Half Write

Getting song titles, poems, and other writing to sit right is half headache, half heaven.

There is an English degree in the basement of my parents’ house. It’s mine. Whenever I tangle with diction, there are wins and losses between this piece of paper and its recipient.

Should I get a little pissed off, there’s a good chance I’ll weave a poem to cool my temper. Most poetry operates in a couple of dozen lines or less, so there’s greater pressure to cook every word to perfection. One poem of mine kicks off as follows:

“The decadent swing

Of a ten-foot martyr

Covers distant shame of having left”

Now, in a Substack article like this, I’d just say that walking through my former hometown reminds me of how tiny it feels, and that there are things about it I miss. Most people don’t care for language that’s so obfuscating. Every Shakespeare play comes with a translation these days, after all.

The problem is that there are times when I put significant effort into kick-ass sentences and two-word punches, only to neglect more basic matters. It might be a tiny word that I forgot to delete in the final draft (“to” or “a”), or I employ the same term to refer to something three or four times, rather than deleting the sin (“the car” or “the band”) with a syn…onym. When these ultra-occasional mistakes whiz by — I don’t have the money to hire an editor — my English degree wins. Substack is where our fights are bloodiest; outside of texting and leaving comments on social media, it’s where I write more “on the fly” than anywhere else, as a lightning rod catching high-voltage memories both new and old.

I can’t defend orphaned words left undeleted, but in daily speech, people often reuse certain terms. The words “automobile” or “ensemble” to replace “car” or “band,” respectively, are clunky on the tongue. There are even memes poking fun at attempts to cure this issue, like this one, featuring famed Needle Drop music critic (and my semi-boss) Anthony Fantano:

Speaking of music, whenever I make some, I try to dream up a creative track title. I pat myself on the back when my brain somehow imagines a weird-as-hell portmanteau that, with a little luck, no one in history has ever thought of. My recent instrumental “Nouveauligarchy” is a great instance of such wordplay — “nouveau” being French for “new.”

Autopilot can strike both non-writers and writers where it hurts. If you pen a story, you won’t be dumping a lot of “he was like,” “she was like,” and “I’m like” into a dialogue sequence. When you talk to someone in the real world, however, conversations become minefields if you’re not careful, each “like” a crippling explosive.

I know it’s far from the end of the world if I fail to say “the sophomore project of the outfit” instead of “the band’s second album” after using “band” and “album” in a paragraph. Still, signing off and publishing has an uncanny ability to bring these, and other dents, to the surface. Maybe we need a mock “publish” button that pretends to send your piece out, and an hour-long window begins, during which you are able to pore over your “public” work and make edits.

I try my damndest to hit a home run for every whiff, since I almost imagine a Picture of Dorian Gray thing happening otherwise, my degree getting consumed by Wite-Out™ as I continue to write. Trust me, everything I publish here has an engine behind it. I’d never cover something I don’t care about, so I hope the passion for all three of my favorite subjects — cars, music, and the written word — bleeds through. The Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat is a rough recording on today’s ears, but every song is blue on Wikipedia. Ferrari 250 GTO 3757GT has a driver’s door one centimeter longer than its passenger door, yet it’s worth tens of millions of dollars. I’m not saying my writing reaches such a stratosphere, but a chip in its paint might appear every now and again. Let me know, or don’t. I just hope you take it all in.