Category: Very Good Paragraphs

From the introduction to John Limon’s Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America, a book I’ve got electronic access to through UA’s web site, but which seems so strong by like page three I’m going to have to just buy a copy and tear it up, highlighteringly:

The one-sentence version of the theory of this book would state the claim that what is stood up in stand-up comedy is abjection. Stand-up makes vertical (or ventral) what should be horizontal (or dorsal). [. . .] The conclusion of the [Lenny] Bruce essay [which opens the book] is that “stand-up is the resurrection of your father as your child,” which approaches the same point from another angle. What I took as the essential Lenny Bruce moment is the joke (if that is what it is) that concludes “I am going to piss on you” and provokes, at one performance, seventeen seconds of boisterous laughter. What struck me is how phallicly aggressive Bruce was able to make this infantile threat, so that he appeared to the audience as punishing father and naughty son in rapid oscillation, just as his audience had to vibrate (this vibration seems to me the essence of laughter) between terrorized child and permissive parent. The abject gets erected and mobilized in the place of the phallus. To “stand up” abjection is simultaneously to erect it and miss one’s date with it: comedy is a way of avowing and disavowing abjection, as fetishism is a way of avowing and disavowing castration. Fetishism is a way of standing up the inevitability of loss; stand-up is a way of standing up the inevitability of return.

Damn!

From Kalefa Sanneh’s review of recent reality-TV criticism in the 9 May 2011 New Yorker:

Makeover shows inevitably build to a spectacular moment when “reveal” becomes a noun, and yet the final product is often unremarkable: a woman with an up-to-date generic haircut, wearing a jacket that fits well; a man who is chubby but not obese; a dog with no overwhelming urge to bare its fangs. The new subject is worth looking at only because we know where it came from, which means that, despite the seeming decisiveness of the transformation, the old subject never truly disappears. “The After highlights the dreadfulness of the Before,” [Brenda R.] Weber writes [in her book, Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity]. “In makeover logic, no post-made-over body can ever be considered separate from its pre-made-over form.” She might have added that no makeover is ever really finished; there is no After who is not, in other respects, a Before—maybe your dog no longer strains at the leash, but are you sure that sweater doesn’t make you look old and tired? Are you sure your thighs wouldn’t benefit from some blunt cannulation? Weber’s makeover nation is an eerie place, because no one fully belongs there, and, deep down, everyone knows it.

Another one from The New Yorker. Do I read anything else? I mean what a bore. Actually, I do. I’m reading Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land which is cap-I Important and full of very good paragraphs. I’ll post one when I’m done.

Here’s something from Evan Osnos’s “The Grand Tour”, about the recent rise of Chinese tourists in Europe:

The Grand Tour has been a tradition of newly rich countries ever since young British aristocrats took to the Continent in the eighteenth century, picking up languages, antiques, and venereal disease. Once the railroad arrived, in the mid-nineteenth century, large numbers of Britain’s ballooning middle class followed—”lesser men with less fortunes,” suddenly free to “tumble down the Alps in living avalanches,” in the sniffy words of Lord Normanby, the future British Ambassador to France.

Lord Normanby!

Well, I was going to post one from Ramona Ausubel’s “Atria” from the 4 April 2011 New Yorker, but every paragraph was very good. Every single one. Damn, it’s such a good story. So instead, we have to go with this paragraph in the Adam Gopnik essay, “Get Smart”, on recent books looking at computers and A.I., which paragraph is also very good:

[The author of one book]’s central point is that the Turing bots that work best, whether produced by a computer or shaped by a mind, have to be, or fake being, dynamic. The best test of their humanness is not how smartly they offer answers but how quickly they interrupt, get distracted, compress information into slang codes, rely on “uh”s and “ah”s. Intelligence is an affect engaged in an activity. It flits between the empty spaces as much as it takes place in the exchanges. If a teen-age boy says to a teen-age girl, “I was, like, wondering, if, like, you’d like to, like, go to that, uh, thing at Jacob’s?” and she says, “Uh, well…” it’s bad news. But if she says, “Well, um…” it’s promising, and if she says, “Yeah, like, funny, because um…” it’s the best news of all. Prefixes and tics and characteristic mannerisms are richly coded with information. The two best Presidential communicators of recent decades had distinctive vocal prefixes that did a lot of their talking for them: Ronald Regan’s “Well…” meant “Despite your attempt to antagonize me, I’m still going to appeal to plain old placid common sense,” while Obama’s “Look…” means “Forgive me if I sound impatient, but if you actually examine the facts in the case you’ll see I’m right.” One marker assures Capraesque cheer the other, Spockian certitude. And it’s hard to make either understandable to a machine.