The Paris Review's Blog, page 732

Maximum Sentence

How prisoners perceive—and misperceive—life in the outside world.

Richard Robles’s self portrait, 2013

I mailed a copy of my book Among Murderers, about the struggles three men faced when they returned to the world after several decades behind bars, to Richard Robles, a pen pal serving an indeterminate life sentence in New York’s Attica Prison. Prison reading and mailing policies are designed to reinforce the feeling of punishment. Family and friends cannot simply send books; they have to come directly from the publisher or an online bookstore. Most prisons only allow paperbacks—Attica, a rare exception, permits hardcovers. I couldn’t find detailed mailing instructions on Attica’s website, so I called the prison. “Send it through the publisher—and don’t hide no weapon in it,” the employee blurted. Richard wrote me that he almost had to return the book.

[My] name wasn’t on the “buyer’s side” of the invoice. The guard said something about a new rule that prisoners have to buy the book. But as you can see I did get it, after another guard said something to him. Miracles, right?

I did consider it a small miracle when, a few weeks later, I began to receive letters from men who had borrowed the book from Richard. Prison is a dark world far away from ours, and communications travel slowly. We may have forgotten “them,” but they never forget us. My book quickly made its way around Richard’s cell block; several prisoners mailed me their reviews, chronicling their ambitious attempts at self-improvement and their struggle to prepare themselves for a world that doesn’t want them back.

Having corresponded with Richard for years, I already knew he was an intelligent, thoughtful writer. But I have to admit that the other men’s reviews—so insightful, thought provoking, and well written—surprised me. And what surprised me even more was that I was surprised. Had I expected less of the men because they murdered another human being and have been in prison for ten, fifteen, twenty-four, or fifty years? Had I really believed that the parole board bases its decision on the prisoners’ rehabilitative progress or potential? Our inability to forgive reflects our own lack of empathy more than the prisoners’. On some fundamental level, it is hard for us to trust that whatever primal impulse causes someone to murder can really be overcome.

These reviews provided a thoughtful afterword to my book: they raise important questions about the more than 100,000 individuals currently serving indeterminate life sentences in the U.S.

This year marks Richard’s fiftieth in prison for the murder of two young women. One of the most shocking crimes of its era, it was dubbed “The Career Girl Murders,” alluding to the dangers that await young women who move to New York. In the decades that followed, America implemented a tough-on-crime stance that didn’t consider forgiveness or rehabilitation. If we would only lock up all the potential Richards of this country, we would be safe; any prisoner who wanted to embark on the arduous journey of rehabilitation was on his own. He had to come to terms with his guilt, his shame, and, most importantly, his remorse in an environment detrimental to happiness and progress. Richard wrote,

Remorse is a tough subject. It’s complicated by the human desire to avoid pain and punishment, which is actually stronger, I think. It includes feelings of shame and guilt. Then there’s the drive to rehabilitate oneself and change. It is complex and confusing. One has to take an honest look at himself and get rid of that “bullshit ego.”

I first met Richard in 2007, when I visited the Quaker prison ministry in Attica as part of my research. That Friday night in December, we sat across from each other in a circle surrounded by several other convicted murderers and three Quakers who led the ministry. Richard looked ashen and frail, and yet I could see something glowing in him.

When I first Googled his name after my return to New York, I struggled to put the two faces together. One was an old man who told me of his conversion to Quakerism and his frustration at trying to draw the hands of a young girl playing the cello. The other was a young junkie who stabbed two women to death during a burglary gone awry. After several years of intimate correspondence with Richard, I managed to assimilate these two images into a more cohesive picture.

Richard read my book in two or three sittings and then shared his thoughts:

I found it very honest and real. I think it will be an eye opener for those who have the misconception that parole is freedom. I’d like to see it as mandatory reading for all first offenders because they often think “parole is freedom” and are quickly, very negatively struck with profound disappointment when reality smacks or kicks them in the face.

Along these lines I would have liked to see more about the unrealistic expectations prisoners fantasize about in prison—and how fantasies inhibit reform/rehabilitation efforts. I think you tried to portray that but I’m not certain the average reader could get it. You portray a prisoner as saying “Expect the unexpected.” I’d rephrase that to “Expect to be disappointed in every dream you conjure in prison.”

I knew that prisoners often have unrealistic fantasies about job opportunities and women on the outside. Richard once asked me to tell him about my experience as an image processor at a publishing house in New York. He is proficient in Photoshop; he used to work an engraving machine in prison, making plaques to commemorate guards who had died. He hoped that, if released, he could land a job similar to mine. At the time, I didn’t tell him that I doubted that a publishing house would hire anyone who spent fifty years in prison for murdering two young women. Should I have quashed his hopes? After all, fantasies of freedom—of women, family, and work—help prisoners survive. I wondered if a more realistic outlook would prevent disappointment and, in turn, recidivism.

Worse, the parole system fosters unrealistic expectations. Like many other prisoners, Richard has been encouraged to amass dozens of documents to prove his rehabilitation. His parole folder is brimming with college and work-training certificates, as well as letters of recommendation from spiritual friends and even from prison administrators. Richard has long since served his minimum sentence, twenty years. His 15th parole hearing is scheduled for May 2014. It is unclear what he could or should have done differently to be released. Every other year he is denied parole because of “the nature of [his] crime”—a fact he will never be able to change—and advised to continue to work on his rehabilitation. No concrete guidance is ever offered.

A certificate from the Eastern New York Correctional Facility.

New York, of course, isn’t the only state with arbitrary or senseless prison policies. I corresponded with Tony Davis, who has been in prison in California since he was eighteen; he, too, has been denied parole many times. At forty-two, he teaches his fellow prisoners empathy in a victim-awareness class and facilitates a peer health program. (The few self-improvement programs available in prison are mostly run by prisoners, not by people with degrees and outside work experience—yet another absurdity.) Tony wrote,

I truly believe that Angel has not addressed the full understanding of remorse and has not fully dealt with the pain of his childhood. I had concern with a lot of the stuff he said. The book really made me understand how messed up the system is and not just on the west coast but everywhere.

Like the subjects in my book, Tony has struggled to unlearn the “street code” he grew up with. He has painstakingly acquired alternative behaviors in an environment that continues to be governed by the law of street. It was Richard who analyzed the street code’s consequences behind bars and the mechanisms prisoners employ to avoid violence:

Often in prison violence occurs after a person is “dissed.” However, quite frequently he will discuss it with friends, in an attempt to be dissuaded from “having to” retaliate in a violent manner. Some so-called friends will advise the guy “You have to stick (stab) the offender”—while real friends will advise the person to forget about it. It’s all a matter of “saving face.”

I’m specifically thinking of a recent occasion when a man of Egyptian heritage asked me what he should do after he was dissed. He comes from a middle class upbringing in Egypt where (I suspect) they don’t have the American ghetto values. But he did learn the “Street Code” during his 20 years in American prisons … He asked me what he should do. I advised, in Quaker manner, to avoid violence and further, if possible, pointedly avoid any future interaction with the individual.

It occurs to me that these people asking “what should I do” is #1 the desire to evade violence and #2 the desire to ascertain that they will be “accepted” if they don’t react violently (i.e. their own need to be accepted is very strong).

Richard is seventy-one years old; he has often served as a mentor to his mostly younger friends at Attica. He tenderly calls his thirty-five-year-old buddy, Jason Rodriguez, “a baby.” Jason, who has served fifteen years of a thirty-seven-to-life sentence, often visits Richard in his cell to discuss politics and philosophy. Jason wrote to me:

I became depressed at times and felt like the way things are going now, in this system, I could end up [like] Brooks, the character out of the movie Shawshank Redemption who couldn’t reconnect with society and committed suicide. I started questioning the true essence of remorse, rehabilitation, and the whole process of corrections; what society deems fit when they’re looking in from the outside at a bunch of papers [and] data … I share, and am grateful for, your sentiments on page 18: “Each man’s story—his needs, desires, risks, failures and moral responsibilities—calls for a highly individualized approach.”

I myself get scared at times and don’t want to socialize or be around the majority of these prisoners; I live among them and see, for the most part, who they truly are and it scares me.

Soon after Jason’s letter arrived, I heard from Dean Faiello, who killed Maria Cruz in 2003 after misrepresenting himself as a dermatologist. He buried Cruz’s body under his New Jersey garage and fled to Costa Rica. Eventually, he was extradited to the U.S. and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

Perhaps self-recognition is what vexes and frightens me. In an effort at full disclosure, I must tell you that I too was convicted of a heinous crime, the details of which are chilling. As a result of my callous actions, a beautiful young woman lost her life.

Despite my efforts to change—facilitating prison programs like The Alternatives to Violence Project, meditation and HIV education; participating in Attica’s college program; struggling for six years with the craft of creative nonfiction in Doran Larson’s writing workshop; attending AA and religious services—despite the battle to achieve enlightenment and transformation, I am haunted nightly by memories of Maria Cruz, her final moments. She may forgive me, but I cannot.

If we consider murder innately unforgivable, we have to ask why we give a prisoner the chance to prove his rehabilitation in front of a parole board every two years after he’s served his minimum sentence. To have his hopes squashed? To punish him even further? The only way we can empathize with murderers is by allowing ourselves to get to know them—not only as criminals but as the people they become in the years that follow.

A recent Pushcart Prize winner, Sabine Heinlein is the author of the narrative nonfiction book Among Murderers: Life After Prison.

Tearjerkers

Still from Cinema Paradiso, 1989

Looking at this year’s Best Picture nominees, I realized that while I had liked three, nine out of nine had made me tear up—including The Wolf of Wall Street. Fellow movie criers will understand. Especially for those of us who might hesitate to cry in the light of day, there is a singular pleasure to letting tears flow, even—or maybe especially—when what’s happening on screen is really stupid. I come by this honestly. My father refuses to see any movie in which a child dies.

This outpouring of emotion is not limited to the cinema; after watching Audra McDonald and Norm Douglas perform “Bess You Is My Woman Now” in the recent revival of Porgy and Bess, my mom and I were so overcome that we had to skip the second act and go get a drink across the street. And the list of songs I can’t listen to dry-eyed is so long that I’ve had to quarantine them in their own Spotify playlist. But movies are the biggest culprit.

The first movie that made me inconsolable was Dumbo—“Baby Mine,” of course, after he’s been taken from his mother—and the second, I believe, was Chipmunk Adventure, after the baby penguin is taken from his mother. My brother and I both sobbed so loudly in Land Before Time (after the baby dinosaur is taken from his mother) that we had to leave the theatre. Thank God we were never exposed to Bambi. (My mother, traumatized to realize that she was “Man,” resolved at age five to spare her own kids the same shock.)

As an adult, I find I can’t watch any of the following without dissolving into tears: The Best Years of Our Lives, The Browning Version, The Remains of the Day, ET, Old Yeller, The Pride of the Yankees, Fear Strikes Out, Bang the Drum Slowly (I like baseball movies), Rudy, and New York Mets 1986: A Year to Remember, specifically the “You Belong to the City” montage.

Psychology Today informs us that

we cry at movies because the oxytocin in the human brain is imperfectly tuned. It does not differentiate between actual human beings and flickering images of human beings. Either one is enough to kick oxytocin into high gear and impel our empathy.

No doubt, and no doubt for many of us, we’re using the story and the darkness as a vent for other, pent-up emotions. But I would argue that sometimes storytelling is just so good, the human condition so universally tragic and uplifting, that it’s earned our tears.

And some championship seasons are so exciting, and so far from a current team’s prospects, that a viewer can’t watch Dwight Gooden’s windup and stay dry-eyed. This one can’t, anyway.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Prude

No sex, please, we’re British intelligence.

We at The Paris Review Daily do not ordinarily see fit to intervene in matters of geopolitics. But the Times brings news too dismaying to ignore: in a ham-fisted effort to tighten national security, Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters has intercepted millions of images from Yahoo webcams. And what have they gotten for their troubles? Not sensitive documents, hot tips, or even shifty conversation—just eyeful after eyeful of amateur porn. Worse still, they’re not even turned on by it.

“Unfortunately, there are issues with undesirable images within the data,” one GCHQ document reads. “It would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person.”

An internal agency survey of 323 Yahoo usernames found that 7.1 percent of those images contained “undesirable nudity.”

“Undesirable” our asses! (Which would, if bared on Yahoo webcams, provide only the most desirable foreign intelligence in the world.)

 

February’s Shocking Secret, and Other News

The astounding, filthy origins of our second month. A derelict tank in mud, c. 1917; photo via the Canadian Dept. of Defense.

You won’t BELIEVE February’s dirty, hidden past! “Before we adopted the Latin name for the second month, Old English used much more vibrant names to describe it. The most common Old English name was Solmonath, which literally means ‘mud month.’”
You won’t BELIEVE what a steady dose of antidepressants and benzodiazepines did to this writer’s creativity!
You won’t BELIEVE who offered these kind, pizzalicious words about our magazine! “I have every issue of The Paris Review, and I only read them when I feel like I’ve worked really hard and deserve a reward. It’s like New York pizza—hard to find a bad slice.”
You won’t BELIEVE how far your jaw drops when you look at these eleventh-century illustrations of the Book of Revelation!
You won’t BELIEVE how this parrot helped solve a crime in India! “Whenever Ashutosh’s name was mentioned, the parrot would start screeching.”
You won’t BELIEVE how lame this writerly T-shirt is!

 

Tonight: Join Us for an AWP Happy Hour

Continuing last week’s westerly trend, our digital director, Justin Alvarez, and our associate editor, Stephen Hiltner, have descended upon Seattle for the AWP Conference. (I’ve never been to Seattle, so I won’t even try to set the scene for you. Insert clichéd quip here—about the Space Needle, Starbucks, the grunge scene, flannel, Microsoft, rain, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, etc.) If you’re around, be sure to stop by table N18, where Justin and Stephen will be all weekend with discounted subscription deals, tote bags, selected back issues from our archives, endless charm, easy smiles, and more.

Oh, almost forgot: booze. There are few things writers and publishers enjoy more than drinking on the cheap; we know this. Thus, from six to eight this evening, The Paris Review is co-hosting a happy hour at Linda’s Tavern with A Strange Object, Electric Literature, and Guernica. Stop by for first-rate hobnobbing and, yes, alcohol.

It’s My Party

How many hotheaded academics does it take to solve a riddle?

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Andrew Stevovich, Hat Party, 2012, 7" x 8"

I don’t know what the best thing was about Jim Propp’s parties. They were a crystalline picture of the specialized, rarified company I kept when I lived in Cambridge in the mid-nineties, parked on Mass. Ave halfway between Harvard and MIT. Profs, postdocs, and assorted academic keepsakes from the cream of Boston academia all piled into Jim’s Victorian four-square house in Somerville for an evening of … well, we never quite knew what the evening would bring.

Technically, these were “word game” parties. Each was planned around a series of intellectual challenges arranged around the house more or less like evil wizards, axe-wielding dwarves, or more mundane impediments in a typical game of Dungeons & Dragons. You’d team up with a couple friends (or the pretty redhead who was probably dating one of your professors, if you could), and make your way from room to room, solving bits and pieces of puzzles that—if you were lucky—you could string together for the grand solution. The prize was bragging rights until the next party, six months down the line.

In any case, it all began with the invitation. Twice a year, a mysterious envelope would appear. I remember the first one I received: a single sheet with nothing but a swirling Spirograph flower on one side, and the letters “RSVP” below it. Where, when, and how were left to the recipient, presumably after he or she had coaxed the secret out of the cryptic drawing.

Another time, the invitation was a short story, beginning something like “‘I can’t believe what a prick Jim is!’ she said, throwing the invitation on the floor.” It self-referentially detailed an argument by a young couple who had received one of Jim’s invitations; they were exasperated that he expected them to divine the details of the party from his little story. At the bottom, as always, it just said “RSVP.”

Of course, if you couldn’t solve the puzzle, there was always a last resort: you knew the puzzle was from Jim, so you could admit defeat and simply ask him when and where the party was.

The party itself was a smorgasbord of puzzles. You could wander through the house, solving them in any order as you mingled, flirted, and nibbled on hors d’oeuvres, but you really had to try to solve all of them. The reason was this: Jim wasn’t content simply to think up a half-dozen unrelated mind benders for us to pound our heads against. There was something larger hidden behind the curtain—solutions for the individual puzzles were merely clues that needed to be strung together to solve a larger puzzle that we didn’t even know existed.

Case in point: Jim’s now-famous “Self-Referential Aptitude Test” (the SRAT), a puzzle that featured in one of his parties before I fell into his orbit. The test was composed almost entirely of questions whose answers depended on answers for other questions, beginning with

 1. The first question whose answer is B is question

 (A) 1, (B) 2, (C) 3, (D) 4, (E) 5

 2. The only two consecutive questions with identical answers are questions

 (A) 6 and 7, (B) 7 and 8, (C) 8 and 9, (D) 9 and 10, (E) 10 and 11

and getting more convoluted and twisted as it went.

Eventually, though, with enough patience—and perhaps a degree in constraint-satisfaction programming—you’d come up with a self-consistent solution and breathe a sigh of relief. But then what? How did solving this puzzle help you unearth, let alone solve, the master puzzle that was still hidden in the evening?

What’s really on my mind is a particularly brilliant, if comically miscalculated, puzzle, intended to be the icebreaker at one of the last of Jim’s parties that I attended.

When the guests arrived at the front door that evening, we were each required to take a name tag. Not a peculiar requirement in itself, given that most of us were strangers who knew Jim from only one of his many disjoint social circles. But what was peculiar was that each name tag already had on it a puzzling (there’s that word again!) collection of words and letters.

One tag had, for example “Cretaceous,” “Run,” “Carbon,” and the letter “M.” Another had “Spring,” “Pius II,” “Uranium,” and “P.” Yet another: “Pride,” “Jurassic,” “Hamlet,” and “A.”

Alone or in pairs, they made little sense, but this clever crowd quickly picked out the nature of the puzzle. What we had here were overlapping strands of partial orderings. Some people had geological periods on their tags; they needed to be arranged in chronological order. Same with the popes and Shakespeare’s plays. Elements had to be ordered by atomic weight. But others weren’t so obvious. “Summer” comes before “Fall” (as does “Pride”, we discovered), but where does the circle of seasons wrap around?

Complication number one: the sequences were carefully spread out, so there was no guarantee you’d have a direct overlap with any particular person. I couldn’t tell if Susan’s tag (“Triassic,” “Walk,” “Macbeth,” “L”) should be before mine (“Benedict I,” “Nitrogen,” “Hoover,” “A”) without discovering the mutual constraint imposed by Richard’s tag (“Cretaceous,” “Run,” “Carbon,” “M”).

That just left the matter of the letters, the only element common to everyone’s tag. It was clear to everyone, then, that the letters must spell out the secret message. But here was another problem: because the tags had been cleverly designed to make pairwise comparisons difficult, it wasn’t straightforward for people to sort themselves by looking at their neighbors. We actually needed an algorithm.

Fortunately for us, a good fraction of the attendees were mathematicians and computer scientists, and understood sorting algorithms better than they understood some of the subtler aspects of personal hygiene. Unfortunately, they were, again, predominantly Harvard and MIT professors, longing for that moment when their particular skills would be called on in an emergency, when they could just once utter that coveted phrase in a loud, authoritative but calm voice: “Stand back, everyone—I’m a computer scientist.”

This would have been a brilliant opportunity, had there been but one such savior lurking in our midst. We would have stood there, willing minions, as he directed us through the dance of his polylogarithmic merge-sort algorithm: You there: step forward and work your way down the line. You, in the pink sweater, now it’s your turn. And so on.

But as cruel Fate would have it, there were at least a dozen such computational mavens waiting in the woodwork, each with their own algorithm to direct, and none willing to abdicate his long-dreamt-of moment in the sun. And so one would direct an innocent partygoer to switch places with her neighbor, immediately causing another to howl that the first was scrambling his already-sorted section of list.

And the computer scientists weren’t the only ones at fault. The English professors may not have known squat about algorithms, but they sure as hell knew they weren’t going to be ordered to do-si-do by scruffy kids half their age with mismatched shoes.

And so things came off the rails. Voices were raised and veiled threats flew, involving tenure and the possibility of anonymous reviews. I don’t think anyone actually threw a punch, but there were plenty of innocent bystanders cowering in the corner. I don’t actually know how long the game went on—they say that time dilates in train wrecks and other disasters—but it was probably close to an hour, and the party was clearly over before it had ever really gotten started. Spouses grabbed coats and tugged their irate academicians, in full protest, to the door. (“But we’ve almost gotten it solved!” “No, dear, you’ve almost gotten punched in the nose.”)

One of the remaining guests, unencumbered by a spouse, seized on this moment to throw his plan into action. Starting with the pretense that departing guests needed to leave their tags in his custody, he quickly fleeced the remaining partygoers of their tags, too. Many came off before their wearers had the chance to raise objections, and our young turk retreated to the back of the room, facing a crowd that was hostile, but still vaguely curious whether the puzzle could be solved.

Unattached, the cards could be sorted more quickly, so we reined in our acrimony, giving him a few minutes to try his hand at sorting out the riddle that had so spectacularly ruined not only this party, but possibly friendships and careers.

Slowly it took form, and slowly, the irony of the message that appeared before us sank in. It was a quotation from Grantland Rice, one that we all knew, and all knew far better than we had when the evening had begun:

“He marks—not whether not whether you won or lost, but how you played the game.”

David Pablo Cohn is a flight instructor, folk musician, travel blogger, and former Google Research Scientist.

Live Long and Prosper

Milton Glaser Collection Box 57 Folder 14: mechanical for Bloomingdale’s advertisement, c. 1970; image via Container List.

Saturday is a special day for buying and doing beautiful things. A whole day stretching ahead. It’s a new lifestyle. A man. A woman. Art exhibits. Antiquing. Movies. Cocktails. Shopping. … together. You’re searching for a special gown. You want something different. You find it at Regalia, a fully-lined chiffon and velvet gown with matching hot pants. You know fashion. You’re a member of Saturday’s Generation. —Schenectady Gazette ad for Regalia Boutique, 1971

Recently, Gothamist featured a 1976 60 Minutes story on said “Saturday’s Generation”—a short-lived term for the young people who “walk and glide, trip and mince, and stride” through a Bloomingdale’s of a Saturday, doing and buying beautiful things and picking each other up.

In the segment, Blair Sabol (of The Village Voice) describes Saturday’s Generation in terms that, today, may as well be a foreign language, but that seem to spell out proto-Yuppie. “I think of a couple, and they live on the Upper East Side, and they have chrome and glass furniture, and they’ve got the brie cheese, and they’re wearing the Famous Amos T-shirt, and they’ve got the right patch jeans … that’s a very heavy identity.”

Containerlist further elucidated the phenomenon:

It’s 1970. You’re young, you’re bored in your Upper East Side apartment, you have a little money to spend. Bloomingdale’s tried to capture the weekend leisure time of this trend-seeking crowd with their “Saturday’s Generation” boutique, inviting customers to hang out in their curvy, psychedelic, over-the-top model interiors designed by Barbara D’Arcy. The in-store environments featured simulated aquarium living, inspiration from Earth Houses, and a structure called “The Cave”, which was wrapped entirely in white polyurethane. There was plenty of plastic, foam rubber, shag rugs, jagged greenery against soft curves, projected wall images.

Certainly the few Saturday’s Generation label garments available for sale on eBay—presumably from said Bloomie’s boutique—appeared distinctly fashion-forward.

I called my parents to see whether, as hip young New Yorkers in the seventies, they had been familiar with this designation. Had my dad, as a young man, not lived in the Village? And my mother, after all, had been a disco regular—family lore has it that the last scene of Saturday Night Fever was filmed in her apartment after a location scout ran into her in the East Sixties.

“Well, Bloomingdale’s was a known pick-up spot,” said my dad. “But not as prominent as the Museum of Modern Art. I picked up a woman at MoMA, one of the few times I ever went.”

I read them description of the heavy identity that was Saturday’s Generation.

“I guess my boyfriend Steve was part of that,” my mother said. “He insisted we buy a chrome and glass coffee table. I hated it. Famous Amos was one of the first gourmet cookies; before that, we just ate Entenmanns’s.”

I was somewhat deflated. I shouldn’t have been; my parents had been similarly unhelpful when asked to comment on the closing of CBGB and the singles bar scene of West 71st Street. “Okay,” I said. “But was this a real phenomenon? Did that phrase catch on? Or was it just a marketing ploy? Did you ever hear anyone use it?”

“I don’t know,” said my mother vaguely. “I was just hanging out with gay men and going to Star Trek conventions. I wore my Andorian antennae to Tavern on the Green when it opened, and a woman approached me in the bathroom and asked if they were a fashion statement, or something medical.”

“I think you’re asking the wrong people,” said my dad.

“But if you watch the last scene of Saturday Night Fever, you can see the coffee table,” said my mom. “Although the location scout insisted on redecorating.”

A Most Searching Examination

Image via Pop Chart Lab

Pop Chart Lab, whose laudable ambition is “to render all of human experience in chart form,” is offering a print consisting of twenty-nine first sentences from novels, including one of my favorites, from David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress: “In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.” Of course, a print comprised of nothing but text would be not much of a print at all, so Pop Chart Lab has done us the favor of diagramming every sentence according to the Reed-Kellogg System, color coded and all. Plotting out the beginning of Don Quixote is, as you can see, complicated.

As a pedagogical device, sentence diagrams have fallen out of fashion; I never had to draw them (if that’s even the right verb) in school, nor was I made to study any grammar beyond the rudimentary parts of speech. This makes me feel like a fraud whenever I pretend to be a grammarian, as I often do. In fact, before today, I’d never heard of the Reed-Kellogg System; it sounds to me like a proprietary method for processing and packaging cornflakes.

Actually, it dates back to 1877, when it was invented by two men with great names, Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg. Though the Don Quixote sample is intimidating, diagramming sentences turns out to be fairly intuitive. (“And fun!” adds a sad, sorry voice in my head.) You begin with the base, a horizontal line; write the subject on the left and the predicate on the right, separated by a vertical bar. Then separate the verb and its object with another mark—if you have a direct object, use a vertical line, and if you have a predicate noun (had to look that up) or an adjective (that one I knew), use a backslash. Modifiers of the subject, predicate, or object “dangle below the base.”

Nothing could be easier.

According to Wikipedia, in certain circles—perhaps not the circles one aspires to run in—the Reed-Kellogg System faced scrutiny for dividing up the order of speech. But fear not, Alonzo and Brainerd had a tart rejoinder for their critics:

The Objections to the Diagram. The fact that the pictorial diagram groups the parts of a sentence according to their offices and relations, and not in the order of speech, has been spoken of as a fault. It is, on the contrary, a merit, for it teaches the pupil to look through the literary order and discover the logical order. He thus learns what the literary order really is, and sees that this may be varied indefinitely, so long as the logical relations are kept clear.

The assertion that correct diagrams can be made mechanically is not borne out by the facts. It is easier to avoid precision in oral analysis than in written. The diagram drives the pupil to a most searching examination of the sentence, brings him face to face with every difficulty, and compels a decision on every point.

Huh Is on Everyone’s Tongues, and Other News

A confused London storefront. Image via Instagram

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America—arguably the closest thing our nation has to a band of superheroes—has announced the nominees for this year’s Nebula Awards. Nicola Griffith, interviewed on the Daily last month, is up for best novel; and Samuel Delany, interviewed in the Art of Fiction No. 210, has won what’s surely the most finely named lifetime-achievement award in the land, the Damon Knight Grand Master Award. Congratulations to both!
Today in common ground for humankind: every language contains the utterance “huh.” Let’s say it together.
“I don’t think I have the right kind of books for homeless people.”
Cosmopolitan’s sex tips have probably never been anything to write home about, but this one is especially bad. It involves a glazed doughnut, and its origins are in a 1995 “sexual recipe book” called The Foreplay Gourmet.
Introducing “normcore,” fashion’s latest, most unremarkable trend: “The kind of dad-brand non-style you might have once associated with Jerry Seinfeld.”
An update to Tuesday’s note on the Voynich manuscript: a medievalist named Stephen Bax claims to have discovered a way of decoding it.

A Curmudgeonly Pain in the Ass

Michel Houellebecq is fifty-eight today.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve said that you are “an old Calvinist pain-in-the-ass.” What do you mean?

HOUELLEBECQ

I tend to think that good and evil exist and that the quantity in each of us is unchangeable. The moral character of people is set, fixed until death. This resembles the Calvinist notion of predestination, in which people are born saved or damned, without being able to do a thing about it. And I am a curmudgeonly pain in the ass because I refuse to diverge from the scientific method or to believe there is a truth beyond science.

—Michel Houllebecq, the Art of Fiction No. 206