Joan Didion and the CIA: a literary friendship

 rhetoric, writers  No Responses »
Jun 082008
 

From a 1967 internal report (released 1978) by the Inspector General of the CIA (and you should see his uniform!):

. . . There is a third point, which was not directly made by any of those we interviewed, but which emerges clearly from the interviews and from reviews of files. The point is that of frequent recourse to synecdoche – the mention of a part when the whole is to be understood, or vice-versa. Thus we encounter repeated references to phrases such as “disposing of Castro,” which may be read in the literal sense of assassinating him, when it is intended that it be read in the broader, figurative sense of dislodging the Castro regime. Reversing the coin, we find people speaking vaguely of “doing something about Castro” when it is clear that what they have specifically in mind is killing him. In a situation wherein those speaking may not have actually meant what they seemed to say or may not have said what they actually meant, they should not be surprised if their oral shorthand is interpreted differently than was intended.

_ quoted in Joan Didion, Miami, 1987

Ah, the advantages of a liberal education. It would be embarrassing to compare even this rather cumbersome example of the Inspector General’s prose with any of the recently-released ASIO transcripts.

In context (readers of Didion might agree) hr quotation of this passage reads like a rhetorical ploy-within-a-ploy. Precisely this kind of analysis, although considerably more subtle, is what she delivers in Miami, as in all her non-fiction from Salvador onwards. And like the Inspector-General, she pays the price of a certain laboriousness. In a world of crazy language, however, spelling it out may constitute a virtue.

That said, there is the question of Didion’s own copious use of synecdoche . . .

 Posted by bruce at 11:48 am  Tagged with:

Be happy, know nothing

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
May 302008
 

PITY the poor word

 Posted by bruce at 10:33 pm  Tagged with:

Feedback short circuits

 public debate  No Responses »
May 302008
 

Some influential and serious blogs like the one Stanley Fish writes for the New York Times attract several hundred comments for one post. (So do some that are utterly trivial.) If you’re far down in the list, would you read, let alone consider, the posts before you? A few ultra-precisians will fiercely attack post #89 from the depths of post #523, but sullen #89 doesn’t often reply, so all that scanning goes for naught. Devotees of Chinese Whispers (why Chinese?) will enjoy the outlandish tranformations of the topic that begin to show up, run their little sputtering course and are then replaced by others still more outlandish. Experienced teachers will hang their heads: this is the tutorial from hell.

So what’s it all for?

The blogs at Prospect, offshoots of their articles, have obviously been filtered and monitored, because the comments that appear are thoughtful and courteous. Whether they are representative of the responses we can’t know – it’s down to how far you trust the editors. The blog author takes the time to respond, sometimes to every post, at paragraph length.

Fish-type blog responses seem to be little more than fodder for others. Fish himself sometimes reports on them; presumably there is a growing class of academics analysing them for tenure, poor devils.

It makes one reflect again that vox pop is all very well, but subject to a melancholy limitation: the larger the pop, the weaker the vox.

 Posted by bruce at 6:00 pm  Tagged with:

Duck

 rhetoric  No Responses »
May 182008
 

IT came as no surprise to anyone who knew her that Dr. Elena Wechsler would find herself with a man who won her heart with ducks.

But the ducks worked their magic only after the bride had been prinked up by Rachel Greenwald, the author of

 Posted by bruce at 11:48 pm  Tagged with:

2020 summit

 public debate  No Responses »
Apr 202008
 

A pity that my invitation to the summit was lost in the post. I had planned to read into the record this passage from Robert Musil’s novel The Man without Qualities. The Austro-Hungarian Empire wishes to celebrate its glories, and owing to the principle of insufficient cause our hero Ulrich finds himself secretariat to something called the Collateral Campaign. The Campaign is not quite sure what it is, or what to do, so it decides to collect ideas from the People.

Ulrich pays a call on his cousin, Diotima, to discuss the results.

“O mighty cousin,” he reported, a thick file in his hand . . . “The whole world seems to be expecting us to undertake reforms, and one half begins with the words ‘Free from______’ and the other half with ‘Onward to_____’

And the narrator summarises:

. . . The one group put the blame for the troubles of the age on one particular thing and demanded its abolition; such particular things, for example, as the Jews, the Roman Catholic Church, socialism or capitalism, the mechanistic system of thought or the neglect of technical developments . . . large-scale land-owning or big cities, intellectualisation or the inadequacy of general education. The second group . . pointed to goals lying somewhere ahead . . . and these highly desirable goals recommended by the second group usually differed from the particular things that the first group wanted to destroy in nothing more than their emotional key. In this dual manner, demands were made both for a slowing up of the tempo of the times and for a competition for the best feuilleton on the grounds either that life is unendurably or that it is exquisitely short.

The Man with Qualities, London, 1961, vol I 322-23.

 Posted by bruce at 12:45 am  Tagged with:

Techno-barbaric?

 Music, writers  No Responses »
Mar 022008
 

Why do American writers smarm up to readers who are not going to read their book? The question is prompted by Daniel Levitin’s This is your Brain on Music (Plume Books, 2007) a thoroughly recommendable book by a cognitive scientist.

The pitch for readership begins at the autobiographical introduction called – hold your nose – ‘I Love Music and I Love Science – Why Would I Want to Mix the Two?’ Throughout the book, there are illustrations from both popular and classical music, with the balance heavily in favour of the popular. Even this is not enough to keep Demos happy.

Modern composers such as Schoenberg threw out the whole idea of expectation. The scales they used deprive us of a resolution . . . thus creating the illusion of no home, a music adrift, perhaps as a metaphor for a twentieth century existentialist existence (or just because they were trying to be contrary).

Compare:

The brain extracts basic, low-level features from the music, using specialized neural networks that decompose the signal into information about pitch, timbre, spatial location, loudness, reverberant environment, tone durations and the onset times for different notes (and for different combinations of notes).

There are lots of sentences like that – and a proper thing too, and a fascinating tale they tell. Is it likely that a reader who will persevere through the scientific explanations will swallow the rubbish about Schoenberg? Will need all the references to Sting and The Police? Now that I ask the question I see that the answer is yes.

 Posted by bruce at 11:02 pm  Tagged with:
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