Lewis Carroll, Funnier than Historians
In an attempt to not get too bogged down by the end of the semester, I'm reading Carroll's Alice in Wonderland for the first time. It's hilarious, and great fun if you need some escapist literature. Especially good for me was his skewering of historians's pedantic prose:

They were indeed a queer-looking party that assembled on the bank - the birds with draggled feathers, the animals with their fur clinging close to them, all ripping wet, cross, and uncomfortable. The first question of course was, how to get dry again.
* * *
At last the mouse, who seemed to be a person of some authority among them, called out "Sit down, all of you, and listen to me! I'll soon make you dry enough!" . . . "Ahem!" said the Mouse with an important air. "Are you all ready? This is the driest thing I know. Silence all around if you please! 'William the Conqueror, whose cause was favored by the Pope, was soon submitted to by the English, who wanted leaders, and had been of late much accustomed to usurpation and conquest. Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria . . .'"

And if you think that sort of historical writing is just for the mid 19th century, try reading Bill Freehling's tome, "The Road to Disunion." It's an insightful book about the causes of the Civil War, but full of pedantic, turgid prose like this, from a page chosen at random:

An outsider who wished to share Southerners' sense of the world was wise to savor that moment. He was experiencing a master metaphor of the southern mind. The flow of slavery downward seemed as irreversible to a late antebellum slaveholder as sand in the hourglass. Eventually, it was widely feared in some quarters (and hoped in others), time would run out on slavery and plantations north of the Lower South.

Ugh. "As sand through the hourglass, so go the Days of Our Lives." If I ever write stuff like that I hope someone slaps me upside the head. Maybe I'll keep Louis Caroll nearby to keep me straight.

- posted by Tom Sawyer @ 11:17 PM