Tom Glenn's Blog, page 134

Temporary Hiatus

Early tomorrow morning, I head to Annapolis for surgery to repair a hernia. That means I’ll be out of action for some period of time and won’t be able to post new blogs. I’m not sure how long.

My office is on the lowest level of my new house. That means it’s down two half-flights of stairs, on the lowest floor of my split-level. I don’t know how long it will be before I’m able to negotiate the stairs.

I admit to being uneasy about the surgery. It’s minor and routine; nothing to be concerned about. But I’m not a young man, and operations are more serious for older people. Granted, I’m a model of good health. I’m still a little edgy.

All that said, I expect to be blogging again sometime this week. I’ll be talking about tax rates and the economy and what my new house is like. As always, I encourage readers to comment on what I have to say.

Irreconcilable Logics (5)

The rules for writing in literary English are regularly violated for artistic reasons. The most frequent breaches are to show dialect. My favorite example is Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the novel by Mark Twain. The unique writing in that book would have lost much of its zest had Twain followed the rules.

I do the same in all my writing. For example, the quotations from characters whose native language is not English pepper the text of Last of the Annamese. The first case is on page 2:

“‘That the phosphorus,’ the woman said. ‘It still burning in his skin. Mother Monique say they try to cut it out. No can do. He dying now.’”

I also use it for Ike, a colored Marine, who sometimes reverts to black English. When he’s asked what time a cake cutting is planned, he answers, “We set it for 2100 so’s we could clear out by curfew.”

The logic underlying the rules and when they can be broken is unique to writing. It doesn’t apply to other disciplines, and the logic of other disciplines doesn’t apply to writing. It’s another irreconcilable logic.

Learning to think in unique logic systems has been of immense value to my primary calling in life, writing. I figured out how to apply the fundamental logic of music to my writing by reading texts aloud and listening for tonal and rhythmic subtleties. And the structure and rules of languages other than English taught me to reshape sentences and paragraphs and blend in vocabularies I could not have discovered any other way.

The knowledge of irreconcilable logics, in short, has enriched my writing.

Irreconcilable Logics (4)

That brings me to the last of my three passions, writing. All my writing is in English, so all I have to say here applies to that language.

English is by far the richest language I have ever studied with more words, in its present form, than any other language. That means that the writer has many synonyms to choose from in expressing his thoughts. The wide choice allows shades of meaning to an almost infinite degree.

We English speakers are fortunate to have two superb dictionaries at our disposal, the Merriam-Webster Unabridged and the Oxford English Dictionary. The latter, in printed form, is twenty volumes. I have both on my computer and consult them regularly.

For common understanding, the writer needs to conform to rules of grammar and syntax. Our grammar allows us a precision in expression to say exactly what we mean. Violation of the rules confuses the reader and renders the meaning murky.

Syntax is an invaluable tool for conveying subtle emotional distinctions. Note the slight difference in meaning between “Quietly, she left the house” and “She left the house quietly.”

Beyond grammar and syntax, I work in two different writing styles, journalistic and literary. The journalistic style is used for most nonfiction. The source for accepted writing conventions in this style is The AP Stylebook. It is this style that dominates writing in newspapers and periodicals.

The literary style is for any literary writing, including fiction. Its two guidebooks are The Chicago Manual of Style and William Strunk’s Elements of Style. I use the literary style for this blog. If I followed the journalistic rules here, the names of the books just listed would not have been in italics. The AP Stylebook specifies, “AP does not italicize words in news stories.” I suspect that the no-italics rule results from the fact that so many newspapers can’t print italics.

Differences between the two styles are subtle. My preference for the literary is that it is more varied and specific and allows more clear expression.

More tomorrow.

Irreconcilable Logics (3)

Writing in Chinese, on the other hand, is an ancient art form. Some Chinese spend their lives perfecting their writing skills. Each syllable has multiple Chinese characters to express its different meanings in writing. Many systems have been devised for the romanization of Chinese. The best known are Wade-Giles and Pinyin, created by the government of the People’s Republic of China.

The Chinese character consists of two elements, the radical and the phonetic. The radical gives some indication of the meaning of the character; the phonetic at least an suggestion of the pronunciation. But over the millennia during which Chinese developed, both the meaning and pronunciation have evolved. So both elements amount to no more than a hint.

There are 214 radicals in Chinese. The number of phonetics seems infinite. For one to learn to write and read Chinese, the student ultimately needs to memorize characters, their meaning, and their pronunciation. That makes it the most difficult language I have ever studied.

The People’s Republic of China has introduced a system of simplified characters and a romanization system (Pinyin, which means “spell sound”) that make learning Chinese somewhat easier. But both systems also rob Chinese of much of its historical richness, in that each character in the original (unsimplified) system reflects the long and varied history of the Chinese people and their language.

So, while learning the old system of characters requires literally years of study, the rewards in understanding China are replete. If one has a life to devote to language study, learning the original has great rewards.

Irreconcilable Logics (2)

Like the rules for music, those for language are, in effect, a description of what people actually do. But unlike music, language rules are inconsistent and sometimes contradictory.

And despite general consistency among western languages, each language has its unique rules. In French, Italian, and Spanish, for example, all nouns, including those referring to objects, have a masculine or feminine gender. Latin and German add a neuter gender. English mostly ignores gender except for living beings.

In some languages, there is a tense distinction between past actions that were completed and those that continued. Some require adjectives to agree with the gender of the noun they modify; others, like English, mostly do not. And the rules for writing in the language can be strict. In German, all nouns are capitalized.

The logic of Asian languages is so different from that of western languages that most westerners have great difficulty learning those languages. Here I can speak of only two languages, Vietnamese and Chinese, because I do not know others like Japanese and Korean.

To me the dominating characteristic of spoken Vietnamese and Chinese is the monosyllabic structure and the use of tones. To express complex meaning, both languages use compounds, two-syllable combinations. And any syllable can have quite different meaning depending on the tone. Chinese (Beijing dialect, the one I know) uses four tones (other dialects use more); Vietnamese has six tones.

To illustrate: in Vietnamese, the syllable ma can mean ghost (level tone, also called no tone), cheek (rising tone), but (falling tone), tomb (low rising tone), appearance (creaky tone), or to plate (low glottal stop). And each of those inflected syllables have several additional meanings beyond those I’ve given. Clarity results from context or use of a compound, that is combining two syllables to form a word.

Writing Vietnamese is relatively easy for westerners. Eighteenth century Portuguese missionaries devised a writing system based on the western alphabet. The sounds intended for each letter often depart from standard English pronunciation (tr, for example, is pronounced like ch in English).

More tomorrow.

Irreconcilable Logics

Three disciplines have dominated my life: music, languages, and writing. The underlying logic of each is internal to the discipline and does not apply to any other. And the logics of other disciplines don’t apply to these three.

The logic of western tonal music—the only system I know although there are probably a dozen others—depends entirely on what pleases the mind of the listener. Melodies must be individual and readily recognizable. They are divided into phrases whose length is determined by how much breath would be required to sing them. The number of phrases in a given melody varies, but the most commonly there are three or four, sometimes with repeats, before moving on to a new section. How many sections  a melody may have is equally variable, but most have three or four. After it is sounded once in its entirety, a melody may then be repeated or a new melody may be introduced before the first melody is repeated.

The rules for tonal harmony, the simultaneous sounding of notes, are entirely different. Standard harmony is based triads, three notes sounded simultaneous. The “root” of each triad—the bottom tone—is one of the seven tones that make up the major or minor scale. Rules, based on what composers have actually done, on the order in which triads can be heard and which one begins and ends a musical section are quite strict but are often violated for creative reason.

Rules for rhythm are mostly determined by whether the underlying pulse of a piece is to be two, three, or four beats. A march is always set in four-beat rhythm; a waltz is always in three-beat.

Then there’s counterpoint, sometimes called polyphony, the playing or singing of two or more melodies at the same time. The classic rules of counterpoint, established by J.S. Bach and his contemporaries and predecessors, are complex and strict. They apply to all western music, even to pieces made up of chords with a single melody. Unlike the rules for harmony, counterpoint rules are infrequently ignored except for special effects.

More tomorrow.

Things Are Getting Worse

The world—and particularly the U.S.—is moving in the wrong direction on so many fronts. We urgently need to change the way we live.

Climate change is progressing faster, transforming some areas of the planet to the edge of livability. Coastal and island communities are being flooded. The time for taking remedial steps has already passed. We are approaching global emergency.

Income inequality in the U.S. continues apace. The Washington Post recently reported that it is the highest since census started tracking it. The rich are getting richer, the poor poorer, and those in the middle are becoming fewer.

Gun violence and the resulting deaths in the U.S. continue to grow. More and more mass shootings occur, and individual deaths from fire arms, including suicide, are on the rise.

Life expectancy is, for the first time in our history, growing shorter. It decreased from 78.9 years in 2014 to 78.7 years in 2015, remained unchanged between 2015 and 2016, and then decreased again between 2016 and 2017 to 78.6 years.

We are, in short, facing disaster on a number of fronts. Other advanced democracies in the world are taking steps to counter these trends, but the U.S. is not. We have a national government that denies global warning—Trump calls is a “hoax”—and discourages efforts to counter it. That same government passed a tax law that favors the wealthy. And it refuses to enact, at a national level, sensible laws to control and reduce gun violence.

It is long since time to change. I suspect our only hope is to change the government in the next election. I think that if we wish to survive, we have no choice.

State Circle Video

In cleaning out my old files, I came across one I had forgotten, an interview Nancy Yamada did with me several years ago on the TV program called “State Circle” on Maryland Public Television. In some ways, the interview is an embarrassment. I was so emotional as I talked about my time in Vietnam. I pulled no punches in addressing the ghastliness of combat.

In retrospect, I’m glad I did the interview and that I was so open about my feelings. One of my life goals as I age is to get people to understand the grisliness of the battlefield. The interview is a step in that direction.

And I am honored that MPT interviewed me and told my story. For decades I was shamed for my work during the Vietnam war. That exacerbated my Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI). Being thanked and praised for my role in that war has gone a long way in helping me heal. I’m grateful.

You can view the interview at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg1UDKl57PA  Let me know your reaction by commenting here.

A Post-Traumatic Stress Video

A year or two ago, I posted here words about a song on a subject close to my heart: Post-Traumatic Stress Injury. Today I’m posting it again, as originally written. I can’t improve on what I wrote some time ago:

A friend sent me the URL for a video from Canada about soldiers in the aftermath of war suffering, and sometimes dying, from Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI).

The video calls it “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” (PTSD). As long-time readers of this blog know, I use the word “injury” instead of “disorder” because the illness is the result of an external wound to the psyche, not the mind simply having gone awry. I suffer from it from my thirteen years involved in Vietnam during the war. I always will.

The importance of the video derives from understanding what happens to the human soul when it is subjected to the unspeakable horrors of combat. One of my life missions is to help Americans understand the ghastliness of combat so that they can better decide about going to war, knowing what it will do to the young men and women on the battlefield.

The video made me cry. I hope it will make you cry, too. Maybe, working together, we can reach out to our young soldiers and Marines and help them survive their soul-destroying memories.

View the video at https://www.youtube.com/embed/Wq0X0bwMprQ?feature=player_embedded

End of quote. If you reacted as I did to the video, please add comments here. The more of us that try to get people to understand this malady, the better.

 

Why and How I Write (3)

Revision and polishing take up the majority of my writing time. I often go through as many as ten drafts before I’m satisfied that I can’t improve a story any further. That means that I’m a slow writer. Fortunately, I’m also, these days, a full-time writer. I have the time I need to do the best I’m capable of.

Despite all that, I find that as I read my published work, I occasionally come across passages I’d like to improve on, especially in work done some time ago. But I have yet to revise and republish earlier work. I have too many new stories in my head demanding to be written.

Two more of my books will be published next year. Both are drawn from my own experience—fiction in name only again. They’re called Secretocracy and Coming to Terms. The first is based on happenings long after Vietnam. The second, a collection of short stories, does not mention Vietnam, but my experience during the war looms over the stories told.

And two more novels are in my head hassling me to write them down. One, provisionally named Josh at the Door, tells of a couple in their eighties having a passionate affair. The other, so far unnamed, takes place during the 1967 battle of Dak To in the Vietnam highlands. Both are impatient to find life in print. I won’t find peace until they on paper.

I read that other fiction writers start with an outline which they flesh out and revise before they put words to paper. Not me. My way of finding and creating stories is far too intuitive for a process that orderly. I sometimes think that the way I approach putting pen to paper is bringing order to the chaos my imagination presents me with. Yet everything I write about really did happen.

I don’t understand how it works. I don’t need to. That it works is enough.