Diary – 30 October 2010

The other day my husband and I went to Winter’s Bone, the much praised (overpraised, we thought) film set in Missouri. Both of us have normal hearing but neither of us caught more than about half of the dialogue. Naturally, we didn’t fully grasp what was going on. It was a familiar experience. In many films now, as well as in much television drama, the sound is muffled and the actors seem to mumble and slur their words. No doubt this is in the interest of authenticity. But what about comprehensibility? Plots today, particularly of thrillers, are hard enough to follow; not being able to hear properly makes it almost impossible. This has been going on for ages. When I edited a short book programme on television in the 1980s, the producers cared passionately about visual precision; they insisted, for example, that no contributor wore a stripy tie because this might cause ‘lens flaring’. But they seemed wholly indifferent to verbal clarity, even though the main point of the programme was to listen to the ‘talking heads’.

The word ‘Dear’ is still sometimes used as a form of address in emails, though ‘Hi’ seems to have become the norm. What was once a ‘Dear John’ letter (breaking off a relationship) would presumably now be a ‘Hi John’ email. Meanwhile ‘yours sincerely’ and ‘yours faithfully’ have become obsolete. But what exercises me is the question of kisses. Even distant acquaintances seem to place xs after their name. But how many? Is one x more chic than two? Is three uncool?

There are some works of literature — fiction and non-fiction — which depict the extremes of human experience with so much insight and honesty that one feels one should wait for a while before reading another book.