1) Godwotterous writerly brain syndrome 2) Blaming your tools, looking for magic programs
More writerly occupational hazards
Adopt a new writing program? Sure. Classic avoidance behavior, combined with the “let’s buy a new guitar because the old one doesn’t work” syndrome. Or was Scrivener something my writing project direly needed? Could this be the Rx for godwotterous writerly brain syndrome?
I’ve been thinking about the plasticity of the brain, and the notion that everyone from musicians to London taxi drivers grow relevant volumes of brain—in some cases, I’m going to imagine, positively Schwartzeneggerian neural structures—to cope with what they need to know and do. I’ve also been thinking about the way my speculative trilogy has been going (call it science fiction if you must), and I fear my own brain is evolving in parallel with the novels.
My question: Might my brain be starting to resemble what the Brits describe as an architectural folly? That’s right. Mirroring the trilogy, it could be effectively growing turrets, niches full of neo-classical statuary, ramparts and doodahs on all sides, probably surrounded by a godwotterous garden in which you could lose an army. What kind of writerly Muse would want to live in a joint like that, eh?
I have another question, one perhaps best addressed to a psychiatrist. What happens when—supposing I finish it—this unlikely novelistic epic succeeds? Will the neural scaffolding then remain, a rambling, ramshackle folly standing in a garden full of grottos and gazebos and arbors and obelisks? Not to mention pink flamingoes and gnomes? Christ. What will I be able to do with a brain like that? Except maybe embark on another trilogy. The horror, eh?
Given the number of digital and hard-copy files, and notes and working drafts that have accumulated over the years as I scribbled bits in the interstices between bread-and-butter gigs as a writer/editor, even my freakishly refashioned mind would have to fold at the thought of making sense of it all. (Better, perhaps, I simply burn the lot of it and set out afresh.)
Except that I’ve been given new hope.
I’m now working in a program called Scrivener, which I heartily recommend to writers and researchers everywhere.
I’ve long resisted the idea of having software programmers decide they know better than I do how to proceed. But Scrivener doesn’t work that way. It has itself evolved over the past few years in light of feedback from working wordsmiths, and it’s an entirely unobtrusive, unpresumptuous, endlessly flexible godsend. It works. Magnificently, it works.
Here’s a link to a review that helped swing me.
I’m not even getting a commission.
Some good things to do with an Internet addiction
"The Joy of Quiet," a story by Pico Iyer in the NY Times (29 Dec. 2011) resonates with something I proposed a week ago at a Christmas party.
.
I'd been talking about plans to go away for a few weeks to finish a novel in draft. As usual, when such an idea is broached, people were quick to say things such as, "Hey, I know a great place on the coast down south" or "My uncle has a yacht crewed entirely by world-class lady beach volleyball players winding down between tournaments." That kind of thing is all very well, but what I really need is somewhere barren of interesting people to chat to (including beach volleyball players), at least one room with a blank wall and no view of wonderful scenery and, most important of all, no Internet connection. In fact, I'd been thinking of some grubby little upcountry hotel here in Thailand.
This is not mere eccentricity. Lots of writers feel the same way, I believe. At least one successful writer (whose name escape me just now) goes so far as to say no one can write a book in the vicinity of an Internet connection. That may be no exaggeration.
At this point my Sara, as is her wont, interrupts. "All you need is self-discipline," she says.
Uh-huh. That's right. I don't even have the self-discipline to activate Freedom, a program I installed on my computers that allows you to disable your communications programs for anywhere up to eight hours at a time (see “Addictions, spinal deficiencies and disciplinary infinite regresses”).
But let's get back to my proposal, which will make both me and some obliging investor rich overnight. All I need is enough cash to buy and renovate a smallish hotel, preferably here in Bangkok.
Here's the deal. We subdivide the joint into windowless cells, each of them equipped with comfortable office chair, desk, adjustable lighting, cot, a basic toilet and washroom, coffee machine, and, by default, no Internet connection. Oh, yeah--and a solid door that unlocks only from the outside.
Just a prototype; we'd tart it up somewhat.
Whoa. We’ll have writers queuing up to pay our exorbitant rates for incarceration till they finish their book in draft or else cry uncle (for which we’ll charge them a hefty penalty). The punters can order food which, for modest charges, our staff will slip through a slot of the sort used in solitary confinement in all the best prisons. Writing supplies, computer repairs, etc. will be provided in the same way.
The real money, though—and this, I have to admit, is pure genius—will come from what we'll charge for temporary access to the Internet. Clients who just can't manage the cold-turkey route may submit a formal written request, agreeing to pay ridiculous sums by the minute for the privilege of being allowed online for a stipulated time. (Of course clients will also have to sign an initial agreement that protects us from charges of kidnapping and unlawful detention.)
So we provide a much-needed service for our age, amassing heaps of good karma at the same time we get obscenely rich.
This idea’s time has come. As I read Pico Iyer’s article, I kept feeling he was on the verge of stumbling upon it himself. I await good news from prospective investors.
Any good ideas for what to call this facility, which in my mind is already becoming an international chain? Mistress Muse's No Mercy Mansion isn't quite right, though it is pretty alliterative.
Save the semicolons
“[U]se of the semicolon is dwindling. Although colons were common as early as the 14th century, the semicolon was rare in English books before the 17th century. It has always been regarded as a useful hybrid—a separator that's also a connector—but it's a trinket beloved of people who want to show that they went to the right school.”
Henry Hitchings, “Is This the Future of Punctuation!?” (Wall Street Journal, 22 Oct. 2011)
Rightfully, I think, there's been a reaction to the venerable prescriptive school of grammar and punctuation. The modern tendency is to go instead with current usage. But some people — and Hitchings might be one of them, if I read his attitude to semicolons correctly — go too far with that. Perhaps what he really meant has been corrupted in its editing. I can’t believe that someone with his background and evident writing skills could describe the semicolon as a mere “trinket beloved of people who want to show that they went to the right school.”
I’m all for minimalism in most spheres of this life; and in no way would I advocate unnecessary and obtrusive punctuation merely on the grounds that I attended Grenville High School, in Quebec, where I was suspended for offenses that modesty forbids I specify. (The year I was in Grade 9, just incidentally, the teachers’ association declared Grenville High the worst school in the entire province and barred Association teachers, i.e. any officially qualified teachers, from teaching there.)
But letting the semicolon go officially extinct would mean competent writers lose a valuable tool for no other reason than pundits yield to current popular taste. The way things are going, we could be left with little more than a few Anglo-Saxon grunts ornamented with full stops, question marks and—for the few writers who still use relatively complex sentences and don’t mind appearing affected—commas. Oh, I forgot!!! And exclamation marks, those handy and hugely popular vehicles of spurious verve and melodrama à la mode. (Doesn’t matter. Whatever. Emoticons are meanwhile threatening to relegate words and punctuation to wherever the dodos have gone.) Mass criteria of the good rool, OK!
I use semicolons sparingly. I'm in no way emotionally attached to them. Used appropriately, however, they make essential contributions to clear prose. Hitchings’ apparent belief that the semicolon is nothing but an affectation among a few ponces is utter rubbish.
Where current usage can be shown to be destructive of effective prose, then it should be resisted. Semicolons rool, OK!
Here are some surplus semicolons I avoided using in the foregoing: ;;;;;;;;;. Help yourself.
Assailed once again by the notion I should instead be working on a novel, I offer a brace of haikus.
Disambiguate
Complex items in a list,
Good semicolons
Disambiguate.
As in: “Punctuation clarifies prose by establishing logical relations, e.g. in distinguishing defining from non-defining relative clauses; by reflecting spoken language, with its pauses for breath or dramatic effect, e.g., or by evoking tones of interrogation, surprise, disbelief, and so on; and simply by providing a rest for short-term memory and attention when a sentence starts going stylistically all Hegelian on you.” Try reading that without the semicolons.
Or in this case (I know we could have two sentences instead, but considerations of meaning or rhythm can mean the semi-colon is better): “He went through the manuscript of ‘How You Know When You’ve Finished Revising,’ culling commas where he could; later in the day, he went back and reinstalled most of them. Then he sent it away.”
Thus:
Middle way
To stop or only to pause?
Good semicolons
Find the middle way.
...
The Wal-Mart sign (above) is meant to be ironic, isn't it?
Writerly occupational hazards: Emotional opportunism & spiritual callousing
Two years after his death, Michael Jackson is back in the news, with his former doctor defending himself against charges of involuntary manslaughter. I’m not sure what emotions this case is arousing in the general public, but it has caused me to revisit my first reaction to the so-called King of Pop’s untimely passing.
“A long time after painting [his first wife] Camille on her deathbed, Monet confessed to his friend Georges Clemenceau about the pain or shock he felt when he suddenly realized, while painting [Camille Monet sur son lit de mort] that he was studying her pallid face and noting the tiny variations of tone and color brought about by death, as if they were an observable everyday matter! He ended by saying: ‘Ainsi de la bête qui tourne sa meule. Plaignez-moi, mon ami.’ (Like the beast who turns his millstone. Pity me, my friend.)”
John Berger, “The Enveloping Air: Light and moment in Monet” (Harper’s, January 2011).
My own initial reaction to Michael Jackson’s death presented a real parallel to Monet's experience, and makes me question my own compassion.
Of course Jackson’s passing was sad—his whole life was sad, by many accounts. And what was my immediate response upon hearing the news? What a pity, I thought. I’d looked forward to seeing where his continuing reinvention of himself would eventually lead. But now I could no longer enjoy imagining the range of potential 80-year-old Jackson personae.
Does that strike you as callous?
Maybe. But, beyond his curiosity value, Jackon, effectively, was a leading exponent of a novel evolutionary development. Cultural evolution has long since superceded biological evolution. And now, what with advances in plastic surgery, bioengineering, and cyborg-type replacement parts and augmentations, human beings are increasingly taking a deliberate hand in their own design (and all this to much applause from the Transhumanists).
Which leads me to the following proposition. Jackson’s real contribution to posterity might have been this: He was our canary in what is becoming an ever deeper and more mysterious pit of our own devising, filled with perils we cannot yet see.
And now our canary is dead.
RIP MJ. I offer commemorative haikus (which, as I’ve said before, are much easier than writing books).
Michael Jackson, our
Tranhumanistic
Canary in a soul mine.
Michael Jackson, our
Commoditized
Ingenue in a gold mine.
Psychopharmacologic
Infelicity.
Michael Jackson, dead.
Psychopharmacologic
Alternative life-
Stylish Jackson death.
An eighty-year-old
New Michael Jackson
We’ll never know.
It occurs to me to ask: Will I be able to view myself with the same writerly dispassion, as I morph away over the years remaining to me? I’ve already had my eyes lasiked; not long ago I had a bathmat installed in my thorax (patching a ventral hernia, or containing the alien? ); there’s every chance that, should I live long enough, I’ll wind up the proud owner of artificial knees… Hell, they’ll probably be implanting info & communications chips right into our heads even before I get around to retiring my already antique, nearly four-year-old iPhone 2G.
Click on the first photo for a progressive portrait of Jackson over his life. (It has occurred to me that visitors often don't realize that many of the illustrations in these posts are linked to URLs.)
Get your new words while they’re hot (warm, anyway)
Watch the English language evolve! Here are some of this site’s neologisms—original, borrowed and even commissioned—from my posts over the past year or two. The numbers refer to how many hits each gets on Google as of right now.
* Cymbalalalazophobia (fashioned to order by Dr Anthony Alcock, coiner of words for our age extraordinaire). 0 hits (a big surprise) 
* Iktsuarpok (with thanks to the Inuit and to Adam Jacot de Boinod for collecting this specimen). 7,570 hits
* To cabbage (v. trans.) David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest). n/a (turns out there are other “cabbage” verbs, but I can’t find references to Wallace’s usage) 
* Hobologoism/ hobologoist (coined by yours truly, I am proud to report). 10 (they all lead to my site, mind you; but just wait till next year, eh?)
* Hi-so (from current Thai slang by way of English hi*gh so*ciety). 752,000,000 (but most instances refer to other things)
* The PlagueBot (a character in MOM). 16,500 (but others have coined versions, which muddies the waters; maybe I'll sue the buggers. Just joking.)
* iField (with apologies to Apple). 1,470,000 (subtract references to towns named Ifield)
* Vuvuzela (from S. Africa, quickly spread around the world on a tide of footie fever, but faded as fast from the popular mind). 11,600,000 (9,320,000 for “vuvuzela 2011,” so maybe it isn't fading as fast as all that)
* Democrazy (used in newspaper interview by former Thai Finance Minister Korn Chatikavanij, at a time, last year, when local demos had indeed gone patently crazy). 755,000 (the word is everywhere, and, just like its half-cognate, applied to all manner of things)
* Apocalyptic cosmophobia (me, looking forward to 2012). 3 (all my site)
* Beepification/ beepify (Leary’s coinage). 5 (only one of them referring to Leary; the expression has had multiple geneses)
* Absent presence (an expression for our times, coined a few years ago and likely to enjoy increasing currency over the years to come). 89,100,000
So that's it for now, with help from a scholarly friend, the South Africans, Inuit, and Thais, a writer or two, and a relic Boomer channelling from 50 years ahead. Stay tuned for more news of changes to the language, not to mention recommended changes.
The ghost portrait of David Foster Wallace brooding at the top of the page won't go away. I fear he's holding me in some way responsible for something.
Can the novel survive the demise of novelists?
The demise of the novel? This has been predicted again and again over the decades, if not the centuries, yet people keep reading novels. Here’s a recent vote of confidence in their persistence:
“The book-length text is coded in our DNA and will never go away; it is the written version of the oral myths and histories told on consecutive nights around campfires for 80,000 years. In each new generation, roughly the same percentage of people is born with this mutation: the need to be immersed in a long story told entirely through words.”
(Russell Galen, prominent New York literary agent)
Galen’s take is encouraging. But compare Booker Prize-winner Graham Swift’s even more recent remarks regarding the effects of e-books on writerly livelihoods:
“I think the tendency will be that writers will get even less than they get now for their work and sadly that could mean that some potential writers will see that they can't make a living, they will give up and the world would be poorer for the books they might have written, so in that way it is quite a serious prospect.”
Quoted in The Telegraph (17 August 2011)
Swift would seem to be saying yeah, novels are good, but you actually need novelists to produce them, and without even a whiff of financial support to keep them at it, how many books are they likely to write? Except of course, for those purest of artists who are able to live on love alone. 
Another writerly occupational hazard: starving to death.
Savage Chickens cartoon used with permission of the artist, Doug Savage.
Graham Swift's Amazon page.
Writerly occupational hazards: Plagiarism
Plagiarism has become more tempting and easier, perhaps, in this digital age. The danger of being found out may also be greater.
Here’s a copy of the letter I e-mailed a week ago to The Tribune, New Delhi (I've yet to hear from either the newspaper or the writer):
Dear Editors,
I must inform you that more than half of Uma Vasudeva's review of C.Y. Gopinath's The Books of Answers (The Tribune, New Delhi, 7 August 2011) has been lifted pretty well verbatim, with no acknowledgement, from my own online review, which I blogged on 19 July and posted on the Smashwords website on 18 July. The passage in question extends from "The book is compulsively readable" to "Pat's relationship with his son Tippy".
Perhaps infected with a laissez-faire attitude that threatens to prevail in this digital age, I considered ignoring this matter. But plagiarism bespeaks intellectual laziness and dishonesty -- theft, in fact -- and I believe it should be resisted, no matter what changes our popular culture may be undergoing.
I'm not blaming your publication for the plagiarism; I expect you published the article unawares. I find it difficult to believe, however, that the writer in question wasn't aware of what she was doing, and thought you would want to know.
And here’s Jack Shackaway accusing yours truly of being a kettle and calling the pot black.
Hope in dark times
Just when things couldn't get any worse, they did. But it turned out they didn't really, and Sara's right, I worry too much.
I've just come back into my office, and I heard this horrible rasping from the left wing of my iMac. My mind is going, "It's the fan, right? It can't be the hard drive, it can't be the hard drive, aiyeeeee."
Careful investigation has revealed the real problem. I had an online jazz station playing, way down low, and what I heard was the drummer's hi-hat going tska-tska-tska and scaring the shit out of me.
Good News 'R Us, eh?
Earlier case of falling-sky syndrome.
Worrywart (alt. worry wart) from eymonline.com: 1956, from comic strip "Out Our Way" by U.S. cartoonist J.R. Williams (1888-1957). According to those familiar with the strip, Worry Wart was the name of a character who caused others to worry, ... the inverse of the current colloquial meaning. The Word Detective has more.
The Book of Answers
C.Y. “Gopi” Gopinath, a Bangkok-based writer of note, has just published his first novel, which promises even greater success than his globetrotting chronicle Travels with the Fish (HarperCollins India, 1999). The Book of Answers, released just this month, also by HarperCollins India, has already soared to #10 on the bestseller list in that country.
I’m going to don my “let’s pitch this book to a modern market” hat, something I find hard to do with my own books and hesitate to do with Gopinath’s debut novel for fear of doing it an injustice. Anyway, here goes:
Think, an Indian Jonathan Swift turns to magical realism with a message for readers everywhere.
Alternatively, we could describe the novel as a fabulist satire wherein a Clarke Kent hero represents the potential of Everyman to take a stand and fight against those absurd and often evil (often bureaucratic) forces that shape our lives. Readers in Thailand might almost believe that former and newly de facto PM Thaksin Shinawatra had seen the book in manuscript and used it as a manual for retaking power.
The book is compulsively readable. I found myself reluctant to skim passages for fear of missing any of the gems scattered across every page. Gopinath sketches his hugely entertaining characters with sure and economical strokes. I enjoyed all of them, from the Convener and the godman to B Plus and the “doctor of venereal diseases,” with his very entertaining medical examination of Pat and Rose, the central characters. The author’s treatment of Indian English, meanwhile, is both warmly funny and minimalist, in no way obtrusive. In the course of one entertaining dialogue, for example, “codswallop” devolves by stages into “shit,” the speaker’s Anglophiliac try for elegance nicely derailed. “More banging for a buck,” in another conversation, is enough to comically conjure, without further ado, the voice Gopinath wanted. “Gourment” (see the extract, below) is how Indian bureaucrats pronounce “government,” and it includes connotations sorely missing in the conventional expression.
The book is also a structural success. Among other features, it presents an excellent conclusion, something too many otherwise good novels lack. En route, Gopinath consistently leaves the reader hanging at the end of each chapter, wanting more, and introduces each successive chapter with a surprise.
In the first chapter, the hero’s proto-obsessive compulsive negotiation of Mumbai's streets and his collision with the Fat Man is superbly realized. And what an idea is introduced shortly thereafter! A blind calligrapher of unknown provenance has inscribed wisdom for times not yet here in a mysterious tome known as The Book of Answers, recording details of a future foretold by that calligrapher's lover, chief cook for a client's household. That’s followed hard upon by an introduction to “The Ministry of Errors and Regrets.” This venerable institution applies the principle of wringing every possible lesson from any mistake by repeating that error as often as possible. Gopinath adopts a wonderfully comic voice, kind of like Flann O'Brien describing a meeting chaired by the Mad Hatter, the agenda set by Kafka. (The latter individual would have appreciated a ministerial interview to determine whether Pat, the hero, and Rose, his companion, were rich or poor.)
The story as a whole is a delightful tapestry woven from such threads as the eponymous Book of Answers itself; the Ministry for Errors and Regrets; Rose's scrapbook of omens; the dynamic between Pat, his friend Arindam, and Rose, who turns out to be Arindam's wife; Pat's comic love-life with Rose; and the rather moving development of Pat's relationship with his son Tippy, as Tippy himself is gradually revealed as much more than the klutz we first meet, the lad with “content-free eyes” tipped back in a chair chewing gum.
Here’s just a taste from the hilariously barbed banquet:
“We live in times of world ending. Kali yug, as we say in the scriptures. The Convener believes our country is in doldrums. Gourment is committed but man can only do so much. Shri Ishwar Prasad is facing challenges of lifetime, struggling with national problems such as upcoming elections, crime, literacy, terrorism, democracy, women's liberation, abortion, sexual slavery, judicial backlog, and a bankrupt treasury. While he is doing all this —”
“We are not fooled,” said Rose. “Your boss heads a government in charge of pulling wool over people's eyes. The reality is that it’s a government of lies.” Her eyes blazed at the Convener’s Personal Assistant.
“You make a good point,” Janki Ram continued reasonably. “But concept of pulling wool is rooted in Hindu philosophy and spirituality. Shri Ishwar Prasad says reality is overrated. It's a nice idea, of course, but it doesn't exist. The Convener’s only wants to make this acceptable to our struggling millions. He is not sidetracked by the facts. He is concerned with the truth.”
Such ideas, expressed differently, figure prominently in another book I've just read. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, by Chris Hedges, is a bleak jeremiad that appears to leave little option other than fleeing the planet. I prefer the darkly comic recourse offered by The Book of Answers.
Available as an e-book from Smashwords.
Another great story, in my opinion, one that also hinges on the discovery of a strange and magical book, is Gould's Book of Fish, by Richard Flanagan.
Extra, added bonus: a couple of Salmon Rushdie takes on “magic realism” and “truth” in fiction.
Freeing the teabags
“Tedium is my medium, and boredom is my game.” (original coinage, Mr Jack Shackaway, Esq.)
Currently I'm producing most of my adrenaline at night. And this morning I awoke tired and anxious, haunted by a dream wherein a gang of Irish writers threatened me with terrible things, the details of which I can’t remember. I do know groupies played a role in developments, which maybe explains why my personal timecock was pointing insistently to noon or thereabouts, even though it was only 6.30am. This kind of dream typically appears when I’m getting really bored. Right now, e.g., I haven’t had an adventure in months. It’s time to kick over the traces, get out of town and into trouble somewhere.
But this morning I haven’t got any farther than the Sugar & Sweet Coffee Shop, a ten-minute walk down the road. In this coffee shop, they tie the teabag strings to the cup handles as though they fearred the bags will try to escape. If it weren’t for the bumper crop of miniskirted and short-shorted humdingers that infest this place, I’d never come in here.
Still, I really hate having to free my teabags and then find a place to put them till it’s time to ask for a refill of hot water.
Thai lesson for the day: kee niaow = stingy, mean.
And maybe I am. But karmic merit from my emancipation of the teabags cancels out the meanness.
Meanwhile I sit here with my laptop computer and tea, indistinguishable from hundreds of thousands of other people sitting in coffee shops around Thailand looking writerly in front of their laptops, except for the fact most of the others are drinking coffee instead, and don’t have to cope with hobbled teabags.
And I’m purely bored.
Click on the miniskirt for a haiku by Collin Piprell.
See how bored I am?
Man for an age
Recent Posts
- 1) Godwotterous writerly brain syndrome 2) Blaming your tools, looking for magic programs
- Some good things to do with an Internet addiction
- Mayan malarkey, reasons to relax in 2012
- Save the semicolons
- Chronicle of an urban drowning foretold
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