TODAY’S SIMPLER SENTENCES. You don’t see complex sentences like Johnson’s very often these days. But you also don’t see a lot of writing which balances arguments. Both of our children had a wonderful teacher in high school who told his students that a good way to begin an essay question was to use a compound sentence of the form: “Although there are these arguments on the other side [set forth the strongest arguments], the following arguments outweigh them.” I fear that this kind of weighing of issues is disappearing and will some day seem as unusual as Johnson’s sentences now seem to us.
Archive for January, 2009
TODAY’S SIMPLER SENTENCES.
Saturday, January 31st, 2009SAMUEL JOHNSON’S SENTENCES.
Saturday, January 31st, 2009SAMUEL JOHNSON’S SENTENCES. Walter Jackson Bate has a wonderful analysis of Samuel Johnson’s style which consists in part of reprinting a couple of sentences of Johnson’s in a format which shows their complexity and balance. Here is one of them, reproduced as best I can:
The great contention of criticism is to find
the faults of the moderns,
and
the beauties of the ancients….
To works, however, of which the excellence is not
absolute and definite,
but
gradual and comparative;
to works not raised upon principles demonstrative and scientifick
but
appealing wholly to observation and experience,
no other test can be applied than
length of duration
and
continuance of esteem.
Bate notes that Johnson makes frequent use of short clauses and that T.S. Eliot said that Johnson often wrote like a man talking “in short breaths.”
SAMUEL JOHNSON AND NaNoRiMo.
Friday, January 30th, 2009SAMUEL JOHNSON AND NaNoRiMo. I posted here on NaNoRiMo (National Novel Writing Month) in which writers complete 50,000 word novels in a month, beginning just after midnight each November. (Annalisa has completed it four times). Speed is obviously important. Samuel Johnson would endorse NaNoRiMo. He said he “would advise every young man beginning to compose, to do it as fast as he can, to get a habit of having his mind to start promptly. It is so much more difficult to improve in speed than in accuracy.” Johnson thought that slow writing can create writer’s block (a problem for Johnson) “as we do not like to do that which is not done easily.”
WALTER JACKSON BATE AND SAMUEL JOHNSON.
Friday, January 30th, 2009WALTER JACKSON BATE AND SAMUEL JOHNSON. Samuel Johnson was born in 1709 so he will receive some attention this year. I have been reading Walter Jackson Bate’s biography of Johnson, which is one of Mary Jane’s favorite books. I asked her why and she said that the book offers direct contact with a great soul and that it removes any writer’s block and makes her want to write. There is indeed a great deal of wisdom about how to live in the book, both Johnson’s and Bate’s.
CARLYLE AND JOHNSON AND THE CASH NEXUS.
Thursday, January 29th, 2009CARLYLE AND JOHNSON AND THE CASH NEXUS. Thomas Carlyle inveighed against the “cash nexus,” in which people were related to each other only by a neutral transaction. I have always objected to his argument, which seemed to me to reflect nostalgia for feudalism where peasants knew their place. The neutrality of cash can have its advantages, as Samuel Johnson pointed out.
SAMUEL JOHNSON ON TAVERNS.
Thursday, January 29th, 2009SAMUEL JOHNSON ON TAVERNS. Samuel Johnson’s insight that “a tavern-chair [is] the throne of human felicity” is familiar. Adam Gopnik in an article in the New Yorker for December 8, 2008 had a different quote from Johnson which explained some of his reasoning. I was surprised to see that he related some of the advantages of the tavern over an entertainment in a private house to the tensions that people experience in society: “The master of the [private] house is anxious to entertain his guests; the guests are anxious to be agreeable to him….Whereas, at a tavern, there is a general freedom from anxiety. You are sure that you are welcome: and the more noise you make, the more trouble you give, the more good things you call for, the welcomer your are.”
FORMULA 1 AND THE OPERATING ROOM.
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009FORMULA 1 AND THE OPERATING ROOM. I posted here about Atul Gutwande’s argument that lives could be saved if doctors and nurses made greater use of checklists for complicated procedures. Here is an article about how the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London used pit stop techniques from the Ferrari Formula 1 pit crew to improve their handoffs from the cardiac care unit to the intensive care unit. “Moving the little body from one bed to another” involves transferring not only wires and equipment but also information from lengthy surgery. A mistake can place the child in mortal danger. The Formula 1 pit crew changes tires and tops up fuel in seven seconds (actually 6.9 seconds) through highly coordinated team work. Doctors at the hospital visited and observed the Formula 1 crew. The handover in the surgery unit was reviewed by the Formula team. The surgeons concluded that the Formula 1 crew had done more anticipation of things that could go wrong and had done more choreographing and rehearsal of coordinated responses when things did go wrong. One change was to establish the equivalent of the “lollipop man” in Formula 1. The lollipop man waves the car in and coordinates the pit stop. The hospital for the first time established one person who was in charge at any one time (the anesthetist at first and then the “intensivist”). The biggest differences between the hospital and Formula 1 are that the hospital deals with a much more complicated procedure and that adequate time and money allowed the race crew to have rehearsal after rehearsal, while the hospital has fewer resources for rehearsals.
“JUST ANOTHER THREE MINUTES” (COMMENT).
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009“JUST ANOTHER THREE MINUTES” (COMMENT). A friend e mailed me about my post on theorizing that that “instead of a universe that emerged from a point of infinite density, we will have one that recycles, possibly through an eternal series of expansions and contractions, with no beginning and no end.” My friend told me that he had taken a course in cosmology which included dealing with the fiendishly complicated mathematics of the first three minutes after the Big Bang. He concluded: “Now I’m deflated. You tell me that this wasn’t the first three minutes, just another three minutes.”
83 CONSONANTS.
Monday, January 26th, 200983 CONSONANTS. I once chatted about the difficulties of the Finnish language during one of those times at closings where everybody is waiting for the money to move. An American woman was representing a Finnish bank. She told me that she had always been a whiz at languages and had thought that she would learn Finnish quickly when she moved to Finland. Instead she found that there were so many cases in Finnish that it had taken her three years and she was still not where she wanted to be. Tim Connell in a review of 1,000 LANGUAGES (edited by Peter K. Austin) in the Times Literary Supplement for January 16, writes about how primitive or ancient languages can be much more complex than modern ones. He says that: “nouns in Sanskrit may take up to twenty-one different forms, and verbs up to 150, which leaves Finnish in the shade with a mere fifteen case endings and Latin absolutely nowhere.” He also notes that there is a language in the Northern Caucasus which has 83 consonants.
KING KONG, THE BAGGIE.
Sunday, January 25th, 2009KING KONG, THE BAGGIE. The sculptures of Joshua Allen Harris remind me of the day I walked out of my apartment building, walked to the corner and saw about a mile away a giant inflated King Kong climbing the Empire State Building. It was an ad for the Dino de Laurentiis remake, so Google tells me this must have been in 1976. I took the subway to midtown and when I came out, I looked back at the Empire State Building. The King Kong had already deflated and was simply a giant baggie flapping against the building. I loved both parts of the experience—Kong inflated and Kong deflated.
