Berthing Twins

The word berth has always, for me, had something of an oaky afterbirth; that is, upon its reaching my lips, I have never been able to escape the taste of a freshly greased newborn. I have a feeling that I am not alone in this phenomenon. Luckily, this neurological event is not without some etymological reason, which makes the whole thing acceptable.

More than mere homophones, birth and berth are more than likely doublets, which means that they were born of the same root-word. Birth is the older of the twins by just a few centuries, finding origins in Proto-Germanic, thence slithering into Old Norse, and a bit later Middle English, during which time berth is born, meaning “bearing” or “carriage,” though not a baby’s, as mothers were still at this time staunchly anti-pram. 

How long can mothers bear to bear bare-naked babies around bears without bearing arms? 

The diversity of the word is hereabove illustrated. Yet, indeed, for what duration can a woman with child truly endure or accept producing unclothed infants within proximity of large, carnivorous mountain mammals sans the proper firearms? However, a better question exists: are bear, bear, bare, bear, and bear related to the birth/berth imbroglio?

Well, as mentioned, berth began as “bearing” or “carriage” and, to this day, still describes any allotted amount of space, particularly a ship’s (and don’t we often call ships she?) allotted space, either for her docking, or for the gentlemen underneath her who sleep in “berths,” otherwise known as small cabins, where sailors sleep in the fetal position, from which they unberth upon the captain’s call to perform their nautical duties, which may also be called a berth. 

Cut the ship. With compound nouns such as “birth canal,” is it so strange, then, to have borne in mind the widths of certain waters and the flowing of certain currents? 

Is a child’s berth, then, such a stretch? 

One Fat Narcissist

Roger Micheldene is fat, drunk, lusty, British, and he is in the United States. But that would be to simplify Roger. He is a visiting publisher at Pennsylvania’s Budweiser University. He is somewhat well-dressed. He is also hypersensitive to criticism and rejection, introspectively self-absorbed, palpably insecure, unable to identify or own hurting someone’s feelings, and leads a black cloud of negative emotion and hostility, even describing himself as “distinguished in anger.” However, like all narcissists, whether grandiose or vulnerable, he is the only one that does not truly know it, and, most of all, the blame lies always with others.

Mollie Atkins, cringe-worthy anglophile, serial adulterer, and soon-to-be budget-mistress to Roger, asks Roger, during the first minute of their first picnic together, “Which (food) [he] would like to try first.” Roger: “I think I’ll start with some of that,” pointing at Mrs. Atkins. And, whilst the very next line in “He had some of that” reeks of humor stinking of Amis, the following describing Mollie’s fruits as “well matured but showing no untoward signs of age and with the customer’s satisfaction borne very much in mind,” though tickling and telling enough, smacks one of a strangely self-centered detachedness, his immediate post-copulation thoughts being those of her age and the customer’s satisfaction. The sinister abdominal workout continues, as one honks through Roger’s description of Mollie’s unattractively intimate utterings and his deadpan espying of a tortoise under a fern that had been watching the sin unfold in real-time. Yet, we are a trifle shaken by the dialogue directly thereafter, wherein he describes Mollie as disturbing “his own sensations.” And, whenever the British literary liaison is bested in vocabulary distinction by a cheating Pennsylvania bumpkin, a scene of some psychological concern commences. Roger uses the word tortoise whenever turtle is called for, and, whenever Mollie catches him on this, Roger “brooded for a moment…He was dissatisfied with the tortoise situation…it had put him down a couple of points conversationally and this must be redressed at once. ‘How’s my old friend Strode?’” In addition to the odd habit of seeing conversation as a points-game, Roger decides to mention the name of Mollie’s apparently dastardly husband for a number of hurtful reasons, chief of those being “Worsted over the tortoises.” Moreover, Roger uses the word “Egotist” to describe Strode, which is fitting, as narcissists are always quite adept at finding narcissistic traits in those other than themselves.

Without much delay are we given another rather indicative scenario. A campus debate develops spontaneously between Father Colgate, a handsome, young, gentle Catholic priest, and Roger. What started as a conversation becomes one of those odd campus showdowns between religious figure and disbeliever. Despite one’s thoughts on the cosmos and their order, Roger’s motivations during interaction are worthy of some attention, starting perhaps with the fact that he “wanted some sort of audience for what he was preparing to tell Father Colgate. One of their number, a blonde girl wearing a man’s shirt but in all other visible respects unmanly to the point of outright effeminacy, was looking at him. These Yank college girls were at it all the time, one heard.” Why would an audience be necessary for what is presently a private conversation? Additionally, why should a blonde Yank girl in a man’s shirt who was potentially at it all the time be an important consideration of the proceedings? Furthermore, why should she be the chief focus of the proceedings? “He must concentrate on showing this blonde…how marvelous he was at dealing with chaps like Father Colgate.” After the churchman had delineated his way through forethought, responsibility, and reason, Roger “said fast and loud: ‘I honestly don’t know which staggers me more, Father, your affection for the obvious or your half-baked humanitarianism.’” And, whenever Roger is momentarily impeded by the young, talented visiting novelist on campus, Irving Macher, Roger feels that he must now “engineer the punishment of Macher for his interruption,” for taking him away from his loyal herd of college disciples, “including the girl in the shirt.” A significant instance of shallow, self-revolving behavior, not to mention a preoccupation with being admired and praised by others, the main representative of those being the blonde, someone much younger than he, someone highly impressionable, someone whom Roger can control and manipulate.

And this instance of attempting to exploit Youth is not singular. Indeed Roger finds great irritation in losing a game of Scrabble to the seven-year-old genius child of the aptly named Dr. Ernst Bang, the husband of Helene Bang, Roger’s supreme lust. Roger goes as far as knocking over the Scrabble board in a way that attempts to convey an accident, whereupon he accuses the child of cheating. It was this same child whom Roger attempts to blame for plotting Roger’s downfall. Whenever all is resolved, however, and the child is free from suspicion, Ernst and Helene laugh a gleeful mirth, the kind of gleeful mirth that expects warm participation on the part of the laughee. Instead, Roger can hardly keep his narcissistic rage contained: “‘The laugh’s certainly on me,’ Roger said, keeping his mouth expanded and producing an aspirated grunt every half second or so.”

With regard to Helene, Roger’s main sexual fixation of the novel, his general sentiment can be summarized rather succinctly: 

“Whether or not his motives about women were obscure he did not think they were. A man’s sexual aim, he had often said to himself, is to convert a creature who is cool, dry, calm, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature that is the opposite of these; to demonstrate to an animal which is pretending not to be an animal that it is an animal. But it seemed a good moment to keep quiet about that.”

This sentiment can be still better understood, whenever taking his private calculations as regards Helene to heart. He oft describes his pursuit of her in quantified terms, one example thereof’s being “…a masterful feat of conscious policy, all of it successfully directed at getting her to come away with him in a week’s time…chances at about sixty to forty in his favour.” 

Roger, in a scene during which a notoriously promiscuous wench asks him whether or not people should be kinder to others who have relationship problems with the opposite sex, even using the phrase “our position,” Roger’s ego is assailed by suggesting the problem to be in the plural. Roger then jettisons all consideration for the cookie and, after “[taking] a deep breath to insure rapidity of fire,” instead locks, loads, and delivers accordingly:

“I fail to see any similarity in our positions. I have, fortunately for you, been taking almost no notice of your nonsense. But considering your time of life I would advise you to conduct yourself with a little more dignity. Most men don’t enjoy drunken women after a certain age making certain passes at them. You have a perfectly good husband. I suggest that you pay a little more attention to him.”

Like all seasoned narcissists, Roger projects his insecurity upon this, albeit not entirely admirable, woman. It is nevertheless striking how much Roger truly desires to hurt people with what he says, and what he says being, with the names and situations changed, really just descriptions of himself.

The novel’s religious meditations are frequent and strong. In general, Roger has it the wrong way around: praying to sleep with another man’s wife, endeavoring to fist-fight priests, even attempting to gaslight God himself, who, being the inventor of the thing, likely hasn’t fallen for Roger’s charms. Although Roger arguably holds his own amongst some of the most despicable characters in literature, his story is redeemed by the call to change. Father Colgate tells Roger, and therefore the reader, how these symptoms are 

“…infallibly the signs of a soul at variance with God. You, my son, are very gravely disturbed. You are in acute spiritual pain…I detected this from your very violent and distraught words to me back at the fraternity house and I obtained the clearest possible confirmation from the way you behaved a moment ago. A man doesn’t act like a child unless his soul is hurting him.”

Roger: “I’m not your son, you dog-collared buffoon…now unless you want to be martyred in the next five seconds you get out of my way.”

At just over 161 pages, One Fat Englishman, written in 1963 by the always witty ambassador to bad behavior, Kingsley Amis, flickers by with the speed and conscientiousness of a character-study. Whilst at first a novel merely unsettling, irritating, and even in nihilistic in scope, clarity reigns upon its conclusion; the redeeming factor to this novel is the call of transcendence that Amis offers in his demonizing Roger’s evil ways, indeed serving very much as something of a spiritual autobiography that led to Amis’s own retreat away from a delusional hedonism and accompanying convoluted nihilism to a life of, though ever satirically snappish, conservatively mannered contemplation.

Amis’s first wife, Hilary Bardwell, paints with lipstick on a sleeping Amis’s back her thoughts on the matter shortly before their divorce.

The Divine Intimacy

The strength of a short story may be evaluated by various quality-judgements. And, as the nomenclature suggests, short stories haven’t the time to unimpress. Fortunately, there are many routes that one may take to perform such a feat; the best-cobbled path is, however, in the same fashion as one would win the heart of a lover: intimacy. Dennis Johnson’s collection of linked short stories, Jesus’ Son, not only deeply affects the reader, but also possesses one’s soul with a devilish intimacy nearly divine in its courtship. Some might moot artistic afflatus; some might point to the rampant drug abuse. I remain nevertheless steadfast in the opinion that these slices of someone’s literary heaven exist from a mastery of craft. It may be interpreted that Johnson completes this coaxing, in part, by three forms of ingratiation: a conversational first-person-reportage narrative style, the acknowledgment of the reader with the second-person, and the Big Kiss Goodnight ending.

Johnson’s stories feel like a shifty, likely armed man in a dusty jean jacket whispering unspeakables. Whenever a shifty, likely armed man in a dusty jean jacket descries us at a social gathering and, after cornering us with his broad shoulders, proceeds to delineate to us his heaviest moments, we normally fear for our lives. Though this is often the prudent choice for those in favor of a full life, the opposite is likely our response to Jesus’ Son. Johnson earns our affections with his conversational first-person-reportage narrative style. Reportage, though often considered unliterary, is pungent with authenticity, for it most closely imitates someone speaking directly to us about one’s life. The reportage style is told using the past perfect tense, “I’d been staying at the holiday Inn with my girlfriend,” in conjunction with the simple past tense, “we made love in the bed,” often also using signifying wording, such as “I remember.” Neither does it hurt to compare one’s Holiday Inn romance with a heroin-junkie to Dante’s climb to Paradiso and the Empyrean with his truest love, Beatrice: “we…carried one another to heaven.”

What do you think about the use of the second person to acknowledge the reader? I am not certain about it, but I shall leave that up to you to decide. I trust your judgement. In any case, it certainly is personal. On the wrong day in Germany, you could get the bamboo cane for it. But, in Jesus’ Son, you understand the second person to be a term of endearment, as this usage suggests: “And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.” Consider this supremely yarn-like confidence that Johnson unravels, after confiding in us some heavy exposition about the characters in his story Two Men: “My two friends and I went to get into my little green Volkswagen, and we discovered the man I started to tell you about, the first man, sleeping in the backseat.” Remember?

What is the Big Kiss Goodnight ending? It is what everyone wants. Moreover, it also seems to be a tactic of writers who enjoy finishing stories with a smooch of the angelic. In accordance with the aforementioned considerations as regards a short story’s incapacity to allow a moment’s somnolence, its ending might perhaps be its most important time to excite, and the stories in Jesus’ Son do not leave us blue. Indeed, each story ends with a bang. 

Consider this coda at the end of a story about a less than gentle man named Dundun: “Will you believe me when I tell you there was kindness in his heart? His left hand didn’t know what his right hand was doing. It was only that certain important connections had been burned through. If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that.” Or this uplifting bit: “Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.”

Of course, this narrator had no filial connection with the barmaid about whom he is reporting, but that has never been a qualification when considering if one has been another’s mother. 

Waugh Who

There is indeed nowadays an armed and steadily growing posse of masters. What with masterclasses, master’s degrees, and masterpieces around every corner, one begins to deliberate over the validity of whether or not one has been duped all along—hoodwinked, shammed out of his birthright that he is yet too an undiscovered master of something or other. Much like the words “amazing,” “crazy,” “awesome,” “impactful,” “unique,” and, every half-literate’s favorite, “problematic,” “master” has taken the initial and regretful Cheeto-crud-on-the-fingers-bathing-suit-tucked-under-the-panniculus stumble towards its bellyflop into meaninglessness. This is all to say that one should, at the very least, attempt to choose one’s words with some intention, and it is with not a little attention that I classify Evelyn Waugh as past master status. And, although Waugh claimed P.G. Wodehouse “the head of (his) profession,” it is in Waugh’s short story Scott King’s Modern Europe in which one may be masterfully classed on the rhetorical devices, grammatical gifts, and narrative tones it takes to make a worthy work of wit. 

Rhetorical devices are the invisible patterns upon the page that make readers smirk and wonder at how a human with only one frontal cortex could turn a phrase so well, the same invisible patterns that make writers lower their heads, peep intermittently out the window, and wait for the approach of the rioting public with hot oils and blunt instruments who had just gotten hip to the jig that he’s been passing off Ancient Greek hand-me-downs at freshly woven silk prices. Waugh, in the course of less than forty pages, performs the unabashed huckstering worthy of a Middle Eastern bazar. 

Most people, even my father, a man of precisely no reading at all, knows what a simile is. Most people, however, do not know a good simile whenever they see one. Allow me to play the purveyor: “He had been cross-questioned about his past and his future, the state of his health and finances, as though he were applying for permanent employment of a confidential nature.” Scott King, Waugh’s British protagonist seems to be rather discontent with his brief examination upon entering the nation of Neutralia: allegorized post-war, socialist continental Europe. The always playful transferred epithet scoots in shortly thereafter, titillating lookers-on with a quick one to the ribs about the story’s oddly breathtaking communist town hottie, Miss Sveningen: “Think of her striding between the beds, a pigtail, bare feet, and in her hand a threatening hairbrush.” Anaphora makes its first appearance twice when King speaks to the comically ingratiating communist professor, Dr. Fe: “There was more than politeness in Dr. Fe’s greeting; there was definite solicitude,” this repetition creating an emphatic effect. That same professor’s depiction of Neutralia’s liberation is eye-squinting in that unique way that many of us now may very readily connote with some contemporary views under the iron regime of Critical Theory: “Then we were liberated and put under the Serbs. Now we are liberated again and put under the Russians.” This fine use of isocolon, better known today as parallelism, achieves a repetition that, in conjunction with its connotation in the repeated word here in question, creates an ironic effect suggestive of successful academic menticide—also a very relatable theme for today’s universities. And a good mix is always appreciated. Consider the following right upstairs, left to the liver of alliteration and overstatement: “But here the din banged back from gilding and mirrors; above the clatter and chatter of the dinner table and the altercations of the waiters, a mixed choir of young people sang folk songs, calculated to depress the most jovial village festival;” though, for me, this is sober empiricism.

Yet one can create feats of wit with good, old grammar as well. Consider how much this simple absolute adds to an otherwise commonplace description: “He took Whitemaid by the arm and led him out of the hall to a cool and secluded landing where stood a little settee of gilt and plush, a thing not made for sitting on.” The key as regards witty grammar is to tincture its instances with a taste of the playful. A settee in indeed constructed entirely for humans to rest their limbs as they see fit, but Waugh revokes that privilege, suggesting something curious about the furniture that leads the lips of readers curling accordingly. In English, the Passive Voice has been, for some reason, forbidden by literary authorities as weak and spineless, and the writerly equivalent of filching the last of grandma’s money from her purse. The passive voice, however, is much funnier than the active voice, as it deletes the subject, indeed suggesting the subject as entirely unimportant, further intimating the subject’s stiff-lipped reaction to the scenario, perhaps mildly offended by it all: “Scott-King petulantly joined issue on this point. Strong words were used of him. “Fascist beast.”—“Reactionary cannibal.”—“Bourgeois escapist.” If his sentence were used in the active voice, the same image of rejection would simply not be enforced. Even something as simple as verb tenses can be used to inspire the acquisition of new facial muscles: “The waiters had drunk and were drinking profusely of brandy and there was a bottle at hand.” Verb tenses, and therefore the passing of time, can be used to achieve humorous results. Here, we have the past perfect tense followed by the past continuous tense, followed still by present bottle, suggesting the protractedness of the activity. This usage of two tenses in direct succession also aids in producing a kind of scene-transition effect, wherein we see the waiters drinking, then perhaps some time goes by, after which we expect the waiters to have completed the sluicing, only to find that they have unnaturally prolonged the activity.

In truth, one could almost give all of the above-mentioned the heave-ho, if one had an infallible command of narrative tone. One of the combinations above used overstatement, a fine comedic tone forsooth, but the understatement is the undisputed heavyweight champion: “The party trailed out through the swing doors into the dusty evening heat, leaving the noblemen to compare their impressions of Miss. Sveningen’s legs. The subject was not exhausted when they returned; indeed had it risen earlier in the year it would have served as the staple conversation for the whole Bellacita season.” Legs tend to have that effect on men, a woman’s legs all the more, a Nordic snow-queen’s of mythological length being thus a certainly. Yet understatements need not be about legs; they can indeed be about any body part and its function: “He hiccupped without intermission throughout the long dinner.” Here, a simple “he hiccupped a lot” would have had the same logic but lost all the sense. Comedians and comediennes alike make sweeping statements. Comedy is meant to make grotesque spectacles of otherwise quiet characteristics or foibles. To suggest that the man next to whom you spent your morning commute emitted a scent wicked enough to send Lot’s wife sprinting out of the salt is a slightly more entertaining image than reporting that he smelled bad. Therefore, get out your broom and sweep. Waugh could push one with the best of them: “The foyer was empty save for Miss Bombaum who sat smoking a cigar with a man of repellent aspect.” A man of repellent aspect? It is additionally funny due to its receiving no further description, thus no debate can be made. He was bloody repellent. That is all. This is not to be confused with making a witty aside. Witty asides are slivers of smartly crafted opinion that show the reader that the writer has thought a lot about the subject at hand, usually not positively. When describing a confused gaggle of herd-mind socialists, Waugh proffers the following: “Noah’s animals cannot have embarked with less sense of the object of their journey.”

Just like cashiers at the grocery, writers of comedy should change registers, making the switch from high language to low, the ornate and well-spoken to a slag-lad of the gutter: “Scott King was an adult, an intellectual, a classical scholar, almost a poet; provident Nature who shields the slow tortoise and points the quills of the porcupine, has given to such tender spirits their appropriate armor. A shutter, an iron curtain, fell between Scott-King and these two jokers.” Just as finally seeing the hilarious things at which everyone’s already hacking up their insides violently is an enjoyable time for most, should one, to achieve the same effect, place powerful images at the end of sentences. It is the long-awaited reveal; the man walking carefully along the icy sidewalk who has finally begun to dance—the cologne-drenched gentleman in the BMW who has been revving it for hussies coming it out of the bar at 2:00 a.m. finally losing grip on his latest drift, remodeling his vehicle upon the nearest metal road barrier; or, a beautiful giant of a Nordic female upon a balcony in a bath towel devouring a large cut of meat: “The windows stood wide open onto the balcony and on the balcony, modestly robed in bath towels, sat Miss Sveningen eating beefsteak.”

If one has not yet deduced the general pattern for oneself, it is indeed the clever changes and juxtapositions, whatever those might be, that carry the day and take home the big win. One very effective way to experience this is to suddenly change either the mood of the narrative or the characters proximity to the events before-described, as in the following: “Dr. Fe, when they met, showed the reserve proper of a man of delicate feeling who had in emotion revealed too much of himself. It was a happy day for Scott-King. Not so for his colleagues.” Or, “Scott-King petulantly joined issue on this point. Strong words were used of him. Fascist beast—Reactionary cannibal—Bourgeois escapist. Scott King withdrew from the meeting.”

Novel Beginnings

The novel’s origins are (with the exception of a few earlier outliers) in the mid-eighteenth century, and, throughout the span of Modernity, the novel has established its foothold as the dominant and near-only form of literature produced. This has created within the literary canon a stark and often unhelpful historical detachment. Previous to the novel, each genre of literature had a “tradition of the past… impossible to change.” Ancient literature was developed not as a way to express subjectivity, as with the novel, but as a way to know and understand the surrounding world through story— “[t]he epic relies entirely on this tradition.” With ancient literature “it is memory, and not knowledge, that serves as the source and power for creative impulse.” The understanding of literature has significantly changed with the rise of the novel, for the Modern era’s consciousness is adamantly fixed on individuality, rationality, and scientific empiricism, the novel mirroring this epistemological phenomenon, becoming itself a form of literature concerned with “experience, knowledge and practice.” In synchrony with this notion of hyper-empirical thought, the novel is therefore also primarily concerned with “verification…plausibil[ity] [and a] requirement that… it appear understandable in itself.” The novel performs a complete about-face from ancient literature and the epic tradition, and, in this way, Modernity usurps the home wherein the epic rested its head. Yet, the novel also plays a double role regarding the crucial adaptation of literature to its era; the Good Novel–The Classic Novel–attempts to remain historically conscious whilst simultaneously meeting the pace of Modernity. “The resolution between art and science, pleasure and cognition” is Modernist Literature’s leitmotif, to say the least.

Killing It

Whom we decide to murder is, luckily, mostly up to us. Simply connect a Latin prefix of your choice with the Latin four-banger of -cide, a suffix with a license to kill.

Feeling fond of warmer weather during the colder months? Murdering your brother might kindle passion’s proper flame. The first round of the ninth layer of hell is, according to an Italian eye-witness account in the early 14^th Century, inhabited by the perpetrator of the world’s first slay, Cain, and subsequently the first fratricide. The Latin prefix frater(brother) joins hands of red deed with -cide in order to fell our brothers. But what about putting a sharp one through your sister? For this, there’s sororicide. This word stems from the Latin soror (sister), likely best recognized through the common university campus clubs called sororities, which institutions also serve as a kind of murder of a young woman. The eight-hour flight just started, the headphones just went kaput, and the baby is right on time with its piercing cries. Infanticide is the killing of infants, a task of unmatched physical ease—David Lynch’s Eraserhead shows one how simple it can be. Or, if offing the baby is not in the offing, then perhaps logic better supports the offing of oneself, namely through suicide, a word stemming from the Latin sui (of oneself). Matricide is the whacking of one’s mother, patricide the same for one’s father—I didn’t say off. For otherwise lesser spendthrifts amongst this exceedingly humble readership, a two-for-one scenario exists in parricide: the killing of one’s parents. Or, perhaps you are one for sticking it to The Man. The French and the Russians, amongst many other highly civilized animals, are rather fond of it: regicide, the murder of a king (or ruler), has been a crowd favorite for some time. The acting party most oft sees it, however, as tyrannicide: the killing of a tyrant. Simply getting your hands dirty without a specific target will likewise put a few hairs on your chest. Homicide (Latin homo [man/human]) will get the task done on the cheap. For a real deal, however, it’s best to buy in bulk. Genocide (Latin genus) is the killing of a race or kind. Or, if you are particularly fond of tragedy on a scale hitherto unforeseen, you might fancy menticide: the systematic undermining of a person’s values and beliefs through brainwashing or torture, a weak attempt at which may be easily imbibed with the viewing of the latest Batman film. 

True humanists are a rare breed nowadays, but they nevertheless roam packless across this planet as God’s lonely children. No problem, though. There is plenty of stuff for you to kill, too. There’s pesticide for pests, insecticide for insects (often pests), herbicide for weeds (unfortunately nothing yet for potheads), bactericide for bacteria, fungicide for fungus, and vermicide for worms. 

A Fellowship of Fallen Women

The bustling thoroughfares, once brimming with buxom bachelorettes, have been becalmed—their wide streets and wending alleyways now empty of women, except for one. All those sporting an XY and half a soul can relate: For every gentleman lucky enough, there exists that special woman in his life who fills his heart with warmth, his ears with bells, and his eyes with her. Amongst all this wide-eyed optimism, however, a practical problem asserts itself upon that same gentleman. Now happily encumbered by love, he suddenly lacks the lexicon to describe the remaining fallen women extant upon creation, those sirens who serve mainly as the forgotten road-bumps on his way home to Penelope. For this, Yours Truly proffers a few solutions. It has been recommended by many a Wise One that to shoot high should be one’s first aim. And to this adage can none be gainsaid.

Courtesan struts into English by way of French, which did its pilfering from Italian. A courtesan provided distinguished services to courtiers, whence derives the word, and later to wealthy, famous, and otherwise powerful men of all sorts. Lower than an escort—whose arrangement is not wholly sexual and indeed could be entirely without—a courtesan is the highest of the Fallen, the Beatrice of wayward Bettys.

No one can sneer at a classic. Prostitute carries with it some strong connotations, the imagery of which be likely readily available to the imagination of the reader. Thus, girls, women, and hookers alike take offense in achieving it as their sobriquet. Harlot sounds cooler, but the work is the same. Harlot is an interpretably milder term for prostitute. It originally denoted a man who was a rogue or villain. Although its Latin origins give this word for professional skanks an air of learnedness, meretrix is a ho, no doubt. Therefore, one might opt for strumpet, trull, or tart, all of which are direct synonyms for the oldest profession. Due, however, to their very Elizabethan and generally British sound, they are deemed excusable, humorous, even taking on the linguistic impression of something closer to a baked good. One might venture even lighter fare, such as slattern or trollop, both of which can mean slut, but have more of a connotation towards an untidy, dirty, or wanton woman of known promiscuity, but not necessarily someone who sells her body to anyone rough enough to take a dip. And our most vulgar: whore. 

Honorable Mentions:

Paramour: a lover or sexual partner who is illicit and often secret; a companion in adultery (not limited to women). 

Concubine: Latin’s “con” (together) and “cubare” (to lie down/go to bed) join forces to describe a woman who makes love to a man to whom she is not married, otherwise known as a mistress. 

You Can Say That Again

Redundant Writing, as defined in the DSM-5, is “a mental disorder in which a person consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others.” 

Why must the DSM-5’s above-displayed introductory description of Anti-Social Personality Disorder—which bears hefty resemblance to the definition of one’s neighbors whenever it’s 1:50 a.m. on a Tuesday and the Mumble Rap is still going strong—reattribute “mental disorder,” whenever we are reading a book called The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders? Moreover, does someone who shows no regard for right and wrong ever consider the rights and feelings of others?

Philadelphians call it water ice. Sexual deviants call them assless chaps. And the Germans call it language. For the rest of us, it’s called redundancy.

The repetition of unnecessary details causes children to weep and the beloved family dog to take its final breath; therefore, the practice has long since been forbidden by literary authorities as a tragedy and miscarriage of compositional justice. 

There’s your classic Thesaurus Thumper:

“A titanic, humungous, behemoth of a mountain—just a huge piece of rock, and enormous.” 

The Dunderheaded Double-Up:

“With every tuna fish sandwich that you swallow whole, you’ll receive a free gift. That’s an actual fact. “

The Fool by Abbreviation Special:

“I’m so drunk from alcohol that I forgot my PIN number before we got to the MLS soccer match, so I couldn’t use the ATM machine to take out any cash money. Please RSVP— s’il vous plaît.“

The Undue Intensity Stack:

“These were extremely important company meetings, and they were met with severely inadequate attendance.”

The Loose-Lipped Lenny:

“Yeah, so that’s basically how you do it; it essentially works like that.”

In all fairness, The Undue Intensity Stack and the Loose-Lipped Lenny can make for humorous combinations, as they can often carry with them a certain amount of irony. The key here is to employ them intentionally and deftly. 

The True Plus True Equals True (Tautology)

“I struggled to find the words to describe the oddly shaped man before me; he was indescribable, due to his appearance, so I was speechless.”

The Tautology by Cliche

“I struggled to find the words to describe the oddly shaped man before me; the cat had my tongue, and I had a rock in my throat.”

Cliches are particularly sinful, for, through their utter banality, they are rendered redundant the moment that they depart the lips or manifest from the keyboard. To use a cliche to emphasize a statement, as depicted above, is a sign of genetic inferiority. 

What we want is deliberateness. Whenever deliberate, these heinous lexical acts aspire to inspire rhetorical emphasis, adding additional dimension and meaning. This called pleonasm.

Here, someone uses pleonasm to show high vexation, perhaps hoping for a payout.

“Yes, officer. That’s right. The stupid idiot and his fellow colleagues completely destroyed my exact replica Porsche by punching it with their fists and kicking it with their feet. That’s a foreign import, by the way.”

The rhetorical forms of merism and blazon, used as they are to describe at length things already stated, could fit into this category, but I have deemed them nearer to sacrifices at the altar of The Description than merely déjà vu all over again. 

All this championing of clear and concise writing for the sake of transparency and succinctness has, however, given rise to the need for balance. Therefore, I’d like to end with a quote from a good friend of mine whom I’ve never met, Mark Forsyth:

“Above all, I hope I have dispelled the bleak and imbecilic idea that the aim of writing is to express yourself clearly in plain, simple English using as few words as possible. This is a fiction, a fib, a fallacy, a fantasy, and a falsehood. To write for mere utility is as foolish to dress for mere utility. Mountaineers do it, and climb Everest in clothes that would have you laughed out of the gutter. I suspect they also communicate quickly and efficiently, poor things. But for the rest of us, not threatened by death and yetis, clothes and language can be things of beauty. I would no more write without art because I didn’t need to, than I would wander outdoors naked just because it was warm enough. Again.”

The Dosser Chronicles: Germany—A Dosser Doubles Down

Halt.

The best description of the German, his environment, and his soul has already been written. To read the most accurate artifact anent the modern Teuton, visit my previous article , or circumvent the middleman altogether by purchasing Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men on the Bummel. For an exact and unbiased treatise on the German language, seek “The Awful German Language,” located in Appendix D of Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad. 

***

A dark-haired woman-porter approximately six feet in height, with the shoulders of an experienced dairy farmer and wearing a red jacket with gold fringe, growled at me in what seemed like the Yiddish of a professional wrestler. 

“Fahrkartenkontrolle,” she snarled again.

“Hello.”

Not long after that I felt a large hand persuade me out of the train and provide thereafter a hefty push. It was when I was lying on the main train station’s platform and staring up at the bottom of an enormous brown boot, behind which the milkmaid’s face could be seen laughing deeply, which earned the laughter of her male comrades, that I knew I had reached Bonn, Germany.

Or, at least that is how my memory had recalled the event. I realized later, however, that this is just called “not knowing the language.” In fact, I’m beginning to doubt that I ever was pushed at all. 

Anyone who’s taken an American train or been in an American train station will know that, although he or she might have never been to Germany, Germany’s is better. This is true. Bonn’s train station is a work of some admirability, nearing perhaps the architectural grandeur of at least a half-respectable American museum or public metropolitan library.

But the American Imagination, at some point, went one step further, conjuring up Germany as one sleek, uncut unit of clean lines, smooth rides, and punctual pink heads moving swiftly and logically in and out of crisply closing doors. But this apt metaphor of German automotive expertise does not seem to have yet translated to the railway sector. 

The next two trains for which I was scheduled were both delayed—significantly and ignominiously. The next one didn’t show up altogether. A few moments later, the announcer over the loud-speaker, in so many words, expressed that we suck it up thusly.

Soon after, reliable word was relayed to me from an authentic German source: “Welcome to Germany.” Perhaps in another epoch, was this true: Germans are punctual. No longer. I know no less punctual a people. 

Typically, where there are trains, there are homeless. This naturally leads me to my first observation on Germany’s homeless population: there aren’t any—at least by American standards. Sure, perhaps they don’t have a home, but this isn’t enough to suffice the definition of the term. I’m looking for something closer to my face, screaming, and ostensibly in-touch with things beyond our corporeal world. In any case, it’s easy to dislike, indeed grow Scrooge-like to the American breed. 

Here they read books, speak two or three languages (not one of them German), and place their offering plates out of their own reach, their heads lowered in the Old Style. And they’re polite as well. I don’t always give money to German bums, but, when I do, there’s some Dickensian satisfaction about the whole thing. I should forsooth sooner trust your standard German bum over your standard American landscaper or roofer any day of the week. Your standard German bum has yet some class.

And, speaking of good bums, I’ve realized why there is precisely zero crime in Germany. Apparently, the entire German police force is entirely comprised of beautiful, young women. And who would want to put his hands on a beautiful, young woman? You’ve never lived until you’ve seen a young German policewoman make a U-turn at a busy mid-day intersection. She is in her habitat; she looks right doing it. Her tight ponytail reveals a German face in its rightful place of intensity, her German body covered in what looks most correct on a German: a uniform. To what crime she is reporting, however, is of great mystery to me. There are statistics online stating that crime indeed occurs in Germany. I’m certain, however, that one could walk drunk across Germany in a suit made of legal tender and only come out of it the richer. It is my assertion that someone in Sector 5 had been reported seen without his daily ice cream. 

The Hindus worship the cow in their way, and the Germans do it in theirs. In a fashion hitherto by Yours Truly unseen, everyone is eating ice cream. They flock from all around just to gawk at it religiously through the glass. It borders on a cultish feeling. And the weather and its temperature seem not to affect how the Germans prefer ice cream: they want it cold and by the bucket. I heard one German mother ask her toddler daughter what she wanted to do that afternoon, and the little tike said, “look at the ice cream.” 

I praise Germany’s treatment of children; the children here are treated as adults. In the United States, an independent, well-adjusted, un-murdered child who walks home on his or her own is an extinct species. Everyone in the purlieu of an American child is only there to either end its precious, innocent life, or in some way make it permanently much worse. In Germany, children are walking home en masse. They’re wandering the streets. Taking trains. Frequenting bars. Adults are talking to them—petting their heads. And who wouldn’t want to pet the head of a German child? Barring Asian competition, German babies inhabit the role of cutest babies on Earth—pink, smiling nuggets already in perfect step with the authority of their parents and eager to learn the laws of the land. As Jerome K. Jerome reports about German children in his book Three Men on the Bummel: “‘you get yourself born,’ says the German government to the German citizen, ‘we do the rest’.” 

One does not merely follow the rules in Germany, rather the rules simply exist and to follow them is to follow the highest ideal. And, against all my contrarian sympathies, there’s something to that. I know not if one must trade freedom in order to be safe. But, it must absolutely be said that the German world is a safe one. Imagine a universe where, upon staring at someone in the eyes, no one’s looking to “knuckle-up” or “run it.” “Moin!” Anna says at 9:00. Not much of a morning man myself, I notice this immediately. “Abend!” Hans chimes in at 18:00, and the good fight continues for the Germans. And they’re winning. There is a quality of life here that the Americans cannot touch. I’ve never felt like the biggest scallywag of the populace before, but it is as such now. The people here remind one of a dairy products advertisement: broad-shouldered, trusting folk who work hard, tell it straight, and smell of high-brow cabbage.

There are other kinds of curious effects from this law-abiding soul that one may witness within the populace. This is most readily observed at German crosswalks. If it is your desire to see an American soul squirm, tell it to stand at an empty crosswalk and wait for the red light to turn green. You’ll sooner see it take up arms and storm the Capitol than wait the duration. Germans, however, “are willing, nay anxious” to obey the supreme law of the traffic light. It is, in fact, a curious thing to see a group of Germans, with no cars for miles, waiting for the crosswalk sign to turn green. And they’re all doing it with that unmistakable German Look, which has simultaneously something vacant yet intensely preoccupied about it. A German either stares into your soul or doesn’t notice you at all. And they do it all in the middle of the sidewalk, especially if they’re over sixty years of age. An inordinate number of Germans are also contemplating water, perhaps because they have none. In the faces of these Germans looking at creeks, one can see how the German mind, so many years ago, saw a lake and said contentedly to itself: “See.” 

In crosswalk finality, if you cross during this time, the shibboleth has been uttered, and you certainly feel the biblical stare as you safely glide from one side to another, looking back from your final destination, wondering at the big German bodies.

And I must say that the people here certainly are large. The broadness of the American shoulder is one of worldwide acclaim, and, in more recent years, the broadness of the American waist. But I speak now of pure size. About fifty percent of the women in this country rival my height, and the other half take careful daily measures not to step on me. The men are giants, plain and simple. It’s no wonder that they gave the Romans such a hard time, and why it took the entire world, twice, to persuade them to have a seat. And those coming from countries even farther north look almost majestic in their height. Nordic women could be mistaken, to the pragmatic American eye, for something mythological. 

But make no mistake: they desire to be governed. And the German government is happy to oblige. The bureaucracy in Germany is something of an ultimate test of patience. I really do believe Sigmund Freud to be essentially entirely a charlatan, but I have noticed your standard German citizen to possess a goodish degree of impatience, and I believe that to be due to his relationship to the parental unit: the government. If I were born with the name of Sixty-Four And One-Quarter, I should still feel less like a number than I currently do. It is rumored that Kafka is a humorist. To me, he’s merely German journalism. Franz Kafka is not known for his particularly exuberant feelings about bureaucracy. Kafka’s 1926 “novel” The Castle (itself a reliable visitor’s guide to Germany) is no exception to Kafka’s stark commitment against that stinky, French word, even going so far as to die in order to spare himself the displeasure of having to write a second draft. Notions of the like are apparent in the interactions amongst the populace. I’m waiting for someone to hand me a form to Commence Conversation, and, at its end, another to confirm Conversation Termination. 

But there are obvious positives to this. The sense of perennial hierarchy in Germany keeps in-tact many things that, in the United States, are now but relics of a lost, better time. There’s still the idea of class in Germany, which is generally desirable, knowing intimately the effects of a society without any. The system of contemporary American values currently runs things in quite the opposite fashion; the better one’s lot, the more one tries to prove one’s egalitarianism, and those already at the bottom beat their chests and scratch their loincloths accordingly. Indeed, it is here where the noses of difference can be most seen peeping over the cultural fence. And the German lifestyle, in this case, is far preferable to the American one. Moreover, things work well, there’s enough to go around, and people respect the nighttime hours as hours of sleep. 

As for classroom and educational culture, Germany’s respect for authority and hierarchy takes over. The teachers are the experts, and the pupils are there to learn from them. Students of all ages assume teachers masters or mistresses of their subjects, and, as such, it is poor decorum to interrupt the learning process by interjecting, imposing upon, or otherwise derailing the learning process. And, if a teacher is proven incompetent, then he or she is shown the door and put back on the excellent German unemployment whence he or she came. In the United States, the teacher is often something of a walking target for physical and spiritual pranks. In the inner-cities of The United States, one is better off with a degree in cage-fighting than of any academic subject. To some more “progressive” souls, the German system might seem intellectually limiting. I ask you, then, to compare the success of a standard German education to an American one. You will find it difficult, as there is not one. The Germans drag us through the mud. And, to me, that says something.

But, under the weight of all this German quality and control, one inescapably ugly variable reigns supreme. 

How does it happen? Who allows it? How do German minds conceive it? Why is it not cleaned up? The graffiti, of course. It biffs the foreign eye with great heft. Amongst such genuinely gorgeous villages and landscapes, the cacographic scrawlings of the bottom tenth percentile lay thereon with the omnipresence of a short man at the helm of a governmental structure. What’s more amazing is that the populace seems not only to tolerate it, but rather to embrace it. In the middle of the day, “professionals” of the aforementioned trade take up arms, take it to the streets, and undertake masterpieces. Cars drive by, but the “artists” continue. Pedestrians look on with indifference. The elderly dodder by unphased as Germany is tattooed to the teeth. Here, I side with the Yanks’ take that graffiti is to be contained to areas in which graffiti is the best that area can conceive, and if it occurs elsewhere, shoot it dead with the biggest gun possible.

Notwithstanding her take on graffiti, Germany’s is a culture that seems to value logic—this championing of logic undoubtedly playing a role in its being the highly detail-oriented culture that it is. It might also claim some stake in the German’s reputation for being humorless. 

But to suggest that the Germans possess no sense of humor is a joke. Everything that these people do is for the sake of humor; they sacrifice themselves at the altar of it. They’ve got humor here down to a science and are committed to it on a societal level. Leather shorts? They must be putting it on. Try it. Tell a joke, make fun of someone, make fun of yourself, turn a good phrase, use irony, satirize something, understate the absurd: your average German will best you with his deadpan face. And, just to prove his comedic superiority, he will up you with the ultimate: “I don’t think that’s true.” Indeed, everything that they do is funny, for they are, without a doubt, one of the goofiest groups of people I’ve ever seen. All jokes aside, they’re definitely laughing about something out here. I hear them do it. About what, I’m not sure.

I have a decent guess, though. There’s a practice here called “walking,” which, auricularly, I have difficultly differentiating from the English “walking.” In practice, however, the distinction is tacit. Germans claim that the poles they use to thrust off the ground exist as practice for whenever cross-country skiing is again possible. It is my belief, however, that this be not for the off-months’ practice for skiing, rather more in line with the well-known German past-time of waking up, eating something with mayonnaise, and saying to herself, “but, how do I make it goofier?”

As regards a quick note on food in the main, as previously noted, you better like it with mayonnaise. Or pork. If not, you’re liable to starve. Waking up on Sunday in Germany to an empty refrigerator is another surefire way, as “Shoot On Sight” laws have been applied to all grocery-seeking patrons on Sundays. And, in those grocery stores, which are closed on Sundays, there exists a race therein called “cashiers.” There’s something akin to this race in English-speaking lands, but it is not identical. Your German cashier can be found sitting behind the register in any store where legal tender is accepted. Their language is a simple yet consistent one: “Hallo. Kassenbon? (or) Beleg?  Schönen(es) Tag/Abend/ (or) Wochenende. Tschuss.” They do not waver from those words. 

Thereafter, a shopping cart is thrusted into the back of your knees, and you are swiftly shown the door. Indeed, whenever one enters a German register line, one’s priorities should be sorted not unlike in manner as those of the military officer’s a few days before the big charge, for there’s no going back. But Germans always play it fair. They foreshadow, indeed, warn you of the forthcoming experience the first moment that you enter the store, with those gates that open on the righthand side and close after you go through them. Even the stores have a German personality: start on the right and move to the left. If you try to leave through the entrance gates, thus disrupting the order of things, the gate growls. If you do not buy anything, then you must go through the shameful experience of squeezing your way past the people in line at the cash register, as empty register-lines are always cordoned with a steel turnstile. This aids the German economy significantly.

German dogs, unlike German humans, possess significant autonomy in Germany, indeed enjoy a great deal of freedom here, for dogs always walk sans leash. To see a dog on a leash here has the same effect on the eye as seeing a child on a leash, which always renders an effect of disbelief. Bicycles here are one way for a human to experience the same joy as a dog. There’s an air of superiority exuding from those riding them, and, if you’re in the way of one, expect no clemency.  

German windows are also of an unprecedented nature. Someone in Germany, at some point, must have said to another: “let’s have the best windows in the world.” And then, like a German, he did what they said.

Unlike those in the Anglosphere, Germans like get to the point. Goofy or not, Germans do value directness of communication. This can lead one to interpret them as rude or perhaps soulless. 

I, for one, am not certain of this latter diagnosis. I side a bit more with Jerome K. Jerome’s scientific take on the matter:

“The Germans are a good people…I am positive that the vast majority of them go to heaven… [that the] the soul of a single individual German has [however] the sufficient initiative to fly up by itself and knock on St. Peter’s door, I cannot believe. My own opinion is that they are taken there in small companies, and passed in under the charge of a dead policeman.”

In today’s case, the policeman might be some sort of high-standing bureaucratic official, like a Vodafone representative.

In every case, however, the Germans are, without a doubt, lovely, passionate creatures who try their little, Döner-filled hearts out every day to be the model of what I imagine the closest thing to a Good Person looks like. And, they often succeed. I, too, am certain that the overwhelming majority go to heaven–as long as they don’t have to make it there by train.

Main Points of the German Language:

• “Huh?” is “hää?”; “um” is “ärhm” ; “ow” is “owuh.”

• “Excuse me” is “hmph.” 

• “Hallo” is reserved for shop-owners or done entirely with the eyes—and everything is “schön.” In fact, I’m convinced that one could get away in German with word alone. 

• Or “ja,” which is used in all cases whenever another word cannot be found. In English-speaking countries, the “yes” system is a trifle more varied. We use various “yes types” to convey various moods or indicate certain various forms of subtle information. The German, “ja” is not only sufficient, but a sign of fluency.

• Only educated German women speak German. German men utter collections of grunts very near German; it sounds like it, rings the same consonant-gilded bell, but ultimately falls short of intelligibility. As regards the German language in the main, they both make it up as they go along.

Plotting over Plodding

If a story were to perform less like a contention with after-dinner bloat and more like a nimble creature flitting across the open plain, then it is likely plotted well. There are a goodish many reasons why one might write a story that plods—saunters in its pilgrimage over antique wooden bridges, stops to contemplate a riverside cowslip—but to incite action is not one of them. The illustrious humorist Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, amongst his many writerly talents, is known for his highly successful snappiness of story and preeminent command of plot. Though he eventually became known as the king of the plotline, Wodehouse reported that his plotting of a story was often his most difficult task. Something of confessed monomaniac himself, he required plotted perfection, a vaudeville-like story so intelligently manipulated and crafted for quickness, that the reader hardly has time to stop and smell the Realism. Nevertheless, even realistic narratives need to move. In Ukridge, Wodehouse’s 1924 collection of linked short stories, “The Exit of Battling Billson” is a typically agile Wodehousian story, through which, upon an analysis of the story’s six major scene-location changes, one may better understand the art of story-movement, and therefore learn to become a bit more up and at ‘em himself.

We begin our jaunt at The Theatre Royal, Llunindnno. It is here where our narrator, Corky, espies “a large man…(whose) air was that of one who has recently passed through some trying experience.” This man is none other than the notorious Stanley Featherstone Ukridge, and it is he who had just experienced the mild ignominy of being forcibly removed from that same theatre. After Corky denies Ukridge’s request “to bung a brick through the window,” the story, only one-page-old and already riddled with tension and expectation, wastes no time pub-crawling to a different public-house, whose “lights… shone like heartening beacons,” in which location a conversation is had, the story develops, and the prospect of movement again looms large. 

Said conversation involves such familiar tones as Ukridge’s managing of a familiar pugilist named Wilberforce Billson, aptly nicknamed Battling Billson, and how Ukridge “couldn’t be more in the velvet if they gave (Ukridge) a sack and a shovel and let (him) loose in the Mint.” Upon a short repartee about this less than likely aspect of grand fortune, Wodehouse shows no fear in beginning the next paragraph with Corky’s saying: “I was in a curiously uplifted mood on the following morning as I set out to pay my respects to Mr Billson.” And in the short span of three pages, we have already been to three locations, presently culminating at another public house, in which Mr Billson is “‘spillin’ (patrons’) beers’” because “‘(b)eer, he proceeded, with cold austerity, ‘ain’t right. Sinful, that’s what beer is.’” After this sound conception, Wodehouse frog-marches us to the next location: “I stood on the steps of Number Seven Caerleon Street,” Ukridge’s trappings. 

At Ukridge’s digs, Corky and Ukridge discuss the unfortunate circumstance of Battling Billson’s new Puritanical attitudes, from which they suffer to learn that Billson, in addition to the consumption of beer, now also believes that ‘fighting’s sinful.’” It is also described, with great dispatch, that Ukridge, fresh out of boxers to manage, decides to fight the match himself. A rigged fight, but a fight nonetheless. We are swimming right along when we enjoy another swift movement to Oddfellow’s Hall for the lacing up of Ukridge’s gloves. Wodehouse summons the occasion with celerity unmatched, the introduction to the hall occurring in the first sentence of page 187’s main expository paragraph.

For the proceeding six pages, a long scene (by Wodehousian standards) depicts Ukridge’s surprisingly capable boxing prowess, and the sudden relapse of Battling Billson into the throes of prizefighting. As it is viewed from more than a few angles, the scene feels something very much like movement or location change itself, each angle containing new happenings. After this highly entertaining fiasco, directly after learning that “a hush fell” on the audience, we awaken back at Ukridge’s flat: “The little sitting-room of Number Seven Caerleon Street was very quiet and gave the impression of being dark.” Even during the last scene, much action is had, and ultimately the story completes itself, as many Wodehouse creations do, on-time, with in a kind of red-herring-led, fully logical, ironically full-circle ending.

Need every story to thrive off a razor-sharp plot such as Wodehouse’s? Yes—if one wants the feeling of movement and action, the feeling of sprinting alongside a story. Some of us might ask: but when do we change scenes? Wodehouse might argue the answer to be right now. Wodehouse does not linger; a sentence is all it takes for us to traipse across villages, cities, and ideas. This lightning-fast teleportation style is a challenge in wit. To be pithy enough to complete such a cross-town leap is, indeed, also a challenge in prose. More still, it is a challenge in plot. And it is whenever these three writerly elements decide to hold hands that we readers behold something truly special.