“No one would write a word, if he remembered how much fiction eventually comes true.” -- Richard Powers, Generosity.
Does your fiction writing predict your own future?
Many fiction writers have found this to be so -- but how to make sense of the phenomenon?
Well... any character you invent contains aspects of yourself. Plotting involves realistically forecasting a character's fate. (While to make similarly objective calculations regarding your own future would be emotionally impossible...)
So on the page you unconsciously create the person you'll eventually turn into? Powers is right that it's better not to think too much about this.
Powers once told Sven Birkerts, “I’ve often thought that each book is, in some ways, an attempt to answer those questions that I failed to answer in previous books. Even at the moment of delivery, most of the captives escape. The desire to go back in and write again is the desire to come to terms with those things that eluded closure.” This brings us back to novel writing as a process of self-integration, an irritating concept that I've already touched on.
I predict that in 2010 I'll be posting to this blog four times a week, instead of five times. A very happy New Year to you all!
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Should Your Characters Dream?
Someone reading one of my manuscripts once crossed out a dream sequence, and wrote, “You can always cut dreams.”
This is sometimes good advice, e.g. if you're aiming for a hardboiled style. Under other circumstances, I think dreams can add a lot to a novel.
One advantage of dreams for a fiction writer is that they tend to be emotionally charged.
Dreams can also, paradoxically, enhance a sense of overall realism -- real people do, after all, dream. Certain types of people, at certain stages in their life, are likely to pay attention to their dreams -- a dream can influence your emotional reactions to what happens after you wake up. Hence dreams can be useful for characterization.
Most people know the first line of Anna Karenina, but ask someone who's only read the book once what happens on the first few pages, and they probably won't remember Oblonsky's dream, about the decanters which are also women. But this dream very economically conveys Oblonsky's aimiably hedonistic and chauvinistic world view. Plus the description of Oblonsky's dream, so early on, signals what an omniscient narrator we have to deal with, and displays the depth of Tolstoy's reach into the psyches of his characters.
What scenes do you remember where fictional characters dream?
Roberto Bolaño in 2666 records a lot of dreams, especially in the first part, “The Part About the Critics.” These dreams help foster the book's mysterious atmosphere. Amalfitano's dream at the end of “The Part About Amalfitano” is one of my favorite in the book – the dream where the last Communist philosopher turns out to be Boris Yeltsin, who tells Amalfitano that the equation of life is "supply + demand + magic." I like this because it's completely “off” in the way real dreams are completely “off” -- more than any other dream in the book, I suspect it of being a dream Bolaño really had himself.
This is sometimes good advice, e.g. if you're aiming for a hardboiled style. Under other circumstances, I think dreams can add a lot to a novel.
One advantage of dreams for a fiction writer is that they tend to be emotionally charged.
Dreams can also, paradoxically, enhance a sense of overall realism -- real people do, after all, dream. Certain types of people, at certain stages in their life, are likely to pay attention to their dreams -- a dream can influence your emotional reactions to what happens after you wake up. Hence dreams can be useful for characterization.
Most people know the first line of Anna Karenina, but ask someone who's only read the book once what happens on the first few pages, and they probably won't remember Oblonsky's dream, about the decanters which are also women. But this dream very economically conveys Oblonsky's aimiably hedonistic and chauvinistic world view. Plus the description of Oblonsky's dream, so early on, signals what an omniscient narrator we have to deal with, and displays the depth of Tolstoy's reach into the psyches of his characters.
What scenes do you remember where fictional characters dream?
Roberto Bolaño in 2666 records a lot of dreams, especially in the first part, “The Part About the Critics.” These dreams help foster the book's mysterious atmosphere. Amalfitano's dream at the end of “The Part About Amalfitano” is one of my favorite in the book – the dream where the last Communist philosopher turns out to be Boris Yeltsin, who tells Amalfitano that the equation of life is "supply + demand + magic." I like this because it's completely “off” in the way real dreams are completely “off” -- more than any other dream in the book, I suspect it of being a dream Bolaño really had himself.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Mueenuddin and Turgenev
Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders has been compared to various works by nineteenth-century Russians – especially Turgenev, one of Mueenuddin's influences. Contemporary Pakistan as seen by Mueenuddin is disturbingly reminiscent of Turgenev's Russia -- a place where the impact of Westernization is powerfully destabilizing.
There are also temperamental affinities between Turgenev and Mueenuddin. Belonging to the intelligentsia of a failing state must be conducive to melancholy.
The way Mueenuddin tells it, the Westernized elite of the Punjab like to party, but they treat their servants like serfs. The justice system is mind-bogglingly corrupt, and there's no safety net for the poor. To me it was surprising how little of a role Islam played in the lives of Mueenuddin's characters – the overall impression is of Paksitan as a feudal, patriarchal, yet largely secular state.
“Lily” is my favorite story in the collection, although I'm not sure the ending is fully earned. “A Spoiled Man” is possibly the best story in the collection, and certainly the most depressing.
A story of Mueenuddin's you can read online is “Home." It isn't in In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, but is similarly bitter and poignant.
There are also temperamental affinities between Turgenev and Mueenuddin. Belonging to the intelligentsia of a failing state must be conducive to melancholy.
The way Mueenuddin tells it, the Westernized elite of the Punjab like to party, but they treat their servants like serfs. The justice system is mind-bogglingly corrupt, and there's no safety net for the poor. To me it was surprising how little of a role Islam played in the lives of Mueenuddin's characters – the overall impression is of Paksitan as a feudal, patriarchal, yet largely secular state.
“Lily” is my favorite story in the collection, although I'm not sure the ending is fully earned. “A Spoiled Man” is possibly the best story in the collection, and certainly the most depressing.
A story of Mueenuddin's you can read online is “Home." It isn't in In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, but is similarly bitter and poignant.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Diurnal Versus Nocturnal Writers
Tolstoy, reported in A. B. Goldenveizer's Talks with Tolstoy -- “I always write in the morning. I was pleased to hear lately that Rousseau too, after he got up in the morning, went for a short walk and sat down to work. In the morning one's head is particularly fresh. The best thoughts most often come in the morning after walking, while still in bed or during the walk. Many writers work at night. Dostoevesky always wrote at night. In a writer there must always be two people – the writer and the critic. And, if one works at night, with a cigarette in one's mouth, although the work of creation goes on briskly, the critic is for the most part in abeyance, and this is very dangerous...”
What's irritating about this passage is that Tolstoy didn't have to work for living, whereas Dostoevsky did. So Dostoevsky had less choice about when to write.
But is Tolstoy right that one creates briskly at night, and is insufficiently critical? If so, wouldn't it make sense to write at night, and edit one's writing the next morning? Suppose an important part of the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, as writers, turned out to stem from what time of day they wrote at...
Kate Morgenroth here describes finding it easier to write prolifically at night, the attendant disadvantage being an increased sense of isolation from the rest of the world...
What's irritating about this passage is that Tolstoy didn't have to work for living, whereas Dostoevsky did. So Dostoevsky had less choice about when to write.
But is Tolstoy right that one creates briskly at night, and is insufficiently critical? If so, wouldn't it make sense to write at night, and edit one's writing the next morning? Suppose an important part of the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, as writers, turned out to stem from what time of day they wrote at...
Kate Morgenroth here describes finding it easier to write prolifically at night, the attendant disadvantage being an increased sense of isolation from the rest of the world...
Friday, December 25, 2009
“Little Billee" and Oral History
Suppose all you knew of the world's literary heritage was what your parents' generation memorized and transmitted to you orally.
Of course, in a world without writing, your parents might have felt compelled to pass rather more oral literature down to you than they actually did.
“Little Billee" was a poem my father liked to recite by heart. After his death, it occurred to me to type some of the words into a search engine, and I learned that the poem was dashed off by William Makepiece Thackeray in 1845. Without the Internet, I might never have found this out, since nowadays you could spend a lifetime reading without stumbling on any of Thackeray's light verse. However it turns out these lyrics were well known for several generations. Apparently Thackeray intended for them to be sung to the tune of “Il y avait un petit navire” but, perhaps fortunately, my father did not know this tune -- he simply recited the words of "Little Billee" with gusto.
This article by Paul Cowdell places “Little Billee” in the context of other maritime cannibalism ballads:
"The entry of a song into oral tradition, and its survival, depend on several factors. There is a complex relationship between a singer's personal taste and the subject of a song. Songs dealing directly with social phenomena and experiences will find singers not just because they have good tunes; they must to some extent accord with singers' understanding of the phenomena they describe. As those phenomena change, it is likely that songs about them will also change."
"I would argue that William Makepeace Thackeray's 'Little Billee' (Roud 905), which was recorded in oral tradition well into the twentieth century, illustrates this process. In the case of songs about survival cannibalism at sea, a substantial part of the repertoire reflects, more or less accurately, an accepted maritime custom during the period of sail. Through the second half of the nineteenth century, changes in maritime life, often enforced legally, altered the cultural landscape. 'Little Billee' was based sufficiently closely on traditional material to enter tradition itself, just before the circumstances it described with affectionate parody disappeared from the cultural horizon."
My father presumably heard this song in the 1930s or 1940s. Part of the reason it stuck in his mind was that he was himself the youngest of three sons. He was still reciting “Little Billee” in the 1970s, when I first heard it from him. Why is it that I know of no songs or poems about the cannibalism associated with the 1972 crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571? After all, this catastrophe actually occurred in my lifetime. (Okay, so there is a stanza about this incident in a James Fenton poem.)
Cowdell claims “Little Billee” only entered oral tradition among sailors once improvements in navigation and technology reduced the likelihood of maritime cannibalism. At this point, he says, sailors stopped singing the more serious cannibalism ballads, and took up the more jokey ones previously reserved for landlubbers in music-halls.
Of course, in a world without writing, your parents might have felt compelled to pass rather more oral literature down to you than they actually did.
“Little Billee" was a poem my father liked to recite by heart. After his death, it occurred to me to type some of the words into a search engine, and I learned that the poem was dashed off by William Makepiece Thackeray in 1845. Without the Internet, I might never have found this out, since nowadays you could spend a lifetime reading without stumbling on any of Thackeray's light verse. However it turns out these lyrics were well known for several generations. Apparently Thackeray intended for them to be sung to the tune of “Il y avait un petit navire” but, perhaps fortunately, my father did not know this tune -- he simply recited the words of "Little Billee" with gusto.
This article by Paul Cowdell places “Little Billee” in the context of other maritime cannibalism ballads:
"The entry of a song into oral tradition, and its survival, depend on several factors. There is a complex relationship between a singer's personal taste and the subject of a song. Songs dealing directly with social phenomena and experiences will find singers not just because they have good tunes; they must to some extent accord with singers' understanding of the phenomena they describe. As those phenomena change, it is likely that songs about them will also change."
"I would argue that William Makepeace Thackeray's 'Little Billee' (Roud 905), which was recorded in oral tradition well into the twentieth century, illustrates this process. In the case of songs about survival cannibalism at sea, a substantial part of the repertoire reflects, more or less accurately, an accepted maritime custom during the period of sail. Through the second half of the nineteenth century, changes in maritime life, often enforced legally, altered the cultural landscape. 'Little Billee' was based sufficiently closely on traditional material to enter tradition itself, just before the circumstances it described with affectionate parody disappeared from the cultural horizon."
My father presumably heard this song in the 1930s or 1940s. Part of the reason it stuck in his mind was that he was himself the youngest of three sons. He was still reciting “Little Billee” in the 1970s, when I first heard it from him. Why is it that I know of no songs or poems about the cannibalism associated with the 1972 crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571? After all, this catastrophe actually occurred in my lifetime. (Okay, so there is a stanza about this incident in a James Fenton poem.)
Cowdell claims “Little Billee” only entered oral tradition among sailors once improvements in navigation and technology reduced the likelihood of maritime cannibalism. At this point, he says, sailors stopped singing the more serious cannibalism ballads, and took up the more jokey ones previously reserved for landlubbers in music-halls.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
The Material Increasingly Masters the Stylistic Intent
I just reread Erich Auerbach's Mimesis. In this book Auerbach develops an amazingly powerful way of combining close reading and distant reading. He closely analyzes a chunk of text, then steps back to ask, what about this writing would have been inconceivable a century or so earlier? Again and again, this technique enables him to draw surprising observations that one feels should have been obvious. An amazing demonstration of how much can be legitimately read between the lines, Mimesis leaves me with the feeling that, whatever a text purports to be about, it's its style that's truly informationally rich.
Here's Auerbach on Ammianus, a fourth century Roman historian:
“... he definitely belongs to the tradition of the antique historians in the elevated style, who look down from above and judge by moral standards, and who never make conscious and intentional use of the technique of realistic imitation because they scorn it as fit only for the low comic style. The particular form of this tradition, which seems to have been especially favored in late Roman times (it is already embodied in Sallust, but especially in Tacitus), is very strongly stoic in temper; it delights in choosing exceptionally somber subjects, which reveal a high degree of moral corruption, and then sharply contrasting them with its ideal concept of original simplicity, purity, and virtue. This is the pattern which Ammianus obviously wants to follow, as appear from many passages of his work in which he cites deeds and sayings of earlier times in moralistic contrast. But from the very beginning we sense – and, in Ammianus, the impression becomes unmistakable – that in this tradition the material increasingly masters the stylistic intent, until it finally overwhelms it and forces the style, with its pretension to reserve and refinement, to adapt itself to the content, so that diction and syntax, torn between the somber realism of the content and the unrealistically refined tendency of the style, begin to change and become inharmonious, overburdened, and harsh. The diction grows mannered; the constructions begin, as it were, to writhe and twist. The equable elegance is disturbed; the refined reserve gives way to a somber pomp; and, against its will as it were, the style renders a greater sensoriousness than would originally have become compatible with gravitas, yet gravitas itself is by no means lost, but on the contrary is heightened. The elevated style become hyperpathetic and gruesome, becomes pictorial and sensorial.”
Rather as if making a medical diagnosis, Auerbach depicts an old tradition wrenched into new shapes by the pressure of great historical forces. I'm left with the strange suspicion that one can make cross-cultural generalizations about late Imperial style -- a lot of what Auerbach says about Ammianus seems to me also to apply to late Imperial English writers like Evelyn Waugh.
Alasdair Gray wrote, “Work as if you were in the early days of a better nation.” But if Auerbach's right, this may be -- for writers at least -- an impossible injunction...
Here's Auerbach on Ammianus, a fourth century Roman historian:
“... he definitely belongs to the tradition of the antique historians in the elevated style, who look down from above and judge by moral standards, and who never make conscious and intentional use of the technique of realistic imitation because they scorn it as fit only for the low comic style. The particular form of this tradition, which seems to have been especially favored in late Roman times (it is already embodied in Sallust, but especially in Tacitus), is very strongly stoic in temper; it delights in choosing exceptionally somber subjects, which reveal a high degree of moral corruption, and then sharply contrasting them with its ideal concept of original simplicity, purity, and virtue. This is the pattern which Ammianus obviously wants to follow, as appear from many passages of his work in which he cites deeds and sayings of earlier times in moralistic contrast. But from the very beginning we sense – and, in Ammianus, the impression becomes unmistakable – that in this tradition the material increasingly masters the stylistic intent, until it finally overwhelms it and forces the style, with its pretension to reserve and refinement, to adapt itself to the content, so that diction and syntax, torn between the somber realism of the content and the unrealistically refined tendency of the style, begin to change and become inharmonious, overburdened, and harsh. The diction grows mannered; the constructions begin, as it were, to writhe and twist. The equable elegance is disturbed; the refined reserve gives way to a somber pomp; and, against its will as it were, the style renders a greater sensoriousness than would originally have become compatible with gravitas, yet gravitas itself is by no means lost, but on the contrary is heightened. The elevated style become hyperpathetic and gruesome, becomes pictorial and sensorial.”
Rather as if making a medical diagnosis, Auerbach depicts an old tradition wrenched into new shapes by the pressure of great historical forces. I'm left with the strange suspicion that one can make cross-cultural generalizations about late Imperial style -- a lot of what Auerbach says about Ammianus seems to me also to apply to late Imperial English writers like Evelyn Waugh.
Alasdair Gray wrote, “Work as if you were in the early days of a better nation.” But if Auerbach's right, this may be -- for writers at least -- an impossible injunction...
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Vonnegut's Rules
Hemingway's rules are about getting ahead, Naupaul's about finding your voice. For balance, here are Kurt Vonnegut's rules, listed in Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, which focus on how to satisfy readerly appetites:
“1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.”
Vonnegut added that Flannery O'Connor “broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.”
The seventh rule is like Alan Cooper's theory from The Inmates Are Running the Asylum that a program should be designed with a specific user in mind.
Animator Kevin Koch provides commentary on Vonnegut's eight rules and extracts a ninth rule from Vonnegut's Paris Review interview:
"9. Don't take it all so seriously."
“1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.”
Vonnegut added that Flannery O'Connor “broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.”
The seventh rule is like Alan Cooper's theory from The Inmates Are Running the Asylum that a program should be designed with a specific user in mind.
Animator Kevin Koch provides commentary on Vonnegut's eight rules and extracts a ninth rule from Vonnegut's Paris Review interview:
"9. Don't take it all so seriously."
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Naipaul's Rules
When V.S. Naipaul was asked by the Indian website Telkeha for writing advice, he produced this list:
“1. Do not write long sentences. A sentence should not have more than ten or twelve words.
2. Each sentence should make a clear statement. It should add to the statement that went before. A good paragraph is a series of clear, linked statements.
3. Do not use big words. If your computer tells you that your average word is more than five letters long, there is something wrong. The use of small words compels you to think about what you are writing. Even difficult ideas can be broken down into small words.
4. Never use words whose meaning you are not sure of. If you break this rule you should look for other work.
5. The beginner should avoid using adjectives, except those of colour, size and number. Use as few adverbs as possible.
6. Avoid the abstract. Always go for the concrete.
7. Every day, for six months at least, practice writing in this way. Small words; short, clear, concrete sentences. It may be awkward, but it’s training you in the use of language. It may even be getting rid of the bad language habits you picked up at the university. You may go beyond these rules after you have thoroughly understood and mastered them.”
Naipaul is here partly reacting against the verbosity of Indian journalism. (An English friend of mine once worked as a copy-editor for an Indian newspaper, and told me he spent a lot of time crossing out clauses like “It is no doubt presumptuous of me to say, although I nonetheless feel inclined to say it,” phrases which were then inevitably reinserted by higher-ups.) As for practicing writing short sentences every day for six months, that sounds rather like a Brahmanistic ritual...
But the rules in this list aren't only about stylistic discipline. They form an injunction to be honest, to avoid false sophistication -- to purge yourself of adolescent illusions about what being a writer means. They're the work of a writer who has determinedly exorcised his younger self.
“1. Do not write long sentences. A sentence should not have more than ten or twelve words.
2. Each sentence should make a clear statement. It should add to the statement that went before. A good paragraph is a series of clear, linked statements.
3. Do not use big words. If your computer tells you that your average word is more than five letters long, there is something wrong. The use of small words compels you to think about what you are writing. Even difficult ideas can be broken down into small words.
4. Never use words whose meaning you are not sure of. If you break this rule you should look for other work.
5. The beginner should avoid using adjectives, except those of colour, size and number. Use as few adverbs as possible.
6. Avoid the abstract. Always go for the concrete.
7. Every day, for six months at least, practice writing in this way. Small words; short, clear, concrete sentences. It may be awkward, but it’s training you in the use of language. It may even be getting rid of the bad language habits you picked up at the university. You may go beyond these rules after you have thoroughly understood and mastered them.”
Naipaul is here partly reacting against the verbosity of Indian journalism. (An English friend of mine once worked as a copy-editor for an Indian newspaper, and told me he spent a lot of time crossing out clauses like “It is no doubt presumptuous of me to say, although I nonetheless feel inclined to say it,” phrases which were then inevitably reinserted by higher-ups.) As for practicing writing short sentences every day for six months, that sounds rather like a Brahmanistic ritual...
But the rules in this list aren't only about stylistic discipline. They form an injunction to be honest, to avoid false sophistication -- to purge yourself of adolescent illusions about what being a writer means. They're the work of a writer who has determinedly exorcised his younger self.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Heinlein's Rules
Robert Heinlein wrote a famous list of rules for writers:
"1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
4. You must put the work on the market.
5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold."
Strikingly, these are all paraliterary rules, rules about staying in the game and not letting the bastards grind you down. No stylistic advice is included -- indeed there's a strong suggestion you shouldn't worry about style. This is particularly true of Rule 3, which hardly any writers would agree with.
Isaac Asimov wrote somewhere that he always wrote two drafts of everything, and that Heinlein advised him to write just one draft instead, but that when Asimov tried this method he found it unsatisfactory... not that two drafts are very many either.
I find it hard to believe The Door Into Summer is really a first draft... but perhaps there are reasons Heinlein needed fewer drafts than other writers. He turned to writing when his views of how the world worked were already well-formed -- and in science fiction, a movement then near the height of its vigor and commercial viability, he found a genre ideally suited to expressing his pragmatic and Libertarian attitudes. Perhaps this helped him feel his thoughts were valid in whatever form they first came to him. Alternatively, claiming he never had to rewrite anything may just have been a ruse to disgruntle other writers.
Robert J. Sawyer offers a restatement of Heinlein's rules, including a less-objectionable version of rule 3 -- the second draft of rule 3 that Heinlein never wrote!
"3. Don't tinker endlessly with your story."
Perhaps that's what Heinlein really meant. Sawyer also adds a sixth rule, entirely in the spirit of the first five.
"6. Start working on something else."
"1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
4. You must put the work on the market.
5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold."
Strikingly, these are all paraliterary rules, rules about staying in the game and not letting the bastards grind you down. No stylistic advice is included -- indeed there's a strong suggestion you shouldn't worry about style. This is particularly true of Rule 3, which hardly any writers would agree with.
Isaac Asimov wrote somewhere that he always wrote two drafts of everything, and that Heinlein advised him to write just one draft instead, but that when Asimov tried this method he found it unsatisfactory... not that two drafts are very many either.
I find it hard to believe The Door Into Summer is really a first draft... but perhaps there are reasons Heinlein needed fewer drafts than other writers. He turned to writing when his views of how the world worked were already well-formed -- and in science fiction, a movement then near the height of its vigor and commercial viability, he found a genre ideally suited to expressing his pragmatic and Libertarian attitudes. Perhaps this helped him feel his thoughts were valid in whatever form they first came to him. Alternatively, claiming he never had to rewrite anything may just have been a ruse to disgruntle other writers.
Robert J. Sawyer offers a restatement of Heinlein's rules, including a less-objectionable version of rule 3 -- the second draft of rule 3 that Heinlein never wrote!
"3. Don't tinker endlessly with your story."
Perhaps that's what Heinlein really meant. Sawyer also adds a sixth rule, entirely in the spirit of the first five.
"6. Start working on something else."
Friday, December 18, 2009
Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall
Mantel portrays Thomas Cromwell as a great political fixer, who can more than hold his own at Henry VIII's court because he's already rubbed shoulders with Niccolò Machiavelli and the Borgias – Mantel has Thomas More call T. C. “an Italian through and through.”
“We shall have to develop a hand signal for 'Back off, our prince is fucking this man's daughter.' He is surprised that the Italians have not done it. Though perhaps they have, and he just never caught on.”
We're in a world of clever gestures, subtle courtiers and their double meanings – a world richly tapestried with ironies, historical foreshadowings, and meditations on power.
“A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fear, fantasies, desires.”
Henry VIII is particularly well drawn, a sensitive man understandably torn between his desire for Anne Boleyn, his need to bear a son for the security of the realm, and his instinctive religious conservatism.
“He has taught Henry to call the Pope 'the Bishop of Rome.' To laugh when his name is mentioned. If it is uncertain laughter, it is better than his former genuflection.”
Fiction writers have tended to sympathize with Thomas More – R. A. Lafferty's Past Master is perhaps the extreme culmination of this More-idolizing tendency. Mantel makes of More a man for rather few seasons – the point is well made that a man willing to die for his principles is all too often a man willing to torture for his principles. Mantel's T. C. accuses More of playing to the gallery of posterity, pompously scripting his own martyrdom instead of facing up to what has to be done.
“Do you know what I hate? I hate to be part of this play, which is entirely devised by him. I hate the time it will take that could be better spent. I hate it that minds could be better employed, I hate to see our lives going by, because depend upon it, we will all be feeling our age before his pageant is played out. And what I hate most is that Master More sits in the audience and sniggers when I trip over my lines, for he has written all the parts.”
Having worked for merchant bankers in the Netherlands, T. C. is a fit hero for an age of globalization – competent, pragmatic and ideologically flexible. Mantel follows historian G. R. Elton in seeing T. C. not as a monster but as a reformer. Or at least, she sees him as a reformer haunted by the possibility he's also a monster. For while Shakespeare's villains know they're monsters, Mantel's T.C. sees everything clearly except the ways his own power corrupts him, which he senses only dimly.
The main action of Wolf Hall covers the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII's divorce from Katherine of Aragon and marriage to Anne Boleyn, England's resulting break with the Church of Rome, and More's execution. The reader cannot but be left craving the rest of the story – Mantel's Anne Boleyn is in her way as powerful a character as Robert Graves's Empress Livia, and I felt cheated when I realized the book would finish before she reached the chopping block. The Dissolution of the Monasteries has so far only been foreshadowed, as has T. C.'s eventual fall, for all of which we must wait until the sequel... there is going to be a sequel, right?
Thursday, December 17, 2009
InsideStorytime HAPPINESS
Nathan Bransford's ten commandments for the happy writer seem pretty reasonable. But what if happiness is counter-productive? Dennis Barron reports here on Joe Forgas's discovery that a “mildly negative mood may actually promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style."
Here is Joe Forgas's website -- he looks a bit cheesed off, which is probably just as well. You can read some of his papers in .pdf format, including this one providing evidence that “people in a negative mood may also be better at producing high-quality and effective persuasive messages.”
Tonight -- Thursday December 17th, 6.30 - 8.30 pm, at Cafe Royale -- we at InsideStorytime HAPPINESS will strive to reduce your communicative efficiency, by manipulating you into a cheerier mental state. Tonight's readers --
Here is Joe Forgas's website -- he looks a bit cheesed off, which is probably just as well. You can read some of his papers in .pdf format, including this one providing evidence that “people in a negative mood may also be better at producing high-quality and effective persuasive messages.”
Tonight -- Thursday December 17th, 6.30 - 8.30 pm, at Cafe Royale -- we at InsideStorytime HAPPINESS will strive to reduce your communicative efficiency, by manipulating you into a cheerier mental state. Tonight's readers --
- Skip Horack, author of prize-winning story collection The Southern Cross
- Robin Ekiss, author of The Mansion of Happiness, acclaimed poet and Litcrawl Maven
- Mollena Williams, a.k.a Ms. SF Leather 2009
- Peg Alford Pursell, producer of Sausalito's flash fiction "Drive-by Shorts" radio show
- Townsend Walker, Cafe Royale regular, author of short stories and of some books on finance
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Towards a Typology of Dyslexic Writers
In Proust and the Squid, Maryanne Wolf makes some observations about which fields dyslexics are to be found in -- “In medicine, individuals with dyslexia were likely to be found in radiology, where the ability to read patterns is central. In engineering and computer technology, they gravitated toward design and pattern recognition. In business, individuals with dyslexia, such as Paul Orfalea and Charles Schwab, tended to focus on high finance or money management, where forecasting trends and making inferences from large patterns of data are critical. My brother-in-law, an architect, told me that his former firm never allowed letters from its architects to go out without two spell-checks. Artists with dyslexia include sculptors such as Rodin and the painters Andy Warhol and Picasso.”
Rodin, Picasso, and Warhol may well have something in common, although I can't quite pinpoint what. Certainly you couldn't accuse them of thinking "inside the box."
But what if anything do dyslexic writers have in common? There are those like Agatha Christie and Roald Dahl who have a knack for plot structures. Maybe with a bit of conceptual squeezing, Hans Christian Anderson and Lewis Carroll could be forced into this category too? Since a story is a type of a pattern, any fiction writer will be pattern-obsessed – but is this even more true of dyslexic writers?
Into another category of dyslexic writers fall the stylistic perfectionists like Gustave Flaubert and Gary Lutz, famously obsessed with micro-patterns, the structure of the sentence... Samuel R. Delany is one example of a dyslexic writer who fits into both categories mentioned – this makes me think of my earlier statement that Delany is a rare case of a critic who's good both at close reading and at distant reading.
In his criticism, Delany uses the word "pattern" a lot. In About Writing, discussing Modulations by Richard Kostelanetz, Delany writes “there is a level of storytelling that seems to me entirely structural, topological even, and that has nothing to do with reference,” and it seems to me that might be a dyslexic kind of an insight to have...
Also dyslexic were or are W.B. Yeats, Octavia Butler, John Irving, and Richard Ford, but as yet I'm unclear what to do with these examples in terms of my dyslexic writer classification system.
Rodin, Picasso, and Warhol may well have something in common, although I can't quite pinpoint what. Certainly you couldn't accuse them of thinking "inside the box."
But what if anything do dyslexic writers have in common? There are those like Agatha Christie and Roald Dahl who have a knack for plot structures. Maybe with a bit of conceptual squeezing, Hans Christian Anderson and Lewis Carroll could be forced into this category too? Since a story is a type of a pattern, any fiction writer will be pattern-obsessed – but is this even more true of dyslexic writers?
Into another category of dyslexic writers fall the stylistic perfectionists like Gustave Flaubert and Gary Lutz, famously obsessed with micro-patterns, the structure of the sentence... Samuel R. Delany is one example of a dyslexic writer who fits into both categories mentioned – this makes me think of my earlier statement that Delany is a rare case of a critic who's good both at close reading and at distant reading.
In his criticism, Delany uses the word "pattern" a lot. In About Writing, discussing Modulations by Richard Kostelanetz, Delany writes “there is a level of storytelling that seems to me entirely structural, topological even, and that has nothing to do with reference,” and it seems to me that might be a dyslexic kind of an insight to have...
Also dyslexic were or are W.B. Yeats, Octavia Butler, John Irving, and Richard Ford, but as yet I'm unclear what to do with these examples in terms of my dyslexic writer classification system.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Solitude Ahead of Survival
From Emmanuel Carrère's fine biography of Philip K. Dick, I am Alive and you are Dead – “A powerful novelistic magic informs those places that lack witnesses. And I feel there is a profound though generally unremarked inequality between those who can avail themselves of this luxury of being able to live for a week or six months unseen by anyone but absolute strangers – which is tantamount to not being seen at all – and those whom the constraints and obligations of their lives force to remain permanently under the gaze of those who know them.”
From Susan Bell's The Artful Edit – “Collaboration is generally unnatural to writers – most would put solitude ahead of cash if asked to choose between the two.”
Which is a way of putting non-survival ahead of survival.
From Don DeLillo's White Noise – “There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Overcloseness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps something even deeper, like the need to survive.”
Error and survival are bound together -- to think clearly or novelistically, it's necessary to wander dangerously far from the Group. From a "Wall Street Journal" interview with Cormac McCarthy –
“WSJ: But is there something compelling about the collaborative process compared to the solitary job of writing?
CMC: Yes, it would compel you to avoid it at all costs.”
These costs are however high. And the writer only gets to enjoy so many hours of hard-won productive solitude before solitude transforms into loneliness, which is no use to anyone.
From Susan Bell's The Artful Edit – “Collaboration is generally unnatural to writers – most would put solitude ahead of cash if asked to choose between the two.”
Which is a way of putting non-survival ahead of survival.
From Don DeLillo's White Noise – “There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Overcloseness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps something even deeper, like the need to survive.”
Error and survival are bound together -- to think clearly or novelistically, it's necessary to wander dangerously far from the Group. From a "Wall Street Journal" interview with Cormac McCarthy –
“WSJ: But is there something compelling about the collaborative process compared to the solitary job of writing?
CMC: Yes, it would compel you to avoid it at all costs.”
These costs are however high. And the writer only gets to enjoy so many hours of hard-won productive solitude before solitude transforms into loneliness, which is no use to anyone.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Neal Stephenson's Anathem
Anathem is a prolonged meditation on the essence of civilization, a manual on reasoning, a page-turning adventure story, a hymn to empiricism, and much more.
It starts off squarely in the tradition of Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, and ends squarely in the tradition of one of those extremely long First Contact novels. The first three hundred pages of Anathem are the best part... (but then this is probably true of most nine-hundred-page novels that actually get published...)
Sometimes when I'm trying to persuade my daughter she'll like something, she expresses her disagreement by singing a song of her own invention that goes “my dad's a nerd, my dad's a nerd...” I'm concerned here not to make Anathem sound more nerdy than it is, but I think it is more nerdy than Cryptonomicon. Stephenson plays with such ideas as that Platonic forms originated in the first few seconds of the big bang (assuming I understood this part correctly) -- and he plays with such ideas using completely made-up terminology specific to the monastic orders in his invented world. That sounds a bit intimidating, but the way Stephenson writes, it really isn't... (this is where, in my head, I hear my daughter singing that song...)
Anathem is also more elitist than Cryptonomicon in its sense of how the world works – Stephenson seems drawn towards the idea that all civilizations will tend over time to become nerdocracies. Late in the book, he introduces the concept of “fascination burnout,” a feeling with which some readers, by that point, will have started to empathize... but overall Anathem is, despite its vast conceptual reach, a fun read, the kind of book Iain M. Banks, Umberto Eco, and Douglas Hofstadter might come up with if you locked them up in a monastery long enough. Stephenson is also (again, assuming I'm following him correctly) the first person ever to make the idea of the brain as a quantum computer strike me as even remotely believable -- I'm not sure how he pulled this off because, now that I've finished Anathem, the idea's gone back to being unbelievable again.
“Orolo nodded. 'Quantum interference – the crosstalk among similar quantum states – knits the different versions of your brain together.'
'You're saying that my consciousness extends across multiple cosmi,' I said. 'That's a pretty wild statement.'
'I'm saying all things do,' Orolo said. 'That comes with the polycosmic interpretation. The only thing exceptional about the brain is that it has found a way to use this.'”
It starts off squarely in the tradition of Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, and ends squarely in the tradition of one of those extremely long First Contact novels. The first three hundred pages of Anathem are the best part... (but then this is probably true of most nine-hundred-page novels that actually get published...)
Sometimes when I'm trying to persuade my daughter she'll like something, she expresses her disagreement by singing a song of her own invention that goes “my dad's a nerd, my dad's a nerd...” I'm concerned here not to make Anathem sound more nerdy than it is, but I think it is more nerdy than Cryptonomicon. Stephenson plays with such ideas as that Platonic forms originated in the first few seconds of the big bang (assuming I understood this part correctly) -- and he plays with such ideas using completely made-up terminology specific to the monastic orders in his invented world. That sounds a bit intimidating, but the way Stephenson writes, it really isn't... (this is where, in my head, I hear my daughter singing that song...)
Anathem is also more elitist than Cryptonomicon in its sense of how the world works – Stephenson seems drawn towards the idea that all civilizations will tend over time to become nerdocracies. Late in the book, he introduces the concept of “fascination burnout,” a feeling with which some readers, by that point, will have started to empathize... but overall Anathem is, despite its vast conceptual reach, a fun read, the kind of book Iain M. Banks, Umberto Eco, and Douglas Hofstadter might come up with if you locked them up in a monastery long enough. Stephenson is also (again, assuming I'm following him correctly) the first person ever to make the idea of the brain as a quantum computer strike me as even remotely believable -- I'm not sure how he pulled this off because, now that I've finished Anathem, the idea's gone back to being unbelievable again.
“Orolo nodded. 'Quantum interference – the crosstalk among similar quantum states – knits the different versions of your brain together.'
'You're saying that my consciousness extends across multiple cosmi,' I said. 'That's a pretty wild statement.'
'I'm saying all things do,' Orolo said. 'That comes with the polycosmic interpretation. The only thing exceptional about the brain is that it has found a way to use this.'”
Friday, December 11, 2009
Endangered Snarkosaurs
Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones -- “First, then, we warn thee not too hastily to condemn any of the incidents in this our history as impertinent and foreign to our main design, because thou doest not immediately conceive in what manner such incident may conduce to that design. This work may, indeed, be considered as a great creation of our own; and for a little reptile of a critic to presume to find fault with any of its parts, without knowing the manner in which the whole is connected, and before he comes to the final catastrophe, is a most presumptuous absurdity.”
Scuttlebutt has it that Kirkus Reviews, along with Editor & Publisher, are folding now that Nielsen Business Media are getting out of the trade publication business. The general response, among those of my Facebook friends who've been reviewed by Kirkus, is nostalgic waxing about snarky reviews past.
Susan Wise Bauer notes here that "as an author, I’m less than devastated. Not because Kirkus was known for snarkiness (although it was), but because Kirkus, to me, was always irrelevant.” She adds that in her experience her books sell almost entirely by word of mouth.
Generally the only way I can tell whether or not I'll enjoy a book is to start reading it -- however, if I am going to try and make this prediction based on reviews, I find skimming through twenty reviews by random people more informative than reading one traditionally-structured review. How about you?
Scuttlebutt has it that Kirkus Reviews, along with Editor & Publisher, are folding now that Nielsen Business Media are getting out of the trade publication business. The general response, among those of my Facebook friends who've been reviewed by Kirkus, is nostalgic waxing about snarky reviews past.
Susan Wise Bauer notes here that "as an author, I’m less than devastated. Not because Kirkus was known for snarkiness (although it was), but because Kirkus, to me, was always irrelevant.” She adds that in her experience her books sell almost entirely by word of mouth.
Generally the only way I can tell whether or not I'll enjoy a book is to start reading it -- however, if I am going to try and make this prediction based on reviews, I find skimming through twenty reviews by random people more informative than reading one traditionally-structured review. How about you?
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Monosyllables
I already touched on Otto Jespersen's claim in Growth and Structure of the English Language that English is a “masculine” language – that it has plenty of consonants being one alleged reason, another that it has plenty of monosyllables. “English has undoubtedly gained in force what it has possibly lost in elegance, by reducing so many words of two syllables to monosyllables. If it had not been for the great number of long foreign, especially Latin, words, English would have approached the state of such monosyllabic languages as Chinese.” Jespersen adds that “an Englishman does not like to use more words or more syllables than are strictly necessary.”
Is this some kind of a Danish thing? Jespersen tends with a certain amount of justice to see old English as a sort of honorary dialect of Danish... still, the prejudice in favor of monosyllables abides -- when Virginia Woolf tells us, in a parenthesis in Orlando, that “only the most profound masters of style can tell the truth, and when one meets a simple one-syllabled writer, one must conclude, without any doubt at all, that the poor man is lying,” she is clearly offering an inverse platitude.
In children's TV shows, heroes always speak more monosyllabically than villains, a tendency which I believe has had a pernicious effect on U.S. political discourse. And yet... an artist once said to me regarding Piet Mondrian, “Monochrome has a power,” and perhaps the same is true of monosyllables. I am the way, the truth, and the life. To be or not to be. I am: yet what I am none cares or knows.
Monosyllabism adds to the evident sincerity both of Wordsworth's evocation of the hopes attendant on the French Revolution --
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive..."
-- and to his disillusioned acceptance that, despite England's many political crimes, she is after all the world's least unworthy champion of liberty --
"O grief that Earth's best hopes rest all in thee!"
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The world is what it is.
Is this some kind of a Danish thing? Jespersen tends with a certain amount of justice to see old English as a sort of honorary dialect of Danish... still, the prejudice in favor of monosyllables abides -- when Virginia Woolf tells us, in a parenthesis in Orlando, that “only the most profound masters of style can tell the truth, and when one meets a simple one-syllabled writer, one must conclude, without any doubt at all, that the poor man is lying,” she is clearly offering an inverse platitude.
In children's TV shows, heroes always speak more monosyllabically than villains, a tendency which I believe has had a pernicious effect on U.S. political discourse. And yet... an artist once said to me regarding Piet Mondrian, “Monochrome has a power,” and perhaps the same is true of monosyllables. I am the way, the truth, and the life. To be or not to be. I am: yet what I am none cares or knows.
Monosyllabism adds to the evident sincerity both of Wordsworth's evocation of the hopes attendant on the French Revolution --
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive..."
-- and to his disillusioned acceptance that, despite England's many political crimes, she is after all the world's least unworthy champion of liberty --
"O grief that Earth's best hopes rest all in thee!"
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The world is what it is.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Sympathy for the Grammarian
Maryanne Wolf writes in Proust and the Squid about a passage in Middlemarch where it dawns unpleasantly on Casaubon that Dorothea may be too flighty for him --
“I have read Middlemarch half a dozen times. Only when I read it last year did I see this passage about Mr. Casaubon in a different light. For three decades I identified completely and solely with the disillusionment of the idealistic Dorothea. Only now do I begin to fathom Casaubon's fears, his unmet hopes, and his own form of disillusion at not being understood by the youthful Dorothea. I never thought I would see the day when I empathized with Mr. Casaubon, but now, with no small humility, I admit that I do. So also did George Eliot, perhaps for reasons similar enough to my own. Reading changes our lives, and our lives change our reading.”
Wendy Lesser, in Nothing Remains the Same, finds herself similarly disillusioned with Dorothea, as with Anna Karenina. Lesser asks, ”Why am I now so unsympathetic to these two young women, Anna and Dorothea, whose fates once meant so much to me?” Of Anna Karenina she writes --
“If it is wrong to interpret the book entirely from the point of view of a twenty-two-year old single woman, it is equally wrong to view it from the position of a forty-eight-year old mother of a son. Still, since that is what I now am, I cannot entirely help it. (Like Karenin – like us all – I am not only trapped in my social role but also infused by it, changed by it, made into someone who is no longer a free agent.) And, as a mother, I find the last scene between between Anna and Seryozha well-nigh unbearable: first his unspoken hope that his absent mother will miraculously reappear on his birthday, then his dream-like happiness when she does appear by his bedside, and finally his terrible despair when she has to leave again.”
I guess you know you're middle-aged when you find your sympathies shifting to the likes of Casaubon and Karenin... another expression of this epiphany can be found in Philip Larkin's “A Study of Reading Habits.”
“I have read Middlemarch half a dozen times. Only when I read it last year did I see this passage about Mr. Casaubon in a different light. For three decades I identified completely and solely with the disillusionment of the idealistic Dorothea. Only now do I begin to fathom Casaubon's fears, his unmet hopes, and his own form of disillusion at not being understood by the youthful Dorothea. I never thought I would see the day when I empathized with Mr. Casaubon, but now, with no small humility, I admit that I do. So also did George Eliot, perhaps for reasons similar enough to my own. Reading changes our lives, and our lives change our reading.”
Wendy Lesser, in Nothing Remains the Same, finds herself similarly disillusioned with Dorothea, as with Anna Karenina. Lesser asks, ”Why am I now so unsympathetic to these two young women, Anna and Dorothea, whose fates once meant so much to me?” Of Anna Karenina she writes --
“If it is wrong to interpret the book entirely from the point of view of a twenty-two-year old single woman, it is equally wrong to view it from the position of a forty-eight-year old mother of a son. Still, since that is what I now am, I cannot entirely help it. (Like Karenin – like us all – I am not only trapped in my social role but also infused by it, changed by it, made into someone who is no longer a free agent.) And, as a mother, I find the last scene between between Anna and Seryozha well-nigh unbearable: first his unspoken hope that his absent mother will miraculously reappear on his birthday, then his dream-like happiness when she does appear by his bedside, and finally his terrible despair when she has to leave again.”
I guess you know you're middle-aged when you find your sympathies shifting to the likes of Casaubon and Karenin... another expression of this epiphany can be found in Philip Larkin's “A Study of Reading Habits.”
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Dale Peck's Body Surfing
I didn't see this one coming: Dale Peck has written a novel that reads like a Clive Barker novel -- witty, gory, stylish horror that's distinctly gay. Hopping genres as easily as the demons in Body Surfing switch bodies, Peck summons up a world of rapid conquests and unbridled appetites – all of human history explained as S/M – and demons that savage their victims as ruthlessly as, in an earlier incarnation, Peck the critic eviscerated the likes of William Faulkner.
Some of the rules: if you die a virgin, you may be doomed to possess other bodies for all eternity, accumulating attendant memories as you go, but you can only switch from one body to another by having sex. “Almost every legendary monster of human or semihuman appearance – werewolves and vampires, yetis and zombies -- could be traced back to the work of this or that demon.”
It seems to be a particular danger of writing horror that it's too easy to go on autopilot, and sometimes reading Body Surfing I got the same feeling I got reading the late dark thrillers of Thomas M. Disch, that the author's heart was not entirely in this... Still, it's a fun read, and stylistically vivid if a bit jaded.
“In years gone by I have taken on Roman centurions and barbarian hordes, Apache war parties and Nazi stormtroopers. Trust me, Jasper. You don't have a chance.”
Peck is scarily versatile. He reports in this blog post that he wrote the beginning of Body Surfing around 2000, and adds “in an effort to keep my literary (and not-so-literary) projects alive and out there in the world, I’ve decided to create a section on this site called First Chapters of Future Novels.” Putting up lots of first chapters on one's website might actually be rather a good idea...
Some of the rules: if you die a virgin, you may be doomed to possess other bodies for all eternity, accumulating attendant memories as you go, but you can only switch from one body to another by having sex. “Almost every legendary monster of human or semihuman appearance – werewolves and vampires, yetis and zombies -- could be traced back to the work of this or that demon.”
It seems to be a particular danger of writing horror that it's too easy to go on autopilot, and sometimes reading Body Surfing I got the same feeling I got reading the late dark thrillers of Thomas M. Disch, that the author's heart was not entirely in this... Still, it's a fun read, and stylistically vivid if a bit jaded.
“In years gone by I have taken on Roman centurions and barbarian hordes, Apache war parties and Nazi stormtroopers. Trust me, Jasper. You don't have a chance.”
Peck is scarily versatile. He reports in this blog post that he wrote the beginning of Body Surfing around 2000, and adds “in an effort to keep my literary (and not-so-literary) projects alive and out there in the world, I’ve decided to create a section on this site called First Chapters of Future Novels.” Putting up lots of first chapters on one's website might actually be rather a good idea...
Monday, December 7, 2009
Plenty of Other Fish in John Banville's The Sea
“I can still recall the aroma of after-lunch coffee on the doctor's breath and the fishy swivel of his housekeeper's eye as she saw me to the front door.” -- John Banville, The Sea
“Fishy swivel” is great, simultaneously a guilty pleasure to pronounce and some kind of a pun -- the housekeeper suspects the doctor has been up to something “fishy” with the boy, and her eye is like that of a fishy, cold and glassy.
Many of the characters in The Sea are fish-eyed, floundering, out of their element when not all at sea. Some also drink like fish, although Banville protests in an aside that fish do not really drink. The narrator's father-in-law wears “those big heavy spectacles favoured by tycoons of the time, with flanged ear-pieces and lenses the size of saucers in which his sharp little eyes darted like inquisitive, exotic fish.”
The whole underwater world is distorted, dreamlike, and treacherous. A similarly oceanic emotion is transmitted by the paintings of Pierre Bonnard – like many of Banville's other novels, The Sea has an unreliable narrator obsessed with a particular painter, Bonnard in this case. I'm also reminded of the feeling I get from the Lou Reed song “Ashes to Ashes (Cremation).” Here's the last moment of eye contact between the narrator of The Sea and his dying wife --
“Waking now, she turned her head on the damp pillow and looked at me wide-eyed in the underwater glimmer of the nightlight with an expression of large and wary startlement. I think she did not know me. I had that paralysing sensation, part awe and part alarm, that comes over one in a sudden and unexpected solitary encounter with a creature of the wild. I could feel my heart beating in slow, liquid thumps, as if it were flopping over an endless series of identical obstacles. Anna coughed, making a sound like the clatter of bones. I knew this was the end.”
We swim through this life, waiting to be hooked.
“Fishy swivel” is great, simultaneously a guilty pleasure to pronounce and some kind of a pun -- the housekeeper suspects the doctor has been up to something “fishy” with the boy, and her eye is like that of a fishy, cold and glassy.
Many of the characters in The Sea are fish-eyed, floundering, out of their element when not all at sea. Some also drink like fish, although Banville protests in an aside that fish do not really drink. The narrator's father-in-law wears “those big heavy spectacles favoured by tycoons of the time, with flanged ear-pieces and lenses the size of saucers in which his sharp little eyes darted like inquisitive, exotic fish.”
The whole underwater world is distorted, dreamlike, and treacherous. A similarly oceanic emotion is transmitted by the paintings of Pierre Bonnard – like many of Banville's other novels, The Sea has an unreliable narrator obsessed with a particular painter, Bonnard in this case. I'm also reminded of the feeling I get from the Lou Reed song “Ashes to Ashes (Cremation).” Here's the last moment of eye contact between the narrator of The Sea and his dying wife --
“Waking now, she turned her head on the damp pillow and looked at me wide-eyed in the underwater glimmer of the nightlight with an expression of large and wary startlement. I think she did not know me. I had that paralysing sensation, part awe and part alarm, that comes over one in a sudden and unexpected solitary encounter with a creature of the wild. I could feel my heart beating in slow, liquid thumps, as if it were flopping over an endless series of identical obstacles. Anna coughed, making a sound like the clatter of bones. I knew this was the end.”
We swim through this life, waiting to be hooked.
Friday, December 4, 2009
Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
“Each language has its own colour and flavour. In this book, we have glimpsed some of the distinctive traits of the various traditions: Arabic's austere grandeur and egalitarianism; Chinese and Egyptian's unshakeable self-regard; Sanskrit's luxuriating classifications and hierarchies; Greek's self-confident innovation leading to self-obsession and pedantry; Latin's civic sense; Spanish rigidity, cupidity and fidelity; French admiration for rationality; and English admiration for business acumen. These manifold qualities can sometimes be seen in the languages' literatures. But they leap out when the languages' histories are told.” -- Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: a Language History of the World
World histories deliver an unusual rush, the feeling of momentarily attaining a god's eye view. Patterns stand out that from an ordinary daily vantage point would not be noticed – e.g. “the remarkable similarity of the careers of the Egyptian and Chinese languages.” Events previously taken for granted are suddenly revealed as comparatively anomalous – e.g. the fact that the invasions of Britain by Saxons constituted “the one and only time that Germanic conquerors were able to hold onto their own language,” possibly because the Britons were decimated by bubonic plague.
Ostler believes that languages have characters and that, even for a language, character is destiny. His background is in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Chibcha, so unsurprisingly he's at his best writing about the ancient world -- his chapter entitled “Three Thousand Years of Solipsism: The Adventures of Greek” transported me to a world of Greek city-states beset by Scythians that I had not imaginatively visited since devouring Paul Park's superb novel The Gospel of Corax.
Because he loves grammar, Ostler loves Sanskrit -- “Indian culture is unique in the world for its rigorous analysis of its own language,” he writes, “which it furthermore made the central discipline of its own culture.” He adoringly itemizes the eleven extra senses the word “padma” (lotus) has in the neuter gender – lotus-like ornament; form of a lotus; root of a lotus; coloured marks on the face and trunk of an elephant; an army formation; a trillion(10^12); lead; a tantric chakra; a mole on the body; a spot; part of a column -- and the eight more it has in the masculine gender -- temple; quarter-elephant; species of serpent; Rama; a treasure of Kubera; a mode of sexual enjoyment; a posture in meditation; a treasure connected with magic.
In another beautiful attempt at conveying the flavour of a language, he provides seven definitions of the German “einfallen” – to collapse, to cave in; to invade (a country); (night) to fall, (winter) to set in; (beams of light) to be incident; (game birds) to come in, settle; to join in, come in (on a piece of music), break in (to a conversation); (thought) occur to somebody. This is a book to lose yourself in.
Here's Ostler on the invented future English in Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker.
World histories deliver an unusual rush, the feeling of momentarily attaining a god's eye view. Patterns stand out that from an ordinary daily vantage point would not be noticed – e.g. “the remarkable similarity of the careers of the Egyptian and Chinese languages.” Events previously taken for granted are suddenly revealed as comparatively anomalous – e.g. the fact that the invasions of Britain by Saxons constituted “the one and only time that Germanic conquerors were able to hold onto their own language,” possibly because the Britons were decimated by bubonic plague.
Ostler believes that languages have characters and that, even for a language, character is destiny. His background is in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Chibcha, so unsurprisingly he's at his best writing about the ancient world -- his chapter entitled “Three Thousand Years of Solipsism: The Adventures of Greek” transported me to a world of Greek city-states beset by Scythians that I had not imaginatively visited since devouring Paul Park's superb novel The Gospel of Corax.
Because he loves grammar, Ostler loves Sanskrit -- “Indian culture is unique in the world for its rigorous analysis of its own language,” he writes, “which it furthermore made the central discipline of its own culture.” He adoringly itemizes the eleven extra senses the word “padma” (lotus) has in the neuter gender – lotus-like ornament; form of a lotus; root of a lotus; coloured marks on the face and trunk of an elephant; an army formation; a trillion(10^12); lead; a tantric chakra; a mole on the body; a spot; part of a column -- and the eight more it has in the masculine gender -- temple; quarter-elephant; species of serpent; Rama; a treasure of Kubera; a mode of sexual enjoyment; a posture in meditation; a treasure connected with magic.
In another beautiful attempt at conveying the flavour of a language, he provides seven definitions of the German “einfallen” – to collapse, to cave in; to invade (a country); (night) to fall, (winter) to set in; (beams of light) to be incident; (game birds) to come in, settle; to join in, come in (on a piece of music), break in (to a conversation); (thought) occur to somebody. This is a book to lose yourself in.
Here's Ostler on the invented future English in Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Animals and Alphabets
Here's something that struck me, years back, while my daughter was first learning to read. My daughter hadn't yet seen a live kangaroo, but having seen the K-is-for-kangaroo illustration in Dr. Seuss's ABC, and the K-is-for-kangaroo illustration in Curious George's ABCs, she could look at a third cartoon of a kangaroo and recognize it instantly. What's fascinating is that the Dr. Seuss kangaroo illustration looks nothing like the Curious George kangaroo illustration – neither are realistically drawn, and a Martian seeing those two illustrations, it seemed to me, wouldn't suspect they portrayed animals of the same species.
This observation pushed me towards a conclusion that was later clarified for me by Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought – my favorite book about religion by an atheist.* Namely, that we have certain innate animal-recognition capacities, that we're born with what Boyer calls a “template” permitting us to assign descriptive facts about an animal to a working model of that animal.
Equally remarkable to me now is something that didn't strike me at the time -- the fact that the letter “K” itself also looks different from one book to another. As astonishing as our ability to recognize kangaroos from stylized depictions of kangaroos is our ability to recognize the same letter in different fonts and handwritings. This is known as the invariance problem -- as stated by Stanislaw Dehaene in Reading in the Brain, “we need to recognize which aspect of a word does not vary – the sequence of letters – in spite of the thousand and one possible shapes that the actual characters can take.”
Dehaene concludes -- “Obviously, our capacity to recognize words does not depend on an analysis of their overall shape.” Rather than a shape, we memorize a description of a shape -- just as when learning to recognize animals. There may even be some overlap between the neurological toolkit we evolved for animal recognition and the neurological toolkit we now use for written character recognition?
* After I watched Bill Mayer's documentary “Religulous” with a friend of mine, she remarked, “The problem with atheists is they take religion too seriously.” An observation worthy of G. K. Chesterton.
This observation pushed me towards a conclusion that was later clarified for me by Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought – my favorite book about religion by an atheist.* Namely, that we have certain innate animal-recognition capacities, that we're born with what Boyer calls a “template” permitting us to assign descriptive facts about an animal to a working model of that animal.
Equally remarkable to me now is something that didn't strike me at the time -- the fact that the letter “K” itself also looks different from one book to another. As astonishing as our ability to recognize kangaroos from stylized depictions of kangaroos is our ability to recognize the same letter in different fonts and handwritings. This is known as the invariance problem -- as stated by Stanislaw Dehaene in Reading in the Brain, “we need to recognize which aspect of a word does not vary – the sequence of letters – in spite of the thousand and one possible shapes that the actual characters can take.”
Dehaene concludes -- “Obviously, our capacity to recognize words does not depend on an analysis of their overall shape.” Rather than a shape, we memorize a description of a shape -- just as when learning to recognize animals. There may even be some overlap between the neurological toolkit we evolved for animal recognition and the neurological toolkit we now use for written character recognition?
* After I watched Bill Mayer's documentary “Religulous” with a friend of mine, she remarked, “The problem with atheists is they take religion too seriously.” An observation worthy of G. K. Chesterton.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Animals With Allegedly Artistic Temperaments
In an afterword to Lolita written in 1956, Nabokov claimed the novel was inspired “by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.”
Brian Boyd, in On the Origin of Stories, summarizes some other famous ape art of the time, described in Desmond Morris's The Biology of Art --
“In the 1950s, when Desmond Morris supplied chimpanzees in his care with paint, brushes, and paper, they threw themselves into painting provided the received no external reward. Those who were offered food would make a few perfunctory strokes and break of quickly to seek another tasty morsel. But those whose motivation remained uncorrupted by 'payment' developed a fierce commitment to painting. They painted intensely, persisting, while the session lasted, until they thought a sheet finished, thought they would never glance at their work later.”
This quiz by Mikhail Simkin tests your ability to distinguish abstract paintings by human artists from those by apes.
My favorite anecdote about an invertebrate performance artist comes from Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression --
“I was fascinated to hear of the suicide of an octopus, trained for a circus, that had been accustomed to do tricks for rewards of food. When the circus was disbanded, the octopus was kept in a tank and no one paid any attention to his tricks. He gradually lost color (octopuses’ states of mind are expressed in their shifting hues) and finally went through his tricks a last time, failed to be rewarded, and used his beak to stab himself so badly that he died.”
Brian Boyd, in On the Origin of Stories, summarizes some other famous ape art of the time, described in Desmond Morris's The Biology of Art --
“In the 1950s, when Desmond Morris supplied chimpanzees in his care with paint, brushes, and paper, they threw themselves into painting provided the received no external reward. Those who were offered food would make a few perfunctory strokes and break of quickly to seek another tasty morsel. But those whose motivation remained uncorrupted by 'payment' developed a fierce commitment to painting. They painted intensely, persisting, while the session lasted, until they thought a sheet finished, thought they would never glance at their work later.”
This quiz by Mikhail Simkin tests your ability to distinguish abstract paintings by human artists from those by apes.
My favorite anecdote about an invertebrate performance artist comes from Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression --
“I was fascinated to hear of the suicide of an octopus, trained for a circus, that had been accustomed to do tricks for rewards of food. When the circus was disbanded, the octopus was kept in a tank and no one paid any attention to his tricks. He gradually lost color (octopuses’ states of mind are expressed in their shifting hues) and finally went through his tricks a last time, failed to be rewarded, and used his beak to stab himself so badly that he died.”
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Sorrowing a Borrowed World
“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.” -- Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Since “borrow” is maybe the only verb that rhymes with “sorrow,” repeating “borrow” three times may help an author get away with using “sorrow” as a verb. But this device is hardly needed – McCarthy convinced us of his ability to sorrow the world a long while back.
For a few days after reading The Road, I suspected everyone I passed on the street of wanting to kill and eat me. If a book's impact is this intense, why complain about intellectual inconsistencies? E.g. why are crows extinct? Wouldn't one expect crow populations actually to increase, in a world populated by constantly warring nomadic slave-owning cannibal clans? A science fiction writer, committed to extrapolation, would have to ask such questions, but McCarthy's mission is not to explain the world but to sorrow it.
It's healthy sometimes to make one's autonomic nervous system face the possibility that civilization is the merest of mirages – perhaps this is the justification for all horror writing, the kind of realism that's faithful not to our waking reality, but to that of our worst nightmares.* While The Road is not as good as Blood Meridian – McCarthy must be very tired of comparisons with that book by now – it's more frightening because at least Blood Meridian wasn't set in the near future.
The Road: a man and a boy walk along a road, and everyone they meet wants to kill them. A plot simpler than that of most video games, yet McCarthy's prose pulls you further in than you thought you dared to go.
McCarthy's typewriter is up for auction on Friday.
* There's a scene in Blood Meridian – the one early on where it dawns on the white men that they're completely outnumbered by the approaching Indians hence are all going to be scalped -- that I actually saw in a nightmare before I first read the book.
Since “borrow” is maybe the only verb that rhymes with “sorrow,” repeating “borrow” three times may help an author get away with using “sorrow” as a verb. But this device is hardly needed – McCarthy convinced us of his ability to sorrow the world a long while back.
For a few days after reading The Road, I suspected everyone I passed on the street of wanting to kill and eat me. If a book's impact is this intense, why complain about intellectual inconsistencies? E.g. why are crows extinct? Wouldn't one expect crow populations actually to increase, in a world populated by constantly warring nomadic slave-owning cannibal clans? A science fiction writer, committed to extrapolation, would have to ask such questions, but McCarthy's mission is not to explain the world but to sorrow it.
It's healthy sometimes to make one's autonomic nervous system face the possibility that civilization is the merest of mirages – perhaps this is the justification for all horror writing, the kind of realism that's faithful not to our waking reality, but to that of our worst nightmares.* While The Road is not as good as Blood Meridian – McCarthy must be very tired of comparisons with that book by now – it's more frightening because at least Blood Meridian wasn't set in the near future.
The Road: a man and a boy walk along a road, and everyone they meet wants to kill them. A plot simpler than that of most video games, yet McCarthy's prose pulls you further in than you thought you dared to go.
McCarthy's typewriter is up for auction on Friday.
* There's a scene in Blood Meridian – the one early on where it dawns on the white men that they're completely outnumbered by the approaching Indians hence are all going to be scalped -- that I actually saw in a nightmare before I first read the book.
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