Roberts English, or the reason why
Savage amusement (a phrase my father uses). I've been keeping an eye on the unfolding Bobby Fischer melodrama. I hope somebody is trying to lock up TV movie rights to this. Fischer has been in a holding cell at the Narita airport for three weeks. He is attempting to fight extradition to the U S. There was a article in the Washington Post on this Friday Chess Champ Fischer Maneuvers to Avoid Extradition (The Washington Post), and one in the SF Chronicle today As Bobby Fischer fights deportation to U.S., the chess legend's politics threaten to limit options. The latter had a throwaway line that the champ was maintaining a website in Japan. They didn't give a link but seconds later (through the miracle that is google) I had it: Bobby Fischer homepage. It contains a lively personal account of his arrest, and scans of his passport, and the letter from the Japanese authorities announcing his detainment, and many other rants going back years. All of it written in a barely lucid often third person howl. I immediately share this with Robert. Whose band was named, the Bobby Fischer Faction, as he notes in comments left to my previous post. We both agree Fischer needs to be under the care of professionals in a quiet place, by order of a concerned judge.
Robert, an english major as an undergraduate, is undone by the low state of the writing. I had lent him a book last week, actually my sister's book, Horowitz, I. A. (Israel Albert), 1907-1973. The complete book of chess
/ I.A. Horowitz, P.L. Rothenberg. London : Collier-MacMillan, 1969,
c1963. "First Collier Books edition 1969." "Originally published as
The personality of chess." [ GV1445 .H67 1969 . This is a well written, entertaining book. Robert is struck by the fact that Horowitz was firstmost a chess player, and then an incidental author, an accidental professional writer. Back in the day, clearly, people could write. Not like now. What happened? he asked.
It was a rhetorical question. He seemed somewhat nonplussed when I tried to answer it.
Some possible reasons I offered:
college educated of previous generations were a much
smaller group, they were formed and drawn from a more literary
formally trained elite.
Advent of photographs, movies, and TV have made us a more
visually reacting culture. As literate, but in a very different way.
Average member of the tenitively literate middle class is probably no more syntaxically
endowed then as now. As an inspection of letters, journals, small town
newspapers from nineteeth early twentieth century might demonstrate. Simply
a matter of less writing making the the divide between published and not. In today's Information culture far more writing in general is published and used. Little of it demonstrating literacy.
Web logs surely prove this.
Then I remembered a Sound Print Radio documentary I heard several months ago What's New at School? that recalled a long repressed memory of my unfortunate childhood. The Sound Print piece dealt with educational fads and their prime example was not just the "new math" (been there), but crucially Roberts English. It all came flooding back in a shudder, like a close damp sickness.
Roberts English the dreaded blue books of my youth, Incomprehensible and consuming
useless and inescapable with their pointless multitude of step by step excercises through all of middle school. Replacing actual grammar instruction and composition in the process. What the hell was that all about! The beast in question:
Roberts, Paul. English syntax : a programed introduction to
Transformational grammar / Paul Roberts. New York : Harcourt, Brace &
World, c1964. [ PE1361 - .R58 ].
Looking this up I struck on the phrase Transformational Grammar. I had a vague idea what this was (well, mostly I have vague ideas), and resort to Wiki. Transformational Grammar as I confirm is a Chomsky thing. It seems to have spent its existence as an idea in a state of flux. A high state of flux. Flux with ... deep structure.
There was a philosopher, I think, who felt that we make the very fabric of reality by the organizing warp and weft of our articulated thought, our concepts and catagories. What I have is more like a busted up lawn chair repaired with duct tape.
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