Essay: Oh, Shut Up! The Uses of Ranting
“While in the parlors of indignation,” Saul Bellow wrote, “the right-thinking citizen brings his heart to a boil.” Bellow’s character Moses Herzog did that. Herzog wrote crank letters to ex-wives, to Dwight Eisenhower, to Adlai Stevenson, to Spinoza. “There is someone inside me. I am in his grip,” Herzog confessed. It was as if his mind had been hijacked.
The little terrorist within the skull can overpower even the steadiest mind. Everyone rants now and then. More than occasionally, it happens behind the wheel of a car.
Sometimes one commits a rant to paper. That is almost always a mistake. A rant should be transient. It should blow away like sudden, violent weather.
The U.S. Supreme Court considered one kind of ranting not long ago in the case of a North Carolina man who wrote two colorful letters to the President urging him not to appoint a judge named David Smith as U.S. Attorney for North Carolina. Smith sued the man for libel. The letter writer said that the First Amendment surely protected a citizen’s right to send an angry letter to Washington. The court said no, a nasty letter to the President or Congress, even if sent in exercise of the constitutional right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” is just as much open to a libel suit as, say, a newspaper editorial.
In a way, it seems a shame to inhibit a good ranter. But ranting is not always entertaining. Often it is embarrassing, even shaming. Sometimes, if it issues forth from a politician or religious zealot with ambitions, it becomes sinister. The U.S. has a fairly rich tradition of ranters, from Thomas Paine to Joseph McCarthy to Spiro Agnew (whose ranting was actually a satire on the form) to Louis Farrakhan. A citizen named Peter Muggins caught the essense of the rant in an intense if repetitious letter to Abraham Lincoln: “God damn your god damned old hellfired god damned soul to hell” and so on.
But ranting is a form of verbal fanaticism, and other cultures often do it better. The Middle East today is to ranting what Elizabethan England was to theater: the cradle of geniuses. Every faction and tribe has its Shakespeare of denunciation, from the Ayatullah on down. Communist bloc countries have bureaucratically institutionalized ranting. The East German government once issued a list of approved terms of abuse for speakers describing the British: “paralytic sycophants, effete betrayers of humanity, carrion-eating servile imitators …”
Ranting has many styles, many purposes. Sometimes its only ambition is to vilify. Robert Burns once let fly at a critic in these terms: “Thou eunuch of language; thou butcher . . . thou arch-heretic in pronunciation, thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis . . . thou pimp of gender . . . thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax.” On and on he went.
Ranting can be a sudden spasm of outrage or a cynical manipulation (the wise demagogue practices ranting in front of a mirror). Private citizens rant at public figures to vent feelings of powerlessness (Muggins to Lincoln, for example). Public figures instinctively use the irrational to call up the irrational –the rant to enlist the people’s power, a passion to follow the leader. One man’s rant is another’s eloquence. General George Patton ranted at his troops to get them to fight. Winston Churchill had a genius for the eloquent rant: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”
Churchill and Hitler staged a fascinating theater of ranting. Hitler perfectly demonstrated an essential truth: a person, when ranting, is often talking about himself. Thus Hitler, in 1941, speaking of Churchill: “For over five years this man has been chasing around Europe like a madman in search of something he could set on fire.”
Ranting sometimes defeats intelligent argument because it possesses the glamour of the prerational, an animal force. Words get fired up. They go on crusade. They storm across the countryside with aggressive and even annihilating intent.
The Old Testament contains masterpieces of apocalyptic rhetoric, notably from Amos and Jeremiah: rants to reduce the ungodly to the finest dust. Jonathan Edwards, the 18th century New England Calvinist, was a genius of the punitive theological rant: “The God that holds you over the pit of hell much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked.”
Ranters are everywhere. The good ranter is the one you agree with. Jesse Jackson rants. The Klan rants. Most of the United Nations rant. John McEnroe rants at linesmen. Phil Donahue rants at housewives. King Lear rants at the cosmos. New York street crazies rant at something that only they can see.
Zealotries spawn rants. Feminism has summoned up some splendid ranting. In the ’60s, Valerie Solanis wrote, “It is now technically possible to reproduce without the aid of males (or for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so. The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene state …”
Ranting may be a hot wind carrying lies. But sometimes it is a way of marching out the truth in a noisy parade of dudgeon. In ranting, veritas–sometimes. What happens in ranting is that the little editor normally on duty in the brain gets shouldered aside. The words come clambering out of their cells, free at last. Japanese businessmen are encouraged to get together with co-workers in the evening. A man gets drunk and delivers a violent tirade against his boss, but nothing will be said of it next morning, or ever. Ranting is permitted as a form of release from the pressures of Japanese business life.
It is the ranting held inside that is most scalding. That is the internal rant, the rant that is never spoken or written down. It is the rant of what-I-should-have-said. It is the magnificently composed and scathing reply that would have left the son of a bitch for dead, had I but said it.
But the internal rant eats at the ranter. It degenerates into impotent eloquence. It tears apart the system like hard drugs. Ranting, after all, is a form of theater, just as theater, too often, is a form of ranting. Both require an audience. –By Lance Morrow
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1050456-1,00.html
Editing is dead
It suddenly dawned on me, as I was searching Google for resources on teaching the basics of editing, that the word ‘edit’ today means something entirely different.
Today, the word ‘edit’ is more synonymous with ‘change’, or ‘amend’. You have photo editors, text editors, video editors, which are all, basically, tools to change and manipulate the underlying medium, be it image, text, or video. Once upon a time, perhaps before ‘Adobe’ and ‘Photoshop’ became household names, to edit something meant to prepare for print, to correct, revise and generally, make fit for general consumption.
Indeed, no one ‘edits’ in the older sense of the word. With everyone capable of generating content at the push of a button, be it a miraculous manifesto or mere mumbo jumbo, less time is spent on revising, and reviewing. After all, everyone wants to hit the climatic ‘submit’ button. The Internet was designed to disseminate information at the fastest speed possible. Your ‘publish’/'send’/'go’ button is always fancier, bigger or more noticeable than any other.
After all, you can always ‘edit’ it after the article is published.
Trailer Thursday: The Town
I love a crime heist as much as the next guy, but I haven’t forgiven Ben Affleck for murdering Daredevil.
Songs for the Emo
I realise there’s no real reason for me to be up at 2.50am on a Friday night, except searching Youtube for random nonsense.
Like intensely emo songs. The type that make you want to inflict unhealthy amounts of violence and observe a minute of silence thereafter and repeat till comatose.
There is talent after Justin Bieber and Soulja Boy after all.
What Goes On In My Head When I Edit
Just for the hell of it I thought I’d do a mental inventory of all the thoughts that flow through my head when I’m editing a piece. The writer of the piece I edited isn’t exactly one of the stronger writers in the stable. Most times I have to frown to make sense of his linguistic ability.
So…let’s begin.
You know editing a piece will hurt when the first typo happens in the title and it’s ‘invesing’. (investing)
There is no such word as ‘noteworthily’.
‘Demand of index funds’ is not the same as ‘demand for index funds’.
The ‘need for direct ownership’ should never be confused with the ‘need of direct ownership’. One is the desire to own, the other is what a pet desires. In fact, you don’t ‘need direct ownership’ when simple ‘direct ownership’ will do. Wordy prick.
Capture the sectorial index movement? Capture the sector’s movement instead!
When someone says ‘because 2008 was a bear market, we’re not surprised to see long-only funds post losses’, someone deserves an award for head-slappingly-obvious statements.
You bloody well define your terms for the end-reader who may or may not posses the specialist knowledge to understand your so-called writing. And if you make your editor trawl the Internet in search of some technical term, don’t be surprised if you piss him off. You might think the universe revolves around you and that writing for the common folk is beneath your 200-point IQ (and that such menial tasks are left to editors and that they should just do their job and no complain, my response to which is to keep reading), but let me assure you that your IQ and your universe revolves a lot faster when both meet my fist.
So that’s roughly the thoughts that go through my head. I’m very thankful that this was a short article, otherwise I’d be screaming bloody murder. To every editor that regularly deals with unhealthy senses of entitlement, I salute you.
Top 10 Job Hazards
10. Sudden disruptions
9. Unrealistic deadlines
8. Difficult people
7. Unexpected delays
6. Murphy’s Law
5. Piss-poor planning
4. Illogical reasoning
3. Redundant work
2. Blissful ignorance
1. Failure.
If anyone knows how to deal with any of the above, let me know.
Consistently Poor Performers: CEO wannabes
TED had a great talk about how kindergarden students consistently beat some working adults at collaborative problem solving.
At some point of time, the speaker, one Tom Wujec, makes the point that regularly poor performers are fresh business school grads. I would say its not that all fresh business school grads are poor performers, it’s that the majority of business school grads have been stewed in an environment that teaches students to tear down other people while building yourself up. In other words, the importance of being ‘right’ and being in power. In short, CEO wannabes.
As much as I am guilty of being a righteous prick at times, I often blame the environment, rather than the person. We are all merely genetic machines with abnormally large frontal lobes. And besides, there is always a job for CEO wannabes.
I am the Devil
Or so says the online etymology dictionary.
Nicholas 
masc. proper name, from Gk. Nikholaos, lit. “victory-people,” from nike “victory” + laos “people.” The saint (obit. 326 C.E.) was a bishop of Myra in Lycia, patron of scholars, especially schoolboys. A popular given name in England in Middle Ages, as was the fem. form Nicolaa, corresponding to Fr. Nicole. Colloquial Old Nick “the devil” is attested from 1643, evidently from the proper name, but for no certain reason. – original link
Exactly how I chanced upon this slightly obscure piece of trivia is entirely the fault of the word ‘niche’ and its search results, which turned up ‘nick’. The word ‘niche’ influenced the word ‘nick’ and shares similar meanings of ‘groove or slit’.
- nick (n.) “notch, groove, slit,” late 15c., nyke, of unknown origin, possibly influenced by M.Fr. niche “niche.” The verb is first attested 1520s. Sense of “to steal” is from 1869, probably from earlier slang sense of “to catch, take unawares, arrest” (1620s). Nick of time is first attested 1640s, possibly from an old custom of recording time as it passed by making notches on a tally stick, though the general sense of “critical moment” is older (1570s) than the phrase. – original link
- Conveniently enough, anyone who’s gotten close enough to smell my breath will generally know that my eyes are slitty.
- How nice to know that my name connotates so.
How To Make A Korean Boyband MTV
You will need:
- 10 good-looking Korean boys (they all look the same to me)
- 1 dance routine
- 1 random lyrics generator (it’s all Greek to me)
- many different backgrounds
- and 1 MV director for the entire music industry
Three different boybands and not a whole lot of variation.
They all look the same, sound the same, dance the same and apparently use the same shots. Either there’s a serious lack of imagination or there’s one VERY industrious MV director running amok in the Korean music industry.
