Concrete Delights

Though I cannot relate to many of the details, I adore this piece.

Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection (1967,1969), pp. 39-40:

Economy is not one of the necessary principles of the universe; it is one of the jokes which God indulges in precisely because He can afford it. If a man takes it seriously, however, he is doomed forever to a middle-income appreciation of the world. Indeed, only the very poor and the very rich are safe from its idolatry. The poor, because while they must take it seriously, they cannot possibly believe in it as a good; and the rich, because, though they may see it as a good, they cannot possibly take it seriously. For the one it is a bad joke, the for other, a good one; but for both it is only part of the divine ludicrousness of creation — of the sensus lusus which lies at the heart of matter. And that is why all men should hasten to become very poor or very rich — or both at once, like St. Paul, who had nothing yet possessed all things. The world was made in sport, for sports; economy is worth only a smile. There are more serious things to laugh at.

O the sad frugality of the middle-income mind. O the humorless neatness of an intellectuality which buys mass-produced candlesticks and carefully puts one at each end of every philosophical mantlepiece! How far it lies from the playfulness of Him who composed such odd and needless variations on the themes of leaf and backbone, eye and nose! A thousand praises that it has only lately managed to lay its cold hand on the wines, the sauces, and the cheeses of the world! A hymn of thanksgiving that it could not reach into the depths of the sea to clamp its grim simplicities over the creatures that swim luminously in the dark! A shout of rejoicing for the fish who wears his eyeballs at the ends of long stalks, and for the jubilant laughter of the God who holds him in life with a daily bravo at the bravura of his being!

Into outer darkness then with the pill-roller and his wife. They have missed the point of the world; they are purely and simply mad. Man invented cooking before he thought of nutrition. To be sure, food keeps us alive, but that is only its smallest and most temporary work. Its eternal purpose is to furnish our sensibilities against the day when we shall sit down at the heavenly banquet and see how gracious the Lord is. Nourishment is necessary only for a while; what we shall need forever is taste.

Pills indeed! Someday, no doubt, the dreadful offspring of that hapless couple will invent flavorless capsules which, when swallowed, will give the user a complete command of any desired language. Let us hope only that when he does, the sane among us will lobby for a law to keep such people from writing poems. Language is no utilitarian abstraction; English, French, Greek, and Latin are concrete delights, relishings by which the flavor or words and syntax are rolled over the tongue. And so in their own way are all the declensions and conjugations of beef, lamb, pork, and veal. Food is the daily sacrament of unnecessary goodness, ordained for a continual remembrance that the world will always be more delicious than it is useful. Necessity is the mother only of cliches. It takes playfulness to make poetry.

Staccato Yelps

A piece from my first copy-editing textbook.

From Lynn Ludlow, "The Unappreciated Art of Writing Headlines," in Bowles, Borden and Rivers, Creative Editing for Print Media (1993), p. 176f.:

The headline itself is considered an American invention. It came after centuries when newspapers were festooned instead with captions, the term used for static labels or headings. Present-tense verbs burst into headlines near the end of the 19th century, when the new-fangled rotary press brought mass circulation dailies into urgent competition for readers.

Editors began to talk of banners, screamers, skylines, ribbons, wrap-arounds, snappers, kickers and eyebrows. Headlines were staggered, hung, stepped, indented, centered, boxed or shaped like a V. The language of headlines was shorn of auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, prepositions [?] and articles. Verbs, ignored in caption days, became queens. As nouveau royalty, predicates began to kill off their subjects. Consider the Chicago Tribune's screamer of April 11, 1951: "FIRES GEN. M'ARTHUR."

The copy editor's language favored staccato yelps: rap, pit, foe, rid, tie, cap, pry, ebb, cut, nip, nab, vow, rip, set, din, bid, aid, jar, try, act, rid, aim, fix, due, ban, jam, row, etc. Perhaps a student of general semantics will someday attempt to analyze the subconscious effects on generations of newspaper readers assaulted each day with a headline vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon terms chosen for brevity and violent impact: fray, whip, rout, stun, raid, curb, howl, lash, spur, rout, slap, slash.

Strangely, considering that copy editors live by the printed word, the lore of headline writing is passed down from one generation to the next by way of oral guidelines, mostly negative, mostly barked.

No, says the dealer, I never want to see set used again in this paper; it makes it too easy.

No, don't write heads with acronyms unless the story is about acronyms (in the Seattle Times: "You CETA Words but They Have NOOA Meaning.").

No, don't use overworked pun ploys ("Jane is Fonda exercise").

No, may is unacceptable; someday, pigs "may" fly.

No, avoid abbreviations. No, avoid officialese. No, avoid jargon. No, avoid cliches.

Note: I don't know why "rout" is used twice in the third paragraph.

Obligatory Sex Scenes

Here's a draft, at least, of a 1999 posting to the Phil-Lit list:

WARNING: Strong sexual content; some quite objectionable language. Read at your own risk.

When I offer up these passages, I do so with reference to a number of threads on Phil-Lit, most of which I won't spell out. One is on rereading beloved works after years have passed. I read the Jane Austen scene when it first came out in 1976 and remembered it fondly over the years — so fondly, in fact, that when I found out, through a little Web searching and close questioning of a Canadian bookseller, that the bit could indeed be found in a little paperback book, I shelled out 11 bucks (U.S., not Canadian) to have the thing sent by air mail. I still find the piece funny, but much less so. Is it that the humor is dated? That I'm not 22 but 45? That my love of Jane Austen is less passionate now than it was 23 years ago? I remembered finding the piece flawed years ago; the flaws in the parody stick out even more now.

To add some philosophy, I give the Heidegger scene. I doubt I read it in 1976, and I know too little about Heidegger to judge it now (I'm so ashamed — should one of the chiders chide me?). It looks ham-fisted. But I feel guilty saying that, nay, even immoral — I should at least know what it's playing off. Yet it's not, I should think, "art."

Other sex scenes in the National Lampoon article, for those interested, are for: Plato's "Republic" (not especially funny); "The House at Pooh Corner"; "Walden"; Sherlock Holmes; Charles Goren's "Contact Bridge"; Amendment I of the (U.S.) Bill of Rights; Carl Sandburg's "Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years"; "The Song of Hiawatha"; "Moby Dick"; Consumer Reports; "The Pickwick Papers"; "Our Town"; "The Gulag Archipelago"; "The Purloined Letter"; "The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu"; Roget's International Thesaurus; F. Scott Fitzgerald ("Bernice Bobs Her Cunt"); "The Brothers Karamazov"; "The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde"; "Who's Who"; "A Streetcar Named Desire"; "Gulliver's Travels"; "Waiting for Godot"; "Dune"; and "The Communist Manifesto."

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"Obligatory Sex Scenes," by the editors of National Lampoon (originally published in August 1976, reprinted in National Lampoon: Another Dirty Book, eds. P.J. O'Rourke, Peter Kaminsky, and Elsie Cagan, 1979).

Three famous men, authors all of important novels (Spiro Agnew, William F. Buckley, and John Lindsay) have lately and often appeared upon prestigious talk shows to plug their respective books. Each member of this august trio has unblushingly observed that, yes, his tome does contain the "obligatory sex scene."

Clearly, these writers, all men of the world, have seen fit to trim the sails of their creative integrity to the prevailing winds of marketing considerations, motivated not by greed but rather by the desire for their significant and redemptive fictions to reach a wider audience than your ponderous and semiliterate political potboiler usually does.

Always keen to follow the example of our elders and betters, we have taken it upon ourselves to write the "obligatory sex scenes" which, if included in the pages of well-intentioned but, alas, for the most part ignored classics of literature will return these works to the popularity they deserve.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
by Jane Austen

Chapter XLIII

The winding path that they had been following had grown narrower, and was overhung with branches that tore at Elizabeth's gown; soon it was but three feet at its wides part when she espied, in the distance, an old summer house, dilapidated and overgrown with weeds and mosses, of a lonely and slightly forbidding aspect. As the first drops of rain began to fall, Mr. Darcy turned his steps towards the building, quitting the path and taking a shorter way through the tall grasses;—Elizabeth had little choice but to follow. He murmured something about the weather as they reached their destination; the door yielded easily to his touch, and they reached their haven just as the rain began in earnest.

The interior was empty of any furnishing, save for a small settee, towards which Darcy led Elizabeth;—and when she had seated herself, much to her amazement, he flung himself to his knees before her, and, in a change of mood that seemed as abrupt as the change of weather, began ardently to express his admiration for and devotion to her person. Elizabeth hardly knew how to respond!—was this the cold, arrogant Mr. Darcy, who had expressed such scorn for her on previous occasions? She was attempting to reply when an even more strange event took place;—to her great consternation, he lifted up her skirts, and disappeared beneath them!—in breathless accents did she beg him to desist; in ardent though muffled tone did he make negative reply, as he attempted, with no little difficulty, to undo her drawers; when he had succeeded in the latter, he stopped attempting the former; and Elizabeth was filled with the most delightful and confused sensations: she allowed to herself that they were certainly pleasurable, but at the same time wondered with rising alarm if she had, by her previous weakness, allowed too much familiarity in their previous intercourse.

But her pleasure mounted to such an extent that she soon lost her fears in that direction. "Oh! Oh!" she cried, when she could contain herself no longer—"I am all in a flutter!—Mr. Darcy, your unexpected cordiality has left me quite speechless;—my previous coldness was unpardonable;—oh, my dear, *dear* Mr. Darcy;—how can you ever forgive me?—oh, oh, *oh!*"—and Mr. Darcy, whose head now emerged from beneath Elizabeth's petticoats, although *another portion* of his anatomy remained hidden from view, joined his voice to hers in an outpouring of sentiment to which no one, knowing his proud, aloof manner, might have responded without a great deal of amazement.

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BEING AND TIME
by Martin Heidegger

V. Being-in as Such

26. Throbbing-Memberhood and Its potentiality-for-Exploding-in-White-Hot-Orgasmicity

At first glance the Being-in (*In-sein*) of Throbbing-member appears to us as a latency. Throbbing-member stands before us as a phenomenon of Itness, i.e., Throbbing-memberhood-in-its-Selfhood-as-merely-ontic Being. The Being-in of Throbbing-member attains facticity as an ontological verity when, with eager hands and low urgent moans, she guides Throbbing-member into her hot, pulsating womanhoodness. Then, too, does Throbbing-member discover the Being-present-at-hand-along-with (*Mitvorhandsein*) of breasts, mouth, clitoris, etc.

Thus, Throbbing-member enters "into" the spatio-temporal nexus of her love-drenched pussyhood and is present (*zugegen*) to its potentiality-for-attaining-orgasmhood. This is what I call Throbbing-member's *Being-toward-orgasmicity.* Her verbal characterization, "Oh my God, you're in me!" has "the entity inside" (*Das inwendig Seiende*) in its ontological selfhood as Throbbing-member, exclusive of the theirness of other "throbbing members" merely ready-to-hand, i.e., mere equipment.

"Oh God, I can't stand it, I'm coming, I'm coming, I'm coming . . ." is, therefore, not only a phenomenological statement, but has existential-ontological meaning as well."

Amy Einsohn: Conventions, fashions, and style

It's just like me to strike a blow for punctuation relativity. In any case, Amy Einsohn is good on changing fashions in punctuation.

Amy Einsohn, The Copyeditor's Handbook: A Guide for Book Publishing and Corporate Communication (University of California Press, 2000), 72-73.

Conventions, Fashions, and Style

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English authors tended to be profligate in scattering commas and semicolons; their style is now called *close punctuation.* The contemporary preference, however, is to use as few commas and semicolons as possible, a style called *open punctuation.* ...
...

Within the realm of open punctuation, some choices, particularly those related to the comma, are more subjective than objective. Some writers, for example, *hear* punctuation, and they use commas, semicolons, and colons to speed or slow the pace and rhythm of their prose. Aural punctuators tend to hear a comma as a one-beat pause, a semicolon as a two-beat pause, and a period as a three- or four-beat pause. Some also hear a colon as a pause; for others, a colon signals a sharp accelerando, a signal to speed ahead because something important is coming.

A second group of writers have a highly visual sense of punctuation, and they are most concerned about how their sentences look on the page, aiming for sentences that are not overly cluttered by punctuation yet not so sparsely punctuated as to look neglected or to be confusing.

A third approach — and the one taken by all the editorial style manuals — is to punctuate according to grammatical and syntactical units. The advantage of this method is that it does not rely on the ear or eye of the writer or copyeditor, and therefore tends to be less subjective. In a given sentence, the question that syntactical punctuators ask regarding the presence or absence of commas is not "Do you hear a pause here?" or "Does this look too choppy?" but "Is this an introductory adverbial phrase?"

You will also encounter writers who regard punctuation as an esoteric art and freely combine the aural, visual, and syntactical methods. Most of the idosyncratic punctuators take a wing-and-a-prayer approach and will be pleased by your imposition of order and reasonableness. A few, however, will defend to the death their eccentric ways, proclaiming that the First Amendment guarantees their freedom to punctuate without editorial interference.

When copyediting nonliterary texts, corporate documents, and scientific or technical reports, you can confidently apply the conventions set forth in your style manual. But if your author is an experienced literary or professional writer, you will want to interpret some of the conventions more liberally. Writers who care about punctuation may become quite upset if a copyeditor imposes conventions that are at odds with their own sense of cadence, appearance, or taste.