Fifty years ago, almost every publisher in the United States was independent. Beginning in the late 1960s, multinational corporations consolidated the industry. By 2007, four out of every five books on bookstore shelves were published by one of six conglomerates: corporate entities that hold businesses from different industries under one governing financial structure. I call this period—from, roughly, RCA’s purchase of Random House at the end of 1965 until the release of the Amazon Kindle and the 2007–8 financial crisis—the conglomerate era.
The conglomerate era was full of prophecies about the coming death of literature, or, on the other hand, its continued flourishing. Literature, said the doomsayers, needed some freedom from commerce to survive. Otherwise we’d be left with only cookbooks and celebrity memoirs. Novelists, especially, rattled their swords. They even convinced the US Senate, in 1980, to hold a hearing about breaking up the conglomerates. E. L. Doctorow argued on behalf of PEN that “the concentration into fewer and fewer hands of the production and distribution of literary work is by its nature constricting to free speech and the effective exchange of ideas and the diversity of opinion.” Publishers countered that—either in spite or because of their consolidations—more and more diverse literature was being published than ever.
The terms of the debate have remained remarkably constant. Literature will die or flourish. Meanwhile, under pressure over time, literature transformed. Into what?
Regarding the purported rules of English syntax, we tend to divide into mutually hostile camps. Hip, open-minded types relish the never-ending transformations of the way we speak and write. They care about the integrity of our language only insofar as to ensure that we can still roughly understand one another. In the opposite corner glower the curmudgeons. These joyless, uptight authoritarians are forever muttering about clunky concepts such as “the unreal conditional” that nobody’s ever heard of.
I’ve thrown in my lot with the pedants. Yes, language is a living tree, eternally sprouting new shoots as other branches wither . . . blah, blah, blah. But a poorly cultivated plant can readily gnarl from lush foliage to unsightly sticks. The internet has turbocharged lexical fads (such as “turbocharge”) and grammatical decay. Rather than infuse English with a new vitality, this degeneration spreads the blight of sheer ignorance. So this month we address a set of developments in the prevailing conventions of the English language whose only commonality is that they drive me crazy.
When a celebrated man is 102 years old, the obituaries are mostly ready to go. Appreciations of the architect I.M. Pei, who died in May, flickered across social media. They left the impression that Pei had been important, and old. They featured tasteful images of his shiniest and most photogenic work, as well as of photogenic Pei himself—remembered as a charmer. He smiled for photos. Among architects, who tend to self-seriousness and try to project power by appearing solemn at all times, Pei was almost unique in that respect.
The photogenic work included the 1984–1989 glass entrance pyramid and underground renovation at the Louvre Museum in Paris; its pyramids-in-a-stone-plaza forerunner, the 1968–1978 East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington DC; and the 1963–1979 John F. Kennedy presidential library, a glass and stone cube on Boston Harbor. These monumental cultural projects were Pei’s most publicized buildings, and their images did communicate something of what distinguished Pei as a designer. He was sometimes audacious but never gratuitous. His forms were simple but not simplistic, resolving complicated problems into complex solutions derived from squares, circles, triangles, and all their intersections and permutations. His signature materials were robust and tightly edited: structural cast concrete, stone veneers, and very big windows and skylights supported by steel space-frames (including that infamously allegorical glass ceiling at New York City’s Javits Center, primarily the work of Pei’s onetime associate James Inigo Freed). But all this is only the second half of the story. It may be that the buildings that will eventually matter most are the ones Pei did when he was starting out.
Hyde’s four notebooks explore Myth, Self, Nation and Creation. He surveys Western traditions and delves into Buddhist teachings that urge us to let go of ego-building in favor of nourishing “serene self-forgetfulness.” Hyde is especially attracted to artists who manage to forget their habits of mind to unleash the freedom of creative thought.