Monday, January 17, 2011
Great Essay from Slate magazine about the "one or two spaces after a period" controversy!
Space Invaders
Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period.
By Farhad ManjooPosted Thursday, Jan. 13, 2011, at 6:20 PM ET
SLATE
Last month, Gawker published a series of messages that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had once written to a 19-year-old girl he'd become infatuated with. Gawker called the e-mails "creepy," "lovesick," and "stalkery"; I'd add overwrought, self-important, and dorky. ("Our intimacy seems like the memory of a strange dream to me," went a typical line.) Still, given all we've heard about Assange's puffed-up personality, the substance of his e-mail was pretty unsurprising. What really surprised me was his typography.
Here's a fellow who's been using computers since at least the mid-1980s, a guy whose globetrotting tech-wizardry has come to symbolize all that's revolutionary about the digital age. Yet when he sits down to type, Julian Assange reverts to an antiquated habit that would not have been out of place in the secretarial pools of the 1950s: He uses two spaces after every period. Which—for the record—is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.
Oh, Assange is by no means alone. Two-spacers are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste. You'd expect, for instance, that anyone savvy enough to read Slate would know the proper rules of typing, but you'd be wrong; every third e-mail I get from readers includes the two-space error. (In editing letters for "Dear Farhad," my occasional tech-advice column, I've removed enough extra spaces to fill my forthcoming volume of melancholy epic poetry, The Emptiness Within.) The public relations profession is similarly ignorant; I've received press releases and correspondence from the biggest companies in the world that are riddled with extra spaces. Some of my best friends are irredeemable two spacers, too, and even my wife has been known to use an unnecessary extra space every now and then (though she points out that she does so only when writing to other two-spacers, just to make them happy).
Advertisement
What galls me about two-spacers isn't just their numbers. It's their certainty that they're right. Over Thanksgiving dinner last year, I asked people what they considered to be the "correct" number of spaces between sentences. The diners included doctors, computer programmers, and other highly accomplished professionals. Everyone—everyone!—said it was proper to use two spaces. Some people admitted to slipping sometimes and using a single space—but when writing something formal, they were always careful to use two. Others explained they mostly used a single space but felt guilty for violating the two-space "rule." Still others said they used two spaces all the time, and they were thrilled to be so proper. When I pointed out that they were doing it wrong—that, in fact, the correct way to end a sentence is with a period followed by a single, proud, beautiful space—the table balked. "Who says two spaces is wrong?" they wanted to know.
Typographers, that's who. The people who study and design the typewritten word decided long ago that we should use one space, not two, between sentences. That convention was not arrived at casually. James Felici, author of the The Complete Manual of Typography, points out that the early history of type is one of inconsistent spacing. Hundreds of years ago some typesetters would end sentences with a double space, others would use a single space, and a few renegades would use three or four spaces. Inconsistency reigned in all facets of written communication; there were few conventions regarding spelling, punctuation, character design, and ways to add emphasis to type. But as typesetting became more widespread, its practitioners began to adopt best practices. Felici writes that typesetters in Europe began to settle on a single space around the early 20th century. America followed soon after.
Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. It's one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion designers know to put men's shirt buttons on the right and women's on the left. Every major style guide—including the Modern Language Association Style Manual and the Chicago Manual of Style—prescribes a single space after a period. (The Publications Manual of the American Psychological Association, used widely in the social sciences, allows for two spaces in draft manuscripts but recommends one space in published work.) Most ordinary people would know the one-space rule, too, if it weren't for a quirk of history. In the middle of the last century, a now-outmoded technology—the manual typewriter—invaded the American workplace. To accommodate that machine's shortcomings, everyone began to type wrong. And even though we no longer use typewriters, we all still type like we do. (Also see the persistence of the dreaded Caps Lock key.)
The problem with typewriters was that they used monospaced type—that is, every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space. This bucked a long tradition of proportional typesetting, in which skinny characters (like I or 1) were given less space than fat ones (like W or M). Monospaced type gives you text that looks "loose" and uneven; there's a lot of white space between characters and words, so it's more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule—on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read. Here's the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. First electric typewriters and then computers began to offer people ways to create text using proportional fonts. Today nearly every font on your PC is proportional. (Courier is the one major exception.) Because we've all switched to modern fonts, adding two spaces after a period no longer enhances readability, typographers say. It diminishes it.
Type professionals can get amusingly—if justifiably—overworked about spaces. "Forget about tolerating differences of opinion: typographically speaking, typing two spaces before the start of a new sentence is absolutely, unequivocally wrong," Ilene Strizver, who runs a typographic consulting firm The Type Studio, once wrote. "When I see two spaces I shake my head and I go, Aye yay yay," she told me. "I talk about 'type crimes' often, and in terms of what you can do wrong, this one deserves life imprisonment. It's a pure sign of amateur typography." "A space signals a pause," says David Jury, the author of About Face: Reviving The Rules of Typography. "If you get a really big pause—a big hole—in the middle of a line, the reader pauses. And you don't want people to pause all the time. You want the text to flow."
This readability argument is debatable. Typographers can point to no studies or any other evidence proving that single spaces improve readability. When you press them on it, they tend to cite their aesthetic sensibilities. As Jury says, "It's so bloody ugly."
But I actually think aesthetics are the best argument in favor of one space over two. One space is simpler, cleaner, and more visually pleasing (it also requires less work, which isn't nothing). A page of text with two spaces between every sentence looks riddled with holes; a page of text with an ordinary space looks just as it should.
Is this arbitrary? Sure it is. But so are a lot of our conventions for writing. It's arbitrary that we write shop instead of shoppe, or phone instead of fone, or that we use ! to emphasize a sentence rather than %. We adopted these standards because practitioners of publishing—writers, editors, typographers, and others—settled on them after decades of experience. Among their rules was that we should use one space after a period instead of two—so that's how we should do it.
Besides, the argument in favor of two spaces isn't any less arbitrary. Samantha Jacobs, a reading and journalism teacher at Norwood High School in Norwood, Col., told me that she requires her students to use two spaces after a period instead of one, even though she acknowledges that style manuals no longer favor that approach. Why? Because that's what she's used to. "Primarily, I base the spacing on the way I learned," she wrote me in an e-mail glutted with extra spaces.
Several other teachers gave me the same explanation for pushing two spaces on their students. But if you think about, that's a pretty backward approach: The only reason today's teachers learned to use two spaces is because their teachers were in the grip of old-school technology. We would never accept teachers pushing other outmoded ideas on kids because that's what was popular back when they were in school. The same should go for typing. So, kids, if your teachers force you to use two spaces, send them a link to this article. Use this as your subject line: "If you type two spaces after a period, you're doing it wrong."
Become a fan of Slate and Farhad Manjoo on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.
Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period.
By Farhad ManjooPosted Thursday, Jan. 13, 2011, at 6:20 PM ET
SLATE
Last month, Gawker published a series of messages that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had once written to a 19-year-old girl he'd become infatuated with. Gawker called the e-mails "creepy," "lovesick," and "stalkery"; I'd add overwrought, self-important, and dorky. ("Our intimacy seems like the memory of a strange dream to me," went a typical line.) Still, given all we've heard about Assange's puffed-up personality, the substance of his e-mail was pretty unsurprising. What really surprised me was his typography.
Here's a fellow who's been using computers since at least the mid-1980s, a guy whose globetrotting tech-wizardry has come to symbolize all that's revolutionary about the digital age. Yet when he sits down to type, Julian Assange reverts to an antiquated habit that would not have been out of place in the secretarial pools of the 1950s: He uses two spaces after every period. Which—for the record—is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.
Oh, Assange is by no means alone. Two-spacers are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste. You'd expect, for instance, that anyone savvy enough to read Slate would know the proper rules of typing, but you'd be wrong; every third e-mail I get from readers includes the two-space error. (In editing letters for "Dear Farhad," my occasional tech-advice column, I've removed enough extra spaces to fill my forthcoming volume of melancholy epic poetry, The Emptiness Within.) The public relations profession is similarly ignorant; I've received press releases and correspondence from the biggest companies in the world that are riddled with extra spaces. Some of my best friends are irredeemable two spacers, too, and even my wife has been known to use an unnecessary extra space every now and then (though she points out that she does so only when writing to other two-spacers, just to make them happy).
Advertisement
What galls me about two-spacers isn't just their numbers. It's their certainty that they're right. Over Thanksgiving dinner last year, I asked people what they considered to be the "correct" number of spaces between sentences. The diners included doctors, computer programmers, and other highly accomplished professionals. Everyone—everyone!—said it was proper to use two spaces. Some people admitted to slipping sometimes and using a single space—but when writing something formal, they were always careful to use two. Others explained they mostly used a single space but felt guilty for violating the two-space "rule." Still others said they used two spaces all the time, and they were thrilled to be so proper. When I pointed out that they were doing it wrong—that, in fact, the correct way to end a sentence is with a period followed by a single, proud, beautiful space—the table balked. "Who says two spaces is wrong?" they wanted to know.
Typographers, that's who. The people who study and design the typewritten word decided long ago that we should use one space, not two, between sentences. That convention was not arrived at casually. James Felici, author of the The Complete Manual of Typography, points out that the early history of type is one of inconsistent spacing. Hundreds of years ago some typesetters would end sentences with a double space, others would use a single space, and a few renegades would use three or four spaces. Inconsistency reigned in all facets of written communication; there were few conventions regarding spelling, punctuation, character design, and ways to add emphasis to type. But as typesetting became more widespread, its practitioners began to adopt best practices. Felici writes that typesetters in Europe began to settle on a single space around the early 20th century. America followed soon after.
Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. It's one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion designers know to put men's shirt buttons on the right and women's on the left. Every major style guide—including the Modern Language Association Style Manual and the Chicago Manual of Style—prescribes a single space after a period. (The Publications Manual of the American Psychological Association, used widely in the social sciences, allows for two spaces in draft manuscripts but recommends one space in published work.) Most ordinary people would know the one-space rule, too, if it weren't for a quirk of history. In the middle of the last century, a now-outmoded technology—the manual typewriter—invaded the American workplace. To accommodate that machine's shortcomings, everyone began to type wrong. And even though we no longer use typewriters, we all still type like we do. (Also see the persistence of the dreaded Caps Lock key.)
The problem with typewriters was that they used monospaced type—that is, every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space. This bucked a long tradition of proportional typesetting, in which skinny characters (like I or 1) were given less space than fat ones (like W or M). Monospaced type gives you text that looks "loose" and uneven; there's a lot of white space between characters and words, so it's more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule—on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read. Here's the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. First electric typewriters and then computers began to offer people ways to create text using proportional fonts. Today nearly every font on your PC is proportional. (Courier is the one major exception.) Because we've all switched to modern fonts, adding two spaces after a period no longer enhances readability, typographers say. It diminishes it.
Type professionals can get amusingly—if justifiably—overworked about spaces. "Forget about tolerating differences of opinion: typographically speaking, typing two spaces before the start of a new sentence is absolutely, unequivocally wrong," Ilene Strizver, who runs a typographic consulting firm The Type Studio, once wrote. "When I see two spaces I shake my head and I go, Aye yay yay," she told me. "I talk about 'type crimes' often, and in terms of what you can do wrong, this one deserves life imprisonment. It's a pure sign of amateur typography." "A space signals a pause," says David Jury, the author of About Face: Reviving The Rules of Typography. "If you get a really big pause—a big hole—in the middle of a line, the reader pauses. And you don't want people to pause all the time. You want the text to flow."
This readability argument is debatable. Typographers can point to no studies or any other evidence proving that single spaces improve readability. When you press them on it, they tend to cite their aesthetic sensibilities. As Jury says, "It's so bloody ugly."
But I actually think aesthetics are the best argument in favor of one space over two. One space is simpler, cleaner, and more visually pleasing (it also requires less work, which isn't nothing). A page of text with two spaces between every sentence looks riddled with holes; a page of text with an ordinary space looks just as it should.
Is this arbitrary? Sure it is. But so are a lot of our conventions for writing. It's arbitrary that we write shop instead of shoppe, or phone instead of fone, or that we use ! to emphasize a sentence rather than %. We adopted these standards because practitioners of publishing—writers, editors, typographers, and others—settled on them after decades of experience. Among their rules was that we should use one space after a period instead of two—so that's how we should do it.
Besides, the argument in favor of two spaces isn't any less arbitrary. Samantha Jacobs, a reading and journalism teacher at Norwood High School in Norwood, Col., told me that she requires her students to use two spaces after a period instead of one, even though she acknowledges that style manuals no longer favor that approach. Why? Because that's what she's used to. "Primarily, I base the spacing on the way I learned," she wrote me in an e-mail glutted with extra spaces.
Several other teachers gave me the same explanation for pushing two spaces on their students. But if you think about, that's a pretty backward approach: The only reason today's teachers learned to use two spaces is because their teachers were in the grip of old-school technology. We would never accept teachers pushing other outmoded ideas on kids because that's what was popular back when they were in school. The same should go for typing. So, kids, if your teachers force you to use two spaces, send them a link to this article. Use this as your subject line: "If you type two spaces after a period, you're doing it wrong."
Become a fan of Slate and Farhad Manjoo on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Friday, November 26, 2010
Everything I Know About Writing A Novel (written for my Ryerson Class)
Useful Hints for Writing
or
more or less everything I know, in two pages
1. Write a story that means something to you; that you care about. Write a story only you can write! Otherwise you will not enjoy what you are doing, and you will not bring anything special to it.
2. You don’t have to know everything that happens before you begin, but it’s useful to make some kind of an outline, mapping where you want to go, and to keep filling it and changing and rearranging as you go along, so that you do not lose sight of your intentions, and so that you have the confidence to keep going.
3. Write more detailed instructions to yourself at the end of each bit you’ve finished writing so that you know what to do when you get back to it. Especially if your schedule doesn’t permit you to write every day, it will be a huge relief to read: “Now he has to go into the restaurant and try to guess which of the middle-aged ladies picking at their salads and sipping iced-tea is his birth-mother. Unfortunately, the restaurant is full of middle-aged ladies. He is, in fact, the only man there.” Or whatever.
4. Having an outline will also prevent “writer’s block” because you will always be able to write a bit that takes place earlier or later if you’re not comfortable with what comes next in the linear progression of the plot. But in order to write a random bit out of sequence, you have to know, at least roughly, what the sequence is!
5. Write sketches of all your characters. Make family trees. Get everyone’s ages right, and link their chronology to the time-line of your plot. A lot of this may never get into your finished story, but you still have to know it. It makes a difference whether your character was 5 or 15 when his parents split up, or if she was 14 or 20 when she ran away from home. It makes a difference whether your protagonist had siblings, or grandparents, or lived in the city or on a farm. And so on.
6. And about that city or farm – imagine it fully; again, more fully than necessary. When you see your character stepping outside to get a breath of fresh air, is she on the balcony of a 12th floor downtown condo or standing in a wheat field under an endless prairie sky? You need to be able to see the world of your book, to smell it, and to taste it, not only so that your characters behave appropriately but also so that your readers can inhabit it imaginatively.
7. If you are writing a story set long ago or far away, you may have to do a lot of research. Let the research inform your understanding of the setting and fill you with confidence but don’t let it weigh the story down with tedious exposition. Don’t forget, the people in your story already know all about the place and time they inhabit! Only put in whatever information is necessary so that the reader can understand what is going on too.
8. Avoid clichés not only of speech but of thought; not only of character but of situation. When you reread your work, be vigilant. Consider revising whenever you find laziness and shortcuts; always try to find fresh ways of seeing things and therefore of saying things. AT THE SAME TIME (and this is important) don’t strain after novelty when it isn’t required. Being fresh doesn’t mean using bizarre, ornate, or improbable imagery and obscure language. Sometimes simple language is a knife to the heart.
9. Accept that it may take you a very long time indeed to arrive at a story you are satisfied with. But enjoy the journey! You are getting to improvise, to play make-believe, finally, again, after all these years. Let your mind wander and go down weird digressions; give your characters freedom to become who they must; write descriptions of what fascinates you. And then accept that you will have to trash a lot of what you have written, and start over. As Samuel Beckett says wryly, "Fail again. Fail better."
10. Don’t be precious. Don’t hoard what you’ve written. Know that there will be more where that came from. Respect the story, and let it become better, no matter how much it costs you. Remember: No effort is wasted. You are serving an apprenticeship to a craft. You can only learn to write by writing.
or
more or less everything I know, in two pages
1. Write a story that means something to you; that you care about. Write a story only you can write! Otherwise you will not enjoy what you are doing, and you will not bring anything special to it.
2. You don’t have to know everything that happens before you begin, but it’s useful to make some kind of an outline, mapping where you want to go, and to keep filling it and changing and rearranging as you go along, so that you do not lose sight of your intentions, and so that you have the confidence to keep going.
3. Write more detailed instructions to yourself at the end of each bit you’ve finished writing so that you know what to do when you get back to it. Especially if your schedule doesn’t permit you to write every day, it will be a huge relief to read: “Now he has to go into the restaurant and try to guess which of the middle-aged ladies picking at their salads and sipping iced-tea is his birth-mother. Unfortunately, the restaurant is full of middle-aged ladies. He is, in fact, the only man there.” Or whatever.
4. Having an outline will also prevent “writer’s block” because you will always be able to write a bit that takes place earlier or later if you’re not comfortable with what comes next in the linear progression of the plot. But in order to write a random bit out of sequence, you have to know, at least roughly, what the sequence is!
5. Write sketches of all your characters. Make family trees. Get everyone’s ages right, and link their chronology to the time-line of your plot. A lot of this may never get into your finished story, but you still have to know it. It makes a difference whether your character was 5 or 15 when his parents split up, or if she was 14 or 20 when she ran away from home. It makes a difference whether your protagonist had siblings, or grandparents, or lived in the city or on a farm. And so on.
6. And about that city or farm – imagine it fully; again, more fully than necessary. When you see your character stepping outside to get a breath of fresh air, is she on the balcony of a 12th floor downtown condo or standing in a wheat field under an endless prairie sky? You need to be able to see the world of your book, to smell it, and to taste it, not only so that your characters behave appropriately but also so that your readers can inhabit it imaginatively.
7. If you are writing a story set long ago or far away, you may have to do a lot of research. Let the research inform your understanding of the setting and fill you with confidence but don’t let it weigh the story down with tedious exposition. Don’t forget, the people in your story already know all about the place and time they inhabit! Only put in whatever information is necessary so that the reader can understand what is going on too.
8. Avoid clichés not only of speech but of thought; not only of character but of situation. When you reread your work, be vigilant. Consider revising whenever you find laziness and shortcuts; always try to find fresh ways of seeing things and therefore of saying things. AT THE SAME TIME (and this is important) don’t strain after novelty when it isn’t required. Being fresh doesn’t mean using bizarre, ornate, or improbable imagery and obscure language. Sometimes simple language is a knife to the heart.
9. Accept that it may take you a very long time indeed to arrive at a story you are satisfied with. But enjoy the journey! You are getting to improvise, to play make-believe, finally, again, after all these years. Let your mind wander and go down weird digressions; give your characters freedom to become who they must; write descriptions of what fascinates you. And then accept that you will have to trash a lot of what you have written, and start over. As Samuel Beckett says wryly, "Fail again. Fail better."
10. Don’t be precious. Don’t hoard what you’ve written. Know that there will be more where that came from. Respect the story, and let it become better, no matter how much it costs you. Remember: No effort is wasted. You are serving an apprenticeship to a craft. You can only learn to write by writing.
Friday, October 08, 2010
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Why you should (not) date a writer
offended by rank OBJECTIFICATION of writers
There is this thing currently going around tumblr about why dating a writer is good. I think it’s nice that this thing is going around, because I like writers, and lots of us could use more dates. As a writer who has dated people, though — including other writers — I would like to offer some correctives to this list.
The items in bold are the alleged reasons to date a writer. I have replaced the original commentary with my bleak corrective, in lightface.
1. Writers will romance you with words. We probably won’t. We write for ourselves or for money and by the time we’re done we’re sick of it. If we have to write you something there’s a good chance it’ll take us two days and we’ll be really snippy and grumpy about the process.
2. Writers will write about you. You don’t want this. Trust me.
3. Writers will take you to interesting events. No. We will not. We are busy writing. Leave us alone about these “interesting events.” I know one person who dates a terrific writer. He goes out alone. She is busy writing.
4. Writers will remind you that money doesn’t matter so much. Yes. We will do this by borrowing money from you. Constantly.
5. Writers will acknowledge you and dedicate things to you. A better way to ensure this would be to become an agent. That way you’d actually make money off of talking people through their neuroses.
6. Writers will offer you an interesting perspective on things. Yes. Constantly. While you’re trying to watch TV or take a shower. You will have to listen to observations all day long, in addition to being asked to read the observations we wrote about when you were at work and unavailable for bothering. It will be almost as annoying as dating a stand-up comedian, except if you don’t find these observations scintillating we will think you’re dumb, instead of uptight.
7. Writers are smart. The moment you realize this is not true, your relationship with a writer will develop a significant problem.
8. Writers are really passionate. About writing. Not necessarily about you. Are you writing?
9. Writers can think through their feelings. So don’t start an argument unless you’re ready for a very, very lengthy explication of our position, our feelings about your position, and what scenes from our recent fiction the whole thing is reminding us of.
10. Writers enjoy their solitude. So get lost, will you?
11. Writers are creative. This is why we have such good reasons why you should lend us $300 and/or leave us alone, we’re writing.
12. Writers wear their hearts on their sleeves. Serious advice: if you meet a writer who’s actually demonstrative, be careful.
13. Writers will teach you cool new words. This is possibly true! We may also expect you to remember them, correct your grammar, and look pained after reading mundane notes you’ve left for us.
14. Writers may be able to adjust their schedules for you. Writers may be able to adjust their schedules for writing. Are you writing? Get in line, then.
15. Writers can find 1000 ways to tell you why they like you. By the 108th you’ll be pretty sure we’re just making them up for fun.
16. Writers communicate in a bunch of different ways. But mostly writing. Hope you don’t like talking on the phone — that shit is rough.
17. Writers can work from anywhere. So you might want to pass on that tandem bike rental when you’re on vacation.
18. Writers are surrounded by interesting people. Every last one of whom is imaginary.
19. Writers are easy to buy gifts for. This is true. Keep it in mind when your birthday rolls around, okay?
20. Writers are sexy. No argument. Some people think this about heroin addicts, too.
Alternate solution: it will be pretty much like dating anyone else who likes to do a particular thing, you know?
(Source: 52hearts)
Cite Arrow reblogged from douglasmartini
There is this thing currently going around tumblr about why dating a writer is good. I think it’s nice that this thing is going around, because I like writers, and lots of us could use more dates. As a writer who has dated people, though — including other writers — I would like to offer some correctives to this list.
The items in bold are the alleged reasons to date a writer. I have replaced the original commentary with my bleak corrective, in lightface.
1. Writers will romance you with words. We probably won’t. We write for ourselves or for money and by the time we’re done we’re sick of it. If we have to write you something there’s a good chance it’ll take us two days and we’ll be really snippy and grumpy about the process.
2. Writers will write about you. You don’t want this. Trust me.
3. Writers will take you to interesting events. No. We will not. We are busy writing. Leave us alone about these “interesting events.” I know one person who dates a terrific writer. He goes out alone. She is busy writing.
4. Writers will remind you that money doesn’t matter so much. Yes. We will do this by borrowing money from you. Constantly.
5. Writers will acknowledge you and dedicate things to you. A better way to ensure this would be to become an agent. That way you’d actually make money off of talking people through their neuroses.
6. Writers will offer you an interesting perspective on things. Yes. Constantly. While you’re trying to watch TV or take a shower. You will have to listen to observations all day long, in addition to being asked to read the observations we wrote about when you were at work and unavailable for bothering. It will be almost as annoying as dating a stand-up comedian, except if you don’t find these observations scintillating we will think you’re dumb, instead of uptight.
7. Writers are smart. The moment you realize this is not true, your relationship with a writer will develop a significant problem.
8. Writers are really passionate. About writing. Not necessarily about you. Are you writing?
9. Writers can think through their feelings. So don’t start an argument unless you’re ready for a very, very lengthy explication of our position, our feelings about your position, and what scenes from our recent fiction the whole thing is reminding us of.
10. Writers enjoy their solitude. So get lost, will you?
11. Writers are creative. This is why we have such good reasons why you should lend us $300 and/or leave us alone, we’re writing.
12. Writers wear their hearts on their sleeves. Serious advice: if you meet a writer who’s actually demonstrative, be careful.
13. Writers will teach you cool new words. This is possibly true! We may also expect you to remember them, correct your grammar, and look pained after reading mundane notes you’ve left for us.
14. Writers may be able to adjust their schedules for you. Writers may be able to adjust their schedules for writing. Are you writing? Get in line, then.
15. Writers can find 1000 ways to tell you why they like you. By the 108th you’ll be pretty sure we’re just making them up for fun.
16. Writers communicate in a bunch of different ways. But mostly writing. Hope you don’t like talking on the phone — that shit is rough.
17. Writers can work from anywhere. So you might want to pass on that tandem bike rental when you’re on vacation.
18. Writers are surrounded by interesting people. Every last one of whom is imaginary.
19. Writers are easy to buy gifts for. This is true. Keep it in mind when your birthday rolls around, okay?
20. Writers are sexy. No argument. Some people think this about heroin addicts, too.
Alternate solution: it will be pretty much like dating anyone else who likes to do a particular thing, you know?
(Source: 52hearts)
Cite Arrow reblogged from douglasmartini
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Monday, August 09, 2010
what to do with your books after you get an e-reader
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/magazine/08fob-consumed-t.html
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Monday, November 09, 2009
Friday, October 30, 2009
A few thoughts about lyric poetry
A Few Thoughts about Lyric Poetry
Originally, the lyric was thought of as a song; even today, we call the words that accompany music “lyrics.” Traditionally it was opposed to narrative and dramatic forms of poetry because originally all literature was written in the formal metre we call verse. But these days narrative and drama are written in prose, not verse, so when people talk about poetry they are usually referring only to the lyric, and thinking of the interiorized first-person meditation, usually rather short, that we associate with the Romantics and Moderns: the kind of poem Wordsworth called “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”
Such poetry gives the illusion of privacy: it is usually not directed towards a particular audience but seems to be overheard rather than heard. This stance tends to limit the subject matter to the personal realm; moreover the brevity of the form tends to keep the focus on a single thought, feeling, or situation. It also creates the illusion of spontaneity, thereby allowing the reader to experience the material of the poem as it unfolds in the speakers mind.
“Unlike the drama, whose province is conflict, and unlike the novel or narrative, which connects isolated moments of time to create a story multiply peopled and framed by a social context, the lyric voice speaks out of a single moment in time. ”
- Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time.
This singleness also extends to voice: whereas in narrative and drama we have a clash of different voices as embodied in several different characters, in the lyric poem conflict and contradiction are situated in the mind of a single speaker as internal tensions or ambiguities. The lyric becomes “dramatic” when it presents a struggle between conflicting points of view either within the speaker, or between the poet (implied narrator) and his or her lyric persona.
The lyric provides the occasion to create unified objects of textual beauty and precision far beyond what is possible in longer art forms: every sound, rhythm, and meaning, the pausing and pacing and emphasis, can all work together to create a persuasive experience with nothing extra, nothing out of place, nothing sloppy. On the other hand such intensity limits the range of the lyric; its focus on the “I” (and just as frequently, the “eye”) can seem stifling, leaving out so much that is messy, complex and unresolved, contradictory and vague, in life. One of the reasons there is constant experimentation in poetry is that poets are always seeking ways to solve this dilemma, keeping the aesthetic control and tonal intimacy of poetry without sacrificing the amplitude available in some of the longer art forms.
Originally, the lyric was thought of as a song; even today, we call the words that accompany music “lyrics.” Traditionally it was opposed to narrative and dramatic forms of poetry because originally all literature was written in the formal metre we call verse. But these days narrative and drama are written in prose, not verse, so when people talk about poetry they are usually referring only to the lyric, and thinking of the interiorized first-person meditation, usually rather short, that we associate with the Romantics and Moderns: the kind of poem Wordsworth called “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”
Such poetry gives the illusion of privacy: it is usually not directed towards a particular audience but seems to be overheard rather than heard. This stance tends to limit the subject matter to the personal realm; moreover the brevity of the form tends to keep the focus on a single thought, feeling, or situation. It also creates the illusion of spontaneity, thereby allowing the reader to experience the material of the poem as it unfolds in the speakers mind.
“Unlike the drama, whose province is conflict, and unlike the novel or narrative, which connects isolated moments of time to create a story multiply peopled and framed by a social context, the lyric voice speaks out of a single moment in time. ”
- Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time.
This singleness also extends to voice: whereas in narrative and drama we have a clash of different voices as embodied in several different characters, in the lyric poem conflict and contradiction are situated in the mind of a single speaker as internal tensions or ambiguities. The lyric becomes “dramatic” when it presents a struggle between conflicting points of view either within the speaker, or between the poet (implied narrator) and his or her lyric persona.
The lyric provides the occasion to create unified objects of textual beauty and precision far beyond what is possible in longer art forms: every sound, rhythm, and meaning, the pausing and pacing and emphasis, can all work together to create a persuasive experience with nothing extra, nothing out of place, nothing sloppy. On the other hand such intensity limits the range of the lyric; its focus on the “I” (and just as frequently, the “eye”) can seem stifling, leaving out so much that is messy, complex and unresolved, contradictory and vague, in life. One of the reasons there is constant experimentation in poetry is that poets are always seeking ways to solve this dilemma, keeping the aesthetic control and tonal intimacy of poetry without sacrificing the amplitude available in some of the longer art forms.
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
Saturday, August 15, 2009
I am the guest columnist at ARC this month
with a little piece about a Yehuda Amichai poem that I hope you'll like. Read it at:
http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2009_08_glickman.php
http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2009_08_glickman.php
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Get Me Off This Freaking Moor! great cartoon about the Brontes.
http://beatonna.livejournal.com/109102.html
Friday, July 17, 2009
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Monday, July 13, 2009
I should have known that any superhero I composed would end up sounding like a yoga asana
I went to this website called http://www.cpbintegrated.com/theherofactory/and selected all the traits suitable for my own personal superhero and came up with this dame who they called "Impenetrable Butterfly." Hot Damn! Perhaps after a summer of unlimited Pilates classes, I may resemble her more than I do at the moment...
Monday, July 06, 2009
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
