Bobulate

Five unrules for writing

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:04:32 -0400

We All Need Words point out that we hear “That’s not what I was taught at school” are words we hear a lot. They post five unrules:

5. Write short or ‘fragmented’ sentences.
4. Split infinitives.
3. Use contractions (eg that’s instead of that is).
2. Don’t sign off letters with ‘Yours Sincerely if you know the person you’re writing to or ‘Yours Faithfully’ if you don’t.
1. And you can start a sentence with ‘and’ or ‘but’.

And a bonus rule from Kurt Vonnegut:

Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.

Ignore Microsoft Word’s green squiggly line. Dare I say, ignore Word altogether. There. Just in time for school.

Language mapping

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 06:34:00 -0400

Language mapping:

The work of artist Leora Lutz deals with language and the landscape:

I am particularly fascinated with ephemeral and invisible lines,
whether man-made or natural. They reveal secrets of how we interact
with our surroundings or how we communicate with each other:
plane flights that eventually end at a destination,
words that disappear into the void of hearing,
gun shots that travel unseen until impact,
the melting of ice to create a small pool,
a fable gone wrong,
life and death,
a memory.

Most recently she traced the “flight path” of a single word at a time with line drawings:

The word strata was translated into a flight path drawing that is sewn onto the canvas. Each locations coordinates used to calculate the path begin with the letters s-t-r-a-t-a.

If you look to the very bottom of each, you’ll see the atlas lists that generate the flight paths are sewn onto the bottom of each painting. Don’t miss the details of mapping language at large, or small.

On silence-speech

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:43:43 -0400

On silence-speech:

Mr. Palomar’s guidelines for keeping quiet, or rather saying his mind, in public:

In a time and in a country where everyone goes out of his way to announce opinions or hand down judgments, Mr. Palomar has made a habit of biting his tongue three times before assuring anything. After the third bite, if he is still convinced of what he was going to say, he says it. If not, he keeps his mouth shut. In fact, he spends whole weeks, months in silence.

Later:

‘Silence can also be considered a kind of speech, since it is a rejection of the use to which others put words; but the meaning of this silence-speech lies in its interruptions in what is, from time to time, actually said, giving a meaning to what is unsaid. Or rather: a silence can serve to dismiss certain words or hold them in reserve for use on a better occasion. Just as a word spoken now can save a hundred words tomorrow or else can necessitate the saying of another thousand. “Every time I bite my tongue,” Mr. Palomar concludes mentally, “I must think not only of what I am about to say or not say, but also of everything that, whether I say it or do not say it, will be said or not said by others.” Having formulated this thought, he bites his tongue and remains silent.’
—Italo Calvino, “On biting the tongue,” Mr. Palomar In Society

On the second time at the moment.

(thx, Erica)

OK and real New York

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 07:23:46 -0400

OK and real New York:

Adam Gopnick on the feral parakeets of Brooklyn and the people who travel to see them:

Jen often takes the number 2 out from Park Slope, where she lives, to look at the parakeets, and she is often with her boyfriend, Jason. Jen is a birder but a democratic one. As a girl in Fairfax, Virginia, she kept pigeons — real city pigeons. She is a small, intently pretty young woman who has the eager eyes, quick mind, and you’d-be-amazed-how-much-fun-the-subway-can-be avidity of the new New Yorker.

Subways are a space in New York where it’s OK to look at people’s eyes. Not to make eye contact, but to look. “Are you alright? Is everything OK?” I want to ask the woman with the swollen eyes, who’s gripping the baby, uncomfortable, distant. “Is it OK?” I want to ask the bespectacled woman, frantic to study stapled papers over the Venti coffee. “Is anything OK?” I want to ask the newly soaped man with the perfect devices. “Are we OK?” I want to pose the question to the car. But the subway rolls on, and it’s too loud anyway.

“You’d hear them at first, but they’re not hard to see,” Jen says of the parakeets. “They’re real New Yorkers.”

Located in the grounds of Hay Castle, Wales is the Honesty...

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 09:05:46 -0400

Located in the grounds of Hay Castle, Wales is the Honesty Bookshop, a 24-hour open air bookshop where people select books and post the money for them through a small letterbox. Hardbacks at 50p and paperbacks at 30p. The Castle is at Hay-on-Wye, the “town of books,” so much so that according to my guidebook “if you don’t like books, you should certainly avoid Hay-on-Wye.” If you’re of the sort who does, however, be sure to make it out for the Hay Festival of Literature and Arts. (thx, adam)

Pictures of words

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 07:30:00 -0400

Pictures of words:

Photographer Steve Stewart is always looking for the unguarded moment, and has found it most often when people are reading (and part II). His new book explores the relationship between reading and art:

We are familiar with words describing images, but not so familiar with images describing words and the impact reading has on our lives. Artists from Rembrandt to Picasso have explored the interaction of people with their books. Everywhere I go in the world, I see young and old, rich and poor, reading books. Whether readers are engaged in the sacred or the secular, they are, for a time, transported to another world. Reading a good book is a universal activity, and people read while they do just about everything else.

Stewart quoting Susan Sontag:

“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality… ” The same can be said for reading books.

As someone who feels equal parts intimate and a visitor while deep in a book, I love this definition. Perhaps this dichotomy may fare well for some in other places.

An algebra of self-reliance

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 06:45:00 -0400

Over homework, I’d become enraged with my parents, my father in particular, as I’d sit at the kitchen table. “How do you spell XX?” I would ask. “Look it up,” he would reply in stride, continuing to put away dishes, not even glancing in my direction. @#&!%! As if he didn’t know! Off I would go to the dictionary (I remember not which, as at that time, I knew only of The Dictionary) to look up the word. This research repeated many evenings for most of my childhood. I was a stubborn child and continued to ask. He was a principled man and continued with the imperative.

These early moments of wonder (really of frustration first) formed a pattern, the methods surrounding wonder and pathways for answer-finding. They too led to a pattern of independence that was discernible, an algebra of self-reliance, that was easy to sense each time it started to emerge in other places.

Algebras of self-reliance

The lookup wasn’t simply about the word at all, it was the physical movement that was solely instigated by and completed by me. A formula that required me to be here, then there, then here again. The chemistry of stimulation.

I can’t help but mention Twyla Tharp, from whom I borrowed the title, on rituals of self-reliance:

My morning workout ritual is the most basic form of self-reliance; it reminds me that, when all else fails, I can at least depend on myself. It’s my algebra of self-reliance: I depend on my body in order to work, and I am more productive if my body is strong. My daily workout is a part of my preparation for work.

Preparation for work

Each morning, I run. The rule, among others, is that I must do it before the light hits Liberty Island a certain way. My own morning ritual isn’t about speed or pace or distance or stamina or iPods, but about rhythm and routine. A catalyst to convert the night to day. To convert energy to productivity, convert anxiety to activity, convert sweat to skirts. Consistency is what’s been valuable. Everyone has their own.

Moment by moment, the ritual then is our formula. Form it once. Shift it often, even. But use algebra again and again. Wonder will always be close behind.

How to tell if a CEO is lying

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 07:16:32 -0400

How to tell if a CEO is lying:

The Economist summarizes a study from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business showing how to tell when a CEO is lying:

Deceptive bosses, it transpires, tend to make more references to general knowledge (“as you know…”), and refer less to shareholder value (perhaps to minimise the risk of a lawsuit, the authors hypothesise). They also use fewer “non-extreme positive emotion words”. That is, instead of describing something as “good”, they call it “fantastic”. The aim is to “sound more persuasive” while talking horsefeathers.

By analyzing the linguistic features present during 30,000 conference calls by CEOs and CFOs the study also found:

[D]eceptive CEOs use significantly fewer self-references, more third person plural and impersonal pronouns, more extreme positive emotions, fewer extreme negative emotions, and fewer certainty and hesitation words.

Give CEOs a pencil and paper and listen well, and you too can detect horsefeathers.

[via]

The habit of being great and other rules

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 08:06:51 -0400

The habit of being great and other rules:

Paul Graham on what he looks for in a YCombinator application:

We don’t look for any particular thing. We just look for people who have a habit of being great. Just so long as when they do things, they tend to do them well.

That and “be succinct; don’t just blather on ad infinitum,” he points out. Not unlike what Jim Coudal has emphasized about interviews with two candidates when both are equally talented, “I will always hire the one who can write.” So you know.

Design for life

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 23:59:00 -0400

Design for life:

Ultimately all problems of design merge into one great problem: “design for life”. In a healthy society this design for life will encourage every profession and vocation to play its part since the degree of relatedness in all their work gives to any civilization its quality. This implies that it is desirable that everyone should solve his special task with the wide scope of a true “designer” with the new urge to integrated relationships. It further implies that there is no hierarchy of the arts, painting photography, music, poetry, sculpture, architecture, nor of any other fields such as industrial design. They are equally valid departures toward the fusion of function and content in design.

This from László Moholy-Nagy in 1947 in Vision in Motion, a compendium of the modern movement. Moholy-Nagy, best known for teaching at the Bauhaus until 1928, and director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937 until its closing one year later.

Whether in academia or profession — or, more telling, places that blur the lines between — as relevant now as it was then, if not more so.

"[T]here are two kinds of purposes. The purpose of having a result, something that exists after the..."

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 22:37:31 -0400

“[T]here are two kinds of purposes. The purpose of having a result, something that exists after the process is stopped, and does not exist until it has stopped, … and there is the purpose of carrying on, of keeping the process going, just as one may breathe so as to continue breathing. The purpose is to carry on.”

- John Chris Jones, Welsh designer and author of book Design Methods. Hurry off to read the full text. [via]

Email, Einstein, and the presence of power laws

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 09:42:06 -0400

Email, Einstein, and the presence of power laws:

Albert-László Barabási shows that no matter what we think about our spontaneity, randomness does not rule our lives:

At first sight, we would not expect our e-mail patterns to show any similarities. Some people send only a few e-mails a week; others close to a hundred each day; some peek at their e-mail only once a day. Still others practically sleep with their computers. This is why it was surprising that, when it comes to e-mail, everybody appears to follow exactly the same pattern. Indeed, looking at the times between e-mails, no one obeyed a Poisson distribution. Instead, no matter the person, their behaviour followed what we call a “power law”.

But:

[A] power law predicts that most e-mails are sent within a few minutes of one other, appearing as a burst of activity in our e-mailing pattern. But the power law also foresees hours or even days of e-mail silence. In the end, the patterns of our e-mailing follow an inner harmony, where short and long delays mix into a precise law — a law that you probably never suspected you were subject to, that you never made an effort to obey, and that you most likely never even knew existed in the first place.

Einstein himself, Barabási’s studies showed, exhibited this “burstiness,” even though he averaged more than one letter written per day, weekends, included, over the course of his adult life. I like this though: hours or even days of email silence as “inner harmony,” rather than words others might be using as they wait for you to respond.

The illusion of literalness

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 06:10:00 -0400

The illusion of literalness:

Jay Rubin (translator of much of Haruki Murakami’s work) on the challenge of translating Japanese:

[He] offers up two sample translations of a paragraph in the Murakami short story “The 1963/1982 Girl from Ipanema.” He notes that while one version is awkward and the other smooth, both are linguistically equidistant from the original Japanese. The awkward version just has an “illusion of literalness” simply because it isn’t as good.

Then Rubin offers up a real literal translation of the same paragraph. English loan words are in italics.

Literal:
High school’s corridor say-if, combination salad think-up. Lettuce and tomato and cucumber and green pepper and asparagus, ring-cut bulb onion, and pink-colour’s Thousand Island dressing. No argument high school corridor’s hit-end in salad specialty shop exists meaning is-not. High school corridor’s hit-end in, door existing, door’s outside in, too-much flash-do-not 25 metre pool exists only is.

Here’s one of the translations Rubin offers — the more literary one.

Published:
When I think of my high school’s corridor, I think of combination salads: lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, asparagus, onion rings, and pink Thousand Islands dressing. Not that there was a salad shop at the end of the corridor. No, there was just a door, and beyond the door a drab 25-metre pool.

Two people pass one another on the street. “How are you? one says. Or perhaps, “What are you up to?” It doesn’t really matter. “Fine,” we respond. “Nothing.” Or worse, “How are you?” the other responds in return, not even responding with anything more than a question. These provocations are greeting defaults, our greeting autopilot, as we try to move forward with our days.

Perhaps any answer would be linguistically equidistant from a true response, as nickmamatas says, since the initial question wasn’t seeking a true answer anyway. When we receive a less than “fine” response to a greeting, it’s curious for us to consider which now feels literal and which just the illusion of literalness. Translation is hard work.

[via]

Occupational alphabets

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 11:17:00 -0400

Occupational alphabets:

John Ptak explores occupations that have not survived through an exploration of the alphabet:

Its interesting to see what jobs have survived over the years, and what jobs haven’t — particularly those jobs that would have been so widespread and popular that they would be instantly recognized by a child — so much part of the common culture that the initial letter of the job’s name could be used to help children learn the alphabet.

This version of commonplace employment found in a child’s alphabetical primer around 1850 lists the following professions:

[A]le brewer, auctioneer, armourer, artist, bookseller, butcher, baker, cooper, carpenter, cutler, dyer, dairyman, engraver, engineer, fishmonger, fiddle(r), florist, grocer, glazier, hatter, hawker, horse dealer, ironmonger, jeweller, knife-maker, knitter, letter-founder, lace-maker, locksmith, milliner, miner, merchant, nurse, newsman, oilman, optician, omnibus, pastry-cook, physician, rope-maker, rider, shoemaker, shipwright, scavenger, slater, surgeon, sawyer, saddler, tailor, turner, tanner, tinker, upholsterer, vintner, wharfinger, wax-chandler, yeoman, youth, zoologist.

See also:
Revisions to Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever, 1963 vs 1991 editions

Some of these professions are just gone (47 of the 59 are still around, he notes). Another book introduces children to occupational rhyming couplets, as in the “Amusing Alphabet for Children.” Elsewhere, he uncovers and terms the “Dada Alphabet,” monuments to quiet bits:

[N]on-sequiturs taken out of context and which — once placed on a their own stage and on their own easel in the strong Borges tradition of the reader making the book.

These come from a self-teaching book for German vocabulary in 1879 and stand as unexpected, strong, and a favorite.

[Image: Kantner’s Illustrated Book of Objects and Self-Educator in German and English, 1879 via]

Tag off

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 11:41:00 -0400

My mother wouldn’t remove the tags from items for quite a long time. She’d save our purchases — any new items — until some future, unidentified date. The practice bedeviled me.

The items, still packaged and stored on a too-high shelf, tempted us. At the time, I believed she believed this taught us the virtue of waiting. But in fact what it taught us was the value of stewardship.

Later on, I regarded these exercises as calisthenics for what was to come. Our ability to judge when to exercise restraint and good judgment is one of the only true virtues we have. Whether it’s deciding whether to abandon the responsibilities of ownership or take on new ones, to take the last xx or to take on a new one, ownership becomes stewardship, and it’s a responsibility that comes with a relationship with things, however transient.

See also:
Speaking of the nearly 1980s, insights on waiting.

The physical item decision, then, is almost inconsequential. Tags need to be taken off with abandon. But our ability, our generosity — with people, with ideas, — isn’t to be stored and saved for some future unidentified date. It should be used and shared until it’s threadbare, and then some. Take the tags off.

Conversational marginalia

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:45:00 -0400

Conversational marginalia:

Ryan Freitas on 35 lessons he’s learned so far:

My father always told me that the day we stop learning is the day we die. I wrote this as a sort of preparation for my 35th birthday last week. Some of these are poignant, others are simply trite; I attribute the latter to my growing sense of sentimentality as I age.

For example:

Your reputation is more important than your paycheck, and your integrity is worth more than your career.

I’ve always been impressed with Ryan’s stunning ability to put into words what others cannot name. He sees clarity where others only, even sort of, see a gray area. I’ve taken to keeping our conversational marginalia, best I can explain it — sentences on Post-Its — of this wisdom. This from him from a snippet of a past conversation, “When I’m throwing everything into the incinerator, I occasionally stop to make something beautiful.” If conversations had margins, their residue would be on my desktop. And sometimes I get to stop to read. Thanks Ryan.

A photograph from Fordlandia, Henry Ford’s 1927 failed attempt...

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 07:50:50 -0400

A photograph from Fordlandia, Henry Ford’s 1927 failed attempt to recreate the American small town deep in the jungle of Brazil. But ultimately, [An] “undertaking that had cost Ford upwards of $200 million dollars was abandoned. … Ford had tried not simply control rubber production, but to export the American way life, to force his will on the natural world, and both respects he failed colossally.” Then and now.

The extraordinary of doing 'being ordinary'

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 23:42:00 -0400

The extraordinary of doing 'being ordinary':

Alain de Botton on distraction:

One of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is the task of relearning how to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.

The obsession with current events is relentless:

We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere on the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties — something that, if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellows. We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture — and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.

We need to diet, he advises. And indeed, if we do not dwell on both on what is extraordinary about the ordinary and that there could be — at any moment — risk of volcanic proportions, we will go assuming that tomorrow will be just like today. Through stacks of unread books, seas of feeds, people, invitations, events, and unanswered emails, if we stand still long enough, if we listen and look, if we pause, we see that nothing is ever the same again tomorrow. And that is mostly extraordinary.

Eight variations on being thwarted

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 12:53:00 -0400

Eight variations on being thwarted :

Kathleen Rooney on her stance on “persistent optimism,” as one of the qualities of poet Kees’ work:

An optimist is one of the saddest things a person can be. …. a person can’t become so bitter and disappointed if he didn’t start out full of hope.

Regarding him:

I get the sense of someone who knows full well that he ought to hope for the best and expect the worst, but who can’t quite force himself to do that. Even though he is sophisticated and knows that what he expects is impossible, he can’t help but keep wanting the world to be better than it is — that people should be kinder to one another, that the government should be more just, that humane behavior toward other people should be returned and maybe even rewarded — and inevitably, he keeps being thwarted in these desires.

I believe there are more than eight variations on being thwarted, but it’s a start.

"When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but a vague spot a little east of Kansas. I think..."

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 16:58:00 -0400

“When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but a vague spot a little east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him.”

- John Updike, The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, the Art of Writing, and Everything Else in the World Since 1953 cf. “Throw that draft away. Write a new outline. Go over your notes. Re-interview a few people. Realize, as if you hadn’t realized this a thousand times before (most recently, a few minutes before) that your own big ideas about this story are pathetic, but this list of details and the more decent quotations from the interviews — there’s some pretty good stuff in there. Fiddle with writing a few more paragraphs. Microwave your cold cup of coffee for the third time. Go over your notes again. Yell irrationally at your spouse/child/dog/a bare wall. Now, kick the wall. Limp. Review all the transcribed interviews one more time from beginning to end. Paste a large sheet of paper to a wall and, standing up with a fresh cup of coffee in your hand, outline the piece in really big letters. Realize that you’ve misunderstood the point of the entire story all this time.” —Jack Hitt, from an interview, Part II