Posts tagged writing

Woolf argues that a good reader needs to approach a text as a co-creator rather than a simple consumer or even a critic (though keep reading her essay ... eventually the time arrives to mount the judge's bench).

critique, cultivation and creation, england, horizons of the possible, literature, reading, writing

Nate

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Reading is a very complex art - the hastiest examination of our sensations as a reader will show us that much. And our duties as readers are many and various. But perhaps it may be said that our first duty to a book is that one should read it for the first time as if one were writing it.

One should begin by sitting in the dock with the criminal, not by mounting the bench to sit among the Judges. One should be an accomplice with the writer in his act, whether good or bad, of creation. For each of these books, however it may differ in kind and quality, is an attempt to make something. And our first duty as readers is to try and understand what the writer is making from the first word with which he builds his first sentence to the last with which he ends his book. We must not impose our design upon him; we must not try to make him conform his will to ours. We must allow Defoe to be Defoe and Jane Austen to be Jane Austen as freely as we allow the tiger to have his fur and the tortoise to have his shell. And this is very difficult. For it is one of the qualities of greatness that it brings Heaven and earth and human nature into conformity with its own vision.

I love this sort of list-making: on the one hand, calling out a tired old cliche and making the case for better writing; but on the other, injecting new life and wonder into the same cliche. Reading through the list, and imagining (sometimes with great difficulty) the possible contexts becomes an exercise in wonder.

cliche, horizons of the possible, metaphor, wonder, writing

Nate

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The Aquaman of the Democratic Party
The Dr. J of murdering people
The Ludwig Wittgenstein of trash TV
The Ned Flanders of the gay blogosphere
The Mae West of fowl
The Sydney Bristow of Miss Hosie’s fifth grade
The Brangelina of the lion kingdom
The Ron Burgundy of the three-feet and under set
The New Jersey of the Batman dimension
The Tina Fey of crazed retrograde gender pundits
The Bea Arthur of diet sodas
The Dr. Doom of my teenage existence
The Nancy Reagan of giant mutant cockroaches
The Mini-me of oscillating tools
The James Brown of neurotransmitters
The Sarah Silverman of operating systems

File under unintended (or nearly so) beneficial consequences. Could the txt msg, sometimes decried as the end of careful writing, end up saving languages? Also file under beneficial Christian culture making: SIL, cited here as "a Dallas organization that works to preserve languages," which is exactly what it is, receives substantial funding from Wycliffe Bible Translators, who have done more than anyone else to preserve these unique and irreplaceable parts of culture. But a note of caution: elsewhere in the article an expert says that "200 languages have enough speakers to justify development of cellphone text systems." That would leave, it seems, some 6,632 languages to go.

communication, language, technology, text messages, writing

Andy

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Texting is the cheapest and most popular mode of cellphone communication in most of the world, and last year text messages topped voice calls even in the U.S. The world’s three billion cellphones far surpass the Internet as a universal communications medium, and they are vital to business development in less-developed economies.

But companies that develop predictive text say they have created cellphone software for fewer than 80 of the world’s 6,912 languages cataloged by SIL International, a Dallas organization that works to preserve languages.

One key to using the languages is the availability of a technology called predictive text, which reduces the number of key taps necessary to create a word when using a limited keypad. Market research shows that text messaging soars after predictive text becomes available. . . .

In Hindi, a language with 11 vowels and 34 consonants that is spoken by 40% of the Indian population, texting “Namaste,” which means “hello,” can take 21 key presses. . . . Typing “Namaste” with predictive text takes just six key presses. Nuance Corp. of Burlington, Mass., which dominates the predictive-text market, says that in 2006 cellphone users in India with predictive text in their handsets averaged 70 messages a week; those without it averaged 18.

I blogged earlier about the Tower of Babel associations in this museum exhibition; here, though, I was drawn to the tactile, portabile nature of all those stylus-embossed notes and epics and receipts—in the case of this image, a record of a gold delivery by the chief eunuch of Nebuchadnezzar II.

alphabets, babylon, cultural worlds, horizons of the possible, museums, technology and change, writing

Nate

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Held in the hand, a typical cuneiform tablet is about the same weight and shape as an early mobile phone. Hold it as though you were going to text someone and you hold it the way the scribe did; a proverb had it that ‘a good scribe follows the mouth.’ Motions of the stylus made the tiny triangular indentations of cuneiform characters in the clay. The actions would have been much quicker and more precise, but otherwise rather like the pecks you make at a phone keypad.

Some tablets are of course larger. Gilgamesh, thousands of words long, is an epic in 12 tablets more than a foot high, and inscriptions carved in rock are more expansive still. But it is the small tablets with tiny writing that are the most tantalising objects in Babylon, Myth and Reality (at the British Museum until 15 March). Can one, through them, get beyond archaeological evidence and inference, bypass the fevered imagination of William Blake’s and John Martin’s Bible illustrations and hear the voice of a Mesopotamian Pepys?

Well, not exactly, but the range and character of what is written down give some idea of the texture of everyday life in Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon. The majority of tablets may be the equivalent of office files – letters, legal documents, contracts, mortgages, lists of goods – but there are also messages addressed to the gods, some of them expressing indignance that good behaviour has not been rewarded. Astronomical observations are detailed and medical texts full of diagnostic descriptions. There are records of refurbishments: the kings, who had responsibility not just for religious ceremonies but for the maintenance of temple structures, celebrated their building works.

Simply coming when you're asked to seems, at first glance, a bit removed (perhaps even antithetical) to the idea of cultural creativity and cultivation. Though this memorable anecdote from the Desert Fathers recasts obedience as an astonishing, and I'd say creative act—a creative discipline, at least.

4th century, alphabets, desert fathers, discipline, egypt, obedience, writing

Nate

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They told of the abbot Silvanus that he had a disciple in Scete named Marcus, and that he was of great obedience, and also a writer of the ancient script: and the old man loved him because of his obedience. He had also another eleven disciples, who were aggrieved that he loved him more than them. And when the old men in the neighborhood heard that the abbot loved him more than the rest, they took it ill. So one day the came to him: and the abbot Silvanus took them with him and went out of his cell, and began to knock at the cells of his disciples, one by one, saying, “Brother, come, I have need of thee.” And not one of them obeyed him. He came to Marcus’ cell and knocked saying, “Marcus.” And when he heard the old man’s voice he came straight outside, and the old man sent him on some errand. Then the abbot Silvanus said to the old men, “Where are the other brethren?” And he went into Marcus’ cell, and found a quaternion of manuscript which he had that moment begun, and was making thereon the letter O. And on hearing the old man’s voice, he had not stayed to sweep the pen full circle so as to finish and close the letter that was under his hand. And the old men said, “Truly, abbot, him whom thou lovest we love also, for God loveth him.”

Technology makes many things possible, but often with a costly trade-off. Here's one novelist's attempt to compensate—I like how it's a very community-based solution, rooted in relationship and trust.

disciplines, horizons of the possible, internet, technology and change, writing

Nate

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Okay, I’ll admit it: work on my new novel, Finch, is going well because every morning my long-suffering yet often amused wife Ann hides the router box and my cell phone. I get up around 7am, I have my breakfast and watch something innocuous like BBC News or Frasier for about half an hour, and then get down to work. Around noon I take a break to get some lunch, then go back to it, usually at that point editing or organizing notes. Around 2:30 I call Ann on our landline and she tells me where the router box and the cell phone are (it has internet access on it) so I can finish up the afternoon with necessary emails and other work, before going to the gym.

The internet in its many forms is, for me, a harmful and insidious enemy of novel creation. A novel takes a great deal of uninterrupted thought, not to mention uninterrupted writing. A novel in gestation does not brook interference of this kind. This isn’t just a matter of procrastination or time-wasting. It directly affects quality and depth in my opinion. The sustained effort required by a novel should not include multi-tasking on other things, if you have the option.

Ten years ago this is not something I, or anyone else, would have had to worry about. In fact, I remember writing parts of one novel in an apartment that didn’t even have electricity. Or, heck, any furniture to speak of. I got up around dawn, went to my day job, and then came back and wrote until it got dark. Sometimes I’d go to a coffee shop so I could write longer.

The point is, some forms of modern technology are, in a certain context, dangerous. Sometimes in workshops, Ann and I will force students to write longhand just to cut them off from their laptops and all the stuff that comes flying up onto the screen. Some hate it. Some realize what they’ve been missing.

*culture is not optional is an endlessly inventive network of friends who create some truly wonderful cultural goods. Among them is the current issue of their magazine catapult. There are several treasures here—don't miss Tala Azar Strauss's spare and eloquent meditation, "Nameless community," or Meredith Kathryn-Case Gipson Hoodendam's column "Community is bullshit" (not least its arresting and hopeful final line). Then there's this short essay by editor Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma (yes, the folks at *cino do tend to have complicated, hyphenated Dutch-inflected names). It sums up what I love about *cino: their patient attention to particular things.

community, cultivation and creation, family, home, writing

Andy

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A photo is floating around our attic somewhere, probably in a Converse shoebox. In it, I am just barely fifteen years old, a sophomore in high school, wearing an oversized green sweatshirt, jeans, and perhaps the shoes that came in the box that now holds the photo. The setting is my school library. I am sitting at a table where I appear to be studying, but across from me is Rob, another fifteen-year-old sophomore. The look I’m giving the yearbook photographer is an exaggeration of innocence. Though our books are open, pens in hand, Rob has just finished giving me directions to his house for the party he plans to have while his parents are out of town.

At twenty-eight years old, nearly eight years in to my marriage to Rob, I can see this sly study hall meeting around a library table as a fulcrum on which much of my life story turns. I can also see tables—those ubiquitous pieces of furniture that invite gathering by their nature—as a key image for exploring where I’ve been and where I may be going.

A marvelous review of Marilynne Robinson's new book Home by Linda McCullough Moore—a fine writer in her own right (and also, full disclosure, treasured family friend).

books, grace, literature, writing

Andy

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Marilynne Robinson is in a category by herself, and that category is both fully staffed and up to any project. I hope this is gratuitous, but if you haven’t read the essays in The Death of Adam, neither sleep nor eat till you have remedied the oversight. Her first novel Housekeeping is what I think a book should be. And now writing in Home of the same people in the same time and place as in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead, everything is different. These two books could not be less alike. And just because she can and perhaps must, Robinson has pages and pages of dialogue about theology here, people sitting on the porch as evening falls, discussing and dissecting the particulars. The reader slows his pace, he doesn’t want to miss a word. Theology as conversation. She’s pulled off the impossible. (I know whereof I speak.)

In all her work we have the writer as magician. She’s making a concoction of her own invention, and if she doesn’t know if it will turn the one who drinks it into a fairy princess or blow the place to smithereens, well, those are risks she is prepared to take on our behalf. Perhaps that hints at her distinctive. She has been the sort of reader in her life who knows the possibility of writing. She takes nothing lightly, but there is lilt and charm for all of that. She can be light precisely because she knows the stakes are high, because she has cared enough to take the measure of the thing. And, she has the requisite humility to say, “There are things worth believing.”

A closing zinger from the obituary of Robert Giroux, editor and publisher of many of my favorite writers (Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, Flannery O'Conner, to name a few).

community, failure, gestures and postures, writing

Nate

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His ambition to write may have prompted an exchange with T. S. Eliot, then in his late 50s, on the day they met in 1946, when Mr. Giroux, “just past 30,” as he recalled the moment in “The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes,” was an editor at Harcourt, Brace. “His most memorable remark of the day,” Mr. Giroux said, “occurred when I asked him if he agreed with the definition that most editors are failed writers, and he replied, ‘Perhaps, but so are most writers.’“