January 2011
19 posts
“Note that we’re not just developing more formats and distribution channels for books as we know them; we’re reconceiving what we mean when we say “book” — perhaps from something completely static to something more dynamic, or at least from something anticipated and aimed for to something that’s gathered up and left behind as a landmark, like an Inukshuk…”
—Quoting myself, shamelessly, from What’s the Future of Reading & Writing?
“… people who criticize the passive the most tend to use it more than the rest of us. George Orwell warns against the passive in his overblown and dishonest essay “Politics and the English language”. E. B. White does likewise in the obnoxiously ignorant little book he coauthored with Strunk, The Elements of Style. Both of these authors have a remarkably high frequency of passives in their work: around 20 percent of their clauses with transitive verbs are cast in the passive, a distinctly higher frequency than you find in most of the prose written by normal people who don’t spend their time pontificating hypocritically about the alleged evil of the passive.”
—Language Log » The passive in English
“In bits and pieces they had been re-written, put aside, and re-written again, the nature of the story changing as the author himself was changed. Now, in Connecticut, Salinger placed the final line on the final chapter of the book. It is with Salinger’s experience of the Second World War in mind that we should understand Holden Caulfield’s insight at the Central Park carousel, and the parting words of The Catcher in the Rye: “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” All the dead soldiers.”
—Holden Caulfield’s Goddam War | Culture | Vanity Fair
Play
“In Wallace, the young scholar saw a writer who, Joyce-like, “could connect the large with the small,” paying “meticulous attention” to individual words and sentences while building a complex narrative structure. Likewise he combined “cutting-edge literary techniques” with “an encyclopedic knowledge of diverse intellectual fields…”
—The Afterlife of David Foster Wallace - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education
“
It’s disrespectful to let writing’s constituent elements bleed into one another through imprecise demarcations. If you see me “making mistakes with comma placement”, please rest assured that I’m doing it deliberately. In most cases the comma doesn’t belong to the phrase delimited by the quotation marks that enclose it. Placing an exclamation point or question mark to the left or right of a close-quote is a weighty decision! That we violate the atomic purity of quotations with injected commas is an outrage.
“And though I don’t get quite as worked up about it, the same sort of thinking motivates my belief in the double space. Sentences deserve to be clearly delineated, but because of the complications of quotation, ellipses, interrogatives and exclamations (among others), there is no reliable punctuation that can be counted on as a terminator for sentences. Single spaces are already spoken for: they separate words. The double space is an elegant and subtle solution.
From everyone has a right to their beliefs at Manifest Destiny — a response to Farhad Manjoo’s widely discussed polemic against using two spaces after sentences.
By the way, I’m a devout one-spacer — not because I’m particular about rules, but because it delights me to break a rule so many teachers and proofreaders from my past insisted on.
Also, I’m much more likely to accidentally violate the double-space rule than the single-space rule. It’s one less inconsequential thing to worry about.
“While a lot of stellar narrative nonfiction also leaves room for readers or viewers to interpret events, they suggest that gaming takes it to another level entirely. Surroundings help create and reinforce the identity of the player. Signs of violence and looting may suggest to a player that future violence will happen, or that the player will be called on to perform similar behaviors. Lab-rat-type mazes will probably make the player feel, well … like a lab rat. At root, Worch and Smith suggest that environmental storytelling involves the player making connections: “What we’re talking about here is subtext, which transforms simple scenes into something with a deeper meaning.” While all stories have subtext, Smith and Worch say that in games, subtext emerges differently. While print and film direct the audience’s gaze and focus its attention, Smith says, “In games, we explore.”
—Harvey Smith on environmental storytelling and embedding narrative: “It has to be possible to miss some things to make finding them meaningful” – Nieman Storyboard - A project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard
“Still, the general path “blood libel” took over the past few days shines some light on how particular terms move within the digital media ecosystem, and how the use of language that seems strange to many — as it did to many commentators, judging on their reactions to it — can appear “normal” to others who are operating within a different discursive community. That’s not to make another lamentation of “cyber-balkanization” or another call for the return of the “mass public sphere” where everyone read and thought the same thing. It is just a reminder, though, that our digital house has many rooms. Sometimes, when you feel like politicians aren’t speaking to you, you’re right. They’re not.”
—“Blood libel”: How language evolves and spreads within online worlds » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism
“Perhaps because of his unusual mind, he had a knack for writing sentences that sounded at once clinical and mystical. His books read like accounts of acid trips written by a bureaucrat. That kaleidoscopic, almost psychedelic style made him a darling of the counterculture—the bearded and the Birkenstocked embraced him as a guru—but it alienated him from his colleagues in academia. To them, McLuhan was a celebrity-seeking charlatan.”
—Nicholas Carr Reviews Douglas Coupland’s “Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing Of My Work!” | The New Republic
“Let’s have a toast for the fruit snacks
Let’s have a toast for the crab roe
Let’s have a toast for the plum wraps
Every one of them that I rolled
Let’s have a toast for dessert troughs
That I just can’t keep my hands off
Baby, I got a plan
Grab a plate fast as you can” —Grab A Plate (via noonemanshouldhaveallthatflour)
Let’s have a toast for the crab roe
Let’s have a toast for the plum wraps
Every one of them that I rolled
Let’s have a toast for dessert troughs
That I just can’t keep my hands off
Baby, I got a plan
Grab a plate fast as you can” —Grab A Plate (via noonemanshouldhaveallthatflour)
“I will politically haunt you for the biggest fumble in the history of San Francisco politics. It’s on like Donkey Kong.”
—
I love that exquisitely thoughtless use of stock language.
Via officialssay:
Chris Daly, an outgoing member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, yelling at a colleague because he disagreed with his vote on who should serve as interim mayor of San Francisco.
(Submitted by rubenfeld)
“Train cases, blue lung, marines uniform underwear, correct pronunciation of caesura, suicide tree house cult, koi ponds, psikhushkas, doll with a head at both ends, how to defer student loan, yogurt mountain birthday club, Gwendolyn Brooks, can a penis literally break in half (?), circumstances under which you can sue your landlord…”
—“Things I Have Needed to Google While Writing Poems to Turn Into My MFA Workshop,” McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (via laphamsquarterly)
