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Xom posted:Seconding this. The book is great. Aaaaand I'm picking it up. I can't quite figure how Pinker got into the academic niche he's in, but a good book is a good book.
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Jan 20, 2015 23:55
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I have no idea if this even the right place to ask but I really couldn't think of a better place - help with Reed Kellogg sentence diagrams? A friend wants to know how "Make Love, Not Grammatical Errors" would be diagrammed and I just don't remember well enough to diagram it correctly. Apologies if this is a bad post 
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Feb 2, 2015 05:14
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Brainworm posted:That gets complicated because there are schools of literary criticism that pretend toward something like universal -- or at least widely-generalizable -- method. Or that at least end up taking that form when they're wielded by someone on a mission. And it's sometimes hard to make the distinction between a tool or process that is good and one that is generalizable to someone whose training leads them to prefer consistency of approach. Specifically structuralism and, more specifically, structural narratology, which tended to take Saussure's linguistics as a base for their ambitions. Which is not in a particularly popular state, as far as I know. I do think there's some work literary critics could do with corpus analysis that's roughly analogous to some kinds of linguistic work. Although again there are some limits. It's easy to track diction throughout a body of texts. It's not really possible for regular expressions to match narratives, or stylistics, without a lot of interpretive work before hand.
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Feb 10, 2015 21:34
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How did you / how do you advise students to focus on an M.A subject? Seems like relatively obvious (I like so-and-so, now what's an angle that no one ever wrote about) if you're really interested in a specific subject / author. But if you have a wide range of somewhat shallow interests, and aren't sure which one you might spend the rest of your academic career with...?
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Feb 21, 2015 15:54
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Xander77 posted:How did you / how do you advise students to focus on an M.A subject? Seems like relatively obvious (I like so-and-so, now what's an angle that no one ever wrote about) if you're really interested in a specific subject / author. But if you have a wide range of somewhat shallow interests, and aren't sure which one you might spend the rest of your academic career with...? A lot of good scholarship comes down to two things: finding similarities in the face of categorical difference, and difference in the face of categorical similarity. Another way of saying about the same thing is that good scholarship dissociates things that are conventionally associated with one another and associates things that conventionally aren't. That doesn't have much to do with depth of interest or narrowness of historical focus; instead, it's more of an engine for approaching scholarship when you're working outside of your field's usual processes. I mean, take any two texts -- say The Spanish Tragedy and The Great Gatsby. If I start off thinking they're different (and there are good reasons to think so), the first thing to do is look at similarities. And there are a few. Just for instance, both of them are driven by conflicts between a moneyed aristocracy and civil arrivistes. Both of them are set just after the end of a war. Both of them employ a narrator/chorus (Don Andrea and Nick) who display considerable ambivalence about the ways the past has claims on the present but, at the same time, believe this overdetermination an inescapable quality of human experience. Both feature wealthy, entitled, sexually violent antagonists who orchestrate the murders of their romantic competitors, and in both texts there is a love triangle subplot that involves a character who revenges the murder of his or her beloved in a way that is surprising specifically because that character's attitude and social station suggests that he or she is incapable of violence. There are probably more. Point is, a piece that notes those similarities is probably publishable somewhere. A piece that makes some sense of them -- that is, asks why they're there and delivers a compelling answer -- is going to be really good. And you can bring that kind of inquiry to any set of texts you're competent to read, at least as long as you're willing to go where the interesting questions lead you.
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Mar 11, 2015 03:52
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Been a long time reading this thread, and it's been quite a blessing! Went from a babby undergrad to now finishing up my thesis ( )/completing my masters in lit next month. Thanks for that!I'm teaching a sophomore level Intro to Lit course based around classic and contemporary mythologies for non-English/Lit students. I'm never real satisfied with where my students stand on that inclusive/exclusive scholarly dichotomy you're discussing above. Though to clarify I understand this can be a lot to ask of a sophomore engineering major who's only taking my course for the writing credit. Do you find certain methods work to establish the relationship between rhetorical perceptions and individual's readings of texts? Am I putting the cart before the horse in trying to engage my students with primary texts' relationships without including secondary source examples of such relationships?
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Mar 11, 2015 04:48
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Dear Brainworm, I recently read and watched the Hollow Crown version of Richard II. It is now probably one of my favourite plays, and I'm continually amazed at how (seemingly) under-appreciated it is. I don't have any specific questions about it, but I would love to hear any insights you have gained, or basically any random blatherings about it at all.
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Apr 1, 2015 13:31
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Verr posted:Been a long time reading this thread, and it's been quite a blessing! Went from a babby undergrad to now finishing up my thesis ( Yeah, it's all grown up now, so I just check on it like once a month. But congratulations on finishing the thesis. quote:[...] I'm never real satisfied with where my students stand on that inclusive/exclusive scholarly dichotomy you're discussing above. Though to clarify I understand this can be a lot to ask of a sophomore engineering major who's only taking my course for the writing credit. Do you find certain methods work to establish the relationship between rhetorical perceptions and individual's readings of texts? One attitude that works for me now, and that worked when I was teaching a number of engineering students, is three-pronged: 1) Meaning is a collaboration between the reader and the writer, and influenced by all kinds of things. It's ultimately very difficult to separate what any text e.g. a song "means" as an artifact divorced from human perception (i.e. any number of variations on what a song means "to you" or what you believe a song means "to someone,") because in the absence of an audience a song doesn't mean anything. Because of this, meaning can be a shared experience ("we" all think a text means about the same thing) or deeply idiosyncratic (e.g. I think Fantastic Mr. Fox is deeply moving because I read it in my paternal grandparents' living room as a child, and as I age the memories I associate with them become increasingly powerful). 2) Because of this, what a text means and what it does in a formal or technical sense are entirely separate discussions. It is always tempting to suppose that meaning emerges from the sum of a text's functions because it is possible to (a) locate moments in the text that mean something to a reader and (b) discuss what those moments do in a technical/rhetorical sense. But there is always a gap between (b) and (a). If I say "this coffee tastes like it was brewed in a dead man's colon," the obvious (b) to (a) connection is that the trope uses connotatively disgusting language (death, lower bodily stratum) and evoke s a like response in the reader. But readers also often find such phrases funny, and it's difficult to locate e.g. a rhetorical device that explains why. This doesn't mean that talking about what a text does isn't valuable. It's extremely valuable, because whether you think of the text you're reading as art, craft, or plain old work, all three require some degree of technical competence which in turn requires at least a naming of parts. 3) Discerning (1) and (2) are skills, and are generally transferrable and improve with practice; while both are amenable to a bunch of different approaches, and involve any number of subjective and even arbitrary elements, it is also clear that some ways of talking about meaning are more (and differently) persuasive under whatever conditions, and that some systems of close reading are likewise more (and differently) persuasive under whatever conditions. That is, the introduction of elements that are subjective (or not governed by any set of clearly-discernible rules) doesn't make judgments about quality uninformed or weightless. I'm mentioning this because I've run into any number of college students who seem to think so, and that tendency is in my experience somewhat more pronounced among engineers. If you run into that specific problem, point to simple, significant everyday judgments -- what makes a person good looking, for instance, or what makes someone a good parent. In those and other cases, you'll get at least three things: any set of criteria you use to judge them are deeply subjective, the judgments themselves will find wide areas of agreement (with some significant number of outliers), and that it is very, very hard to talk about criteria (what, specifically, makes a person a good parent or attractive) persuasively because every criterion is riddled with exceptions (or, as I like to put it, fiddly). quote:Am I putting the cart before the horse in trying to engage my students with primary texts' relationships without including secondary source examples of such relationships? Not really. I like to run learning arcs and classes through EEL DR. C or some variation (Enroll, Experience, Label, Demonstrate, Review, and Create).* The world is littered with variations of this, and I think people get too caught up in the details of it to exercise the central insight common to both it and e.g. Problem-Based Learning approaches: students are often better served by experiencing something before learning about it, at least to the degree that real-world problems and opportunities present themselves as experiences that need to be analyzed and re-approached (as opposed to clearly bounded problems for which an expert is well-prepared through prior theoretically-intense training). So if I had a choice, I'd present students with the texts first, and ask them to look for relationships between them. Let them struggle with that for a while, and develop some simple techniques for doing it persuasively. Depending on what the goals of your course are, that may get them to where they need to be. But I'd introduce criticism or secondary sources after that or -- better yet -- create a project whose successful completion implicitly requires them to discover the criticism they need on their own. You can do that in a bunch of different ways, right? E.g.:
Those are going to get you pretty much the same thing, but I've actually listed them in something like the order of my assignment preference. Every assignment requires the student to do the ones below it, but there's some value in the process of discovering what needs to be done rather than having those needs handed to you. That only works, though, if they're clear on the kinds of writing you expect -- otherwise, you get a paragraph for the first assignment when you should get like ten pages, and you get a lot of confused students. * Sometimes "Celebrate," and I'm not sure what people mean by that.
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Apr 8, 2015 15:51
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ceaselessfuture posted:I recently read and watched the Hollow Crown version of Richard II. It is now probably one of my favourite plays, and I'm continually amazed at how (seemingly) under-appreciated it is. It is good, or it can be, but it's a hard play to appreciate because on the face of it Richard seems self-centered and ineffectual. I haven't yet seen the Hollow Crown version of Richard II, but when I've seen it done effectively the central story is of a fundamentally decent and emotionally literate guy who's not up the the responsibilities of the throne. He's just smart and capable enough to understand why things go wrong, and just articulate enough to describe them, but he lacks whatever thing it takes -- intelligence, will, or the right kind of break -- to get ahead of his kingdom's problems instead of constantly reacting to them. So I think there are two meaningful Shakespearean contexts for this. The first is that, if you read Richard II like I do, it's actually Shakespeare's third attempt at telling exactly the same story. The first two are 2 and 3 Henry VI. There, the center of the tragedy is a king who has everything it takes to appreciate the horror of civil war but is powerless to stop it. Not exactly the same story, but it makes Richard and Henry deeply similar characters. The second is that it's almost the exact opposite of Lear, and the two of them play into the kind of opposition we seen between Old Hamlet and Hamlet in Hamlet. Basically, basically, basically, Shakespeare only gives us three kinds of English kings. You have killers, philosophers, and planners, or: 1) Wartime kings (killers), who approach problems by killing people (Old Hamlet, Henry V, Lear), 2) Peacetime kings (philosophers), who approach problems by thinking about and feeling them deeply (Richard II, Henry VI), and 3) Plotting kings (duh), who approach problems by crafting intricate and strategic plans (Claudius, Richard III). These aren't categories so much as attributes. Prince Hal (who later becomes Henry V) spends a deal of time in 1 and 2 Henry IV moving from (2) to (3), but as a king he's mostly (1) with dashes of (3). Hamlet is of course never king, but follows roughly the same pattern. Macbeth starts as (1) and becomes (2). And so on. But even when you have similar kings, and the kings have similar goals (getting and keeping the crown, for instance), the obstacles they face are very different. In what I'm going to call the tragedies (basically, tragedies that focus on kings and the histories that end badly for the king they focus on), you get some kind of a mismatch between the conditions of the nation and the capacities of the man on the throne. So. Henry VI and Richard II are both philosophers/peacetime kings whose kingdom demands martial leadership. That ends badly. Lear, on the other hand, is a great wartime king (with his biting falchion he'd have made them skip, right?), in a peacetime situation that demands thoughtfulness and consideration. That also ends badly. And in that sense, Henry VI/RIchard II and Lear are inverses of one another. In the Histories that end well, the important thing is that your Shakespearean king (or Duke or General or ruler) knows how to be all three things and knows when to be which (like Henry V). The extent to which they miss one of them describes the nature and extent of their failures. This is also true in the comedies. Part of the humor in Midsummer, for instance, is that Theseus is a wartime ruler unsuited to managing the petty brabbles of peacetime Athens. Of course complex characters defy generalization and neat little formulas like this, but I've often thought of this as a good place to start thinking through what makes the Histories and Tragedies play out as they do.
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Apr 8, 2015 19:13
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Why is "sophomoric" an insult and how did it come to be?
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Apr 11, 2015 03:26
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Baron Porkface posted:Why is "sophomoric" an insult and how did it come to be? I can only speculate. The OED locates the first recorded use of "sophomoric" in an 1837 issue of the Harvardania (IV.22), a literary journal adminstered by Harvard undergraduates. Here it is as it appears in the OED: quote:Better to face the prowling panther's path Than meet the storm of sophomoric wrath! The capitalization of "Than" suggests that this was two lines from a poem, and that the resulting lines (a) rhyme and (b) are decasyllabic and roughly iambic (i.e. roughly iambic pentameter) suggests that this was from a poem. Fortunately, Volume IV of the Harvardania is available on Google Books, so we can see the rest of the piece, which is not in fact a poem but a piece of literary criticism concerning an apocryphal new poem of Homer's. Turns out, the "sophomoric" line is from a two stanza mid-football-game battle of tepid wits between a freshman and a sophomore who (as far as I can tell) are equally objectionable. The freshman spends what little dialogue he has talking about where he's from and what his father does, for which the sophomore promptly mocks him. They both end up equally smote by Zeus/Jupiter. So I suspect the usage of "sophomoric" here is more specific than the OED's "pretentious" and "immature." It's those things, but also part of the typical freshman/sophomore dynamic where (from the perspective of the upperclassmen), the sophomore is the self-appointed regulator of a social group that's contemptible all the way down -- slightly more experienced than the completely inexperienced and therefore pretending to a wisdom he doesn't have.
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Apr 12, 2015 16:59
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So, I guess this is a thing: http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/10/entertainment/shakespeare-play-double-falsehood-feat/ CNN posted:New research indicates that "Double Falsehood," a play first published in 1728 by Lewis Theobald, was actually written more than a century earlier by Shakespeare himself with help from his friend John Fletcher. The findings were published this week by two scholars who used computer software to analyze the writings of the three men and compare it with the language of the "newer" play. ceaselessfuture fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Apr 14, 2015 |
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Apr 14, 2015 04:31
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re: 'sophomoric' From etymonline (which is by an amateur): etymonline posted:sophomore (n.) "[i posted:How to Read a Book[/i], 1972 revision, by M. Adler and C. Van Doren"]The first is the ignorance of those who, not knowing their ABC's, cannot read at all. The second is the ignorance of those who have misread many books. They are, as Alexander Pope rightly calls them, bookful blockheads, ignorantly read. There have always been literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well. The Greeks had a name for such a mixture of learning and folly which might be applied to the bookish but poorly read of all ages. They are all sophomores.
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Apr 22, 2015 03:38
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really good thread. i've spent a lot of time reading this thread instead of studying this past week. qs: recently (2013, 2014), john williams's stoner got really popular among the new york sophisticates crowd. since it's about an english professor's life, i thought i'd be particularly interesting to you. do you have any insight on why it got popular ("rediscovered") and what you think of the story? along those lines, if you follow this thread from 2009, you got married and then divorced along the way. somewhere in the tens of thousands of words you've written, you discuss insight (or something along those lines) and how it is basically impossible for students to have it b/c they don't have enough life experiences to say something truly insightful. do you think that you have approached certain texts in a different way b/c of your own (recent) life experiences than you did in 2009? i think the text i most enjoyed reading as an undergraduate for my one english credit was aa milne's winnie the pooh and the house at pooh corner. please do the thing where you don't tell me what the book was actually about but you still say cool insightful things about it. thank you
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Apr 24, 2015 19:43
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ceaselessfuture posted:So, I guess this is a thing: I don't know whether it helps put this into context, but Cardenio shows up as an entry in the Stationer's Register in 1653, and is one of I think two plays in the SR attributed to Shakespeare for which there is no known copy (the other being Love's Labors Won). E.K. Chambers found some kind of evidence for Cardenio's performance by the King's Men in 1613 -- late enough that it's almost certainly a collaboration between Shakespeare and Fletcher (Shakespeare's successor in the King's Men). Double Falsehood is based on the Cardenio sequence in Don Quixote, and was published by a sketchy character named Humphrey Mosley in 1653, who was almost certainly responsible for the SR's Cardenio entry that same year. His edition credits Double Falsehood to Shakespeare and Fletcher, but this gets complicated : Humphrey attributed something like a half-dozen plays to Shakespeare (including the History of King Stephen and Duke Humphrey) and as far as I'm aware there's no substantial corollary evidence to support those attributions. The thing that makes Double Falsehood different, really, is the record of Cardenio's performance by the King's Men, and the connection of Double Falsehood to the Cardenio story. There's been a slow accretion of evidence to support the conjecture that Double Falsehood is the same play as Cardenio, and is in fact by Shakespeare, so this linguistic analysis isn't really a groundbreaker. I teach out of the Arden Shakespeare right now, and the current edition includes Double Falsehood; it dates from 2010. And I think it was the RSC that performed Double Falsehood as Cardenio at some point before that. Apart from that, I think there are really only two things I can add: (1) Linguistic analysis, whatever the method, is not very good at telling the difference between a piece by a writer and a piece by someone doing a very good imitation of that writer. This is complicated when working with Shakespeare, since he collaborated with a number of different people who all had a hand in producing the texts that constitute the baseline for any analysis. It's already hard enough to tell a painting for a very good forgery, and this is like trying to do so on the basis of a single photograph (since the original texts or scripts, with e.g. handwriting and other clues are simply not available). (2) Double Falsehood is OK Shakespeare at best. Even if it were totally and convincingly authentic, it's in the pack with King John and Two Noble Kinsmen and other plays that it's difficult to justify reading or staging unless you're either a completionist or using them as a stepping stone to some other thing.
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Apr 25, 2015 15:13
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Xom posted:re: 'sophomoric' I think the "1680s" source for that is from Randel Holme's Academy of Armory, which describes college rankings as: quote:Fresh Men, Sophy Moores, Junior Soph, or Sophester. And lastly Senior Soph [...] That's not necessarily inconsistent with the idea that sophomore is derived from sophos + moros, and that the "Junior Soph" is also a "Sophester" supports at least the conjecture that a student progresses from a "dull" (moros) sophester to a full-on sophester and finally to a senior one. But it's hardly proof of the same. And, in any case, the etymonline fellow misses a likely earlier version of the word "sophomore," sophumer, which has at least a 1653 use in Thomas Gataker's pamphlet feuds with William Lillie. There, he writes: quote:Your Argument [...] is so sillie, as that not some exq[u]isite Sophister, but any punie Sophumer may at first sight discover the feebleness of it [...] There, I think the logic that a "sophumer" is some sort of diminutive sophister is pretty clear. And my knee-jerk reaction to it is that a classical scholar like Gataker is unlikely to combine sophos and moros and get "sophomer." Unless we conjecture that the "e" in "sophumer" should in fact be an "o" (not outside the realms of possibility given 17th c. printing practice), the vowel is about as wrong as it can be.
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Apr 27, 2015 17:01
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"[i posted:How to Read a Book[/i], 1972 revision, by M. Adler and C. Van Doren"]A work of fine art is "fine" not because it is "refined" or "finished," but because it is an end (finis, Latin, means end) in itself.
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Apr 28, 2015 00:48
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I need to improve my grammar. I like to think I write very well, but I'm constantly making mistakes on "who vs. whom", "whichever vs. whatever", or how to order something like "investors and ourselves". I never learned the formal parts of speech that help you remember the core rules that underlie grammar either. Even something simple such as "who/whoever" is always subject to a verb while "whom/whomever" is always the object of a sentence mystifies me. In that sentence I don't know if "mystify" should have been the plural form of the verb or not. And I'm unable to do this sentence deconstruction on a piece of paper, let alone in the real time you need to make grammar rule decisions while speaking or writing. I need to learn how to break down sentences and identify the parts of speech and learn the grammar rules needed to write it correctly. I end up going to my analyst, who was an English major, for writing help multiple times a day. I wrote a monthly commentary for my company: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Eigv-lLtroAqcT5CyLo7ejcOzkUTuIV2g7NngOj9fb0/pub And it got shredded in the revisions. The final version is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ex_QA4EYEwsubuI40JCLPWpqYoUNWkFKk3SUt2mAYJ0/pub Some of the revisions are word choice or content oriented but the majority were grammatical. I couldn't figure out how to upload a redline to the internet but could someone help identify some of the common grammar mistakes I'm making? Just to be completely paranoid, the above links do not constitute an offer to sell anything, they're to help with my grammar, I won't talk to you about the underlying financial products. What are some resources I can read or use? Its Miller Time fucked around with this message at 02:19 on May 1, 2015 |
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May 1, 2015 02:15
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I don't have any formal advice about this since I am not an English professor and don't do any teaching, but here are some random thoughts. If you want to get fancy, look into diagramming sentences. It's a nice way to really start to understand the pieces of grammar. I haven't done a close read of what you posted, but from a quick skim one of your big problems is that you bury the subject and verb. Start with who's doing what, and how they're doing it. For instance, my first sentence in this paragraph is a problem. I should have said: You bury the subject and verb of your sentences, though admittedly I haven't done a close read of everything you posted. Both sentences are grammatically correct and both say the same thing, but they say it in a very different way. In one, I am assertive and direct, making a clear claim and then explaining/justifying it. In the other, I begin with couching and explanatory language and later make my point. It's like a fancy version of passive voice that is technically not passive. There are times it's appropriate (when you want to couch or soften an assertion) but it looks like you were writing a document that needed to be upfront, persuasive, and assertive. You needed to make strong claims. Also, vary your sentence length. You have too many long sentences with a bajillion clauses. Try writing a paragraph and limit yourself to five words per sentence. It is brutally difficult. But it illustrates how much useless stuff we put in sentences. Varying sentence length emphasizes important points, which can be made clearly and in a brief statement later justified by a longer sentence. This also lets you separate distinct ideas in different sentences. For instance, look at your "electricity trader" paragraph. The experts thought is distinct from the trader stuff. You can string them together, but it is more forceful to separate them. Basically, I don't know that grammar is your problem. Your problem is that you don't write confidently. You write scared. For instance, take your RMBS paragraph. "They commented that blah blah blah blah blah blah blah" Two lines later I"m super asleep. The revised version says: "blah blah except for blah that we already told you about. No worries." Your grammar may be part of the general issue here, but I don't think it's the whole problem. (Notice how in that last sentence, the "I don't think" is useless filler that dilutes the point I'm making? Don't do that unless you intend to.) Shorter, simply sentences will help your grammar issues. It's easier to diagnose a sentence if you see how all the chunks fit together. We're much better at figuring out how chunks work if we can see them in order, with relevant pieces stuck together. (this is basically what sentence diagramming does) Take your "mystifies" example. What is the verb? Mystifies. Ok, so the core of our sentence is: X mystif[y/ies]. What is doing the mistifying? Something simple. But simple isn't a noun. Something is the noun. So it's: something mystif[y/ies]. Something's a pronoun, and I always forget whether it counts as a plural noun or the precise term for it, but I think when we just look at those words together it's clear that the sentence should be: something mystifies. Not something mystify. Ok, so start adding chunks back in, like adjectives and descriptors (whatever the gently caress simple is in that sentence - I have no idea. But some grammarian or sentence diagnostician does.). Something simple mystifies. Even something simple mystifies. Even something simple mystifies me. Even something simple (such as X) mystifies me. Even something simple (such as the difference between two things) mystifies me. You can write this as whether X or Y is correct or as why X is status while Y is status, but you shouldn't mix the two. Even something simple (such as why X is <status> while Y is <status>) mystifies me. Even something simple (such as why "who/whoever" is always the subject of a verb while "whom/whomever" is always the object of a sentence) mystifies me. Or, if you prefer whether, Even something simple (such as whether X or Y is correct) mystifies me. Even something simple (such as whether "who/whoever" or "whom/whomever" is correct, which seems to depend on whether we are dealing with the subject of a verb or the object of a sentence) mystifies me. (Also, you have minor goofs on prepositions as well - for instance, "subject to a verb" vs. "subject of a verb." I'm not sure exactly how to fix that, but it's something to pay attention to. I don't mean to yell at you - you're trying to improve and that's exactly the right thing to do. But I think that if you break things into little pieces it may be easier to see the errors. It's often easy to get confused about how to write things when writing long, complex sentences. I find it helpful to abstract out the stuff that's not part of what you're thinking about so that you can focus only on one connection/word/piece at a time.) EDIT: More crappy random thoughts. Look at their edits, and think about why different phrasing works and why to use it. For instance, let's look at a sentence in your housing manager paragraph: "They stated that new housing starts for February materially beat Wall Street consensus and represented a 7 year high." There's a fair bit going on here. So let's break it into pieces. What are you saying? It seems like three things. They said X New Housing starts materially beat WS consensus New housing starts represented a 7 year high. So we can leave all three of these ideas in one sentence, like you did, or we can split them up and shuffle them. They said new housing starts materially beat WS consensus. This represented a 7 year high. ("This represented a 7 year high." is a bit awkward, because it's a high in what? and "this" is what? Presumably housing starts, but it's somewhat vague. The vagueness might be acceptable. You could instead say: "The starts hit a 7-year high.") They said new housing starts represented a 7 year high. The starts materailly beat WS consensus. Or some of that information is irrelevant (e.g., they said): New housing starts materially beat WS consensus. They hit a 7-year high. (Here, I can use "They" in the 7-year high sentence because we didn't talk about "They said" in the prior sentence. That means "They" is less ambiguous here, and I don't feel compelled to use "this" to distinguish from "they." It's still not ideal, because the paragraph we're in starts by referring to the housing manager, so "they" could refer to either the manager(s) or the starts.) Or we can ignore "they said" and re-order the sentence so that our 7-year high business and the verb represented is closer to the "starts," which takes our "this/they/etc" discussion off the table. That's what the revision did: New housing starts for Feb represented a 7-year high and materially beat WS consensus. (The revision left in "they said" which you could probably drop. Personal preference) That both cleans up the problem with represented & 7-year high, and also starts with the flashier news - 7-year high! woo! Also it beat WS consensus, but whatever, meh, that's important but not "7-YEAR HIGH CRAZY TIME." Another random thought: if you want a reference book, the Chicago Manual of Style is excellent. It's more useful as a reference than as general information about grammar, but it has examples about how to deal with various situations and I think would be useful to you. Arcturas fucked around with this message at 17:32 on May 1, 2015 |
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May 1, 2015 17:15
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Strunk and White, The Elements of Style.
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May 2, 2015 04:05
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What do you think of this? http://columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2015/04/30/our-identities-matter-core-classrooms quote:During the week spent on Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” the class was instructed to read the myths of Persephone and Daphne, both of which include vivid depictions of rape and sexual assault. As a survivor of sexual assault, the student described being triggered while reading such detailed accounts of rape throughout the work...When she approached her professor after class, the student said she was essentially dismissed, and her concerns were ignored. Our biomedical engineering lecturer used to warn us when he was about to show a 'red' slide of dissected artificial knuckles or whatever. Do you warn people about the subject matter they're about to study?
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May 19, 2015 18:16
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Xom posted:Fake or real? Silly, unless it's attempting to be a new argument rather than the reveal of a "true" definition. All uses of "fine" in English come from that Latin root, but it's meant "well-crafted" or whatever for as long as it's been in English (alongside the parallel evolution of the development of the term as a financial penalty). If it's an argument about what it really means, instead of what the author thinks it should mean, I'd probably want to know why the parallel forms in other Western European languages are all variations on "beaux arts".
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May 26, 2015 20:34
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dongsbot 9000 posted:really good thread. i've spent a lot of time reading this thread instead of studying this past week. I should probably wait until I've finished Stoner to say anything about it, but right now I'm in a hotel room in Evanston with the time to write a response and without the book handy. And if I don't say something about it now, I probably won't make the time until the revival passes entirely. As far as I can tell, Stoner is a specific kind of story that has some kind of modern resonance but comes out of a deeply Naturalist kind of story that's essentially defeatist: a character tries to, but cannot, sufficiently distance himself from his origins in order to become a full-fledged member of his adopted culture. The tensions attendant on that distancing coincide with some number of bad decisions and some set of social conditions that lead inevitably to catastrophe. Think Oedipus for the Gilded Age. McTeague and The Rise of Silas Lapham are two other examples. Of course that kind of story has all kinds of antecedents and all kinds of descendants (I'd include Imitation of Life among them), and they seem poised for revival as part of the movement that in 2010 Adam Kelly called "The New Sincerity" and that other critics have called "metamodernism," which is in short characterized by earnestness (rather than irony) becoming the dominant mode of self-conscious expression. David Foster Wallace's deeply reflective and psychologically self-assessing prose is the example Kelly and everyone else like to point to. This kind of writing, done well, is emotionally perceptive; done poorly, it's shallow, pretentious, and self-obsessed. I'm making that last distinction because I don't think this is just a literary movement. It's a cultural one. One newly-valued way of communicating involves talking about yourself in a way that pretends to a combination of perceptiveness and honesty. You know: quote:Even as I'm writing this, I'm wondering about my motives. I'm in a charming B&B in an exclusive suburb of Chicago, and I'm pretty sure that if I called the actress who I'm pretty sure was flirting with me last night, we'd spend the rest of the day together and have what I'm pretty sure would be amazing sex. For me. And I'm pretty sure that beats writing some underconsidered lit. crit. for an internet comedy website's. Doing that well (or at least persuasively) takes some kind of self-knowledge. It takes what most people call authenticity. And there's a real social risk in being sincere without being authentic -- the kind Abe Lincoln was allegedly and famously getting at in "better to be silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." It's Jaden Smith saying "I WIll Always Give You The Truth" or every self-righteous parent on every fat baby episode of Maury. To generalize: If young sophisticates have one anxiety, it's that they're not authentic enough to be effectively sincere. That if they say what they'r really feeling, it's going to be trite and vapid in the ways that reality TV and social media ruthlessly parade and more generally reward. If I were going to speculate even further, I'd say that's a generational characteristic because we live differently noisy world that we did twenty years ago i.e. one in which we expect individuals to broadcast their thoughts and opinions and in which silence therefore means differently. So Stoner is something like a cautionary tale, right? If you're a young and intelligent social aspirant, it's not enough to be technically good at what you do. You also need to know yourself well enough to have some kind of sincere relationship with the people you expect to be your peers. If there's one note that Stoner hits consistently, it's the protagonist's total inability either to do this or to recognize the need for it. quote:along those lines, if you follow this thread from 2009, you got married and then divorced along the way. somewhere in the tens of thousands of words you've written, you discuss insight (or something along those lines) and how it is basically impossible for students to have it b/c they don't have enough life experiences to say something truly insightful. do you think that you have approached certain texts in a different way b/c of your own (recent) life experiences than you did in 2009? Totally. I've had failed relationships before, right? Everyone has. But a divorce -- or at least my divorce -- was different because its lessons were costly enough to demand attention. And the most important generalized lesson I took away from the experience is that self-delusion isn't cute or quirky or inspiring, or not just cute or quirky or inspiring. It's also a deeply self-centered and damaged relationship to reality that has little to actually recommend it. I have in fact come to think of delusion as a mark of villainy. So there are all these stories built on basic delusions becoming a triumph of imagination, either because the delusional person turns out to be an underdog or has one last effort left in him (every Rocky, The Wrestler, and some readings of Lear) or because the world in which the deluded person lives has most of its rough edges conveniently sanded down (like Lars and the Real Girl). I used to not mind those kinds of stories, apart from maybe being vaguely critical of the first type because of what any undergraduate would say about their relationships to unrealistic notions of individualism, success, and so on. And good examples of them do a nice job of working out the consequences of delusion in a satisfying way. So I've gone from being "meh" about The Wrestler to thinking that it's frankly brilliant storytelling, and to paying a bit more attention to the gritty pieces of Rocky that get weirdly and retroactively sanitized by the sequels. And I'm really starting to like Lear. But a movie like Lars and the Real Girl, I just can't work with. It's a kind of saccharine emotional pornography that doesn't have enough basis in reality to be wistful, isn't imaginative enough to be surreal, and takes itself too seriously to be fun. I haven't seen Nymphomaniac, but I have the same basic response to everything I've seen by Lars von Trier -- it makes delusion too neat and therefore too comfortable, even when it nods at behaviors that are only captivating because they're so damaging. quote:i think the text i most enjoyed reading as an undergraduate for my one english credit was aa milne's winnie the pooh and the house at pooh corner. please do the thing where you don't tell me what the book was actually about but you still say cool insightful things about it. thank you I actually ordered these but I haven't yet read them.
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Jul 6, 2015 16:30
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Brother_Walken fucked around with this message at 06:12 on Jul 8, 2015 |
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Jul 8, 2015 03:39
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Brother_Walken posted:I find this idea interesting. I wonder if you think writers, on some level, are delusional. Or at least have to be. I'd like to write novels for a living and I've been trying for the last three years or so. I haven't done it much recently but in the periods when I wrote lots I operated generally under the impressions that my ideas were good and that I was writing well. I always later changed my mind though. And on the other hand, when I thought of myself badly I could barely write anything. I think there's a distinction to be made here between self-delusion and self-confidence. The latter is 100% necessary for any writer -- if you don't think what you're writing is something that someone else would like to read, it's not something that's going to get published. Nothing wrong with writing for self enjoyment, or for an audience of one (stories for friends, etc.), but any sort of commercial fiction needs to have some sort of authorial confidence behind it. You'll see this in a lot of query letter advice: Do not grovel, do not beg, do not explain why you're so lucky that someone is giving you a chance. Tell them about your story and why they would enjoy reading it. And yes, even literary fiction is still commercial, in a sense, just targeting a different audience. Tom Pynchon isn't published out of charity; he's published because he sells. On the other hand, there's the strange bubble that some people seem to live in, especially characters in certain types of fiction, where their refusal to engage with the world is seen as endearing or precious, and that we can't pop their bubble and sully them with the dirtiness of the "Real World". Lars and the Real Girl is a perfect example of this, with everyone in the town going on the journey and playing along. Which, lets face it, is a pretty hard pill to swallow. His family, sure. But the entire town? Not to mention the audience, who are supposed to see his delusion as endearing rather than creepy. There are no consequences to anything. It's difficult to figure out why Margo has fallen in love with him for any but plot reasons. I didn't hate it as much as Brainworm, but I can easily see flaws in the script and story, and can see it as part of a long tradition of "girl helps guy grow into himself" films. Anyways, this sort of confidence is fundamentally self-serving on an authorial level because, yeah, you do need some swagger and balls to say "Yes, this poo poo I wrote, you should spend 100+ hours of company time on it, then print a few thousand copies of it, so thousands of people across the country can spend hours and hours pouring over it". Nothing wrong with that. James loving Patterson does it four or more times a year with books he didn't even write. Make sure you (the general you, not you specifically) can take criticism, can handle editing, can deal with rejection slips without pulling a John Kennedy Toole, don't end up like Henry Darger, don't start talking about how you're better than Shakespeare without having published a single thing, and have a reliable source of income until you're writing novels regularly and seeing paychecks come in. You want to be able to take stock of yourself and understand who you are and where you're coming from, and what options exist realistically for you. This isn't necessarily some depressive thing, but sometimes it does lead to realizing that you've made a huge mistake somewhere along the line and that you need to do something about it. When it comes to holding up delusional characters without eventually puncturing their bubble or showing off the real horror that comes alongside, to pick extreme examples, schizophrenia or paranoia? It romanticizes the condition in the same way that consumption was romanticized in the 1800s: "Oh, I have to go live by the sea. Oh, I'll cough up some blood discreetly. Oh, I must finish my work before I perish. How romantic!" while leaving out how lovely is it to be unable to lift yourself out of bed or keep down solid food. It's inauthentic because it doesn't honestly display what's happening. You don't want to be saying "Oh, it's so wonderful, don't you wish you had my problems?" basically. It's not that you can't write about purely good people; Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking Bird is a perfect example of this. The only bad thing about Atticus Finch is that he doesn't win the trial, and the book is better for it. He's not a secret alcoholic or hiding some incident of racism in his past that he's been working all his life to make up for. The book would be worse if he was. He's just a good guy doing his best in a lovely situation because it's the right thing to do. Finch winning the trial and ending racism forever in the town would be just as bad. As would him being some sort of legal superman who'd never picked up a law book before his best friend was accused of rape, and he needed to Do The Right Thing and Save Him. The point is to write it in such a way that it doesn't feel contrived, forced, or silly. One doesn't have to over share to do that, though folks like Bukowski and Updike managed to write many good books doing just that. Take, for example, the part in Bukowski's Post Office where he rapes the woman who accuses him of rape, figuring that he might as well since she's already screaming rape accusations at him. Is it true? Almost certainly not. But it sounds like the sort of story that a guy like that would tell, and it further gives you an impression of him as an rear end in a top hat that you probably won't want to spend much time around, even if they're somewhat interesting to listen to at a distance. Couple that with, say, the anecdote about how there's a specific number of minutes that each bucket is supposed to take to sort and they'll be punished if they aren't sorted quick enough, and the argument he gets into with his supervisor -- can he run down to the cafeteria and have a slice of pie if he finishes two minutes faster than par? -- and you start to get a very complete picture of someone who seems like someone you'd know. Someone who could be real, despite being a fictional caricature of the real Bukowski. It feels authentic, even if it isn't factually honest, because it isn't asking anything of you, there's no "Okay, I need you to buy that XYZ just happens" without any sort of credibility being established. But then again there's an entire contingent of people who really dislike Bukowski precisely because he puts on the Henry Chinaski persona to write with; they don't want to read about a sexist rear end in a top hat being a sexist rear end in a top hat, authentic or not, or they think his yarns are just too out there to be credible, and/or that his faux conversational writing style sucks, and to an extent I can understand where they're coming from. The trap is to do the DFW thing, where you're anxious about your anxiety over being anxious. Of course, he wrote some great stories about that, too: the Depressed Person, in particular, is a perfect tear down of that style of writing, as well as of Prozac Nation author Elizabeth Wurtzel, whom he'd been in relationship with. If you haven't read this one, I'd check it out. It spirals in on itself multiple times, with digression after digression, apology after apology, for not being interesting enough, taking up too much time, talking too much about feelings, worrying about worrying, almost to the point where I'd think it was parody if I hadn't read his biography and wasn't very familiar with his other work. He similarly goes on at length in Infinite Jest about how much he dislikes the dismissals of the AA slogans like One Day at a Time, because most people dismissing them really haven't actually taken the time to think about what it would mean, for example, for someone to really only be able to think about getting through the next 24 hours, and how laughing it off as a dumb self-help thing that you're too cool for really prevents actual growth and problem solving. Wallace was also an alcoholic and regular AA attendee, and much of those sections were written based on his experiences in a half-way house, so I suspect he had a personal axe to grind there. You've probably noticed that in all three example, I've used authors who've fictionalized their own lives. They didn't write these pieces as biographies, nor did they tell the whole truth. But they told something like it, they used their feeling and experiences to craft something that felt like the truth, and that's what brought them success. It doesn't have to be The Truth. One of the best books I've ever read about Vietnam is Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, a sci fi novel about space war and time dilation, but the feelings of the soldiers he captures in prose and the sense of being out of place in the world are just as good as, say, Full Metal Jacket or MASH. Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 06:34 on Jul 8, 2015 |
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Jul 8, 2015 06:28
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Xom posted:Fake or real? ["fine" art as "finished."] I think I want to say something like "a conjecture supported by minimal evidence." It's certainly disingenuous to pass this off as some kind of established fact, at least if the OED has anything to say about it. "Fine" can mean "cessation, end, conclusion" or "finish," but only seems to definitely carry that meaning as a noun. There are phrases, such as "in fine" (meaning something like "in summary'), but those seem to be specific and idiomatic. As an adjective ("fine art"), the original (c. 1300) meaning is "of superior quality" with intimations of "purity" (as per metals and liquids) in most of the early and specific uses (c. 1320-1380). But there's no OED evidence I can see that suggests "fine" as an adjective has any history of meaning "finished." There might be other evidence out there -- maybe uses of the Latin that support this conjecture -- but if the use isn't recorded in the OED, what we have is something like an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof.
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Jul 10, 2015 12:17
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Endjinneer posted:What do you think of this? This looks broken all around, and in ways that are sadly typical of higher ed -- that is, in ways unlikely to produce anything other than a sad, slow burnout. Let's start here: The Way Things Ought to Work Getting better at something is really simple: you define a problem, set a policy, communicate what the policy is, act on it, assess it, and then either redefine the problem or redesign the policy based on whatever assessment information you gather. That's it, and that's all. So say you've got a lot of vets coming in on the GI Bill, and one of your vets comes to you with something you didn't anticipate -- like that campus healthcare doesn't have VA training. That's a problem. And maybe the policy you set is that nothing's going to change. So you communicate the policy -- you know: "you're a vet, so you should know that our campus health care staff don't have VA training. That's unlikely to change, so if you want someone with VA training, you're going to have to go to wherever" -- live it out, and see what happens. Maybe what happens is that vets keep enrolling, or maybe this is an issue that pushes them to transfer. So you get those numbers, and figure out what you're going to do. Maybe your problem has evolved (or you got it wrong in the first place) so you redefine it ("vets think the college undervalues them"), and maybe you change the policy in response (by setting up an office of Veterans' Services on campus). That's the playbook, right? You build every decision so that the consequences of that decision give you information you can use to make a better decision next time. If you throw money at a problem without defining what it is, or without the kinds of information you get through trials, you end up giving your campus health care staff VA training when what your campus really needed was a Vets' Service office. All of that starts with defining what the problem is in specific, tangible ways. Even if those ways are totally wrong. And you do that because it's a lot easier to develop good (and affordable) policy from a string of inexpensive failures than it is to get everything right on the first try. So the place a lot of colleges gently caress up is that they skip the "define the problem specifically" and the "assess the solution" parts of this sequence. Why? I don't know. But I suspect that: 1) There's nothing that bad students, academics, and administrators fear more than being wrong, 2) Defining problems specifically tends to break down fragile coalitions (i.e. because it means not being so vague that everyone agrees with you), and 3) Some number of students and Faculty make a fetish out of protest (which is an easy way to claim moral high ground) and strategically avoid problem solving (which is often difficult and thankless). Anyway. What's Actually Happening As far as I can tell, what's actually happening at Columbia is something like this: A group of students (and maybe faculty?) have reached the conclusion that "transgressions concerning student identities are common" in core courses, and passed on some recommendations. Those are: quote:[...] we proposed that the center issue a letter to faculty about potential trigger warnings and suggestions for how to support triggered students. I'm not going to spend much time taking these apart, but they sound like garbage. And by garbage, I mean that at least two of these four things already exist at Columbia: anonymous (in this case, indirect) communication and the mediation mechanism are specifically covered under Columbia's academic grievance process. For the other suggestions: the important thing isn't whether you should train faculty to work with students (obviously you should, and I'm certain Columbia does); it's how you build that training so that it solves the problems you want to solve (or makes the improvements you want to make), and how you measure effectiveness in those areas so that you can improve things over time. Without that, you're just throwing a pile of money and time at a problem without knowing whether you're fixing it or making it worse. quote:Our biomedical engineering lecturer used to warn us when he was about to show a 'red' slide of dissected artificial knuckles or whatever. Do you warn people about the subject matter they're about to study? I do, and doing so seems like common courtesy. I don't care for the language of "triggering" because it is too variously used, but I will tell students whether a piece is violent (and especially whether it is sexually violent), and usually couple that with a discussion of where the piece stands in relationship to the course and our learning goals. There's probably a broader discussion to be had at most colleges and universities about how to accommodate students with PTSD. Faculty aren't equipped to handle a student who's effectively traumatized by a reading, a film, or campus event any more than they're equipped to handle a student with dyslexia or a missing limb. So, on one hand, what you really need are students with PTSD declaring their diagnosis to a central office the same way they would for any other accommodation. On the other hand, I'm not a huge fan of asking e.g. a survivor of sexual abuse to declare his or her condition to an office in order to receive an accommodation if, say, a class is reading Ovid. And (on a third hand) I'm not about to ditch readings that portray all kinds of violence and other genuinely horrible things. Apart from ushering in a new and deeply embarrassing Victorian age, and apart from creating any number of issues re: academic freedom and censorship, horrible things are necessarily the subject of much decent art.
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Jul 22, 2015 21:54
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Brainworm posted:I think I want to say something like "a conjecture supported by minimal evidence." It's certainly disingenuous to pass this off as some kind of established fact, at least if the OED has anything to say about it. On the other hand, Charles van Doren, not exactly a first stop for academic integrity
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Jul 23, 2015 01:51
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i like nice words
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Okay, wow. Just finished the thread, and have like a hundred new books on my Amazon list for it.  My question is, how does reinterpreting a work of fiction, well, work? I know the thread has talked about The Stand and Watership Down, or Slaughterhouse Five and Red Badge of Courage. If I wanted to try my hand at reinterpreting Catch-22 in relation to experiences in the Iraq war (or whatever), what would I be looking for?
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Jul 31, 2015 12:20
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LowellDND posted:[...] I should start with a disclaimer: I'm not a novelist. I'ma give advice, but it's likely riddled with impracticalities. I think reinterpretation works best when it simultaneously evokes and distances itself from the piece it reinterprets. Sometimes that happens at a global level (Star Wars reinterprets Hamlet by telling a story of a young man choosing allegiance to one of two father figures who represent different ways of acting in the world, but telling that story differently), and sometimes it happens at a local level (Lunar Park reinterprets Hamlet by turning the intrusive, threatening character of Fortinbras into a shopping mall). I don't know that one strategy of evocation does something terribly different from another, or that the effects of one over the other are terribly different. The important thing is that both the evocation of the precursor text and the distancing from it can be meaningful to the reader without being a prerequisite for the reader's enjoyment of the story. Star Wars's relationship to Hamlet effectively broadens its appeal by adding a way that a different audience can watch the same move while appreciating entirely different things about it. Done poorly, it would only appeal to a Hamlet-literate audience. So it's easy enough to evoke Catch-22. You can build every event in your story around send-ups of typical army half-logic, or call something a syndicate, or have a character or location named Yossarian. Where I suspect things get more difficult is in how you tell the story differently, because differences are an implicit claim that you've improved on Catch-22 in a specific way. Maybe that's fidelity to another time, and Milo's syndicate is set up by independent contractors. Maybe that's fidelity to another vision of military absurdity, and your Yossarian character becomes a celebrity war hero. Or maybe an Aarfy character gets a reality show after his tour. Maybe you think catch-22s are the best possible way to build a stable, functional society and every other conceivable alternative is somehow worse. I don't know. It depends on where you think you can improve on the story you think Catch-22 was trying to tell.
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Aug 26, 2015 15:41
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Hey Brainworm. Been a while between thread updates. How's your semester coming along?
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Nov 13, 2015 02:54
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We're OK over here. In no particular order: 1) My Shakespeare festival just hired an Artistic Director, our first real employee, and I'm building all kinds of curriculum around it. It's also financially independent (i.e. not subsidized by the college), so I and the rest of the Board do a lot of fundraising and grant writing. It's a constant suburban carnival. 2) The administrative work I do at the college is uniquely irritating. It's an old story to committee veterans, with all the typical problems. You know. Your committee gets a shopping list and some drat fool insists you have to re-invent the wheel before you leave for the grocery store. 3) I have a manuscript that's now been hung up by a revolving-door-of-editors problem for about two years. This is my third monograph and I don't see any good reason for a fourth, at least not for a few years. If I can't make Full Professor with three books and a self-sustaining internship-rich nonprofit, a fourth book won't tip the balance. Plus, the editorial travails with this last manuscript bled the fun out of it. So I'm writing some poo poo science fiction instead. I'll be happy with it as long as the characters read like human beings instead of sexually-confused autists. (Magic 8-ball says don't count on it.)
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Nov 18, 2015 17:53
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Brainworm posted:So I'm writing some poo poo science fiction instead. I'll be happy with it as long as the characters read like human beings instead of sexually-confused autists. (Magic 8-ball says don't count on it.) This is me zeroing on on the least consequential point in your update, but I can't help asking: what's your writing process when it comes to fiction, given your skill at close reading? That is, how much do you think about story structure or other texts when you write?
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Nov 18, 2015 18:53
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3Romeo posted:This is me zeroing on on the least consequential point in your update, but I can't help asking: what's your writing process when it comes to fiction, given your skill at close reading? That is, how much do you think about story structure or other texts when you write? Just like a lot of this thread, I'm talking about something I'm not good at. So all my advice is bad and all my models are terrible and all my experiences are underinformed. That's just fair warning. Books on Books I think about other texts a lot. Maybe too much. I can actually, truthfully tell you that the book I'm writing is really of Ben Bova's End of Exile -- a book I read and loved as a child -- that corrects one thing (flat characterization) and emphasizes another (the staggering and innocent horrors abandoned children visit on one another). That's really the what of the book, right there. It's conjoined with other books in other ways (Lord of the Flies, Oryx and Crake, Annihilation, Authority & Acceptance, The Shining, and blah blah blah). It's its own creature, but it can only live because it's monstrously connected to others, and if you looked at all of them together you'd see a kind of family resemblance. Mine's the ugly one. In other words, as a writer I'm doing the same thing that, as a reader, I imagine a lot of writers doing: intentionally building relationships with other texts. And I'm doing another thing I imagine a lot of writers doing: writing a book they'd like to read. With that in mind, it's hard for me to start with details or images, like I've heard other people do. I can't work from an idea about a character or a "what if?" unless those small things get me into relationships between texts. Maybe that's good and maybe it's not, but those relationships are to me what 4x8 sheets are to a builder. They're my reference units, and while they might be the wrong tool for the job I'm so used to them that I'll not only try them, I'll make every job a "relationships between texts" job whether that's a good idea or not. It's another case of the blade inciting folks to violence, or a hammer making surgical pins look like nails. That's all a way of saying that I'm a critic before I'm a writer. Goals and Process I'm also an administrator before I'm a writer, so I plan and plan and plan. I have an outline of acts and scenes, treatments of characters, and style/tone notes for each beat in each scene. When I write, I want to execute those things, not spend my time making decisions about them. Also, I want the reader's movement between scenes to have intentional effects, and the only way I can think of to manage that is to write them into the outline. I have all of that partly because it bothers me when books -- even pulp adventure science fiction -- don't have that kind of coherence. Sadly, it's the same kind of irritation I feel when a sequence of assignments isn't threaded through a set of learning goals. Last, I have a list of things I do and don't want to do, and that list has everything to do with what and how I read. Just for instance: * I like the ways that Stephen King's novels are character driven, but I don't like the often unsatisfying endings this seems to produce. It's like he abandons his plotting when his characters develop enough to do things he doesn't expect. * I like that GRRM has the guts to kill his characters, because knowing that main characters might die is great for suspense and reader interest. I don't like GRRM's soap-opera sprawl of plot threads or the endless possibilities he can open up with e.g. magic that operates according to unspecified and infinitely elastic rules. The combination practically begs for one cop-out resolution after another. Heroes went this route after Season 1, right? * I like that Lev Grossman wrote Quentin Coldwater as goony but not irredeemable (like Quentin's prototype, Vic Frankenstein). I don't like that this is the tenor of every fictional world or psychology that Grossman examines in depth. "Wait," I asked while reading Magicians, "you mean that this person/setting/situation is also lowkey defective in a cynical way?" * I like that Margaret Atwood's prose can be casually cruel to her characters and therefore both perceptive and funny. I don't like that this perceptiveness and humor is limited to her narrators. As a writer (he said in an orgy of naive and optimistic self fashioning) it's reasonable to expect that at least at least a few of the people who live in your imaginary world are at least as smart and clever as you. * I like that Joe Abercrombie writes fantasy characters with actual psychological and emotional interiors. I don't like that he accomplishes this with hamfisted exposition and by bringing them into line with a set of specific moral and philosophical reference points.* And so on. It's arrogant to think that I can do better, and I'm not going to. But, for me, writing starts with reading and criticism. I don't know how to do it any other way. The how of what I'm writing also comes out of reading. That's not artistically essential or anything -- just a by-product answering basic questions (how do I write a description?) by using the tools I know how to use. At least that's where I started. Being Inept The thing about writing a novel (instead of a book or an article) is that it wants tools I don't have and don't know how to use. And that makes things strange. I'm not starting from nothing, right? I'm starting with an advanced set of tools and practices and techniques fit for a similar kind of project, so most of my learning has been about how to turn those tools and practices and techniques into the ones I need. It's a kind of ineptitude. The situation: you're good at one thing and try to do another thing that seems like it ought to be similar when it's actually different. There's a problem with expectations: Morningstar ain't Jimmy Dean. And there's a problem with ego: baseball isn't softball, bodybuilding isn't rock climbing, and articles aren't novel chapters. Being good doesn't at A doesn't make you good at B, even when A and B seem like they ought to be a lot alike. That makes it hard to respect your performance at B, since you're likely to hold yourself to impossible standards and question whether you were ever any good at A in the first place. Here's an example: No poo poo, I spent the first three weeks just writing for style. Prose modeling, really: looking through about a dozen books that did something I liked, and whipping them into a kind of slurry that passes for style. That's not the huge job it sounds like, because "style" is really just a set of voices that can be really different, but just have enough common elements that they're not incoherent when they happen next to one another. I didn't know that I was "writing for style" at the time. I wouldn't have called what I was doing "practice." I thought I was drafting, because what I thought of as my writing experience told me that I was ready for that stage of the process. But it turns out that I had to revise and rewrite scenes, throw them away, use them to flesh out characters and setting, and -- in other words -- use the process of writing to answer questions that didn't occur to me while I was planning. That's not drafting, right? I wasn't quarrying the stone that I would carve into the statue. I was doing site surveys, looking for stone, and doing it in a bad way (digging) instead of a good way (stepping back, looking at maps, and figuring out where the stone ought to be). I'm not going to press the metaphor any further, but I think you get the idea. Had I been completely inexperienced, I'd have spent some time on writing exercises, working one specific thing and then on another, and all with an eye to improvement rather than manuscript progress. But because I thought I was experienced, I trusted my intuition and ended up doing a whole lot of work that was deeply educational but otherwise useless -- learning from the defeat instead of the live-fire exercises. There's nothing wrong with that; learning is learning and better done than not. But (like everyone else) I'd rather own foresight than failure. In a way, that's like every other book I've written, and probably like every book anyone's ever written for the same basic reasons it's like every project anyone's ever done. The problem? Planning is inadequate to real-world complexity unless you are either (a) very, very good at planning or (b) very, very good at bluffing your way through inadequacy. The difference between this novel and other projects is that the list of things I missed during planning was different, longer, and more embarrassing. Other bits of the process: I write every day. I've barely practiced fiction writing, so my first expectations of what I could do in e.g. two hours every morning were delusional. Writing articles and academic books and handouts and essays and overviews, I can count on somewhere between 500 and 750 words of finished (drafted, revised) product per hour of work. The novel is slower and more prone to mistakes. I spend a lot of time paying attention to details that don't matter and overthinking my drafts, and as a consequence I've had days where I spend four hours on four hundred words and they all suck. Aspiring to Lesser Ineptitude I know I'll get better, right? It's like going to the gym. Results take time, and most of the early work is learning how to improve rather than actually improving. At least I hope so. Because if not, man, I have to live with writing this: quote:A push. No. More than that. A sudden point of urgent and unnatural pressure against his collarbone, grinding there, pulling, snagging. Had it come from somewhere? It jerked and tore. Pain was happening, somewhere. Linc felt clammy, oily, his guts loose and watery. His hands were cold. There was no heat. There was no heat anywhere, there never had been, and the floor he saw in front of him was the only thing left, the only thing in the world. It was as wide as a city street. Or as wide as a city street would have been, back when there were cities. There were crowds of people in it but it was empty. This was a riddle, Linc thought, and the floor slid out of focus in silent agreement. He was weightless. Weightless and alone. No, he thought. That was wrong. It was something else. There was something else. The only thing more depressing than reading that paragraph remembering how long it took to write it. What I've got is a character who doesn't know where he is or what's happening, but knows that something's going on, that he should be in pain. He is, naturally, frightened in a specific way that comes from doing the math: if you know you ought to be feeling pain and you're not, you're in deep poo poo; odds are that someone -- or something (gasp!) has put you there with sinister intent. But that doesn't come across. I'm not up to writing with one foot in the thoughts of a confused and frightened character. Other writers do it and it's great. I do it, and it more than stinks. It's a tire fire in a Taco Bell dumpster. So now I know I can't lift this specific weight. Not yet. And it took me a few hours to figure that out, right? It's not "the weight's not moving, it's too heavy." It's "I'm lifting this, waking up with bad kinds of pain, and not seeing any gains." It's novice failure: I'm too inexperienced to spot bad form while I'm writing, so I have to work wrong until my problems become so severe that even I can spot them. And once I spot a problem I don't have many options. I'm sure a good (or experienced) writer could see what that passage was trying to do and fix it, somehow. I'm sure a lot of the problems it has are both identifiable and have practiced solutions. But I don't know the names of the problems or even how to structure the questions I'd ask to find out what they are. So instead of fixing it, I've got to rebuild or recast it until it falls inside the bounds of my ability. You know: my car's making a funny noise, so instead of driving to LA I've got to either buy a plane ticket or hire a limo because I'm too dumbass to know there's such a thing as a mechanic. Anyway, that passage became this one, at least basically: quote:For no reason at all Linc remembered a video he had seen in the Archives. Lions eating an antelope, or maybe a gazelle, on a savannah under some burning equatorial sun. Back when there were lions and antelopes and gazelles. Back where there had been a sun. The lions had taken their time, crouched around the corpse as if in conference, eying one another, tails twitching with restless, leisured indifference. The antelope or gazelle was long dead, gone hot and flabby, and as the lions nosed into its guts the corpse had flopped this way and that, rubbery, the legs a stiff and pointless inconvenience. We're still in rough-draft stage, so this isn't art and it's not even good craft. But (at least in context) it's an improvement, or I hope it is. And it's hard won, too. Working in metaphor, even of the "for no reason at all" associated type, means that: 1) The metaphor needs to make sense to the reader, and this is the best I could do. Something eating something in a calmly predatory way (which is the tenor of Linc's situation, even thought he doesn't know it yet). This means, 2) The animals in the metaphor need to be familiar to the reader, but this novel's characters (including Linc) are adolescents born aboard a spaceship that has been travelling for generations, and haven't had meaningful contact with anyone older. This absence of authority figures is like Lord of the Flies-level inflexible, which means that any conventional meaningful education about the working of, well, anything, is out. Point is, Linc can't know anything about lions and how they eat because somebody told him.*** That means, 3) Eureka? The intergalactic spacecraft has a library where Linc has seen and read things. Why the gently caress not? It beats a zoo, and that's apparently my other option. That means that all I need to do is: 4) Identify every problem (e.g. gross implausibility) that emerges from the inclusion of a library aboard an intergalactic spacecraft, and solve it in a satisfying way. So, you know, it's slow going. And the TL;DR is that I don't know whether the process I've cobbled together from the things I'm supposed to be good at will ultimately help me do what I want to do. But that's fine. I like my day job. * I feel bad using JA as an example because he's not the worst offender. On the character exposition front, Californication commits all of Abercrombie's sins with a kind of Satanic gusto, but people still watch it so it can't be that bad. But I can't watch it, because to me it is. When one character says to another "Let me tell you who you are and how you grew up..." as a kind of party game, you know you're in for a stilted ride that ends with all the mystery sucked out of a character and the ritual violation of "show, don't tell."** Likewise, you know, I get it. People don't get real choices and the world is full of bastards and happiness is a precious, fleeting reward for possessing the precise degree of cynicism and self-loathing these conditions demand. That's a fine philosophy, but he Ayn Rands it like a motherfucker. ** And I know that "show, don't tell" is a bad rule, impossible to follow when you have other legit priorities, and blah blah blah. But, as a reader and viewer, I hate being told; I feel like my intelligence and maturity are being insulted by a writer who thinks I can't tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity. And I can. Actually, I enjoy it and I'm willing to bet that most readers and viewers also enjoy it, so long as they trust that a writer will resolve the most important ones in a satisfying way. You know, all in due time. So Californication's "let me tell you about you" move is like a date that ends in penetration before dessert. Maybe you want that every once in a while, and I guess it's a way of keeping people around, and I suppose judging it is unenlightened, and I further suppose that given the way I've framed things the expository technique I'm saying bothers me now seems ironically appropriate to the show. But it takes the mystery out of things, and mystery is half the fun. I want to see a character do something and wonder why he or she is doing it, not be given the character's motives and life story and then see him do something that, given all of this, is inevitable. *** I know what the bad solution is here, just BTW. The bad solution is to fill the alien setting with fauna familiar to the characters but necessarily unfamiliar to the reader, e.g. "for no reason at all, Linc remembered seeing a clutch of xanthors eating an icthywaddle..." And gently caress that. That move bothered me as a kid and it bothers me as an adult (or at last as a nominal adult who risks reading SF and fantasy when so much if it is so terrible). Using alien nomenclature to impress the reader with the alien nature of a culture and civilization, like Frank Herbert does in Dune or even like Edgar Burroughs does in John Carter. Burying a reader under a tangle of confusing, superficial exoticism is another; it sounds like satire even when it isn't mean to be: quote:The tribesmen had guns, much like our guns, which they called 'blastigers,' and these shot bullets much like ours, which they called 'bligisters,' and these caused wounds they called 'ballumphers' that sent people to hospitals they called 'bibbiters,' where they were treated by surgeons called 'blabbifers,' which treatment was impossibly costly ('bifferiffer') and had therefore led to the proliferation of medical insurance practices constituting a vexed an unstable alliance between citizens, employers, insurance companies, re-insurers, and every level of local, provincial, and national government, all united in their seeming mission to bury every experience of mortality beneath a flotsam of indifferent and occasionally adversarial bureaucracy. This regrettable and entirely alien condition was designated by an unpronounceable symbol which, to my mind, greatly resembles the caduceus.
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Nov 21, 2015 21:32
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Brainworm posted:
Sci-fi writer's workshops refer to this as "Calling a rabbit a smeerp". I'm afraid I don't have much else to say beyond that.
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Nov 24, 2015 04:32
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Posts like that are why I still have the thread on bookmark, Brainworm
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Nov 24, 2015 09:23
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nothing to seehere posted:Posts like that are why I still have the thread on bookmark, Brainworm Glad to hear it. Writing it helped me get my own thinking about writing in order, too, and I'd probably have had to do some version of it in one way or another in order to get where I needed to be. It's strange. Most of the time, I think I have things sorted out well enough in my head. I can repeat my thinking back to myself and it makes sense. But writing it out, thinking about how somebody else would read it, ends up sorting out the fiddly bits and details, and I almost always end up finding something important in them. Like, when I started writing that post, I already knew I didn't want to write something where the aliens had funny names. But I'd never thought about why, and it turns out that the reasons (confusion, superficial exoticism) added some entries to my list of do-not-dos. I don't like narrative forwards, for instance. Early Stephen King did this every once in a while, and those moments stand out to me as cheap shots in stories that didn't need to take them. I'm thinking of "they never saw Stu Redman again" in The Stand and something similar in The Dead Zone, right after John drops Sarah off at her house after the carnival -- something like "John didn't speak to her again again for four and a half years." Every time I read something like that, I feel like a kid who's been told what he's getting for his birthday. He might be happy with Skate or Die, even if he really wanted Megaman, but it kinda sucks to lose the chance to guess, to wake up in the middle of the night thinking "holy poo poo what if I get a telescope?" It's kinda sorta the same thing as "calling a rabbit a smeerp." If you're going to attach a weird name to an alien, man, make it an alien.* Don't tell me what you're giving me for my birthday. Keep me guessing. And when it's time to reveal, blow the lid off the motherfucker. * And if it's not an alien alien, if what you need is a rabbit, just make it a rabbit. Because, you know, it's a rabbit in space or on another planet or in the fifth dimension or the astral plane, so how did it get there? Therein hangs a tale, and even if it's not a tale you want to tell I think you've got to at least know what it is. So, yeah. Smerps, they-never-saw-Joey-again, and the like make me think of a short-tempered grandpa reading fairy tales to the kids: "look, you little pissants, I don't care where the giant found the goddamn goose. Let grandpa put a loving bow on this one."
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Nov 24, 2015 22:14
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Any advice for campus visits? Things you're hoping to see out of candidates, or things that would instantly doom them?
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Jan 26, 2016 08:36
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elentar posted:Any advice for campus visits? Things you're hoping to see out of candidates, or things that would instantly doom them? A bunch. The governing idea is that campus interviews are much more about soft skills and personality than they are about hard competencies or expertise. It's not that those aren't important; it's that earlier interview stages focus on them almost exclusively. If there were doubts about your expertise you wouldn't be on campus. So when I see interview candidates blunder, it's mostly there. A lot of them overestimate both the quality and importance of their scholarship, and some of them are under the misapprehension that expertise and technical competence are substitutes for being a functional collaborator or, you know, someone you'd want to invite into your life for eight hours a day. A lot of interview rules you'd think would be obvious are in fact not obvious to everyone:
The most positive things I see from candidates involve thoughtful interest in the college, the division, the department, and the position -- probably in rank order of most to least impressive. Most people demonstrate that by asking informed questions, usually about current or developing situations but sometimes about the future. For instance:
You get the idea. The most important parts of your interview are generally the ones where you're in a room with more than one person, so you want to demonstrate thoughtful interest in whatever their common denominator is so that you invite responses from everyone. And since it's a job interview, that common denominator ought to pertain to the job. Also, the impressiveness of a question is usually inversely proportional to the degree it reveals (a) naked self-interest and (b) lack of initiative. Anyone can ask about tenure requirements, but anyone can also look up their potential colleagues CVs and make a reasonable inference. So if you're going to ask a question that is nakedly self-interested, do your homework first. For instance:
Again, you get the idea. Nobody expects that you're going to know everything about the place, but you also want to send the message that the interview is at least as important to you as it is to them. And effort is the language of honesty, right? If you're saying you're interested in the job, you ought to have done whatever homework it takes to back that up.
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Jan 28, 2016 17:48
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Thanks, that's really helpful. 
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Jan 29, 2016 09:00
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