Category: Writing

Anything on the process or results of writing as an activity and a passion

Advice to supervillains – killing your own scientists

One classic mistake made by cartoon supervillains concerns the complicated piece of machinery that is inevitably at the heart of their secret plan. It might be a time travel device of some sort, or a machine that strips the opposing superhero of their power, or a key part of a world domination scheme.

As a way of illustrating just how evil and ruthless they really are, supervillains will often kill the whole team of scientists who built the thing, perhaps by having them all drink poisoned champagne. This does make a certain measure of sense. Killing the scientists keeps them from going off and telling people about what they did, which could cause problems for you.

That being said, I strongly object to the timing that is frequently used for these killings. The supervillain will kill off the science team right before testing the device for the first time. As anyone who has worked on anything remotely technical and complex can tell you, this is the worst possible time to kill off all the people involved. Chances are, the machine will not work properly on the first try and that the only people who can figure out what went wrong are the people who designed and built the machine.

By all means, kill the science team once you are confident that you have a machine that will do what you want. Build it, test it, build an improved model, build a backup copy or two, and then hand out the glasses of killer champagne.

The Hound of the Baskervilles

I read The Hound of the Baskervilles as a bit of post-GRE brain decompression. Most of the books I am reading at the moment are related to my doctoral research proposal and are thus rather heavy. Also, because Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel is out of copyright, I was able to read it for free on my iPhone during a couple of my lengthy daily commutes. Previously, I had used similar bits of unallocated time to listen to the many recordings of Sherlock Holmes short stories that are available through iTunes University.

The Hound of the Baskervilles was the first novel-length Sherlock Holmes story I have been exposed to. While it did a nice job of letting me celebrate liberation from special triangles and the peculiar vocabulary favoured by GRE-writers, it wasn’t especially satisfying as a piece of fiction. I found most of the plot elements predictable, uninteresting, or both. Perhaps Sherlock Holmes as a character is better suited to the vehicle of a short story, in which he can make some clever deductions, unravel a mystery, and be done with things within a reasonably short span of the reader’s time. When extended out to novel length, readers will tend to see his deductions well in advance of when they are revealed, somewhat diminishing our admiration for the character’s intellect.

The novel including an annoying tendency to have Holmes go on about how this particularly case is singularly more complicated and important than his previous work. This claim doesn’t stand up very well, when you consider that some of his previous adventures included involvement in matters where war threatened between great powers or where sinister conspiracies had to be unravelled. Without revealing too much about the plot, it seems fair to say that the matter at hand here is of relatively minor significance and the mystery is not so unfathomable. Even Watson – the reliable narrator who primarily plays the role of being astonished by Holmes’ insights – nearly figures the whole thing out for himself.

GRE and travel upcoming

The GRE is in four days, and I am pretty nervous. I don’t think it should be the most important consideration, when people are applying to graduate school. It is a very artificial test, largely based on some really narrow conceptions of how language should be used. I bet a lot of authors who have won major literature prizes would have trouble with their ‘reading comprehension’ and ‘verbal reasoning’ questions. Often, several answers are justifiable, and the rules according to which the test-writers choose which one is ‘right’ are somewhat arbitrary and parochial.

But I shouldn’t grumble too much. It will be over soon.

Getting in applications by the end of the month is a major undertaking. At the same time, I have a couple of exciting trips coming up. I am going to Ottawa next weekend for the launch party for my friend Andrea Simms-Karp’s excellent new folk album: Hibernation Nation. I have had the songs stuck in my head constantly since I first head them. Probably about 100 people have caught me humming them to myself on the subway to and from work, operating under the false assumption that everyone around me has hearing as mediocre as mine.

The weekend after, I am going to New York City for American Thanksgiving. I definitely need to have my applications in by then, as the trip will incorporate a 28th birthday celebration and is something that I want to be able to focus all my attention upon.

Not generic boilerplate text

British journalist George Monbiot has turned the ‘about me’ page on his blog into a sort of mini-autobiography. It is an interesting read. For instance, he describes some of the time he spent in West Papua, traveling with forged papers:

We were as reckless and foolish as only young men can be – this is why wars get fought. We threw ourselves into and out of a great deal of trouble. At one point we had to walk and canoe for four weeks from the central highlands to the south coast. We became lost in the forest for several days and ate insects and rats to stay alive. I was stung almost to death by hornets. We also had some close brushes with the occupying Indonesian army.

It’s comforting to know that people can have such adventures and go on to write books about climate change and columns for The Guardian.

The serial (Oxford) comma

When writing lists, there are two different conventions for what to do before the final item:

  1. Lions, tigers and bears are charging toward us from all directions.
  2. To fend them off we will need rifles, pepper spray, and dynamite.

I strongly prefer the second approach, where the final item is set off with a comma, and not just because of where I did my M.Phil.

I have heard some people argue that the commas in a list are stand-ins for the word ‘and’. Instead of writing “life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, we should therefore write “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. To add a comma between “liberty” and “the pursuit of happiness” while keeping the “and” is redundant.

I can see the point of this argument, but I think it takes too mechanical a view of language. The purpose of every element of language is to convey ideas and – James Joyce aside – it is usually best to do so clearly. The Oxford comma is very clear. The writer has a list of items, and each item is separated from each other item by means of a comma. In the event of a higher level list, with items separated by semicolons, the final semicolon would surely not be omitted:

His crimes were many: some related to property, like theft and burglary; some related to reputation, including many slanders; and some wanton violations of the Law of the Sea, particularly the disregard of established conventions for deciding maritime boundaries.

In this data-driven age, the serial comma is also in keeping with mathematical and computational conventions. The set of prime factors of my telephone number is: {2, 3, 11, 89, 709453}. Comma separated values are also a common way to store and exchange data sets.

My hope is that I have won over a waverer or two to the serial comma approach. If not, can we please at least agree to put only a single space after a period? We do not live in the age of typewriters anymore!

The Wordy Shipmates

I was first exposed to Sarah Vowell through her entertaining contributions to This American Life and The Daily Show. In addition to being rather charming, she comes across as expressive and very nerdy. Those qualities are also evident in her short and engaging book on Puritan settlers in North America in the 17th century.

Vowell is an American patriot who is nonetheless acutely aware of the injustices in America’s history, from the earliest days of European contact to the present. Thrown in with the discussion of the founding of Rhode Island is a sophisticated conceptual criticism of Ronald Reagan and a moving expression of pure disgust about Abu Ghraib and the use of torture by the Bush administration. She is also delighted to celebrate the achievements of people she admires, and skilled at showing why what they did was important and people in the present should care.

While the book is written in an entertaining and informal style, the subject matter is serious. Vowell pokes some fun at the theological quirks of the Puritans, but she takes their disagreements and positions seriously. Even I found myself caring about the disputes of 17th century theologians. The book is also forthright about the brutality involved in European colonization – from smallpox epidemics that killed 90% of some native tribes to massacres in which men, women, and children are burned alive.

Vowell colours her work in with anecdotes and personal asides. The final result reminds me a bit of Monty Python – clever, funny work that demonstrates a real interest and knowledge about the sometimes-obscure subject matter behind it and a willingness to engage with challenging and controversial topics. One passage of analysis on a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. struck me as illustrative of her way of writing:

I happen to be with King in proclaiming the Sermon on the Mount’s call for love to be at the heart of Christian behaviour, and one of us got a Ph.D. in systematic theology.

I suspect Vowell is one of those authors whose entire canon I will eventually read.

Constancy

There is a real sense in which this site has been the most constant part of my life since 2005. During that time, I moved from Vancouver to Oxford to Ottawa to Toronto. The group of people who I spent time with shifted several times. I moved from school to employment – from shooting using a Canon A510 point and shoot digital camera to using a 5D Mk II – from exploring the British isles by minibus to exploring North America by Greyhound.

The content has shifted somewhat, the banners have changed, but this is still basically the same thing it was six years ago – a way to stay in touch with friends around the world, discuss ideas, and generally think things through by writing them down.