When I recently discussed fucktard, I was sad to see that the tard ending was short for retard. (I know! I’m dense! Go read someone else if you don’t like it!) Up to that point, I had thought that fucktard was a charming linguistic invention. It is true that retard is not generally a word used to describe those with Down’s Syndrome and such—at least not among the sort of people I know. It is normally used to describe someone like me, “What a retard! You didn’t know that fucktard was a contraction for fuck and retard?” But the word retard has a bad history—generally as bad as nigger or kike.

This has brought me back to a variation that is nothing but a delight: fuck-a-doodle-doo. (Of course, what do I know? But I’m pretty sure this is just putting fuck at the beginning of cock-a-doodle-doo. Right?) There are two definitions of this word on Urban Dictionary. The first, entered in September 2004, is:

The second is from March 2005, but it misspells the word “Fuck-a-doodle-do”:

It is interesting that both of these definitions refer to Sean of the Dead. It is a good reference, but certainly not the first. The first appearance of the word that I know of (although almost certainly not the first) is 11 years earlier in Four Weddings and a Funeral. In it, after Carrie says “I do” at her wedding, Charles says to himself, “Fuck-a-doodle-doo.” He is heartbroken.

This scene also shows that the definitions on Urban Dictionary are wrong. Fuck-a-doodle-doo is just an expletive. It can be used in joy or sadness, but as with all expletives expresses something ineffable.

Fuck-a-doodle-doo.

There is a librarian who, on seeing me, is fond of yelling out, “Frank” in the Liverpudlian accept of the title character in the film Educating Rita. I find this charming. What’s more, I would only be too delighted to think of myself as the erudite and emotionally wounded Frank Bryan. I’ve always been fond of his big plunge into the dark side, and his vicious comment, “Found a culture, have you Rita? Found a better song to sing? No, you found a different song to sing, and on your lips it’s shrill and hollow and tuneless.”

What a cruel remark. But also: how true. At least, I always thought so.

This evening, I was reading William Hazlitt’s The Pleasure of Hating, a collection of essays, including that for which the book is titled.[1] And Hazlitt is nothing so much as a revaluation. First, he is a wonderful writer. As a 19th century British essayist, he commonly writes thousand word paragraphs. This is such a delight in a time when most magazines will only accept stories that are less than 2000 words. But more than the pure joy of the writing, Hazlitt is a radical thinker—both in his time and ours.

I have a new hero. And you are likely to hear much more about this great man from me.

Reading through these essays in an almost religious ecstasy, a thought came crashing into my mind: you are not Frank. Frank Bryan, that is. Certainly, I accept this song that I now sing is in no objective sense better than the song I was born to. But that isn’t the point. It is a matter of perspective. For Bryan, this was the song he was born to. For Rita and me, it is a song we’ve worked very hard to sing in key. Love is never objective, but that doesn’t make it any less fundamental. And those who feel that our song is shrill and hollow and tuneless have sunk to the point where all songs sound that way.

[1] Just to give you a taste of what Hazlitt is like, I offer you some quotes from the essay The Pleasure of Hating, which he wrote when he was exactly my age. Here is the essay in brief:

Here he could be writing about Frank Bryan, but then, I expect that Hazlitt knew more than a few of them:

I marked this one because I thought it worthy of Dorothy Parker:

There is no question that Hazlitt liked the plays of Shakespeare very much. However, if people today were as broad minded on this subject, I would never feel the need to complain about That Bard:

The essay itself is an indictment of the writer and the reader:

A long time ago, I wrote poetry, just like too many sensitive young people. But I was marginally successful, reaching the height of my art with a couple of things published in Andrei Codrescu’s Exquisite Corpse (now just known as The Corpse). But in looking back at my work, on balance, I would have to say it was all crap. (I didn’t put the image on the left because it was a skeleton. I put it there because it is the painting All is Vanity — What a card those artists are! — and the title of this article is a play on that.)

Recently, I wrote a love poem of sorts for one of my many passing fancies for librarians and bank tellers — the only women I come into physical contact with. So I sent it off to my friend Kristen McHenry. Now she’s an actual poet. And, well, great. Her first book is The Goatfish Alphabet. It is very good and will appeal to most people. It has some amazing moments like her poem “Museum,” which I don’t think she will mind me reprinting here:

Wow. I could write thousands of words about that poem. But what would be the point? What could I possibly say that would begin to get at the power of the work itself. It is, quite simply, perfect and better than anything I’ve ever done.

The truth is, however, that not all the poems in The Goatfish Alphabet are this strong. They are all good, but they are culled from years of writing over which McHenry refined her craft. And so, it is not surprising that her most recent book, Triplicity, is this good throughout. I plan to write about it in detail, but I’ve only read it four times and I’m still not ready. But you don’t need me to walk you through the book; she does an excellent job herself.

Triplicity is combined with Chella Courington’s Paper Covers Rock, which is also quite good, but I’ve only read it once and can’t say much more. Together they are well worth the $16 cover price. You really should buy it now!

So I sent this horrible poem off to Kristen and she worked it over and sent it back to me. It was amazing. What she’d done was kind of like an etching: she’d removed all the crap and left only what was good. Frankly, it was humiliating. She told me that all she does when she works on other people’s stuff is to try to make it as clear as possible.

That sounds simple enough, but it is so profound. It is a truth that any halfway decent writer knows, but which we all forget. So I am forever thinking back on it. Clarity is all.

Unless you’re five:

There are currently 403 definitions of “fucktard” on the Urban Dictionary. Of course, many of them are like number 402:

Love that “whom” don’t you? Just so you know: I don’t have time to put in all the necessary sic entries; I copied them directly, so you can assume that what is written is how they wrote it. We’ll be nice and just look at number 201:

The best definition by far in number two, for obvious reasons:

But the truth is that there are apparently a lot of different definitions for “fucktard.” In particular, I thought Number 5 was quite useful as a word used by specialists (although it seems to me that dancers may well call their leotards “fucktards” for very different reasons; this one sounds too much like a male fantasy):

Very similar (at least in the male sexual fantasy way) is this one:

But by far the most common definition, repeated over and over, is “a contraction of ‘fucking retard.'”

All of this research has frankly put me off what I have thought of as a charming word. The fact that “retard” might be part of its etymology never occurred to me. But I’m dense in this way. I had to be told that Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia was a play on “Jerry Garcia.” Up to then, I knew the ice cream flavor reminded me of the Grateful Dead, but I had no idea why. (Sadly, this is absolutely true.)

Many years ago, Andrea English developed a theorem that people were either stupid or evil. I hypothesized that the “or” was not exclusive and that some people (quite a lot, actually) were both stupid and evil. To me, “fucktard” is the perfect word for this: stupid and evil. (See, just like with the ice cream, my subconscious knows, but the thought never makes it to my cortex.)

Now I am deeply torn: to fucktard or not to fucktard, that is the question…[1]

[1] Am I the only one who has noticed that about a decade into his career Shakespeare fell in love with the weak ending of his iambic pentameter?

I might also point out that the “weak ending” of the last line is not weak. Sometimes Shakespeare was such a fucktard.

Scott Turow is about the only modern “Best Selling” novelist who I will read. I give him credit for teaching me how to write a mystery/suspense novel, and to some extent how to write a novel at all. So while in the Hong Kong Airport, I found myself without anything to read. So I picked up a copy of Turow’s newest novel, Innocent, the sequel to his first novel, Presumed Innocent. I’ll write about the novel later, because I have much to say. For now, I want to focus on one sentence that Turow wrote in the following short paragraph:

This is the character Nat, son of the main character Rusty. He is talking about his father’s computer skills. He was asked, “Are you computer literate?” And this is the question he appears to be answering, but isn’t.

There are two ways the last sentence can be written:

1. I know a lot more than him.
2. I know a lot more than he.

The first sentence means, “I know a lot more about computers than I know about my father.” The second sentence means, “I know a lot more about computers than my father knows about computers.”

Clearly, when speaking, only a pedant like me would say, “I know a lot more than he.” So maybe Turow wrote the sentence that way because that’s the way people talk.

But I’m not sure. All of Turow’s books are fundamentally about how unknowable everyone is. And this theme is very much on display in Innocent. Nat does not really know his father. So the question is whether Turow is such a good writer that he knew he was doing that when he wrote that line.

“I know a lot more about computers than I know about my father.”

Because I am a freak, I suffer some considerable anxiety about the proper way of dealing with complete sentences inside of parenthetical enclosures. Most of this is purely aesthetic. For example, I hate constructs such as “XX XX (XX XX.).” I just hate the period-parenthesis-period. Or anything similar: “XX XX (XX XX!).”. So I will never put a complete sentence inside an inner-sentence parenthetical enclosures at the very end of a sentence. But before I go any further, we should look at what The Book says.

According to The Chicago Manual of Style 15th Edition:

I don’t think I have ever included more than one sentence inside a parenthetical enclosure in a sentence. Certainly, doing so outside a sentence is done all the time. In fact, one or more paragraphs are sometimes put inside a parenthetical enclosure, although it seems to me that such things should be put into footnotes. What’s more, I feel no compunction about putting rather complex sentences (including: colons and semicolons) inside inner-sentence parenthetical enclosures. But care must be taken.

It is a matter of opinion, but any writer must ask if a parenthetical statement is so long that it causes the sentence on one side of it to lose contact with that on the other. If that’s the case, the whole construction must be reevaluated. There are always alternatives. Often, I find that things I initially put inside parenthetical enclosures really want to be independent sentences. This is especially true when what’s inside is very long. Consider putting it in its own paragraph—without parentheses. Often what at first seems parenthetical is not.

The quotation from The Book seems to indicate that these inner-sentence parenthetical enclosures should never end with a period. However, there is no admonition against any other full stops and there is no guidance whatsoever about capitalization. This is where my biggest concerns lie. These are the rules I’ve developed for complete sentences inside of inner-sentence parenthetical enclosures:

• If it is at the end of a sentence, put it outside the sentence. If this makes the meaning confused, rewrite the paragraph and find something that does work.
• Otherwise, capitalize the first letter in the sentence.

What I often see are parenthetical enclosures that end with question marks or exclamation points that do not capitalize the first word of the sentence. This is certainly what The Book seems to dictate. But—because I’m a freak—it drives me crazy. And I think it is confusing, because these are full stops. But I don’t know of anyone else formatting inner-sentence parenthetical enclosures in my way. But they should. Anything else is inconsistent and just odd.

I was cleaning out spam earlier today and I noticed another bout of random acts of spamness: “If you’re not acceptable at this ratio, afresh either you are traveling afterwards the amiss projects or you’re angle and presentation abilities charge a tune-up…” I now see them in a different light, however. I know that their purpose is to seem kind of like English without actually saying anything. This is very similar to Lucky’s speech in Waiting for Godot: it is one academic cliche after another that has the style of serious argument without any content.

There is meaning to be found in this fragment, but it takes digging. Lucky is hypothesizing the traditional Judeo-Christian God, who lives in a realm that transcends time. He (which we must assume given that he has a white beard) loves us, even though he has no emotion. This is a hypothesis, of course, because God is incapable of communicating his feelings in a way that we can understand. What’s more, why God’s love is given to certain people and not to others is unfathomable. God suffers just like we do, but he is able to push through this and live in peace—but not for long. This is a vision of the universe that Schopenhauer would have considered gloomy. For the normal person, it treads very close to a reasonable argument for suicide. But this hardly matters, because one only gets this much meaning out of the speech after great effort. For those sitting in a theater, the speech is nothing more than logorrhoea. However, the fact that a speech about the unfathomability of the universe is itself unfathomable was certainly Beckett’s intention.

Unfathomable Speech: Spam

In Lucky’s speech, Beckett lampoons the language constructs that hinder communication. Today’s spam creates this same kind of language. The purpose of Beckett and the spammers are different, however. Beckett’s purpose is to show how word combinations that sound meaningful can be entirely without meaning; the spammers’ purpose is to create meaningless word combinations that sound meaningful. Thus, it is not surprising that they would sound similar.

The text created by the spammers is not their actual product. Their products are links—viruses that live on a host site; the text is a kind of defense system that hinders their removal. To accomplish this, the spammers wish to create text that is not repeated from infection to infection. There are two reasons for this, I believe: to avoid possible legal problems with posting identical comments for very different articles[5] and to make the work of those checking comments more difficult and error prone (that is, make it more likely that the spam will survive).

In his day, Beckett was not confronted with intentional meaninglessness. People certainly tried to obfuscate, but this was not the main issue. He wasn’t attacking advertising. The much more fundamental problem was people trying to communicate truthfully and succeeding only in obfuscating. Thus, he would not have been attacking spammers, if they had even existed. But his solution to the problem of showing the effects of literary cliche on meaning deterioration is the same as the spammer’s solution to the problem of creating original text that sounds meaningful but is not. The solution: combine phrases in a random way. The difference between Beckett and the spammers is primarily in the phrases chosen. Beckett’s phrases are substantially more complex; the spammers rarely use phrases longer than two words. Also, Beckett takes great care in how he matches these phrases, to make them sound even more compelling. He is subtle and clever in how he combines them. Thus, it is only on a cursory reading that one would mistake one for the other. But the similarity of them in terms of their sound and rhythm is unmistakable.

Intentions matter. Even if the spammers could somehow create great Lucky-like (or Not I-like) speech, their output would still be unwelcome. It would still be evil. I am waiting for the day when Yesterday is used to sell an SUV.

Here is the brilliant, if flawed, scene from the Beckett on Film Waiting for Godot with Stephen Brennan as Lucky:

[1] What exactly is meant by “quaquaquaqua” is a point of some debate. Beckett is in no way a careless writer and so we can’t assume that it is a meaningless statement or an error. There are only two occurrences of it in the whole play and they are placed just as shown here: within four words of each other. It could be a pun on the word quaquaversal, which means “sloping downward from the center in all directions.” This is an appealing interpretation because this certainly sums up the traditional view of monotheistic religions. It could also be a pun on the Latin phrase quaque die (Q.D.), which means “every day.” This too has a certain appeal as it relates to the omnitemporal nature of monotheistic gods, or as Beckett writes, God that is “outside time without extension.” However, having studied the speech in some depth, I conclude that it is a kind of onomatopoeia indicating that Lucky’s mind is having difficulty getting started—like a cold car forced to accelerate too quickly.

[2] These three words (apathia, athembia, aphasia) are quite challenging. By apathia, Beckett is probably referring to the Latin word, which means “freedom from emotion.” Who knows what athambia means. It may mean the state of calmness. Aphasia is an actual English word (in the traditional latinized Greek sense). It means “the loss or impairment of the power to use or comprehend words usually resulting from brain damage.”

[3] Although it sounds like it, there is no mythology related to Miranda. In Latin, “miranda” means “to be admired.” Does that help? Of course not.

[4] Lucky’s six to seven minute speech is a single sentence without any stops like semicolons. I have inserted some punctuation to make it easier to read. These reflect just my interpretation, although they are in keeping with all performances I’ve seen.

[5] Related to this is the ability to automatically detect such spam. If the link text was always “Happy Happy Joy Joy!” then it would be easy to spot this text and remove the spam infection. If the text is always different, it would not be possible to do this. Although it is easy for a human to read the text that protects these spam links, computers still have great difficulty distinguishing between Beckett and noise.

I found a delightful little poem in The Grammar Bible by Strumpf and Douglas. I plan to write a write more about little gems I’ve found in this fine book. But for now, here is the poem of unknown origin:

The other night, I was lying in bed unable to sleep because my odd little mind was running amok. “Will you be able to pay your son’s tuition? Jeez, I hope so. He’d never forgive you if he had to quit and go to community college. Say goodbye to grandchildren. Speaking of grandkids, it’s too bad you aren’t 30 anymore. Right? I mean, not even taking into account the loss of skin elasticity, the middle-aged hairstyle (‘style’–that’s funny), or the loss of muscle tone, that extra 15 pounds–yikes! What? I’m just sayin’. Aging sucks. Sadly, in this country, only youth matters. OMG. I just thought; what if Tom loses his job? Holy shit that would be bad. Maybe you should get a part-time job at WalMart. You are so qualified for that! Really. Although, now that I think about it, why bother? You wouldn’t make enough to pay the electric bill, much less the mortgage. Oh well. The house won’t be paid off in your lifetime anyway so why worry? Someone will take it off your hands if you can’t afford to keep it and then you can move into a teeny-tiny low-maintenance apartment in a relatively safe neighborhood somewhere. Can you please make your heart stop palpitating like that? It’s really distracting.”

At that point… no, first my mind noticed the interesting similarity between “feat” and “feet”. Then it very cleverly (I thought) came up with, “Having great big feet is no great feat.” Actually, that wasn’t the first draft, we had to collaborate on just the right wording and then discuss the best way to illustrate such a clever play on words. That led to thinking about books. I wondered, of all the books I’ve read, which three did my mind and I find most disturbing. What about the most delightful? Here’s what we came up with:

The Three Most Unsettling Books I’ve Ever Read

Cover art by a talented artist (unkown) for a horrifying story.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

The son-of-a-bitch English teacher who made me read that bit of horror at the age of 11 should have had his head stuck on a pike while savage little children dance around it.

Edition designed by Shepard Fairey.

1984 by George Orwell

It’s scary because it’s happening and no one seems to notice.

Cover intelligently designed by an anonymous
typesetter (probably an agnostic).

The Bible by Committee

It’s scary because it isn’t true and yet continues to be one of the most powerful weapons of mass propaganda ever created.

The Three Most Delightful Books I’ve Ever Read

Artwork by Jules Pfifer

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

I wished I had a little electric car that could drive me out of this boring, tedious, senseless existence into a world of adventurous wordplay. I felt sorry for Milo when he had to come home, but his hopefulness in the face of impending indifference was truly inspiring.

Beautiful cover, designer unkown

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein

One of the most enjoyable and unique respites from reality I’ve ever read. Short people can be heroes, not just comedy relief.

Cover art by Cassandra Austen

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Anyone unable to appreciate this book is vapid, insufferable, and probably too plain to dance with.