I should have known.  I should have anticipated that writing about an extremely controversial topic like Paul Revere would land me in trouble.  I should have predicted that, shortly after posting the latest edition of Brevity=Wit, my inbox would be rent asunder by a veritable firestorm of enraged emails.  But, foolishly, I did not.  And this is what I got for it:

“Paul Revere never made it to Concord!”

“How could you not mention Samuel Prescott and William Dawes?”

“He never said, ‘The British are coming!’  Most Massachusetts residents at the time thought of themselves as British!  He actually said, ‘The Regulars are coming!’ . . . oh wait.  You did that.  Never mind.”

Personally, I think that these people should really take up their problems with Longfellow.  He wrote the poem.  I was just going off of his work (and, for the record, even Hank gave a nod to both tradition and accuracy by using the phrase “British Regulars.”)  But, since he’s been dead for approximately 130 years, I guess I’m the only one around who can do anything about it.  So, here goes.

Listen, my readers, with “oohs” and with “aahs”
To a tale of Sam Prescott, and poor William Dawes
In the middle of April, Seventeen-seven-five
Truly no one is still alive
To remember that famous time of year

Now, Revere was not useless, as some’d have you believe
He was busy as he did to Lexington ride
Through fair Middlesex County he bobbed and did weave
And by time he was done they were fit to be tied
But to put him in Concord, where he didn’t belong
Longfellow, I am sorry to say, was quite wrong
And to leave out poor Prescott, and great Billy Dawes
Cheating them out of their highly deserved applause
Such a mighty affront should be against the laws

I normally like to start off these entries by mentioning my inspiration, describing the spark that led me to seek to improve each particular piece.  In this case, however, I will have to refrain.  There must have been some sort of catalyst, something that spurred me to this course of action, but I cannot for the life of me remember what.  So I’ll just say that we’re talking about Longfellow and leave it at that.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  Wow.  It takes an awful lot of characters just to get out this guy’s name.  I’ve got a bad feeling about this one.  But let’s go ahead and take a look anyway.  Here is perhaps his most famous poem, Paul Revere’s Ride:

“Listen my children and you shall hear:
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now”

Hardly a man is now awake sounds just about right to me.

Clearly, Longfellow has a thing or two to learn here.  First off, it’s generally not a good idea to start by calling your audience children.  A lot of people take offense at that.  Unless the ones he’s talking to really are his children, in which case I don’t think his poem is going to have a very broad appeal.  Call me a skeptic, but it seems unlikely that Longfellow got around like Genghis Khan got around, if you know what I mean (and no, I don’t mean “on a horse.”)

Then we’ve got this date.  Never spell out dates.  It’s such a blatant waste of characters.  But, worse than that, he doesn’t even finish it.  I mean, come on, Longfellow, how are you supposed to teach us kids about Paul Revere if we don’t even know which century he lived in?  Guess we have to do a little detective work on this one.

Hmm . . . Jimmy Hoffa, the Edmund Fitzgerald, Saturday Night Live, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the Thrilla in Manila . . . and Paul Revere?  Nope, it’s not 1975.

Carmen, indoor ice hockey, first person swims the English Channel . . . and Paul Revere?  Not 1875 either.

Second Centaurian Invasion, polar ice caps refreeze . . . and Paul Revere?  He’s not talking about 2075.

Second Continental Congress, “Give me Liberty or give me Death,” Bunker/Breed’s Hill . . . okay, now I think we’re got it.  1775.  Whew.  Took long enough.

Anyway, now that we’ve got that sorted out, we can get down to writing a version that’s short enough for everyone to enjoy:

“4/18/1775: Revere rides.  12:00- Medford.  1:00- Lexington.  2:00- Concord.  He told the villages and farms the Regulars were coming.”

There.  Now you know exactly when everything happened.  And isn’t that what’s really important?

Sport is in the air.  In college basketball, teams on the bubble are looking for one last hot run that might get them into the Big Dance.  In baseball, pitchers and catchers are reporting to spring training.  In the NHL . . . well, something must be going on.  And in Vancouver, in between uplifting and inspiring us, the greatest athletes in the world are reminding us of one of the greatest truths in sport: even heroes sometimes fall (in the case of the Winter Olympics, often literally).

In the realm of fiction, nowhere is this truth better exemplified than in Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s poem “Casey at the Bat.”  Long-term readers (and, as far as I know, I have nothing but) may recall from last summer that I am a particular fan of this work, and I thought it would be worth taking a look at it from another angle.  Non-fans of baseball often complain that the game is too long.  Wondering if these people might have the same problem with a poem about baseball, I decided to look into shortening it.

Let’s start from the beginning, shall we?

“The Outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day:
The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play.
And then when Co”

Now, we’ve seen this before: the author gets in a good introduction, but he wastes so many characters that he has no time left to get to the meat of the story.  Casey isn’t even mentioned for another stanza, and this hero doesn’t actually appear until about a thousand characters in.  Thayer gets to mention the Mudville nine, but the only specifics we get about them are the first two letters of a name (at least, we assume it’s a name because of the capital “C,” though his capitalization of “Outlook” makes such an assumption risky at best).

Authors could solve much of this “setting dilemma” by taking care of business with the title and then moving on.  In this case, once we’ve seen “Casey at the Bat,” we’re already pretty sure it’s about baseball, discounting the off chance that it’s a story about Casey and a buddy of his from the order Chiroptera.  But we can go further.  If the title was something like “Casey’s Bat: Hot or Not?” or “Casey: Hit or Die,” then we could easily skip the first 5-7 stanzas, avoiding wasting time with peripheral characters like “Cooney” and “Barrows,” who clearly aren’t as important as Casey himself.

This leaves us free to cover all the essential facts in a few quick, painless fragments (this is poetry, remember, so we’re not too worried about grammar):

“9th inning, two out.  Mudville down by 2, two men on base.  Casey takes strike one, strike two, strike three.  Game over.  Mudville joyless.”

Now that you’ve gotten the story of Casey out of the way, you have plenty of time to move on to reading the scouting report on the vastly underrated Jimmy Blake.

As Valentine’s Day was this weekend, I thought it only made sense to talk about expressions of love.  There are many ways to say, “I love you,” some long, some short, some famous, and some obscure.  Let’s take a look at “famous,” starting with this well-known poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For”

It’s not a bad start, really.  She loves as deeply as her soul can.  That’s pretty good.  But when you count it, as she herself suggests, that’s only one way, three tops, if you count “depth,” “breadth,” and height separately.  When you look at it that way, it’s not very impressive at all.

Let’s try another one, the famous Sonnet 18 by my good friend and frequent participant in Brevity=Wit, William Shakespeare:

“Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer’s lea”

This one’s just a mess.  You kind of understand where he’s going.  He does call her (or, depending on what interpretation you subscribe to, him) “lovely,” but that’s about it.  “Temperate?”  I really can’t tell if that’s supposed to be a compliment or not.  Clearly what happened here is that old Willy tried to profess his love, but in the end he panicked and just babbled on about the first thing that came into his head, which happened to be the weather.

Now, I’m not going to suggest any of my own compositions to be used instead.  And I suppose that even these long-winded sonnets could work for some people, if high school English class is their idea of romance.  But, for those of you that are looking for more bang for your buck (or, specifically, more content for your characters), then I would like to recommend this classic work of unknown authorship:

“Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Sugar is sweet,
And so are you.”

There you have it.  Everything you need, in only sixty-one characters.  A fabulous exemplar of brevity.

But it’s not the best.  Even this terse, to-the-point poem spends half the time going on about flowers, which don’t really have anything to do with anything.  If you want the ultimate declaration of love (as measured by quantity of love expressed per character), then I direct your attention to The Empire Strikes Back:

LEIA: “I love you.”

HAN: “I know.”

Eighteen characters.  Beautiful.  It doesn’t get any sweeter than that.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

In a previous edition of Brevity=Wit I lamented the disappearance of prologues, implying that they have all but vanished since Shakespeare, but there are some modern works that take the time to set the scene with a few choice words.  Some of the best-known examples from the latter half of the twentieth century are the “opening crawls” from the Star Wars trilogy.  George Lucas was a man who knew how to get the audience up to speed quickly, beginning the first of his most famous creations thusly:

“It is a period of civil war.
Rebel spaceships, striking
from a hidden base, have won
their first victory against
the evil Galactic Empire.

Du”

Zzzzzz . . .

Okay, you have to admit, those yellow letters moving slowly past a black backdrop are strangely hypnotic.  They could put people to sleep even without going on and on, which is why I think we should make sure that this introduction is no longer than it needs to be.

It’s not a bad start, really.  He sets up the whole “Rebellion vs. Empire” situation pretty effectively, but the point could easily still be made while conserving a few valuable characters.  A couple tips: one, do rebels have anything but hidden bases?  I can’t imagine they’d last very long operating out in the open.  Cut that phrase.  Second, do you honestly think anyone could believe that an organization called the “Galactic Empire” is not evil?  You save an easy five characters by removing that unnecessary classifier.

On the other hand, looking at this piece more harshly, we can see that many key elements are missing: the stolen plans, Princess Leia, the DEATH STAR for crying out loud!  Sure, you’ve established that there’s a war on, but I kind of already figured that, given the title, “Star Wars.”  How are we supposed to know why the big white spaceship is attacking the little gray one, or why the lady with the sticky-bun haircut is messing with that little robot, or what the heck that giant thing that looks like a moon but is actually a space station is?  Do you expect audiences to figure these things out for themselves?

Then at the very end the prologue appears to switch to German, but let’s not go into that.

Don’t worry, though.  This thing is salvageable, with a judicial application of brevity:

“Rebels stole plans for the Empire’s Death Star, which can blow up planets. Princess Leia got them, but she’s being chased. What can she do?”

There.  Now we the audience can sit back and watch spaceships shoot lasers at each other without having to think about a plot and other silly things like that.

As I write this, I find myself thinking about sports.  At any given moment, people all across the country are eagerly anticipating some big game somewhere.  It seems to me sometimes that the world of professional sports spectating is defined by waiting.  You have to wait during commercial breaks.  You have to wait during timeouts.  You have to wait during pitching changes.  And, from hockey rinks to baseball stadiums to football fields, before anything can even get started, you have to wait through someone singing our national anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner.  And when you’ve been thinking all week long about that first pitch, jump ball, or kickoff, it can feel like our friend Francis Scott Key wrote not just a song but an entire opera.

To be fair, the duration of the anthem is not entirely the fault of its author.  Let’s not forget the performers, those people who (if they bothered to learn the lyrics) can put eighteen or more syllables into the word “free.”  But I thought that it couldn’t hurt to take a look at the text and see if I couldn’t cut it down to a more reasonable length, for the sake of all those impatient sports fans out there.  My first attempt looked something like this:

“O, say can you see
By the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed
At the twilight’s last gleaming
Whose broad stripes and bright stars
Throu”

Sure, it’s shorter, but it’s also just about incomprehensible.  All I get is that we’re supposed to be looking at something with stripes and stars.  That could be anything: a tiger eating Lucky Charms, a zebra who was rewarded by his elementary school teacher for doing well on his homework, or a group of Hollywood party animals who got too rowdy and had to be sent off to prison.  Clearly, it takes more than twilight’s last gleaming to shed some light on this mess.

Now, you could argue that many people don’t know what the song is really about even in its full version, but I like to strive for clarity.  So here is the comprehensive abridged anthem:

“Look at that flag with the stripes and the stars.  You can see it by the gunfire.  Up there on the ramparts with those free and brave folks.”

There you go: you’ve got the flag, the stripes, the stars, the ramparts, the free and the brave, all the fun stuff.  Plus you don’t have to spend nearly as long on your feet before you get to sit down and enjoy the game.  And you know, it wouldn’t have to just be for sports.  Now that I think about it, I see no reason why you couldn’t replace the interminable full version of our national anthem with this baby (let’s call it “Starry Flag”) whenever you want.  Why, even in the most formal situations . . . what?  He actually wrote three more verses to this song?  Oh, come on, Key.  No wonder the British locked him up.  They must have been sports fans.

This week on Brevity=Wit, we take a break from our more literary investigations to examine a different genre of composition: giving directions.

The field of direction-giving is one in which brevity is perhaps even more important than in literature.  Lengthy directions are confusing and impractical; as you’re driving to your destination, you don’t want to be holding up a direction sheet the size of a newspaper (since this concept may be difficult for some to understand, think of it instead as being the size of about 30 iPhones) in front of your windshield.  The person being guided does not want to know about landmarks that are no longer there, or how to get to other places that are sort of on the way, or how it would be possible to get there if it weren’t for all this construction.  Keep it short and sweet.

For your further education, here is an example I once heard of how NOT to give directions:

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could”

And, if you can believe it, it goes on like that for about three more paragraphs.  These directions, given by a guy named Bob, are entirely unhelpful.  First off, directions should not be seasonal.  Just because the wood was yellow when you went there in October doesn’t mean it still will be when you’re telling me how to get there in February.  Second, there is absolutely no reason to discuss your feelings about a route.  Tell me that you tried both ways and one didn’t work, or that the other path is a decent alternative if you’re not in a hurry and want to avoid the highway.  Don’t tell me that you felt sorry for a road.

Thirdly, as you’ve probably noticed, our friend Bob presents us with a fork in the road and then doesn’t say which way to go. He does get to the topic eventually, in paragraph four, but even then his description is useless.  “The one less traveled by?”  How am I supposed to know?  What if the Department of Transportation came through and paved it since you were there?  C’mon, Bob.

Now, in this day and age, you could say that the art of giving directions is no longer necessary, that you can just go to Google Maps and type in “the yellow wood” and you’re all set.  But some people don’t fully trust internet directions.  Some still want to hear it from the mouth of someone who has been there, and if nothing else, Bob does convince you, at length, that he has been there.  For those people, I have prepared these succinct instructions:

“At Yellow Wood, the road splits.  Turn left.  Actually, you could go right, as long as you still get on the turnpike, but left is easier.”

Not being late to your job interview because you spent hours sitting in the woods wondering which way to go?  That’s what really makes all the difference.

Do you know what I miss?  I miss big opening speeches.  Nowadays it seems like everyone prefers to start off a story by just throwing you into the middle of it and letting you figure out what’s going on as things transpire.  Whatever happened to the storyteller, the almighty omniscient narrator, the unquestionable figure who appears in the beginning and definitively sets the stage for us all?

William Shakespeare knew how to do it.  Now there was a man who could open his plays with a great starting speech.  Let’s take a look at one of his most famous, the starting monologue from Romeo and Juliet:

“Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny.
Where civil blood makes”

Huh.  Wow.  Yeah, that opening speech was a lot longer than I remembered.  Setting the scene is all well and good, but come on, let’s see a little concision here!  If you’re going to begin with talking rather than action, you’ve got to make sure you wrap it up before you lose everyone’s attention.  We’re told about the feuding families, which is important, but I always thought that Romeo and Juliet was about, you know, Romeo and Juliet.  Our famous star-crossed lovers don’t appear in this intro.  And Heaven help you if you want to know what civil blood makes.  I can’t tell if the last line sounds like it should be a proverb or a Zen riddle.  Civil blood makes . . . civil neighbors?  Waste?  A man healthy, wealthy, and wise?  The sound of one hand clapping?

This thing definitely needs saving.  Let’s see if we can cut it down:

“Two classy families in Verona hate each other.  Two of their kids don’t, but they’re doomed.  When they kill themselves it fixes everything.”

Tada!  All the vital information, quick and easy.  Sure, it gives away the ending, but you’ve got to remember that this play predates the spoiler warning by several centuries.  When they call it The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, nobody’s expecting them to have kids and live to a ripe old age.  Anyway, with this we are able to finish the opening quickly and move on to the real meat of the play: puns on the carrying coals/colliers/choler/collar theme and a veritable rash of thumb-biting.

With Christmas coming up soon, I felt that it was time to take a look at a holiday classic.  “Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas,” commonly known as “The Night Before Christmas,” is a nice, short poem.  Clement Clarke Moore knew what he was doing; the whole thing can be read in only a few minutes, which is much quicker than all those Christmas carols, where it takes half an hour to remember and agree upon the words to all the obscure verses that no one ever sings.  Truly an exemplar of brevity . . . or, at least, it was in 1823, when it was first published.  Let’s see how it holds up to today’s standards:

“‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro’ the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimn”

Well that explains why everyone thinks the poem is called “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.”  It’s the only part that anyone can remember.  I mean, geez Louise, Moore really needs to remember what his priorities are.  He called the thing “Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas,” and the jolly guy himself never even makes it down the chimney (the chimney only barely sneaks in itself).  The author sets a nice scene, but is it really fair that the mouse, without even making a sound, earns more mention than the title character?  Looks like this thing is in need of serious work after all.

I don’t see what Moore’s big problem was.  The substance of the poem can be easily summed up within reasonable limits.  Observe:

“On Christmas Eve, I saw Santa and his reindeer on the roof.  He came down the chimney, laughed, went back up, and wished us well as he left.”

There you go.  Everything you need, right there in just two sentences.  St. Nick gets to play his part, as do the reindeer.  Everyone should be happy.

Of course, there are those who complain that the condensed version lacks the true Christmas spirit, that it lacks “whimsy.”  Let it never be said that I am an unreasonable man.  In response to this objection, I have prepared a second version that both stays within appropriate character limits and maintains the rhythm and rhyme that are what some people believe gives the poem its heart:

“Xmas Eve, quiet, I got up quick
Saw on the roof: ol’ jolly St. Nick
Gave gifts to us, then he took to flight
‘Merry Xmas to all, and also good’”

(NOTE: Sources suggest that St. Nicholas intended to include one additional final word in his parting phrase, but, most regrettably, his sleigh had already passed beyond the narrator’s range of hearing.)

Now, when we left off last week, Brutus had just calmed the rabid crowd (with the help of some tasteful editing) by convincing them that Caesar’s death was necessary in order for them all to remain free of tyranny.  But the funeral was not over yet.  Someone had to speak up for Caesar, and that someone was Marc Antony.  He may not have been as smart as Brutus, but he knew one thing: when given the choice, always choose to speak second.  And, to the ears of the gathered mob (who were satisfied by Brutus’ speech and probably already starting to break up), he spoke thus:

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is of”

Okay, so he starts off a little better than Brutus.  Antony was more of a people person.  It doesn’t take him nearly as long to get across the point that he wants them to listen.  After that, though, things go downhill.  It sounds like all he’s doing is backing up Brutus.  Not only does he say he’s not going to praise Caesar, he even goes so far as to suggest that the man was evil.  Maybe he was going to stick in something about how he was also good there at the end, but unless you were really paying attention, how would you ever know?  Looks like Marc Antony could use a little help as well:

“Listen, folks.  I thought Caesar was good, but Brutus says he was bad, and Brutus is honorable, right?  But, see, there’s this will . . .”

If there’s one thing that’s going to get people’s attention at a funeral, it’s a will.  By mentioning it right off the bat, he can ensure that everyone will forget all of Brutus’ high-fallutin’ talk about slavery and tyranny and such.  Marc Antony 1, Brutus 0.