Take the exam in Althouse's on-line class in media bias.

First, read this post about Dana Milbank's description of the way Senator Marco Rubio looked as he waited his turn to speak about the bipartisan immigration plan. Note the literary techniques he employs. He seems to be describing what he sees, but I implied that his descriptions revealed bias, and, indeed, that Milbank would like to destroy Marco Rubio.

Now, here's a video clip showing Marco Rubio giving his presentation. Feel free to listen to what he says, but I want you to concentrate on Senator Chuck Schumer, who can be seen at the left of the screen. Observe any gestures or expressions, because the assignment will involve describing him, deploying literary techniques of the sort we saw in Milbank's description of Rubio.



Here's the assignment. Write 2 descriptions of Schumer, in the style of Dana Milbank's description of Marco Rubio.

1. You are the equivalent of Milbank, but attuned to the goals of the Republican Party. You would like to impede the advancement of Chuck Schumer.

2. You are a Milbank-style columnist at a place like The Washington Post, and you'd like to further the political career of Senator Schumer.

Cast a critical eye on your work. Are your 2 descriptions equivalent? They should be equally accurate, equally presentable as journalism, equally in service to your political agenda.

What have you learned from this exercise? Has your respect for Milbank grown or shrunken? Explain.

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"A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble."

For some reason, that's been my official favorite "Great Gatsby" sentence for a long, long time. I thought I'd bring it out today after getting unreasonably angry at yesterday's "Great Gatsby" sentence (here in our Gatsby project of looking at one "Great Gatsby" sentence each day in absurd isolation). You remember, the crowded hams and the salads of harlequin designs. People said to me, Althouse, you are wrong, this is a perfectly wonderful sentence, it describes sumputuousness and sensuousness. Sumptuousness! I was contemptuous of all this you-us-ness. I said:

1. Any hack writer can use a lot of words and create a picture of a "sumptuous" feast.

2. I'm a reader, a consumer of the words, not of the food itself, so it's not like I'm getting a lot to eat here.

3. "Sumptuousness" seems like a corny idea, like something from a Harlequin (!) romance, especially in the effort to make it seem to refer to sexuality.

4. I'm not getting enough of an elite vibe from the food choices. They seem rather awful. It really does make me feel like it's Thanksgiving at Mom's, not a glorious affair at Gatsby's. Crowded hams! Could ya scootch over, Mom?

Then betamax3000 came in with sharp analysis attributed to Naked Advertisement Copywriter Robot:

Naked Advertisement Copywriter Robot has analyzed sentence and determined an 8.6 correlation with:

Appleby's

Suggested improvement: addition of the word "drizzled."

And so forth.  And that put me in a cheerful mood and prompted me to whip out the official Althouse favorite sentence. Three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble. I love that. After reading that, you feel like taking an oath never to say anything as banal as: I was introduced to three men, but I didn't catch a single name. Or: Someone introduced us to three men, but the sound quality in the room was such that they might as well all have been named Mr. Mumble. No, you realize, from now on, I must remember to simply assert that the men were introduced as Mr. Mumble. Let the reader lag for a quarter of a second and imagine that could be their names and then get it. Readers are quick. They get this comic, surreal accuracy.

Similarly surreal, the tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight. Don't bother us with the human being carrying the tray. No one thinks there's some magic floating tray. We get it, and we feel woozy with cocktails, so that it's no wonder every man is Mr. Mumble and every woman is a swatch of color — yellow, in the twilight.

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"I always start with physicality when I’m writing as a woman. So I always have a vagina and think about having periods."

Said Will Self, who has a new novel, "Umbrella," the title of which is based on the Joyce quote "A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella."

By the way, the first appearance of the word "umbrella" in English, according to the OED (not linkable), came in 1611:

T. Coryate Crudities sig. Lv,   Many of them doe carry other fine things.., which they commonly call in the Italian tongue vmbrellaes... These are made of leather something answerable to the forme of a little cannopy & hooped in the inside with diuers little wooden hoopes that extend the vmbrella in a prety large compasse.

That predates the first use of "vagina," which was in 1682:

T. Gibson Anat. Humane Bodies 20   It has passages..for the neck of the Bladder, and in Women for the vagina of the Womb.

The etymology of "vagina" is: "Latin vāgīna sheath, scabbard." The etymology of "umbrella" is: "Italian ombrella and ombrello, < ombra < Latin umbra shade."

Here's Perry Como singing "Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella."

Fill in the blank: Let a smile be your umbrella. Let a _________ be your vagina.

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"There are notes and notes, of course: notes to oneself and notes to others; notes taken, made, jotted, and passed."

"Mash, doctor's, suicide, and condolence notes. Field, class, and case notes; notes for general circulation; foot and head notes, notes of hand. But it's the bookish notes that academics care most about, the ones that intervene between the things we read and the things we write."

Geoffrey Nunberg has notes from his notes as a note-taker at a conference on notes.

For [Walter Benjamin], the rise of note-taking signaled the book's reduction into a purely transitional object, "an obsolete mediation between two different filing systems." Everything that matters, he said, could be found in the card boxes of the researcher who wrote it, which the scholar studying it had merely to incorporate in his own card index.

Ha ha. Brilliant. And archaic. Card boxes.

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"The biggest and weirdest myth out there about the $1 trillion platinum coin is..."

Matthew Yglesias debunks a myth without establishing that anyone believes it.

Clue to Matt: No one believes it.

This is one of those glaring examples of the attitude of superiority leading to missing humor and subtlety. You may think you're smart, but it's not smart to assume other people aren't smart too. I recommend a working assumption that other people are smart, and when you think you're reading something ridiculously stupid, go through the exercise of reading it with the thought that the writer is wonderfully clever. This is especially important when you are reading something concise/elliptical. Look at every word. Think before you mock.

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"Be a Sadist."

Rule #6 on Kurt Vonnegut's 8 rules for writing a short story:

No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

This is a problem I have with fiction. Characters are created for you to care about and the author invents torments for them — for us to enjoy. Have you ever written a fictional story and experienced sick excitement as you contemplated what you were about to do that poor unsuspecting sympathetic character you created? Or do you only read fiction. If you're able to get into fiction, is it because you fully trust the author to deliver the titillation of bad things happening to this sweet leading character?

This is a line of thought that brings me back around to an opinion I've arrived at from other directions as well: Give children nonfiction to read.

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"Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say..."

"... anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter — as indissolubly as if they were conceived together."

Let me preach again for one moment: I mean that what you have felt and thought will by itself invent a new style so that when people talk about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it, because they think that is only style that they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought.

ADDED: For comparison: "Something that you feel will find its own form."

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Obama's inauguration poet "tackles 'the intersection of his cultural identities as a Cuban-American gay man.'"

The poet is Richard Blanco, the verb "tackles" comes from Politico, and the quote within the quote is in the Presidential Inauguration Committee press release.

I'm not a poet, but I pay attention to images, and I find the picture of tackling an intersection absurd in a particularly amusing way. Intersection of his cultural identities is also absurd but only in that dry, dreary academic way that makes you want to say to all your children and grandchildren: Do not major in the humanities!

What amuses me about tackling an intersection is that it seems to reveal the author's anxiety about the masculinity of the gay poet. Why make us picture a football move? Admittedly, the verb tackle originally meant to equip (a ship) with the necessary furnishing and then to harness (a horse), and only later "To grip, lay hold of, take in hand, deal with; to fasten upon, attack, encounter (a person or animal) physically." So says the OED. But it's all pretty damned macho.

There's no Blanco poetry at the link, but there is a description of an essay "Afternoons as Endora" from a collection "My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them."

“According to [my grandmother], I was a no-good sissy — un mariconcito — the queer shame of the family,” Blanco wrote. “And she let me know it all the time: Why don’t we just sign you up for ballet lessons? Everyone thinks you’re a girl on the phone — can’t you talk like a man? I’d rather have a granddaughter who’s a whore than a grandson who is a faggot like you.”

Go here for a little more of the writing, including Blanco's description of dressing up like Endora and watching "Bewitched" on TV:

Together we'd turn Mrs. Kravitz into a chihuahua, Derwood into a donkey, or Uncle Arthur into a chair. We were unstoppable....

I was a helpless and scared child, powerless against my grandmother, while Endora was a mighty witch with limitless powers. Unlike Samantha, her foolish daughter, she was a witch who wasn't afraid of being a witch, and used her magic to get her way or enact revenge every time she had a chance.

A fantasy of power. Suitable for a presidential inauguration.

AND: More on Blanco:

"Since the beginning of the campaign, I totally related to [Obama's] life story and the way he speaks of his family, and of course his multicultural background,” Mr. Blanco said... “There has always been a spiritual connection in that sense. I feel in some ways that when I’m writing about my family, I’m writing about him."...

Cynics might say that in picking a Latino gay poet, Mr. Obama is covering his political bases....

Aw, come on. People observing the normal things that happen in politics don't deserve to be called "cynics." OED defines "cynic" as:

A person disposed to rail or find fault; now usually: One who shows a disposition to disbelieve in the sincerity or goodness of human motives and actions, and is wont to express this by sneers and sarcasms; a sneering fault-finder.

Oh, what the hell. I'll accept the label. With politicians, we should be cynics. By the way, "cynic" comes from the Greek for dog-like (which you can sort of see in the word currish, which echoes in churlish).

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"A serious person should try to write posthumously."

"By that I took her to mean that one should compose as if the usual constraints—of fashion, commerce, self-censorship, public and, perhaps especially, intellectual opinion—did not operate."

Or...

"Write...  as if you are alive, both because the alternative is cramped and stupid, and because you don't have any other choice."

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"Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes."

The most interesting thing about today's "Gatsby" sentence is the use of plunged for the action of the hands into the pockets, when the feet are in a puddle of water. A puddle isn't deep, and Gatsby is just standing in the puddle. He can't be plunged into a mere puddle, but then again, his pockets are not bodies of water, so the plunging into the pockets is metaphorical.

The puddle is shallow and the pockets are not deep water, and Gatsby's hands aren't really weights. They're just like weights. But if you were weighted and plunged into deep water, you'd be in great danger of dying, and, indeed, Gatsby is pale as death. Drowning could be called a tragedy, and Gatsby is glaring tragically into the narrator's eyes.

Maybe you think this sentence is overwritten. Pale as death is a cliché and it's sort of redundant with glaring tragically.  Adverb adversaries would say you don't need tragically when you've already got glaring. Verbosity prigs might say if the narrator is able to see that Gatsby is glaring, it's tedious to go to the trouble to tack on into my eyes. And into my eyes is kind of a slow way to coast to an ending when you're trying to be this dramatic, what with death and weights and tragically dragging us down.

But maybe if we could escape from this isolated sentence — which we can't, in the Gatsby project as arbitrarily defined by me — we would see reason behind the seemingly weak into my eyes. Gatsby is desperate for something that must come, very specifically, from the narrator. Save me!

AND: Did "a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes" bother you?

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In discussing what makes a job the "least stressful"...

... consider that, in this context, the opposite of stress is control.

Is that true? For some, I would think, too much control would lead to stress. Let's say much was expected of you. You were supposed to be brilliant, high-achieving, and productive. But it was your responsibility to define your tasks, to figure out how to accomplish them, to set your own standards about what constitutes excellence, and to put time — any time, whenever you want, night or day, weekdays or weekends — into doing what you've decided is appropriate to do.

There is some reason to think that people feel best when they are in the psychological state called "flow," which is defined as having 8 components:

First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over. Finally, the sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours. The combination of all these elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it.

Can you get there within the "least stressful" job, university professor? Of course. But you'd better be good at defining realistic tasks that will look accomplished when they are accomplished. You'd better be able to get into the zone where you feel a sense of effortless expertise.

Mihaly Csikszentmihaly's book "Flow" identifies surgery and rock climbing as 2 activities that produce flow for the people who have the appropriate expertise. There, the tasks are specific, and the feedback about whether you are doing them right is clear. Compare a scholarly book project, which might take years, where you might wonder whether what you are writing is too dull or too controversial or unsupported by the data you're trying to use or who knows what your colleagues — your rivals? — will say about it at some unknown point in the future if you ever get this damned thing done?

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"Gatsby’s notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and so become authorities on his past, had increased all summer until he fell just short of being news."

That's from Chapter 6. I'm getting used to these F. Scott Fitzgerald sentences (as I continue with this Gatsby project, taking one sentence out of context every day). Each one — so far — has a little narrative arc, with perhaps a missing center or a surprising ending. In today's sentence, we see a process of inflation and then deflation.

"Gatsby’s notoriety" — Gatsby has fame. He's big. We begin this sentence with bigness. The word "notoriety" tends to refer to a negative sort of fame. For example, E.M. Forster, in "Room with a View," wrote: "Mrs. Honeychurch... would abandon every topic to inveigh against those women who (instead of minding their houses and their children) seek notoriety by print." Imagine what she would think about blogger ladies. 

But back to Gatsby. He's got notoriety — which is bigness — and it spreads. It gets bigger.

It is spread about by the hundreds — now the sense of inflation comes not in the form of the great Gatsby but the hundreds, the horde of people. Who are they? They are the ones who "had accepted his hospitality," so there's an inference of big parties. In moving from Gatsby to the hundreds, we see a transaction occurring. Gatsby is giving hospitality and getting fame-spreading. The fame comes in the form that he wants. It's a joke to say that these people are "authorities on his past." Drawn to his parties, they got loaded with the stories he wanted told. He plied them, got them drunk with an illusion of authority, which motivates them to spread Gatsby's PR. And they spread it successfully because of their belief in the stories they are telling. The hundreds desire inflated size too, and if they are authorities, they have it, and they seem to love to go about in the world, flaunting their bigness, even as they are dupes for Gatsby, increasing his notoriety.

Notice the progression of -ity/-ety words in the sentence: notoriety, hospitality, authority. There's poetry to the sound alone, but the similarity of these words makes us feel a logic to the mechanism operating here. Hospitality promotes authority and thus notoriety.

We finally arrive at the verb of this sentence: increased. If we were diagramming this sentence, we'd build around notoriety | increased. The bigness got bigger. We've arrived at the peak of the narrative arc, where we get to stay all summer until — "until" is the word that warns of change — he fell. He fell! We are plummeting into the back end of this arc. He fell just short. Where's our bigness now? We get our 2 jarring smallness words: fell and short. And now we arrive at the punchline: just short of being news.

He was so big, he had his hundreds and his notoriety — increasing all summer — but in the end, how big was he? He didn't break the surface of the public consciousness. He wasn't news.

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"They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house."

I decided to pluck something from Chapter 1 for today's entry in the "Great Gatsby" project. I randomly selected the sentence that appears above. You must believe me that it is indeed random, and yet someone had just emailed me to say he liked the Gatsby project and:

When I was a Harvard Freshman in 58-59, I took the required freshman English class and the instructor was an expert on Gatsby....

At one point while we were reading Gatsby for the class, he remarked "Have you noticed that whenever you see Daisy in the novel, she is wearing white?"

Now, how can my correspondent believe that I randomly picked a sentence with 2 women in white? But, on my purest honor, I did. We're focusing on sentences, so I don't know or care whether Daisy was one of the 2 women. I won't presume, though I will presume that the 2 entities known as "They" are women, given that they are wearing dresses. We must bring our knowledge of what is possible and what is probable to the enterprise of reading, even as we bear down on an isolated sentence. One or both of "them" might be a transvestite male (or a nonhuman), but I'm going to presume 2 women (or girls).

The "they" is perplexing in another, more disturbing way, because it reappears halfway through in "as if they had just been blown back." We're given a simile that asks us to picture the women, in their white dresses, flying around the house at some earlier moment. They — the women — look like they just landed, as their dresses are "rippling and fluttering" from a recent "short flight." But to say "their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back" is to create ambiguity, the possibility that the "they" was "their dresses," and we might feel called upon to picture the dresses, by themselves, flying around the house before getting blown back onto the 2 erstwhile naked women. The flying-around-the-house image is fantastical, so we can't tap our our knowledge of what is possible and what is probable, and yet, somehow we know it was the women in their dresses who seem as if they'd just flown around the house and gotten blown back in.

I think the problem of 2 possible antecedents for the second "they" is a writing error, and this Gatsby project is premised on the greatness of the sentences. I hate to be the one to have to say a good editing eye would have seen that ambiguity, but the greatness of the sentence-writing doesn't require a complete absence of error, and the logic of the sentence precludes the dresses flying around the house on their own because we can't picture the dresses getting back on the women without losing the "rippling and fluttering" action caused by the flight and landing. So enough of that. Stop picturing naked women waiting while their dresses fly around the house.

It was the women, so magical and light, like birds or butterflies, that flew around the house. They could fly, but they didn't fly far, only around the house which they got blown back into. These women don't have much ambition or power on their own. They are housebound, even though they can fly. They do an orbit of the house and then a breeze sweeps them back in. But here they are, so pretty in their fluttery white dresses. And of course, they only look as if they'd taken that charmingly domestic flight. The truth is they are sitting together in the house, and they haven't been going anywhere. But there is a breeze, a breeze that might blow a butterfly into the house, and it ripples their flimsy dresses.

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"A paparazzo hoping to get a picture of Justin Bieber in his Ferrari after the vehicle was pulled over by police in Los Angeles got struck and killed by an SUV instead."

"And as it turned out, the 18-year-old singer wasn't even in the sports car."

This seems to be an occasion for wheeling out that horrible old saying: He died doing what he loved. He thought he had Justin Bieber set up for a shot. The photographer was swelling with delight and then — blam — not from a Ferrari but an SUV. Let's hope he never knew what hit him — to coin a phrase — and never knew that Bieber wasn't even in that car. He died doing what he loved! He had his peak of paparazzi ecstasy and then... annihilation. A consummation. It's over.

But wait! Justin Bieber wants to speak:

"While I was not present nor directly involved with this tragic accident, my thoughts and prayers are with the family of the victim... Hopefully this tragedy will finally inspire meaningful legislation and whatever other necessary steps to protect the lives and safety of celebrities, police officers, innocent public bystanders, and the photographers themselves."

Oh, Justin. Not every screw-up is an argument for legislation. Putting "meaningful" in front of "legislation" is itself meaningful, but what does it mean? 1. It means meaninglessness, an empty existential cry in the face of helplessness. 2. It means I would like to soothe myself with the fantasy that if the right laws had been in place, the bad thing that just happened would not have happened. 3. It means that we can express meaning through laws, that laws work as expression, quite aside from whether they have any effect on the bad things we would like to call bad.

Now, should we also get on Bieber's case for calling what happened a "tragedy"?

Tragedy (Ancient Greek: τραγῳδία, tragōidia, "he-goat-song") is a form of drama based on human suffering that invokes in its audience an accompanying catharsis or pleasure in the viewing....

Pedants love to say that the word "tragedy" is misused, but I think we may have encountered a correct use of the word. That correct usage seems out of place with the rest of the statement, with its angst about prayer, inspiration, and meaning. One suspects Bieber bumbled into saying something he wouldn't have meant to say. It's meaning without a mind that meant it. We witness human suffering and feel... good!

ADDED: The more apt term is poetic justice — "a literary device in which virtue is ultimately rewarded or vice punished, often in modern literature by an ironic twist of fate intimately related to the character's own conduct." The key is the self-contained logic of the story. It makes sense. There should be no call for legislation to find meaning. The meaning is already there. What happened is exactly right: poetic justice. The Wikipedia page I just linked has some examples, and since we were just talking about Wile E. Coyote, I enjoyed seeing him first on the list of poetic justice in TV and film: "Wile E. Coyote always sets traps for Road Runner, only to end up in the traps themselves." The phrase "hoist with his own petard" expresses the concept. Did you know it's from "Hamlet":

"For 'tis the sport to have the engineer / Hoist with his own petard." (Shakespeare, Hamlet (III.iv.226).)

And did you know (again, from Wikipedia):

During the late 17th century, critics pursuing a neo-classical standard would criticize William Shakespeare in favor of Ben Jonson precisely on the grounds that Shakespeare's characters change during the course of the play.... When Restoration comedy, in particular, flouted poetic justice by rewarding libertines and punishing dull-witted moralists, there was a backlash in favor of drama, in particular, of more strict moral correspondence.

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"Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season..."

"... suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed."

We're sticking to sentences, here in our "Gatsby" project. I won't pretend not to know that Daisy is the main female character in the book, but for the purposes of this project, I'm disregarding what we know about her and where she might be in the plot line when this sentence appears. I'd like to follow a rule that excludes all extrinsic evidence, but the phrase "this twilight universe" shows why that rule may be too severe. Nevertheless, I'm going to stick with the no-extrinsic-evidence rule, and accept "this twilight universe" as a mystery. Daisy has been up to something in what is now being referred to as "this twilight universe," and there's something poignant about encountering someone — a flower-named woman — in a mysterious place where she has moved before and is beginning to move again.
That Daisy's renewed movement comes with the season makes us think of the plants that come and go seasonally. One third of the way through the sentence, we are thinking about the annual cycle of the seasons as well as the daily cycle of light and dark that contains twilight. A flower that is a woman moves within the inexorable movements of the universe.

This lone female is suddenly joined by numerous men. Though the unnamed men never get definition as individuals, they presumably get one-on-one dates with her, since the numbers match up: half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men. This is the kind of "dating" one associates with a prostitute. The "twilight universe" feels more sinister, and the next thing we see is Daisy in bed: drowsing asleep at dawn. The daily sun cycle has turned from twilight to dawn, the 6 dates have somehow been cranked through and (suddenly) there is our wilted flower on her bed, but there is a string of words — like a string of men — that we must experience before we get to to "bed" (the last word of the sentence (she and we must get to bed)).

The words are the things on the floor beside her bed: "the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids." Orchids! There is Daisy — the flower we associate with freshness and simplicity — and there, next to her, on the way to the bed, are the complicated flowers whose name, literally, means testicles. So the 6 men were unnamed, but there is a name that bespeaks male sexuality. And there are those testicles, dying (as Daisy is drowsing), dying and all tangled up the pretty tatters — beads and chiffon — of what once was a dress.

Note carefully that it is not a dress that is tangled up with the orchids, it is the beads and chiffon, suggesting that the delicate dress has lost all integrity. And yet our Daisy has disentangled herself from the spewings of sex that lie on the floor. And she's not passed out, dead drunk. She's drowsing, in her presumably pretty nakedness.

It's dawn, and she will emerge again, with the cycle of the new day, fresh and daisy-like again. Remember, she was only beginning to move through this twilight universe, and with the new day, the movement will continue, with 6 more men and another dress to move through. She's not caught in this twilight universe. She moves through it. She gets through the men and through the dresses, and sleeps lightly as the detritus dies on the floor.

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"Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York..."

"... every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves."

I warned you I was going to do this. Come on. Play along. (And, no, I wasn't thinking about Andy Kaufman when I dreamed this up. It was all a riff on that Baz Luhrmann trailer for the new "Great Gatsby" movie.)

So, now, let's talk about oranges and lemons. The phrase "oranges and lemons" appears twice in the sentence, unchanged, even as the oranges and lemons themselves are changed. That's the whole action of the sentence, the transformation of oranges and lemons in one form into oranges and lemons in another form. Here they are on Friday, in crates, and here they are on Monday in "a pyramid." That is, they have become, in that alluded-to time period  — the weekend — a pile of garbage. But the pile is called "a pyramid," A pyramid! We're called upon to think of the grand erections of pharaohs, in comparison to crates from the lowly little character with the silly-sounding occupation "fruiterer."

Are the crates even stacked up? There's the absurd and obviously false notion that the fruit has been improved by whatever it was that went on in that house over the weekend. That absurdity calls upon us to think about the people who arrived and left, the people who ate all that fruit. But of course, they didn't eat it. They drank it. The pulp was extracted for use in alcoholic mixtures, and if the fruit emerged from the weekend as "pulpless halves," then, we may infer, so did the people. We don't hesitate to keep calling them human, yet we see the inaptness of calling the mere rinds "lemons and oranges." Even if you could conceptualize the big pile of rinds as a pyramid, you'd easily perceive it as garbage. Since that perception is easy, we have energy left to think about what is more difficult. Who are these people?

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