Monthly Archives: July 2011

I Felt Like a Gringo

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On this 4th of July, I find myself thinking back to the Minutemen’s 1983 EP Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of Heat and the song “I Felt Like a Gringo” by Mike Watt:

Got a ton of white boy guilt, that’s my problem,
Obstacle of joy, one reason to use some drugs.
Slept on a mexican beach slept in trash – American trash
Thinking too much can ruin a good time.

I asked a mexican who ran a bar for americans
“Who won” I said “The election?”
He laughed, I felt like a gringo,
They played a song and they had some fun with us.

Why can’t you buy a good time? Why are there soldiers in the street?
Why’d I spend the fourth in someone else’s country?

I list them here, because they are hard to make out when D. Boon sings them, but here is an acoustic version of the song:

I always feel sad on nationalistic holidays. This is a great change from my youth when I looked forward to watching 1776 on the 4th. Now I think of Ben Franklin’s statement that the United States was, “A republic, if you can keep it.” It sure seems like a republic, at the same time I feel I am not represented. People with money are represented. Things with money are represented. But me? I don’t know. I am an outsider in my own country. I would feel far more relaxed in Mexico right now.

Happy Independence Day!

A Couple of Questions for That Bard

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As regular readers of this site know, I very much like Kenneth Branagh and very much dislike Shakespeare, who I derisively call “That Bard.” It is wrong to say that I dislike Shakespeare; it is more that I just don’t think he is all that great. If no one liked him, I would probably sing his praises. But I commonly read such ridiculous praise for him that I can’t help it. As a poet, he’s okay I guess. As a dramatist, he is pretty good at his best, mediocre most of the time, and absolute rubbish at his worst. Today, I watched Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 version of Much Ado About Nothing—twice! The first time, I watched it with the play in front of me to see how close it is to the play. It is quite close. Branagh yanks out a couple of scenes, cuts some lines (although rarely his), moves a couple of things around, and adds purely visual material that is not in the play. But all in all, it is quite close to the play and so I have a few questions for Shakespeare.

  1. Why do you think you can just make villains without providing any context? Why is Don John such a bastard (in both ways)? His first major speech sounds suspiciously like the opening of Richard III—a play where again we get a villain who just is a villain. (“And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover… I am determined to prove a villain”? Come on!) And while I’m on the subject of Don John, here’s a question for Kenneth Branagh: in what universe could Keanu Reeves be the half-brother of Denzel Washington?
  2. Why, after Don John tricks Claudio regarding Hero, does he allow himself to be tricked again?
  3. Why does Don John want to disgrace Hero and stop her marriage to Claudio? It is his brother, Don Pedro, who he hates.
  4. Benedick and Beatrice are both highly nubile. Are we to believe that they just have to be tricked into thinking the other is in love with them for them to fall passionately in love? Don’t get me wrong, the scenes with these two (whether in or out of love) are the best in the play. It is good fun. It is also, unfortunately, totally unbelievable.
  5. If Hero were unfaithful, Claudio and Don Pedro act disgracefully by shaming her in public. I’ll grant you that Hero is one of your air-head female characters, and so will put up with anything to get a husband. But what about the audience? Why is Benedick going to come up with some good punishment for Don John, while Claudio and Don Padro (who acted worse in many ways) live happily ever after?

These are just a few of my questions. If I held myself to the same standards of plot and characterization as Shakespeare, I’d be pumping out a novel a week.

Five Dollar Man

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Coin FlipThere is a test that psychologists can give to a person to determine how much of a gambler he is. It is quite simple. Would you bet a quarter for a quarter on a coin flip?—that is to say, if it comes up heads, I pay you a quarter and if it comes up tails, you pay me a quarter. A man who would take this bet is a gambling man. But if he will not take this bet, the psychologist ups the ante. Would you bet a quarter on two quarters? The plot thickens. If not that, three quarters. Then a dollar. Most people are not really interested until it reaches the dollar for a quarter level. I’m more a five dollar man.

Even though I’m not a betting man, I used to be a professional sports handicapper. Sports betting is interesting to me, because unlike most forms of betting, you can win if you are good at it. The problem is that almost no one is. The reason is that it is highly random. One year, I looked at all the NFL games and found a striking correlation between the team with the fewest turn-overs (lost fumbles and interceptions) and the team that covered the line. Thus, it didn’t matter how well the teams played otherwise (that’s all figured into the line anyway), what really mattered were the random and uncommon events (the turn-overs).

Nonetheless, it is striking that almost all sport bettors lose money, because you don’t have to do much better than random (50%) to win. But you do have to do better. In order to explain this, I first have to explain how the house (casinos and similar institutions) run their sports betting operations.

It should come as no shock that the house is not a charitable institution; they are in the business of making money so they take a percentage off the top of any bet. This percentage is called the vig. This amount is traditionally 5% of the entire bet. So bets are usually placed as “Betting $55 to win $50.” This means that if you win, you get a $50 profit but if you lose, you get a $55 loss.

In order for the house to make sure it doesn’t take a bath on any given game, it moves the line around so that there is roughly the same amount bet on both teams. The house doesn’t care who wins, they just want that 10% of the loser’s money; the rest goes to pay the winner. The house always wins. Always.

To compensate for losing more when you lose than you win when you win, you must win more than 50% of the time just to break even. How much more? Well, not that much. A little algebra will help to explain. Assume that you are making $50 bets. If x is the fraction of wins then the total amount of money you get from wins will be ($50)*x. But the total amount of money you lose would be ($55)*(1-x). For you to break even, these must be equal. So…

$50*x = $55*(1-x)
x = .5238 = 52.38%

You need to win roughly 52.4% of the time to break even. This may not seem like too much to ask for but most bettors lose money year after year after year. So I recommend not betting. But then, I would: I’m a five dollar man.

Don Quixote in Pieces on the Ground

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Don Quixote is roughly a half-million words long. The average modern novel is about 100,000 words. My first novel was 60,000 words. My current novel was supposed to 120,000 words, but it is becoming clear that it will have to be roughly double that length. The point is that Don Quixote is long. It is the longest novel I know of, and this presents a problem. Just yesterday morning, I pulled out my Putnam translation from my backpack, and found it in pieces. In one way, this is a good thing: I only have to carry around the half of it at a time because the book broke almost exactly in half (with some individual pages floating about). But this does not compensate for this book being destroyed. And it does not bode well. All of my copies of Don Quixote are in paperback, and I’m sure they too will fall apart when I get around to manhandling them.

I have been neglecting my discussions of Don Quixote because I have been working on a comparison of all my translations of Chapter 6. It is a daunting task. It took me some time to compare various translations of a single sentence in the book. Doing a whole chapter—and a long one at that—takes forever. For now, idling reader, we will just have to continue on with Putnam.

The Traveling Merchants

When last we encountered our hero, I compared him to Henry Bergh—finding him quite wanting. Bergh was a true hero—a great man. The Ingenious Gentleman is just a nut who, while trying to do good, does very bad things indeed. After leaving a peasant boy to be brutalized by his master, our hero rides off feeling very good about himself. Then he runs into some merchants who he will not let pass, “Unless everyone will confess that there is not in all the world a more beauteous damsel than the Empress of La Mancha, the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso.”[1] When they insist upon seeing at least some likeness of her, Don Quixote attacks. Luckily, Rocinante—Don Quixote’s old, skinny horse—falls. The merchants take the opportunity to beat up Don Quixote and then go on their way. Apparently because of the weight of his armor (and being in bad physical shape because of the beating), Don Quixote is forced to lie on the ground over night until a local farmer finds him and helps him home.

There is an interlude at this point: Chapter 6. Mostly, it is a way for Cervantes to have some fun with the chivalric books of his time—even his own. I am waiting for the compendium of all the issues from 1940 of More Books, The Bulletin of the Boston Public Library. It contains an article by Esther B. Sylvia called “Don Quixote’s Library.” Putnam does an excellent job of annotating this chapter, but I expect Sylvia’s paper to be far more enlightening. So I will not discuss this chapter, except to say that as Don Quixote sleeps, his friends burn most of his library.

On the Road Again

As soon as he is recovered, Don Quixote slips away at night. He has managed to get a local farmer named Sancho Panza to be his squire by promising to make him governor of an island—or something similar. Then we get to the windmills. It is remarkable that this section of the book is so well known, because it really doesn’t stand out. Don Quixote sees a bunch of windmills, mistakes them for giants, and attacks them. There really isn’t much to say about this episode. If you joust with a windmill, you will lose. Don Quixote lost. Sancho warns him before and chastises him afterwards:

“God help us!” exclaimed Sancho, “did I not tell your Grace to look well, that those were nothing but windmills, a fact which no one could fail to see unless he had other mills of the same sort in his head?”

“Be quiet, friend Sancho,” said Don Quixote. “Such are the fortunes of war, which more than any other are subject to constant change. What is more, when I come to think of it, I am sure that this must be the work of that magician Frestón[2], the one who robbed me of my study and my books, and who has thus changed the giants into windmills in order to deprive me of the glory of overcoming them, so great is the enmity that he bears me; but in the end his evil arts shall not prevail against this trusty sword of mine.”

The one interesting part of this episode is that it is the first indication that while Sancho is an illiterate and gullible farmer, he’s pretty smart and very grounded.

The Murderous Nut

After this fiasco, the pair meet up with a couple of friars followed by a lady in a coach accompanied by six or seven guards, it would seem. Don Quixote thinks the friars have kidnapped the lady and so attacks them. They flea for their lives. Then Don Quixote goes to the coach and tells the lady that she need not pay him for not saving her. All he wants is for her to go back to La Mancha and tell Dulcinea del Toboso about the heroic deed that he just didn’t do. One of her companions says this is ridiculous—the lady was on her way to Seville to say good-bye to her husband who had been appointed some kind of high post in India. As a result, the two begin to fight. Don Quixote gets the better of the other man and would have killed him if not for the ladies in the coach begging him to spare the man’s life.

This episode was much less enjoyable than that of the merchants, because in this case, Don Quixote got what he wanted. He attacked two friars and would have killed one of them had he not fallen off his mount. Then he would have killed another man when he was prone. There is nothing chivalric about his behavior. Later that evening, Sancho suggests that they take refuge in a church because they might be arrested. Don Quixote will have none of it; he sums up very well what it means to be a knight-errant:

“Be quiet,” said Don Quixote. “And where have you ever seen, or read of, a knight being brought to justice no matter how many homicides he might have committed?”

It is a shocking statement that jumps off the page. Up to that point, one can see all of Don Quixote as farce, but this statement is too true. In general, knights were not the good men of movies and novels; they were murdering rouges, more like Mickey Knox from Natural Born Killers than Robin Hood. So after but ten chapters, we find that our hero is nothing more than a murderous madman who talks pretty. I already know that in the end, Don Quixote dies feeling bad and embarrassed about the things that he has done. But there is a long way to go, and I find I am not enjoying the book as much as I had. Like Francois Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel I can understand and even appreciate the comedy, but it does not make me laugh. Don Quixote is serious business indeed. And it is in pieces on the ground in more ways than one.

[1] Dulcinea del Toboso is a peasant girl. She has no idea who Don Quixote is. And Sancho lies to Don Quixote when they meet. Don Quixote sees just a dirty peasant girl (which she is). But Sancho convinces him that she is really a beautiful princess and that Don Quixote must be under an evil curse by Frestón to make him unable to see this.

[2] Frestón is a magician Don Quixote’s friends made up to explain how his study (they walled over the door) and books went missing. Like so much in Don Quixote’s mind, Frestón does not exist.

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Clarity, Convenience, and the Serial Comma

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Jay Ward created Hoppity Hooper, George of the Jungle and Rocky and Bullwinkle. Confused? If you didn’t know all these shows, you might think that “George of the Jungle and Rocky and Bullwinkle” somehow modify “Hoppity Hooper.” Or you might think that the three shows Jay Ward created were “Hoppity Hooper” and “George of the Jungle and Rocky” and “Bullwinkle.” All this confusion is due to the lack of the serial comma — the comma after the “and” in a series of items. Thus:

With Serial Comma: cats, dogs, and horses
Without Serial Comma: cats, dogs and horses

Yesterday on Salon, Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote about the uproar over the decision of the University of Oxford’s PR department to revise its style rules to eliminate serial commas. I’m not too upset about this, because for the last couple of decades the serial comma has fallen out of favor and many style guides have given up on it. This does not mean, however, that I agree with the decision.

From the standpoint of clarity, sometimes the serial comma is necessary and sometimes it is not. Therefore, given that it is sometimes necessary for clarity, always use it. I don’t see what is gained by destroying the serial comma, but I know why editors don’t like it. It is part of the general move to remove as much punctuation as possible. I like to use a lot of punctuation, but I fight the urge and end up using a half to a quarter of what I think is right. Really. What’s more, I don’t think the extra punctuation that I want to add would slow the reader. It would help. Punctuation helps define syntax. Those who would remove it think that sentences are clear without them. Sometimes they are — but rarely. Take that last sentence, for example: would it have meant the same thing if written, “Sometimes they are but rarely”? On first reading it, you would parse it incorrectly and then have to figure out what I meant. The way I wrote it, you get it right the first time without having to investigate the sentence like a literary Colombo.

My guiding philosophy is: make rules that make writing easier. This is why I think we should get rid of the word announce. With the serial comma, there are times when a writer must use it. Thus, why not use it all the time so you don’t have to think about whether it is required in a particular instance. Unfortunately, editors write style guidelines, not writers. This is why we Americans are stuck with totally unsupportable constructs like, “He spelled paper ‘papper.'” That period clearly does not belong to “papper.” The American quotation rules do make writing easier, but only at the expense of clarity and consistency. If we are going to do it with periods, we should do it with question marks and exclamation marks. This is a case where we shouldn’t make life easier on the writer. We should only do that when the change does not hurt the writing.

I guess the editors think they are eliminating clutter. But if they really want to remove clutter, why not get rid of all punctuation? Why not get rid of spaces? Who needs a “hot cup of tea” when the reader can figure out a “hotcupoftea”? “Really don’t you think as my friend Gerald Burns did before he died at age 59 that a hot cup of tea with or without sugar but surely with milk is better than coffee?” Perhaps not. “Really, don’t you think — as my friend Gerald Burns did, before he died at age 59 — that a hot cup of tea, with or without sugar — but surely with milk — is better than coffee?” I’m sure you can reverse engineer the first jumble of words, but you don’t have to in the second sentence because of all the directional signals (punctuation) controlling the flow of the jumble.

Oxford can do what it wants. I will continue to use the serial comma. I will continue to over-use the em-dash. The purpose of punctuation is to make the life of the reader easier. The abandonment of the serial comma does not do this. There is all down-side and no upside to this change. And the worst thing of all? This will kill Lynne Truss.[1]

[1] Actually, Truss is very liberal on this matter. She seems to think that she must justify the serial comma when she uses it. See, for example, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, pages 84-85. Lynne: I’m very disappointed with you.