Angry letter

A client of ours recently had us draft a letter to an attorney.

It was a letter demanding payment for services rendered, and — sparing you the details of the business relationship that Mark, let’s call him, had unfortunately committed to — the letter, in the fresh, raw form in which I first saw it, was not up to par.

It was angry and incoherent, the way most of us might be if we looked back at months of labor lost and lots of money too. And Mark realized it and knew it needed work.

Ouch! This is not the kind of nourishment we want to send to our lawyer -- or our ex-partner.

He called his writing, both at the start and finish of our project, a “shit sandwich.”

A more polite rendering might be “knuckle sandwich” — the written equivalent of a bust in the chops.

Our aim, in explaining affairs to the attorney, was of course to make clear just what had happened and who was at fault. I secured from Mark, then, a chronology of the failed relationship and, then, a summary of the chief injustices he had suffered because of it.

The final product, calm and logical, put Mark’s case in chronological and causal order. This is what occurred over the course of the relationship … and these behaviors of the partner resulted in these damages.

When we were finished, we were breathing easier. Our case was put about as fairly as it could be. And the attorney (whose fees no doubt are several times ours and whose prose, I suspect, is larded with jargon) was ready to take over and make the partner pay.

The storyline

Okay, every company has a story, sure — if not a way of telling it to good effect.

We’re not talking here about turning out a history of the company. That happens, of course, at felicitous moments, like a big anniversary (no. 50, 75, 100). And when it does the history is turned out handsomely in a voluptuous volume suggesting the blessings of long customer relations and comfortable profits.

We’re talking, rather, about an organization’s opportunities to tell its story every day in so many ways:

• In greeting customers
• In phone manners
• In web pages
• In newsletter articles

Everything a company does, in fact, and says is grist to the mill of story-telling. Of telling a story with a definite storyline that starts and stops with one point in mind.

A point in mind.

Not a mishmash of facts.

Or dusty historical artifacts.

The point of the story we’re telling, a storyline goes, whether it says so explicitly or not, is such and such. We’re not telling the story merely to entertain, though you may find this story entertaining. We’re not telling the story to educate, though you may be educated. We’re not telling it to edify.

We’re telling it, let’s be frank, so that you remember one thing about the company.

One thing.

One theme.

Whether that’s our extraordinary caring attitude. Our cutting-edge products. Our stability through the years. Or whatever.

The story is not the shortest point between A and B. It’s a roundabout way of getting at a point that can’t be delivered in cliches or jargon; in incoherent anecdotes; in plagiarized expressions.

Reading: who has time anymore?

I’m of an age (say, “old”) to remember how thrilling it was to discover the powers that reading unlocked. As a good, squeaky-clean Catholic schoolboy, I was brought up not just on Dick and Jane, the heroes of our primers, but the missal for the mass (in Latin and English), various songbooks (including Gregorian chant), and of course the bible.

A young friend and I, along about fifth grade, would compete to see who could read the assigned textbooks first.

And we devoured the Hardy Boys thrillers along with the page-turning maritime tales of Howard Pease.

I remember, in fact, malingering a few days so I could stay home, curled up in the sack, and read these things. They were immense private pleasures, the kind commemorated in the lines of Longfellow inscribed above the lintel of a community library where I once lived in St. Paul, Minnesota:

These days, it seems, fewer of us have the leisure to take a book and retreat into a niche with it. (It’s a nice occupation, we might say.) Unless we’re on vacation, that is, or stealing a few free moments at lunch or on the bus.

Having moved recently from a private house to a rented condo, however, I find myself with more time on my hands and, like my wife, I am consumed by reading. I find myself, in fact, reading greedily, a habit that my younger sister, who also has a teacher’s background, calls “greading” (something she’s done both alone and with her daughter for many years).

I find myself recovering habits of mind, and body too (that fetus-like curling, that sighing, that clock oblivion), that a busy career in teaching and writing seemed to have obliterated.

I’m not claiming that I forgot how to read, as I taught or wrote for a living. Simply that as for the majority of us reading for pleasure seemed to fade away. It was generally reading for work, either teaching or business writing, that preoccupied me.

And that confirmed in me the habits of mind that a writer needs so badly and that distinguish him from most folks:

• A love of words for words’ sake (the pleasure of their sound, their tactility)
• An equal love of logic and clarity (those critical-learning gifts that a noisy commercial culture would banish)
• An ability to organize thoughts that, without being written out, would dissipate or never cohere

What I’m finding, in my latest greading phase, in short, is a recovered ability to enjoy our cultural heritage — the gifts that our elders have handed down for generations and that we continue, in our place, to hand down to youngsters. And to enjoy the sense that logic, clarity, and pleasure in words are things that matter above the trivial distractions that crowd our days.

What have I been reading? All sorts of stuff, really, though strangely not any fiction per se (my mainstay, for pleasure reading, during my working career). How about these titles:

• The Rocket That Fell to Earth: Roger Clemens and the Rage for Baseball Immortality (2010) by Jeff Pearlman. An easy read and no great shakes, really, but fun. Boo hoo, another star, another hero has fallen, Clemens, the thesis goes, cheated, and all red-blooded American baseball fans were cheated too of what we might have expected of a Hall of Fame type.
• Mozart: A Life (2006) by Peter Gay. Learned a few things about the genius Wolfgang that I didn’t know, including stuff about his relation with father and emperor. This short bio is one of the Penguin short life series.
• Truman by David McCullough (1992). This fat biography of our 33rd president is thick with fact and lived experience. From pioneer days in Independence, Missouri through Truman’s ride to the White House, McCullough presents the life in interesting, measured chapters. We learn a lot about where Truman came from both physically and psychologically. The unsatisfying thing about the book is that McCullough presents the facts but rarely interprets or analyzes them. What are we to think, in the end, for example, of Truman’s dependency on Pendergast, the Kansas City political boss, for every career move Truman made? Or for Truman’s ambivalent relation to FDR, the man who barely talked to him and yet elevated him to the top?
• De Kooning: An American Master (2006) by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan. This bio is by far the best, an immensely readable saga of the life, art, and dementia of one of our foremost “abstract expressionists,” if you can call De Kooning that. Equal parts life and art, the analysis is exact and it never stoops to amateur psychologizing. It’s the kind of text, with illustrations, that makes you eager to read the next thing these fine writers might be turning their attention to.
  

  Willem De Kooning's Woman I: kinda scary, yes?

• Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War (2007) by Joe Bageant. I snatched this bad boy from my wife, who had ordered it from Amazon. And devoured it in pretty short order. Despite the charge of ranting that could easily be laid at Bageant’s doorstep, I found the book tremendously clarifying. It explains, in convincing detail, why America’s working class consistently votes (and thinks) against its own self-interest, identifying as Freud would say with the aggressors (the rich, the capitalists). The plain folk of Winchester, Virginia, Bageant’s townsmen and neighbors, are descendants of the Scots Irish that battled the English crown and each other — and came to America to escape taxes and government repression. As my 3 year old granddaughter is fond of singing, they too “won’t bow down to no man”!
• Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle (2011) by Thor Hanson. This work of natural history explains how bird feathers evolved, from dinosaur to bird, and details both form and function. Hanson deals with 19th through 21st century scientific controversies about this evolution and interlards the text with many easy-to-understand examples of his own field work, as when he dissects and examines the frozen carcass of a flicker in his “Raccoon Shack.”
• Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters (2004) edited by Rosamund Barlett. These are wonderful, vivid letters by Chekhov, the Russian story teller and playwright who lived from 1860 to 1904. As one of the great modernist writers, Chekhov is both self-made and original. He didn’t accept the cant of the church or state, and had no use for lying by friend or family. Each letter, no matter how obscure the details, blows with the fresh breath of honesty and precocious wisdom.
• Building Strong Brands (1996) by David A. Aaker. This sequel to Managing Brand Equity defines, illustrates, and explains the process of, yes, building strong brands. Companies without strong brands, from bakeries to auto producers, risk forfeiting large market shares, indeed losing their entire market.

OK, OK, I have more time now than formerly. I’m not a home owner, I own a life. A life in letters, you might say, and reading.

And for a fee, a small fee all things considered, I can make it available to you. (I won’t write politics or literature for you, but what I write will be filtered through the great and the not so great things I’ve managed to read. And reading, as I intimate, in this time and place may not be so widespread as it once was. We’re too busy texting and surfing the Web. But more on these distractions later.)

Useful consciousness

In this morning’s paper there was a story about the rupture of the fuselage on a Southwest Airline 737-300 jet.

An aviation expert is quoted as saying that, in such circumstances, “At an altitude above 34,000 feet, the Southwest pilots would have had only 10 to 20 seconds of ‘useful consciousness’ to get their oxygen masks on or pass out.”

No doubt this “useful consciousness” is expert language, even jargon of the industry, but it strikes us non-experts as odd indeed. And then (it struck me, at least) as hilarious.

Of course, the expert, John Gadzinski, is talking about reaction time that a pilot would have to take crucial action. “The higher you are,” he goes on, “the less useful consciousness time you have.”

Passengers, presumably, would have just as little time to secure their oxygen masks, and one witness recounts some passengers fumbling and falling in their frantic haste to secure oxygen.

It would be good to cultivate useful consciousness, even if we can't all attain the Higher Consciousness of the wise.

But the language is hilarious, I mean, because taken out of this strict expert context, and tucked into an everyday sphere of discourse, it might suggest that most of us are flying most of the time with little “useful consciousness.” We’re flying by the seat of our pants, perhaps. We’re not straightening up and flying right. We’re on autopilot.

What do we do in fact with this incredible gift, this blessing, of consciousness? How do we develop it, pursue it, improve on it? Do we see the world in its freshness and, yes, fresh hilarity? Or do we plod along in the ruts, in the ox carts (not airplanes) of our daily habits?

I don’t mean here to provide psychological counseling. (Who am I to suggest direction?) But to say that language reflects our habits of consciousness, and unconsciousness. (Some would say creates these habits.) And that changing our language may change our lives. Being more conscious of how we use what we use every day (language) can make a qualitative difference.

Take an obvious example. We all know people whose every other word seems to be the f word. Now if they could cut their vulgarity in half, and then replace that half with words and phrases more appropriate, or more exact, even if they are measures of the anger and frustration the speakers may be feeling, this new verbiage may reflect / create changes in the life. They will begin feeling, and being perceived as, not quite so angry, marginal, out of the loop.

Or, another example, take an engineer who, proud of his expertise, her mastery of arcane lore, has no idea when he speaks to laymen and press that he’s using insider language. Every other word is not a swear word but a tech word, and he baffles us as much as the angry, obscene speaker may.

In less dramatic instances, consider just about any business brochure or website you come across. If it’s not full of jargon, it uses stale language, the hard crusts of yesterday’s banquets. Old scraps that should’ve been thrown out with the garbage long ago.

A local academic, who advises watershed districts (one of my clients is the Lower Minnesota River Watershed District), has set up a Watershed Game workshop in which participants “learn how their choices can prevent adverse impacts.”

Oh my, my, my. Save us from the adverse impacts of such game playing! From the dents in the head we’re sure to receive from such bruising jargon! How can someone who talks like this, expert as he may be, lead games? He has forgotten how to play with language, for sure, and language creates, if it doesn’t just reflect, our reality.

Well, you say, business is business, and we’re in the business of selling, not making bread or art. People care only what you say, not how you say it.

Which is true enough, at the surface anyway.

But don’t we all want to sell — and buy — something fresh and new? No matter if it’s a commodity, or a highly rare or technical service, we want the sizzle with the steak. And cliches don’t sizzle. Jargon doesn’t compel with its aroma. It beats us into submission, into the hematomas of the everyday workday. Yes, sure, it adversely impacts us, rendering us if not dead then on life support!

Useful consciousness, at last. Isn’t that what we’re after in business as in life?

Going viral: must we?

It’s the sheer unrelenting uninventiveness of jargon that gets me.

The way a new word or phrase sweeps through society like a tsunami or, to use an example, “goes viral.”

A closer examination of these bits of jargon reveals metaphors that are born one day and, like flies, die that same day, as dead metaphors, though they live on and are used.

So, then, “going viral.”

A YouTube post can go viral when everyone clicks on the Internet site.

A phrase itself, like “going viral,” can go viral when everyone, suddenly, starts seeing it in print. (Do we read print anymore? Print not produced by texting?)

Yes, the metaphor, originally striking and original, dies almost immediately, becomes a dead metaphor, for few people recognize it any more as a metaphor, a simile or comparison. It’s just words, dead words, dead flies, detritus that piles up and connects us to each other in a kind of disease or diseased network.

If a bit of language, or a video, goes viral, isn’t it by definition virulent? Doesn’t it, like a virus, have the power to spread rapidly — but also to infect?

If we are infected by this virus, then aren’t we too sick?

And if we use the phrase or video, aren’t we spreading the disease?

We don’t have to be high priests of language, purists, “gloomy grammarian in …  golden gowns” (thanks, Wallace Stevens), to realize that unconscious use of language makes us susceptible to all sorts of diseases. We spread the germs. We don’t realize we’re ailing. We don’t realize we’re being overtaken by these germs, even as we do their bidding, willy-nilly, the way an HIV-positive person may succumb to the virus.

If we must go viral, can we develop some consciousness of our predicament?

So that we don’t spread the jargon, the cliches, the disease indiscriminately?

(For a good example of viral hype, see BuzzFeed, the kind of contemptible tripe we’re all too used to in the infotainment sphere. For a quick consideration of how jargon corrupts, see “What Is Your Gibberish Component?”)