Follow It

I read the title “How to Seduce a Cop,” and I can’t deny that I was interested. No, I did not in a way plan to learn how to bat my eyelashes or bare some skin in a blatant attempt to satiate my fetish for cops. Because I can assure you that I have no such fetish. Thank you. It just happened to intrigue me. If there is a foolproof system of getting out of a parking ticket, who’s stupid enough to turn down such expertise? And so Jay Heinrichs delves into the art of persuasion.

Heinrichs plants his idea by telling a joke about how a psychologist screws a light bulb and the punch line is “ First, the light bulb has to want to change.” Of course. Because light bulbs have feelings, or didn’t you know? Seriously though, it is actually a very plausible and logical answer. Everything that changes in this life has to want to change. Unless it is a pregnant teenager, in which case I’m pretty sure she didn’t actually want or plan on having a growing fetus obstructing her otherwise flat stomach. But that’s a rare exception that takes into account causes of actions.

To get people to do something, they have to want to do it themselves, unless you hold a gun to their head. Heinrich explains how to attain this change of attitude in the first place: mood, mind and desire to act. First, you have to change the person’s mood to one that will be most amiable and easygoing (ie. More accepting). It is by doing this that you are making them more prone to manipulation, more malleable to understand your arguments. In other words, this is how you get them to change their mind.  The last is probably the most difficult of all which to spurting them with the desire to act. Here is where you have to resort to appealing to their emotions to convincing them they are doing what they want to do. Changing the mood is where seduction comes in. To seduce is, by definition, to lead away from duty, accepted principles, or proper conduct. It’s not only about sex, the concept we usually relate it to, it’s about being subtle and cunning enough to change someone’s concrete views. Changing a person’s perspectives and judgment is not easy, and that is why persuasion is not as easy as it looks. But with the given tools, it can be quite useful.

Arguing doesn’t always necessarily mean you’re going to win. The difference between fighting and arguing is that in fighting you can win, but in arguing you can get what you want. It is all a matter of subtlety, of manipulating your adversary very casually to the point where they think they are the ones making the decisions, when really, they’re doing what you want them to do. But you don’t only want to convince them that it’s what they want to do. “Besides using desire to motivate an audience, you need to convince it that an action is no big deal-that whatever you want them to do won’t make them sweat.”

The goal is to change another person’s mindset. You don’t always have to win, you just have to get them to concede, reach consensus. This is Heinrichs advice. Follow it.

Darkly Humorous, Self-satirizing, and Hilariously Tragic.

            There is something that stands out when every time a character is mentioned, they’re doing the exact same thing they were doing before. Always. This is the case for Egger’s father:

            “Through the family room window, in the middle of the white silver screen, my father was in his suit, a grey suit, dressed for work…. He did not move. His suit, even with him kneeling, leaning forward, was loose on his shoulders and back. He had lost so much weight. “

            This paragraph is placed in its own private strand of square page. By that I mean to say that there are three wide spaces between the paragraph preceding this one and also the one that follows it. Almost like a sudden thought in your conscience, so abrupt and placed between to abruptly in between because it’s that noteworthy. And it is. Here we have Eggers exposing some random, concise, and yet powerful dialogue between him and his brother Toph and then Bam, this paragraph is alone with too much space for itself. The image is heartbreaking. The suit itself is just a great detail to perfectly capture the idea of a working man, ruffled and tired, getting home only to kneel forward, like people bowing down in exhaustion or in deference, clad in duress. The mere detail of the suit’s looseness on his figure shows his apparent instability, how he isn’t exactly steady. The statement about his having lost so much weight just highlights the suffering of something that manages to even deprive you of you appetite. One paragraph and it is so apparent that his wife’s disease is not only killing her, it’s killing him.

            About ten pages later and the same type of random paragraph appears, isolated, mentioning the father once again:

            “ My father had not moved. He was about ten feet from the street. He was kneeling, but with his hands on the ground, fingers extended down, like roots from a riverbed tree. He was not praying. His head tilted back for a moment as he looked up, not to the sky, but to the trees in the neighbour’s backyard. He was still on his knees.”

            What is interesting about this is the time span between these two paragraphs. Eggers places a lot of material in between the two so when the reader comes by the father, still in the sameness of before, it makes you halt. The fact that so many things have happened and the father is still there emphasises the lack of time, highlighting his actions. If it were not for this repetition of sorts, the reader would, sure, take into account the father and his suit, but eventually forget. This last paragraph brings the reader back to the father, in the dame position, but with his hands on the ground almost as if trying to dig up anything worthwhile, trying to grasp the metaphorical treasure that will bring him happiness. Trying to find anything. It’s depressing. His suffering is obvious and one wonders about how his life will pan out. One might even infer that he will probably fly up to heaven with Egger’s mother as well.

            And he does. Eggers starts out two pages later by saying, “ You should have seen my father’s service.” So, of course, he died. It’s interesting how said fact is unknown until after the paragraph about his father’s funeral. This is a great example of how Dave Eggers manages to visibly show the abruptness of his father’s death via the abruptness of is prose. The news, to say the least, is sudden to the reader in apparently the same way it was to Eggers. Later he proceeds to actually explain and speak of his dad when he was in the road to dying (that sounds odd) and describes how “I did not know that last time I saw my father would be the last time I would see my father.” His father was in intensive care and when Eggers entered his room, he was sprawled on the bed, cigarette in hand, “grinning like he had won the biggest award there ever was.” Am I the only one that finds that disturbing? The guy just been diagnosed with God-knows what and he’s smirking, a mocking smile plastered on his face? I guess after all the suffering in thinking of his wife’s impending death, he just realized dying with her was the perfect solution.

            It’s sad. What’s even sadder is the way Egger writes it. No, his tone is not borderline dramatic and lugubrious stuffed. His tone is actually pretty dry, ironic, humorous. The fact that his tone is anything but sad is a tool he uses to distance himself. It is the means by which he copes and is able to retell what to him must be a really painful experience. But he does it this way because he can, and even then, that he does with that type of diction makes the reader feel even more. The way he is obviously detracting himself from said occurrence makes his story all the more real and all the more touching. He could have decided to display the tragedy of his life by aiming for pity and resorting to deep metaphors of his withered soul and frayed heart. But he didn’t. His diction is what makes A Heartbreaking work of Staggering Genius  the work that it is: Darkly humorous, self-satirizing, and hilariously tragic. 

Killing Penguins

            There is a way to make even death sound amusing. It may sound absurd to even think of such a thing, but everything is a matter of situation and how it is expressed. Death is tragic. Death when caused by some bizarre force or in unexpected circumstances can be seen as much more. If someone where to tell me of a certain person got killed by a penguin, I would laugh. It’s so weird and unlikely that the disbelief factor adds to the effect. A penguin, with their flappy limbs and waddling like pregnant women, killed someone. It’s funny.

            So we see that there can be a fine line between tragedy and humour. If you tread it correctly, you might even make something so painful into something hilarious. In that same way, you can take something that is very painful and drenched with tragedy, and pass it off as something insignificant, amusing, or annoying. It is all in the way you word things, in the language you use to describe said matter. It is all diction.

            Dave Eggers masters this concept perfectly. While dealing with his mother’s cancer and having her upcoming death clear in his conscience, he manages to describe it with such dryness, irony and humour that while the story itself is tragic, the writing is not. Of course, he often does manage to trigger the reader’s emotions and pity, but instead of drowning them in bathos, his use of irony and dry humour in describing his mother’s death makes the feeling of tragedy greater.

            He also creates a certain relationship with the mom that adds to the clichéd outlook of the poor, frail woman about to loose life. An example of this is when he’s trying to stop the bleeding in her nose and asks her if it hurts. To this, she replies, “No, it feels good, stupid.” Maybe it’s just the fact that no typical mother would talk like that to her son, in such a sarcastic teenager conversation manner. Just with his dialogue he’s managing to tell us a lot about the mother as a person and their relationship. It wraps her in this aura of concrete, and while she is lying on a sofa spitting out bile into a plastic container, her words manage to help her keep her dignity.

            His mother is dying and yet his prose is dry and matter-of-fact. He already accepted the fact that she is going to die. And even though his tone is so lacking in dramatics, it is what helps him use pathos and elicit the reader to feel. It works.

           

           

           

Of Gaydar and Archaic Language

There is more to every day language than meets the eye. It is not just a pile of very obvious rules and errors. There is no definite right or wrong way to use language. Okay. There is. But taking into account the fact that words like “gaydar” and “mini-me” are currently in certified dictionaries, there might be a slight aberration from concrete rules of language as we speak.

And so I happen to agree with a certain Robert Lane Greene in his ideas of very often prescribed rules of standard English that he finds unnecessary. According to Lane, there are two types of people when in the bloodthirsty battle fronts of language wars: descriptivist and prescriptivist. Word just underlined the word “presciptivist” in red and so I’m guessing prescriptivists themselves are under a title that contradicts the essence of their beliefs. Then again, Word has never been a very creditable source. The point is, descriptivists describe language as it is while prescriptivists focus on how language should be used. In other words, the former try to comprehend language as it is now and find the intricacies of why it is used in such a manner while the latter are more archaic in their cemented beliefs that language rules from the 17^th century are to be followed in an era where women now have rights and African Americans are ruling one of the world’s “More Developed Countries.” In other words, their mindset is that of one who fails to understand the fluctuating world we live in.

Lane isn’t saying that we should just pay no heed to any language rules whatsoever and become a hodgepodge of chaos. He just happens to be more open in his ideology that while one should follow the rules, they don’t and should not dictate how we use language. Even a certain literary master like E.B White wrote about the proper use of “which” versus “that” and later on managed to make the same mistake he described. Lane accepts that White is a genius and ergo said mistake does not mar his talent in any way. This is seen when he says, “It’s a fine sentence from a fine American writer.” Lane manages to use pathos by appealing to the logic of the reader. If the reader recognizes White as the great writer that he is, then he or she will take a mere language mistake to be less significant. Great writing doesn’t necessarily have to be flawless in its compliance with language rules. Sometimes, it’s the way a person deviates from said rules that adds to a special tone and eccentric style that makes a writer stand out.