Tag: other people saying interesting things

Another Neat Thing They’re Doing

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Scholars are using computers “to help reassemble more than 100,000 document fragments collected across 1,000 years that reveal details of Jewish life along the Mediterranean” — a task that previously had to be done by eye and hand.

A lot of the documents retrieved so far deal with the minutiae of daily life:  contracts and sales records and legal documents and even recipes.  For a historian, and even more for writers who are trying to recreate history for their readers, such details are golden, worth far more, sometimes, than the word about who defeated whom on the battlefield, and where.

(I’d be particularly interested to know the ingredients and techniques involved in what the article describes as a “particularly vile” recipe for honey-wine.  Purely as a matter of academic curiosity, you understand.)

 

Two from the Guardian

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Today’s “Go look over there!” links, both from the Guardian online:

First, we have the plagiarism scandal du jour:  The poet David R. Morgan got caught lifting other poets’ poetry and publishing it as his own:  American poet Charles O Hartman realised Morgan’s poem “Dead Wife Singing” was almost identical to his own, three-decades-old “A Little Song”.

Keep an eye on this one, folks; there’s no telling who else he may have stolen from.

Then, on a less dispiriting note, a column on overdone or imprecise metaphors:  “A catalyst is something that speeds up a chemical reaction but is itself unchanged at the end of the reaction. Someone who sparks a revolution by setting themselves on fire shouldn’t be described as a catalyst.”

Elsewhere: In Praise of Good Sentences

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From The Chronicle of Higher Education, a blog post on memorable sentences.

The post, and the comments, have some good ones, though so far they seem to have missed James Thurber completely.  At one point in my life I not only could quote Thurber extensively, I would — under sufficient provocation — actually do so.  (How could I not admire a writer who could come up with lines like “He was six-feet-four and forty-six, and even colder than he thought he was”?)

Anyhow — go over there and read the post and the comments.

Saving the Endangered Wansdyke

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This showed up today on ANSAX-L, the Anglo-Saxon language and literature mailing list, where I’m a long-time lurker. (I’m a long way from the groves of Academe, but I still like to keep up with the hot gossip in the field.)

It has all the earmarks of something that is chock full of local politics and confusing issues (there is nothing more opaque, sometimes, than somebody else’s politics — as I discovered once when I tried to explain local option liquor laws, wet and dry counties, and the Baptist/bootlegger alliance to a European correspondent), but I present it here for what it’s worth.

More from the Department of Nifty Stuff

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Because writers, as I’ve observed before, are intellectual packrats who gather up odd bits of information just in case they may need one of them someday:  The scholarly hairdresser who figured out how to do the Vestal Virgins’ seven-braid hairdo also takes on 18th-19th century papillote curls — the “curling-papers” we read about in period fiction.

When I googled on “papillote curls” to retrieve the link, I also found links to blogs where other recreationists have gone on to try the process themselves, which is how I learned that the process works best on hair that hasn’t been washed for a day or so — “every day” hair-washing being a mostly 20th-century innovation.  And in the “everything is connected to everything else” department, I liked the hairdresser’s comment that this particular style and curling method didn’t become popular until technology had advanced enough for paper to become relatively cheap.

Not Something You Hear Every Day

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Ever since the rise of the novel in the 18th century, mimetic realism has been the unmarked state for fiction in English (of fiction in other languages, I lack the authority to speak.)  Everything else is genre — science fiction, fantasy, romance, mystery, moribund genres like the western and nearly extinct ones like the nurse novel — and yes, literary fiction.  The fact that literary fiction occupies a position of high prestige doesn’t exempt it from having its own tropes and clichés and habits of thought, and doesn’t exempt it from Sturgeon’s Law.†

But it’s not often you encounter a writer of literary fiction actually admitting to the fact in public, as J. Robert Lennon does in the March 29th issue of Salon.

†Named after the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, to whom someone once said, “Ninety percent of science fiction is crud.” To which Sturgeon replied, “Ninety percent of everything is crud.”

Some Things Never Change

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Found while looking through my bookmarks the other day,  a blog post from back in 2010 talking about something even earlier:

A (personalized and encouraging) rejection letter from William Dean Howells, in 1900.

I don’t know if Howells also had a stack of pre-printed “your manuscript does not meet our needs at the present time” letters, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find out that he did.

From the Department of Good Advice

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Billy Wilder’s tips for screenwriters.

Most of them also apply to novelists.  The only one that could be debated is #10:

10. The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then – that’s it. Don’t hang around.

But that’s because movies are more like short stories, or at most novellas, than they are like novels.  That’s why Tolkien’s extended fourfold wrap-up of The Lord of the Rings works in the context of the novel, but is less effective on the big screen.

(Also, of course, it is necessary to remember that in a perfect world any writer’s advice on writing would come with a clearly-printed THIS IS HOW IT WORKS FOR ME, ANYHOW label attached.)

What He Said.

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I was going to write a post about this:  ‘Libraries Have Had Their Day,’ Says ‘Horrible Histories’ Author.

But then I went on the road for a week, and when I came back the estimable John Scalzi was already on the case:  A Personal History of Libraries.

I can’t help but think that there are two kinds of people who believe that shutting down public libraries is a good idea:  the ones who, not being bookish people themselves, have no idea how important libraries are to people, bookish or otherwise, on limited budgets; and the ones who know exactly how important library access is to such people, and have their own selfish reasons for wanting to deny it to them.

(We need a better class of robber baron for this new Gilded Age of ours.  At least Andrew Carnegie built libraries, instead of trying to tear them down.)

Tell It to the (Space) Marines

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This story is all over the science fiction and fantasy segments of the internet this morning, but just in case you’ve missed it, a few links:

Games Workshop, owners of the Warhammer 40K gaming franchise, slap down a self-published Amazon author in the name of asserting their trademark on the term “space marines.”

The estimable John Scalzi weighs in on the topic, as do many commenters.

I particularly like the person who provided a link to a Wikipedia list of actual space marines.  I have no idea how many, if any, cosmonauts were the then-USSR’s equivalent of marines, but I’ll bet that somebody on the internet does.

Over at Making Light, they’re on it as well.

And why did Games Workshop choose to go after a self-published author, and not, say, the Heinlein estate or any of the other fairly large gorillas who have used the term and the concept of “space marines” in their science fiction since the late nineteen-thirties at least?  For the same reason that school administrators, when they decide to implement a “zero tolerance” drug policy, go after the honor student who gives her best friend a Canadian Tylenol for cramps, rather than the apprentice hoodlums selling coke and steroids to the football team out in the school parking lot — they can get the desired result (the appearance of vigorously carrying out policy) without the fear of serious repercussions (in the form of lawsuits or busted kneecaps.)