To Throw Thoreau and Rearrange

A Conversation With Sam
...some weeks ago, in the car, on the way to Lil' Athletes at the South Shore YMCA...

Sam: (noticing a passing ambulance) What's that?

Me: That's an ambulance.

Sam: What do?

Me: An ambulance helps people.

Sam: Yeah!

Me: Do you want to help people?

Sam: (Thinks about it) No.

Me: You don't?

Sam: (More confident) No.

Me: You want to be a rugged isolationist?

Sam: Yeah!

Me: Live out in the woods in a cabin you built yourself, like Thoreau?

Sam: Yeah!

Me: And did you know that Thoreau went home from Walden Pond on the weekends, and that his mother would do his laundry? Are you going to be that sort of rugged isolationist?

Sam: Yeah!

---------

I've been reading John Hodgman's More Information Than You Require over the past couple weeks, in tandem with books by Steven Pinker and Roy Blount, Jr. I've finished the Hodgman and will probably put down the Blount for awhile. Hodgman is often very funny, but the fake trivia trope sort of wore me down. There's something about that McSweeney's absurdo-ironic humor that is starting to taste, to my tongue, a bit too precious and light. Maybe it was the right kind of literary entertainment for the Bush era, and maybe we're facing a return to earnestness now. Hard to say.

Years ago, as an undergraduate English major, I fell under the sway of late 20th century post-modernist meta-fictional stories by John Barth and Robert Coover and Donald Bartleme. Their sort of "The Emperor Has No Clothes!"-style attacks at fiction were fun, and seemed to break apart the form of fiction which is a useful thing to investigate. I read an interview once in which Barth complained that no one was writing like that anymore, but, having pronounced the death of the author and the artifice of narrative, what else is there to do but go on telling stories?

Roy Blount's book about words is a bit of hodge-podgey mess. While it contains some good examples of well-turned phrases and some solid writerly advice, it mostly consists of either admiring words that sound like the things they signify or decrying those that don't. The word "Kiss" for example -- Blount thinks it is too soft and breezy-sounding for the action it describes. Okay, sure. It's also too bad they don't show Lost on Tuesday nights.

Steven Pinker, meanwhile, has a whole f*cking chapter about swearing, and uses the following example to illustrate how we tend to use swear words for emphasis rather than as a word for the thing they technically describe: "I come home to my f*cking house after three f*cking years in the f*cking war, and what do I f*cking-well find? My wife in bed, engaging in illicit sexual relations with a male!"