Just a quick link today–this article details 23 words identified by a research team at the University of Reading that have lasted largely unchanged across 15,000 years. I’ve read a few comments saying how nice it is that words like “thou” and “give” and “mother” are in there…but obviously, I went in scanning for anything with axes. Very gratified to see that both “fire” and “worm” are on the list. Now all we do is combine them, and things are getting very pleasingly Viking-y…
Article link
Archived Posts from this Category
May 7, 2013
Last Words
Posted by meghanpurvis under Article link, Beowulf | Tags: beowulf, vikings |Leave a Comment
March 19, 2013
Nomenclatures
Posted by meghanpurvis under Article link, Writing | Tags: barbara stanwyck, link, novel |Leave a Comment
A bit of an odd post, but this is my blog so I do what I want: if you are not already reading Anne Helen Peterson’s Scandals of Classic Hollywood over on The Hairpin, read this article on Barbara Stanwyck.
If you need something to make it blog-worthy aside from the article’s inherent brilliance, it is: Barbara Stanwyck’s real name was Ruby Stevens. So when I was starting work on my novel-in-progress and needed a name for a feisty, slightly rough around the edges heroine in 1932, I couldn’t resist. Stanwyck is anything but rough around the edges, but in terms of her on-screen personality and sass, well, we should all be so lucky.
June 15, 2011
iWaste Land
Posted by meghanpurvis under 1920s, Article link, Historical, Medieval | Tags: canterbury tales, ebooks, Reading, salon, the waste land, ts eliot, writing |Leave a Comment
I usually find attempts to make literature all modern and techy and NEW MEDIA! a little desperate, but this Salon article’s description of a digital version of "The Waste Land", complete with audio performances and visual aids of Ezra Pound’s edits, may have just changed my mind. I remember having to create an annotated version in high school, and having to write in teeeeeensy-tiny letters to fit in all my notes on classical references, earlier drafts, and connections to contemporary history.
I also—and this is probably coming out of my recent viva-studying and associated academic pretension—think it’s particularly fascinating because of how it might provide a workaround for the marginalia dilemma. Notes in the margins or footnotes can often provide useful information for a reader, but the act of providing side information simultaneously distracts the reader from the actual text and places the text underneath the commentary in a hierarchy of time and/or knowledge. Oh god, and there goes my scholarly voice, I REALLY CAN’T STOP IT—but anyone who’s struggled to stop themselves from automatically checking every last gloss, even when they already know what the word being glossed means, knows what I’m talking about. There’s something about providing background knowledge that assumes the reader needs that knowledge, which I think has the potential to create quite a misleading relationship between the writer (or editor, or translator) and the reader.
To be able to provide a text that offers historical or linguistic background without forcing it onto the page with the text, though—that’s a really interesting idea. And note that Miller suggests a digital version of “The Canterbury Tales” as another text ripe for exploring—now, that I can definitely get behind. My boyfriend does keep saying he and I should find a techy project to work on together—I may have to tell him I’ve found just the one…
April 1, 2011
Oh, April Fool’s. Every year I know you are coming, and every day as I begin reading my blogreader, whatever fake news story hits my eyes before my first cup of coffee has hit my bloodstream gets me. This year, it was the Guardian’s column announcing, in the face of this month’s royal wedding, its new complete support of the monarchy. Best paragraph, and the one that FINALLY made me think “haaaang on one second–what day is it?” is the following:
The couple themselves, meanwhile, reflect values close to this paper’s own. William encapsulates our spirit of internationalism, thanks to his Greek and German heritage on his father’s side, and his gap year in Chile. Kate embodies our commitment to gender equality in the way in which she has faced work-life challenges common to many women today, juggling such roles as accessories buyer for Jigsaw and being one of Tatler magazine’s top 10 fashion icons. Other royals, too, are surely deserving of recognition: belatedly, for example, we have come to appreciate the crucial work done by Prince Andrew, using his personal connections to plant the seeds of democracy in repressive regimes worldwide.
This also reminds me that every year, I am tempted to post something on Facebook along the lines of “Mom, I’m so sorry: I’m pregnant.” I know big announcements are a popular prank, but I think the world in general is just about tacky enough that I might pull it off. But every year, I think about the fact that I’m Facebook friends with my grandmother, and I refrain.
Anyone else pull successful pranks for April Fool’s? Maybe when I’m ready to start a family, I should aim to clear the first trimester right around now, and pull THE GREATEST APRIL FOOL’S PRANK OF ALL.
March 29, 2011
So over the weekend, there’s been a series of duelling interviews/press releases/etc over Natalie Portman’s performance in Black Swan, and how much of her character’s dancing was her versus how much was performed by Sarah Lane, her dance double. A Jezebel article points out that the timing of the whole thing is a little weird and pointless—Portman’s already won the Golden Globe and Oscar, and the movie is a success. Lane’s revelation, whether it’s believed or not, isn’t going to make that much of a difference to the movie’s bottom line. So…why does it matter?
The obvious explanation is that if Portman wasn’t doing most of her own dancing, the performance somehow suffers—it wasn’t a full portrayal of a ballerina having a mental breakdown. And I guess there’s an argument to be made there; the climactic moments of the film happen onstage, and if we know it’s Portman’s face superimposed on Lane’s body, maybe that would lessen the impact for some people.
The thing is, though, that climactic moment also involves Portman sprouting wings. That scene is not about the reality of her dancing; it’s about seeing what her character feels—and given that we’re already well, well into CGI territory, I’m not sure why having someone else do the footwork matters. Also, and I say this as a girl who took about ten years of dance lessons, ballet is really fucking difficult. Mind-blowingly so. It’s not just being able to spin or kick really high, it’s about performing feats of balance even for moves that look totally basic, and having a certain stance that we as audience members take for granted but is actually the result of years of practice, and about just generally being aware of your own body and its movements in a way lay people (and I’m including myself in this number—I took lessons as a decided amateur) don’t understand. Even if Portman just learned to hold herself like a dancer and move well enough to allow a professional dancer to be superimposed in, I’d consider that an impressive achievement.
So why the insistence (complete with percentage breakdowns! I’m expecting a pie chart press release any minute now) on Portman having transformed herself in eighteen months into something dancers work their entire lives towards? I can’t help but wonder whether it’s because such an overwhelming amount of the discussion of her performance has been about her physical transformation: how skinny she was, how she lived on coffee and worked out eight hours a day, just look at her tiny dancer’s body! If we agree she looked that way because she turned herself into a ballet dancer, then it’s a triumph of immersive acting. If it turns out she did all that just to be able to look like a dancer, though, then we’ve all been lauding an actress for being really really good at dieting.
Don’t get me wrong: I think Portman is a fantastic actress, and I think her performance in Black Swan is about much, much more than what she looked like. But I think a lot of the critical discussion of her performance has devolved into talking about her looks, and if we take the artistic merit of her dancing out of it, that discussion starts to look a whole lot like rewarding an actress purely for hitting extreme physical ideals. I’d argue certain people aren’t insisting on Portman’s dancing for Portman’s sake; they’re arguing their point because of what it says about themselves.
March 17, 2008
How to get into poetry magazines: Statistics 101
Posted by meghanpurvis under Article link, Blog Link | Tags: poetry |[2] Comments
So the folks at the Virginia Quarterly Review tried to write a blog post about how writing about poetic cliches will get you nowhere, only to find it will apparently get you into the VQR. Check out their terrifying (on any number of levels) post about it here; I’ve reproduced their handy table below:
| Submitted | Published | |
| Water | 19.9% | 24.8% |
| Death | 14.1 | 15.2 |
| Blood | 11.7 | 13.8 |
| Stone | 11.1 | 16.0 |
| Bone | 9.1 | 7.8 |
| Poetry | 7.6 | 10.3 |
| Heart | 7.5 | 6.7 |
| Fish | 7.0 | 5.3 |
| Birth | 5.5 | 7.4 |
| Darkness | 3.9 | 17.0 |
| Rust | 3.3 | 2.5 |
| Cat | 2.3 | 2.8 |
I think the worst part of this for me is realizing how many of these I absolutely am guilty of writing about way too much. Apparently, though, I just haven’t been writing about them in the right combination. So, a poem about a fish boning a cat to death it is…
February 29, 2008
Random Thing I Like and Thus So Must You: the poetry edition
Posted by meghanpurvis under Article linkLeave a Comment
I was super-pleased last fall to see that Bloodaxe published a UK edition of Here, Bullet, a collection of poems by Brian Turner, about his experiences in the current (*obligatory liberal grumblings*) war in Iraq. War poems are a funny one for me–it’s one of those subjects where as soon as I hear “oh, a poem about war,” I get a nebulous half-poem in my head made up of cliches from other war poems I’ve read–and, a lot of the time, that nebulous half-poem is what I get on the page. But sometimes a poet comes along and blows that out of the water–Bruce Weigl is another one of these for me, which reminds me to slap him up here sometime–and Turner’s another one. Here, Bullet is a collection I like in short spurts rather than a longhaul reading, because the subject is so focused I think it’s easier to lose perspective; if I read several in a row I start comparing them to each other, rather than thinking “fuck, that’s a good poem,” which is clearly what I should be doing. Observe:
Here, Bullet
If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.
***
I mean, fuck, that’s a good poem.
Also! If you were a diligent reader and went to Turner’s Wikipage, you will notice he’s from Fresno, that fair boil on the face of California that I know, and love, and returned from about two weeks ago. I have a morbid fascination with poets from Fresno, mostly because I’m in awe of anyone who manages to be arty in the place and not get shot. (I am, mostly, kidding.) I suppose the fact that Turner brings his own firepower probably bought him a bit of protection, but that’s an inappropriate joke for another time.
May 28, 2007
…and what have I been doing with myself? Actually working, for once! A friend of mine who’s one of the editors of the Translation Studies journal at UEA asked me to write an article for them. (She’s also a regular reader of this blog (hi, Chloe!), which probably means she has questionable taste in all things, but I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.) So, uh, I’ve been doing that. We’ll see how it goes. The theme of the issue is “the translator as writer,” so basically it plays into all my dreams of egocentric grandeur–loads of fun! (Perhaps not tomorrow, when I’ll be doing minor edits + fixing up an introduction that I know damn well is, shall we say, sprawling.)
Anyway, it’s been interesting work, plus is relatable to my PhD work (important, since I have an upgrade meeting with a written-work-submission requirement looming), and it has also taken precedence over this here blog as of late.
Also, on Slate today, writers tell us what font they prefer to compose in, and why. I’m surprised by all the Courier fans–perhaps this is a generational thing? I grew up writing on computers, so while I like typewriters, writing in an intentionally typewriter-y font seems overly precious to me. I think I’m just used to Times New Roman, and when I’m composing, at least, whatever font distracts me the least from the actual writing work is best.
On a random note, though, I’m a big fan of Garamond for books. I wrote an entire paper last year on the Garamond font for a publishing class–I chose the topic just to be a pain in the ass, but it ended up being surprisingly interesting. Studies (yes! studies on fonts!!) have shown that people in the sciences tend to prefer sans-serif fonts, humanities go for serif all the way, and slightly fussier fonts (ie, Garamond) are typically seen as more artistic. Proponents of cunieform were, alas, not consulted.
May 1, 2007
Is it just my sadomasochistic impulse talking here, or does this sound like something just begging to be adapted into an all-poetry version?
I mean…I think I am a decent poet at this point in my life. When I first started writing poems (HAND-ILLUSTRATED, no less) as a young teenager, to express the overflow emotions of what is a rather fraught period in anyone’s personal development? Oh, christ, I was wretched. Off the top of my head, a few topics I decided were worth covering in verse:
1. alien abduction
2. the futility of human emotion
3. how much my parents sucked
4. how much the world sucked because Stephen, a godly eighth-grader in my P.E. class, inexplicably refused to return my quiet yet intensely devoted love.
Some of these were in meter. Obviously, this is territory rich for mining. I may have to see what I can organize.
(ps–about two years ago I walked past a random guy outside an Old Navy in Fresno and belatedly realized it was Stephen. I’m taller than him now. For those of you who haven’t seen me in person, I’m 5’5″. Karma, I remain forever your handmaiden.)
April 25, 2007
There’s an apocryphal anecdote from my undergraduate college that I’ve been thinking of a lot lately. I went to Oberlin College, and to me, at least, it was the embodiment of everything you hope your undergraduate experience will be–it’s small, it’s nerdy and geeky and very earnest about what it does, and it’s full of people who feel very passionately about, well, almost everything. It has a strong arts program, including a separate major just in creative writing (*waves*), and so there was a large minority of…oh, I’ll say “arty” students in the population.
Anyway, so a professor who shall remain unnamed supposedly once started off a meeting of the English and creative writing faculty with a request that “For fuck’s sake, could we please stop letting in crazy people?”
Since I’ve heard that story (and retold it numerous times, journalistic accuracy be damned), I’ve thought of it as something amusing, in that “telling embarrassing stories about your relatives” kind of way. I’ve had my own struggles with depression, and I’ve known enough fellow writers who carry around their own weird personal demons–yes, yes, the tortured-artist stereotype is just that, but there’s a comforting black humor to it (one of us! one of us!) that I think many writers find oddly accepting.
And then, the last week. I won’t patronize anyone by summing up the events at Virginia Tech; this early on, I’m afraid words fail me. In the discussion about Cho Seung-Hui, people keep mentioning his creepy, violent submissions to his creative writing classes as a warning sign–as something that should have gotten more attention than it did. And it probably should have. Nikki Giovanni was disturbed enough by him to ask him to leave her class, and Giovanni (she’s the extremely talented poet who also has a tattoo reading “THUG LIFE,” if you didn’t know) is not someone I would imagine as easily spooked.
But then again…who hasn’t written something truly regrettable out of anger, or frustration, or just a desire to shock? Everyone has stories about this. The student who brought in a short story that cribbed liberally from her roommate’s current, and very painful, break-up–the roommate, I should mention, who was also in the creative writing class. The guy who tried to start off his new poetry workshop with a bang with an unfortunate use of the phrase “meat curtains.” Hell, even I (who am typically the source of all things poetic genius) went through a particularly pissed-off phase in seventh grade where I got my frustrations out writing hideous, melodramatic stories of revenge on the bitchy eighth-graders in my P.E. class. Granted, I never showed them to another soul (unlike my stories of torrid nineteenth-century romance via Newsies, which thanks to a vengeful god are probably hiding in some florid corner of the internet), but…I can’t help but think, what will happen now to the good-but-weird kids, the ones who might end up someplace like Oberlin, now that the writers are the Trenchcoat Mafia of this new age?
Salon has an interesting article on this, Deadly Prose, should you feel like reading more. I’m not sure I have a pat summing-up of my thoughts. The line between bad writing and dangerous writing seems like the line between art and pornography–I know it when I see it. What troubles me now, I guess, is just how many people are looking, and how badly we all want a better answer than that.
