Dear Internet,
Sorry I’ve been so… so… casual about our relationship over the last few days.
Not Quite Chinglish, Not Quite a Pun
From his vantage point of working with the English language behind the Bamboo Firewall, friend of RAMH Froog wages what must at times feel like a lonely battle against Chinglish. (For the uninitiated, this is the generally mangled result of applying Chinese grammatical rules, pronunciations, and mindset to ideas expressed in “English.”)
I have no wish to steal her punchline, so I will just point you to The Intern’s recent post. It’s an exquisite example (even if just a joke, or a PhotoShopped image*) of a related but different phenomenon: a phrase in “Chinese” which sounds as if it means something wildly (in)appropriate in English.
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* Not a joke, apparently: Someone on a snopes.com forum has tracked it down. It’s currently listed (about halfway down this page) as a retailer of books for Oxford University Press (China).
Worth a Thousand Words (Plus the Speed of Light in Parsecs per Month, Times Pi, Divided by Planck’s Constant, to the ith Power…)
Per Tim O’Reilly, on Twitter… To quote the site where he found it:
To all of you nerds and geeks who — like me — have been unfairly and inaccurately labeled “dorks,” only to then exhaustively explain the differences among the three to a more-than-skeptical offender, I say: You’re welcome.
The simple eloquence of colored circles…
Apostrophizing the Enemy
[Image at right from the Celestial
Heavens/Might and Magic site]
In a comment the other day over at the Querulous Squirrel’s treetop lair, I ad-libbed a suggestion for people facing what are commonly called “nervous breakdowns”: name them. Please forgive the self-citation (which feels to me like a breach of Interweb etiquette):
Every “nervous breakdown” should have its own term, because every one is different from every other — and its, um, its significance is too great to let it go unnamed.
Somewhere, no doubt, someone has collected the names of all the demons and imps of Hell. Maybe every one of us who’s had a “nervous breakdown” should consider assigning it the name of a demon…
I did some looking around and found just such a (brief) collection. It’s here. As I described it in the rest of that comment:
…names and descriptions to fit many moods and ways of regarding a breakdown, from the scary to the wry. There’s even a Leonard. “When I first met Leonard, he scared the living crap out of me. Now I know he’s just the biggest jerk I ever met.”
Then today I encountered, at Colleen Wainwright’s communicatrix blog, a post about (in part) remembering trying times gone by. In that post, Colleen referred to someone she called “The Resistor.” As you can see for yourself in her post, The Resistor is/was not one of her best friends. His or her story — what The Resistor had done to Colleen in the past — just sounded too interesting to ignore. I had to learn about that “that rat bastard” for myself, so followed the link she’d conveniently provided… and discovered that The Resistor wasn’t a person. The Resistor was (is?) a feature of Colleen’s own internal landscape.
I’ll turn the mike over to her for a moment:
The Resistor needs no one and nothing — except something to push against, and everyone else does a damned fine job of providing fodder. The Resistor is very well developed, very smart and very, very strong…
It is indifferent to pain, although it seems to find it interesting or even amusing. But it doesn’t derive pleasure from causing pain. Far from it. It enjoys pushing back, period. Hence, the Resistor’s particular gift at shape-shifting (and, perhaps, a wee bit of pride in its highly refined abilities in this area.)
…[My hypnotherapist] tried every way he knew of to bring the Resistor to the side of Light, much to the amusement of the Resistor, who patiently, if a little condescendingly, kept insisting that was not a possibility.
Can I possibly tell you how much I love this picture of The Resistor?
(While you’re there, by the way, be sure to visit via her generous linkage her posts on the other denizens of her self, as revealed through hypnotherapy: Monkey Brain, The Edge, and the rest.)
LitFic: Online Resources
The other day, Moonrat replied to a question about the acceptability of collections of “linked” short stories: stories united by a common theme, cast of characters, whatever. Along the way, she wondered what the state of short fiction in general might be, in these days when writers seem so focused on books.*
(The comments surprised her, and me too, by implying there are a lot of short-story readers out there. On the other hand, the readers tend to be writers of short stories, too — which implies a certain… goal orientation, let’s say.)
One gauge of continued interest in short stories (and poetry, and “creative non-fiction” as they call essays these days) is the health of the literary-fiction markets. Eileen, a/k/a Speak Coffee to Me, points us to a post at the Third Coast** blog — a “linkbucket” of online resources:
There’s much more to revolution and innovation in literature than the Kindle. To find some, all you have to do is open your browser.
I knew of the DuoTrope directory of magazines (both print and online); it’s been linked to for months over at the right, in the the “Writer’s Biz Resources” category. (I didn’t know, though, about its submission-tracking feature.) And including general links to Twitter and Facebook — not to specific resources there, just to the services’ home pages — seems, er, a little… obvious?
But whether you’re a writer or reader of literary fiction, you could build a pretty respectable list of browser bookmarks from nosing around the links the post provides: consider it a “Start Here” post on the subject.
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* Hey, you can be a writer of short stories, but we all want to be authors — which means books, right?
** If you’re imagining the “Third Coast” to be along the Gulf of Mexico, er, not. Try the Great Lakes.
Real-Life Dialogue (EDT Edition)
[The scene: a suburban home situated somewhere in the (US) Eastern time zone. It is a mild, sunny Sunday afternoon in mid-March, and He and She are seated at their respective computers on opposite sides of a low wall, enjoying the sunshine when they remember to look out a window.]
She: [From her side of wall.] John?
He: Hmm?
She: What do you think about dinner tonight? Feel like grilling something?
He: Hmm? Oh, sure, yeah. What you have in mind?
She: I don’t know. Let me think about it.
He: Okay, let me know. I’ve gotta return the movies and pick up some other groceries, so I can grab something to grill, too.
[Time passes.]
She: What time is it?
[He consults his watch.]
He: A little before 2.
She: But… Oh, that’s right — I must’ve never adjusted this clock over here the last time we changed. Did you remember to change your alarm clock last night?
He: Yeah.
She: Good.
[Time passes. At various times, one or the other of them goes downstairs, heats up water for another cup of coffee or tea, messes with dog for a few minutes, and returns to his or her computer. Silence for a while, and then…:]
She: Omigod, look at the time! Weren’t you going to go to the store?
He: C’mon for crissake, will you relax, it’s only quarter to five!
She: Then how come my computer’s time says quarter to six?!?
He: [Frowning and rolling eyes, safely on his side of the wall.] Oh, for… don’t you see? It’s stupid damn Windows! If you’d let me switch you to Linux like I—
[Momentary silence.]
She: Well, what?
He: Crap crap crap. My computer’s clock says quarter to six, too.
She: But I thought you said—
He: Yeah, I set the alarm right. But I never adjusted my damn watch.
[Muffled explosions of breath from far side of wall.]
She: So now it’s too late to grill, isn’t it?
He: Uh, yeah, I guess so. Yeah… sorry.
She: So what are we gonna do about dinner?
He: I don’t know. Let me think about it.
Fill in the Blanks: Win an Oscar
“I Can’t Market My Art!”
Oh, Yes You Can
In a recent blog post, loyal friend of RAMH Froog dredged up a name I hadn’t seen or heard for years: “cartoonist” Hugh MacLeod.*
I no longer have any idea where I first encountered MacLeod and his interesting work. At the time, though, he was struggling to forge some sort of business from his creative output while still suffocating in a day job. He’d started up an e-newsletter, and in each issue he included — free of charge — a sample of one of his special projects. That special project was the creation of drawings (“cartoons”? eeehhhh… maybe) which he’d doodled on the backs of business cards. Some of the drawings were quite dark in tone; some were laugh-out-loud funny; some just made me uncomfortable with how much they made me think.
Ultimately, I unsubscribed from the Gaping Void newsletter, as MacLeod called it. Not because it had ceased to be interesting, even valuable or important. No, simply because I was saving every single issue, with all the others, in a separate GapingVoid email folder. The computer I had at the time had begun to wheeze with overload and I started to throw things overboard: MP3s, images, software… Gaping Void.
And then I forgot all about it. Until yesterday, when I read Froog’s post, and shortly learned that MacLeod is making a living doing what he wants to do. Crazy, huh?
If you want, feel free (of course!) to explore what is now MacLeod’s Gaping Void blog. But by all means (as Froog suggested) do stop over at the Lateral Action site for a terrific brief interview with MacLeod, in part on the topic of getting your art — dare I say writing? — in front of people who will want it for themselves.
Excerpt:
“Artists cannot market” is complete crap. Warhol was GREAT at marketing. As was Picasso and countless other “Blue Chips”. Of course, they’d often take the “anti-marketing” stance as a form of marketing themselves. And their patrons lapped it up.
The way artists market themselves is by having a great story, by having a “Myth”. Telling anecdotal stories about Warhol, Pollack, Basquiat, Van Gogh is both (A) fun and (B) has a mythical dimension… if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have had movies made about them. The art feeds the myth. The myth feeds the art.
The worst thing an artist can do is see marketing as “The Other”, i.e. something outside of themselves. It’s not.
So: what’s your myth — your “great story” about your story?
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* The “cartoonist” is MacLeod’s preferred term, rather than “artist.”
What’s in a Song: Fever (2)
[This is the second of two posts about the popular song “Fever.” Part 1 was a couple days ago, here.]
As I mentioned in Part 1 of this “Fever” mini-series, the song’s lyrics and pulsing rhythm (and reputation!) seem to lead immature and/or lazy performers down sexual pathways they haven’t really earned the privilege of traveling. When a singer purrs the words “Never know how much I love you/Never know how much I care” while humping a microphone stand — well, it’s hard to imagine wanting to jump that performer’s bones. I just want to laugh.
So when you set out to post a handful of covers of “Fever,” from among the gazillion available, you’ve got to exercise some judgment, some restraint:
Say you’re sort of squinting as you run your thumb over the corner of the flip-card animation. Say you stop at random. And say you’ve landed on an MP3 of, I don’t know… say you’ve stopped at the Pussycat Dolls‘ cover. If you just state the obvious — Oooh, pretty girls! — you’re headed for disappointment to then conclude: “I bet they’ll do it justice!”
So anyway, those covers don’t count for me. What’s left ranges from the overly respectful — almost note-for-note, beat-by-beat respectful — to the out-there: covers which take the basic melody and bass line and flip them inside-out, making the song almost (almost) unrecognizable in the process.
Uncomfortable Numbers
From whiskey river:
A Word on Statistics
Out of every hundred people,
those who always know better:
fifty-two.Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.Ready to help,
if it doesn’t take long:
forty-nine.Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four — well, maybe five.Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.Those not to be messed with:
four-and-forty.Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.Harmless alone,
turning savage in crowds:
more than half, for sure.Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it’s better not to know,
not even approximately.Wise in hindsight:
not many more
than wise in foresight.Getting nothing out of life except things:
thirty
(though I would like to be wrong).Balled up in pain
and without a flashlight in the dark:
eighty-three, sooner or later.Those who are just:
quite a few, thirty-five.But if it takes effort to understand:
three.Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred —
a figure that has never varied yet.
(Wislawa Szymborska; translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak [source])
…and:
One Hundred and Eighty Degrees
Have you considered the possibility
that everything you believe is wrong,
not merely off a bit, but totally wrong,
nothing like things as they really are?If you’ve done this, you know how durably fragile
those phantoms we hold in our heads are,
those wisps of thought that people die and kill for,
betray lovers for, give up lifelong friendships for.If you’ve not done this, you probably don’t understand this poem,
or think it’s not even a poem, but a bit of opaque nonsense,
occupying too much of your day’s time,
so you probably should stop reading it here, now.But if you’ve arrived at this line,
maybe, just maybe, you’re open to that possibility,
the possibility of being absolutely completely wrong,
about everything that matters.How different the world seems then:
everyone who was your enemy is your friend,
everything you hated, you now love,
and everything you love slips through your fingers like sand.
(Federico Moramarco)
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