HSB’s reading list for 03/01/2009
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Such, Such Was Eric Blair – The New York Review of Books
And George Orwell? It would surprise, and doubtless irritate, him to discover that since his death in 1950 he has moved implacably toward NT status. He is interpretable, malleable, ambassadorial, and patriotic. He denounced the Empire, which pleases the left; he denounced communism, which pleases the right. He warned us against the corrupting effect on politics and public life of the misuse of language, which pleases almost everyone. He said that “good prose is like a window pane,” which pleases those who, despite living in the land of Shakespeare and Dickens, mistrust “fancy” writing. He distrusted anyone who was too “clever.” (This is a key English suspicion, most famously voiced in 1961 when Lord Salisbury, a stalwart of the imperialist Tory right, denounced Iain Macleod, secretary of state for the colonies and member of the new reforming Tory left, as “too clever by half.”)
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TPMMuckraker | Talking Points Memo | Jindal Admits Katrina Story Was False
This is no minor difference. Jindal’s presence in Lee’s office during the crisis itself was a key element of the story’s intended appeal, putting him at the center of the action during the maelstrom. Just as important, Jindal implied that his support for the sheriff helped ensure the rescue went ahead. But it turns out Jindal wasn’t there at the key moment, and played no role in making the rescue happen.
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A majority of African-Americans surveyed in a nationwide poll this week reported feeling “deeply disturbed” and “more than a little weirded out” by all the white people now smiling at them.
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Aquatic Sex: Pregnant Fish Fossils Found – CBS News
The fossilized remains of two pregnant fish indicate that sex as we know it – fertilization of eggs inside a female – took place as much as 30 million years earlier than previously thought, researchers said Thursday.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
HSB’s reading list for 02/17/2009
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Ben Smith’s Blog: Gay snipers stalk WV – Politico.com
The ad, which targets Christian voters, calls for a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage, something that’s already in place in a majority of states. “A weekend trip to SF for a WV same-sex couple, plus a pro-bono ACLU attorney, could easily become a nightmare for marriage in West Virginia,” says the narrator.
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Holy parody Batman! I just saw over at the Fake Chuck Westfall blog (read *fake* Chuck Westfall blog folks, sorta like that *fake* Steve Jobs blog from a while back) that Canon Inc. and some lawyerish type named Douglas E. Mirell from Loeb & Loeb are trying to shut poor fake Chuck down.
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Wallace Stegner on Profanity – The Atlantic (Fiction Issue 2005)
Words are not obscene: naming things is a legitimate verbal act. And “frank” does not mean “vulgar,” any more than “improper” means “dirty.” What vulgar does mean is “common”; what improper means is “unsuitable.” Under the right circumstances, any word is proper. But when any sort of word, especially a word hitherto taboo and therefore noticeable, is scattered across a page like chocolate chips through a tollhouse cookie, a real impropriety occurs. The sin is not the use of an “obscene” word; it is the use of a loaded word in the wrong place or in the wrong quantity. It is the sin of false emphasis, which is not a moral but a literary lapse, related to sentimentality. It is the sin of advertisers who so plaster a highway with neon signs that you can’t find the bar or liquor store you’re looking for. Like any excess, it quickly becomes comic.
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Here’s how it happened. My column reported on a startling development at the United Nations. The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights has always had the job of investigating governments who forcibly take the fundamental human right to free speech from their citizens with violence. But in the past year, a coalition of religious fundamentalist states has successfully fought to change her job description. Now, she has to report on “abuses of free expression” including “defamation of religions and prophets.” Instead of defending free speech, she must now oppose it.
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Why Wikipedia’s Policy to Blacklist Blogs is Outdated and Wrong – ReadWriteWeb
This week we received an email from a reader telling us that he’d tried to add a link to ReadWriteWeb onto a Wikipedia article, only to get the message: “The following link has triggered our spam protection filter: http://www.readwriteweb.com. Either that exact link, or a portion of it (typically the root domain name) is currently blacklisted.” After a bit of investigation, we discovered that our site had been blacklisted by Wikipedia in mid-2008 and labeled as ’spam’! There is no explanation on Wikipedia as to why this happened. We certainly don’t think we’ve done anything that would justify being blacklisted. So after some emailing and twittering, we found out that the way to challenge this blacklisting was to make our case on this Wikipedia page.
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On Darwin’s Birthday, Only 4 in 10 Believe in Evolution
On the eve of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, a new Gallup Poll shows that only 39% of Americans say they “believe in the theory of evolution,” while a quarter say they do not believe in the theory, and another 36% don’t have an opinion either way. These attitudes are strongly related to education and, to an even greater degree, religiosity.
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The Shorty Awards: Why Nerds Hate Twitter | Epicenter from Wired.com
It’s official. No longer the domain of the digerati, the Twitter short messaging platform has woven itself into regular peoples’ lives to help with practical matters — getting in shape, picking stocks, raising funds for a Senate run or selling cruise ship tickets. For proof, one need look no further than Wednesday night’s Shorty Awards, which honored the best Twitterers as determined by a popular vote.
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Hit & Run > Sheriff Lott’s New Toy – Reason Magazine
The Richland County, South Carolina Sheriff’s Department (that’s them above) just obtained an armored personnel carrier, complete with a belt-fed, .50-cal turreted machine gun. Sheriff Leon Lott has charmingly named the vehicle “The Peacemaker,” and insists that using a caliber of ammunition that even the U.S. military is reluctant to use against human targets (it’s generally reserved for use against armored vehicles) will “save lives.”
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
HSB’s reading list for 02/10/2009
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Mininova – One Million Torrents Strong | TorrentFreak
For the first time in its four year existence, Mininova now has a million torrent files stored on its servers. These meta-data files are spread out over 10 categories on this BitTorrent giant, with movies and music representing more than half of all the torrents.
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Obama Stumps for Stimulus in a City Hit Hard by Downturn – NYTimes.com
President Obama took his case for an $800 billion economic recovery package to one of the most distressed places in America on Monday as he opened a series of campaign-style events intended to press Congress to approve the plan by week’s end.
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How to Write for the Web (Full Paper)
Studies of how users read on the Web found that they do not actually read: instead, they scan the text. A study of five different writing styles found that a sample Web site scored 58% higher in measured usability when it was written concisely, 47% higher when the text was scannable, and 27% higher when it was written in an objective style instead of the promotional style used in the control condition and many current Web pages. Combining these three changes into a single site that was concise, scannable, and objective at the same time resulted in 124% higher measured usability.
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Obama Has Upper Hand in Stimulus Fight
The American public gives President Barack Obama a strong 67% approval rating for the way in which he is handling the government’s efforts to pass an economic stimulus bill, while the Democrats and, in particular, the Republicans in Congress receive much lower approval ratings of 48% and 31%, respectively.
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Commonweal – A review of religion, politics and culture
Don’t expect triumphalists to recant or apologize. Yet their time has passed. The Age of Triumphalism has ended. The Age of Muddling Through has commenced. In this new era, over which Barack Obama will preside, grandiose ideas will take a back seat to figuring out what actually works and calculating how much we can afford. Instead of looking to transform the world, the imperative of this new age is to preserve what’s left and restore what’s been lost. The nattering about the United States as an almighty superpower has ceased. For this at least we should be grateful.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Department of Dumb-ass White, er, Right-Wing Hacks
This is quite possibly the stupidest and most embarrassingly retarded post I’ve ever read on the NRO; and that’s saying something:
Cinderella vs. the Barracuda by Jonah Goldberg on National Review Online
My gods, the man is still on about Sarah Fucking Palin! Better, and funnier, writing about SFP can be found here, utterly without the fake appeals to faux feminism.
Now, I know the comparison between Palin and Caroline Kennedy is not perfect.
Calling perfect anything about this writing assignment would make anyone choke.
Hey Goldberg! Look what I did! I didn’t split the object off from my verb with a big-ass clause. I therefore avoided ambiguity and bizarre sentence structures, completely unlike what you’ve done, oh, about a billion times over the course of your “writing” career.
Give the Senate seat to Caroline, fer frak’s sake; and let SFP go back to presiding over the slaughter of turkeys.
File this post also under: These people have jobs? or They pay him for that?
On blogging: Andrew Sullivan defines and celebrates a new form of writing
As the author of the most popular single-person political blog on the planet, Andrew Sullivan oughta know a thing or two about what blogging means and where it’s going. I don’t even know him and I’m proud of him. And jealous! I wanna be on Bill Maher’s show!
Along with his indispensable and profoundly moral essay on the abolition of torture, I have a hunch that this essay, but maybe not the glasses he’s wearing, will stand the test of time. An introductory quote:
For centuries, writers have experimented with forms that evoke the imperfection of thought, the inconstancy of human affairs, and the chastening passage of time. But as blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that’s enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral, and sometimes brutal. And make no mistake: it heralds a golden era for journalism.
Emphasis mine.
Blog on.
Get some help
Bryan has chosen not to publish a comment of mine in which I recommended he read a George Orwell essay called “On Writing,” published in the New Criterion, and available as a digital download from Amazon. My comment was written in response to an execrable, pretentious piece of garbage he wrote as an ode of sorts to one of Prague’s most annoying rent boys — the one least deserving of an ode, IMNSHO. However, anyone could benefit from what Orwell had to say so I’ll repurpose my comment here.
Here’s just a small example of Bryan’s badness:
Stain and Guilt find their sure holds slippery; Willfulness, Rage and raw, aching Need cease from their chip, chip, chipping away at Self esteem. Shame and Spite cease their merciless whisperings that fall like the ceaseless drip, drip, drip that digs pits of lies and lust and vengeance that can never be filled.
[He's talking about sleep in that passage, by the way.] Unless you’re writing in German, or you’re, ya know, Dante or someone, just keep your nouns in lowercase, fer fuck’s sake. Better yet, write what you really mean, and clearly. Unless, of course, you want to sound like a grandiloquent sophomore (in high school, not university) trying to impress his English teacher. Regardless, that’s not even the worst of it. The post is full of crap like:
Or with a practiced and critical eye that one cursed day flashed like a scythe as it’s [sic] fell blade, sharp as betrayal and final as death severed his future like a fruit judged ripe for the market.
Never mind that’s a sentence fragment.
However, the real reason why this post is so awful is not that it’s written badly. It’s fake. All the verbiage belies the assertion that whom the author wants you to care about is a young boy forced to sell his body to survive. What comes across most forcefully is the author’s love of his own choice of words. Whom Bryan wants you to notice — and here I’ll ignore my own advice given above — is BRYAN THE WRITER. Or as Bryan might put it, he has: “… inflict[ed] self upon the world.” I wouldn’t have put it that way, and I don’t think Orwell would have either, but there ya go.
Bryan’s blog has plenty of examples of decent writing, and good blog writing. In fact, just do a random search on his blog and you’ll no doubt find one. My personal favorite is when he wrote from the perspective of the house dog, Candy. Part of the success of the post stems from writing from the perspective of another person, er, dog, and making himself just another character.
In addition to On Writing, linked to above, I also recommend George Orwell: 12 Writing Tips, reproduced here on Gotham Writers Workshop. Relating to the post in question, but also to Bryan’s writing in general, I’ll quote two secondary tips here:
- Could I put it more shortly?
- Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
The answers to both questions in this case, and in many others, are yes and yes.
Other instructive reads are Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, which I suspect Bryan wouldn’t read simply because of the title, and The Economist’s style guide, which I couldn’t find a link to. Whenever my prose starts to turn too purple, I pick up a copy of the The Economist as a corrective. The Economist may not be the best English-language magazine in the world, although it’s among the best, but it may well be the best-written. The writing style is clear and well, economical. A writer couldn’t go far wrong emulating it. Even pithy bloggers.
Blogged with Flock
word count of this post: 615
character assassination quotient, on a scale of 1-10: 2
A blog plug, of sorts
I try to promote blogs I like and often bloggers I like but just as often I link to blogs with poor writing because that blog or blogger has been nice to me.
Sometimes, however, I surf onto some really bad writing in a popular blog — read that as: more popular than mine — and I just can’t hold my tongue. Hardly ever this bad though. An example:
The ocean’s thunder is like a symphony to my lyrics: “Christopher, I love you.”
He looks at me, feeling weeps from his eyes.
I mean, wow, I’m dizzy from my own eye-rolls. I really believe that overly sentimental writing does an injustice to the sentiment; that is, if the feeling is real and worth sharing. What’s really shitty about a metaphor like “the ocean is a symphony to my lyrics” is that, with a tiny bit of thought, it’s so fucking phony. Really? The ocean’s thunder really is a symphony to your feelings or are you just grabbing at cliches in order to bolster a flimsy idea. Which, of course, just makes it worse.
However, I skimmed the rest of the blog and what few posts I read seemed fine. He’s been blogging a long time so he’s not a newbie. Obviously a smart guy even though his sentiments tend toward the treacly.
I’m sure I’ve posted my share of purple prose and I’d like to hear from regular readers what they’ve thought was particularly bad. I’ve probably prompted my own share of eye-rolling myself. It’s almost inevitable when you don’t have an editor or at least a second pair of eyes. A blogger is always too close to her writing.
But, Rick, consider yourself edited on this one. Yuck.
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