hello again

Holy crap, it's a new post!

Since I last remembered to update this thing, I've had my first barbecue of the season, paid doctors to remove part of my intestines, starting a nonfiction writing project to give myself something to do when I'm not working on fiction, and written about five more books on the Fill in the Gaps blog (Blindness by Jose Saramago, Collected Prose by Paul Auster, First Childhood and A Distant Prospect by Lord Berners, and The Gods Will Have Blood by Anatole France).

Now that that's out of the way, I wanted to talk about two non-Fill in the Gaps list books I've read recently, Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese and Red Meat Cures Cancer by Starbuck O'Dwyer (which I hope for his sake is his actual name, because the implications are just too depressing if he chose a name that dumb as a psuedonym).

Red Meat Cures Cancer was a book I found on our bookshelves one evening while browsing for something light to read (my wife insists that her ex-husband is responsible for purchasing it). I was planning on just spending an hour or two entertaining myself before going to bed. Instead, I ended up staying up until four in the morning reading the novel cover to cover, which I don't mean as a ringing endorsement -- far from it, in fact. You see, Red Meat Cures Cancer is one of the worst books I've ever had the misfortune of reading. It is a ham-fisted, dull, aggressively banal story about an executive in a fast food company trying desperately to hold on to his job and pension by reaching new lows in advertising, a story wholly reliant on jokes so old and tired that I'm not sure it's fair to call them jokes anymore.

No, I couldn't stop reading it because I could not believe that such a thing was printed and put in a bookstore where people could see it. I couldn't believe that O'Dwyer held the manuscript for this novel in his hands and, rather than burn it, decided that it was good enough to send out. I couldn't believe that there exists in the world a literary agent willing to shop it around to publishers, an editor who liked the damn thing enough to buy it, and a publisher willing to sign off on the editor's decision. I hoped that somewhere in those pages I would come across an okay joke, a nice turn of phrase, anything at all to justify the book's existence.

I didn't find a damn thing.

From now on, every time I find myself sinking into writer's block because I'm worried that what I'm writing will never get published, I'm going to think about this book. If O'Dwyer can get that thing published, a chimp with a claw hammer firmly embedded in its skull has a good chance of seeing its name on a book jacket.

Verghese's Cutting for Stone, by contrast, is a beautifully written novel, a fluid, effortless read that moves along much faster than most books its size (560 pages). The ease at which the narrative moves forward is even more impressive considering the complicated medical procedures Verghese describes and the rich detail of his prose (I found myself thinking of A.J. Cronin and Gita Mehta while I was reading it). The narrator of the novel is one Marion Stone, who is born (alongside his twin brother Shiva) to a young nun working in a hospital in Ethiopia. From there, the narrative intertwines the story of Marion's life with the drama of rural medicine, the lives of the other inhabitants of the hospital, and the history and culture of Ethiopia.

One of Verghese's strengths is that there are no throwaway characters in the novel. Even the minor characters are fleshed out just enough to make them feel like real people, and every last one is integral in some small way to the overall scope of the work. At times he has a tendency to pile descriptions and events on top of one another until the combined weight of it all becomes too much and the scene collapses into bathos, but considering everything that Verghese does right in the novel that's a minor complaint.

"Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure."

J.D. Salinger
1919 - 2010

merry happy etcetera and so forth

I just thought I'd drop by and assure everyone that I'm not dead, or if I am nobody's bothered to tell me yet. I've just been busy elsewhere in life and so on, but I will be back after the new year to post sporadically, as per usual.

Until then, enjoy your personal Saturnalia or what have you. I know I'll enjoy mine.

pronunciation via cool internet gadgets

As per usual, I received a great many books for my birthday (I know, big surprise, right?), including The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Later, while discussing book-related things with my stepfather-in-law I began to say the author's full name, then promptly stopped myself. I was okay with Alfonso, and Casares was no problem, but Bioy? How do I pronounce Bioy? Bee-oy? Byoi? Something else entirely? I went with just Casares to keep the conversation moving, but that small ignorance on my part stayed in the back of my head the rest of the night.¹

That little incident was not an isolated event, either. Many times over the years I've wanted to mention an author who was relevant to the conversation at hand only to realize that, while I knew what his or her name looked like visually on the page, I was completely clueless as to how it actually sounded when spoken aloud. For example,

Barthelme: Bart-ul-me? Bart-helm? Barth-elm?

Goethe: Go-uth? Go-et? Goo-tuh?

Borges: Bor-gus? Bor-hees?

It's not like most of the names I wanted to pronounce could be looked up in the biographical section of the dictionary, either. Then last year the internet decided to give me a hand by launching a cool little website by the name of Forvo. Forvo works as a huge pronunciation guide where native speakers of various languages can come and submit mp3 clips demonstrating how to pronounce a given word. The usefulness of the site isn't limited to author's names, of course, but that's mainly what I've used it for.

Since I stumbled across it, Forvo has taught me that Borges is Bor-hays, Barthelme is Bar-thal-uh-may, and Goethe is . . . well, I doubt I'll ever feel like I'm pronouncing Goethe correctly, but I suppose I can't have everything.

¹ It's Bee-oy.

well will you look at that

There is a pattern I've slowly come to notice in which my age seems to increase by one year on a roughly annual basis. Today I have turned twenty-nine, and all is well.

Oh, and I wrote another review over at the Fill in the Gaps blog, this time on Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. You can read it here. McCarthy writes stark, brutal things, but the Old Testament themes he deals in transforms that violent content into a commentary on all the aspects of human nature most of us would rather ignore. My respect for the man and his prose grows with every novel I read, and I think it would be a shame if he isn't eventually awarded a Nobel on the order of Borges', Nabokov's, and Tolstoy's snubbings by the award committee.

gaps and the filling thereof

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I've been participating in the Fill in the Gaps 100 Project, a great little challenge for anyone who loves to read. The idea is simple: put together a list of one hundred books you've been meaning to read but haven't for whatever reason, and give yourself a deadline of five years to finish reading the books on that list. Participants are encouraged to discuss books, organize reading groups for some of the more intimidating reads they have in common, post reviews, etc.

There's some other fine print in there, like an "acceptable gap" exemption for a certain percentage of your reading list, but I'm not interested in half measures--for me, it's all one hundred or bust. You can read my list here (eleven down, eighty-nine to go), and all my posts can be found here, although from now on I will also try to remember to post a quick note here whenever I write a new book review.

And hey, if any of this sounds interesting to you, then head over and join up yourself! This may be the academic OCD talking, but it's deeply satisfying to check things off a reading list.

of siblings and nerdery

Last Friday, a UPS delivery man dropped off a box on our doorstep. We've been receiving plenty of boxes filled with wedding presents lately, most likely because we got married recently, but this one was a bit more puzzling:


Apparently, someone had seen fit to send us a box full of Jones Soda. Sure, it seemed like a strange thing to use to congratulate newlyweds, but if nothing else I figured it was better than receiving something less useful like, say, a second toaster, a package of doilies, or a pipe bomb¹. After inspecting the bottles more closely, however, I noticed there was something decidedly different about them:


That's right, someone didn't just send us a box of soda, they sent us a box of Magic: The Gathering themed soda. But who did it? The box didn't contain any receipts or packing slips and the shipping label on the box was addressed to me, so the packaging was no help in identifying the culprit. More importantly though, why would someone send me these sodas? Was it a message--an edible insult, perhaps? Did I just find out that I had the world's geekiest stalker? The box was heavy on calories, but short on answers².

The mystery persisted until a friend of mine took a closer look at the package and noticed the listed phone number wasn't mine. The number that was there sounded familiar, though, and a quick check of my cell's phone book gave me an answer: the person who sent me a box full of sugar and embarrassment was none other than my own brother. I then sent him the following text:

I just received the soda. You are a dork.

A few minutes later, he replied:

If I'm a dork, why are you the one with a box of Magic themed soda in your house?

I suppose the lesson here is that no matter how many miles separate you or how many adult responsibilities you take on, there's no outgrowing the pleasure of antagonizing a sibling.

Also, as further proof that I have no sense of shame, I served those sodas to guests at a barbecue the next day.

¹Yes, I'm well aware that there are several contexts in which a pipe bomb would be very useful indeed, but I'm trying to write a post here that won't get me red-flagged by the FBI.

² I know this is a terrible, groan-inducing sentence, but I can't bring myself to delete it. Call it perversity, but it fills me with an odd sense of pride³.

³ Before you ask, I have no idea if this endnote thing is going to end up being a regular thing. Chances are it's just a passing phase, much like bed wetting or storing the remains of last week's hitchhiker in the crawlspace. If my wife happens to be reading this, I'm just kidding, dear. There's no need to check the crawlspace. Or, for that matter, the tool chest in the closet, the cooler underneath the old tent in the carport, or the box of polaroids in the back of the filing cabinet. On second thought, it might be best if you just forgot this post ever happened.

festina lente

When I started my novel writing project, I thought it wouldn't be too terribly difficult to figure out. After all, I had plenty of prior experience writing short fiction, poetry, academic papers--hell, I'd even taught writing courses. How much different could a novel possibly be?

As I've come to learn over the last few months, a whole lot different. After all of my early novel starts hit dead end after dead end, I tried consulting some books on novel writing (typical researchaholic thinking, I suppose: when in doubt, hit the books). I'll spare you all a tedious recounting of each and every book I consulted, but the one that had the biggest impact was No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty, the guy who started National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo as it's more commonly known, but I hate cutesy abbreviations so I refuse to call it that). No Plot? No Problem! advocates writing novels in a breakneck, marathon fashion wherein the goal is the completion of a 50,000 word manuscript with a deadline of thirty days. To this end, Baty offers plenty of tips and strategies and makes the whole thing sound fun and interesting, which it is, at least at first.

When I tried Baty's method, I managed to produce plenty of text, but about two weeks in I began to realize that the increased output didn't matter because every last thing I wrote was crap. Not a damn bit of it was usable, and I ended up discarding everything. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to badmouth the approach--according to the National Novel Writing Month website, in the last ten years over 70,000¹ participants have met the 30 day/50,000 word deadline, so it's clearly effective for some writers. What the experience underscored for me was that other people's writing strategies were just that: strategies that worked for other people. I needed to learn how I write novels, and the only person who could teach me that was me.

I began trying out writing strategies of my own devising, mixing and matching various techniques and schedules, and in the process discovered a great many ways how not to write a novel. But I stuck with it, and a few weeks ago I finally hit on a solution that works for me: notes. I don't mean a few here and there, I mean lots of notes. Tons of notes. Notes piling in snowdrifts around the room and threatening to trap pets and small children in avalanches. Okay, so maybe my note output isn't quite that out of control, but on average I write about three to five pages of notes for every one page of fiction. The reason for that disparity is partly because writing all those notes gets helps me get rid of the squirrely extraneous stuff bouncing around in my head so that it doesn't muck up the fiction, but mostly it's because writing them forces me to justify to myself each and every writing decision I make. If I can't identify a solid reason a scene needs to exist, or a plausible motivation for a character's actions, then the idea in question doesn't get written. I talk myself out of writing a great many things these days, but the things that do get written are more effective, more substantial. And best of all, I rarely have to discard anything.

¹Granted, the National Novel Writing Month website lists only 37 participant-written novels that have gone on to be published, giving the whole endeavor a discouraging .0005% publication rate, but I have a feeling the written to published ratio isn't much better for all the non-marathon written novels written out there.

marital interlude

I've been neglecting to post much of anything here in the last few months, but for once I have a pretty good excuse: I'm getting married on July 25th, so arranging, planning, financing, and contstructing all the wedding-related stuff has taken priority. So it goes.

I've been keeping up with my writing elsewhwere, though. The novel writing is progressing slowly but surely, and tomorrow the first part of a four-part article I wrote concerning 4-3 and 3-4 defensive schemes will be published over on Seahawk Addicts, a Seahawks fan blog I've been editing for the last year or so.

I'll be sure to tell you all how things went when I get back on the 31st, but until then hooray for writing, double hooray for marriage, and go Seahawks!

"ye olde" should be grounds for a justifiable homicide defense

I am most likely alone in this sentiment, but I get inordinately angry every time I see "Ye Olde" written on a shop sign. And no, it isn't because "Ye Olde" is a sad, overused marketing ploy meant to imbue a store with a certain sense of age and pedigree that in reality only succeeds in insulting the intelligence of everyone involved, although that is a pretty good reason for hating the living hell out of the phrase.

I hate "Ye Olde" because everyone insists on pronouncing "Ye" as "ye" when it's actually pronounced "the." Yes, that's right: "ye" is just "the" wearing an idiotic wig and glasses.

This whole mix-up began with the original version of English, which historians have creatively named Old English. Aside from sounding like a sort of Scandinavian German, Old English also made use of several letters that are no longer around today:

Ææ - ash, which makes the same sound as "ae"

Œœ - ethel, which makes the same sound as "oe"

Ƿƿ - wynn, which sounds exactly like "W"

Ȝȝ - yogh, which makes the same sound as "Y" when it isn't busy sounding like "X" or "W"

Đđ - eth, which sounds like "th," and

Þþ - thorn, which also sounds like "th" but was a much more popular letter than eth.

Most of these either fell out of use early enough to not cause much trouble (yogh, eth, wynn) or were just other letters glued together and thus relatively easy to exchange (ash and ethel). Thorn is the exception, as it managed to survive just long enough to ensure that centuries later I would want to murder random shopkeepers.

You see, the first printing presses were made in continental Europe, not England, and as a result nobody thought to crank out a batch of the English language's wonky special letters. As a work-around, printers substituted a Y whenever they needed a Þ, and sometime in the intervening years everyone decided that it was time to retire thorn and just use "th" instead.

I can't help but wonder if those printers would have made a different choice in typography if they'd known that a few hundred years later a bunch of business types would decide it was a good idea to ape old timey spelling in their store names without actually knowing a damn thing about how any of those old timey spellings were meant to be pronounced.