The Guardian's Blog, page 154

The rules regarding words, and a word regarding rules

From Snoop to Shakespeare, the tricks of rhetoric serve playwrights, singers, politicians and evangelists equally well. That is cause for celebration, not snobbery

What do Snoop Dogg and Bruce Forsyth have in common? No? OK, what do Snoop Dogg, Bruce Forsyth, JFK, Billy Ocean and William Shakespeare have in common? The answer is chiasmus (pronounced ki-AZ-mus), and if that means nothing to you, don't worry – it's terribly simple.

With my mind on my money and my money on my mind
Nice to see you. To see you nice.
Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going.
Fair is foul and foul is fair.

That's chiasmus. It's easy to do and … to do it is easy. Ah! The great poetry of Bruce Forsyth, and the cheap tricks of William Shakespeare. And it really is that way around because, whereas Shakespeare was taught these things in school (chiasmus and the other figures of rhetoric were an essential part of the Elizabethan grammar school syllabus) , Bruce had to come up with his catchphrase through pure inspiration. Shakespeare knew what he was doing, Snoop Dogg relied upon the muses (and certain substances).

Some people get very annoyed when you tell them about the figures of rhetoric – the group of tricks for making a memorable sentence. They feel that there must be a difference between poetry and advertising jingles. To say that they are all one and the same when you scratch the surface seems like blasphemy, literally so when you get on to the Bible. The word of God should be different from the word of Katy Perry. But if you know about the technique of progression – a long series of opposites – then you can see that:

A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance ...

Is exactly the same as:

You're hot then you're cold
You're yes then you're no
You're in then you're out
You're up then you're down ...

And for that matter the same as Gershwin's "You say potato/ and I say potato", but those lyrics don't work so well when you write them down.

The truth is that there is no blasphemy involved. To take an engineering analogy, you can use an arch to build a cathedral or a railway tunnel or a humpbacked bridge. Nobody can have a monopoly on a technique.

These techniques underlie most of the famous phrases you know, from the unutterably ancient to the mindless and modern. The Bible tells us: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth. And the Earth was without form and void." That repetition is called anadiplosis, and anadiplosis is what Joaquin Phoenix uses in Gladiator when he says: "The general who became a slave. The slave who became a gladiator. The gladiator who defied an emperor." Shakespeare used it, and Milton, and everybody else who knows how to write a good English sentence. It's a technique that is lying around, and equally available to poet, politician and the man on the Clapham omnibus.

This doesn't ruin poetry, or make Shakespeare any less wonderful; understanding does not dampen beauty. If it did, nobody with a knowledge of music theory would ever be able to enjoy a symphony. A motoring enthusiast does not lose all enthusiasm when he finds out about the internal combustion engine, because you don't have to believe in magic to find things magical. If anything, the reverse is true. A professional appreciates the work of a fellow professional much more, because they can see what they're doing and how they're doing it, and appreciate the effort that was put in.

These days, Shakespeare is discussed for his views on feminism, politics and even colonialism. I suspect he would be laughing in his grave if he knew. He was a playwright, and a playwright must be able to write both sides of an argument. It's essential that most of the time we don't know what side he was on – all we have is the opinions of others, but opinions perfectly expressed. When he can write like that, who cares if he was wise or foolish? Or, as Shakespeare put it:

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.

And by now you should know that that's a chiasmus.

• Mark Forsyth is the author of The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase.

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18. Sacred 18 of the whirling dervish

Our festive countdown, extracted from Rogerson's Book of Numbers, continues with a number linking sacred Sufi verses, meditation and food

The 13th century Sufi mystic Rumi composed 18 verses for the introduction of his iconic teaching verse, the Mathnavi, which like all his work must be referenced back to the Qur'an. For the single great introductory phrase to every Muslim verse, prayer and blessing is "Bismi'llahi' r-rahmani' r-rahim" – "In the name of God, ever-merciful and all-forgiving" – which has 18 consonants in it.

A spiritual apprentice who wished to join the Mevlevi Sufi brotherhood (the whirling dervishes) was expected to first learn to achieve 18 kinds of service in the kitchen, each occupation requiring at least 18 days of study. Similarly, the last ladder in the apprenticeship of learning was to meditate alone for 18 days, having been escorted into one's cell by an 18-armed candelabrum. Gifts and courses of food were customarily served within the tekke (dervish monastery) in sets of nine or 18.

Tomorrow: the sacred 19 of the Bahá'í

• Taken from Rogerson's Book of Numbers by Barnaby Rogerson

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Forget selfies, we want to see your shelfies

We asked to see your shelfies and you didn't disappoint. Here's a selection of our favourites

Guardian readers

Who is the greatest American novelist? 1: Saul Bellow v Raymond Chandler

You nominated the contenders - and now the literary tournament designed to find the greatest American novelist continues, with the second group of 16 authors going head to head

These two writers are as different as chalk and cheese. Bellow, the big cheese of American letters, has won three national book awards, the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for literature. He has many notable literary acolytes including Amis, Roth and Bradbury and in this head to head he is up against that much maligned thing, a "genre" writer. A slam dunk, surely? Although Chandler is definitely the underdog - a term that typifies his main character, Philip Marlowe - it must be noted that Chandler not only stands (alongside Dalshiel Hammett) at the pinnacle of American crime writing, but transcends the perceived limitations of a crime genre. For all their differences, and they are legion, both novels are built around a strong and colourful hero. This book battle could be waged as the battle of the characters - Moses Herzog versus Philip Marlowe.

Herzog is a playful novel that follows the mental dissolution of the punctured professor, Moses Elkanah Herzog (the name taken from a minor character in Joyce's Ulysess and a nod to the meanderings of a troubled mind). His second wife Madeleine - the "devil-bitch" - has left him for his former best friend, the peg-legged, fox-haired Valentine Gersbach. His life is ruined and in order for him to cope with the litany of failures and tragedies and remain, on the surface at least, confident and cheerful, he submits to a mental fracture, the main symptom of which is endless writing: 'To the newspapers, to people in public life, to friends and relatives and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead.'

This writing starts as brief notes and blossoms into full-blown essays that give Bellow a chance to display his philosophical chops. Herzog's mental meanderings are entertaining, amusing and insightful but eventually my enjoyment began to wane. At the start of the novel, I basked in the warm and wise writing and happily jotted down many great quotes, but they became just succulent berries in a dense, thorny bush of a novel. Mr Bellow, I can see that you are brilliant, but where is all this really getting us? "Knock off the crap, dreamy boy," one of his detractors drawled at him, and I tend to agree. The inconsistencies of Herzog himself - a paunchy, balding man who attracts a cast of desirable women - seemed odd. He is a brilliant philosophy academic but the book is slow and it felt a little too contrived.

The Long Goodbye is the sixth Philip Marlowe novel and we find him as a 42-year-old veteran sleuth seemingly searching more for truth and humanity than for criminals. He likes 'liquor and women and chess and a few other things'. He is the enemy of insincerity, envy and greed, and oh yes, he doesn't do divorce cases. He takes more than his fair share of beatings and sleights to find his way to the solution, but the solution is clearly not Chandler's aim (he was famously irked by 'plotting' and once said that a solution, once arrived at, should seem inevitable). The plot is complicated enough - there are suicides that could be murders and murders that could be suicides and Marlowe finds himself both investigating and investigated - but really it is about the characters. There is a fantastic cast of troubled souls, street toughs and corrupt cops and Chandler gives them all great depth. He imbues them with vibrancy and verve and leaves Marlowe, that astute professor of people, to dissect them for our pleasure.

I felt the poignancy and tragedy of Chandler's own alcoholism and artistic doubts throughout the book, particularly in the troubled writer Henry Wade. Marlowe gets himself entangled with the writer and his beautiful wife. Robert Altman cast Sterling Hayden as Wade in his 1973 film version, bearded and brooding, an apparent homage to Hemingway, and there is a feel of Papa in the whole tone of Chandler's novel.

There are diatribes on Blond's rather than Bellow's philosophical symposia, but Chandler can also riff marvelously on advertising, empty commercialism and the corruption of power. While Bellow is the intellectual superior, Chandler has more oomph and more humour. His writing, behind the entertaining, overblown descriptions and swaggering waggery, seems to come from a deeper level of his soul and therefore feels so much more enduring.

I really wanted to prefer Herzog, but as Mark Twain once wrote: 'You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.' And my heart thumps for Chandler, more specifically for his great character, Marlowe. If high-falutin psychobabble and schadenfreude is your thing, well, as Marlowe said 'You take it, friend. I'll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.'

Winner: The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

• Next time, Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire vs Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions.

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Does snark have a place in literary debate?

Books culture has to allow for negative reviews, but there's no need for hostility, knowingness and contempt

Maureen Dowd launched the latest round in the niceness wars at the weekend, with a biting attack on those who want to accentuate the positive by following Walt Disney's advice in Bambi that "if you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all". She starts by pouring scorn on Buzzfeed's new books editor, Isaac Fitzgerald, and his suggestion that the "theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

How Beatrix Potter self-published Peter Rabbit

The aspiring children's writer was fed up of receiving rejection letters - so on this day in 1901 she self-published a certain book about a naughty rabbit

So you think self-publishing is a 21st-century phenomenon? Think again. On December 16, 1901, a 47-year-old writer and illustrator printed 250 copies of her first book, featuring a naughty rabbit. Beatrix Potter decided to take control of her own future after getting fed up of receiving rejection letters from publishers for a story she had made up to entertain a sick child.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit was printed with 41 black and white woodblock engravings and a colour frontispiece, and proved so successful that, within a year, it had been picked up by one of the six publishers who had originally turned it down. By Christmas of 1902, Frederick Warne had sold 20,000 copies of the book, with Potter's own watercolour illustrations, at 1 shilling, and 1/6d for a luxury clothbound edition.

But Potter's self-publishing adventures didn't stop there. In 1903 she again took her career into her own hands after failing to reach agreement with Warne over her new story The Tailor of Gloucester.

Rare book dealer Christiaan Jonkers says: "She was very dogmatic about what she wanted it to look like and couldn't agree with Warne. Also he wanted cuts, so she published 500 copies privately. By the end of the year Warne had given in, cementing a relationship that would save the publishing house from bankruptcy, and revolutionise the way children's books were marketed and sold."

Potter, who was briefly engaged to one of the Warnes before his premature death, left the rights to her works to the publisher on her death. She thought up the tale of "four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter" in 1893, in a letter to Noel Moore, the sickly son of her old governess.

One of the few surviving copies of the original Peter Rabbit is on sale at Jonkers Rare Books, based in Henley-on-Thames, Oxford, with an asking price of £35,000.

Children's books: 7 and underSelf-publishingChildren and teenagersPicture booksClaire Armitstead
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A Christmas Carol: a classic that warms the heart, even as it makes you weep

What Dickens's comforting – and discomfiting – Christmas tale lacks in joy it makes up for in familiarity

• Guardian Book Club: Claire Tomalin on A Christmas Carol

It has been 170 years since A Christmas Carol was first published, by Chapman and Hall on 17 December 1843, but its characters and plot are so embedded in the psyche of readers that it feels as though the story has been around since the beginning of time. As Anthony Horowitz writes in his introduction to the latest Puffin Classics edition, even people who haven't read the book know exactly who Ebenezer Scrooge is – and Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim and Jacob Marley. Like Fagin in Oliver Twist, Oliver himself and so many of Dickens's characters, they have a life outside its pages.

I thought I'd read the book long ago. But when my daughter, Molly, aged 10, came home from school with a copy and began reading it aloud I realised with a jolt that I never actually had.

In many ways, the familiarity of A Christmas Carol makes it a perfect comfort read. My seven-year-old son, Christy, and I were both gripped as Molly read it to us by the fire one cold, dark evening last week. And, at 125 pages, it is short enough to read over one or two cosy sittings. But there is no denying that in other ways it is the opposite of feelgood. As we all know, Scrooge is a bitter and twisted old miser, damaged, like Dickens, by childhood neglect. He cares nothing for the people around him, prioritises material wealth above love and happiness, overworks and underpays his clerk, Cratchit, and detests Christmas, which he views as "a time for finding yourself a year older and not an hour richer". His former partner, Marley, lies in an unquiet grave, tormented by the consequences of his penny-pinching life. Poverty and need, ignorance and want are all around. Not much joy there.

Dickens was aiming to highlight the plight of the poor at Christmas, and the parallels between the Victorian England he depicts and 21st-century Britain are striking – and discomfiting. The charitable fund being set up by the portly fundraisers who knock at Scrooge's door looking in vain for a donation resembles nothing so much as today's food banks: "Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir," they tell him. "We are endeavouring … to buy the Poor some meat and drink, some means of warmth." ("Are there no prisons?" Scrooge replies.) Scrooge himself is running a Victorian version of Wonga from his under-heated counting house: no wonder the careworn couple he visits with the ghost of Christmas future are so happy to hear he has died, taking their debts – they hope – along with him.

You could argue that A Christmas Carol is also too scary to be classified as a comfort read. The ghosts – and what they reveal to Scrooge – are genuinely spooky. Even though I knew what was coming, I could not prevent a serious chill going up my spine when the ghost of Christmas past appeared:

The hour bell sounded … with a deep, dull, hollow, melancholy One. Light flashed up in the room upon the instant and the curtains of his bed were drawn. The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a hand … and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now to you …

The story is so bleak, too. Dickens pulls no punches when describing the fate that awaits Scrooge if he doesn't change his ways: he will die unmourned and forgotten, buried in a lonely, weed-choked graveyard, his possessions stolen by his charlady and the undertaker. "If he wanted to keep 'em after he was dead … why wasn't he more natural in his lifetime? If he had been, he'd have had somebody to look after him when he was struck with Death, instead of lying gasping out his last there alone by himself."

And as ever, Dickens does his best to move us to tears. Who could fail to be affected by Tiny Tim's deathbed scene with his father, Bob Cratchit? Or by the sight of the boy's "vacant seat … in the poor chimney corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved"?

But I would say you can always derive great comfort and pleasure from being properly scared, or moved by such brilliant writing. And the final chapter of A Christmas Carol really does warm the heart. You can almost feel the urgency of the last pages as Scrooge, having seen his own grave, wakes up, thrilled to be alive, desperate to make amends and to change the way he lives his life. Dickens is said to have stayed up until 3am writing it. You close the book feeling there is hope for a better future – and there is not much that is more comforting than that.

Charles DickensFictionChristmasLisa O'Kelly
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17. Hidden 17 of the Bektashi

The books advent calendar continues, with an extract from Rogerson's Book of Numbers centring on a group of patron saints from the Ottoman empire

The Bektashi dervishes were associated with 17. There were 17 Bektashi saints who stood as the patrons of 17 of the great trade guilds of the Ottoman empire, while Ali ibn Abi Talib, their most important teacher, had 17 companion disciples and offered 17 sets of prayers three times a day.

The Bektashi smoothed over many of the differences between the Sunni and Shia schism within their own closely guarded belief structures, as well as delighting in numerology and absorbing various Turkic and Anatolian spiritual traditions. One of the oddest of these was the seventeenfold sacrifice to the guardian spirit of Mount Ararat, where Noah's Ark was believed to have anchored. The flood was traditionally believed to have started on the 17th day of the second month and ended on the 17th day of the seventh month.

Tomorrow: the sacred 18 of the whirling dervish

• Taken from Rogerson's Book of Numbers by Barnaby Rogerson

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Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading this week?

The space to talk about the books you are reading and the authors and topics you would like to see covered on the site

Hannah FreemanGuardian readers

Shelfie: show us a photo of your bookshelf

From celebrities to politicians, selfies have been all over the internet in 2013. But perhaps shelfies would be more interesting?

This year may go down in history as the year of the 'selfie', with even world leaders getting in on the act, but we're asking for something a little different.

We want your shelfie. What's more telling than a bookshelf? You can share a snap of a single shelf or your entire bookcase - you decide. If you're feeling in a particularly adventurous mood, you could even film yourself giving a guided tour of your shelf, explaining your categorising methods; do you, for example, only place novels together if you think the characters in them would get along?

You can send us your photo by clicking on the blue 'contribute' button on this page or download the free GuardianWitness smartphone app and upload your shelfie from your phone. You can look at the contributions on GuardianWitness and we'll feature a selection of our favourite images.

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