I need to talk (email) someone who knows more about the workings of the internet than I do. Specifically, I have some ideas as to how one could create an absolutely untraceable computer, one that would allow you to browse anywhere with no fear of being identified. But I don’t think I can write this out without it looking really, really naive. Like, “the internet is a series of tubes” naive. So if there’s anyone out there who’s savvy enough to help, can you chime in, please?
Thanks!
D.
From Miller’s Crossing:
I doubt you could sustain much more than a five- or six-second burst from a tommy gun with a full magazine, but Leo manages at least two to three times that. And then there’s the exploding car at the end. It’s always better when cars go kaboom. Still, as I get older I’m finding myself more and more fond of badass seniors, which is why I’m probably writing them into my story (there will be three before all is said and done . . . four if you count the #1 Bad).
Research today has focused on krav maga, Israelis speaking in English, and the evangelical back-to-Israel movement. Having a lot of fun with this, although it seems like there isn’t enough time in the day to do as much as I would like to do.
D.
It never fails to amaze me how much “show” it takes to convey the information in 100 words of “tell.” I’m guessing the ratio is something like 10:1.
Yup, just checked. I eliminated two paragraphs of “tell” with 2700+ words of show. That’s more than 10:1.
In fairness, I accomplished a hell of a lot more in those 2700+ words than I did with those 200+ words. But I’m still wondering what to do with something like 2000 more words of “tell” — which was a hell of a lot of political exposition. And I know that I just need to man up and cut the stuff. Very little of it is truly essential.
D.
5822, spread out over three incomplete chapters.
Bits of scenes come to me and I write them down or email them to myself, to save them from memory death.
Just letting it happen however it will. Not fighting it.
Having fun.
D.
But I have been writing. New stuff, not just editing old stuff. Don’t know how long it’ll last but for the time being, the muse is feeding me ideas, and if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that you don’t fuck with the muse.
D.
One of my favorite essayists is former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham (who, in his life since Harper’s, now edits Lapham’s Quarterly). Lapham’s essays often have a unique form of argument, stabbing at the thesis from multiple directions, convincing you of the thesis’s validity before the thesis has ever been articulated. By the time the reader finishes, he not only agrees with the thesis (usually) but has a deeper understanding of the topic; and if he does not agree, he still comes away with that same depth of knowledge.
I have always felt that this was the pinnacle of essay writing, the ideal to which the young author should aspire. When I home-schooled my son, knowing that he didn’t have the depth of knowledge that decades of scholarship brings, I simplified the format into one which would still stand him in good stead in college. Begin with your thesis paragraph, I told him, develop and prove it in the paragraphs which follow, and restate at the end; but, and here’s the kicker, your goal should be to augment the thesis with your arguments, and when you conclude, restate a thesis which is deeper than the one with which you began. Call it value-added essay writing.
Jake’s Theology teacher (a Jesuit, and therefore in my opinion NOT an intellectual lightweight) disagrees. Theology this year is a writing class more than anything else. All to the good. I asked Jake how he was doing, and he told me that the only thing the teacher red-lined was precisely the thing I had been teaching him all these years. I know what his teacher has in mind because he discussed this with us at Open House. He wants a very simple format: state your thesis, support it, restate it at the end. In other words:
Okra is a disgusting vegetable.
It’s slimy no matter how you cook it.
The taste in no way compensates for its inherent sliminess.
Hence, okra is a disgusting vegetable.
Whereas my ideal essay would run more like this:
Okra is a disgusting vegetable.
It’s slimy no matter how you cook it, and the taste in no way compensates for its inherent sliminess.
In many areas of the country, a child could easily get through the first twenty years of life without seeing, let alone tasting, an okra dish, while in other areas of the country, okra is as much a part of a weekly schedule as potatoes, onions, or carrots. Those people often develop a fondness for okra.
In other parts of the world, staple foods may include things that others find unacceptable and “disgusting” — blood, intestines, insects. Foods we find acceptable (poached egg, anyone?) might be similarly revolting to people living in those regions. The emotion of disgust in response to particular foods may have more to do with what the eater is used to than anything else. Never eat anything slimy? Then slimy is not a characteristic you associate with acceptable food.
Okra’s unacceptability to many Americans is thus not only an example of the diversity of dietary practices in the world, but also tells us a little something about human nature.
(Forgive the topic, you okra-lovers; I pulled that one out of the air. And I’m afraid I did not put much time into creating something that would stand in the same galaxy as Lapham’s essays, let alone the same room.)
The Theology teacher’s version is geared toward getting high marks on AP History or English essay exams. The SAT written exam almost certainly has similar grading practices. Considering how poorly most college students write at the undergraduate level, I suspect most college profs would be delighted to read a well executed version of the A, B, C, D, and therefore A essay. So there’s nothing at all wrong with this goal. It’s good writing. But it’s not great writing.
Okay, so maybe I was wrong in my attempt to get Jake to shoot for the stars. But I don’t think so. Because if you can write even a little bit like Lapham, you can easily modify your writing to suit the circumstances. I explained this to Jake this morning . . . hopefully he can excuse me for making him write with too much finesse.
D.
From The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiel Hammett (1929):
“Another thing,” Spade repeated, glaring at the boy: “Keep that gunsel away from me while you’re making up your mind. I’ll kill him.”
The word “gunsel” made it into the script for the 1941 film with Humphrey Bogart, Sidney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre. The various editors — Joseph T. Shaw for Black Mask, where the story was first serialized, and whomever Warner Bros. employed to parse scripts — apparently figured the word was slang for “gunman.” Has “gun” right there, don’t it? But in fact, “gunsel” was a brilliant sleight-of-hand showing why, when it comes to words, you should never screw with a writer.
Erle Stanley Gardner writes in “Getting Away with Murder,” The Atlantic, Vol. 215 No. 1 (1965):
Hammett wrote a story which contained an expression that gave Shaw quite a jolt. He deleted it from the manuscript and wrote Hammett a chiding letter to the effect that Black Mask would never publish vulgarities of any sort.
Hammett promptly wrote a story in which he laid a deliberate trap for Joe Shaw.
One of the characters in the story, meeting another one, asked him what he was doing these days, and the other shamefacedly admitted that he was “on the gooseberry lay.”
Had the editor known it, this meant simply that the character was making his living by stealing clothes from clotheslines, preferably on a Monday morning. The expression goes back to the old days of the tramp who from time to time needed a few pennies to buy food. He would wait until the housewife had put out her wash; then he would descend on the clothesline, pick up an armful of clothes, and scurry away to sell them.
Shaw had the reaction which Hammett had expected. He wrote Hammett telling him that he was deleting the “gooseberry lay” from the story, that Black Mask would never publish anything like that. But he left the word “gunsel” because Hammett had used it so casually that Shaw took it for granted that the word pertained to a hired gunman. Actually, “gunsel,” or “gonzel,” is a very naughty word with no relation whatever to a bodyguard, a gunman, or a torpedo.
(Full excerpt here.)
So what’s a gunsel? From Wiktionary,
gunsel (plural gunsels)
1. A young man kept for homosexual purposes; a catamite .
2. (street and prison slang) A passive partner in anal intercourse.
I first encountered that word in The Maltese Falcon, and all these years I assumed it meant a gunman, or a hired punk with a gun. I was going to use it today, and googled it merely to check the spelling. Imagine my surprise. And think of all the writers who use it as a synonym for “gunman,” propagating Hammett’s little joke for generations to come.
It’s stuff like this that makes it all worthwhile.
D.
The key to breaking the block, I think, has been to write. I knew this all along, of course, but I didn’t have anything to write. But in editing The Brakan Correspondent (which henceforward will be referred to by its new name, The Correspondent’s Daughter), I’ve realized that I need to write more stuff. Not padding, no — there’s stuff missing. I’m serious. The pacing is off in many places because I’ve rushed things terribly. There are opportunities missed, settings and characters not fully fleshed. I need more writing, not less — a black pen, not a red pen.
Realizing this has made all the difference. All the many times I’ve opened up my TBC files, only to get discouraged because I couldn’t fix things by changing words, cutting words, rewriting or cutting sentences. Each time, I had hoped to edit a chapter a day and zip through the whole job, and each time I would wither and die by the third chapter. I couldn’t fix it. It was beyond me. I couldn’t make it the book I wanted it to be, not without rewriting it altogether.
The truth is somewhere in between the total rewrite and the speedy edit. And the truth, it seems (based on the fact that I’ve managed to write for four days out of the last five), is far easier to accomplish than either extreme. It will be slow-going, and I really shouldn’t celebrate until I’ve made it past that deadly Chapter 3 barrier. But for now it feels good, really good, to be creating new scenes, and that good feeling has given me the energy to fix the busted scenes.
But I’m done for the day. Time to play video games. Or give the ferrets a bath.
D.