The truth, you don't say (.)(?)

Everyone knows the truth is a slippery commodity. It is all in the packaging, in the spin. I was watching the commercials during one of the networks' evening news broadcasts the other day and this is who the advertisers were and what they were selling:

1. A national oil producers' association – shale oil production
2. A national coal producers' association – “clean” coal
3. A Big Pharma member – “big” pills
4. A retirement association – their organization
5. An insurance company – You need them more than ever now
6. An investment firm – Your retirement money is safe with them

They all touted their information as “the truth.”

1. The national oil producers' association – No mention of flaming water faucets
2. The national coal producers' association – “Clean” coal seems to be an oxymoron to me
3. The Big Pharma member – They warned about it working to well
4. The retirement association – No mention of their insurance connections
5. The insurance company – They are better than the less expensive e-surance brands. (Now that they have their own e-surance brand.)
6. The investment firm – They didn't need to mention Lehman Brothers or the global financial crisis.

As a writer it is often what you leave out that matters. Here is an example:

1. The sun was shining.
2. The sun was shining, the birds were singing.
3. The sun was shining, the ground was baked and cracked.

From connotations of hope, of spring, of drought it's all right there. The truth be told it was all three things: The sun was shining, the birds were singing and the ground was baked and cracked.

Save that receipt when you open the package, maybe you can return it if its not what you thought.

George W. Parker

Too much of a good thing.

I just finished re-reading my favorite Raymond Chandler book The Long Goodbye. It has everything.

A great hardboiled story: Marlowe's friend is accused of murder and the cops, the hoods and the powerful all warn Marlowe off the case. Inexorably the case is pushed onto him until he solves everything to no one's liking, including his.

It defines the essence of hardboiled detectives: “...this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I grew up and worked in the hardware store...”

It discusses writing as a business: “The public likes long books. ...if there are lots of pages there must be lots of gold.” There are shots at advertising which he compares to chess: “...as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.”

It has the best descriptions of drinking this side of Malcolm Lowry: Such as when you have stopped drinking “... It's a different world. You have to get used to a paler set of colors, a quieter lot of sounds. ...”

But if I had to give The Long Goodbye a book review rating it would be 2 stars. Chandler doesn't do the 1950's well. Censorship had loosened up and he uncomfortably tried to go with the new flow in pulp. Marlowe calls a man “flea dirt” and describes himself in one scene as being “erotic as a stallion.” I doubt that those lines read well in 1954, much less now.

As much as I enjoy the literary side trips in The Long Goodbye, it has too many. I wish Raymond Chandler had stayed focused on the hardboiled angle.

 George W. Parker

How to make a point.

Here is a link to an interesting article by Lee Drutman entitled Is Congress getting dumber, or just more plainspoken? http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/05/21/grade-level-congress/

The premise is of the article is simple: Examine speeches using the using the Flesch-Kincaid test and see what happens. I want to point out that Flesh-Kincaid equates higher grade levels with longer words and longer sentences.

According to the results at the above link Congress is speaking at a 10.6 grade level down from an 11.5 level in 2005.

MS Word includes a Flesh-Kincaid analysts in its tools. I took a few book/author samples and tested them. I grant this is a small sample but I think it has some “tough reading” in it from a diverse group of English language writers.

Martin Eden – Jack London – 3.8

As I lay Dying – William Faulkner – 4.8

Treasure Island – Robert Lewis Stevenson – 2.0

Paradise Lost – John Milton – 3.4

Ulysses – James Joyce – 2.7

Bleak House – Charles Dickens – 4.5

The Winter of Our Discontent – John Steinbeck – 2.7

Based on my sampling it looks like it might be more important to say something meaningful that everyone can understand than worry about vocabulary and sentence length.

(I wanted to slip obfuscate into my comment up there somewhere but I use Open Office now so I can't check to see if it would have helped my Flesh-Kincaid rating.)

George W. Parker

Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath

I have been thinking about John Steinbeck and his writing. I like Steinbeck. One of the questions I ask everyone who confesses to reading is “Have you read The Winter of Our Discontent ?” No one reads it. I have met two people in my entire life who have read it and one of them was in Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan. And I don't understand that. It's entertaining. It's funny. It's readable and you can justify the time you spend on it.

It seems like everyone gets the Steinbeck kicked out of them at an early age. No one ever gets past The Grapes of Wrath. I was lucky that the first Steinbeck I ever read was Travels with Charley. If I had started out with The Grapes of Wrath I would never had picked up another thing by him. (If you have ever seen the John Ford movie adaptation staring Henry Fonda then you need to be sure and see the SCTV version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6O5xCRNx4g )

My son is in high school. One of the summer reading choices is, you guessed it, The Grapes of Wrath. I don't understand why they would force that book on anyone. They should be reading something they would enjoy. No wonder all he does is play Call of Duty.

You can find my review of The Winter of Our Discontent at http://georgewparkertalkingbookreviews.blogspot.com/.

George W. Parker

B. Traven and social media

The creative person should have no other biography than his works. B. Traven

How is that working for him in today's social media environment?

• B. Traven has an official website – http://www.btraven.com/english/about.html.
• Here is his Facebook page – http://www.facebook.com/pages/B-Traven/112166092128826.
• This is the Twitter page - https://twitter.com/#!/btraven (Here he is in the guise of Kenneth Sean Glade.)
• How about the blog? - http://www.crimethinc.com/blog/author/b-traven/

Today B. Traven's publisher would be working to own and manage all the above web pages to consolidate and and control the marketing of his “brand.” Speaking to us, the buying public, in a single voice.

Traven's various “beards” (aka agents) would probably have their own Internet platforms and plaster us with all kinds of insipid Tweets and posts. (Well, they are just “beards,” not B. Traven.)

The one thing that you can be sure of is B. Traven would be using a Tor browser.

George W. Parker

I am not a Travenologist. What I know about B. Traven you can find here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._Traven and here - http://www.btraven.com/english/about.html. I must admit that I do agree with the opening quote.

Naivety

Here are a couple of things I hope I never come to disbelieve: “Cheaters never win, winners never cheat.,” and “Honesty is the best policy.” I realize these are a little old fashion but I still like them.

Another old fashion idea is that it is against the law to buy votes in the United States. It is against the law to buy them directly. To be successful at it you have to use a third party money laundering device. And the safest and most successful washing machine available is the US Government.

Here are a couple of recent examples , in my opinion, of vote buying. (I don't mean that the following things are wrong in themselves, just that the driving purpose behind them is suspect.)

1. During a time of deflation Congress passed and the President signed a 3.6% benefit increase for Social Security recipients. (I realize that there are many legitimate reasons behind this increase. I also realize that this group of Americans are active voters.)
2. Just last week President Obama was touting, on campuses across the US, his fight for lower interest rates on student loans. (Again, I realize there are a great many good reasons for these lower interest rates. But was this really anything thing more than an attempt to buy votes?)

Vote buying via the Washington machine goes the other direction too. In a previous blog I talked about the immense spending on Capitol Hill by lobby groups. What is a PAC or Super PAC but a way to massage money to the people, Representatives and Senators and Presidential candidates, who enact monetary laws?

It would be naive to believe that this behavior is something new in Washington. But is it naive to believe that it can be minimized? Probably, but I do plan on holding onto the possibility.

George W. Parker

Lobbyist

On PBS there is a Moyer & Company promo in which a woman laments that we (the American Everyman) don’t have a lobbyist working for us in Washington, D.C.

I did a search and found out at http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby that there were 12,655 Federal registered lobbyist in 2011 with combined expenditures of $3.31 billion dollars. (You’ll find a lot of interesting information at http://www.opensecrets.org)

Lobbies by definition are special interest groups whether they are the American Association of Retired Persons ($15 million spend in 2011http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000023726&year=2011), Pfizer Inc. ($1 million spend in 2011 http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=H04) or The National Association of Broadcasters ($13.9 million spend http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/firmsum.php?id=D000000202&year=2011, and on and on and on. A lobby’s business is looking out for their own issues.

The United States once experimented with a group of multi-issue lobbyists. The thought was that one person could look after the interests of a diverse group of people. So our population was divided up and assigned lobbyists. These multi-issue lobbyists were called Senators and Representatives. Apparently that experiment did not work out as expected. But maybe it’s time to reset that idea of representing a diverse group of people.

George W. Parker