Fate does funny things to us.
Many years ago, when Edie was a blithe, attitudinal teen, she (I) read a book called Class by a guy named Paul Fussell. It made a significant impression on me. I read it many times over the years, and even discussed it with people who I felt would be interested in having such a conversation (not many). The book was about the American class system; it’s sort of sociology, but written without so many footnotes, with amusing line illustrations, and with a marvelously snotty sense of humor. (I’m betraying my own class, of course, by describing the book as such. Sue me.)
Now, Paul Fussell has been the subject of considerable debate in more recent years; his first wife Betty has written about his, I guess, somewhat icky personal life, and Fussell’s writing has moved on to other topics (I should really say, “moved back to other topics,” since he is really a literature/history guy, not a sociologist). I guess there are going to be people who find Fussell and his subject matter distasteful. If you’re one of those people, go somewhere else for a while.
This month I found myself re-reading Class and I enjoyed it thoroughly, as usual. It had been several years since I’d had a look at it, and I started thinking, “This is all very good, but – what would this book be like if it were written today? Fact is, things have changed a lot.”
Then, out of nowhere, I received an email from an old college friend. He lives in New York, where he works as a writer/editor (sounds familiar) and maintains a blog which might be of interest to the sort of people who’d read this blog (all two of you, right?) – you can find it at ronmwangaguhunga.blogspot.com, it’s called The Corsair. Anyway, Ron sent me an email, the title of which nearly made me fall out of my chair: Paul Fussell and Class.
I thought, “How the fuck did he know?”
And then I started writing a reply, which evolved into this thing you’re reading now.
The book was originally published in the early 1980s – the era of The Preppy Handbook (a book which I had the pleasure of lending to an employee at current-Prep favorite clothing company Vineyard Vines (vineyardvines.com, for those of you looking for a really expensive tie) – she had never heard of it, and found it hilarious and disturbing) – and so many aspects of American culture have moved, shifted, been created, really, since that time. Fussell wrote another book called BAD: The Dumbing of America, which could also use an update probably. But it’s Class that’s really worth revisiting.
The book is clearly a minor classic. Examining its listing at Amazon.com, I discovered that its sales rank is (as of today, a date in early February 2007) in the low 13,000s; this is significantly higher than that of another book I wrote about recently, Maryjane’s Ideabook, which was published in 2005 and has a sales ranking of 50,000 or so. (This is an arbitrary comparison, I grant you, but I just wanted to see what the rankings would be like for another book I’d been thinking about. I’m also re-reading The Portable Dorothy Parker, and the new edition of that has a sales rank of 10,850. So you see: the Dorothy Parker book – a new, snazzy edition of a book that has never been out of print, sells better than Class, which I could be wrong but I think has also never been out of print since it was first published – and they both sell dramatically better than a book which I was told by sales reps was going to be huge, simply huge, an awesome hit… Sales rankings are funny things, and I know I ought not pay too much attention to them, but one can’t help but notice them, and they’re just interesting, as raw data goes.) (And it goes to show that sales reps are generally full of shit, though they may be very nice people.)
My point is that Fussell’s book Class is still selling steadily, and people post comments on it on a regular basis. People are thinking about this book. In my own opinion, this is a good thing; I just wonder why it hasn’t prompted Fussell’s agent to ask him, “Hey, buddy, wanna do a revised edition?”
I mean, think about all the things that have mutated culturally since Fussell’s time. Thinking about his discussions of higher education in America alone… The rise of business schools and law schools – so many grads! How many of them can possibly have actually learned anything? – and the choices they make in housing, spouses, not to mention professional specializations -- would surely be something he’d have thoughts on. The business of college rankings and admissions have gotten so much coverage in the last five years, but Fussell’s book was the first I can remember to call a spade a spade. I imagine he’d have more than a little to say about books like The Price of Admission, or any of Alexandra Robbins’ little works. (Of which, incidentally, I’ve read none, but I live in New Haven, so I feel I’m exempt.) Not to mention David Brooks! Imagine David Brooks and Paul Fussell in a room together – bon mot after bon mot, but longwinded and kind of annoying, right? Well, imagine Fussell discussing Bobos in Paradise! Now, there’s a good time! (To be fair, I’d also enjoy reading a Brooks essay on Class.)
What would Fussell make of the sort of culture we seem to have now where there is a class structure but it’s so stratified yet warped that it barely makes sense anymore? Where Donald Trump is a symbol of class to some, and the exact opposite to others? (Think of what’s been happening with Trump and his fortunes since Class was published, you need a spreadsheet to keep track of it. And a lot of TV sets.) Speaking of spreadsheets: imagine what fun Fussell would have talking about computers and cell phones and MP3 players: the branding of these things is all about matters that Fussell talked about in ’83. I assume that people who have Macs think they’re classier than people who have PCs; the Mac is more user friendly (less elitist) (so computer people tell me; I’d be the last to know, since I basically use my computer as just a really quiet typewriter) but the PC is easier to buy, and so – less elitist. I mean, you can go around and around on this shit. What does one’s cell phone ring really say about one? Brand of jeans?
What would Fussell make of rap culture and its hierarchies – I can’t help but remember Superhead’s book (see elsewhere in this blog) and wonder, “What Would Fussell Think?”
And consider New Urbanism through the lens of Class: boy, there’s a lot to chew on.
I suppose that if I were energetic or had a contract to do so, I could write the book that I’m proposing Fussell should write. But I don’t, so I won’t. I just wanted to point out to people that the book is out there – it’s in print, it’s probably in your local library – so you should go have a look at it. Class doesn’t seem complete, anymore, the way it once did. But it is still, for my money, the finest description of the different ways of life in America. You read it now, and you kind of fill in blanks, mentally, but then… maybe that exercise is good for us.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Friday, February 09, 2007
A scribe against poor use of language, inspired, incredibly, by the death of Anna Nicole Smith
I suppose there’s no point in prefacing this by saying, “I don’t want to come off as a language Nazi or anything, but…” because I can face facts sometimes, like now. I am a language Nazi. I don’t understand why people are comfortable with sounding stupid when they talk (beyond doing so for occasional comic effect), or, worse, reading stupid when they write.
This essay was inspired by the death of Anna Nicole Smith. I’m not too sorry that she’s dead. It’s a shame for her newborn child, in a way; in reality, if we were honest, we’d realize that it’s probably a boon for the child, because Ms. Smith could not possibly have been a good mother to that little girl. (It’s a little girl, right?) I’m being cynical here, but there you are.
My husband, The Most Ethical Man in the World, was the one who broke the news to me yesterday afternoon. “Anna Nicole Smith died,” he said, looking at his computer screen.
“That can’t be,” I said. “It’s gotta be a hoax.”
Nope, no hoax: the woman’s dead.
“Well, it’s just a matter of time before we see things online using the words ‘icon’ and talking about Marilyn Monroe,” I thought. “That’s gotta be the most useless celebrity death since Jayne Mansfield,” I said, as I reached over the back of my little pink comfy chair to pet our cat, who was playing with a catnip mouse back there.
I haven’t actually seen anyone yet talking about Mansfield but Monroe’s name has definitely been invoked, stupidly; and the word “icon” is being tossed around like rice at one of Liz Taylor’s weddings. It’s ridiculous.
People, good people, please stop using the words “icon” and “iconic” to describe things that really aren’t. Just stop it. Madonna is not an icon. She is a pop star. You know who’s really an icon? Moses. He’s an icon.
I just went to the reference section of our library here in the house and looked up the word “icon” in not one but three dictionaries. Along the way in the OED, my eye fell on the word “hyperbolic.” “God, yes,” I thought, as I flipped pages, “how appropriate.”
Media types should please remind themselves of the existence of the following words:
Symbol
Touchstone
Emblem, or perhaps emblematic – as in, “emblematic of the Jazz Age,” in reference to F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
The fact is, if everything that the media folk described as an icon, or as iconic, actually were such, we’d all be dead from exhaustion. We can only worship so many images at one time.
But here’s the real problem: reading and writing and listening gets boring if we all just use the same words over and over again because we can’t come up with something better. Are we too lazy to come up with interesting sentences? It appears so. I am reminded of a class I took at a hippie high school in the late 1980s. This was a campus where there were no classrooms, just sort of these vague spaces where classes were held; the year before I arrived there, the bean bag chairs had finally been replaced with proper chairs, and a classmate of mine bemoaned this every week at the school’s town meeting. Smoking was permitted as long as your parents had signed a permission slip.
That’s the kind of school this was. It was, in its way, a great place.
Anyway, I had an English teacher who was a real gem. He reminded me strongly of Hunter S. Thompson; he had a way of loping around campus and you knew he was basically doing this to fill in a dead period in his career, whatever his career really was. He had us read Hemingway and some other important 20th century writers, none of whom I can remember now – he clearly loved Hemingway best – and he gave us all nicknames that made us sound like characters out of Aeschylus. He loved the verbal riff. He must have been a jazz fan.
What he did not love, oddly, was swearing. This school did not have a speech code, and students all felt comfortable using whatever four-letter words they felt best expressed what they thought. A psychology class was legendary, I remember, because in this class, no one described anyone as being crazy; people with mental or emotional problems were officially described as being “fucked in the head.” But my English teacher did not condone this. I don’t think he found such language offensive, per se; I think he found it incredibly dull.
So his rule was, you could swear, but you had to do it creatively. You had to make up a new word to convey whatever disgusting act you were trying to communicate to your classmates. This led, yes, to a lot of laughter and general silliness in class, but I think he was basically onto something. So, wherever you are, Deac Etherington, thanks for being a hard-ass when it came to language. You had a good point, you made it well, and I ardently wish more people paid attention to your point.
English has thousands and thousands of words. Why do we need to rely on one – icon, to take my current bugaboo as an example – so heavily? It’s just so fucking dull. (Sorry, Deac.)
Another word that I’ve been noticing a lot that’s being used wrongly – I could say incorrectly, but that doesn’t convey what I mean – is “flair.” For reasons totally unknown to me, people keep writing it as “flare.” A newly built condominium in my neighborhood is being marketed as having “European flare.” Really? The apartment has bell-bottoms? That’s really something.
Look. There’s flair and there’s flare and they’re not the same thing. And when I say the words are being used wrongly, what I mean is, yes, they’re being used incorrectly – but they’re also being wronged by being used incorrectly. I mean to use “wrong” in the sense of “you treat me bad, you do me wrong.” You’re hurting the words by using them stupidly. And there really isn’t, as far as I’m concerned, any excuse for this.
If I thought this was a matter of an innocent typographical error, that’d be one thing. But it isn’t. It’s some kind of massive cultural glitch. People seem to think that it does not matter if words are spelled or used correctly. Yesterday I walked past a theatre downtown where a local arts magnet high school stages productions on a regular basis. I never go to these things, because I hate theatre, generally speaking, but I laud the effort these kids make, and on the whole I assume that the theatre geeks at the local arts high school are smart and basically on-the-ball. I used to work in a bookstore near this high school, and the kids who used to come into the store were always really fun and sharp. You talked to them and you saw tons of potential. You almost wouldn’t weep for the future, if you talked to these kids.
But: here were flyers for a number of productions that this school is putting on this spring. And the word “separate” is included in the title of one of these plays. Except it’s not “separate,” it’s spelled “separate.” Goddamn it, my computer won’t even let me type the word the way these kids did; the spell-check on my computer fixes it! Let’s try it this way: the word was spelled s-e-p-e-r-a-t-e. (Take that, spell-check.)
This is not good, my friends.
My computer wouldn't let me misspell this word; how did these kids manage it? What went wrong here?
Could we please try to pay attention? In the era of text messaging and blogs and all this, every letter, literally, counts. So use them correctly, and considerately, and mean whatever the fuck it is you’re saying.
This essay was inspired by the death of Anna Nicole Smith. I’m not too sorry that she’s dead. It’s a shame for her newborn child, in a way; in reality, if we were honest, we’d realize that it’s probably a boon for the child, because Ms. Smith could not possibly have been a good mother to that little girl. (It’s a little girl, right?) I’m being cynical here, but there you are.
My husband, The Most Ethical Man in the World, was the one who broke the news to me yesterday afternoon. “Anna Nicole Smith died,” he said, looking at his computer screen.
“That can’t be,” I said. “It’s gotta be a hoax.”
Nope, no hoax: the woman’s dead.
“Well, it’s just a matter of time before we see things online using the words ‘icon’ and talking about Marilyn Monroe,” I thought. “That’s gotta be the most useless celebrity death since Jayne Mansfield,” I said, as I reached over the back of my little pink comfy chair to pet our cat, who was playing with a catnip mouse back there.
I haven’t actually seen anyone yet talking about Mansfield but Monroe’s name has definitely been invoked, stupidly; and the word “icon” is being tossed around like rice at one of Liz Taylor’s weddings. It’s ridiculous.
People, good people, please stop using the words “icon” and “iconic” to describe things that really aren’t. Just stop it. Madonna is not an icon. She is a pop star. You know who’s really an icon? Moses. He’s an icon.
I just went to the reference section of our library here in the house and looked up the word “icon” in not one but three dictionaries. Along the way in the OED, my eye fell on the word “hyperbolic.” “God, yes,” I thought, as I flipped pages, “how appropriate.”
Media types should please remind themselves of the existence of the following words:
Symbol
Touchstone
Emblem, or perhaps emblematic – as in, “emblematic of the Jazz Age,” in reference to F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
The fact is, if everything that the media folk described as an icon, or as iconic, actually were such, we’d all be dead from exhaustion. We can only worship so many images at one time.
But here’s the real problem: reading and writing and listening gets boring if we all just use the same words over and over again because we can’t come up with something better. Are we too lazy to come up with interesting sentences? It appears so. I am reminded of a class I took at a hippie high school in the late 1980s. This was a campus where there were no classrooms, just sort of these vague spaces where classes were held; the year before I arrived there, the bean bag chairs had finally been replaced with proper chairs, and a classmate of mine bemoaned this every week at the school’s town meeting. Smoking was permitted as long as your parents had signed a permission slip.
That’s the kind of school this was. It was, in its way, a great place.
Anyway, I had an English teacher who was a real gem. He reminded me strongly of Hunter S. Thompson; he had a way of loping around campus and you knew he was basically doing this to fill in a dead period in his career, whatever his career really was. He had us read Hemingway and some other important 20th century writers, none of whom I can remember now – he clearly loved Hemingway best – and he gave us all nicknames that made us sound like characters out of Aeschylus. He loved the verbal riff. He must have been a jazz fan.
What he did not love, oddly, was swearing. This school did not have a speech code, and students all felt comfortable using whatever four-letter words they felt best expressed what they thought. A psychology class was legendary, I remember, because in this class, no one described anyone as being crazy; people with mental or emotional problems were officially described as being “fucked in the head.” But my English teacher did not condone this. I don’t think he found such language offensive, per se; I think he found it incredibly dull.
So his rule was, you could swear, but you had to do it creatively. You had to make up a new word to convey whatever disgusting act you were trying to communicate to your classmates. This led, yes, to a lot of laughter and general silliness in class, but I think he was basically onto something. So, wherever you are, Deac Etherington, thanks for being a hard-ass when it came to language. You had a good point, you made it well, and I ardently wish more people paid attention to your point.
English has thousands and thousands of words. Why do we need to rely on one – icon, to take my current bugaboo as an example – so heavily? It’s just so fucking dull. (Sorry, Deac.)
Another word that I’ve been noticing a lot that’s being used wrongly – I could say incorrectly, but that doesn’t convey what I mean – is “flair.” For reasons totally unknown to me, people keep writing it as “flare.” A newly built condominium in my neighborhood is being marketed as having “European flare.” Really? The apartment has bell-bottoms? That’s really something.
Look. There’s flair and there’s flare and they’re not the same thing. And when I say the words are being used wrongly, what I mean is, yes, they’re being used incorrectly – but they’re also being wronged by being used incorrectly. I mean to use “wrong” in the sense of “you treat me bad, you do me wrong.” You’re hurting the words by using them stupidly. And there really isn’t, as far as I’m concerned, any excuse for this.
If I thought this was a matter of an innocent typographical error, that’d be one thing. But it isn’t. It’s some kind of massive cultural glitch. People seem to think that it does not matter if words are spelled or used correctly. Yesterday I walked past a theatre downtown where a local arts magnet high school stages productions on a regular basis. I never go to these things, because I hate theatre, generally speaking, but I laud the effort these kids make, and on the whole I assume that the theatre geeks at the local arts high school are smart and basically on-the-ball. I used to work in a bookstore near this high school, and the kids who used to come into the store were always really fun and sharp. You talked to them and you saw tons of potential. You almost wouldn’t weep for the future, if you talked to these kids.
But: here were flyers for a number of productions that this school is putting on this spring. And the word “separate” is included in the title of one of these plays. Except it’s not “separate,” it’s spelled “separate.” Goddamn it, my computer won’t even let me type the word the way these kids did; the spell-check on my computer fixes it! Let’s try it this way: the word was spelled s-e-p-e-r-a-t-e. (Take that, spell-check.)
This is not good, my friends.
My computer wouldn't let me misspell this word; how did these kids manage it? What went wrong here?
Could we please try to pay attention? In the era of text messaging and blogs and all this, every letter, literally, counts. So use them correctly, and considerately, and mean whatever the fuck it is you’re saying.
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