A colleague of mine has emailed to ask my thoughts on “professionalism” and also ways in which she could be more “professional”. I’m struggling because without defining the former, I can’t make suggestions on the latter. Now, this is all complicated rather by the fact that the email was prompted by my colleague’s manager setting her such an odd task as a “development objective”. I can only assume that this “development” is also in terms of professionalism rather than, say, moral or physical development.

Given that the obvious inference is that the manager clearly sees some lack in her subordinate (that I haven’t seen), my primary concern is that my colleague’s request for my thoughts displayed such levels of restraint and composure that she looks a model of professionalism when judged against what I suspect my reaction would have been. But that apart, what is professionalism? I would appreciate advice from readers on how to define professionalism without sounding like a Human Resources barbarian.

Without Unspeak’s help, I may simply have to rehearse my too-obvious reading of “Bartleby the Scrivener” where the unprofessionalism of B and colleagues in the Dead Letter Office was prompted, I’ve always thought, by stultifyingly dull work and inhuman mismanagement.

Good question! It reminds me, by the way, of a related annoying phenomenon: the rampant deflation and curious redirection of the word professional in the sphere of commercially manufactured objects or immaterial products, which themselves are described as professional, even though it is a vicious insult to thought and language to suppose that a computer (“Macbook Pro”) or a software program (“Logic Pro”) or a tennis racquet (“Wilson Pro Staff”) or a filter coffee maker (“KitchenAid Pro Line”) can be professional.

Of course the promise here is really about the elevation of the user’s status by use of such objects: if you buy them, you will become more professional, no longer (as the usual demarcation in commercial product lines has it) a mere consumer, as though professionals do not consume things — as though, indeed, there are not such persons as professional consumers, ie restaurant critics.¹

But all that brings us back to our initial question, addressed to you, eminent unspeak.net readers. What is professionalism?

1. The enjoyable hybrid term prosumer is not, I think, meant to apply to restaurant critics, but then again, why not? ↩

Pigeons rustled in the beams of the Staten Island Ferry terminal as Rebecca Miller, the writer and director, ordered a soft pretzel.

I have no idea what the rest of the article says, because every time my eyes attempted to scan further down the page they were wrenched back by this prosaic sorcery, whose surely unprecedented arrangement of English words had me mesmerized for what seemed like hours, but might in reality have been seconds?

There is so much going on in this sentence that I can only scrape the surface of its eldritch machinery in a kind of ape-like wonder. The bookending pseudo-chiasmus — pigeons rustled … soft pretzel! The devastating bathos of that foodstuff! The vivid contrast between the peremptory harshness of ordered and the doughy vulnerability of the soft pretzel! The haughty vagueness of the job description! (“Rebecca Miller, the writer and director” — oh yes, the writer of what again? The director of what? In what forms does she practise? I don’t know and maybe I never will!)

Perhaps most hauntingly: the implication that it was our heroine’s ordering of the bathetic foodstuff that actually caused the pigeons to rustle — as though Miller is some kind of pigeon whisperer.

I feel like quoting the whole thing again, just to bask in it:

Pigeons rustled in the beams of the Staten Island Ferry terminal as Rebecca Miller, the writer and director, ordered a soft pretzel.

This sentence might actually be inexhaustible in its delicately bonkers kitsch poetry. Once one has succeeded in composing such a marvel, one must be sorely tempted to retire?

As usual, the shortlist also included some highly perishable Stupid Novelty Words (funemployed, deleb, intexticated), as well as a few that might turn out to have more staying power than the winner: paywall, ecotown, tramp stamp, and sexting?

What is your word of the year, readers?

1. Apparently last year it was hypermiling, which I’d never heard of. It just goes to show? ↩

Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

It turns out from LL’s investigations that, when the piece in question was originally printed in the New Yorker, that magazine’s legendary editors corrected Gladwell’s booboo to read “eigenvalue”; yet it has reverted to the nonsense “igon value” in his new collection of “essays”.

A mystery nonetheless remains: what on earth did Gladwell intuit that an igon value had to be, such that he didn’t bother to check? A number that has disappeared? (Middle English i-gon: past participle of i-go, meaning, um, go.) A technique named after a Basque mathematician called Igon? Or perhaps he thought an Igon Value was a moral standard among members of the Igon commune in Pyrénées-Atlantiques?

I have never read a whole book by Malcolm Gladwell. Have you, readers?

1. How Mr Kamer came to write this nanopost even though he was in hospital with an exploded brain is a fascinating question for medical science. ↩

“The absence made me nearly speechless.” said poet and creative writing professor Cate Marvin.

But not actually speechless?

Another non-speechless respondent, Erin Belieu, says:

When PW’s editors tell us they’re not worried about ‘political correctness’, that’s code for ‘your concerns as a feminist aren’t legitimate’. They know they’re being blatantly sexist, but it looks like they feel good about that.

If the editors did say they were “not worried about ‘political correctness’”, that would be a warning flag. All I can find independently that resembles this, though, is the claim from the woman who introduced PW’s list, Louisa Ermelino:

We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz.

If you make a list of your favourite books of the year and then notice that they are all written by men,² should you remove some of the books and insert some written by women? If you don’t do so, are you “ignoring gender” or “excluding women”?

What are your favourite books of the year, readers?

1. I have not read any of them! ↩
2. “It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male,” Ermelino said. ↩

Any reader of my book will find that many of the quotations Packer cites, not least the one where he finds me “condescending to a refugee” or expressing “a secret preference for the violent outcome,” are yanked painfully out of context.

Oh, not just quoted out of context, but yanked painfully out of context! Well, let’s take the first example Danner cites, shall we? Packer wrote:

Danner watches human struggle and misery at such a remove that he can’t resist taking issue with a young Kosovar woman who is quoted in a news article comparing her family’s expulsion from Pristina with the experiences of the Jews in World War II. “Such drawing of half-century-old parallels, of the parallel, derives in fact from a failure of memory,” Danner intones. “How much more comfortable to invoke Europe in the 1940s than Croatia and Bosnia in the 1990s.” Not as comfortable as condescending to a refugee.

If that had been yanked painfully out of context, we should expect to find something much more nuanced in Danner’s book. Oh, look, we can find the page in question on Amazon’s useful “Search Inside” facility!¹ Before the quotation at issue, Danner has been citing a newspaper report:

[...] “It was very horrible,” Gjylizare Babatinca, 32, said as she described how her family was forced out of a house Wednesday by masked Serbs with automatic rifles. . . “We were forced into the train cars they use for animals. We were packed tightly together. . . It was completely dark, and we did not know where we were going.”

Danner then comments:

The historical resonances could not be stronger, of course, though here the victims themselves could hear the echoes: “You can’t imagine what kind of silence there was as we walked through the streets of Pristina,” one young woman said. “I thought Hitler’s time was coming back, and we were going to some kind of Auschwitz.”

Such drawing of half-century-old parallels, of the parallel, derives in fact from a failure of memory. How much more comfortable to invoke Europe in the 1940s than Croatia and Bosnia in the 1990s, a mere four years ago. It is no accident that Serb forces — regular army soldiers, Interior Ministry specialists, and paramilitary marauders — were able to “cleanse” hundreds of thousands from Kosovo in a matter of days. For nearly a decade now, while presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton and other Western leaders watched — while we watched — Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, his Bosnian Serb henchman Dr. Radovan Karadzic, General Ratko Mladic, and various army and paramilitary commanders had been developing these techniques, refining them, perfecting them.

Do you see anything in this fuller context that makes what Packer quoted of it (the first two sentences of the second paragraph) an unethical or misleading quotation, a deliberate yanking painfully out of context? Well, Danner really does accuse the young woman he quotes of a “failure of memory”. It seems to me to be within the realms of rational criticism for Packer to argue that this constitutes “condescending to a refugee”.

Actually, a view of the fuller context begins to make things look worse, not better, for Danner. Consider that effortfully sonorous first statement of the citation above: “The historical resonances could not be stronger, of course, though here the victims themselves could hear the echoes.”² It seems very much as though this is saying that the author is allowed to allude to the obvious historical “resonances” (they “could not be stronger”!), but if the young refugee dares to “hear” the same “echoes” and mention Hitler and Auschwitz out loud, she will immediately be diagnosed with a “failure of memory”. That does seem rather unfair, doesn’t it?

Packer might even have gone further in his criticism of this passage, commenting for instance upon the remarkable in fact: the drawing of these historical parallels by the young woman, Danner asserts, “derives in fact from a failure of memory”, where in fact appears to be deployed, somewhat unusually, to mean in my entirely speculative psychological analysis of someone I have never met. So: “condescending to a refugee”? Very possibly!

Danner’s yanked-painfully-out-of-context whinge continues:

When it comes to judging whether the reviewer quotes what he does in good faith [...] readers must decide for themselves.

Well, I just did decide for myself, and it doesn’t look very good for Danner. What about you, readers?

1. From the book’s page, search for “comfortable” and click on the result for “page 316”. ↩
2. I assume that in switching from “resonances” to “echoes” in this sentence, Danner is merely striving for elegant variation, though of course it makes an irrecoverable mess of the attempted acoustic metaphor. ↩

The best way to think of “Detour,” which shows at BAM on Nov. 16, is as a kind of anti-“Cleopatra.”

The best way to think of the strategy of opening an article with the phrase “The best way to think of x” is as follows. The writer is announcing:

Before committing forefinger to keyboard, I already saw all the ways it is humanly possible to think about this subject, and having surveyed them pitilessly in my phat brain, I am now going to do you the service, dear reader who is not as clever as I, of revealing the best way to think of it. Do not under any circumstances try to think about it in another way. You will just be wasting your time! Just sit back and observe me thinking about it in the best way. Oh, you may applaud, I suppose.

Of course you do not necessarily need to be a genius of pantactical thought, like Anthony Lane, in order to attempt this ploy. Indeed, in theory, it would even be possible for a writer to announce that what he was going to say was the best way to think of his subject even though it was actually the only way to think of the subject that popped into his poor, befuddled head three minutes before deadline.

Liberal use of the best way to think of may thus be heartily commended to all writers who would like to achieve a rarefied level of intellectual pomposity without actually being obliged to think as hard as a pettifoggingly literal reading of the phrase might indicate.

1. Previously in “annoying New Yorker-ese”: Put it to me this way. ↩

Worst-ever example of Unspeak on X-Factor last [Sunday] night. Cowell in his capacity as producer obviously wanted to keep ratings hit Jedward, so he needed to vote for them to create the deadlock that would lead to a public vote Jedward were bound to win. But in his capacity as “straight-talking” judge, he couldn’t bring himself to say “I vote for Jedward”, an act he has vilified for weeks. So instead he says “I’m letting the public decide.” See? He’s not only betraying his only redeeming characteristic for greed, he’s championing democracy. FUCK THE MAN!²

Evidently passions run high about The X-Factor, which as far as I understand it is some sort of televised karaoke contest judged by shits? But my correspondent’s point generalizes beyond the jurisprudence of reality TV: very often, a politician who declares that he will let the public decide (thereby appealing to the highest imaginable virtue, democracy), is doing so as a way of getting himself off the hook with regard to an uncomfortable decision that he’d rather not make.

Just so, plastic-browed God-discoverer David Cameron promised for a long time that he would hold a referendum on the constitutional changes to the EU, so as to avoid having to tell the BNP wing of his party where to get off, in contrast to the prime minister who, he fulminated, would not let the public decide. Meanwhile, Obama’s ethics czar said earlier this year, of the opening-up of the White House visitor logs: “We did full transparency. We’ll let the public decide who among them is a lobbyist or not.” Eh? Why not tell the public yourself?

If politicians really consider it such a virtue to let the public decide on matters of significance, then they must be of the view that elected representatives are useless except for the purpose of stealing money to buy themselves houses. So we should expect that, shortly, they will all sack themselves and institute an entirely automated system of state decision-making via premium-rate telephone polls. Let me say now that I for one welcome our new mob-rule overlords.

The only thing I didn’t understand about my correspondent’s otherwise devastating observation was the assertion that Simon Cowell has a “redeeming characteristic”. Please?

1. Thanks to Daniel F. ↩
2. Happily, we need not decide whether this means “Fuck Simon Cowell” or “Fuck The Man, generally”; we may hold the two senses in a delicious equilibrium. ↩

The US and the UK famously came to grief when they tried too hard, when lacking proof, to be convincing about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Those of us closely involved on the UK side believed we were illustrating a case that was bound to turn out to be true when the final evidence was collected. But it never was; and we had to take the rap for anticipating the facts.

Diplomatic language, of course, is celebrated for its litotes and subtly playful oxymoron,² and here I believe that Greenstock has designed a masterpiece of the genre: anticipating the facts.

At first it looks like a mere exculpatory understatement, on the order of “jumping the gun”: a cover-your-ass euphemism, decorated with self-mocking paradox (things that aren’t true were never “facts”, anticipated or not). Yet the chronology implied in anticipating the facts is of course devastating: to say that the claims of the existence of WMD were anticipating the facts is to say that those claims (of certain knowledge of the weapons’ existence) were made before the facts were known. And so Greenstock is confirming — in the most delicate possible way! — what was already known but bears repeating: that the US and UK lied (about what they knew to be the case versus what they hoped “was bound to turn out to be true”).

In this way, to say that the US and UK governments were anticipating the facts is an even stronger verdict than saying the “facts were being fixed around the policy”. Greenstock’s formulation makes it clear that there were at the time no “facts” of the required sort to be had, let alone to be had and then fixed around the implacable plans for war.

What “facts” are you currrently anticipating, readers?

1. Not yet renamed to Times Literary, though I suppose it is only a matter of time. ↩
2. The phrase non-paper, also used by Greenstock in his review, is a particularly nice term of art. ↩