STYLE: It Don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing
by Bruce Piasecki, author of 2040
PREMISE IN THE FIRST PARAGRAPH:
Style makes the man, and those transparent women of substance in plastic dresses Bob Dylan sings about in his latest collection of songs near age 80. Style makes the song, as Bob Dylan knows, and the Counting Crows, and the long deceased but lively chants sung by Leonard Cohen. Style is everything, and we need to discover and now remember that most of the time we are “overeducated” when it comes to style.
ARGUMENT TO BOOT:
Now many educators would say “get that and” out of the last sentence above. Some would say, “be good now Bruce — get each of the three “ands” out of the opening paragraph.” I say: pure foxtrotting rot!
Beauty is the trail of thoughts, how the words — as assembled — jump over and into each other. Reread the first paragraph for flow, not just comprehension. This happens in how we speak to how we read “Song of Myself” by the master cascading Walt Whitman. When you are meeting children, you can watch how they determine if they can trust you. It often depends on how imaginative the flow of your words remain, child-like, song-like, in my experience. Cartoons have multi-valance. They jump about, in loving instructive ways. As does a Fellini film. To hell with excessive clarity; it is a sham.
Beauty in phrasing does not reside in the exact precise over careful directions of simple coherence and logic. Take down E. B. White’s Elements of Style from your shelves and burn it during this pandemic. Only imaginative style will make you survive.
THE FUNGUS OF FAME MEDIUM.COM ENTRY RESPONSE
Take this extended example.
Last Medium.com, now posted, I wrote about “The Fungus of Fame.”
One caring reader said I used the word “fungus” way to many times.
God damn it, the entire piece was designed to celebrate the excessive styles of new journalists Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese. Fungus was among us in that piece, and its repetition was part of the chant. I deliberated each time it was reused. It grew within the readers toes by the time I was done.
Look again at most of Tom Wolfe’s famous essays. He selected a key word like Marshall, and said it 12 to 24 times in a few pages. To edit that out would be to miss what Wolfe was dramatizing about Marshall McLuhan’s famous style of generating endlessly insightful speech. To delete “fungus” from my piece “The Fungus of Fame” is like saying M. H. Abrams’ book The Mirror and the Lamp would be a great work of literary scholarship “if you took out the redundancies in the title!”
No way Jo Say. The stupid suggestion was shown to me by Mike Abrams in his office a few decades back. Mike showed me one of his many manuscript rejections said “this would be a good piece of early scholarship except for the horrible and unclear title.” How hilarious. Abrams’ bold genius resided in calling the 18th century imagination mostly about “mirroring” nature; while the 19th century was about when stylists learned they were “lamps”, self-illuminating. To strip that out of his book title, for the sake of clarity, would be nothing short of a mortal sin. Yet many of Abram’s colleagues at Cornell spent wasted hours striving to beat the beat out of my prose.
I write about this repressiveness for clarity in my new Fable in 2040. Here is an extended excerpt from page 85 of the new book:
“IT WAS ELITE SCHOOLING THAT BLINDED ME
Today, most people are content with acclamation. They are happy when their voice is kept to a yea or a nay, when their purchase is only a click away, and they click autofill on the rest. This is not what we were trained for in critical thinking, or critical reading.
I am the opposite. I like to elaborate, to fix a goal higher than reality. Screw the dominant repressive culture. Freud was right when he wrote Civilization and its Discontent — elite training is like an ever-tightening belt around your temples and jewels. They make it hurt, slowly, like drip torture, and before you know it you are in the straightjacket of professionalism. Yet when in the first person, when alert, when mindful, I find that time is on my side.”
By the ending sessions of 2040, I convey a message about taking off the Noh masks of emotiveless prose. Is there even a word “emotiveless”. Well, in this context there is!
THERE ARE MANY STYLES IN THE ZOO, LIKE ANIMALS IN YOUR THOUGHTS
It is absurd to expect the world to only want one style.
That is one of the points in the Fable. A protest song is required, like in the celebrated artists of this Fable: Bob Dylan, Fellini, Banksy. They are replete with a shocking absence of clarity. It is in their explosive creativity, the very multi-valence jumping atoms between atomic rings — in their style that you get the nuclear power of their minds. They generate head within your mind.
Traditionalists want your mind in sequence, from the letters A to B to C to M and T before you get to the Z. But Fellini often starts with a final feeling, and zooms back into further memory before he proceeds with a dance of daring seemingly unrelated scenes and characters. Their is a unique method to this work, that is why it lasts. The same with Dylan. I have now read five biographies on Bob Dylan, and most do not get it. Some frame his genius, but most book writers of biographies are trying to put a stinging bee in a bottle. Let it fly Bob, let it fly.
This new century would be very bland and horrible world if we followed the compositional suggestions of the best schools. In a world of E. B. White stylists, it would be hard to raise venture capital. No one would go for the spiel. There would be long silences in the classroom of business plans. Hyperbole is an element of grand style.
Looking longer, lingering, at that first paragraph I offered above, you can see a few other points. I woke up to in my mind this dreamy morning with the full paragraph assembled in my mind — that was the dreamwork. Much of 2040 is disciplined to stay close to this kind of style. You see that the absence of repression is another feature of grand style.
THE GRAND EXAMPLE OF LEONARD COHEN’S SUZANNE
An overeducated English teacher might say what do you mean by “the long deceased but lively chants sung by Leonard Cohen.” Yet the thrill is in figuring how it runs along like his master song “Suzanne”, his classic retrospect on love, and a chanting enchanting chat with a lover.
Take a few minutes and listen again to this classic Leonard accomplishment. By the time you are the end, where the finale stanza’s walk on water, you are mesmerized by the lack of exactness, by the pure poetry of the stanzas.
If true to a song, why not true to a Fable like 2040?
They say when Leonard died recently the real Suzanne wrote him back a love letter, which the press leaked. Now that is style. “Suzanne takes you down to her place by the river. She feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China. And just when you are about to tell her that you have no love to give her, she takes you down…”
Look at that perfect “and”, “And just when you are…” That is the “and” of genius, high style. And it would have been edited out of my Cornell freshman grammar classes, and yours.
For decades, my teachers and friends said my style is too flamboyant. After watching the fate of eighteen published books, I am glad I refused to listen to that advice. That I must “tone it down”, be like E. B. White!. What the hell?
ELEMENTS OF GRAND STYLE
E.B. White would want you to edit out the word Grand above, one of the most delicious words in English. What the hell?
Yes, of course, their is one kind of style that resides its eloquence in directness, clarity and simplicity. Ok, good enough. Let’s move on, you have the rest of your life to discover the grander styles in the works of the Scottish essayist Thomas Babington, renamed McCauley by the British, who wanted a piece of his ass because they often lacked his grandness. Sure, there are some grand essayists in British prose, like the author of “The Prize Fighter”. I forgot his name after 40 years, but did not forget the zing of his opening paragraphs.
The first element of grand style is that it must have gusto, force, bravado in it, like a sentence in any essay or book by Tom Wolfe, Thomas Babington in Scotland’s prior centuries, or Dylan himself. Amen. There is a fungus among us. The literary tradition is alive with it.
