In his essay "Why I Write," George Orwell observed that, "looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally." I have read a lot of Orwell and I have never come across a purple passage, but I will take his word for it. However, I am reluctant to agree with him that good writing necessitates a political purpose because it is in 2021 and I am exhausted. Politics is ubiquitous and obnoxious. Nary a coffee shop in America is free of a political slogan scrawled in chalk next to the single-origin prices. It is tedious, exhausting, and endlessly divisive. Literature without political purpose seems like a relief to me.  

In the same essay Orwell has an answer for my complaint. "The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude." Fair enough, but also exhausting. We have many, many writers today eager to stress that point. I mean, God forbid you write about the moon or a flower.

Despite my resistance to these claims, Orwell is probably right. The political purpose that is nearly always present in his books and essays gives his work moral force, but it does not make his views correct, nor is it the aspect that makes his writing stand out from the other sincere and humane political tracts of his time. Before all else, Orwell is a fantastic stylist. He has a casual, almost conversational tone that belies a confidence and an authority that nearly no writer can match. He is concise, direct, but never dull. To take one example of his many talents, he is one of the finest lead writers in English. Here are a handful of classic opening lines:

​One afternoon late last summer my wife and I were sitting on the porch working on our laptops when a man walking two large, white, and expensive dogs passed by. Without breaking stride he looked up at the Stars and Stripes hanging over our steps and said, “I love that flag,” in a passionate, breathy tone I now imitate whenever I see a giant flag flying over a car dealership.
 
This was a few months after the George Floyd riots, around the time of the Kenosha riots, and, as my wife and I working from home implies, several months after the coronavirus had sunk its protein spike into America. “I love that flag” is an odd greeting, and I have wondered, pretty much whenever I see a flag or a large dog, why he chose that salutation out of all possible options.

​Which one motivates you more? Which one do you think is truer to reality?
 
Are you, in fact, beautiful—currently, right now, no matter what? If so, how are you beautiful? Physically, spiritually, generally? Does your beauty come with any obligations? Does this statement/fence make you feel better?
 
Or are you, in fact, a loathsome sinner worthy of hell? Have your deeds made you a delicious snack for a demon? (I love his expression; you make it after your fifteenth Cheeto—dude is zoning out.) If you are not currently a stand-in for one of the munchable-damned in this painting, do you think you could be if you gave in to a few temptations? Do you see something like this and not laugh from the safe distance of the post-Enlightenment, but instead react like Rilke before the torso of Apollo and hear a voice saying, “You must change your life”?

I received the following email from Slack yesterday:

​April is National Humor Month and we’re celebrating by inviting you to a special virtual event.

Join us as we welcome the authors of the best‑seller Humor, Seriously: Why Humor Is a Secret Weapon in Business and Life, Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas, for a conversation on how leaders can use humor to empower employees to bring a broader and more authentic range of their humanity to their work and to their team.

We’ll talk about:

--The behavioral science of humor, and why it is an underleveraged superpower to fuel creativity, foster resilience and strengthen bonds at work.

--How to flex a new leadership muscle that will foster greater boldness, authenticity, presence, joy and love—in yourself, your teams and at your business.

Implicit in complaints about political correctness is that it (the statement, term, belief) is logically incorrect or at best misleading. It then follows that a deliberate logical fallacy creates aesthetic problems in essays or speeches or works of art-- or whatever the PC thing touches. In short, PC feels stupid just like any bad logical leap, and is therefore ugly and distracting.

That thought came to me while listening to a decent podcast from the BBC called "Living with the Gods." It's a series of 15 minute episodes about some of the core aspects of religious belief throughout history and across culture. The first several episodes are great, and generally it's way above average for podcast/radio shows, but I score it a mere "decent" thanks to commentary in several episodes that is simply PC bullshit of the 2017 vintage.

Last week I wrote an essay about Tom Petty and his influence on me. Read it here.


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There are a pair of comic-relief scenes in Manchester-by-the Sea that concisely encapsulate my problems with the movie. 16-year old Patrick, whose father recently died, practices with his band, Stentorian, in the garage or basement of one of Patrick’s two girlfriends’ houses. The band sucks, and that is supposed to be True and Funny. In the first scenelet Patrick and his mates reprimand the drummer for playing too slow. In the second, they reprimand him for—hold on, you’ll never guess—playing too fast. Nothing else happens in either scene.

These two paired bits add little to Patrick’s character beyond 1) reminding us he is just a teenager and 2) showing us one of the things that binds him to his titular town. The latter is important because his uncle Lee may move him out of it.
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Unfortunately, the terribleness of the band makes Patrick less interesting, not more, and makes this particular bond to his hometown flimsy. I’m not asking for Jack Nicholson suddenly playing a busted piano like a virtuoso minutes after clocking out of the oil-rig in Five Easy Pieces, but some nuance or passion or depth of character would have been nice. If I am supposed to spend over two hours giving a shit about a guy, please make him interesting. Beyond the death of his father, the boy possesses little to excite our sympathies. I mean, he’s one of those dudes juggling two girlfriends once. Nuts to him.

"Don’t Let Facebook Make You Miserable," the New York Times ordered me this weekend. Facebook can do no such thing since I bravely deleted my account in 2013. Even still, I have a patrician disdain for social media, so was hoping to enjoy some schadenfreude over the world I left behind and its many mindless prisoners. Alas…
 
The premise of Seth Stephens-Davidowitz's article is simple: we don't live lives that are quite as exciting as we portray them on social media. The problem is he turns every piece of data into evidence of this phenomenon. Here are three examples that serve, for him, as proof of our hypocrisy:
 
1. "In the real world, The National Enquirer, a weekly, sells nearly three times as many copies as The Atlantic, a monthly, every year. On Facebook, The Atlantic is 45 times more popular."
 
2. "Americans spend about six times as much of their time cleaning dishes as they do golfing. But there are roughly twice as many tweets reporting golfing as there are tweets reporting doing the dishes."
 
3. "Owners of luxury cars like BMWs and Mercedeses are about two and a half times as likely to announce their affiliation on Facebook as are owners of ordinary makes and models."
 
Try to find the flaws those stats. In the meantime, I will relate that Stephens-Davidowitz "actually spent the past five years" unearthing them. Now, let's bitch about the above and explore why they do not support his brief.

I’m 174 pages into Martin Amis’s “The Rachel Papers.” It’s been a breezy slog so far, and I have 50 pages left. At one minute and thirty-nine seconds per page (I timed myself on the el this morning), that is one hour, twenty-two minutes and thirty seconds to go.
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Is it worth it? My wife just got me a great book on how to make pizza and I need to bone up on the science of crusts. Plus there is writing like this here blog post that I want to do more of; it’s in my blood, man. Then there’s being a good father and husband and well-informed citizen and all the prayer and study that goes with semi-pro Catholicism. Plus there’s fitness and over-all self-improvement beyond just reading. All that takes time. Do I really have 1:22:30 to spend on this book that I am not exactly enjoying?

Last night I smoked six wings and four legs. The unnamed animal in that sentence was a chicken. If I had a photo I could have posted it beside this paragraph and you would have known it was a chicken (or, rather, chickens) that filled my belly and my wife’s and my friend Marty’s bellys. You also would have admired the uncommonly red skin and finely mottled dry rub. You may have said, “Where’d you get it?” as if I must have had to purchase what is clearly the work of an expert. I would have been able to respond, “I made it MYSELF, dog,” as a sort of culinary muscle-flex to the cheering crowd.

“Food porn” is too coarse a term for the photo that does not exist. It would have been food erotica. Humanists would have held up pictures of the wings and legs while making life-vows during their DIY marriage ceremonies. “This is what you are to me,” they would say over the Unity Bush. Grandmothers would cry tears out of their mouths. That’s called salivating, ma’am, and wait till you see the spread at the reception.

On Sunday, February 24, 2013, my friend Sonari and I sat in a bar outside Dallas, Texas, each staring at a phone and barely speaking to the other. The specificity sounds portentous but it was just a random Sunday, easy to look up because it was that year's Oscars night. A decent crowd had shown up to watch the ceremony. We neither paid attention to the TVs nor, as I said, to each other. We'd just driven 450 miles from Memphis with a long mid-day stop in Little Rock. Google Maps says the drive takes about six and a half hours, but I recall it taking three times that.  It was a fine time, not complaining, but it was 10:00 at night and we had not had dinner yet. I recall feeling completely exhausted. 

The line between cliché and colloquial expression is fine. Consider, for example, the idea that there is “a line” between two categories and that the thickness of it is“fine.” Cliché to thee, adage to me.

Or what if I say, “Friendo, this here toilet’s flushing mechanism just hit a home run.” Have I uttered a tired cliché or used an expression that, like my accent, tells the listener that I am an American? I choose the latter interpretation. It’s not that I am fond of stock phrases. I am just a generous soul who would prefer to think that the speakers and writers I encounter are displaying hallmarks of their culture, not foreign objects clogging their mental pipes. Lack of eloquence is not crime, and stock phrases “are there for the taking” so people who don’t know how to say something clever “can get through the day.” 

So the merely inelegant does not invite the sting of my mace, nor the heat of my blade. Nay, my wrath is reserved for the lazy cliché, the phrase too graceless to be colloquial, too devious to be polite, and too faddish to mean anything but that the person has not thought about what he is saying. Or worse, what he is writing.

I have compiled a brief list of internet-era clichés that we need to put onto a raft in the middle of the ocean, along with the collected works of Aerosmith and Starbuck’s Coffee’s roasting methods. After a small ceremony we will give the raft a shove, and then never look upon their like again: