Happy Halloween, Word Pirates! Here’s Poe reading his poem “Annabel Lee” to get you in the mood:

Annabel Lee
by Edgar Allan Poe

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea:
But we loved with a love that was more than love -
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her high-born kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me -
Yes! that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud one night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we -
Of many far wiser than we -
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling -my darling -my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea -
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

NPR has a fascinating little snippet on the letters of Lord Byron, which are going to be auctioned off soon. They are to a clergyman Byron corresponded with, and are full of tales about cities he visited, thoughts on Christianity, stories of botched love affairs, and literary gossip–Byron called Wordsworth “Turdsworth.” Ha! It’s worth a listen.

As soon as I saw the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, I had a serious case of book lust. It has 800,000 meanings for 600,000 words in more than 230,000 categories and subcategories. It took 44 years to make. It also costs $400, which is sadly out of my price range for a reference book. A girl can dream…

Anyway, I was interested to learn that the longest entry in the thesaurus is the word “immediately,” with 265 synonyms. Why so many words for immediately? It all gets down to the nature of human procrastination:

According to Professor Christian Kay, who has worked on the project for the past 40 years, it is down to the human tendency to procrastinate. (Procrastinate: foreslow, adjourn, proloyne, protract, tarry, defer, delay … ) “A lot of the words that once meant ‘immediately’ came to mean ‘soon’, so you then needed another word that really meant ‘immediately’. ‘Soon’, for instance — its original meaning was ‘immediately’.”

This is why I love language. It reflects humanity better than anything else I know.

Word Pirates loves Lydia Davis. She has a style like no other, and really gets to the core of emotions without a lot of fuss. A critic accused her of having all autistic narrators, because she does not have characters relate directly to each other in her stories. Here’s part of her response:

We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don’t usually serve us up whole scenes complete with dialogue. So I suppose I’m saying that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place.

Lots of good stuff on the craft of writing in this interview. I don’t approach things the way she does, but there’s something about hearing a writer articulate how she does something that makes me think about my own technique in a new way. She calls her work “isolated events in a context of mystery” … intriguing!
Believer Lydia Davis interview

A good one from The Onion:

Privileged Little Artiste Writing Something Oh-So-Precious Into His Moleskine Notebook

SAN FRANCISCO—After gently unfastening the elastic strap keeping his dearest musings safe from prying eyes, little literary artiste Evan Stansky penned a few more darling thoughts into his clothbound Moleskine notebook Wednesday. “These are much higher quality than the notebooks you find at CVS,” lilted the auteur, who couldn’t be bothered to use—dare it be said—a journal of lesser craftsmanship or pedigree, or one not famously used by such legendary artists as van Gogh and Hemingway. “They’re a little more expensive, but I try to write on both sides so I don’t go through them as quickly.” At press time, the princely scribe was seen finishing his apricot jasmine tea, asking a mere mortal sitting nearby to watch his literary accoutrements, and then prancing off to the Starbucks powder room, light as a feather.

(Via Bookninja)

I’m torn. I want to follow book news to keep up with the industry. At the same time, it’s so depressing. Every day, there’s an article, or two, or four, saying how publishing is dying, no one is reading, and no one is getting their books into print.

In real life, I don’t find this to be the case at all. People read plenty, books are dominating our cultural landscape, and I know lots of writers getting publishing deals or agents right now. I’m not saying there’s no truth whatsoever in the doom and gloom stuff, but sometimes it feels like everyone in the publishing industry is re-enforcing everyone else’s self-fulfilling prophesy. It makes me want to crawl into a closet and hide.

The reality is, writing has always been hard. And while I am concerned about aspects of the doom and gloom stuff, reading about it every day makes my own writing life suffer. It’s harder to write when I am discouraged.

So I go back and forth. I want to get the news and keep up with things, but I also don’t want to hear negative Nellys say that writing is pointless because in a few years, the book will be dead. The truth is, storytelling will never die. It’s part of being human. I know that perfectly well, but sometimes it’s hard to remember when everyone is bemoaning the coming book apocalypse.

Here’s James Ellroy talking about writing. To him, publishing is a matter of extreme persistence. It’s interesting to hear what he got paid for his early novels. (Via GalleyCat)

In an essay in The New York Times, Arthur Krystal brings up something that has long bothered me as a writer. Why am I a good communicator in print, but a somewhat lousy one in person? Conversation is a very different art than writing, even though they both use words. Or put it another way, the process of bringing words out the fingertips takes a different part of the brain than bringing them out of the mouth. According to Krystal:

Like most writers, I seem to be smarter in print than in person. In fact, I am smarter when I’m writing. I don’t claim this merely because there is usually no one around to observe the false starts and groan-inducing sentences that make a mockery of my presumed intelligence, but because when the work is going well, I’m expressing opinions that I’ve never uttered in conversation and that otherwise might never occur to me. Nor am I the first to have this thought, which, naturally, occurred to me while composing. According to Edgar Allan Poe, writing in Graham’s Magazine, “Some Frenchman — possibly Montaigne — says: ‘People talk about thinking, but for my part I never think except when I sit down to write.”

Krystal believes that writing actually creates thoughts–and so it does, in the sense that it helps us organize a jumble of connections and emotions into coherent logic. Writing just engages with thought and language. With speaking, there are all these other things to worry about–whether one is being boring, whether the other person has had a chance to speak, whether a topic is polite to bring up, etc. etc. Also, there’s the matter of time. Ask me a question and I might not know the answer off the top of my head. I usually have to think about it to give you an intelligent answer. Thus, I stumble over my words in person. Allow me to write the answer to the question down and I can manage to sound pretty smart, especially if I can revise the thought a few times to make sure it makes sense.

And so, I am a writer and not a politician.

Ever read a novel that had no story? According to the Guardian, if you read according to the tastes of the Man Booker Prize, then you most certainly have. I don’t follow most awards or prizes, but I think I know exactly what kind of novel the piece is referring to:

For years, many Booker shortlists have been synonymous with “baffling”, or “unreadable”. There was something almost crusading about Booker prize juries’ preference for that bird without wings, the novel without a narrative. The more the market for “literary fiction” boomed, the more impenetrably Stygian the lists became. The truth that dared not speak its name was that many of the books in the Booker catalogue were below par. … Remote, Olympian, at times impossibly grand, Booker has held itself apart from the vulgar manifestations of commercial storytelling.

The books on this year’s shortlist are supposed to break that cycle. Hurray! I believe in stories. Somewhere along the way it became very “literary” to stray from the literary tradition of telling damn story. I appreciate experimentation, but since when did it become low-brow to expect something to *happen* in a novel?
It’s important for authors to write without worrying if it will be popular or if Joe Public or Jane Marketer will get it. But I think slapping each other on the back for being inscrutable is a bad direction for the literary community to go. I still believe a novelist is creating a world for me to explore. If your world is the written equivalent of a pretentious student film where everyone is dressed in rags and talks backwards, I’ll pass.

Return of the Cracking Good Read - Guardian UK