Strachey

 He is a very good writer:

"The members of the English Church had ingenuously imagined up to that moment that it was possible to contain, in a frame of words, the subtle essence of their complicated doctrinal system, involving the mysteries of the Eternal and the Infinite on the one hand, and the elaborate adjustments of temporal government on the other. They did not understand that verbal definitions in such a case will only perform their functions so long as there is no dispute about the matters which they are intended to define: that is to say, so long as there is no need for them. For generations this had been the case with the Thirty-nine Articles. Their drift was clear enough; and nobody bothered over their exact meaning. But directly someone found it important to give them a new and untraditional interpretation, it appeared that they were a mass of ambiguity, and might be twisted into meaning very nearly anything that anybody liked."

Eminent Victorians (p. 12). Kindle Edition. 

Choice of vocabulary is excellent. There is a wit to it, as well, a particular kind of humor. The sentences are long and stately, but with some relief in the brief phrases: "Their drift was clear enough..." 

I'm by no means interested in the subject matter here, except as it reflects a keen appreciation for the limits of language and interpretation.  

Kay Ryan on Anne Carson

 "How does smart sound? It isn’t the Greek and Latin references. The smartness is a tone, something light—dry—exact and amused. It makes it a pleasure to listen to her language and thought experiments; they are offered lightly; you are under no emotional obligation to care. Which of course makes it more possible to do so. Noting what a very big audience it is (as though she hadn’t known it would be), she begins differently than she had planned. She’ll start with a thirteen-second (as I recall) interactive love poem relying upon the audience for a small recitative part. She divides us in half with her tiny commanding arm: this million will say this when I indicate (“What a deal!”) and this million will say this (“I’ll take it!”). She says her parts, we roar our briefer parts, and we’re in cahoots, co-creating (we flatter ourselves to think) a heady ambient smartness. It keeps on like that. She does a bunch of Catullus translations—in which she lobs modern references into classical poems (at one point Catullus looks in the “fridge”) the way she lobs Latin into her contemporary stuff—not quite beautiful or exactly amusing, but always out of left field."

Here is some good prose. You feel that she appreciates Anne Carson for highly specific reason; no uncritical admiration here. She sees through it, but still gets into it. I feel before Kay Ryan's writing the same way that she does in  relation to Anne Carson's writing.    

 

More sparkling prose from Denby

Here are three paragraphs from "About Ballet Decoration" from Denby (1944). He presents a theoretical framework and writes a 6 paragraph essay with some concrete examples. The middle paragraph here consists of three sentences, relying heavily on the verb "to be." The other verbs are fairly ordinarily ones to, like know, make, hold, look. The next paragraph explain how a ballet set can be "pictorially alive," by doing "different and opposite things decisively."

My aim is to write this way about music. The thing about dance is that is is visual but also kinetic, performative, and auditory. So writing about it has to take into account multiple dimensions. Look how Denby summarizes here what makes a ballet "alive and satisfactory."

I would say a poet can write good dance criticism because poets are also in the business of writing something that holds the interest for "hundreds of years." Denby's own poetry is odd, and I will have to read more of it to comment on it with the required degree of acumen. Right now it seems quirky, comic, and dependent on rhyme in a funny way you wouldn't expect, but that's just a first impression.

Denby

Denby has some prose chops:

Handsome the NYC way of dancing certainly is. Limpid, easy, large, open, bounding; calm in temper and steady in pulse; virtuoso in precision, in stamina, in rapidity.  So honest, so fresh and modest the company looks in action. The company's stance, the bearing of the dancer's whole body in action is the most straightforward, the clearest I ever saw; it is the company's physical approach to the grand style--not to the noble carriage but to the grand one. Simple and clear the look of shoulder and hip, the head, the elbow, and the instep; unnervous the bodies deploy in the step, hold its shape in the air, return to balance with no strain, and redeploy without effort. None either of the becks and nods, the spurts and lags, the breathless stops and almost-didn't-make-it starts they cultivate in Paris. (On the analogy of painting the French go in for texture, the Americans for drawing.) As clear as the shape of the step in the NYC style is in its timing, its synchronization to the score at its start, at any powerful thrust it has, at its close. So the dancers dance unhurried, assured and ample. They achieve a continuity of line and a steadiness of impetus that is unique, and can brilliantly increase the power of it and the exhilarating speed to the point where it glitters like cut glass. The rhythmic power of the company is its real style, and its novelty of fashion. Some people complain such dancing is mechanical. It seems quite the opposite to me, like a voluntary, a purely human attentiveness.  (Dance Writings and Poetry, 223)

Note the abundance of adjectives. We are told to write with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs, but they provide color and texture here. There is some technical language. I don't know the difference between the grand style and "noble carriage." Nor would I be able to perceive with the sharpness that Denby does--almost preternaturally. The paragraph builds gradually, through enumeration of detail, to a stunning conclusion, a pithy statement of the major achievement of the New York City Ballet: it rhythmic dynamism. Then we are told, surprisingly, that this approach seems "mechanical' to other people! He's throwing a wrench into his own argument.  But then he has the perfect rejoinder. And isn't "attentiveness" the quality that Denby's own writing demonstrates?

I'd probably suggest some edits in a few sentences if I were an editor. I'm not saying this paragraph is perfect in all respects, but it is vigorous, attentive, varied in rhythm, as dynamic as the dance style is is describing.

The Lorca connection: Denby has a wonderful piece on La Argentinita, mentioning Lorca in passing.

Flaubert

My writing style was influenced by Flaubert's ideal: a fluid, seamless rhythm with nothing wasted; no needless repetition of words. Sentences and paragraphs are shapely, balanced and varied in shape. There are no poetic rhythms, but the rhythm is carefully crafted as verse. I can easily not write that well, if I am not trying very hard. But the effort does pay off. The Dean told me that several of my letters of support (for a recent nomination) praised the grace of my prose. The grant coordinator told me that my grant applications were far better written than almost anyone else's here.

Wordsworth

What are your moves?

If I think of Wordworth, I know he has certain moves that he uses consistently. The Shakespearian / Miltonic enjambment that creates a rocking movement from line to line. The way of ending a phrase with two latinate words, like "abundant restoration." A certain trope, whose name I don't know, that consists of using two adjectives close in meaning to each other in close proximity:, like "steep and lofty." This trope has Shakepearian resonance, if we consider lines from Hamlet like "led by a delicate and tender prince."

A vocabulary is not just a set of words, but a set of moves or devices, of ways of making phrases and sentences. Marjorie Perloff will introduce a quote with an imperative: "Consider the following passage:... " I know I have my own moves as well. It would be good to have a certain self-awareness about them.

Emulating Bad Models

If you take as your model a kind of standard academic prose, without really considering whether you, personally, really want to write like that or not, you will end up imitating the worst aspects of the prose in your own field. That is why it is important to emulate particular models of good prose, rather than unconsciously writing in a style that you assume will be an acceptable default.

If you write a kind of generic acadamese, you will still be able to get published, You will fit in, more or less. But you will never take that next step. You won't receive compliments on your elegant writing. Nobody else will take your writing as a model for their own.

***

What is generic academese? Lots of passive voice and long words. Inelegant signposting. Vagueness. A "written" quality far from any language used in real speech. A lack of personality or of a distinctive "voice." Numerous quotes from other scholars who also write indifferently.

Finding a Realistic Model

I believe you can learn to write by imitating models of writing. The first thing that good writers usually have in common is having read a lot (quantitatively), but also with a sense of discrimination, thinking about what makes writing effective along various dimensions (clarity, elegance, good organization, etc...)

Realistic models are those in the same language and genre in which you are working. I can learn about writing from reading Proust, but I am not writing in French. They should be relatively modern, from the early 20th-century on, say. Your prose is not going to sound like an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson or like a sermon by John Donne. You also want a style that is not too oratorical, but that is not dead on the page either.

They should be models that solve the particular problems that you face. How to talk eloquently while analyzing poetry, without getting bogged down in literary criticism-ese. How to summarize the secondary literature without doing a "data dump." How to place voices in dialogue with one another without confusion.

A realistic model should give you hope. The academic writer whose work you are emulating is not a great genius of prose style, but someone who has self-consciously worked to achieve a level of elegance and clarity that is well within your reach too. Chances are the writer you are emulating learned from other models.

Proofs

I was a reading some proofs of an article yesterday, one that you will soon be reading too if you would like since it will on line. It was one of the first in which I deliberately suppressed obvious "signposting" while still signaling the direction of the argument clearly in a more implicit way. I was very pleased with the writing in this article: enough time had passed so that I had not remembered the specific thought-processes that went into the prose composition, so I could judge it almost as another person. I did remember that I had purposefully ended a few sentences with a preposition and written others with a slightly more colloquial tone than I usually employ.

I did notice some metadiscursive makers that were not signposting per se, but served that function. In other words, I didn't use markers like "In the next section I will consider...." but I did use phrases like "in other words." I could have gone a little further even here, but I am still pleased with my progress. When you read it I would like you to tell me whether you would miss the signposting, or whether I could take the next step and eliminate even more meta-discourse.

There was also one very hideous-sounding sentence with two syntactically ambiguous adverbs sticking out like bony elbows. It's fine if there is only one, though of course other readers might find more they don't like.

What I really want to see is the editor's introduction to this issue of HIOL and the afterword, to see how other people construe my argument. That will be a more significant test.

"Classic style respects the stress position"

That sentence is on page 69 of Clear and Simple as the Truth (Turner and Thomas). The last element of a sentence is the most important, generally speaking, and so the classic writer puts something which is to be emphasized in that stress position. Often this is new information.

The initial part of the sentence, conversely, is the best place to situate the topic (what the sentence is going to be about) or to cover information already known to the reader. Frustration often ensues when the beginning of a sentence seems to offer no guidance at all as to what the sentence is going to be about.

The topic might be clearly stated, but the stress position might be wasted. "The role of violence in the novels of Ricardo Piglia..." That sound like a good topic for sentence, but too often it is followed by something vague or pointless like "is one of the defining characteristics of his work." You should say something specific and worthy of the stress position instead of a throwaway line this this. In this case, I would reverse those two elements: "One of the defining characteritics of RC's novels is the ...' i would also be more precise in my statement, trying to define a very specific treatment of violence, for example, or the narrator's implicit attitude toward it. So the topic is "novels written by Piglia" and the new information is "some specific and interesting point about these novels." That is classic recipe for a good sentence.

In other words...

Every metadiscursive phrase or tic bears its own clues as to the writer's thinking. "Of course" means that that you are making an assumption or leaving something unquestioned. "In other words" means that you didn't say it right the first time. What follows "in other words" is what you might have said in the first place, if you had thought of it first. That doesn't mean that you should always go back and eliminate the first formulation of the idea, but you should always at least think about doing this. You could even rewrite the first formulation to make it better and still leave the second. Some ideas need restatement for clarity or rhetorical effect.

I used to use "At the same time, however...." virtually every other sentence. Here the logic is to leave both halves of the contradiction operant. Or "I'm always giving you what you already know first, then I'll spring the new information on you." There is nothing particularly wrong with any of these devices, used in moderation, but it helps to have some self-awareness. I was using the word "entail" a lot a few months ago. When I noticed that I realized that my thinking was orientated toward a certain variety of logical consequences. Once I realized that, I could clarify my own ideas more easily by sorting out different kinds of "entailment" and seeing whether I really needed to use that word so much.

Shitty First Drafts

As you might imagine, I am of two minds about the concept of "shitty first drafts." The idea, from the writer Anne Lamott, is that "All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts." The advantage of this approach is that it frees the writer from having to worry about the quality of the first draft. Even a good writer's first draft will be shitty, according to this logic, and so the difference is that the good writer writes something, even if it is shitty, and then revises it until it is good and then excellent. The bad writer presumably either writes nothing in the first place, or does not know how to revise. For the writer terrified of putting words down on paper, the notion of a shitty first draft is wonderfully freeing. This approach works for many people.

So what's the problem? At some point the writer needs to learn to write, not just revise. The first drafts will not be perfect, but they will not be shitty either. Revision will still be necessary, but much less. The experienced writer will avoid certain kinds of mistakes on the first draft. After all, if you can't write, you won't be able to revise either, because re-writing is still a form of writing. A good writer needs to know the feeling of composing a good sentence, once in a while, on the first try. I'd much rather have a model that emphasizes the development of the writer's competence.

If I find I have written a really shitty draft, what I do is discard it and start again from scratch with the same ideas but different words. Looking at my own crappy sentences is far from inspiring. Those crappy sentences don't suggest better ones to my imagination. In fact, there is a danger in revising sentences that were never destined to be great in the first place. If a sentence really isn't working, the problem is not a cosmetic one that can be fixed by revision. Erase it completely and write what you really meant to say.

Maybe I'm being too literal-minded about this. I would say the idea of a "shitty first draft" is, indeed, a stupid motivational trick, but it is not my stupid motivational trick. For the same reason, I hate the idea of a "rough draft.".

Inseparable

"Blank is inseparable from blank." When you find yourself writing that sentence (fill in the blanks), you need to find a more specific claim. The "inseparable" claim just means that there is some unspecified relation between the two elements, that they cannot be considered separately, only together. Your job, however, is to specify what that relation actually is.

"Blank is no exception." You've described a general trend, and then you want to transition into your more specific subject. "Blank is no exception" (to this general trend) does the job, but it is a weak claim, because it simply asserts a lack of contradiction. You want to say that blank is a particularly interesting example of the general trend, for these specific reasons.

"Is it any accident that..." "It is no coincidence that...." Two things happen at the same time. The scholar is asserting a relationship because the two things happen in the same decade. But it could be coincidence unless the actual relationship is specified. Juxtaposition takes the place of a real argument for the relation between the two elements. In many cases I've seen, the time frame of the supposed coincidence does not even match up.

A lot of scholarly writing consists of asserting claims of relatedness. In all three cases (three clichés of scholarly writing), the relationship is stated in a lazy and imprecise way.

Research in a 2nd Language

Writing in Spanish is a wonderful for me. I have no grammatical problems with it, and the rhetorical flow is much more satisfying. I tend to think of fewer options to express my ideas, so the process is faster. My personality is different, since I tend to think in the commonplaces of Spanish prose rather than those of English. Sentences tend to be longer and less choppy. I have to explain fewer things, because the Spanish audience can be presumed to understand things that might be unclear for English speakers. There is no need for translations into English, so that saves a step or two as well.

I would like to write only in Spanish, but I also like writing for readers who don't know the language, as in Apocryphal Lorca. Explaining Spanish literature to those who don't know the language, including my relatives, is also highly satisfying.

Rhythm

A paragraph needs a flowing rhythm. This means varying the length and structure of the sentences, but this cannot be done in a mechanical way, arbitrarily inserting a short sentence after every three long sentences, or following any other formula. In fact, each paragraph should have its own unique rhythm.

You can create a nice effect by giving a series of examples without using the exact same syntactical structure for each one. This is what I've tried to do here:

Lorca’s “Play and Theory of the Duende,” while a very well-known text, does not have a secure place in Spanish intellectual history. It is evidently not a part of the “jejune and uninfluential” canon of “Spanish theory.” Philip Silver does not consider Lorca’s duende in La casa de Anteo, a work devoted to the relation between Spanish poetics and the philosophical tradition arising out of German romanticism. Valente, likewise, fails to recognize Lorca as a thinker or a poet of “integration, fusion, union” in the lineage of Saint John of the Cross—even though Lorca was not an erudite “poet-professor” either. Although the duende lecture is densely allusive and metaphorical, critics have been quick to reduce it to a few key ideas rather than acknowledging its depth and complexity, and hence its privileged place among works dealing with “the inner nature and process of poetry itself.”

Good Writing

This article is an example of some first-rate writing. It is an article about the eminent Hispanist John Kronik, written by his son. Since I knew Kronik well, I especially appreciated it.

We use defensive euphemisms when someone else dies, but when our own time comes, no one says “I’m afraid to pass away.” We become blunt under the threat of mortality: we do not want to die, period. Meanwhile, loss is only permanent when identified as such, but after the fact, no one told me, “I’m sorry for the permanent loss of your father.” Death’s foreverness is the intolerable part, hence language that resists it and religions that reject it. But if an agnostic says we live on in memory, this sounds no less wishful to me than claiming someone is in “a better place.” Without messages from our senses, there is nothing left that we can accurately call life.

Comp Studies

I also realize that I am largely ignorant of the field of rhetoric and composition studies. I realize that it is a legit field that has a lot to say about writing that I ought to be incorporating into this blog. If this were intelligent motivational tricks, I would have studied all that before even beginning it. I've read an issue or two of College English, and I haven't been impressed, but I'm keeping an open mind.

That being said, I think I would disagree with a lot of the positions taken in this field, which arose in English departments out of the need to theorize the teaching of composition in a way not necessarily dependent on that other function of English departments, the teaching of literature. My aim here is to teach writing in disciplines that take literature, and other forms of art, seriously, so I wouldn't exactly be crazy about the extra- if not anti-literary ethos of the field. I think the cognitive psychology grounding of Turner and Thomas's Clear and Simple will eventually make an end-run around Comp studies and make a lot it irrelevant anyway. We'll see.

How I Wrote 4 Years Ago

WHAT DOES IT MEAN to be a modernist poet at the end of the twentieth century? Perhaps no poet more clearly embodies the ethos of “late modernism” than José Angel Valente, whose final book, Fragmentos de un libro futuro, was published after his death in the final year of the millennium. This book is not only posthumous but also designed to be posthumous. According to its front flap, “José Angel Valente concibió una suerte de obra poética ‘abierta’, un libro que—como la parábola cervantina de Ginés de Pasamonte o la novela de Proust—no acabaría sino con la desaparición misma del autor” ( José Angel Valente conceived of a sort of “open” poetic work, a book that, like the Cervantine parable of Ginés de Pasamonte or Proust’s novel, would not end until the author himself disappeared; my translation here and throughout). The book’s futurity, then, lies beyond the lifespan of the poet. Yet, in relation to the avant-garde movements of the earlier part of the twentieth century, Valente’s book is decidedly nostalgic rather than forward looking. Its predominant tone is elegiac. While steeped in the culture of modernity, it ultimately exemplifies an arrière-garde rather than an avant-garde spirit. Given Valente’s pre-eminent position within the canon of late twentieth-century Spanish poetry, an examination of his work during the last two decades of his life can also reveal the degree to which the modernist aesthetic has maintained its vitality in the contemporary period.

(Mayhew 2007)

A little verbose. It's not much different from how I write now, and I don't have the distance from it to give it a grade. A-?

How I Wrote 18 Years Ago

RAMÓN de Garciasol, reviewing Claudio Rodriguez's first book, Don de la ebriedad, praised the young poet for his rugged Castilian virility: "Claudio Rodríguez puede al verso, le gobierna con mano viril" (7). When I first came upon this quote several years ago, in the course of writing a dissertation on Rodriguez's poetry, I rejected it as an uncomprehending and inappropriate response to a highly complex work of metapoetry, an absurdly gratuitous intrusion of machismo into a context in which the author's gender was simply irrelevant. While rejecting Garciasol's blatant sexism, however, I was making a highly questionable assumption of my own: that Rodriguez's poetry somehow transcended gender. By dismissing out of hand the relevance of the poet's "virility," I was committing the familiar error of equating the masculine with the universal.

It should not be surprising to learn that Claudio Rodriguez writes as a man rather than as an impossibly genderless human subject. No one would claim otherwise; in fact, the point seems too obvious to be of any real significance. In what non-trivial sense, then, does Rodriguez's poetry reflect a particularly "masculine" vision? One approach to this question would be to identify masculinity with misogyny, canvassing the poet's work for sexist attitudes. Rodriguez does occasionally identify feminine figures with negative aspects of reality, especially deceptiveness ("Brujas a mediodía," 127-30). A related avenue of investigation is the poet's relation to his mother, a figure that appears in several poems from Conjuros and Alianza y Condena. A biographically minded critic could interpret these texts in light of the poet's problematical relation to his mother.

"Claudio Rodríguez and the Writing of the Masculine Body"

This is actually a bit better, in some respects, than the article from 2000, somehow livelier. The second paragraph is a little verbose, with "it should not be surprising that..." and "seems to obvious to be of any real significance" and "a related avenue of investigation..." There's the repetition of the word "mother" at the end of this paragraph too. The last two sentences should have really been one. I'll give myself a B here. I start off well, but fade in the second paragraph.

How I Wrote 11 Years Ago

THE majority of critical studies devoted to Francisco Brines insist upon the universality of his concerns. For Carlos Bousoño, the author of an important early study, Brines's poetry, while rooted in the particularity of his experience, ultimately transcends the merely personal, suppressing details that do not pertain to his more general themes: death, the passage of time, and the transitory nature of human existence. José Olivio Jiménez, likewise, speaks of "la indiscutible universalidad de su canto hondamente elegiaco, en el que, a un tiempo, el hombre se empeña en afirmar su débil realidad y la hermosura del mundo y de la vida " (Brines, Antología poética 8). Man and his existential problems are also crucial for North-American Hispanists like Andrew Debicki and Judith Nantell: "Francisco Brines ' Insistencias en Luzbel (1977) presents the reader with highly complex and often cryptic portraits of the modes of being displayed by man as he lives and works out his existence" (Nantell, "Modos de ser" 33). Whatever their differences, these critics share an underlying commitment to one of the fundamental tenets of humanist ideology: the universality of human experience. Thus Brines's poetry, in the eyes of its most influential interpreters, comes to epitomize the values of humanist existentialism.

From "Francisco Brines and the Humanist Closet," 2000.

I'd like to say I've improved substantially, but I don't find much to criticize here. I use the word "study" (studies) in the first two sentences. I would try to avoid that now. I don't like the word "important" very much. The phrase "whatever their differences" sounds a little vague to me as well. Did I mean that they were different because some were Spaniards and some Americans?

The rhetorical effect I was after was to cite particularly banal or over-general statements by other critics in order make my point, that critics should have approached him in more particularist, less general ways. At the same time, I was not overly disrespectful of these critics. Since I am arguing, in the rest of the article, for a homoerotic reading, I wanted to find a lot of quotes with the word "man" / "hombre." I'll give myself a B or B- here. It is clear and achieves the effect of hanging the other critics by their own rope, but it is not particularly elegant.