She speaks in sentences!!!

This analysis from Laura Rozen at War and Piece, commenting on Sarah Palin hurdling the high linguistic bar set by the Bush-Cheney era in her interview with Charlie Gibson.

“She’s alert, she speaks in sentences, identified the threat from Islamic extremists, and it seems that she’s capable of absorbing new material at least at a certain level.”

She speaks in sentences?  She’s capable of absorbing new material at least at a certain level?  And we’re supposed to be reassured? This sounds like a doctor speaking about the victim of a car accident who has just awakened from incapacitating brain injuries.

On the other hand, the saddest thing to say is that Sarah Palin seems like an improvement.

Summer’s Guilty Pleasures: Hard Times with Hard Times

Charles Dickens

Hard Times is one of those books that English teachers make you feel bad about not liking.

Oh, I forgot. I am an English teacher. What to do that I found what some people call Dickens greatest novel so dull that it was not even engaging enough to be a soporific (Side note about falling asleep to books, books make us fall asleep best not when they are dull but when they are engaging enough that they take us to the edge of dreaming).

Seriously though, consider the first lines “Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.”

Isn’t it plain from this moment that the game is rigged. Who could not know that the speaker is a grind–well actually a Gradgrind–that he will get his comeuppance, and that the virtues of truth beauty and the imagination will out.

And, not to put too fine a point on it, that’s mostly what you get in this novel. The Gradgrinds, Bounderby, the Blackpool’s, they exist to tell us that industrialization has made the world go awry reducing everything to its material usefulness and leaving no room for the more spiritual world of the imagination embodied in things like–surprise!–imaginative literature. Of course there are details. Louisa Gradgrind marries the much older Mr. Bounderby on the basis of the practicalities of the facts and her father’s wishes, and we’re quite sure that she will be ground to nearly nothing, which she nearly is. She ameliorates her desperation by trying to help the laborer Stephen Blackpool and we’re nearly sure that Blackpool will die, which he nearly does. And then does. All parties concerned learn their lessons, including Mr. Gradgrind, who comes to realize that there’s more to life than facts, like his love for his daughter and his wayward son. Still, the love seems mostly to exist to make a point, and the point seems too familiar.

Industrialized Education

There’s nothing wrong with a thesis in a novel–I say this against all those who say novels don’t make points; I agree with those from Kenneth Burke to Wayne Booth who see fiction as a kind of rhetoric. But there is a problem with a novel whose thesis is baldly stated like an essay and whose thesis is never complicated, decomposed, challenged, reconfigured, or developed beyond what we can gather from the first sentence. (For that matter, there’s a problem with an essay written in a similar fashion).

I felt myself slogging along through the mud of the obvious and predictable, waking up just a bit when we finally get to the figure of Stephen Blackpool but descending again in to readerly despair when it’s obvious that Stephen is mostly a foil for the display of Louisa Bounderby’s sentimental charity, and later for the display of the pusillanimity and bourgeois moral corruption of Tom Gradgrind.

Stephen Blackpool and his mad wife

Stephen Blackpool, cog in Dickens’ sentimental machine.

On the other hand, I found myself wondering whether I found this all so predictable because so much has been built on a Dickensian edifice. In other words, would Dickens’ early readers have found his book dull and predictable or perhaps instead appalling, thrilling in its view of human degradation. Do we have a responsibility as readers to recover the shock of the new in classic works when they are no longer new?

I’m not sure. And I may be trying to cut Dickens too much of a break. I have read both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Douglass’s Narrative a multitude of times, and both are rife with moral sentimentalism, obvious bad guys, and endings that surprise only in their predictability. Yet I never find them dull. I will still be moved to tears by sections of both. So what it is it about Hard Times that leaves me cold, in the grip of something I feel I already know and don’t need to learn again, while I can read Stowe and Douglass (and Faulkner, and Hemingway, and at least some of Toni Morrison) as I read the Psalms, an ever renewing source even when I know everything that will happen.

Side Note: An interesting bit from Hard Times about reading. From the chapter where the town is beginning to hunt the falsely accused Blackpool, believing him guilty of robbing Bounderby’s safe.

“The factory-bells had need to ring their loudest that morning to disperse the groups of workers who stood in the tardy daybreak, collected round the placards, devouring them with eager eyes of those who could not read. These people, as they listened to the friendly voice that read aloud–there was always some such ready to help them–stared at the characters which meant so much with a vague awe and respect that would have been half ludicrous, if any aspect of public ignorance could ever be otherwise than threatening and full of evil. Many ears and eyes were busy with a vision of the matter of these placards among turning spindles, rattling looms, and whirling wheels, for hours afterwards; and when the Hands cleared out again into the streets, there were still as many readers as before.”

Me and My Aura

This is perhaps a fairly typical view of oral reading that occurred with regularity up until the 20th century. Now the only people who sit and listen to someone else read are either children or tony types who attend poetry readings. Still, I’m struck by the mystical aura of the word, the mystery and power that written discourse must have held for the masses of the illiterate underclass. Perhaps still holds for that matter. Still, it seems to me that the ubiquity of print has been bought at the price of its own devaluation. Indeed, the inflated presence of the word everywhere around us, where everyone and their mother can write–and indeed, where everyone does write, so much and so often, that no one really has time left to read–this glut of written verbiage has been bought at the price of writing’s (and reading’s) triviality.

Not that this dismal view applies to my own blog, of course. It’s infinitely valuable and more than worth your time. I’m sure it even has an aura.

For More of my summer’s guilty pleasures, see

Summer’s Guilty Pleasures: Black Snake Moan–June 30th

Is a Sentence revisited

A couple of weeks back I posted some reflections on the loss of language that I think is going on in our society. Daniel Green over at “The Reading Experience” was kind enough to reference that piece and I had some comments from folks disputing the notion that public language is somehow being diminished by the internet or television or whatever. I guess like a lot of things on the net–who am I kidding, like a lot of most things everywhere–argument comes down to assertion without a lot of evidence one way or the other. So I decided to track down what evidence I could for the language decline I’m intuiting. David Broder in the Washington Post on Sunday discussed a new book by Elvin T. Lim that charts the increasing lack of complexity and sophistication in Presidential rhetoric over the life of the country. Among other things, according to Broder

Applied to the annual State of the Union addresses, the average score has doubled from the first few presidents to the last few. Those “messages were pitched at a college level through most of the 18th and 19th centuries,” Lim says. “They have now come down to an eighth-grade reading level.” The same trend, but more pronounced, is found in inaugural addresses. Their average sentence length has dropped from 60 words to 20.

Simplification has its advantages, if it serves to increase public comprehension. But it comes with a huge risk: The complexity of real-world choices can be, and often is, lost.

The result according to Broder according to Lim is a rhetoric that panders to what people supposedly already know.

These trends, too, are charted by Lim. Basically what has happened, he shows, is that rather than seeking to persuade voters by arguing for their policies, presidents increasingly have sought to build trust by identifying themselves with those voters and their “common sense” view of the world. “Whereas all of the presidents through Woodrow Wilson appealed to ‘common sense’ just 11 times in their recorded papers, presidents since Wilson have done so more than 1,600 times,” he writes.

I doubt that these developments have much to do with the desire to speak clearly to all of the American people rather than to an intellectual elite. I suspect that it has a great deal more to do with the broadbased, but minimally developed literacy of the greatest number of American people through the course of the latter 19th century as compulsory public schooling took hold and made minimal literacy available to all.

New meaning to the idea that our President has the common touch. We are not laughing at him; we are laughing with him, and at ourselves.

A similar tidbit comes from Norman Solomon writing in 2000 on alternet.

In contrast to the TV commercials bought by politicians, news on the tube is supposed to be informative. Yet, in the real world, TV news coverage is more superficial than ever. During the 1968 presidential race, when Nixon squared off against Hubert Humphrey, the average length of one of their sound bites on network TV news was 43 seconds. By 1988, when George Bush and Michael Dukakis ran for president, the average length had dropped to nine seconds. These days, the notion of sound bites is obsolete. A more fitting term for televised snippets of political rhetoric would be “sound nibbles”. Which should raise a key question: What, of substance, can be said in nine seconds?

Now it may well be that “language is rather drifting towards elaboration and obscurity, and speech toward complex rhetoric. It is rioting in the mouths of ordinary people, who are speaking more poetically that any contemporary poet,” as Lloyd Mintern argues in his comment on my earlier post. However, wordsworthian though they may well be, ordinary people are doing all this elaboration and riotous poeticizing nine seconds at a time.

Other analysis of sentence length and structure point to the 200 and 300 word sentence as something that was relatively common in the 18th and 19th centuries, but is nearly unheard of now and is commonly seen, at least in the United States as being contemptuous of readers, if not bad writing. Of course, there’s nothing inherently eloquent or sophisticated about a long sentence. Nor are short concise sentences absolutely incapable of carrying beauty and sophisticated thinking. But it ought to give us pause that so many readers can’t even make a choice as to whether they prefer an aesthetic of short or long sentences. Can’t choose because they can’t even follow a long sentence to its conclusion. This isn’t demonstrating freedom or creativity or individuality. It’s merely celebrating one’s own incompetence. What makes Hemingway interesting isn’t that he couldn’t read and understand the Faulknerian or Jamesian sentence, or that he couldn’t write them if he wanted to. It’s that he chose to do something different and create a different aesthetic with different tools and different language.

Side note: there’s an interesting post at Juicy studio where you can apply readability tests to your blog. I come out right about 12th grade, at least by one measure, which is close to what I’m shooting for, with another instrument putting me a little lower. I hope the average high schooler could read this stuff.

Of course, what sane high schooler would want to.

April 4, 1968

Today is the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The video is a montage surrounding the Civil Rights Movement and the life of MLK with the speech by Robert F. Kennedy playing in the background.

I was in many ways too young to completely understand what was happening in 1968. But even now these words and these images move me.
The words speak for themselves. Related to the general interests of this blog, they make me think of one thing very simply: Words Matter. Whether in the life and preaching of Dr. King, or the eloquence of RFK, summoned from the heart at the instant of crisis.

I think I am no sentimentalist to say that I find myself longing for a leader who could quote Aeschylus by heart, who did not hold words in contempt, who knew enough to see that eloquence isn’t empty. Through words we imagine a life we can’t yet see.

Insomniac dreams; boys who love language

I’m not sure blogging is good for insomnia, but when I lay awake at night I find myself thinking of things to blog about. So why waste all those synapses firing in a haze of sleep-deprived wakefulness. Following up on my post of earlier this evening where I despaired of the new (or not so old, perhaps ancient?) mechanistic view of both reading and writing that seemed, well, deadly, I remembered the following video that I stumbled over at Hopping Into Puddles.

Here at least language is not a machine. I realize that if these kids were older it would play right in to Gilbert and Gubar’s thesis that language, in the hands of men and boys at least, is a phallus. Which also calls all kinds of other things to mind. Still, better this than the dead metaphors of language as a tool, a medium, an interface. If it is, let’s at least say that language is the vehicle of the heart, the hands of one soul reaching out to another.

As Michael over at Hopping Into Puddles observes, this classroom too exemplifies a lot of what could be stereotypically wrong with an educational setting. The teacher reading that private speech aloud says that the only thing the classroom is for is the instrumentality of public speech. Any word that passes sideways is called in to public account. No doubt some techie out there would like a computer to grade this young Romeo’s note for word choice, sentence variation and paragraph length.

Anything so we forget that language is first and foremost a means of touching. My pen is the tongue of a ready scribe. Indeed.

One of my great failed experiments as a teacher of composition was to ask my students to go home and write the most beautiful sentence they could muster and come back prepared to tell why they experienced it as beautiful.

I had forgotten these kids attended high schools in America. Ah well. I’ve also learned not to assign a particularly beautiful bit of prose to my composition classes and ask them to comment on what makes it an effective or ineffective piece of prose. To a man or woman they destroy my icons by describing them as “wordy,” “unclear,” clogged with long sentences, or damaged by short sentences.

My question is, who damages kids this way, having dulled their imaginations, their inner ears into insensitivity to language? It can’t be their fault, surely. They are only 17 or 18 at the most. Too young to think the only thing important in the world is getting the job done as efficiently as possible. Or probably not. This is why we send them to school no doubt.

The boys especially struggle with this assignment, confirming my general sense that the literary theories emphasizing the masculinist and misogynistic biases of language have never been around a teenaged boy who loved poetry. This is a love won at the cost–society tells him–of his manhood, not a way of winning it. What the video above leaves out is the mocking laughter the boy will face at recess, no less from girls than from the boys. And why? Words expose, exposure disarms, potentially humiliates. James Baldwin truly believed that confession of one’s hidden self was the surest way to freedom, but it’s not clear that this wasn’t a romantic dream after all. The Hemingways and Norman Mailers of the world are not exceptions that prove the rule. They are more like men so unsure of their own sexuality they have to posture and preen; their viciousness with words reassures them that, loving words, they are men none the less for that.