BBC.
As a first-year law student I, along with my peers, had to read and sort out a seeming infinitude of cases written by appellate judges whose writing skills varied widely. Navigating the dense prose of the tomes we lugged around in outsize briefcases seemed at times like slogging through a trough of fudge. I was once grilled unforgettably in class by my contracts professor for having reached the wrong conclusion about the law established by a historic case. My reading had led me to deduce the opposite of what the judge had actually decided.
I appreciate the work of Linda Greenhouse, who writes a regular column for The NYTimes about the Supreme Court and the law. Her profession is to parse what judges write, tease significance from it, and write clearly about it. In such a writer I learn from a rare stylistic slip as well as from her customary excellence.
Item (the emphasis is mine):
The cases I’ve discussed here that were not, as they reached the court, on many people’s radar — not the high-profile cases like the [T****] administration’s defense of adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census, in a case to be argued this month, or the immigration, abortion and Affordable Care Act cases now filling the pipeline to the Supreme Court. Looking ahead, is there any chance the court will avoid mirroring the country’s cavernous polarization — and any way we won’t all be the poorer if that proves to be the case?
(Linda Greenhouse, “A Supreme Court Do-Over,” NYTimes, 4-11-19)
In general, an opinion piece demands a strong, clear wind-up. Nuance can be appropriate in the body of the article, but the reader expects no puzzles at the end. The concluding paragraph cited above strikes me as flawed.
The “that” in the first line introduces a dangling subordinate clause; it’s never completed with its own verb. The verbose interpolation introduced by the first double dash encourages this lapse. The writer loses her beginning.
The second double dash introduces a question that derailed me because of how I wanted to understand “any way”; I read the phrase initially as an equivalent of “nevertheless”; however, that reading asks for the inversion “won’t we”: “— and any way won’t we all be the poorer if that proves to be the case?” Then I realized that it also requires “any way” to be written as one word: “anyway.”
Upon another re-reading I concluded that what is meant would become clearer if it were put like this: “— and is there any way we won’t all be the poorer if that proves to be the case?”
In this manner, then, I have furnished a wooly elucidation to a wooly conclusion in the best tradition of appellate judges.
(c) 2019 JMN.
EthicalDative 
Ruination
Photograph: Brian Rose.
My first encounter with Texas writer Bruce Sterling was through a column he penned in the early nineties for one of the Houston newspapers. It proffered the notion that our very nature is to seek drugging; that if there existed a legal, performance-enhancing substance with no negative side-effects (a hypothetical), it would be unnatural for a person not to use it in order to gain the advantages it conveyed. It hit me as an impudent, bad-boy
bugle-toot from the contrarian fringes of our perpetual “war on drugs,” and hard to disagree with in a certain light.
Sterling’s column opened the door for me to the impudent, bad-boy fiction of the so-called cyberpunk novelists: Sterling himself, as well as William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, Vernor Vinge, and Roger Zelazny. (This isn’t an exhaustive list.) I was hooked when a character in one of the books hands a broken device to his companion and says, “Unfuck this.”
Photograph: Brian Rose.
I consumed their stories avidly. They limned a near-future dystopia in which basic institutions have cracked up for one reason or another. The hulks and remnants of a collapsed society are scavenged by mavericks with assorted nerdy knacks who dodge, juke, and improvise to eke out a living in the urban badlands. Their existence is contingent on unfucking the world they inherited.
I was working in the computer industry at the time. I lived in a sprawling urban jungle which I could easily imagine disintegrating around me. The view of ruination through my cyberpunk-tinted lenses — the wreckage left by feral commerce, the general
comeuppance of predatory civilization — was oddly exhilarating.
Photograph: Brian Rose.
I made a run at my own rendition of a post-catastrophe fantasia. My protagonist, descended from a programming family, had inherited much code savvy; he knew the ancient languages — Object Pascal, C++, Java. The quaint parking garage he lived in was a vestige of pre-Outbreak times when “cars” thronged the now-weedy streets of the Medical Center. He hunkered in the fortress-like structure along with a spunky cohort of eccentrics. It greatly resembled where I parked my car every morning in the “industrial park” that housed our offices.
Seeing the photos in the article cited here stirred my memories of the cyberpunks. Like scrappy flies those writers lit imaginatively on the pus and scabbiness of the world’s self-inflicted wounds and extracted engrossing stories from the vision. The images of
creeped-out decadence in Atlantic City are similarly pathetic and moving. The spectacle of the elements — aka Mother Nature — reclaiming turf from relics of tawdry rapacity and deluded self-aggrandizement is comforting in its way. The catastrophile in me dwells on it like a motorist rubbernecks a collision, craning for survivors.
Photograph: Brian Rose.
(Photos are from Thomas Hobbs, “Atlantic City: ‘Trump turned this place into a ghost town’,” The Guardian, 4-8-19)
(c) 2019 JMN.