Author: J.S. Bangs

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1. I already have a change of NaNoWriMo plans. The story for week #3 will not be Whalesong, as previously written into the schedule, but rather There Is No Such Place As Canada. It’s a story about oppression, specifically the oppression of Canadians. It should be a riot. Week four, then, is a wildcard, in which I write any story whose plot comes to me in time, but the current candidates are either Whalesong or The Blasphemous, the Cruel, and the Weak.

2. So evidently there’s some kind of election coming up? Based on the coverage, it appears that the candidates are a notorious international anarcho-terrorist and a rapacious, black-hearted banker who wears funny underwear. Plus there are third-party candidates, who are hilarious. So I’m encouraging everyone to do their part for democracy and not vote.

3. Jim Hines has a good NaNo pep talk. So do lots of other people, for that matter. See, NaNoWriMo would be a good thing you could do instead of voting next Tuesday. I have your best interests in mind.

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It’s coming. Can you feel it? It sounds like thousands of keyboards being battered all at once, their keys clattering, crying, and falling silent. You can smell it on the wind. The smell of imagination, the incense of hope, and the bitter smoke of despair. The writers approach, their eyes wide, their fingers trembling, and on their lips the mantra: fifty thousand, fifty thousand, fifty thousand.

NaNoWriMo.

I’ve plunged into the madness of NaNoWriMo once before, and emerged, miraculously, victorious. I’m told there are not many that succeed on their first foray into that ravenous land. On that occasion I was writing a novel, The Failed Apostle, and I successfully penned its first 60,000 words that November. It was very hard. I was very glad I did it.

I am foolish enough to try again, after a fashion.

This time I do not have a novel which I would like to begin. I do, however, have another kid, and a larger and more pressing set of responsibilities. Examining my current projects and the realities of my schedule, I have put myself another, more realistic goal: I shall write four short stories in the month of November. One each week.

All together, these stories will probably not total more than 20,000 words—but this is hardly the point. As any short story writer will tell you, 2,000 words of short story may take as much effort as 20,000 words from a novel. Your canvas is smaller, and so your attention to detail must be greater. Under current conditions, writing a full rough draft of a story normally takes me much more than a week, so this will still be a significant challenge to my dedication and time. I think it will be worth it.

As with last time, I do not go into battle unprepared. I have chosen which stories I will write, and slotted them into a schedule.

  1. The Heresy Trial of Friar Travolo, about a monk who proves a thesis which is scandalous to the mathematical authorities of his day. This one is cheating, somewhat, since I already have it half-written. I do not care, though. It’s a difficult story for me to write, somewhat outside my usual oeuvre, and finishing it within its allotted week will be challenge enough.

  2. Mr. Yamamoto’s Night Janitorial and Demon-Hunting Service, about a young man who is trained to empty the trash bins and, if necessary, exorcise them. This one I have pretty clearly plotted in my head. It’s something of a satire.

  3. Whalesong, a story about (obviously) sunspots. This one is only a vague idea, yet.

  4. The Blasphemous, the Cruel, and the Weak. I have no idea what this one is about. I only have the title, which I love, but I still have to discover what the plot is.

Nor do I expect that I will have finished with these stories by the end of the month. It is enough that they be complete; making them be good is the task of the months to follow.

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Time for another toddler language update! Today’s topic: gender agreement and past tenses.

For the most part, my younger son doesn’t exhibit have any gender agreement yet. He has only a handful of adjectives, and for they’re fixed forms, usually the masculine. However, there’s one word that he has acquired in the feminine form: obosită "tired".(The reason for this acquisition is that the word is most often applied to his mother. Yes, that sounds like a bad joke, but it’s true.)

This leads to some amusing mismatches, as when he says of himself Sebi obosită ("Sebi is tired [fsg]"), or when he talks about the horses near our house and says Cai obosită ("The horses [mpl] are tired [fsg]"). We do usually correct him when he makes mistakes of this sort, but as you might expect this isn’t terribly effective.

The other exciting development is that Sebi appears to be acquiring (slowly) the past tense. We have heard him occasionally using past-tense forms over the past few weeks, but it seemed likely that those were fixed forms. Today, however, I heard him correctly and appropriately contrast the present and past of a ploua "to rain". When returning to the car after preschool it was raining, and he repeated after me plouă! ("It’s raining!"). This is a word that he’s used frequently, but once we reached the car he pointed to the window and said A plouat geam ("It rained [on] the window"). This is the first time I’ve ever heard him switch from present to past tense on a verb, and a ploua is not a verb that we use most often in the past tense. So I don’t think this is something that he acquired as a fixed form, but rather appears to be him accurately applying regular past-tense morphology.

This acquisition is still intermittent, at best, and I expect it’ll be some time before he regularly uses any past tense, regular or irregular. But it is a fun milestone.

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In 1908, the poet T.E. Hulme gave a famous speech at in which he laid out the programme for modernist poetry, inveighing in vigorous language against rhyme and meter. His influence was already considerable by that time, and his address would both solidify his position and influence English literature for the rest of the 20th century:

Regular metre to this impressionist poetry is cramping, jangling, meaningless, and out of place. Into the delicate pattern of images and colour it introduces the heavy, crude pattern of rhetorical verse. It destroys the effect just as a barrel organ does, when it intrudes into the subtle interwoven harmonies of the modern symphony. It is a delicate and difficult art, that of evoking an image, of fitting the rhythm to the idea, and one is tempted to fall back to the comforting and easy arms of the old, regular metre, which takes away all the trouble for us.

Metered verse was, for Hulme and the other modernist poets, a crutch and an obstacle to authentic poetic expression. And rhyme, though already failing by the time that Hulme gave his speech, lost any chance of its survival as a vigorous part of modern poetry by this salvo. The edicts of Hulme and his influential cabal of modern poets (including Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and others) effectively directed the mainstream of English-language poetry (and, to a large degree, its prose) for the rest of the century.

All of which is preamble to something I heard a few weeks ago on This American Life. They commemorated the passing of one of their frequent contributors David Lakoff, with this excerpt from his new novel. Written in verse. In rhyming verse.

It was sadness that gripped him far more than the fear
that, if facing the truth, he had maybe a year.
When poetic phrases like “eyes, look your last”
become true, all you want is to stay, to hold fast.  
A new, fierce attachment to all of this world
now pierced him. It stabbed like a deity-hurled
lightning bolt, lancing him, sent from above, 
left him giddy and tearful. It felt like young love.

Listen to the whole episode here..

And I could only think: rhyme is back, baby.

Of course one admittedly quirky novel doesn’t make a trend. But it’s one of several examples I’ve met lately of significant literary projects written in rhyming verse, which does suggest that there’s something in the water. Part of it is the hipster mentality—all of the examples that I’ve heard have been rhyming couplets, the cheesiest form of rhyme, the literary equivalent of wearing your dad’s chunky black glasses and plaid sweater vest. Part of it is 21st century remix culture, playing on old discredited poetic forms just for contrast and quirk.

And some of it is the inevitable tendency of "progress" to turn on its ancestors. (This is something that I’ve remarked on before,) Once you embrace novelty and progression as literary virtues, you set yourself up to be rejected a few generations down the line once your radical, progressive views have become commonplace. I don’t know if there’s any forceful rejection of unrhymed poetry going on here, and there certainly doesn’t seem to be any kind of organized pro-rhyme school of poetry coming together. Literature in the early 21st century does not seem to lend itself to that sort of movement-building. Instead, it’s just that rhyme is becoming hip. And being hip is a more powerful motivator than being progressive ever was.

Which brings me to my real point: "progress" and "novelty" are terrible things to hold as literary virtues. Hipsterism is better, but only a little.

(Also, rhyme is awesome, but I still don’t think I want to read an entire rhyming novel.)

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I need to read more Raymond Chandler.

The Big Sleep cover

Two weeks ago I went away with my wife for a weekend at a nearby bed-and-breakfast, and I took along a copy of Carver’s The Big Sleep that I had picked up from a friend. I knew Carver only by reputation, as a sort of godfather of the mystery genre, someone that many people spoke highly of. I had heard the name Philip Marlowe, and I had the vague impression that his books all took place in smoky film noir settings full of sultry dames, bootleggers, wise guys with pistols tucked into their pants, and dirty cops.

These things all turned out to be true.

However, The Big Sleep wasn’t nearly as pulpy as I expected it to be, nor as pulpy as my summary above might suggest. Chandler wasn’t much for spectacle, and he plays down the more lurid aspects of his work rather than playing them up for titillation. What I expected the least, though, was how brisk and exacting the prose was. Chandler’s style eschews florid detail and "literary" ostentation, and instead lays out his scenes and arranges his words with crisp, punchy directness. Take the opening paragraph:

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

I love this line: I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. Here we’ve got setting, tone, character, and the first note of the plot, all in just a few sentences. The presentation of the first-person protagonist, Phillip Marlowe, is especially deft. We get no direct characterization of Marlowe at all, and no expansive inner monologues or deep explorations of his inner life. But this doesn’t mean that Marlowe is a cipher; on the contrary, by the end of the book you know him very well, but you know him by virtue of his actions and, more importantly, by observing the world through his eyes, noticing what he notices, and feeling the effect of the words he chooses to describe it. This is marvellously effective. The plot never slows down to reveal the characters, yet we never have to wonder about who the characters are.

The plot construction, too, is excellent, especially in the opening chapters. We get a series of questions, and then a trickle of answers, each of which brings with it new questions. There is a constant sense of progress, but never a plateau or a moment where there is nothing to keep driving us forward. By chapters:

  1. Q: Why is General Sternwood hiring Marlowe? Q: What is up with his daughter Carmen?
  2. A: Sternwood is being blackmailed by A.G. Geiger, who claims to have information about Carmen. Q: What does Geiger know?
  3. Q: What is up with Victoria Sternwood? Q: What does Rusty Regan have to do with all this?
  4. Q: What sort of business is Geiger really running out of his "bookstore"?
  5. A: Geiger lends pornographic books. Q: What’s the connection to Carmen?
  6. Q: Who killed Geiger? And what does it mean for the Sternwood?

Chapter 6 is where things really pick up, as the sleepy little blackmail case suddenly becomes a murder case, and solving the murder requires Marlowe to untangle the rest of the questions posed in those first six chapters, as well as other questions posed thereafter. Then, about halfway through, things seem to wrap up… but following the last few loose ends (including things foreshadowed in those very first chapters) leads to another, deeper layer of mystery whose resolution is more difficult and more chilling.

The internets tell me that this was Chandler’s first Marlowe book, but that it was stitched together from previously published short stories. Knowing the book’s hybrid nature, one can make out some seams here and there, but overall this is a remarkably coherent and remarkably good early novel. I’ll be coming back to Chandler.

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I’ve been busy lately: family from sundry parts of America and Romania have been visiting, bringing the total people under our roof to nine at one point. This has severely cut into my time for writing, hence the sudden lack of posts.

But a friend of mine Marlene Dotterer recently posted the Look Challenge, and I thought it was interesting enough to take her up on it.

1. Find the first occurrence of the word “look” in your WIP, and post the surrounding paragraph.
2. Tag others to do the same.

My current WiP is a short story called The Heresy Trial of Friar Travolo, and conveniently the first instance of “look” in the story is the description of the eponymous Friar:

And so I met the famed heretic. Travolo is a small man, stooped at the neck, with muddy brown eyes and a thin, greasy beard, unpleasant to look at. His chamber was floored with planks of wood and furnished only with a straw mattress and a burlap rag for a blanket, and the only source of light was what trickled in from the narrow windows set into the stone walls of the tower. I carried a lamp, but without it it was very dark, and Travolo had no lamp of his own. Yet by the lamplight I could see that he had fashioned a crude pencil from wood, and in the stone walls had begun to scratch the outlines of an exegesis right at the spot where the light would fall on it as it slipped through the window in the evening.

I tag Natasha and Corey, should either of them happen to see this. (But if you’re reading this you’re welcome to participate, even if you aren’t either of them.)

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My wife always said that I should keep a log of some sort about my kids linguistic development. And while I haven’t kept a detailed log, here I am blogging about it for the second week in a row.

So: pronouns. As mentioned before, proper use of pronouns is something that children acquire late, but partial use of pronouns develops quite a bit before that. What’s interesting here is the differing rates at which English and Romanian pronouns have been acquired. Because Romanian is pro-drop, pronouns are relatively uncommon in Romanian speech. For this reason, Sebi already uses the English pronoun I fairly consistently, but has not acquired any Romanian pronouns at all. He even mixes the two languages:

I făcut caca.
I went poopy.

The only thing approaching a Romanian pronoun that either child uses is the syllable [tu:], which represents an interesting conflation of the Romanian pronoun tu (you, sg.) and the English word too. The reason for the conflation is that both English and Romanian tend to locate these words at the end of utterances, in similar contexts, and with both words bearing the prosodic stress:

Do you want some, **too**?
Vrei şi **tu**? (Lit. "Want also you?")

Because of this coincidence, both children use the syllable [tu:] with a variety of meanings, including "me, too," "also," and "let me do it." As I noted with the discussion of verb inflection, the kids tend to use second-person forms with first-person meanings, based on what they most often hear.

Despite these few examples of confusion between the two languages, the kids already seem to have a good understanding of the differences between the languages and the contexts in which each is used. Their teachers at preschool say that they never hear the boys using Romanian words at school, and at home they seem to switch effortlessly into Romanian. They have even begun to exhibit some awareness of translation, the notion of a statement in English having an equivalent in Romanian and vice-versa. I’d say that this portends good things.

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My kids are young and are just beginning to speak in sentences. This in interesting, first because their linguistic development is bilingual, and secondly because I’ve never before had significant exposure to young children speaking a language other than English at this stage in their linguistic development. And now I’m getting a chance to observe something I’ve always wondered: when children learn a language with highly verbs, which forms do they learn first?

Romanian, like most Romance languages, inflects the verb for agreement in person and number in a variety of tenses. By way of illustration:

eu merg         I go
tu mergi        you go
el merge        he goes 
noi mergem      we go 
voi mergeţi     you (pl.) go 
ei merg         they go

Romanian is also pro-drop, meaning that pronouns are usually omitted when they occur as the subjects of sentences. So, given that a child learning Romanian hears a wide variety of verb forms with little way of distinguishing them at first (pronouns are one of the later syntactic features that small children acquire), which form do they use when they first start speaking?

The answer is: it depends, and it’s different for different verbs. This is not the answer that I was expecting. And what it depends on, as far as I can tell, is the form in which the child most often hears the verb, especially when its directed at him.

For example, my youngest always uses "want" in the 2sg form v(r)ei. This is because he most often hears the word used in questions like the following:

What do you want?
Ce vrei?

The word "give", on the other hand, is always dau, the 1sg form, because of the frequency of statements like "I’ll give you…" or "Do you want me to give you…?" (That second one involves an infinitive in English, but a finite verb in Romanian.)

A surprising number of verbs have been acquired in the imperative, most notably vino "come". The reasons for this should be obvious. Since the Romanian imperative is usually identical with the 3sg, there are a number of verbs in which it’s unclear which form has been acquired—and since the differences between imperative and indicative are certainly beyond him at this point, I doubt that the question is even answerable. He judges identifies imperatives solely by pragmatics, and he uses the imperative form even in clearly indicative contexts. Just today I heard Sebi vino used where the intended meaning was clearly "Sebi is coming", despite the morphologically imperative verb.

Most surprisingly, there’s a handful of verbs which have been acquired as a past participle, especially făcut "do" and dormit "sleep". This probably reflects the frequency with which these verbs are used in the past tense, since the normal Romanian past tense is synthetic, formed with the present-tense form of avea "to have" and the past participle. Sebi does sometimes use the auxiliary with the participle, but it seems very doubtful that he actually understands this as periphrasis at this point, as opposed to a fixed phrase.

Finally there is a single verb which has been acquired in the first person plural: rugăm "(we) pray". I find this adorable.

This is a small sample size (n=2), and only one language, but I would expect that results from other languages would be similar. What I wonder about, now, is how child language evolves in languages with really complex systems, such as polypersonal agreement, object incorporation, or other polysynthetic features.

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Some time ago at Tor.com there was a re-watch of all of the Pixar films to date, in preparation for the upcoming release of Brave. The reviewer had this to say about Wall-E:

More than anything else, Wall-E is a movie about the importance of appreciating and creating art—without it, we are cut off from each other, and from ourselves. As far as depictions of dystopian futures are concerned, the movie is rather gentle—nothing about the cushy Axiom is likely to traumatize small children… but at the same time, its indictment of a culture entirely devoted to the mindless consumption of “entertainment” with no artistic merit or intellectual value is chilling the more you think about it.

This was an interesting analysis, mostly because it doesn’t match up with my own feelings about the film. I don’t think that this analysis is wrong, necessarily, but I would not have thought to linking Wall-E primarily to art. It seems to me that Wall-E is largely a film about love.

Wall-E decorates sleeping Eve for Christmas.
The most striking scenes in Wall-E are his early interactions with Eve, which present a beautiful picture of love and devotion which persists in the face of rejection by the beloved. Wall-E loves Eve from the moment he meets her, but his love is not a shallow infatuation or self-serving obsession. Rather, he attempts to serve her and woo her, and his efforts are not dissuaded by her disinterest. His persistence never impinges on her or threatens her. He conquers her resistance with his devotion, but he does it without invoking any of the territorial or aggressive overtones that that word sometimes brings.

He most clearly demonstrates this in the scenes after Eve discovers the plant and shuts down, when Wall-E is required to protect and tend for her. During this time, Eve has not yet reciprocated Wall-E’s devotion, but he cares for he anyway, even though she’s unconscious and unaware of his actions. This, more than anything, is what proves Wall-E’s worthiness of Eve: he cares for her, not to impress her or possess her, but for her own sake. And this selfless love is what eventually brings Wall-E to the Axiom and sets in motion the redemption of the human society there.

Wall-E amongst the garbage
But how does this relate to the films ecological and anti-consumerist themes? At first glance, Wall-E’s love does not seem like an answer to the environmental catastrophe of the Earth and the pleasant tyranny of the Axiom. But this is a false conclusion. Consumption is the opposite of love, and the excesses of consumption can only be righted be relearning what it means to love.

Consumption is self-oriented. Consumption is about fulfilling ones own desires and disregarding the broader consequences. Consumption is individual rights, profit-seeking, and competition. Consumption can only think of love as acquisition, and could not fathom Wall-E’s care for Eve, which she can neither reciprocate nor even remember. The Earth that Wall-E leaves has been rendered a waste by the excesses of consumption, and the Axiom that he comes to is one in which all human interaction has been replaced by consumerism. People talk to each other on the Axiom, but only through screens and advertising. Wall-E’s advent on the Axiom knocks a pair of humans out of their flying chairs and into a romance, foreshadowing the upheavals of the entire society which occur at the end of the film. The repudiation of consumption can only come through the recovery of love.

The end of the film shows us the human society returning to love as a social principle. A sustainable society requires that we act with love, not just for those nearest, but to those who cannot remember or reciprocate, the unborn and the dead. The work of reclaiming the ruined world is a work of love for those who will come after, while the work of preservation is an act of love and honor for those who came before.

In another, more predictable film (cough Avatar), our ecologically ruined world might be contrasted with some pristine native paradise, showing us the difference between what we are and what we could have been. Wall-E does something better. It shows us what we could become, but then says I will show you a better way.

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In 1987 both the Internet and the Soviet Union existed. Twenty-five years later, only one of these things exists, and it’s not the one that most people would have predicted in 1987, or even the one that they had heard of.

This comes to mind because I recently came across this set of time capsule predictions from notable SFF authors of 1987. Like all retro-futuristic predictions, this one is a lovely mixture of the wrong and the ridiculous, and it gives us all a chance to smirk at how smart we are for living in the future that those poor schlubs could only guess about. I especially note how pessimistic most of these gentlemen are (and they are all gentlemen). Many of them predicted nuclear war or ecological collapse; economic troubles were widely forecast, and the human population was routinely overestimated. (In fact, nearly every person who mentioned population used the number eight billion, which is so coincidental that I assume the number was the official estimate at the time. It also overshoots the actual world population by about a billion.)

I’m particularly amused by Isaac Asimov’s short prediction, which I quote in its entirety:

Assuming we haven’t destroyed ourselves in a nuclear war, there will be 8-10 billion of us on this planet—and widespread hunger. These troubles can be traced back to President Ronald Reagan who smiled and waved too much.

The cause of all our problems

Gregory Benford made this puzzling remark:

The outer-directed, social-issues consciousness of the USA, only nascent in 1987, will have peaked and run its course…leading to a fresh period of inward-directed values, perhaps even indulgence…though there will be less ability to indulge.

1987 was the beginning of a period of social consciousness? And it’s supposed to have run out of steam by now? I can safely say that I have no idea what he’s talking about, not even enough of an idea to say for sure that he was wrong.

Lots of people predicted computers would be important. No one mentioned the Internet. Other technological predictions, about space missions to Mars or the moon, about nanotechnology, and about renewable energy, all failed to come true.

And of course no one guessed that the Soviet Union would break up, especially not in two short years.

But what’s the point of reading about failed predictions of the past if you aren’t willing to make a few predictions of your own? So here are my predictions for the year 2037:

  • The Internet will be ubiquitous in economic and social interactions. It will, in fact, be so omnipresent that no one will think about it much.
  • The US will still have the world’s strongest economy, but not by much. Its main competitors will be the developed economies of China, India, and Brazil.
  • The EU will still exist, but it will have fewer countries in it than it does today.
  • Islamic terrorism will largely be a thing of the past.
  • Humans, but not Americans, will have been back to the moon. Most likely the newest moon visitors will be Chinese. No manned mission to Mars will yet have taken place.
  • The Singularity will not have happened. There will be no strong AI. There will be no contact with extraterrestrials. We will not run out of oil, nor will there be any game-changing renewable energy source. There will be no radical breathroughs in biology, cryogenics, nanotechnology, or robotics. Instead, there will be modest, incremental advances in all of these fields (except the Singularity and extraterrestrials, because those are pure fantasy).
  • Global warming will still be going on, but nothing much will be done about it. It turns out that incrementally adapting to global climate change is easier than radically revamping the entire world economy in an attempt to stop it.
  • There will be wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet.