Tim Dick, and keeping the writing simple for the sake of the stupid ...

Ever since Tim Dick ravaged classical music with inept wordsmithing, I've had a bone to pick with the fellow, especially as he refused the challenge issued on these pages, and failed to show up to Haydn's The Creation at the Sydney Opera House.

More loss to him, as a quick read of Peter McCallum's review in the SMH suggests the rag's not always cluttered with the ramblings of proud, boastful philistines. (From out of the void comes music of beauty).

Some manage to enjoy classical music done well, and McCallum neatly summarises the way the creative team fronting the SSO, and the band and choir, both in sharp form, took their audience back to a now exotic world, wherein Haydn astutely packaged the creation myth for eighteenth century audiences, and thereby generated his biggest hit. The result was delightful - rampantly sexist, but fun all the same - and it sustained the attention for an hour and a half, or thereabouts.

Note the length well. In the world of Dick, length is a matter of supreme importance.

So what's up this week in the world of Dick?

Well it seems the fellow has decided to take on the spirit of a prattling Polonius, and become a kind of Gerard Henderson of word smithing by urging on us Polonius's dictum "brevity is the soul of wit". Heroically he scribbles Take a clear mind and a sharp pencil into battle against verbiage.

Shakespeare was of course having fun with the sanctimonious claptrap mouthed by Polonius, and made the rat hiding behind the arras fail to follow his own advice, by shoving as many words into the old chatterbox's mouth as he could:

POLONIUS:
This business is well ended.
My liege, and madam, to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night night, and time is time.
Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time.
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief. Your noble son is mad.
Mad call I it; for, to define true madness,
What is't but to be nothing else but mad?
But let that go.

QUEEN:
More matter, with less art.

POLONIUS:
Madam, I swear I use no art at all.
That he is mad, 'tis true: 'tis true 'tis pity;
And pity 'tis 'tis true—a foolish figure!
But farewell it, for I will use no art.
Mad let us grant him then. And now remains
That we find out the cause of this effect
Or rather say, the cause of this defect,
For this effect defective comes by cause.
Thus it remains, and the remainder thus.

Which of course goes to show what fun you can have sending up a chatterbox at great and convoluted length.

Dick on the other hand purports to be mounting a campaign to cut through verbiage, and tell it simple so simple-minded folks can understand it all.

Luckily for him there are modern translations of Shakespeare which keep it simple for the Dicks of this world. Here's one, offering text and "translation":

POLONIUS:
This business is well ended.
My lord and madam, to lecture on
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night is night, and time is time,
Is only to waste night, day, and time.
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward decoration,
I will be brief: your noble son is crazy.
”Crazy” I call it, because to define true craziness,
What is it except to be nothing else but crazy?
But ignore that.

But enough of that, even though the absurdity of the 'translation' mounts by the line, as it's designed for lazy students who want to stay stupid while passing exams and writing essays.

Instead, how about this for an opening par?

The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts into a dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved, is derived from the perusal of the following entry in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club, which the editor of these papers feels the highest pleasure in laying before his readers, as a proof of the careful attention, indefatigable assiduity, and nice discrimination, with which his search among the multifarious documents confided to him has been conducted.

It is of course from Dickens' Pickwick Papers, but you could sample any Dickens, or any Victorian writer, say Jane Austen or George Eliot, or Thackeray, or others, say Lawrence Sterne, or Dean Swift, or Herman Melville, or dozens of others for examples of similar rich, florid, verbal flourishes.

Enough already, there are hundreds, thousands of writers, from any and every century, who treasure words and the richness of wordplay, and produce delicious results, a kind of ornate frolicking and gambolling ... sometimes roughly equivalent to the building of a gothic cathedral out of words.

But Dick will have none of it, because, in the classic Dick manner, he conflates all writing with the writing of a technical guide on the operation of a VCR, or a bureaucratic memo, or a legal opinion:

An admission of hypocrisy before writing poorly about poor writing, but I'll plead the parent defence: do as I say, not as I do. The war against literary blubber has gone on an awfully long time. Valiant battles are waged against waffle and worthy campaigns fought for clarity of thought. Yet still we hear leaders who can't say what they mean, and those who choose not to.

There was William Strunk's a brave effort in 1918, with The Elements of Style. He declared: ''Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary word, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.''

The hapless Dick tries to get out of jail by mentioning Jackson Pollock ignored the drawing directive so we might have Blue Poles, a bizarre notion, since splashing paint on canvas in the Pollock manner hardly constitutes drawing. (here).

Then he wheels out Polonius, and of all people the poet Robert Southey, as verbose a romantic as you might find, who started off with the epic Thalaba the Destroyer, a twelve book work with irregular stanzas and unrhymed lines (here). There are plenty of Southey's works on the intertubes, just make sure you take a packed lunch if you decide to explore the longer ones.

Next we get to the obligatory George Orwell quote, followed by an evocation of Don Watson, without a word of explanation as to why writers should try to imitate either Orwell or the ostentatiously simple Ernest Hemingway in their scribbles, or keep their scribbles to the style of a bureaucrat (as if Watson managed that challenge in his biography of Paul Keating).

Sure enough, Dick backtracks, just like a babbling Polonius, and allows Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song into the pantheon, accepts that Gibbon was not concise, nor Dickens, and then does a further 180 degree twirl:

... there is ample evidence Strunk, Orwell and Shakespeare are on the money. We should honour their rules, knowing brevity leads to clarity, and prolixity to confusion and obfuscation.

No, you goose, something simply said that is simply stupid remains simply stupid, and brevity as practised by Polonius isn't wi,t but another form of verbosity, verbiage and verbiflage.

There's a point to saying something well, but length is no indication that it's been said well, or with sufficient clarity or capacity to either aid comprehension or delight the soul (a sudden nightmare vision: T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland, abbreviated to one page by T. Dick and published by the Reader's Digest so at last it can be properly understood).

Happily Dick gives up on literature shortly after he's made a completely contradictory and incoherent goose of himself, because he wants to take on the High Court, and by golly, he's determined to say something stupid in a simple way about that institution as well:

This week, it released its judgment in ICM Agriculture v Commonwealth, telling us in 33,082 words and 109 pages who won and why. The Work Choices decision remains a scandal in length and content. It stretches to 411 pages, taking 135,147 words to explain why the constitution doesn't mean what it says.

Yep, the High Court clearly wasted 411 pages, because Dick can summarise it all in a short and profoundly stupid sentence. "The constitution doesn't mean what it says".

Well what document does say what it means, fixed in amber like a fossilised scarab, when everything is open for personal interpretation, from the bible to any constitution you care to name? Hence the business of lawyers and judges, and the flailing attempts of politicians to cage them and their sharp way with words and their varied meanings.

Nothing is but what is not, said another Shakespeare character, and he got that right, righter than the Dicks of the world.

Because, you see, Dick had the cheek to write:

As Mailer demonstrated, length isn't always proportional to incomprehensibility but it's a good indicator.

Can we now compose a Dick corollary? Shortness isn't always proportional to stupidity, but it's a good indicator.

Of course if you want to take a look at the High Court decision in the matter of Work Choices, it's freely available, here.

It isn't so hard to understand if you're interested in the complexities of state versus federal law and industrial relations, though it's written in the knowledge that there were legal sharks circling waiting to pounce, and is therefore written at elaborate forestalling length.

You can also look at the wording of Section 51 of the Australian Constitution, which these days a smart lawyer (of the Commonwealth or State kind) could drive a 22 wheel semi through if so inclined, especially if paid well enough by politicians wanting to have a pissing war about their turf.

Dick of course, wants it all kept simple for the simple minded, as if lawyers would suddenly turn around and put it all down in words of one syllable, so that they can be torn apart by a slavering, slobbering, howling pack of their colleagues.

According to a study in 2004, High Court judgments have quadrupled in length between World War I and 2000, with a marked spike after 1990. There are legitimate reasons for the growth but the effect is the same: exclusion of the citizenry from understanding the rules they are meant to obey, just as many Catholics were excluded before the church abandoned Latin.

It's a hard to be a good citizen if, after trying to find out, you still don't know the law.

Suddenly the average citizen wants to obey the rules of Section 51 of the constitution while drafting legislation for the Federal or state parliaments on industrial relations?

What on earth is the Dick on about? And what the hell has it got to do with the use of Latin in the Catholic mass? As if metaphysical gibberish written in English makes any more sense! Now can we have an explanation of transubstantiation in twenty words or less?

One day, when politicians are allowed private lives, I might seek public office. My first act as attorney-general would be to limit judgments to 10 pages, or 20 with my consent in exceptional cases. (If Mailer were alive, he could have as many as he liked.)

It's hard to write short. You have to think, decide and communicate. That's what judges are supposed to do. Right?

Wrong. In this particular case, they were there to decide on the validity of the legislation, and to explain complex matters in a coherent way, because of the implications and ramifications for Commonwealth and state legislators, and the appellants. They could have written it out in ten pages or less, and likely enough set the states off on further bouts of federalist bashing, but ain't it grand that the federal Labor party could retain a federal rather than state based industrial relations system under the same section? (here).

Oh dear, Dick as the classic comic writer for the High Court of Australia. Well I guess it would be a splendid make work scheme for lawyers.

But now I know why my hackles got a little rise when he wrote about classical music. Remember, back in the day when he scribbled There's just no sound argument for being hooked on classics:

Advertising people know most classics need a good edit. They know how to reduce a dreary, over-long composition into a good, snappy tune, or at least one that's not soporific.

Yep Tim Dick is a KISS man.

Now you might think that means keep it simple stupid, but in the case of Dick, I'm here to tell you it means keep it stupid, simpleton. They even have a Tee with a similar kind of logo enhanced feel:

Well it gave me great pleasure to write at great, tedious obfuscatory length about T. Dick and his views of the world.

A bit like splashing paint on a canvas and calling it drawing.

Now here's your prescribed reading for the week, courtesy of T. Dick: