style

"With precious few exceptions, all the books on style in English are by writers quite unable to write. The subject, indeed, seems to exercise a special and dreadful fascination over schoolma'ms, bucolic college professors, and other such pseudo-literates....Their central aim, of course, is to reduce the whole thing to a series of simple rules — the overmastering passion of their melancholy order, at all times and everywhere."

- H.L. Mencken

I like this quote. Few things are worse than "melancholy order".

Mencken goes on to insist that style - and logic itself - is "congenital" and cannot be taught, but I'm not so sure about that. I would agree that you can't teach someone who doesn't think...but can you teach someone to think? I think so.

I dig Mencken, largely because we both agree that most people are idiots. However, I think they're intellectually lazy, not intrinsically stupid. People are mindless sheep, not because they're incapable of knowing, but because they don't want to know.

You can teach people to think; you just can't make them want to learn.

Sue lies when she cries

It's easy to see Dion as a two-faced bastard for his performance in "The Wanderer"; after all, he brags about precisely the sort of love 'em and leave 'em behavior that he felt victimized by in "Runaround Sue".

But it's actually more of a sequence* than an inconsistency. See, he found a place for "Lovers Who Wander". It's hard to tell whether Dion was actually over this chick or not, but the dude certainly talks a good game (the joke's on her...she doesn't bother me). Maybe Sue just did him a favor. Perhaps he needed to have his heart broken. Indeed, it could have been formative, an important stage in his evolution into a nomadic womanizer.

Anyway, perhaps Dion isn't such a dick after all. He just wants you to know how little he cares. If he sees her, it's just "hi Sue, how are you", and that is it.

* At least it SHOULD have been a sequence. Curiously, "The Wanderer" was the follow-up single to "Runaround Sue". "Lovers Who Wander" was released the following year.

It's still cold here. I leave my apartment morning after morning with a tinge of hope, only to be greeted by familiar mountains of snow and ice. But today, the sun was out. And, despite the sub-zero temperature, it felt warm on the back of my neck. It was pleasant and unexpected.

It's the beginning of the beginning. Barely discernable, but it's there.

Life would be simpler, easier, and more agreeable...if only we could see our endings as beginnings.

citation

In further support of the last post: Academics, when referring to their own published studies in their papers and manuscripts, generally adhere to a third person citation style. In other words, I might write about myself:

Sloan (2004) maintains that he is "not a writer".

rather than...

I said in 2004 that I am not a writer.

However weird it may be to refer to one's self in the third person, it does seem to support the notion of a constantly evolving identity.

I once had a prof who adhered rigidly to this during his lectures, proudly citing his old research by saying:

Jefferies 2001 noted that...

All the students knew what he was doing, but it was still kind of funny to hear this aloud. Here was Professor Jefferies telling us what "Jefferies 2001" had said about a particular topic. You had to crack a smile. Most of us just thought he was completely full of himself.

I've often thought that this citation convention could help with relationship disputes. Significant others, as we all come to find, have an uncanny knack for remembering unsavory shit that you did or said (see Dave Chappelle's "Home Stenographer"). The unsavory shit comes up years later and is applied (unfairly, perhaps) in a completely different context. It is at this point that APA style suddenly becomes necessary...

Did you not say I was "a bitch"?
You were talking to Sloan 2002! Sloan 2008 would never think of saying something like that. But sure, Sloan 2002...you wanna keep an eye on that creep.

It wasn't me...it was him.

I'm like Bill Murray at the end of Scrooged:

It's me! But the best thing about it is...it's NOT me!

Fun stuff.

writing and living/doing and being

No one writes alone. Anything I write is alive with everyone I have ever known, with everything I've ever read, remembered, or imagined.

Your thoughts are your own, but they only exist in the context of other thoughts.

As such, I find many accusations of "plagiarism" or "rip off" to be more than a little bit dubious, and tend to approach artists who claim to be "original" with extreme skepticism.

Like writing, our self-concept is a continuous, evolving process. Ideas and selves are fluid, social constructions; various people and experiences cause us to "re-write" our identities, to "revise" our sense of purpose. To live is to change. There is no "final draft" of who we are, only the current incarnation.

So...snapshots of one's identity that imply static, objective meaning (i.e. I am a writer) are things that I try to avoid.

Today: I write.

I am a ________

Don't you dare fill in the blank.

I categorically despise anyone trying to be anything. In the spirit of my last post, I don't just hate people who define themselves by their taste in music. I hate people who define themselves by their taste in anything. Come to think of it, I just hate people who define themselves.

I prefer a world conceptualized by verbs rather than nouns. Tell me what you do, not what you are.

music and relationships

Today, a perenially dateless indie music geek (I know a lot of these) lamented on an online message board (I lurk):

"How come I don't know any girls who like pop punk? Seriously, I go to school with like 3,000 girls at least remotely within my age range, all of whom I'm more than willing to meet and converse with and I've yet to meet a single one with musical tastes even somewhat similar to mine. How's a dude supposed to find a lady in circumstances like this?"

The question here is completely serious: How can he possibly find a girlfriend when none of the girls at his school rock out to his music? For some people, not liking Screeching Weasel is actually a dealbreaker.

Of course, I wanted to tell him that any girl who defines herself by the type of music she listens to is probably worthless, that complimentary personalities are infinitely more important than mutual interests, and that The Whatevertons (insert Ramones clone band here) are totally overrated anyway.

One of the better responses:

"Do you plan to fuck her music collection?"

Sadly, I think he probably does. Some people are passionate about music, go to live shows and music festivals, collect records obsessively, and generally care way more about music than does the general listening public. They like to argue about whether Band A has a better guitar sound than Band B, or about how Album X could easily have been as good as Album Y, if only it weren't for the dubious inclusion of Song Z (the worst song ever), and how the postmodern narrative within said song marked the beginning of Genre C, which is comprised almost entirely of songs that suck. I like these people.

However - there are those who get more turned on by the track listing on a Pavement bootleg than by an attractive female posterior. They want to have dirty sex with Replacements reissues and go down on limited colored vinyl test pressings of Joy Division records.

These people must go.