The Art Of Editing

An article from Salon.com

Sound Familiar?

The following is taken from George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," 1946.

(If you're interested in words in general & not just how they relate to politics, I recommend the whole essay, which can be found Here. It takes a while to get going, but once it does it's very good)

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

"While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

________________

A few clicks & scrolls on www.whitehouse.gov showed the following:

The President's proposed standard deduction for health insurance will reform the tax code to make private health insurance more affordable and to level the playing field so those who buy health insurance on their own get the same tax advantage as those who get health insurance through their jobs. For those who remain unable to afford coverage, the President's Affordable Choices Initiative will help eligible States assist their low-income and hard-to-insure citizens in purchasing private health insurance.

President Bush's top priority is the safety and security of the American people. Though America and its allies are safer since 9/11, we are not yet safe. We have important challenges ahead as we wage a long-term battle not just against terrorists, but against the ideology that supports their agenda.

"The men and women of the Coast Guard know how to navigate the storm. We're counting on you to help America weather the challenges that lie ahead. As you begin your Coast Guard careers, you can approach the future with confidence, because our nation has faced dangerous enemies before, and emerged victorious every time. Terrorists can try to kill the innocent, but they cannot kill the desire for liberty that burns in the hearts of millions across the earth. The power of freedom defeated the ideologies of fascism and communism in the last century, and freedom will defeat the hateful ideologies of the terrorists in this century."

President George W. Bush
May 23, 2007

The Federal government will continue to provide assistance and guidance, but the people of the Gulf Coast and their elected leaders must drive the effort to rebuild their lives and their communities.

"The law allows our intelligence and law enforcement officials to continue to share information. It allows them to continue to use tools against terrorists that they used against -- that they use against drug dealers and other criminals. It will improve our nation's security while we safeguard the civil liberties of our people. The legislation strengthens the Justice Department so it can better detect and disrupt terrorist threats. And the bill gives law enforcement new tools to combat threats to our citizens from international terrorists to local drug dealers."

-- President George W. Bush
March 9, 2006

And just for fun:

"The world is seeing the promise and potential of the peaceful use of nuclear energy. I emphasize that word, peaceful use, because one of my predecessors, Dwight David Eisenhower..."
--President George W. Bush

$1.50 Find

Bought a copy of The Bhagavad Gita today for $1.50 outside of Washington Square Park. I've been wanting to read it for a while. I'm glad I had $1.50 on me. I'm on page two, so nothing to report yet, other than the price, where I bought it, my desire (for some time now) to read it, & my joy at having enough money to buy it.

Capital post, young man!

Read It

I've started reading Roddy Doyle's book, A Star Called Henry*. I'm only fifty pages in, but it is amazing. You. Yes, you. Go buy it and read it. Then, when we are done reading it, we can talk about it. Or, you can read this when I post on it again, and you can comment. Or, you can have no interaction with me at all after reading it. Any way you go, just read it. He's good.



*The same friend who gave me AAK&C gave me this book. If you don't have a friend who provides you with really good books to read, you should get one.

Hey Michael Chabon, I Get It, You're Vocabulary Is Bigger Than Mine OR What This Entry Presupposes Is...Maybe He Doesn't Need All Those Words

I'm reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay right now and have been for a while—lay off, it's 636 pages. I promised myself that after reading Ulysses over the winter I would tackle something light, something that I could breeze through and take the feeling of satisfaction quickly and move on to something else. But then a friend gave me AAK&C and it had a picture of New York on the cover, and I was coming to New York, so I jumped in and got hooked.

I quickly noticed that this Chabon guy liked to toss around his weight in words the way the guys in Seattle’s Pike Place Fish Market toss Copper River Salmon. Early and often. It’s less his vocabulary—which is huge—and more his elongated sentences, his immense detail, that at times distract from the story. Like I said, I was hooked from the beginning, and a lesser writer wouldn’t be able to hold a reader’s attention for as long as Chabon does trying to pull the same tricks. A reader would label it instantly as too flashy coming from the pen of someone less talented. Still, as good as he seems to be, some of the sentences in this book become exercises in deliberation. Especially in the YouTube society in which we find ourselves living; you have to work to stay with these sentences. Which is probably a good thing. We should all settle down from time to time and focus a bit more. However, as I come to the end of page 212 and reach the following two sentences, I can’t help but feel as though I’ve been at this book an awfully long time to only be on page 212, and maybe, just maybe, Mr. Chabon could, at time, get to his point a bit quicker:

"There was a long hemicircular reception desk opposite the entry, faced with black marble and ribbed with Saturn’s rings of glass, behind which three black-coated firemen, their faces concealed by heavy welder’s masks, crouched, poking around carefully with broom handles. On the wall over the reception desk, there was a painting of a lithe masked giant in a dark blue union suit, his arms outspread in ecstatic embrace as he burst from a writhing nest of thick iron chains that entangled his loins, belly, and chest."

It may not seem like much reading it here, standing alone. But when it comes on the heels of other paired expository sentences, the result can be a bit draining. A few pages prior:

"At the time, he had taken note only of the charming scene: the two boys lying shirtless and barefoot, in a swinging hammock stretched between a pair of unblighted elms, in a dappled bend dexter of sunlight, their downy legs tangled together, the restless attention of each wholly absorbed in a crudely stapled smear of violent color labeled Superman. Love had followed the subsequent conquest by the strapping, tights-wearing hero of the newspapers, of cereal boxes, and lately of the Mutual Broadcasting System, and was not unknown to cast an eye toward Superman’s funny-page adventures."

Does Picador (the publisher) have editors on staff? The two boys were lying in a hammock reading Superman and now their uncle, Love, reads the comic himself. Obviously we wouldn’t want to read that. I am not calling for a death to Mr. Chabon’s creative use of language. But maybe an imprisonment here and there of some of the words he knows. Just chain ‘em up for a short time and work with the ones remaining. These boys most likely never return to the story. Possibly we could have brushed over them in a few words. The fact that they were reading Superman is the important point here, but we have gathered from many other places throughout the book that all teen and pre-teen boys were reading Superman at the time. This is just another example to make us understand the culture of comics at the time. And all I’m saying is maybe we don’t need another example. And if we get one, maybe we don’t need to know every detail about the example.

Again, it probably doesn’t seem like much with only two excerpts, and I am most likely coming across as a lazy reader, which may be true (I don't know if you noticed above where I mentioned finishing Ulysses). But stack thousands of these sentences on top of each other and the result is a heavy book. A book that could possibly have lost some physical weight somewhere along the way and not have lost any of its cerebral weight along with it. And, if nothing else, at least I’d be more than a third of the way through it.