You Can Run but You Can’t Hide

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From whiskey river:

All you can do is this: Whatever you experience, whether tangible or intangible, look underneath the experience, like a child looking for a lizard under a stone. You’re not expecting anything to be there, but you’re always wondering if there might be.

(Richard Leviton)

Not from whiskey river:

One of life’s primal situations; the game of hide and seek. Oh, the delicious thrill of hiding while the others come looking for you, the delicious terror of being discovered, but what panic when, after a long search, the others abandon you! You mustn’t hide too well. You mustn’t be too good at the game. The player must never be bigger than the game itself.

(Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories)

And finally, sometimes you can’t help wondering if there might be something under the next stone, too… Cartoon from The Funny Times cartoon archive:

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Partridge-Built Canoes

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I was scouting around recently looking for information on the word “gnomic.” It seemed apropos for a comment I wanted to make on somebody else’s blog, and I thought I gnew knew what it meant, but wasn’t 100% positive.

One of the more thorough resources I located on this subject was the “Love to Know 1911” site, which is supposedly (who knows?) based on the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Here’s an abridged version of what it says there about “gnome and gnomic poetry”:

Sententious maxims, put into verse for the better aid of the memory, were known by the Greeks as gnomes, from [the Greek word for] an opinion. A gnome is defined by the Elizabethan critic Henry Peacham (1576?-1643?) as “a saying pertaining to the manners and common practices of men, which declareth, with an apt brevity, what in this our life ought to be done, or not done.” The Gnomic Poets of Greece, who flourished in the 6th century B.C., were those who arranged series of sententious maxims in verse… But the title “gnomic” came to be given to all poetry which dealt in a sententious way with questions of ethics. It was, unquestionably, the source from which moral philosophy was directly developed, and theorists upon life and infinity, such as Pythagoras and Xenophanes, seem to have begun their career as gnomic poets. By the very nature of things, gnomes, in their literary sense, belong exclusively to the dawn of literature; their naivete and their simplicity in moralizing betray it.

Which tends to confirm what Wiktionary tells us about “gnomic” in the informal sense:

(of a saying or aphorism) Mysterious and often incomprehensible yet seemingly wise.

In the event, I didn’t end up using “gnomic” in the comment. It fit, but (per the above) it can be pejorative, and I hate to hurt people’s feelings (or, alternatively, p!ss them off).

And anyway, I’d come across some distractingly interesting examples of Native American gnomic pronouncements. (Who knew?) These are from the eighteen-volume Cambridge History of English and American Literature (Ward & Trent, et al. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907–21):

Watch him with his neighbour’s children.
Would you choose a councillor,
(Sioux)

Do not stand wishing for the fish in the water,
Go home and make a spear.
(Puget Sound)

And my favorite:

Of an affair which makes a great stir without getting forward the Micmac will say: “It goes like the canoe that the Partridge made.” The point of the comparison is in the fable of the Partridge who, observing that a canoe goes faster when the ends are well rounded, conceived the brilliant idea of a canoe which should be rounded on the sides also. The result was a bowl-shaped structure which went round and round without progress.

Don’t ever let anybody tell you these were primitive people.

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The Touraine Passenger

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Flag of former French province of TouraineWriting exercise, short version: Write a story (or poem or essay or what-have-you) (blog entries don’t count, ahem) whose title is “The Touraine Passenger.” The “the” is optional, but the other two words must be used in that order in the title; one or both may, at the author’s discretion, be italicized.

(If you’ve no other ideas for how, even generally, to use the word “Touraine,” er, well, you do know by now that Google can be your friend, right?)

Need more details? Read on.

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Water Falls. It Really Does.

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[First, to get this out of the way, allow me to introduce you to Miss Globe-head. That’s her over there on the right. And if you don’t know why I’m introducing the two of you, please check my previous post.]

For a number of reasons — most of them having to do with writing, by the way — I’ve been fascinated for years by the country of Wales.

(The Missus might argue with that “most of them,” by the way. She believes that I must have lived a former life there, and maybe she’s right. Not that I have any memory of it. Or evidence of it, for that matter, beyond the fascination.)

This Welsh thing of mine has taken several turns. I’ve got books about the history and culture of Wales. I’ve got a Welsh-English/English-Welsh dictionary. Somewhere along the line I even picked up a cassette-tape “teach yourself Welsh” language-instruction course.

Sometime in the early ’90s I was in a used bookstore in Charlottesville, Virginia, and came across a beautiful picture book called The Waterfalls of Wales, by one John Llewelyn Jones. (And it was beautiful, despite the fact that except for the cover, all its photographs were in black-and-white.)

Aside from the Welsh connection, I think what drew me to the book was the subject: waterfalls in general.

Now, if you’ve been following weather news during this hurricane season, you know that the topic of running water is especially fraught for people around the state of Florida right now. But the water-borne terrors of Fay, say, are of a completely different character than the sorts of running water I’m thinking of.

Consider, for example, this photograph (not from the book) of Sgwd Isaf Clun Gwyn, Afon Mellte (roughly, “White Meadow Lower Falls, [on the] River Mellte” — and if anyone can supply more polish to the translation, please speak up!):

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How Do You Figure?

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Crazy week upcoming (as if the last one wasn’t crazy enough)… More details on that later, but for now I’ll just say that I’ll have blog posts stacked up in the pipeline and ready to go, starting a week from today [double emphasis added 2008-08-29] and continuing for the next four days. (I know how the Web’s attention wanders if a site goes dark too long.)

The catch?

I hope but can’t promise that I’ll be able to get to a computer to actually post the things. All I’ll need, once the posts are written, is about ten minutes to read, revise as needed, and click the Publish button. But I won’t actually have a computer with me — so will depend on the kindness of strangers or family members or, I don’t know, Internet cafes. Don’t be surprised if you read reports of some guy in Groucho glasses and mustache, stealing laptops in bookstores and then returning them 15 minutes later.

Anyhow, to kick off that series of posts starting which shall start [clarification added 2008-08-29] in a week, let me introduce you to a slender volume (103 pages, with index) called Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase, by Arthur Quinn. (Amazon says the book is 112 pages long, which may be attributable to a later edition; the one I’ve got here is copyright 1982.)

From Quinn’s preface:

Graduate students in literature eagerly buy little dictionaries so that when a monograph intones about later Shakespeare’s penchant for the anthimeria, they will have a place to look it up. So they look it up, while their own prose often becomes more and more like a monograph’s, a groaning misery to read.

…Learning about the figures of speech should be less like learning about the periodic table of elements than like learning how to model clay. To ask a sentence if it has a zeugma is not like asking a rock if it has silicon. In fact, the very phrase “figures of speech” is misleading in its static, passive form. It should be the “figurings of speech” — or, better yet, “figuring speech.”

The figurings of speech reveal to us the apparently limitless plasticity of language itself. We are confronted, inescapably, with the intoxicating possibility that we can make language do for us almost anything we want. Or a least a Shakespeare can. The figures of speech help us to see how he does it, and how we might.

I’ve always been haunted by the possibility that I might be a better writer than storyteller. Discussions about story always have me glancing nervously over my shoulder, as though the ghosts of Homer and Twain and Hemingway are going to materialize and demand my credentials. “Papers, please,” they’ll say. I’ll pat my pockets, frown, slap my forehead, say “Jeez, my other suit–” and while they’re distracted I’ll take off in a broken-field run, heading for the safety of the Prose Mountains.

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Boiling It Down to a Single Word

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Hypothetical-question time:

You’ve just been introduced to the classic visitor from outer space. He (or is it she?) is in a hurry — in fact, will be leaving in about 20 seconds, starting, say, now — but has a super-important question which needs answering. How you answer is to determine whether the saucers will (a) blow Earth up or (b) let her (or is it him?) continue on its stately course through the stars, through terrestrial history, and through the annals of intergalactic comedy.

Here’s the question:

We are very interested in this thing you call ‘fiction.’ But we do not understand it, and it is the last thing on my chop-chop must-do last-minute checklist before reporting back to Grand Inquisitor Xarg. I need to get going. Can you please give me one word so that I may understand it?

(Tip: “Uhhhh…” will not count as a valid reply. Nor will “Wait!”)

So what’s your answer? And if you yourself write novels or short stories, what’s the one word which is the key to understanding your fiction in particular?

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The Most Amazing Word

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Back in my college days, I took a course in semantics. One of the more revelatory learnings I acquired from that course’s professor was the power of function words: all the “stuff” which fills in among the supposedly more robust verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. Presented with a paragraph of all those “important” words and no function words, it’s hard to make sense of it. Just a pile of verbiage, really. On the other hand, a paragraph of nothing except function words instantly, in your mind’s eye, acquires all the strength of an understandable structure — like a skyscraper’s underlying girders — because the function words define the relationships among words.

A classic example* is the first stanza of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” as seen here with the function (and other “null”) words dimmed out:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome rath outgrabe.

…and here, with the function words emphasized:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome rath outgrabe.

A few weeks ago, agent Nathan Bransford posted two open-ended questions on his blog, a week apart: “What’s Your Favorite Word?” and “What’s Your Least Favorite Word?” I can’t swear to this, yet I believe every single nominee in both categories — including my own — was an “important” word. Let’s take all those commenters at their (ahem) word, and assume those are their favorites and least favorites.

Per the title of this post here, though, what’s the single most amazing word in the English language — the word whose weight is out of all proportion to its size and apparent significance? I bet it’s a function word. Here’s my nominee:

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Actions Speak Louder

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Robert Mitchum in 'Night of the Hunter'Writer’s dilemma: “Show, don’t tell.” “But how do I show somebody who’s uneasy? Isn’t that why we have the adjective ‘uneasy’ in the first place — sort of shorthand for all the… the stuff an uneasy person might do?”

Um, no.

Enter The Emotion Thesaurus, a (weekly?) Thursday feature at The Bookshelf Muse.

You start to type how your [Main Character] is cringing in terror and then stop. You glance back a page and shake your head. Somebody cringed in the last scene — can’t use that one. Hot, shuddering breaths? Nope, breathing’s already come up a million times in this book, so that beat won’t work. You need something different, something unique to show fear. His eyes widened? His face was a frozen mask? Pu-leeze. The POV police are screaming at the thought.

The joy and energy starts to leak out of you. The excitement that brought you here is fading. You can’t seem to find the right way to show the rawness of your character’s fear. Everything action you come up with seems trite or hollow or cliché.

Reality trickles in: the coffee’s even colder now, and the mailman has gone. Your flyers are probably out there on the step, about to blow away. And of course the eerie silence means your dog no longer needs to go outside. You sag in your chair, defeated by a descriptive beat.

As you leave to mop up Mr. Ruffy’s mess, you glance at the computer screen and think, if only I had a thesaurus of emotional beats.

…Now, if you draw a blank on how to show your character’s emotion through a physical action (a beat), we can help. Each Thursday we will introduce new cardinal emotions to our thesaurus, offering you an ‘idea bank’ for the times when you get stuck. You can scroll through our lists, and see if one of our ideas sparks one of your own.

For instance, here’s a selection from yesterday’s post, on “impatience”:

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On Writing Long: Edith Wharton

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Time change - tastes change - *I've* changed!Back in May — the 26th, to be exact — Steve King’s invaluable and always entertaining Today in Literature newsletter informed us that on that day in 1891, Edith Wharton’s first story was accepted for publication, by Scribner’s Magazine. The story was called “Mrs. Manstey’s View.”

(Yes, by the way: that’s accepted for publication — not actually published. I can’t imagine how Mr. King manages to keep all these dates organized or, for that matter, how he learns of them in the first place.)

I confess, with some embarrassment, that I have never read any of Edith Wharton’s books. (Now that I’ve written that, I guess I should commit to filling that gap in my education.) Yet I do have a few connections with her.

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Like a Candle in the Wind

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God, do I love moments of unintended poetry.

God, do I hate the ravages of age which, within minutes, can scatter those moments to the far edges of memory. Then you have to mount a whole frigging safari to recover them…

The Missus and I were on the way home from work yesterday. (We don’t work at the same place, but we do carpool. Which gives us a chance to talk, to share moments of drama and outrage from the past eight hours, to be present when the other bursts into song or, yes, poetry.)

Her boss and his wife are doing us a favor which, if they can manage it, will be done ideally sometime the next 24 hours. I hadn’t heard if it was still “on,” though, so I asked TM if she knew what the status was Actually, she said, actually, no I haven’t. She had me punch her office’s phone number into her cell phone (she was driving) so she could briefly remind her boss about it. It took 10 seconds, if that.

But the end of the conversation cracked me up. Her half of it went something like, “Uh-huh… Okay. Thanks. Just remind me in the morning, in case I forget to ask.” And then she hung up.

She saw me laughing. “What?”

“Oh, you know. Suddenly I just thought of a saying.” Which was:

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