I can't really blog today. I have to write 16,114 words by the end of the month.
See you next week.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Fatuousity
I like words a lot. It feels a bit pretentious to just assert that, but it is the case (and maybe it's also the case that I'm pretentious). I appreciate the ways words express our thoughts, obviously, but I also like the way words carry ideas with them. I can take two words without any preconceived image (walrus, gargle) and when I put them together (walrus gargle) they create an image, or several. Now I'm imagining someone distilling arctic wildlife into a hygienic mouthwash. I didn't seek out the words for that particular effect; it just happened.
There's a dark side and a danger to this. Words carry meaning, and they can combine to create new meaning, but this isn't the same as creating truth. I suspect those of us who live especially on words are particularly susceptible to forgetting this. Obviously, just because I recently envisioned a pinniped-flavored mouthwash does not mean such a thing does, could, or should exist. Most people get that. But if the words I string together at random are abstractions, it gets more dangerous.
Suppose I said, "Shame is the resort of cowards." Its provenance is the same as walrus gargle. I can make a sort of sense of it, and I think it's baloney (or bologna?), but if I insinuated it into a book of quotations, a certain sort of person could confuse it for a profundity.
If you're not careful, you can pull this on yourself, and convince yourself of all sorts of ridiculous things.
So what set me off on this ramble? Well, in my wanderings on the internet I encountered this article on Slate. (I confess I encountered an article mocking it before I read the article itself.) The article, by literature professor Andrew Piper, is headlined: "Out of Touch: E-reading isn't reading," and is excerpted from his book, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times. It's actually an interesting read, in its own way--at least to someone who does not regularly read this sort of academic spun-nonsense confection.
I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and suppose that an editor came up with the flatly declamatory headline. It was probably meant to attract traffic by irritating people like me and getting us to blog about it. But the damage is done. And the rest of the article is an amazing irony engine: it argues the inadequacy of the experience of e-reading (since it lacks the physicality of dead-tree books), but there isn't a shred of substance in all the words he strings together.
He says, "The significance of the tactility of reading could begin with St. Augustine." Okay. It could. That's not actually a chronological assertion, I guess, just an erudite way of saying "Here comes a quote from St. Augustine." He relates Augustine's conversion, in which he picked up a nearby Bible, read part of Romans 13, and converted. Piper finds significance, I guess, in the fact that Augustine picked up a hardcover Bible instead of just reading the passage on his iPhone--it's not really clear. "No other passage has more profoundly captured the meaning of the book than this one," he says, and that's that.
He continues in this vein: words, words, words. Touchscreens are worse than turning pages because "kinesthesia, the sense of bodily movement, overrides the book’s synesthesia, its unique art of conjoining touch, sight, and thought into a unified experience."
At his most cogent, Piper's argument echoes the ancient scribes who scoffed at the idea of putting spaces between words. Having to figure out for yourself where one word ended and another began enforced deeper thought about the text, they would say. And, says Piper, "Swiping has the effect of making everything on the page cognitively lighter, less resistant." But at its most entertaining, the article spins its semantic wheels with hardly any friction at all. The closing paragraphs are an intensive course of eyebrow calisthenics, starting with the assertion that "Perhaps the patron saint of reading should be Dr. Faustus," and concluding, "the meaning of reading lies in the oscillatory rhythms of the opening and closing hand."
Look, I love books too. I can't count the books I can see without turning my head here in this chair in my living room. I do appreciate the flutter of a softcover book. Sometimes it's even useful to be able to write in the margins. But a book is its contents, not its shape.
It's harmless, really, and I don't want to be too mean. I probably wouldn't even be writing about it if I hadn't also learned this week about the bizarre "Allocutions on the Wall of the Harvard University Library," a collection of quotes that are apparently quite popular in China, and spuriously claimed to be written on the wall of... you get the idea. The inscriptions are emphatically disavowed by Harvard's actual university librarian, but a lot of Chinese people allegedly take them seriously.
The sayings themselves are exhortations to work harder, like "Happiness may not be ranked, but success will at the top," and, "Enjoy the unavoidable suffering."
This is something worse than silliness, because it shapes people's thinking. And these are just words conjured in a syntactic imitation of wisdom. With an appeal to the authority of the wise and diligent vandals of Harvard University, they assumed the illusion of history, weight, and veracity.
Words have power, and they can come out of nothing. There's something rightly frightening about that.
There's a dark side and a danger to this. Words carry meaning, and they can combine to create new meaning, but this isn't the same as creating truth. I suspect those of us who live especially on words are particularly susceptible to forgetting this. Obviously, just because I recently envisioned a pinniped-flavored mouthwash does not mean such a thing does, could, or should exist. Most people get that. But if the words I string together at random are abstractions, it gets more dangerous.
Suppose I said, "Shame is the resort of cowards." Its provenance is the same as walrus gargle. I can make a sort of sense of it, and I think it's baloney (or bologna?), but if I insinuated it into a book of quotations, a certain sort of person could confuse it for a profundity.
If you're not careful, you can pull this on yourself, and convince yourself of all sorts of ridiculous things.
So what set me off on this ramble? Well, in my wanderings on the internet I encountered this article on Slate. (I confess I encountered an article mocking it before I read the article itself.) The article, by literature professor Andrew Piper, is headlined: "Out of Touch: E-reading isn't reading," and is excerpted from his book, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times. It's actually an interesting read, in its own way--at least to someone who does not regularly read this sort of academic spun-nonsense confection.
I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and suppose that an editor came up with the flatly declamatory headline. It was probably meant to attract traffic by irritating people like me and getting us to blog about it. But the damage is done. And the rest of the article is an amazing irony engine: it argues the inadequacy of the experience of e-reading (since it lacks the physicality of dead-tree books), but there isn't a shred of substance in all the words he strings together.
He says, "The significance of the tactility of reading could begin with St. Augustine." Okay. It could. That's not actually a chronological assertion, I guess, just an erudite way of saying "Here comes a quote from St. Augustine." He relates Augustine's conversion, in which he picked up a nearby Bible, read part of Romans 13, and converted. Piper finds significance, I guess, in the fact that Augustine picked up a hardcover Bible instead of just reading the passage on his iPhone--it's not really clear. "No other passage has more profoundly captured the meaning of the book than this one," he says, and that's that.
He continues in this vein: words, words, words. Touchscreens are worse than turning pages because "kinesthesia, the sense of bodily movement, overrides the book’s synesthesia, its unique art of conjoining touch, sight, and thought into a unified experience."
At his most cogent, Piper's argument echoes the ancient scribes who scoffed at the idea of putting spaces between words. Having to figure out for yourself where one word ended and another began enforced deeper thought about the text, they would say. And, says Piper, "Swiping has the effect of making everything on the page cognitively lighter, less resistant." But at its most entertaining, the article spins its semantic wheels with hardly any friction at all. The closing paragraphs are an intensive course of eyebrow calisthenics, starting with the assertion that "Perhaps the patron saint of reading should be Dr. Faustus," and concluding, "the meaning of reading lies in the oscillatory rhythms of the opening and closing hand."
Look, I love books too. I can't count the books I can see without turning my head here in this chair in my living room. I do appreciate the flutter of a softcover book. Sometimes it's even useful to be able to write in the margins. But a book is its contents, not its shape.
It's harmless, really, and I don't want to be too mean. I probably wouldn't even be writing about it if I hadn't also learned this week about the bizarre "Allocutions on the Wall of the Harvard University Library," a collection of quotes that are apparently quite popular in China, and spuriously claimed to be written on the wall of... you get the idea. The inscriptions are emphatically disavowed by Harvard's actual university librarian, but a lot of Chinese people allegedly take them seriously.
The sayings themselves are exhortations to work harder, like "Happiness may not be ranked, but success will at the top," and, "Enjoy the unavoidable suffering."
This is something worse than silliness, because it shapes people's thinking. And these are just words conjured in a syntactic imitation of wisdom. With an appeal to the authority of the wise and diligent vandals of Harvard University, they assumed the illusion of history, weight, and veracity.
Words have power, and they can come out of nothing. There's something rightly frightening about that.
Sunday, November 11, 2012
NaNo update Mo
NaNoWriMo is on, and every year is a new adventure. This year I'm freelancing, which means managing my own time. It also means that instead of just having to write one thing, I have to write several, some of which I'm getting paid for. So, I confess, I'm quite a bit behind this year. Of course every year I have my birthday to throw me off. In fact, every year I'm behind pretty much until the end.
I decided to go back to my Arthuriana. It's taking some time to get back on track with it, which I actually hadn't anticipated. I had forgotten just how long it's been since I wrote the installment that came last in the continuity--what I wrote last year (and finished belatedly) was more of a prequel.
Sigh. Things got complicated, and I forgot them. I really should have spent October reading my own book. The good news is that it's mostly come back together now, and I've got some plot going again. I've had to stop dropping hints to Girlfriend about what I have in store for my alpha couple, because of the anguished sounds she makes. "You know how this is going to end!" I told her.
Meanwhile, on Friday we went to see Skyfall, which was a worthy investment of our time. It's not quite good all the way through, but it's surprisingly good for the first and last third, which made the whole experience very satisfying. In fact, quality-wise, the structure of the last three Bond movies is somewhat recursive.
I tried to go deeper into that thought, but I really shouldn't. It's silly.
I decided to go back to my Arthuriana. It's taking some time to get back on track with it, which I actually hadn't anticipated. I had forgotten just how long it's been since I wrote the installment that came last in the continuity--what I wrote last year (and finished belatedly) was more of a prequel.
Sigh. Things got complicated, and I forgot them. I really should have spent October reading my own book. The good news is that it's mostly come back together now, and I've got some plot going again. I've had to stop dropping hints to Girlfriend about what I have in store for my alpha couple, because of the anguished sounds she makes. "You know how this is going to end!" I told her.
Meanwhile, on Friday we went to see Skyfall, which was a worthy investment of our time. It's not quite good all the way through, but it's surprisingly good for the first and last third, which made the whole experience very satisfying. In fact, quality-wise, the structure of the last three Bond movies is somewhat recursive.
I tried to go deeper into that thought, but I really shouldn't. It's silly.
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