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Tuesday, August 03, 2004
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STYLE, AND HOW TO GET IT
Regular readers of UD will recall one of her earliest posts [UD, 11/30/03], on television and her avoidance of it. Television is a boring subject, but UD wants to begin today’s post with it in order - among other things - to make a point about writing style. Recall UD’s post in praise of Jan Morris’s essay on La Paz [UD, 3/26/04]. Here, the point was that Morris’s precise and exuberant prose conveyed through style as much as content her excitement at the eccentric, life-packed spectacle of high Bolivian cities, her openness to all sorts of experiences, and so forth. Morris was in spectacular control of her prose; it revealed exactly what she wanted it to reveal of the world and of Morris. A less skilled writer, like the New York Times “Personal Health” columnist, Jane Brody, often reveals aspects of her character she would probably prefer not to have been revealed. Look, for instance, at the first few cliché-choked paragraphs of her piece in today’s paper. Hell, start with her title - she probably didn’t choose it, but nonetheless… TV’s TOLL ON YOUNG MINDS AND BODIES Already the cliches are there - the silly melodramatic word (“toll”), and then a phrase that makes me think of old Wonder Bread commercials (“Helps build strong bodies twelve ways.”). And here’s the beginning of the essay, with my bitching about it [literary critics call what I’m about to do “reader response analysis” - that is, I’m sharing with you my actual responses as I read the text] in parentheses: Television can be a wonderful learning tool. [Gevalt! One title and one sentence and I’m already puking cliches! “…wonderful learning tool”? Actually, no, tv cannot be a wonderful learning tool, and Brody knows this, so why does she feel she has to suck up to her readers by starting off with a lie? Her false and prim language has already got me started on my tendency to reread in a subversive way writing that seems to me, like this writing, intolerably smug and healthy-minded … I begin trying to read it as pornography… And (“…Young bodies…tool…”) it’s working!] Thirty-odd years ago, “Sesame Street,” “The Electric Company and “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” helped my sons learn to read, count, socialize and cope with feelings. [Well, these are the usual suspects, and you wouldn’t know from Brody’s uncritical endorsement of them that none of these shows is in fact a particularly good way to learn anything beyond, as The Onion put it awhile ago in one of their greatest stories, “viewing skills”. And there’s the clump of clichés again - “socialize,” “cope with feelings” - this is the crap you express when you’ve secretly been watching Oprah even though you want people to think you’re too high-toned to do that. Or, again, is this simply condescension toward a readership you assume does nothing but watch tv and talk like this?] Nature programs on public television taught them an enormous respect for the world at large and the creatures within it. [Yeah, yeah, all you did was watch public tv… and I’m plotzing to beat the band with “respect for the world at large.”] Not until the boys were old enough to understand how commercials tried to promote consumption were they allowed to watch sports programs on commercial television. [Same lame claim that they only watched public tv, plus the newsflash that commercials try to promote consumption.] With little tv, they were two lean, strong, athletic children [porno button flashing] who grew up in a home without junk food [boast, boast. Martha Stewart eats no junk food and watches only public tv, and look what happened to her], did not pester their parents to buy things they saw advertised [uh huh], never smoked or drank alcohol and knew more about wildlife than the leader of a trip to Kenya [twenty-four hour nature show watching will do that to you]. Unfortunately, our experience with television is rarely duplicated these days [We’re special…better than other people…]. You get the idea. The way you write reveals way more than you think it does about you -- unless you’re in control of your style. There are a couple of things you can do if you want to get serious about writing well. One is to study with great concentration the prose of people who write much better than you do. The other is to practice your writing in a quiet and conducive sort of environment. Which is where the second part of today’s post comes in. A retired English professor each summer takes a small group of University of Michigan students to “an idiosyncratic - I think it’s even fair to say eccentric - annual [retreat sponsored by] the university English department,” writes a New York Times reporter, who goes on to describe a six-week outing to the New England mountains during which students read Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Frost, and other locals, discuss their work, write in a literary journal, and climb hills together. Sounds hippie dippie, but the curriculum is pure canon and hasn’t changed in thirty years, and the founder and leader of this “artificially circumscribed community” is a serious teacher. Part of the circumscribed nature of the community involves a lack of electronics - not only are there no televisions, but “students give up their cellphones…they leave their computers at home…they aren’t allowed any recorded music.” Which is indeed idiosyncratic in the context of today’s universities, but is also exactly what colleges and universities were originally supposed to be - circumscribed, artificial environments within which one’s distance from the noisy world allowed a temporary concentration upon complex and important matters. A few colleges - St. John’s in Annapolis comes to mind - are still sort of like this, but most have bought the bullshit about how it’s better to be part of the big nasty world than some airy-fairy ivory tower, etc. The Michigan students seem happy with this eccentric outing - it seems to have improved their writing and their thinking. And this is not only, UD would like to suggest, because their minds have been calmed and cleared by their setting and their asceticism. They are also beginning to intuit that the greatest writers are often unapologetically eccentric, idiosyncratic people, themselves acquainted with solitude and silence. They do not give a rat’s ass what anybody thinks of their eccentricity. They lack Jane Brody’s anxious concern with what she takes to be the sensibilities of her readers. They are not self-righteous message-mongers; rather, they embody and express better and/or more substantial ways of being in the world, and they do it with such style that they inspire rather than irritate. The path of indirection and embodiment is as much a model for great teachers as for great writers. But students cannot follow this indirection if they are as distracted as most of them are by the havoc that’s been hauled onto their campus. |