reading

Wordsmithing

I love words. What’s not to love? There appears to be a never-ending supply of them. If you Google “How many words are in the English language?”, you get answers like this one: “There is no single sensible answer to this question. It’s impossible to count the number of words in a language, because it’s so hard to decide what actually counts as a word.” (oxforddictionaries.com)

Good writers have an almost cosmic-size vocabulary.  Mine’s pretty limited in comparison, especially going by some of the words I’ve been noting down in a couple of books I’ve read recently; words I either loved the beauty of – the way they form in the mouth, or the sound they make – or had never seen before and had to look up the meaning of. Here’s a selection of recent ones: sophistry, alembics, capricious, palpebra, crepitation, eidolon, astrakhan, lachrymose.

But the difference between a good writer and a great writer is not the size of their vocabulary, it’s the way they use words.

Great writers bring words together, extra-ordinary and very ordinary, in ways that enlighten our minds, imagination and our hearts. They create new worlds, challenge us to think differently about our existing one, or simply make us discover parts of ourselves buried deep under layers of years, routine or mass media messages.

They understand the power of grammar.  The subtle, but no less impactful, way it alters meaning or sets the dynamic, tone or pace of a message.

They wield metaphor, alliteration, onomatopoeia and other literary devices taught in high school English like a maestro guides a symphony orchestra.

In W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, for example, the conversations Philip Carey has with the drunk poet Cronshaw are a case in point.  They are the very essence of the book, even the name of the book reflects them.  Maugham is clever, his writing smooth, weaving simple words to guide the reader through complex ideas of philosophy, faith, dogma and politics.  He’s also funny, “You’re not a bad fellow, but you won’t drink.  Sobriety disturbs conversation“.

It’s why I love great books and advocate, in my small way, for a world where we celebrate intelligent writers and voracious readers rather than tolerate dumbed-down, lazy, mediocre writing.

But don’t mistake it for wordsmithing.

I was thanked for wordsmithing a proposal for one of my teams at work recently.  While well-intentioned, this really bothered me.  Wordsmithing carries with it an implication you’re just superficially micromanaging some words. That’s not what I had done.  The author’s ideas were completely buried in awful syntax, dreadful presentation and complete ignorance of grammar. I did not play with some wording, I rescued his ideas, pulling them out of quicksand. His ideas deserved to be rescued.

Francis Bacon once said “knowledge is power”.  It’s seductive in its simplicity and apparent self-evident nature.  But I’ve always thought it was hogwash.

Acquiring knowledge and doing nothing with it is intellectually anaemic. The use of knowledge is power. Until then it is no more powerful than ignorance.

It’s the same with words.  On their own they are nothing more than letters on a page.  But an idea well articulated can be the most powerful thing on the planet.  So here’s to a world where words are combined with intelligence and grace presenting ideas that make our minds leap and hearts soar.

Waving the white flag

I’m really competitive; not what you would describe as mucho, Wolf of Wall Street competitive.  I do play sport – tough, physically demanding, contact sport – and as a young man I was the guy on the court or pitch who would argue with a referee/umpire convinced that he was variously blind or biased and very often both.  It’s not something I am particularly proud of, just part of my experience growing up.  While I may never completely grow up I  am well past this stage of my life.

No, I am more the kind of person who just really hates mediocrity and mediocrity in myself is not something I am comfortable with.  And that’s a problem, as it leads to chronic procrastination, not wanting to start something until I am absolutely convinced I can be moderately successful, and certainly never last or the worst at anything. Geez, I sound like a real piece of work.

When it comes to reading, I like to think I’m pretty widely read.  I absorb anything that comes my way like a gravitational singularity inside a black hole absorbs matter.  While studying a post-graduate degree I loved reading detailed, highly technical academic journals and I’m a veracious ‘Googler”, reading up on anything that spikes my curiosity from quarks to syllogistic logic, and sometimes I even understand what they’re talking about.

That’s why it is so hard to admit I have been defeated; resoundingly, thoroughly and completely defeated.  I tried, I really tried.  My form was flawless and nothing I had faced got close to bettering me.  But in this case I wasn’t good enough.  And the protagonist of this humiliating defeat is a book.

What makes it worse is that this book is described by some critics as the most important book of the 20th Century, James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The first time I picked it up I was really looking forward to it.  Of course I had the usual trepidation I feel faced with a monster read – it is long, very long, at 933 pages (see my previous post, I’m a coward) – but I’ve read Joyce before.  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a modernist masterpiece of creative, intellectually stimulating poetic prose.  I devoured it, enjoyed it and even understood it.  But Ulysses was too much for my feeble mind.  It is opaque and reading it is like wading through quicksand.

Since then I’ve tried twice more and each time I haven’t got past page 137 (of 933) … that’s less than 15%, not even close to a 50% pass mark.

Sure, the language is complicated.  In the process of writing Ulysses Joyce effectively invented a new dialect of English.  According to Wikipedia he used 30,030 different words out of the 265,000 words in the book.  But I’ve read complicated, modernist books before, so this can’t be it.

May be it’s because of its parallels to Homer’s poem Odyssey, which has been translated in to English dozens, if not hundreds of times, over hundreds of years.  I’ve read a little of the Illiad, but none of Odyssey and Joyce apparently once wrote to his aunt Josephine that, ‘If you want to read Ulysses you had better first get or borrow from a library a translation in prose of the Odyssey of Homer.’.

May be I just didn’t get in to the story or Leopold Bloom.  The ‘hero’ is indifferent and in the 137 pages of I have read of the novel I just haven’t warmed to him.  Or it could be that each time I have tried to read it, it has been at night, before going to bed; Ulysses could be a day time book, needing the soft warmth of the sun and higher ultraviolet or infrared light; may be the production of vitamin D helps an unmalleable mind be shaped in to a form capable of appreciating the story.  Now I’m clutching at straws.

Whatever it is, it has beaten me.

The book still sits on my book shelf, in fact right at the top of a pile of similarly silvery-spined books I have managed to consume my wife has curated on our colour-coded shelves.

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One day I may be ready to read it, but I suspect I’ll procrastinate for many years to come.  In the meantime I have waved the white flag.

I’m a coward

There are a lot of things in this world to be scared of – spiders, snakes, terrorism, Britney Spears.  Books shouldn’t be one of them.

But I have to confess I am a bit of a coward when it comes to some books.

I wrote in a previous contribution about how I often choose books because of their cover or title (You Can Judge a Book By Its Cover).  If you haven’t tried it yet, you should.  But I omitted to say that I will also judge a book by another superficial criteria – how thick it is. If it’s thicker than two of my fingers, then I balk – I’m a coward and a wimp.

I look at the book, it looks at me.  Everything else around goes out of focus; all I see is the spine of the book in wide-screen, high-definition, digital, Blu-Ray clarity.  I hear a faint buzzing sound in my ears and the thump thump of my rapidly increasing pulse.  I break out in a cold sweat and I’m almost overcome with a wave of self loathing – “you nob” I think “you’re such a hypocrite – an intellectual snob on one hand, yet you don’t have the balls to tackle a really meaty story.  What a lightweight!  Ohh poor you, your hand will get sore and it will take you a while to read it and it will be heavy in your bag … boo hoo you little baby”.  Well that last part might be an exaggeration, but you get the picture.

And even if I do close my eyes, grit my teeth and go against all instinct and buy the book, I can never quite shake the feeling.

A number of years ago I read Illywhacker by Peter Carey.  When I bought it, it met all of my criteria – great title, great cover, an author I have been encouraged to read for years – everything; except it is a monster of a book.  To my eyes it’s a foot thick, weighs in at 150 kgs, is written in 4pt font single spaced and the page edges are intermittently serrated or razor-sharp.  Each day I would pull it out of my bag and I’d think I’m never going to finish it and even if I do I’ll be 87 and won’t have remembered what happened at the start of the book, so I’ll have to read it again.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it.  I read all 817 pages (I feel nauseous) and it was a great read.  Not many authors can use words the way Carey can.  It’s clever, funny, well researched etc etc.  But even today, it frightens the living hell out of me.  I’m tired even thinking about it.

Now, years later, the feeling is still there.  When considering the prospect of a long book I look like Homer Simpson faced with a day without doughnuts or Paris Hilton faced with the prospect of wearing polyester – totally and completely petrified and out of my depth.

Other books like 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (925 pages) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (933 pages) had just the same effect, worse in fact in the case of Ulysses, and if I can bring myself to, I’ll make that the subject of a future blog all it’s very own.

Now excuse me while I get back to enjoying the 201 pages of Vladimir Nabokov’s Bend Sinister.