sssh! this is a working library.

On words

When language is undeniably beautiful, the beauty is evidence of the truth of the words.

There are many writers capable of composing phrases which, at first glance, seem beautiful. They are like plastic surgeons who excel at temporary beauty — that which lives and dies in the glimpse. A long, hard look destroys them both.

A writer who knows her words are beautiful will yet harbor doubts; accuse her of ugly writing and you will be met with silence. But direct the same accusation to a writer who knows the shallowness of his words and he will viciously protest. The depth of the protest is a measure of the truth of the claim.

Kinross on the typographer’s bible:

For all its learning, for all the width of its reference, Bringhurst’s book lacked a critical or historical sense. In this vision, concentrated so exclusively on the well-resolved product and neglecting the dimension of process (and thus the unfinished, the disputed, the failed and discarded), there could be no power of explanation. Kinross, Modern Typography (175)

I love the language here. “The unfinished, the disputed, the failed and discarded” evoke the poor, the neglected, the tired and sick; he’s appealing to our sense of democracy. No government can succeed if it oppresses or ignores the majority of its people, just as no theory can be complete if it forsakes the process by which a work is created. Criticism does not admit of immaculate conception.

Further discussion of anti-theoretical language:

In private moments men like Blair defend themselves by saying that their critics (always labelled armchair critics) forget that in this less than ideal world politics is the art of the possible. They go further: politics is not for sissies, they say, by sissies meaning people reluctant to compromise moral principles. By nature politics is uncongenial to the truth, they say, or at least to the practice of telling the truth in all circumstances. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (125)

They call them “armchair critics” because it connotes an image of leisure. The critic is maligned as a member of the privileged class, averse to hard work, spending his many hours reclining in a soft chair, a drink within arm’s reach. He knows nothing of the real world. Once this image of the critic takes hold, there is no need to engage the criticism that emerges from him; it becomes, a priori, irrelevant.

Supporting this image is the belief that physical action is somehow superior to intellectual actions such as speaking or writing. Nevermind that those who denigrate critics for being too soft in the middle, too unaware of the physical labors of the world (think farmers, construction workers, etc.), have themselves never broken a sweat over anything but the treadmill at the nearest luxury gym (a fresh towel nearby, afterwards a massaging shower and a $6 smoothie). In other words, an elite person in power waves aside criticism by attacking his critics with terminology that suggests it is the critic who is the true elite. Nothing short of brilliant, if it wasn’t so disastrously effective.

I love the way etymology can be so revealing:

What they have created is a system of deterrences, and indeed a spectacle of deterrences. It says: This is the purgatory to which you will be subjected if you arrive in Australia without papers. Think again. In this respect Baxter Detention Centre out in the South Australian desert is not dissimilar to Guantanamo Bay.…As evidence that their system works, the Australian authorities point to the drop in the number of what they call “illegal arrivals” since the system came into operation. And they are right, as a deterrent, their system clearly works. Deterrence, from terrere, to terrify. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (112)

Every word we speak has a history, even if we cannot or do not acknowledge that history.

Relative to Eagleton’s comments on the body:

The fact that such common locutions as “my leg,” “my eye,” “my brain,” and even “my body” exist suggests that we believe there is some non-material, perhaps fictive, entity that stands in the relation of possessor to possessed to the body’s “parts” and even to the whole body. Or else the existence of such locutions shows that language cannot get purchase, cannot get going, until it has split up the unity of experience. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (59)