Desperate Cases

 My sister and I were talking the other week about beloved movies, and we were struck all over again by the number of creative people in the world who seem to have made one beautiful and interesting thing, only to follow it up with a parade of mediocre and boring things. There was the Star Wars trilogy, but then it was followed by... the other Star Wars trilogies. There were the Lord of the Rings movies; but then there was King Kong, and then the Hobbit trilogy that no one asked for. There were the Harry Potter books; but then there were a bunch of raunchy detective novels, yawn-inducing films, and transphobic screeds. 

And as if we hadn't enough examples of this phenomenon already on our hands, the world threw another in my path just a few nights after our conversation. A friend and I logged onto HBO Max to watch the new Matrix sequel, which follows up with our main characters twenty years after the first movie. It... did not break the pattern we have established above. 

Combinational Delight

I have a friend who—in all kindness—accuses this blog of being at times rather pointlessly agglutinative. My usual procedure, he says, is to take a bunch of seemingly disparate things—usually quotations or literary exempla—and line them up next to one another and say "see, this one is like that one; and that one is like this one."

I don't deny the charge. Indeed, the only way in which I know a Six Foot Turkey blog post has formed in my brain is when I suddenly (and this usually only happens when I am in the shower or driving) see illuminated, as if by flaring lanterns, the path leading me from one passage to another of seemingly diverse material. 

Autodidacts

 A friend and I were swapping tales of the minor intellectual humiliations in life that stem from trying to pronounce words that one has previously only ever encountered in print (a topic subconsciously prompted, perhaps, by my having just gotten to the part in Nabokov's Pale Fire in which his narrator/commentator, Charles Kinbote, observes that Baudelaire is a two-syllable name, the middle "e" having no metrical weight, and suddenly feeling like I had to reevaluate my whole life). 

I forwarded my friend a poem I had written on this very subject over a year ago. Noting the dangers of things like the silent "l" in Ralph Vaughan Williams, I observed "These are the things/You can’t get/Just from reading/Unless, that is,/You know/The pronunciation code," referring to the international phonetic alphabet (to which even the most solitary autodidact has recourse in principle). 

Irony font

 I talked last time on this blog about Keith Houston's book on the history of typographical marks, Shady Characters; but it has inspired another thought I wished to impart. 

In his final chapter, Houston recounts the appalling number of times people have proposed creating some sort of special typographical or punctuation mark to distinguish irony and sarcasm from straightforwardly-intended prose. It appears the same idea has been floated—and even some of the same designs for the hypothetical mark put forward—so many times that the whole subject has become almost as tired as the debate around whether or not the incidents described in Alanis Morissette's "Ironic" are actually ironic. 

!?

In his entertaining book Shady Characters—a series of capsule "biographies," if you will, of various punctuation and typographical marks throughout history—Keith Houston devotes a chapter to the ill-fated mid–twentieth century campaign to promulgate and adopt a new punctuation mark—the "interrobang." It came about because strings of punctuation had begun to appear at the ends of sentences—"?!" and the like—particularly in the more informal idiom of advertising copy, and so the idea was to combine the two symbols into one.

Closing a sentence with a "?!" defied traditional grammatical practice, after all. Yet, there was a particular feeling and intonation these strings of characters conveyed that was not fully captured by either the question or the exclamation mark in isolation. The proposed way out of this dilemma was to invent a new character that could serve double-duty. The interrobang—a combination of question mark and exclamation—could convey the sense of a question being asked with incredulity and a rising tone of outrage—consternation is one of the apt words for it that appears in Houston's text.