A trip to the Monkey House

A great  Moment of Truth for this previously unreconstructed white Southern great-grandson of a Confederate veteran came on a bright summer day at the Monkey House of the Washington Zoo.

(Clarification – that would be the National Zoological Park, as opposed to Washington’s other zoo. Noam sayin?)

I and my offspring were observing those cute little primates swinging, leaping, scrounging, making faces, and slinging dookie at each other.

Amidst the mouth-making poop-fights,  I began to see how some could say we higher primates had perhaps inherited some of our show-offy little cousins’ DNA.

All you have to do is follow a couple of dozen “Friends” on Facebook to see the grown-up version of the Monkey House in action.

Or – even worse – read every email you actually get.

For example, I got one the other day that asserted President Barack Obama had said on Meet the Press in 2008 that he was going to turn the country into an Islamic caliphate.

The record shows he said no such thing. It was pure fabrication.

And that was a rehash of the same email that made the rounds seven years earlier which I had hoped would have been laughed out of existence by now. So why has it resurfaced now? Why has a seven-year-old- lie bubbled up through the slime again now?

I believe it has a lot to do with the undeniable fact that the President is now nearing the end of his second term in office and is enjoying some rather undeniable successes.

Not all of us agree on those successes. But they have happened, and a divided Congress has even  come together to make at least one of them real – something that would not have happened if the two parties had not found compromise. Common ground.

I write as we enjoy Fourth of July celebrations all across the fruited plain. And that has sparked some introspection on my part.

In the run-up to my celebration, I have been examining the history of how the United States negotiated  the fevered times between these times:

• The period from Patrick Henry's "Liberty or Death" speech in1775, and the following year when the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed ...
• And 1787 when we finally got ourselves a Constitution.

Reading anew the history of the period between 1775 and 1787 shows how it took honest compromise and the ability to keep compromising – and find common ground -- before the founders arrived at consensus. It was agonizing, but a republic with a constitution was the result.

Since then, history unequivocally proves that compromise has been the key to American exceptionalism. Any honest survey course in American history makes that clear.

But today? Do we still  have it in us to find common ground between factions?

Or does the Monkey House suddenly look eerily familiar?

 

A non-book-review book review

To write a “book review” of  The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert somehow seems presumptuous of me.

First, a “review,” as I understand reviews, would have me tell you a bit about the story. I do not want to do that.  For once, I picked the book up just because of the author and my love of her writing. I did not read anything about it beforehand.

The title was enough to pull me into it on its own. The title resonates. What was this “signature?” I found out…but not before something like Page 497 (of 500), and even then it’s something your book club can debate for a long time. I’m still thinking about it myself.

So, I’m glad I approached it that way, for to have nestled up to any spoilers would have been unthinkable. I did not want to know “what the book is about” beforehand. I’m glad I did that, because it made everything in it a wonder, and with wonders loaded it is.

Signature is really an epic, I’d say. It covers most of the 18^th and 19^th Centuries, and it ranges from London to Philadelphia and more wondrous places than you might ever imagine. The story it presents is more richly researched than any I’ve read in a long time.

Her classy writing moved me forward like not many other books. Even at 500 pages, it presented no temptation to stop, as have others of that length. It never seems to drag, and it may not even be long enough. I would have liked for the goodies of plot and character development to never stop.

But that would have been impossible, for Gilbert’s characters are one-offs, singular, never-to-be born-anew as somebody else.

Simply stated, “there is no there there,” as Gertrude Stein once wrote.

Good management … and what happens when it’s not

Some of you may remember Bass’ iconic “Weejuns.” AKA the world’s greatest casual shoes. I had worn them for years, but then sadly my last pair – re-soled and re-heeled one time too many – had to be retired..

I was pleasantly surprised, however, to find that Bass still makes Weejuns. They call them something else, but they are the same, and the box they come in proudly displays the semiotic brand “Weejuns.” I was delighted … and even more so when I found out my favorite retail store was advertising them at a nice discount online.

Ca-ching. A deal was done. And they emailed me within minutes to say that I could pick up my new Weejuns the next day at their Short Pump Town Center store.

I did. But I did not try them on until later that night at home. I put the right one on. Perfect fit. I would not have expected anything less. Just like the old days.

But then … what was this? I have been buying and wearing shoes for more years than I’d care to think about. But this had never happened.

The left shoe would not fit. Not because it was a size smaller, but because it was simply another right-footed shoe. I had been delivered a box of perfectly packaged shoes but perfectly fitted for right feet only.

“Well, never in my born days,” as my Georgia-bred grandmother used to say …

The good news is that I took the box back to the store the next day, and the manager who helped me and I both got a big laugh out of my question: “I wonder what the dude who got the other box thinks about having two left-footed Weejuns?”

You know the rest. I was made whole. And cheerfully so…even with an additional 15 percent discount for my “trouble,” as the manager put it, of having to come back to the store.

No trouble at all, I replied. They just solidified an already good customer’s loyalty.

*

But about three hours later, this happened at the grocery store I usually go to. I go there because they were the unlikely heir to one to the best grocery chains I’ve even known.

I’d been seeing the signs for a while. First a well-respected manager left, his replacement virtually invisible even three years later.

But that management absence – or dereliction of duty – showed its true stripes tonight.

I was walking though the bakery area when I saw a woman slip on a wet floor and fall almost flat. And she did not fall lightly either, it could have been serious. I helped her to her feet and stayed with her to make sure she was going to be OK. She said she was. It had just been so unexpected, she said.

Indeed. There was a single flimsy yellow sign warning of a damp floor…but it was about four feet away from where she had slipped and fallen. Water – or something clear and wet –covered about 10 square feet of busy aisle space, the misplaced excuse-for-a-warning sign about as effective as Chicken Little announcing a tsunami.

Once all was OK with the lady who had fallen, I was incensed. No one from store management showed up. So I went to them. At their mis-named “service desk,” I told the four employees gathered there helping a single customer what had happened.

They were taken out of their game, one showing a bit of an attitude. She said, “but there was a warning sign there.”

My response was rather direct and forceful. I did not cuss .. but I sure as hell did think it.

I told the four of them to please get somebody over there to mop up the water in the aisle where customers were walking and quit standing around arguing with me.

I’ve seen this kind of attitude there before, but not to the point of ignoring the fact that a woman had fallen on their pristine floor.

FuelPerks be damned. They just lost a good customer.

And they want $15 an hour?

Do 'real writers' Tweet?

Suggest Tweeting to some writers – or writers in their own minds – and they go all infra-dig snooty on you, like “Thou shalt not Tweet” is some kind of Writer Religion Commandment, or something.

What a mistake. Tweeting can be a wonderful discipline. For me, a former newspaper person, it’s like writing headlines. Having to squish the essence of a 1,200-word story into three lines of 18 characters each focuses one’s thinking very fast. Especially with some grizzly, cigar-chomping Ed Asner look-alike editor growling over your shoulder. And that’s kind of like the old saw: “Eat a live toad first thing every morning, and nothing worse will happen to you all day long.”

Being a ham radio operator (K4GLX) since age 13, hasn’t hurt either. As a teenager, I spent long hours thinking fast and translating information into the dots and dashes of Morse code, or CW, as we on the inside call it. Brevity, in that mode, is always more than just “the soul of wit.” It is a necessity.

I loved it when I first read Stephen King’s now famous line from On Writing: “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” It’s also full of more such encomia praising needless verbosity. We can all tighten up, me included.

So, Yikes! That’s almost 300 words up there. I better stop. But before I do, if you’re interested in a great essay on this whole topic of good writing, including Tweeting, by a master essayist, Thomas Beller, writing for The New Yorker’s “Page-Turner” feature, Google it. He reminds us, after all,  that it was Gertrude Stein who wrote, “There is no there there,” one of what he calls ”the great proto-Tweets.”

Umm: You do Google, don’t you?

On writing well

Writing well is a life-long job, I’ve learned. People and mores change, but if I ever let-up on the idea that I must always be a student of good writing, I’m doomed.

So how does that work?

Reading good writers is one way. And learning from editors.

When I was a teenager, my father perceived that I was a potential writer. So he encouraged me, and along the way he gave me a couple of books by Theodore Bernstein, then an assistant managing editor of  The New York Times. The books were collections of Bernstein’s critiques of writing by Times staff writers. They were a huge helps and even fun to read. I’ve missed them over the years, but recently I’ve discovered that The Times still does in-house critiques of its writers’ work. In a column called After Deadline  -- Newsroom Notes on Usage and Style, Philip B. Corbett does the job. He praises good examples, and offers positive criticism when it’s required. It’s published internally, but you can find it on the Internet right here.

For my writer friends and friends of writing – and I know you follow this blog – these are for you:

Uber Adds a Low-Tech Twist to Its Modern Business Model in India

 

Some of the green-and-yellow “autos” come equipped with speakers in the back that blare Bollywood hits. Many drivers will allow more than the legal maximum of three riders, leaving some passengers clinging to the sides of the vehicles. Few use their meters without a fight.

 

This feature by Nida Najar, about Uber’s move into India’s auto rickshaws, was full of fine descriptive touches. This paragraph is particularly effective because of the three-part structure, building to the short, sharp final line.

 

* * *

 

Hunting a Serial Killer as a Political Enemy Nips at Their Heels

 

“Child 44,” directed by Daniel Espinosa from a screenplay by Richard Price, is an English-language movie set in Russia, which means that it is above all a festival of accents. Gary Oldman, Paddy Considine and Vincent Cassel measure their vowels and consonants carefully, but the most floridly enjoyable voices belong to Tom Hardy and Noomi Rapace, last seen together speaking Brooklynese in “The Drop.” In that film, Mr. Hardy dropped his r’s like a champ. Here he lands heavily on the aitches and contracts the words “it is” into the letter Z. “Zimpossible,” he says. “Zdifficult.”

 

As for “Child 44″: Znot too terrible, but znothing great, either.

 

A typical funny touch by A. O. Scott, one of several that make the review worth reading even if the movie isn’t much to cheer about.

 

An Unprecedented Tsunami of Hyperbole

We all want our stories to be engaging, even exciting. Deep reporting, clear writing and sharp detail are the best tools. But sometimes we can’t resist the impulse to pump up the prose with hyperbolic language.

It generally doesn’t work. Often, the overhyped language seems clichéd or trite rather than gripping. If every dispute is bitter, every development unprecedented, every performer a superstar, then there’s nothing so special about yours.

By all means let’s be vivid and descriptive. But restraint is a virtue, too. Here are a few recent overheated examples:

That is the largest such gap, or “spread,” since 1989, according to Marc Chandler, global head of currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman. And it has unleashed a tsunami of capital flows from Europe to the United States.

Unless you’re describing an actual natural disaster, metaphors like “tsunami” or “earthquake” are almost always over the top. (And speaking of earthquakes, let’s not say “epicenter” when all we mean is “center.”)

But in a volatile example of how thorny and tangled the debate can become as communities nationwide implement new rules to protect the brains of young athletes, Florida’s mandate has created a combative firestorm that has reverberated across the country.

What’s more powerful than a tsunami? A “firestorm,” of course. Here, we embellished further — and mixed the metaphor — with “volatile,” “thorny,” “tangled,” “combative” and “reverberated.” The subject, by the way, was girls’ lacrosse.

The history of Atlantic Records, now part of the Warner Music Group, is populated by a small country’s worth of megastars from across the spectrum of jazz, pop and rock — names including Ray Charles, John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, Roberta Flack, Charles Mingus, Wilson Pickett, Yes, Led Zeppelin, Cream, Abba and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

First, there were singers, musicians and other performers. The truly outstanding ones were singled out as “stars.” At some point, all performers became stars, and the most successful were promoted to “superstars.” Now, apparently, in a world full of superstars, we have to switch from Latin to Greek and single out a handful of superstars as “megastars.” Putting aside the question of whether Aretha and Abba really occupy the same niche, this passage would not suffer a bit if we just called them “stars.”

In fact, Mr. Obama’s ties with teachers’ unions have grown increasingly toxic.

“Toxic,” meaning poisonous, seems like an overstatement; “strained” may be closer to the mark. And once again we’re mixing metaphors; as a colleague said, a “toxic tie” sounds like a weapon in a James Bond movie.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu despite his victory in this week’s elections, signaling that it is in no rush to repair a historic rift between the United States and Israel.

Perhaps it will prove historic — that is, important in history. Or perhaps it’s a blip that will pass with a new administration or other unforeseeable developments. The Times’s stylebook urges care in using “historic”:

Use it with caution for a current event, because history’s verdict is rarely predictable by journalists, and the word suggests hyperbole.