Writing by Hand

"Writing by hand is more than just a way to communicate. The practice helps with learning letters and shapes, can improve idea composition and expression, and may aid fine motor-skill development."

WSJ

Let the Reader Do Some Work

Humor works best when the reader has to connect some dots. The smarter your audience, the wider you can spread the dots.

Scott Adams telling a risque story about a friend who never had any children, in the Wall Street Journal.

Posts that almost weren't II

A paean to Chekhov, 150 years after his birth.

There had been sceptics, agnostics, doubters, questioners of every kind before Chekhov, but perhaps no writer in whom the utter mysteriousness of existence was felt so deeply, or counterpoised by such ­inexhaustible interest in the teeming variety of forms – human and otherwise – in which it manifests itself.

"What kept these sixty-five thousand people going? That's what I couldn't see . . . what our town was and what it did, I had no idea."

Posts that almost weren't III

On Drinking What You Know:
“Drink, damn you! What else are you good for?” (Joyce) -- er, I paraphrase.

When you think about it, rules for drinking are not so different from rules for writing. Many of these are so familiar they’ve become truisms: Write what you know. Write every day. Never use a strange, fancy word when a simple one will do. Always finish the day’s writing when you could still do more. With a little adaptation these rules apply just as well for drinking. Drink what you know, drink regularly rather than in binges, avoid needlessly exotic booze, and leave the table while you can still stand.

Leave the desk while you can still stand. Sounds good to me.

Posts that almost weren't

Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses, courtesy of Mark Twain (whose autobiography can finally be purchased, 100 years after his death.

1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the "Deerslayer" tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in air.

2. They require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the "Deerslayer" tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.

3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the "Deerslayer" tale.

I'll try to do better next month, but here are some of the posts I would have written about, if I'd had the time this month.

Margaret Atwood Writes Like...

Stephen King, or James Joyce, according to I Write Like -- the popular website that told William Gibson he writes like Haruki Murakami, and based on my blog entries, told me I write like J.D. Salinger. Fun. Try it. Read Atwood and Gibson's results at the Guardian.

Janine Pommy Vega and Andy Clausen

Happy to report that I saw these two excellent Beat poets read in Woodstock, NY, yesterday. You can look them up on youtube -- it was an amazing reading, and even more so to see them together, Janine drawing on personal mythology and her work in the prisons, Andy with political and humorous work. People who really believe in poetry are inspiring. It's good to be reminded that poetry can be a force.

Weirdly, only a lot of older folks in the audience. I hate being the youngest person at these things. Where is everyone?

I bought Janine's Mad Dogs of Trieste, and Andy's 40th Century Man, as well as a copy of Long Shot, with a tribute to Gregory Corso. Andy signed, and when I got it home, I realized it had already been signed by Ferlinghetti. Nice.

He loved invective.

“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden.” Mark Twain, quoted in his new, unexpurgated autobiography. Review at NY Times. Title quote from Justin Kaplan, author of an earlier bio, and also of the acclaimed bio of Walt Whitman. This is volume one, and I'm sure it's a good read. Three volumes are planned, based on material Twain dictated to a stenographer over four years before he died in 1910.

“From the first, second, third and fourth editions all sound and sane expressions of opinion must be left out,” Twain instructed them in 1906. “There may be a market for that kind of wares a century from now. There is no hurry. Wait and see.”

Another Reason to Like Neil Gaiman

As if Neverwhere, American Gods and The Graveyard Book were not enough:

"Closing libraries...a terrible mistake."

Beauty of Procrastination

"I have often asked myself whether those days on which we are forced to be indolent are not just the ones we pass in profoundest activity? Whether all our doing, when it comes later, is not only the last reverberation of a great movement which takes place in us on those days of inaction." ~Rilke

The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination. From Book Bench at the New Yorker.

Or, if you don't want to spend $50+, you can read the review.

I wonder if, like Dyer, we have chosen the wrong project when we procrastinate. He started with an academic study of D.H. Lawrence, then tried a novel, and finally gave us the funny and neurotic Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence.

Dark, Smelly Bedroom

Of adolescence. Article about the darker side of YA fiction. I keep wondering what young adult readers see in the stuff when they can just as easily read adult fiction. A lot of the attraction is that it's fantasy, but also, according to this author, the obvious: young adult protagonists. Oh, makes sense then.

Who's Making Money in Publishing?

Icky Glenn Beck.

Maybe conservatives don't have as much to read?

Amusing but Sad: Paris Syndrome

Paris Syndrome affects around 20 tourists a year, mostly Japanese, for some reason. It appears to spring from the shock of the disparity between the popular image of Paris – of accordions, flowers and cobbled streets – and the exposure to, say, the Place de Clichy at night. They do not know that, within our lifetimes, those cobble stones have been prised up and thrown in anger; they require immediate psychiatric help.

Parisians, by Graham Robb.

I think it's touching that someone would have such a romanticized view of Paris that he or she would need psychiatric help upon finding out that the city has a modern, even seamy side. I'm always pleased when a place I visit lives up to its reputation in a good way. I kind of expect the overdeveloped and seamy stuff -- and that tourists will get the worst of it -- but then, I lived in New York for a long time. Once, returning from a trip to Europe, I was mistaken for a tourist myself by a limo driver who tried to con me into an expensive ride home in his car. Being a New Yorker, I flagged a legitimate cab under his very nose, just as he was saying that cab would never stop for me. I looked at him as the cab drove away. He shrugged. That was in the shadow of charmless, barely distinguishable downtown office towers. Not a carriage horse in sight.

Beg you read this.

My favorite grammar problem: Begging the question. It has a fine meaning here, or here, having to do with faulty logic. Of which there is no end.