Saturday, January 12, 2008

Random bulletin points of (non)randomness

  • First of all, I resist the very idea of "random bullet-points." Bullet points by their nature imply a certain orderly arrangement of ideas, the sort of progression from point A to point B that is the antithesis of randomness.
  • Likewise "random notes." If you really want random notes, set a bunch of squirrels loose on a piano keyboard.
  • Even more annoying is the way my students use "random" to describe any piece of writing organized in an unfamiliar manner. I have heard students refer to the writing of Henry Adams as "random," which is sort of like calling Britney Spears "predictable" or "a model parent."
  • "The author did not just pull words out of a hat and toss them on the page any which way," I tell my non-random students. "The words are arranged that way for a reason. If that reason is not apparent to you on first glance, maybe you ought to look again."
  • Still, there's something appealing about the opportunity to just plop ideas down as they pop into my head, like this: 17! Mustard! Chattanooga!
  • But even those ideas are not really random, are they? I asked my mind for some random ideas and it sent me some, of which I chose these three, discarding others for various reasons.
  • Moreover, my mind could send me only those ideas with which it was already equipped and which were accessible on short notice.
  • I suspect that deep down, at a level inaccessible to my waking self, my mind is a seething mass of randomness, but if I could dip a bucket down into that chaotic well, I might come up with nothing more interesting than "17! Mustard! Chattanooga!"
  • And who really wants to read that?
  • So I believe I'll opt out of the whole "Random Bullet-Points" genre and revert to my usual plodding style...except now I've forgotten what I was going to say.


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