How Do You Like Your Writing--Crunchy, Smooth, Syrupy, Chewy?

Check out this box of chocolates. Each piece represents a different Japanese onomatopoeiac texture. Toge toge; zaku zaku; goro goro.

Yum yum, right? Well it got me a little curious about the texture of prose.

Texture? To prose? I know what you're thinking: Brendan must be musing again. I know you're preparing yourself for a smattering of five dollar words like susurration, synecdoche, smattering, and crenellations.

Well don't flee to Facebook just yet. I think understanding the texture of writing can help us understand that elusive beast--style. And maybe by understanding how prose has texture, we can improve our own writing styles.

Let's start out with something we all know. Smooth writing. Smooth prose is effortless, easy, flowing evenly across the page. 

We can push the metaphor even further. Sometimes smooth writing comes across as too fluid, too rehearsed, too polished, too damned smooth. Editing has buffed the prose so clean it looks like the shiny hood of a fancy sports car. The worst kind of New York Times op-eds have this kind of smoothness; the smoothness of gelled hair, of dry cleaned slacks, of too-perfect teeth. On the more palatable end of the spectrum there's the smoothness of Malcom Gladwell--a lozenge that you can swallow without flinching. Still, even well-done smooth writing feels a little bit like a trick. Like it's been focus-grouped.

So let's have some fun and think about other prose textures.

Crunchy

Crunchy writing gives up its meaning reluctantly. You gnaw and gnaw and gnaw. Nothing comes. Chew and chew and chew. Still the paragraph looks like a meaningless scribble. A brow furrows. A pen is chewed. The tension builds. Maybe you want put the book down, say fuck it, check Facebook, burn every book you own in frustration. Never read again. Move to the forest.

But then!--the meaning splits open--crunch, and there it is--all at once you understand. And it's like the meaning has been staring you in the face this whole time.

Kant is the crowned king of crunchy prose.

Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! 'Have courage to use your own reason!'- that is the motto of enlightenment.

Crunchy writing is not necessarily good. But when it's done well---!

"Hope" is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the soul —
And sings the tune without the words —
And never stops — at all — 

And sweetest — in the Gale — is heard —
And sore must be the storm —
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm — 

I've heard it in the chillest land —
And on the strangest Sea —
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb — of Me.

That was Emily Dickinson, of course.

Chewy

Chewy writing is good to eat. Like crunchy writing, chewy prose makes you work a little before it gives up its meaning. But chewy writing makes that work fun. Its sentences can have the habit of trundling along, but if it is ever long-winded, there is a prize at the end of it--a joke, a metaphor, a candy center. When chewy writing is done well it is never a chore to read, nor to re-read.

Chewy writing is a phrase that gets stuck in your head. The paragraph that grabs you so tightly that you have to put your book down and just ponder. The strikingly grating metaphor that makes you go oh. Where smooth writing aims to go down easy, chewy writing wants you you ruminate. Where crunchy writing expects you to sweat, chewy writing wants you to savor.

Here's Laurence Stern being nicely chewy:

Nay, if you come to that, Sir, have not the wisest of men in all ages, not excepting Solomon himself, -- have they not had their HOBBY-HORSES ; -- their running horses, -- their coins and their cockle-shells, their drums and their trumpets, their fiddles, their pallets, ---- their maggots and their butterflies ? -- and so long as a man rides his HOBBY-HORSE peaceably and quietly along the King's high-way, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him, ---- pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?

Syrupy

Forget the insipidly sweet Hallmark pablum that comes to mind when you hear the word syrupy--this is about texture, not taste. Imagine instead the languid drizzle of honey off of a honey dipper. Prose that circles and turns, heavy with adjectives and metaphors, stuck to one large idea, never giving it up, spiraling around and around with meaning. Syrupy prose could just keep on going forever (syrupy books double as doorstops) rich, full, and solid, in huge page-long paragraphs, with chapters the lengths of ambitious novellas.

When the book is finally put down, you get this feeling like you're still covered in gummy similes and exquisite words. Like you've just stumbled out of a slightly magical library and are blinking at the light of the mundane world.

Syrupy writing used to be all the rage. The Victorians get syrupy. Poe is syrupy. Here's Gibbon drizzling the prose everywhere:

The Germans, in the age of Tacitus, were unacquainted with the use of letters; and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of the mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular.

Lest you think that the style is completely extinct, a contemporary propounder of syrupy prose is Mike Pesca, of the Gist.

Watery

Not to be confused with fluid writing (an especially clear sub-variety of smooth writing), watery writing has been diluted so it can go down easy. Its sentences are straightforward. Its allusions are simple.

The watery writer is concerned with taxing the reader's attention span. The watery writer is not sure the reader can keep up. The watery writer really wants the reader to get it, even if you're skimming, even if you're watching TV and just killing time while the commercials are on.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for watery writing--in its proper place. Watery writing is an efficient information transmission system--it is easy to skim. Advice columns, how-to manuals, and technical writing are all often watery, because these genres are less about style, and more about getting a point across. Good business writing is watery, which is better than the usual cloudy alternative. A great collection of watery writing can be found at Our Incredible Journey, a compendium of the notices start-ups give when they are bought by a bigger company.

Lots of writers should be in the habit of watering down their prose once in a while. (This author included.) God knows that social theory needs to get chased with a few cups of water every once in a while; otherwise it's liable to get stuck in the reader's throat. Undergraduates should make their writing watery--they don't need to be worrying about style. They need to make themselves understood.

Here's Emily Yoffe (Slate's Dear Prudence) showing the power of watery prose:

When it comes to planning one’s funeral some people just don’t want to think about it; some people express general wishes (cremation not burial, memorial service not funeral); some people orchestrate every detail, from the music to the speakers. Of course, each of these choices is valid. You can make whatever decisions you want, let your husband know your wishes, and then put your funeral out of your mind.

Rugged

Rugged prose is written under a moonlit sky. Journal spread open against thighs. Pencil sharpened with bowie knife. Body tight after a day of hard work.

And every so often the rugged writer has to stop writing just to listen. He listens to the lowing of a coyote echoing out over the valley. He listens to the silence of the big big world. He doesn't feel alone. He just feels small.

And every so often the rugged writer thinks. He thinks about death. He thinks about women. He thinks about the can of beans simmering on the fire. He thinks about the long ride home, through chaparral and sagebrush country, across dry riverbeds, and then over the border. He wonders if home will still be there when he gets back. They probably won't even recognize him, with this two-month growth of beard on his face, with his beaten-up jacket and cold eyes. Probably a good thing they won't recognize him. When he left he felt like nobody wanted him back, not until that boy was a distant memory.

He wishes he didn't need to kill that boy. But the damned kid would've killed him otherwise.  That's the honest truth, no matter what anybody else thinks.

But the rugged can't shake the feeling that the whole world would've been better off if the boy had shot him. That he was living a borrowed life like another man's jacket. That he was living the boy's life, with all it's promise and evil.

The rugged writer listens to the silence stretched taut across his exile like the skin of a drum. He thinks about the long ride home through Indian country. He eats his beans. He pictures the moon, women, the boy's face as he lay there in the dust, asking for his mamma that'd died the summer before, the blood pooling through his shirt. Enough thinking. He starts writing again. He is writing about the moon, about women, about men wearing leather gloves. The coyote has gone silent. He is writing about the silence, too.

It is also acceptable to compose rugged writing on a farm, in remote Alaskan townships, or in outer space.

The Beats were masters of rugged prose. Thus, Kerouac:

What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.

And Patti Smith:

nodding tho' the lamps lit low
nodding for passers underground
to and fro she's darning and
the yarn is weeping red and pale
marking the train stops from algiers

sleeping tho' the eyes are pale
hums in rhythum w/a bonnet on
lullaby a broken song
the sifting-cloth is bleeding red
weeping yarn from algiers

lullaby tho' baby's gone
the cradle rocks a barren song
she's rocking w/her ribbons on
she's rocking yarn and needles oh
it's long coming from algiers

Lacy

From BibliOdyssey. 

The lacy author likes to evoke in her prosody the feeling of a pair of middle-aged men walking solemnly through the loggias of an Oxford college in autumn, the smell of leather armchairs and old books hanging in the air, the sound of the two men's long coats swishing softly in the air as they talk about something ever-so-slightly sordid. An affair, a scandal, or Cesar. Or a rigged by-election.

The lacy style is completely unafraid to embark on circuitous sentences that meander from clause to clause; where another author might want to plump down a solid period somewhere if only to let the reader have a bit of a break, the lacy author just keeps on going, loving the opportunity to pile word upon word, decoration atop decoration, filigree on filigree, clause after clause. In the most adept examples of lacy writing--P. D. James at her most psychologically acute, George R. R. Martin at his pomp-puffed best--the meaning is perfectly clear, the sentences complex but well-tightened. At its more mediocre, lacy writing does little more than dare the reader to be dazzled at what the writer is capable of. At its worst, it's unreadable.

Here is the legendary Gene Wolfe, from his experimental sci-fi novel, The Shadow of the Torturer, giving a great example of laciness in action:

Dr. Talos leaned toward her, and it struck me that his face was not only that of a fox (a comparison that was perhaps too easy to make because his bristling reddish eyebrows and sharp nose suggested it at once) but that of a stuffed fox. I have heard those who dig for their livelihood say there is no land anywhere in which they can trench without turning up shards of the past. No matter where the spade turns the soil, it uncovers broken pavements and corroded metal; and scholars write that the kind of sand that artists call polychrome (because flecks of every colour are mixed with its whiteness) is actually not sand at all, but the glass of the past, now pounded by aeons of tumbling in the clamorous sea. If there are layers of reality beneath the reality we see, even as there are layers of history beneath the ground we walk upon, then in one of those more profound realities, Dr. Talos's face was a fox's mask on a wall, and I marveled to see it turn and bend now toward the woman, achieving by those motions, which make expression and thought appear to play across it with the shadows of nose and brows, and amazing and realistic appearance of vivacity.

Goopy

Image from the great Kinspiracy blog 

Watery and syrupy. And definitely not smooth. Insert Gwyneth Paltrow joke here.

How many times a day do we throw our words away? We say things like, ‘I hate my hair,’ ‘I’m so stupid,’ ‘I’m such a klutz.’ We never think that these words bring negative energy into our vibration and affect us on a physical level, but they do. Emoto’s experiments were conducted with water. Why? Because sound vibration travels through water four times faster than it does through open air. Consider the fact that your body is over 70% water and you’ll understand how quickly the vibration from negative words resonates in your cells. Ancient scriptures tell us that life and death are in the power of the tongue. As it turns out, that’s not a metaphor.

Further thoughts?

I'd love to hear what you think about texture in language. Which textures do you think matter in prose? Which authors do you find crunchy, watery or chewy?

If you found this post super chewy yourself, please share it or leave a comment!

I stumbled across this digital humanities project working with texture words. I link to it without comment--I need to digest it more.

Eight Reasons Why Listicles Are The Greatest!

Listicles are totally the literary genre of 2015. There's already a listicle on any topic imaginable. They range from the self-obsessed (18 Struggles Of Having An Outgoing Personality But Actually Being Shy And Introverted) to the serious (9 Facts About Eurozone Crisis) to the dadaist (7 Everyday Products That Were Invented By Accident.) Since they're so prevalent, so obviously superficial, so click-baity, they are easy to make fun of. But I think listicles have a lot to teach us about writing on the internet. Especially for people who don't know how to write on the internet (like academics.)

So let's dig into why are listicles so popular.

1 Listicles are popular

Facebook and Reddit and all the other social media tornados give more popular links more prominent placement. This means that even marginal differences in the initial popularity of an article compound into huge differences in that article's virulence. Think of it as hypertext Darwinism, red in link and metadata.

Of course, this leaves an important question: what makes listicles more popular than other forms of internet writing?

Curious? Read on!

2 Listicles are easy to skim

Or skim on, I should say.

Listicles are made for people who don't have the time to read the wordy waffling of the wannabe writers who produce 99% of the content on the internet. You can get the gist of the listicle simply by passing your eyes over the super-huge headlines. (That's why they are big and bold.) The prose elaborations beneath the headlines are purely decorative. Or a place to shove supporting evidence; usually statistical. Or a place to put a joke. (Did you know that 15% of listicles have a made up statistic in them?)

3 The title helps you figure out how long the listicle takes to read

Helpful for readers who don't have a lot of time.

100 Reasons to Not Have Kids? That's going to take half an hour to read. Skip it.

Eight Reasons Why Listicles Are The Greatest? Short enough to read over your coffee break. Share it.

4 Listicles are easy to write

There is no thesis to a listicle. No need for sustained argument. The writer can simply rattle off six, ten, or twelve half-warmed observations about a topic, make sure their there are no misspellings, and hit post.

They're also easy to add to. Did you stumble across a relevant article right at the end of the writing process? You don't need to start again from scratch. Just add another bullet point.

5 Listicles let authors speak with authority

The listicle's big, bold headlines encourage an impersonal authoritative voice that makes writers sound like they know what they are taking about. There can be no waffling in a listicle heading, no hedging of bets, no qualifications.

It is the exact opposite of the way we are usually taught to write prose. And a lot more fun to read.

6 Memes are okay, too

7 Listicles encourage concision

Because let's be real. This shit is gonna get skimmed.

8 Listicles stand out in a crowd

New rule of the internet: If it it exists, there is already an article about it that has received more pageviews than you ever will. (Call this a G-rated Rule 34.)

Other articles may have the substance--but the listicle allows even neophytes to offer something with panache. Other articles may have done more research. The listicle is short and to-the point. Other articles may hit the same general points. There is no other listicle about listicles that have the same eight points this listicle has.

So what's the point? (for academics)

I'm not lot saying that the listicle is the future of writing. That would be horrifying. Imagine if Clifford Geertz had written 17 Things About Culture I Learned From This Island Bloodsport (That Will Blow Your Mind!)

Yet as scholars continue to wring their hands about the fact that nobody is listening to them, maybe it's time to rethink the kind of writing they produce. The quality of tenure-worthy scholarship hasn't changed for a couple decades. It's the same intentionally boring, incredibly inaccessible crap that only highly educated people can read. And highly educated people find it boring, too.

The listicle accepts the fact that most work is written to be skimmed. The listicle does not shy from mixing information with entertainment. The listicle acknowledges that we want more than six people reading the stuff we write. Academic writing would be a lot better if it followed suit.

Thanks for reading, here is a gif of a monkey hugging another monkey

Because this is internet writing, after all

There's A Word For Everything: The Cupertino Effect

Spelling is a curious convention.  In the infancy of alphabetic scripts, there were no standardized spellings:  people just wrote words out as they sounded.  This continued into the adolescence of alphabetic scripts.  And into the quarter-life crisis of alphabetic scripts.  It didn't really matter that there were no standardized spellings, because, you know, who was reading anyway?

It was really only after the invention of the printing press that people cared to standardize spelling.  And this was a serious cause, on the same level of intense commitment as we might see today in global warming protestors.  People wrote pamphlets trying to reform spelling, wrote books, had meetings, had more meetings, made proposals, and tried to make the mess of English spelling more sensible.  Hopefully the spelled consistently, though, knowing that humanity is a hypocritical race, they probably didn't.

Anyway the reformers won, and we are left with wonderfully sensible spellings like the word 'laugh' 'name' and 'debt'.

Generations of spellers have struggled with pen and dictionary trying to remember the irrational jumble of letters that English calls its spelling.  How many countless hours of study have been wasted just because our spelling doesn't make sense?  How many lifetimes ruined by forgetting a silent E at the end of a word?

My generation is the last that will ever take spelling seriously.  And it is the first that does not need to spell properly.  The reason is that in our word processing programs there exists a friendly little fairy called a spell checker that looks at every word we write and makes sure that it is of correct orthographic assembly, and, if it is not, puts a handy little red line under it.

For every convenience of life, we suffer an equal inconvenience.  For spell-checkers, that thing going wrong is called the Cupertino Effect.

You have no doubt experienced the Cupertino Effect.  You slam your hands on your keyboard in rude approximation of a particular English word like cooperate.  Then you right-click on that scramble of letters to find the correct spelling.  You choose the first suggestion and continue your merry writing way. But the fates have not been kind to you!  The suggested word was not in fact the word you wanted!  You have been cursed by the Cupertino Effect!  Fie!  Alas!  Alack!

The Cupertino Effect got its name because early spell-checkers only had the hyphenated version of the word co-operation in them.  People who wrote 'cooperation' stumped the spell checker, which gave only a single suggestion:  the California town of Cupertino.  Thousands of people have been duped by this very mistake--including writers from the UN, the EU and NATO.

As electronic communication becomes ever more common, the Cupertino Effect will daunt us more and more.  Someone should make a blog detailing all the funny things that can happen to us because of it.  Oh wait, this is the interent and there are no new ideas.

Drink For The Muses

Monkeys do it.  College students do it.  Even gigantic elephants do it!  So why don't we do it?

Let's do it!  Let's get tipsy!

For our creativity, of course!  Lordly science has proved that a quaff of fermented potato juice can help the mind.

Recent research at the University of Chicago has started to explain why there may be a link between intoxication and creativity.  In what may be one of the simplest experimental set-ups I have ever read about, Andrew Jarsosz and his collaborators brought forty people into the lab to do a "Remote Associates Test", a common test of creative thinking.  Twenty of these lucky experimental subjects were given vodka.  The others were left quietly sober.  The tipsy people did better on the test of creativity than the dry ones.  Score one for the drunken artist!

Why should a drug that mildly poisons your brain also help you think?  Jarsosz et al suggest that drinking might help us get into what they call a divergent mode of thought, one which makes it easier to answer questions that require you to think creatively.

I am firmly to the coffee side of the coffee-alcohol-writer-continuum, so until Jarsosz and his friends prove that cracking open a beer can help blogs suddenly get popular, and novels suddenly become published, I am going to stick to my bean-based stimulant.

I read about this research on the excellent BPS Research Digest.  Boring name, fascinating blog.

Learning Today: The World's Oldest Jokes

A stale joke is about as appetizing as a dead metaphor.  But for generations some jokes, no matter their groan-worthiness, have been passed from victim to victim like a kind of meme-based viral infection.  Take my wife--please.  A horse walks into a bar.  Why the long face?  The ten-inch pianist.  Sometimes I expect that the shame might get so bad that humanity just jumps off a bridge.

Would you believe that this has been going on for over three-thousand five hundred years?

That's when the oldest recorded gag joke was put down on a clay tablet in Mesopotamia.  Here's one of three ancient old knee-slappers orientalists have pulled from the sands of Iraq:

In(?) your mouth and your teeth (or: your urine)
constantly stared at you
the measuring vessel of your lord. (— What is it?)
(Answer:) Beer(!?).

The same tablet contains what is most likely the earliest Yo Mama joke, though only the middle of the joke remains, so it's of minor interest.

The collection of translations in the journal Iraq from which these jokes are taken also presents a dialogue between two friends (too fragmentary to be interesting to the non-expert) and a very promising set-up where a barber of evil, a harlot of evil, a scribe of evil and one unidentified professional woman (of evil?) argue with their clients.  I smell an Adult Swim series.

If you want antiquity to give you jokes that make sense, you have to jump forward about a millennium and a half to Rome.  The historian Mary Beard found an old Roman joke book that contains jokes that are actually amusing.  Two favorites jump out at me.

A barber, a bald man, and a bumbling man are taking a trip.  One night they have to sleep outside and they take turns looking after the luggage.  The barber gets bored during his watch so he shaves the bumbling man's head.  When the bumbling man is roused for his watch, he feels his head and thinks.  'Stupid barber.  He's woken the bald man instead of me.'

Here's another.

An absent-minded professor is asked to bring his friend two fifteen year old slaves.  He says, sure.  But if I can't find two fifteen year olds, will one thirty year old do?

Now that is comedy.  People have been laughing at absent-minded professors since Caesar.

Three Rare Views Of The Great Dictator

So--who would've predicted that holding down a full-time job teaching little tiny children, tending to a loving girlfriend, and writing fiction every morning would leave me so little time to blog about facts, real and imagined?

Nevermind. I know that I have been an awful curator of this bloglet, and I will heartily try to add more scribbles soon. I promise. All I need is more coffee. And about forty-five minutes more to every single day.

But! I've come to you today to tell you something important! I want your money! No seriously. But you get words in return!

I write a lot. Mostly fiction. I think I'm good enough to actually merit a real paper and binding book, but what with the moribund economy and some predictable eccentricities re: my book's actual genre, I remain unpublished. No publisher nor agent wants to take a risk on me.

So tonight I tossed caution to the wind and decided to make an eBook.

AND YOU CAN BUY IT! From Smashwords.

The book is called Three Rare Views of the Great Dictator. It's about a dictator of an imaginary country. It's more fun than it sounds.

Leave a comment. Like the book on Facebook. And read it! Enjoy it on your ereaders! Tell your friends! Write a review! Even tiny acts of recognition can give my manuscript the little boost that it needs.

Thanks for indulging me.

Now Is Time To Help The Starving Artist

So I've recently finished a novel, and I'm trying to get it published. Writing a novel is pretty easy, all things considered. Getting it published is hard. I'm also pounding away at another novel. It is really a beautiful life, writing, I assure you.

But there's a problem. You see, normal human beings use money to buy goods and services, including housing and food, which are considered by most to be necessities. Writing fiction--especially when it is fiction whose only laurels to date are some absolutely glowing rejection letters--does not provide much of this money.

Yet, there is a solution. It is called the internet.

There's this neat website called Kickstarter, and I've started a project up there. The idea of Kickstarter is this: you give artists money, and you get stuff in return. If you give me five bucks--ONLY FIVE DOLLARS!--you will get an electronic copy of my novel when it is finished. If you give me seven dollars, I will chuck in a copy of my already completed novel. Wow! There are many other wonderful things you can get, including me being your personal writing slave, so I encourage you to check it out.

Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

David Foster Wallace Dead

As far as public figures go, this death feels personal to an embarrassing extent. Usually I am somewhat callous towards death, especially about the death of people who one does not actually know personally. But it's not just insensitivity to the public lamentations around Heath Ledger and Princes Di--barring it befalling close friends and family members, death fails to move me. Throw a friend in my lap, inconsolable that her sister's best friend died, and I'll look at them with the condescending incomprehension fitting the observation of forgotten and ecstatic religious rites of some minor deity of the Roman pantheon. But then I read that this author has died, David Foster Wallace--who I have never met and who I have had only the most tangential personal relationship with--I can't do anything but fall to my bed.

Enough of this personal stuff. Well, one more thing. In my senior year of college when I was worrying whether or not I should try to "make it as a writer" I wrote David Foster Wallace with a story of mine. I got a postcard back a couple months later, and he said that my style was "clear and unpretentious" (I can remember that) and he wished me luck in a way that I interpreted as meaning that he saw some promise in me. My number two most recurring fantasy about my novel (number one is having ex-girlfriends and -crushes call me and tell me how my they like me) is that I would get it published and sent it off to DFW and he'd read it and appreciate it and we could become friends.

Of course that's not going to happen.

But that brief brush with the man himself is not enough to warrant my feeling upset by his death. Even taking into account the place that DFW's writing held in my own personal story, his death is not enough to make me fall on my bed and not want to get up and, at a Korean Thanksgiving I was attending, invited by the Tae Bo teacher I have a ridiculous crush on, his death should not make me nearly sob over the tiggim that "My favorite author has just killed himself"--a sentence which elicited nothing but bemused glances from my dining companions, English- and non-English-speaking alike.

The thing that makes Wallace's death so poignant is that it shouldn't of happened. First, we all wanted more. Wallace's was the kind of writing that was perfectly compulsive. The loss of his voice, of the chance of another novel, that's baffling to me.

But there's more, and here's where we might have to get a bit more personal again. Wallace seemed to have struggled with the demons that come with being a smart, sensitive person in the world. And he'd seemed to really conquer them. An aside that will make sense further in this paragraph: You know how you can tell the difference between someone who gets Wallace and someone who doesn't? Someone who doesn't get him will talk about his verbal acuity (or, pretentiousness) those footnotes, that flair. Someone who gets him will talk about his observational acuity. How he seemed to be able to frankly talk about the dark corners of life with such off-putting, shocking accuracy. Like he just peered into your secret, crazy thoughts, described them just right, and told you what to do about it. And so he peered into those crazy thoughts, understood them, and didn't like what he saw.

Is it a cliche to say that the choice of our lives is whether to live or whether to off ourselves? It's something I've thought about. Does the periodic bed-bound wordless sadness that sometimes strikes me--is it worth sitting through to get to the other bits? To get to those times that rank with eating chocolate cake or hearing that your friend gets promoted or sitting at Korean Thanksgiving and having the Tae Bo instructor who may or may not want to date you hold your hand. Does the banal difficulty of life merit the pleasures? Now, sometimes I haven't dared think about that reckoning. But most times I think, pretty solidly, that the pleasures by far outweigh the indignities.

But Wallace, who I respect, who I understand, who I thought got this stuff better than most people out there--he thought otherwise. He thought that life was just too painful to keep going.

And so Wallace's suicide makes me afraid!

I'm not angry at him. I'm not going to throw around any pablum about how it's grossly selfish to kill yourself or anything like that and I'm not going to try to call him crazy for doing what he did. Because if you can't understand why he'd do it, then you're not trying hard enough. And even though those things are true, that suicide is selfish and never the right answer, just saying that doesn't make sense of his death, it doesn't give any sort of comfort.

The tough part is thinking that with all his sensitivity and intelligence, this was his answer. Not another book, no more courses teaching students, not even an easy life reading somewhere eating cake. A rope around his neck. That was his answer. And it's that answer which hurts. Like if you hiked up a huge mountain to meet an enlightened master and asked him what you should do with your life and he turned his eyes towards you and slowly, proudly, asked you what brand shoes you wore.

Let's conversate in this space.

To the stakeholders of the Super Naarkatron project,

We need to touch base about this offline, but in order to pre-prepare and get some forward planning as we are going forward together, from the get-go we’d better not let the grass grow too long on this one and get all of our ducks in a row, we need to start actioning 110% of our human capital if we don’t want to have egg on our face because we didn’t pick the low-hanging fruit when we have the chance and we ended up being stuck at the close of play without even looking under the bonnet to conversate about how we could solve the challenges we faced: the fact is that we are in negative territory in this space; we need to have some 360-degree thinking idea showers because we all know you can't turn a tanker around with a speed boat change—I assure you I have a holistic, cradle-to-grave approach on my radar but my door is still open with respect to this—but let’s loop back on this: the fact is that you can't have your cake and eat it too, so you have to step up to the plate and face the music; I know that there have been rumors to the effect that we don’t have enough bandwidth to come to the party and really live the values of our company, but at the end of the day that’s a way to wrongside the demographic—why don’t you take a business 2.0 approach to that and learn to sprinkle some magic on our challenges and incentivise our paradigm shifts?—also in addition if anyone wants to get their fingers down the throat of the organization of that nodule tell them you’ve got leverage it was auspiced by me, Rupert Naark: to feed it back, not only do we need to become project evangelists we must capture our colleagues and hope for the strategic staircase will cascade into the target demographic, but I digress; taking a high-altitude view I assure you the business is still a really cool train set, and we continue to be optimistic things will feed through the sales and delivery pipeline, but despite drilling down, we must make drastic reductions in our workforce in this space.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year,

Rupert S. Naark, CEO-at-large, Nark Industries

This sentence has every single one of the BBC News' 50 office speak phrases you love to hate.

Gore Vidal Is A Badass The Only Problem Is He Knows It

Do you read a lot of contemporary fiction these days? Like everyone else, no, I don’t.

On Style.

Ben Weyl, that enterprising young scamp, has a good post up on Strunk and White's Elements of Style, the book that every self-respecting writer needs to read so they can make themselves feel bad about their various grammatical insufficiencies.

Now, towards the end of the post, Ben wonders why writing on the Blogospehere is so damned sloppy. My practical answer is that there is so little time between writing and publication in the blogosphere it discourages editing. With much writing, a writer has time to leave a piece in a drawer for a day or two - or an hour or two - and then return to it with a fresh mind to add new ideas and prune the old ones - in other words, to edit. It's hard to write well without taking this time.

With the Blogosphere, you can just slam out some words in ten minutes and then hit 'Publish Post" and there you are: You're a blogger.

The annals of blogging contain a huge number of sloppy fuck-ups. Check out the interminable Lee Siegel, who coined the term 'blogofacisim'. He argued that blogging was an essentially idiotic way to communicate, but then made a huge fool of himself when he was caught ghost-writing self-congratulatory comments for his blog posts. It was like he got caught masturbating. After preaching against the horrors of masturbation. Actually, he was caught masturbating.

Or, check out The New Republic's resident crazy-guy-with-too-much-power, and his grammatically challenged rants on the New Blog Order. And my alma mater.

Now, I'm super-guilty of being a bit, say, rough around the edges with these posts sometimes. Just ask my dad, who as the only reader of this blog sends me a weekly digest of all my grammatical stuff-ups.

But aha! there is hope: While blogging might tends towards sloppiness, I think with restraint it remains a wonderful tool to communicate. It lets people like me assume a pulpit of possibility - and even if our readerships never expand beyond our families and our close friends, we are still engaged in the act of writing. And that act of writing and editing, of setting out our thoughts into a more less wispy form, helps us think better. At least I think so.

And the great thing about blogging: you can do it even if you're not wearing pants.