Strange are the tongues of mortals: you say so much that you do not mean, and yet mean so much more than you say.
—Talanel, seeress of the yrani, in The Grey Death
Selections from the Octopus
21 September 2013 by Leave a Comment
Told by an idiot
20 September 2013 by 2 Comments
As every real literary person knows, brevity is not only the soul of wit, it is the absolute sine qua non of the literary art. The most essential part of writing is cutting.
Some fools and philistines think the most essential part of writing is writing: on the silly grounds that until you have written something, you have nothing to cut. This is an error.
My latest manuscript consists of 500 sheets of blank paper, and I am cutting it already.
I am making it into paper dolls.
They are going to be the most critically acclaimed paper dolls in all of literature.
(signed)
H. Smiggy McStudge
Sayers on Hell
13 September 2013 by 7 Comments
If we refuse assent to reality: if we rebel against the nature of things and choose to think that what we at the moment want is the centre of the universe to which everything else ought to accommodate itself, the first effect on us will be that the whole universe will seem to be filled with an inexplicable hostility. We shall begin to feel that everything has a down on us, and that, being so badly treated, we have a just grievance against things in general. That is the knowledge of good and evil and the fall into illusion. If we cherish and fondle that grievance, and would rather wallow in it and vent our irritation in spite and malice than humbly admit we are in the wrong and try to amend our behaviour so as to get back to reality, that is, while it lasts, the deliberate choice, and a foretaste of the experience of Hell.
—Dorothy L. Sayers, Introductory Papers on Dante
Jeremiah
26 August 2013 by Leave a Comment
A song I sing to cheer up when I’m tempted to feel sorry for myself. The music exists and could be made available, supposing anyone wanted it, but it’s not in machine-readable form and would be a bother to transcribe. It’s a ghastly tune, about halfway between a polka and ‘The Volga Boatmen’.
My notes don’t include any exact dates, but I wrote this about fifteen years ago.
Jeremiah
The day you left me, the war broke out;
I stubbed my big toe and it made me shout.
My next door neighbour took her husband’s life;
I lost my keys and my Swiss Army knife.
Oh, the shame! Oh, the pain!
All my life running down the drain—
And then it started to rain—
And then my goldfish died.
The day you left me, the markets crashed;
I had a hangover ’cos I got smashed.
A mad assassin tried to kill the Queen;
I lost a quarter in a vending machine.
Oh, the shame! Oh, the pain!
All my life running down the drain—
And then it started to rain—
And then my goldfish died.
[Spoken over bridge:
I’ll never forget the sight of poor little Jeremiah, floating belly-up in his bowl. Why didn’t anybody tell me Ty-D-Bol is not for use in cleaning fish tanks?
I think I’m gonna sue someone.]
The day you left me, the H-bombs fell:
Five hundred million people blown to hell.
Millions are homeless ’cos their slums got sold,
And I’m bummed out because my coffee is cold.
Oh, the shame! Oh, the pain!
All my life running down the drain—
And then it started to rain—
And then my goldfish died.
Oh, the shame! Oh, the pain!
Flushing Jeremiah down the drain—
And then it started to rain—
How to prevent writing
26 August 2013 by 27 Comments
It comes to my attention, as a difficult summer draws to an end, that altogether too many people (some of my 3.6 Loyal Readers among them — I will not hide the truth even to protect them) are still writing books, and even releasing them to the public, despite the very best efforts of the publishing industry to put a stop to this pernicious practice. It would appear that some of you out there have not yet mastered the art of not writing, and still leak wordage from time to time. Herewith, a few helpful tips gleaned from my own recent experience. If you are still writing and want to help stem the tide, here are some methods you might try:
Tom Weller on Books
17 August 2013 by Leave a Comment
Books are like a magic arrow, an arrow by which poetry, literature, auto repair, indeed, all of cvltvre may soar from the minds of the artists and thinkers who created them swiftly to their final target – the remainder bin.
With books, we can travel in outer space, talk to Shakespeare, conquer the world, prop open doors and windows.
In them we can gaze on the faces, and wonder at the thoughts, of people from the remotest times, like in your high school yearbook. Through them, inhabitants of one part of the globe can understand the feelings and customs of those of another far distant, usually resulting in war. Indeed, it is just conceivable that through the unifying power of literature all peoples may yet come to live together as brothers and sisters: in continuous, squalling enmity.
—Tom Weller, Cvltvre Made Stvpid
A note on neologisms
27 May 2013 by 2 Comments
Today, in a letter to John C. Wright, I fell into a digression on neologisms, and one of the possible reasons why some of them catch on and others fail. I thought it might be as well to repeat it here, and throw it open to my 3.6 Loyal Readers for discussion or demolition:
One wants names for things, not for un-things. One may need new words to express new facts, but a lie, to be effective, must be tricked out in language that the intended victim already understands.
If I discover a species of rabbit previously unknown to science, I may point at it and say, ‘That is a zeffle.’ I have done well: I have made a new name for a new thing. If anyone asks ‘What is a zeffle?’ I can appeal to the facts by showing them the animal. But if I point at a plain old-fashioned domestic rabbit, and say, ‘That is not a rabbit, but a smeerp,’ my words will not convince even the most gullible, because there is no fact to appeal to. They have no standard of ‘smeerp-hood’ in their minds, so the word does not communicate any ideas to them, not even false ones.
If I said, ‘That is not a rabbit, but a horse,’ I would at least communicate a meaning. If I were to say, ‘That is not a rabbit, but a hare,’ I would move into the realm of the plausible, where all lies must have their being if they are to prosper.
It is for this reason that the most skilful liars work not by inventing new words, but by distorting and perverting the meanings of old ones.
Sticks and stones
24 May 2013 by 4 Comments
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make me think I deserved it.
—xkcd
The myth of autarky
17 May 2013 by 26 Comments
Personally I believe that most people are influenced far more than they would care to admit by novels, serial stories, films and so forth, and that from this point of view the worst books are often the most important, because they are usually the ones that are read earliest in life.
—George Orwell, ‘Boys’ Weeklies’
Fantasyland, as the late Diana Wynne Jones showed in her seminal Tough Guide thereto, is an irksome place. It irks me, at any rate, because it is not a world but something more like a film-set; it does not have the working parts to do what it pretends to do. Tolkien was confessedly ignorant of economics, but he at least tried to make sure (for instance) that the Shire was in a naturally fertile clime that could support a large population of hungry hobbits, and that the ‘townlands’ surrounding Minas Tirith were adequate to feed the people of the city. He even threw in a sentence or two about slave plantations in the South of Mordor, around the Sea of Núrnen, to show how Sauron supplied his horde of evil minions. Many fantasy writers don’t even take that much trouble.
Whenever I read about a Glorious Imperial City of Gold™ on top of a high mountain, or a Decadent Palace of the Evil Sultan™ in the midst of a trackless desert, I always find myself asking: ‘But what do these people live on?’ A writer could, by mere fiat, say that they get their food by magic; yet the magic is never there. Not only do we not see it onstage, we also do not see any of the probable consequences and (as fools and mortals say) ‘side-effects’ that such magic would have on all other areas of life. One day I shall probably write a snarky and contumacious tract on the economics of Faërie, but for now I want to leave most of that subject on one side and tackle one particular issue. That is the attitude of almost religious awe that fantasy writers have for societies based on subsistence agriculture — an attitude that, in my wide experience, only occurs among people who know nothing about agriculture and precious little about subsistence.
This attitude is not only prevalent in fantasy; some people hold it in real life as well. Among these we must number the ‘locavores’, the well-meaning fools who think it somehow unethical to eat any food grown more than, say, 100 miles away. This is nonense, and easily proved to be nonsense; but a hundred proofs are not worth as much as one plausible story. That is why it is so dangerous that so many of our storytellers don’t know the facts of the case and do not seem interested in learning them. People, consciously or not, are forming their views of life from stories that are not based on life at all.
I hope you will bear with me, then, while I tell a little story, and if it is not a hundred-proof story, I hope it may be strong enough drink for the occasion. And if it is drink that we want, I had better put wine in the story, since wine is the drink of the storyteller, except in those far Northern climes where the skalds sing in mead-halls. I have simplified the details, but everything I say about the simple diet of Eucharia applies to our own more complex society as well. [Read more…]
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