SAM writes:

This article by Junot Diaz was recently published in The New Yorker, which is supposed to be a highbrow magazine and a cultural bellwether. The article is a symptom of how rapidly the culture is coming apart, of how our flagship institutions are collapsing right in front of our eyes as a consequence of egalitarianism. I was never a fan of The New Yorker, but I could not have imagined something like this being published even five years ago.

 The article is poorly written, poorly reasoned, and laden with cheap vulgarity and street slang. I don’t recommend that anyone waste their time reading it, so here is a representative sampling of Diaz’s elegant prose just in case anyone wonders just how bad the article might be:

“I didn’t have a great workshop experience. Not at all. In fact by the start of my second year I was like: get me the f*** out of here.

So what was the problem?

Oh just the standard problem of MFA programs.

That s*** was too white.”

Yes, the editorial board at The New Yorker thought that fit to publish.

The article is an attack on the “whiteness” of MFA (Masters of Fine Arts) writing programs. It is all just standard anti-white, anti-culture boilerplate.

What is remarkable is not that the article expressed the content that it did, but that it did so so poorly, so inarticulately, and in a manner unworthy of a freshman English paper, let alone an article in The New Yorker. Even Peggy McIntosh writes prose that is at least grammatical and coherent and free from cheap vulgarity. No more, apparently. The demands of racial “authenticity” and “inclusivity” now apparently dictate that we must permit bad prose, vulgarity, and logical fallacies; and that we must do so at the highest levels of culture authority and prestige.

— Comments —

Joe A. writes:

Sam, what we are really witnessing is the final rejection of the mythological lie that was “assimilation”.

Why would Africans want to be imitation whites?  For that matter, why would Mexicans want to be American?  Immigrants have their own cultures to prize, their own heroes to remember, their own ancient tongues, their own mythology, authentic not synthetic.

The Other have been square pegs in round holes for too long.  While their natural feelings of insufficiency and rejection by an overwhelming Western civilization are exacerbated by devious politicians for selfish reasons, the feelings are themselves an organic response to an imposed life, utterly unnatural to their being.

Seen in this light, the poor, inarticulate vulgarity of The New Yorker becomes instead the emergent realization that culture is an artifact of underlying biology.  No amount of propaganda, thoughtcrime, or newspeak can [change this reality.]  The sooner we openly confess this impossibility, the sooner we can go our separate ways and be who we were meant to be without interference.

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

I had an experience similar to Sam’s.  In my case it concerned the New York Times.  I weaned myself from newspapers twenty-five years ago when I concluded that the politicized, sub-literate practice called journalism had nothing to tell me.  I haven’t looked at the Times or any other newspaper for two decades.  Nevertheless, my tavern-keeper-of-choice always leaves the Sunday Times on the bar in case any of his customers might want to take a look at it.  I was waiting for a friend to show up for our usual Sunday-afternoon symposium and decided the pass the time by glancing at theTimes Sunday Magazine, or whatever it is called.  The articles were utterly predictable in topic and attitude.  Their intellectual and emotional level is well-described by the useful old term sophomoric.  The writing was, in every case, narcissistic and self-righteous.  I stopped counting the split infinitives and incorrect usages of words like “moot” and “to infer” after the first dozen or so instances.  Someone recently characterized the reigning modernity as a state of mind that considers itself extraordinarily talented and intelligent but is really abysmally ignorant and simply not all that smart.  There was the proof, in print.

May 8, 2014

Hurricane Betsy writes:

Regarding Thomas Bertonneau’s upset over split infinitives (in Times Sunday Magazine).  They can be a darn sight more readable than the sometimes artificial, pained attempts to not split them.  [heh, heh] The results can be awkward and not the way we talk or think.

Here is a commonsense approach to splitting of infinitives:

Here is an extract from the above little article:

Famous writers have been splitting their infinitives with abandon for centuries. George Bernard Shaw, the brilliant Irish playwright, once sent this letter to the Times of London: “There is a busybody on your staff who devotes a lot of time to chasing split infinitives: I call for the immediate dismissal of this pedant. It is of no consequence whether he decides to go quickly or to quickly go or quickly to go. The important thing is that he should go at once.”

Dr. Bertonneau writes:

The split infinitive is typically associated with an ensemble of other, related errors.

I’d say that the split infinitive is acceptable in speech, but unacceptable in formal written discourse.  I don’t object to ain’t in speech, but I would never write it, not even here.  My sense of a contradiction is aroused when liberal writers who pose as smarter than anyone else and more righteous than God make the full ensemble of sophomore-level grammar errors, just like sophomores.  (Fascinating word, sophomore – it is from the Greek, meaning “a wise dullard.”  Or as we said at the Mayall Street School in sixth grade in 1965, a Wisenheimer.)

Shaw was a playwright.  His characters speak, so they also naturally split their infinitives; it is a true representation of spoken language.  Shaw also found the apostrophe ridiculous and advocated the elimination of the gh in enough and though.  But his character, Henry Higgins, transformed Eliza Doolittle by instructing her how to elocute and observe grammar.

In the full flower of oratory, I agree with Hurricane Betsy that we might as well endeavor to boldly split our infinitives where no one has split them before!  In Hartford, Hereford, and Hampshire – after all – hurricanes are known hardly to ever happen!

Steve Kogan writes:

Sam writes that the piece by Junot Diaz is poorly written even by the standards of a freshman English paper, “let alone an article in The New Yorker,” but the magazine is subpar even at its upper levels and continually exploits an authoritative-sounding prose style that amounts to highbrow junk. Dan Chiasson’s opening to a literary review last year (October 28) is a good example of what I mean:

“Stay Illusion,” the title of Lucie Brock Broido’s new book of poems, her fourth in twenty-five years, is borrowed from Horatio’s fruitless command to the ghost of King Hamlet. Illusions, don’t stay – of course – that’s how we know they were illusions – but poets often talk directly to them anyway.

How clever, how lofty sounding: “Illusions don’t stay – of course,” thus flattering the reader at the same time that the reviewer preens himself. Meanwhile, poor Horatio is supposedly not bright enough to know even that much about illusions, when in fact he is not talking about illusions at all but about this one particular phantom, who will most certainly stay for his son, as Horatio himself says to the guards on watch a few lines down: “Let us impart what we have seen tonight / Unto young Hamlet; for, upon my life, / This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him.” And speak he does, in what amounts to the longest speech of the play, with brief exclamations by the prince. What Chiasson has written is no more than high-sounding drivel that subverts the text and then plummets into the colloquial by impugning the poetic imagination itself, since poets don’t understand the nature of illusions any better than Horatio but “often talk to them anyway.” This is what comes of half a century’s worth of postmodern indoctrination in the superiority of theory over literature and the critic over the author. It is an indoctrination in intellectual license and has led to all manner of trash talk, high and low, wherever it has taken root.

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