Methodized

Boswell's teenage commonplace book. (Via Jim C.)

Closing tabs

Tiny books of the Bronte children: digital facsimiles here. These are so amazing (I think the link came via Becca?)....

Also:

The Lawn Road Flats chronicled (truth is sometimes more interesting than fiction!).

Jim Holt on the conundrum of personal identity.

Abandoned settlements of the far north. (Via Anna.)

Closing tabs

Via Sadie Stein, Sylvia Plath's drawings.

What have neutrinos done for you lately?

Claire Cameron interviews Sheila Heti at The Millions.  (Particularly interesting thoughts there on revision.)

Lauren Beukes's teenage novel-ideas notebook.

Lily Ladewig on publishing her first book of poems (and good tips here on first-book-writing in general).

Highlight of last week: gin and marmalade at Madam Geneva!

Light reading update

I have to say that I hugely enjoyed Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind. I had heard very good things about it, but it is necessary to take epic fantasy recommendations with a grain of salt: however, it breathes new life into the old scarecrow of the genre with incredibly rewarding results. I will even go so far as to say that it strongly and pleasantly reminded me of David Copperfield, one of my top ten favorite novels of all time! My only regret is that I did not wait just a little longer to get to it, since my impulse on finishing it was to demand the next installment - but that's not out till March 1: however will I wait?!?

I had quite mixed feelings about Bound to Last: 30 Writers on their Most Cherished Book. There are a number of very good essays, but many of the others are on the short/shallow side (you get that bad magaziney feeling, cumulatively - there is no clear principle of selection for who is included, and people have spent quite evidently different amounts of time and thought in composing their pieces); there is also a genuinely distressing subtext of hostility towards electronic books! It is perplexing to me - I have seen it elsewhere recently too - why the sense of an opposition? It is surely not an either-or, a few of the writers here acknowledge this thoughtfully but more of them just lash out against the immateriality of the e-text.

Perversely, I read this book on my Kindle - I should have waited till I was back in the U.S. to order it, since I'm only reading it now anyway, but as soon as I heard about Ed Park's piece on "The Dungeon Masters Guide" I knew I had to get my hands on it at once, island living notwithstanding. That piece met or even exceeded expectations: it is a great little bit, and now I will have to get hold of a 'real' copy of the book so that I can xerox it and share it with others!

Other standouts: David Hadju on Ralph Ellison; Karen Joy Fowler on The Once and Future King.

Anyway, here's one of the bits I liked from Ed's essay - I too grew up on and loved those Wordly Wise vocab books! -- the whole pieces takes the form of 100 numbered points:

15. "In grade school, English class was divided between reading, grammar, and spelling. I liked the first, dreaded the second, looked forward to the last. The vocab book we used was called Wordly Wise. There was a whole sequence of them, with an owl on the cover."

16. "At school I loved vocabulary lessons. Discovering new words. I remember distinctly the time we learned the difference between metaphor and simile--the time we learned what these words even were. The words themselves were so interesting. They weren't shaped like other words I knew. Simile reminded me of smile and, in doing so, made me smile."

17. "Dungeons & Dragons, particularly the Dungeon Masters Guide, was like the phantasmagorical appendix to Wordly Wise. My supplementary, self-directed lessons."

When I was in fifth and sixth grade, I used to race through two or three of those Wordly Wise lessons each week, burning through increasingly 'advanced' workbooks like a fiend: at the end of the week, I would take a spelling test on the words I'd learned (really I knew them already!), there would be perhaps 45 of them because I would have done more than one lesson's worth, and I would have to write a sentence to show that I knew the meaning of the word: but laziness and frenetic energy combined made me make huge absurd portmanteau sentences that would fit three or four or five of these words into a single sentence. I fear it left its mark on my writing style...

(I think I have some of these in a box in my office, I will see if I can dig them out; I am overdue for a posting on more Davidsonian juvenilia! I loved those workbooks - I would strongly recommend them to home-schoolers with kids aged 8-12 or so, I think they are ideal.)

The children and the fruit tree

Earliest known work by JMD! Not sure whether I was three or four when I dictated this story to my mother, but certainly I was already in thrall to the absurd notion that the only thing really worth doing with one's time was writing a book....

Diagnostics

When I was little, I was always writing something - but starting when I was around ten or so, I spent an inordinate amount of time writing a novel called The Purple Cow. It was known in the family as "Jenny's bestseller" - "Where's Jenny?" "She's in her bedroom working on her bestseller."

(There was no ironic freight to the usage, but neither was there anything delusional - it was just always my life ambition to write a trashy novel a.k.a. bestseller, an ambition I have slightly reluctantly given up as I realize that I have missed the moment in life when I might have actually written my Upper Manhattan animal shapeshifter urban fantasy...)

I have just unearthed the box with the novel in it - it is in a green plastic binder, both the original manuscript and a partially typed version - I cannot resist scanning and posting the first page of the typed version. I am guessing it was drafted when I was ten or eleven and typed up a year or so later!

Hmmm, I cannot spare the time right now to do a further selection, though I have slightly mesmerized myself by looking at the middle stretch of pages and I do think I'll redact some of this stuff later on. The book is episodic rather than arc-like in structure, but the main central episode involves a book-writing competition that everyone gets involved in, with charts and calculations! I definitely recognize the person who now likes to make to-do lists and training schedules - really this was an utterly demented project...


NB I learned to type because we only had two cartridges for our TI-99/4A - Munchman and the Touch Typing Tutor!