re: Lapham

Well, I wrote the above post a couple weeks ago, and figured I was only about halfway through. But it's been kind of busy lately and I don't remember where I wanted to go. So I'll just say I've been thinking a lot, lately, about how we convince others through language. The problem is that when different people have different goals, political writing seeks agreement only rarely (as opposed to some legal contexts, eg).

So, not a particularly profound thought to memorialize the Editor's career. But I will say there's a touch of irony in Lapham's defense of clarity: for a man who writes with such rhythm, he is surprisingly unmemorable. Something about the density of the language, I think -- it's the opposite of pointillism. Reading his essays, I would get so caught up in the punchy little metaphors and analogies and allusions that the (rather basic) argument was left by the wayside before I'd even gone ten pages into the magazine. And then the figures of speech followed, having nothing to attach them to. Yeah. Density, a real killer. Something to bear in mind.