More on the paragraph

As I often do, I brought some more serious books along with the espionage/mystery stuff with me on vacation. I started with the Ernaux I already mentioned, partially because I knew it was bite-sized and easily consumed in almost one sitting. Next on deck was Alberto Moravia's 1951 The Conformist, which I picked up used somewhere. Now that I poke about the internet a bit, I see that the book doesn't appear to have been received that well and isn't even considered to be Moravia's best, but probably survives in print because of attention brought to it by Bertolucci's 1970 film. But somebody translated it into English and it has survived so here I am, reading it. It's OK. I may come back to it later.

One noteworthy feature of the book is its rather lengthy paragraphs. I have railed a little on the prevalence of the one-sentence paragraph earlier on the blog. In Moravia paragraphs can easily run a page, a page and a half. My gut says that he displays a bias towards the long paragraph because it signals the high style and seriousness of modernism. Moravia's book is shot through with hints of Kafka and Proust if not Joyce, Faulkner and Broch, those other high priests of modernist interiority as signaled by paragraphs that at times strike the modern reader as veritably interminable.

I've also been dipping into the New Yorker archives here on vacation on my new tablet and have started reading the first 1961 Rachel Carson article that expanded into the 1962 book Silent Spring. Carson also prefers long paragraphs. Looking at them I can see obvious places where a modern editor would probably break them into new ones, on account of a shift in narratorial focus.

There are of course no hard and fast rules as to when paragraphs should begin and end. They are more or less supposed to contain units of focus or content. A bias towards longer paragraphs on the part of an author or (dare I say it) an era seems to indicate human subjects with greater integrative capabilities. To the extent that -- as many have said -- we live in an attention economy, the inability and/or wholesale disinclination to attend to things for longer hollows us out. When Our Robot Overlords finally arrive to conquer, they may discover there is nothing here to seize.

The truly prolific and the one-sentence paragraph

There's a guy I know from the coworking space who has now posted for like 1400 days straight on LinkedIn and is, according to him, killing it leading "social selling" seminars Monday nights on LinkedIn. I am, I must confess, intrigued. Many deride it but LinkedIn has evolved into an extremely useful platform over the years. A good way to keep in track of people, relatively tightly focused on business for the most part which keeps it largely free of the partisan rancor that infects other networks. 

But then again I find the writings a little annoying. All too many people have gone over to this style of writing exclusively in one-sentence paragraphs. If the Lord had intended paragraphs to include only one sentence, why would he have made it so easy to have more? And why would the convention stating that the one sentence paragraph should be used only sparingly have evolved. Overuse of the one sentence paragraph is an asinine thing.

So I should probably resist. Especially as it may well conflict with tennis.

Emerson's paragraphs

After years of having the book on my wish list at a certain web site that used to mostly sell books, I have begun working my way through Emerson's essays, starting with "Self-Reliance," published in 1841. For someone of our age, it is rough going, heavy-handed and tendentious. Since I am reading it first thing in the morning I can only chew off a couple of pages at a time. Then again, it might well be that my ability to read Emerson depends less on time of day than on the weightiness of his style. 

A new consensus has been driven by Substack,* Medium* and -- worst of all -- Linkedin, that modern readers have such Liliputian attention spans that they cannot process paragraphs of lengths greater than one sentence. I've probably railed against this before. So we are endlessly buffeted by lengthy but breathless enjoinders in which sentence follows sentence set off be a paragraph break. Time was, the convention was that the one-sentence paragraph was an extreme device to be called out only when the author had something super-important to say, most often in conclusion, which would stand alone on the page in a lonely sentence.

Emerson is the opposite. His paragraphs flow on endlessly, often without apparent thematic consistency. Often bold philosophical statements, even things that have risen almost to the level of aphorism over time, are jambed in there cheek to jowl with other sentences pretending to the same status. It gets pretty exhausting.

*Not to criticize the new prose platforms which are helping writers organize and even monetize their musings. Far from all writers on them fall prey to the one-sentence paragraph disease and even those that do often have some good thoughts and are fine humans. But the style grates on me.

Presidents' Day

A cursory survey of the Grouse shows me that I have never made this point before, but in principle I think that Presidents' Day follows too hard on the heels of MLKJ Day. It might be better if the holiday were pushed back into March to get a better spread of holidays across the year.

Then again, this morning I'm feeling pretty good about not having a slew of normal work tasks to do. Even if much of the non tennis-playing (you know that's happening) portion of the day will be devoted to getting my ducks in a row for tax season. It will feel good to have done so. Meanwhile, I am easing into the day rather luxuriously, drinking coffee, reading the various magazines that languish on flat surfaces throughout the house, dashing off notes on this question and that, scheming on things I plan to do (wash sheets) and outsource to others (restring and clean up my acoustic guitar) because researching them on YouTube convinced me that I don't have all the tools or knowledge I need to do it best.

Long held tradition would seem to dictate that there should be a third paragraph here to pull together the mildly disparate threads from above and knit them together neatly. The structure for such a paragraph flashed briefly through my mind, then evanesced. Godspeed to it.

Mr Johnson goes to Washington

It is 1931, and LBJ, having made it through college by a circuitous and curious path, after frenetically teaching public speaking and debate in Houston for one year, has over a few short years passed from Cotulla, Texas, in the middle of nowhere between San Antonio and the Mexican border -- to the US Capitol building.

At times Caro lingers, fairly wallows, in so much detail that you think, like your subject, that you may never move on, but when the tide turns, he generates momentum and interest like no other. So when Johnson's debating team improbably makes its way to the Texas State Championship only to.... (win? lose? I will not be a spoiler), and Johnson passes from nothingness into somethingness with improbable speed, Caro has you, or me, and each paragraph snowballs in importance.

I almost can't believe I took time out to write about it.  Back to the drama.

Parkour Jr.

This morning Graham running back and forth on the 2nd floor landing in sweatpants with his shirt off, twirling the shirt around his arm while shrieking reminded me of some of those Parkour guys I've checking out on YouTube. Fearless. Pearless. Fierce.

If only he could master the dark, fetid one. Or should I say "two"?

Meanwhile, I've been inspecting the Nancy Drew books Natalie inherited from Caroline, and from Leslie and Joan before her. The great thing about these mysteries is there's no messing about. The enigma is introduced in the first paragraph, if not the first sentence. Someone literally bursts in the door or up the front steps: "Nancy. You won't believe what a mystery I've stumbled onto." And they're off.

The ever-insistent clock

Right now I am due on the tennis court in 40 minutes or so, the sun goes down 5:30ish. Meanwhile, great brown blobs of leaves has settled on our roof and need to be brought down. It is, moreover, November 16, making Thanksgiving right around the corner and Christmas coming right behind that. Then in 1Q16 a guy is coming to redo our bathroom, if I can assure that Mary is organized with all of her choices for tiles, fixtures, blah blah and blah. Right now I believe she may have tabs open in her browser for those things.

With year end approaching, there are all these other year end tasks at the office. Historically though one might do tax-loss selling to lower people's income, but with income taxes at an impossibly low level given the deficit, it might not make sense to lower their tax burden now, but instead to leave that for the future. Really, with a number of people out of work, it makes more sense to get people organized to accelerate taxes from the future to the present with Roth conversions while they are in lower than normal brackets in a nonsensical tax policy moment.

The clock beats down upon me from every direction, including the blog. And the fact that post office delivered The Economist, mysteriously, two issues at once this week, having teased me mercilessly once again. So I have more reading than usual piled up.

I knocked out a number of unexpected tasks yesterday, taking a bunch of crap to the solid waste center on Eubanks and then going to Lowe's to buy more crap to replace it. Sadly, I missed out on one parameter of Mary's very detailed instructions to buy lightbulbs so they must be returned. Really I should let her do it. It is good for her to leave the house, and maybe she will look at bathroom stuff and flesh out her ideas for the 1Q16 renovation (see paragraph 1). 

Momentum

In recent days/nights I've made some progress towards moving to an earlier schedule: going to bed earlier, waking up earlier. Which translates into momentum along a variety of axes. I think it's because, for me at least, morning time is just inherently more productive than night time. 

I could spell it all out for you but that might get boring. Trust me.

In the early yeats of the blog I was comfortable with very short posts and felt that by just getting something up here I was fulfilling my obligation to you, dear reader. Then somehow I fell into the tyranny of the three paragraph format. I am going to try to return to the earlier modality and just do what feels right.

The ponderous yoke of the book

One of the great blessings in my life has been exiting from academia at a young enough age where I was freed from believing that only publishing a number of books with prestigious presses would demonstrate that I had been an adequate human being. Unfortunately, that's how the culture of many of your higher-toned universities leads them to believe: only books really count.

In fact, even in the case of academics, they don't actually post a publication list on your gravestone. It ultimately just doesn't matter. But professors are so very deeply programmed to believe that only in publication does true glory reside. 

Given the traditional three-paragraph format of this blog, I am tempted to keep repeating the same basic point in a variety of ways until I have reached my statutory minimum of text. Instead, let me just thank you, fair reader, for taking the time to visit with me again in 2025. I'll be back next year with both more and better. 

Tea Party of the Spirit

Last week the Economist ran an article about the continued ratcheting up of the war for the very top tier of technical talent, the hunt for the Jeff Deans of the world (Google him and read up). The ever higher dollar figures attached to technical talent has in turned fuelled the messianic but likely ill-founded self-belief of many of these profoundly-talented people. Looking back over the blog I see that I had thought of and alluded to the quote below a couple of times in recent months, so here it is in full. If you are in a hurry, skip to the second paragraph (which I myself have taken the liberty of separating off).

One time in Holland when the market was rather dull for spices the merchants had several cargoes dumped into the sea to peg up prices. This was a pardonable, perhaps a necessary device for deluding people. Is it something like that we need now in the world of spirit? Are we so thoroughly convinced that we have attained the highest point that there is nothing left for us but to make ourselves believe piously that we have not got so far-just for the sake of having something left to occupy our time? Is it such a self- deception the present generation has need of, does it need to be trained to virtuosity in self-deception, or is it not rather sufficiently perfected already in the art of deceiving itself? Or rather is not the thing most needed an honest seriousness which dauntlessly and incorruptibly points to the tasks, an honest seriousness which lovingly watches over the tasks, which does not frighten men into being over hasty in getting the highest tasks accomplished, but keeps the tasks young and beautiful and charming to look upon and yet difficult withal and appealing to noble minds. For the enthusiasm of noble natures is aroused only by difficulties. 

Whatever one generation may learn from the other, that which is genuinely human no generation learns from the foregoing. In this respect every generation begins primitively, has no different task from that of every previous generation, nor does it get further, except in so far as the preceding generation shirked its task and deluded itself. This authentically human factor is passion, which also the one generation perfectly understands the other and understands itself. Thus no generaton has learned from another to love, no generation begins at any other point than at the beginning, no generation has a shorter task assigned to it than had the preceding generation, and if here one is not willing like the previous generations to stop with love but would go further, this is but idle and foolish talk.

Soren Kierkegaarde, Fear and Trembling, tr. Walter Lowrie 1941

Kierkegaarde writes of "generations," but what he says applies to individuals as well. The monumental arrogance of thinking that young tech gazillionnaires could, by virtue of reading Peter Singer and talking late into the night about it, figure out the optimal scheme for distibuting their wealth through "effective altruism" is ultimately ill-founded. Likewise Elon Musk's at once messianic and onanistic idea that he should aggregate untold riches with the goal of getting to Mars in case mankind can't figure out how to save itself. If mankind can't work together to save itself we all deserve to die. The earth will soldier on in our absence, largely indifferent to our momentary (from its perspective) presence. 

Technical, commercial and spiritual genius rarely coincide perfectly, and even more rarely in an individual's life. Bill Gates passed along a bumpy road of bare-nuckled capitalism and sexual poor judgment (to be gentle about it) to get to where he is today, and he hasn't fully nailed philanthropy, as MacKenzie Scott's challenge to his model (and Melinda Gates tacit acceptance thereof) has made clear. Gates should certainly be given lots of credit for his level of seriousness, effort, and recognition of the genius of others as he tries to give his money away.

End of the semester as anticlimax

At around 10:30 last night, shortly after Graham and I finished watching another episode of Columbo, Natalie hit send and submitted the last paper of her junior year at Yale. What an anticlimax. This kind of thing should be punctuated by a little joyous excess with one's friends, who hopefully have done much the same thing around the same time. A last round of drinks and fun before getting organized to head to the airport or the interstate to get home for the holidays.

Instead, she just pressed a button. It is very sad how much is being taken from our children by this pandemic. The rhythms of their lives are being inexorably altered. I have told Natalie that she should be open to planning a year of whatever in New Haven, waiting tables, working some middling job around the university, to have some of the fun she should have had as a student and to firm up friendships. I need to reiterate that offer.

There are times, I will confess, when I am disappointed in what she's studying. It sounds all too much like what the Right lampoons universities for: an undifferentiated morass of interdisciplinary neo-Marxist, post-feminist, intersectionality claptrap. But at the same time I see that she works really hard, learns a lot, reads an incredible amount, does good things in her extracurriculars (which is more than could be said for me) and that her heart is in the right place. So I try to go easy. I just need to plug gaps where I can and accept that the world changes.

And to return to the second paragraph above, when I bemoan how much is being taken from our children, I am well aware that it pales before what is not offered to so many children at all, and that many kids from less fortunate households are being hurt by the pandemic even worse. I'm thinking of any household where there's not a lot of space to spread out and not a lot of books and a culture of learning, so black and brown kids but also rural ones as well as just flat out philistines and troglodytes. That's what we need to work on going forward, and there's lots of work to do.

Elegant density

Beth and Kevin have this knife block that is very low slung and fits very neatly within the drawer to the left of the stove. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say Beth has it, because I can tell you fo sho Kevin didn't find it. It's not his thing.

In any case, it is rather ingenious and is an example of the marvelously efficient ways that city dwellers use space, which is something I first really saw when I started coming to New York regularly in the 80s, at Mark's family's apartment at 91st and Park but more particularly at Hilary's at 89th and Madison. His family was a little more affluent than hers, which meant, frankly, that her place was smaller and therefore more thought was put into it, and it was more homey.

There were bookcases in the narrow hallway outside of Hilary and Ellen's room, lots of bookcases generally. Not built in, for the most part. I remember as well a display of Medallia d'Oro coffee tins in the kitchen atop the cabinets, a decorative flourish and therefore not the most efficient use of space, but it was way up there and none of them was Sheryl Swoopes, so it wasn't really usable space. But to a North Carolina boy it was a lovely touch, urban and urbane.

But overall the place did have this quality of making a warm and hospitable home out of a small space, which is one of the magical things about city dwelling. And now I have come to the fourth paragraph, and the alarm bell in my head signals that it's time to stop blogging and move on with the business of the day, a day much less intense than yesterday's 5 meetings. Which I can live with.

Shifting gears

With Graham headed off to college on Wednesday, I realized we have a few lasts coming up. The yard needed mowing, so I had Graham mow it for perhaps the last time that it will be part of his normal portfolio of responsibilities. I settled up his allowance account (run for years on a Google document for both kids) for maybe the last time. Etc.

The fact that I am no longer on the LFA Board continues to sink in each time I look at something in the park and think "fuck it."

At the AA meeting this morning, they needed someone to lead next week. I'm kind of underintegrated into that meeting so I said I'd do it, kind of against my better judgment, the internal voice saying that I don't really need more relationships now, that what I really need to do is focus on being with Mary.

Last night Graham unexpectedly got called over to Jake's house to hang out with Jake (shortly headed off to State) and Ben (to Wash U in St Louis). He texted around 9 to say he would be home late. Turns out they got pizza and watched Ocean's 11 ("the 2001 version" -- not that I knew there had been another one). It's great that he's doing these things and continues to forge relationships, something he didn't do as much of when he was young as I did. 

It is funny, and entirely accidental, by the way, that at this point in time (just one paragraph later) in the post I find myself back at the question of establishing relationships. In the most simplistic sense, I think I was of necessity more outwardly focused when I was young because at the center my dad was so questionable. He was kind of there, but often not. In my perception at the time, my mom was always there, sometimes a little too much so (but that turned out to be a salvation when I had my crises in my 20s).

My goal for my kids has always present, but just here enough, not excessively domineering. It has been a hard balance to keep. In a decade or two we'll get a fuller assessment of how Mary and I did at striking a balance.

For tonight, in any case, we are hosting Graham's first/new girlfriend and her mom. Graham told me she had an 8:30 curfew, so we are hoping that by meeting the mom she'll see that we are a solid and reliable family and maybe the mom will let her daughter stay out late enough for an evening movie. 

Nostalgia for the war

Picked up another Alan Furst -- one of the pile of books I snagged a couple of weeks back at the excellent used book store in Pittsboro -- as my quick read for the holiday weekend. As with all of these books, it's set in the 30s, as the Nazi threat moves across Europe, and is deeply nostalgic. Just read a lovely paragraph about the hero's dog, which came from the hills around Salonika and is a shepherd, so it escorts the kids from its block to and fro from school, likewise the postman, etc., much to the delight of the old ladies who watch it from kitchen chairs on the sidewalk each day.

It is curious that the time around WWII, a time of almost unprecedented calamity, death and disruption on the world stage -- is the focus of so much contemporary nostalgia. Perhaps it's because it was a time when the fruits of modernity were beginning to be shared more broadly across the populace, but still everything was relatively direct, person-to-person, and unmediated. The size of the boomer cohort and the longevity of the "greatest generation" and its children probably also plays a role. Will this specific nostalgia outlive those generations, just because we've all experienced the imprint of the good old days tone associated with its styles?

It's also likely that the sheer destruction of so many buildings and the cold anonymity and lack of geographic particularity of modernist architecture plays a big role.

Where are the editors?

At my friend Danny's recommendation have been reading Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire. There is much to recommend this book. The guy is generally enthusiastic about his plants and has some interesting stuff to say.

However (and you knew it was coming), sometimes the Grouse just wishes the guy would pay attention to what he's doing. Check this out:

Actually, the apples and the man (Johnny Chapman "Appleseed") have suffered a similar fate in the years since they journeyed down the Ohio together in Chapman's hull. (ok. he's got us set up for his analogy). Both then had the tang of strangeness about them, and both have long since been sweetened beyond recognition. (point made) Figures of tart wildness, both have been thoroughly domesticated -- Chapman transformed into a benign Saint Francis of the American frontier, the apple into a blemish-free plastic-red saccharine orb. (point made again) "Sweetness without dimension" is how one pomologist described the Red Delicious; the same might be said of the Johnny Appleseed promulgated by Walt Disney and several generations of American children's book writers. (point made thrice). In both cases a cheap, fake sweetness has been substituted for the real thing, (point hammered home mercilessly)... blah blah blah at last he moves on.

Is that really a paragraph, I ask you, or just reps in a gruelling session of verbal aerobics?

A Wealth of Well Being

Not too long ago I got a message on LinkedIn from the account of Meir Statman of UC Santa Clara, a pretty reputable behavioral economist, plugging his new book, A Wealth of Well Being. I was impressed that a senior academic like that would be doing direct sales so energetically and proactively, though I assumed he had engaged a graduate student or something like that to actually do the pushing and I replied to the message saying that. No no, he responded, this is actually me, Professor Statman.

So I bought the book and started reading. The book promises to provide the most many-faceted expostulation of the holistic financial planning value proposition that so many are working towards these days. And indeed, Professor Statman has thought about people's financial lives from many angles, I daresay all of them, perhaps, and he has done so in an exceptionally thoughtful and respectful manner. The author comes across as one who has read broadly and been to talks at all the departments around the academy and thought about how all of it fits into people's lives financial and otherwise. Of about 350 pages, about 1/3 is devoted to end notes.

The problem is that it is all a little underdigested. I'm sure it all fits together fairly neatly in Professor Statman's head and he probably can spin it out well orally. But as a written text it's a little too much data, too little thought. It is, indeed, too respectful of it's source material. The good professor would do better to throw away the pieces, step forward and present us with a whole.

I sympathize, of course. As someone who rolls out experience day after day, week after week, in three paragraph chunks, I sense that I am long overdue for some synthesis. I am, however, like Jim Sinegal, working. Honestly, I am.

Methinks the text protests too much

Reading a friend's manuscript about the history of Baltimore recently, found myself struggling to keep turning the pages. The author fairly overwhelms his subject matter with flashes of wit and daring and intellect, trying in every sentence to shine. So that each paragraph my easily contain 5 0r 6 mini-performances, and the paragraphs themselves pile up on the themselves numerous pages. It all begs the questions: what is he writing for, and what is he writing about? Style obstructs content, or doesn't let it flower.

This is a pretty valuable lesson, dialling back the style. If what you have to say is worth saying, then you don't need to work it too hard, just like how those with both buff bods and a strong sense of self needn't parade their abs and other marquis muscles.

And you have to know when to stop.

Mr. Bullet Point

For this high-powered Yale networking conference I'm going to next weekend, featuring such luminaries as David Gergen and Nicholas Brady, the organizers had us fill out professional biographies and lists of personal interests to facilitate getting to know you and you and you. I like.

So I laid out my life in the style to which I've become accustomed: bullet points. Then a whopping 100-page document arrives in my email with the bios and interests of all those who had taken the time (or had their admin person do so) to fill it out. And lets guess how many did it in a bullet-pointed, resume-like style. You guessed it. One. The chewer of grouse.

When I first left academia, I was outraged at all these bullet points, all this PowerPoint. "Why are we boiling complexity down?" I asked. "We should revel in it and its cousin ambiguity." But I've unlearned that. Neither complexity nor ambiguity is the modern corporation's middle name. So I learned to love and appreciate the bullet point. Succinct. Economical. But it is, in fact, also a subordinate means of communicating, meant to respect the more expensive time of the executive being addressed or to grab the eye the many passing by the poster next to the elevator or lunch trays.

At some point in time in one's career, it seems, one re-accedes to the paragraph, luxuriating in its calm pace and relative freedom. I may yet get to the place where I can write interesting professional paragraphs, on top of these blog ones that I will let the reader characterize.

But my biographical bullet points certainly leap off the page. They've got that going for them.

Eat your pineapples

Esh' ananacy
Riabchikov zhui
Poslednii den' tvoi idet,
burzhui

Eat your pineapples
Chew your grouse
Your last day is coming
You bourgeois louse.

-- Vladimir Mayakovsky

Absurd as it would seem for someone so thoroughly embourgeoised as myself to launch a blog by citing these rather silly and charmingly apocalyptic verses from Mayakovsky, the fact remained that:

1. I had to select a name for my blog
2. I knew that if I didn't do it right now, it wouldn't get done
3. I couldn't think of a better name than "Chew your grouse"
4. I couldn't very well name my blog something silly and not explain it, now could I?

So let Mayakovsky set the tone for this blog, which will surely be no more nor less onanistic than most others. Your host, cast adrift from the humanities on the rough seas of management consulting, will seek to free himself from the confines of the bullet points and think once more in his native tongue, the paragraph. In time, I may actually have something to say.