A Commonplace Book

The fat of sentences is sold to us with the meat untrimmed, and we pay a heavy price in waste for all our information.

How silly we would feel in a powdered wig, exposing our calves in silk knickers, or wearing long peacock feathers, silver buckles, or carrying a fan: yet we bear the language rules of that age of Aristocracy with patience and enthusiasm.

Of course snobbery is part of every language difficulty: WE have learned useless language ornamentation. So shall YOU!

The greatest enemies of language are the bureaucrat and the professional political manipulator: the first is ignorant, stubborn, and a subtle verbal defender of his bureau against the people; the second deals in "double speak" wherein he shrewdly hides his real character under a patriotic lexicon of grammatical lies.

We're perpetually warned about the contemporary rise of cynicism, but a parallel American contagion, often infecting the same citizens, is credulity. The postmodern cynic cum naïf mistrusts the government, the media, and the other élites even as he recklessly embraces this or that line of grassroots make-believe. You believe that a majority of women were sexually abused as children? You believe that Ben Franklin was an anti-Semitic propagandist? You believe that you have seen a documentary videotape of government doctors performing an autopsy on a captured extraterestrial? Whatever.

This laissez-faire ultra-populism finds its perfect medium in the Internet. Not only is every citizen entitled to his or her opinion but he or she is entitled to deliver it instantaneously, studded with chunks of fake information, to the whole world.

...[One site] contains dozens of dense, competently written reports on subjects as various as the Hale-Bopp coment, AIDS, and TWA flight 800, and its frequently updated pages look as professional as those of brand-name news-media sites; the articles assert, however, that the comet may be travelling alongside "a gigantic spacecraft," that H.I.V. grew out of a "U.S. biowarfare program," and that Flight 800 was brought down by "a rift in the space-time continuum."

Thanks to the Web, amateurism and spuriousness no longer need look amateurish or spurious.

"Oldboy" is a good if trivial genre movie, no more, no less. There's no denying that Mr. Park is some kind of virtuoso, but so what? So was the last guy who directed a Gap commercial. Cinematic virtuosity for its own sake, particularly as expressed through cinematography - in loop-the-loop camera work and, increasingly, in computer-assisted ornamentation - is a modern plague that threatens to bury us in shiny, meaningless movies. Historically speaking, the most interesting thing about "Oldboy" is that like so much "product" now coming out of Hollywood, it is a B movie tricked out as an A movie. Once, a film like this, predicated on extreme violence and staying within the prison house of genre rather than transcending it, would have been shot on cardboard sets with two-bit talent. It would have had its premiere in Times Square.

The fact that "Oldboy" is embraced by some cinephiles is symptomatic of a bankrupt, reductive postmodernism: one that promotes a spurious aesthetic relativism (it's all good) and finds its crudest expression in the hermetically sealed world of fan boys. (At this point, it's perhaps worth pointing out that the head of the jury at Cannes last year was none other than Quentin Tarantino.) In this world, aesthetic and moral judgments - much less philosophical and political inquiries - are rejected in favor of a vague taxonomy of cool that principally involves ever more florid spectacles of violence. As in, "Wow, he's hammering those dudes with a knife stuck in his back - cool!" Or, "He's about to drop that guy and his dog from the roof - way cool!" Kiss-kiss, bang-bang, yawn-yawn. We are a long way from Pasolini and Peckinpah.

...journalism professor Michael Skube, writing in the Washington Post: "College students nowadays call any book, fact or fiction, a novel. I have no idea why this is...

What explains [this] trend? In the limited commentary on the question, mention has been made of the blurring of generic boundaries, and the fuzziness of "truth" in the postmodern era--brought on by none other than In Cold Blood, with its well-documented fabrications. I tend to view it more pragmatically. English has no word to denote "nonfiction book" or "writer of nonfiction book(s)." Considering the clunkiness of the expressions in quotation marks, it's not surprising that college students--who are frequently called on to refer to such books and writers, and who are famously not semantic sticklers--would have turned to "novel" and "novelist," which come trippingly on the tongue.

[T]he real fun of a list -- and the intellectual labor -- is realized only when its creator has to explain and defend its rationale. That's where the allure of lists really lies, because, for impassioned devisers of Top 5's, the nakedly evaluative function of the list is underwritten by a mode of popular-culture criticism that is considerably more complex -- and more exegetical -- than the form of the Top 5 seems to suggest....

[D]eveloping the faculty of discrimination is part of the fun of immersing oneself in the popular -- which means, interestingly, that few fans of popular culture are wholly "immersed" in it. To be a really knowledgeable fan, in other words, you usually have to be a keen critic. Remember this the next time you're accosted by some meerschaum-chomping, muttonchop-wearing columnist for The New Criterion or the National Review: It's the people who can't stand popular culture who are truly indiscriminate. Just say to your muttonchop friend, "If you can't tell the difference between Poison and the Cure, don't waste my time with your worthless denunciations of what you call 'rock 'n' roll.'"...

Academic modes of cultural criticism ... are rarely explicitly evaluative (and the exception of that famous outlier, Harold Bloom, only proves the rule). Though this aspect of academic criticism is usually ascribed to the pernicious relativism of postmodernism, it actually has a much more tangled and interesting history....

[O]ne of the most important functions that the culture industries perform is to produce criticism of the cultural artifacts produced by the culture industries.

That knowledge is problematic--difficult to establish, labile once created, often imprecise and always subject to the limitations of the human mind--is not the discovery of postmodernism. It is a foundational insight of the age of science, of fact and information, itself.... The point is not that facts do not exist, but that they are unstable (and are becoming more so as the pace of science quickens). Knowledge is always an attempt. Every fact was established by an argument--by observation and interpretation--and is susceptible to being overturned by a different one. A fact, you might say, is nothing more than a frozen argument, the place where a given line of investigation has come temporarily to rest.

The postmodernist argument that all truths are partial (and a function of one's perspective) led to the related argument that there are many legitimate ways to understand or represent an event. This both encouraged a more egalitarian discourse and made it possible for the voices of the previously disenfranchised to be heard. But it's also been exploited by those who want to make the case for offensive or debunked theories, or who want to equate things that cannot be equated. Creationists, for instance, called for teaching "intelligent design" alongside evolution in schools. "Teach both," some argued. Others said, "Teach the controversy."

And then it is soon discovered that the forms of the past are merely the excuse by which a powerful ruling oligarchy have made a comfortable home for themselves in the midst of a decaying order, while the rest of us discover to our horror that the comfortable rules of the past are oppressing and frustrating us: Then it is a time that has come to re-examine our real position and our real problems, and seek answers and solutions which may meet entirely new conditions, conditions which now do not automatically answer to the rules which we have inherited.

Creative acts are most often the work of rather young people who have not yet learned the profit inherent in selfishness.

The Sentence ws invented by the 18th century and was based on the academic study of Hebrew, Greek and Latin.... The regularization of both grammar and spelling was the likely result of seeking to apply Law and Order to the human spirit.... The Sentence is thought-control, thought-restraint, effective censorship.... The Sentence is not organic to language. Only thought is.... The airplane defied walking, as the imagination defies the earth-bound Sentence.... Thought will not be confined, private conversation is never conducted in Sentences.... Money and Sentences are made of the same base measure: popular success.... Popular Success is crippled, caned, strapped, twisted, limping, broken: lusting only after pornography -- its pain so great, it seeks relief only in distraction.

I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her, 'I love you madly', because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, 'As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.' At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same. Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated, both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony... But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of love.

But you cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.... If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. but a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.