There's a lot of whining these days about the truckloads, the veritable landslides of email that today's information workers (TM) suffer each morning when they log on (TM).
I don't suffer such deluges and when I do, my usual response is just to delete a few. Or a few hundred.
No. The kinds of email epics I have known are a joy of the written word.
They include the late-night tailoring of a client email from "bitchy" to "charming", a slow honing of sharp edges to rounded, graspable curves along with a sprinkling of sundry smiley faces.
They include the serialised dramatic reportage of what seems on the face of it to be an ordinary task that blows out into a months-long real-world ordeal that demands—yes, demands—to be shared with someone I know will find it amusing.
They include small portions of the multi-media, multi-part, sentence-snippet-by-irrelevant-sentence-snippet communications I have with various friends who, while erudite, witty and intelligent, appear incapable of stringing together a coherent thought in the written form.
And they include actual, take-it-in-turns stories written over weeks, and over email, in boring desk jobs where one could easily turn out half a novel in one's mountainous downtime, in installments interleaved with those of a suitably bored and thesaurus-armed partner in dissentful thinking.
This, my friends, is epic email at its best.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Monday, November 28, 2011
Holiday dos and donts for writers
No, not "the holiday season" holidays. I'm just talkin' 'bout ordinary holidays.
Do:
Do:
- take all those books you've been trying to finish for months
- take a notebook (as in paper) for writing (as in personal writing)
- take some new stuff to read
- take pencils
- prepare self to read the local press
- prepare self to avoid the web
- prepare articles to publish in our absence: you'll need that income when you get back
- consider, but not commit to, second-hand book shopping
- take those books you've been trying to finish for months, but can't because they are actually too boring to bother with
- forget a few copies of New Scientist: easy to carry around, always wildly entertaining
- even toy with the idea of glancing over your email while away
- think you need a guide book, you fool
- post boring photos to Facebook while away
- think you're even taking your computer, anyway, bucko, I don't know why we're even discussing this!
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Mind-blowing lines #29
Graham Greene's Journey Without Maps is a holiday in a book. When you think things are rough, travel with Greene and his lady cousin on their first trip outside of Europe: to trek through Liberia in 1935.
Things will still seem rough now, but hey: you will have a way to escape them, to 1930s Liberia, as Greene's breathtaking prose transports you almost bodily to the crushing heat and dull jungle of Africa's West coast.
If you've never read Greene, he has an awe-inspiring way of making astute, circumspect observations at the ends of paragraphs, just so you need to pause for an air-gasping, what-but-wait-but-what moment before you read on.
Here then, are the mind-blowing lines that give his justification for the whole affair. As relevant now as in 1935, I think:
Today our world seems particularly susceptible to brutality. There is a touch of nostalgia in the pleasure we take in gangster novels, in characters who have so agreeably simplified their emotions that they have begun living again at a level below the cerebral. We, like Wordsworth, are living after a war and a revolution, and these half-castes fighting with bombs between the cliffs of skyscrapers seem more likely than we to be aware of Proteus rising from the sea. It is not, of course, that one wishes to stay for ever at that level, but when one sees to what unhappiness, to what peril of extinction centuries of cerebration have brought us, one sometimes has a curiosity to discover if one can from what we have come, to recall at which point we went astray.
Things will still seem rough now, but hey: you will have a way to escape them, to 1930s Liberia, as Greene's breathtaking prose transports you almost bodily to the crushing heat and dull jungle of Africa's West coast.
If you've never read Greene, he has an awe-inspiring way of making astute, circumspect observations at the ends of paragraphs, just so you need to pause for an air-gasping, what-but-wait-but-what moment before you read on.
Here then, are the mind-blowing lines that give his justification for the whole affair. As relevant now as in 1935, I think:
Today our world seems particularly susceptible to brutality. There is a touch of nostalgia in the pleasure we take in gangster novels, in characters who have so agreeably simplified their emotions that they have begun living again at a level below the cerebral. We, like Wordsworth, are living after a war and a revolution, and these half-castes fighting with bombs between the cliffs of skyscrapers seem more likely than we to be aware of Proteus rising from the sea. It is not, of course, that one wishes to stay for ever at that level, but when one sees to what unhappiness, to what peril of extinction centuries of cerebration have brought us, one sometimes has a curiosity to discover if one can from what we have come, to recall at which point we went astray.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
[when our words ruled the world]
[I dreamed that I met you in Auckland, in a light-blind city street. I was scared you wouldn't speak to me, but when you saw me, all those lost years fell away.
It was as if nothing had happened: I was still the prime collaborator and confidante. As if I'd only been gone for a moment. As if, in conversation, I'd simply paused for breath.
You, with your big career and champions, still treated my mind like a beautiful thing, a mystery, a delight—like you had when the sun had shone on the two of us, and our words ruled the world.
And when I woke up I realised I was back at square one: at the start of the race for distance, at the impossible start of leaving you behind]
It was as if nothing had happened: I was still the prime collaborator and confidante. As if I'd only been gone for a moment. As if, in conversation, I'd simply paused for breath.
You, with your big career and champions, still treated my mind like a beautiful thing, a mystery, a delight—like you had when the sun had shone on the two of us, and our words ruled the world.
And when I woke up I realised I was back at square one: at the start of the race for distance, at the impossible start of leaving you behind]
Monday, November 14, 2011
Word association
A proliferating trend is to refer to good things as "nuggets". I don't know about you, but I'm seeing this everywhere online: people are "hitting on nuggets", "picking out the nuggets", "looking for the nuggets" and on and on.
Etymonline indeed proves that the term "nugget" is intrinsically associated with gold, which should be promising. But at its root is the word nug, of dubious dialectical origin, and as lacking in form as the thing it describes: a lump.
Where's all this heading? Every single time someone uses the word nugget I think "...of crap". No kidding. I'm sure some young wag probably created this association for me in high school sometime, but regardless of its pathetic origins, I can't get away from it now.
To all you crazy metaphorically gold-panning technopreneurs out there, though, good luck with your nugget-finding! Hee hee. etc.
Etymonline indeed proves that the term "nugget" is intrinsically associated with gold, which should be promising. But at its root is the word nug, of dubious dialectical origin, and as lacking in form as the thing it describes: a lump.
Where's all this heading? Every single time someone uses the word nugget I think "...of crap". No kidding. I'm sure some young wag probably created this association for me in high school sometime, but regardless of its pathetic origins, I can't get away from it now.
To all you crazy metaphorically gold-panning technopreneurs out there, though, good luck with your nugget-finding! Hee hee. etc.
Monday, November 7, 2011
The nano
I always shunned NaNoWriMo for reasons more to do with a dislike of organised events, team sports, and we're-all-in-this-togetherness than the idea of writing 50k words in a month outside of the other writing I do.
As it turns out, nano is an allegory for life.
All you need to turn out is 1.5k words a day, and let's face it, we can all do that. If you're struggling today, and you're pretty sure everything you've put down sucks, who cares? With this exercise, as in life, at some points the sheer act of writing trumps quality.
Sometimes, the act itself is all that matters.
If you ask me, more of those whiners endlessly complaining online about "the difficulties of writing" would do well to try nano and see what lengths they're actually willing to go to to write. If you claim to be a writer, and you can't manage 1.5k words a day, then, er, the writing's on the wall, chump. No pun intended.
As it turns out, nano is an allegory for life.
All you need to turn out is 1.5k words a day, and let's face it, we can all do that. If you're struggling today, and you're pretty sure everything you've put down sucks, who cares? With this exercise, as in life, at some points the sheer act of writing trumps quality.
Sometimes, the act itself is all that matters.
If you ask me, more of those whiners endlessly complaining online about "the difficulties of writing" would do well to try nano and see what lengths they're actually willing to go to to write. If you claim to be a writer, and you can't manage 1.5k words a day, then, er, the writing's on the wall, chump. No pun intended.
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Grammar ... almost
Technically, it should be "To which", because the answer to "what?" is "A URL, dummy, just like you said!"That aside, I couldn't help but be charmed by the coy formality of this blogger.com dialogue box. Tee hee hee. It makes me giggle even now.
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