The Writer’s Voice
The 10th annual Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival is over. It was, for me at least, a treasure trove. I always take copious notes when I attend a lecture or panel discussion because I know I will end up dwelling on the more interesting concepts and using some of the ideas as starting points for philosophical meanderings that could last days, weeks, even months. (Somebody’s not overly busy, I guess.) The Blue Met had these in spades.
It is a special treat meeting established authors from around the world. Two of these, James Meek and Andrew O’Hagan were featured in a panel discussion on Scottish writers and writing. Both Meek and O’Hagan have journalistic bents that have taken them to such ‘exotic’ places as
O’Hagan talked about the current Scottish renaissance, a myth really, since the true Scottish enlightenment really took place in the 18th century when that small and impoverished nation engendered an unprecedented burst of intellectual and scientific accomplishment. It was the time of Boswell and Burns and Sir Walter Scott, of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and David Hume’s Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding. O’Hagan joked about the Scottish propensity for mythological self-construction that produced Robert the Bruce and Rob Roy.
I also had the good fortune to spend time with Irish writer Glenn Patterson, author of seven novels, a wonderful teacher and, clearly, a very decent human being. He explained the difference between a good novel and a good book. He talked at length about Voice. Imaginative literature, he said, is about listening to a voice… that of the author, of course. At the beginning of each novel, the writer decides on how he or she is going to tell the story and then who is going to tell it. In this way, the narrative is given shape. Patterson expounded on the omniscient narrator as well as the unreliable narrator. (For a good example of the latter, read Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal.)
It was all quite an education. Good thing I am porous.
P.S. For more on the Blue Met, check out this series of four posts by Kate Welch.
Map Quest
When there is enough of anything, a cluster pattern will appear. This is the case even if the anything is randomly distributed. Cows, clouds and coffee drinkers cluster or clump, depending on how many there are and how wet it is. So do books. Dewey knew this and figured there was a future for his notion of decimals.
People who read enough will find a clustering emerge in their reading patterns. This gives rise to reading challenges like, say, 10 Literary Thrillers or 20 Historical Fiction titles, or my own daughter’s absurd quest to read 50 classics in one year. The nature of this last challenge put what would ostensibly be a broad range of readings – Ovid’s The Aenid, de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Lawrence’s Sons & Lovers, The Voyages of Marco Polo – under one umbrella.
What I have found is not that my reading clumps per se, but that it goes off on tangents. And then, apparently, clumps anyway. For example, I listened to the Teaching Company’s 18-CD History of Russia: From Peter the Great to Gorbachev. That led, naturally, to The Giants of Russian Literature, this one part of the Modern Scholar lecture series. In the latter, Professor Liza Knapp of Columbia University discusses the themes of love and death in Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov. How broadly love is defined and how uniquely it is handled is a topic worth pursuing. It is interesting, for example, to compare societal and personal impacts of adultery on Anna Karenina, Anna Sergeevna (Chekhov’s lady with a dog), Flaubert’s Emma Bovary and Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne. To do that, you have to read the books, or in the case of Chekhov, short story.
I’ve had my Chinese kick as well, listening to Kenneth Hammond’s mammoth undertaking, From Yao to Mao: 5000 Years of Chinese History and then reading novels like Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.
The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin leads naturally to reading the polemics of Thomas Paine.
I loved Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night (on CD), so I just had to listen to A Spot of Bother. Ditto Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season, which necessitated, for me at least, Wickett’s Remedy. If you like Robertson Davies and read Fifth Business, clearly you have to complete the Deptford trilogy. And if you like Robertson Davies and the Scot’s accent on life, then you should read Andrew O’Hagan and James Meek.
Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip is a natural companion to Great Expectations. As is Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair and its original Bronte classic progenitor.
And so it goes, from here to there until, eventually, a series of clusters are created. Tracking the paths you take - genre or author, place or period, or any combination of these - creates what my daughter, a librarian, would call a ‘reading roadmap’. If you think your reading is completely random, check it out. There is reason behind the madness.
A Case of the Twiggles
I’m sure most of you have heard of Web 2.0. Essentially, it encompasses web technology that facilitates creativity, information sharing and collaboration among users. The practical and most visible effect of 2.0 is the development of self-propagating and self-sustaining web-based communities and social networking sites, wikis, blogs and so on.
Tech blog A List Apart gives this description: Web 2.0 is a fresh-faced starlet on the intertwingled longtail to the disruptive experience of tomorrow.
The creative and participative nature of Web 2.0 and its progeny (like Facebook, You Tube and Twitter) have conspired to generate an English vernacular all its own. There are some weird combination words that may or (if we are lucky) may not ever take hold. David Armano’s Logic + Emotion offers his Top 10, gleaned from Twitter, for our consideration. They include:
- Twiggles
A spontaneous burst of laughter caused by interactions on Twitter. As in, “Oh, look who has a case of the twiggles today!”
- Emotrics
“Yes, we’ve seen the metrics. But what about the Emotrics? We need to measure emotional engagement!”
- Facehook
When you write catchy lines or clever comments in order to get more traffic on Facebook
“If I want more friends, I really need a Facehook - something to draw them in…”
And for those who are overwhelmed by the endless stream of pap and punditry coming from the millions of blogs, a reader offers this evocative addition: Bloggorrhea.
How long will it be, I wonder, before someone publishes the Merriam Webster 2.0?
Blue Skies Ahead
Montreal may not go far in the National Hockey League playoffs, but it is going the distance with the 2008 Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival. The Blue Met runs from April 30 to May 4. With some 200 different events conducted in eight languages bringing together talent from around the world, Blue Met reflects the cosmopolitan nature of the city itself.
Some of the highlights, spicing up the usual mix of readings, book launches, panel discussions and award ceremonies:
- Writers in Peril will feature more than a dozen writers, reporters and cartoonists, many controversial, several in exile, to discuss freedom of expression under despotic regimes that seek to silence the messengers.
- Festival participants will include dozens of top writers of world-renown, including Scottish literary star Andrew O’Hagan, Northern Irish novelist Glenn Patterson, and Alaa El Aswanty, the Egyptian dentist who has become the publishing sensation of the Arab world. This year’s Literary Grand Prix winner is Daniel Pennac, born in Casblanca and resident in Paris. Pennac is one of the best-loved contemporary French authors; his books have been translated into more than 30 languages.
- Writers’ Workshops: The five hour sessions cover a wide range of writing issues. Listen Who’s Talking will look at both voice (modes of narration) and voices (dialogue) in prose fiction. Beyond Exotics: Travel Writing that Humanizes will provide insight into how the best travel writers get outside themselves and into the hearts and minds of those living far away. Successful screenwriter Gerald Wexler will be session leader for The Art of Pitching a Feature Film.
- Among the numerous lectures, Daniel Levitin will discuss This Is Your Brain on Music, his best-selling book on the science behind why we like music.
- A new addition this year is the Blue Metropolis Children’s Festival which gets close to its audience in venues around the city. It will feature a host of talented children’s writers and even a marionette story-telling session.
The Blue Met is certainly not the only literary festival around, but in its 10th iteration, it will almost certainly prove itself among the best. It is expected that there will be well over 15,000 attendees. As a member of the Blue Metropolis Foundation, I plan on being one of them.
For more information, check out the Blue Metropolis website.
Picture Perfect
“Brevity is the soul of wit”, wrote William Shakespeare in Hamlet. It is also one of the key elements in making quotations…well…quotable. A quote is the literary equivalent of the 10-second sound bite. It has to be quick and, yes, it has to bite. If properly delivered, few get the chance to bite back.
So before I leave Oscar Wilde behind (ref: Wilde Thing), I wanted to list my top 10 quotes from The Picture of Dorian Gray. The best lines with the most bite come from Wilde’s on-page proxy, Lord Henry Wotton. It is he who influences Dorian Gray to make his Faustian pact and become, in the process, a mere echo of Lord Henry’s music. No wonder; the tone and pitch of this music are compelling.
10. Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for friendship and it is by far the best ending for one.
9. There are many things we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
8. American girls are as clever at concealing their parents as English women are at concealing their past.
7. I always like to know everything about my new friends and nothing about my old ones.
6. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
5. They have been through the fire, and what fire does not destroy, it hardens.
4. The value of an idea has nothing to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.
3. Young men want to be faithful and are not; old men want to be faithless and cannot.
2. I like men who have a future and women who have a past.
1. The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.
Wilde’s descriptive powers apply not just to the human condition, but to its physical manifestations as well…especially, it seems when those manifestations are of women. And so, as an added bonus, I am listing five wonderfully evocative descriptions, also from Dorian Gray:
1. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead.
2. (Her) dresses always looked if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest.
3. Elderly ladies with gigantic tiaras and parrot noses.
4. There was something of the fawn in her shy grace and startled eyes.
5. A dowdy dull girl with one of those characteristic British faces that, once seen, are never remembered.
Okay, now I can move on.
Wilde Thing
Oscar Wilde: I wish I had said that.
James Whistler: You will, Oscar, you will.
A few words on Oscar Wilde and James Whistler are merited. Whistler, of course, is best known for his nearly black-and-white full-length portrait of his mother, in fact titled Arrangement in Gray and Black: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, but usually referred to as Whistler’s Mother. Whistler was well-known for his biting wit, especially in his exchanges with Wilde. Both were figures in the café society of Paris at the turn of the 20th century.
Wilde certainly was the equal of Whistler when it came to wit. He had few equals when it came to ego and eccentricity. “I never travel without my diary,” he wrote. “One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” It is not surprise that it was Wilde who penned: “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” (from one of the few books that can still, years later, give me the creeps, The Picture of Dorian Gray)
Wilde is considered one of the greatest playwrights of the Victorian era. He wrote nine plays, one of which I both read and saw performed: The Importance of Being Ernest.
The play’s protagonist is Jack Worthington, a pillar of the community and a man of weighty responsibilities. His escape: an imaginary black-sheep brother named Ernest who lives a most scandalous life dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure. Ernest becomes both alibi and excuse. Things get complicated, however, when the object of Jack’s desire, Gwendolen, becomes fixated on the name Ernest, one which apparently inspires absolute confidence. Gwendolen makes it clear that she would not consider marrying a man who was not named Ernest. It is from the tangled web of lies that these gems are found:
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be vary tedious if it were either and modern literature a complete impossibility.”
“I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.”
“Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?”
One final comment on the Wilde/Whistler exchange. The whole event may never have happened at all; some say that Wilde wrote both the initial remark and the riposte. Perhaps the story is apocryphal but, in the end, it doesn’t really matter. Because it works perfectly and, because it does, it endures.
So To Speak
In case you were wondering, the interacting processes of respiration, phonation and articulation used in speaking are activated, coordinated and monitored by acoustical and kinesthetic feedback through the nervous system. Whew! Fully half of our 12 cranial nerves send motor fibers to the 50 facial muscles that are involved in the production of speech. Add the industry and auditory effects of the larynx, glottis, palate, tongue, lips, teeth and nose and it is clear: speaking is hard work.
It is also complex. Which is why there are so many branches of linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, etymology, syntax and semantics. It is, after all, important to know why words with unvoiced labiodental fricatives and without the power of the plosive can tend toward the unpleasant. Well…isn’t it?
If you’re going to learn more about the components and conventions of speech, then you’ve got to know the jargon. You’ve got to understand how morphemes (not to be confused with phonemes, the first being about meaning, the second sound) build up into words. Morphemes include root words, all manner of fixes (from the usual prefixes and suffixes to the more slangy infixes) and, of course, lexemes.
Tautologically speaking, and all rhetoric aside, you should also be on a first name basis with metonyms, merisms, grammalogs and mondegreens. It would be simply uncouth to publicly trip over your metrical feet: the iams, anapests, and spondees and, especially, the dinosaurian trochees, dactyls and amphibrachs.
Of course, you already know that colophons are not indiscrete body parts, isolons are not subatomic particles and litotes don’t hang in caves. You also know that you can’t buy synecdoche at a French pastry shop and you won’t cure prosopopeia, antonomasia or chiasmus with antibiotics.
You are pretty sure that hypernyms and hyponyms do not reside in Lilliput or Brobdingnag and that neither monosemy nor polysemy are practiced by New Caledonian natives. Despite ongoing concern for your prosody, you would let your kids play with phonopedes; you might not, however, rent out the basement flat to concatenants.
All of these terms come up in The Making of a Name: The Inside Story of the Brands We Buy by Steve Rivkin and Fraser Sutherland (Oxford University Press, 2004). This rather weighty book makes a significant contribution to the science of onomastics…which is the study of the history and forms of proper names (including brand names).
In case you were wondering.
Take a Ride on the Reading
Alberto Manguel is an erudite and eloquent observer of the human condition. A Reading Diary (Knopf Canada, 2004) is his one-a-month, later-in-life revisiting of his favorite classics. Each book is a point of departure for philosophical musings and philological mischief. Each spins off quotes and anecdotes that lead the reader behind and beyond the text. Here is a sampling.
Kim, Rudyard Kipling:
- If we were able to explain thoroughly the mysteries of religion, there’d be no room for faith.
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes :
- The physical death of the hero is not the conclusion of the ethical argument.
The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame:
- It might be useful to compile a list of things that don’t really matter. Such a list would alleviate a lot of worrying.
- The places we live in become transformed through our prejudices, whims, limited experience, through the fact that we walk one route and not another from our house to the baker’s. Or that we choose one café, one park, one grocer from the variety of sites that make up a city. In this sense, every place is imaginary.
Elective Affinities, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
- We choose possibilities that fate has already chosen for us.
- All business is conducted between the characters and the reader; the author is absent.
Surfacing, Margaret Atwood:
- In France, the landscape is essentially one dimensional. You feel as if you could simply stretch out an arm and touch a church. In Canada, the horizon is always receding.
The Pillow Book, Sei Shonagon:
- Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt, and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and emasculate.
- Books have no knowledge of our existence. They come to life because we open them and turn their pages, and yet, they don’t know that we are their readers.
Manguel seeks to capture, in the essence of the novel, the essentials of life. The supreme compliment he gives his favorite writers is what, in fact, makes his own work so compelling…that they have seen clearly “something which was already there from the start”.
Descent into Madness
In Bee Season (Doubleday, New York, 2000), Myla Goldberg describes the slow disintegration of a dysfunctional family and the brave attempt of one little girl to keep it together. It is a coming-of-age novel entangled in the cobwebs of an obsessive compulsive mother coming apart.
The mother’s obsession with The Perfect leads her to collect items – thousands of items – that call out to her. That these items do not belong to her is of secondary importance. The unfortunate means - stealing - creates a fantastic end: a kaleidoscopic wonder in an abandoned warehouse, bits and pieces painstakingly reassembled by a dissembled brain. The result is an overwhelming cacophony of color, a profusion of patterns and shapes that leads to ocular overload.
“A spiral of shoes of decreasing heel heights cycles from brown to orange as it winds its way to a center of earrings whose shapes and colors form a pattern of stripes and circles in sparkling metal and rhinestone…”
“The perimeter is composed of glasses lying lengthwise on the floor, but with the aid of marbles, beads and shot glasses, the line arches upward in a graceful curve to join a column of stacked wineglasses, brandy snifters and champagne flutes…”
“A hedge of books expands into a miniature labyrinth. Books give way to picture frames, each containing its own mosaic of small objects. Beads and earrings, cuff links and stickpins create their own immaculate order…”
“Hats of felt and straw and cotton and crepe alternate with dinner, dessert and salad dishes to form a study of circles…”
“Gloves and scarves become an ocean of texture and color…”
“Suspended from a web of delicate threads hang silverware, hatpins, and peacock feathers, silk cravats, plastic figurines, and artificial flowers. They are strung individually and in groups, arranged to interact with each other as well as to capitalize upon the slightest wind current…innumerable objects twisting and twirling …”
So perfect is the room in its genius that visitors become absorbed in Daliesque fashion into the design itself.
“This space is not a passive object to be observed and left behind. It is interactive. Every person who steps inside becomes an object in its perfect order, associating with it in infinite, beautifully balanced ways.”
While the mother is not the book’s central character, she may just be the most compelling, the most disturbing, the most memorable. She is a side show, as most of our disordered generally become. But she remains in the mind’s fringes long after the book is put away.
Why? Because the reader, watching her slow descent into uncommon craziness, coming upon her oversized kaleidoscopic creation, suddenly…finally…understands. Somehow, the mother’s irretrievable madness makes perfect – absolutely perfect – sense.
Finding Style in Forgotten English
I love the English language. I am referring here to the richness and texture of the language and the myriad of ways in which it allows itself to be used.
Depending on who does the counting and how, the English language comprises a half million plus words, not including what some philologists refer to as word forms (combination words, derivatives and phrases) and not including a further half million technical and scientific terms that daily appendage themselves, catalogued or otherwise, to our collective vocabulary.
There are the words that contribute to substance and others to style. Some words are themselves quite stylish. I have found that many of the more obscure words and those that have fallen into disuse can be counted among these.
Here are a few of the latter, lifted from Jeffrey Kacirk’s Forgotten English (with helpful explanations):
To chalm: to chew or nibble into fine pieces as do mice and my octogenarian Aunt Mable. In both cases, there are leftover signs of someone or something being there.
Pediluvium: a footbath. What would the long lost word have been for what is now a sitz bath, I wonder?
Erubescent: a blushing for shame. A word with just a hint of fragrance that probably explains the appropriateness of the blush.
Curlgaff: the shock felt when one first plunges into cold water. Under the circumstances, it likely ain’t just the gaff that curls.
Nullifidian: one of no faith or religion. Was there also a nullandvoidian, that is, one who doesn’t believe in the hereafter?
Vraisemblance: from the French, a true representation. This was replaced over time (for obvious reasons) by the much more common ‘verisimilitude’. To what kind of parties do I get invited, you ask?
For more of Forgotten English and more of Jeffrey Kacirk, go to: http://www.forgottenenglish.com.
