The Oncoming Hope

Teddy Roosevelt once chased some bandits down a frozen river, captured them, and then found himself (and them) trapped on the frozen river for eight days. Being a forward-thinking man, he'd brought along Matthew Arnold's poems and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

In the course of being stuck, he not only managed to keep watch on his prisoners, but read both books completely, and even wrote a letter to his sister reviewing the book. ALL WHILE STUCK ON A FROZEN RIVER WITH THREE DANGEROUS BANDITS WITH NO FOOD BUT DRY FLOUR.

Sorry, I just had a case of the vapours ::fans self::

Ahem.

Basically he shares my essential reaction to the book, which might be summed up as "Anna! Stop being so cray-cray! Oh yay, thank goodness for the sanity of Levin."

Anyway, I'll let him speak for himself:

“I took Anna Karenina along for the trip and have read it through with very great interest. I hardly know whether to call it a very bad book or not. There are two entirely distinct stories in it; the connection between Levine’s story and Anna’s is of the slightest and need have existed at all. Levine’s and Kitty’s history is not only very powerfully and naturally told, but it is also perfectly healthy. Anna’s most certainly is not, though of great and sad interest; she is portrayed as being a prey to the most violent passions, and subject to melancholia, and her reasoning power is so unbalanced that she could not possibly be described otherwise than as in a certain sense insane. Her character is curiously contradictory; bad as she was however she was not to me nearly as repulsive as her brother Stiva; Uronsky had some excellent points. I like poor Dolly, but she should have been less of a patient Griselda with her husband. You know how I abominate the Griselda type. Tolstoi is a great writer. Do you notice how he never comments on the actions of his personages? He relates what they thought or did without any remark whatever as to whether it was good or bad, as Thucydides wrote history--a fault which tends to give his work an unmoral rather than an immoral tone; together with the sadness so characteristic of Russian writers. I was much pleased with the insight into Russian life."

Check out the original letter.

If you want more of an account of the actual bandit-chase, you can find it here in Teddy's own words.

Most importantly, read Edmund Morris's amazing biography.

He says commandments for teachers, I say commandments for life. You should be so lucky with your own education (with rare exceptions, I was not).

Bertrand Russell's "A Liberal Decalogue" (1951)

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

2. Do not think it worthwhile to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.

3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.

4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavour to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper argument than the latter.

9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

Russell's rules are as effective as commandments for good thinking as for teaching, and it's incredibly how frequently they're violated. Which particularly touches your life? Share in the comments.

(h/t to Marginal Revolution)

Oh, I love the internet. Saul Bellow, writing in ye old New York Times, takes overzealous literary students to task for failing to see the forests for the trees, and he does so in fine form.

"Deep reading has gone very far," Bellow writes. "It has becomes dangerous to literature."

Bellow continues by illustrating his point with a story that cuts directly to the heart of the devoted grad student.

"'Why, sir,' the student asks, 'does Achilles drag the body of Hector around the walls of Troy?'

'That sounds like a stimulating question. Most interesting. I'll bite,' says the professor.

'Well, you see, sir, the 'Iliad' is full of circles - shields, chariot wheels and other round figures. And you know what Plato said about circles. The Greeks were all mad for geometry.'

'Bless your crew-cut head,' says the professor, 'for such a beautiful thought. You have exquisite sensibility. Your approach is both deep and serious. Still I always believed that Achilles did it because he was so angry.'"

Buuuuuuuuuuuurn. That student may not be the best example, as his analysis seems reasonable and serious. But beware the students of Moby Dick.

Are you a Marxist? Then Herman Melville's Pequod in Moby Dick can be a factory, Ahab the manager, the crew the working class. Is your point of view religious? The Pequod sailed on Christmas morning, a floating cathedral headed south. Do you follow Freud or Jung? Then your interpretations may be rich and multitudinous.

I recently had a new explanation of Moby Dick from the young man in charge of an electronic brain. "Once and for all," he said. "That whale is everybody's mother wallowing in her watery bed. Ahab has the Oedipus complex and wants to slay the hell out of her."

Yikes. Bellow proceeds to excoriate the "dabbler" in deep reading, warning them to "be sure that your seriousness is indeed high seriousness and not, God forbid, low seriousness."

Personally, I long for a new day when the New York Times pretends to any sort of seriousness whatsoever.

Go read the whole thing. The complete article is available here: 
http://mail.baylorschool.org/~dpadilla/Bellow_DeepReaders.pdf

Why do I love this word? Partly because it's appearance bears NO RESEMBLANCE WHATSOEVER to its actual meaning. If you look at it, the logical conclusion might be a type of explosion or, at the very least, a verb.

"I'm gonna interrobang your face!"

But no, it is in fact that most mundane of things: a punctuation mark, and the first new punctuation mark in two centuries! It was invented in 1962 by an ad agency: Martin K Speckter Associates. Other optional names for this most well-named of punctuation marks included "rhet", "exclarotive," and "exclamaquest." (I'm on a quest for EXCLAMATION!!!)

It' a punctuation mark that's particularly well suited to our modern culture. It adds visual emphasis to emails, tweets, and what not:

"She kissed him?!?"

Oddly, it's also well-suited for our new modern speech, where no one wants to commit to any statement that they make. Imagine the valley girl uptalk?!? That's the interrobang. It's used for rhetorical questions and, in chess notation, stands for: a dubious yet good move?!

Here's some notes on the reception of the interrobang back in the day:

The “?” at the end of “How do you do?” doesn’t always indicate just the tone of voice a writer wants to convey. The proposed interrobang, which for mechanical reasons cannot be here displayed, would indicate more accurately the degree of pleasure, curiosity and maybe surprise —all in one — the writer intended “How do you do” to deliver. An interrobang would be just right, also, to punctuate a rhetorical accusation, such as “Who forgot to put gas in the car?” where a plain question mark alone just isn’t adequate.

Wall Street Journal, 6 Apr. 1962.

And the funniest comment about the interrobang (care of http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-int1.htm):

I seriously doubt if we are going to solve the problem by creating new punctuation marks. That only clutters up a language more. ... Besides, let in one man’s interrobang and you let in every nut who is trying to express the incredibility of modern life. They’ll start hanging around typographers’ shops hoping to get their own symbols into the language to solve their own emotional needs.

Life, 15 Nov. 1968. The writer, William Zinsser, jokingly suggested amperstop (&;) “to catch that delicate moment when you want to say something more and then think better of it” and the percentoquote (%”) “to suggest that the person being quoted should be only partially believed.”

Now that's harsh. Lucky for him, the American public found drugs, alcohol and sexuality to fulfil their emotional needs after 1968.

In type, it is meant to be one character:

Though, it is acceptable (though not stylistically preferred) to use long strings of ?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!.

Wouldn't you agree that REVEEEEEEEEEEEEEEENGE! would be a very different show indeed if it were REVENGE?!?

While it's common for grammarians and prescriptivists to blame everyone from blacks to women to class distinctions on the erosion of English grammar, they ignore the biggest culprit: modern business-speak. If real life were twitter, I believe most of us would instantly unfollow anyone who uses the word "synergy".

Allow me to add another word to the unfollow canon: "leverage" as a verb. If you think I am merely being pedantic, consider the following. Would you say "I can't managementate my flock of children"? "Don't cry over spillaged milk?"

Of course you wouldn't. You know why? There's already perfectly good root verbs: to lever, to manage, to spill.

Not only is leverage a grammatically obtuse word, it's completely meaningless. When you leverage a project, what are you doing? Are you beginning a project, ending it, or ramping it up? Are you selling it? Are you dancing upon its grave? It's meaningless doublespeak, to obscure the fact that the speaker either lacks clear information or is wilfully misleading the listener.

In a nutshell, unless you work as a carpenter, a homebuilder, a lever manufacturer, or a financial professional, there's little reason to use "to lever" as a word, and even less reason to use "leverage."

I leave you with a quote from 30 Rock:

Liz: "Cross-promotional...deal mechanics...revenue stream...jargon...synergy!"

Jack: "That was the best presentation I've ever heard."

Oncoming Hope, out. Argue amongst yourselves in the comments.

Hi everyone, and welcome to my latest (and first) issue of Sunday meditations, a chance for us to discuss fun, random things in the comments.

Today's question: what is your #1 writerly device? Meaning, some trope, image, theme or figure of speech that keeps showing up in your work, unbidden, unknown to you until the editing stage? And would you give it up if you had to?

I'll get the ball rolling: mine is the humble semicolon. I've yet to meet two sentences that can't be truncated and rejoined.