Pressures

By Randy Koch

 

Like everyone else, I get calls from telemarketers, and I imagine that the training they receive before they dial my number goes something like this:

"Welcome to Ob-Nox, Inc.," announces a tall, middle-aged man, "one of the largest and most successful telemarketing companies in the country." His slicked-back hair glistens with reflected fluorescent light, and his green necktie curves over his potbelly like a grassy ski jump. He stands in a small room before a handful of new hires -- two college students needing money for tuition, a recently laid-off salesman with a mortgage and a daughter's wedding bearing down on him, a grey-haired woman whose Social Security check never lasts until the end of the month, and a business college grad desperate for some work experience to put on his resumé. The man looks down at each of them and then continues. "Ladies and gentlemen, you are about to embark on a great journey during which you will become not only a key to the continued success of Ob-Nox but part of the lifeblood of the international business community.

"Telemarketing is the most cost-effective and successful sales method since encyclopedia salesmen went door to door, and" -- a lopsided grin lifts the left side of his face -- "while you won't have to worry about big dogs, flat tires, bad roads, or cheap motels, you can and will rely on the same successful methods used by door-to-door salespeople over the past 75 years. In the Associate's Portfolio on the table before each of you, you will find the principles that have guided Ob-Nox to the pinnacle of the telemarketing world and which will now guide you as you begin your career as an Ob-Nox Associate."

The future telemarketers open their cheap two-pocket folders and pull a single sheet of paper from the right-hand side. At the top in a large, bold, calligraphic font is printed "Ob-Nox's Keys to Success for New Associates." Beneath that appears the following list:

1. Call when customers are likely to be tired, hungry, and impatient; in short, call when their defenses are down.

2. Stick to the script (located in the left-hand pocket of your Associate's Portfolio).

3. Talk fast; never give the customer an opportunity to ask a question.

4. Keep the pressure on.

"Any questions?" the man says as he looks at his wristwatch.

"Sir," the business college grad says meekly, "Do--"

"Good. This, ladies and gentlemen, concludes our training session. Take your place at one of the phones on that wall" -- he points to the back of the room -- "and make Ob-Nox proud."

Okay, I might have exaggerated a bit, but the Associate's fourth principle -- keep the pressure on -- interests me. When I get a phone call and discover it's a pushy salesperson, I'm tempted to say, "One moment, please," set the phone next to one of the speakers connected to my CD player, turn on an instrumental version of "I Shot the Sheriff," and go back to my computer. Certainly, I'd feel better, but let's not dismiss the idea of pressure too quickly since it also has its practical applications -- though in a much less obnoxious form -- in writing.

Pressure can be put on language by compressing it, by saying things as compactly as possible. A loose, flabby sentence takes up more space than necessary and does very little despite its size, much like a guy who spends too much time on the couch with a bag of potato chips in one hand and the television remote in the other. Flesh encircles him like gelatinous rings of Saturn, big and wobbly. His largeness is obviously not for appearance's sake but results from avoiding exertion and from the ease that comes with 21st-century life. Taking it easy on sentences, too, will result in slack, flaccid writing. On the other hand, muscularity can also be taken to an extreme, and suddenly the language and structure becomes inflated and self-important, like a body builder who flexes and bulks up and measures his biceps and pecs and quads, not for the utility of more muscle but for the sake of appearance. Similarly, sentences can be pushed to extremes, and all of the convolutions and gyrations of syntax and diction take on a self-importance that we see from people concerned with what others think of them. However, putting pressure on our sentences can produce a less obvious strength that comes not from length and big words but from compactness, density, and other more subtle qualities.

Surprising the reader by mixing in with sentences of predictable and ordinary length a suddenly brief, abrupt sentence or fragment is another way to put pressure on the language. This is much like a quarterback trying to mix up plays to keep the defense off-balance so that on third and goal out of a very tight formation, when everything suggests that the fullback will lead the tailback into the heart of the line, there's this nagging doubt in the linebackers' minds that maybe it'll be a tackle-eligible play or a little flare pass out to the running back or a slant pattern over the middle to the tight end. Then, when the ball is snapped and sore-kneed quarterback Joe Namath spins to his right and reaches out to the back, and the back accelerates toward the line and folds his arms over Namath's hand and propels himself like a springboard diver into the stack of grunting men, the defense converges on him like kids to a raspa truck. But trotting unexpectedly around the left end with the football hidden on his hip, Joe Willie, ignored by the defense because of his bad knees and the impossibility of his running the ball, eases into the end zone for the touchdown. This is what good writers do -- they keep the reader off balance and when they do something unexpected, the reader, though surprised, suddenly realizes how right, appropriate, and effective it is.

Another way of putting pressure on language is by making words mean more than they say. "Dead ashes" can mean either lifeless trees or the remains of a burned-out fire; in the right context, the possibility of it meaning both can be powerful and add another dimension to the writing. In The Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean's nonfiction bestseller that inspired the film Adaptation, the first description of main character John Laroche is of "some guy . . . gunning his throat." However, "gunning" is normally associated with an aggressive revving of an engine rather than throat clearing, but this detail of Laroche seems particularly appropriate a few pages later when we see how he drives and in subsequent chapters when we come to more fully understand his character. Similarly, early in Jonathan Franzen's National Book Award-winning novel The Corrections, Enid Lambert decides to move her husband Alfred's massive blue chair into the basement, and, of course, 70-year-old "Alfred followed." Then comes a statement that has literal meaning for the Lamberts and far-reaching implications for everyone else in the novel and for readers as well: "[L] ife came to be lived underground" (10). When words are chosen carefully, layers of meaning pile up on one another, compressing logic and leaving vivid impressions, like living fossils of future and long-past meanings, on our minds.

We've all heard that "a picture is worth a thousand words," but the truth is that few pictures actually are, particularly if the writer knows what he or she is doing. The cliché devalues words, sees them as common, cheap, widely available, and largely inadequate. It takes them for granted, much as I took water for granted when I lived in Minnesota . In the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes and of countless rivers, streams, creeks, and ponds, water was all around us. In Lake Itasca the Mississippi River gets its trickling start; in Duluth I first saw Lake Superior, its cold, blue-gray surface running to the horizon; and on camping trips to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota with my older brother Ken and some friends, we paddled across Insula Lake, paused in our canoes, dipped a cup in the water, and drank. But now that I live in Laredo, a place so desperate for water that the county judge is willing to entrust $1.2 million to a Russian medicine show in hopes that they'll be able to conjure clouds from a clear sky, I better appreciate the value of water just as I better understand the potential power and value of each word. Words that are compressed, as in a fine poem or a powerful short story, are also worth a thousand words. One only needs to read some academic criticism or book reviews to see the truth of this or try -- in fewer words than Albert Goldbarth used in his poem "And the Rustling Bough As an Alphabet" -- to explain the implications of his simile: "a row of ten-floor buildings / flattened to the ground, lined up like bodies / in the hands of a gang-style execution." Words create pictures, and are themselves pictures, their relatives long ago carved on cave walls and stone tablets, something most of us have forgotten when we mistakenly say that "a picture is worth a thousand words."

I've tried to put pressure on the language when writing poetry; it's what results from conscientious revision, from demanding that the words do more, say more, convey more with more precision and implication. I'm not talking about a psychological or emotional pressure, the sort of thing that we often feel when someone has high expectations for us or for our performance in a game or on the job, but about a physical pressure. When I write, I feel able to push the language to do things that it won't do on its own, to compress and squeeze it, to force it beyond its accepted and expected grammatical, syntactical and logical limits and into spots that readers will, however, accept and understand. It's bullying a noun into working like an adjective, coercing a verb to animate the inanimate, making an adverb wisely contradictory or at home among the comfortably homeless. It's withholding the thing that the reader feels barreling down on him, knowing that it's coming and wanting to jump ahead but unwilling to because he's immersed in the now. It's briefly -- though necessarily -- digressing and enticing the reader along. It's putting the language on the rack and forcing it to reveal its secrets to the reader and the writer.

It's recognizing pressure, how to create it, and even how to turn it on the telemarketer with capitals and periods, visible in print but tangible, nonetheless, in speech: "Do. Not. Call. Me. Again. I. Am. Writing."

 

(Randy Koch teaches English and directs the Writing Center at Texas A&M International University .)

 

Local Writers at Work

 

¶ Texas A&M International University English professor Dr. Faridoun Farrokh wrote the introduction for and translated prize-winning Iranian fiction writer Goli Taraghi's A Mansion in the Sky, recently published by University of Texas Press and now available through Amazon.com. Taraghi's fiction is known for exploring with finesse the psychological depths in her characters as they go through the ordinariness of everyday life.

¶ Early this year Norma Hannigan's poem, "Advocare," will appear in Reflections on Nursing Leadership, the newsmagazine of the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing. In addition, her essay "Nothing Personal" will be published in the July 2004 issue of ADVANCE for Nurse Practitioners.

¶ "Promised Land," a short story by local CPA Chris Morgan, was published in the most recent issue of RiverSedge, a literary journal out of UT-Pan American in Edinburg , TX . Chris has had stories published in La Frontera, Nerve Cowboy, and Concho River Review.

¶ Raquel Valle Sentíes was the featured artist in the Spring/Summer 2003 issue of Weber Studies, an art and literary journal published at Weber State University in Ogden , Utah . This issue includes a conversation (with excerpts from an interview which appeared in LareDOS in March 2003), color plates of 15 of her paintings, and eight poems, including "Soy como soy y qué", in both Spanish and English.