John Crowley's Blog, page 48

Nuova scienza

 
So even even if she didn't go to Stanford after all, but UC Santa Barbara, the wonderfully named Lisa Zunshine and associated researchers may be on to something interesting about narrative, fiction, and how we understand stories, why they are entertaining.  

www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/books/01lit.html 

Combine these insights (supported, maybe, by the ubiquitous and maybe not so actually revelatory MRI imaging) about how and where in the brain the understanding of stories works with older Reade...

The Grim Slide

 By which I don't mean the political one, but the language in which it's cast, my own purview.  This in Slate, in an article wittily titled "Republican Whips":

Say what you will about the RNC. Let he who has never visited a high-end West Hollywood lesbian bondage-themed nightclub cast the first stone.

Mary Sue?

 Can anyone help the writer of this letter I received?

Dear Professor,

I am not one of your students but I have a question about a fictitious character I would hope you could help me with. I have a bachelor degree in English and French literature. I am also a member of an online forum called The Hannibal Lecter Studiolo. In one of our current discussions there, a debate whether Dr Hannibal Lecter is some sort of a “Mary Sue” appears to be an unsolved dilemma. If you are familiar with Thomas...

Oh well

 I see that the last Grammar Whiz was obvious -- the first three correct answers arrived within minutes -- all you had to do was add another subject to the clause to make the verb plural.  What was I thinking?  It may be that these snippets fool me because my own mental acuity is declining.  I wish someone else would try posting one so I could see if I can still cut the mustard (whatever that means.)  Competition on this one  is now closed.

crowleycrow @ 2010-03-25T06:48:00

Here is your new Grammar Whiz. Add wrods to either end or both ends to make a proper English sentence. No adding punctuation internally in the given phrase. (From NYTimes)


the company pressure businesses to advertise

Mark of the B-east

 
A nice time a Vericon, which was smaller than usual (I was told) because the date was not in midwinter as usual but in the middle of spring break, and the weather was -- many seemed to feel -- too nice to be inside gaming in stuffy rooms and parading in funny costumes.

I read to a vanishingly small audience (they did not, however, vanish, thanks guys) form my new version of the old alchemical romance "The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz," now nearing some sort of publishing commitme...

Traduttore/Tradittore

 
Highly interesting article about how Google Translate differs from other machine translation programs, and what the consequences are:

www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/opinion/21bellos.html 

This is of course a tremendously clever thing for those Google computers and their algorithm buddies to achieve.  A couple of weeks ago there was actually a comparison of the Google Translate version of the opening paragraphs of The Little Prince with other translation program results.  Google's was near perfect....

William Wordswords

 

You doubtless know that old entertainment where you name the most beautiful word or words in the language, irrespective of meaning.  This usually leads to sincere results that can't escape the shade or sunshine of a meaning (Henry James's choice was "summer afternoon") or to funny choices of words with low or repllent or comic meanings that the chooser insists are beautiful (I'd choose "celery" for instance).

A few things seem evident about beautiful words in English:  they tend to have long ...

Mush

 

Remember those Manchester Guardian rules for writing we were enjoying a while back?  Exception was taken to them on the New Yorker blog -- the problem that if you combined them all you'd end up with no instruction but mush -- and an old student of mine, James Pollack, who's very into digital word art, or whatever it's to be called, the successor thing -- you know -- took them and id that.  Here's the NYer blog where it's linked:

www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/03/mush-triumphant.html

Outrageous and unfair and pretty funny.

 
beck.cnnbcvideo.com/