The Puget News

Evidently, Mark Twain went a bit existentialist as he aged and spent the final 20 years of his life working off and on on a story encapsulating some epiphanies related to the dream-like nature of life. What he came up with is a bit darker than most people would probably believe came from Twain.

It’s worth while to take a few minutes to read the wikipedia article on “The Mysterious Stranger” before watching the creepy video below. Just call it your literary moment of the day.

First of all, congratulations to Doris Lessing.

I’ve never read her work before but I’ve been thinking about starting a series of blog posts where I read all of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature and write about the experience. Have any of you read Doris Lessing? Any thoughts on what book I should start with? I read in her wikipedia entry that she considers the Canopus in Argos series to be her most important work to date.

If you have ideas on which Doris Lessing book I should start with, please suggest it in the comments.

Update: You can check out the New York Times article here. I love the photo of Doris Lessing sitting there in disbelief on her front porch.

Stout, sharp and a bit hard of hearing, after a few moments Ms. Lessing excused herself to go inside. “Now I’m going to go in to answer my telephone,” she said. “I swear I’m going upstairs to find some suitable sentences which I will be using from now on.”

Update 2: With everyone getting in on the action, it was only a matter of time before Kakutani weighed in.

A wonderful series of Ira Glass videos on the art of storytelling:

Note: Just to be clear, I saw this over at “Your Daily Awesome” but I wanted to re-create it for my own readers and archive for my own site

While reading the April 2007 issue of Harper’s I came across an excerpt of an interview [subscription required] between Tom LeClair, professor of English at University of Cincinnati, and William Gaddis, the famous author.

LECLAIR: How do the novels get to be so long, if they don’t start out with mass in mind?
GADDIS: If one is involved with a complicated idea, and spends every day with it, takes notes, and reads selectively with it in mind, ramifications proliferate. If one has what could be called an obsessional wish to exhaust an idea, understand it on six, seven, or eight levels, the book gets longer and longer.

While this extract might seem obvious, I just love the idea of focused time around the exploration of complex ideas and the expressed dedication to following them through to their natural conclusions. It always helps to remember that great authors wrestle with these ideas day in and day out while the rest of us are out grabbing our coffees. This gives me hope.

Note: The excerpt in the magazine is called “They call me Mr. Difficult” by Tom LeClair. This is part of a newly released collection of essays called Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System.

Other Interesting Links:

• Harper’s makes all past content available for free to subscribers

Living in the countryside of Northern California when I was about 12, going through some of the things my parents had stuffed into my large bedroom closet because their own large bedroom closet was stuffed to overflowing, I discovered a boxed set of 5 Vonnegut books from the 70s - my dad’s books. The covers were gaudy comic-book like things with lurid female imagery and so I asked my dad about them. His response was that they were “books for adults,” they had “complex themes,” and I “probably wouldn’t like them.” Of course that set my mind’s course upon immediately ripping through them all. I quickly tossed whatever Dragonlance novel I was reading at the time and read straight through “Slaughterhouse Five,” “Cat’s Cradle,” and “Breakfast of Champions.”

Read the rest of this entry »

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html

 And my own personal vietnam: http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/affect.html

I can NEVER keep these two words straight.  Now I’ll go there everytime I need to know whether I should be using AFFECT or EFFECT.  The site will have a good affect…er…effect…ah crap…it’s gonna help my writing.

I posted an essay by George Orwell that talked about the craft of writing and how simplicity should be strived for. Here is a related essay also about the craft of writing, in this case written by Kurt Vonnegut. He echoes many of the same thoughts raised by Orwell.

http://www.harmonize.com/probe/aids/manual/style.htm

Keep it simple. Keep it clear.

As an example he brings up one of the simplest yet most famous sentences ever written : “To be or not to be?” No word longer than three letters but so much depth in those 5 words.

Where Orwell emphasized keeping the use of words as straightforward and simple as the subject permits, Vonnegut talks a bit more about your voice. He urges the writer to write from within their own persona and don’t try to be someone you are not.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am.

This is a much shorter article and a good companion to the Orwell essay.

Related Links:

• Eric Franklin’s TPN Post: Kurt Vonnegut RIP (1922 - 2007)
• Technorati Search: Kurt Vonnegut

Matthew Baldwin, ex-Amazonian and hilarious writer/blogger, has written a piece for “The Morning News” about a collection of experiences he had with dogs when he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Bolivia:

Before I joined the Peace Corps, I thought I knew dogs. Loveable. Loyal. Affable. Man’s best friend.

In Bolivia, I met dogs: the canine id—not the superego-in-a-sweater I see today at my local suburban dog park.

I just discovered a lovely blog with a provocative literary angle. Written by Julie Wilson from Toronto, Canada, Seen Reading is her little peep-show into the reading lives of others. It’s her creative amalgamation of a person she saw reading, a quote from the work, and literary interpretation of what she imagines the person must have been sensing while reading.

Personally, I’ve always been intrigued about what you could tell from people by their bookshelves. I guess I’ve subsconsiously always done what Julie publicly posts via this blog. That’s what makes her idea so fascinating. These are the narrative realities we create for the people we don’t know, based on the fewest of details.

What Is Seen Reading?

* 1. I see you reading.
* 2. I guesstimate where you are in the book.
* 3. I trip on over to the bookstore and make a note of the text.
* 4. I let my imagination rip.
* 5. Readers become celebrities.
* 6. People get giddy and buy more books.

The decline and fall of the English Language.

This is an extraordinary essay written in 1946 by George Orwell: Politics and the English Language - read it.

If you are a writer and wish to improve your craft, I recomend it highly. In fact I can think of little else that would be of higher benefit to your skill than understanding Orwell’s point of view.

He boils it down to six main points that you may or may not have already seen elsewhere:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.

I like rule number six, which is just a way to say “don’t go overboard”.

The whole essay is excellent but there are several passages that really struck me.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing, is that it is easy. It is easier–even quicker, once you have the habit–to say IN MY OPINION IT IS A NOT UNJUSTIFIABLE ASSUMPTION THAT than to say I THINK. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious

He’s right. The first example in that passage flows out very easily. “I think” is just so simple you are inclined to skip over it and use the more complex phrase for it appears to lend credence to what you are writing.

Orwell’s point is that it does not lend credence merely smoke and mirrors.

Next there is this gem:

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were instinctively, to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

This sums up the whole paper. Essentially write with as simple and clear a prose as possible. This will force you to think about what you write, make your writing easier to understand and it will be harder for you to lie to your reader and yourself.

If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy.