I Can Has Library?

by 8 Comments

I Can Has Library? (small dog in big library)

Somewhere within the last few weeks, I read a description of a dog’s-eye (or rather, -nose) view of the world. It went something like this: As a dog crosses the living room, it is reading the Doggy Daily News.

Pretty funny.

But since I’ve now had a few months’ practice walking a very olfactorily-oriented dog up and down the street, and around the yard, I think I’ve got to sharpen the analogy a little.

Here’s the way these walks go:

  1. Trot out front door.
  2. Sniff exploratorily at front porch.
  3. Canter briskly up the sidewalk or, if the mood strikes you, detour across the shortcut to the driveway.
  4. Trot up the driveway to the street.
  5. Stop. Sniff the air. Look left, look right, turn around so as to look over your shoulder, turn around again.
  6. Toss a doggy coin and face left or right, accordingly.
  7. Apply nose to ground.
  8. Go.

[Read more…]

Share

Knowing Only the Present

by 6 Comments

M.C. Escher: Hand with Reflecting Sphere - what's behind you seems to be before youSince history is on my mind anyway…

From Jeff VanderMeer’s Ecstatic Days blog recently, by guest blogger Tero Ykspetäjä: the top five reasons “Why Finnish Is Cooler Than English.” Reason #5 (with slightly tongue-in-cheek coda):

There’s no future tense in the Finnish language. The present tense is used instead. “No future,” as the Tähtivaeltaja slogan says. This makes it easy to seize the day, to live in the moment and not worry about tomorrow. At least in theory. There are some who insist on trying to introduce a sort-of future tense by artificial constructs like “you will come to know this,” but they are clearly in the wrong and should stop immediately.

I jogged over to Wikipedia and found this example:

The future tense is not needed due to context and the telic contrast. For example, luen kirjan “I read a book (completely)” indicates a future, [while] luen kirjaa “I read a book (not yet complete)” indicates present.

(If you’re a native English speaker — perhaps especially so — contemplating following the link to Wikipedia’s article on telicity, and you are not a linguist, prepare yourself to learn more about the language than you ever picked up in Mrs. Grundy’s fifth-period class. Let alone on the playground.)

All of which got me wondering: are there any languages with no past tense?

Duh, what a question. I should have known this (emphasis mine):

All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word’s function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections — it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to “the, a, an” in English), and no gender.

It’s a topic for a *cough* future post, maybe. But I’ve always been interested in the idea that knowing one language from birth, as opposed to another, might (does?) shape the way one thinks throughout life.

For instance, if you have no grammatical form to express the future tense, can you even think in terms of a time containing events which have not yet happened? If you can’t express the past, what goes through your mind the first time you see a timeline? If your language has no tenses at all, do you have clocks and calendars? What does “time” itself mean to you? If you forget something you mean to pick up on the way home from work, what is the context in which you fail to pick it up, vs. the context in which you formed your intention to remember it in the first place — is there a “when”? (And what on Earth do you make of bizarre concepts like “daylight savings time”?)

Surely it can’t be that you think of “time” only as what English speakers call the present, a sort of neverending concurrency. Surely you don’t think you may walk out your front door and eventually come within (say) a mile of where the Emperor Gaozu is currently taking a bath.

Er… can you?

I think I’m experiencing some sort of linguo-philosophical vertigo here. (Almost said “at the moment” but, well…)

[P.S. For the link to the post on Finnish-vs.-English which started this avalanche of paradox, thanks to the “Instant Distractions” sidebar at Colleen Lindsay’s blog.]

Share

The Open-Heart-Surgery Theory of Writing

by 6 Comments

Cover of D. Hoffman's 'Poe Poe Poe [etc.],' by Anita KunzFor Halloween last week, in their contribution to the weekly around-the-Web Poetry Friday, the folks at the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog offered up Poe’s weird — and kind of forced — “Ulalume” (full title “To — — –. Ulalume: A Ballad”).

The ensuing discussion got me thinking once more about Poe — “once more” because it seems to be a topic my thoughts revisit every few years. (My favorite book about Poe is Daniel Hoffman’s Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (yes, seven Poes); the picture at the right is by Anita Kunz, from the cover of the cover of the 1985 paperback Vintage Books edition.)

Here’s Poe laying out a challenge for writers, in a passage often quoted — especially by writers:

[Read more…]

Share

Happy Birthday, Lester Dent

by 4 Comments

Today marks the 104th anniversary of the birth of Lester Dent, a/k/a Kenneth Robeson.

Not exactly a household name these days, eh? But in his time, which occupied a substantial chunk of the first half of the last century (he died young, in 1959), Dent was one of the most prolific and most successful writers on the planet. And it all came from a single character, the protagonist of — according to Wikipedia — 190 novels to date, and scads of stories. (Nearly all the books are credited exclusively to Dent, with the majority of the others, even those published long after his death, giving him at least partial credit. The “Kenneth Robeson” whose name actually appeared on the covers, though, was just a pseudonym.)

That protagonist: Doc Savage.

[Read more…]

Share

Transparent, and Not Quite So

by 4 Comments

Per usual, the Friday selection from whiskey river:

We suffer not from our vices and our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in place of reality.

(by Daniel J. Boorstin)

…and a bonus:

Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.

(by Eric Hoffer)

…and — not from whiskey river — this:

Introduction To Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

(by Billy Collins)

Finally, the deep-blue version (lyrics follow):

You Don’t Know Me

You give your hand to me
Then you say hello
I can hardly speak
My heart is beating so
And anyone can tell
You think you know me well
But you don’t know me

No, you don’t know the one
Who dreams of you at night
And longs to kiss your lips
And longs to hold you tight
Oh I’m just a friend
That’s all I’ve ever been
’cause you don’t know me

I never knew
The art of making love
Though my heart aches
With love for you
Afraid and shy
I’ve let my chance to go by
The chance that you might
Love me, too

You give your hand to me
And then you say good-bye
I watch you walk away
Beside the lucky guy
You’ll never never know
The one who loves you so
Well, you don’t know me

[break]

You give your hand to me, baby
Then you say good-bye
I watch you walk away
Beside the lucky guy
No, no, you’ll never ever know
The one who loves you so
Well, you don’t know me

(by Cindy Walker and Eddy Arnold, performed by B.B. King and Diane Schuur)

Share

Sponges, Sieves, Duck’s Backs, Horse’s Patooties

by 4 Comments

A new addition to the blogroll here, one “Cuff” of the Countersignature blog, recently made what I think is a stupendous find: a 1914 book, by one MacGregor Jenkins, entitled The Reading Public, available via Google Books.

Here’s how Cuff introduces the book’s content:

Jenkins divides the “reading public” into book readers and magazine readers. He further subdivides the book readers into three categories from least to greatest numbers: the sponge reader, the sieve reader, and the duck-back reader. The sponge reader reads “fewer and better books than his fellows” — resulting, according to Mr. Jenkins, in his being ignored by authors and publishers. The sieve reader reads quite a bit and is full of surface facts and plots and literary gossip, but doesn’t have the critical acumen of the sponge reader. Meanwhile, the lowly duck-back reader, while great in number, absorbs absolutely nothing and is entirely unchanged by reading because reading is for the duck-back simply a way to kill time (Jenkins believes the swelling of this number to be caused by the increasing phenomenon of commuting).

I wonder what kind of reader I am? Sad to say, it feels more sieve-like (although I’d love to be a sponge). The Missus would say this has something to do with my being a Gemini, and/or being born in a Chinese Year of the Rabbit. Grasshopper, not an ant. All that.

Interestingly, Jenkins’s book — despite the title — also has quite a bit to say to authors. (He was apparently a magazine editor.) Remember again that this is from, well, a century ago, to all intents and purposes. Bear in mind all that Maxwell Perkins, golden-age-of-authors-editors stuff. And, of course, make some allowances for the pre-World War I syntax:

[Read more…]

Share

Upsetting the Apple Cart

by 12 Comments

I’m going to go out on a limb here and…

…no, I’m not going to write a post about posts which begin with long-dead metaphors, posts whose authors should really know better. Though I, or somebody, probably should.

What I am going to say is possibly heretical and, well, possibly something I should keep my mouth shut about, since I care about my putative writing career. But it’s been driving me crazy — a real professional and perhaps even personal dilemma.

One of the first pieces of advice you get from agents, published authors, writing workshops, writers’ guides, and so on, is that you must picture where in the bookstore your book will be shelved. This becomes, then, your genre. Fiction’s got mystery, romance, SF/fantasy, young adult (YA), so on and so forth; and then non-fiction too is all over the map — biography, history, true crime, humor (hey, I didn’t make up these categories!), travel, reference…

(Above all else, the advice goes, if you’re serious about your writing career, avoid the dreaded mid-list/mainstream classification.)

Where will your book come to rest? they all want to know. Where do you belong?

Actually, it’s not such questions per se which are problematical. You do need to have some sense of how to explain your work — especially to potential agents, editors, even casual readers — and providing the genre helps accomplish that, even before you’ve offered details.

Where problems do come in is when you select a genre in advance, before a book is even written — despite your own proclivities.

[Read more…]

Share

Publisher Seeking Authors: The New Frontier

by 4 Comments

At the Dennis Cass Wants You to Be More Awesome site, in a thread about dispensing with the whole query-an-editor/agent process, member Paul Mikos pointed me to an experiment by publisher HarperCollins UK.

The experiment goes by the name “authonomy” (a cute neologism I’m still trying to make up my mind about). From the authonomy page of Frequently Asked Questions:

authonomy invites unpublished and self published authors to post their manuscripts for visitors to read online. Authors create their own personal page on the site to host their project — and must make at least 10,000 words available for the public to read.

Visitors to authonomy can comment on these submissions — and can personally recommend their favourites to the community. authonomy counts the number of recommendations each book receives, and uses it to rank the books on the site. It also spots which visitors consistently recommend the best books — and uses that info to rank the most influential trend spotters.

We hope the authonomy community will guide publishers straight to the freshest writing talent — and will give passionate and thoughtful readers a real chance to influence what’s on our shelves.

The reason Mikos pointed me to the authonomy site was that I’d earlier commented on the same thread that writers should form online marketplaces to which agents and publishers would come, seeking writing samples.

I suspect I’ll soon be lurking in the authonomy wings for at least a little while, and if so I’ll report back here about the experience.

For now, as I said to Mikos, I’m concerned about the time commitment required to participate fully and fairly. I know about myself that if I posted 10,000 words of my own writing, I couldn’t just sit back and wait to hear reactions to it. I’d want to read at least one to five thousand (or more) words of the contributions of five or more other authors, and I’d want to try maintaining an active involvement in the authonomy forum(s), and, and, and…

But it may also be too tempting to pass up, especially this early in the experiment.

For the record, as I said in an earlier post about blurbs, the whole business of writers trading public responses to one another’s work seems heavy with potential for abuse. I’m still not 100% comfortable with it at authonomy; that the mutual reviewers aren’t compensating one another with cash seems a minor point, since the real coin of an unpublished writer’s career is that of attention. The authonomy FAQ deals with this question, to some extent:

Just like the books market at large, there may be a few flutters and fads at authonomy. And in this day and age, there’s no denying you need to think about actively promoting your book to readers by networking if you want to gather a healthy army of support.

But with thousands of members at the site to impress and some stiff competition, it will take more than schmooze and a winning smile to reach the top. We believe quality of writing and book construction will be the ultimate test to sustained support and success on the site. When your book is assessed by the editorial board or by any visiting agent or publisher, quality of work is by far the most important consideration.

We’ll see!

Share

Will Cuppy

by 2 Comments

The most recent category for the links here, all the way at the bottom of the right-hand menu, is labeled “The Pantheon.” These aren’t authors who’ve necessarily influenced my style (although no doubt many of them have); they aren’t all authors who’ve meant a lot to me for my whole life (although some of them have). Instead, they’re authors who at one time or another bowled me over with the unexpected, offering surprising insights into what writing could possibly achieve.

One who didn’t make the cut, although I sure thought about including him, was Will Cuppy.

It was during the summer of 1964 that I first encountered Cuppy’s The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody. Earlier that year I’d been introduced to James Thurber, thanks to my 7th-grade English teacher Mr. Krause; I had almost made up my mind that I wanted to grow up to be a Professional Humorist or, failing that, a Professional Teller of Occasional Jokes.

And then I hit Cuppy. (It was almost exactly like that, a collision.)

[Read more…]

Share

The Extravagant Gesture

by Leave a Comment

From whiskey river:

The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire since the word go. — Annie Dillard

Share
Verified by MonsterInsights