In high school, I was a budding grammar Nazi. I blame this on an ex-girlfriend’s grandmother, who, despite her advanced years and Alzheimer’s, had an ear for the same violations that once gave Strunk&White the howling fantods: ungrammaticality. Dottie’s favorite game–one I adopted, to the chagrin of virtually everyone I knew–was to count incorrect usages of the word “like” in speaking. She would say nothing while doing this. Dottie would simply listen serenely to whatever you said to say, raising her fingers, one at a time, until the speaker realized the correlation. “They’re decorating it with, like, this like jungle theme with palm trees and like tigers everywhere.” Three silent digits extend.
This game generated one of two effects on speakers: either you slimmed your sentences and removed a great deal of your chaff (as the ex- and I both did, quicksharp), or the stress of avoiding “like” became so enormous that smooth sentence completion be impossible: pausing, backtracking, violent re-words and stuttering were the new modus operandi.
Of course, I went to public school, and in public school, they don’t teach you things like the nominative/accusative/dative/genitive/locative cases, what a preposition is, how polarity words work, and so forth. Thankfully, SOMEBODY learned all these things, and are willing and able to share them all with us. Without further delay, a few more language-oriented blogs to recommend you to:
Perhaps the biggest and brightest and best of the language blogs, this site is run by Mark Liberman, a professor in UPenn’s well-esteemed linguistics department. He get’s plenty of help from a number of other linguistic luminaries, and the blog covers plenty of ground from Dan Brown’s prose and Van Morrison’s swearing to Beatles gibberish and Google books critiques.
This charming piece of webspace is occupied by Gabe Doyle, a UCSD linguistics grad student. His sub-header and motto apparent is “Prescriptivism Must Die!”, which is funny in such an inside-baseball, grammar-nerds-only sense that the time it would take to explain the joke would render it unfunny. Timing, as they say, is everything. Perhaps his hallmark post thus far (for me, at any rate) is his thorough argument, with ample evidence, of why the singular “they” is perfectly grammatical.
Ben Zimmer spends a lot of time moonlighting at Language Log or filling in for William Safire. When he’s doing neither, he keeps his own site, tracing words and their usages back through history. Most notable in his recent work, perhaps, is his debunking of “Cronkiters”.
Liverpool took Hull City for 6 goals yesterday, including a hat trick from Fernando Torres, and this beauty from captain Steven Gerrard. That goal, which put Liverpool up 4-1, inspired speculation the captain scored by accident. I contend to you: it doesn’t matter one whit.
In 1970, the Beatles released “Let It Be”, a ballad credited to Lennon/McCartney but generally thought of a Paul McCartney composition. The song begins with broad chords, and the words, “When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me…” The song opens like a hymn (and, of course, closes like a rock song). The character of Mother Mary adds to the hymn-like nature of the introduction, and gives the singer a sort of universality that anyone familiar with Christianity (and especially Roman Catholicism) can relate to. The fact, though, is that when he wrote the song, McCartney wasn’t thinking about the church. He was thinking about a dream he once had of his mother, Mary, who died when Paul was 14. Despite this very personal and individual direction of the lyric, the song was hugely successful, and remains one of the band’s most popular and beloved tunes.
In a way, I think, this is an trait among all the super talented. There ceases to be a distinction between the fortunate accidents and the intentional successes. It doesn’t matter if Gerrard was trying for the back of the net or if he was looking to Dirk Kuyt at the far post. We’ve seen him score that goal before, and we’re perfectly happy to accept him doing it once again.
For a long time in America, atheism has been long associated, rather unfortunately, with hedonism and anarchy. To be atheistic is to be evil, to hold no values, to be young and crass and cruel. The word itself is negative; it is merely the word theist with a privative a attached indicates an absence or a negation of the root word. Atheists believe in the absence of a god, but this reality is taken to an extreme: they believe against a god.
The response by the atheists has been to look for a new word to describe themselves. Some have declared agnosticism, a word which connotes either a lack of thought on the matter, or the belief that, even if there IS a god, that god cannot be known, for certain. Some prefer non-believer, but that carries the same baggage as atheism. Many have taken humanism (especially secular humanism), and that term received a shout-out from the President at the National Prayer Breakfast this year.
It would seem the newest term to gain the minds and preferences of the un-religious is “Nones”. Or maybe that’s just “nones”. This usage seems to stem from survey question that goes something like:
Religion?
A. Christian
B. Jewish
C. Muslim
D. Hindi
E. Other
F. None
Today, the proportion of Independents who are Nones has leaped from 12 percent to 21 percent; and the percentage of Democratic Nones has doubled from 6 percent to 16 percent. In stark contrast, the GOP share has fallen from 8 percent to 6 percent. I’d say that’s a function of the GOP becoming an essentially Christianist fundamentalist party; and the Democrats having lots of Irish, Jewish and Asian supporters, who are the strongest groups in the None cohort.
The Nones are not wealthier than average, but they are more male. Almost 20 percent of American men are Nones, compared with 12 percent of women.
61 percent of Nones find evolution convincing, compared with 38 percent of all Americans. And yet they do not dismiss the possibility of a God they do not understand; and refuse to call themselves atheists.
But that’s “none”, as in “Religion: none”. If “a-theists” don’t like being defined as against a God they don’t believe in, “None” is worse still. An atheist is, truly, someone without belief in God. Though the Trinity study says most “Nones” are not actively hostile to religion, the name makes it sound like “Nones” believe in nothing at all. I’m sure most “Nones” wouldn’t appreciate that. Or perhaps, consistent with the name, they just don’t care.
Personally, though I am not one, I’ve often been more comfortable with people who self-identify as atheists (or one of its many synonyms) than I have with the religious.
From 2009’s TED conference comes a Dutch architect whose buildings are so interesting and so pleasant to behold, and yet, so simple, I must ask: why doesn’t everybody do it this way?
I have worn glasses for the past 22 years, roughly, since the age of three or so. I received my first pair of bifocal lenses at the age of eight. Finding they did little for me that holding a book at a somewhat greater distance couldn’t do, I dropped the bifocals, and have endured increasingly more severe prescriptions ever since. My vision has yet to stabilize, and every new pair of glasses I receive becomes obsolete within a few months of reception. I am ever-squinting, and likewise frustrated.
This has left me deeply sympathetic to anyone else who can hardly see. A British physicist, Joshua Silver, has been developing a cheap pair of glasses that can be made by anyone. Glasses without the need of optometrists. They currently run about $19. That price will have to come down, since they are trying to get glasses to people who make less than $1 per diem. Here he is explaining his work:
I confess: David Lynch simply does it for me. I’ve seen now four of his movies: Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Dr., and now Lost Highway. His movies engage a variety of esthetic features. Eraserhead is black&white, with German expressionism popping in there; Blue Velvet touches film noir and has the rough, grainy feeling of the story it tells; Mulholland Dr is rich and daring and colorful; Lost Highway has the the aching calm of the ride home after a car accident.
Part of the appeal is the inscrutability. Lynch’s films can be explained in a sentence. Lost Highway: A movie about a man who may have killed his wife. This sentence is entirely true, and fails to reach any of the conflicts that make it so compelling. While talking about the movie today, a friend, entering the conversation late, asked what it was about, and I used that very sentence. His reply was a demanding: “And what?”
To get at the heart of the movie, it’s perhaps better go almost on a scene-by-scene basis. Fred Madison and his wife, Renee, are receiving unlabeled videotapes of their house. The tapes continue, and with increasing detail, coming inside the house to a shot of the them sleeping. The police can do nothing. Fred Madison, saxophonist and the husband, meets a mysterious and patently creepy man at a party. Meet Robert Blake:
The Mystery Man is a man of talent. He has Fred call his own house, and when Fred does so, the Mystery Man, standing in front of Fred at the party, answer’s the house phone. The scene is executed with malice and restraint. Fred is, like the audience, sufficiently creeped out.
The next day, another videotape comes in, unmarked as ever, and this one shows Fred killing his wife in their bedroom. Suddenly, Fred is convicted of murder. Suddenly he is in prison. Suddenly he is a man named Pete Dayton, and Pete Dayton is free. Free to fall in love with a woman named Alice, who looks identical to Fred’s deceased wife, and whom is the mistress of Mr Eddy, an apparent gangster.
In an effort to escape Mr Eddy, Pete and Alice attempt to rob an associate of Mr Eddy’s. They take what they’ve stolen, and drive out to the middle of the desert to visit a fence, who will give the money for the stolen goods. The fence isn’t home, so they’ll have to wait. Alice and Pete start to go at it on the desert floor. Pete tells Alice he wants her. Alice replies, “You’ll never have me,” and she darts up and into the fence’s cabin. When Pete stands up, he’s Fred Madison again. The Mystery Man appears, again, mysteriously, and leads Fred into the cabin. Alice is gone.
Fred, of course, asks where she’s gone. The Mystery Man replies with hostility, that she is gone and her name is Renee. If she said her name was Alice, she lied. And your name? What the fuck is your name? The mystery man is wearing a camcorder, and he is angry, and he is dangerous in ways that are entirely left to the audience’s imagination. Fred’s imagination has him pegged as damn frightening, also, and Fred books it from the cabin back to the car. The mystery man keeps pace without running or hurrying. Fred gets the car’s engine started and drives away.
He drives to the Lost Highway Motel. He pulls Mr Eddy from his room there, brings him outside. The mystery man reappears, shows Mr Eddy a handheld TV depicting Eddy and Renee having an affair. The Mystery Man shoots Mr Eddy, and drives away in Mr Eddy’s car. Fred goes off to tie up one little loose end, and ends up getting chased down the highway by cops. As he is doing so, he is getting apparently electrocuted, and is metamorphosing into yet something else. End scene. End movie. Being sober contemplation as to what the hell happened.
There are a few guidelines, I think, that are helpful when watching Lynchian cinema.
First: time is an illusion. Or, rather, it is flexible. The sequence of events should be questioned at every turn.
Second: if it is too fantastical to be real, it’s probably someone’s imagination.
My guess: Fred found his wife cheating, and killed her in a fit of rage and madness. The madness continues, and while in solitary confinement in prison, he imagines himself younger, free, and with his wife again. The dream unravels and reassembles, until the end in which Fred receives electroshock therapy. You can make your own theories.
On this view, the movie reminds me a bit of Finnegans Wake, in that both LH and FW take place in at least two distinct realities, with no clear lines of demarcation between them. The major difference, I suppose, is that the individual scenes that compose LH are deeply interesting and compelling the narrative forward, while FW is exhausting at every opportunity.
