Sentences and Court Decisions - Uncle Orson Reviews Everything

Noted academic and literary theorist Stanley Fish has written a book called How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One.

Now, I'm definitely of the school of thought that if, as a writer, you are thinking about your sentences, you're probably not going to be doing a very good job of telling your story.

That's because sentences are a matter of form, and thinking about them instead of just letting sentences flow in the service of telling a clear, powerful story is rather like thinking about balance and pedaling instead of steering while you're trying to ride a bike. You're very likely to fall over, or make little progress toward your destination.

The thing is, Stanley Fish is a really smart guy and his theory of "interpretive communities" has been useful to me in my work on community theory. Besides, a friend told me this was a really helpful, fascinating book.

As a fan of language studies, I'll agree to the last bit. I loved his close analysis of different kinds of formal, elaborate sentences from great works of literature. He goes to great lengths to draw a clear distinction between "the subordinating style" and "the additive style," but his examples in both categories are so self-conscious, so elaborate, that they actually defeat the storytelling by stopping it cold as we admire the workmanship of the writer.

But that's OK -- the examples are chosen from works that are obviously written with the primary purpose of showing off the talent and cleverness of the writer, rather than of telling a story to an eager audience. These are sentences created for admiration more than communication, and so they work very well.

Still, it's almost sad that Fish apparently thinks that the difference between the two methods of constructing sentences is actually significant in anything other than a pedantic way. In fact, reading his examples draws attention to a numbing sameness even in writers generally considered to be quite different in style. I suspect that's because, to make his point, Fish has selected sentences that represent an extreme. Yet, oddly enough, the more extremely additive or subordinating his examples are, the more they feel alike.

Fish pays lip service to the idea that there are many different purposes for sentences, and many kinds of sentences that fulfill those purposes well. On page 44, he says, "Pick your effect, figure out what you want to do, and then figure out how to do it." I would only quibble that most of us, in speech and in writing, do this instinctively, without any conscious thought at all, and usually with excellent success.

Despite his laissez faire declaration, the sentences that he loves and admires are of a particular kind, examples of which he sets forth frequently. And you know what? I think they're all quite wonderful, too.

The trouble is, they are only occasionally useful -- and then only when you don't mind distracting the reader. Writing this way is rather like a playwright who sits on the front row during a performance of his play, and periodically leaps to the stage and shouts, "Did you like that scene? That line? I wrote that! It was me me me! Not this foolish actor who merely parrots the words I wrote! I'm the real star!" Then he sits back down and expects you to go on watching as if nothing had happened.

I will now confess that at times I have written extreme sentences, because I thought they were absolutely essential to my fictional purpose. In retrospect, on those rare occasions when I reread one of my own novels or stories, I come across such sentences and shake my head and say, "What an idiot," which is a correct assessment. Because whenever a reader -- even me -- notices how I wrote something instead of staying completely immersed in the story and character, I have failed.

That's why I heartily recommend this book for people who love close analysis of extravagant writing. It's great fun, a wonderful game. But if you have ambitions to be a writer, please remember that the decision to write like Fish's examples is usually a decision to have only a handful of readers, in which case, unless you're independently wealthy, your writing is likely to be a hobby rather than a career. (And that last sentence of mine, in case you're wondering, is in the subordinating style.)

I found The Great Decision: Jefferson, Adams, Marshall, and the Battle for the Supreme Court to be a fascinating book that shone a light on an aspect of our Constitution and government that most of us take for granted: The power of the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down laws passed by Congress and signed by the President on the basis that they are not constitutional.

This power was only acquired by the Supreme Court because of John Marshall's brilliantly manipulative (and politically astute) decision in the case of Marbury v. Madison. Marshall was displeased with the near uselessness and relative weakness of the Supreme Court compared to the legislative and executive branches, and things were hardly likely to change, with anti-Federalist Republicans (members of the party now called Democrats) like Jefferson and Madison in control of government.

1. The behavior of Madison was dishonest and wrong in every way, and Marbury, the plaintiff, was morally right on every point, but

2. The law on which his complaint was based violates the Constitution on a technicality, and therefore

3. The Supreme Court strikes down the law, and Marbury loses his case and Madison, as representative of the government, wins.

So here's how he manipulated his opponents. If they declare that he doesn't have the power to strike down a law on the basis of its unconstitutionality, then they decision clearly goes against them, condemning them for illegally depriving a civil servant of a job he was lawfully appointed to.

In order to win their case, they have to accept that the Supreme Court has a new and unprecedented power that is not explicitly written into the Constitution; but if they reject the Supreme Court's having that power, they lose their case -- and suffer serious political embarrassment.

How that master manipulator, Jefferson, gnashed his teeth at this -- Marshall (like so many others) had proven himself smarter than Jefferson, and old Tom could never stand it when everyone didn't agree that he was the smartest man in America, or at least Virginia. So he groused about it for a while -- but the decision stood. It was obeyed. Poor Marbury was out of a job, but Marshall had made the Supreme Court the most powerful of the branches of government -- at least as long as they obeyed it.

I have a good friend who thinks this was the worst Supreme Court decision ever, and when the Supreme Court oversteps its bounds, I'm inclined to agree. But then I try to imagine America without a final authority on what is and is not Constitutional, and I suspect that even admitting the times when Supreme Court decisions are morally and legally indefensible, it's better to have such a final arbiter than not.

For without the Supreme Court in that role, I doubt the Constitution would be taken seriously at all -- it would leave us all wondering, you see, as Al Gore once did about campaign finance laws, "Where's the controlling authority?"

The Great Decision is extremely well written by authors Cliff Sloan and David McKean, but let's face it -- it's about nit-picking law and a lot of deeply trivial historical facts surrounding the case; there are times when only one's prior knowledge of the importance of the case keeps you reading.

But if, as I do, you care about our history and how we got to where we are, this book is indispensable reading.

Every Day Is Special

First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC.

Time, People, Prayer, and Lent

Thursday, March 3^rd -- National Anthem Day

Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, was born on this day in 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland. We count the telephone as an American invention because he immigrated to this country. His interest in the transmission of sound began with the fact that his father, Melville Bell, was a teacher of the deaf.

The TV series Moonlighting premiered on this day in 1985. Centered on a detective agency run by Cybill Shepherd's Maddie Hayes, an ex-model, and Bruce Willis's smirky, self-mocking David Addison, the show was a model of clever writing and steamy repartee.

Shepherd, whose comedic talents were thitherto unsuspected, revived her career spectacularly, though Willis became not just a phenom, but a star with staying power. Allys Beasley as the meek-seeming but spunky receptionist, Agnes DiPesto, and Curtis Armstrong as the seedy, ever-needy Herbert Quentin Viola, rounded out the regular cast.

Series creator Glenn Gordon Caron, with roots in Remington Steele, made a spectacular start, but the writers allowed the romance to take over the show and the weekly mystery cases lost focus. The series sputtered out after 66 episodes. But Caron resurfaced, after the brief Now and Again, with the brilliant Medium, which had the sparkling dialogue and a much deeper set of relationships than Moonlighting -- and never lost its focus.

Today is the 80^th anniversary of the designation of "The Star-Spangled Banner" as our national anthem in 1931, with Herbert Hoover signing the bill into law the same day the Senate approved it. Apparently nobody asked an actual musician whether the anthem was actually singable, or the words particularly inspiring. It's just plain weird that our national anthem commemorates a feeble victory in the War of 1812 -- just after the British burned Washington DC, the wretched nadir (so far) of our national pride. I say 80 years are enough -- let's put the beautiful, meaningful, and singable "America, the Beautiful" in its place!

Time, the first weekly newsmagazine was first published on this day in 1923. The creation of visionary journalist Henry Luce, Time's purpose was to go into greater depth of reporting and analysis than was possible with daily newspapers, and for the first five or six decades, Time set a standard of editorial and journalistic excellence.

The international edition of Time was my only connection with American news while I lived in Brazil in 1972 and 1973. Otherwise I would never have heard a thing about either Watergate or the movie The Godfather.

It all started to go wrong for Time in the late seventies, when the editors foisted upon us the absurd word "masterlily," which had nothing to do with skillful flowers, but instead was meant to be the adverb form of the adjective "masterly." It was clear then that some evil force had taken over Time, and the magazine has since faded into a pale shadow of its former good sense and integrity.

Friday, March 4^th -- National Grammar Day

Former U.S. President John Quincy Adams returned to Congress on this day in 1830, and served in the House of Representatives for eight consecutive terms, where he made a more distinguished mark as a legislator than he had done in his single term as President. He represented Plymouth, Massachusetts, and continues to be the Best Ex-President Ever.

It looked for a while as if Jimmy Carter was going to be the new Best Ex-Prez, what with Habitat for Humanity and other humble service, but he eventually became nearly as crazy as ex-attorney general Ramsey Clark, interfering in American foreign relations and irritating his successors with smug, ignorant declarations that remind us of other extreme-left-wing presidents who won elections by pretending to be moderate.

The National Day of Unplugging is sponsored by Reboot, a non-profit organization that aims to reinvent the cultures, traditions and rituals of Jewish life. "The project encourages hyperconnected and frequently frantic people to re-embrace the ancient beauty of a day of rest" -- an idea born in Torah's declaration of the law of the Sabbath.

People of all backgrounds and faiths are urged "to recharge their spiritual and personal lives by not using computers, cell phones or any technology for 24 hours -- from sundown on Friday, March 4^th, to sundown on Saturday, March 5^th -- something which all Orthodox Jews are required to do anyway. So in effect, only gentiles and semi- or non-observant Jews would be changing their lifestyle in any way by Unplugging.

My problem is, I don't see anything wrong with being connected, and I don't think my computer and cellphone connections in any way make my life more complicated or frantic. Quite the contrary. A recent cable outage in my neighborhood, which cut us off from the internet, caused a great deal more franticity than usual. (I know, it's franticness, but I can play with words if I want to.)

So, while I'm a Sabbath-keeper according to the teachings of my religion, I find my life more convenient and relaxed precisely because I am so easily in contact with the people who matter to me.

When it comes to National Grammar Day, let's get a few things straight. Everybody uses good, workable grammar; what most people mean when they say "good grammar" is actually "formal grammar," which is just as wrong in ordinary speech as spoken grammar is in formal written treatises.

That's why books like Strunk & White's Elements of Style are so harmful -- they convey the idea that there's one "best" style, when in fact every community evolves its own language, and speaking according to the rules of that community's grammar is just as correct, within that community, as any other grammar.

Grammar is only "bad" when you cannot communicate.

However, that does not change the fact that if you speak in a dialect that is perceived as ungrammatical by the people in power -- by the media, by potential employers, by teachers -- you will be judged negatively and it will quite possibly keep you from achieving everything you hope for.

Just say to yourself: There's nothing wrong with the way my friends and family and I talk when we're together. But I will also learn to speak in ways that people in authority respect, so that I can get what I want from them.

If you think of it as learning a foreign language so you can make your way through unfamiliar and hostile territory, you won't have to feel that you're disrespecting your own people or changing who you are. You'll also be correct. Very few people speak "correct" or elevated English as their native tongue. They're all pretty much faking it, too.

People Magazine was launched on this day in 1974, with Mia Farrow on the cover.

This is the 124^th annual World Day of Prayer, an "ecumenical event that reinforces bonds among peoples of the world as they join in a global circle of prayer." I'm afraid I'm always a little skeptical of things like this. The differences between religions are real and important -- unless you don't believe in them, in which case they seem trivial.

So the more firmly you believe that prayer will actually do some good -- that God lives and is listening -- the more likely it is that your prayer will be different from what sounds like authentic prayer to people in other religions. In the eyes of a Muslim or Buddhist, is what I do really praying at all? And when you consider that faithful believers in all religions that even have prayers are probably praying every day, anyway, I can't really see what this day is for. It's as if the participants are praying as a kind of show, so everybody can see how prayerful they are on this occasion. "Behold, they have their reward."

Saturday, March 5^th -- Flat Map Day

Rex Harrison, the noted British actor best known and loved for his performance as Henry Higgins in the musical My Fair Lady, was born on this day in 1908 in Huyton, Lancashire, England. Few people realized that he did all his acting work while nearly blind in his left eye, the result of childhood measles.

The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race begins today and will continue through the 20^th of March. "The Last Great Race on Earth," which originated on March 3^rd, 1973, runs a thousand miles through Alaskan wilderness from Anchorage to Nome along the historical Iditarod Trail. More than sixty 16-dog teams will be competing this year. I will not be there; I wish you similar good fortune.

On this day in 1946, Winston Churchill, speaking at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, first publicly uttered the words "Iron Curtain" to refer to the Cold War boundary between the Communist-ruled countries and the free West. "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the continent," said Churchill; though Churchill was not the first to use the phrase, his speech established it as a readily-recognized icon in public conversation; everyone knew what "behind the iron curtain" meant.

Small local maps, like street maps or even state maps, work fine, but when you're trying to map the whole world, how do you deal with the fact that the map is flat and the world is a globe? Gerhardus Mercator, born on this day at Rupelmonde, Belgium in 1512, devised the "Mercator projection," which lays out the world on a perfectly rectangular grid of latitude and longitude.

The result is gross distortion near the poles -- no, Greenland is not larger than South America and Antarctica is not a thin irregular ribbon along the bottom of the world -- but it allows you to see the relative positions of land masses at a glance. All the other projection methods introduce their own distortions, and actual globes only let you glimpse half the world at a time.

Mercator also coined the term atlas for a collection of maps bound together as a book.

Sunday, March 6^th -- Dred Scott Day

On this day in 1857, the Supreme Court's infamous Dred Scott decision struck such a terrible blow in favor of the extension of slavery throughout America that it almost guaranteed that the Civil War would be fought.

A slave named Dred Scott had successfully petitioned a lower court for his freedom, based on the fact that he had resided long enough in a free state and territory to place him under the anti-slavery laws there. But his owner appealed, and the Supreme Court not only returned him to slavery but also declared the 1820 Missouri Compromise unconstitutional on the specious grounds that slaves were property, not citizens -- though the Constitution carefully called them persons in servitude, not outright property.

Chief Justice Roger Taney further declared that Congress had no power to restrict slavery in the territories, once again inventing restrictions that did not exist in the Constitution. This decision left abolitionists in despair; one can understand why John Brown was able to gather support for his revolt against the U.S. government, if that government now required its citizens to tolerate slavery everywhere.

When the Constitution is interpreted to throw out laws and impose unbearable moral burdens on a people, it is understandable that many believe it is the Constitution, not the moral principles of the people, that needs to be revised or, if that is not possible, defied. Yet the Supreme Court has several times legislated in just that way, with Plessy v. Ferguson (upholding segregation) and Roe v. Wade (allowing abortion everywhere) as later examples of the same kind of judicial dictatorship.

This is the first day of Read an E-Book Week. I wonder how they celebrated this week when I was young. And I can't understand why the week is even needed. All I care about is that you read a book -- the medium by which it is delivered to you makes no difference in the content.

Monday, March 7^th -- Hey! Are You Asleep?

National Sleep Awareness Week begins today. If ever there was an oxymoronic occasion, this is it. If you're aware that you're asleep, you're not asleep; if you're asleep, you cannot be aware of it. Or are we supposed to take note of other people's sleep?

For instance, when we're watching a TV show or DVD together as a family, if one person falls asleep it can mean going back and replaying long sections. So we have learned to be vigilant and periodically say -- loudly -- "Hey! Are you asleep?" The two possible answers are "No" and "What?" By being aware of other people's sleep, we make it so the sections we need to repeat are much shorter.

Tuesday, March 8^th -- Mardi Gras

International Pancake Day is not formally affiliated with International House of Pancakes (IHOP), but I bet they don't mind. It is celebrated on Shrove Tuesday or Fat Tuesday -- Mardi Gras in French -- because traditionally luxurious sugary and fatty dishes are given up during Lent, so that this is the last day Christians could get a good feed on till Easter.

Since pancakes are far from being the fattiest and sugariest food imaginable, it's actually a relatively healthy Mardi Gras feast. I especially recommend the downright healthy pancake mix at Great Harvest Bread Company. The pancakes made from it are so robust I can only eat a couple of them. And instead of putting syrup on them, try eating them with fruit or -- my favorite -- cottage cheese.

Of course, pancakes are often at their decadent best with a few over-medium eggs sandwiched between them, so that forking into them will cause egg yolk to run like syrup, which you then soak up with each bite of pancake.

This is Organize Your Home Office Day. I would like to replace it with It's My Office and It's In My Home and I Know Where Everything Is So Mind Your Own Business Day.

Wednesday, March 9^th -- Ash Wednesday

Mattel's Barbie Doll debuted on this day in 1959. More than 800 million Barbie dolls have been sold. That means that about 300 million Barbies have been stripped naked by curious brothers or neighbor boys, and nearly 7 million have had their heads torn off by said brothers or by family pets or lawn mowers.

Ulysses S. Grant was commissioned as commander of all United States armies in 1864, for the first time putting an active, bold, and competent general in charge of overall strategy. That was the decision by Abraham Lincoln that won the Civil War for the North and for the cause of human freedom.

The season of Lent begins today. For those who follow the Catholic calendar, the Lenten Season begins on Ash Wednesday and continues 46 days until the day before Easter (this year, April 23^rd). Officially we speak of the forty days of Lent, but that's because Sundays don't count, each of them being a kind of lesser Easter in which Christ's victory over sin and death is celebrated.

Lent is intended as a time of penance, fasting, and prayer in preparation for receiving the blessings of Easter. Now, I believe in penance, and in fasting, and in prayer, and in the resurrection and redemption of Christ. I'm just glad my church doesn't require forty days of it, six days a week, every year.