Woody Allen's 2 super-powers.

Over the last couple days, we watched the lengthy PBS documentary about Woody Allen. I know a lot of my readers haven't been watching his movies and think of him only in terms of his sexual misdeeds. Exclude that topic for the comments on this new post. All that has been said. Noted. If you must say that again, go to the link above and put it in that comments thread. I want to say something new, based on the documentary, which is overwhelmingly about Allen's work. If you don't know his movies or don't want to talk about the ideas about writing that I'm going to raise, please don't comment in this new thread.

Woody Allen has directed a movie a year — almost precisely — every year since 1969. He's an astounding movie-making machine. It's really quite bizarre. He's a monument not so much to hard work, but to consistently cranking out work, much of it quite excellent. As a writer, he's a lot like a blogger. He just keeps going. It's what he does, quite aligned with living itself. I love that.

Now, it suddenly occurred to me that his achievement is propelled by 2 super-powers — one which he knew he had from his teenage years and another that he discovered through Diane Keaton. (I'll try to finds the specific lines in the documentary that support my theory and transcribe them for you, but I don't have time for that now).

Super-power #1: Automatically thinking of one-line jokes. It's harder for him to stop his thoughts from taking the form of jokes than to think of them (he says). As a teenager, he got a job making $20,000 a year writing jokes. He had to write 50 jokes a day. It wasn't difficult for him.

Super-power #2: As a man, taking the woman's perspective. We see this power burst forth in his fabulous movie "Annie Hall." Allen gives credit to Diane Keaton, whom he worked with in the earlier films "Sleeper" and "Love and Death," for getting him interested in taking on the feeling of being inside the woman's head and writing from there. In this position, he experienced a flow of ideas, that let him write wonderful scenes for actresses, like this one, from "Hannah and Her Sisters," which is used in the documentary as an illustration of his style of writing from the woman's perspective:



You can say that he doesn't really achieve the female perspective or that women aren't really quite like that, but that isn't the point. The point is that his sense of being inside a woman's head empowers him to produce writing that often works for the viewer, including many, many women who love and identify with scenes like that. He's a man, with male thoughts, projecting those thoughts into women's minds. What a powerful force that is, the male with something of his own that he wants to put inside the woman. It makes the urge to write like the sexual urge. That's creative flow. If you can put that force behind your writing... it's a super-power.

"Interesting, smart liberals are called... conservatives."

Said Meade, just now, as I was reading the poll results and the comments on this post on Herman Cain and expressing my puzzlement about how so few of my readers are liberals. I said: "Why do conservatives find what I'm saying so yummy? I would have thought interesting, smart liberals would love this."

"You know Hunter [S. Thompson] typed 'The Great Gatsby'?"

"He'd look at each page Fitzgerald wrote, and he copied it. The entire book. And more than once. Because he wanted to know what it felt like to write a masterpiece. He was so hungry, yeah. Innocent, and yearning."

Says Johnny Depp, who's played the part of Hunter S. Thompson in 2 different movies now.

I'm thinking maybe that would be a good practice for all of us who presume to write. Pick one book, the book that exemplifies the best writing for you, and type it out, to see how it feels, to learn something elemental in that mysterious eyes-to-fingertips interplay.

What's your book?

Forget NaNoWriMo. It's AcBoWriMo.

Charlotte Frost declares the first Academic Book Writing Month. (Hey, that's what I meant to do last August!)

We are going to wear comfy clothes, drink a lot of coffee, probably nap in our offices at strange hours and see how close we can get to writing 50 thousand words in one month. I know, it’s totally insane, there can surely only be a handful of academics who can actually turn out decent material in such a short space of time. 

It's 1,667 words per day. About 7 pages a day. You can do that! I've written as many as 15 pages a day though not for an entire month. I think 5 pages a day is doable for academics cranking out books. So why not 7 pages a day? Make a sport out of it. A contest.

There’ll be a hashtag for Twitter where anyone interested in participating – or indeed watching from afar – can talk about progress and share tips and ideas for speed reading/writing (#acbowrimo). And we’re also hoping there might be a write-in in our department or someone’s apartment where we gather people together for mutual support and literally write the night away. Maybe you fancy staging one too somewhere and Skyping us for solidarity?

I like the Occupy Wall Street vibe translated into productive individual work. Not that I could picture myself engaged in group writing. Or... no... maybe I could. I remember loving the "blogger dinners" we did back in 2005. 

(Sorry the photos on that post are not currently displaying. Apple changed up Mac.com — for which I paid over $100 a year — in a way the wrecked the photo URLs. I'll try to redo them today.)

"In the history of baseball, there have been a small collection of World Series games identified solely by the moniker 'Game 6.'"

So begins David Waldstein in his write-up of last night's World Series game. It's an exciting read. But there are 2 more new essays on the game in the NYT alone.

Tyler Kpner begins:

The two men, both in their 70’s, with decades in baseball and a fortune to their names, huddled together in the runway outside the home clubhouse at Busch Stadium early Friday morning. They could have been caffeinated Little Leaguers at a pizza parlor, celebrating the most thrilling game of their lives.

Pat Borzi begins:

He guessed right on a changeup, and once the ball left David Freese’s bat, he saw everything. The soaring drive deep to center field. Josh Hamilton chasing it for a few steps, then giving up. And a solitary usher in the bleachers trying to stop joyous St. Louis Cardinals fans from jumping onto the grassy batter’s eye in pursuit of Freese’s game-winning home run.

It's a sportswriters' contest. Fabulous raw material. As the teams compete to determine who's the best in the land, so do the sportswriters.

"I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences."

"I suppose other things may be more exciting to others when they are at school but to me undoubtedly when I was at school the really completely exciting thing was diagramming sentences and that has been to me ever since the one thing that has been completely exciting and completely completing."

Diagram that! is the implicit challenge from Gertrude Stein – whose sentences are devilishly devoid of commas.

Stein hates commas passionately. I wish she were just a little more fond of them, LOL. Even I have a nagging desire to insert commas in her prose!

Commas are servile and have no life of their own... what does a comma do, a comma does nothing but make easy a thing that if you like it enough is easy enough without the comma.

She uses them instead of question marks, though, because she hates them even more! She says the question mark looks like "a brand on cattle."

Writing with dashes.

Do you like dashes? I do. There are certain ways of using dashes that I particularly admire. Rather than try to explain what I like so much, I'll give you an example. This is from the Charles Dickens novel, "Bleak House." The narrator is encountering the mother of a child who has just fallen down a flight of stairs.

Mrs. Jellyby, whose face reflected none of the uneasiness which we could not help showing in our own faces as the dear child's head recorded its passage with a bump on every stair — Richard afterwards said he counted seven, besides one for the landing — received us with perfect equanimity.

Doesn't that sentence make you feel like diagramming it... just for fun?

I like sentences like that — I think — because I like conversational side roads especially when they get you back to the main road. That relates to the way I feel about blogging. For example, the reason I was out there in Project Gutenberg searching for "Africa" on a webpage that contained the entire text of what is — in paperback — a 544-page book is that — like everyone else who checked Memeorandum today — I got waylaid by a NY Post story titled "Florida banker's wife left family to join Wall Street protesters."

A married mother of four from Florida ditched her family to become part of the raggedy mob in Zuccotti Park -- keeping the park clean by day and keeping herself warm at night with the help of a young waiter from Brooklyn.

“I’m not planning on going home,” an unapologetic Stacey Hessler, 38, told The Post yesterday.

“I have no idea what the future holds, but I’m here indefinitely. Forever,” said Hessler, whose home in DeLand sits 911 miles from the tarp she’s been sleeping under.

Hessler — who ironically is married to a banker — arrived 12 days ago and planned to stay for a week, but changed her plans after cozying up to some like-minded radicals, including Rami Shamir, 30, a waiter at a French bistro in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.

Hey, check the dashes: "— who ironically is married to a banker —." Ironic? Or not ironic at all? It's just what you'd expect if you were reading a novel about a woman married to a banker. Stacey Hessler immediately called to mind Mrs. Jellyby. Remember Mrs. Jellyby? She's a minor character in "Bleak House." Here's a summary/spoiler:

[Mrs. Jellyby] resolutely devotes every waking hour to the “Borrioboola-Gha venture.” The reader never discovers the details of the endeavor except that it involves the settlement of impoverished Britons among African natives with the goal of supporting themselves through coffee growing.

Mrs. Jellyby is convinced that no other undertaking in life is so worthwhile, or would solve so many problems at a stroke. Dickens’s interest is not in the project, however, but rather in Mrs. Jellyby, who is so wedded to her work that she has no time for her several children, with the exception of Caddy, a daughter she has conscripted as her secretary. Ink-spattered Caddy puts in nearly as many hours as her mother in the daily task of answering letters and sending out literature about Borrioboola-Gha.

Caddy, however, has come to hate the very word “Africa” or any word that has the remotest suggestion of causes. For her, causes simply mean the ruin of family life. Mrs. Jellyby’s husband eventually becomes suicidal and, though surviving despair, is last seen in the book with his head resting despondently on a wall.

In the book’s postscript, we discover that the Borrioboola-Gha project failed after the local king sold the project’s volunteers into slavery in order to buy rum. Mrs. Jellyby quickly found another cause to occupy her time, “a mission with more correspondence than the old one,” thus providing a happy ending for a permanent campaigner.

Like a sentence with well-deployed dashes, it all comes together in the end.

"Does this writer's capacity for language expand my capacity to think and to feel?"

The test — proposed by Jeanette Winterson — for what counts as literature.

We are nervous about anything that seems elitist or inaccessible, and we apologise for the arts in a way that we never do for science.

Nobody blames maths for being difficult – and it isn't difficult – but it is different, and demands some time and effort. It is another kind of language. Literature is also another kind of language. I don't mean literature is obscure or rarefied or precious – that's no test of a book – rather it is operating on a different level to our everyday exchanges of information and conversation.

From an essay involving an controversy about who won and who didn't win a literary prize, something I really don't care about. But the test... the test is interesting. I don't know whether it's right, and actually I don't care. What difference does it make, the definition of "literature"? Unless you care about the prize. But it seems interesting, even though I don't care if it succeeds in testing what it purports to test. And frankly, I think it's quite silly to care about the 2 capacities. It's a double aptitude test, looking backward at the capacity the writer brought to the project of writing the thing and forward to the increased capacity the reader took away from reading it. What about the reading itself?

The 4 Mistakes of Ezra Klein... [ADDED: or Rich Yeselson].

1. He's written a blog post titled "The four habits of highly successful social movements," but he never talks about any habits.

2. He does have paragraph containing "four things," but the verbiage is mind-numbing and lacking in parallelism:

Whether [the Occupy Wall Street protests] will grow larger and sustain themselves beyond these initial street actions will depend upon four things: the work of skilled organizers; the success of those organizers in getting people, once these events end, to meet over and over and over again; whether or not the movement can promote public policy solutions that are organically linked to the quotidian lives of its supporters; and the ability of liberalism’s infrastructure of intellectuals, writers, artists and professionals to expend an enormous amount of their cultural capital in support of the movement.

3.  He evokes the best-seller title "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People"  which prompts us to think about his ineffectiveness.

4. He promised a list of a specific number of items and then he didn't put it in the form of a numbered list. People love numbered lists. The internet is full of them. They're highly clickable. What's wrong with us? Why do we keep falling for that? 

ADDED: The post is signed by Ezra Klein but has an italicized parenthetical at the top saying he asked Rich Yeselson, a research coordinator at Change to Win, for some "thoughts on Occupy Wall Street." The post I'm complaining about is introduced as "some notes" from Yeselson, which Klein says he thinks are "worth publishing in full." Obviously, I didn't think this was worth reading in full, but now I assume the published text is completely the work of Rich Yeselson. As Bill Harshaw alerts me in the comments, this is "The one mistake of Ann Althouse." This is the great danger of pointing out someone else's mistakes: You look especially bad if you make a mistake yourself — and chances are you'll make the mistake at that point. (It seems everything every time I decide it's worth mocking a typo, I make a typo.)

Why Stanley Fish never wants to meet his personal piñata Jürgen Habermas.

Because he's so important. Because he needs him so much:

If he were taken away from me, I wouldn’t know what to do. I’d have to find someone else to be the object of my unreflective scorn. And that would prove difficult, given that Habermas, or anyone else who might fill this slot, has very particular views (the ones I love to hate), and installing a disciple or a simulacrum in his place would not really be satisfying....

[W]ere I ever to meet him, the odds are that I would like him (the public record suggests that he is an admirable fellow) and if I liked him it would be hard for me to continue beating up on him....

[W]hoever are the characters filling out your precious roster of perfect villains and nogoodniks, take care not to meet them. And if one of your antiheroes happens to turn up in a coffee shop you’re sitting in, get up and leave immediately.

Ha ha. He's saying that knowing that people use him that way (which he's okay with, since it means he's important). Just spell my name right is the old saying. And Stanley Fish is a lot easier to write than Jürgen Habermas. Also a lot easier to read.

And by the way, this is why I like writing from my remote outpost in the Midwest. I don't want to encounter the various politicos I want to inspect and criticize and mock. I need to protect myself from the squishiness that would infect my writing. I have gone out of my way not to meet, say, a Supreme Court Justice.

And this is why political candidates go roaming all over the countryside, looking for hands to shake, eyes to contact. Stay away. Don't let them infect you with their camraderie.

"Trust me."

Is that line in every movie these days? It's driving me crazy. Don't screenwriters have any ideas anymore for how to make characters talk to each other? The other line I'm seeing constantly is: "What are you talking about?"

Movies today... it's like there are 2 kinds of characters, the ones that say "Trust me" and the ones that say "What are you talking about?" See there's some plan or idea that the first character has and instead of any interesting interchange, they just say "What are you talking about?" and "Trust me" to each other.

Discuss. Without saying "What are you talking about?"!

"An Ex Blogs. Is it O.K. to Watch?"

This is one of those NYT "Modern Love" columns, and it ranks #3 on the NYT "most e-mailed" list. A woman discovers and reads a blog written by an old boyfriend. So what?

Buried among the philosophical musings and literary exegeses were struggles of a more intimate nature. Somewhere in the course of creating his blogs, my ex had slipped into the role of diarist.

As noted, it's a blog. She professes surprise to find that "a guy in his 40s" would include "amid a cogent dissection of 'Infinite Jest,'... an account of his outré dream from the night before." Why is that surprising? It's a blog. The man she'd known had "literary aspirations," and why wouldn't a writer who cared about "Infinite Jest" indulge in an odd digression or two. It's the kind of thing the book's author does, and writers read novels to get ideas that they can use in their own writing.

To me, it's irritating that this "Modern Love" columnist is "surprised" that a blogger goes into a personal digression and that she tells us it's "outré" but not whether it's good writing.

But it's all about her. She says "There was dirt here," but that only means that she has a prurient interest in digging into this man's life — or at least in writing a NYT "Modern Love" column about her emotions in relation to internet technology.

You'd think this "Modern Love" column had already been written! A woman sees an old boyfriend's internet presence and she's launched on an emotional arc: It's like finding his diary! Ooh! Am I bad to peek? To become obsessed? He's married, but I can horn into his life....

Settle down, lady! He's writing on the internet. You're reading the things he chose to post in public. He's looking for readers. Annoyingly, the NYT doesn't link to his blog, so he's not getting new readers. But this woman who's displaying her titillation in reading him gets a "Modern Love" column. She's Helen Schulman, whose "most recent novel is 'This Beautiful Life' (Harper)."

Picture yourself as this guy, this guy with literary ambition who would like to be read but is written about, in the NYT, by a woman with a string of well-published novels. I'd like to read his "Modern Love" column about his emotions in relation to the old media that is the NYT with its "Modern Love" column!

Schulman goes on:

As time passed and I kept reading, I cultivated a stake in his life, in him. “Way to go, honey!” I thought when he turned the troubled boy around. And “No, stop!” when he heedlessly posted explicit musings about his kinky sex dreams. I wanted to tell him, “Just forgive yourself: there’s nothing terrible in these fantasies. But do you really want your kids to stumble upon this stuff the way that I did?”

He was in need of a cyberintervention. I toyed with the idea of contacting him; I had a bizarre desire to help. The intimacy of his postings reawakened old feelings of loyalty and attachment — and irritation and annoyance.

I thought about writing to ex as myself, and I wondered if he would find it creepy. Was it creepy? Maybe it was.

So... maybe this guy doesn't deserve the exposure or would be hurt if he got it. And maybe his writing isn't good enough to deserve any help from a woman with a string of well-published novels. Maybe exactly what he deserves is this semi-exposure, this absorption into the literary work of the successful author, the one whose "literary aspirations" have long been sumptuously fulfilled.

Take that, ex!

IN THE COMMENTS: Fred4Pres says:

She can't link to them because all the blogs vanished.

He's right. She says:

The day after ex posted something he decidedly should not have, talking about his students in a way no teacher ever should... someone with sense in his real world must have gotten to him. By the next morning, all the blogs had vanished.

AND: Remember that teacher who was suspended for writing mean things about her students, calling them "lazy whiners" and so forth?

"Perhaps it would be helpful to imagine me as the White Rock girl..."

"... kneeling on a boulder in a nightgown, either looking for minnows or adoring her own reflection."

That's the last sentence of the preface to Kurt Vonnegut's "Welcome to the Monkey House." He's purporting to explain himself, writing in a style that appeals to me more than anything I've read in a long time. Here's the White Rock girl, by the way. Here's Vonnegut.

He's saying that in response to The New Yorker magazine saying that one of his books was "a series of narcissistic giggles."

ADDED: Here's one of the essays that appears in the "Monkey House" collection — one of the 3 things I read in the middle of the night last night. It's a 1966 review of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, which was new back then. Here's the part about the business of unabridged dictionaries:

Whoever decides to crash the unabridged dictionary game next--and it will probably be General Motors or Ford--they will winnow this work heartlessly for bloopers....

Have I made it clear that this book is a beauty? You can't beat the contents, and you can't beat the price. Somebody will beat both sooner or later, of course, because that is good old Free Enterprise, where the consumer benefits from battles between jolly green giants.

And, as I've said, one dictionary is as good as another for most people. Homo Americanus is going to go on speaking and writing the way he always has, no matter what dictionary he owns.

The plight of the independent — right wing? — blogger.

Right Wing News has a piece called "The Slow, Painful Coming Death Of The Independent, Conservative Blogosphere," and the part that jumped out at me isn't about where one is on the political spectrum:

Most bloggers are not very good at marketing, not very good at monetizing, there are no sugar daddies giving us cash, and this isn’t the biggest market in the world to begin with. In other words, this is a time-consuming enterprise, but few people are going to make enough money to go full time. How many people can put in 20-30-40-50 hours a week on something that’s not going to ever be their full time job? Can they do it for 5 years? 10 years? 15? 20?

Actually, there are a lot of people who do that: artists, retired folk, stay-at-home spouses, people who already have enough money, the disabled, and the hardcore believer. You know when you are writing for the intrinsic value of writing (and reaching readers) and when you are writing for money (or some combination of the 2). The thought that you are "put[ting] in 20-30-40-50 hours a week" nags in the head of a person who is doing it for money.

Erica Jong, who's nearly 70, would like you all to know that she's so much sexier than her daughter, who is 32.

Molly Jong-Fast will be 33 on August 19th, and Erica Jong, writing in the NYT, says that her daughter is "in her mid-30s." Ouch. Mom! That hurt. Let's take a closer look at that mother-daughter relationship. Jong prattles on, purportedly revealing what young people think about sex but really revealing how she, an aging woman, looks at young women:

Daughters always want to be different from their mothers. If their mothers discovered free sex, then they want to rediscover monogamy. My daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, who is in her mid-30s, wrote an essay called “They Had Sex So I Didn’t Have To.” Her friend Julie Klam wrote “Let’s Not Talk About Sex.” 

Klam! What a great name — an aptonym — for a woman who doesn't want to talk and specifically wants to close off the topic of sex!

The novelist Elisa Albert said: “Sex is overexposed. It needs to take a vacation, turn off its phone, get off the grid.” Meg Wolitzer, author of “The Uncoupling,” a fictional retelling of “Lysistrata,” described “a kind of background chatter about women losing interest in sex.” Min Jin Lee, a contributor to [Jong's] anthology, suggested that “for cosmopolitan singles, sex with intimacy appears to be neither the norm nor the objective.”

Generalizing about cultural trends is tricky, but everywhere there are signs that sex has lost its frisson of freedom....

Not only did we fail to corrupt our daughters, but we gave them a sterile way to have sex, electronically....

Jong thinks young women use the internet for "simulated sex without intimacy."  Jong was famous in her youth for seeking actual in-person sex without intimacy . Or... no, she wasn't! She was famous for writing about seeking actual in-person sex without intimacy. Writing... reading... hello? That's a simulation. On the internet, women find actual real partners and then meet them in person. How many women are just hanging out on porn sites? Men, maybe, but Jong purports to tell us about young women. And Jong's evidence is what other women writers are writing. These are the writers, the simulators. What are other young women doing, the one's who aren't cogitating and regurgitating cogitations?

Just as the watchword of my generation was freedom, that of my daughter’s generation seems to be control....

In this intergenerational battle, who is the real control freak?

The backlash against sex has lasted longer than the sexual revolution itself. Both birth control and abortion are under attack in many states...

Lust for control fuels our current obsession with the deficit, our rejection of passion, our undoing of women’s rights....

Now, she's all over the place. I think it's funny that she made "control" a big theme, then mentioned "birth control" and didn't notice the irony. Birth control... why not say the feminists who wanted to control birth were the ones obsessed with control?

The ultimate in control is determining the things that will be controlled and the things that will be kept uncontrolled. Can we talk honestly about that? After you've finished preening over how free you are about the things that you like to be free about?

Blaming "politically correct" textbooks for the widespread ignorance about history.

It's David McCullough (the very popular writer of historical biographies):

"History is often taught in categories—women's history, African American history, environmental history—so that many of the students have no sense of chronology. They have no idea what followed what."

What's more, many textbooks have become "so politically correct as to be comic. Very minor characters that are currently fashionable are given considerable space, whereas people of major consequence farther back"—such as, say, Thomas Edison—"are given very little space or none at all."

Mr. McCullough's eyebrows leap at his final point: "And they're so badly written. They're boring! Historians are never required to write for people other than historians."

McCullough sounds a bit self-promoting or self-defensive there. He knows he writes well. He's popular. And other historians disrespect that, perversely. But keep to the point. Who writes textbooks for schoolkids? Not the lofty scholars McCullough has a gripe about. There should be an immense amount of care taken with respect to school textbooks. Why wouldn't those things be written especially well? The whole point is to digest material and present it for the consumption of children.

Also, it seems to me that McCullough himself gives "considerable space" to  "minor characters" to satisfy the "fashionable" interest in women's history. I read his tome about Truman, and there was an insane amount of material about Bess Truman. I mean, there's no historical significance at all to Bess Truman as far as I can remember. It just doesn't matter. It was pablum for female readers. And then he did it again with his book about John Adams. Abigail Adams is more important than Bess Truman, but nevertheless, why are we reading a thousand-page book about a reasonably nice marriage? Clearly, McCullough isn't following some rule about giving characters attention in proportion to their historical significance.

"Alright, my package and I are not going to beg. We both see the hazard of going down the path of comparative sexiness."

That's something I read out loud over here at Meadhouse.

MEADE: "Is that Weiner?"

ME: "Do you recognize Weiner's writing style?"

No. He just recognizes my reading style. I'm reading something about sex out loud, basically.

The most likely innocent explanation for the Weiner Hacking Incident.

Yesterday, I said:

But I think it is news when a politician mishandles his internet communications. Minor news, but worth noting.

And it's really news — serious news — if either: 1. the internet accounts of a politician have been hacked in an effort to destroy the man, or 2. the politician makes the false statement that he has been victimized by a crime. One or the other has occurred in this case (unless I'm failing to see some other option).

Should we all be closing our Twitter accounts lest some devious prankster destroy our reputation? Or has Weiner — for his own purposes — maligned Twitter's business and undermined the Twitter-user's sense of security? I want to know!

AND: If Weiner is lying about his accounts getting hacked, he could be sued by Twitter (and the other companies) for defamation.

This morning, looking at a new NYT article, I thought of another option. This article goes on at length about what a prolific tweeter Weiner has been and how clever his Tweets are.

His first real Twitter post used a play on the title of Ms. Palin’s book to declare his intentions to embrace the new medium: “Going rouge over here. Starting to twitter w/o telling my minders. But what if nobody hears me? Did it happen.”

Going "rouge"? You'd think a man whose name could be misspelled to be the name of a sausage would be more careful. But he has been going rouge these last few days.

The funny thing is, the innocent explanation for what happened requires me to suspect that his first post was a something of a lie. The innocent explanation is: He doesn't write his own tweets. He's got a ghost-tweeter.

Mr. Weiner’s Twitter tone is strikingly punchy and personal, and sometimes juvenile....

Maybe because he's got some cheeky Harvard Lampoon-type guy tapping out the wisecracks.

He often posts several messages a day... Many are about national politics, with cheeky hashtags, like “Newt running for Prez. Mitt running from Mitt. Where to begin? #TargetRichEnvironment.” And there was “Ok let’s start with Newt. He’s the brains of the field, right? #TallestPygmy.”

So terribly clever and edgy. Why does a Congressman have time for that? Why does a Congressman have a mind for that?

The number of members of Congress who are on Twitter has more than doubled, to more than 400, since the start of this year, but the actual involvement of those members in the crafting of their messages varies widely.

So who's writing all that junk?

Mr. Weiner, a technophile, has clearly considered the role of Twitter in honing his public image, and he said in an interview earlier this month that while his Twitter stream “is usually something about the national conversation or a five- or 10-degree pivot from the national conversation,” his Twitter personality is all him. 

So he doesn't want to admit he's not writing it. You know, there's another meaning to the word "hack." There are hack writers. It's normally a noun, but I'm sure I'm not the first person to say it could work as a verb.

My Twitter account was hacked could mean: The hack writer I hired wrote the tweet.

To use this explanation, Weiner would have to concede that his clever tweets were not — or not always — his. I note that he could use this explanation even if it isn't true. Get some 21-year-old fall guy to say he got drunk and let his crush on that cute girl in Seattle go to his head.

"Justice Anthony M. Kennedy... said he aspired to Ernest Hemingway’s stripped-down language..."

Talk about falling short of your aspirations! Of all the Justices on the Court today, I find that Justice Kennedy writes in the least straightforward style. Ah, well. At least he means well. Or is he conning us with this Hemingway talk?

The linked article — by Adam Liptak, in the NYT — links to this set of long recorded interviews with Supreme Court Justices about how they write and how they want lawyers to write.

Justice Ginsburg said she had learned much from a course Nabokov taught at Cornell on European literature.

“He was a man in love with the sound of words,” she said of her former professor. “He changed the way I read, the way I write.”

Justice Thomas, on the other hand, cited only a single author, and then only by way of contrast. “It’s not a mystery novel,” he said of a good brief. “People can’t think, ‘I’m Agatha Christie,’ or something like that.”

Ginsburg and Nabokov. Thomas and Christie. What do you think of Liptak's juxtaposition? It's a literary device. Would you put it at the Nabokov level? The Christie level? Somewhere lower?

ADDED: Both Nabokov and Agatha Christie are discussed in the Wikipedia article "Unreliable Narrator":

A controversial example of an unreliable narrator occurs in Agatha Christie's novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, where the narrator hides essential truths in the text (mainly through evasion, omission, and obfuscation) without ever overtly lying. Many readers at the time felt that the plot twist at the climax of the novel was nevertheless unfair....

Humbert Humbert, the main character and narrator of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, often tells the story in such a way as to justify his pedophilic fixation on young girls, in particular his sexual relationship with his 12-year-old stepdaughter....

Now, you want your judges and lawyers to be reliable narrators when they tell you about the facts of the case and interpret and apply the law. Thomas said don't be like Agatha Christie. You need to tell it straight. But Ginsburg said she learned from Nabokov, learned to love the sound of the words. Liptak — I think — intended to make Ginsburg look good and Thomas bad, but it didn't quite work out that way.

RELOCATED FROM ALTHOUSE2: "[T]he canny performer whose utilitarian decisions and whimsical tastes became the totems and scripture of a tribe."

= how they write in The New Yorker about... well, try to guess before clicking. Here's some more high-tone verbiage:

She has been the regulator of weight; the titrator of substances; the veteran of a love triangle; the female artist who escaped the long shadow of a male collaborator; the commercial artist who passed through wildly different stations of commerce... She survived both the corrosive lift of cocaine and the lead apron of Klonopin.

Come on. Klonopin is the giveaway. If you're in the know. In the klono...

ADDED: Oh, that reminds me. We were just watching this.

COMMENTS (Relocated):