by James Clive-Matthews | 19 Feb, 2020 | Structures & Models
3/5 stars
A strange book. Well written, entertaining, but largely pointless – and doesn’t deliver on its core promise of explaining *how to use* rhetoric more effectively.
Instead, its basic argument consists of the astonishing revelation that:
- language can be used to make a case that’s designed to persuade
- people have been doing this for a long time
- people used to study the techniques involved and gave them all fancy Greek names
- people no longer use the fancy Greek names but still use the techniques.
All of which is illustrated with examples, including deconstructions, showing what techniques were used.
So far, so good – but that’s a *what*, not a *how*. As such, so what?
This book starts out as a plea for the restitution of rhetoric as a field of study – but then fails to follow through with a convincing case to do so because it never manages to demonstrate the practical application of an understanding of rhetorical theory. About halfway through there’s even a line that tells us to ignore the detailed analysis and use of rhetorical terminology via the double dismissal:
“in the end, these distinctions… can safely be left to the theorists.” (p.131-2)
If those distinctions can be ignored, what is the benefit of learning *any* of the terminology of rhetoric that is scattered throughout the book? It seems to be just to make you look clever by spouting archaic Greekisms.
(That question was, of course, a rhetorical device.do I know the *name* of the rhetorical device? No. But I knew how to deploy it. I rest my case.)
Because the problem is that while Leith shows how an understanding of rhetoric can be used to analyse words and see how arguments were constructed, at no point does he coherently illustrate how to use this knowledge in a practical way to construct arguments of your own. Nor does he provide a single example of how anyone has done so – beyond references to great speakers of the past reading lots of past great speeches, which is not the same thing at all.
All of which means that, while this is a perfectly entertaining enough book, I’ve come out of it *less* convinced that there’s any point in trying to memorise what hendiadys or hypallage, pleonasmus or polysyndeton are. All I need to know is that I know how to use them. And this book, despite giving plentiful examples of how these techniques have been used by other people, is no practical use on that front at all.
In short, if you want to learn more about how to write or speak in a more convincing rhetorical style, this may be good to point you to some of the greats of the past so you can go and read their stuff (as long as you’re happy focusing primarily on British and American greats, that us), but that’s about it.
And, most importantly, that’s not what the dust jacket promises.
by James Clive-Matthews | 20 Sep, 2018 | Structures & Models
3/5 stars
This didn’t get only three stars because this isn’t well-written, or that it’s not fun and interesting – but because it’s so inconsistent and hard to follow.
It purports to be the “story of a city and its people”, but can’t decide which people. Mostly it seems to be the story of kings, occasionally writers, very rarely others.
It both assumes a lot of prior knowledge of French history and explains the well-known at length – including things that have little specifically to do with Paris. But then it passes over specifically, uniquely Parisian events like the Revolution and barricades of 1848 in mere paragraphs, ignoring the vast numbers of fascinating people who could have made for great diversions.
Basically, I can’t work out the author’s criteria for what to include and ignore.
This lack of a clear schema means you’re better off with a tourist guide for the linear narrative history, a literary guide for the cultural, and a social history for an insight into the people. This covers parts of all, none of them comprehensively enough to be fully satisfying – but well enough to make me want to find out more. From a more coherent, consistent book.
by James Clive-Matthews | 28 Jun, 2018 | Structures & Models
3/5 stars
Inventive, but as if by numbers: multiple perspectives over several centuries, in multiple formats – diaries, letters, court transcripts, book extracts, stream of consciousness, snippets of pub conversation, photo captions, film scripts – with only the smallest nods to past sections throughout, meaning an excellent memory is vital to spot the narrative connections.
But the point here isn’t narrative (because there isn’t much of a one, beyond the vague narratives of each section, most of which end in disappointment for the subject) – it’s the nature of history and memory, how different people and eras have different priorities, how there’s always a clash between the desire to maintain tradition and progress (even if that tradition is barely understood, and the benefits of that progress aren’t clear).
This makes it, in many ways, both a deeply melancholy and a deeply pessimistic book. And also means it perfectly captures elements of the attitudes of rural southern England in the late 20th century – and probably still today. In some ways it feels quite Brexity, in fact – or, at least, that it helps explain Brexity attitudes.
by James Clive-Matthews | 23 Oct, 2017 | Structures & Models
5/5 stars
Had read most of these in isolation before, never cover to cover as a coherent collection. They work better as a collection – themes emerging, parallels, repetitions.
No real standout story for me, bar possibly The House of Asterion and The Writing of the God, though many standout ideas. The core concepts of The Zahir (an object or thing that drives obsession it’s impossible to shake) and The Aleph (a point in time and space from which it’s possible to see all other points in time and space simultaneously) both could have been expanded into much more.
And that’s the thing with Borges – he always leaves you wanting more. May well try this same trick of reading his collections as collections with the rest now…
by James Clive-Matthews | 3 Aug, 2017 | Structures & Models
3/5 stars
I’ve come away convinced that this would have been infinitely better as a 400-page standalone novel with an optional 600-page sister volume of semi-related spin-off short stories as a kind of DVD extras disc, rather than this incoherent mess of disjointed interconnected short stories.
Even though I understand *why* he structured it this way (to fit in with his new, fun, central concept of the nature of nonlinear time), and though he makes it clear enough he doesn’t really care what his audience thinks (this is ART, darling – and if you don’t like it you’re an idiot and can fuck off), I kinda prefer novels to have some kind of coherent narrative to them, as well as a thematic point.
All that said, there are bits of this vast, meandering not-really-a-novel that are five stars. There are some genuinely great bits in it, where Moore is at his very best. The 350-odd pages of straight narrative in the middle, written as a kind of heightened, metaphysical Enid Blyton Magic Faraway Tree for adults, is good fun – the sort of thing fans of Promethea, Top 10, Tom Strong and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen will love. Even the Joyce pastiche chapter is very well done – albeit an appropriately hard slog that adds little, if anything, to the overall narrative.
But it’s far too self-indulgent. Too smug. At points – especially towards the end as he builds up to the conclusion (which isn’t really a conclusion, because – thematically appropriately – the promised one never comes), he starts breaking the fourth wall via his characters, dropping more and more hints as to his book’s grand design.
Eventually he gives up, and taps on a final “postlude” chapter to smugly, patronisingly, and still vaguely obscurely, explain the entire thing, positioning himself as a weirdo artistic genius who doesn’t really care if you understand it or not.
I did understand it. I did enjoy much of it – including many of the bits I think should have been cut. I just didn’t think it was as clever as he does, and didn’t think it holds together as a narrative whole. Because it doesn’t, pretty much by design.
Glad to have got it over with. Glad to have read it. And now know far more about Northampton than I ever wished to.
by James Clive-Matthews | 3 Sep, 2016 | Structures & Models
5/5 stars
“events! if you want those, you’d best stop reading now)”
Extremely readable – finished in one sitting – and a perfect piece of postmodern contemporary anthropology of a particular kind of existence in c.2012-2015 London that felt all kinds of familiar. I can see how some would find it pretentious, but it felt so much like a more accessible, less thesaurus-prone mid-90s Will Self that I couldn’t help but like it lots.
Two passages in particular sum up the book, for me:
“It will find its shape, he’d said; I leave all that to you… What if, rather than *it* finding its shape, the age itself, in all its shape-shifting and multi-channelled incarnations, were to find and mould *it*? What if the age, the era, were to do this from so close up, and with such immediacy and force, thay the *it* would all but vanish, leaving just world-shape, era-mould? I started thinking thoughts like this… Beneath their vagueness, I felt something forming”
And:
“Certainly, the fact it came from me, and the context within which it was presented, would imbue it for him with all kinds of cryptic meaning. And besides, I felt with real conviction that it *was* full of this already: meaning of a genuinely deep and intense nature, whose sense eluded me but whose presence radiated, pouring into everything around it.”
Yes, I can see how some would find it pretentious, pointless. Because it is. But knowingly so. Which is, as far as I can tell, the entire postmodernist point – and one that I greatly enjoyed.
by James Clive-Matthews | 14 Jun, 2014 | Structures & Models
3/5 stars
Foucault’s Pendulum remains one of my favourite novels, and as this is another conspiracy theory piece from Eco I was looking forward to it. The unrelenting antisemitism (and general racism) of the central character was unpleasant, but bearable – I’d been warned what to expect – but still stumbled to a halt halfway through on my first attempt, mostly due to frustration with the amnesia conceit and the inconsistently intermittent interruptions of the mysterious narrator, which occasionally seemed to forget they were meant to be the narrator rather than a diary entry.
I’ve since restarted, and have been enjoying it more on the second attempt. Not one of Eco’s best, but evocative of the time and place – a grotty, unpleasant time and place, from his portrayal, and as such a refreshing alternative to the usual depiction of late 19th century Europe as some kind of golden age.
Finally finished, after another long break. Dense with information and impressive research, it’s an interesting fictionalised history. But I’m still unconvinced by the contrived structure – the pointless addition of a decidedly intermittent narrator, the found diary conceit, and (most of all) the split-personality amnesiac concept that forms the core of the book’s narrative reveal. Why did Eco think this necessary? For me, it merely distracted from the substance with unnecessary, not very well done style.
by James Clive-Matthews | 14 Jun, 2014 | Structures & Models
Fascinating, thought-provoking piece – another of those ones you come away from thinking “damn, that’s so obvious – why didn’t I make the connection before?” A few highlights:
Quality doesn’t mean popularity:
every single newspaper that I talk with. They are saying the same thing, which is that their journalistic work is top of the line and amazing. The problem is ‘only’ with the secondary thing of how it is presented to the reader.
And we have been hearing this for the past five to ten years, and yet the problem still remains. There is a complete and total blind spot in the newspaper industry that, just maybe, part of the problem is also the journalism itself.
Instead, they move the problem out of the editorial room, and into separate and isolated ‘innovation teams’… who are then charged with coming up with ideas for how to reformat their existing journalistic product in a digital way.
But let me ask you this. If The NYT is ‘winning at journalism‘, why is its readership falling significantly? If their daily report is smart and engaging, why are they failing to get its journalism to its readers?
If its product is ‘the world’s best journalism‘, why does it have a problem growing its audience?
Newspapers (and all-in-one-place sites) are an outdated concept:
No matter how hard they try, supermarkets with a mass-market/low-relevancy appeal will never appear on a list of the most ‘engaging brands’, or on list of brands that people love.
And this is the essence of the trouble newspapers are facing today. It’s not that we now live in a digital world, and that we are behaving in a different way. It’s that your editorial focus is to be the supermarket of news.
The New York Times is publishing 300 new articles every single day, and in their Innovation Report they discuss how to surface even more from their archives. This is the Walmart business model.
The problem with this model is that supermarkets only work when visiting the individual brands is too hard to do. That’s why we go to supermarkets. In the physical world, visiting 40 different stores just to get your groceries would take forever, so we prefer to only go to one place, the supermarket, where we can get everything… even if most of the other products there aren’t what we need.
It’s the same with how print newspapers used to work. We needed this one place to go because it was too hard to get news from multiple sources.
But on the internet, we have solved this problem. You can follow as many sources as you want, and it’s as easy to visit 1000 different sites as it is to just visit one. Everything is just one click away. In fact, that’s how people use social media. It’s all about the links.
One of clearest examples of this is how Washington Post is absolutely failing to engage people on YouTube. Every single day, they are posting a bunch of news videos about random things. Each video is well made (great production quality), but there is no editorial focus.
The result is this:
Here we have a large US newspaper that is barely reaching any people when it uploads a video to YouTube. And it’s not that the videos are uninteresting. There is one about iPhone cases that you can buy at the 9/11 museum (and the controversy of that), with only 687 views. There is a motivational speech (usually a popular thing to post on YouTube), with only 819 views. We have social tactics, like “5 awkward political fundraising moments”, with only 101 views.
Then we have a video by the super-popular George Takei that we all know from Star Trek. This is a person with millions of fans, but his video on Washington Post only attracted 844 views… in two weeks! If this had been posted by any Star Trek focused channel, this very same video would have reached 50,000 views, easy!
What the Washington Post is doing can only be described as a complete and total failure. It cannot get any worse than this.
by James Clive-Matthews | 14 May, 2014 | Structures & Models
I love Quartz.
I love news “atomisation” app Circa.
I am fascinated by the future of news.
So unsurprisingly yesterday’s launch of Quartz’s new Glass site – focused on the future of news via an experimental bite-sized format – got me rather excited.
But a day in, I can’t see the point of the atomisation format for this kind of site.
The perils of high expectations
What we get are Tweet-length (or thereabouts) snippets of media news, usually with a link – similar to the linklogs popular around the late 90s / early 2000s (think Memepool, Fark, LinkMachineGo) – or some kind of opinion, often with a little arrow indicating that you can click for more.
A linklog aggregating media news is fine – a useful addition to my Twitter list of handy sources of industry info, with some useful selections.
But why this atomised opinion approach? It’s like a choose your own adventure book, only with argument/opinion – subsequent points hidden until you click – for reasons that largely escape me.
Form vs function
Take this piece on the (excellent) Fargo TV series. That link takes you to the full post – with all the subsections expanded. It reads fine – just like a regular blog post.
But come to it from the front page? You get the first paragraph only.
Click down, you are presented with the tier two paragraphs (numbers 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10).
To get the full post, you have to click an additional four times to get paragraphs 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11. That’s five clicks to get one story.
What matters more – metrics or readers?
Now yes, this will give Quartz lots of useful data that they can analyse to check reader engagement – just as Circa does with their atomised news stories.
But where Circa’s use of “atoms” for presenting their stories makes sense and is backed up by a clear philosophy*, for the opinion piece parts of Glass I simply can’t see the rationale.
If I’m interested in your opinions about Fargo, I’m interested – so give them to me when I click. Don’t make me work harder to get your nuggets of wisdom – you risk annoying and disappointing me when the additional clicks prove pointless.
So from being excited, I’ve become annoyed – the content may be good, but the presentation is annoying. It’s bullet point lists with hidden child bullets, nothing more.
Or am I missing something?
* Short version of my understanding of Circa’s news philosophy (as an aside):
1) news is fast-paced, so keep coverage short and to the point
2) news is made up of facts, and facts change, but themes and stories persist/evolve
3) some facts can be recycled into new stories on the same theme
4) therefore breaking stories into their component (factual) parts makes sense both in the long and short term, as they
a) make the news easier/quicker to understand (when properly presented),
b) can be recycled into other stories on the same theme down the line, and
c) can have tracking attached to each element to see how/if audiences are engaging with that content, giving far more detail about user behavior than is possible from a standard article
by James Clive-Matthews | 10 May, 2014 | Structures & Models
3/5 stars
Judt was obviously a master, as anyone who’s read even parts of Postwar can attest. His illness and early death was tragic. The idea for this book – to capture some of his knowledge and ways of thinking before the end – was a good, if macabre, one.
The trouble is, it’s an extended interview where the interviewer doesn’t seem to know when to shut up and let the interviewee speak. Timothy Snyder may well be a good historian in his own right (I don’t believe I’ve read any of his stuff, so can’t tell), but as an interviewer he leaves much to be desired – acting like an eager student trying to please teacher by showing off his own knowledge rather than shutting up and learning from the teacher as he’s supposed to do.
This gets particularly frustrating when Snyder keeps trying to divert Judt onto topics – such as the repeated questions about impact of Judt’s Jewish heritage on his upbringing and thought processes – that Judt continually tries to politely dismiss as largely irrelevant. Judt himself repeatedly points out that he had a more complex intellectual background than merely being a left-wing Jew – to try and shoehorn him into such a stereotype pushes the book dangerously close to being predictable, which is the last thing I’ve come to expect from Judt’s work.
That said, there’s still some fascinating stuff in here – but it needed a tighter edit, largely to remove Snyder’s voice and some of the more rambling digressions, and let Judt’s voice and opinions come through more clearly.
