Showing 1-10 of 10 results tagged “Language”

“He braced himself for this big fucking scream.”

That’s the final sentence of James Ellroy’s American Tabloid, the first book in the “Underwold USA” trilogy that concluded with the release of Blood’s a Rover last week. It’s hard to believe that more than 14 years passed between these novels, because the memory of reading that line the first time feels a lot fresher than 1995. It’s nearly seared into my brain.

It’s easy to dismiss Ellroy for being lurid, coarse, and florid in his subjects and in his rhythmic, peculiarly pretty shards-of-glass prose, and for being an egomaniacal braggart in interviews. (I think it’s an act, but that makes it only more annoying.) It’s understandable to want a reprieve from his characters’ black souls and the incessant violence, sex, and drugs. And it’s only human to wish the guy some peace, even as each novel continues to reflect a man tortured by the personal history detailed in My Dark Places, about the murder of his mother.

Yet all that is essential Ellroy and given, and focusing on those things means we ignore his larger brilliance: how his style simultaneously beats and hypnotizes the reader into trance-like immersion; how that submission to the author forces the reader to accept the (frequently) ridiculous, and makes his alternative history more than plausible; and how he quietly manages a story underneath all that complicated verbal jazz, with chaotic, wide-ranging narratives converging beautifully, naturally, and correctly.

American Tabloid’s closing sentence hints at all of that. By itself, it’s an unremarkable collection of words, but it carries an almost agonizing anticipation. The whole novel has been building to this event — the book concludes in 1963, by the way — and in the final rush of pages, the reader wonders how it’s going to go down.

And Ellroy, with what only seems like uncharacteristic restraint, pulls up just short, and leaves us on the sidelines, and lets it hang. There is a horror here, not in seeing, but in knowing what’s about to happen. It’s a great ending, and I smile every time I think about it.

So it was written, and I agreed.

On the other hand ... .

For what it’s worth, the following sentence made me stop taking seriously Lauren Wissot’s initial piece, and that puts me among the author’s detractors:

“For example, a few weeks back I had fantastic afternoon sex with a hot bodybuilder — the tryst ending badly afterwards when we got into a heated debate over John Barrymore and Marlene Dietrich (who he feels are both vastly overrated).”

The problem here is a simple one of construction: The emphasis is in the wrong place. The nature of the sex isn’t relevant — fantastic, afternoon, or the hotness of the bodybuilder — yet it dominates not just the sentence but the paragraph and the whole damned essay. What’s important is treated structurally as an afterthought and is consequently lost.

The sentence could have easily been made more effective, and more appropriate to the piece:

“A recent tryst with a bodybuilder ended badly when we got into a heated debate over John Barrymore and Marlene Dietrich (who he feels are both vastly overrated).”

We all write bum sentences (and pieces) now and again, but this one by Wissot is pretty egregiously (and unnecessarily) self-involved. And this comes from someone who would know.

We were in the play area of the department store — most likely building things with Legos — and two girls were taking great delight in excluding me. They were speaking a language I didn’t understand, and it wasn’t exactly a private conversation. They would glance my way during their exchange and occasionally laugh. I felt mocked, which was exactly what they wanted.

They were speaking Pig Latin, I figured out later.

Of course, Pig Latin is only effective as a private language through a certain age, but we update and upgrade our codes throughout our lives.

To break away from The Dark Knight, here’s a Culture Snob essay that’s been distilled by Wordle:

I love many of these random groupings, but I’m particularly fond of the proximity of “audience” to “want” to “understand.” Bride of Culture Snob noted “need Peña,” which I pointed out could actually be read as “writer need Peña.”

Man Offered 11-Year-Old Tickets for Sex.

If the tickets were 11 years old, who would want them?

Singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer tells about a friend who leads a group of people who knit for the local food bank. They’ll set up somewhere and knit with a sign that reads, “Knitting for the Food Bank.”

“People will come and talk to them,” Newcomer said in a phone interview last week. “Folks who might not maybe go up to someone on the corner and talk to somebody who has a sign will sit down with a group of women knitting and talk about the issue. ‘What’s happening with the food bank?’”

The lesson is that directness often isn’t the best way to reach people. “Sometimes our most powerful activism, our most potent activism, comes out of what we love,” she said.

Nominated for its brevity, its simplicity, its expressiveness, and its sonic shape:

“They’d boo free pie.”

Plus: A reader educates Culture Snob about the history of free pie given to tough audiences!

In the magazine Cinema Scope, David Bordwell demonstrates how a lack of specific examples undermines a potentially intriguing argument.

Jim Emerson, whose blog has been given a space separate from Roger Ebert’s, twice recently has addressed our cultural tendency to be lazy with language, particularly in marketing movies. First, he parses the MPAA’s explanatory descriptions of its ratings:

“Bad Santa (R): ‘pervasive language, strong sexual content, and some violence.’ (Language is pervasive in Bad Santa.)”

“Read it slowly, one word at a time. It says almost precisely nothing at all — and could be said (with conviction!) even by someone who has not seen the movie.”

In response to a call for movie-related haiku, I submitted the following on Robert Altman’s The Player:

The pitch, in 10 words:
Griffin Mill kills the writer,
and he steals his girl.