Use and Abuse

Rohan Maltzen writes a memo to Marjorie Gerber about Gerber's new book The Use and Abuse of Literature:

You are caught, I think, in the tension many of us feel between our theoretical commitment to an inclusive approach to literature (some aspects of which you discuss in your chapter on the literary "canon") and our deep appreciation for the aesthetic and intellectual richness of certain texts. As professionals, we have learned that this appreciation is itself conditioned by ideas about what "literature" is and how to measure its greatness. You celebrate close reading and lament a tendency (of which you give no specific examples, which is a problem) for "the historical fact [to take] precedence over the literary work." However, close reading works best—as you glancingly acknowledge when you tie it to Archibald MacLeish's lines "A poem should not mean / But be"—on texts that are verbally complex, ambiguous, and densely metaphorical, rather than ones that work through affect, exposition, even didacticism, texts that address philosophical arguments or social problems rather than turning inward towards language. You praise "the rich allusiveness, deep ambivalence, and powerful slipperiness that is language in action," but once we acknowledge that different standards are also important—once we admit that, say, Elizabeth Gaskell, Felicia Hemans, or Walter Scott (none of whom are particularly ambivalent or slippery) deserve our critical attention as much as Herbert and Donne—we also need to accept other standards, other ways to appreciate and measure a text's significance. Ironically, when you abandon your relativism about what literature is, your anxiety about its reductive "uses" leads you to define it so narrowly that writers who don't think literature is "useless," who use it themselves for clear and potent purposes (what about Pope, or Dickens?) might seem to be ruled out—or against. Pace Keats, not all poets embrace "negative capability," and Henry James is hardly the last word on the relationship between morality and the novel.

Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson

I must admit some surprise that the best book I've read about judgement, taste, and aesthetics is a book about Céline Dion. Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste is not only thoughtful and well-informed, it is also compelling in every sense of the word. (It's part of the ever-surprising and wonderfully odd 33 1/3 series from Continuum Books.)

I don't know where I first heard about Wilson's book -- probably via Bookforum -- but it's gotten plenty of press, including a mention by James Franco at the Oscars and an interview of Wilson by Stephen Colbert. The concept of the book is seductive: Wilson, a Canadian music critic and avowed Céline-hater, spends a year trying to figure out why she is so popular and what his hatred of her says about himself. I kept away from the book for a little while because I thought it couldn't possibly live up to its premise, and that in all likelihood it was more stunt than analysis. Nonetheless, the premise kept attracting me, because I am fascinated by the concept of taste and I, too, find Dion's music to be the sonic equivalent of a Thomas Kinkade painting.

What makes Wilson's approach so effective and insightful is that it avoids the fanboy defensiveness marring everything from internet discussions to scholarly studies such as Peter Swirski's From Lowbrow to Nobrow. Wilson isn't grinding axes or settling scores; he's more interested in exploration than proclamation, more inclined toward maps than manifestos. The result is one of the few books I know that is as likely to expand its readers' view of the world as it is to provide the choir with an appealing sermon.

Alright Already!

Loath as I am to disagree with John Scalzi, I must note a difference of opinion with regard to the word "alright", which John proclaims is not even a word. And he thinks it's ugly.

Whether it is ugly is a matter of taste, and I shan't argue that. Whether it is a word, though ... well, it's definitely a word, since it has boundaries and is used to convey meaning, though I will grant that most American dictionaries of English do not accept it as part of formal, standard English yet.

I will also say here that I use the word "alright" much more often than I use the words "all right", and when an occasional copyeditor changes my alrights to all rights, I change 'em right back whenever possible. (Usually my sometimes-British/ sometimes-American punctuation distracts copyeditors from my other idiosyncracies, but not always.)

In terms of grammar, usage, style, orthography, etc., I am a radical liberal. I teach my students standard English, but also encourage them to make innovations whenever possible. I tell them they must learn standard English not because it is inherently better than anything else, but because pedants will yap at them, and they need to be able to defend their choices. Few things make people more pedantic than grammar, style, and usage, and most of the yaps of pedants are nothing more than pet peeves. We're all welcome to our pet peeves, and I certainly have some ("loathe" for "loath" annoys me, as does "disinterested" for "uninterested" -- the latter I can justify as a useful distinction, though), but I try to let my desire for a lively and vivid language overcome my occasional desire to battle the barbarians. And I have little problem with people deviating from standard English by choice. I wish more people did so, in fact.

Thus, I am stating here and now, in a public forum, that when I use "alright" I mean "alright" and not "all right". Sometimes, in fact, I use both, because I like the distinction that can be made between them, as pointed out by a commenter at this post who says:

The prosodic pattern of the two differs. In alright they are written as one word because they are articulated as one word, initial stress on ‘all’ while ‘right’ is unstressed. In all right the ‘right’ element gets stressed instead as it is the head of the constituent -- an adjective phrase, with ‘all’ as its specifier.

(I first decided to use both forms when I was writing plays, because I hear the two quite differently, and I wanted actors to be able to make a distinction.)

And here's a quote I'm stealing outright from this excellent overview of the controversy -- the quote comes from The Cambridge Guide to English Usage:

The spelling alright is controversial for emotional rather than linguistic or logical reasons. It was condemned by Fowler in a 1924 tract for the Society for Pure English, despite recognition in the Oxford Dictionary (1884-1298) as increasingly current. But the fury rather than the facts of usage seem to have prevailed with most usage commentators since. [...] Dictionaries which simply crossreference alright to all right (as the “proper” form) typically underrepresent its various shades of meaning as a discourse symbol. It may be concessive, as in Alright, I’ll come with you—or diffident, as in How’re things? Oh alright—or impatient as in Alright, alright!. None of these senses are helpfully written as all right, which injects the distracting sense of “all correct.” Those who would do away with alright prefer to ignore its various analogues, such as almost, already, also, although, altogether, always, which have all over the centuries merged into single words. Objections to alright are rarely justified, as Webster’s English Usage (1989) notes, and Burchfield (1996) only makes a shibboleth of it. [...] At the turn of the millennium, alright is there to be used without any second thoughts.

I'm a devoted reader of The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, and the entry for alright, all right takes up nearly two double-columned pages. Here are some tidbits: the first OED citation of the word in a context that seems similar to current use is Chaucer's "Criseyde was this lady name al right". Moving beyond Middle English we have a long gap where any form of the word(s) is unrecorded with its current sense until Percy Shelley in 1822 (where it is "That was all right, my friend"). "Alright" doesn't appear until 1893 (in the Durham University Journal). The Dictionary notes:

Alright did not appear in a Merriam-Webster dictionary until 1934, but several dictionary users had spotted its omission earlier and had written to us to urge its inclusion.

They cite a letter from "a New York businessman named William E. Scott" from September 25, 1913:

I wish you would submit to your experts the feasibility of putting the word alright into use. As a matter of fact it is used quite extensively without the authority of dictionaries because it is the quick common-sense way of doing. The cable and telegraph companies are the ones who profit by the lack of an authoritative ruling that alright is synonymous with all right

The Dictionary points out the argument for the different emphasis when speaking "alright" and "all right" and notes that that may explain why, when it is found in books, it is most often found in printed dialogue. Finally, they note that it seems to be more accepted by the British than the Yanks -- it is, they note, "the standard spelling in Punch, and the King's Printer at Ottawa officially sanctioned its use as far back as 1928. The OED Supplement calls it simply 'a frequent spelling of all right" They conclude: "It is clearly standard in general prose, but is widely condemned nonetheless by writers on usage."

Finally, two writers I don't mind having as predecessors:

...however alright well seen then let him go to her...
--James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922

A success, a success is alright when there are there rooms and no vacancies, a success is alright when there is a package, success is alright anyway and any curtain is wholesale.
--Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons, 1914