Jonathan Owen, over at Arrant Pedantry, on twelve common mistakes made by people who write about grammatical mistakes.
Fair warning, for those who want it: Like most scholars of linguistics, he’s a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist. (As the header of this post suggests, so am I.) If descriptive grammar is the sort of thing that makes your milk of human kindness go all sour and curdled, you probably don’t want to go there.
A blog post over here, by author Erica Smith, about the ever-present tension in historical fiction/historical romance writing between historical accuracy and reader entertainment. Do follow the outbound links; they lead to yet more discussion and commentary by other writers in the field.
It’s an ongoing matter of contention, apparently, and (to my eye, at least) yet another angle on an old argument. Classical tabletop wargamers used to (and for all I know, still do) debate for hours about the relative virtues of simulation and playability – the more accurate the simulation in a particular scenario, the less evenly-balanced the game. Likewise, back in the days when I was active in the Society for Creative Anachronism, the “fun versus authenticity” debates were a staple of the local discourse.
I’m a big fan of fun and playability, as a general rule (otherwise, I’d never have been able to watch the historical flashbacks in Buffy and Angel with a straight face); but I’m also a fan of historical fiction and romance played according to the strict rules of the game, which includes taking into account the fact that people in the past were not men and women just like us only in funny costumes.
I suppose it’s kind of liking both authentic, straight-from-the-source Italian cooking and the spaghetti-and-meatballs your born-and-raised-in-the-heart-of-Texas mother used to make at home. Which one you want on a particular day depends a lot upon how you feel at the time . . . and they’re both of them good, too, just as long as you remember that they’re not the same thing.
Because the past is another country, but sometimes you can visit it through pictures:
The CARLI Digital Collection, “established in 2006 as a repository for digital content created by member libraries of the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI) or purchased by the consortium for use by its members.”
You can find all sorts of stuff in there, from a photo of the 1908 Pinckneyville Fire Department to a shot of the interior of the Voss Brothers Bicycle Shop in Peoria, Illinois, circa 1920. They’ve also got Civil War era letter collections, an archive of material dealing with the 1933-34 Chicago World’s Fair. a collection of plans and drawings for Pullman passenger cars, and lots and lots of campus newsletters and alumni magazines.
It’s the sort of place you can wander around in for hours.
Over at The Toast: Every Irish Novel Ever.
It’s a hoot. Even the comments are hilarious. (Which is a rarity, and a thing to be celebrated when it occurs, given that the comments section of most web pages could serve as an argument for the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity.)
It reminds me of my younger son’s summation of his course in The Modern Irish Novel (which would have been more accurately titled Irish Novels Not Written by James Joyce): “Life in twentieth-century Ireland sucked.”
When you’re done, go on to read the pages for, variously, Every French, Russian, and Canadian Novel Ever.
My spouse and co-author, James D. Macdonald, has some new posts up over at his blog:
One on the start, a hundred years and two days ago, of the Great War, as they called it during the twenty years or so before it became unpleasantly clear that they were going to have to do it all over again, only louder and longer and with more atrocities.
One with a Smashwords coupon code for a free short story by the two of us.
A brief note on Yog’s Law.
And all you need to know about the plot of Great Expectations, in three stanzas.
Go. Enjoy.
Over at The Toast, a clear and excellent explanation of why English pronouns are the screwed-up and confusing things that they are, and why grammatical gender isn’t the same as actual real-people-doing-real-things gender, and how we got the confusing mess we have today:
A sample (on the subject of how third person singular “they” fell into grammatical disrepute despite a long history of pre-existing usage):
But then, in the late 18th century, grammarians started recommending that people use he as a gender nonspecific pronoun because they was ostensibly plural, as part of the grand tradition of awkwardly shoehorning English grammar into Latin which has caused many of your present grammatical insecurities, and which I’m totally sure had nothing whatsoever to do with the patriarchy.
The rest of it is just as good. Go, read, have fun.
A Guardian archive of digested (which is to say, condensed) classics – parody/pastiches by John Crace.
A sample, from the digested version of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:
The flood had made and the only thing for it was to wait for the turn of tide. The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! … The dreams of men, the germs of empires.
Between us four was the bond of the sea, making us tolerant of each other’s yarns. Which was just as well when Marlow, sitting serenely as a Buddha, began his two hour, Freudian critique of colonialism.
And another couple of choice bits, this time from the digested version of Dickens’s David Copperfield:
“Mr Murdstone and I are now wed, Davey,” said my mother, “so if he wants to give you a good beating then I shall have to let him.”
“Indeed I do,” sneered Mr Murdstone, “for he is a disagreeable boy. And when he has been thrashed sufficiently, he shall be sent to Mr Creakle’s school in London to be thrashed some more.”
***
…the only break in my day was the invitation to take tea with an unattractive clerk by the name of Uriah Heep. “Most ‘umble,” he said. In truth, I did not much care for Heep, finding him a deeply aspirant member of the lower orders, but I bore myself with the dignity expected of distressed gentlefolk and treated him with a patronising contempt disguised as good manners.
There are over a hundred of these gems in the archive. Go have fun.
(Or, Dr. Doyle is peeved, again, and thinks some unkind thoughts.)
How to be self-pitying and self-aggrandizing, both at once. If the literary novel is a moribund art form, maybe it’s because this is the sort of person who writes them.
Of course, my opinion isn’t worth bothering with, because I read and write genre fiction — the sort of stuff the writer characterizes as “the kidult boywizardsroman and the soft sadomasochistic porn fantasy” — as opposed to serious, difficult fiction.
(Right. I spent seven years studying literature written in languages nobody even speaks any more because I’m scared of difficulty. Pull the other one; it’s got bells on.)
Found elseweb: The Cowboy Hávamál, or, Old Norse wisdom translated into Wise Old Cowpoke†. A couple of brief samples:
You’re a goddamned fool
if you think you’ll live forever
just because you won’t fight.
Say nobody ever kills you –
old age is no peach, either.***
Don’t think you’re the goddamned smartest,
or the toughest, or the best at anything,
and don’t let folks think you are, either.
Otherwise you’ll find out the hard way
that someone is always better.
†It’s one of the Three Faces of the Action Hero, which are like the Three Faces of the Triple Goddess, only different: The Kid, the Gunslinger, and the Wise Old Cowpoke. They can be seen all in one movie in the first Star Wars film, with Luke and Han and Obi-Wan (aka Old Ben) Kenobi, or serially over time in the television and film career of Clint Eastwood.
An amusing mini-essay in defense of the semicolon, here.
I confess; I am, myself, one of those who love the semicolon, sometimes perhaps not wisely but too well. Much as other writers need to double-check their second and third drafts for run-on sentences, excessive sentence fragments, and comma splices, I have to go through and make certain I don’t have entire paragraphs where every single sentence has a semicolon in the middle.
And a thought-provoking long article here about the connections between the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Cold War, and the CIA. The whole thing makes me strangely grateful that my writing lineage comes through science fiction, which at least in those days was an inhabitant of the outer darkness and hence spared conscription into the feuds and politics of respectable literature.
I did come briefly into contact-at-a-remove with the academic workshop style, in that I took a couple of undergrad creative writing courses at the University of Arkansas, whose MFA writing program has a certain degree of credibility as these things go. To which all I can say is, I learned a lot, including just how little respect genre writers got in writing programs back in those days. My reaction was to go off and get a doctorate in medieval literature and write almost no fiction for the next seven years.
(Things are a bit better these days, or so I’m given to understand. But if you’re working in fantasy or science fiction or mystery or romance, and have a hankering for the MFA experience, it’s still a good idea to check out your prospects for genre-friendliness first.)
Dr. Doyle's Blog 