Month: August 2013

The Perfect Political Slogan

Richard Morris attests to the difficultly of crafting it:

I once sat in a room of about 20 people, where we were invited to write a memorable line to adorn the platform at conference. Entirely predictably, this process was an unmitigated disaster. After an hour of coming up with any number of lines that randomly sorted words like New, Better, Fair, Green, Future, Britain, Fresh, Together and Change into a new order, we all agreed that perhaps it would be better if we got one person to write one memorable line with a single pertinent thought. We then, ahem, “discussed” for another hour who should write it.

He zooms out – and offers some advice:

[W]e’ve all become fixated with “the one great line”. And it’s all Barack Obama’s fault, with “Change we can believe in”. In reality, not even this line stood alone. Other lines dominated the campaign, like “Yes, we can” and the Fairey Posters “Hope” and “Change“. But since 2008, it’s become a “mandatory” – and an obsession – to write a great campaign line. And it takes up an inordinate amount of headspace.

So can I make a suggestion to all the parties. If you want a great line, get a single person to write it. Then get a single person to approve it. Then spend two years and a lot of money saying it over and over again. And get someone to say it with affection, with emotion and with conviction. It’s the only way.

Alone With The Written Word

David Paul Deavel nominates Ben Yagoda’s How to Not Write Bad as a successor to The Elements Of Style. Part of why he’s impressed:

As good as most of his guidance and judgments are, what I like most about Yagoda’s book is the more general advice he gives to those who really want to write better. It primarily involves habits of reading and thinking rather than learning specific rules. Yagoda is skeptical of accounts of the past in which everyone was writing elegant letters with classical and biblical allusions between battles of the Civil War. There may have been great letters, but few were writing them. Today more people than ever are writing on blogs and other social media. The problem is that most of this digital writing is not all that good due to the fact that it is done in a rather mindless fashion. Most people are “multi-tasking,” which is a perfect condition in which to write bad. Precision, accuracy, and diction that avoid ambiguity, vagueness, and cliché will inevitably be sacrificed when one is not “mindful” or concentrated on the difficult task of writing. Yagoda says what my students and I need to hear: Turn off the radio, the phone, and the social media if you want to write something that’s not bad.

Emma Woolf similarly tries to limit distractions when writing:

Isolation is a big part of writing (if you crave constant company then writing’s probably not for you) because you need to be alone simply to get the words down.

But you also need to experience life and people and relationships in order to have something to write about. When I went freelance a few years ago, after a decade in publishing, I found the enforced solitude hard. I missed the banter and time-wasting with colleagues, I even missed the silly office politics. These days I escape writing-at-home madness at the British Library: in its hallowed reading rooms, surrounded by other freelancers, I feel less caged (and you can’t work there in pajamas).

Avoiding the distractions of social media and the Internet is another problem for writers these days. I struggle with this: currently my screensaver is the warning from Jonathan Franzen: “It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.” It was Franzen who told Time magazine he’d resorted to pouring super-glue into his Ethernet port to deprive himself of Internet access. (He went on to write the novel Freedom, so it obviously worked for him.) Other writers, including Zadie Smith, use applications that prevent them from going online; I haven’t tried this software yet, but I’m considering it.

A Deliberately Slow Reader

Mahatma Gandhi

Reviewing Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading, C. Christopher Smith emphasizes the way the newspaper Gandhi created, Indian Opinion, aimed to cultivate certain habits of mind and body among its readers, through both its content and form:

The selection and arrangement of extracts in the Indian Opinion, as well as the pamphlets that Gandhi published, served to create a rough surface—in contrast to the smooth macadam of industrialization—that would help readers slow down and contemplate what they were reading. The content that Gandhi offered in his publications was meaty and aimed at promoting the cause of satyagraha. News stories and excerpts from authors such as Ruskin, Tolstoy, and Thoreau, whose work Gandhi saw as essential to the ethics of satyagraha, served to form a slow, attentive community that could resist the empire’s industrial pressure for speed.

How today’s West might learn from Gandhi’s philosophy of reading:

We are in dire need today of practices that shape our identity as a people, and that teach us to slow down and be attentive to the world around us and the power that it exerts upon our desires. As Gandhi’s experiences in South Africa indicate, reading can be an important practice of this sort, but it must be done with intentionality about what we read and how we read it. Committing to practices of reading and conversation (about reading) in our church communities can help to provide the structure we need to begin the challenging process of slowing down. Perhaps our communities will have leaders like Gandhi who can help guide us in these kind of practices, and recommend resources that will help us to read (and live) more slowly and attentively. If we are to bear witness to a different way, then we must seek to apprentice ourselves to practices that—when sustained over many years—will inevitably slow us down.

(Photo of Gandhi at work via Wikimedia Commons)

A Literary Zoo

Alissa Nutting’s debut novel, Tampa, tells the story of Celeste Price, “a young, recently-married, beautiful middle-school teacher — who also happens to be a sociopath who throughout the book recounts her systematic and relentless seduction of a fourteen-year-old student.” In an interview, Nutting differentiates between herself and her deviant main character:

I know that in my case — and I think this is true for so many authors — writing is the place where I mull over the things about the world that are beyond my comprehension: mainly death, sociopathy, and inequality. For me, being a writer is like going to the zoo, holds the same level of otherworldly curiosity — I can stand in front of a gorilla’s cage and have just an inch of glass separating me from fatal danger, yet feel completely safe. I can get right next to all these bizarre creatures I’d never, ever want to be close to otherwise. Writing Celeste was a lot like that. She’s so depraved that I didn’t really worry about people conflating me with her voice in any way… after all, this is a book that indicts the narrator instead of glorifying her. In order to do that, to truly capture the wrongness of what she does, and how much delight she takes in it, I needed to show the grittiest aspects of her transgressions. For the subject matter to be adequately disturbing, I had to push the writing until I’d thoroughly disturbed myself — that was the test I held the writing up to. And I did disturb myself, on a daily basis. I went through an incredible amount of antacid products while writing this book. Celeste is intense, to say the least.

Seduced By The Beauty Of Despair

Dr. Paul Gachet, who treated Vincent van Gogh during the painter’s last days, had a romantic view of melancholy. Gregory Curtis explains:

Dr. Gachet lived in an age when medicine was still considerably more art than science. He 487px-Portrait_of_Dr._Gachethad received his medical degree in 1858 after writing a thesis on melancholy which was not scientific at all but literary. He found melancholia throughout history, from Diogenes in Athens, to Seneca in Rome, to the present day. “One might almost say,” Gachet wrote, “that all the great men, the philosophers, the tyrants, the great conspirators, the great criminals, the great poets, the great artists, were essentially melancholic beings.” In fact he saw melancholia extending throughout nature. There were melancholy animals, melancholy plants, and even melancholy rocks. “Who,” he asked, “has knelt beside a tomb and not seen in the cypress, 
the weeping willow, the poplar the emblem of sadness!” He went on in this vein for a while in his thesis before blaming melancholy in the present day on civilization and progress that broke the laws of nature, a theory with which Vincent would concur.

(Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet, 1890)

The Folly Of Molly Mormonism

In an interview, “Natalie,” a 23-year-old Mormon feminist, describes how her teenage sexuality collided with her faith:

The thing is, masturbation is a normal thing, but [the community] doesn’t talk to girls about it—I have since learned that they talk to boys about it—because we’re not supposed to desire. So I knew it was something a girl is not supposed to do, which made it even worse. So then it became kind of masochistic for me. It was like, Oh, Natalie ate too much today, she’s going to masturbate. I didn’t want to cut myself, I wasn’t ballsy enough to get drunk, I wasn’t ballsy enough to smoke—it was the biggest thing I could think to do to hurt myself within my religion. Which is really sad, that I was using my sexuality to hurt myself. So that was one of the things that I had to unpack with my therapist.

After that, I put my religion in a box for about a year. I was kind of like, I need to know who I am right now.

She eventually made her way to BYU-Idaho and decided she would give the religion another chance, describing her first two semesters there as her attempt “to be the good Molly Mormon” – an ideal she eventually relinquished. And what, exactly, is a Molly Mormon?

It’s kind of the Mormon idea about how a woman’s supposed to act.

Molly Mormons are women who are so spiritually obsessed that everything has to be by the book. Oh, your dress is not knee length! Oh no! It’s encapsulated by this sense that you have to be modest enough to be deemed attractive but not immodest enough to be deemed sexy. Being blonde and petite is sort of an added bonus. There’s a different type of body shaming that happens within Mormonism. It’s not necessarily the same as you see in Vogue or watching Sex and the City, where it’s like, “I have to be a size 4.” It’s more trying to be this modest female paradigm virtue where you’re supposed to be enticing and attractive but also sweet and naïve.

Why Don Draper Read Dante

Alan Jacobs recently made this observation about how we misread Dante:

Dante is not at all interested in placing persons (or as he would see them, ex-persons) in their proper places in the afterlife, nor is he interested in speculating on the precise nature of the sufferings of the damned: he is, rather, interested in exploring the nature of sin. The topic of the Inferno is not Hell but sin, for the Pilgrim must understand what sin is so he can renounce it, and thereby begin to find a way out of that dark, dark wood.

J.L. Wall uses that insight to unpack the meaning of Mad Men, the latest season of which begins with Don Draper reading Dante on the beach – a clue, he thinks, to understanding what the show’s writers are trying to do with their elusive main character:

Don Draper and Mad Men are, like Dante, less concerned with Hell than with sin.

Though the imagery was ratcheted up in this most recent season, questions of sin’s reality or applicability have been present since the show’s beginning. And not only with Don: The second-season character arc for Peggy Olsen, Don’s protege, is dominated by her conservative Catholic mother and a liberal priest both trying to confront her with the reality of sin and steer her off its path.Whether or not Peggy still believes in sin’s reality, Don does—and knows himself to be a sinner. Lying in bed with his neighbor, he shies away from the sight of the crucifix on her neck and ultimately pushes it from sight as they make love. (Her name, Sylvia, is etymologically related to the “dark wood”—selva—into which Don’s voiceover announces he has stumbled.) As much as Don’s flashbacks are dominated by scenes as a child in a whorehouse, they are equally dominated by discussions of sin, purity, penance, and redemption. His memories aren’t dominated by sex, that is, but by the connection between sex and his self-identification as a sinner.