Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Thanksgiving (and yet another attempt to find out what you’re reading….)
I once read someone (maybe it was Judith Viorst?) say that her father’s idea of being safe and secure was having money in the bank, that her mother’s was always having enough toilet paper, and hers was knowing you’d have enough hot water no matter how long you showered. Mine has always been having enough unread books to make it through a snowstorm or a long illness or whatever catastrophic occurrence might keep me from being able to get to a bookstore and get more. As anyone who knows me will tell you, my chances of running out of books are slim to none – surface areas to put them on is a whole other matter. I need more time, not more books, so I’m thankful for a long weekend. Here’s what's going to the beach in my suitcase: Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates, Lauren Goff’s Monsters of Templeton, and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. What’s in yours?
LOLaplooza
Wth
Did you hear that? What is that deafening peel of thunder, that terrible groan of suffering, that indistinguishable cacophony of cries? That’s the death of the English language as we know it.
Spend more than five minutes with anyone between the ages of 10-18 and you will see their thumbs blazing across the touchpad of whatever high tech electronic device they use to communicate with others of their ilk. This by itself is not a bad thing. I’m all for communication. The problem I have is with the content of said messages.
“OMG!!! Lol!! I’m afk for a sec Ill brb”
Pause for a second and allow that to resonate in the deep strata of your brain. I think there’s a noun in there somewhere. A verb? Well maybe not. In fact as I write this piece the spell checker has just had its second seizure.
I don’t claim to be Shakespeare here but that sentence above is typical of many conversations going on right now on computers and phones around our great big world. With each passing generation I fear that our language will become more and more infiltrated by this genre of dialogue.
So, what’s going on here? Are these words just to long to type on tiny keyboards or is their something more insidious afoot? I think the answer lies somewhere between tiny keyboards and outright laziness. Our society has made it so convenient for us to do practically anything. I mean we have drive thru liquor stores now. We have a remote for practically everything in our home. Even my beloved books are being made more palatable through the use of compact disks and now these reading devices. Couple that with a nonchalant attitude and you have cyber speak, leetspeak, or Internet slang.
I begin to wonder what some of the older classics might sound like with this particular brand of communications.
Gone with the Wind: “FMD I don’t gad.”
Catch 22: “ Just bc your paranoid don’t mean they aren’t ay”
Hamlet: “Alas, poor Yorick! Ikhm.”
Maybe I’m being a tad unfair to this generation. Maybe I have just become one of those old people who refer to kids as whippersnappers. I don’t know but what I do know is this. Teens are going to continue to lol, brb, and afk themselves silly but we have to instill in them at an early age the need to write whole complete sentences and paragraphs. If left to their own desires the books of tomorrow will be much shorter because it will be filled with abbreviations.
The responsibility of this falls to us as parents, teachers, and fellow communicators. We have to start now by encouraging them to write, by not taking the easy shortcuts when writing ourselves, by setting an example and expecting them to live up to it. We need to bring back the hand-written letters and stop relying solely on e-mail for our communications. Just because the devices are getting smaller doesn’t mean our words have to. It starts with us and maybe we can find a happy medium of cyberspeak and real English.
As A.A. Milne said: “You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”
Ltr,cya!
Did you hear that? What is that deafening peel of thunder, that terrible groan of suffering, that indistinguishable cacophony of cries? That’s the death of the English language as we know it.
Spend more than five minutes with anyone between the ages of 10-18 and you will see their thumbs blazing across the touchpad of whatever high tech electronic device they use to communicate with others of their ilk. This by itself is not a bad thing. I’m all for communication. The problem I have is with the content of said messages.
“OMG!!! Lol!! I’m afk for a sec Ill brb”
Pause for a second and allow that to resonate in the deep strata of your brain. I think there’s a noun in there somewhere. A verb? Well maybe not. In fact as I write this piece the spell checker has just had its second seizure.
I don’t claim to be Shakespeare here but that sentence above is typical of many conversations going on right now on computers and phones around our great big world. With each passing generation I fear that our language will become more and more infiltrated by this genre of dialogue.
So, what’s going on here? Are these words just to long to type on tiny keyboards or is their something more insidious afoot? I think the answer lies somewhere between tiny keyboards and outright laziness. Our society has made it so convenient for us to do practically anything. I mean we have drive thru liquor stores now. We have a remote for practically everything in our home. Even my beloved books are being made more palatable through the use of compact disks and now these reading devices. Couple that with a nonchalant attitude and you have cyber speak, leetspeak, or Internet slang.
I begin to wonder what some of the older classics might sound like with this particular brand of communications.
Gone with the Wind: “FMD I don’t gad.”
Catch 22: “ Just bc your paranoid don’t mean they aren’t ay”
Hamlet: “Alas, poor Yorick! Ikhm.”
Maybe I’m being a tad unfair to this generation. Maybe I have just become one of those old people who refer to kids as whippersnappers. I don’t know but what I do know is this. Teens are going to continue to lol, brb, and afk themselves silly but we have to instill in them at an early age the need to write whole complete sentences and paragraphs. If left to their own desires the books of tomorrow will be much shorter because it will be filled with abbreviations.
The responsibility of this falls to us as parents, teachers, and fellow communicators. We have to start now by encouraging them to write, by not taking the easy shortcuts when writing ourselves, by setting an example and expecting them to live up to it. We need to bring back the hand-written letters and stop relying solely on e-mail for our communications. Just because the devices are getting smaller doesn’t mean our words have to. It starts with us and maybe we can find a happy medium of cyberspeak and real English.
As A.A. Milne said: “You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”
Ltr,cya!
Monday, November 24, 2008
The American Mystery
On NPR’s Morning Edition today, there was an interview with Junot Diaz, author of the excellent Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. He had a lot to say about his experiences growing up as a Dominican immigrant in America. Towards the end of the interview, he made the point that what unites and defines us –all of us—as Americans is the desire to answer the question of what it means to be American.
I have to say that while most of the interview was a little tedious (Diaz seems as impressed with himself as everyone else is impressed with him), that last point resonated with me. See, while trying to come up with something for my regular Monday gig here on The Gargoyle, I’d been thinking a lot about mystery novels.
Some of us here at the Gothic Bookshop are big fans of mysteries (or crime novels, as a few of us like to call them, just because it sounds tough). Whether they’re cozies, hard-boiled novels, or straight-up procedurals, we eat them up. A lot of our customers go for mysteries, too, so we do our best to keep the newest and best examples of the stuff on hand. Of course, these novels are great fun to read, but I wonder if there’s something else that draws us towards these books, something that has to do with what Junot Diaz was talking about in his interview.
Mysteries have been a vital part of the American canon almost since its inception. Fairly or not, Edgar Allen Poe is universally credited for creating the genre with his stories featuring the cunning detective, Dupin. Early masters of hard-boiled detective writing not only were wildly popular but had broad global influence over the styles of contemporaneous and later writers. James M. Cain's influence on Camus’ The Stranger is the most well-known example**, but there are plenty of others. Many of our most important contemporary writers of fiction, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, draw heavily on the genre. Michael Chabon, in his award-winning (and freakin’ awesome) book The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, uses the framework of the procedural mystery novel to explore themes of identity and alienation in modern Jewish culture.
And it’s not just out-and-out mystery novels, either. (Here comes one of my sweeping, only partially accurate pronouncements, so buckle up.) I would argue that the mystery is at the heart of all great American literature. The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird –these are all, at the core, novels dealing with secrets, slowly revealed. In other words: mysteries.
Maybe Junot Diaz is right. Maybe none of us knows what it means to be American, and maybe we’re all trying to figure it out. Maybe that’s why as writers and readers we turn to the story structure of the mystery novel again and again, and why we’ll keep doing so until we finally get the answer.
I sort of hope we never do.
** In the interest of full disclosure, I have to acknowledge that I originally credited Dashiell Hammett with influencing Camus. My good friend & bowling teammate "The Rev" reminded me that it was in fact James M. Cain. Thanks, Rev!
I have to say that while most of the interview was a little tedious (Diaz seems as impressed with himself as everyone else is impressed with him), that last point resonated with me. See, while trying to come up with something for my regular Monday gig here on The Gargoyle, I’d been thinking a lot about mystery novels.
Some of us here at the Gothic Bookshop are big fans of mysteries (or crime novels, as a few of us like to call them, just because it sounds tough). Whether they’re cozies, hard-boiled novels, or straight-up procedurals, we eat them up. A lot of our customers go for mysteries, too, so we do our best to keep the newest and best examples of the stuff on hand. Of course, these novels are great fun to read, but I wonder if there’s something else that draws us towards these books, something that has to do with what Junot Diaz was talking about in his interview.
Mysteries have been a vital part of the American canon almost since its inception. Fairly or not, Edgar Allen Poe is universally credited for creating the genre with his stories featuring the cunning detective, Dupin. Early masters of hard-boiled detective writing not only were wildly popular but had broad global influence over the styles of contemporaneous and later writers. James M. Cain's influence on Camus’ The Stranger is the most well-known example**, but there are plenty of others. Many of our most important contemporary writers of fiction, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, draw heavily on the genre. Michael Chabon, in his award-winning (and freakin’ awesome) book The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, uses the framework of the procedural mystery novel to explore themes of identity and alienation in modern Jewish culture.
And it’s not just out-and-out mystery novels, either. (Here comes one of my sweeping, only partially accurate pronouncements, so buckle up.) I would argue that the mystery is at the heart of all great American literature. The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird –these are all, at the core, novels dealing with secrets, slowly revealed. In other words: mysteries.
Maybe Junot Diaz is right. Maybe none of us knows what it means to be American, and maybe we’re all trying to figure it out. Maybe that’s why as writers and readers we turn to the story structure of the mystery novel again and again, and why we’ll keep doing so until we finally get the answer.
I sort of hope we never do.
** In the interest of full disclosure, I have to acknowledge that I originally credited Dashiell Hammett with influencing Camus. My good friend & bowling teammate "The Rev" reminded me that it was in fact James M. Cain. Thanks, Rev!
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Enough About Us
What are YOU reading?
You all have us at a disadvantage. All you have to do is go to the Gothic Bookshop website or come by the store and look at the staff picks table to know what we’ve read lately and enjoyed, but we’d like to know about your favorites. No, really. We are interested. So tell us between now and Dec. 1st – and if your favorite is picked at random, we’ll put it on the staff picks table for the month of December with your name and recommendation on it and you’ll win a $10 gift card to the Gothic.
You all have us at a disadvantage. All you have to do is go to the Gothic Bookshop website or come by the store and look at the staff picks table to know what we’ve read lately and enjoyed, but we’d like to know about your favorites. No, really. We are interested. So tell us between now and Dec. 1st – and if your favorite is picked at random, we’ll put it on the staff picks table for the month of December with your name and recommendation on it and you’ll win a $10 gift card to the Gothic.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Fallings, Nothing More Than Fallings
Winter is coming!
No, I don’t mean that literally, though there were a few flakes in the air today. That is an often thrown about line from one of my favorite fantasy novels. It got me thinking about autumn and about how much more satisfying everything seems to me in the fall/winter seasons; food tastes better, warmth feels warmer, friendships seem deeper, and you guessed it reader books seem more profound.
I have been a long time lover of fantasy novels. While other people were reading the classics like Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, and Wuthering Heights, I was reading The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time. I cut my teeth on fantasy novels. They were the books that gave me a hunger to read. They were the books that made me choose them over television or comics even. I have always had a love affair with fantasy.
So when I say a book like A Game of Thrones is one of my favorite pieces of fantasy you can consider me somewhat of an expert. I don’t claim all knowing Nostradamus like foresight but I do consider myself to be a good recommender in this subject.
The thing that sets Thrones apart from some of the other books in the fantasy genre is complex. Many fantasy novels follow a similar thread. An evil overlord thrusts some young child who is more powerful than they realize into a dangerous situation. Along the way the child is befriended and aided by a wise elder mentor, a strange magical creature, and a rag tag army of misfits and such. In Lord of the Rings for example, the child is Frodo, the evil overlord is Sauron, the elder mentor is Gandalf, and so on. In no way is this a judgment on Tolkien. I firmly accredit Tolkien for starting this “ Great Fantasy Novel Blueprint”.
Back to Thrones, Thrones throws out the single young hero thread by allowing us access to many protagonists. In fact, George R.R. Martin allows us to read the book from 8-12 point of view characters. Some of these characters are protagonists, some antagonists, some fall in a grey area in between, and some start off in one and switch to another. Such is his skill as a writer that in Thrones you may hate a character and by book 3 understand completely why he chose the path he went down.
The many point of view characters allows us not to get fixated on one character as a main entity. Instead we are given a handful of characters that we can identify with on different levels. In Thrones for example, one of the first characters we are introduced to is the head of the Starks of Winterfell, Eddard. Eddard is a family man; he has a loving wife, many kids, and a great family castle called Winterfell. Eddard is someone who you identify as a good man in the books immediately and you want him to succeed in whatever endeavors the writer puts before him.
Eddard is not the only character we get a point of view from. There are his sons and daughters, the king of the land, his bastard son, a strangely grotesque misshapen dwarf who is heir to a large family of Westeros (the land of the books), the dwarfs evil and malicious brother and sister who are quite fond of one another. The differing points of view allow you to judge each character individually. Obviously you will have characters you root for more than others, some that you look forward to reading about more than others.
As an example I identified largely with Jon Snow, Eddards' bastard son. Eddard loves him and treats him like a real Stark but he is keenly aware that he’s not a Stark and this is not his place. There is also Tyrion, the aforementioned dwarf. Tyrion has a brash attitude, he already knows people will be inclined to dislike and underestimate him. He uses this to his advantage by living up to their expectations and saying things that would be considered rude or socially unacceptable.
The deep characters are set against a wonderful world. Martin uses magic very limitedly in Thrones. One of the point of view characters comes from a family of dragon raisers but no dragons have been seen in the land in many years. There are no over the top magicians, magic swords, spell battles, or wands. The weapon of choice in Thrones is political maneuvering and swords and shields.
As a last point to my appreciation of this book, there is a long-standing rule of fantasy that the antagonist is usually going to survive the peril the writer places him in. If not the sequel gets harder to write. Martin makes it obvious by the end of Thrones that he has no problem killing point of view characters dead. This is in a way good and bad. Its good in that there is always a sense of peril for the characters you’re invested in. It’s bad in that he might very well kill one, leaving you frustrated and genuinely angry.
Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, and A Feast for Crows are some of the finest fantasy I have ever read. I could go into more detail about them but I would recommend you just read them yourself but do so knowing that you will get angry, frustrated, laugh, feel joy and perhaps even cry. That is what separates a great fantasy novel from a good one.
So when the skies darken and the snow starts to fall, pull out a nice thick fantasy novel like Thrones and allow yourself the pleasure to slip away into another world, after all this ones just to hard sometimes.
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