I mean the people who say "troublesome" for "troubling." This is a very serious gaffe, given how immoral it usually is to dismiss something truly troubling as merely troublesome. What to the rest of us is troubling in Iraq is troublesome to the Bush administration, for instance. If they said it is troublesome, they'd mean it. But time and again I hear perfectly well-meaning people who mean "troubling" pick the wrong word. Please stop these people.
I also beg you to stop the people who say "unchartered territory" for "uncharted territory." I was actually kind of shocked to hear such a boneheaded malapropism in an oil company goodwill ad (Exxon?). How many millions is it giving to the advertising firm that turns out this bizarrely wrong copy? But you hear this one all the time.
I bring these up in part because I usually find lots of other grammar police whining about other such errors when I google them, but these two have hardly been touched. The first one, as I said, is more serious because it is actually usually unethical to make this mistake.
Please stop them.
Mittwoch, März 26, 2008
Dienstag, März 04, 2008
A couple more
Adam Bede and Ethan Frome.
I'll start with Ethan Frome, which is the first thing I've read by Edith Wharton. This was certainly worth the quick read for the intensity of the late middle section, which read very much like an excellent modern drama. A wonderful, quick leap into this intense conflict of feelings which had much of the discomfiting thrill of the real experience. Things start to fall apart in the unbelievable suicide-pact moment. If they're willing to die for one another, then why not run away regardless of their lack of money, either living on love or starving, but in either case extending their time together? The "gotcha," twist ending felt utterly cheap and forced, unworthy of the moment-by-moment intensity of the earlier section. Who are these people? How did they become what they are? I'm not happy as a reader to have to figure this out myself.
Also, by the way, I was almost scared off the book by its wholly unnecessary and ineffective framing, which is something along the lines of, a couple of people told me a couple of things and I intuited the rest. Fascinating.
I enjoyed Adam Bede a good deal. It is certainly a younger brother to Middlemarch, lacking the scope and breadth in its characters, storylines and ethics. But there were many flashes of genius; I actually liked Adam's character the most, because though he was so nearly idealized he was ultimately convincingly humanized by his fits of anger. Dolly the Methodist, on the other hand, was just over the top with her little miss perfect routine. She was also too prim to possibly be any fun, in the sack or elsewhere, and I admit I like the heroine to be someone I myself might find attractive. All that said, and despite my allergy to things religious, I cried at the scene in which Dolly offers Hetty the comfort of Christ while the lost girl is waiting to be hanged. But then I also cried when Keanu Reeves made those bullets float. Something about a miracle, I suppose.
Not that I'm looking to defend myself, but I came upon an essay (collected in 1963) on Joyce by the English critic Cyril Connolly, who's a personal favorite of mine, and I noted that he and I made some of the same arguments about Ulysses. He's more willing to praise the book, but partly as a "young man's novel." Indeed, I would have found much in the book more titillating, shocking and revelatory when I was 20 than I do now. But here's Connolly:
"I feel that so much of Finnegans Wake and Ulysses, even when the obscurity has been penetrated, is fundamentally uninteresting that there must be some failure of conception or execution or both."
Connolly joins other critics in blaming Joyce's "frozen in 1906" viewpoint for these failures.
"I am trying to suggest that he fed his queen bee of a mind with inferior jelly and that from such subject matter it could not produce the sublime or even the comic effects which were intended. He asks too much of his ideal reader. This is perhaps an English heresy and may account for the way we lag behind America in our appreciation of Joyce (or is it our lack of subsidized theses?); and perhaps I am the only person to find the plans and keys and clues and commentaries on Joyce's books more exhilarating than the originals. Is there an immaturity in his mind and humor or a blind spot in mine?"
I'll start with Ethan Frome, which is the first thing I've read by Edith Wharton. This was certainly worth the quick read for the intensity of the late middle section, which read very much like an excellent modern drama. A wonderful, quick leap into this intense conflict of feelings which had much of the discomfiting thrill of the real experience. Things start to fall apart in the unbelievable suicide-pact moment. If they're willing to die for one another, then why not run away regardless of their lack of money, either living on love or starving, but in either case extending their time together? The "gotcha," twist ending felt utterly cheap and forced, unworthy of the moment-by-moment intensity of the earlier section. Who are these people? How did they become what they are? I'm not happy as a reader to have to figure this out myself.
Also, by the way, I was almost scared off the book by its wholly unnecessary and ineffective framing, which is something along the lines of, a couple of people told me a couple of things and I intuited the rest. Fascinating.
I enjoyed Adam Bede a good deal. It is certainly a younger brother to Middlemarch, lacking the scope and breadth in its characters, storylines and ethics. But there were many flashes of genius; I actually liked Adam's character the most, because though he was so nearly idealized he was ultimately convincingly humanized by his fits of anger. Dolly the Methodist, on the other hand, was just over the top with her little miss perfect routine. She was also too prim to possibly be any fun, in the sack or elsewhere, and I admit I like the heroine to be someone I myself might find attractive. All that said, and despite my allergy to things religious, I cried at the scene in which Dolly offers Hetty the comfort of Christ while the lost girl is waiting to be hanged. But then I also cried when Keanu Reeves made those bullets float. Something about a miracle, I suppose.
Not that I'm looking to defend myself, but I came upon an essay (collected in 1963) on Joyce by the English critic Cyril Connolly, who's a personal favorite of mine, and I noted that he and I made some of the same arguments about Ulysses. He's more willing to praise the book, but partly as a "young man's novel." Indeed, I would have found much in the book more titillating, shocking and revelatory when I was 20 than I do now. But here's Connolly:
"I feel that so much of Finnegans Wake and Ulysses, even when the obscurity has been penetrated, is fundamentally uninteresting that there must be some failure of conception or execution or both."
Connolly joins other critics in blaming Joyce's "frozen in 1906" viewpoint for these failures.
"I am trying to suggest that he fed his queen bee of a mind with inferior jelly and that from such subject matter it could not produce the sublime or even the comic effects which were intended. He asks too much of his ideal reader. This is perhaps an English heresy and may account for the way we lag behind America in our appreciation of Joyce (or is it our lack of subsidized theses?); and perhaps I am the only person to find the plans and keys and clues and commentaries on Joyce's books more exhilarating than the originals. Is there an immaturity in his mind and humor or a blind spot in mine?"
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