Languages in LA

While cruising the L.A. Craigslist hunting for this week’s four writing gigs that will be fought over by 20,000 frustrated screenwriters, I encountered a highlife-observing newsletter/website called Pocket Change (pocketchangenyc.com). This glittering piece of frivolity is spreading herpes-like into Los Angeles via New York (oh, where else??) and features the biting commentary of a smirking fop known as Richard Nouveau.

 
Richard isn’t a real person, he’s a caricature who comments on “the finer things” in L.A., such as where to get good chutney, or a facial, or a spa where they put the chutney right on your face.

 
I should like this character, this Richard. Whoever is doing the writing manages to make every sentence count. Commenting on L.A.’s most expensive personal trainer, he writes: You know, it’s a terrible shame that high-end breeding and bear-like musculature and athleticism seldom go hand-in-hand. Those of us born with a fashion acumen draped over a consumptive frame are fortunate enough, however, to be able to hire someone to do the pushups for you.

 
Clearly, this is Saki’s Reginald reincarnated. In an earlier paragraph he even simperingly mentions hemophilia and asthma… what clearer references to English noble blood can there be?

 
Yes, I should like him. But I already don’t, and I know why.

 
I can be a wee bit snippy but this fellow fairly oozes snark. I imagine him gliding along Melrose Avenue, perilously close to the Pacific Design Center, smirking at Urth Café and the incense-wafting bookstore nearby. He seems downright cruel, and I don’t like the current notion that wit equals sadism. There’s a difference. Witty people have cats. Sadistic people do too, but they refuse to have them spayed because distressed cats in heat amuse them. That’s how this Pocket Change Richard comes across to me. Oh, he’s funny. But I don’t like him.

Some of my students are budding thuglets with La Vida Loca faux-tattoos inked onto their hands — it’s three blue dots in a triangle at the juncture between the thumb and forefinger. One of these kids got stabbed last year in Echo Park. (That scar on his shoulder will win him female attention and sympathy for years to come. Chicks dig scars.)

So amid that bleak landscape, refreshing moments are precious. Here’s what I mean: amid my usual crop of wild, disinterested adolescents, there are the rare wonders, children who washed up on our shore God-knows-how. Two years ago it was a tall, blond Russian boy with wit and remarkable cultural knowledge. Gordy once watched three boys playing and needling each other as I struggled, exasperated, to get them to just once pay attention to the lesson. Finally he turned to me and said wryly in thickly-accented English, “The Three Stooges.” That was a refreshing moment.

Another was a girl from Bolivia whom I sat down in front of a computer and directed to write a summary of the book we had just read. She was the (very) quiet type, so I sort of wandered off and forgot about her for the better part of an hour. When I came back, she silently presented me with 9 pages… nine pages… of methodical, exact details from the novel. Single spaced. I am still certain that she is from Mars.

My most recent refreshing moment was yesterday. My little bespectacled girl from India came into the room and bounded up to me with a tiny white rose bud she had picked from a bush as she passed. “Here,” she said with a gallant flourish, “a white rose for a white lady!” This is just precious; she can’t know that “white lady” is not usually a term of endearment. Particularly in Los Angeles. I think I shall have to press that rosebud in my Complete Works of Jane Austen book. It’s just too cute.

I both love and hate the latest stylistic developments for conveying tone. Let me explain. On the political website I haunt, it was common years ago to interpret all caps as screaming. If someone wrote, “THAT IS NOT WHAT I MEANT!” people would actually say, “Stop screaming, you sound hysterical.”

But we’ve come a long way, baby. Posters have now developed conventions for sotto voice, Captain Kirk imitations, and measured tones. For example, recently we were musing on the worst popular songs of all time, and of course, the song Sometimes When We Touch came up.

Sometimes when we touch

The honesty’s too much

And I have to close my eyes and hide.

Yes, the Mr. Sensitive Ponytail Theme Song. Anyway, one wag wickedly confessed that he whenever he hears that song, he mentally substitutes a certain vulgar term for the word “touch.”

I said, “But then it won’t rhyme, and the honesty’s too muck doesn’t make sense.”

He said, “It does to me. And that’s what matters.” Instant sotto voice. Cute, eh?

Captain Kirk imitations abound, meant to suggest someone struggling against a superior (though invisible) force.

“Must… not… make… joke…. must… resist…”

Then of course, there is the measured tone, reeking of deliberation.

“Do. Not. Put. Words. In. My. Mouth. I said nothing of the sort…”

But while I appreciate these developments, I regret the loss of elegance that used to attend writing. Behold, an excerpt from the diary-turned-travel guide, With Malice Toward Some by Margaret Halsey (1938). She describes a group of fellow-Americans on her cruise ship as:

A large group of beautiful, shiny-looking young people who generally travel in a flying wedge and whose voices are distressingly reminiscent of seagulls discovering a floating orange peel. We have not talked very much with these citizens, as most of the secular ones seem to be in the midst of an impromptu mating season.

Man, that’s good. That’s. So. Good.

At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly, one development I cannot help but mourn is the devolution of the art of fiction. Currently, my favorite book is The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. This tragic 1905 story chronicles the gradual descent of a likeable society beauty, Lily Bart, and is packed with gems. By ‘gems’ I mean beautifully honed passages that reveal startling human insights, or remarkably unique and succinct descriptions.

This passage describes Seldon, an intelligent, introspective man, contemplating the seemingly frivolous Lily as he struggles to understand why he is increasingly drawn to her:

“…the qualities distinguishing her from the herd of her sex were chiefly external, as though a fine glaze of beauty and fastidiousness had been applied to vulgar clay. Yet the analogy left him unsatisfied, for a coarse texture will not take a high finish; and was it not possible that the material was fine but that circumstance had fashioned it into a futile shape?”

Or this bit describing Bertha, the high-maintenance little diva whose calculated betrayal will trigger Lily’s ultimate downfall.

“Her small, pale face seemed the mere setting of a pair of dark exaggerated eyes, of which the visionary gaze contrasted curiously with her self-assertive tone and gestures, so that, as one of her friends observed, she was like a disembodied spirit who took up a great deal of room.”

Fast forward 100 years to the popular and admittedly enjoyable but terribly inferior Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.

“Am going to be top-flight journalist and gradually build up more and more work and extra money so can give up job and merely sit on sofa with laptop on knee. Hurrah!”

How to even respond to such a comparison? I’ll return to Wharton:

“Grotesque? Yes—and tragic—like most absurdities. There’s nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.”

A Google search for Thomas Jefferson and the phrase “education of women” reveals that our distinguished Founding Father had little use for reading novels. In an 1818 letter to Nathaniel Burwell, Jefferson writes:

“When this poison infects the mind, it destroys its tone and revolts it against wholesome reading. Reason and fact, plain and unadorned, are rejected. Nothing can engage attention unless dressed in all the figments of fancy… The result is a bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust towards all the real businesses of life.”

Jefferson makes some exception for “useful vehicles of a sound morality.” But he refers to the rest as “this mass of trash.”

That was 200 years ago. As a teacher in L.A. today, I am desperate to get students to read. Children today seem to despise the printed word, and their attention can hardly be captured by anything that does not writhe, scream, or bleed. Like Madonna’s character in A League of Their Own, I am ready to hand out the trashiest novels I can legally distribute if the phrase “her milky breast” can lure todays’ jaded adolescent into deciphering a few lines of code.

I am, in fact, so despairing of modern youth’s hatred for reading, I have a policy in my classroom: if you are not working, but you are reading a substantial book, I will pretend not to notice. Today I caught a young man with the 7th Harry Potter book tucked surreptitiously in his lap. I was dazzled. It’s not Gameboy, it’s not an iPod, it’s… dare I believe… it’s a book?? He may well end up with a bloated imagination and sickly judgment, but this is L.A. Everyone I meet is like that. This kid will at least be able to READ. And in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.