The Jordan Creek Town Center in Des Moines is the largest shopping mall—scratch that—the largest “retail park and lifestyle center” in Iowa and the fourth largest in the Midwest: two million square feet, 164 stores plus sundry kiosks, 20 movie screens, 25 restaurants and eateries, and anchored by Dillards, Younkers, and Scheels All Sports. Opened in August 2004, the Jordan Creek Town Center is comprised of three districts: the shopping district, which contains a decidedly upscale two-level enclosed mall done up in a streetscape design; the lake district, which contains walking trails, a 3.5 acre lake with boardwalk, an amphitheater, and several fine-dining restaurants; and the village district, which contains several big-box retailers like Best Buy, PetCo, Old Navy, and Costco, along with any number of smaller establishments. Until February 22, 2011, I had never been to this 19th largest mall in the United States, and the newest of the nineteen.
On that date I had an appointment with a Des Moines endocrinologist. Now, going to see the doctor, even the family physician, Hunter Thompsons me with fear and loathing, and being scheduled to see a specialist—well, let’s just say I’d rather be a piñata at a baseball bat convention. So, I asked my wife Kathy, a registered nurse and the best hand-holder I know, to accompany me. Kathy has her hair done at Mini and Max’s in the Jordan Creek Mall, so, to save herself an extra trip, she scheduled a hair appointment after my poking, prodding, and blood drawing session. I was reluctant to go to the mall, but she knows my weaknesses all too well: “There’s a Barnes and Noble across from the hair salon, and a Starbucks and Godiva Chocolatier at the food court, and big comfortable leather chairs all over the place,” she told me. That sealed the deal for me—that, and the fact that, unlike all the other times I go to bookstores, she assured me she would not demand that I turn my credit card over to her before I entered. Some six and a half years after its hoopla-ed opening, I would finally get to savor the “shopping experience” of the Jordan Creek Town Center mall, a citadel, the promotional literature says, to “fashion and lifestyle.”
It is easy to criticize shopping malls, easy to toss off dreary Marxian bromides like “commodity fetishism,” “reified experience,” and “ideological mystification;” easy to call those who frequent them “cultural dupes” in thrall to “narcissistic consumerism;” easy to pronounce malls a culturally fabricated space of jostling signifiers through which empty selves wander and wonder, seeking to fill the emptiness, the lack, the radiant, hungering desire for a fulfillment their vacant, everyday lives do not provide. It is easy to say that places like the Jordan Creek Town Center are nothing more than a fantasy of consumerist empowerment; a false consciousness of choice and autonomy; a kind of George Lucas-like Industrial Light and Magic experience that holds at arm’s length, unopened, the sealed book that we are; an emporium of eye-glazing wonders for people who possess a need for possessions to hide from themselves their lack of self-possession. It is easy to say all this; the reality, however, for me, as I spent an hour wandering through the mall, was less grandly conceptual, less a pontificating academic voice in a whirlwind, more a thin, prosaic slipstream, a bleak liturgy accented with sadness.
Outside Younkers, an old man sat in a wheelchair, asleep, head in hand. Someone ambling past the counters and displays inside, perhaps stopping to sample perfume or try on some trousers, had left him there. At the first kiosk I encountered a young woman was selling Rosetta Stone foreign language software. She told me it creates “an immersive environment” and has “really cool voice recognition technology.” “How many languages do you speak,” I asked. “Oh, none,” she said; “I just sell the DVDs. I got enough trouble with English.” And she laughed. At another kiosk selling T-shirts, the young salesman sat scrutinizing his fingernails with exquisite care. At the next, selling sunglasses, the young saleswoman was texting. In the Godiva Chocolatier store, when the woman behind the counter asked if she could help me, I replied, “Oh, no, thanks; I’m just salivating.” She did not smile. “Well, let me know if you need help,” she said, and disappeared into the back of the store. I repeated the remark at The Cheesecake Factory. The young man did not smile. “OK, that’s cool,” he said, and resumed wiping down the glass-topped counter. I repeated it yet again at Auntie Anne’s Pretzels, and the woman’s lips contorted into an almost smile, though it did not escape into the rest of her face. At the Fudge Shop on Scheels’ second floor I sampled a bit of peanut butter fudge while the young salesman sat reading Stephen King’s Under the Dome. “This is really good,” I told him. He looked up. “Yeah, but I didn’t make it,” he replied, and, slipping back under his dome, went back to reading.
The delightful fragrance of the Bath and Body Works Store drew me inside. “It smells great in here,” I told the saleswoman. “So I’m told,” she said; “I’m used to it; it’s lost on me.” Unolfactoried in a nectared space of musk and sweet and spice. At the center of the mall’s second floor, slouched in a leather chair butted up against a wrought-iron railing, an earbudded teenager lay sleeping. Why wasn’t he in school? Outside the Apple Store, the only Apple Store in the state of Iowa, five navy-blue knit shirted employees were convened. As I passed by, I heard one say, “Well, look, here’s what I tell them,” and I remembered an article I had read about Apple employees lying to customers, telling them that trying to unlock their iPhones will render them as useless as bricks—and I thought of words as bricks, plucked from the hod of thought, and how easily they can be mortared into a deceptive solidity. And I remembered the Oz-pointing yellow brick road and the curtained charlatan at the end of it.
Taking a down escalator, I entered the lower floor of Scheels looking for warm winter boots, the only purchase I had thought about making, only to find a profusion of flip-flops and sandals and thongs and crocs and biking, baseball, soccer, and running shoes—nothing but spring footwear. The young salesman was friendly and apologetic. “Snow is being forecast for the weekend,” I told him. “Yeah,” he said, “but, you know, if management says to strike the winter display and put up the spring shoes, well, you gotta do it.” We talked a bit. He was 19, had his own place, liked to hike, had his eye on the assistant shoe manager position. I asked if he planned to go to college. “Maybe, but right now I want to work and make some money. Maybe in a couple of years, though,” and I knew he never would, knew the poetics of his life were end-stopped, even if they did rhyme.
It was time to head back to Max and Mini’s to pick up Kathy. I arrived where I started, at Younkers. The old man asleep in the wheelchair was gone. I imagined him eating a bowl of ice cream, a reward for his lonely waiting. I had purchased nothing, not even the Frappaccino Lite I had briefly contemplated while passing Starbucks. I felt, somehow, subversive. No getting and spending for me this day. Instead, I walked. I looked. I had circumnavigated the mall, had followed the scripted path laid out by the mall’s designers, leading me past the open mouths of store upon store. I passed past a profusion of stores, the same store in many cases, only the name different, nothing distinctive about them except their determined effort to be distinctive. An exultant banality.
It was a dark transit, but I found I could make no portentous pronouncements about hegemonic economic forces spin doctoring into misrecognized freedom and individuality and choice. I garnered no insights into the privatized logic of consumer-driven culture. We can never really know the thrumming, vibrant churn of meaning that things capture, contain, and allude to. There is always, locked in the heart, an immaterial etcetera, made of feeling and experience, unkeyed by and attached to material things. What I do know is that I saw something smaller than socio-political theorizing, but bigger, possibly, than philosophy; something cataracted by its very everydayness, a structure of feeling, an affect, shadowed and unsayable, a desire, perhaps, for the elsewhere, the something other, the unfastened moment, the more than.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Eulogy For an Unknown Grammarian
I am here to eulogize a decent man, one who moved upon the earth and has now passed from it. What can I say about him? Literally, what can I say? I did not know him, and you did not know him. Still, here he is, supine, before us, so I can say with some confidence that he was born, though whether or not it was in the usual way I cannot say, and he lived, if not among us, somewhere among somebody. He likely attended school, in all probability held a job, in all likelihood paid his taxes, maybe followed some professional sports team or other, possibly found The Three Stooges uproariously funny, could have hated shopping, could have been fortified by a steady diet of Red Bull and bite-size Snickers, could have thought “molecular gastronomy” the ugliest combination of words in the English language, could have considered Elvis’s hips a blasphemous affront to all that was holy, could have thought upright posture evolved so humans could dance the funky chicken, could have liked all movies starring Steven Seagal, could have even considered Steven Seagal the finest actor working in American cinema. But we do know that he was a human, a male and that he appeared on this planet, though I don’t know exactly when, that he lived, though I don’t know exactly where, and that he has shuffled off this mortal coil, though I don’t know exactly why. And though, to tweak King Lear a bit, I do not know who it is that can tell me who he is, or was, he was a decent man, and decency, I think we can all agree, deserves to be memorialized.
But possibly I know something else about the deceased. I have heard a rumor of a hearsay of a reputed report that he had a keen-edged passion for correct grammar. That correct grammar was his bliss station, his rapture and quickening, the fine-structure constant of his universe, the Higgs Boson imparting mass to his existence. That he was blushlessly and bottomlessly in love with correct grammar, considered it a choral exultation sung by a confederation of angels. In short, it seems he was a linguistic Puritan, the John Calvin of grammar, soldiering onward against the voguish Calvin Kleinification of language, with its dark, precipitous descent into degeneracy. For our unknown grammarian, good grammar was saving grace.
If this rumor of supposed exuberant affection is in fact true, we can safely infer that our grammarian’s hero would have been former New York magazine theater critic John Simon, and that his scripture would have been Simon’s 1988 book, Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline. Simon was the Jeremiah of the backsliding grammar world, an aggressively elitist and acerbic prophet to a grammatical world he considered open beset by the “arrant solecisms of the ignoramus.” Our grammarian would have thrilled at Simon’s angry denunciation of language change; approved Simon’s identification of bad grammar with bad manners, like “someone picking his nose at a party;” and agreed that lovers of language should “educate the ignorant up to our level rather than stultify ourselves to theirs.” He would have answered affirmatively the subtitled question of Edwin Newman’s 1975 book Strictly Speaking: Will America Be the Death of English, where he would have found confirmed his dream-deep belief that the unwholesome American propensity for vaporous clichés, jargon, redundancy, and fashion-addled word coinage proved positively that, as Newman mournfully intoned, “language is in decline.” And William Follett’s 1966 Modern English Usage would have thrummed the chord of his soul by insisting that there is only one “right way to use words and construct sentences, and many wrong ways.” For our unknown grammarian, as for Simon, Newman, and Follett, good grammar prescribed the way people ought to speak and write, simply must speak and write, if they were to emerge from the dark forest of language barbarity onto the sunlit savannah of full-fledged literacy. Only the authoritative prescriptions of normative grammar could forestall the tragedy awaiting clarity and economy of expression. There would have been no "pluribus" in our grammarian’s linguistic "unum."
We can also infer that he would have shuddered, would have seethed, at the pronouncements of those advocating more liberal, democratic, and tolerant usage: Joseph Webbe’s 1662 An Approach to Truth, which argued that custom “is the Lady and Mistress of speaking” rather than “the poore and penurious prescriptions of Grammar rules;” Bill Bryson’s mild contention that “little basis” existed for the sanctified status of traditional grammatical rules; Steven Pinker’s provocative assertion that grammatical rules were “ridiculous” and that insisting upon them amounted to little more than ritualistic cultural sadism. But the brunt of our grammarian’s fury, the full frontal assault of his blisteringly rancorous rage, would have been reserved for Philip Gove, the apostate editor of the 1961 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, under whose guidance such labels as “colloquial,” “correct,” “incorrect,” proper,” and “improper” had been audaciously removed. And then the matter of Gove’s heretical effrontery, in the face of the Atlantic Monthly’s righteous description of Webster’s as a “scandal and disaster,” to announce he had “no truck with artificial notions of correctness or superiority,” that his interest was in describing, not prescribing, language. Undoubtedly, our unknown grammarian felt that the gate to the formerly closed fortress of language had swung open, and the mongering barbarians of confusion and corruption were pouring through. Undoubtedly, he felt the End of Days loomed. Perhaps he felt an Inquisition was in order.
Having pledged fealty to the army of Simon and Newman and Follett, he must have believed the distinction between “infer” and “imply,” “disinterested” and “uninterested,” “lie” and “lay,” “who” and “whom,” “fewer calories” and “less calories” mattered mightily. He must have found “between you and I” cringe-worthy, “Me and Julio down at the schoolyard” joint-ache-worthy, “hisself” and “theirself” and “refudiate” coronary-worthy. He would have fulminated most white hotly against “viral” being hijacked from its original meaning as an illness distinct from one of bacterial origin, and “epic” being shanghaied to mean anything big. He would have agreed with Benjamin Franklin that verbing—turning nouns into verbs—was “awkward and abominable.” If it were statemented to him that no less a literary luminary than William Shakespeare penned such phrases as “Thank me no thanks, nor proud me no prouds” and “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncles,” he would have likely accused the bard of contributing to the linguistic delinquency of minors. One can only wonder at his reaction to Jack Kerouac’s “Tennessee me no Tennessees.” Quoth our unknown grammarian, “Nevermore.”
Friends, I believe we can infer from the deceased’s rumored grammatical essentialism that he was a man of tradition, attempting in his own way to keep both the fiddler and good grammar on the roof, braiding golden threads from the rule-bound past to weave into what he saw as the yawping tapestry of current language use. Beyond that, our grammarian is an unlit mystery. Did he flourish in his tilting against the windmills of linguistic permissiveness? Was he bruised in the encounter? Did he grieve that the world was contingent, that its tefloned eventfulness prevented the caress of intimacy, and did that grief, repetitively experienced, embed itself in him so deeply that it emerged finally as a rage for the order and clarity that grammar provided? I don’t know. I do know that he lived and he had a passion born of the courage to be dissatisfied. For that, if for no other reason, he deserves a remembrance.
But possibly I know something else about the deceased. I have heard a rumor of a hearsay of a reputed report that he had a keen-edged passion for correct grammar. That correct grammar was his bliss station, his rapture and quickening, the fine-structure constant of his universe, the Higgs Boson imparting mass to his existence. That he was blushlessly and bottomlessly in love with correct grammar, considered it a choral exultation sung by a confederation of angels. In short, it seems he was a linguistic Puritan, the John Calvin of grammar, soldiering onward against the voguish Calvin Kleinification of language, with its dark, precipitous descent into degeneracy. For our unknown grammarian, good grammar was saving grace.
If this rumor of supposed exuberant affection is in fact true, we can safely infer that our grammarian’s hero would have been former New York magazine theater critic John Simon, and that his scripture would have been Simon’s 1988 book, Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline. Simon was the Jeremiah of the backsliding grammar world, an aggressively elitist and acerbic prophet to a grammatical world he considered open beset by the “arrant solecisms of the ignoramus.” Our grammarian would have thrilled at Simon’s angry denunciation of language change; approved Simon’s identification of bad grammar with bad manners, like “someone picking his nose at a party;” and agreed that lovers of language should “educate the ignorant up to our level rather than stultify ourselves to theirs.” He would have answered affirmatively the subtitled question of Edwin Newman’s 1975 book Strictly Speaking: Will America Be the Death of English, where he would have found confirmed his dream-deep belief that the unwholesome American propensity for vaporous clichés, jargon, redundancy, and fashion-addled word coinage proved positively that, as Newman mournfully intoned, “language is in decline.” And William Follett’s 1966 Modern English Usage would have thrummed the chord of his soul by insisting that there is only one “right way to use words and construct sentences, and many wrong ways.” For our unknown grammarian, as for Simon, Newman, and Follett, good grammar prescribed the way people ought to speak and write, simply must speak and write, if they were to emerge from the dark forest of language barbarity onto the sunlit savannah of full-fledged literacy. Only the authoritative prescriptions of normative grammar could forestall the tragedy awaiting clarity and economy of expression. There would have been no "pluribus" in our grammarian’s linguistic "unum."
We can also infer that he would have shuddered, would have seethed, at the pronouncements of those advocating more liberal, democratic, and tolerant usage: Joseph Webbe’s 1662 An Approach to Truth, which argued that custom “is the Lady and Mistress of speaking” rather than “the poore and penurious prescriptions of Grammar rules;” Bill Bryson’s mild contention that “little basis” existed for the sanctified status of traditional grammatical rules; Steven Pinker’s provocative assertion that grammatical rules were “ridiculous” and that insisting upon them amounted to little more than ritualistic cultural sadism. But the brunt of our grammarian’s fury, the full frontal assault of his blisteringly rancorous rage, would have been reserved for Philip Gove, the apostate editor of the 1961 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, under whose guidance such labels as “colloquial,” “correct,” “incorrect,” proper,” and “improper” had been audaciously removed. And then the matter of Gove’s heretical effrontery, in the face of the Atlantic Monthly’s righteous description of Webster’s as a “scandal and disaster,” to announce he had “no truck with artificial notions of correctness or superiority,” that his interest was in describing, not prescribing, language. Undoubtedly, our unknown grammarian felt that the gate to the formerly closed fortress of language had swung open, and the mongering barbarians of confusion and corruption were pouring through. Undoubtedly, he felt the End of Days loomed. Perhaps he felt an Inquisition was in order.
Having pledged fealty to the army of Simon and Newman and Follett, he must have believed the distinction between “infer” and “imply,” “disinterested” and “uninterested,” “lie” and “lay,” “who” and “whom,” “fewer calories” and “less calories” mattered mightily. He must have found “between you and I” cringe-worthy, “Me and Julio down at the schoolyard” joint-ache-worthy, “hisself” and “theirself” and “refudiate” coronary-worthy. He would have fulminated most white hotly against “viral” being hijacked from its original meaning as an illness distinct from one of bacterial origin, and “epic” being shanghaied to mean anything big. He would have agreed with Benjamin Franklin that verbing—turning nouns into verbs—was “awkward and abominable.” If it were statemented to him that no less a literary luminary than William Shakespeare penned such phrases as “Thank me no thanks, nor proud me no prouds” and “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncles,” he would have likely accused the bard of contributing to the linguistic delinquency of minors. One can only wonder at his reaction to Jack Kerouac’s “Tennessee me no Tennessees.” Quoth our unknown grammarian, “Nevermore.”
Friends, I believe we can infer from the deceased’s rumored grammatical essentialism that he was a man of tradition, attempting in his own way to keep both the fiddler and good grammar on the roof, braiding golden threads from the rule-bound past to weave into what he saw as the yawping tapestry of current language use. Beyond that, our grammarian is an unlit mystery. Did he flourish in his tilting against the windmills of linguistic permissiveness? Was he bruised in the encounter? Did he grieve that the world was contingent, that its tefloned eventfulness prevented the caress of intimacy, and did that grief, repetitively experienced, embed itself in him so deeply that it emerged finally as a rage for the order and clarity that grammar provided? I don’t know. I do know that he lived and he had a passion born of the courage to be dissatisfied. For that, if for no other reason, he deserves a remembrance.
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