Year: 2013

by Patrick Appel

Ta-Nehisi reflects on learning French in Paris:

I came here everyone told me that the enemy was the French. It would be their rudeness, their retreat into English that would defeat me. But I am here now and it is clear that–as with attempting to learn anything–the only real enemy is me. My confidence comes and goes. I have no innate intelligence here–intelligence is overrated. What matters is toughness, a willingness to believe against what is apparent. Learning is invisible act. And what I see is disturbing. In class my brain scatters, just as it did when I was in second grade. I have to tell myself every five minutes to concentrate.

The hardest thing about learning a language is that, at its core, it is black magic. No one can tell you when, where or how you will crossover–some people will even tell you that no such crossover exists. The only answer is to put one foot in front of the other, to keep walking, to understand that the way is up. The only answer is a resource which many of us have long ago discarded. C’est à dire, faith.

One of TNC’s commenters adds:

Learning a second language as an adult involves an implied contract. The negative side is that you’re now, if not the village idiot, then at least the village’s linguistically-challenged person. You will struggle for words, you miss stuff, you can’t make jokes, you’re stiff and slow, you’re not eloquent. All that beautiful stuff you said about Paris in English? You have no idea how to say that in French. Your brain is rewiring itself for something unanticipated, more or less as happens with people with head traumas who must relearn their native language. You’re not the same person you are in English: if I can be blunt, you’re dumber in French. For now.

The positive side? You’re opening yourself up to another world, and the people in that world. People appreciate that, on a pretty fundamental level. You’re learning humility, and there are few more visceral ways to do it. You are taking steps toward knowing people in a way you couldn’t know them before. You’re going to learn the intricate social dance that happens when two people who know each other’s language to different degrees figure out – word by word – how they like to talk to one another

Dreher applauds TNC:

What a wise man, welcoming the humiliation of hard experience, in faith.

by Patrick Appel

Jessie Walker discusses his new book, The United States of Paranoia:

Victoria Taylor calls Walker’s book “a thoroughly researched and completely readable look at infamous and forgotten conspiracy theories and presumed cabals throughout American history”:

Walker identifies five American conspiracy archetypes: the perceived enemy within (think the Salem witch trials), the enemy outside (al-Qaeda, Indian tribes during the colonial period, religious movements), the enemy above (e.g. the government, secretive masterminding organizations out to establish a New World Order, like the Illuminati), the enemy below (slave uprisings) and the “benevolent conspiracy” (angels, the Theosophical Society). Some groups fall into more than one category, and in some cases the differentiating lines are blurred, but just about all myths can be viewed as at least one of these.

In another review, Laura Miller explains how conspiracy theories catch on:

As Walker sees it, our brains are predisposed to see patterns in random data and to apply stories to explain them, which is why conspiracy theory can be so contagious. Although conspiracies do exist, we need to be vigilant against our propensity to find them whether they are there or not. The most sensible outlook would appear to be that of Robert Anton Wilson, who concluded that “powerful people” could well be “engaged in criminal plots” but who found it unlikely that “the conspirators were capable of carrying out those plots competently.” Or, I would add, of covering them up effectively. It’s the ineptness of human beings in executing elaborate schemes and then shutting up about it afterward that makes me skeptical of almost all conspiracy theories. Besides, if the U.S. government was masterful enough to engineer the 9/11 attacks, why couldn’t it also plant some WMD in Iraq?

Salon has an excerpt from the book. It concludes:

The first decade of the twenty-first century saw three particularly notable eruptions of elite paranoia. The first came with the reactions to the 9/11 attacks. The second was the response to Katrina, when powerful people’s fears both fed and were reinforced by the centralization and militarization of disaster relief. And the third began when Barack Obama became president, as commentators treated a group of unconnected crimes as a grand, malevolent movement. As is often the case with paranoid perspectives, this connect-the-dots fantasy said more about the tellers’ anxieties than it did about any order actually emerging in the world.

by Matt Sitman

Josh Jones highlights novelist Cormac McCarthy’s unusual punctuation style which, as he confirmed in an interview with Oprah, entails never using quotation marks or semi-colons:

James Joyce is a good model for punctuation. He keeps it to an absolute minimum. There’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. I mean, if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate.

More on his style:

McCarthy declares his stylistic convictions with simplicity: “I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that’s it.” It’s a discipline he learned first in a college English class, where he worked to simplify 18th century essays for a textbook the professor was editing. Early modern English is notoriously cluttered with confounding punctuation, which did not become standardized until comparatively recently.

McCarthy, enamored of the prose style of the Neoclassical English writers but annoyed by their over-reliance on semicolons, remembers paring down an essay “by Swift or something” and hearing his professor say, “this is very good, this is exactly what’s needed.” Encouraged, he continued to simplify, working, he says to Oprah, “to make it easier, not to make it harder” to decipher his prose. For those who find McCarthy sometimes maddeningly opaque, this statement of intent may not help clarify things much.

Not everyone is enamored, however. From Jacob Lambert’s 2009 parody of McCarthy’s The Road:

With the first gray light he rose and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Godless and blasted. A madman’s timeshare. The trees dead, the grass dead, the shrubs dead also. The rivers dead. And the streams and reeds, the mosses and voles. Dead as well. He glassed the ruins, hoping for a shred of color, a wisp of smoke, a faroff Cracker Barrel. There was nothing but swirling gloom, a grasping murk. He sat with the binoculars and the gray, and thought: the child is my warrant. If he is not the word of God God never spoke, although he might have scribbled something on a paperscrap and passed it along. He bit hard on his blistered upperlip. If only I had thought to give him a name. If only.

An hour later they were on The Road, an Oprah’s Book Club selection. He pushed the cart and both he and the boy carried knapsacks in case they had to make a run for it. Cannibal rapists, roving bloodcults. Greenpeace volunteers. In the knapsacks were essential things: tins of food, metal utensils, a broken Slinky, a canopener, three bullets, a picture of ham. He looked out over the barren waste, the scorpled remain. The road was empty, as was its wont. Quiet, moveless. Are you okay? he said, quotation marks dead as the reeds. The boy nodded. Then they started down the road, humming a sprightly tune. The tune was silent, and unsprightly.