, the mounting of one’s high horse, Up Yours!ism, Well, I Never!ism — SOS has warned you against this sort of writing for years. She has directed you to this Onion article as a cautionary tale. She has provided real-world examples of what she calls Harrumphs.
Harrumphs are often letters to the editor, in which writers, offended by bad reviews, lose all restraint (Emotion, SOS always says, is the enemy of good writing.) and let their wounded egotism rip. If you want your writing to work for you, to persuade your audience to take your side, it’s a good idea not to reveal yourself to the world as an arrogant thin-skinned fool.
Here’s a recent rather amazing Canadian Harrumph, from Victoria’s poet laureate.
An English professor from Camosun College reviewed the laureate’s latest book of poetry (It was a perfectly ok review… thorough, not particularly exciting… critical here, admiring there…), and the laureate blew a laurel.
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I wasn’t going to dignify the badly written, inaccurate and savage review of my book Muscle Memory in last week’s Times Colonist with a response. [Harrumphs always, always start like this. I wasn't going to write! I have better things to do than stoop to that! I'm busy doing the Lord's work!]
I considered the source and decided to ignore it. [Consider the source -- a playground cliche.] The record speaks for itself. It is the first negative poetry review in a lifetime of writing and most of the poems have been published elsewhere and won national and international awards. [Never got a negative review, eh? Think that's a sign of a strong poet, do you? Along with all the awards you just boasted about?]
… That the Times Colonist would publish hate mail in the form of a book review at a time when the world is focused on the devastation of lives in Haiti is in appalling taste. [Now we're right round the bend. What does this sentence mean? Can you figure out what she's saying? I can't. It's absolutely mad.] The newspaper insulted the suffering [and] insulted the city that has chosen me to be poet laureate …
Your local university teams bleed guns, drugs, and violence, and for weeks all over the country people have been writing and talking about it. What do you have to offer? Can you bring anything new to the table?
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From the Cleveland Tennessee Daily Banner:
… With the bitter taste of Nu’Keese Richardson and Mike Edwards being arrested for attempted armed robbery and being kicked off the football team less than two months ago, Tennessee basketball faithful were kicked in the teeth Saturday when four prominent Volunteers took the position of “shooting guard” to a whole new level.
[Since the latter story broke a couple of days ago, everyone's made the shooting guard pun. It's too late for you to make it too.]
… With former Volunteers’ “geniuses” Richardson and Edwards still awaiting their fate in a Knoxville courtroom, four more “intellectual giants” will more than likely be retaining attorney services in a effort to watch the big orange sun set over the Tennessee River on the outside rather than wearing the big orange jumpsuit on the inside behind Knox County bars.
[Ah, quotation marks. Here in Winchester, Virginia, where Les UDs are having a freeze-your-ass-off-visiting-Civil-War-cemeteries vacation, every store and civic sign seems to feature quotation marks: "Best" Pizza in Town, which presumably means worst; "Fine" Hotel, which I guess means squalid... Similarly, in Tennessee, you've got the local sports columnist painstakingly placing genius and intellectual giant in quotation marks in order to make it very very clear, as clear as it can possibly be, that when he calls idiots recruited to college for their sports skills intellectuals and geniuses he doesn't really mean it. Yet aren't we smart enough to figure out that he's being sarcastic without the quotation marks? I don't know about you, but I myself feel pretty confident that if I'd met intellectual giant and genius in this context without quotation marks I'd have gotten the point.]
… If the system doesn’t toss the rotten fruit, hopefully Pearl and Hamilton will take of it in a serious and message-sending manner that will reverberate throughout the limbs of the Big Orange athletics tree. Kiffin, Pearl and Hamilton have a serious responsibility to prune the trees and fence out any other potential blights that could destroy the huge orchard that is University of Tennessee sports. If not, then there is a serious risk the athletes’ Eden will dry up and become a distant memory of what might have bloomed in the future.
[Sometimes prose is just absolutely wild. Wild, mad, mad, and wild. UD of course has nothing against figurative language, but here we're getting pretty close to Chauncey Gardiner with the trees and the fruit and the drying Eden.
By the time we get to the end of this elaborate natural metaphor, we are not making a lot of sense, temporally speaking: A distant memory of what might have bloomed in the future? Can we remember, even distantly, what has never been?
And does the sentence need in the future?]
… a nice concise opinion piece. Author, Gary M. Crakes. See how he gets it said without emotion, without personalizing things? How he avoids a mere recitation of numbers?
It’s from the Hartford Courant:
This month, the board of trustees of the Connecticut State University System announced a 6.3 percent increase in tuition and fees for its students. It was also revealed that more than two months ago the executive committee of the board, without public announcement, had approved an $82,500 retention award for Chancellor David Carter, to be paid in three annual installments beginning July 1, 2010.
The board approved this award and Carter accepted it during a time of crisis with escalating tuition, a state budgetary shortfall and the elimination of jobs in the university system. Although Carter subsequently turned down the first year of his bonus, it is difficult to exaggerate the irresponsibility of this action by the board and the chancellor.
Over the past year, Carter has spoken frequently about shared sacrifice by the students, faculty and staff as tuition rose, salaries were frozen and pay was reduced by way of employee furloughs. Apparently this sacrifice applied to all but Carter.
Paying the so-called retention award in three annual installments serves to dramatically increase its size beyond the $82,500. Carter has a defined benefit pension plan from the state. Delaying the retention award ensures that the payments will factor into Carter’s pension base. When Carter retires, which given his age is likely in the next three to four years, he will receive a larger pension because of the retention award for the remainder of his life.
The board granted Carter a life annuity, probably in the neighborhood of $15,000 a year, in addition to the $82,500 payment. This life annuity will be drawn from a state employee pension fund that is one of the most underfunded public plans in the nation.
Chancellor Carter offers as a defense that he requested nothing and was not involved in any discussions. So are we to believe that student and taxpayer money is just being given out in $300,000 to $400,000 blocks to public employees without any request for it?
Carter’s other defense is that he could have made more money if he had taken his pension and continued to be employed at 75 percent of his salary. That is true for the two-year period when he could have continued in his employment. But the differential pales in comparison to the size of payments he will receive later with additional years of service and his retention award included in his pension base. He makes no mention of his 38 percent salary increase from 2006 to the $398,510 he was paid in 2008.
It is not clear how Carter can continue to serve as the chancellor of the university system. When the next round of budget cuts, layoffs and salary reductions occurs , how can he request a sense of unity of purpose? Even if, as the result of negative publicity, the board withdraws the award or Carter disingenuously decides to refuse it, can one really un-ring a bell?
Perhaps it is time for Carter to resign and move on to a new phase in his life — one that is not characterized by the betrayal of the public trust he has demonstrated as chancellor.
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More on Guy Style.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm takes a look at an opinion piece in the Texas A&M student newspaper.
Most Aggies pride themselves on the aesthetic appeal of campus. Both antiquated and modernly [Antiquated and modernly are weird choices. Antiquated sounds critical, and I don't think the writer means to be critical. Modernly is a word, but a very awkward one. How about old and new?] designed [Drop designed.] buildings are surrounded by large open cobblestone walkways and courtyards dotted with old growth trees, at least for now. [The meaning of at least for now is obscure. Until the sun explodes and destroys the earth?] But this lovely campus has a dark side some will find hard to swallow. [The combination of abstract figurative language -- light and dark -- with the homely, physical hard to swallow is unlovely. Also, since the opinion piece is about to be about oral and other forms of sex, hard to swallow is not a good choice.] Often as most students go about their business, illicit and anonymous sex occurs publicly in the very buildings we call home.
A quick search through the personals section of Craigslist might [will would be better] reveal more of this world than readers [might] care to know. The use of study rooms in Evans for sex is better known, but these activities spillover into every corner of the University. To truly realize the extent of what goes on behind closed doors, visit the men’s bathroom on the second floor of the Academic Building.
A casual observer might never notice the walls separating the bathroom stalls across campus are made of incredibly hard material, largely stainless steel or some form of faux marble. But a few weeks ago, the walls of the aforementioned [Drop the evil aforementioned.] bathroom were replaced with thick plastic. In a shorter period of time a large 8″ hole along with several smaller peep-holes have been cut and melted into the walls. [New paragraph for next sentence.] As early as the eighties, anonymous public sex has been happening on campus, and a lot of it. Even older generations of Aggies know about the reports and rumors about various places on campus being used for public anonymous sex. [Anonymous public sex, public anonymous sex -- we're getting redundant. Need to find different ways to say this.]
During an interview with a professor who wished to remain anonymous, the seriousness of these sexual exploits became obvious. The professor told a harrowing tales [Tales should be singular.] about one night in the late 80s, when he and his three young children were in the Academic building and went to use the restroom. Upon entering in [Drop in.] the restroom he encountered several males openly performing various sex acts. Needless to say he was mortified. In fact, the older classroom doors that [Drop that.] had grates in them making it very easy for one to bend wide enough to reach through and unlock the door for larger “engagements.” [Why quotation marks around engagements? Is he afraid we'll think he's talking about people thinking of marrying?] Decades later, the glory hole carved into the second floor of the bathroom of the same building tells the same story.
Efforts to curb public cuckolding [You can sort of see why he used cuckolding, which means the act of cheating on your spouse. Cuckolding sounds a lot like cockholding.] on campus seem to have been, at best, modestly successful. Online posts and personals provide countless chances for a homosexual encounter, and the details of even browsing these messages are too graphic to repeat or even believe. But since these sexual opportunities seem to attract largely the gay community, the situation begs the question: why Texas A&M? Our school is ranked the 8th most conservative school in America by the Princeton Review, and seems like an improbable location. To answer this question, I interviewed a poster of a similar craigslist.org advertisement. [The writer, with his hard to believe and improbable, reveals a rather loose grip on the situation.]
The poster spoke only on the condition of anonymity, and so will be referred to as Mike. Mike is 26 years old and a life long resident of Bryan and he does not, nor ever did, attend any higher education. Mike responded to the question of why Texas A&M campus with several explanations. The main point was that College Station is the perfect distance between Dallas, Austin and Houston. As for the location, it would not seem odd to anyone to see people of all ages walking around campus all hours of the night.
Also, perhaps due to the aforementioned conservative tendency of the towns, there seems to be a larger number of homosexuals in the area than the general population realizes. Most have not come out yet and many have no intention of doing so. [Wonder why not.] Mike added there is no fear that they will be caught, and because of that he is able to “meet up with” up to 15 new partners a semester. I concluded by asking Mike why this anonymous sex had to be on campus. Certainly there were more safe and sanitary places for men to enjoy each other’s company than a bathroom. Mike told me that there was more thrill in using public facilities and that he has a “good thing going” with no intention of ever stopping.
There will always be people like Mike who take advantage of an open door policy, [Comma should be a semi-colon.] a larger question is where are the University Police who patrol campus 24 hours a day? [Check the stalls.] Public sex has occurred long enough at A&M, and instead of simply fixing vandalized facilities, our fees and tuition should go towards stopping it. The University needs to put back those fancy non-permeable walls, and actually make their security employees do their job to protect the students, faculty, and staff from having to be subjected to these seedy and illegal sex acts.
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By the way, the op/ed’s headline:
A HOLE DIFFERENT WORLD.
The Open Letter form is treacherous. Scathing Online Schoolmarm herself would never use it. If you’re going to use it, be careful.
SOS featured one of these years ago, by the poet Michael Blumenthal. Addressed to his creative writing class, it attained a certain notoriety. SOS admired its honesty, its capture of the emotional sleaze at the heart of some writing programs… But it carried the same sense of off-putting personal grievance most of these things carry, and therefore wasn’t really effective.
Here’s a more recent open letter to one’s students, with commentary in bracketed blue by SOS.
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Empathy, Not Apathy
An open letter to my students.
By Karla Jay
[Terrible title. Lame. The words empathy and apathy are constantly coupled in writing, because they share athy, and because they're both affective states. So the title's a cliche. But worse than this, the title's emotional. It's mushy, without substance. And since the biggest problem with open letters tends to be their self-involved, self-righteous, prescriptive feel, the title does not bode well for the writer's argument.]
[The writer begins with a summary of her letter:]
Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think that blogging or texting will get hundreds of thousands of people out in the the street. The Internet has turned you away from the world. [The initial cliche is just asking for it. It's old-fashioned to use cliches, and this writer has therefore copped to being archaic in her first phrase. She's also factually incorrect. While this new technology won't save the world, it has been very effective in a number of venues at gathering up large numbers of people.]
Dear Students,
Where have we—your elders-failed? [Do you really want the biblical elders? And do you really want the where did I go wrong thing? The hand-wringing Jewish Granny rhetorical question thing?]
Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the Columbia University uprisings. The students had many grievances, including the university’s attempt to build a private gym in a public park and its involvement in the war in Vietnam, as well as the war itself and the unpopular draft. This year marks the 40th anniversary of both the Stonewall uprising and Woodstock. My involvement with a radical feminist group, Redstockings, also began four decades ago. I emerged from these events and groups as a radical lesbian, feminist and pacifist, committed to a lifetime of global struggle and local issues. [Weird list. Begins with the private gym and then throws in the Vietnam War. After that begins the overstuffing which only makes things vaguer and less substantive -- Woodstock, Stonewall, Redstockings, and patting herself on the back for her lifetime of struggle as a ... and here's another list - lesbian, feminist, pacifist. All of these things are good things. The point SOS is making involves the writer throwing all she's got at the reader from the get-go. It's both intellectually confusing, in that there's too much going on, and unpleasantly boastful: Look at all I've done! Look at how little you're doing!]
Reflecting back [Drop back.] on these catalytic events, I wonder why you, my beloved students in women’s and gender studies at Pace University, aren’t out at the barricades in the fight against the interminable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, widespread genocidal acts against women, the lack of equality for the queer community and evildoing by the banking industry. [More undifferentiated listing. Most people - certainly most of this woman's students - have complex affiliations, positions, commitments. They may oppose Iraq but not Afghanistan, may not believe that genocide is the right word to use in discussing women's issues, may not believe bankers satanic. This early in the essay, it reads like personal articles of faith rather than arguments about the world directed to other people. Beloved embellishes our portrait of the writer as Sardonic Granny.]
I have tried to interest you in local crises through involvement in community outreach courses in which you work two hours or more per week in battered women’s shelters, at food pantries, in homeless shelters and with underprivileged children. I want you to become the next generation of activists. About one third of you enjoy your stint and get over feeling that community service is for felons. [This is good. Funny. Should have done the whole thing like that.] You stay on because you’ve bonded with your new community, knowing deep down that somehow you got more out of it than they did. (When I lost most of my eyesight and became a recipient of social services myself I found out that “it’s easier to give than to receive” is not a cliché but a hard truth.)
It seems to me, [Drop the comma.] that many of you don’t see current “issues” as connected to you. [Why the quotation marks around issues?] That nothing is “real” unless you’ve seen it on reality TV. [And why around real? Just makes it seem the writer herself questions the existence of reality.] The violence in the world can’t match the latest hit film. [Lame. See how abstract it is? Like the title? The writer can't come down from her speech-making and talk in specific, human terms to people.] Since there is no draft, attending college is no longer a prelude to going to Iraq or Afghanistan, except for those on ROTC scholarships. You think feminism is passé. For those of you who are white, racism is over, too, because Obama is president. There is no gender or racial gap at your minimum wage jobs at Abercrombie, The Gap and as student aides, but you haven’t entered the real work force yet. There’s a Stonewall Coalition at the university, but you don’t need that because New York City has so many queer bars and you have the fake I.D. to get in. You’re oh-so-out, though most of you can’t apply the LGBTQ words to yourself in my queer courses. [Way, way bad. Again the listing, but here it's transparent petulant complaint. The world isn't the way I want it. People aren't doing what I tell them to do. And if you think the election of a black president means shit you've got your head up your ass.]
I observe your lives. [At this point in the letter, the reader is correct to doubt this assertion.] You are smart and can do things via computer I can only dream of. But few of you read a newspaper or even online news sites. However, you are constantly texting and twittering—opening e-mail seems too dated. You want the news to be as brief and fast as Twitter; you would like classes to move along in some more amusing format like animé. You avoid doing research if it involves books; the text you read is on your cell.
Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think that blogging or texting will get hundreds of thousands of people out in the street. If Martin Luther King, Jr. had blogged “I have a dream” on Facebook, how many would have twittered back, “Yeah, dude, I had a dream last night, too.”
Life online has turned you away from the world around you. This virtual life is more real to you than planet Earth. [The writer makes a clear distinction between the bracing reality of her world and the pointless narcissistic unreality of her students. But because she has failed to establish her world's stronger reality in her opening paragraphs -- because it seems in fact rather unreal, dated -- the distinction fails.] As Taylor McHugh, one of my activist students put it, “Students feel apathy, not empathy.” [The writer has no empathy with her non-activist students -- the sort of empathy that would be plenty critical, but would also exhibit nuanced understanding. So her apathy/empathy thing doesn't come off.]
When I was a student, the mimeo and ditto machines were the closest thing we had to going viral. Maybe some of us went out because we had nothing else to do, but there was only so long we could stay inside scrutinizing our Ché Guevara and Madame Binh posters. It was also so much less dangerous back then to risk losing a college degree over an uprising. [I don't understand this final sentence.]
I understand how different your world is from mine. [No, she seems not to.] I know how much harder many of your lives are than mine was 40 years ago. My total undergraduate education at Barnard cost approximately $16,000, which my scholarship covered part of. According to US News and World Report, for example, the average indebtedness of a 2008 Pace graduate was $29,622. The minimum wage jobs that I worked at for $4.00 per hour should be $16 by now, not $7. 25. I shared an apartment on the Upper West Side with three other students for under $75 each per month.
I know that some of you have one job on the weekends, another at night; some of you work late as waiters, showing up the next afternoon to class hardly able to stay awake. (I know one of you worked all night at a supermarket, studying by sitting between the plastic bag holders when there were no customers.)
[These paragraphs, while not very well-written, are good faith efforts to sympathize. They do not really empathize.]
Some of you help support a single mother or siblings, but most of you simply have other priorities. You want things: brand-name clothes and shoes, iPods, iPhones, flat-screen TVs, fast laptops. Acquiring them takes weeks of work. Your drug of choice is consumerism, and you are its slave: You are Gen C, not Gen Y. [Way to retain the one or two students still reading at this point. Call them slaves, drug addicts.]
If I blame anyone, though, it is my colleagues and those of us on the Left who fail to lead and involve you. [Sardonic Granny again. Spends hours beating you over the head for your failings and then shrinks back into the chair and pretends she thinks it's really her fault.]
I could blame the recession, but even in times of prosperity, most faculty members teach and go home. For most, there’s no sense of responsibility to students outside the classroom. Some, mostly from the humanities and social sciences, supported an SDS uprising against Pace University’s former president a few years back and helped oust him. It’s easier and more lucrative for faculty to research, teach extra courses or become a consultant on the side. For some, teaching IS the other job. [Teaching, says SOS, primarily involves presentation and discussion of important ideas and phenomena. Dispatching students to the ramparts is something else.]
We on the Left haven’t done our jobs. Some organizations, such as the Left Forum, Third Wave Feminism and NARAL, encourage on-campus recruitment and participation. But we probably would be appalled if our students wanted to do more than simply support our efforts. [Why does she use the word appalled?] We have not encouraged them to become leaders, instead of followers. In our early twenties, many of us founded or led organizations. Now we are still leading them, while the young remain powerless. They are the new women, relegated to making sandwiches and answering phones or e-mail rather than taking charge. The more Left groups became organized, the less the young were to be found in the hierarchy. Many groups suffer from “founders’ syndrome,” in which the original leaders are still there and not planning to step aside any time soon.
If we cherish our goals more than our own prowess, it is time for activists and tenured radicals to see ourselves as mentors and partners rather than leaders. This is how I now approach education, but shifting my attitude meant that I had to relinquish much of my power in the classroom. And that in turn has forced the students to take charge of some of the teaching, to abandon their comfortable passivity. It was and still is scary for all of us to some degree, but my battle-wise colleagues and comrades need to understand not only how much we can teach the young, but also how much we can learn from them if we will only listen. [This is just confused. It's just a very confused essay. It begins by establishing the writer's belief that her students are confused and out of control -- drug addicts, slaves. It ends by shifting its grievance from students to battle-wise colleagues. They need to understand how much they can learn from these lost souls... ]
The reporter knew to shut up and let Carter do his thing. A great article, full of laughter.
A lot of football players turn into stark-raving maniacs on game day.
In Brandon Carter’s case, he actually looks the part.
Carter, Texas Tech’s senior right guard, is well-known around the Big 12 for his unique — some may say outlandish — appearance. He sports a spiked mohawk, face paint and dozens of tattoos, and at one point had as many as 26 body piercings before coming to the realization that they were an occupational hazard.
On the surface, it may appear that Carter is trying to intimidate his opponent, but that isn’t the case at all. He’s just being who he is.
And who is he? An intelligent, interesting, talented and complicated 23-year-old man.
“Kind of looks like a curveball, but it’s going to come in as a fastball straight down the middle,” Texas Tech coach Mike Leach said of Carter. “He’s got the highest test score on our team. He’s a ridiculously articulate person. He’s just a real intense guy before the game. He’s one of those guys who wishes we were playing a doubleheader instead of one game. You can literally see, regardless of the score, he’s disappointed the game’s over.”
That gung-ho, let’s-get-it-on attitude was molded during Carter’s youth in Longview, as he was admittedly a rambunctious lad who rarely stopped moving.
“I could play all day,” Carter said, in an interview conducted prior to the season. “It’s just like when my dad (Jack) was my coach, and I was playing flag football. As soon as we were done, we’d go home and play pickle with a baseball, where I just ran back and forth. I love the physicality of it, and if I could play two games in a day, I would.”
At Spring Hill High School in Longview, the 6-foot-7, 344-pound Carter established himself as one of the top offensive line prospects in the state, helping pave the way for a 2,000-yard rusher in his final season. Connecting with the rather unique personality that is Leach, Carter opted to sign with Tech, choosing the Red Raiders over the likes of Notre Dame, Texas A&M, Nebraska and Baylor, among others.
Just two days after he graduated high school, Carter headed west for Lubbock and went under the needle for his first tattoo — the word “Chaos” on his left arm.
It wasn’t his last.
“Whenever I get bored, I just put on music and draw stuff,” Carter said. “Ninety percent of the stuff I throw away, but every once in a while there’s something I want to get tattooed. Nothing’s exempt from being tattooed. My body’s a canvas. There’s always some skin somewhere I can tattoo.”
Carter said all his tattoos reflect a specific time in his life or an element of his personality, including the largest one, which covers his entire, rather expansive, back.
“I’ve got one on my back that took eight months. It’s a pretty big tattoo,” he said. “I drew it up, and it’s inspired by the movie Red Dragon. The guy’s got two different personalties, and that’s the way I am. Outside of football, I’m a nice guy. But inside of football, you wouldn’t want to see me or talk to me.”
Carter began unleashing his intensity as a redshirt freshman in 2006, becoming a special-teams standout. He then earned a starting spot on Tech’s offensive line in 2007, routinely tattooing opposing defenders on his way to honorable-mention all-Big 12 status.
Last year, Carter ratcheted his play up another notch as the Red Raiders put together one of the finest seasons in school history, winning their first 10 games and finishing 11-2. Despite Tech airing the ball out on more than 650 pass attempts, the instinctively-quick Carter did not allow a single sack all season, achieving first-team All-America recognition from The Sporting News and the American Football Coaches Association.
True student-athlete
Away from the field, Carter is far more subdued. He takes his academic pursuits seriously and is certainly unafraid to challenge himself in the classroom. He even enrolled in German II without ever having taken German I, just because the former worked well with his class schedule.
“That was not fun,” Carter said, chuckling. “The first day I walked in, I’m sitting in class, the (professor) looks at me and says something in German, then just kind of stares at me, waiting for a response. I said something in English and he said, ‘You can’t talk in English in here.’ And I said, ‘We’re going to have a problem.’ ”
Carter actually stuck with the class and managed to catch up quickly, after clearing the initial learning curve.
That could describe his football season this year, too. A week after Tech lost, 34-24, to Texas in Austin, the Red Raiders had an even more heartbreaking outcome against Houston, falling 29-28. Carter was suspended for one week following that game, reportedly for damaging the visiting locker room at Houston and criticizing the coaching staff.
Since then, however, Carter has been back to his old self, steamrolling defensive linemen from his usual starting right guard spot.
And, of course, he’s back to painting his face and showing off his professional wrestling look — a profession, incidentally, Carter has long dreamed of entering someday.
Though he insists that his look is not a show.
“It’s not really to get in the opponents’ heads,” he said. “It’s really just to psyche myself up, and get all excited and ready to go. It’s not a publicity stunt or anything like that. It’s not to intimidate anybody, because I wouldn’t be intimidated if someone else did it. It’s really about me.
“Whenever the fans start going crazy when I come out, and the opposing fans start cursing you and throwing batteries and stuff like that, it’s always fun. Then you’re ready to go.”
German II.
You cannot make this shit up.
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(I got the image here.)
Here’s an example. It’s an article from the Harvard Law Record. It has this headline:
LESSIG’S FOCUS ON CORRUPTION MAY HAVE
UNCOMFORTABLE IMPLICATIONS FOR HARVARD
Now UD, with her interest in the ways in which universities become corrupt and betray their mission, is hot to trot when she reads this. Let’s go!
Professor Lawrence Lessig’s new focus on institutional corruption is now hitting home, as a Harvard Alumni Association event last week [Where did it take place?] demonstrated. Lessig, head of the new Institutional Corruption initiative within the Edward Safra Foundation for Ethics [Is this Harvard-affiliated?], was accompanied by Linda Greenhouse, former New York Times Supreme Court correspondent, who questioned Harvard President Drew Faust on the university’s own miscreant behavior. [So the event was a public interview of Faust by Lessig and Greenhouse? Did the event have a title? And miscreant's a way loaded word.... depraved, villainous... What's the deal? Does the writer of the article think Harvard's a miscreant? Does she assume it's common knowledge Harvard's a miscreant, and that we, her readers, agree with her?]
Lessig, best known for his work in law and technology, particularly copyright issues (including the establishment of Creative Commons) returned to Harvard this past year to pursue his new found field of study. Through the Safra Foundation’s Institutional Corruption initiative, Lessig reported that he hopes to create a metric to determine “when institutional corruption occurs” and find a way to “produce remedies.”
Lessig defines institutional corruption as “an economy of influences upon an institution” that weaken both “the effectiveness of that institution” and “the public trust” within [of?] the system. He is less concerned with traditional notions of corruption, like favors traded for “money in a brown paper bag,” than, as he has written on his wiki, “non-obvious corruption where a decision is improperly and/or subtly influenced by a government actor’s anticipation of some sort of indirect economic gain or loss”. [Always and only government?]
Lobbying Congress is a “paradigm[atic] example,” said Lessig, according to whom lobbyists have become “pushers or suppliers,” affecting Congressional votes. Wealthy lobbyists like Gerald Cassidy [Identify some of the interests Cassidy works to promote.] have accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars to throw at Congress. With their coffers open to lobbyists, Congressmen decide wrongly on “nutrition, healthcare and global warming policies,” explained Lessig. “And these are the easy public policy questions,” he guffawed. [Guffawed is weird. Laughed?]
A “weakened public trust in the institution,” also defines corruption [The writer already listed this.], according to Lessig. In essence, the concern is not whether Representatives were bought. Instead, the problem is that “the American public thinks they were bought. That is what is important,” he explained. Lessig once again pointed to Congress. “Only 22% of the U.S. has a positive view of Congress,” he stated, “And 88% of California believes money buys results.”
Linda Greenhouse never explicitly asked President Faust [I totally don't get the scenario here. Greenhouse and Lessig are invited to sit across from Faust and interview her in front of alumni?] whether Harvard was corrupt, though her interview circled the question. Like Congress, Harvard seems to be a money making machine, illustrated by its recent endowment plunge: a 30% drop, from $36.9 billion to a still-phenomenal $26.0 billion as of June this year. Like Congress, moreover, Harvard seems to have lost the trust of its constituents. Harvard’s alumni magazine recently highlighted the university’s losses, in an article entitled “$11 Billion Less”. [Are these points Greenhouse made, or points the writer of the article is making?]
“We have a new understanding of what risk is,” Faust said, when Greenhouse asked her about the meltdown. “In a school that relies so heavily on its endowment, we understand we now need to save for [a] rainy day.”
Although her prepared response seemed to assuage fears about Harvard’s future [What does this mean, prepared? Did Faust respond to interview questions by reading her answers off of a page?], alumni were still curious about the university’s past decisions about its finances. “What about the compensation?” an audience member asked, referring to the Harvard Management Corporation, the entity responsible for Harvard’s endowment. Its top six officials made a collective $26.8 million in 2008. Faust replied that they were “consistent with the other salaries in the market” in order to be “competitive.” She did not address an issue at the heart of Lessig’s definition of corruption, however: the loss of public trust. [Part of the problem with this article is that its lede is terribly misplaced. The news that emerged from this event -- not that I have much of a grasp on the nature of the event -- lies here, in the audience response. The writer has buried it.]
But the driving need for such risky investing seems to be part of a much greater problem. Faust claimed that “we expect too much of our universities. We give them too many roles.” Universities are expected to “supply our workforce, help our children with mental health and socialization, be centers for art and culture and be scientific research centers,” she said. “This is an enormous array of tasks. We must ask how universities are supposed to do all of these things and pay for it. Should these roles be played elsewhere?” [This is a bizarre comment, which the writer needs somehow to have noted. No one gave Harvard the role of starting a whole new campus in Allston. No one insisted Harvard accumulate thirty billion dollars.]
In her book University, Inc., Jennifer Washburn [How did we suddenly get here? I love Washburn's book, and I can see there's a focus on corruption in it, but ... wha...? What's it doing here?] explores the commercial transformation of American higher education over the last 30 years. She argues that universities have made money by contracting with pharmaceuticals and other medical institutions as their private researchers and therefore been bent by their influences. Washburn’s book suggests that universities have become like corrupt Congressmen, dependent on and influenced by the economic pressures of pharmaceuticals, which behave like the lobbyists. Unfortunately, that leaves students to play the role of the shafted American public.
Another way to pay for this structure is by increasing tuition, an issue Faust has addressed since assuming her role in 2007. Faust made financial aid a priority after she realized the “cost of higher education had risen so much that many intelligent individuals could no longer attend,” she said. But with the economic downturn Harvard has had trouble committing to its financial aid.
Either way [Which two ways does the writer have in mind?], people like disgraced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich are not to blame, said Lessig. “We are they, the problem [is] in society,” he continued. “Institutional corruption is primed and permitted by the passivity of the most privileged.” Lessig’s closing remarks go back to the roots of the Safra Foundation, which almost three decades ago began a national movement to institute professional codes of ethical conduct. “These serious problems need serious attention,” said Lessig, “and we are the ones who need to speak up.” If there are problems within Harvard, within this country, he implied, alumni, students, faculty and others should speak up and not just sit and wait for the panel to be over. [As with so much in this piece, the final phrase is confusing. Panel to be over?]
What’s frustrating about this article is that the event the writer vaguely describes seems to UD a rather dramatic one — serious people like Lessig, and like some audience members, challenged Faust on fundamental issues of greed and corruption within Harvard. But the writer seems not to know what to do with what she’s got hold of.
… um… a bone to pick with this year’s finalists for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Most of the entries are bad, it’s true, and bad in the amusing way bad writing descriptive of sex can be — leering, embarrassing, absurdly literary and pretentious…
In fact, before I make my complaint, let’s ogle an example or two and try to be precise about why they’re bad.
The worst bad sex writer – the person who should win this year’s contest – is John Banville, a writer UD has always found, carnal or non-carnal, pretentious:
Alba has stepped out of her dress in one flowing, stylised movement, like a torero, the object of all eyes, trailing his cape in the dust before the baffled bull; underneath, she is naked. [Before the baffled bull -- heavy-handed alliteration here for no reason at all other than to insist Not Cheap Porn. Here You Get Assonance With Your Ass.] She looks to the side, downwards; her eyelids are so shinily pale and fine that Adam can see clearly all the tiny veins in them, blue as lapis. [Shinily, clearly, he holds you back from the hard stuff because this is literature, man. Delicate Yeatsian simile, lapis... We're not in just any motel. We're in High Art Motel.] He takes a floating step forward until his chest is barely touching the tips of her nipples, behind which he senses all the gravid tremulousness of her breasts. [Wanna get me some of that gravid tremulousness.] She puts her hands flat against his chest and leans into him in a simulacrum of a swoon, [L'Artiste makes a fuck a simulacrum.] making a mewling sound. [Pregnant bullfighter goes all kitty on us.] Her hips are goosefleshed and he can feel all the tiny hairs erect on her forearms. When he kisses her hot, soft mouth, which is bruised a little at one corner, he knows at once that she has been with another man, and recently – faint as it is there is no mistaking that tang of fish-slime and sawdust – for he has no doubt that this is the mouth of a busy working girl. He does not mind. [Sawdust?]
They conduct there, on that white bed, under the rubied iron cross, [I hope you're picking up here, with the fish and the sawdust and the oracular They conduct there, on that white bed, T.S. Eliot's
"Prufrock;" and, in "The Waste Land":
And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;...]
a fair imitation of a passionate dalliance, a repeated toing and froing on the edge of a precipice beyond which can be glimpsed a dark-green distance in a reeking mist and something shining out at them, a pulsing point of light, peremptory and intense. His heart rattles in its cage, a vein beats at his temple like a slow tom-tom. When they are spent at last, and that beacon in the jungle has been turned low again, they lie together contentedly in a tangle of arms and legs and talk of this and that, in their own languages, each understanding hardly a word of what the other says.
The Paul Theroux extract is more conventionally bad.
‘Baby.’ She took my head in both hands and guided it downward, between her fragrant thighs. ‘Yoni puja – pray, pray at my portal.’
“She was holding my head, murmuring ‘Pray,’ and I did so, beseeching her with my mouth and tongue, my licking a primitive form of language in a simple prayer. It had always worked before, a language she had taught me herself, the warm muffled tongue.
Pray at my portal is just funny. Just funny gets you shortlisted, but lacks the philosophy in the boudoir haughtiness of Banville.
But here’s my complaint. This excerpt is not bad:
Let’s have sex, they think simultaneously, couples having strange mind-reading powers after months and months of trying to figure each other out. Panting, Georgie starts rubbing her hands round Bobby’s biological erogenous zones, turning his trousers into a tent with lots of rude organs camping underneath. Bobby sucks all the freckles and moles off her chest, pulling the GD bib wheeeeeeeeeee over her head and flicking Georgie’s turquoise bra off her shoulders then kissing her tits, and he’s got so much energy – plus he’s very impatient – Bobby tugs off his sweaty sweater himself and gives Georgie a helping hand with his zip. Then comes the enormous anticipation of someone putting their mitts on your cock and balls. Georgie smiles to herself and keeps him hanging on for a bit, which in a way is even better though it makes the Artist want to explode and after one or two tugs he moans ‘whoah’ then screams ‘whoah!’ and Georgie lets go giggling, then suddenly her face is all serious and Bobby pulls her polished pine legs apart and slithers a hand up her skirt where her fanny’s got a bit of five o’clock shadow like a pin cushion but her lips are nice and slippy, and he slides some lubricunt round and round, mixing clockwise with anticlockwise with figure 8 until Georgie’s shagging the air with pleasure bashing her feet about. Then, Bobby starts scrabbling frantically across the carpet for Mr Condom, sending five or six multicolour Durexes flying through the air, and he struggles getting the packet open and Georgie has to roll Mr Condom down Mr Penis for him and she has to help insert him into Mrs Vagina.
This frenzied amusing description conveys through their form of sex and their thoughts the world in which the characters live, the kind of people they are. Indirect discourse takes us back and forth between their heads and creates a silly, human, sweetness.
And for once, instead of ships entering harbors and storms quelling and flowers bursting into petals, we get fresh images — that camping thing; the five o’clock shadow fanny like a pin cushion…
This isn’t whatever 700-level literary seminar Banville and Theroux think they’re in. It’s the real world. Round these parts, when a man sees a woman’s breasts, he doesn’t say gravid tremulousness.
A completely charming opinion piece in the Texas Tech newspaper. It’s written Guy Style. UD loves Guy Style.
Of course, Scathing Online Schoolmarm makes a few corrections, etc.
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Most of us students have all [Drop all] had a class or two where the professor was pretty lenient on the idea of students using their laptops to take notes. While some do use their laptops during class with proper self control, I believe I could accurately state most do not. [Drop I believe I could accurately state]
A couple weeks ago [I like the way he doesn't write A couple OF weeks ago... There's a chatty, relaxed, loping along feel to this prose that's very attractive.] I was sitting in class trying to pay attention to my lecture [Drop to my lecture] when I caught myself constantly looking over the shoulder of a fellow [Drop fellow] classmate who had brought his laptop to class that day. Most of the time I am not distracted by the usual Facebook addict flipping through Halloween photos of their 2,000 friends. However, this student was engaging in a different online obsession: blackjack.
This was very distracting for someone like me who also likes to try my luck every once in a while. Not knowing this student, I found myself wondering if he was staying true to the book by practicing basic strategy techniques such as doubling down on 11, splitting aces and eights or holding on soft 18.
After several bad beats, I shifted my focus back to my professor. Nevertheless, I could not stop thinking about Vegas and the bestselling book “Bringing Down The House,” which was the basis of the movie “21.” [The stuff on blackjack is great.]
… We are all aware of how short our attention span is relative to the amount of time of professors’ lectures. Is being able to type your notes in class worth the added amounts of [Drop amounts of] distractions [Write distraction - singular.] you bring to yourself and others?
I rarely see students on computers fully exert themselves in the topics being discussed by their professors. … When there is no interaction between students and professors the entire class is boring. Professors want students to ask questions and participate in lectures to show students are paying attention and at least trying to learn the material.
It is like when a girl asks a guy a sports question. The guy instinctually [instinctively would be better] wants to prove his masculinity by providing as much knowledge on the subject as the girl is willing to listen to. Professors are the same way. They want to provide any additional information so we can fully understand the subject matter [The analogy is echt-Guy.].
On another note, I believe [Drop all that; start with Professors...] professors take notice of students who do not ask questions or participate in lecture to the extent of not caring to learn their name or show sympathy toward poor performance on exams. [Altogether an awkward sentence. Too wordy -- the writer has that problem in general, as you can see from all my suggestions that he drop stuff -- and it's not clear to whom their refers.]
Reasons such as these should be example enough to discourage those from bringing computers to class when they are not required. [Drop this whole sentence.] Not only do you [Drop; maybe begin With laptops you...] heighten the level of temptation for your mind to wander, [and] you rarely learn things that are [Drop that are.] not test material. This may be a revelation, but some students go to class to learn things that are not going to be on the test. [Drop whole sentence.]
I’m sure some will not agree with my position that students should be barred from bringing laptops to class when they are not necessary. I accede to the argument of [Drop everything that precedes typed.] typed notes being much easier to study and follow along with than those that are hand written. [Rewrite: Typed notes may be easier to study and follow along with than hand written, but typing your notes after you hand write them in class is a good way to study. Drop the rest of this paragraph.] However, typing your notes after you hand write them in class is a good way to study without putting much stress on your brain.
Students should dissuade themselves from bringing their computers to class out of respect for your classmates and professors. We all know your schedule is very busy and you cannot possibly find the time outside of class to check your e-mail or Facebook. However, please be courteous to others who are there to learn with minimal distractions. [Drop the last two sentences; the sarcasm of the second doesn't quite come off; and, again, it's too wordy. Simply end the piece with the first sentence of this paragraph, changing your to their.]
Martin Amis concludes his remarkable essay on Vladimir Nabokov with praise, and with the same uncanny clarity of understanding he’s shown throughout the essay. He expresses the essence of Nabokov’s miraculous genius.
They call it a “shimmer” – a glint, a glitter, a glisten. The Nabokovian essence is a miraculously fertile instability, where without warning the words detach themselves from the everyday and streak off like flares in a night sky, illuminating hidden versts of longing and terror. From Lolita, as the fateful cohabitation begins (nous connûmes, a Flaubertian intonation, means “we came to know”):
“Nous connûmes the various types of motor court operators, the reformed criminal, the retired teacher, and the business flop, among the males; and the motherly, pseudo-ladylike and madamic variants among the females. And sometimes trains would cry in the monstrously hot and humid night with heartrending and ominous plangency, mingling power and hysteria in one desperate scream.”
Isn’t this the same sort of sentence we saw here, in Part Two of my series of posts on the Amis essay? Recall the sentence from Nabokov’s short story, “Signs and Symbols,” the sentence Amis calls a “one-sentence demonstration of genius.”
Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths – until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.
Both sentences offer amusing lists of homely human attributes and homely human types. Then, either with a dash or with a new sentence, both suddenly shift to death, power, and hysteria. From the trivial to the thunderstruck, from ordinariness to extremity, from insipid to insane, these small sentences first settle us into the world and then shatter it.
They shatter it in the direction of truth. The plangency in the Lolita sentence is, by frightful implication, Lolita’s, in bed with Humbert. The power and hysteria is Humbert Humbert’s hideous self-imprisonment.
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Versts? A verst is a Russian unit of distance. The word is obsolete.
Fourth part of a series of posts on University Diaries about an essay by Martin Amis on Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov’s unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, has just appeared.
Left to themselves, The Enchanter, Lolita, and Transparent Things might have formed a lustrous and utterly unnerving trilogy. But they are not left to themselves; by sheer weight of numbers, by sheer iteration, the nympholepsy novels begin to infect one another – they cross-contaminate. We gratefully take all we can from them; and yet . . . Where else in the canon do we find such wayward fixity? In the awful itch of Lawrence, maybe, or in the murky sexual transpositions of Proust? No: you would need to venture to the very fringes of literature – Lewis Carroll, William Burroughs, the Marquis de Sade – to find an equivalent emphasis: an emphasis on activities we rightly and eternally hold to be unforgivable. [Amis seems to express his thoughts spontaneously here, as he asks himself questions, pauses, produces an ellipsis or two -- it feels as though we are following, in real time, the movement of his mind as he attempts to clarify for himself the nature of Nabokov's obsession, and the degree of condemnation -- aesthetic, moral -- he ought to bring to it.]
In fiction, of course, nobody ever gets hurt; the flaw, as I said, is not moral but aesthetic. [Something a little too quick and dismissive here, no? No fictional character gets hurt, true. But literature has profound effects upon us, and it's no good insisting there's a bright clear line between weightless pretend little stories and the big hefty actual world of moral and immoral human beings.] And I intend no innnuendo by pointing out that Nabokov’s obsession with nymphets has a parallel: the ponderous intrusiveness of his obsession with Freud – “the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world” of “the Viennese quack”, with “its bitter little embryos, spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents”. Nabokov cherished the anarchy of the inner life, and Freud is excoriated because he sought to systematise it. Is there something rivalrous in this hatred? Well, in the end it is Nabokov, and not Freud, who emerges as our supreme poet of dreams (with Kafka), and our supreme poet of madness. [Part of the attraction of this essay lies in its both confident and tentative feel. Amis, from the outset, is a deeply informed lover of the best literature, the sort of practitioner who knows exactly where to go for the most inspiring writing - the most lucid, controlled prose. Yet he also understands, and cherishes as much as Nabokov did, the anarchy of the inner life, and the right of each anarchist to a bit of privacy as he lives that life. And he understands that great literature often emerges, in some alchemical way, from a special sort of mucking about in that inner life -- the foul rag and bone shop of the heart, Yeats called it. So Amis in this essay shows you his struggle between a desire to grant the artist's inner life as much freedom as it likes, and a recognition that what Nabokov, as he got older, did with that freedom -- aesthetically -- produced both bad art and bad morality. The Freud point is particularly intriguing -- that perhaps the root of Nabokov's way over the top detestation of Freud was his sense that psychoanalytical thought is about bringing to the artist's conscious awareness internal patterns of which the artist wishes to remain unaware.]
One commonsensical caveat persists, for all our literary-critical impartiality: writers like to write about the things they like to think about. And, to put it at its sternest, Nabokov’s mind, during his last period, insufficiently honoured the innocence – insufficiently honoured the honour – of 12-year-old girls. In the three novels mentioned above he prepotently defends the emphasis; in Ada (that incontinent splurge), in Look at the Harlequins!, and now in The Original of Laura, he does not defend it. This leaves a faint but visible scar on the leviathan of his corpus.
I have read at least half a dozen Nabokov novels at least half a dozen times. [A novelist reading a novelist is a marvelous thing. Bellow reading Joyce, Amis reading Nabokov, Foster Wallace reading DeLillo... You know they're not really reading; they're grazing. Slowly, repeatedly, they're nourishing themselves, they're ruminating, chewing on this phrase and that figure. The Amis essay is terrific in part because it's all about this special sensibility: The hyper-receptive writer working a verbal field. Nobody knows another writer as well as another writer.] And at least half a dozen times I have tried, and promptly failed, to read Ada (“Or Ardor: A Family Chronicle“). My first attempt took place about three decades ago. I put it down after the first chapter, with a curious sensation, a kind of negative tingle. [For what it's worth, our own UD, mad lover of Nabokov, bought, when she was an undergrad, the black hardback of this novel and opened it all agog. Fifty pages later, weary and vaguely embarrassed, she closed it.] Every five years or so (this became the pattern), I picked it up again; and after a while I began to articulate the difficulty: “But this is dead,” I said to myself. The curious sensation, the negative tingle, is of course miserably familiar to me now: it is the reader’s response to what seems to happen to all writers as they overstep the biblical span. The radiance, the life-giving power, begins to fade. Last summer I went away with Ada and locked myself up with it. And I was right. At 600 pages, two or three times Nabokov’s usual fighting-weight, the novel is what homicide detectives call “a burster”. It is a waterlogged corpse at the stage of maximal bloat. [First, there's the reader's purely visceral rejection response. Then -- and this is what's so good about Amis -- there's the explanation. Listen up.]
When Finnegans Wake appeared, in 1939, it was greeted with wary respect – or with “terror-stricken praise”, in the words of Jorge Luis Borges. Ada garnered plenty of terror-stricken praise; and the similarities between the two magna opera are in fact profound. Nabokov nominated Ulysses as his novel of the century, but he described Finnegans Wake as, variously, “formless and dull”, “a cold pudding of a book”, “a tragic failure” and “a frightful bore”. Both novels seek to make a virtue of unbounded self-indulgence; they turn away, so to speak, and fold in on themselves. [Old people - and old, venerated writers, tend to do this, no? Withdraw from the world, indulge more and more deeply in their own fantasies, give themselves license to do any old thing because they're don't care about or can't deal with the world outside themselves anymore.] Literary talent has several ways of dying. With Joyce and Nabokov, we see a decisive loss of love for the reader – a loss of comity, of courtesy. The pleasures of writing, Nabokov said, “correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading”; and the two activities are in some sense indivisible. In Ada, that bond loosens and frays. [This is crucial, I think. Julian Barnes writes that there’s a “strange, unwitnessed, yet deeply intimate relationship between writer and reader," and it's just that delicate and profound transaction that gets betrayed when writers fold in on themselves. The writer no longer makes the courteous effort to conceive, as he writes, the existence of a creature, a consciousness, separate from his own. Perhaps he tells himself he's so powerful a writer that he's creating a new consciousness in the reader, bringing the reader to greater heights of awareness, to a form of understanding analogous to the writer's own, in forcing the reader to enter the writer's hermeticism. But every careful reader instinctively senses the difference between a jarring aesthetic sensibility that changes her as she makes the effort to enter into it, and a sort of plugged-up verbal belligerency.]
There is a weakness in Nabokov for “partricianism”, as Saul Bellow called it (Nabokov the classic émigré, Bellow the classic immigrant). In the former’s purely “Russian” novels (I mean the novels written in Russian that Nabokov did not himself translate), the male characters, in particular, have a self-magnifying quality: they are larger and louder than life. They don’t walk – they “march” or “stride”; they don’t eat and drink – they “munch” and “gulp”; they don’t laugh – they “roar”. They are very far from being the furtive, hesitant neurasthenics of mainstream anglophone fiction: they are brawny (and gifted) heart-throbs, who win all the fights and win all the girls. Pride, for them, is not a deadly sin but a cardinal virtue. Of course, we cannot do without this vein in Nabokov: it gives us, elsewhere, his magnificently comic hauteur. In Lolita, the superbity is meant to be funny; elsewhere, it is a trait that irony does not protect.
In Ada nabobism disastrously combines with a nympholepsy that is lavishly, monotonously, and frictionlessly gratified. Ada herself, at the outset, is 12; and Van Veen, her cousin (and half-sibling) is 14. As Ada starts to age, in adolescence, her tiny sister Lucette is also on hand to enliven their “strenuous trysts”. On top of this, there is a running quasi-fantasy about an international chain of elite bordellos where girls as young as 11 can be “fondled and fouled”. And Van’s 60-year-old father (incidentally but typically) has a mistress who is barely out of single figures: she is 10. This interminable book is written in dense, erudite, alliterative, punsome, pore-clogging prose; and every character, without exception, sounds like late Henry James.
In common with Finnegans Wake, Ada probably does “work out” and “measure up” – the multilingual decoder, given enough time and nothing better to do, might eventually disentangle its toiling systems and symmetries, its lonely and comfortless labyrinths, and its glutinous nostalgies. [Lovely writing from Amis here in this list of items -- and at this point, who could miss the alliterative sweetness of each? The letters T and S played out in the first; L in the second, G in the third -- along with the devil-may-care making of neologisms -- nostalgies... Sounds a bit French, which does nicely for Nabokov... Or, okay, not so much a neologism as the opposite: nostalgies is archaic.] What both novels signally lack, however, is any hint of narrative traction: they slip and they slide; they just can’t hold the road. And then, too, with Ada, there is something altogether alien – a sense of monstrous entitlement, of unbridled, head-in-air seigneurism. Morally, this is the world for which the twisted Humbert thirsts: a world where “nothing matters”, and “everything is allowed”.
But again, as Amis notes, Lolita will condemn everything is allowed, while the self-important convolution of Ada will appear to endorse it.
In this section of his essay (I’m being selective; it’s quite long), Martin Amis simply wants to establish Nabokov’s artistic control in Lolita, the way the text makes its condemnation of Humbert Humbert brilliantly clear to the careful reader:
… Lolita’s … judgment of Humbert’s abomination it is … severe. To establish this it is necessary to adduce only two key points. First, the fate of its tragic heroine. No unprepared reader could be expected to notice that Lolita meets a terrible end on page two of the novel that bears her name: “Mrs ‘Richard F Schiller’ died in childbed”, says the “editor” in his Foreword, “giving birth to a still-born girl . . . in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest”; and the novel is almost over by the time Mrs Richard F Schiller (ie, Lo) briefly appears. Thus we note, with a parenthetical gasp, the size of Nabokov’s gamble on greatness. “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book,” he once announced (at the lectern), “one can only reread it.” Nabokov knew that Lolita would be reread, and re-reread. He knew that we would eventually absorb Lolita’s fate – her stolen childhood, her stolen womanhood. Gray Star, he wrote, is “the capital town of the book”. The shifting half-tone – gray star, pale fire, torpid smoke: this is the Nabokovian crux.
The second fundamental point is the description of a recurring dream that shadows Humbert after Lolita has flown (she absconds with the cynically carnal Quilty). It is also proof of the fact that style, that prose itself, can control morality. Who would want to do something that gave them dreams like these?
“. . . she did haunt my sleep but she appeared there in strange and ludicrous disguises as Valeria or Charlotte [his ex-wives], or a cross between them. That complex ghost would come to me, shedding shift after shift, in an atmosphere of great melancholy and disgust, and would recline in dull invitation on some narrow board or hard settee, with flesh ajar like the rubber valve of a soccer ball’s bladder. I would find myself, dentures fractured or hopelessly misplaced, in horrible chambres garnies, where I would be entertained at tedious vivisecting parties that generally ended with Charlotte or Valeria weeping in my bleeding arms and being tenderly kissed by my brotherly lips in a dream disorder of auctioneered Viennese bric-a-brac, pity, impotence and the brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed.”
That final phrase, with its clear allusion, reminds us of the painful and tender diffidence with which Nabokov wrote about the century’s terminal crime. His father, the distinguished liberal statesman (whom Trotsky loathed), was shot dead by a fascist thug in Berlin; and Nabokov’s homosexual brother, Sergey, was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp (“What a joy you are well, alive, in good spirits,” Nabokov wrote to his sister Elena, from the US to the USSR, in November 1945. “Poor, poor Seryozha . . . !”). Nabokov’s wife, Véra, was Jewish, and so, therefore, was their son (born in 1934); and there is a strong likelihood that if the Nabokovs had failed to escape from France when they did (in May 1940, with the Wehrmacht 70 miles from Paris), they would have joined the scores of thousands of undesirables delivered by Vichy to the Reich.
In his fiction, to my knowledge, Nabokov wrote about the Holocaust at paragraph length only once – in the incomparable Pnin (1957). Other references, as in Lolita, are glancing. Take, for example, this one-sentence demonstration of genius from the insanely inspired six-page short story “Signs and Symbols” (it is a description of a Jewish matriarch):
“Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths – until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.”
Pnin goes further. At an émigré houseparty in rural America a Madam Shpolyanski mentions her cousin, Mira, and asks Timofey Pnin if he has heard of her “terrible end”. “Indeed, I have,” Pnin answers. Gentle Timofey sits on alone in the twilight. Then Nabokov gives us this:
“What chatty Madam Shpolyanski mentioned had conjured up Mira’s image with unusual force. This was disturbing. Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself . . . never to remember Mira Belochkin – not because . . . the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind . . . but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira’s death were possible. One had to forget – because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one’s lips in the dusk of the past.”
How resonantly this passage chimes with Primo Levi’s crucial observation that we cannot, we must not, “understand what happened”. Because to “understand” it would be to “contain” it. “What happened” was “non-human”, or “counter-human”, and remains incomprehensible to human beings.
By linking Humbert Humbert’s crime to the Shoah, and to “those whom the wind of death has scattered” (Paul Celan), Nabokov pushes out to the very limits of the moral universe. Like The Enchanter, Lolita is airtight, intact and entire. The frenzy of the unattainable desire is confronted, and framed, with stupendous courage and cunning…
Why is that sentence from the short story a demonstration of genius?
“Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths – until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.”
Well, for one thing… speaking of rereading… I’m always rereading “Signs and Symbols,” and not only because I teach it when I teach The Short Story. I read it all the time because it’s beautiful and mysterious. And this particular sentence that Amis cites always gets to me; it jumps out at me. I think it’s because it compacts into itself so much – the smartly listed attributes of Rosa, her farcical delight in bad news. She’s a comic Jewish stereotype, the woman who greets everyone she knows with Who died?
Having sketched her wild tremulous hyperactivity, Nabokov just as quickly has the Germans put all that hyperactivity to death – thereby conveying the staggering, naked rapidity of her murder, the instant sledgehammer of the real, as opposed to the soft, scattered, mainly fantasized disasters with which she liked to excite herself. Nabokov’s phrase “put her to death,” in this context, echoes sickeningly with the image of a parent calming a child and putting her to bed. The final phrase of the sentence – “together with all the people she had worried about” – carries a very strong force of restrained outrage; it seems the longterm result of a disgust so distilled as to become a sort of weird, sardonic stoicism.
