Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays
STAYS SLICK EVEN UNDER
WATER… NEVER DRIES… WILL NOT HARM LATEX!
— plus several from California Exotic Novelties Corp., maker of the RAMROD Penile Pump, of Doc Joc’s Incredible Jack-Off Device, and of the “Anne Malle Facsimile Fullsize KNEELING DOLL”:
• KNEELING POSITION — READY TO BE TAKEN
• EXCITING ANAL PENETRATION
• RIPE LUSCIOUS SQUEEZABLE BREASTS
• VIBRATING ACTION
• BEAUTIFUL BLACK HAIR
BEND OVER and TAKE ME NOW!!!
Whether these ads are niche-directed at industry Insiders (doubtful, although they’re pretty much the only ones who are going to see the Programs), at retailers, or at plain old mooks is unclear. (back to text)
35 There are 45 official voters listed in the Awards Program. Here are some of their names: Avie Chute, Rich C. Leather, Marlon Brandeis, Roland Tuggonit, Stroker Palmer, S. Andrew Roberts & Slave Girl (so actually there are either 45 or 44 official voters, depending on whether Slave Girl gets her own vote or is just along to rubber-stamp S. Andrew Roberts’s vote). Oddly, Ms. Ellen Thompson appears on the list both as Ida Slapter and as Ellen Thompson, so one sort of wonders just how many ontologically distinct voters there actually are. Nor does an independent Big 6 accounting firm tally the ballots in secret under armed guard or any of that Oscar-type security. According to Slapter/Thompson, the Awards voting is “secret,” but the completed ballots are all turned in to Paul Fishbein and Gene Ross, who are the Publisher and VP (and Fishbein a co-owner) of Adult Video News, and who thus have an obvious interest in happy sponsors and healthy ad revenues. The whole thing inspires something less than rock-solid confidence. (back to text)
36 What many of the top woodmen resemble most are gymnasts. They’re compact and muscular and move with the liquid economy of athletes, as if equipped with internal gyroscopes. Little of their physical grace is ever visible on tape. (back to text)
37 We are not kidding — the Oscars are brisk and minimalist compared to the AVNAs. (back to text)
38 (e.g. Debbie Does Dallas, Behind the Green Door, something ill-lit with John Holmes in it, The Devil in Miss Jones, etc. — nothing identifiable from Deep Throat, though, and definitely nothing involving the statutorily infamous Traci Lords…) (back to text)
39 There is something deeply surreal about standing behind a female performer in hot-pink peau de soie, a woman whose clitoris and perineum you have priorly seen, and watching her try to get a microwaved egg roll onto her plate with a cocktail fork. (back to text)
40 (platonically) (back to text)
41 Despite the fact that the movie presents everybody in porn as cretinous, pathetic, or both, the adult industry has evidently embraced Boogie Nights the same way the music industry embraced This Is Spinal Tap, and the Anderson rumor (which never comes to anything — if P. T. Anderson ever shows, it’s deeply incognito) generates the least cynical enthusiasm of the evening. (back to text)
42 (We’re on duty.) (back to text)
43 For instance, H. Hecuba has strictly enjoined us from buying any sort of distilled beverage for Dick Filth, for reasons that become clear as the evening wears on. (back to text)
44 (The waiters’ special 15th AAVNAs fringe benefit, which sharply reduced yr. corresps.’ empathy with them, wasn’t revealed until the gala concluded — see below.) (back to text)
45 Filth is shouting because between the screens’ clips’ audio and the stage band warming atonally up and the ambient conversational roar it’s close to deafening in here. When the Awards Show starts, the audio techs will have the amplifiers turned all the way up to Shattering, which, even though it will tend to cause mussed hair and spilled drinks in both directions’ front rows, those of us way back in mookland appreciate. (back to text)
46 As both the screens’ preliminary clips and the Musical Salute indicate, Adult Video News appears to believe that the History of Adult begins circa 1975, when in fact this is merely the year when the locus of US porn moved from New York to California. (back to text)
47 E. just one g.: AVN head Paul Fishbein takes a moment out from his welcoming remarks to announce that his proud parents are in the audience tonight… and they are. (back to text)
48 (Nobody mispronounces Sodomania, though, we notice.) (back to text)
49 There is no will left to inquire about this (much less about the gynecological logistics of a Triple Penetration); by this time yr. corresps. are slumped in opposite directions in their chairs, only slightly less fried than the lady from ABC Radio. (back to text)
50 Yes — it’s a real category. There’s also Best Anal Sex Scene/Video, Best Group Sex Scene/F & /V, Best All-Girl Sex Scene, Best Gay Sex Scene, Best Foreign Sex Scene, Best Tease Performance, and something called Best Solo Sex Scene. Etc. etc. Hence the Awards Show’s extreme and numbing length: There’s a total 104 categories overall, plus three Special Achievement Awards, an AVN Breakthrough Award, and sixteen new inductees to the already engorged AVN Hall of Fame. (back to text)
51 Though Ms. Swift won for Miscreants, she is here actually alluding to her and director R. Black’s real breakthrough video in 1997, Gangbang Angels, which is essentially a one-woman show and features the year’s most infamous scene: Twelve woodmen line up and do an about-face, and S. Swift performs analingus on each in turn; she then kneels and assumes a prayerful/compliant posture as the twelve men all do a right-face and form a moving line and take turns hawking and spitting in her face. (back to text)
52 (Meaning people in the live audience. Adult Video News is taping the whole Awards Show, and they’re going to distribute the tape for sale/rent; and in the taped version, clips from various winning scenes are going to get spliced in, which seems clearly designed to mitigate at-home boredom.) (back to text)
53 (who is no J. Whatley but at least doesn’t screech) (back to text)
54 No woodmen are invited to join in, or at any rate none try to. (back to text)
55 (whom D. Filth is still hectoring for $13.00 in alleged Grand Marnier change) (back to text)
* Hereafter, GMNs. (back to text)
* Unless, of course, you consider delivering long encomiums to a woman’s “sacred several-lipped gateway” or saying things like “It is true, the sight of her plump lips obediently distended around my swollen member, her eyelids lowered demurely, afflicts me with a religious peace” to be the same as loving her. (back to text)
1 Compare e.g. in this regard the whole “What was the old man in despair about?”– “Nothing” interchange in the opening pages of Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” with water-cooler zingers like “The big difference between a White House intern and a Cadillac is that not everybody’s been in a Cadillac.” Or consider the single word “Goodbye” at the end of Vonnegut’s “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” vs. the function of “The fish!” as a response to “How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” (back to text)
2 I’m not referring to lost-in-translation stuff here. Tonight’s whole occasion [*] notwithstanding, I have to confess that I have very little German, and the Kafka I know and teach is Mr. and Mrs. Muir’s Kafka, and though Lord only knows how much more I’m missing, the funniness I’m talking about is funniness that’s right there in the good old Muirs’ English version. (back to text)
3 There are probably whole Johns Hopkins U. Press books to be written on the lallating function that humor serves in today’s US psyche. A crude way to put the whole thing is that our present culture is, both developmentally and historically, adolescent. And since adolescence is acknowledged to be the single most stressful and frightening period of human development — the stage when the adulthood we claim to crave begins to present itself as a real and narrowing system of responsibilities and limitations (taxes, death) and when we yearn inside for a return to the same childish oblivion we pretend to scorn* — it’s not difficult to see why we as a culture are so susceptible to art and entertainment whose primary funct
ion is escape, i.e. fantasy, adrenaline, spectacle, romance, etc. Jokes are a kind of art, and because most of us Americans come to art now essentially to escape ourselves — to pretend for a while that we’re not mice and walls are parallel and the cat can be outrun — it’s understandable that most of us are going to view “A Little Fable” as not all that funny, or maybe even see it as a repulsive instance of the exact sort of downer-type death-and-taxes reality for which “real” humor serves as a respite. (back to text)
61 * (or, “POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE” IS REDUNDANT) (back to text)
1 (the best and most substantial of these being The American Heritage Book of English Usage, Jean Eggenschwiler’s Writing: Grammar, Usage, and Style, and Oxford/Clarendon’s own The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage) (back to text)
2The New Fowler’s is also extremely comprehensive and fine, but its emphasis is on British usage. (back to text)
3 Sorry about this phrase; I hate this phrase, too. This happens to be one of those very rare times when “historical context” is the phrase to use and there is no equivalent phrase that isn’t even worse (I actually tried “lexico-temporal backdrop” in one of the middle drafts, which I think you’ll agree is not preferable).
INTERPOLATION
The above ¶ is motivated by the fact that this reviewer nearly always sneers and/or winces when he sees a phrase like “historical context” deployed in a piece of writing and thus hopes to head off any potential sneers/winces from the reader here, especially in an article about felicitous usage. One of the little personal lessons I’ve learned in working on this essay is that being chronically inclined to sneer/wince at other people’s usage tends to make me chronically anxious about other people’s sneering/wincing at my usage. It is, of course, possible that this bivalence is news to nobody but me; it may be just a straightforward instance of Matt. 7:1’s thing about “Judge not lest ye be judged.” In any case, the anxiety seems worth acknowledging up front. (back to text)
4 One of the claim-clusters I’m going to spend a lot of both our time arguing for is that issues of English usage are fundamentally and inescapably political, and that putatively disinterested linguistic authorities like dictionaries are always the products of certain ideologies, and that as authorities they are accountable to the same basic standards of sanity and honesty and fairness as our political authorities. (back to text)
5 SNOOT (n) (highly colloq) is this reviewer’s nuclear family’s nickname à clef for a really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to hunt for mistakes in the very prose of Safire’s column. This reviewer’s family is roughly 70 percent SNOOT, which term itself derives from an acronym, with the big historical family joke being that whether S.N.O.O.T. stood for “Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Ten-dance” or “Syntax Nudniks Of Our Time” depended on whether or not you were one. (back to text)
6 This is true in my own case, at any rate — plus also the “uncomfortable” part. I teach college English part-time. Mostly Lit, not Composition. But I am so pathologically obsessed with usage that every semester the same thing happens: once I’ve had to read my students’ first set of papers, we immediately abandon the regular Lit syllabus and have a three-week Emergency Remedial Usage and Grammar Unit, during which my demeanor is basically that of somebody teaching HIV prevention to intravenous-drug users. When it emerges (as it does, every term) that 95 percent of these intelligent upscale college students have never been taught, e.g., what a clause is or why a misplaced only can make a sentence confusing or why you don’t just automatically stick in a comma after a long noun phrase, I all but pound my head on the blackboard; I get angry and self-righteous; I tell them they should sue their hometown school boards, and mean it. The kids end up scared, both of me and for me. Every August I vow silently to chill about usage this year, and then by Labor Day there’s foam on my chin. I can’t seem to help it. The truth is that I’m not even an especially good or dedicated teacher; I don’t have this kind of fervor in class about anything else, and I know it’s not a very productive fervor, nor a healthy one — it’s got elements of fanaticism and rage to it, plus a snobbishness that I know I’d be mortified to display about anything else. (back to text)
7 N.B. that this article’s own title page features blocks of the typical sorts of contemporary boners and clunkers and oxymorons and solecistic howlers and bursts of voguish linguistic methane that tend to make a SNOOT’s cheek twitch and forehead darken. (N.B. further that it took only about a week of semi-attentive listening and note-taking to assemble these blocks — the Evil is all around us.) (back to text)
8 Please note that the strategically repeated 1-P pronoun is meant to iterate and emphasize that this reviewer is very much one too, a SNOOT, plus to connote the nuclear family mentioned supra. SNOOTitude runs in families. In ADMAU’s preface, Bryan Garner mentions both his father and grandfather and actually uses the word genetic, and it’s probably true: 90 percent of the SNOOTs I know have at least one parent who is, by profession or temperament or both, a SNOOT. In my own case, my mom is a Comp teacher and has written remedial usage books and is a SNOOT of the most rabid and intractable sort. At least part of the reason I am a SNOOT is that for years my mom brainwashed us in all sorts of subtle ways. Here’s an example. Family suppers often involved a game: if one of us children made a usage error, Mom would pretend to have a coughing fit that would go on and on until the relevant child had identified the relevant error and corrected it. It was all very self-ironic and lighthearted; but still, looking back, it seems a bit excessive to pretend that your small child is actually denying you oxygen by speaking incorrectly. The really chilling thing, though, is that I now sometimes find myself playing this same “game” with my own students, complete with pretend pertussion.
INTERPOLATION
As something I’m all but sure Harper’s will excise, I will also insert that we even had a fun but retrospectively chilling little family song that Mom and we little SNOOTlets would sing in the car on long trips while Dad silently rolled his eyes and drove (you have to remember the theme to Underdog in order to follow the song):
When idiots in this world appear
And fail to be concise or clear
And solecisms rend the ear
The cry goes up both far and near
for Blunderdog
Blunderdog
Blunderdog
Blunderdog
Pen of iron, tongue of fire
Tightening the wid’ning gyre
Blunderdo-O-O-O-O-O-O... [etc.]*
9 (It seems to be a natural law that camps form only in opposition to other camps and that there are always at least two w/r/t any difficult issue.) (back to text)
10 If Samuel Johnson is the Shakespeare of English usage, think of Henry Watson Fowler as the Eliot or Joyce. His 1926 A Dictionary of Modern English Usage is the granddaddy of modern usage guides, and its dust-dry wit and blushless imperiousness have been models for every subsequent classic in the field, from Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage to Theodore Bernstein’s The Careful Writer to Wilson Follett’s Modern American Usage to Gilman’s ’89 Webster’s. (back to text)
11 (Garner prescribes spelling out only numbers under ten. I was taught that this rule applies just to Business Writing and that in all other modes you spell out one through nineteen and start using cardinals at 20. De gustibus non est disputandum.) (back to text)
12 From personal experience, I can assure you that any kid like this is going to be at best marginalized and at worst savagely and repeatedly Wedgied — see sub. (back to text)
13 What follow in the preface are “the ten critical points that, after years of working on usage problems, I’ve settled on.” These points are too involved to treat separately, but a couple of them are slippery in the extreme — e.g., “10. Actual Usage. In the end, the actual usage of educated speakers and writers is the overarching criterion for correctness,” of which both “educated” and “actual” would rea
lly require several pages of abstract clarification and qualification to shore up against Usage Wars–related attacks, but which Garner rather ingeniously elects to define and defend via their application in his dictionary itself. Garner’s ability not only to stay out of certain arguments but to render them irrelevant ends up being very important — see much sub. (back to text)
14 There’s no better indication of The Dictionary’s authority than that we use it to settle wagers. My own father is still to this day living down the outcome of a high-stakes bet on the correct spelling of meringue, a bet made on 14 September 1978. (back to text)