Sunday Sharing #1

Yet another idea I stole from Ari over at A Fuzzy Mango with Wings. Mostly because I don’t have enough to say about any of these things for a whole post yet they’re still all awesome. 

1. I’m kind of in love with spoken word, even though its something I have absolutely zero talent for (*cough* overbearingly shy *cough*). The gorgeous Sarah Kay has made this playlist of poets from the Bowery Poetry Club, a collection of videos of amazing NYC poets.

2. I tend to write a lot of pieces that have either tons of female characters or tons of male characters, which inevitably leads to sentences with two he‘s doing things together and no one can tell who’s who. One of the best discussions of this problem is on the NaNoWriMo erotica writers’ forum (oh, hush) but its applicable to even the most unsexy of fiction. Link here.

3. For the science fiction-ers out there, here’s the crazy and kind of beautiful picture (and story) of an opera singer who grew algae with her voice during her performance. By modulating her voice she can even change the color and taste of the algae. Isn’t that crazy cool?

Look at it!

4. Then there’s this article from Cracked, which is not for the faint of heart or the hypochondriacs. But there’s a story inside one of these unexplainable, brain-altering diseases. One of the buried ideas inside of it is that disease is oftentimes location-specific, and yet we don’t know why. Any new place humanity steps foot on has the potential to turn us to the lemming route and throw ourselves from cliffs. Or burrow deep into our brain, unknown and silent, until we come home and it makes us blind but suddenly able to hear every crick of an old house from a hundred meters away.

5. I just have to ask: Is there anyone on the House Science Committee who actually likes science?

6. Finally, 12 Novels is the project of a woman who is, basically, attempting to do NaNoWriMo every month of the goddamn year. The italics pretty much show the level to which my mind is blown. Part of her mission was to show that life doesn’t have to be perfectly arranged and convenient for you to be a writer, because that will never happen. A very neat read.

Reading Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot

I’ve been trying to expand my horizons lately. Which basically means not rolling my eyes at people who practice homeopathy and trying to read more Literary Fiction instead of stories with spaceships in them. Some of my first forays weren’t that helpful–”meaningful” non-endings, and characters who Never Talked About Their Feelings Because That Is Bad. Then I saw that The Marriage Plot was coming out.

Jeffery Eugenides is the type of author who you always hear about. I hadn’t read Middlesex or The Virigin Suicides yet (though I am going to soon) but I figured that his new one would be a good jumping-on point.

It opens like this:

To start with, look at all the books. There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but by date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her twenty-first birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college course, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Bronte sisters. There were a whole lot of black-and-white New Directions paperbacks, mostly poetry by people like H.D. or Denise Levertov. There were the Colette novels she read on the sly. There was the first edition of Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade and which she was using now to provide textual support in her English honors thesis on the marriage plot. There was, in short, this mid-size but still portable library representing pretty much everything Madeleine had read in college, a collection of texts, seemingly chosen at random, whose focus slowly narrowed, like a personality test, a sophisticated one you couldn’t trick by anticipating the impactions of its questions and finally got so lost in that your only recourse was to answer the simple truth. And then you waited for the result, hoping for “Artistic,” or “Passionate,” thinking you could live with “Sensitive,” secretly fearing “Narcissistic” and “Domestic,” but finally being presented with an outcome that cut both ways and made you feel different depending on the day, the hour, or the guy you happened to be dating: “Incurably Romantic.”

Was there ever an opening that spoke to a book-lover better? One paragraph, and I was in love.

This isn’t a review. All I can say on the book is that Eugenides deserves every ounce of his reputation (especially for providing an actual honest-to-god satisfying ending) and writes brilliantly. The characters–cliched as it is for me to say, especially about a book that is themed on subverting romantic cliches–breathe. There’s no self-indulgence or pretension or sentences you have to have a doctorate in English to understand grammatically.

The main problem people have had with it is that it is heavy in philosophy and allusions to literary theory. I wasn’t bothered (its what I take classes in, after all) but I think even if I was its integral to the book.

Pick it up. It’ll go quick, but you won’t want it to.

Grammar Antics

I am one of those people. I admit it. When in the course of a normal conversation someone says “I can’t believe how much photos you have!” I feel obligated to snap “Many. Not much. Photos are a number not an amount.”

Just call me Grammar Lady. I’d probably answer to it.

Occasionally, I wish I could be one of those easy-going laissez-faire people who appreciates the “modernization and democratization”of our language. You know, one of those smiley people who thinks that children spelling later like l8r is creative and forward-thinking.

Perhaps my divine mission is to be an English martyr, carrying the flag of properly punctuated sentences into a battleground where the winning team is “experimental literature” and the bastard sons of e.e. cummings.

Just a bit of advice: he only person who is e.e. cummings is e.e. cummings. Also, you will make more money flipping burgers than writing poetry. Especially e.e. cummings knock-off poetry.

Someone has to stop this man.

Other than the fact that I’m constantly pulling my hair out, it isn’t a hard job. Somebody’s got to protect the Queen’s English after all, and who better than a slightly anal-retentive English/PoliSci major with a penchant for poorly dialogued 90′s comic books.

Oh, and I wrote 280 words today. Not a lot, but I was busy.

 

Day 1 and a Tidbit of Random

Well, it’s Day 1 of my 30 day write-every-day kick. For those of you who were expecting a post along the lines of “OMG all it took was a self-imposed deadline and I started doing 5,000 words a day!”, sorry. I’m good, but not that good.

However.

I did do 395 words, which is a bit above my rather measly goal of 250 words per day. Once you get started it really is much easier. And no, I am not upping the goal. That was another thing I promised myself. This is going to start out easy.

And since I don’t want to do 30 posts that are just “This is how many words I did today” each of these write-a-day posts will have what I ma terming Tidbits of Randomness! Today’s Tidbit of Randomness! is a few quotes from my quote book.

“Revenge is living well, without you.” ~Joyce Carol Oates

“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living; the world owes you nothing, it was here first.” ~Mark Twain

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” ~Oscar Wilde

“We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone with weirdness compatible to ours, we join up in mutual weirdness and call it love.” ~Dr. Suess

That’s all for now, folks!

Addict

I realized today that I have devoured oner seventy issues of James Robinson’s Starman in slightly over ten days. And it’s not like it’s the most brilliant comic I’ve ever read (that probably goes to Batman: Year One or Supreme: The Return). I just had to finish it.

The same thing happened when I started watching The Office. It’s not one of my favorite TV shows. I don’t even find it all that funny. But somehow I watched all seven seasons in two weeks. While I was in school.

Books and I have a long and contentious relationship. I love them. I have had some book characters living inside my head for years (I’m talking to you, Leo). Others I have obsessed over and pulled apart until I feel like I’m going stir crazy inside the plots. 

On one hand, this is good. I wouldn’t be the person I am today without Sherlock Holmes (the books, my dear), Harry Potter, Captain Picard, Victor Frankenstein, and a host of other more obscure characters with me.

The first time I read Sherlock Holmes I was twelve, and it was a hot, sticky summer with nothing to do. It was the first summer where all we neighborhood kids felt too grown up and too pretentious to play the pickup capture-the-flag games that we used to. It was only a two-minute walk to the local elementary school and I used to go there and sit hunched over on a swing and read until my neck hurt from bending.

The copy I have was my mother’s, a complete set of all the Holmes tales. It’s about as thick as a brick, with onion-skin paper and gold writing on a black cover. It smells like dust, and back then I would have to switch hands every few minutes, from the heaviness. I always liked Watson a little better than Holmes, but then again I think we were meant to.

I can tell you all this about a book, and yet I can’t remember the first time I held my baby sister, although I know it must have been around the same time.

Not my drawing by the way. But squee-worthy.

And oh, how happy I was when I discovered fanfic. If you’ve ever been to Fanfiction.net you know the wealth of stories on that site, and how they could let a girl happily explore for months. And for months I did, delving into gen, slash, cross-overs, and every other geeky slang-tern you can imagine from fluff to lemon. There are very few things that compare to three hour chunks spent reading piles of Justice League and comic book and Sherlock Holmes fanfic. I’ve posted more comments using the word “squee” than I ever imagined I would. To date, I’ve contributed 100,000 words of my own. I find it soothing, friendly, and instantly gratifying. Also, a little shameful. Incidentally, this is about the mix of feelings I’ve heard alcoholics describe.

I alway have a book with me. I love them. I read under the table even though I know damn well that it would do me good to actually listen in Statistics for once. When things get awkward or when I just don’t know anyone I pull it out. My books are my security blanket.

Once, at the very end of tenth grade, a boy told me that I talk like a book.

I am quiet. I do not talk like a normal person. I like symbolism, and metaphors, and discussions about politics and religion. Sometimes, I think I would be better off as a girl who didn’t fall in love with Italo Calvino but who could comfortably have a conversation on the telephone.

The summer when I devoured Holmes, I devoured it because I had nothing else. The only two books in the house I hadn’t finished were it and Little Women, and the only thing Little Women ever taught me was what kind of girl I do not want to be. That was the summer when my mother refused to take me to the library. She said she was afraid I was addicted to books. I think what she thought was that by not letting me get new books she could break the cocoon of the imaginary world I’d built around myself, so I’d be the type of girl to smile at strangers and make friends with a handshake. My mother, you see, was not that type of girl either, though my sister was. I think she wanted to show me the easy path, and I also think she knew she would fail.

She was partially right in her fears. I have never had as many friends as my sister–the social butterfly and easy talker–but I have had better friends. Deeper ones. I have friends who I have known for a third of my life, who I can truly tell anything, and who trust me the same.

I don’t trust anyone who says they don’t read.

I do not talk easily, but I do it well. I can appear stony and cold, but I am not quick to anger or rashness. I am judgmental, I admit; I don’t like girls with high voices who giggle too loudly and think too little, but I know myself enough to choose my friends wisely. If I lose friends, it isn’t over fights or betrayal, we simply grow apart. I am smart. On the ACT I beat the boy who was three years ahead in math because there are two languages sections.

I am obsessive, but I am not alone in that. An addiction to language and words and imagination is certainly better than heroin or cocaine or vodka. I value my mind too much to lose it.

I would rather be this person than another. I would rather know what its like to roll lines of poetry around in my mouth like fine wine than give it up for comfort in crowds. I do not like people, at least not the sort of people who smile too easily and too often. This odd sense of humor I possess is better than being able to laugh at Will Ferrell. I’m the type of girl to smell old books and rub my hands across the leather, the type who collects ’50′s and ’60′s science fiction dime novels and stacks of comic books.

I like my life. I like being one of those odd little library girls. I am not the only one, I know. Perhaps this addiction of mine is not strictly healthy, but I would rather have it than not.

Hate Poetry. But Read It.

There is a certain book from the library that I have checked out over ten times. It’s gotten to the point where I know my favorite parts and skip between them, rereading the lines that make me quiver in my chair and twist around in my head in the middle of the night.

No, it’s not a comic book, or Garcia-Marquez. It’s The Collected Poems of Phillip Larkin.

I don’t usually like poetry. I find Sylvia Plath whiny, Wordsworth annoyingly contradictory, and most other poems pretentious to the point of hypocrisy. But I adore Larkin.

He has a strange tension in his poems between religion and reason, and government and freedom, that pervade all of his works. Take, for instance, one of my favorites, “Observation”:

Only in books the flat and final happens,

Only in dreams we meet and interlock,

The hand impervious to nervous shock,

The future proofed against our vain suspense

Or from “Homage to a Government”:

Next year we shall be living in a country

That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.

The statutes will be standing in the same

Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.

Our children will not know it’s a different country.

All we can hope to leave them now is money.

If that’s not enough, it may interest the comic-readers to know that Grant Morrison’s  nineties Batman masterpiece Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth got its title (the serious house part) from a line of Larkin’s poetry. Originally it referred to a church.

Poetry teaches about sound better than any novel. The way a poet makes the syllables fit together so no line stumbles, but rolls off the tongue to be happy or sad or elevated through just the tone of them. Literary fiction people know how to use this–but any book could.

So here is my plea to fictioneers–go read poetry. Lots of it. Find the ones you like and take them apart. It’ll make you better.

Warning: Profanity

This post is not safe for work. Don’t like, don’t read.

Recently, my friend and I were discussing profanity (meaning both language and sex/violence) in literature. Now, neither of us are censorists, and the genesis of the conversation was those idiots who try to ban books because of sex scenes or the word ‘shit’ or whatever. (Which is a great deal of What Is Wrong With The World Today, if you ask me). But somehow it turned to a debate about where the line is is between stuff that suits the story and what we lovingly termed sexfuckingcrap.

There are far too many people who would like to believe, for whatever reason, that any violence or sex or swearing in a story is Evil. There are an equal number of people who imagine that everything a person could possibly put on paper, no matter how gratuitous is A Wonderful Use Of Free Speech to be cherished and celebrated because in this country we are allowed to say whatever we want. To differing degrees, both of these views have a kernel of truth to them. The censorists (yes I know that is not the term but live with it people) are right in the fact that just throwing whatever you want into a story is not appropriate. A children’s book should not have detailed descriptions of mommy and daddy’s nighttime activities. But the other side is right in the fact that we should be able to write whatever we want, because that is one of the founding principles of freedom, and once you start banning things it is a steep and slippery slope.

So where’s the line?

Certainly, it doesn’t depend on age. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, the beloved book by Judy Blume, is written for fourth and fifth graders, but it deals with puberty and “your changing body.” I’ll admit, I never read it, because I was that weird girl who wanted to eat up the horrific ghost stories instead, but that’s what I hear. And then there are some YA books that never touch on anything sexual/violent ever and turn out to be majorly popular.

Likewise, there have been some adult novels, even some by authors I really love, where a sex scene or sudden profanity has knocked my opinion of the book down at least two points.

In my opinion, the line between what good profanity and SFC is whether it fits the story. Having a hard-boiled detective with alcohol issues drop the f-bomb is earned. Having a church-loving Christian virgin do it (in usual conversation) is not, unless you say very early on that this is part of her character.

Otherwise perfectly good books can be knocked down points by misplaced profanity. Anyone who knows me knows my love of Cory Doctorow and pretty much everything he does, but his book The Makers there’s a sudden 2-page sex scene that turned me off. It just didn’t feel right and made an other wise brilliant book seem lesser.

This doesn’t mean you should avoid profanity for fear of turning readers off. The world would be a much better place if everyone adhered to the fanfiction rule of DLDR (Don’t Like, Don’t Read) and just didn’t finish things they didn’t like. No whining about it, no trying to ban anything. Your opinions are your own, and you shouldn’t try to make them anyone else’s.

So, when deciding what to put in your book, ask three questions: Am I comfortable with this? Does this suit the tone of my book? and most importantly: Would my characters do this?

Because honestly, a wee l’il hint of naughtiness never hurt anyone.

Ways in Which Spanish is Superior (and Isn’t)

I’m now in second-level Spanish (which basically means I can order food, ask where the bathroom is, and inquire about la familia but not carry on a conversation that takes place in past tense) and the differences between the languages are quite stunning, actually. No, it’s not very hard to learn, but there are subtle things that make Google Translate fail miserable where anything but basic speech is concerned.

Ways Spanish is Superior

1. The Collective “You” In English there is no way to say “you” and have it be automatically known whether you are addressing one person or multiple–which leads to regional things like “ya’ll.” In Spanish there is ustedes which means “you all.”

2. Everything is Phonetic. Nothing in Spanish is spelled weirdly, and every vowel has exactly one sound. “Ph” doesn’t exist, because you have “f” so why would there be a need for a strangely spelled pair of letters that does the exact same thing?

3. Punctuation at the Beginning of the Sentence. Yes, the funny upside-down punctuation marks do have a purpose. For one, it lets a speaker know how to modulate their voice in advance, and can also mark a question inside a sentence, like “I have the jam you asked for, do you have jelly?” In Spanish, the “do you have jelly” would have another question mark inside the sentence to mark it.

4. Strict Grammar Grammar in Spanish is pretty much set in stone. A verb can go one place in the sentence, and an adjective always comes after the noun. Who an action is done for (such as “Isabel serves tacos to us” where the action is being done by Isabel for us) the pronoun denoting who it is done for is always connected to the verb. 

Ways Spanish is Inferior

1. De, de, de… Everything in Spanish has de’s. A table made of wood is “la mesa de madera.” People from Colombia are “La gente de Colombia.” Besides the obvious problem of from and of getting mixed up all the time, it’s annoying to write.

2. No Contractions There are exactly two contractions in the Spanish language, “al” and “del” which can only be used with masculine nouns. So if you want to say “My sister’s doll” what you have to say is “the doll of my sister” which is much more complicated.

3. Accent Marks These are also meant to help speech, by marking which vowel to stress. They’re just irritating to remember, though, since there’s no rule as to where they’re placed (unless you’re a native speaker, in which case I’m sure it just makes sense). Also, a QWERTY keyboard doesn’t include them, so you have to go through a bunch of menus to “insert symbol” when writing in Spanish on a computer.

4. Gender In English, there is one “the” and one “a”. In Spanish, however there is la and el for masculine and feminine “the” and un and una for m/f  ”a.” Also, the gender of the noun changes a bunch of things within the sentence. Most adjectives usually have two forms, and some vary by more than just the end letter. The “el” form also means “he” when there is an accent over the e but la with an accent over the a isn’t “she”–ella is.

5. Conjugation For each verb there are six forms for present tense (for referring to I, you, multiple people, we, and collective you–plus one form only used in Spain and therefore not often taught), six forms for past tense, and six for past perfect, etc.

There are different rules for verbs ending in -ar, -ir, and -er, and about a quarter of verbs don’t follow those rules and change for one conjugation out of the six, or two–it can be anything. Also the “we” verb form doesn’t change in past and present tense, so the time frame has to be deduced from context when using that form.

6. Indirect Object Pronouns (specifically le) Indirect object pronouns are used in place of pronouns in sentences like “He likes cake.” He, instead of being el is le. But le can also mean she, or the formal you–so when using le and les (them–male or female–and you all) you have to clarify who, exactly, you are referring to at the end of the sentence.

All in all, I prefer English–mostly because I’m proficient enough in it to say sentences more complex than what I ate for breakfast. But sometimes I catch myself thinking in Spanish, so maybe there’s hope for me yet. I think I’ll stick to writing in my native tongue for right now, though.