I flipped on the news early Monday morning, and there was a linguist analyzing what had emerged from Trump's mouth at a rally. The newscaster, Joy Reid, was earnest as she read a series of words that made no sense. Like a jazz singer scatting, Trump had tossed up a word salad of epic proportions. "He says he has the best words.... but he seems to be using all the words, regardless of whether they make sense or not," she said. The woman is a writer so she was experiencing the same thing I was—pain. She repeated various sections of his speech, searching for the secret message underlying the words. Was there any? The linguist, John McWhorter, broke it down for her. "When you're processing language, the first thing that comes into your brain is the tone, the music, then the content." Like animals in a forest, the strange noises emerging from Trump's mouth carried an emotional code, though the string of nonsense was utterly lacking in any coherent meaning. For a writer, this can be crazy making. Sure, we deal in the musicality of language, but writers spend an inordinate amount of … [Read more...] about Writing in the Age of Insanity
Raymond Chandler on What Haunts the Reader.
“A long time ago when I was writing for pulps, I put into a story a line like ‘he got out of the car and walked across the sun drenched sidewalk until the shadow of the awning over the entrance fell across his face like the touch of cool water.’ They took it out when they published the story. Their readers didn’t appreciate this sort of thing: it just held up the action. And I set out to prove them wrong. My theory was they just thought they cared nothing about anything but the action; that really, although they didn’t know it, they cared very little about the action. The things they really cared about, and that I cared about, were the creation of emotion through dialogue and description; the things they remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain on his face and his mouth was half open in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death. … [Read more...] about Raymond Chandler on What Haunts the Reader.
Bowie’s top 100 books – the complete list – David Bowie Latest News
Originally posted on www.davidbowie.com “Lend us a book we can read up alone” It’s likely that most people reading this will have already seen either the original story on openbookstoronto.com last week, or a version of it referring back to that original list of “DAVID BOWIE'S TOP 100 BOOKS”. There have also been numerous suggestions of a Bowie Book Club to tackle each of the 100 volumes. However, there was a problem with that particular openbookstoronto.com feature in that only 75% of the books were actually listed! For anybody planning on completing this epic voyage of discovery, we’ve listed every single one of the 100 books here (in no particular order) for your reference. You may have also noticed the two chaps in the middle of our montage. Well, it’s none other than David Bowie sporting a Clockwork Orange T-shirt (the book by Anthony Burgess is in the list) with his old chum, George Underwood. George kindly supplied the previously unpublished photograph, which according to him was taken aboard Amtrak somewhere between New Orleans and Chicago on the first US … [Read more...] about Bowie’s top 100 books – the complete list – David Bowie Latest News
