Criticism – Page 6 – Common Infirmities

The domestic elephant

I’ve long been bemused by the function of the elephant in the popular phrase “the elephant in the living room”. When it was invented by the recovery movement — I think in the 1980’s — it clearly was supposed to be both a shocking and ridiculous image. Families, it was saying, often deal with huge and obvious problems, such as addiction or abuse, by developing elaborate mechanisms for ignoring the very existence of the problem, that to an outsider seem both confounding and absurd. It’s as though you had an elephant in your living room, but acted as though you could pretend it wasn’t there.

The weird thing about the later career of the expression is that it has come to be an everyday expression — “That’s the elephant in the living room, isn’t it?” — as though it were perfectly ordinary to have such a thing; indeed, as though every living room has its elephants. I thought of this when I encountered an early use of elephants in the domestic setting, but with a different thrust. In Dominic Sandbrook’s history of Britain in the late 1970’s, Seasons in the Sun, there is a quote from Labour’s Welsh Secretary John Morris, acknowledging defeat in the devolution referendum:

If you see an elephant on your doorstep, you know what it is.

(The second episode of the new season of the BBC’s Sherlock made excellent comic use of the phrase, playing on its strange ubiquity. Giving a wedding toast to Watson, Sherlock reels off a list of some of their cases, concluding with “And then there’s the elephant in the living room.” For a moment it sounds like he’s switching modes, from the CV to something more personal, but then we have a split-second flashback to the detective encountering a real elephant in a real living room, and you remember that “The Elephant in the Living Room” does sound kind of like the title of a Conan Doyle story.)

Lazy headline clichés: Obesity edition

Am I the only one who is briefly bemused when a Guardian homepage headline refers to obesity “leaping” in the developing world, or when the headline on the article tells us

Obesity soars to ‘alarming’ levels in developing countries

I understand the need for colourful imagery in headlines, but it shouldn’t clash. Thinking about obesity leaping and soaring makes my head hurt. We might imagine a headline about a “Healthy increase in measles cases”, or “New NHS rules allow GPs to make a killing”.

The striving after punchy language sometimes makes for weird effects when combined with the English language’s exceptional parts-of-speech ambiguity, as in this BBC headline from the time of the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico:

BP caps shattered oil leak wellhead

At first I thought BP had put some caps on, which proved counterproductive because they shattered the wellhead. I forgot that headline writers like to put everything in the present tense (sounds more exciting that way, I guess), so what I thought was a noun (caps) was actually the verb, describing a success, and what looked like a past-tense verb describing the failed effort was actually a participle, referring to the state of affairs that started the whole story.

Distant relative: A transitive relation?

With regard to Martin Scorcese’s new film “The Wolf of Wall Street”, portraying ancien règime levels of decadence and debauchery in 1990s New York finance, based on the memoir of stockbroker Jordan Belfort, fellow broker and ex-convict Danny Porush commented

The book … is a distant relative of the truth, and the film is a distant relative of the book.

It’s a strange thing to say. I’m guessing he means to say that the film is even farther from the truth than the book is, but it’s perfectly consistent with a claim that the film (unlike the book) is the truth, or that it is closely related to the truth. By analogy, the famous rabbi Adin Steinsaltz is a distant relative of mine. And my brother is a distant relative of Adin Steinsaltz. But I am not distantly related to my brother.

New functions for old clichés: Conditions for passing through an open door

Mixed cliches are nothing unusual for journalists, but the interview this morning on Deutschlandfunk with their Brussels correspondent about the EU stance toward the current protests in the Ukraine, and the failure of democracy there, offered an unusually innovative abuse of cliché.

Speaking of the negotiated association treaty that has already been negotiated between the EU and Ukraine, she says

Die Tür bleibt offen. Die Bedingungen, dass durch diese offene Tür gegangen werden kann… die bleiben die gleichen.

The door is open. The conditions for being permitted to pass through the door remain as they were.

Now, in reality I could have an open door — the front door of my house, say — and nonetheless impose conditions for people being allowed to pass through the door. (In Texas I might even be permitted to shoot people who pass through the open door.) But is a metaphorical open door with conditions still an open door? Is the “open door” in this sentence actually serving any function? Perhaps it is best described as a “hurdle”. Or she might have said, the door to finalising this agreement has been shut, until certain conditions have been met.

I imagine some further applications of this principle:

Yes, this issue is a hot potato. But no one minds grasping it, because it happens to be sheathed in asbestos.

The jury is still out on that… But it has already delivered its verdict in writing.

He is on Death’s doorstep. Fortunately, it appears that Death is currently subletting the property to a less lethal tenant just now.

Data-mining for Cthulhu

I don’t ordinarily repost what other people have written, but this post by The Atlantic‘s Alexis Madrigal is so beautiful that I feel the need to copy it. It really just consists of juxtaposing the buzzword Big Data with this quote from H. P. Lovecraft — one that I was already familiar with, but had never exactly put into this context. It is the famous opening of The Call of Cthulhu:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Safety of a new dark age. Hmm. If only I could turn that into a grant proposal…

New lows in modern copy-editing

The NY Times has, right at the top of its current web site, misspelled the name of Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel. I’m inclined to say that this is not the sort of fast-breaking news where the requirement of speed overrides the demands of careful copy-editing.

For clarification, the figure on the right is not Merkel. I’m not even sure he’s German.

Has “belie” changed meanings?

I came across this comment in a history of movie popcorn (by way of The Dish):

Movie vendors, however, preferred yellow corn, which expanded more when it popped (creating more volume for less product) and had a yellowish tint that belied a coating of butter.

Now, it’s unusual for people to use words to mean their exact opposite, and I have a vague idea that I’ve seen this usage before — belie meaning not “contradict” or “conceal”, but more something like “dishonestly suggest”. If this is a trend in the word, it’s a fascinating slippage, because this inversion of the meaning — from concealing something true to proclaiming something that is false — is a bit of a double negation. In both cases, the subject is dishonest. In the usual sense of belie the object belied is true. In this new meaning — or maybe it’s just a thinko — the thing belied is false.

Interestingly, among the meanings included in the OED are single negations of what I consider the central meaning: Straightforwardly claiming (or demonstrating) something to be false, as in this 1893 citation from the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society:

The postulate of free will and moral responsibility assumed by the classical school is belied by physio-psychology.

Bill and Phil

Having published my comment on William S. Burroughs and his place in the grand tradition of English perversity, I should point my readers to this brilliant précis of the Burroughs corpus by Belle Waring at Crooked Timber:

I think pretty much all the Important Male Novelists of the mid to late 20th-century are such sexist dillweeds that it is actually impossible to enjoy the books. For me. Except William S. Burroughs, and that is because he does not want to sex chicks up. Not even a little bit. He wants us to be able to make clones, and then just go live on another planet with only men and boys and million-year-old crab creatures made of radioactive cadmium and then have gay sex there. It is astringently refreshing to have a novelist not care about having sex with you at all. It’s the best! Goodbye, poorly drawn female characters who exist as trophies for when the protagonists level up after a boss battle with Freudian analysis!

But I should complement this dismissal of the IMNs with this interesting feminist (or, at least, womanist) defence of Philip Roth.

Jane and Edith and Hunter and Bill

Jane Austen and Edith Wharton and Hunter Thompson and William Burroughs. I presume I am the first person to put those four names on the same page, but it is not in the interest of priority that I mention them.

Rather, I happen to have just read The Age of Innocence right after Pride and Prejudice, and was reminded obliquely of my experience, many years ago, reading Naked Lunch right after Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. My thought then was, Hunter Thompson, for all his skill as an entertainer, is just a little boy playing at decadence. Burroughs, for good or ill — and he seems pretty ill — is serious. And it caused me to feel retrospectively revolted at Thompson for playing with horrors, instead of feeling revolted at Burroughs, who describes the perversity of the flesh in a style that feels more real — hence more disturbing — than any realist chronicle could be. Surreal in the original sense: higher than reality, more intense.

And it is the same with Austen and Wharton. I am not insensible to the charms of Austen’s prose, and I finished P & P with great satisfaction, but next to Wharton, her fellow in the comedy-of-manners genre, she seems terribly unserious. Her characters have motives and passions, but they all seem so superficial. Obviously we can’t blame Austen for not anticipating the psychological revolution in fiction that Wharton was heir to, and her elegantly polished prose has many pleasures that Wharton’s prickly — and sometimes overly analytical — sentences can’t match. But her characters are all such simpletons — particularly the men. There is an occasional mention of the virtue of someone being generous to his servants, but no one has any real project beyond redesigning her garden, and ambition is scoffed at. It all feels so confined and dreary.

Maybe a mathematician has trouble appreciating Pride and Prejudice because it’s too much like our work. It’s like a chess game, or someone working through all the combinatorics of possible relationships with a certain set of people, given some arbitrary but fixed social rules. A friend of mine likes to compare Jane Austen’s novels to the publications of the RAND corporation.

On a peripheral note, I discovered recently that there is a whole world of Jane Austen reënactors, who meet at the Jane Austen Society of North America to dress up in regency gowns and do… stuff. (Deborah Yaffe has written a whole book on the cult.) It seems pretty bizarre to me. There are authors whose fictional worlds I would less like to inhabit — the aforementioned William Burroughs is one; George Orwell comes to mind — but not many. I’ll have to read Yaffe’s book for insights. I suppose there are all those Civil War reënactors who play at having their legs sawn off in a field hospital, so who can say what motivates people? Continue reading “Jane and Edith and Hunter and Bill”

What we talk about when we talk about what we talk about

It seems that everyone’s favourite hip formula for a title is “What we talk about when we talk about X”. It certainly caught my attention that there were two books by prominent fiction writers with titles of this form, Haruki Marukami’s memoir What I Talk about when I Talk About Running, and Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. I take these to be derived from Raymond Carver’s celebrated story What we Talk about When We Talk about Love, though I can’t be sure the phrase didn’t exist in some form before.

But it’s definitely taken on a life of its own. I was inspired to write this post by an article in The Atlantic titled What We Talk About When We Talk About Privacy. A recent book on the future of books included a chapter titled What We Talk About When We Talk About Metadata (which is somewhat ironic, because what we talk about has changed radically in the past few months, as metadata have gone from being a niche concern of bibliographers to a main topic in the discussion of domestic espionage). A quick Google Book search turns up books from the last few years: What We Talk About When We Talk About God, The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop, as well as WWTAWWTA Vision, Emotion, Error, Revolution, and Ralph Sampson.

So, why the swelling concern with talking about what we talk about when we talk about things? Obviously, it’s a great phrase, conveying both intense focus and ironic detachment. It promises to lift the lid on the “real story”, to get behind all the “talk”, while still sounding itself kind of chatty. To move to talking about what we talk about, you must have already mastered all the things people talk about on the relevant topic. Continue reading “What we talk about when we talk about what we talk about”