Lucy Kemnitzer, a technical writing teacher once told me that crocheting each sentence back into the one before it was a useful technique for making text easy to use if one expects one's reader to be reading under highly adrenalizing circumstances. She was talking about placing the most conspicuous nouns from the end of the previous sentence within the first five words of the new sentence. Apparently that kind of repetition soothes the fight-or-flight response. I have no idea whether the claim's true or not, but it sounds good.
If you're curious to see an accessible, ardent defense of deliberately difficult writing, you might want to check out the poet Joshua Corey's blog (http://www.joshcorey.blogspot.com/). I disagree with him about...well, almost everything, but his ongoing project of explaining why the most challenging of the contemporary poets are worth the work assumes an intelligent audience that disagrees with him.
I wish you luck and perseverance, Lucy. Luck and perseverance to all.
One of the mantras that got me through the end of my dissertation was, "Completion requires sacrifice." Of course, at the time, I was thinking about giving up my Babylon 5 habit, rather than about the sort of Aztec performance TNH proposes.
G. Jules wrote:
Something written to the same audience as the "Tough Love for New Writers" panel at Worldcon -- what was Gavin Grant's advice to new writers? I think I remember it being something like "Write. Don't get published. And die." Which, as he said, is really quite manageable.
My notes suggest that this was part of a four part plan. The beauty of it is that the writer only needs to complete the first three steps. The hard part, seeing the decedent's body of work into print, is left for the late writer's friends and family.
As Grant pointed out, this method does sometimes work, though he didn't name examples.
As I recall, W.H. Auden got into a bit of trouble when he awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize for 1947 to a writer he knew to be dead, when the intent of Yale University Press was to herald the beginnings of promising careers. Joan Murray's mother had approached him with the manuscript in person, and he liked it better than anything that had been sent in through proper channels. O, the uproar. And A Confederacy of Dunces was published seven years after John Kennedy Toole died. Decades later, it's still in print.
So I guess if I were writing the advice book, it would be called The Perversely Optimistic Guide to Writing and Publication.
The Literary Review's annual Bad Sex Awards have been announced. The prize's purpose is "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel."
These two articles include some hilariously bad sentences from mainstream fiction. Um, enjoy?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4091643.stm
http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/books/12/13/odd.literature.sex.reut/index.html
Sally Beasley calls to our attention:
Dave Luckett's Rhianna books (admittedly, I'm biased!) published in the US by Scholastic as The Girl, the Dragon and the Wild Magic, The Girl, The Apprentice and the Dogs of Iron and The Girl, The Queen and the Castle...
Well, don't I feel silly. As if the prolific Mr. Luckett needs any encouragement from little me!
David Luckett, I don't think you need to be ashamed of your MFA, even though most of what Seekins says about the poetry biz rings true. There are things about writing that can be taught in classrooms, and things things that can't. Your MFA indicates that some of the time you put into learning the teachable stuff passed while you happened to be in a classroom. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, especially since your comment indicates that you know better than to mistake your credential for a halo. No credential can prove you've learned the things that have to be approached the hard way, or that you've lucked into the wild talent--and no credential proves you haven't. If the poems you wrote during your schooling look inadequate to you now, then write more, different ones. Why did you pursue the MFA in the first place? Presumably because you intended to keep writing. So keep writing.
MFA programs are easy rhetorical targets, because we all know there are things that can't be taught. Billy Collins is an easy target, because he's a popularizer who had the misfortune of happening to be Poet Laureate when 9/11 called for a heavyweight. But I wouldn't wish the world rid of Sherry Fairchok's kickass debut, The Palace of Ashes, just because it had its roots in an MFA thesis, and I am prepared to confess in front of witnesses that I once heard Billy Collins perform a poem (mixed in with his usual stand-up comedy routine in poetry reading drag) that woke my mortal dread.
bellatrys wondered parenthetically:
Homophobia as a relict of ethno-religious prejudice and wars - does anyone know if there was such a focus on homosexuality in the western church prior to the Cathar wars?
According to (what I remember years after reading) John Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, the objection to homosexuality in the early and medieval church was not to love or commitment between men, but rather to the fact that, in homosexual male sex, a man gets penetrated, and thereby feminized. In a mindset that presumes penetration is an act that inherently enforces the superiority of the penetrator and inherently degrades the penetrated person (needless to say, a misogynistic mindset), the consensual penetration of one man by another threatens to destabilize the entire concept of masculinity, and any adult man who sought to be penetrated was regarded as freakish. According to Boswell, nobody in the church before the early modern period regarded as especially abominable men who wanted to penetrate other men--that was just one more manifestations of the manly desire to penetrate. It was, under most conditions, considered sinful, but not with the horrified sense of taboo that one finds among religious homophobes these days. In fact, same-sex pedophilia was much less disturbing in this zero-sum game of masculinity than was same sex love between adults of equal age, power, status, etc. The concern about queer sex was not primarily about non-reproductive sex acts; the church bigwigs were upset about non-reproductuve sex in the context of heterosexual sex, too, and don't seem to have regarded queer sex as worse on that basis. Before the fourteenth century, says Boswell, people thought about sex acts, but not about sexual orientations. In the fourteenth century, the novel concept of homosexuality as an exclusive set of behaviors or a category of identity began to form, but it didn't solidify all at once, and it was centuries before the development of the reified binary of homo/hetero that Kinsey blew up. My recollection is that Boswell claimed the rise of homophobia was the result of increasing tension between urban and rural populations--backlash against the Renaissance, culture wars, the same sorts of things we've been watching unfold right here.
I gather that Boswell's interpretations were not undisputed, but I don't really know what his critics' objections are, or what the current status of his argument is among scholars of the early modern period. Maybe someone here knows more about this?
Yet another call for Patrick's quote. I am so ready to wear those words.
Some reasons not to despair--or rather, reasons not to let despair stop you--in untidy form and no particular order, because despairing people shouldn't have to wait:
Walt Whitman, who lived to be our good gray poet and died without ever for one minute having hope that he could marry the man he sang to in the Calamus poems, sang America anyway. He lived in darker days than ours have been so far, and saw worse with his own eyes than most of us here are likely to see, and sang America anyway. When you've had enough of sackcloth, ashes, and Eliot, Whitman's good medicine.
Susan B. Anthony fought all her long life for women's suffrage and died with the job unfinished. If she'd known from the start she wouldn't live to see it for herself, that wouldn't have stopped her. She had no precedent to look to for encouragement; in the end, she won anyway, and now we have her for our precedent.
We've already agreed, motivational posters to the contrary, that confidence alone is not enough to bring about our goals. In fact, confidence isn't necessary at all. Every person I know who has completed a doctorate has had to push through to the end despite an absolute, bone-deep certainty that s/he would never finish the dissertation. The closer to triumph we got, the more certain we were that all was already lost, years ago, because every time we'd thought we were close before, we'd been wrong. It's not only possible to complete a Ph.D. in the complete absence of hope--that's the most common condition in which completion occurs. From which I extrapolate that our despair is not in any way a measure of our efficacy. We don't need to believe we're going to win in order to win. We don't even need to believe it's possible.
Some of our nation's founders genuinely believed they'd end on the gallows for treason against George III, yet today here we are, with a great democracy to believe we've lost. That's more to work with than Jefferson had, starting out.
John M. Ford wrote:
Anyway, reverse side of the adhesobeasties explains their origin, in cartoons by "famous political cartoonist Thomas Nash."
This is presumably the same guy who drew cartoons of Boss Hweed of Hammany Hall and Sanha Claus.
Yes, same guy. Thomas Nast was so ruthless in his skewering of crooked politicians that to this day folk etymology would have you believe his name was the origin for the word "nasty."
I'm utterly delighted with the word "adhesobeasties".
TNH wrote:
Here are some motivational posters you'll never see:
1. Photo: A wilderness EMT/rescue operation on the slopes of Mt. Washington. Slogan: Remember: In a crisis, it's the people below you who are going to save your sorry ass.
If you print it, they will buy.
I heard variations on this theme all the time, growing up on army bases. My father and his colleagues recognized this truth, and most of them would not have been shy about broadcasting their clue. A related JAG Corps aphorism was, "The world is run by secretaries and sergeants," which isn't a bad slogan for a poster, either.
Jonathan Vos Post wrote:
Since Bush proudly declares that he doesn't read newspapers, he may be immune to literary criticism. Which, I think, was near my point.
Since Jacques Derrida's death, I've been thinking that Bush is the apotheosis of deconstruction. As far as Bush is concerned, there is no reality outside his text. Meaning is infinitely deferred. As long as everything is a social construction, he can construct reality to suit himself. The rest of us can object but we're just bombinating in a void, as it were.
My petty little revenge fantasy is that Derrida recognized his complicity in creating this monster by crippling so many thinkers on the Left with dead-end deconstructive theory such that they, too, abandoned the reality-based community, and that he finally keeled over in shock and repentance.
Actually, it's even weirder than that. The Kipper Kids are in it. They're a performance art duo of heavyset, middle-aged guys who appear in this film dressed in children's clothing. They communicate with the other characters primarily by means of blowing raspberries. Rhythmically. In unison.
Favorite bad scary movie of all time: The Forbidden Zone. Our lame heroes Frenchy and Chickenboy discover they can reach the Sixth Dimension through a door in their basement. Alas, the evil midget king of the Sixth Dimension (played by Herve "de plane! de plane!" Villechaize) and his deranged queen have some sort of evil plot. There's always an evil plot, of course, but this one gets nixed by Satan himself (played by Danny Elfman, in a white tuxedo, doing a spirited Cab Calloway imitation, filking the Hell out of "Minnie the Moocher"--I swear I am not making this up). Hear Danny Elfman's first film score, performed by the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. Relish that, since everything else about the film is agressively, willfully awful, in a German Expressionist kind of way.
Steve Taylor wrote:
A very enjoyable article about the difficulty of translating poetry between languages and cultures, particularly medieval Persian to modern English.
Of course, I speak as a more or less monolingual person who has never translated more than about two pages of prose, but what the hell...
Thank you for the link. So many poets and translators are working on bringing more Islamic literature into English, and the English results are terribly uneven. Not having any of the relevant languages, I just have to assume when one of the famous Arabic or Persian (or whatever) poet falls flat for me, it's the translator's problem. I've actually tried to get a Hafiz translation that could give me any kind of clue as to why he's such a major poet--at least now I know more about the particular difficulties in translating him.
After 9/11, I raided the university library for Arabic poetry, etc., in my effort to Make Sense of It All. Didn't make sense of it all, of course, but came across a volume called Ghazals of Ghalib: Versions from the Urdu, that probably came as close as anything can to addressing the translation problems discussed in the article Steve linked to.
Aijaz Ahmad translated Ghalib from Urdu into painstakingly literal, unpoetic English, and then sent his translations to an impressive roster of American and British poets to see what they'd do with it. Each poem in the volume appears first in Arabic, then in literal translation with Ahmad's explanations of idiom, etc., and then in multiple poetic translations by the Anglophone poets, so you can see the same piece filtered through the very different styles and sensibilities of, for instance, Adrienne Rich and William Stafford. Gorgeous stuff, and highly recommended, if you can find it.
Here's a fun slippery slope for writers:
Good=whatever feeds the book
Bad=whatever starves the book
Jacques Derrida, who bears the greatest share of personal responsibility for the rise of deconstruction, has died. This is the sort of obituary you can hope for if your work spawns legions of professional apologists:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1324635,00.html
Vicki wrote:
I took one course in my entire academic career (through a B.A. in history) that made a point about revision. It was a writing course called Daily Themes, which was exactly that--five short (1-2 page, double spaced) papers a week, in theory to be handed in one a day, though that tended to slip as the semester went on. After the first week, one assignment for each week was to revise an essay from the previous week, based on our discussions with our tutors.
This wasn't a creative writing course: the goal was to improve skills and mechanics, not to produce something especially worthwhile by semester's end. The main problem with it, in retrospect, is that (because it was always oversubscribed, and they weren't budgeted for an infinite number of tutors/tutorials) it was limited to seniors and, if there was room, juniors: I suspect it would have been at least as valuable sooner.
It might have been more valuable sooner, and of more benefit if more widely available, but would students actually have enrolled voluntarily if there hadn't been a shortage of seats to make the course look desirable? I've lost count of how many sections of freshman composition I taught while I was at Rutgers, where the course is required for nearly all students, and there are literally hundreds of tutors available. The Writing Program standard requires six papers, 4-6 pages each, with a mandatory minimum of two drafts. If there is one thing the students hate most about being required to take a composition course--and they hate many, many things about it, having been told all their lives that their college years would be a glorious, lawless time when all that had been forbidden would be encouraged and they'd be free to cut class meetings at will--it is the inescapable necessity of revision as a condition of passing the class. At this very moment, the students in this fall semester's new crop of 10,000 Rutgers freshmen are pulling all-nighters for their second drafts of Paper 2 and hating revision with a profound ardor they'll remember for years.
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