Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Name the Author

Here are four quotes on the topic of literature by the same author. Each provides an insight into the author's personality and therefore a clue. Without cheating by using a Google search, do you want to venture a guess what author it is?

"In literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original; whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."

"Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become."

"A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading."

"You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me."

Friday, August 22, 2008

Regional Language

I look for phrases unique to regions of the U.S. Having lived in seven states, I found one phrase unique to north Arkansas (I may have written about this before). When someone in the rest of the country says he wouldn't "care to" do something it means he doesn't want to do it. In fact, it is a polite way of refusing to do it. "I wouldn't care to attend the lecture" means "I won't attend the lecture."

But in north Arkansas "care to" means you're happy to do something. "I don't care to carry you to the Wal-Marts" means "I'd be happy to drive you to Wal-Mart."
The "carry" part sounds odd to many ears as well. But in rural areas the word "carry" is common for "drive." I've heard it from Minnesota to Texas. And "the Wal-Marts" is common, if incorrect, in many places.

Another phrase I've heard only in Arkansas: "That was so good (speaking of someone's cooking) it makes me slap my grandma." Has anyone heard that one elsewhere?

"Fixin'" for "preparing" is common in the South. "I'm fixin' to fry me up a mess of turnip greens." I think "fixin'" is actually growing in popularity and moving into the mainstream.

Know of any other words or phrases unique to a small geographic area? Do you find any regional words or phrases particularly charming? Or grating?

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Writing Adventure

Do any of these describe your writing?

Robert Louis Stevenson:
"The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean."

Winston Churchill:
"Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him out to the public."

Saul Bellow:
"You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write."

Henry David Thoreau:
"Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience."

Friday, August 15, 2008

Journalists

The late New Yorker writer Abbot Joseph Liebling had this claim to fame:
"I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better."
So there.

Another journalists, H.L. Mencken, wrote:
"Why authors write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or a cow stands patiently while a farmer burglarizes her."

Speaking of journalism, Oscar Wilde penned this jewel:
"The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read."
Ouch.

And if that's not too close to home, here's one from an unknown source published Robert Byrnes' "The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Every Said":
"All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hills after the battle is over and shoot the wounded."

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Lousy Writers

Another author's view on one of his own:
The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.
— Robert Graves

The late author and Harper's magazine editor Russell Lynes wrote:
Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.

Mark Twain:
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.

Got a favorite author quote? How about a non-author quote?

A while back I asked readers to submit a statement that summarized their approach to writing. Here's one from Peyton Place author Grace Metalious:
I'm a lousy writer; a helluva lot of people have got lousy taste.

Something's appealing about such stark honesty and brevity.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Hopefully

A company advertises on the radio that its product can "prevent identity theft BEFORE it happens."
As opposed to after?
Now that would be some product.
"Prevent accidents after they happen with the Time Machine from Sharper Image!"

Should we give up on "hopefully"? It is used so often to mean "I hope" and so seldom as its dictionary definition "full of hope" that maybe it's time to surrender. Hopefully, it won't lead to the disintegration of the entire English language.

If something is destroyed the destruction is complete. "Completely" is unnecessary. "Partially destroyed" is an oxymoron. The correct word is "damaged."

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

European view

Which 20th century American author called Mark Twain "... a hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven 'sure fire' literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy."

Answer: William Faulkner.
Who else would be so arrogant? Was he unaware of Twain's immense popularity in Europe?


I wrote today on Aleksanr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian author who died Sunday. I recommend that you read his speech "A World Split Apart," delivered in June 1978 at Harvard, creating quite a stir. Just do a Google search. The speech is an insightful look at American culture, just as applicable today as 30 years ago. He brings the objectivity of a non-native born observer, in much the same was as the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville did a century and a half earlier.

It has been years since I tackled Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago," the book that did more than any other to expose the brutality of communism. In this time when idealists talk about "saving the world," this Russian writer might actually have done it.

Monday, August 4, 2008

Ouch

Answers to Friday's quiz.

Here's what five famous writers had to say about five other famous authors.

1. Leo Tolstoy wrote: The undisputed fame enjoyed by Shakespeare as a writer ... is, like every other lie, a great evil.
2. Edgar Allan Poe wrote this about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: His didactics are all out of place. He has written brilliant poems, by accident; that is to say, when permitting his genius to get the better of his conventional habit of thinking.
3. Virginia Woolf wrote this about James Joyce: The work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
4. George Orwell wrote this about Aldous Huxley: Huxley's book ... is awful. And do you notice that the more holy he gets, the more his books stink with sex? he cannot get off the subject of flagellating women.
5. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote this: Nathaniel Hawthorne's reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact, because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man.

And here's a bonus. Which 20th century American author called Mark Twain "... a hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven 'sure fire' literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy."


Confession time.
I awoke at 3 a.m. Saturday and sat bolt upright. I suddenly remembered misspelling a word in Sunday's column. I used "bare arms" for "bear arms." I got up and put the dictionary on my dresser next to my keys as a reminder to drive down to the office and correct it later in the morning. That was so I could go back to sleep. Unfortunately, I was stewing and couldn't sleep, so I read for a couple of hours before finally nodding off. When I got to the office at about 9 a.m. I found that one of the editors had already found and corrected the error. Whew.

That's one of the curses of this business, at least for me. Many times when I was publishing my own weekly newspaper I awoke in the middle of the night on deadline day and realized I had made an error. Back then I would drive to the office and correct it right away, since a courier would be driving the grids — the pasted-up pages — to the printer early in the morning.

Why did I make the error to start with? And why did it not enter my consciousness until the middle of the night? Your guess is as good as mine.


Here's Sunday's column for that immense audience of readers who both want to read it and missed it in the paper.

Football is the only sport; all other contests are games

How can Barack Obama claim to care about the serious problems facing this country but do nothing to solve America's most immediate crisis — getting Brett Favre back onto the playing field? All Obama talks about is ending the war, solving the energy crisis, getting free health care to the poor, blah, blah, blah.

Uh, heLLO! Training camp has started!

OK, I admit I get a little obsessed every year at this time. I'm worried that the preseason games won't be televised because of that little, you know, whaddayacallit track meet in China. Priorities, please.

I'm not saying football is the only sport. I enjoy some of the other games myself. In the off-season. There's nothing more relaxing than sitting in the bleachers at a ball park with a dog and brew on a warm summer evening watching a game of baseball. Once in awhile something mildly interesting happens on the field.

And basketball's not all bad. A close game, with the crowd on its feet, can really get the heart pumping. Except at the end when it's all free throws and timeouts, stretching 10 seconds into an excruciating hour and a half. Snore.

Even hockey can be exciting — until they break from punching each other's brains out to skate around with that ridiculous little puck.

I've been told there's even a sport where the players try to kick a ball down the field and into a big net, and they never use their hands. I'm not sure I believe it. Why would anyone make up a game like that? And if they did, who would watch it? The players would probably score, like, one point in a whole game. You might get distracted by watching the grass grow, which would be more exciting.

But not football. Football is more than just a sport. It is the essence of being. Football is to other sports what Elvis is to other singers. What the great white shark is to other fish. What the Grand Canyon is to other gullies.

In what other sport can you see one guy make a bone-jarring hit on another, drive him into the dirt and send his helmet flying, and not get a penalty? He might even get a sticker on his helmet for "lick of the week." And the reverse, in what other game would the coach bench you for failing to hit somebody?

Nothing in baseball compares to that. You've got a guy sliding into third who then stands up and brushes off the dirt. Brushes it off! While everyone else on the field waits. Did you ever see a 290-pound defensive tackle brush the mud off his jersey? Or the blood?

In basketball, a defensive player tries to draw a charge by falling backwards after a little bump by some guy driving to the basket. What the heck is that? If it were a real sport the guy on defense would body slam the guy on offense and then jump on the ball.

Track and field, which in some Third World countries is actually considered sport, is worse. You've got people running around on a soft rubber track in their underwear. First one across the line wins. Real captivating. The runners have to stay in their own lanes, and no elbowing. At least in roller derby you get to jostle the other players. What kind of sport makes you keep you hands to yourself? If we weren't supposed to bump others we wouldn't be born with forearms.

The only track and field event that doesn't have people snoring after five minutes is the pole vault, and that's only because there's a chance something might go wrong when the vaulter is 18 feet in the air. I mean, you've got some guy whose entire goal is to run a few yards with a pole to vault over a bar and land on a soft cushion. Nobody is even trying to stop him.

Hey, put some pads on him and let him break through a couple of lines of defenders on the way to the vault. Better yet, put another pole vaulter out there going the opposite way at the same time. And sharpen the ends of the poles. Call it the lance vault. Only one guy survives to reach his bar.

Oh, and get rid of those cushions. In football, does the receiver leaping into the air at the back of the end zone need a cushion to land on? Of course not. And he's about to get hit.

As for that that alleged game where they kick the ball down the field, at least put some boxing gloves on the players. If they can't touch the ball anyway, you might as well give them something to do with their hands — like punch the opposing players. People might actually come out for a game like that.

Football doesn't have to be the only sport worth watching. But it will be until they take a lesson from the gridiron and spice up the other games with a little contact.

Yeah. I'm ready for some football.

Friday, August 1, 2008

Writers on Writers

Name the writer who made each of these statements about another writer:

1. The undisputed fame enjoyed by Shakespeare as a writer ... is, like every other lie, a great evil.
2. (On Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) His didactics are all out of place. He has written brilliant poems, by accident; that is to say, when permitting his genius to get the better of his conventional habit of thinking.
3. (On James Joyce) The work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
4. (On Aldous Huxley) Huxley's book ... is awful. And do you notice that the more holy he gets, the more his books stink with sex? he cannot get off the subject of flagellating women.
5. Nathaniel Hawthorne's reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact, because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man.