Perhaps it is a great movie I don't know. I may never know. I suspect I'm not going to see it until it ends up on small screens. But THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA II has this to its credit. It has inspired some fine writing amongst critics. I'll just quote here one example, from SALON, where senior culture writer Coleman Spilde raves about it. But “The Devil Wears Prada 2” isn’t here just to make easy money by force-feeding audiences IP slop in the form of Miranda Priestly one-liners; it’s using its existence to issue a mass-scale warning about the future, stressing the worth in fighting tooth and nail to preserve what we hold dear — in cinema, in publishing, in every element of life being disemboweled by rapacious tech bros in fleece vests. Dug.
Posts
just found something in the Guardian's style guide that had never before occurred to me. The entry on the use of the names of people quoted refers to the situation in which it is thought necessary, in a news report, to introduce someone to ones readers with a description beyond the name. In a story about a football [soccer!] game, one might write, "Paul Heckingbottom, the Sheffield United manager, said...." Why the commas, though? Here is the interesting bit. Why not just "Paul Heckingbottom the Sheffield United manager said..."? TIL that commas around the name indicate that there is only one person with this function. If the team were managed by committee, and each member of the committee had the title "manager," then one might well write "Paul Heckingbottom the Sheffield United manager said...." More plausibly, and shifting to political coverage, "The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, said" is proper. But there are a lot of former L...
I've heard that GE Moore once said that whenever he wrote anything down, he saw that it was either false or true but only if qualified. But then when he wrote the qualification down, he would see that the same was true of THAT. Much of PRINCIPIA ETHICA reads like what would eventually be produced by someone who has that sort of writer's block. A, but only when B, except that B is not strictly always necessary, in circumstances such as C, but there might be some ambiguity in that statement of C, so .... And I feel simpatico. As I've mentioned before, Moore is the great philosopher whose death comes closest to coinciding with my own birth. I was born at a moment when Moore only had six days to live. This story about his unquenchable self-qualifications rather strengthens the case that I am he, despite the brief overlap when we must have shared a soul, ebbing from one body and flowing into the other.
The cozy home sat at odds to the primary compass points. The front of the building faced northeast, so its corners (and the corners of each of the rooms) faced off to the various proper compass points. There stood a large television stand in the eastern corner with an even larger (though thin) television stretching out of the edges of both sides of it. One of those "big screen" teevees that really ought to be hanging on a wall but isn't. Two chairs to the right of the television, framing an electric fireplace with a mantle of seasonal decorations. To the right of THAT, on the northern corner, a very plush older Easy Chair with a wooden level on the side to lean it back or stand it up again. What should be the wall on the northwestern side of the room is mostly a doorway to the dining room. The contents of THAT we leave out of account for now. To the right of the wide door, an abstract painting. To the left, the thermostat (actually two thermostats, of different vi...
"Students like to say that they stage no confrontations because people avoid confrontations in modern life. “Modern life is so lonely,” they say. This is laziness. It’s the writer’s job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all. If a writer can’t or won’t do that, he should withdraw from the trade." - Kurt Vonnegut One of my Facebook friends posted this quote recently. I like it, and that will have to be my complete excuse for including it here.
The Jan/Feb issue of Men's Journal includes a piece of salesmanship on behalf of the tourist industry in the city of Miami, Florida. Why am I slumming for blog topics? My love of paradox. Anyway, the gist of this piece is its effort to bathe the already tourist-friendly, and tourist-befriended, city in the waters of sophistication. The writer, Mark Healy, is not to be held responsible for the headline or subhead. The writer never is. In this case, though, I submit that the headline fairly expresses the gist of Healy's lead paragraph. So I'll start with it. "Miami Gets Real: America's greatest urban beach has evolved beyond its cheesy South Beach years with an international art scene, serious cocktails, and food that's worth the flight." The angle of the story, then, is that you - a traveler sufficiently sophisticated to be looking to Men's Journal for guidance -- are too high-brow to have been taken in by the cheesy look of, say, The Birdcag...
I'm thinking of the TV show now, not the actual theory. One snippet of dialogue from an early episode sticks in my mind as a fine example of concise writing and character development. In the character's world, they are fans of a reality teevee show about aspiring supermodels, and the various beautiful young women aspiring to that status all live together, "Big Brother" style, in a house in southern California. One character, Howard, is determined that he will find the location of that house and visit the supermodels within the week. The dialogue (I'm working from memory) goes something like this: LEONARD: You'll never be able to get in there, Howard. HOWARD: That's what they said to Neil Armstrong about getting on the moon. SHELDON: No one said anything of the sort to Neil Armstrong. An entire nation spent a decade getting him there. HOWARD: [Affecting a Kennedy accent]: Well, my fellow Americans, before this week is out, we will put a...
Working writers, aspiring writers, and struggling writers have often encountered the hint, sometimes even phrased as a rule, "Eliminate adjectives." Usually Hemingway is invoked just before or after that is propounded. Since the first word of this blog entry served as its first adjective, you might already have grasped that I don't take that hint to heart. But don't listen to me. I'll invoke a higher authority: Roald Dahl. "He had a fine white mustache and bushy white eyebrows and a wrinkly pink face." That is how Dahl describes the title character in his short story, "The Umbrella Man." That sentence breaks at least three of the rules associated with the authoritative manuals. It uses a weak predicate (the verb is a form of "to have," which is almost as bad as "to be"!) It says something in a lot of words that it might have said in fewer ("he was old but still healthy" might do it for a minimalist). And i...
Carl Watner has written the front-page piece for the 1st quarter issue of The Voluntaryist, a periodical he edits. He issues it each quarter of each year in the hope of advancing the cause of freedom in the world. I used to know something about The Voluntaryist when I was editing The Pragmatist . I later lost track of it and have only recently made the rediscovery. It isn't "The Voluntarist," by the way. The "y" is integral to the thought. Anyway, Watner has written a front page piece on the freedom to choose your own money. I recommend it all, and I will quote only a bit of it here. "The Federal Reserve System will onlybe replaced permanently if people come to understand the morality and practicality of a voluntary system. When a sufficient number of them recognize its merits, then instead of abolishing the Federal Reserve System, they will simply abandon it in favor of using better money. At that point, laws supporting the Federal Reserve would...
One of my Facebook friends posted this exchange recently. I like it so I'll simply repeat it, with thanks to Leon Gettler and, behind him, to the Paris Review . Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do? Ernest Hemingway: I rewrote the ending of "Farewell to Arms", the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied. Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that stumped you? Ernest Hemingway: Getting the words right.
"The University of Kinshasa sits on a hilltop near the edge of the city, reachable by an hour's taxi ride through the broken streets, the smoggy sprawl, the snarled traffic of vans and busses and pushcarts, past the street-side vendors of funerary wreaths, the cell-phone-recharge kiosks, the fruit markets, the meat markets, the open-air hardware stores, the tire-repair stores and cement brokers, the piles of sand and gravel and garbage, the awesome decrepitude of a postcolonial metropolis shaped by eight decades of Belgian opportunism, three decades of dictatorial misrule and egregious theft, and then a decade of war, but filled with 10 million striving people, some of whom are dangerous thugs (as in all cities) and most of whom are amiable, hopeful, and friendly." Say that in one breath! Spillover is a recently published volume by David Quammen , a piece of popularized science quite analogous to Microbe Hunters , the classic history-of-medicine book . Quammen ...