Fraywatch

No Shoving and Pushing at the Back Please

Manners are free; birthday dinners aren’t.

Slate’s customer base: “gangstas that want to pimp their lives”? Yes, we, too, were surprised by JonIscream’s description, it conjured up such an … unlikely view of you all. The topic was etiquette one way or another: This post referred to the review of a new biography of Emily Post, but etiquette was also at the heart of John Swansburg’s piece on other people’s birthdays. That article touched a nerve with you gangstas, and it is time to trundle out the Fray Multiple Post summarizer. Birthday reactions divide (with a bit of unmannerly pushing and shoving) into the following categories:

  1. The person with the birthday should be paying for everyone, not being treated. There was strong support for this view, though “Grown-ups pay for themselves” was a puzzle. KateNonymous  means by this that one grown-up pays for everyone else—who knew?
  2. No, says another strong faction. If I invite you to the cinema, or a sports game, or a vacation, you don’t expect me to pay for you, do you? By far the most imaginative variation on this was from kari9704: “Would you be hosting if you said to your friends, ‘I’m going to the zoo; want to come along?’ Would you be responsible for buying their elephant key chains and cotton candy during the outing?” Kari, a friend who would invite you to the zoo is a friend worth paying for.
  3. We don’t have this problem, say some readers. It doesn’t arise in other parts of the country, they say, perhaps because New Yorkers notoriously have less room at home for the suggested alternatives: a cheap party (“potluck … karaoke. Best Birthday Ever”) or barbecue at home. Even then there can be difficultiesAnse told us about a recent event (a wedding, but still): “It was set up for a classic Czech-Catholic affair, except for one glaring problem: instead of barbecue brisket, sausage, and potato salad, they served prime rib and grilled chicken. There were complaints.” This nuance falls into the category of inexplicable but compelling for some of us.
  4. “Your significant other should be the one to take you to the steakhouse for your birthday,” sayshstein—oh bad luck if you don’t have one then.
  5. Mystifying posts. Several people mentioned the Puerto Rican option (as opposed to the Jefferson Davis solution suggested in the original article)—so what was this? “Full internal autonomy within the sovereign territory of the United States”? No apparently, it’s something to do with drinking rather than eating. And those of us of a timid disposition are also mystified by this description of a bachelor party.
  6. Posts that tell their story in the title: Server POV; Been there! Started a price cap! Now write an article about weddings.

As it happens, your Fray editor has special authority to speak on etiquette matters and knows that, in fact, everyone believes his or her rules to be best and hates to be challenged and is outraged by everyone else’s (totally wrong) rules. “I was always brought up to …” are words you can hear too many times. So it was a pleasure to read an unusually kind, charming post on etiquette from bigmac, who was talking aboutEmily Yoffe’s article  on taking offense.

Most people walk around with sharp nails and thin skin—they offend others sometimes even unawares, and then take offense to the slightest askew look. Rather than concentrate on their behavior, we need to look inward at ours. For example, when reading this article, it is easy for me to see how this subject applies to so many people. … But I can’t change them. I can only change myself (with God’s help and grace) and so I should read this and examine my own head and heart. A rhino hide and velvet gloves—that’s what I need to go for.
Defiinitely someone you should invite to your birthday party.—MR2:30 p.m. GMT

Wednesday, Oct. 15,  2008

“Politically speaking, ‘elite’ just means ‘just as educated and rich as us, but in the opposite party.’ This was a useful definition from justicepsych but not one that was going to meet with a lot of approval. Some of us have not been able to get to the “XX Factor,” let alone its Fray, in recent weeks, so it was certainly time to drop by and see which cool intellectual debates were going on there. Whoa, take that back, the word intellectual has proved to be as controversial as almost anything in Slate this election year, and cool isn’t exactly the right word, either. Rachael Larimore’s “Thoughts on Intellectuals and Anti-Intellectuals” in the blog was the focus of endless discussion on—well, on intellectuals and anti-intellectuals. Amazingly, apparently you can insult someone by calling them either of these names. Throw in “elitist” and you have a full-scale flame war.

Ophymirage posted a splendid disquisition on intellectuals. Naturally we’re going to quote the funny bit:

When it comes down to it, Intellectual are a harmless bunch. About the worst thing that intellectuals are going to do to this country is to stage a pretentious community-theater production of “Titus Andronicus” with giant puppets.

But also a serious, if possibly idealistic, bit:

The best thing that intellectuals can do for this country is to show everyone the way to the tools that are necessary for genuine self-knowledge. And one of the chief benefits of knowing yourself is that it makes it a lot harder to hate other people.

There’s a long discussion here on whether we want elites ruling us or not. Go here to find out who’s an intellectual, who an engineer, and who could run a gas station. At what might be called the far edges of the discussion: What was that again about the Labrador going to duck-collecting college? No, didn’t quite get it. Lubbesuh says there are too many intellectuals, and even those with opposing political views seemed to agree.

The splendidly-named HopefulCynic had this to say

Is it better for Americans to vote for someone they feel reflects their own worldview, or someone who is best able to do the job? It seems to me loyalty to party should come far below loyalty to country or family or duty … somewhere around loyalty to Kellogg Brand Cereals.

—and made a convincing case. “Are Intellectuals Mean?”, posted byMalone, was very popular with other readers, though mostly, it has to be said, those who agreed with him or her politically.

Posts are still pouring in on this topic, so feel free to join in. But a word of warning: you don’t even want to go near the other current argument in “XX Factor” on flag mending/trampling. It’s sticky and cross and long and involved. But, no—what are we saying? That would be a recommendation to most Fray posters. MR …5.00 p.m. GMT

Friday, Oct. 10,  2008

Kitty Burns Florey’s attempt to diagram Sarah Palin’s sentences was a hit this week. Even before Tina Fey’s dead-on impersonations brought attention to the VP candidate’s tortured linguistic style, language itself was already a campaign theme, starting with Hillary’s famous declaration during the primaries: “You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.” After the frequent attacks on Obama’s “lofty” (and, therefore, supposedly empty) rhetoric, Sarah Palin’s syntax is in some respects just the latest to come under scrutiny.

If diagramming was intended as the most neutral and objective way to decipher meaning in Palin’s speech—a candidate who has elicited enormous curiosity since her introduction to the national stage in September—Ischua dismisses the diagramming exercise as “petty partisan parsing.”

kaboku68, a schoolteacher from Chitina, Alaska, writes in to say that “[w]e have a different form of syntax. … Alaskans often have elements of the indigenious [sic] languages of … Alaskan Natives involved in their speaking patterns” (a claim contested vigorously by Fritz Gerlich).

For WetHen here, the debate format may have had an effect:

Palin’s object was to only sound decisive, matching her punchy delivery method to that of Biden’s forceful style. The words – they didn’t matter. Anything that sounded like a word would do as long as she didn’t pause, didn’t sound thoughtful, didn’t break pace.

northwoods describes the VP candidate’s “Joycean stream of consciousness” as a generalized condition among politicians, who “never mind the meaning … fill up time so that the questioner is defeated and time runs out.”

In ConcernSimian’s assessment, Palin’s “florid, babbling ideation” is tantamount to what psychiatrists might call a “word salad.” But ezames warns against any such pathologizing:

the little I’ve read about linguistics suggests, counter-intuitively, that the coherence and diagramability of [Palin’s] speech aren’t reliable indicators of her intelligence or clarity of thought. Chomsky’s notion that language isn’t the product of some sort of general intelligence, but of a specific module in the brain, is generally accepted today.

JerseyInsuranceGirl wonders, should Palin get elected, how translators will revamp and interpret her sentences in foreign languages. Scotboy56 gives it a try, and “with a few judicious uses/changes of punctuation, and one reordering of words,” manages to make the Palin quote “read perfectly”:

I know that John McCain and I, as his vice president, will do that. Families, we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20. That will be. Our top priority is to defend the American people.

Not bad. Do you have a more coherent take? Consult the original here and then post your translation in “The Good Word” Fray. AC11:20 a.m. ET

Tuesday, Oct. 7,  2008

We love it when the post titles tell the story. The Swedish Academy speaks on why Americans don’t win Nobel Prizes for literature, Adam Kirsch puts the case for homegrown fiction, and readers get to comment on all of it. A quick scan of the “Culturebox” board gives the following posts: U.S. writers robbed by Nobel Committee; most Nobel literature is boring; good to know America isn’t the only place with bigots; Nobel nordicentrism; MFAs killed American literature; Europe is finished, anyway (“skinny French women … will all be in burkhas”); Danielle Steel.

Danielle Steel? By no means is she the only author who has been omitted from the prize-giving, thanks only to the sheer prejudice and anti-American feeling of the committee, apparently. But we would still challenge readers to guess what name is going to come after these words from Bec393: “[T]he only living American writer worthy of a Nobel nom is …”—go and see, prepare to be surprised (maybe).

Bjoern Staerk says America’s greatest contribution to literature is science fiction and goes on:

But then literary fame is not about justice. I’ve given up counting the number of wonderful authors I’ve come across by accident, only to find out that they’re utterly forgotten and ignored. Perhaps the real problem with the Nobel Prize and other awards is that they give readers the illusion of knowing who the greatest authors are. The odds are that the world’s greatest author wrote one promising book which didn’t sell well, then gave up writing for a paying job.

There’s a nice defense of Dario Fo by thelyamhound, who tackles liberalism in the same post:

As far as the politics go, the fact is that since the beginning of time, artists tended, overwhelmingly, to be “liberal” in comparison to the dominant social flavor of their respective eras. What exactly that meant must be taken in relation to the era in question, but the notion that there’s suddenly some “liberal bias” to art is nonsense–not because there’s not a bias, but because there’s nothing new about it. If conservatives want more art, they should raise more artists … but don’t be surprised if the industry turns them (if nothing else, gays have always been disproportionately represented in creative fields, and while gays aren’t reflexively liberal, they tend to be so on social matters, at the least).

Readers were keen to discuss the merits of Philip Roth and Toni Morrison along with the some less obvious names: According to B-Real, “We’ll see Bob Dylan get the medal before they give it to some guy who sees fit to make biting commentary about the horrors of modern America from his monastic abode on a farm in Connecticut.” (We think that would be Mr Roth.) Everyone had a dog in this fight, but Mikerol gets a mention for the most heroic nomination: In his view, Austrian writer Peter Handke “would deserve [the Nobel Prize] even if he raped his grandmother, just for the capacities for communication that he has enabled in the logos.”

That might be the Fray sentence of the week, although there’s competition: Let’s hear it for WorkingAuthor, who has harsh words for Doris Lessing, and adds sternly, “I hope she reads this.” Let’s hope her day isn’t ruined. MR 3.30 p.m. GMT