Delight and Disgrace

We went to see The Prestige on Saturday, as part of our day-long anniversary celebrating, so now here I am telling you to go and see it. It's a really cool plot with lots of twists, told using an interesting structure (it's directed by the same guy as Memento — he's really into backwards causality), and it looks fantastic. In all senses of the word. Michael Caine is very good in it too. Plus it's about magicians. What more could you want? OK, some of the dialogue divulging important information is a little clunky, but there's a lot of important information to get out. It's not like Primer, which we also recently watched again, where you not only can't figure out what's going to happen but you don't even know what happened after it's over. Not that I didn't like that movie too, because I really did. But it was a little dense, you have to admit. I'm just saying.

Before that we went to the farmers' market to buy fresh fish and some little charcoal disky things that we burn our hippy-dippy loose incense on, then went to hippy-dippy yoga. And after the movie we rented more movies and ordered in too much Chinese food. It was a pretty perfect day.

I was recently glancing through Strunk and White in search of something I thought I remembered "them" saying (i.e. always spell "all together" as two words; turns out it was "all right" I was thinking of), and I ended up getting all excited and full of admiration as I usually do, and read the whole thing again. It's not like it's huge or anything. I was particularly struck by Reminders #8 and #9 in the "An Approach to Style (With a List of Reminders)" chapter:

"8. Avoid the use of qualifiers.
Rather, very, little, pretty—these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words. The constant use of the adjective little (except to indicate size) is particularly debilitating; we should all try to do a little better, we should all be very watchful of this rule, for it is a rather important one and we are pretty sure to violate it now and then."

Ouch. OK, damning enough, but then I read on:

"9. Do not affect a breezy manner. (Uh oh.)
The volume of writing is enormous, these days, and much of it has a sort of windiness about it, almost as though the author were in a state of euphoria. "Spontaneous me," sang Whitman, and, in his innocence, let loose the hordes of uninspired scribblers who would one day confuse spontaneity with genius.

"The breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that pops into his head is of general interest and that uninhibited prose creates high spirits and carries the day. Open any alumni magazine, turn to the class notes, and you are quite likely to encounter old Spontaneous Me at work—an aging collegian who writes something like this:

"Well, chums, here I am again with my bagful of dirt about your disorderly classmates, after spending a helluva weekend in N'Yawk trying to view the Columbia game from behind two bumbershoots and a glazed cornea. And speaking of news, howzabout tossing a few chirce nuggets my way?

"This is an extreme example, but the same wind blows, at lesser velocities, across vast expanses of journalistic prose. The author in this case has managed in two sentences to commit most of the unpardonable sins: he obviously has nothing to say, he is showing off and directing the attention of the reader to himself, he is using slang with neither provocation nor ingenuity, he adopts a patronizing air by throwing in the word chirce, he is tasteless, humorless (though full of fun), dull, and empty. He has not done his work."

OK, OK! Uncle! Even imagining the lameness of the CGI, Julia-Roberts-as-Charlotte version of E. B. White's Charlotte's Web that's coming out couldn't do any work toward softening those pointed blows. I hung my head in shame, vowing never to irresponsibly blog again.

Until next time.

- Ol' Cousin Cornmaster Himself