I know that blogs are new to most of my readers, so now it's time to introduce comments. Did you know you can add comments to my postings? It's easy: just click on the "Permalink" link at the end of the post. You will be taken to a page that contains the post, any existing comments, and a place to add your own comment.
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Thursday, January 19, 2006
Writing lessons
I feel a little let down by my high school English curriculum. For six years I read countless novels, short stories, and plays, I identified themes in spot quotes, and I wrote five to ten page essays purporting to explore the deeper meaning of these stories. Despite all that reading and writing, I have not been able to shake the feeling that I missed the day when the teacher discussed how to write a good essay (I missed very few days, so it must have only taken one or two classes).
I'm a huge fan of Tim Cahill's writing. Cahill, who used to be a regular contributor to Outside Magazine, has a style that melds personal experience with history and often has you thinking about the future as well. For non-fiction, he is one author I'd like to be able to mimic (another is Jon Krakauer, another contributor to Outside Magazine who writes with a very similar style). Why didn't we read articles by Cahill in high school? Why didn't we spend any time analyzing the writing techniques used in our endless reading list of the classics? I suspect it was because my high school English curriculum was more geared towards making sure we could quote from Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
("Madame, I never eat Muscatel grapes.") than to develop an understanding of different writing styles and how to mimic them. Not to suggest that mimicry should be the goal of any aspiring writer, but that it can and should be used as a valuable step towards developing one's own style.
Today I was very excited to discover an analysis of a typical article by Tim Cahill. If you haven't read anything by Cahill, I suggest you get a copy of his first book, A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg, which is a collection of articles on topics as diverse as the Jonestown Massacre and Bigfoot sightings. The aforementioned analysis is of a piece from Pass the Butterworms, a collection I haven't read, and is quite understandable even without having first read the article. I will be reading this analysis several times to glean everything I can from it. Hopefully it will have an effect on what you see here, but no one should hold their breath for that.
According to Stephen King, in his memoir/writing instruction manual On Writing, good writing comes from lots of reading and lots of writing with a few things like grammar and vocabulary thrown in (in other words, there is no formula).
With the exception of a few pages of Cujo when I was too little to be reading Stephen King novels, I've never read anything by Stephen King. I was so scared of the shadows in my closet that I have avoided scary books and movies ever since. And I'm not terribly interested in writing fiction. I never would have picked up his writing manual except that my mother was so enthusiastic about it that she sent me a copy. Once I started reading it I couldn't stop. I was hooked by the second page, which I suppose is why he is a bestselling author.
The book starts with an autobiography that exposes his insatiable appetite for horror, a love of writing, and a determination to publish, all of which started from a very early age. The second half of the book commences with a discussion of the elements of one's toolbox and relies heavily on Strunk and White's Elements of Style (he recommends that any writer own and study this book). The better part of the writing manual, however, is about how to manage story, themes, background information, and research in writing. He illustrates this very effectively with examples from his own writing history and samples of his writing. The postscript is about getting hit by a car and how writing fit into his recovery.
My only complaint is that he assumes that the reader is an aspiring fiction writer to the extent that he instructs the reader to stop reading if he is not. I found the book interesting, regardless of my non-existent desire to write fiction, because it demonstrates how one successful author cultivated his skills and develops his stories. This book would be a welcome addition to any high school English curriculum.
Reading On Writing made me want to read more of King's books, but I'm still a little afraid of the shadows in my closet.
I'm a huge fan of Tim Cahill's writing. Cahill, who used to be a regular contributor to Outside Magazine, has a style that melds personal experience with history and often has you thinking about the future as well. For non-fiction, he is one author I'd like to be able to mimic (another is Jon Krakauer, another contributor to Outside Magazine who writes with a very similar style). Why didn't we read articles by Cahill in high school? Why didn't we spend any time analyzing the writing techniques used in our endless reading list of the classics? I suspect it was because my high school English curriculum was more geared towards making sure we could quote from Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
("Madame, I never eat Muscatel grapes.") than to develop an understanding of different writing styles and how to mimic them. Not to suggest that mimicry should be the goal of any aspiring writer, but that it can and should be used as a valuable step towards developing one's own style.Today I was very excited to discover an analysis of a typical article by Tim Cahill. If you haven't read anything by Cahill, I suggest you get a copy of his first book, A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg,
which is a collection of articles on topics as diverse as the Jonestown Massacre and Bigfoot sightings. The aforementioned analysis is of a piece from Pass the Butterworms, a collection I haven't read, and is quite understandable even without having first read the article. I will be reading this analysis several times to glean everything I can from it. Hopefully it will have an effect on what you see here, but no one should hold their breath for that.According to Stephen King, in his memoir/writing instruction manual On Writing
, good writing comes from lots of reading and lots of writing with a few things like grammar and vocabulary thrown in (in other words, there is no formula).With the exception of a few pages of Cujo
when I was too little to be reading Stephen King novels, I've never read anything by Stephen King. I was so scared of the shadows in my closet that I have avoided scary books and movies ever since. And I'm not terribly interested in writing fiction. I never would have picked up his writing manual except that my mother was so enthusiastic about it that she sent me a copy. Once I started reading it I couldn't stop. I was hooked by the second page, which I suppose is why he is a bestselling author.The book starts with an autobiography that exposes his insatiable appetite for horror, a love of writing, and a determination to publish, all of which started from a very early age. The second half of the book commences with a discussion of the elements of one's toolbox and relies heavily on Strunk and White's Elements of Style
(he recommends that any writer own and study this book). The better part of the writing manual, however, is about how to manage story, themes, background information, and research in writing. He illustrates this very effectively with examples from his own writing history and samples of his writing. The postscript is about getting hit by a car and how writing fit into his recovery.My only complaint is that he assumes that the reader is an aspiring fiction writer to the extent that he instructs the reader to stop reading if he is not. I found the book interesting, regardless of my non-existent desire to write fiction, because it demonstrates how one successful author cultivated his skills and develops his stories. This book would be a welcome addition to any high school English curriculum.
Reading On Writing
made me want to read more of King's books, but I'm still a little afraid of the shadows in my closet.
Monday, January 16, 2006
Outsourcing international relations
I got a phone call from India the other day. This is nothing new. Even though I don't know anyone in India, I get many calls from the call centers there.
Like anyone with a telephone who has lived in the same place for more than a few months, we regularly get sales calls. Everyone who has been subject to the litany of calls can attest to the poor timing; the calls inevitably happen just as you are getting home, just as you are cooking dinner, or just as you are sitting down to eat. They call during that precious period between when you arrive home and that ill-defined time when it's considered too late to call, which for a telephone solicitor is, thankfully, earlier than it would be for a friend.
What you may not know is that these calls also happen during your normal working hours. I discovered this when I stopped work to take care of my child. Now I can get an unsolicited sales call when I am feeding my son, changing his diaper, or putting him down for his nap. The timing of the call is annoying because it happens when you are at home at all. It is an invasion of our personal time (and space - I don't pay $30/month to have a phone line with the intent of making it easier for the telemarketers - wouldn't it be great if we could treat them like the trespassers that they are).
Okay, so you know how I feel about telephone solicitors, and my guess is that you share some of these feelings. I'm probably not the only one who provides an abrupt response when I receive these calls. My partner often engages in little games with the callers before telling them he's not interested. I'm sure some people give the telephone solicitors an earful before they hang up. I certainly have in the past. My standard reply when I get a sales call now is "Not interested. Please remove me from your list. Thank you." Then I hang up the phone before they have the chance to try to convince me otherwise. A few people are authentically sorry for bothering me and don't even try. Most callers I can hear starting their plea as the phone makes it's way
to the hook.
Like many things these days, the work of telephone solicitors is being outsourced overseas. I rarely receive sales calls from rural Australia, even more rarely receive them from one of the major cities. Virtually all of our sales calls come from India. This may make economic sense to the companies using the call centers to sell their wares. Labor is certainly cheaper in India than Australia. It probably costs less to call from India to Melbourne than from Adelaide to Melbourne (if my international phone card is anything to go by). And Indians speak English. In theory, it's perfect.
Unfortunately for the poor Indians, and for the companies employing their services, they don't actually speak the same language. Even though the grammar and much of the vocabulary is the same, the pronunciation is often so different that it is notably more difficult for a person from the US or Australia to understand someone from India than someone from their own country. Furthermore, it is immediately obvious that the caller is not a native Australian, which increases my irritation with the company using the call center; not only are they paying someone to invade my time and space with annoying sales calls for things I don't want, but they won't even pay Australians to do it (probably because it's such a despicable job that Australians demand a lot of money to do it). Unfortunately for the person on the other end of the phone line, they bear the brunt of this irritation.
Many of the people working in the Indian call centers probably do not have phones in their homes (according to the Economist, there are 4.4 land lines per 100 people in India - compare that with 54.1 and 60.8 land lines per 100 people for Australia and the US), and therefore do not understand how numerous and annoying sales calls are in countries like Australia. They must think Australians (and this American living in Australia) are terribly rude. But now, because of this peculiarity of international markets, there is probably more contact between Australians and Indians over sales calls than over cricket.
And that leads me to wonder what effect this new trend towards international call centers is having on international relations.
Like anyone with a telephone who has lived in the same place for more than a few months, we regularly get sales calls. Everyone who has been subject to the litany of calls can attest to the poor timing; the calls inevitably happen just as you are getting home, just as you are cooking dinner, or just as you are sitting down to eat. They call during that precious period between when you arrive home and that ill-defined time when it's considered too late to call, which for a telephone solicitor is, thankfully, earlier than it would be for a friend.
What you may not know is that these calls also happen during your normal working hours. I discovered this when I stopped work to take care of my child. Now I can get an unsolicited sales call when I am feeding my son, changing his diaper, or putting him down for his nap. The timing of the call is annoying because it happens when you are at home at all. It is an invasion of our personal time (and space - I don't pay $30/month to have a phone line with the intent of making it easier for the telemarketers - wouldn't it be great if we could treat them like the trespassers that they are).
Okay, so you know how I feel about telephone solicitors, and my guess is that you share some of these feelings. I'm probably not the only one who provides an abrupt response when I receive these calls. My partner often engages in little games with the callers before telling them he's not interested. I'm sure some people give the telephone solicitors an earful before they hang up. I certainly have in the past. My standard reply when I get a sales call now is "Not interested. Please remove me from your list. Thank you." Then I hang up the phone before they have the chance to try to convince me otherwise. A few people are authentically sorry for bothering me and don't even try. Most callers I can hear starting their plea as the phone makes it's way
to the hook.
Like many things these days, the work of telephone solicitors is being outsourced overseas. I rarely receive sales calls from rural Australia, even more rarely receive them from one of the major cities. Virtually all of our sales calls come from India. This may make economic sense to the companies using the call centers to sell their wares. Labor is certainly cheaper in India than Australia. It probably costs less to call from India to Melbourne than from Adelaide to Melbourne (if my international phone card is anything to go by). And Indians speak English. In theory, it's perfect.
Unfortunately for the poor Indians, and for the companies employing their services, they don't actually speak the same language. Even though the grammar and much of the vocabulary is the same, the pronunciation is often so different that it is notably more difficult for a person from the US or Australia to understand someone from India than someone from their own country. Furthermore, it is immediately obvious that the caller is not a native Australian, which increases my irritation with the company using the call center; not only are they paying someone to invade my time and space with annoying sales calls for things I don't want, but they won't even pay Australians to do it (probably because it's such a despicable job that Australians demand a lot of money to do it). Unfortunately for the person on the other end of the phone line, they bear the brunt of this irritation.
Many of the people working in the Indian call centers probably do not have phones in their homes (according to the Economist, there are 4.4 land lines per 100 people in India - compare that with 54.1 and 60.8 land lines per 100 people for Australia and the US), and therefore do not understand how numerous and annoying sales calls are in countries like Australia. They must think Australians (and this American living in Australia) are terribly rude. But now, because of this peculiarity of international markets, there is probably more contact between Australians and Indians over sales calls than over cricket.
And that leads me to wonder what effect this new trend towards international call centers is having on international relations.
Thursday, January 12, 2006
"TV is God"
...or so said a friend of mine some time ago. I've always liked this thought, because whenever a TV is on, people can't help but watch, even when there's very little worth watching. I dislike restaurants with TVs for this very reason, because the TVs draw my attention away from the people I'm with and the conversation I'm having.
Of course, the problem with TVs goes beyond restaurants. Virtually all Americans and Australians now own at least one TV (some own many so they don't even have to pretend to be spending time with their family while they watch TV). In Australia, unless you have cable, there are only two to seven channels, depending on where you live, which limits your nightly viewing options. Still, I had somehow developed an addiction to shows four nights a week.
I recently gave up TV. When the season finale of Grey's Anatomy was announced, my response was "Thank God" (you decide which one). The Grey's Anatomy season finale meant I would no longer be tied to Meredith's weekly indecision about whether to stick with Dr. McDreamy. It meant I was free to spend one more evening a week doing something else, like write blog entries, or read a good book, or talk with my spouse! That's when I knew that I was ready to give up TV.
It was surprisingly easy. Two things conspired to make it this way. The first was the shift of dinner time to before my son's bedtime of 7:00 PM. The second, was that the networks obliged me by showing all the season finales and then starting the typically uninspiring summer line up. Every few evenings I wonder what's on the tube, and there have been a few times where I've just felt like watching, but then I remember that summer line up and decide to read a book instead.
Giving up TV has been great. I have more time to get things done, I'm better rested, and I'm reading more than I have since college.
Unfortunately, I know that once the long dark of winter consumes Melbourne, I'll be sucked back in. Hopefully, now that I've found so many other things to do during my evenings, I will only allow myself to watch one or two shows, the really good ones, if such a thing exists.
Of course, the problem with TVs goes beyond restaurants. Virtually all Americans and Australians now own at least one TV (some own many so they don't even have to pretend to be spending time with their family while they watch TV). In Australia, unless you have cable, there are only two to seven channels, depending on where you live, which limits your nightly viewing options. Still, I had somehow developed an addiction to shows four nights a week.
I recently gave up TV. When the season finale of Grey's Anatomy was announced, my response was "Thank God" (you decide which one). The Grey's Anatomy season finale meant I would no longer be tied to Meredith's weekly indecision about whether to stick with Dr. McDreamy. It meant I was free to spend one more evening a week doing something else, like write blog entries, or read a good book, or talk with my spouse! That's when I knew that I was ready to give up TV.
It was surprisingly easy. Two things conspired to make it this way. The first was the shift of dinner time to before my son's bedtime of 7:00 PM. The second, was that the networks obliged me by showing all the season finales and then starting the typically uninspiring summer line up. Every few evenings I wonder what's on the tube, and there have been a few times where I've just felt like watching, but then I remember that summer line up and decide to read a book instead.
Giving up TV has been great. I have more time to get things done, I'm better rested, and I'm reading more than I have since college.
Unfortunately, I know that once the long dark of winter consumes Melbourne, I'll be sucked back in. Hopefully, now that I've found so many other things to do during my evenings, I will only allow myself to watch one or two shows, the really good ones, if such a thing exists.
Monday, January 9, 2006
Raising children gets easier, I hope
When my son was about four months old the father of a young girl told me, "It only gets harder." There aren't many crueler things a person can say to someone who hasn't had four consecutive hours sleep in almost six months.
I consoled myself, saying that if it never got easier no one would ever have a second child by choice.
Now my child is a year old. Despite the occasional temper tantrum (which is a relatively new development), it is easier than it was when I heard that cruel remark eight months ago. Maybe it's just a temporary reprieve, but then maybe a little rest was all I needed to be able to approach all the new challenges with a sense of humor.
Or maybe he just got off easy when his daughter was younger.
I consoled myself, saying that if it never got easier no one would ever have a second child by choice.
Now my child is a year old. Despite the occasional temper tantrum (which is a relatively new development), it is easier than it was when I heard that cruel remark eight months ago. Maybe it's just a temporary reprieve, but then maybe a little rest was all I needed to be able to approach all the new challenges with a sense of humor.
Or maybe he just got off easy when his daughter was younger.
Tuesday, January 3, 2006
Books that changed the way I see the world, part 3: The Control of Nature
Four months after it was hit, New Orleans is still cleaning up from Hurricane Katrina. The population of the city is down and city officials are lobbying the federal government for funds to build new and improved levees, reconstruct housing, and trying to encourage former residents to return.
Okay, I must admit that I probably didn't change many of my preconceptions about the world from reading The Control of Nature, but I still found it fascinating. John McPhee is one of those writers who can make any topic interesting, and in this book he provides three stories of man versus nature that seems particularly apropos in the aftermath of Katrina. For instance, did you know that the Mississippi River has been trying to change course into the Red River and the Atchafalaya swamps for most of the last century. It has been stopped by an ongoing dam project at Old River driven by the desire for New Orleans to continue to be a port. While the Mississippi gets increasingly shallower and more likely to flood as it fills with silt, the amount of water flowing from the Mississippi river to the Red river has been frozen to the proportions from the 1950s at great expense because of economic interests!
This book is interesting for several reasons. First, it illustrates how dependent our homes and property interests are to current geographical conditions. Second, it demonstrates the exhaustive amount of energy people will use to protect their homes and their property interests from changes in those conditions.
Currently the population of New Orleans is less than one fourth the population prior to Katrina. Some of these undoubtedly haven't returned because they do not have a place to return to. Perhaps some of these people have decided that it's easier just to stay where they are now. Some may have decided that New Orleans is too prone to flooding (if it weren't for all the levees the place would always be under water). But then there are others who are trying very hard to make New Orleans livable and encourage people to return.
Do we insist on living in places that require continual control of nature because we are too stubborn (or lazy) to move or is it because we are running out of more suitable places? Are the projects described in this book over the top or are they just extreme examples of the control we exert over nature everyday to make our existence comfortable? The book answers neither of these questions, but it got me asking them.
Your thoughts?
Okay, I must admit that I probably didn't change many of my preconceptions about the world from reading The Control of Nature,
but I still found it fascinating. John McPhee is one of those writers who can make any topic interesting, and in this book he provides three stories of man versus nature that seems particularly apropos in the aftermath of Katrina. For instance, did you know that the Mississippi River has been trying to change course into the Red River and the Atchafalaya swamps for most of the last century. It has been stopped by an ongoing dam project at Old River driven by the desire for New Orleans to continue to be a port. While the Mississippi gets increasingly shallower and more likely to flood as it fills with silt, the amount of water flowing from the Mississippi river to the Red river has been frozen to the proportions from the 1950s at great expense because of economic interests!This book is interesting for several reasons. First, it illustrates how dependent our homes and property interests are to current geographical conditions. Second, it demonstrates the exhaustive amount of energy people will use to protect their homes and their property interests from changes in those conditions.
Currently the population of New Orleans is less than one fourth the population prior to Katrina. Some of these undoubtedly haven't returned because they do not have a place to return to. Perhaps some of these people have decided that it's easier just to stay where they are now. Some may have decided that New Orleans is too prone to flooding (if it weren't for all the levees the place would always be under water). But then there are others who are trying very hard to make New Orleans livable and encourage people to return.
Do we insist on living in places that require continual control of nature because we are too stubborn (or lazy) to move or is it because we are running out of more suitable places? Are the projects described in this book over the top or are they just extreme examples of the control we exert over nature everyday to make our existence comfortable? The book answers neither of these questions, but it got me asking them.
Your thoughts?
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