A new book by, and an old post about, Alan Glynn (on words as self-deluding weapons)

Today's mail brought a copy of Alan Glynn's upcoming novel Paradime, and that is beyond good news. No crime or thriller writer is more alert to the scary power of language, to its manipulation by government and business elites (including, of course, Apple), and to our eager complicity in that manipulation. Have you ever been part of the conversation? Part of a narrative?  (If not, you will be. We can partner on that going forward.) If so, and if you take words seriously, and think they should mean what they say, you'll like Glynn.

Paradime is Glynn's fifth novel, following Winterland, Bloodland, Graveland, and The Dark Fields. (The last is also available as Limitless, the title of the movie adaptation that starred Bradley Cooper and Robert DeNiro.) All the books are excellent.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

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Words are weapons, and Alan Glynn knows weapons can be evasive and defensive as well as offensive.  Anyone who says "going forward" clearly would prefer that you not examine what he or she has left behind. (Is it any accident that going forward entered the American lexicon in a big way around the time Mark McGwire torpedoed his Hall of Fame chances by telling the U.S. Senate that he was not here to talk about the past?)

Glynn is alert to the ominous vogue uses of conversation and narrative, especially by corporations and politicians. But even the good guys in his books slip into jargon of their own, which adds to his novels' all-embracing sense of dread. Here's the crusading reporter Ellen Dorsey in his new novel, Graveland, (emphasis mine):

"Walking back to her apartment, she decides that with the lack of any intel on the perps, the only other likely route into the story is through the vics."

Perps is probably widespread enough in American usage (Graveland is set in New York) by now to have been stripped of whatever moral weight it may once have carried, and I'm not sure vics (for victims) is real slang. But intel is real, as fraught with self-importance and grandiosity as good, ominous slang ought to be. (A good test for a buzzword's bullshit quotient is how easily it can be replaced with an ordinary word. In this case, intel says nothing information would not. Its bullshit score is therefore 100.)

*

Here's Glynn on 1970s paranoia thrillers. And here's a question for you, readers: What are your least favorite buzzwords and phrases that have come into wide use since the early 1990s, say since the beginning of Bill Clinton's first administration? Why do you hate them? Here are two more of mine:

• Friend modified by a person's name, e.g., a Clinton friend. Calls attention to the clubbiness of America's controlling elites, which might be good news except that reporters embraced the construction wholeheartedly. A (fill in the name) friend may a uniquely American construction. No one in the UK would see the need to call a prime minister's associate a Cameron friend because everyone would take for granted that, having gone to the same public schools before going on to Oxford or Cambridge, of course they were friends.
• Conversation, as a neat catch-all for the vast, messy sprawl of opinions, verbal ejaculations, and seeming irrelevancies on a given subject, with the implication that the mess can be tidied up and manipulated. Trust no one who invites you to be part of the conversation, much less, as one of Glynn's characters does in Bloodland, to "change the conversation."

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

News flash!!!

Mannion

Pearson

I've singled out Alan Glynn's fine novel Bloodland for recognizing narrative as a contemporary weasel word. So I was especially pleased just now when, 8 minutes, 51 seconds into Series 3, Episode 4 of The Thick of It, the jargon-spouting political spin doctor Stewart Pearson says: "Let's imagine here a narrative—" at which Peter Mannion MP rightly and righteously rolls his eyes and replies: "Oh, goodie." 

Sorry, The Onion and P.G. Wodehouse. Pack it in, S.J. Perelman. We can still be good friends, but I have a new love: The Thick of It.

***

I've just watched the first 3 minutes, 43 seconds of Veep, the new American TV series created by The Thick of It creator Armando Iannucci, and that was enough to send me back to The Thick of It. A Wikipedia article on Veep says the show uses "the same cinéma-vérité production style" as the TToI, and all I can say is what was that particular publicist watching?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

"Innovation": Breaking ground in buzzwords

He did not
produce innovation

I really do have a crime-fiction post lined up, but first a bit about a buzzword so pervasive that many people may not recognize it as such: Innovation.

I mean innovation as a product, not as a process, as an end rather than a means. What do I mean by this? In researching a recent post about Alan Glynn's Bloodland, I found that the author of a relevant statement worked for the Center for Innovation in something or other, and I thought, now there's a name tailor-made to capture the attention of deep-pocketed charitable foundations. What does a center for innovation produce? Innovation, I suppose.

On the other hand, there was Steve Jobs, who produced products. Yes, Jobs was an innovator (Thanks to him, millions of people can call up computer programs by swiping their fingers across a touch pad rather than clicking a button), but innovation for him was a means rather than an end. When innovation becomes a goal in itself, it's time to roll your eyes and watch millions of dollars being seduced out of millions of pockets.

(See "new and improved.")

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

More Alan Glynn, plus "interactive discussion"

Where was I? Oh, yes: buzzwords, privatization, the evils of corporate control.

Alan Glynn's new Bloodland sparked much of that discussion, and the concerns in that book are a neat bookend to those in Glynn's  2001 novel The Dark Fields (also published as Limitless, title of the movie based on it).

That novel follows a New York semi-slacker on a journey through Manhattan's financial stratosphere fueled by a magical drug that lets him do just about anything, includings things he can't always remember. Here are three favorite quotation from the book which, though ten years old, is possibly more pertinent today than ever:

"The military superpower was a thing of the past, a dinosaur, and the only structure that counted in the world today was the ‘hyperpower’, the digitalized, globalized English-language based entertainment culture that controlled the hearts, minds and disposable incomes of successive generations of 18- to 24-year-olds."

"She worked as the production co-ordinator of a small cable TV guide, but I’d always pictured her moving on to bigger and better things, editing a daily newspaper, directing movies, running for the Senate."

"Hank Atwood, the Chairman of MCL-Parnassus, was routinely described as one of the ‘architects of the entertainment-industrial complex.’"

Back on my personal newspaper front, a story about young civic activists had one touting "sustainable models" and another talking about a conference that sought to encourage "interactive discussion."

"Interactive discussion." That takes redundancy to the next level.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

"This point in time" to "regime change": What are your favorite weasel words?

I wrote yesterday about Alan Glynn's recognition in his novel Bloodland of narrative as a contemporary weasel word. Two further examples from the book make the word's ominous associations clearer:

"In fact, since the entire Buenke operation is under his command, he'll be the one responsible for shaping and disseminating the official narrative of what happened here."

and

"Of course, the high-visibility brace on his hand leaves no one in any doubt about the narrative subtext that's being peddled here."

What's so ominous about narrative? Couldn't Glynn have substituted story with equal effect? I don't know. Narrative, especially as a noun, is a vogue word, and vogue words, especially ones with lots of syllables, are good for concealing an absence of thought or conveying an illusion of seriousness. I may have more to say on this subject going forward.

But Glynn's ear for contemporary Orwellianisms goes further:

"`...your best chance with these people will actually be down to something else entirely, something quite intangible.'

"Conway looks at him. `What's that?'

"`You. The Conway Holdings brand.'"

and

"I've got to take it to the next level, you know, keep the traction but change the conversation."

The speakers of the boldface word are, respectively, a lawyer advising a client on evading the consequences of a shady deal, and a politician trying to capitalize on a monstrous lie. Be very, very skeptical of people who talk or write like that.

***

Most Americans would likely associate Richard Nixon ("This point in time") and the second George Bush ("Regime change") with truth-deflecting political euphemisms, but the Bill Clinton years ushered their own creepy phrases into popular speech, "national conversation," to name one, a weirdly bogus attempt to create an illusion of community in a fragmented culture.  What euphemisms and evasions do you find especially nauseating? What authors have especially sharp eyes and ears for them? 

© Peter Rozovsky 2011