Lost Season 6: This Has Potential

Hello, everyone. Atvar here. Today we have a guest post - an unsettingly on-point guest post - from an insightful critic and good friend of mine, who goes by pure.Wasted, on the subject of the half-finished sixth season of Lost.

Oh, and guys, for the record: MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT.

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Lost Season 6: This Has Potential

That should have been the tagline. Everything about Lost shows -- suggests -- promise in its final season. The end is nigh and the upcoming confrontations are the talk of the town, even in-show. Major players like Jacob, the artist formerly known as John Locke (aka, the Smoke Monster, aka the Man in Black), and Widmore are trying to claim their respective corners of the chessboard. Guns are pointed, dynamite sticks lit on fire, plot devices smashed to pieces, and lives threatened in all sorts of nasty ways -- sometimes all the way through to the dark and gruesome conclusion -- on a regular basis. Epic, defining stories that will forever shape the legacies these characters leave behind are in the process of being told. The set-up is there for something greater than great, something that has never been seen on television to date. So why does it all feel so wrong? Directly compared to previous seasons, episode-for-episode, moment-for-moment, line-for-line, the show simply does not stand up to what came before. Frankly, it isn't even in the same ballpark.

The answer lies not with the ideas and stories that are being tackled, but the way said tackling is being done. Episodes are laden with blatant exposition that the writers make no attempts to cover up, ie. "The Substitute," where the only conflict the writers could come up with for a 42-minute episode was Sawyer ALMOST falling to his death from a random cliffside. Phew! We were so worried he might really bite it! But it's true, some of Lost's finest offerings have been verbal sparring matches, like the chewing out Widmore gives Desmond in Season 3's "Flashes Before Your Eyes," which is painful to watch no matter how many times I've seen it, or, a few episodes later, Locke's "The Man From Tallahassee," where Locke and Ben play an episode-long game of one-upmanship with no more than their wit and the hands the island deals them. Lost has proven time and time again that talky episodes are nothing if not their forte.

In Season 6, these moments are few and far between. In "LA X," Terry O'Quinn's menacing turn as the Man in Black is perfectly juxtaposed with the humility displayed by a broken old John Locke who has to be carried out of his seat on the plane. The dialogue hits home, and it hits hard, in both scenes. But there is no follow-up -- no TMFT to "LA X"'s FBYE. The next attempt is Ben's monologue during his search for redemption (more on this later), and I emphasize 'attempt,' because it is sabotaged by the predictable re-use of the Alex plot from "The Shape of Things to Come" as a crutch, its total lack of subtlety, and finally, a performance by Zuleikha Robinson that didn't deserve to grace the cutting room floor. Her "I'll have you," may be the most underwhelming line in the series' history, seemingly a malicious attempt to undercut Michael Emerson's efforts with dialogue that is desperately above-par -- but only that. Ms. Robinson, or whomever was responsible for the final cut if indeed that was one of many takes she offered, should be ashamed. She didn't need to carry the scene. She didn't even need to do a good job. All the scene needed was for that one line to not fall completely flat on its face... and it did just that. It's difficult to pinpoint who's to blame for such a monumental screw-up; the character has had absolutely zero personality ever since she landed on the island, and yet she was engaging and charismatic in Season 5's "He's Our You," which details her meeting with Sayid off-island. I was watching her because she was an interesting character. Now I watch her because the show insists that she's an interesting plot device.

"I've been trapped for so long, I don't even remember what it feels like to be free. Maybe you can understand that. But before I was trapped, James, I was a man, just like you. I know what it's like to feel joy, to feel pain, anger, fear, to experience betrayal. I know what it's like to lose someone you love," the Man in Black tells Sawyer as they're traipsing through the jungle. It's an understandably uninspired performance by Terry O'Quinn; what did the writers honestly expect when they gave him instead of a speech, a laundry list of emotions that aren't attached to anything we've (or he's) ever seen?

But slow, generally unsubstantial episodes that are character-driven aren't new either. Season 4, critically acclaimed and praised for its tight writing and a general "return to form" following the inspired Season 3 finale, "Through the Looking Glass," had a little episode called "Something Nice Back Home" that told us nothing we hadn't already seen, or heard, before. But Season 4 had something Season 6 doesn't have, as much as it likes to pretend that it does: a sense of urgency and impending danger. A sense of stakes.

I say 'pretend,' because the characters on the show insist time and time again on reminding me how high the stakes are. "Dr. Linus," a plodding mess very nearly redeemed by Ben's own redemption, closes with a shot of Charles Widmore, who, having finally found the island after more than twenty years of searching, has decided to appear in person. "Recon," a generally enjoyable if predictable ride, closed with Sawyer telling Kate they would let the two 'bad guys' - Locke and Widmore - duke it out. Jack is for the first time since the detonation of Jughead convinced of his significance. Ilana is out for blood. Jin and Sun are about to be reunited. Yet it all feels distant and insignificant. Here, the complexity of Lost's plot works against it. I don't know whether I'm supposed to be terrified of Widmore (he sent Season 4's freighter, with Martin Keamy on board) or cheer for him (Jacob seems to like him; and he, in turn, liked Locke last we saw the two in "The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham"). In the end, I feel absolutely nothing. The idea of making Widmore's antagonism in Season 4 being a misperception had great... potential... and yet if the writers wanted that, they had to demonstrate his heroics dramatically and in a way that actually explains the misperception -- BEFORE he got to the island. Because they didn't, Charles Widmore's arrival -- once the most dreaded thought imaginable, and what should have felt like a momentous scene in Lost history -- feels no more than a footnote on a larger canvas. The same is true of the Man in Black. It's not clear whether the writers want us to be scared (he humiliated Ben, has no compunctions against lying when he says he's telling the truth, and seems set up to be the Big Bad if ever there was one) or on his side (his reasons for rebelling seem plausible and relatable, all of his murders were easily preventable by the victims; he only kills douchebags). Season 4 benefited from a clear antagonist who loomed over the show and existed solely through his merciless agent, Keamy. From the moment Keamy was introduced, it was clear that the confrontation we wanted would come, and every moment he was on the show built towards that confrontation. Widmore and Locke, however, suffer from a severe case of mistaken agendity.

"Guy named Widmore set up camp on the beach. Got a whole team with him, guys with guns. They're here for Locke. I'm gonna let them fight it out." Unfortunately for the show, I am no more emotionally engaged in the conflict than Sawyer.

Conceptually, I believe what Sawyer says is true; there will be a confrontation of sorts. There has to be. Emotionally, there's no reason to buy into any of it. The antagonism rises and falls unevenly; the agents are far too ambiguous to pose a genuine threat to my favorite characters. In "The Lighthouse," Jacob told Hurley, "Someone's coming [to the Temple]. Someone bad. We can't warn them, Hugo. I'm sorry. It's too late." A startling moment of clarity and urgency, clearly setting up the conflict in the subsequent "Sundown." The problem? Once we got to that conflict, the only discernible reason for its taking place seemed to be Dogen's obstinate stance on compromising; the massacre, ably (even if untruthfully) justified by the Man in Black, seemed entirely warranted. But since the Island didn't explode the moment Dogen died, I can't very well tell if the Man in Black's agenda is more devious than he lets on, now, can I? Once again, the writers directly sabotage their efforts by deconstructing any tension they've managed to build up.

The writers forget something else that is very crucial. Season 4 was able to cheat thanks to incredibly ominous flashforwards. Even episodes that seemed to stall managed to feel as though they were getting us closer and closer to the inevitable. From the revelation that the Losties did escape, to the subsequent reveal that Jack is bitter and suicidal (why?!), to the reveal that one of the Losties is dead (who?!) to the reveal that Hurley believed it was a mistake to have gone with Locke (why?!), to the reveal that Jin is dead (how?!), and so on, and so forth. All of these helped paint a clear (distressing, in the best way possible) picture of where the show was going, and every episode felt like a puzzle piece clicking into place. Halfway through Season 6, I have no idea where the show is going, and this isn't a good thing. Episodes that seem to stall... feel like just that. There is nothing emotionally inevitable about the conceptually inevitable confrontation between Locke and Widmore. There was no reason for him to arrive on the Island precisely when he did, as opposed to sometime during Season 5, or five episodes from now. His appearance was random and anti-climactic, and it turns out that the set-up for Lost's potentially most epic conflict is a haphazard mess, tripping over itself every step of the way.

Speaking of poor planning, whose idea was it to give Sawyer's episode to Kate? I'm talking, of course, about "What Kate Does," which is Sawyer's story of coping with the loss of Juliet, for some bizarre, inexplicable reason told through Kate's eyes. Did the writers forget the reason for having centric episodes to begin with? They are meant to show us something interesting and insightful about a given character. So, all enjoyment of "Recon" aside, why in the world would they not take 42 minutes to show us Sawyer's self-destruction with a side-story involving Kate doing what she does worst? One of the character's pivotal moments is glossed over, as opposed to making a true show of it. How much sense would it have made to tell "The Constant," Desmond's time-hopping adventure that lands him that phone-call with Penelope after many years apart, through Sayid's point of view? Or "The Shape of Things to Come," which deals with Ben's choices and the consequences Alex pays for them, from Locke's? The potential was there for the Lost writers to show they were still at the top of their form. They didn't even try.

The same thing happened with Richard. Over the 3 seasons we've known him, he has probably been the most consistent character for acting... well, in-character. He has been cool, calm, and collected in the face of bald-headed time-travelers, guns pointed at his face, nukes being pointed at his island, and all manner of general weirdnesses. ...And now we're supposed to buy into his instant transformation into Jack-on-the-bridge (just add dead Templites!) when we didn't even get to SEE IT? Gee, I don't know, sounds like something with a lot of potential, doesn't it? Something that might have been fun to watch in progress, something that might have been fun for the very able Mr. Carbonell to act out... ...and wouldn't have made his subsequent appearance seem so glaringly out of character. And wouldn't have made his return to form at the end of that very same hour make me throw my hands into the air in exasperation at how ineptly the story had been told. Watch this. "Ab Aeterno" is going to come around tomorrow, and it's not going to tell a single Richard story, in the present, that is nearly as interesting as watching his reaction to the Temple massacre would have been. Just how bad is this? Remember Locke's crisis of faith late in Season 2? Now imagine if we didn't hear Ben telling him the button was meaningless. Imagine we didn't see the tape he and Eko found in the Pearl, which suggested the Swan staff were simply under an experiment. We just jumped from the first scenes of Lockdown straight to the finale, where Locke would appear suddenly, inexplicably out of character and then 80 minutes later have his original beliefs vindicated. And then the next time we saw him, he was acting completely in-character (kind of like "Further Instructions") and had no interesting stories to tell (kind of like "Further Instructions"). There's a reason that story wasn't told that way, and unfortunately for Lost, the circumstances are far more analogous than desirable.

Speaking of characters that have gone missing when they shouldn't have... Sun has become the show's running joke, her screentime reduced to a single appearance every 3-4 episodes, in which she predictably demands to know just Where Is Her Husband?! She has been so marginalized, in fact, that in these 8 episodes (and many that came before) she is demonstrably outshined by Leslie Arzt's scene-stealing performances in "Dr. Linus." Hint: it had something to do with the lines he was given, and the lines she was not. The show insists time and again that she is important by bringing up that "Kwon" is one of the few un-crossed out names in the caves, by making Ilana take her under her wing, and so on... but not for one moment does it make us believe it. Sound familiar? And yet, the development Sun underwent as a result of Jin's "death" -- and the startlingly icy acting elicited out of Ms. Yunjin Kim in her scenes with Widmore in the Season 4 finale -- should have made her a central player and a formidable foe. Too bad they forgot. Desmond, whose ties to Widmore and Ben should have ensured him a key role and a performance to rival "The Constant" in gusto, has been written out simply because the writers couldn't come up with things for him to do. What's with the blatant anti-matrimony? Married people can have fun, too!

So where does that leave us? Talky episodes that contain no remarkable dialogue of note, and conflicts which are too ambiguous to feel involving. A general lack of planning that has resulted in character arcs that deserve attention being condensed, and stories that don't deserve to be told taking up valuable space. (I'm not against Kate having episodes. I'm against Kate having episodes that don't deserve to be told.) [Editor's Note: I am against Kate having episodes.] Sounds pretty bad for being halfway into the final season... but wait, there's that word again: "potential." It keeps coming up, because truth be told, there's plenty of intriguing ideas floating around Lost Season 6, and with more planning and a clearer agenda, they might have been truly great.

-The use of flashsideways to tell an interesting story, when taken advantage of. Jack and Ben both received incredibly focused, tightly-scripted flashes that felt both fresh and true to the characters at the same time. Neither contained an extraneos, unnecessary moment. Kate's and Sayid's, on the other hand, were simply more of the same old, same old, "What Kate Does" actually going so far as to literally replay an island event (Aaron's birth). I can just see the ideas converging... "The usual Kate we have in the regular 2004 timeline is no longer interesting... the usual Claire we had in the regular 2004 timeline wasn't interesting (which is why we stopped being able to write material for her and wrote her out!)... now if only we had some excuse to not be bound by the stories we've told, and to give these characters interesting, unusual moments... Oh, I know! Let's make a whole episode revolve around them both! That will solve EVERYTHING."

-The conflict between such key players as Jacob, the Man in Black, Widmore, and the Losties caught in between. Should have been the greatest thing since sliced bread, even (especially?) during the set-up. Turned out more like a piece of toast that landed buttered-side down.

-Ben's redemption. As mishandled as the episode's island story might have been, the idea of Ben seeking redemption with such humility, after all he's done, is heartbreaking. On the other hand, the idea of Ben starting this search in episode 7 out of 15, and then presumably not appearing in numerous episodes afterward (he was a no-show in "Recon"), is inexcusable. This should have been a Season-long arc, and instead his reduced screentime prompts a Cliff's Notes version condensed to fit in a single episode halfway through the season. It is unworthy of both the character and Michael Emerson, whose efforts to make the 'arc' play out so much more competently than it's written are admirable and almost, almost, almost succeed.

-And of course the increasingly game cast at the writers' disposal:

--Terry O'Quinn's delicious monster -- which instead turned tame and lame. Compare his supremely staggering confidence in "Dead is Dead" or "LA X" when he humiliates Ben, to the excuses and ramblings he makes in "Recon." Is the problem that he now has no characters to humiliate? Well, hell, we've resurrected Mikhail once before... and if John Locke had no problem beating him up at a moment's notice, the Man in Black should have a field day.

--Michael Emerson taking on the humbled and redemptive Ben -- who has received as much screentime this season as Ilana, whose lack of personality makes the Man in Black look verifiably human by comparison, or Frank. I've got nothing against Frank. But when his one-liners are coming at the expense of Ben's character-defining moments, I'm going to second-guess that Season outline.

--Evangeline Lilly's subtle efforts to make Kate seem vaguely human -- and being sabotaged by the writing every step of the way. "The writers have admitted they can't write women," is no excuse. Just watch reruns of Battlestar Galactica. Or pretend they're men. Hey, it worked for Ana Lucia!

--Ken Leung, whose Miles has finally achieved the dream of all young wooden characters -- characterization ("I'm a real boy!") -- through his genuine affection for Sawyer. Sure. It's taken him two and a half seasons to be good for more than his snarky wit and usefulness as a plot device and NOW you stop giving him screentime.

Sawyer: "Hey Miles, you mind hanging back?" "You got it, boss." I cared more about Miles in this one scene (that is completely not about him) than all of his other appearances -- including his own episode, "Some Like it Hoth" -- before, or since. Well, "since" is easy enough, since he's had like 3 of them.

--Josh Holloway, whose portrayals of Sawyer's self-destructive urges were the high-points of the one and a half episodes in which we saw them. Speaking of which, for all the drama that surrounded his 'transformation,' what did it change, really? Yeah, he's with evil Locke, and-- wait a second, he's not really with evil Locke, he's with Richard! But wait, he's not really with Richard, is he? He's genuinely convinced by Locke, who seems to be a reasonable smokey being! No, no, he's actually posing as Locke's trusted lieutenant to give him up to Widmore at the first opportunity. Unless... he's really leading Widmore into a trap. Yes, a trap -- a trap for BOTH, while he leads his friends to ESCAPE! And that's obviously the actions of a completely upredictable, dangerous Sawyer still reeling from Juliet's recent death. Because the Sawyer of seasons past wouldn't, y'know, con everyone in sight to save his friends. Ever. Except if they were all stranded in 1977 or something. But otherwise, no.

All of these things keep insisting that the next episode could be the big one, the one that resolves all of this set-up and makes it all worth-while. And the episodes keep ticking away, turning in a decent if unremarkable product by Lost's high standards. Anyway. All this talk about potential seems now somehow deceptively optimistic. So let's conclude with a final failing demonstrative of Lost's uninspired story-telling come Season 5... and now, unfortunately, 6:

The Alex crutch. Or should I say, the Alex hammer (the better to hit us over the head with). I agree with the writers, Alex's death was a significant moment both for the show and for Ben personally. But when it's used as it was in "Dr. Linus," simply to save time for a monologue that would have otherwise taken genuine effort to write (might have even been forced to turn it into a conversation!)... we have a problem. The writers should have learned their lesson with "Dead Is Dead," which was an outstanding episode save for the title, the death of Caesar (who was infinitely more interesting in his four scenes than Ilana has been over both seasons so far), the anti-climactic flashbacks, and the anti-climactic climax. Well, OK, it might have been just the Ben and 'Locke' scenes that were any good. But the point is, the judgment over Alex's death was built up as this huge thing, and it turned out to be no more than a replay of things we've already seen, with a 10-second cameo by the Smoke Monster in the form of the Man in Black in the form of John Locke in the form of Alex Rousseau. And it didn't even take. What makes this redemption any more definitive? Absurdly enough, I'm almost happy this is the last season. I'm not sure I'd be able to take another episode where I successfully predict that Ben will make yet another earnest (oh, but so much more earnest than last time!) effort to redeem himself, for the umpteenth time in a row, just to demonstrate how difficult it is for some people to change their ways. I'm not sure I could stand to see one of Lost's finest reduced into a Kate.

But "Ab Aeterno" is just around the corner. Little birdies tell that it's going to reveal some of Lost's biggest mysteries -- those secrets that go to the show's very heart. Talk about potential, right? And it's great. It sounds like there's so much they could do with that.

You know... in the future.

-p.W

Fiction: Atvar Flashes You

Hello, boys and girls. Today I will be starting a new segment. You see, as I've said, I'm an obsessive writer, and I expend most of my energy working on fiction. From here on out, I will be posting occasional snippets of my work to the Accounts. For your enjoyment, of course, all...erm...one of you... In any case, here it is.

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The story of John J.'s life came out to mixed reviews. The most positive called it an “unspectacular if admirable endeavor which minimally achieves its purpose” - whatever that meant. Most critics, however, were not nearly as kind. One of their number wrote: “That any person could have the audacity to call what this man experienced a life simply astonishes me.”

It wasn't that John J. had been deviant or otherwise abhorrent in any way – at least no more so than any other human male since the advent of the internet – quite the contrary. John J. himself was actually surprised and distressed to learn that most people didn't like his life very much.

Of all the controversy that his life stirred up (some critics faulted his “excessive contentment” and found his propensity for happiness “dull and contrived”; others appreciated his “sunny optimism” but chided him for “going absolutely nowhere with it”) the one part that no one complained about was his birth. The father was an alcoholic and the family hovered just above the mire of abject poverty. Who didn't love an underdog story?

And after that, as the poet said, the dark. John J.'s childhood games were “far too cutesy,” his friends were “insipid, cookie-cutter human beings, half-baked and mass-produced,” and his first crush on little Jessica Parker was “sickeningly saccharine with a dash of deranged stalker thrown in for good measure.” John J.'s attackers demanded to know if he had orchestrated his life in such a way (which one Amazon.com reviewer labeled “more mindless than a daytime soap and even dumber than Seinfeld”) as to insinuate himself with the middle classes and pose as an “everyman.” His defenders, when they could be found, pointed out that John J. was middle class and thus had no need whatsoever to pretend.

The review of his life in the New York Times further questioned the veracity of John J.'s claim to have learned the English language at only nine months, but witnesses were eventually secured who could verify it. The controversies and doubts filled page seven, which is as close to the front page of that publication as John J. ever got. The apology and official retraction came in the form of a couple of lines of fine print crudely inserted between the Classifieds and the Obituaries.

John J.'s adolescence received much the same treatment. Although some critics found his chaste high school years “sweet and refreshing,” most hammered him for being “a caricature of Victorian morality that doesn't see the joke.” These same people deemed John J.'s first pseudo-intimacy with a woman at the age of twenty-three “utterly ludicrous.”

Virtually no reviewer could find a single redeeming quality in John J.'s wife – to John J.'s deep dismay – who, as it happened, was only the second woman with whom he had been intimate, and the question resounded across the internet: “how the fuck could anyone want to bone this woman?” John J. lost much sleep over this.

The birth of his first child was universally agreed to be moving, but, when the second one was born, people said that it “seems like John J. is just rehashing old material in an obvious ploy to artificially manipulate the emotions of the public and conceal the directionless floundering that permeates every moment of his life.”

Even his graduation from law school summa cum laude only elicited yawns. All he did was sit out in the sun for a number of hours, step up to the podium, receive his diploma, and leave with a rather nasty sunburn. He wasn't the valedictorian, and the person who was seemed incapable of delivering anything more than platitudes. One review labeled this an “unsatisfying and predictable conclusion to a meandering arc.”

They found his sometime use of pornography “sordid,” though it was hardly any spicier than a mild taco. They called him a hypocrite for committing tax fraud while lecturing his daughters on the importance of honesty. They laughed (or cringed) at the haiku and bits of free verse he sometimes wrote in the evenings when he'd had a couple glasses of wine. They hated his life for its emotionally discordant tones; they hated that it was a dissonant thematic mess; they hated its defiance of all laws of convention and its failure to take any clear direction after breaking them. But the thing they hated most of all was that it had no detectable rhythm, no conscious pacing, no sense of dramatic control. It was, in a word, crap. The sheer volume of slow creatures copulating to which the critics compared it (sloths, slugs, turtles, barnacles, pollen-bearing plants, etc.) would have filled a small book on its own.

Jack Steward of the Tetra-Weekly Show even devoted one relatively experimental segment to John J. The comedian-cum-cultural icon simply sat at his desk for a full minute, absolutely silent, staring at the camera, while drool and flecks of foam accumulated at the corners of his mouth. When that minute was up, he blinked, frowned in a his trademark depressing way, and said, “Now I know what it's like to be John J.” Before anyone had time to respond, Steward pulled out a gun and mimed committing suicide. It was his highest rated show of the month.

The most eminent of professional critics, Reginald Eggbert, putting the capstone on general public opinion, ended his review thus: “Unless you are personally invested in Mr. J., there is nothing emotionally gripping about his existence at all. It just sits there, sort of like a still life, except you get to watch the fungus and the mold and the maggots all have their way with it for nigh on half a century. And all the while, the man who supposedly owns it sits and stares blithely at what is, by the end, a big bowl of festering rot. Fungus soup. Decay soufflé. You would think people would have the modesty not to put their petty failures on display to be publicly humiliated. You would think that, but then you would be wrong. I shudder to think of what kind of person will be born tomorrow.” He gave John J.'s life one and a half stars.

After the popular critics had their crack at John J., it was the academics' turn. The deconstructionists hardly even bothered to acknowledge John J.'s life, dismissing it as “so obviously meaningless that it hardly merits a sustained analysis.” Other scholarly types were impressed that, for once, the descendants of Derrida made sense.

The realists loved John J.'s “simple earnestness.” They said this made him more relatable, and they used phrases like “common clay” and “salt of the earth” a lot. Not all of the realists were quite as impressed with his lack of aesthetic taste, however. One English grad student following in the realist tradition wrote on his blog, “His [John J.'s] capacity for interior decorating sort of reminds you of Weyoun and the Vorta. lol hai guyz, wut iz blew?”

Meanwhile, the New Critics tried desperately to detach something from John J.'s life which they could criticize, but this proved futile and they ended by instead pretending they'd never heard of him.

A very minute number of (neo-)modernists tried to carry John J.'s banner. They found his life a “brilliant piece of existence, worthy of a foremost spot in the history of man” and lamented, melodramatically and at length, the ignorance and smallness of the masses. This severely confused some of the Marxists, who wanted to defend John J.'s life as instructive of the contemporary class struggle (since John J. was a graduate of Columbia Law School devoting most of his time to the poor and thus had much contact with the waste of the capitalist system), but they didn't want to associate themselves with anything that could be linked to elitism. Fortunately for them, the modernists' contention rested on the idea that John J. was living a conventional life to achieve an unconventional effect, and this idea would ultimately not hold water. They were convinced that John J. was a very ironic human being and was being boring, as it were, sarcastically. The postmodernists, (to the public indistinct from the modernists in every way except for their vehement disagreement) disagreed.

The modernists pointed to a key event on day 8,830 of John J.'s life where he had come home and fixed himself a tuna and cucumber sandwich. Not a tuna sandwich with pickle, a tuna sandwich with cucumber. He had done this just to see what the difference was. They found this an exceedingly inspired move on his part, at once an acerbic criticism both of the concept of normalcy and of the shallow, timid “individualism” of contemporary American society. They lauded his subtlety and extolled his wit.

The Marxists, on the other hand, found this episode very distressing because all of John J. 's pickles were imported luxury pickles. The postmodernists argued that there was a religio-socio-politico-economic backlash against pickles and the cucumber represented nothing more than John J.'s acceptance of postcolonial realities. The New Critics sharply rebuked the postmodernists for turning to “outside” explanations for the cucumber, the realists rejoiced in the cucumber and its wonderful "naturalness," and even the psychoanalytic schools got in on things by asking if the cucumber was really just a cucumber. This outraged the feminists, who rebuked John J. on various grounds, few of them having anything to do with vegetables or even meals – strictly and non-euphemistically speaking – at all.

While the Marxists and the modernists and the postmodernists and the New Critics and the realists and the psychoanalysts and the feminists all badgered each other over the cucumber, a very bored assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Washington took the time to write a short article, the thesis of which was that John J.'s life was not at all ironic and the cucumber episode was both inane and irrelevant. It was universally acclaimed, and the anti-John J. crowd rejoiced. Amid the triumphant crowing of the postmodernists (whose position on John J.'s significance nobody could say for certain, not even themselves) the modernists quickly abandoned him.

John J. would have been much more upset by all this if the academics had had an audience large enough to require more than a single sack of potatoes to feed.

Thus, by the time all the reviews were in – and they arrived in a noticeably swift manner – the critics had achieved a consensus: John J. was a second-rate publicist and a twelfth-rate human being. All of this was, of course, emotionally devastating. When he had finished crying copious if bland tears of disappointment, John J. vowed to get a better life.

The critics never reviewed John J.’s tears, though. They never took any significant interest in anything about him once they had handed in their assignments early, never worried much about how specific their criticisms were or what would happen to the content of their complaints after the editors had their way with the criticisms’ form.

For John J., none of the details of the critics’ scheduling mattered. What did matter was fixing his life. There were, however, a few difficulties inherent in pursuing that course of action. The first was that, though John J. had always craved recognition, he liked his life as it was. He liked his legal practice which was devoted to aiding the disadvantaged. He liked his wife and the lazily harmonious love they had shared for twenty-seven years. He also liked his two young daughters. Yet people found his lawyering boring, his wife more boring, his daughters more boring still, and he the most boring of all for being content with it. One wit remarked: “You can't even call John J. the King of Mediocrity, because 'king' implies someone exceptional.” John J.'s mediocrity was not greater in quality than that of other people, it was simply more all-encompassing. It wasn't a ranking, the wit argued, it was a condition – like impetigo.

John J. pondered how best to go about crafting his new life. He considered modeling it on certain conventional genres such as horror, adventure, and lesbian erotica. Still, John J. kept coming back to what it seemed most people wanted. He was convinced that, although he was not spectacular, he could at least become a spectacle. It was the only way his life could ever be well-received.

After much thought, John J. decided on a plan. He knew what he had to do, and he threw himself into it with a passion. So the story goes, anyway. It’s somewhat difficult to reconstruct a precise chronology of events, but certain evidence, both documentary and anecdotal, does remain.

There is, for instance, a complaint on file which refers to strange auditory and olfactory emanations originating from John J.’s home. This complaint was lodged between seven and ten months after the last review of John J.’s life hit the stands. A local marriage counselor also claims to have seen John J. and Mrs. J. for several sessions, though he says the couple were going nowhere (because, try as they might to develop genuine issues, being content simply came more easily to them). Several doctors remember keeping John J. in the hospital for a few weeks after some kind of traumatic accident. John J. was even, apparently, charged several times with public indecency. There are also a few receipts from Home Depot; Marcus’s Tequila, Gin, and Ammo; and Jack’s Big Barn of Firestarting Supplies.

Sadly, no one quite knows how all this fits together. You see, no one is sure how or even if John J. did change his life, because no one paid him another ounce of attention, and he died some years later in destitution.

Megan Fox: A Quick Lesson in Economics

Before I begin this post, I'd like to open with a small disclaimer. That is this: I do not want this collection of venom and vitriol to be trivialized or otherwise co-opted by irrelevancies. With that said, however, my contempt for the stupidity and vacuousness of our cultural icons - for the whole human race, if you want to get right to the crux of the matter - is a not insignificant part of who I am. Therefore I will dedicate a post (a small post) to it.

The focus of my contempt? Megan Fox.




Going back almost a year, I first learned of this "person" when a friend asked me if I was "familiar with the Megan Fox phenomenon." I was forced to admit I was not. I had heard the name and seen the face, sure, but the movies were and are pretty much dead to me. Television has the same quality of actors, access to many of the same special effects, costumes, makeup, etc., and has infinitely better creative talent. Put it this way: would you rather watch the series finale of Battlestar Galactica or James Cameron's Pocaho- I mean Avatar?

My friend explained to me that Megan Fox had been "getting some publicity" because she had "views on things" and "opinions." I was then subjected to several of these "opinions." They struck me as the sorts of things a stoned Sarah Palin would have said to her sorority. My friend then clarified that "she said these things with her mouth in front of people."

I was horrified.

That was in May of 2009. In the interim, Megan Fox has not gone gently into that good night. And, axiomatically, any night into which she would go (and not come out of) would be a good one. In fact, she seems to have become a fixture of the landscape (read: train wreck) that is American culture. So fine, she's here to stay. Can she at least be quiet about it, though?

No, no she can't.

This would be a good time for a Picard facepalm.









I feel much better now.

So do you believe Megan Fox is pure as the driven snow? Yeah, neither do I. I also have an IQ significantly above that of the common garden slug. I wonder if there's a correlation.

Now, I normally don't want to associate myself with (dull) gossip. I avoid such minutia as who has slept with whom, or whether he got her pregnant, or if she gave him syphilis. It's not that I consider myself above the muck of human affairs, it's simply that I don't care. But at the same time, the number "two" sounded too fantastic to be believable. It resounded in my head, tolling like the bells of Notre Dame, until I realized something - something profound. I realized that Megan Fox is an economist - a dazzlingly, amazingly, stupefyingly brilliant economist.

You see, boys and girls, that number that Megan Fox has arrived at - that "two" of hers - is an example of what economists would call "deflation." Allow me to explain.

Say each shallow, cheap, drunken fling equals one dollar. Now imagine that Megan Fox has roughly two hundred "dollars." Each "dollar," being access to Megan Fox's twat (which is the standard her "dollars" are on - unless, of course, she has a double standard, but I won't go into that right now...), becomes less and less valuable. Why? Because as time goes on, it becomes increasingly easy for Megan Fox to acquire one "dollar" despite the fact that her "product" is certainly not increasing in quality. It becomes so diluted, in fact, that the "dollar" begins to lose any semblance of value.

When Megan Fox realizes that her massive accumulation of "dollars" might look petty and trivial when people realize how insubstantial and cheap they really are, she jettisons them. Not all of them, of course, just most. How many does she keep? Two. It's every bit as arbitrary as two hundred, but because there are so few of them, Megan Fox's twat gets divided in halves as opposed to in two hundredths.

This makes each individual partition seem more desirable. The number of "dollars" in circulation gets deflated and the perceived value goes up. But, because money is a social construct without any objective value beyond that determined by the minting authority, it has no intrinsic worth. Her deflated number is therefore every bit as worthless as the real one, but has the added bonus of being a skewed representation of the actual figure.

So what I'm saying is, Megan Fox is a whore.

Limbocide

I have the privilege of knowing an Australian who goes by the alias Project_Xii. The man is one of the most creative storytellers I've ever met, and he has a solid grasp of English prose. I spend a bit of time on a forum called the KFF – a mostly-dead website where an old group of once (and future) writers who met via the Blizzard battle.net forums nigh on a decade ago hang out, mostly for nostalgia's sake. While checking it today, I came across a new thread of his relating to his masterpiece-in-progress, Limbocide.

A bit of background: This story dates back to about late-2006/early-2007. It was almost halfway finished when he abandoned it, and he has refused, on various grounds, to take it up again since then (despite my own repeated, if futile, efforts to get him to continue it). The story deals with four suicides (in the afterlife, unnaturally) whose lives were intimately intertwined, though they didn't know it at the time. The mystery of the book is precisely how.

Anyway, the new thread alerted my fellow forumers and I to the fact that a film student at the Art Institute of Atlanta, who had apparently once read and been thoroughly impressed with the story some years ago, wanted permission to make a movie based on it.

Project, of course, said yes.

It feels good to know that some people get the recognition they deserve – even if only in a small and occasional way.

Here is the opening scene – a brilliantly crafted, tangible, almost physically painful scene – from Limbocide. I repost it here with all due credit to the author:

I want to die.

The words echo through my head, even as I pull the trigger. The gunshot, metal bar hitting detonator, the soft 'click' of the gun powder igniting, and then the explosion that follows. My ears ring. Something that feels like a mach truck carrying a load of titanium hits my temple. It strikes bone.

It's impossible to describe the sound of a bullet burrowing into your brain, suffice to say that it resembles a gumboot in mud. A sort of... squelching, sucking sound, littered with the tiniest clinks of bones fragments following in its wake. I'm falling towards the floor, pushed over from the force of the blow. Falling.

But this does not affect the path of the bullet. It exits my skull on the other side, a little higher then the temple, and disappears into the opposing wall. A spray of blood, brain, and bone follows it, decorating the wallpaper I swore I'd redo many times during the past year.

I'm still falling, but things are darker now. Getting hard to think, vision getting hazy. The floor finally rushes to meet me, and I greet it like a lover long lost. Though the impact makes a considerable portion of matter spray from the wound, I don't seem to mind. In fact, nothing matters anymore. It's done. I'm free. I'm going to a better place... one without... problems... where I... can be.... ....

Forget visualizing that scene - you can feel it.

The Craft of Writing and the Art of Style

Since this is my first post on the subject of writing, I'll try to be as explicit and precise as possible. If it is excruciatingly long, then – I don't apologize. Thomas Mann once said that a writer is someone for whom the act of writing is more difficult than for other people, and the corollary is that they spend more time on it than other people. So I have.

I have always been fascinated by stories. Before I could read, or so my parents tell me, I would memorize books and recite them as I turned the pages. When I was about seven or eight years old, I would sometimes shut myself in my room, draw the blinds, sit down, open a book, and not move until I was finished. I have written on and off my entire life, but since the age of about thirteen I started writing and have never stopped. Nor do I ever intend to stop.

To be a good writer, of course, one must be an avid reader. By the current date, I have sampled many different authors and styles of writing from various eras and cultures, but the sheer volume of human literary output makes me a dilettante at best. That is not to say, however, that my observations are entirely inconsequential. After all, I define myself by my writing.

So I think, before I touch on Scott Fitzgerald, that I'll begin at the beginning.

What is writing?

Goes rather far back, doesn't it? That's okay, I could have gone farther. In fact, I'll have to go farther. Because the answer to “What is writing” is “The use of symbols or characters to represent language,” which necessitates asking the question “What is language?” The answer, of course, is that language is a tool for communicating meaningfully between people. It's basically a shared code.

The study of linguistics has shown that language, like all cultural constructs, is a balance between order and chaos. Language abides by certain more or less inviolable rules, but some of these rules admit creative variation, alteration, and growth. The structure of these rules, shared amongst all speakers of a language group, allows one English speaker to communicate meaningfully with another English speaker. Violate too many of these rule however, and language becomes meaningless. As an example, I submit Ebonics.

That last comment would be disputed by linguists. Linguistics, which is a subfield of anthropology, prefers not to pass judgment on cultural quirks. To a linguist, every language, dialect, and pidgin variant has a grammar. Language as a system, after all, is what linguistics studies. It might not sound pretty to speakers of the common, proper, “vanilla” form of the language (the Queen's English as opposed to Ozark or Jamaican versions), but it holds meaning for those who are acclimated to it and its rules.

But very well, leave the linguists to their analysis and categorization of language, free of value judgments. But within the culture itself, language, and especially writing are always subject to value judgments. Granted, they are not always the same value judgments. Different sects within a language group fight to promote their own interpretation of what is “good” for that language. The birth and death of slang terms, for example, are subject to the whims of the under-educated, the clique-y conformists, the painfully ironic, children, and the overly tolerant (i.e. the inane “kicks” for a perfectly good word like “shoes” - there is no reason, Shakespearean or otherwise, to use a word which already has a use to the exclusion of another word which has only one function; to illustrate that point, consider the occasionally-used “eats” in place of “food” and the just-now-invented “hits” for “gloves” or “dongs” for “underwear”). Some of these variations catch on culturally and survive, either becoming enduring slang or managing to evolve into part of the standard language itself (take “cool” as a case in point).

Some groups argue for absolute permissiveness in all areas of language. Others advocate a more conservative approach, harping on very strict, set grammar and rules of word usage. As a rule of thumb, however, a language in which “all is permitted” is not a language, and a language which admits no change or permutation is a dead language. And the interplay of permissiveness and conservatism is the essence of a living language. In the contemporary atmosphere, however, it seems to me that grammarians are too conservative and speakers/amateur anthropologists are too liberal.

In all honesty, anyone who thinks Ebonics is permissible is too liberal, and anyone who thinks that book by Strunk & White is the Bible of modern English letters is too conservative. For a good book on the ideal contemporary style, take a look at the aptly titled Style by Joseph Williams.

Many grammatical principles and ideas on word usage which are espoused by Strunk & White are, quite simply, dead. In fact, White himself is occasionally guilty of violating his own rules.

Strunk & White say:

That. Which. That is the defining, or restrictive, pronoun, which the nondefining, or nonrestrictive.

The lawn mower that is broken is in the garage. (Tells which one.)

The lawn mower, which is broken, is in the garage. (Adds a fact about the only mower in question.)

The use of which for that is common in written and spoken language (“Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass.”) Occasionally which seems preferable to that, as in the sentence from the Bible. But it would be a convenience to all if these two pronouns were used with precision. Careful writers, watchful for small conveniences, go which-hunting, remove the defining whiches, and by so doing improve their work.

Williams responds:

2. 'Use the Relative Pronoun that – not which – for Restrictive Clauses.' Allegedly, not this:

Next is a typical situation which a practiced writer corrects “for style” virtually by reflex action.
-Jacques Barzun, Simple and Direct (p. 69)

Yet just a few sentences before, Barzun himself (one of our most eminent intellectual historians and critics of style) had asserted,

Use that with defining [i.e. restrictive] clauses except when stylistic reasons interpose.

(In the sentence quoted above, no such reasons interpose.)

A rule has no force when someone as eminent as Barzun asserts it on one page, then violates it on the next, and his “error” is never caught, not by his editors, not by his proof-readers, not even by Barzun himself.

This “rule” is relatively new. It appeared in 1906 in Henry and Francis Fowler's The King's English (Oxford University Press; reprinted as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1973). The Fowlers thought that the random variation between that and which to begin a restrictive clause was messy, so they just asserted that henceforth writers should (with some exceptions), limit which to nonrestrictive clauses.

For the liberal side, there are those who think the dialogue of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is pretty.

Now, on a strictly linguistic basis, the dialogue in Their Eyes Were Watching God is merely representative of an English dialect which uses a different but coherent grammar, making it scientifically no “better” or “worse” (since science allegedly tends to avoid thinking in those terms, even though it seems to have no problem with believing in its own metaphor of physical “laws” rather than, say, “imperatives” or “necessities”) than Midwestern English. Similarly, if a culture's grammar mandates that “which” and “that” must be used in different contexts, that's fine, but if it says they can be used interchangeably, then that's fine, too.

Culturally, however, the grammarians themselves note that we use “which” and “that” almost interchangeably. We've made a value judgment. “Which” and “that” can be used wherever we feel they are appropriate. However, it's a value judgment about a linguistic grammar, not about style per se.

Now, to get further along in my long-winded non-diatribe, I'm going to skip over a lot and take a few things on faith (which I dislike doing, but which will have to suffice for now). Simply put, I think “proper” or “vanilla” English is infinitely more attractive than any of its bastardized, mongrel progeny. I like the fact that English is a polyglot language one that was originally Germanic but which also draws on Latin and Latin derivatives like French, Spanish, and Italian. It is a child of all Europe, in a sense, and its capacity for expression and variation is, in a word, beautiful. It's not quite the commanding, violent language of German, nor the uniform Japanese, nor the musical French or poetic Italian. But it is, in its own way, the language with the greatest horizon. So standard modern English, as the direct inheritor of Early Modern (Marlowe) and Middle (Chaucer) and Old (Beowulf) English, is the strain I find most attractive. And if that is only a prejudice, then it is both a good and triumphant one.

The general rules for a contemporary style can be found in any decent handbook on the subject, but the best one remains, as I have said, Joseph Williams's Style. From that book, you get a couple of general ideals which form the basic principles of good writing (and, naturally, specific methods of achieving them). Precision, clarity, directness, and a logical layout of one's ideas. Finally, of course, there is elegance – a subjective value if ever there was one.

Now, of course, that book can tell you the rules for a good, solid English style (such as that possessed by King, Crichton, Vonnegut, or Orwell), but it cannot make you into a John F. Kennedy, a Thomas Jefferson, a Friedrich Nietzsche. The most brilliant style is almost always a matter of such subjective taste that it begins to defy rational explanation. After all, weren't Kennedy's words perhaps overwritten? Didn't Thomas Jefferson lay it on a little thick? Wasn't Nietzsche sometimes florid and hysterical?

Yes, but what brilliance even so!

What price I wouldn't pay to write a passage as magnificent as this:

Indeed, we philosophers and "free spirits" feel, when we hear the news that "the old god is dead," as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an "open sea."—

True enough that the original was not English, but neither was the Bible, yet we venerate the poetic interpretation of the King James Version. We extol the virtues of the Hobbes translation of Thucydides. Rightly so. And I think Nietzsche's rhetorical powers were on a level with the greatest poets and orators in our history.

I have sometimes been accused of being a stylistic reactionary. One of my friends, I believe, is quite convinced that I must be not only an old soul but an archaic one. And sometimes there are jokes about my would-be elitist tendencies in matters of literary (or any) aesthetics. But allow me to justify myself, non-existent readers, ghost-people, shades of the Underblogopshere.

I know convincing people in matters of artistic taste is an issue not of argument but of cultivation. If one grows up listening to rap, it will never matter that no decent student of music history and theory will tell you that it is deserving of the name “music.” It will never matter that they would be right. The fact that you are culturally conditioned to enjoy it means that it would take a whole new conditioning process to acclimate you to another musical style. I speak here in generalities – there are always those who rebel against their culture and latch onto something else. And that's not to say one can't change one's tastes, either. I grew up in a more or less non-musical environment. My father listened to jazz, my mother to classic rock, and I to nothing. These days, I listen to Brahms, Shostakovich, and Richard Strauss. But it has taken time for me to come to terms with their forms of expression, and I am still only a bad listener to what their music says. I have defended my choice in music based on certain principles of aesthetics, but it did not originally appeal to me on rational grounds. It was an issue of cultivation of taste. I listened, and slowly I appreciated. Axiomatically: you can want what you like, but you can't like what you want.

I will now try to give a preliminary apology of my aesthetics, along with examples.

Writing – I should have said this before – is not a pure art. There are pure arts, of course. Music is the most notable example. Sculpture is another. Painting can be a pure art, and currently it has become one almost exclusively, but until the advent of the camera it was also a tool for transmitting images of something one had seen to those who hadn't. Other forms of human activity are only secondary arts. Architecture is a secondary art. It serves the purpose of providing shelter, and after it has performed its utilitarian function it may also aspire to aesthetic significance. Think suburbia for the former, the Hagia Sophia for the latter.

Secondary arts can only become pure arts if there is a change in the medium. For instance, painting became a pure art because images could be produced mechanically and with perfect accuracy via photography. This left the hand-crafted production of images to the realm of talent and creativity rather than necessity. Similarly, architecture could become a primary art if there were a change in building materials such that one substance was infinitely strong. This substance could then be arranged in ways that, with conventional building materials, would be structurally unsound, but with this new material would still be capable of supporting any weight. If that change occurred in the medium, then the utilitarian demands of architecture would be nullified and it could be considered a primary art.

With this in mind, we must realize that writing, which is, after all, the symbolic representation of language – and language is the means of communicating meaningfully between people – could only ever be a pure art if one could devise a means for transmitting coherent concepts, from one person to another, regardless of the code of language itself. Essentially, one would have to come up with a way to communicate concepts without regulation of symbols.

As a matter of fact, they tried this once. It was called “modernism.”

Now, I won't devote my post to defining or declaiming modernism, or to nitpicking its various virtues and villainies. I'm only going to say that the strain of practical nihilism in it was murderous to literature and to meaning. Go ahead and read the first page of Finnegan's Wake if you want any sort of evidence for what I'm saying. I will say this much, however: the discontent with received truth and absolutes was taken too far in modernism. I'm versed in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and I have a passing familiarity with Wittgenstein, but I am not about to join some radical French deconstructionist philosophicult. One can acknowledge the uncertainty of life in a text and create internal resonances for readers to question and interpret without making the text itself meaningless. In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway claims his one virtue is that he is “one of the few honest people I know.” And yet, by the end, Miss Jordan Baker questions his integrity so much that she only “thought you were honest.” And we are relying on this man to tell us of Gatsby, that sad, wounded, even crippled romantic whose entire world was founded securely on a fairy's wing. This same Nick Carraway who tells us right off that he prefers to withhold judgment, but who is “glad” he said to Gatsby, “You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

Sad, beautiful, troubling, uncertain – and at once crystal clear.

Music is an art of sound, the plastic arts one of image, dance of motion, and writing of concepts. Because of this, writing is certainly the most fundamentally intellectual of the art forms. That is to say, when it is an art at all. Writing is also the most autocratic – authoritarian if you will forgive the incidental pun – of the arts. For writing to mean anything at all, it must maintain its “faith in grammar.” When writing questions its own capacity to transmit meaning, its doubt is of the kind that, to echo Wittgenstein, presupposes certainty. And the fact that we can ask a baker for a loaf of bread and watch the baker go and retrieve the loaf is all the scientific proof we need that language does have the capacity for meaning, skeptics be damned.

In any event, the demands of communication which are placed on writing make it virtually impossible for writing to be anything other than a secondary art. So if language is first and foremost a tool, then writing is, strictly speaking, a craft. This means that before a writer can be a good artist, he must be a good craftsman. This is no different from the architect, who must be a good worker before he can apply his creative powers to the embellishment of his creation.

This means that a good stylist must also be a good craftsman. Now, in the realm of “artistic” writing, discerning good styles can be difficult since many in the last century who have championed “experimental” styles have also been incredibly careful craftsmen and been driven by philosophy or purpose. In fact, it seems that to be heralded as great, all you need is to write a philosophy – any philosophy – into your work. That's it. That's all there is.

In light of the foregoing, I am going to turn to examples of style, drawn from a variety of authors. I am going to skip over those whose writing is solid and uncontroversial. A clear, direct, vivid style almost cannot be a bad thing. No one disputes that J.K. Rowling and George Orwell have a perfectly acceptable, functional style. But when people feel the need to be creative with their prose, to make it more than a craft, to add a layer of artistry to it all, then it becomes necessary to discern that which is done in good taste from that in bad.

I have drawn eight examples from authors/works with which I am familiar. Most of them are regarded by some parts of the populace as examples of genius.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (p. 1):

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

First we have this passage. I will admit my prejudice in favor of the author here. I find the imagery almost surreal in its oily clarity – permit me the poetic turn of phrase – though perhaps the sentence structures could stand a bit of revision. Notice that all of the sentences here are clear and direct, but also that they are not short, limited little things. Rather, the sentences are languid and varied in form. The use of modifying descriptors is moderate. Roughly one descriptor to an item, i.e. “motionless” brooding and “interminable” waterway.

At the same time, the sentences do not strike me as always perfectly formed. Take this line: “In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits.” It seems to hang in there, moving inexorably beyond what one might think of as its ideal focus, unregulated by punctuation. The images are beautiful, but the sentence borders on rambling. Rambling might sometimes serve a purpose for, say, Kerouac, but here we are concerned with an elevated elegance, not an explosion or superabundance. (Granted, not every “story” deserves the same style, but as a general rule of writing a personal style should tend towards a single ideal – naturally I wouldn't want Kerouac's narrator or Twain's Huck Finn to speak like Nietzsche, and the best example I can come up with for stylistic manipulation might be Flowers for Algernon – but unless you have a damn good reason for your book being a tale told by an idiot or one committed to the page by one committed to a prison, you don't really have an excuse for adopting a bad style because it's disingenuous – and a nonfictional “this is me” style should be elegant, elevated, refined, but at the same time individual rather than pretentious or contrived...and my apologies for bringing fiction into this, since that is another discussion entirely).

In any case, it's easy to see that the author has a command of English and that he goes a step beyond it to achieve something that is vibrant and alive. Blunt, utilitarian English could never have served to create the same dark, brooding atmosphere as this style does. Bleak, maybe, even empty, but not this perfect blend of poise and torment. Read that passage and you are there, on the Thames, on the Nellie, listening to Marlow, and waiting for the turn of the tide.

Janet Fitch, White Oleander (p. 38):

We swam in the hot aquamarine of the pool late at night, in the clatter of palms and the twinkle of the new-scoured sky. My mother floated on her back, humming to herself. 'God, I love this.' She splashed gently with her fingers, letting her body drift in a slow circle. 'Isn't it funny. I'm enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you. Changes its mind.' Her eyes were closed. Beads of water decorated her face, and her hair spread out from her head like jellyfish tendrils. 'But hatred, now. That's something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but hatred cradles you. It's so soothing. I feel infinitely better now.'

'I'm glad,' I said. I was glad she felt happier, but I didn't like the kind of happiness it was, I didn't believe in it, I believed it would crack open sooner or later and terrible things would come flying out.

This passage shares its virtues with the one which precedes it. Again, it is vivid, and moreover it is concise. The imagery is original, refreshing (and this is, of course, characteristic of the whole book). Astrid (for that is the narrator's name) swims in “the hot aquamarine” - the color, not the substance. The palms clatter; the sky is new-scoured and twinkles. The sentence patterns and lengths vary with their purposes. The similes are clear, apt, singular, individual: “her hair spread out from her head like jellyfish tendrils.” Above all, there is a sense of control. The language is highly deliberate. And the final sentence is beautiful. It moves from a timid position to the terror which lies beneath, ending on an appropriately striking note.

Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford (p. 3-4):

It may well be said that plain English cannot encompass a life so various, tortured and contradictory. And yet it was Marston who in his innocence called him Kind Kit. He did not know him. Words were moreover to him more than human reality. It was surely wrong of him to emend the verse about shallow rivers to whose falls melodious birds sing madrigals to his gallimaufry of Cantant avians do vie with mellous fluminosity. And not in jest neither. There is a limit to all things.

Cat, or Kit I said, and indeed about Kit there was something of the cat. He blinked his green eyes much and evaded, as cats will, the straight gaze either from fear of fearful aggression or of some shame of one order or another. Even in the carnal act the eyes were not engaged, at least not often, and it may well be that the sodomitical seek to avoid ocular discourse as speaking too much of the (albeit temporary) union of hearts.

Burgess was to style what Gary Oldman is to acting. He could adapt to anything. Witness the differences between his A Clockwork Orange, Earthly Powers, and Nothing Like the Sun (the last of which I detest) for a very passing acquaintance with the sheer range and versatility of which the man was capable. But even so, there are certain tendencies that show through in all of Burgess's prose. It is precise, it is controlled, it is clear. It is also original without being florid. “Plain English cannot encompass a life” (aside from being a half-joking commentary on the adopted Elizabethan English of the book itself) is a vast improvement over the same sentiment encapsulated in the cliché “words cannot express.”

And Burgess had power in the short and simple sentence - “There is a limit to all things” - as well as the long - “Even in the carnal act the eyes were not engaged, at least not often, and it may well be that the sodomitical seek to avoid ocular discourse as speaking too much of the (albeit temporary) union of hearts.” Could a few words be shaved from that sentence if absolutely necessary? I believe so. “Not often engaged” could replace “were not engaged, at least not often,” but that removes the gentle pause-and-turn from the fact to its explanation and inserts an abrupt right-angle. “Seek to” is also, strictly speaking, not entirely necessary. But again, this is a highly stylized variant of an already individual style, and so I won't dwell too much on what is, ultimately, a matter of subjective taste.

Just be glad I didn't try wading through Nadsat, ya starry vechk.

Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor (p. 281):

Van closed his eyes in order better to concentrate on the golden flood of swelling joy. Many, oh many, many years later he recollected with wonder (how could one have endured such rapture?) that moment of total happiness, the complete eclipse of the piercing and preying ache, the logic of intoxication, the circular argument to the effect that the most eccentric girl cannot help being faithful if she loves one as one loves her. He watched Ada's bracelet flash in rhythm with the swaying of the victoria and her full lips, parted slightly in profile, show in the sun the red pollen of a remnant of salve drying in the transversal thumbnail lines of their texture.

This style amazes me. There is no hint of the pointed precision of other English stylists' poeticizing. Rather, this is rhapsody.

In all my reading, I have never encountered another author (save possibly Poe) who can make the borderline-excess of this style work for him. Then again, I have yet to seriously engage with some of the authors who deliberately mimed this style.

The beauty of this style is not merely its rich excess, but its force. It imposes itself on you without being formless or bloated. It is not a leech-infested swamp, it is the Galapagos. Swelling, eclipse, piercing, preying, swaying, flash. And the rhythm of words is there, too. Just read the last sentence. These touches do tend to fade the fastest (we have, after all, lost some of the musicality of Chaucer and Shakespeare to the erosion of time), so I won't dwell overmuch on them. All the same, the style is not only gorgeous but active and dramatic. The buzz of life hums in every line. I have nothing but admiration for it.

Now I'll turn to styles which I am compelled to decry-

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead (p.78):

During my time in prison it happened, although extremely rarely, that some senior official visited the prison without a personal guard. It was instructive to see how this impressed the convicts, and impressed them favourably. A fearless visitor of this type always aroused their respect, and even if there was a possibility that something unpleasant might happen, it would not happen in his presence. The fear that convicts inspire is to be found wherever there are convicts, and I really do not know what it springs from. It does of course have some foundation, starting with the convict's outward appearance, the look of the acknowledged bandit; in addition to this, anyone entering a prison can feel that this entire body of men has been assembled here against its will and that, whatever measures are taken, it is impossible to convert a living man into a corpse: he retains his feelings, his thirst for vengeance and life, his passions and his desire to satisfy them. Yet in spite of this, I am positively convinced that there is no reason to be afraid of convicts. A man does not so readily or so swiftly go for another with a knife. In short, even if there is some possible danger at times, one may conclude from the rarity of such unfortunate incidents that it is not a very great one. I speak here, needless to say, only of convicted prisoners, many of whom are glad that they have at last reached the prison (so attractive does a new life sometimes appear!) and are consequently disposed to behave quietly and peaceably; and, quite apart from this, their own kind will not allow the truly restless ones among them to behave with too much audacity.

It pains me to say one bad word about this man. His genius is excelsior. His comprehension of humanity was unmatched by any other single mind save possibly that of Nietzsche himself. I have drawn great solace from his works, and I prize him above any other author. He was, however, a terrible writer. In a mad attempt to nail down concepts more firmly than a crucified convict, he overwrote and avoided simplification with such pathological and academic intensity that much of his prose lacks life. It is wordy beyond measure. Sometimes it is wonderfully nervous, sometimes it trembles, but much of it is quite simply overwritten.

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (p. 23):

The man still crying against her neck, Marla takes another drag on her cigarette.

I watch her from between Bob's shuddering tits.

To Marla I'm a fake. Since the second night I saw her, I can't sleep. Still, I was the first fake, unless, maybe all these people are faking with their lesions and their coughs and tumors, even Big Bob, the big moosie. The big cheesebread.

Would you just look at his sculpted hair.

Marla smokes and rolls her eyes now.

In this one moment, Marla's lie reflects my lie, and all I can see are lies. In the middle of all their truth. Everyone clinging and risking to share their worst fear, that their death is coming head-on and the barrel of a gun is pressed against the back of their throats. Well, Marla is smoking and rolling her eyes, and me, I'm buried under a sobbing carpet, and all of a sudden even death and dying rank right down there with plastic flowers on video as a non-event.

'Bob,' I say, 'you're crushing me.' I try to whisper, then I don't. 'Bob.' I try to keep my voice down, then I'm yelling. 'Bob, I have to go to the can.'

“Writing the way people talk” would be fine if “people” didn't talk like illiterate, pretentious idiots. Would you want to read a whole book written in the manner of my blog posts? No? Good. I would be embarrassed to write such a thing.

William Faulkner, Light in August (p. 187-188):

Then she stopped laughing. There was no cessation of mirth in that, either. The still, abject, downlooking voice reached him. 'I made a mistake tonight. I forgot something.' Perhaps she was waiting for him to ask her what it was. But he did not. He just stood there, with the still, downspeaking voice dying somewhere about his ears. He had forgot about the shot sheep. He had lived with the fact which the older boy had told him too long now. With the slain sheep he had bought immunity from it for too long now for it to be alive. So he could not understand at first what she was trying to tell him. They stood at the corner. It was the edge of town, where the street became a road that ran on beyond the ordered and measured lawns, between small, random houses and barren fields – the small, cheap houses which compose the purlieus of such towns.

A master prose stylist once wondered how this man's “corncobby chronicles” could be considered masterpieces. I am, ultimately, inclined to agree. There is no writer more grotesquely overrated than this one. The prose meanders, it repeats pointlessly, it focuses on details which are irrelevant. There are, of course, moments of beauty in his works, but the style is, overall, too erratic. A good craftsman, I admit, lies beneath this warped and mutilated style. And he believed his own rationale for what he did. The problem is that things like this - “With the slain sheep he had bought immunity from it for too long now for it to be alive” - interrupt the fairly decent passages too often to be ignored.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (p. 1-2):

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders.

For this I have nothing but contempt. Sure, it's an interesting linguistic experiment in how much we can get out of a text despite its patent lack of any sort of sensible governing principle, but in that sense so are passages of Joyce. Both should stay in the realm of linguistic experiments where they belong, or at least they shouldn't occupy more than a couple dozen pages. After all, a couple dozen pages is far more than they need to make their inane stylistic points.

Past that, I will merely quote an old conversation with the friend who convinced me to start posting these rants here in the first place:

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: [I am not a big fan of The Road.]

The Other Guy: Bad book?

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: [redacted] Well, not a "bad" book per se. I would call it terrible, mortifying, pretentious, absurd, sickening – a rape of the language, if you will – and, also, it's as dull as watching flies [redacted].

The Other Guy: Wow. That's..harsh.

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: Take a look at a page of something of his on amazon. Just go do it.

The Other Guy: This might take a sec.

[Discussion of Catch-22.]

[Discussion of incest in Lord of the Rings.]

The Other Guy: Um...one sentence into the excerpt, and McCarthy already abandoned traditional sentence structure (who needs noun>verb?!).

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: Yep. He hates the language.

[Time passes.]

The Other Guy: What the hell is up with this guy's SENTENCES? They're like...WEIRD...

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: He talks about how semi-colons don't make sense...but then he does [redacted] LIKE THIS. Check out his *dialogue.*

[Redacted to preserve the intellectual reputation of another friend.]

The Other Guy: [redacted] "corrects" my poor grammar when I do things MUCH less terrible than all... all of this...

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: Humans are designed to see PATTERNS. Patterns are the *human imposition of order on what is fundamentally chaos.* THERE IS A REASON MUSIC HAS HARMONY AND SENTENCES HAVE A SUBJECT, VERB, AND OBJECT. Order is a TRIUMPH over chaos. [It is PART OF WHO WE ARE. You CAN'T abandon that, yet he TRIES. People have been trying to do this from the 1920s on.] IT ISN'T NEW. IT HAS ALL BEEN DONE BEFORE. CAN WE ALL GO BACK TO MAKING SENSE NOW PLEASE?

The Other Guy: "In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls." WHOSE LIGHT? I am already frustrated by this writing.

[Discussion of Nazism.]

The Other Guy: And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the egg of spiders. And on that shore this dirty thing coughed, and was almost heard to say, "Gollum, Gollum." Er, wait, one of those sentences isn't from The Road..

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: LOL

The Other Guy: I don't like his metaphor. "sightless as the egg of spiders" implies that other 'eggs are not sightless, which is a blatant lie. I don't know of any creatures that are born with sight.

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: I know of no eggs that can see period. It's sloppy writing.

The Other Guy: I ASSUME he meant 'young' by 'eggs' - which is retarded, but even granting that, it still makes no [redacted] sense.

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: This is how it should have gone: "stared into the light with eyes sightless and dead, white as the egg of spiders." And, better imagery would be squid eggs. You don't get a more dead, milky white than squid eggs. Spider eggs? I don't even know what the [redacted] that looks like.

The Other Guy: I haven't even past the first page yet! Wow did you finish this!?

[Discussion of Yahoo! Answers.]

The Other Guy: Whoa... The Road = no apostrophes? In ... the narrative? Who needs apostrophes?

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: So did you see McCarthy's dialogue yet?

The Other Guy: Not yet. Pages 2-X took a long time loading, all at once. I'm on 2 now.

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: ic

The Other Guy: "He thought the month was October but wasnt sure." Wasnt.

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: Yeah. Wasnt. I cant understand why hed do that

The Other Guy: Just in case I might have thought that was a fluke or something, the very next sentence: "He hadnt.." That's very witty. But, seriously, what the [redacted] gives? He did this... .... because he could?

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: Basically. And his publisher let him get away with it.

[Discussion of capital punishment.]

He apparently doesn't "like" certain punctuation.

The Other Guy: Um...I might have found dialogue, but I'm not sure.

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: Yeah, that's a way to tell you've found it.

The Other Guy: LOL! He said: If [the child] is not the word of God God never spoke.

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: See, this is the kind of [redacted] that I can juxtapose against Burgess. McCarthy does this because he's just a [redacted] up writer. [Burgess always has a reason for his stylistic changes.]

The Other Guy:

“The boy turned in his blankets. Then he opened his eyes. Hi, Papa, he said.
I'm right here.
I know.”

...............WHICH of these things were said? It's a mystery!!! Was it,

"Hi papa," said the boy
"I'm right here" said the dad
"I know" said the boy

or

"Hi papa" said the boy
"I'm right here. I know" said the dad

oooor

"Hi papa," he said. "I'm right here."
"I know," dad said

ooor WTF

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: *Geoffrey Rush voice* It's a mystery.

The Other Guy: I have absolutely NO idea how that conversation went. Whatsoever. Or what was meant by it.

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: NO ONE DOES.

The Other Guy: What the [redacted] McCarthy. WHAT THE [redacted].

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: In ten years, McCarthy won't even know how it went. And in a hundred years, when the language has changed, scholars will be duped into thinking it is even SIGNIFICANT how it went.

The Other Guy: BUT PEOPLE LIKE THIS. THEY SAY THEY LIKE THIS. How did people get a film script out of this??? How the [redacted] did they decipher the conversations???

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: Guesswork.

[Discussion of moral principles preventing the bartering of a Swedish bikini model orgy for ten minutes spent reading another McCarthy novel.]

The Other Guy: With your permission I'm actually not going to keep reading that excerpt of The Road. It's just garbage.

Your Not-So-Humble Narrator: That's fine. You discovered how the dialogue went.

The Other Guy: "Went" is one way of putting it. "Didn't went" would be another. Err, sorry: “didnt went.”*

Is that harsh? Sure. Overstated? Maybe a little. Prejudicial? Absolutely. And the spirit of it is still true. McCarthy's due is that he has flashes of poetic inspiration, and he manages to create a bleak atmosphere with his words. That, however, is nothing that cannot be done with a little effort in a normal style. For an even bleaker and more moving vision, see Heart of Darkness. Hell, see The Gunslinger. There is no valid reason for what McCarthy does as a matter of course. None. By degrees, violation of rules and principles is of course inevitable, even necessary in writing. That does not mean that one should commit the literary equivalent of the Rape of Nanjing. Clarity is sacrificed, meaning is spat upon, and communication is stampeded to death. McCarthy and Joyce think writing is a primary art. As I said before, it isn't.

That concludes my sketch of a comparison between good styles and bad. As always, things have to be taken on a case by case basis (down to the word at times), but the overall effect is what I have been looking at here. Now, at the risk of seeming perhaps to align myself with the title character, I will leave you with one more example of a style - an ineffably beautiful style - which too many contemporary writers have let fall by the wayside:

As I went over to say good-by I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby's face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

As I watched him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn't be over-dreamed – that voice was a deathless song.

They had forgotten me, but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand; Gatsby didn't know me now at all. I looked once more at them and they looked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went out of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there together.

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

And if you still think me an arch-reactionary with only the most myopic of views...then, as the Historian of my as-yet-unfinished story says, I have resigned myself to that.