Winter has well and truly arrived. If you’ve forgotten what daylight looks like, ice is forming on your keyboard and your fingers feel as though rigor mortis has set in, then let Litopia After Dark thaw you out with the warmth of our convivial banter and the fever of heated debate.  This week we’re discussing the death of irony, writing in colour, sound-bite culture, cosy village pubs and sex addiction… red hot topics to fire up your synapses and set light to your brain cells.

In a piece in the New York Times this week, Andy Newman reports that eminent novelist Joan Didion has declared that irony is dead. Research appears to confirm this. A Nexis search found that the incidence of the words “irony,” “ironic” and “ironically” in major American newspapers during the two-week period beginning Nov. 6 slipped 19 percent from the same period last year. We ask whether Didion is right, are the days of irony over?

There’s no disputing the fact that the internet is a huge research boon for writers, yet in this week’s Boston Globe, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow suggests that far from widening our horizons, the net may actually be making the average writer rather myopic in their research.  How far will the internet take us with our search for answers, and is it far enough?

Harvard magazine this month looks at how animals acquire the language of colour and use it. With nature ablaze with colour, we’re wondering just how colourful – literally – writers really are. It’s a bit like asking – so you dream in colour? And how important is the language of colour?

In FIRST THINGS: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life, John McWhorter reviews a new book by Elvin T. Lim, entitled The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush.  The problem is real, says McWhorter. Analyzing all the presidential inaugural addresses, for example, Lim shows that the average sentence length has become ever shorter and the level of vocabulary ever lower. So, is oratory dead? Can we expect better oratory from Obama than Bush?

Bloomsbury are reissuing the collected drinking books of that old soak, Kingsley Amis. On Drink, is a witty, belligerent and often profound defence of the kind of drinking habits that Kingsley acquired in the Old England of mixed drinks and beer. In it, Amis laments the destruction wrought on the English pub, writes Roger Scruton in The Observer. Is the English pub really dead?

The days of the misery memoir may be limited, but rapidly rising up to replace it is the first-person account of the author’s sex addiction. In recent months, we’ve had Susan Cheever’s Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction, Benoit Denizet-Lewis’s America Anonymous: Eight Addicts in Search of a Life, Rachel Resnick’s Love Junkie, Kerry Cohen’s Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity, and a few higher-class affairs such as Giulia Sissa’s Sex and Sensuality in the Ancient World and Ian Kelly’s Casanova: Actor Lover Priest Spy. What is with all these sex addiction memoirs? Who is reading them… and why???

On the panel this week we’ve kept it small and intimate to create maximum warmth.  There’s scorching Donna Ballman, blistering Dave Bartram and inflamed Eve Harvey () and the Ustream chatroom (8pm GMT) was on fire this week, join us next Friday in the smouldering ruins.

Links mentioned in the show…

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

In the New York Times, Andy Newman…

PITY poor irony. Declared dead after 9/11, it staged a strong rally beneath a “Mission Accomplished” banner, only to find itself in mortal danger once again.

Its ill health was noted by, among others, no less an ironist than Joan Didion, the nation’s poet laureate of disillusion. The week after the election, in a talk at the New York Public Library, Ms. Didion lamented that the United States in the era of Barack Obama had become an “irony-free zone,” a vast Kool-Aid tank where “naïveté, translated into ‘hope,’ was now in” and where “innocence, even when it looked like ignorance, was now prized.”

Who’d want to live in a world like that?

But are ironic sensibilities like Ms. Didion’s — the detachment of mind, the appreciation of the folly of taking things at face value — really disappearing?

Not according to the conservative humorist P. J. O’Rourke, who reported from his New Hampshire office on Wednesday that he was finishing a piece for The Weekly Standard with the working title, “Is It Too Soon to Start Talking About the Failed Obama Presidency Just Because He Isn’t President Yet?”

Not according to the thin black novelist Colson Whitehead, who wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times under the headline, “Finally, a Thin President.”

“Something bad happens, like 9/11, it’s the death of irony,” Mr. Whitehead said in an e-mail message on Thursday. “Something good happens, like Obama’s win, it’s the death of irony. When will someone proclaim the death of iceberg lettuce? I’m sick of it making my salads boring.”

To be sure, President-elect, you’re no 9/11. Back then, irony seemed, for a time, impossible. Nowadays, Ms. Didion said in her talk, which will be published Monday in The New York Review of Books, it is simply “not the preferred way” of viewing events.

In the Boston Globe, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow…

FOR SCHOLARS – ESPECIALLY scholars who like to wear pyjamas – the Internet has been a godsend. It allows instant communication with colleagues around the globe, and makes tracking down published research a matter of seconds.

But perhaps the greatest boon is the sheer quantity of readily accessible knowledge. Millions of journal articles are available online, enabling scholars to find material they never would have encountered at their university libraries. From classic psychology studies to the most esoteric literary theory, it’s all just a few clicks away.

A recent study, however, suggests that despite this cornucopia, the boom in online research may actually have a “narrowing” effect on scholarship. James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, analyzed a database of 34 million articles in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and determined that as more journal issues came online, new papers referenced a relatively smaller pool of articles, which tended to be more recent, at the expense of older and more obscure work. Overall, Evans says, published research has expanded, due to a proliferation of journals, authors, and conferences. But the paper, which appeared in July in the journal Science, concludes that the Internet’s influence is to tighten consensus, posing the risk that good ideas may be ignored and lost – the opposite of the Internet’s promise.

“Winners are inadvertently picked,” says Evans. “It drives out diversity.”

In Harvard Magazine, Christopher Reed…

To delight and instruct, The Language of Color at the Harvard Museum of Natural History corrals a many-hued menagerie of birds, mammals, reptiles, fish, mollusks, and wonderfully iridescent beetles from the University’s numerous collections of specimens, and adds a colony of live dart frogs in a miniature jungle. With text, videos, and engaging interactive computer displays, it offers revelations to humans not fluent in the language of color.

The poisonous dart frogs use conspicuous color to tell predators that they are not good to eat. Similarly, a venomous coral snake sports rings of bright color to advertise that it isn’t to be messed with—by a bird considering it for lunch, for instance—while a milk snake, which isn’t poisonous and could be taken quite safely, looks much like a coral snake and trades on the latter’s reputation. Bauer fellow Marcus Kronforst studies a bad-tasting species of butterfly that is orange, black, and yellow, and other species of unsavory butterflies that mimic its color and pattern to form a uniformed corps of the unappetizing.

In First Things, John McWhorter…

In our times, we are not surprised that in policy statements slogans will be valued over explanations and parsimony of words valued over complete accounts. For a defense of the war in Iraq, for example, we expect applause lines such as “When the Iraqis stand up, we’ll stand down.” For more serious policy engagement, we look to wonky policy journals, not to the president.

Most of us have come to accept this state of affairs, but not Elvin Lim. His recent bookThe Anti-Intellectual Presidency is not one more rant about the limited cognitive abilities of George W. Bush but a brisk, methodical deconstruction of “the relentless simplification of presidential rhetoric in the last two centuries and the increasing substitution of arguments with applause-rendering platitudes, partisan punch lines and emotional and human interest appeals.”

The problem is real. Analyzing all the presidential inaugural addresses, for example, Lim shows that the average sentence length has become ever shorter and the level of vocabulary ever lower. The rallyesque State of the Union address that is now typical—a sequence of punchy lines designed to elicit applause—was unheard of until the Nixon administration. At that time, the average media sound bite was forty-two seconds, which sounds almost Faulkneresque compared to a mere eight seconds in 2000.

In contrast to the elevated, didactic level of discourse expected in, for example, Lincoln’s era, which produced the likes of the Gettysburg Address, the Public Papers of the Clinton administration show that “government was conducted in the language of eighth- and ninth-graders.”

Using logos (argument), ethos (credibility), and pathos (emotion)—the distinctions Aristotle made in rhetoric—Lim observes that logos has been all but eclipsed in modern presidential speeches. Today, for example, Woodrow Wilson’s professorial speech in support of the League of Nations proposal seems almost otherworldly. “I have perceived more and more that men have been busy creating an absolutely false impression of what the treaty of peace and the Covenant of the League of Nations contain and mean,” Wilson said, and he followed it with a point-by-point refutation. He did not hesitate to engage the kind of detail that we would now expect from National Public Radio rather than from the president himself: “You have heard a great deal—something that was true and a great deal that was false—about that provision of the treaty which hands over to Japan the rights which Germany enjoyed in the province of Shantung in China.”

Wilson’s focus on explanation was not exotic in his time. Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats were regularly praised as “instructive” and “explanatory” by listeners, descriptions distinctly unlikely for any president today. More typical today is the contrast between a paragraph of one of Bush’s speeches defending the Iraq War at its start and one made at the same time by Great Britain’s then prime minister, Tony Blair. Lim notes that Blair’s paragraph contained seven reasons for invading Iraq, while Bush’s contained only one, with an eye cast toward pathos rather than logos: “We choose to meet that threat now, where it arises, before it can appear suddenly in our skies and cities.”

In The Guardian, Roger Scruton…

Kingsley Amis wrote three short books on drink, which are collected for the first time here. The first, On Drink, is a witty, belligerent and often profound defence of the kind of drinking habits that Kingsley acquired in the Old England of mixed drinks and beer. Its recipes are based on spirits, the repeated recourse to which enabled Kingsley to suffer fools if not gladly, then at least with a recognition that their defects are largely human

These recipes belong to a vanished world, in which you had to think hard as to how to get as much alcohol into the system for as little outlay as possible, and in which those noxious medicines Dubonnet, Martini, Advocaat and Noilly Prat stood on the sideboard, waiting to be enlivened with vodka or gin. Wine occasionally gets a look in, but it is clear that Kingsley despised the stuff, as representing an alcohol-to-price ratio far below the horizon of a real drinker’s need.

At the start, Amis announces certain ‘general principles’ to be followed in creating drinks, all of which can be derived, by natural drinkers’ logic, from the first of them, which holds that ‘up to a point [i.e. short of offering your guests one of those Balkan plonks marketed as wine, Cyprus sherry, poteen and the like], go for quantity rather than quality’. Spirits prevail over the stuff that might soften their impact, as illustrated by the Lucky Jim, which consists of 12 to 15 parts vodka to one part vermouth and two parts cucumber juice, and there is a drink for just about every ordeal that Kingsley’s ordeal-filled life could be expected to present.

In The Chronicle Review, Carlin Romano…

Some people just like to do it again and again and again.

Go to conferences, that is. Direct dissertations. Apply for jobs. Publish their latest thoughts, no matter how uncooked. And yes, that other thing — OK, make it those other things — that librarians might categorize under “Sex: Supernumerary.”

When David Duchovny checked into a facility for treatment of sex addiction a while back, a certain smirking overtook the land. What does such a facility deny you, folks thought — access to your thoughts? “Other bodies” may be closer to the banned substance, but there’s no denying that many people don’t take sex addiction seriously. They think of it as on a par with “tennis addiction,” or “travel addiction,” or “good-restaurant addiction” — a category mistake left over from religions that exalt the noncorporeal.

Au contraire, suggests an onslaught of books this season. Even in the age of Viagra, Cialis, and newly upbeat senior citizens, too much sex and too much interest in it can be fatal, it seems, to one’s self-esteem and esteem in the eyes of others.

The current lead title in this arena is Susan Cheever’s Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction (Simon & Schuster, 2008). The daughter of novelist John Cheever and an accomplished writer herself, the author comes out big time as one overly familiar with the supposed ailment. She catalogs her promiscuous history while retailing useful info about sex addiction’s connection to alcoholism. (It seems Alcoholics Anonymous guru Bill Wilson suffered from sex addiction once he cleared up his other problem.)

Soon to follow in her footsteps is Benoit Denizet-Lewis, a New York Times Magazine contributing writer, with America Anonymous: Eight Addicts in Search of a Life (Simon & Schuster, 2009). That book contextualizes Denizet-Lewis’s recovery from sex addiction amid tales of fellow addicts hooked on or returning slowly from surrender to drugs, food, alcohol, or gambling.

The sociological bent of both authors gives them a leg up, so to speak, on writers who simply memoir their way, however finely and entertainingly, into the subject.

With thanks to iosonadry on Flickr for the tail photo

Filed under Litopia After Dark. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.