Some Words

A while back I meant to say more about this stuff, but I’m going to just close the tabs…

Apparently there is a backlash against Ian McEwan going on. I can’t help but think that part of this is that there is a subset of readers (of whom I am often a part) who want authors to be perfect creators of wonderful gem like novels that change your life every time you read one, and are always as good as the last. There’s a reason we’re so often disappointed. McEwan also suffers from being successful enough that other people get a kick out of hating him. I’ve been guilty of this one from time to time as well, though not direct at him. The drummer from Phish once said he’d know they’d made it when people started hating them just for who they were, not their music. I’m guessing McEwan isn’t loosing a lot of sleep over this one. I’m also guessing that a lot of the people who are saying they hate him now are just disappointed because he didn’t live up to their over inflated expectations.

Mark Millar on the other hand I frequently feel is presented as far deeper than he really is. Much of his stuff seems like empty crap done for shock value. He probably isn’t loosing any sleep over me though either.

Donkeylicious has a post citing the Bard for the use of they as singular, which is both convenient and technically forbidden. Having had a talk with a professor about this very issue. (I hadn’t done it, but I’d screwed up my use of ‘effect’ which was embarrassing for an English major.) This needs to become accepted. I had no idea that Shakespeare had done this, and am glad it was pointed out. The other options, as they point out in the post, are either inadequate or absurd. Fifty years from now, they will be available for use as singular. The question is really how long it takes to get there.

Denby’s article on snark for the Guardian is better and wider ranging than it was, perhaps, intended to be. I found myself thinking about how I talked in a way that I had not since last reading Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language, which was more recent than you would think. I have a friend who reads 1984 once a year, or at least used to. I might have to do that with Politics and the English Language, the most telling part is how much of it I realize applies to me, every time I read it.

Through Bookslut, I stumbled onto this plea for better Hugo shortlists.

It was interesting and inspiring, but I think it may miss the point of why many people read science fiction. Genre readers are often very similar. Mystery readers are an excellent example, some of them churning through the books in the field at a pace that astonishes and may scare people a little. Looking around the advice on the tubes, you find that mystery novelists especially, and genre writers in general, general are editing one book, working on writing the next, and promoting the one that just got published. The industry has to keep pace with the most voracious readers with low sales and high volume, which doesn’t serve the authors very well, and doesn’t let the books achieve anything beyond a workmanlike mediocrity most of the time. Those sorts of readers are looking for escapism more than erudition, and if there are a large number of voters who are that kind of voracious reader, for better or worse, it will show up as mediocrity in the listed books.

Also of note from that post was that the new Le Guin was good if flawed. This is heartening news. I had given up on her after I felt she phoned in several novels upon closing up the Earthsea cycle.

A few of my friends have kindles, and I’m sure they’ve all read 1984 and have paper copies, so it won’t have effected them much that the title was removed in an act of pure irony by Amazon, ostensibly at the request of Orwell’s estate. This is yet another lesson (many of them provided by the estate of James Joyce) in poor management of your own intellectual capital.

In other, personal, book news, rereading The Diamond Age is a good thing, it holds up very well when you know what is going to happen already. This is a feat that surprisingly few books manage.

I finished David Copperfield (Modern Library Classics)
tonight. It was an odd experience. Because I have been reading it in installments delivered to my email, and because those installments totaled over 400, I feel like I might have some small indication of what it was like to read it when it first came out. I grant that there were larger chunks when it was first published, but it was strung out over a similar length of time.

When reading Dickens slowly like this, I find that the sins of which he is accused, the overly repetitious characterization and his general loquaciousness seem to fall away. You need a refresher on some of the charaters sometimes, and by the end, David is like an old friend saying goodbye. Maybe not your best friend, but someone you meet for coffee from time to time and catch up on the latest with him. And it is a bit of a one sided conversation, but you put up with it because you always have.

Well… with the computer out of commission, I found myself unable to get much work done on the big project. That was frustrating, as this week was supposed to be the big push to finish it, I should have been able to do that by the end of the month.

So I wanted to be able to get something done on that front while I waited to get my computer back, and was busy grousing to myself that the other computer was the one with all the software licenses. This gave me a chance to use Google Docs. I’d never done so before, and I have to say that I’m pleasantly surprised. It’s not going to get me to abandon what I normally use, but it’s fine in the short term.

It also reminds me that I’m a little crazy for having a program just to do outlines. And despite that program, I’d let my outline of the text fall off in the past few chapters and I was flying blind. Without the main text though, I’m outlining the last eight chapters finally, which should speed things up if it is anything like when I was last working with an outline. Not my most efficient use of time, these past few weeks, if loosing my primary computer forces me to get cracking.

Also, as a PSA for the few people who read this in Minneapolis: (and some who may be coming into town for the wedding) Dreamhaven is moving. What does this mean? They’re not looking forward to having to haul all their stuff, so for this month there is a big sale. Used paperbacks are 75% off original cover price, with a minimum of 75¢. That means most books are under a dollar in their used section. A lot of the comics are 10¢. The other day I walked out with a pile I could barely carry for just over $15. You should check it out if you are in town.

There are very few times in life that you can look to and say, “Now I know that ‘x’ book changed my life.” Usually, whatever way a book might have changed you is subtle and insidious. You never notice the choice you made or the shift in your reactions.

Today was not like that. My reading of this BBC article was changed by having read Haruki Murakami, I’m not sure for the better. My initial reaction, upon reading that the knifing happened on the same day as another knifing from 2001, was to think that it would be a Murakami story in a few years. A lot of his work is about finding order and shape to the seemingly meaningless events that surround us. Once the matching dates came in, it just felt like one of his stories. Combine that with an increase in mass stabbings… and well, I start to feel a little guilty thinking that way.

One of the worst parts of writing, to me, is the fear that I’m just running along the same lines as some book that someone else published and I never read. I have been working with the idea for the current project for about two years now, while I finished up the last one and read for this one, and then started writing about a year and a half ago.

During that time I read Special Topics in Calamity Physics and Absurdistan. Both were pretty good books, despite frustrations and flaws that I had with them. Nothing is perfect after all, and I’m a fussy bitch of a reader. But I also spent an undue amount of time while reading these books thinking, “is this too much like what I’m writing?” Well, of course it isn’t, because I’m writing my own damn story, and while there are elements of the stories that I can’t help a little overlap with, that’s all of fiction. There are only so many things you can put in a novel, and any novel, sufficiently long, will have overlap with something.

Nevertheless, because my main character thinks he is a relative of Grand Duchess Anastasia, I have been feeling a little like the man in Ficciones who sets out to write Don Quixote from scratch.

Today I found out that there was a thriller published in 2004 that had the Romanovs as the central element, I had a long period of panic that I was sitting on over one hundred and twenty thousand words that were too close to this other one. I had to read the wikipedia entry on it to satisfy myself that it was sufficiently divergent, a standard antiquities/supernatural/thriller in the style that a certain Mr. Brown, not to be confused with the Browne who will be a groomsman at my wedding, has made popular.

And even then all I did was shift the worry from accusations that I’d stolen and idea to the idea that I’m working on terrain everyone is sick to death of. That may be due to the fact that everyone is a little tired of the Anastasia stuff. Hell, I’m tired of it, but I tell myself that it’s not such big part of the plot that it sinks everything.

Today, after poking at it for a while, and spending a bunch of time outlining plot points, I got back to the big writing project.

The words came fast and easy as I sat there. It was quite a relief. Over the past few months I’ve been working on getting into grad school and getting married. Now, with a lot of that off that taken care of (though both of those things are far from done) I’ve cleared away enough time to hopefully finish this before school starts. I was quite nervous at the start. For a while I had been quite regular about sitting down and writing. I had tracked the rate at which I produced words and dropped other tasks when I wasn’t making my count. When I needed to study for the LSAT I abandoned the writing for a while. I probably should have done that earlier, but it was what it was.

That was months ago, and all the little tasks had kept writing on a back burner. The story was still there, but I hadn’t given it the time it was due. Writing is at its best when you can fall into a sort of a trance. The editing doesn’t work so well that way, but the first draft is always more fun when it happens. I didn’t get there today, but I did manage to get solid work done without staring at the screen wondering what came next. So that was nice. I’ve only got a few more weeks of work and then it’s nothing but the writing and the wedding before grad school.

In other news, the latest update of WordPress seems to have broken the old url for this blog. Before I got ianmacleod.net, I just had a subdomain on my friend’s deepthought.org. I’m looking into how I want to fix that, as it seems to be related to how the new version handles the database. While I work at an ISP, that’s not something I generally work with. In fact I never really touch them. It’s a whole branch of computer knowledge that I’d always meant to get involved in. The current job did not really work for that though, and it seems I’m likely to remain ignorant about it for the foreseeable future. The writing projects feel more pressing to me now than the computer skills. Then, for the next five years or so, I’m probably not going to want to use what little spare time I have on more enjoyable things.

In a few weeks, my subscription to the New Yorker runs out. This has left me wondering if I should renew it. In the past, I had been getting gift subscriptions from my parents. A while ago, I hinted heavily that I wasn’t sure they should bother. They obliged and I did not get a renewal notice this time around. At this point I’m getting the tail end, from when Conde Nast decided my address had changed without me moving. It didn’t come for a whole and when I called up they said that it was undeliverable, which was of course odd, as it had been delivered for months previous.

Regardless, that gave me a backlog, and now I have to do the math on this thing to see if I really want it. It’s a harder choice than I had realized. Most New Yorkers have one or two articles I find interesting, and catty movie review, and maybe a profile of an artist or two that perks my interest. There’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes, as was the case with this last issue, almost the entire magazine is interesting.

But that is a lot of time sunk. The New Yorker has its style. That style happens to be one that leads to a lot of extrea reading. People are introduced, given hundreds of words of background, and then given a single meaningful quote. I know why they do it. I think it works quite a bit of the time, but I don’t know that I have time to read it, especially since I’m going to grad school. So, now the question is, do I resubscribe? How much of that paper is going to be wasted?

Over the past few months, I have read three Poirot novels bby Agatha Christie. It took me a while to get over how racist they are. In Murder on the Orient Express, a man is stabbed. While they are trying to figure out the case, someone advances that it must have been the Italian passenger who did this. His only reason? He feels that Italians are a stabbing people. That would be one thing, but the other characters all take that at face value. No one questions it. In the other two books I’ve read, characters who love money have pointedly been called Semetic.

At times I don’t know why I keep reading. She wasn’t a particularly good writer of sentences. There are plenty of bits that read like bad fiction workshop stuff. That may be a result of her success, or it may simply be a reliance on cliche. I mean, God, she wrote how many of these things?

But I keep reading them, and I’ll probably read a few more, at least the one where Poirot dies, and the rest that are in the binding of five novels I have. I’ve heard a lot of people complain about how formulaic she was, and indeed she is. But, as I started in on the latest one, I realized what kept them entertaining. She knows how formulaic she’s gotten. A few pages into The ABC Murders, Hastings, Poirot’s requisit foil, turns to Poirot and basically announces that this mystery is unlike any of the other they have worked on. Poirot agrees with him. For all I know it’s true, but who are they trying to convince? I like the feeling of watching a writer trying to derail the train to get the spark of life back into things. I like that the stories all feel shopworn before I’ve even read them. I like using them to put off the end of 1984. I don’t want to read about poor Winston getting tortured by rats.

1984 related note. On this, my… I think fifth attempt to read it all the way through, I have now gotten farther than before. Previous attempts left me grumpy and depressed about halfway through. This time I’m over two thirds through. I see why so many high school students fall in love with it, but I wonder if mayby I missed the window to really love this book.