"Weak Statement. Stonger Statement."

I often fear I’m destined to be a conservative. Many of the breaking points that I look forward to are reversals of modern trends. They’re usually not political, but they are conservative in more of a personal, romantic, yearning-for-an-imagined-past sort of way. In all probability, I’m just cynical. I have a habit of looking with scorn on things that are new and seeing the worst examples with particular clarity. Meanwhile, I tend to focus almost exclusively on the best elements of things once they are comfortably in the past.

I know it’s a flawed way of engaging with the world. I don’t think it’s altogether incorrect, though, only skewed. I’m just more optimistic about legacies than about trends. I like to believe that my perceptions of good and bad are still accurate, even if they aren’t counterbalanced in either case.

I can be quite unforgiving with the negative observations that I make of culture and the arts. I’m sure that history will vindicate the best that music, literature and film currently have to offer, but while I’m living amidst it I see so much more dreck. It gives me the impression that our collective standards are getting lower. The least sophisticated works of art gain the greatest popularity. Perhaps it’s always been like that, but such beautiful things have grown out of the past; how did they avoid being corrupted by pablum?

I don’t read what seems to be bad literature. There is far too much excellent literature to read for me to waste my time, and I don’t read enough anyway. So I don’t have a thorough sense of what linguistic or stylistic features are characteristic of bad artistry, beyond what is apparent on the surface. But as a result of reading modern writing more generally, I worry about the trajectory what is accepted as literary language.

I am fairly proud to admit that I’m rather snobbish about grammar. I’m probably prone to error, but I am the sort of person who will stop and correct myself in mid-conversation if I end a sentence with a preposition. (I know that’s not a hard-and-fast rule, and I know that my third clause in this post ended with a preposition.) So I’ve noticed some trends with which I am snobbishly uncomfortable. One of these is that sentence fragments seem to be commonly accepted, even encouraged in published literature these days.

I was reading the most recent issue of Creative Nonfiction, and I found in one article several examples of short, declarative, ungrammatical phrases, which decidedly limit how seriously I can take the writing. Early in the article, the author writes:

“California is among the states that require judges to divide the community property perfectly equally between the divorcing parties. No matter what.”

Now, I recognize that the author is trying to give particular weight to that latter phrase by isolating it from the rest of the sentence, but I think that that’s a lazy way for a writer to evoke the intended response from his or her audience. But this author does it again later:

“She followed and shot him again. And again.”

(Nice phrase, let me re-use it.) And again:

“Maria got revenge. And six years in state prison.”

Thinking about it now, I’m quite sure that I’ve seen numerous other examples of this in published work elsewhere. I am uncomfortable with a literary landscape in which this sort of cutting of corners is considered effective and is widely accepted by editors.

Writers are different from spoken word artists. We should be able to convey our ideas and leave an impact upon our audience by more nuanced means than pausing for dramatic effect. If an author wishes for there to be strength in a subsequent observation, he should convey it with the strength of his language, and his words should punch his audience in the gut or grab it by the testicles, not merely slap it on the ear.

I’m sure that I have little cause to worry and that these trends will fade in the history of modern literature, but so long as I’m in the midst of it, I’ll demand better from the here-and-now. Perhaps it is the persistence of those demands that keeps the worst of our culture and art from being as visible in retrospect as it is in the moment.

My Compliments

I make it a point to not read my major local newspaper, The Buffalo News, as it is a terrible publication. I once made the mistake of subscribing to it, which afforded me a complete picture of its editorial quality. Suffice it to say that I’ve seen a typographical error in a sub-heading on the front page. Still, I happened upon a copy of the Friday edition’s events guide, the Gusto yesterday, and I found some amusement with the restaurant reviews. In the “Cheap Eats” column, there was one of those gems of a sentence that reminds me of the entertainment value of bad writing, while also filling me with depression at the thought that there are plenty of people who write poorly and are paid a substantial salary for doing so.

Worse still, I was dismayed to read that the author, Toni Ruberto is also a Gusto editor. Presumably then, her job is not only to avoid writing flawed language, but also to identify and remove flawed language that others fail to notice in their own writing.

Yet, in a review of Christie’s Family Restaurant, Ms. Ruberto writes:

“Hash browns served on a large oval plate, enough for two, were moist with just enough of a crunchy edge that they were flavorful, not burnt.”

I wonder, what possible purpose could she have seen for those last two words, other than to turn her intended praise for this restaurant’s hash browns into a backhanded compliment? There is no reason to add the addendum that your food was not burnt unless you mean to imply that you had expected otherwise. Ruberto is not even contrasting “burnt” with any other quality that would call that to mind. It’s not as though different degrees of the same feature separate being burnt from being flavorful, or even crunchy. It’s an almost complete non-sequiter, and it’s so tactless and lacking in self-awareness as to actually affect the tone of the entire review. In light of it, I get the impression that when Ruberto closes her review by saying “We’ll be back for more,” she’s not saying “I expect their food to continue being good,” but rather “I expect their food to continue to surprise me by not being poorly prepared.”

In honor of Ms. Ruberto and the publication that employs her, I would like to offer the following compliments on their review of Christie’s Family Restaurant:

It was understandable, not written in Swahili.

It used proper punctuation, and the text was not one giant paragraph.

It contained relevant information, and the address of the restaurant was not wrong.

The prices of the dishes were accurate, not given in Mexican pesos.

It was professionally published, not posted by a twelve year old blogger.

The text was printed, but not in white.

The typesetting was not upside-down.

There were five columns, which did not read from right to left.

Toni Ruberto has a job that’s not at the New York Times.

There was not a typo in the sub-heading.

And this is just a small handful of the things that you’ve done right. So I hope you feel proud. Good show, The Buffalo News! I’ll be back for more.

Stick to the Character Limit

In advance of the current issue, The Atlantic Monthly has changed its Letters to the Editor section. Comments are now printed in a more broadly conceived section called "The Conversation," which, as James Bennet explains in the Editor's Note for May, "is an attempt to more fully express the widening range of reaction to our work." That is to say that there is a much greater diversity of media through which one might comment on a piece of journalism, and The Atlantic now prints traditional letters to the editor alongside blog comments, poll results from TheAtlantic.com, and so on.

By and large, I find this to be an admirable way of extending the dialogue that might grow out of the writing in the magazine without giving short shrift to anyone who tries to express their insight in what is arbitrarily identified as the wrong place. That said, I think there are wrong places - media that ought not be included, and I was appalled to see that among the meaningful and articulate commentary, one tweet had been transcribed and printed in the pages of an esteemed, historic magazine. It read: "I love the 'Letters to the Editor' part of The Atlantic where they let the writers respond. SO MUCH GLORIOUS CATTINESS."

Perhaps this is appreciably amusing, and perhaps it comments on the nature of the discourse that tended to fill the newly renamed section. But anything that's one hundred forty characters at an established maximum is severely limited in how amusing it can be, and debilitatingly limited in how insightful or poignant it can be. The main impression that I get from the above tweet is that it seems like it's just somebody's off-the-cuff, knee jerk commentary. It seems like something that somebody might have simply said aloud to a friend while reading the magazine, not a series of thoughts that somebody took the time to formulate and carefully express. The latter is the only thing that deserves to be put into print.

But of course, my reaction to the tweet printed in "The Conversation" is my reaction to every tweet I'm likely to run across. They all strike me as just being part of somebody's unfiltered and unrefined stream of consciousness, because of course that is what they all are. That is specifically what Twitter is an outlet for, and it has no more place in "The Conversation" than a word from somebody who is simply passing through the room has in an actual ongoing conversation.

The tweet printed in The Atlantic is a perfect example of that. The word "love" is used in it in such a way as to actually denote almost complete detachment. Neither is it used sarcastically nor does it indicate genuine affection, of the sort that would make one want to give something back to the object of it. It is "love" in a sense that is almost unique to the internet, and no doubt endemic on Twitter, in that it is expressed in pleasure at simply letting something happen while you stand as an anonymous observe to it, neither contributing to nor mitigating its persistence.

More than that, anything that uses the word "glorious" in such a casual, colloquial, and borderline meaningless way should not be taken seriously. Is "glorious" really the best word that could have been used here? Does the cattiness the tweeter refers to actually confer something triumphal, something magnificent? Or would it be better to simply call it something like "pleasant"? I won't pretend to never use words like "glorious" in such exaggerative, overly-emphatic contexts when speaking to friends, but I would never write like that. And that is just the problem. The Atlantic is a magazine. It is a piece of literature. It is not idle talk, and there should be a distinction between the two.

It depresses me every time I see things like twitter further validated in traditional media. Does no one else perceive the absurdity of hearing a news presenter say "You can tweet at us," or of seeing a 134 year-old magazine print a comment IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS? Does no one else think that this sort of thing robs us of self-respect as a society? It seems to me that it is all an effort at inclusiveness in building a dialogue, but that fact, as I see it, is that including the largest number of voices possible tends to reduce the number of actual ideas being shared. We shouldn't strive to make room for the words of people who haven't really thought things through.

But everywhere I look, we seem to go on reducing the level of discourse, and I am left to wonder: Will there ever be such a volume of pablum in the media that we reach a breaking point that changes and compartmentalizes the ways in which we communicate, or will this go on indefinitely, until the entire conversation is presented in one-sentence increments, with every third comment being LOL or WTF?