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Monday, October 08, 2007
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Scathing Online Schoolmarm Hope it's not too early in your day for a higher-level consideration of bad writing. By bad writing here, I don't mean full of grammatical errors or stylistic faults. I simply mean writing that doesn't work, writing whose clear desire to move the reader in a certain direction intellectually and emotionally meets with resistance and failure. Consider this opinion piece in this morning's New York Times. Terror and Demons [Weak title. Too vaguely portentous. The entire piece is vague and portentous.] History happens, but only just. The lives of individuals, as of nations, may hinge on a millimeter’s difference in the trajectory of a bullet, a road not taken on a whim or the random spray of shrapnel. But there is no undoing what is done. [This first paragraph introduces the problem. It's a string of ominous but vacuous cliches -- road not taken... undoing what is done... It suggests a smug writer who thinks himself full of life wisdom. It's preachy.] Nothing, for example, can bring back the life of Carol Ann Gotbaum, 45, whose terrible end in a holding cell at the Phoenix airport was chronicled in a Times report by Eric Konigsberg. [Little is yet known about this woman and the way she died. The author nowhere acknowledges this. Instead, he spins a still-mysterious story his way, and that feels to the reader like manipulation.] Depressive and fighting alcoholism, Carol missed a connection by minutes. [Was she fighting it? We don't know. Maybe she wasn't fighting it, or wasn't fighting it very hard. And note the use of her first name. This creates a false sense of intimacy. The writer doesn't in fact know her, and he knows almost nothing about her. He intends, early in the piece, to make us sympathize with her, first names creating a greater sense of vulnerability and particularity, I suppose, than last. In fact it comes across as condescending.] She became hysterical and was subdued, handcuffed, shackled, abandoned and found dead with the shackle across her neck. [The writer unfairly slips in the incendiary word abandoned. She was, it appears, not abandoned.] All this happened fast. We can hear her cry: “I’m not a terrorist. I’m a sick mother.” [We. We can hear her cry. You have seen their faces. Bad writing is about emotionality forced upon us. Readers tend not to like this. It's alienating. No one enjoys being manipulated. The effect of the writer's portentous and histrionic language is to push us away from his point of view, not to bring us into his mental world, where he'd like us to be.] We can see the heavy-handed police officers, their sense of mission redoubled by the alcohol on her breath, muscling Carol to the ground. [How come the police officers don't get first - or even last - names? Monsters don't get names.] In their zeal — for American airports are now temples of zealotry — they would not have imagined her three young children, her distraught husband, much less the dislocated life that had put her en route, alone, to an Arizona addiction-treatment clinic. [This is contemptible writing. Fuck the pigs, the author tells us, because in subduing an out of control person they failed to imagine the fact that she has ... not children, of course, but young children... a distraught husband (who, according to the Times account, put a woman like this on a plane by herself)... and a dislocated life... Let me pause a bit on the dislocated business, okay? I love the NYTimes, but never was there a louder public address system on behalf of special pleading for the rich. The woman in question lived in unimaginable opulence -- unimaginable, I mean, for the police whose ugly job it was to deal with her shouted threats and profanities (We can hear her cry... Why doesn't the writer tell us what else we heard before she was subdued? Because the saintliness he's sketching would get fuzzy if we heard her fucks and shits.) No doubt this woman suffered from clinical depression, but it's clear from the newspaper account that her life was a glorious one by any standard. As a result, the only aspect of it the writer can glomb onto in order to convince us of her miserable existence is the fact that she moved from one city to another when she got married, and therefore felt displaced.] As it happened, on another perfect New York morning redolent of the endless summer of 2001 (a time when sunlight mocked pain), I was particularly affected by Carol’s story; and here I am writing about her, rather than brave monks in Burma, because certain signals are too powerful to ignore. [As with the opening sentences of this piece, this sentence is just a mess. A mess. What the hell is he saying? Is there a reference to 9/11 in there? What's the temporality of this sentence? Was he moved by this woman's death in 2001, years before it happened? That's how the sentence reads. And note again the stilted writing ... brave monks... redolent... endless summer... These are dead words.] In many particulars — her South African upbringing, her uprooted life, her acute postpartum depression after the birth of her last child, her hard-working and often absent husband, her radiant smile overlying pain and her powerlessness before her own self-destructive urges — Carol resembled my mother. [Forget the cliches -- radiant smile, etc. Just note again the use of inappropriate words that mean to rev your emotional engines. For instance, the word "uprooted." This woman had an international background, moving from one city to another in search of a good education, a good job, and then a good family life. This ain't uprooted, a word that suggests involuntary removal.] So having read about Carol, my head filled with her disoriented rage before punitive officialdom [Again, the writer prejudges the police response.], I did something I rarely do. I went back and read my mother’s suicide note of July 25, 1978. The note reads in part: “It’s as though I’ve turned to stone. I can’t relate, I can’t communicate and I can no longer bear the pain and gloom I cause to those I love most. I feel I’ll never completely throw off this mood and hopelessness and depression. I know I have everything to thank God for and be thankful for, which only makes my ordeal worse and worse.” In conclusion, my mother asks if “my body — any part of it — can be used for research.” With that, she downed valium, antidepressant drugs and gin. That was almost the end of the story, or the start of a different tale of anguish, but my father, a doctor, found her just in time. Her life hung in the balance and was salvaged. [Wretched cliches.] Other suicide notes would follow — one of June 15, 1982, says: “I’m just too tired to fight anymore” — but never again was the attempt so serious. Technology leaps forward. Medicine advances. Lives grow longer. Diseases are vanquished. But the brain, and in particular the vagaries of mental illness, present mysteries as deep as the elusive enigma of life itself. [Straight out of a cheesy public tv documentary.] When Carol, raised in Cape Town, had her postpartum depression after the birth of her now 3-year-old son, she was a relative newcomer in New York. When my mother, raised in Johannesburg, had hers after the birth of my sister in 1957, she was new to London, with its chill postwar pall. What happened to my mother in the 1950s — insulin shock therapy, electric shock treatment, hospitalization in harrowing wards; things about which she could never speak without a shudder — were of that time. Nobody would have treated Carol’s despair, or anybody’s, like that today. But the riddle remains, etched in radiant mothers’ faces clutching laughing children, faces that seem to mock the very idea of panic, delusion and suicidal self-hatred, but contain them nonetheless. [Radiant mothers in whose faces are etched... Bugger me. This is unbearably bogus writing.] You can look at Carol’s end in many ways: as an innocent’s devastating encounter with terror-obsessed police, as a ghastly but haphazard event, as a death foretold. [Beyond pompous. Offensive in its facile dismissal of the complexity of police-work. Self-congratulatory in its lazy lifting (death foretold) of talented writers' formulations.] In the days of the Irish Republican Army’s terrorism in London, my mother was thrown into what amounted to a holding cell at Fortnum and Mason, the department store, after she left a bag unattended. Under questioning, she became hysterical, confused, unhinged — and was locked up. There was no shackle, however. [This last sentence is just funny. Amid an absurd campaign to paint two women as political prisoners, the writer does feel compelled to note the absence of shackles ...] Thus do the affairs of the world intersect with individuals’ pain. The upshot then rests on a razor’s edge. Lives veer into a vortex. [What can UD say at this point about this sort of prose that she hasn't already abundantly said? Bad writers try to invest their dead writing with life by lists of brief portentous cliches. Sometimes this leads them to the sort of crisis point in which upward shots come to rest on the edge of razors.] Carol Ann Gotbaum and June Bernice Cohen are dead. Cancer took my mother in 1999; she viewed the illness as a trifle beside depression. Her favorite book, unsurprisingly, was Anna Karenina. Her favorite line was from Othello: “What wound did ever heal but by degrees?” [What does this mean? What is the writer trying to say? Nothing much, actually. He's emoting.] Labels: SOS |