writer – A Quiver Of Quotes

Hazelnuts in the Chocolate Text

On metaphor as a measure of magic: how the ordinary text becomes extraordinary. Quote from Roland Barthes’s “The Pleasure of the the Text”.

*Characters in yellow* by Paul Klee (1937)—resisting uniformity

Endless walls, endless trains, endless clouds.

Uniformity, monotony, apathy. They make for drearier reading than a blank page (at least a blank page is hope’s canvas). Hence Kurt Vonnegut’s counsel to aspiring authors:

Make [your] characters want something right away even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

(From his interview with The Paris Review in 1977.).

Needs must when nature drives.

Wants give the reader a foothold in the story: What do you think of a man dying of thirst because he cannot reach the glass on his bedside table? Or of a political activist refusing a glass of water as part of her protest fast until she is force-fed?

Opinion is hardly dispassionate. A meagre glass of water will elicit something in even the most desensitised reader (pity, bile, fever), and the emotional investment in another’s hardship—be it fictional—amounts to attention.

Generating hardship is the storyteller’s prerogative and duty, generating it any which way, usually by an idiosyncratic magic opaque to others. But before the twirl of the wand happens, the elements of the craft are strategically employed: the opening paragraph hooks the reader, story parts flow into one another, the final punch is delivered with due panache. Ultimately learnable, practicable, and discernible, these elements are the ideal backdrop against which to measure the effect of the wand’s hocus-pocus. Continue reading “Hazelnuts in the Chocolate Text”

“God is a gentleman. He prefers blondes.”

On Joe Orton’s collected works, and a selection of quotes from his “Loot”.

Front cover of Joe Orton's Plays — Front cover (the painting is Richard Lindner’s *Untitled No. 2*)

I discovered Joe Orton in a second-hand bookshop, on the bottom shelf, between a travelogue and a potboiler thriller. The front cover featured a cubist grotesque, while the back cover showed a man in his early thirties, crisply sunburnt, sitting back on a patio folding chair wearing nothing but an amused smirk and a pair of decidedly front-and-centre white briefs, fashionable half a century ago. He’s looking at the camera as if to say: “What you see is only the tip of what you’ll get.”

The mixed metaphor, the innuendo, and the natural smugness are a comedic staple—black comedy in his case. The picture spoke to me. I placed a coin on the counter and the yellowing, 1987 copy of his life’s work became mine.

(Orton, English playwright and etymon of the word Ortonesque, was bludgeoned to death by his partner in 1967, at the age of 34, only a few years after his commercial breakthrough.)

It’s always poignant paying virtually nothing for all that somebody’s left behind, though I suspect that’s not what got me the awkward smile from the cashier who rang up the purchase.

As it turns out, a preposterous dismembering of sensibilities—hinted by the book covers—is just the beginning of what follows. Continue reading ““God is a gentleman. He prefers blondes.””

Writing What Will Not Be Read

On Roland Barthes’s tmesis, and on density, depth, and the reading speed of a text.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DvorakReader.jpg — *Reader* by František Dvořák (1906)

In a conversation, we speak to be heard, if not listened to. In a letter for a friend or a story for the public, we write to be read, if not deeply regarded.

Every word is intended for effect.

No other starting position makes sense for a wordsmith, especially with respect to impatient, multitasking modern readers. Their attention mustn’t be wasted on unnecessary ideas, passages, or words.

(Or, in the extreme, on individual letters. Getting the Words Right, an otherwise helpful guidebook to writing, suggests that s be cut from words like towards and forwards as part of a so-called nano-reduction, at least in American English. In British English, towards and toward are interchangeable, but the nuanced distinction between forward and forwards is still respect-worthy at the cost of the occasional extra letter.)

But who judges what’s necessary in a text?

A writer’s intentions—the best, the worst, and the proverbially dubious—pave all sorts of profoundly manufactured, “necessary” roads the reader almost certainly won’t walk. The reader seeks what the reader needs: excitement, information, oblivion, or perhaps just a digestive after a heavy meal. The reader takes what is useful and strips off the rest. Roland Barthes calls this perceived encounter of useful and useless tmesis. Continue reading “Writing What Will Not Be Read”

Reading Faster, or Speeding up the Striptease

On Roland Barthes’s analogy between reading and striptease in “The Pleasure of the Text”

https://www.wikiart.org/en/jean-honore-fragonard/a-young-girl-reading-1776-1 — *A Young Girl Reading* by Jean-Honore Fragonard (1776)

Most communions are licit between mind and body, though only some are enshrined in language.

Within standard usage, the mind can handle, sit on, kick about, or push through difficult problems, while the body remembers what it’s like to be out in the open, the legs are happy to run for miles, and the lungs don’t mind the effort. More creative metaphors would have the mind swimming through a sea of problems or the body navigating a complex ontological issue by mutating. (Here navigating, the physical action of driving a ship, was first abstracted for application in matters of intellect and Internet, before being returned to serve in the physical realm, metaphorically.)

While metaphors can sidle up, similes are signposted either with like or as, or with phrases such as the colour/sound/feeling of or the way that. Also, similes tend to focus on partial comparisons: in the context of gymnastics, a girl could be as nimble as a fawn, without the reader worrying that she might fall prey to the wolves in the hills. Because there are no wolves and no hills; the fawn is, with few exceptions, confined to the initial phrase. That said, extended, unintended meanings are effortlessly available (predatory males as wolves, for example). The imagination obliges, whenever the simile resonates. Continue reading “Reading Faster, or Speeding up the Striptease”

Cutting Through Language

On the rhetorical figure asyndeton, and how Roland Barthes uses the word metaphorically in “The Pleasure of the Text”.

https://www.wikiart.org/en/wassily-kandinsky/gentle-accent-1934/ — *Gentle accent* by Wassily Kandinsky (1934)—one way to think about the deep layering of language?

Covering a few miles on the weekend means checking the weather program and pulling out those old shorts and putting on the stinky trainers and knotting the fraying shoelaces and stepping outside and taking the first step and… jogging.

It can also mean getting ready, warming up, jogging, finishing with a sprint.

These two descriptions of the same activity illustrate the basic difference between the rhetorical figures they employ: polysyndeton in the first case (many conjunctions), and asyndeton in the second case (no conjunctions).

The polysyndeton brings about a stream of consciousness that reports elements as they occur, or a stately, biblical grandness, such as:

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me:
And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, …

—John 10:27–28, KJV

The asyndeton brings about swiftness and density, or a jerky, rushed rhythm, such as:

Ho! hearts, tongues, figures, scribes, bards, poets, cannot
Think, speak, cast, write, sing, number, ho!

—Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra 3.2.16

(These and many more examples are offered in Arthur Quinn’s Figures of Speech.)

The Shakespeare example is a particularly radical asyndeton, called a brachylogia (meaning short speech), where the conjunctions are omitted between individual words making them into a list or heap. Indeed, the Roman rhetorician Quintilian classed both syndetons as types of acervatio (a heaping up).

Rhetorical heaps are sensible sequences. The Gospel polysyndeton is a temporal sequence; the Shakespeare asyndeton comprises two sequences derived from the same word classes (nouns, then verbs). Other more general heaps, like congeries, rely on a climactic ordering to achieve the satisfying feeling of crescendo and carry the reader over (sometimes dubious) reasoning.

Commas hold an asyndeton heap together.

A proliferation of commas, however, can signal crisp yet complex writing not comprising of homogeneous sequences. Continue reading “Cutting Through Language”

Reading Speed: Aristocratic

On the two reading speeds that Roland Barthes describes in “The Pleasure of the Text”.

https://www.wikiart.org/en/rene-magritte/the-art-of-conversation-1950-3/ — *The art of conversation* by René Magritte (1950)—slow down, look. *Rêve* is dream in French.

In an age obsessed with saving time, reading speed is increasingly scrutinised. Brevity, clarity, immediate relevancy—done! Click on the next link.

The prize is gratification at the price of linguistic mystique.

Lyrical novels are the obverse. Looping descriptions, metaphors upon symbols upon embedded stories, resonances with previously unexplored feelings and questions questions questions—not done! Not done, even when the last word is read.

The prize is linguistic mystique at the price of gratification.

The dichotomy isn’t so obvious: lengthy thrillers immediately pertain to the specific goal of fun pastime, as do mystery novels; on the other hand, short poems resonate for years, as do certain “clear”, brief statements or questions (traditional sayings, koans).

In fact:

One. This dichotomy isn’t drawn between nonfiction and fiction, or between genre and literary, or between prose and poetry.

Two. This dichotomy isn’t about the words per minute one person can read compared to another.

Three. This dichotomy isn’t well-defined.

Four. A better-defined dichotomy is that of renown French literary critic, Roland Barthes, who divides the world of texts according to one of the two systems of reading applied to each text.

The translator, Richard Miller, makes clear that Barthes’s original Pleasure of the Text is far more titillating than the English version. (The book, after all, centres on the explicit, almost erotic pleasure that can be derived from a text.) If there’s one reason to learn French— Continue reading “Reading Speed: Aristocratic”

The Figure of a Book

Defining the figure of a book following Borges’s figure of man in “Mirror of Enigmas”.

https://www.wikiart.org/en/leonardo-da-vinci/the-proportions-of-the-human-figure-the-vitruvian-man-1492/ — *The proportions of the human figure (The Vitruvian Man)* by Leonardo da Vinci (1492)

Some measurements of an object may be more important than others. If a medieval scholar asks how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, you’re unlikely to enquire about the length of the pin. (But enquiring about the size of the dance area, namely the head, would be reasonable.)

Some measurements distort under projection. A man at noon dwarfs his own shadow, but a man in a torchlit cave casts a giant on the wall. This happens because the shadow of an object depends on the object, the source of light, the surface catching the shadow, and their relative positions. Therefore, shadows hint at features of their owner without necessarily describing their owner’s essence.

Those in Plato’s cave cannot imagine the sun.

Similarly: silhouettes are contours from one viewpoint (a cylindrical candle is a rectangle when seen from the side, and a circle when seen from above); photographs show us the lens-facing side (a rectangle of wax and a flaming disc).

Projections are simplifications.

Shadows, silhouettes, photographs, x-rays, scans are projections of physical objects that a human mind grasps more easily than the objects themselves. In intellectual matters, we outline issues and give snapshots of complex situations. Further, a state of mind is the mind viewed within a slice of time—it’s a momentary projection of a more complex figure.

A current state of the mind is by definition “reasonable” or “comprehensible” to that mind, but taken over time, taken together, these projections of mind trace an incomprehensible figure consisting of various states (incomprehensible, in as much as we cannot remember all of it or recreate all of it or make sense of all of it).

But what if all projections over all time could be understood in their entirety? And not just those of mind, but more generally, those of man? Continue reading “The Figure of a Book”

The Shell of a Book

On the finiteness and linearity of book-shells, inspired by a quote from Borges’s “The Book of Sand”.

https://www.wikiart.org/en/leonardo-da-vinci/study-of-hands/ — *Study of hands* by Leonardo da Vinci (c.1474)

Artefacts are made to the measure of a human hand. A spoon balances between thumb and forefinger, a cigarette between forefinger and middle finger, a ring between the knuckles of the fourth finger. A keyboard letter fits on the tip of one, a smartphone fits in the grip of all five.

Physical books are no different: their shells are designed to be held and manipulated (from the Latin manus meaning hand). Size, weight, shape; cover quality, binding; texture, thickness, stickiness of pages. Certain values of these parameters confer certain “paravalues” on the content, even if spuriously. Larger is lengthier is deeper or broader. Slimmer is smaller is sleeker or sparser. Weightier is weightier. Lighter is lighter-weight.

Test it on unfamiliar content.

Unfamiliar content is more serious in hardback, more grand in a large format, more fancy on glossy paper—than it is in mass-market paperback. The content ought to vaguely match the paravalues implied by a particular shell, and usually does. Or else, for example: A jolt of incongruity strikes me every time I see an airport novel bound solid and shiny for the centuries, like it’s a compendium of philosophical wisdom.

Test it on familiar content.

The same content in a sturdy shell and in a flimsy shell is not the same content.

Conventionally, visual aspects of the shell feed prejudice, hence the saying: do not judge a book by its cover. But the saying omits to warn against judging a book by the overall feeling of its shell—edges, friction, and gravity—when hand goes to cover.

The shell’s physicality also imbues the reading process. Via the visual aspect, as usual: font, layout, print quality. But also via the tactile: size, weight, shape, etc, like above. The landscape between the palms, with a broken spine or dog-eared pages or an annoying French flap, integrates, over the formative period, a reader’s proprioception with their mental representation of the book’s content.

This is why the e-reader experience, where the “shell” of all e-books is the same, sometimes feels like a bobbing about of the mental faculty, disconcerting and abstract, in the absence of the body—it’s discombobulating.

Which hints at one of the two underappreciated aspects of a book-shell: its finiteness. Continue reading “The Shell of a Book”

Imaginary Architecture: The Cathedral of Mist

On fancy literary abodes, and in particular Paul Willems’s “Cathedral of Mist”. And a list of 20+ famous (more or less) literary towers, castles, rooms.

https://www.wikiart.org/en/m-c-escher/other-world/ — *Other World* by M. C. Escher (1947)

Looking at the diverse collection of M. C. Escher’s sketches, it’s hard to believe there exist impossible architectures he has failed to conjure.

Throw in everything else described on this site, Impossible World, with its historical and modern explorations of the subject, and you’re in a genuine tight spot to think of something new.

Visually speaking.

So take a sidestep and look at the problem linguistically. Instead of asking about the impossible, ask about the imaginary.

(Note the synaesthetic idioms we swallow daily: you can speak visually—apply the eye to an action of the mouth, and look linguistically—apply language to an action of the eye.)

The sidestep works. Words can paint pictures more bizarre than pencils can. What a warped, inconsistent visual geometry does for sight, a description of an imaginary, non-existent wonder does directly for the brain—many times over and uniquely so for every individual. This shouldn’t be surprising: on paper, a drawing is constrained by two-dimensions and utensil type, while a story is only loosely constrained by two hundred thousand words and some grammar rules (amongst which linearity is chief).

So if you’re not a naturally gifted draughtsman with an instinct for the optical paradox, literary expression is another potential outlet (assuming learning how to write comes more easily to you than learning how to draw well).

If all else fails—read! Inhabiting the worlds that rise from the rows of black squiggles is your prerogative. Continue reading “Imaginary Architecture: The Cathedral of Mist”

The Onion Man

On Louis Levy’s “Kzradock”.

The slender blade of reason is no more than a probe against the tomahawk of insanity, which can crush a skull with a single blow.

—Louis Levy, Kzradock (translated by W. C. Bamberger)

Doubt.

Doubt about our surroundings, about our reality, about ourselves.

But where should doubt start, and when? What do we gain by being the detectives of our minds and souls?

These are the themes at the core of—take a deep breath—Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah: From the Notes of Dr. Renard de Montpensier by Louis Levy (1910).

A moment to parse the title of this novella:

Dr Renard is the protagonist.
Kzradock the Onion Man is the title of Part I.
The Spring-Fresh Methuselah is the title of Part II.

A shorter moniker generally aids mental manipulation, so I chose Spring-Onion (no disrespect meant); you might chose something else. I note that the original Danish title at least avoids the English double-barrelled translations: Menneskeløget (Onion Man) and vaarfriske (Spring-Fresh).

Continue reading “The Onion Man”

How to Survive a Tough Book: Bizarre

On Oskar Panizza’s “The Pig” and how to deal with eccentric books.

The Pig by Oskar Panizza is difficult to classify.

It first appeared in the 1900 in the Zurich Discussions, a journal self-published by the author. Translated into English by Eric Butler, the book now reaches us via Wakefield press—an American publisher that specialises in literary oddities. The full title helps support its claim to uniqueness:

The Pig: In Poetic, Mythological, and Moral-Historical Perspective.

A quick flip-through provides a tad more insight.

It is non-fiction, erudite, creative in its approach to interpretation, and it has footnotes, lots of footnotes, so many that a page without them is a surprise and a page only of them ought to have been encouraged by the editor. Hebrew slips between two teeth, German and Latin between the other, Greek likes it on the tongue to roll about with French.

The first page has a black and white reproduction of The Lady with the Pig by Félicien Rops (1878). Continue reading “How to Survive a Tough Book: Bizarre”

Burn the Manuscript

Jorge Luis Borges on Kafka instructing Max Bod to burn Kafka’s unpublished work.

In the days before the internet people used more ephemeral media for writing, like paper, like parchment, like papyrus. If you wanted to destroy your work, you would chop it up and commit it to flames. You could also delegate the task, though in modern terms that would be like handing someone your phone and asking them to delete your notes.

Kafka died a month shy of his forty-first birthday, in June 1924. Most of his unpublished work he left to his friend Max Brod with a final request that it all be burned.

Brod didn’t burn it.

Jorge Luis Borges offers an answer as to why. The following excerpt is from his interview with The Paris Review in 1966.

In the case of Kafka, we know very little. We only know that he was very dissatisfied with his own work. Of course, when he told his friend Max Brod that he wanted his manuscripts to be burned, as Virgil did, I suppose he knew that his friend wouldn’t do that. If a man wants to destroy his own work, he throws it into a fire, and there it goes. When he tells a close friend of his, I want all the manuscripts to be destroyed, he knows that the friend will never do that, and the friend knows that he knows, and that he knows that the other knows that he knows, and so on and so forth.

True or not, this Borgesian circularity has a particular, pleasing ring to it, like an echo—an echo every reader of Kafka’s work perpetuates.

Thinking about that gives me goosebumps.

Continue reading “Burn the Manuscript”

Fishing in a Bathtub

Albert Camus on Kafka and the absurd, taken from “Myth of Sisyphus”.

Here, have some flash-fiction from seventy years ago.

You know the story of the crazy man who was fishing in a bathtub. A doctor with ideas as to psychiatric treatments asked him “if they were biting,” to which he received the harsh reply: “Of course not, you fool, since this is a bathtub.” That story belongs to the baroque type. But in it can be grasped quite clearly to what a degree the absurd effect is linked to an excess of logic. Kafka’s world is in truth an indescribable universe in which man allows himself the tormenting luxury of fishing in a bathtub, knowing that nothing will come of it.

—Albert Camus on Kafka, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (Translated from the French by Justin O’Brien)

The bathtub story starts from an absurd proposition (fishing in bathtub).

The doctor assumes the patient has taken seriously the first part of the proposition (fishing), so proceeds to play along by asking whether the fishes are biting.

The patient, however, latches onto the second part of the proposition (bathtub) and is insulted by the doctor’s lack of intelligence.

The logic of both participants isn’t at fault, though the disjunction stemming from the initial absurdity is. At a basic level this paradoxical repartee is easily inserted into the core of any incident. Somehow it doesn’t fail to perplex every time.

Man is talking to the wall. Friend asks whether the wall is talking back. Man responds: “It’s a wall, how can it talk back?”
Woman in a café is teaching her dog to read. Kindly waiter asks whether the dog has learned any of the letters yet. Woman responds: “It’s a dog, you idiot.“
Boy is writing dead grandma a letter. Mother asks whether he expects grandma to reply with a letter. Boy rolls eyes and responds: “Of course not, grandma is dead.”

Even though I just wrote those three examples, holding their meaning in my head makes me spin like Kafka’s top.

Continue reading “Fishing in a Bathtub”

Running After Tops

Anne Carson on Kafka’s short story “The Top” (taken from the preface of her book “Eros the Bittersweet”).

There goes a philosopher running after a children’s top. His glee! His ardour! Look how the top spins and wriggles away from him. Now he’s caught it—it’s stopped spinning—he’s inspecting it, grimacing, disgusted, and throwing it to the ground in disappointment.

Oh look another top!

Off he runs after the toy as enthusiastically as after the first. Now he’s caught it, he’s inspecting it…

This inveterate optimist is of Kafka’s imagining (from his short text The Top), and his behaviour is justified: For he believed that the understanding of any detail, that of a spinning top, for instance, was sufficient for the understanding of all things. This character is more allegorical placeholder than philosopher.

But I won’t interpret the allegory.

Over the past weeks I’ve had my say regarding Kafka’s work, so for the next few posts I’ll let the experts speak: Anne Carson, Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, and Jorge Luis Borges.

A well written commentary intended for a general audience doesn’t require the reader to be familiar with the primary source beforehand. However, if upon enjoying the commentary you decide to go and make yourself familiar with said primary source—all the better! The four authors above reignited my interest in Kafka, and perhaps they will do the same for you. Continue reading “Running After Tops”

Inspired by Myth: Modernising

On giving a modern flavour to a retelling of an old myth, specifically Kafka’s “Poseidon”.

https://www.wikiart.org/en/ivan-aivazovsky/sea-view-by-moonlight-1878/ — *Sea view by Moonlight* by Ivan Aivazovsky (1878)

“The sea anemones need counting.”

“May I be assigned the Mediterranean section?”

“Same as every year. Here’s the conch. Put one white speck of sand for each healthy specimen, and one black speck for each diseased specimen. You have two days to bring back the conch to the records department.”

“Yes, sir.”

“No frolicking about with Triton.”

“Certainly not, sir.”

Poseidon watched the nymph swim off, giggling. Poseidon envied her—all he ever did was sit in his throne room, at the big rock slab of a desk tallying numbers and writing up reports. He sighed. Better get on with it.

“Give me some more ink, will you?” he said.

The squid perching on his shoulder filled his pen. Continue reading “Inspired by Myth: Modernising”

Inspired by Myth: Alternative Ending

On exploring alternative endings to classical myths, specifically Kafka’s “Prometheus”.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Heinrich_fueger_1817_prometheus_brings_fire_to_mankind.jpg — *Prometheus Brings Fire* by Heinrich Friedrich Füger (1817)

Pity the mortals, for they are cold.

Of all the powerful beings populating Greek myth, Prometheus always seemed the most generous towards our kind. According to some sources he moulded the first men from clay. According to most sources he stole fire from the gods and gave it to men. Crafty, haughty, but indomitable in his creative pursuit, Prometheus is perhaps more of a human ideal than we wish to admit.

(Mary Shelly does admit it in the title of her book Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus.)

For his crimes, Prometheus, the titan, was strung up naked on a cliff in the Caucasus and sentenced to an eternity of having his (regenerating) liver torn daily by an eagle. Frostbite and cold, and continuous pain was the price he paid for our warmth and grace.

According to the legends. Continue reading “Inspired by Myth: Alternative Ending”

Inspired by Myth: Reinterpretation

On fresh retellings of myths, specifically Kafka’s “The Silence of the Sirens”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus#/media/File:Draper_Herbert_James_Mourning_for_Icarus.jpg — H. J. Draper (1898)

Feathers are the soul of the wind.

To fly, you just need wings, gleaming, beautiful, lighter than the thickest ribbons of air so you can take off, heavier than the thinnest clouds so you don’t stumble upon the pathways of the gods.

So the man believed. Man, inventor, father.

The wings were almost ready, the primary feathers sown into place, the secondary feathers glued with wax.

“There.” The man tightened the strap on his son’s right arm, before adjusting his own. The boy quaked for fear of heights.

“What can be more exciting than this,” the man said, “father and son, taking to the clouds, escaping all those guards Minos has sent to secure the coast?”

The boy nodded, hardly reassured.

They launched themselves from the highest Cretan cliffs at noon, when no archer dared watch Helios drive his blazing chariot across the sky.

The man went first, confident, eager to feel the air carry him. He glanced back, and saw his son steadily gliding in his wake. Good.

They flew.

Shy, inexperienced, and wary of his large wings, the boy chose a steady course between heaven and sea, not looking up, not looking down, even when his father swerved and looped, showing off his flying skills. How he soars, my father! He’s so skilful and I’m so clumsy. One day, I’ll make him proud. The boy glided on.

Disaster crept upon them, stealthily, like a lion stalking a flock of sheep.

The boy noticed a small feather slip from his father’s wings. Then another. All that soaring and acrobatics was making the wax melt. He shouted a warning.

“It’s nothing,” his father said, though he too now chose to fly a cautious middle-course.

But the melting had started, the boy saw, and it could not be stopped. Unless…

Without a word, the boy flew up and up, until he was right above his father, flying at the same speed, providing a constant shade for the melting wax on his father’s wings. It hardened; no more feathers separated.

As they neared an island, the father rejoiced. They had made it. “Son! You see, my wings have not melted after all.” He turned.

Nothing, nobody.

Down below, his son’s body bobbed on the wine-dark surface of the Aegean Sea. Continue reading “Inspired by Myth: Reinterpretation”

Imaginary Creatures: Beautiful Frankensteins

On coherent, meaningful combinations of traits that make up entirely original creatures. Example: Franz Kafka’s Odradek from “The Cares of a Family Man”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubism — *Portrait of Picasso* by Juan Gris (1912)

A 1000-piece puzzle is not a project for Frankenstein. The pieces were cut from a unified starting picture; the problem was deliberately made and has a predictable, well-fitting solution. No, a worthy project requires the invention or the discovery of something previously inconceivable.

Like stitching together pieces of flesh and reanimating them (science).

Like connecting pieces of metal and animating them (engineering).

Like layering paint or notes or movements and binding them (art).

Like assembling concepts and words and creating a coherent story world, character, or creature (writing).

I mean it in all in a positive way.

Credibility and resonance is achieved by using what’s around us:

Story worlds recycle and recombine common tropes in new ways. (Few go ahead and do the Tolkienesque thing of inventing new languages as well.)
Interesting characters are made up of different already-observed personality traits: take a bit from Aunt Veronica, a bit from Ruth the next door neighbour, a bit from Mum, together with a generous dollop of yourself, then mix with convenient imaginary glue till the gallimaufry congeals into an appetising dessert.
New creatures are often forged through similar borrowings; though, unlike with shape-shifters and cross-breeds where the number of sourced parts or shifts is limited, the creatures I call beautiful frankensteins come from so many sources their existence is as unexpected as it is baffling.

Continue reading “Imaginary Creatures: Beautiful Frankensteins”

Imaginary Creatures: Cross-Breeds

On hybrid creatures, and in particular on Franz Kafka’s half-kitten, half-lamb in “Crossbreed”.

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q17494958#/media/File:Joseph_blanc,_perseo,_1869.JPG — Perseus riding Pegasus by Joseph Blanc (1869) — Pegasus has a braid in his tail!

Moonlit blue-tinted night, billowy curtains flicking edges of open terrace doors, impending danger for two sky-gazing protagonists. In swoops a softly neighing white horse with wings so large they trail on the ground when folded.

My first memory of Pegasus.

Despite the grainy TV picture and the obviously unrealistic set of what must have been an ancient Hollywood film, I only remember the awe. The magic! A flying horse, whoever thought of that?

Afterwards, catching a glimpse of a flying lion in a show about Narnia somehow didn’t do it for me. Not to say that Aslan is comparable to Pegasus, but perhaps there is a little idea-bulb in every child’s mind belonging to winged animals, and it can only be turned on once: first-imagined best-imagined?

https://www.wikiart.org/en/gustave-moreau/the-sphinx-1864/ — *The Sphinx* by Gustave Moreau (1864)

Fictional cross-breeds, or hybrids, are produced by mating or creatively putting together a few different species. They’ve populated humankind’s imagination as long as shape-shifters.

I won’t attempt a classification—Wikipedia is thorough. However, since I mentioned horses and lions, here’s a taster for their hybrids.

With lion bodies:

The Great Sphinx of Giza (built c. 2550 BCE) has a human head, but the mythological sphinx also has wings.
The manticore, a fantastic man-eater creature from Persian mythology, has a human head and a scorpion’s tail (recorded by Pliny the Elder c. 70 CE).
The lamassu, an Assyrian protective deity, has a human head and wings (first recorded in 3000 BCE).
The Lion of Venice has wings (erected in the 12th century).
The griffin has the head and wings of an eagle (traced back to before 3000 BCE).

Continue reading “Imaginary Creatures: Cross-Breeds”

Imaginary Creatures: Shape-Shifters

On shape-shifting creatures, and in particular on Franz Kafka’s Rotpeter in “Report to an Academy”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganymede_(mythology) — *The Abduction of Ganymede* (ca. 1650), by Eustache Le Sueur

Fantasy bears many children and loves them all, heads, tails, wings, jaws, beaks, two legs, four legs, five and an input console. Magic and technology marry to make aliens; words (e)merge to make new monikers. A complete classification of templates may be impossible, but spotting patterns can be fun as a reader and helpful as a writer.

I’ve picked three basic categories: shape-shifters, cross-breeds, and beautiful frankensteins. Three is a fairytale ideal number. Also, Kafka’s complete short stories provide three fun examples.

Today: the shape-shifters.

Dracula and the vampiric model come to mind: man, cloud of bats, mist. The fictional traits of blood-suckers in fiction are tabulated extensively on Wikipedia.

The w-s yield werewolves, wizards, and witches.

Evil masquerading as good or the duality of the two is well-suited to flipping between forms like in Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

More recently there’s Pennywise the Clown form Stephen King’s It, Mystique from the X-Men Comics, Terminator from Hollywood, and all manner of decanting from body to body, like in Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon.

However, mythologies did it first. Continue reading “Imaginary Creatures: Shape-Shifters”

Kafka’s Invisibles

Exploration of invisibility in daily life through four stories of Franz Kafka: “The Bucket Rider”, “Investigations of a Dog”, “Rejection”, and “The Bridge”.

Invisibility is a superpower.

Tolkien’s One Ring and Harry Potter’s Cloak of Invisibility render the wearer unseen by conventional methods. Much before that, the Ancient Greeks had gods who surrounded their favourite heroes in mists and clouds so that they could pass unchallenged.

Of course, all superpowers come with a price, and occasionally end in tragedy. H. G. Wells’s invisible man, the protagonist of his eponymous novel, struggles to control his ability, so much so it becomes more of a hindrance than a help.

But what of invisibility in daily life?

It’s actually quite prevalent, and it comes about in two flavours: as a result of being ignored, or as a result of ignorance. The former implies intention and a deliberate act, the latter an accident and blameless innocence—the middle ground is shaded by degrees of intentional ignorance.

(Unsurprisingly, both ignore and ignorance come from the negation of the same Latin stem gnō-, meaning to know, but perhaps surprisingly ignorance is the older word by a few centuries.)

Franz Kafka’s collection of short stories includes at least four very different explorations of invisibility, of which only Rejection was published during his lifetime. Here they are. Continue reading “Kafka’s Invisibles”

Kafka’s Hunger Artist

On Franz Kafka’s “Hunger Artist” and the performance art of fasting.

Fasting would surely come into fashion again at some future date, yet that was no comfort to those living in the present. What, then, was the hunger artist to do?

—Franz Kafka, The Hunger Artist (1922); translated by Will and Edwin Muir.

Fasting has come into fashion. Today it’s called dieting.

In moderation, it’s vaunted as a healthful activity. Taken to an extreme, it’s a debilitating mental illness. Either way, dieting is usually triggered by peer pressure, and since our bodies are our visible, measurable exteriors, all those peers will have an opinion which will affects us.

To put it bluntly: losing weight quickly becomes a performance art.

Kafka’s Hunger Artist explores what this performance art means without going into the physical aspect. Sure, bodies existed in the early 20th century, but calorie-counting, bodybuilding, and pilates weren’t the fad. So instead, the premise is entirely absurdist à la Kafka, but the debilitation, the existential angst, and the struggle of the protagonist with the world (and with himself) are all recognisably modern. Continue reading “Kafka’s Hunger Artist”

Kafka’s Harrow

On the creeping terror of the slow reveal in Kafka’s short story “In the Pental Colony”.

Kafka has fallen out of favour in the modern age.

The German-speaking Bohemian author, Franz Kafka (1883–1924), I mean.

In contrast, the software, Apache Kafka, is prominently favoured in nine out of the first ten Google results for the search string Kafka.

Perhaps rightly so. After all, software is designed to aid not to befuddle, and to disperse existential angst not to replicate it on paper. Although, it’s a toss-up which of computer-esque or Kafkaesque better describes the alienation of man from mankind.

Since computers are all the rage, I’ll favour the “underdog” Kafka on this blog.

Image of the man?

I expected the search engine to throw up pictures of a human-sized beetle with a rotting apple stuck in its carapace. Even after having read five hundred pages of Vintage Kafka that contains all of his shorter works, I still identify the author with his novella The Metamorphosis. Or rather, with the protagonist, travelling salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous vermin-beetle-creature.

The beetle is nasty; his story is sad.

The revulsion, the absurdity, the helplessness of this ungeheueres Ungeziefer (the German original helps spur the imagination), the ostracism that follows, and the final sinking into irrelevancy—they’re the sequence of events anyone on social media dreads. What happens if one day you wake up “ugly”, “disabled”, “different”, and ultimately incapable of communicating with the rest of society?

So despite his poor performance in search results, Kafka is still germane today. Continue reading “Kafka’s Harrow”

Wittkop’s Necrophiliac

On Gabrielle Wittkop’s “Necrophiliac” and the questions in raises.

This post stands in the controversial shadow of its title.

You have been warned.

Quote: Sex is spoken of in all forms except one. Necrophilia isn’t tolerated by governments nor approved by questioning youth. Necrophiliac love: the only sort that is pure. Because even amor intellectualis — that great white rose —waits to be paid in return. No counterpart for the necrophiliac in love, the gift that he gives of himself awakens no enthusiasm.

—Gabrielle Wittkop, The Necrophiliac (1972); translated by Don Bapst.

Should every gap in the literary offering be plugged with a high-brow treatment?

I’d say no, because every is too broad a requirement. But some gaps do need the occasional thoughtful contribution. Necrophiliac was Wittkop’s, and she wasn’t shy about it.

Rewind a couple of centuries, and we find one of her literary forefathers: Marquis de Sade. He plugged a gap of his own, but in a savage, largely unpalatable, and tedious manner. For example, his 120 Days of Sodom runs close to four-hundred pages, and just the opening few contain enough brazen graphic violence to put off most people.

The Necrophiliac isn’t like that. It’s ninety pages, written in first person, from the point of view of a sensitive, poetically inclined protagonist. Readers always have to work harder to condemn the narrator in whose head they ride—Wittkop knew what she was doing. Continue reading “Wittkop’s Necrophiliac”

Siren, Man, Mandrake Stem

On mixing metaphors in a quote from Gabrielle Wittkop’s “Exemplary Departures”.

Metaphors are charming, scenic shortcuts to multiple layers of meaning. But they’ve got a dark side that scares people or perhaps doesn’t scare them enough—depending on how you look at it.

For example:

Leave no stone unturned.

Once fresh, but now clichéd metaphors are best avoided in creative writing. (Dead metaphors in the sense of those whose meaning has shifted are something else and can, with care, be put to good use.)

We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.

Malaphors blend two phrases or idioms. They’re humorous, but hardly appropriate in an original piece. (The label itself is a portmanteau, or a blend, of metaphor and malapropism.)

Her learning capacity towers over yours; I bet you she can bridge any knowledge gap in under a month.

Mixed metaphors are more general malaphors, but without the humour. They combine different metaphors in incompatible ways: how can a capacity tower, or then be used to bridge? Sure, we get the message, but the clash draws attention to itself.

Clichéd metaphors can be avoided by not writing down what first comes to mind and malaphors are more often spoken mistakes than deliberate constructions. Which leaves mixed metaphors. They may not be as obviously jarring as my example. In fact, the more complex or original or dense your metaphors, the more difficult it is to judge whether what you’ve written coheres.

Getting the opinions of a few friends helps.

Studying examples packed with metaphors also helps. So let’s do that. Continue reading “Siren, Man, Mandrake Stem”

Unsaid Goodbyes

On stories where you know the protagonist dies at the end, and quotes about death and rebirth from Gabrielle Wittkop’s “Exemplary Departures”.

The hero dies at the end.

Suppose you know this from the moment you pick up a book. The suspense of “what’s ultimately going to happen” has been taken away from you. Worse, you’ve been told the ending is fatal. So why read a dreary tale?

At least two popular types of books start with the death premise: biography and tragedy. All-encompassing life stories have an inescapable birth-to-death trajectory, while the (classical) tragic drama will likely be lethal for the protagonists.

Then come books that have had their ending “spoiled”. Maybe it’s a history book, and you’re familiar with the outcome of the events it describes. Maybe you’ve seen the film. Maybe you’ve been told. This list is individual to each person.

I would read any of the above for the literary merit or the linguistic enjoyment (or because I needed information)—and not to revel in the plot. How about you? I have met at least one person who claimed she always started a thriller by reading the last few chapters; that way she knew where the novel was headed.

To each their own.

Next, we move into the fictional realm where the author controls your perception. For example, a cryptic opening scene may imply the hero will die (so you read on hoping that’s not the case), or it may depict a memorable death of someone who you find out is a false protagonist (a minor character who’s gratuitously killed off to make a point).

Finally, the most outrageous giveaway are the title and the blurb, like in Gabrielle Wittkop Exemplary Departures (1998), which contains five novellas depicting deaths under extraordinary circumstances. (I’ve also noted the young adult novel They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera. I’m curious to see how that one pans out.) Continue reading “Unsaid Goodbyes”

Zeus in the Attic

On “Recommended Instrument: Apartment Thunder” from Henri Michaux’s “Life in the Folds”.

Thud-thud-thud.

Silence.

Thud-thud-thudthudthud.

If you’ve lived next to a basketball court, or if the walls of your ground floor apartment have been used for football or squash practice, you know the sound.

It’s the sound of a headache.

Add some shouting, squealing, and laughter, make the noise polluters children rather than “sensible” adults and voilà, you have yourself a reason to let Zeus move into your attic and provide you with some audio cover. (As apartments don’t have attics, he might consider moving into the indoor cornices, suitable dangling lamps, or wallpaper patterns at a stretch.) Continue reading “Zeus in the Attic”

I’m Not Telling You What I’m Telling You

On paralipsis, the ironic process, and the combination of both in “Never Imagine” from Henri Michaux’s “Life in the Folds”.

Contrary, are you?

Most likely, yes. Brains like to disobey negative orders: don’t think about that stressful meeting tomorrow (you will), don’t worry about that mosquito bite (it’ll prompt start itching), don’t ruminate on all the goals you have failed to achieve recently (a list will promptly appear).

Ouch.

The inability to deliberately shake off a thought through negative command is called Dostoyevski’s white bear problem or the ironic process.

Writing can harness this process to magnify the impressions left by (disconcerting) images. This is another reason why word associations are hard to dispel; in Dangerous Associations the pairing of baby and knife was disturbing because the mind connected the two words via cutting, but also because the image stuck and telling yourself not to think about applying knife to baby may have lead to a mental deepening of the scenario rather than its dispersion.

(When faced with gloom, it’s worth trying to direct the ironic process towards a positive purpose by trying really hard not to think about, for example, cuddly white teddybears.)

Like with other unbalancing acts, the more stressed you are the more distress persistent, unshakable negative thoughts can cause you. Which is why reading emotionally challenging books during a difficult period at work, for example, can affect you more than reading them during your vacation. Continue reading “I’m Not Telling You What I’m Telling You”

Dangerous Word Associations

On the power of word associations and “The Danger in Associations of Thoughts” from Henri Michaux’s “Life in the Folds”.

Green for spring-growth, blue for water, white for air. Yellow for the sun, black for mourning, white for wedding. You may disagree, depending on culture or idiosyncrasy. But the fact stands: some colours are associated to some objects, gestures, rituals—and the connection is exploited as well as propagated by literature.

And that’s only the colours and their meanings.

Language itself carries encoded other associative dimensions. For example, in English, words containing a metaphorical up usually stand for positive emotions. For example: buoyancy, bouncing, floating, flying. Conversely, sinking, submerging, descending, falling, are words that contain a metaphorical down and therefore convey negative emotions. (Lakoff and Johnson go into detail in Metaphors We Live by).

Of course, connotations of words can be bent away from their most common denotations. Take floating, for example, and shade it with gloom:

She floated about, giddy with shock.
The drugs made her float like a ghost in her own body.
Standing over the coffin of his late uncle, the man felt eviscerated, emptied of sense and purpose, and carried along by grief, like a husk barely floating on the surface of a steady, but merciless stream.

Note that in each case the act of floatation had to be qualified before it could achieve its opposite sense: shock, drugs-ghost, elaborate grief padding. And even then, the first two sentences don’t unequivocally carry negative meaning without further context (perhaps the shock was due to a promotion; perhaps the drugs alleviated debilitating pain). Continue reading “Dangerous Word Associations”

Writing Helplessness

On the try-fail-speechless cycle of helplessness, and “The Demolition Workshop” from Henri Michaux’s “Life in the Folds”.

Bullets chase you, or an illness, or even just last month’s bills. If evasion and shielding fail, your soft flesh—whatever the pursuer’s weapon—will suffer. The inability to prevent cataclysmic injury leads to helplessness.

As there are many wars out there, daily, personal, and local, on top of the devastating regional ones, let’s consider the most extreme cases where life is endangered without any rational escape options.

In such situations, what your body does as a reflex or on mental command simply matters no longer—a realisation which goes against the fundamental survival instinct creating a paradox of the highest order. If the situation is somehow protracted, for example in the cases of people trapped inside confined spaces or of those tortured over longer periods, helplessness will have time to set in.

What happens then nobody wishes to find out voluntarily, in situ, but fiction does go exploring. At the very least, fiction allows a reader to explore an atrocious situation, broadening their empathic response, their insight, and their ability to prevent arriving at similar circumstances. Continue reading “Writing Helplessness”

The Terror-Horror-Revulsion Sequence

On how the suspense-tension-reveal sequence is reversed in “Man-Sling” from Henri Michaux’s “Life in the Folds”.

Macabre isn’t the word I’m looking for. Yet it presents itself, perhaps chiefly because of Stephen King’s book Dance Macabre.

The word, with a capital M, has its own entry in the OED as part of the phrase dance of Macabre, meaning the Dance of Death, which in turn represents the medieval allegory of Death leading the dance of souls to the grave.

Even if you refuse to read about pirouetting skeletons, you may have unwittingly enjoyed Camille Saint-Saëns’s Dance Macabre, a symphonic poem from 1874:

Returning to King’s book: even though I haven’t read it, I have seen it quoted and paraphrased for its delineation of three concepts in fiction: revulsion, horror, and terror. It’s a useful gradation, regardless of genre or topic, because it pinpoints the crease between the explicit and the implicit.

Here’s how King’s words have filtered down to me.

Revulsion or gross-out is when you’re told about the eye that burst out of its socket and splattered the doctor, or the parents who threw at each other the heart of their unborn child, or the woman who was walled in with the heads of her lovers, or the long-haired zingaro serenading a pile of severed body parts while admiring his reflection in a lake of blood (mostly images from Barbey and Lorrain). It’s all red and mushy, and anyone Halloween-minded can do it. The sufficiently exaggerated gross-out is grotesque.

Horror is the moment you take out a bunch of beautiful flowers from a precious historic vase and find a baby’s body providing compost feed (Barbey). Horror is the realisation before the gross-out.

Terror is the suspense before the horror that never quite happens: it’s the quiet laughter in the cellar that is empty when you turn on the light; it’s the attic that calls to you, but when you get there is only full of creaking boards and whistling wind; it’s the nightmare in which you’re chased with a chainsaw, but when you wake up, you see that you’re safe, except there’s a trail of blood across your living room carpet leading to the toolshed.

Terror is almost perpetual horror that prolongs the repulsive revelation, the way a romantic comedy prolongs the first kiss.

Continue reading “The Terror-Horror-Revulsion Sequence”

Diabolical Framings

On frames within frames as a storytelling technique in “Diaboliques” by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly.

Perhaps I am mistaken, but it seems to me that if you saw Hell through a small window, it would be far more horrific than if you were able to see the place in its entirety.

—Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Diaboliques (translated by Raymond N. MacKenzie)

Boundaries are meaningful when exceptions plant flags on faraway summits.

Conventions love to hate those who break them.

The don’t do that, begs for the what if I do do?

Such questioning of authoritative admonishment leads to the fall of Satan in Milton’s Paradise, to the Faustian deal with the devil, to murder mysteries, to class-breakers like Gatsby, principled men like Atticus Finch, alienated teenagers like Caulfield, contrarian patients like McMurphy, and in general any tension that falls under the I won’t take out the trash because you insist that I do so.

Space sagas defy scientific barriers; the absurdity of Kafka defies reason.

Even walls that protect from valid harm—no matter how noble their cause—inevitably invite curiosity: some want to peek over, some want to vault over. Imagination allows us to do so multiple times, in multiple ways, and still wake up in our own beds, warm. Imagination leads to written fiction, and fiction thrives on probing the transgression: either how it was done or why.

This is why there exist whole literary movements built on investigations of taboos. The merits of reading such fantasies are myriad, from gaining historical and cultural context, to understanding existential issues, to merely expanding your perception of the human condition. For those of us who care about the storytelling technique, such texts exhibit a number of methods for addressing tender topics, eliciting either disgust or empathy, and skirting the sensitivities associated with the “fallen”.

Also fiction can be read because: fun, exposure, and yes, curiosity.

Continue reading “Diabolical Framings”

Holiday Fragment: To Pedestal an Author

You may take the statue down from the pedestal only when you feel you understand its flaws.

patrick-fore https://unsplash.com/photos/LkjruCBLg9I

When reading a well-known author, first put them on a pedestal justified by their reputation, by laudatory secondary literature, by personal awe and impersonal envy.

Then study the statue you’ve erected. (Rub your neck occasionally.)

You may take the statue down from the pedestal only when you feel you understand its flaws, and when improving on those flaws haunts your dreams (even if you have little evidence that you are able to do better).

Pedestal a new author.

Repeat.

Repeat until the time that passes between putting up and taking down a statue becomes small enough to be negligible (the duration of reading a magnum opus and sundry). At that point you have become:

an objective critic,
a supreme author,
a blind man (a fool),
some or all of the above.

This is part of a series of short holiday posts that are mostly excerpts and thoughts from my literary diary. Here is what a “usual” post on Quiver Quotes looks like: The Softness of Pillows: Quirks and Perks.

Holiday Fragment: Literary Orts

This is how Christmas unravels for you.

andreas-brucker https://unsplash.com/photos/d75_vVbOET8

When my post World Building ballooned, I had to omit a fun little essay I’d prepared: the words in italics are all the literary words from Forsyth’s Horologicon (picked out from around 300 general, old-fashioned words scattered throughout his book) and then fitted into a compressed, sensible-ish narrative. Of course, I do a much poorer job than him at generating coherency and humour, but do give me some credit for effort.

Although, in a week or so, there’ll be a post on effort, so perhaps don’t judge me yet.

For those who didn’t read the previous posts: Surfle is the cutest puppy. He’s imaginary.

— deep breath now, this is how Christmas will unravel for you —

On Christmas Eve:

Tacenda are things that ought to be left unsaid (like aspiring secrets), especially if they’re some nifandous atrocity. But if pressed to confess your crime (who ate the Christmas cake early?), you may attempt to obnubilate the details in a bluster of words, or if your confederate is present (Surfle), then the two of you can constult and play at being fools. If that also fails, you may try to discept by differing, disagreeing, debating (it wasn’t my imaginary pet, but yours). Lastly, you can accuse your colloquist of searching for your dirty laundry because they’re secretly a rhyparographer who writes about distasteful topics (how you keep all the wrapping paper from last year labelled with names so you can reuse for a different relative this year).

Don’t forget to interjaculate at every opportunity. Defined as to interject an ejaculation. (Best done at the dinner table with your mouth full.)

On Christmas Day:

Continue reading “Holiday Fragment: Literary Orts”

Holiday Fragment: On Communication

An efficient expression courts silence.

andreas-brucker https://unsplash.com/photos/d75_vVbOET8

An efficient expression courts silence.

Tacit encodes social axioms. Foreigners bane: Culture is tacit.

Everyone should know how far their tongue bends.

This is part of a series of short holiday posts that are mostly excerpts and thoughts from my literary diary. Here is what a “usual” post on Quiver Quotes looks like: Tolkien’s Fox.

On Annotating Books

On my method for annotating books.

My annotations on a page from John Banville’s *Birchwood*.

To read, I need a book and a pencil.

I’d like to emphasis that the pencil is as much a conduit of information between book and mind, as are eyes and brain, and as much of a physical necessity, as is my ability to hold a book open or flip a page.

I produce the following anecdotal evidence:

If I sink into a sofa with a book, but without a pencil, I will exhibit all the symptoms of anxiety and discomfort—fidgeting, gazing about, scratching, gazing about, back-and-forth page-flipping because I can’t remember what I just read, and some more gazing about—until I finally get up and acquire that writing implement I’d been gazing about for.

It has to be a pencil (preferably a mechanical pencil so I don’t need to sharpen it), but no erasers are needed.

michal-grosicki https://unsplash.com/photos/refAFfV35Cw — *Reading* implements.

Underlining is much maligned; it’s generally useless, it’s for those who can’t think at the time of reading but leave it for later, it produces an appearance of engagement while actually reducing it.

All true.

That is why I mark up the text and take notes.

Marking up a text involves:

Continue reading “On Annotating Books”

Six Hundred and Twenty-Three

On words that John Milton introduced into English.

*Avond (Evening): The Red Tree*, by Piet Mondrian (1908-1910)—I preferred this painting to one of his *lozenges*.

I compiled a list. Take a moment to guess what these words have in common:

leaven, reticulum, neroli oil, raglan, syzygy, lozenge.

Don’t try too hard, it’s not obvious, other than I liked them, they’re nouns, and they sit in a file together with a few dozen others. That’s it. No deeper insight.

Doesn’t that leave you feeling unsatisfied?

Certainly that’s how I feel, when I’m given a selection off someone’s list, but there isn’t a clear designation of why these words even when they’re supposedly a purposeful sample.

It’s like being given a few answers from a survey, but not being told whether those answers are the best, the worst, the most frequent, the most obscure. In which case you might respond: fine just give me all the data from the survey, I’ll read it myself.

*Satan in Paradise* by Gustave Dore, illustrating Milton’s *Paradise Lost*.

One chapter of Mark Forsyth’s Etymologicon presents a selection of words that John Milton (1608–1674) introduced into the English language. The chapter is written in Forsyth’s signature style—bantering, yet erudite—but at one point he simply lets a list speak for itself:

Milton adored inventing words. When he couldn’t find the right term he just made one up: impassive, obtrusive, jubilant, loquacious, unconvincing, Satanic, persona, fragrance, beleaguered, sensuous, undesirable, disregard, damp, criticise, irresponsible, lovelorn, exhilarating, sectarian, unaccountable, incidental, and cooking. All Milton’s. When it came to inventive wording, Milton actually invented the word wording.

Fun! But what to make of the list? Is it ordered alphabetically? No. Are its elements the same parts of speech? No. Are the words related to an obvious subject? No. So what then?

Continue reading “Six Hundred and Twenty-Three”

Dissenting Voices: Quirks and Perks

On how diverse content sparks diverse thoughts.

Livraria Lello, Image by Morra, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A number of years ago I read a book called How to Read a Book (1940), by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. It’s not some postmodernist meta-referential literature; it’s non-fiction that teaches the art of absorbing letters.

I was mocked for taking it seriously. (After all, what is there to reading?)

I persisted.

The book pointed out some useful techniques, of which one at least has become almost a reflex. I call it book pigeonholing.

Quote:

Rule 1. You must know what kind of book you are reading, and you should know this as early in the process as possible, preferably before you begin to read.

Knowing what type of text you’re approaching determines your point of view. For example, reading a short fictional story versus a piece of investigative journalism changes your willingness to suspend disbelief and apply critical thinking.

Pigeonholing a piece of writing is usually done first by source: where did you find it, who wrote it, is it a trustworthy source, is it fiction, etc. Then by title and subtitle: as I’ve discussed these past two weeks in terms of non-fiction, the most successful titles are designed to resonate with the content (as well as “hook” the reader). Next come any prefaces or pictures or graphs or other information.

Ultimately, it’s all to do with expectation. The closer a reader’s initial expectation is to the actual experience, the higher the likelihood they’ll be satisfied. This is why blurbs or advertisements ought to be representative; and why we have the divisions into fiction and non-fiction, into literary and genre, into YA and adult; and why websites tell you the expected reading time of an article or the particular skill set or information you will glean.

So things have changed since 1940.

Continue reading “Dissenting Voices: Quirks and Perks”

The Writer Who Never Writes

On setting down those first words, and on Augusto Monterroso’s story “Leopoldo (His Labors)”.

max-conrad https://unsplash.com/photos/H1rvxkzq8A0

If you want to write, you should write. Otherwise you might become one of those people who are brimming with ideas, while perennially on the verge of penning a story.

Oh, but the writer’s block!

Oh, but I’m not ready!

Oh, but …

I fear the verge more than I fear the blank page. However, I do acknowledge there is an inherent resistance present at the beginning of any project. The mind, like the body, prefers stasis. That is why getting started with an activity is often a challenge, but also why once on a roll it becomes easier to stay on a roll.

When you’re writing a piece in a single sitting, getting yourself into that chair is harder than staying there. When you’re writing a larger body of work that requires many sittings, getting into that chair is hardest the first time, but still an achievement every other time.

The question is: what if you’ve been planning to write, planning and plotting and note-taking for days and weeks and even years, but it’s come to nothing because you haven’t thrown down that first word?

Augusto Monterroso wrote a short story exploring that situation. His thirty-four-year-old protagonist, Leopoldo, has been devoted to literature for half of his life, but seems unable to surmount that crucial first hurdle. In the Quote, Leopoldo is considering writing a story about the pecking order in corporate society.

Quote: He made a note that he needed to take notes, and he wrote in his notebook: “THE PECKING STORY. Visit two or three large department stores. Make observations, take notes. If possible, talk with a manager. Get into his psychology and compare it to a chicken’s.”

—from Leopoldo (His Labors), translation from the Spanish by Edith Grossman.

What makes the Quote quiver?

The psychology of a chicken. (Specificity.)

Continue reading “The Writer Who Never Writes”

To Really Know a Word

On learning words and the section on vocabulary in Noah Lukeman’s “First Five Pages”.

Modern-day aspiring authors are advised against long words in convoluted punctuation-sausages filled with phrase upon clause upon fragment. Such constructions are said to be either obsolete or abstruse. And why bother when masters of the craft themselves rarely reach for such exotic linguistic contortions?

(Brevity is the soul of wit.

Occam’s razor.

Tweets.)

Taken at face value, that kind of advice is equivalent to suggesting you should make a good façade, without worrying whether your building is part of a Potemkin village, that is, whether there exists a building behind the front-facing wall.

Potemkin gave façades a bad name. (Painting by Dmitry Levitzky, c. 1797)

It’s the fake it till you make it method, which argues that eventually you’ll pick up the complicated stuff by osmosis.

But any serious piece of writing is cumulative: you can only fake it for so long. Sooner or later an audience member will move in a little closer and touch the brickwork with their pinkie. Which is when the glitzy scenery comes toppling down—paint, plywood, and authorial pride included.

So before making it the hard labour has to be done: the foundations dug, filled in, reinforced, all that goodly construction work that ensures the building can withstand the hurricanes of time and the hellfires of critics. In the case of the writer, that means grappling with (amongst other things) the basic blocks of language: words.

Hands up if you’d love to brush up on your vocabulary.

Hands up if you do brush up on your vocabulary regularly. Or ever.

(I’m not even going ask about learning foreign languages.)

Children imbibe new words; they’re unafraid to experiment with them, to practise their variations, to ask endless chainlinked why questions. The rest of us swallow new words like they’re thistles—it’s painful and digestion takes a while.

But that shouldn’t deter us.

jonathan-simcoe https://unsplash.com/photos/GxnyOLTxCr8

In Negative Writing Advice, I discuss Noah Lukeman’s First Five Pages. His approach to telling writers what not to do works well, in part because he also includes some brilliant exercises and positive advice. He won me over with a tight, spot-on section on vocabulary.

Continue reading “To Really Know a Word”

Negative Writing Advice

On negative advice and Noah Lukeman’s “The First Five Pages”.

Advice comes in two flavours:

what to do (positive advice),
what not to do (negative advice).

Positive advice is like being shown Edgar Rubin’s vase …

… and being told you should look for two faces.

Aha, a revelation! Your eyes have been opened; your problems have been fixed.

Negative advice is like being shown the same vase …

… and being told it’s not a vase. Then the interpretation is up to you.

Yes, I did flip the image; yes, I added some black, some white. I not only changed my perspective, I embellished it—according to my imagination.

Negative advice is far more open-ended and sometimes it’s the only kind you can give with a degree of certainty. In particular, here’s Noah Lukeman, in the opening of his book The First Five Pages.

Quote: There’re no rules to assure great writing, but there are ways to avoid bad writing.

Note, however, that avoiding poor writing is a necessary, but by no means sufficient, condition for producing great writing. Indeed, like with my vase example above, even after you’ve been told what not to do, your literary venture—in all its newfound gloss and glory—may fall short of a masterpiece. Just because you’ve been shown which way lies artistic hell, doesn’t mean you’ve found a ladder to the heavenly abode of your muse.

(It occurs to me: eight of the Ten Commandments are of the negative form thou shalt not.)

Continue reading “Negative Writing Advice”

The Way We Swing

Tips on how to write clean, balanced prose that conveys your meaning (without hiding it behind unnecessary hedge words.)

nicole-adams https://unsplash.com/search/children?photo=mKw4eamvjKA — The “radicals”.

E. B. White was not yet thirty-eight when he wrote a tongue-in-cheek piece about Roosevelt’s suggestions to retire Supreme Court judges over the age of seventy. At seventy, men are just beginning to grow liberal again, after a decade or two of conservatism, writes White. The piece ends with the following paragraph; note White’s use of sweeping generalisations, balanced by a sprinkling of caution (italics are mine).

Quote: A man’s liberal and conservative phases seem to follow each other in a succession of waves from the time he is born. Children are radicals. Youths are conservatives, with a dash of criminal negligence. Men in their prime are liberals (as long as their digestion keeps pace with their intellect). The middle-aged, except in rare cases, run to shelter: then insure their life, draft a will, accumulate mementos and occasional tables, and hope for security. And then comes old age, which repeats childhood—a time full of humors and sadness, but often full of courage and even prophecy.
— E. B. White in Life Phases (2/20/37), Writings from The New Yorker 1927–1976, edited by Rebecca M. Dale.

Do you agree, more or less, or do you disagree and have you come up with (yourself as) a counterexample?

Continue reading “The Way We Swing”

Paragraph Packing: A Short Example

On repetition, redundancy, conveyed information, and emotional impact in paragraphs. Example from Bukowski.

Scream When You Burn.

If that were a writing prompt for a short story exercise, what would you write?

Image by Aziz Acharki https://unsplash.com/search/burn?photo=HsXgRlIr4Ls — Don’t actually burn

As it happens, Bukowski already wrote a short story with that title. While preparing Monday’s post featuring a dialogue sample from his Hot Water Music, I came across an excerpt that I’d highlighted in his Scream When You Burn. I thought the excerpt overwritten, and had marked it for analysis; I cite it below, as today’s Quote.

My impressions was that it repeated sentiments, and that not all the sentence were needed to retain meaning and impact. Take a look. What, if anything, do you think is redundant in the Quote?

The Quote also explains the title of his story—if you’d thought of your own story idea to match the prompt, you can compare how he justifies the title with how you would do it.

Quote:
He picked up Camus’ Resistance, Rebellion and Death…read some pages. Camus talked about anguish and terror and the miserable condition of Man but he talked about it in such a comfortable and flowery way…his language…that one got the feeling that things neither affected him nor his writing. In other words, things might as well have been fine. Camus wrote like a man who had just finished a large dinner of steak and French fries, salad, and had topped it with a bottle of good French wine. Humanity may have been suffering but not him. A wise man, perhaps, but Henry preferred somebody who screamed when they burned.

(The ellipses in the Quote are present in the original text; I have not omitted anything.)

Quick observations:

Continue reading “Paragraph Packing: A Short Example”

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