The Great Automatic Grammatizator

Pauline Kael and the Hacks, Craftsmen, and Artists

A great recent article by Sam Sacks in Open Letters Monthly reminded me that one of the most influential voices in my life as someone who thinks and writes for a living was Pauline Kael, the New Yorker’s film reviewer from 1968 to 1991. 

We got the New Yorker delivered to my home in Indiana all throughout my childhood and adolescence, and the magazine was like a periscope into a very different world than the one I was living in. A lot of its content was opaque and/or intimidating to a kid in the sticks, and I remember having a hard time understanding what points some of the writers were trying to make.

But when Kael talked about movies, I could relate. She had a great mind, but she wrote from the heart and the gut because she understood that these are the organs engaged by the movies. And instead of trying to cover that fact up, she embraced it and celebrated it. 

She didn’t have a theory of film; she had reactions to movies, and she explained and justified them in prose that never stopped being brilliant. Here’s some of her review of “Taxi Driver”:

Robert De Niro is in almost every frame of Martin Scorsese’s feverish, horrifyingly funny movie about a lonely New York cab-driver. De Niro’s inflamed, brimming eyes are the focal point of the compositions. He’s Travis Bickle, an outsider who can’t find any point of entry into human society. He drives nights because he can’t sleep anyway; surrounded by the night world of the uprooted—whores, pimps, transients—he hates New York with a Biblical fury, and its filth and smut obsess him. This ferociously powerful film is like a raw, tabloid version of Notes from Underground. Scorsese achieves the quality of trance in some scenes, and the whole movie has a sense of vertigo. 

And she nails what’s compelling about Charles Bukowski in a single phrase:

 a master of rut who writes about the gutbucket pain and elation of being human.

I don’t know how you could encounter writing like that and not want to read on, or go see the movies she’s writing about.

In her review of “The Road Warrior” (which she called ‘terrific junk food’ ) she talked about why she went to movies:

“to experience all the worlds that all the hacks and craftsmen and artists who worked in the movies could bring into being.”

She taught me a lot about how to experience all those worlds. If you want an education in the movies, in criticism, and in fiercely engaged writing, get a big collection like For Keeps and dig in. You will thank me.

Awesome, literally

Here are the opening words of Heda Margoulis Kovály’s memoir “Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941–1968,” which I just learned about from this excellent article in The American Interest by Michael McDonald. Kovály, who was born in Prague in 1919, survived both the Nazis and Soviet Communists. Her book is about both of them. It begins 

Three forces carved the landscape of my life. Two of them crushed half the world. The third was very small and, actually, invisible. It was a shy little bird hidden inside my rib cage an inch or two above my stomach. Sometimes in the most unexpected moments the bird would wake up, lift its head, and flutter its wing in rapture. Then I too would lift my head because, for that short moment, I would know for certain that love and hope are infinitely more powerful than hate and fury, and that somewhere beyond the line of my horizon there was life indestructible, always triumphant.

Suddenly, my day has a very different feel to it. I’ve just ordered Kovály’s book, and will report back after reading it.

Why I Hate Scrabble

Among my more literate (read ‘word nerd’) friends I’ve counted more Scrabble players than crossword solvers at every level of ability, from casual fans to true obsessives.

This is both wrong and bad. Scrabble demeans English, and should be abolished. Until we get the Constitution amended to that effect, we should at least shun Scrabble as a way to pass the time.

Scrabble is not a game about words. It’s a game about acceptable strings of letters. If your idea of fun is sitting around memorizing long lists of kosher two- and three-letter words, Scrabble is for you.  

As you do this, you’ll quickly learn that aa, ae, ai, al, and ay are all OK to use (and those are just in the two-letter ays). But you won’t learn what these ‘words’ mean, and you won’t ever have to. Words have meanings, acceptable Scrabble strings don’t. You’ll never be challenged to define your entry while playing ‘official’ Scrabble.

Words also have etymologies, synonyms, uses and misuses — in short, they have stories. Scrabble only has letters in the right order. The game rewards some level of strategic boardplay, and the ability to come up with anagrams and memorize looong lists of words. What a charmless set of skills.

To shut this open-and-shut case against Scrabble’s connection to our language and culture, I point out that many of the world’s top players are Thai who do not speak English. I congratulate them (using Google Translate), and thank them for proving my points.

So put away your Scrabble board and pick up the Times crossword. You’ll find yourself immersed in a world of meanings, ideas, facts, puns, similarities and differences, history, and all the other things that go along with words. You’ll never look back.

(And no, this post has nothing to do with the fact that I’m a pretty lousy Scrabble player)

Best Baseball Writing?

I’m heading to Fenway in a bit to, I have the bad feeling, watch the currently punchless Sox get stood on their heads by Felix Hernandez. I want baseball to bring me some joy today, so I thought I’d make a list of my favorite baseball writing in a bunch of different categories. I’d love to hear your thoughts on what you agree and disagree with, and what I’m leaving out.

Novel. No real competition on this one. Bernard Malamud’s The Natural is a dark masterpiece, one of the best American novels of the 20th century. It’s not an uplifting book - it bears no resemblance to the silly Robert Redford movie of the same name - but you can’t resist it.

Short Story. I’ll go with Jim Shepard’s “Batting Against Castro” here, written in 1993 and anthologized here and other places. It’s the story of two sad sack Americans playing winter ball in Cuba just as the revolution sweeps over the island, and the event referenced in the title does occur. But not before a lot of hilarious and acerbic writing:

I’d always come off the field looking at my bat, trademark up, like I couldn’t figure out what had happened. You’d think by that point I would’ve. I tended to be hitting about .143

General Humor. There are a lot of contenders here, but I’m picking Chet Williamson’s “Gandhi at the Bat” (1983, available here). It’s the (fictional) account of the Great Soul’s 1933 plate appearance, under the tutelage of Babe Ruth, against Lefty Grove. The laughs are rapid-fire:

“Mr. Gandhi… I want you to meet Babe Ruth, the Sultan of Swat.”

Gandhi’s eyes sparkled behind his Moxie-bottle lenses, and he chuckled. “‘Swat,” qouth he, “is a sultanate of which I am not aware. Is it by any chance near Maharashtra?”

“Say,” laughed the Babe, laying a meaty hand on the frail brown shoulder, “you’re all right, kiddo. I’ll hit one out of the park for you today.”

“No hitting, please,” the Mahatma quipped.

Long nonfiction. Total hometown choice: Mark Frost’s Game Six; Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America’s Pastime. A pitch-by-pitch account (no exaggeration) of that amazing game in the series that Boston won, 3-4.  ;)

Short nonfiction. Another hometown choice, but one no sane person can quibble with. John Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,’ his 1960 account of witnessing Ted Williams’s last at bat. It resulted in a home run, and also in a description of its aftermath that is transcendent, even by Updike’s standards:

Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted “We want Ted” for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

 Poetry: “The Night Game,” by Robert Pinsky. About watching Whitey Ford play baseball at night, and also about many other things like being Jewish in America. It ends:

Another time,
I devised a left-hander
Even more gifted
Than Whitey Ford: A Dodger.
People were amazed by him.
Once, when he was young,
He refused to pitch on Yom Kippur. 

And I get to pick two in this category. The other one is Donald Hall’s “Green Farmhouse Chairs” which is yet another hometown pick, as it’s about New England and the Sox. But it’s wonderful, not least because it includes a loving reference to his wife Jane Kenyon, one of my favorite poets. She died from brain cancer and battled depression. Hall writes of growing old without her:

All day I sit silent and alone
watching the barn or TV baseball,
usually grateful for the hours
of isolation’s slow contentment—

Please, have at this list. Let me know what I got right and wrong, and what gems I’m forgetting. I look forward to hearing from you…

The Blessed Field

To celebrate my birthday the Countess and I are going to Fenway Park tonight to watch the inexplicable Daisuke Matsuzaka and the Red Sox take on Seattle. My birthday started on a redeye back from that same city, but I was not on a plush charter flight as I’m sure the Mariners were; I was in a middle seat in coach with a screaming baby as a neighbor. Ambien did what it could, but it was still a long and unpleasant flight.

The rest of the day was bound to be an improvement, but by any standard going to a night game at Fenway is ending on a high note. Major leaguers have been playing in this ‘lyrcial little bandbox’ as Updike called it, for 99 years, and the current ownership completed this season a decade’s worth of improvements that have hugely improved the fans’ experience. The seats are still small, some of the sightlines are still skewy, and many concourses are still dark and crowded, though.

I hope these things never change. There are plenty of antiseptic and ergonomically bland buildings in the world; my ballpark doesn’t need to become one of them. I want Fenway to remind me that it, and its sport, are a century old.  

I had the chance to work out as part of a corporate event on the park’s warning track earlier this week. Here’s me grinning like an idiot in front of right field’s Pesky Pole:

I got to trot over the same ground patrolled by Ted Williams, Dom DiMaggio, Dewey Evans, Carl Yaztremski, and so many others over the years. As you can see, this made me little-kid happy.

I don’t know exactly where my passion for the game comes from —  my desire to watch 162 times a year, and hopefully more. All I know for sure is that baseball, the Sox, and Fenway are one of the best things in my absurdly good life.

Some Words on Easter

I went to a Catholic high school. The religion didn’t stick to me, but Christ’s teachings did. It’s hard to imagine more radical ideas coming out of a subjugated people in the Middle East two thousand years ago, or more important ones for humankind.

Turn the other cheek. Let us love one another. Think of the poor, mournful, and merciful as blessed. Some ideas deserve to reverberate down the centuries.

So to celebrate Easter, here are words from two great souls on the novelty and immense power of Christ’s thought.

From St. Augustine, a quote:

“I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are wise and very beautiful; but I have never read in either of them: Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden”

And from Mary Oliver, a Poem:

Maybe

Sweet Jesus, talking
   his melancholy madness,
     stood up in the boat
       and the sea lay down,

silky and sorry.
   So everybody was saved
      that night.
         But you know how it is

when something
    different crosses
       the threshold — the uncles
          mutter together,

the women walk away,
   the young brother begins
      to sharpen his knife.
         Nobody knows what the soul is.

It comes and goes
   like the wind over the water —
      sometimes, for days,
        you don’t think of it.

Maybe, after the sermon,
   after the multitude was fed,
     one or two of them felt
       the soul slip forth

like a tremor of pure sunlight
   before exhaustion,
      that wants to swallow everything,
         gripped their bones and left them

miserable and sleepy,
    as they are now, forgetting
       how the wind tore at the sails
          before he rose and talked to it —

tender and luminous and demanding
   as he always was —
      a thousand times more frightening
         than the killer storm.

Happy Easter to my Christian friends, and peace to all.

About this blog, and its title

The British author Roald Dahl is best known for his children’s fiction, including Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach. However, he also wrote a lot of short stories for adults, most of which are strange, dark, and fantastic (if sometimes misogynistic).

“The Great Automatic Grammatizator” is about as close as he comes to science fiction. It’s the story of a man who invents the machine of the title, which automatically generates literature based on settings supplied by an operator (it has buttons for historical, political, humorous, etc.; stops for tension, suprise, pathos…; and two foot pedals to regulate passion). The results aren’t as good as what the best human authors can do, but they’re good enough for most purposes and audiences. By the end of the story the machine is writing at least half of all English fiction, leading to widespread poverty among people who used to write for a living.

I hope the Grammatizator never comes to pass, and this blog is about why. It’s about the stuff outside my professional life, in which I study information technology —   how it changes and improves over time, and how it affects the business world.

I love my work and talk about it here, but there are some things that I hope are never outsourced, automated, digitized, or otherwise subsumed by technology. These include good writing of all kinds, the sport of baseball (especially as played by the Boston Red Sox), travel, coral reefs and other dive sites, art, crossword puzzles, good movies and television, and a few others I’m not thinking of now.

So I’ll talk about those things here. I’ll try to point to things I find interesting and/or well-done, and talk about why I think so. If you find this at all compelling, great. I hope you’ll visit here, read, link, tweet, or comment. If not, thanks for visiting.

And please do read the un-automatable Roald Dahl. Everyman’s Library has an edition of his collected stories, of which my favorites include “Skin,” “Galloping Foxley,” “Madame Rosette,” and the “Claude’s Dog” series. But they’re all pretty good, and completely inappropriate for young children.