Follow-ups to my posting on Ronald Knox and his ten “rules” for detective fiction (enjoining writers to play fair with their readers): the origin of the rules; floutings of the rules; and attacks on detective fiction as a genre.
Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category
More detection
April 26, 2015“Cosseted like rare orchids”
April 24, 2015Very briefly noted: in a book review by Christine Smallwood in the May Harper’s,
Reality wasn’t directly relevant,” one character thinks, all too relevantly, in Nell Zink’s manic new novel MISLAID … The fun begins in the hazy 1960s at the all-female Stillwater College, a former plantation decked out with Virginia creeper: “A mecca for lesbians, with girls in shorts standing in the reeds to smoke, popping little black leeches with their fingers, risking expulsion for cigarettes and going in the lake.” One of these lesbians is a would-be playwright named Peggy, and before you can say “freshman orientation,” she’s shacked up with the resident campus queen, a gay male poet and professor named Lee Fleming who lives down the lake and paddles to class in a canoe. Their eventual marriage isn’t exactly a sham — “vestiges of heterosexuality . . . cosseted like rare orchids” produce two children — but neither does it provide what you might term fulfillment.
A wonderful turn of phrase.
Fictobiography
December 29, 2014Today’s Calvin and Hobbes, in which Calvin embarks on writing a book:
Extended discussion (with examples) of two types of fiction/biography crosses in “Memory and fictobiography” of 6/26/10:
(auto)biographical fiction, fiction with an (auto)biographical cast: biofiction for short
fictionalized (auto)biography, (auto)biography with a fictional cast: fictobiography for short
Calvin’s project is fictobiography, heavy on the ficto-.
Paper vs. screens: handwriting
November 12, 2014Briefly noted.
In the latest NewScientist (for11/1/14), a piece by Tiffany O’Callaghan, “Goodbye, paper: What we miss when we read on screen”, subtitled “Digital technology is transforming the way we read and write. Is it changing our minds too – and if so, for better or worse?”. A report on reading and writing on paper vs. on-screen. O’Callaghan observes that, for the most part, there’s been plenty of speculation, but very little conclusive research. We don’t really know much. One notable exception, in a box on the work of neuroscientist Karin James of Indiana Univ.:
Writing freehand, then, seems to be an important part of learning to read – but does the type of handwriting make a difference? Some schools have stopped teaching cursive or joined-up writing. In the US, for instance, it is not part of the national curriculum adopted by 46 states, though it has been reinstated by some states in response to a public outcry. When it comes to learning to read, though, James has found that writing in cursive doesn’t seem to add anything to the mix. “It seems like it’s any kind of creation of a letter by hand that makes the difference,” she says.
That is, the physical action of writing, in whatever style, facilitates learning to read.
feuilletonist?
October 30, 2014My postings on this blog range over a number of topics, and they also take a number of forms. Many of them are relatively short responses to things I’ve overheard, examples I’ve come across in my reading, or linguistic phenomena in the comics. Often light in tone, but with serious linguistic content. What to call this sort of posting?
The New Yorker used to call similar columns casuals; now they appear as items in the “Talk of the Town” section of the magazine. Another label recently came to my attention: the feuilleton. Not entirely perfect, but close. In any case, that would make me a feuilletonist.
Musical talent decomposed
May 7, 2014A cartoon from New Yorker artist Tom Cheney decomposing musical talent into an assortment of distinct abilities, much as style books decompose writing style:
The band has a lot of work to do.
Squiggles
April 1, 2014In the NYT of March 29th, this piece, “In an Era of Squiggles, You Can’t Tell the Players Without a Handwriting Analyst” by Tyler Kepner, about signatures from baseball players.
Another three for the weekend
March 22, 2014Three more cartoons, on varied topics: a Zippy, a Zits, and a Pearls Before Swine:
Three for Pi Day
March 14, 2014Three cartoons this morning: A Dilbert on writing conventions, a Pearls Before Swine with yet another word avalanche (a repeated theme in this strip), and a Zits on reading and listening:
Two Peanuts
February 25, 2014(Or maybe Peanutses.) On Facebook, Jeff Bowles has been posting old Peanuts cartoons. Here are two with some linguistic interest, having to do with writing.
From 3/13/86, on narrative:
(#1)
From 3/14/86, on literary rejection:
(#2)
An earlier, gentler, rejection strip here.