Save the semicolons
“[U]se of the semicolon is dwindling. Although colons were common as early as the 14th century, the semicolon was rare in English books before the 17th century. It has always been regarded as a useful hybrid—a separator that's also a connector—but it's a trinket beloved of people who want to show that they went to the right school.”
Henry Hitchings, “Is This the Future of Punctuation!?” (Wall Street Journal, 22 Oct. 2011)
Rightfully, I think, there's been a reaction to the venerable prescriptive school of grammar and punctuation. The modern tendency is to go instead with current usage. But some people — and Hitchings might be one of them, if I read his attitude to semicolons correctly — go too far with that. Perhaps what he really meant has been corrupted in its editing. I can’t believe that someone with his background and evident writing skills could describe the semicolon as a mere “trinket beloved of people who want to show that they went to the right school.”
I’m all for minimalism in most spheres of this life; and in no way would I advocate unnecessary and obtrusive punctuation merely on the grounds that I attended Grenville High School, in Quebec, where I was suspended for offenses that modesty forbids I specify. (The year I was in Grade 9, just incidentally, the teachers’ association declared Grenville High the worst school in the entire province and barred Association teachers, i.e. any officially qualified teachers, from teaching there.)
But letting the semicolon go officially extinct would mean competent writers lose a valuable tool for no other reason than pundits yield to current popular taste. The way things are going, we could be left with little more than a few Anglo-Saxon grunts ornamented with full stops, question marks and—for the few writers who still use relatively complex sentences and don’t mind appearing affected—commas. Oh, I forgot!!! And exclamation marks, those handy and hugely popular vehicles of spurious verve and melodrama à la mode. (Doesn’t matter. Whatever. Emoticons are meanwhile threatening to relegate words and punctuation to wherever the dodos have gone.) Mass criteria of the good rool, OK!
I use semicolons sparingly. I'm in no way emotionally attached to them. Used appropriately, however, they make essential contributions to clear prose. Hitchings’ apparent belief that the semicolon is nothing but an affectation among a few ponces is utter rubbish.
Where current usage can be shown to be destructive of effective prose, then it should be resisted. Semicolons rool, OK!
Here are some surplus semicolons I avoided using in the foregoing: ;;;;;;;;;. Help yourself.
Assailed once again by the notion I should instead be working on a novel, I offer a brace of haikus.
Disambiguate
Complex items in a list,
Good semicolons
Disambiguate.
As in: “Punctuation clarifies prose by establishing logical relations, e.g. in distinguishing defining from non-defining relative clauses; by reflecting spoken language, with its pauses for breath or dramatic effect, e.g., or by evoking tones of interrogation, surprise, disbelief, and so on; and simply by providing a rest for short-term memory and attention when a sentence starts going stylistically all Hegelian on you.” Try reading that without the semicolons.
Or in this case (I know we could have two sentences instead, but considerations of meaning or rhythm can mean the semi-colon is better): “He went through the manuscript of ‘How You Know When You’ve Finished Revising,’ culling commas where he could; later in the day, he went back and reinstalled most of them. Then he sent it away.”
Thus:
Middle way
To stop or only to pause?
Good semicolons
Find the middle way.
...
The Wal-Mart sign (above) is meant to be ironic, isn't it?
Incoming, incoming! Or, the problem with glass houses
I've decided one of the comments on my last blog installment merits a post in itself, together with my response. This is from a friend and professional editor:
"Is “Eyes filled with disquiet” a full sentence or is it a noun modified by a phrase? Do you mean to say the eyes, they filled with disquiet? Or these are eyes that are filled with disquiet?"
My initial response:
"The latter, of course."
Then, following further reflection:
If that isn't "of course," then I suspect a failure of style and a lesson in humility. If the latter, then how would this ride?
"Disquieted, street dogs slink panting from shade to shade."
OR
"Street dogs slink from shade to shade."
Arguably, "slink" includes the notion of disquiet, in this last draft.
OR
Maybe I shouldn't have worried about it in the first place, since--as some had already suggested--no one would have noticed a touch of stylistic tinniness anyway.
Stones hurled from a glass house
Bangkok Noir is enjoying favorable review, both locally and abroad. But I’d like to critique the second sentence of my own contribution to that story collection, “Hot Enough to Kill.” In fact, I suggest that readers take a pen and revise it.
Here’s the printed version (not mine—I swear that some gremlin on my computer vandalized the sentence; I have two copies of the story that read the way I wrote them, and two more corrupted versions):
Eyes are filled with disquiet; street dogs slink panting from shade to shade.
Here’s the way it should read:
Eyes filled with disquiet, street dogs slink panting from shade to shade.
Okay, maybe. But like, whatever, eh?
Style? I don’t need no stinkin’ style.
This is my point. Friends and others have said why worry? It reads okay the way it is. “Nobody’s going to notice.”
What? A writer labors over every sentence, every word, and nobody’s going to notice? What the hell are we talking about, here?
Here’s Laura Miller’s fourth tip for writers (“A reader's advice to writers: A word to the novelist on how to write better books,” Salon, Feb 23, 2010, emphasis mine):
“Remember that nobody agrees on what a beautiful prose style is and most readers either can't recognize "good writing" or don't value it that much. Believe me, I wish this were otherwise, and I do urge all readers to polish their prose and avoid clichés. However, I've seen as many books ruined by too much emphasis on style as by too little. As Leonard himself notes at the end of his list, most of his advice can be summed up as, "if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it." Or, as playwright David Hare put it in his list, "Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it." But whether you write lush or (please!) transparent prose, keep in mind that in most cases, style is largely a technical matter appreciated by specialists. You probably don't go to movies to see the lighting and photography, and most readers don't come to books in search of breathtaking sentences.”
Miller is an accomplished critic and journalist (see her bio, below). But I believe she has muddled “style” proper with “voice,” which too often amounts to little more than affectation or literary idiosyncracy. I’d argue that style refers to the mechanics of accomplishing what a writer intends in a way that makes the reader’s job as easy as possible, and that competent writers will always do everything they can to respect rules of style. (Though competent writers may break any and all rules of style in a good cause, as I’ve suggested in an earlier post.)
But Miller first sentence (my emphasis) could be interpreted as confirming an ever-more prevalent attitude that prose style is no real issue. It’s all “like, whatever; let’s just get on with the story.”
That attitude suggests the difference between a potboiler, e.g., a ripping good yarn nicely plotted, but one best read aboard a lurching bus somewhere in upcountry Burma, where you enjoy the advantage of catching no more than every fourth phrase or so—making do with the gist of things—plus, in a country short on toilet paper and long on stomach bugs, you can apply finished pages to emergencies. It can be a mistake to stop and actually read the prose. Attention to the cardboard characters and wooden dialogue reveals apparent contempt for the reader—a blithe assumption on the part of author, editor and publisher that it doesn’t matter, no will notice anyway.
With writers such as Robert Bolano or David Foster Wallace, no mention just two currently popular “literary” authors, every phrase, every sentence, rewards attention. Or stop to consider a V.S. Naipaul story, where the prose is all but invisible, a minimalist prop for this magician to conjure characters and settings. Elmore Leonard’s prose is similarly transparent. This master of style aims to do no more than entertain, and that he does, in spades. However much I’ve enjoyed his books, though, they disappear from my mental palate the moment I finish reading. Naipaul’s stories can remain with you forever after, coloring the way you experience you world.
Anyway, here's a parting word from Elmore Leonard. “My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
10 Rules of Writing, Elmore Leonard
Bio from Miller’s page on Slate:
In 1995, Laura Miller helped to co-found Salon.com, where she is currently a staff writer. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, where she wrote the Last Word column for two years. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and many other publications. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" (Little, Brown, 2008) and the editor of "The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors" (Penguin, 2000). She lives in New York.
Grundnorm of writing style
Dorothy Parker's opinion of the most widely recognized writing style manual in the English language:
"If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy."
But those who nevertheless persevere and do become writers should understand this: One cardinal principle underlies all other rules of style, including those presented by Strunk and White. The Grundnorm of style is simply this:
Make the reader’s job as easy as you can without losing anything you wish to communicate.
Basically, that in turn suggests you ensure maximum profluence. Good writers smooth out the speed bumps—they look for any problems readers might encounter before they encounter them and resolve them in advance. They get the writing out of the way of the reading. This goes some way towards defining good prose, and provides a general guide for revision and editing.
Do Strunk and White's guidelines still apply, a half-century after they first appeared in print? Mostly yes, I believe. And some recent quibbles with Strunk & White’s classic Elements of Style may miss the real point: Any rule of style, in every instance of its application, should be measured against both our Grundnorm and a corollory to this rule:
Rules of style can only be rules of thumb.
Good writers break the rules
Rules of style are maxims. They may be broken at will by competent writers. (Though competent writers will on some level recognize that they’re breaking a rule, and understand why.)
To some extent, this applies even to our Grundnorm. Just think—if writers were to apply it too rigorously, no one would ever get to read such modern classics as Infinite Jest.
For all kinds of reasons, writers may well decide they want to bring the reader up short. The essence of humor, for example, is presenting the audience with something problematic, something that appears wrong, somehow, and in its resolution evokes laughter.
Arresting the reader in mid-flow for comic effect can work. In other cases, however, we get people, many of them graduates of creative writing courses, who scatter arresting images throughout their prose, often winning big points for originality and negative scores for style. Where readers are stopping to wonder at the novelty of some turn of phrase, perhaps mentally congratulating the author, they may then need to go back and pick up the thread again. This generally suggests a failure of style.
Yet someone like David Foster Wallace routinely makes this sort of thing work. At one point in Infinite Jest, e.g., he uses “cabbage” as a transitive verb to describe a character separating a plastic garbage bag from its companions and pulling it out from under a sink. Never mind the image of someone “cabbaging” a garbage bag stopped me in my tracks, I have to concede Wallace knew what he was doing. With this book, the reader quickly grows accustomed to stopping and admiring the language, taking pleasure in the story phrase by phrase, clause by clause, page by page (for quite a considerable number of pages, in fact, including a whole lot of notes at the end of the book, some of which contain notes within notes within notes). In fact, I frequently had to re-read passages to pick up the thread again, but I didn’t mind, acknowledging that Wallace’s prose made this worthwhile.
For lesser mortals, though, such devices are normally ill-advised, no matter how accurate the expressions might appear. A book such as Infinite Jest presents a special case, where readers are already accustomed to exploring every sentence and phrase as an adventure.
Some writers ignore the rules
Then we have writers such as Hegel. He had no sense of writing style whatsoever and didn’t care. He was too busy working out the entire structure of existence—preferably, it can seem, in one sentence. Lots of people read him anyway, seduced by the intellectual adventure or maybe the need to pass a university course.
Hegel specialized in philosophical tomes. Embarking on a novel of ideas, however, is a dangerous tack for any writer to take. It makes creating real characters convincingly enmeshed in compelling dramatic situations even more difficult a task than it usually is. Thomas Mann pulled it off pretty consistently, and so did some others, though their names aren’t leaping to mind this foggy Sunday morning.
"A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind. "
In a similar vein, though I can’t find the quote, Singer has suggested somewhere else that if fiction writers set out to communicate great ideas for our age, they’ll most likely produce a bollix. If they merely sit down to write ripping good yarns, on the other hand, they may be surprised at how universal messages for humankind emerge from their stories.
So, Sara asks me, why am I writing The Proteant Enigmass? To the extent MOM worked, that was mainly luck.
Concluding note. A gang of Eastern European philosophers once told me, in Dubrovnik as it happens, that they preferred to read Hegel in English, and to heck with the notorious impossibility of finding precise English equivalents for some of the German expressions Hegel used. To whatever extent that was true, the problem was outweighed by another consideration: professional translators actually tried to make the overall prose as intelligible as possible, and generally succeeded better than Hegel ever had.
Maybe to prove they were real philosophers, some of these heavy thinkers brought with them large unlabeled bottles of what they called Polish drink. “Is good!” they said, and it was.
I mention this anecdote only to suggest that I’m a real writer—a hairy-chested, two-fisted specimen of the old school—and to dispel disturbing and persistent rumors regarding my teetotal disposition.
Another concluding note. Re-reading the above, I see that the mere thought of Hegel has perverted my own style, and I blame him. Not that I really have to shirk responsibility, since nearly no one will read this far anyway.
Inspirational hobologoist aphorisms & epigrams
Insights into the hobologoist mindset.
Money corrupts.
Impecuniousness rools, OK!
Artists must suffer.
I have my principles.
Solipsism means never having to say you’re being corrupted by money and prizes.
I like semi-colons; commercial editors can go screw themselves.
I like [literary practice of your choice]; commercial editors can go screw themselves.
Hobologoists don’t write query letters.
Nobody ever read Antoine Blorschacterforth either.
Save the trees, save the bytes, save having to explain to critics why they are fools. Remain unreadable, unpublishable, unflappable in face of famine.
Zen hobologoism: “Why write a book that no one reads? That is the whole point.”
Taoist hobologoism: “Stuff happens. Some of it we call books. Better to contain these than let them lead to readers and critics, eh?” (Few people realize that Taoism originated in Canada.)
Chief Smokey Tent: “I write my novels on the wind; read them if you can.”
Collin Piprell: “Haiku are easier than novels, unless inscrutability is your first aim.”
Marketing model for hobologoists.
Kafka portrait by Dimitrije Popović.
Rules? I don’t need no stinkin’ rules
Well, maybe just a few.
A writer should find a good chair, e.g. Install it right there in front of computer, pencil & pad, whatever, and then sit in it for extended periods, writing stuff.
Here’s a real lode of good advice from The Guardian—10 rules for writing fiction from each of a bunch of prominent writers.
And here are five tips of my own, something I recently added to advice emerging from a Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop (which I didn’t actually participate in, aside from posting my two cents worth on their blogsite):
1. Ignorance can be a real virtue. Don’t collect too much in the way of information and ideas before you begin writing. With academic theses, feature stories and science fiction alike, it’s often best to spin as much of the story as you can before you do most of your research. Ignorance simplifies things enormously, since you have fewer elements to synthesize from the outset. Wait till you’ve got the story up and staggering about before worrying too much about incorporating all the ideas in the world. It’s easier to be selective, at that point, and much easier to organize all the ideas now that you have a basic framework. The storyline can always be revised in light of new information.
I still have problems following my own advice, mind you. It can be far easier to “research” than it is to spin fiction. Just as it’s easy to convince yourself you’re really working on the novel when in fact you aren’t.
2. Hit the ground running. Write first thing in the morning, when the stuff your subconscious has been working on all night is still fresh. (I have a hard time not thinking of this product as “night soil,” which in Chinese refers to something rather different.) A character in a Graham Greene novel describes this as a process of remembering and recording, more than of creating something out of whole cloth.
3. In light of (2), try to fix your life such that each morning the first thing that arises in your mind is the writing project. Making a living at things other than fiction interferes mightily with this, of course, where instead you awaken niggled to creative death by all the chores and commitments of a freelance feature writer or editor (or instructor or gun runner or whatever). This refers us to Tip #3 in Clarion's lead list: “Pick a life partner with money.”
4. Every journey of 1,000 miles… The mere thought of all that remains to be done on a novel may induce paralysis and despair. You have to remind yourself how fast the days and weeks and months go by, and how fast a regular daily increment of writing amounts to a book. A whole life can slip away just as fast while you tell yourself that today (and the next day, and the next) would, for example, be better devoted to background reading; you can always get down to the actual writing mañana. An equivalent warning from the Buddhist Dhammapada:
Think not lightly of evil, saying, "It will not come to me." Drop by drop is the water pot filled. Likewise, the fool, gathering it little by little, fills himself with evil. Think not lightly of good, saying, "It will not come to me." Drop by drop is the water pot filled. Likewise, the wise man, gathering it little by little, fills himself with good.
5. Conciseness is a cardinal virtue. This advice is old hat, I suppose, but I’m always amazed at how—even after I know I’ve already honed something down to the bones—it seems I can always find more fat on my prose.
Exercise in conciseness: Revise a ms. as best you can, paying, as you always should, special attention to conciseness. Then do the book design yourself. (Anyone preparing a book for Amazon’s Createspace or Apple’s iStore will need to do this.) In MS Word, e.g., activate Justify and Auto-hyphenation. Fix hyphens, widows, orphans. Then reset the line leading, and repeat the previous step.
You’ll find that much of the hypenation is inappropriate. If you’re anything like me, you’ll then do your darnedest to eliminate all the hyphens manually, mostly by finding words you can trim away. And these words will be there, despite the fact you would have bet big money no fat whatsoever remained on that draft.
Repeat all the above steps, and be amazed all over again at how perfect conciseness has once more eluded you.
Thanks to Doug Savage for permission to use the Savage Chickens cartoon.
Qubital worlds save Pyramids from erosion by camel crap
Leary here. Wherever that might be (not to mention when).
Current affairs written on the wind (“mere ephemera,” according to my editor, which I didn’t ask). Right now, many of you folk back in 2011 will be fretting about political events in Egypt. The papers should be full of it. (You could still read newspapers back then, and they were often full of it.) No doubt the TV networks will be talking it up like they discovered Egypt only last week, and isn’t it amazing?
But that was just politics and economics and unhappy people, all of it written on the wind. Meanwhile, much more important issues were being neglected—the kind of thing that tends to evolve over many years and resists packaging as soundbites. (In fact, network news went on to nibble our world half to death, hardly noticing some other things that were about to chew up the whole shebang and swallow it, hardly leaving a crumb.)
More substantial issues. I won’t even mention China or emergent collectives or the PlagueBot. What would be the point? But here’s an Egyptian problem, one related to what was an world issue so important it made politics du jour pale by comparison. Though nearly nobody noticed (“Do you want that alliteration?” asks my editor, as though I need a machine holding my hand in this matter) because it wasn’t entertaining or dramatic enough. The Great Pyramids stood for more than 5,000 years. They may have even survived the PlagueBot, who can say? (That would be worth checking out.) Early in the 21st century, though, about 50 years ago, some people noticed the Pyramids were being eroded by piles of manure from where thousands of tourists rode camels around them, not to mention crusts of salt from where thousands more visitors sweated all over everything. (Never mind the city of Cairo had already spread out to swallow the Pyramids anyway, with highrises, traffic and air pollution also doing their bit.)
That was just one example of where mass tourism—along with urbanization, industrialization and human carelessness, not to mention plain old cussedness—having already made a mess of our natural environment, went on to destroy our cultural monuments. Rising sea levels soon made much of this problem moot, in any case. (Yeah, yeah. I know. Bad style. “Moot” interrupts the flow of my argument, since many readers will stop to savor this too-rarely used word. So says my editor, which knows many things I don’t, including whether I should worry about having many readers, never mind whether they’re going to be stopping or not.)
Qubital saviors. Then along came the generated realities. Now we had a way everyone could enjoy all the forests and pyramids anybody could handle, they didn’t even have to sweat on them if they didn’t want to. Didn’t even have to leave the comfort of their own homes. And the real items, what was left of them, would be left to recover. Except that before you knew it there wasn’t anything left of them to recover.
First we got the Troubles, then sea levels surging higher, and then the PlagueBot, which spelled an end to most of the Troubles and just about everything else as well. But what the heck.
THE PLAGUEBOT: READ ALL ABOUT IT
If you want to know something about what followed the PlagueBot—though I don’t know why anybody would, darn it, not unless they thought it was possible for me to change the past by telling you about our future which, I’m sad to say, it isn’t—you can read MOM. Find out in advance how the human race looked set to become extinct, with the machines taking over and everything. If all that’s true, of course, then how could I still be blathering away, here in the future, expecting anybody to read these chronicles? Well it’s been a near thing, I have to say, and the whole story has yet to be told.
One thing, nobody’s worried any more about who’s running the show in Egypt. There is no Egypt. In fact, countries in general are kind of passé.
So you should read MOM. (In all modesty, I have to admit that this novel draws on privileged information.) And read the next book, coming soon, the name of which Collin doesn’t want me divulging at this time.
Jazz piano par excellence: FCCT Friday night happy hour
Bob King’s pianos don’t believe in musical spaces. This rendition of “Night in Tunisia," e.g., presents a solid wall of brilliant but super-dense improvisation. When Bob’s in this mode, he says, the piano starts playing him. He’s capable of playing the most delicate, subtlest jazz you could want; but his piano doesn’t always want him to play it this way. So Bob can appear to resist, asserting his basic autonomy by demolishing a piano with his bare hands.
I’m composing a piece for him entitled “Crasheous Crescendo for Jazz Fingers and Medieval Mace.” The only lyrics come right at the end, right after that sudden, shocking silence that finds him sitting amid the rubble. My sheet music says at that point he should mutter, “Darned pianos.”
Only kidding. I’m a big fan. But sometimes he loses me. Which, in some opinion, is easily done. Check out “Take the A-Train” and others on his myspace site, plus comments from his many musical friends. Find performances on YouTube
or catch him live in Bangkok at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand (FCCT), generally the last Friday evening of each month, and Tuesday nights from 9pm at Nui’s, Sukhumvit Soi 19.
Thanks to Lee for this late addition: Bob's also playing at Giusto’s every Thursday@9pm (Sukhumvit Soi 23).
Paper books rool, OK!
One more advantage of paper books. Once upon a time before e-book readers, on an upcountry excursion in Burma, I was smitten with acute diarrhea in a land without toilet paper. But I was equipped with a fat paperback on Chinese history and politics. Over the next few days an assortment of conveyances jounced me along back-country roads as I attempted to learn about China fast enough to stay ahead of immediate needs for paper. I never did get to finish that book, but I sure was glad it was a lengthy bugger. (Though this was in a time before e-book readers, the story presents evidence for one more advantage of paper books over their digital counterparts.)
Artful entertainment at length. At 1,100 pages, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest might appear even more suited to such journeys. But it resists reading at a pace that exceeds Burma Belly in full sprint. For sure it’s no print version of TV, no nicely narcotic diversion from life proper.
Infinite Jest demands attention and real engagement. Dare we say it’s art, rather than mere entertainment? Nevertheless, this book is certainly entertaining; in fact, it’s one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. It’s also science fiction, of sorts, though it doesn’t fall into any genre I recognize.
Tomorrow, sometime soon, whenever, I’ll use Infinite Jest to kick off a short discourse on “good writing style.” Good blogging style, meanwhile, suggests I should cease and desist for now, properly respectful of contemporary attention spans, besides which distractions of every digital species summon me away to other matters.
Starbucks and the social construction of reality
Sara and I are having breakfast at Starbucks. Being a kee niaow species of curmudgeon, I’m complaining about everything from the prices to the clonish docking of people and their digital devices. Discerning impatience in her manner, I eventually desist.
“Give me a break,” she says, going on to explain that Starbucks doesn’t sell coffee; it sells a lifestyle experience, and I should dummy up about it, she’s trying to relax.
Ah, I reply. So we’re banking some sort of lifestyle karma here, and it’s probably cheap at the price.
Sara says I have a talent for turning what should be a simple cup of coffee and a dose of lifestyle experience into a mountain of mumbo-jumbo and a pain in the ass, and I believe she could be right. Nevertheless.
Speeding away on caffeine, I tell her that reality is a social construct. Once people start to recognize this, even only tacitly, then the construction of social reality becomes big business, with advertising, public relations, politicians and special interest groups all packaging and selling their own realities. The mass of the people are consumers, then, of realities. Reality is basically a range of supermarket commodities, and you just stroll along picking glitzy packages off the shelves. Choosing our “lifestyles” and personalities du jour is part of this. (Consumerism-infused New Age thinking is no exception.)
Modular mix and matching rools, OK! I am my iPhone, not to mention my Timberland shoes, Levi's 501 jeans and the Melody Gardot on my iPod. That’s this week. Maybe I’ll let Jack the Hack Shackaway be my lifestyle/personal image mentor next week, and wear a tie, maybe carry a nicely rumpled sports jacket in case I find myself subjected to Bangkok hi-so grade air-conditioning, ducking in to some flash establishment to seek shelter from the rain and not wanting then to die of exposure. Yeah, and that week I’ll be plugged in to Dion singing “St. Jerome the Thunderer” over and over again till I can’t get it out of my head even when I wrench the earphones out and moan and clasp my head with both hands.
“You always know best,” says Sara. “What makes you think you’re better?”
Son of iMac, spawn of the Devil
Some lads my age buy themselves a Harley, or a nice gun-metal Lamborghini. Instead, I’ve recently switched from PC to Apple and bought a secondhand state-of-the-art 27” iMac desktop.
I’ve suffered the transition to a new operating system, familiarized myself with 1,000 new key commands for a bunch of new programs, and learned interesting things such as how you really need a UPS and how incredibly expensive a UPS really is for this particular computer, and that, no matter how mature and savvy and well-versed in the pathology of consumerism and how it relates to the failure of the Western metaphysic and the hard-wired shitheadedness of the average specimen of Homo sapiens, I can still find myself in the position I am now in, with Sara saying I did the right thing, and I should just relax and enjoy it, and there, there, you aren’t really a moron, though I know she secretly believes I am, and delights in this circumstance.
Especially after I found how inconvenient it was to lug the 27” iMac along to the coffee shop with me. That’s right. So I pretty well had to buy a Mac Pro laptop as well, eh?
Hey, but now I’m the dude.
Man for an age
Recent Posts
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- Some good things to do with an Internet addiction
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