Last Wednesday the Writhing Society came out of hibernation and reconvened at Proteus Gowanus to take up a challenge posed by Carrie Cooperider FWS. She had found, in her collection of odd books, Grenville Kleiser’s 15,000 Useful Phrases, a self-help compendium from 1919. 15,000 Useful Phrases provides a set of readymade locutions, some as simple as an adjective-noun combination, some more elaborate, but all meant to be useful to a person lacking the Harvard vocabulary but interested in raising his or her station in life. Kleiser combed through the literature of the period to come up with — besides merely useful phrases — significant phrases, felicitous phrases, impressive phrases, prepositional phrases, business phrases, literary expressions, striking similes, public speaking phrases, and miscellaneous phrases.
Just this table of contents proposes a constraint, to extend the list in a sort of Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia entry (cf. “John Wilkins’ Analytic Language” in Other Inquisitions): phrases found on tombstones, phrases most often garbled by actors, phrases that sound like Finnish vulgarities, phrases popular with parrots, phrases with too many d’s in them, phrases that raise the dead, private speaking phrases, and so on.
You can download the entire text of Kleiser for nothing from: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18362. The page reproduced above gives you the flavor of his enterprise. The young Jay Gatz, on his way to becoming Gatsby, surely memorized a dozen of these every day. They bespeak that interesting moment in American history when working-class men and women who had been through the wars, either in Europe or in the battle for suffrage, who had been doing some reading and hearing some speakers, decided to challenge the oligarchy by appropriating their speech. (For a look into the same process among immigrants, in this case Jews, see Leo Rosten’s immortal The Education of Hyman Kaplan, in print from Prion Books.)
Carrie proposed a couple of ways in which Kleiser’s readymades might be used. The first, which we didn’t try but which we sense would be fruitful, was to take a published interview (and here I’d like to put in a plug for BOMB magazine, where artists interview other artists) and replace all the answers with phrases from Kleiser. The second requires the writer to fill in if… /then… constructions with phrases. Some results follow, after we note that other similar correlative constructions are equally attractive: neither… /nor…; not only… /but also…; on the one hand… /on the other hand…; there was a time when… / but now… ; shading into the oulipian Marcel Bénabou’s list of antitheses: “Maybe you [do or think or like something]; not me [followed by details].”
If/Then
If the adroit flatterer is the precursor of love, is the ambiguous grimace its apotheosis? (George Spencer)
If familiar sacredness, then air, woodland, water. (Jocelyn Hoshauer)
If each like a corpse within its grave then eyes like a very dark topaz. (Erik Schurink)
If exquisite tact, then a mind very like a bookcase. (Wendy Walker)
If enforced silence, then explosive violence. (Jonah Bloch-Johnson)
If lacerated feelings, then she permitted herself a delicate little smile. (Tom La Farge)
If pelted with an interminable torrent of words, then equitably governed. (Corina Bardoff)
A couple of further procedures were proposed by Jonah Bloch-Johnson, whom we knew in a former life and who here made his entry into the Writhing Society with great fanfare (he is a musician). Jonah began by identifying Kleiser’s phrases as consisting of clichés. Many of them are, certainly, though not many are current. Clichés, Jonah argued, point to some sort of concept in our minds or some sort of experience that many people have had. Flann O’Brien would agree: "A cliché is a phrase that has become fossilized, its component words deprived of their intrinsic light and meaning by incessant usage. Thus it appears that clichés reflect somewhat the frequency of the same situations in life. If this be so, a sociological commentary could be compiled from these items of mortified language." Writing as “Myles na gCopaleen” he compiled a catechism of cliché in his Cruiskeen Lawn column in the Irish Times. A sample:
When things are few, what also are they? Far between.
What are stocks of fuel doing when they are low? Running.
How low are they running? Dangerously.
What does one do with a suggestion? One throws it out.
For what does one throw a suggestion out? For what it may be worth.
What else can be thrown out? A hint.
In addition to hurling a hint on such lateral trajectory, what other not unviolent action can be taken with it? It can be dropped.
What else is sometimes dropped? The subject.
For more like this, go to: http://grammar.about.com/b/2008/10/01/the-myles-na-gopaleen-catechism-of-cliche.htm
As a first step, then, at Jonah’s orders, we were to choose a phrase, or more than one, and then for each phrase chosen write two or three short descriptions of situations that the phrase could be used to indicate, the descriptions to be two or three sentences long “and include some detail.” He left it to us to decide whether the activating phrase should be mentioned or suppressed. Then as a second step one would compose a narrative connecting all the descriptions of all the phrases.
The first of these steps could be practiced collaboratively. Each participant in a group could choose a phrase and begin by writing a single short description of the situation evoked by that phrase, and then, concealing that description, pass the phrase along to the next person, who would repeat the process. At the end of a round each participant would have a collection of situation-descriptions by various hands, and then could proceed to write the narrative connecting them.
What we actually did was another minor variation. We each chose two phrases from Kleiser. We then passed those choices to the person on our right. (If we were doing this again, I’d pass one to the right and the other to the left.) We performed Jonah’s first step for each phrase individually, but only describing a single situation. Then we wrote a longer description of the situation suggested by both phrases taken together. I was handed limpid twilight and shadowy vistas of sylvan beauty (both poetic phrases, as you can see). Too easy in combination; there wasn’t much tension between them.
Corina Bardoff took the phrase excretory secretion in the following direction:
There is always a longer way to say a thing, and longer causes a listener to stop paying attention midway through a statement, so the air feels delicate around the two of you. A conversation should be like a silk negligee - soft and almost imperceptible - a negligee that will rip obscenely if anyone says "shit!"
From faces pale with bliss, like evening stars Erik Schurink derived:
At the museum of clocks with fluorescent numbers, there were no visitors but one, enough for the motion sensor to shut off the light, to dissolve the walls and ceiling into Dali’s hereafter.
Here is how Jocelyn Hoshauer combined fatalistic belief and affected, pedantic, and vain:
For living a sinful life, I was condemned to hell in a lecture hall. Knowing I couldn’t do anything about it anyway, I learned what “sin” meant in every religion, first in practice on earth, and then in theory, in hell.
And Wendy Walker’s merger of erudite labors with engulfing waters:
She dove into books looking for she knew not what, and they swallowed her completely. She read each sentence so closely, and pursued it so far, that in the end she couldn’t find her way home. On she journeyed, each volume dropping her through a trap-door into the next, with a what then or why or could this be true, and if so, according to whom? Where was the proof? Where the final word? Down she dropped through the rustling tunnel, down, down, into the nethermost circle of ink.
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