Less Words; Fewer Meaning: Badspeak

Fist Edition cover, 1949 (from: Wikipedia)

"To paraphrase Orwell, the English of the world wide web – loose, informal, and distressingly dyspeptic – is not really the kind people want to read in a book, a magazine, or even a newspaper. But there's an assumption that that, because it's part of the all-conquering internet, we cannot do a thing about it. Twenty-first century civilisation has been transformed in a way without precedent since the invention of moveable type. English prose, so one argument runs, must adapt to the new lexicon with all its grammatical violations and banality. Language is normative; it has – some will say – no choice. The violence the internet does to the English language is simply the cost of doing business in the digital age.

     From this, any struggle against the abuse and impoverishment of English online (notably, in blogs and emails) becomes what Orwell called 'a sentimental archaism.' Behind this belief lies the recognition that language is a natural growth and not an instrument we can police for better self-expression."
— Robert McCrum, The Guardian
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"The word doublespeak was coined in the early 1950s. It is often incorrectly attributed to George Orwell and his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The word actually never appears in that novel; Orwell did, however, coin Newspeak, Oldspeak, duckspeak (speaking from the throat without thinking 'like a duck') and doublethink (holding '…simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them…'), and his novel made fashionable composite nouns with speak as the second element, which were previously unknown in English. It was therefore just a matter of time before someone came up with doublespeak.
     Doublespeak may be considered, in Orwell's lexicography, as the B vocabulary of Newspeak, words 'deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them.'"
— Sourcewatch
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"While you here do snoring lie, Open-eyed conspiracy His time doth take." — William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Ariel at II, i)

Clouds performing Hamlet's "Alas poor Yorick" scene. (From: the Daily Mail)

"Tuesday is Shakespeare's birthday, and there's no shortage of Bard news in the UK media.
     James McElvoy's Macbeth, a hot ticket, is playing in London. Adrian Lester's Othello is about to open at the National Theatre. There are any number of Hamlets in the pipeline. And two academics – the very distinguished Professor Stanley Wells and Dr Paul Edmondson – have decided (unwisely, in my view) to take on the so-called anti-Stratfordians in a volume entitled Shakespeare Beyond Doubt.

     The conspiracy theories surrounding the 'authorship question' are so bonkers, and the people questioning Shakespeare are – to put it politely – so eccentric, it beats me why Wells and Edmundson felt the need to engage with this matter. Professional exasperation no doubt. It's understandable, but I wish they had not given this question serious attention.
     Just because Hollywood made a dreadful, and dreadfully stupid, film (Anonymous), and a West Coast campus (Concordia, in Portland, Oregon) together with an English university (Brunel) have decided to offer coursework in the authorship question, does not, in my view, require a considered response from good scholars. As Gore Vidal said in another context: you can handle shit with a kid glove. It still remains shit, but the glove doesn't get any glove-ier."
— Robert McCrum, the Guardian
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"When polish composer André Tchaikowsky died in 1982, according to his wishes, his body was donated to science, but his head — his skull, in particular — was donated to Shakespeare.
     In making this cranial contribution, Tchaikowsky hoped that his skull would be used in Hamlet as Yorick, the dead jester whose skull is exhumed by the gravedigger in Act 5, Scene 1…
     For many years, no actor or director felt comfortable using a real skull in performances, although it was occasionally used in rehearsals. In 2008, the skull was finally held by David Tennant in a series of performances of Hamlet at the Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon."
— 22 Words

Read more and see the pictures (of Dr. Who alumnus David Tennent holding "poor Yorick") here…

And get more "Bard News" here…

And here…

"[…] where anything is permitted but nothing is admissible." — Allan Massie, in The Telegraph

From: The Telegraph

"Opening a new [John] Le Carré novel is like stepping into a hushed and well-appointed London club. The tone is English and metropolitan, the mood sombre but enthralling, even intimidating. As readers, we have to be on our mettle, but we also know we'll be well cared for by a silver-haired major-domo who has already chalked up more than half a century of dedicated service.

     It's exactly 50 years since a young Foreign Office official, and sometime spy, named David Cornwell woke up to find his alter ego, John le Carré, internationally famous with the publication of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Macmillan was PM; the cold war with the Soviet Union as dark and bleak as ever. In 1963, the novel of espionage seemed the perfect instrument for examining the soul of a post-imperial society.
     Then came George Smiley's finest hour, a sequence of novels that elevated the spy thriller to an art form – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley's People. Few English writers of the late 20th century produced fiction to match the Le Carré of these titles."
— Robert McCrum, The Guardian
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"'The State is a concept based on the power principle and a denial of responsibility. It is thus itself criminal… Its own blacker evils are hidden under a veil of hypocrisy, whitewashed by propaganda, and, when laid bare, covered by the raison d’état, a term stretched to enrobe the basest ignominy.'
     This judgment was delivered by that fine novelist, Nicholas Freeling, in an essay on Stendhal. It is equally relevant to the great body of John le Carré’s work and to his new novel, A Delicate Truth.
     Le Carré makes the conventional division between genre and the literary novel obsolete. It was always ridiculous, at least inasmuch as it carried the suggestion that the genre novel – crime or espionage – was necessarily inferior to the literary one. The Heart of Midlothian is a crime novel. So is Bleak House. Likewise, The Secret Agent, The Quiet American and every one of le Carré’s 23 novels. Crime is at the heart of all of them.
     If we commonly make a distinction between the crime novel and the spy novel, it is only because we tend to think of crime as belonging to the sphere of private life, and we airbrush the criminality of state action out of view and mind."
— Allan Massie, The Telegraph
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Buy all of John Le Carré's books here...

Spineless Books

"This cultural recession mirrors the economic downturn. Last month, on a visit to the US, I got a rare glimpse into the desperate conditions in which the contemporary writer must operate. Apparently, for at least one prominent literary agent, there is now only one rule, which can be expressed mathematically as 1/10, thus: 'A new novel should be summarised in a single sentence, and should stop dinner conversation for at least 10 minutes.' [...] It's the Ikea novel, shaped by the logic of 1/10. Ikea novels are the kind of fiction that comes direct from the factory, with no intercession of craftsmanship or artistry en route to the consumer. They are created by often talented writers, frantic to make a career, who have acquired a boxed-up fiction kit at a suburban outlet and assembled it in their spare time on the living room floor, with a construction manual in one hand, The Writers' & Artists' Yearbook in the other. [...]
The Ikea novel has all the things that fiction is supposed to have. It is competently written in a simulacrum of fine writing. It has character and situation, conflict and resolution. Somewhere you will find the 'arc of the narrative.' Under its highly painted metalwork there's probably an 'inciting incident' or two. Ikea-fiction writers know all about 'first-' or 'third-person' and 'unreliable' narrators. The latter are fashionable just now, because they can be used to explain away narrative cock-ups.
The thing that Ikea culture manufactures looks like fiction, sounds like fiction and even reads like fiction. There's just one problem: Ikea fiction is not original, and not distinctive, with no inner vision or humanity. It comes from a kit. It's a fake and can never be a work of art. How could it be? It was invented to please a market, and to make money. No wonder so many erstwhile novelists are turning to film and television." — Robert McCrum, Guardian
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"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." — Thomas Mann

Illustration: Michael Hale

"[...] what's the best time of day to write? and its corollary: how many hours are necessary?
     Some writers (Dickens among them) are larks. Others – more nocturnal – are owls. Robert Frost, whose remote Vermont cabin I visited recently in company with his biographer Jay Parini, never started work till the afternoon, and often stayed up till two or three in the morning, not rising until midday, or even later. Proust, famously, worked night and day in a cork-lined room. I remember reading somewhere that Raymond Chandler observed that it was impossible to write well for more than four hours a day. What do you do in the afternoon?
     There's also the question of how long it might take to complete a novel. Here, you encounter literary legends. Faulkner claimed to have completed As I Lay Dying in six weeks. In the mid-1930s, PG Wodehouse, who wrote fast once he had the mechanics of his plots straight, polished off the last 10,000 words of Very Good, Jeeves! in a single day. In his autobiography, A Sort of Life, Graham Greene describes writing Stamboul Train on benzedrine, to pay the bills, working against the clock. Further back, Samuel Johnson wrote Rasselas, which is short, in a fortnight to defray the expenses of his mother's funeral. Or so it's said.
     More usually, a 60-70,000 word novel seems to take at least a year to complete, allowing for two or three drafts, although often the first, rough outline can get written in a matter of weeks. The strange truth about a lot of fiction is that the dominant moments that animate an entire novel can occur to the writer in a matter of minutes. After that, in the words of one New Zealand writer I recall with affection, 'it's just typing.' " — Robert McCrum, Guardian
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"My stories run up and bite me on the leg — I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off."— Ray Bradbury

Telegram from Dorothy Parker to her Viking editor, Pascal Covici
(from: Nancy Campbell)

"[...] According to [Frank] Rose, 'a new type of narrative is emerging – one that's told through many media at once in a way that's nonlinear, that's participatory and often game-like, and that's designed above all to be immersive. This is "deep media."'
     Kate Pullinger, a Canadian writer who has spent her adult life in the UK, is fascinated by the opportunities of deep media. Pullinger has pioneered 'digital fiction.' She insists that 'my primary concern is to tell stories,' but believes that 'the new technology has the potential to inject a new dimension to storytelling.' She describes digital fiction as 'a hybrid genre,' mixing screen and text in radical ways. Pullinger thinks that 'we have barely scratched the surface in the potential for storytelling.' " — Robert McCrum, Guardian
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“ 'E-books as we know them are electronic replicas of books, it’s paper under glass,' says Kate Pullinger, author of the children’s novel Inanimate Alice – which can be viewed free online. (She also won the 2009 Governor-General’s Award for her conventional novel The Mistress of Nothing.) 'If you are going to put a work of fiction on a computer, why would you not use the multimedia components a computer has to offer you – image and sound and interactive games?' " — Kate Taylor, The Globe and Mail
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Hard Times — media meltdown

From: David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page

"[Household Words was a] Weekly magazine which Dickens edited along with sub-editor W. H. Wills. Charles' father, John Dickens, also had editorial duties on the magazine. Dickens received a salary and additional payments for his own contributions. The weekly contained topical journalism, essays, short fiction, and poetry by a total of 380 contributors. It was published every Wednesday at a cost of twopence and consisted of 24 pages of double columns without illustration. The magazine proved a financial success with sales reaching 100,000 weekly. Although serial publication was not planned for the journal, Dickens published his novel Hard Times in Household Words in order to bolster sales during a period of reduced profit. Dickens' total contribution to the weekly included 108 full-length essays and articles, co-writing another 45. After quarreling with his publisher, Bradbury and Evans, Dickens discontinued Household Words and the journal was incorporated into a new weekly, All the Year Round. 31 of the articles Dickens wrote for Household Words were published as Reprinted Pieces in 1858. [...]
      Dickens' successor to Household Words took the same format as its predecessor. Dickens contributed less material to All the Year Round than he had for Household Words, although he did serialize A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations in the weekly. Dickens owned 75% of the venture and served as editor until his death in 1870 at which time his son Charley took over as editor until 1888. The magazine ceased publication in 1893. A collection of the sketches Dickens wrote for All the Year Round were later published as The Uncommercial Traveller."
— David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page
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"Make no mistake: as in every previous IT revolution, there will be (already is) a creative dividend. For instance, the print boom of 1590-1610 liberated Shakespeare and his successors, from Jonson to Donne, and sponsored an explosion of ephemeral publications, the inky compost that would nurture the best of the Jacobeans. Similarly, in Edwardian London, new media shaped the careers of Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, and countless others. Heart of Darkness was first published as a magazine serial."
— Robert McCrum, Guardian
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"We are all witnessing the sudden dematerialization of our arts and entertainment, their transfer from unique artifact source to universally on-demand screen availability. Walk down Main Street. The video and DVD emporia are gone — it happened in a year or two. The bookstores, if not yet folded, are quickly going the way of record stores. More and more people are persuaded to access their culture through screen portals, ordering up what they need for their Kindle, their iPod, their nightly watching pleasures. And the middle men, the algorithmically nimble purveyors of books and music and film, increasingly access them — us — identifying what they think we want and laying it on our electronic doorstep."
— Sven Birkerts, Los Angeles Review of Books
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