Category: blog

blog

all we have to do is keep talking

Posted on By Wil

Back in the Before Times, we’d go to a blog, read the post, read the comments, add a comment, and (usually) encounter interesting people who engaged us in interesting conversation. That probably feels like a fairytale to a lot of you, but it still happens here, because I think I’ve used a combination of no-fuck-giving and the banhammer to push away most of the idiots who would waste our time being dicks and just trying to disrupt our ability to communicate with each other.

 

Still, I imagine that a substantial percentage of you don’t have the time or interest to read what other people have to say, so it is for all of you that I am sharing this conversation I had over the weekend. I think you’ll dig it as much as I did.

In the comments to my post nebulat ergo cogito, Stephanie said

This is really beautifully written and I sincerely enjoyed reading it.
Nitpick/ question : If your title is “Fog therefore I think” then there’s a typo in your latin. There shouldn’t be a “t” on the end of “nebulat” because nouns in the in the nominative singular don’t change their endings. If you wanted it to be “I fog therefore I think” as a play on cogito (I think) ergo (therefore) sum (I am) I’d recommend adding an “ego” which is latin for “I” because nebula won’t function as a verb. Or for “fog is therefore I think” I might try “nebula est ergo cogito” Unless your title is meant to be something else and I missed it?

Latin grammar nazi 😀

I replied

So I love that, of all the kinds of grammar Nazis you can be, you’re a Latin one, because that’s really freaking cool! I had a friend who could read and write Latin, and it was always fun to make him do it at parties.

The title is taken from a quote by Umberto Eco, and because I don’t speak Latin, or read it, or even understand it, I just copied it from him. 🙂

She said

I love Umberto Eco! My favourite is the Island of the Day Before, although I’ve never read something he wrote that I disliked. I deeply wish my Italian was strong enough to read him in his original language, because I think it must be beautiful, but I can barely order coffee. Anyway, excellent choice in source material 🙂
Umberto Eco was also a poet and medievalist, whereas my Latin language training was classical (think medieval English versus modern), so there could be some difference there. He was also far more skilled a Latinist than I will ever be.

Basically, latin grammar uses different endings on the end of words in place of things like pronouns and prepositions, or to indicate if the verb is subject or object, plural or singular, etc. And Latin nouns never take a “t” ending so far as I know.

Given that I know the source is a poet, I’d say he added the ending to make nebula function as a verb in the 3rd person singular (he/she/it).

If that’s the case then the translation is roughly:

It fogs, therefore I think.

However, “ergo” may be static in meaning as “therefore” but “cogito” can mean: think; consider, reflect on, ponder; imagine, picture; intend, or look forward to; and “nebula” can mean: mist, fog; cloud (dust/smoke/confusion/error); thin film, veneer; or obscurity.

So there’s a lot of play with the translation, and we’ll never be able to say with 100% certainty what that translation should have been. As a writer and lifelong teacher, I’m sure Umberto Eco wouldn’t mind if you played with his words.

If you ever come across any more latin phrases and want a rough idea of their meaning this stuff might help you a little bit:

http://archives.nd.edu/words.html

http://www.dummies.com/languages/latin/declining-a-latin-noun/

Oh! that reminds me. Did you know that there’s a rule in English grammar that says it’s incorrect to split the infinitive? This is because in Latin the infinitive is a single word, so it’s physically impossible to split it and a long time ago, the original grammar Nazis decided that English grammar should adhere to the same rules as Latin. Of course that makes no sense at all, you can split the infinitive in English quite easily and its meaning is perfectly clear. The most famous example of the split infinitive? “To boldly go.”

Thus ends Latin to English translation 101.

I said

This is fascinating, Stephanie! Thank you for taking the time to share all of this stuff with me!

And she said

You’re more than welcome.

Latin is basically a math puzzle for the literary minded, so you’d probably really enjoy studying it since you enjoying programming and such. Have you ever thought about going back to school? A lot of people study things like languages and history and come away feeling like it’s just a bunch of names and dates and words to memorize, but if you have the right kind of mind for it, you’ll see that what it really is, is the study of the framework of our world. Once you learn to see the scaffolding that holds everything up, you get good at working with the shell that’s built up around it, and you realize that the anthropological idea that all history is fiction is literally true. If you spend enough time with languages then you start to see that writing is only a series of symbols which function as a kind of telepathy allowing you to read the thoughts of other people, whether it’s been hours or millennia since those thoughts were given form. Although It’s kind of weird when time loses its scope and the tragedies of 200 CE become just as immediate as something that happened yesterday.
I know you think of yourself as a creative type, but academia is creative, that’s why it produces so many people like Tolkien and CS Lewis and Umberto Eco. It also gives you a lot of free time to spend on other pursuits. Plus your performance ability would have made you an amazing professor, like really fantastic.
Things to think about in case you get bored.

Anne and I watched ARRIVAL this weekend, and that film deserves an entire post of its own, but something Stephanie said harmonically resonated with some dialog from the film. Amy Adams plays a linguistics professor, who is teaching her class about the origin of Portuguese:

So I was already thinking about how language and art are ways to express thoughts and emotions and all of those things that make us individuals. When I read Stephanie’s most recent comment this morning, it landed on me in a profound and meaningful way. Part of me wants to tell you precisely what that is, right now, but a different part of me, who I guess is in charge right now, would rather leave that thread out there for you to pull on in the hopes that you’ll share what, if anything, is makes you feel and think about … because I think that one of the biggest reasons we are staring into the Abyss right now is that we’ve started talking at each other, instead of talking to each other.

blog

nebulat ergo cogito

Posted on By Wil

The rain was coming down steadily when I walked to my car. By the time I got in and closed the door, I was cold and wet, water dripping off my hair, down my neck and into my eyes. I turned the key, and my headlights came on. Through the raindrops on my window, the reflected taillights of the car parked in front of me looked like stained glass. The trees, shrubs, and houses up the block looked like an impressionist painting.

I wiped as much water off my head and face as I could. It was running down my back, now, and I shivered. I still didn’t regret not bringing an umbrella. It never rains in Southern California, as they sang in 1972, so when we get a brief storm, I like to experience it to the fullest.

I started the car, and pushed a button on my steering column. The impressionist painting and stained glass were wiped away, revealing the stark realism of a residential street in the hills, a small, muddy river beginning to flow down the center of it.

I pulled away from the curb and began what would be a very slow drive home, through dark and winding streets that eventually put me up onto Mulholland, where I entered fog so thick, it could have been a cloudbank. The rain continued to fall, making the puddles on the road deeper than I expected. Winding across the spine of the hills that separate Hollywood from The Valley, the fog enveloped me, reflected my headlights back to me, turning the entirety of the world outside my car into a short stretch of pavement surrounded by a nearly uniform grey blob. I turned off the radio, my only tangible connection to the rest of humanity, and imagined that I was alone in a space between worlds.

I followed the slow turns, past the occasional suggestion of a hillside, a fence, or a turnout. The rain came down harder, mixing with the fog and my headlights to create a whiteout. I slowed my car, almost to a stop, and silently waited for reality to finish buffering.

 

blog

Three books that helped make me a better writer

Posted on By Wil

I’m really tired, and don’t have a whole lot of motivation to do anything today, but I don’t want to break the chain of daily posts that I started over a month ago, so here’s some writing advice I gave on my Tumblr earlier today:

Do you have any recommendations for books on how to be a better writer and/or how to go about getting published? Or any advice in either. Thanks you’re the best!

Before you get into books, read and listen to Ira Glass talk about The Taste Gap. You’ll come back to this many times over the next few months and probably years.

Books:

  • Stephen King’s ON WRITING is incredibly valuable, and each time I read it, I learn something new because I’ve grown as a writer, and unlocked new perception abilities.
  • Save the Cat, by Blake Snyder, is very good, too. I don’t agree with all of it, and its primary focus is on screenwriting, but the fundamentals of pacing and working from a logline and basic story type are really useful.
  • The Anatomy of Story, by John Truby, is also very insightful and helpful. I love that it uses movies you’ve already seen and know to help explain the mechanics behind building them, so you can use the same mechanics in your original work.

As far as getting published goes, don’t worry about that until you feel confident and mature as a writer. Put your effort and XP into developing your voice, your discipline and commitment to doing the work, and rewriting the first draft. Once you’ve gotten all of that into your build, you can go ahead and start looking for publishing.

I hope this helps get you started. If there was one thing that I could make you listen to and internalize, though, just one single thing that you would be compelled to do, it is this: Write every day, and keep it simple.

I say to keep it simple because we all have this tendency to complicate things, in an effort to show everyone how clever we are. There’s certainly a place for that, but when we’re learning and developing, it’s going to be complicated enough on its own. Think of it like learning to play guitar: get your scales and basic chords down before you decide to tackle Metallica’s One or Stairway to Heaven.

blog

it’s a secret to everybody

Posted on By Wil

I’ve never been someone who goes to sleep early, and I only wake up early when I have to, but I had a 7:30am call the next day, and I was in a lot of scenes, so I’d closed my bedroom door and turned off the lights at the relatively early hour of 10pm. I sighed, reached up to the shelf above my bed, and pressed play on my CD player. I put my head on on the pillow and stared at the ceiling. I listened to the disc spin up, and then the mournful guitar that opens the second disc of The Wall began to play.

Hey you… out there in the cold getting lonely getting old can you feel me?

Hey you… Standing in the aisles with itchy feet and fading smiles can you feel me?

Hey you… Don’t help them to bury the light. Don’t give in without a fight.

Before I realized what was happening, tears began to run out of the corners of my eyes. I was so lonely, so sad, so frustrated and so unhappy. I imagined myself like Pink, in The Wall; an artist who felt trapped by success he wasn’t ready for, and the expectations of everyone around him to maintain and expand it.

It wasn’t nearly as bad as the complete breakdown Pink has, of course, but I was a hormonal teenager. I was a dramatic artiste, and until a few hours earlier I had been staying at a beach house with my best friend and his family, in a house full of the girls from his mom’s drill team, including the girl I liked. Oh, she didn’t like me back, and was was never going to like me back — she was cool and confident, and I was so uncomfortable in my own skin, I was a total weirdo even when I was trying hard not to be — but I could dream that someday I would graduate from Duckie to Blaine.

I laid there in my bed, listening to Pink Floyd, and I cried. I cried because I was lonely. I cried because I was frustrated. I cried because I was in almost everything on the call sheet for the next day, but I didn’t so much more than say “Aye, sir,” and that was all I’d been doing for what felt like a long time. I cried because, though I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it at the time, I felt like I was having my childhood taken away from me.

I let myself feel sad. I let myself miss my friends. I let myself wallow in the unrequited love that is so outsized when you’re a teenager. I stared at the ceiling until the CD was finished, and then I listened to it again, finally falling asleep during the second time through, sometime before Comfortably Numb.

So, obviously, I got better.

And I haven’t thought about that night, late in the summer of 1987, in over twenty-five years, but earlier this afternoon, it came back to me as clear and viscerally as if it had just happened. I’ve been playing classic NES games on my RetroPie, and 1987 was the summer that we were obsessed with The Legend of Zelda. We played a lot of Blades of Steel, Double Dribble, and Lifeforce, but we were obsessed with Zelda. In those days, we discovered secrets in the game by hearing them repeated from kids who knew a kid who knew a kid who went to camp with a kid. We pooled our money and bought big strategy guides that we couldn’t really afford, even though it felt like cheating, because that was the only way to get help when we were stuck. We made maps on graph paper, and kept notes about the different weapons, their damage against different enemies, and all the rumours we’d heard about secret levels and hidden dungeons. That was the summer we stayed up all night more than once, listening to Depeche Mode, Van Halen, New Order, and The Smiths while we ate enough junk food and drank enough Jolt cola to kill a muggle. That was the summer that I started to figure out who I was, and began figuring out who I wanted to be, and on this particular night that I’m remembering right now, I wanted to be with my friends.

Playing these old games has been like unwrapping memories, gifts I’d hidden for myself and forgotten about, and just accidentally knocked off a shelf. When I remembered how to beat King Hippo in Punch Out, though I hadn’t thought about that game in decades, and had completely forgotten that he ever existed, I felt like I’d punched a hole through time and watched myself, thirty years ago, doing it for the first time. The same thing happened when my hands took over and made me a spectator to a game of Super Mario Bros. that was played almost entirely by memory.

I have my system set up on the floor in my office right now, because I haven’t figured out where my RetroPie can live permanently, and my 44 year-old hips can’t handle sitting on the rug like their 14 year-old version could (though my 44 year-old self has a 100% better chance of actually kissing a girl before the end of the day than my 14 year-old self ever did) but I’ve spent hours there over the last few days, revisiting these games I loved when I was a kid, and letting the memories they reveal wash over me.

Building and updating and configuring and running this RetroPie (which is currently in a tiny, NES case that I made on my 3D printer) was a fun and rewarding experience, but the real joy that I get from Retrogaming isn’t from playing games from my youth, in some cases for the very first time. The real joy — in fact, the real magic — is when the animated goal celebration in Blades of Steel unlocks the memory of my best friend, Ryan, scoring against me in a two-player game to tie the score, standing up and mimicking the 8-bit characters while saying, “He who dances last, dances funkiest!” It’s when I instinctively remember how to get to the graveyard in Zelda, hearing the music it plays when I get there, and then getting knocked over by a sad memory like the one I wrote at the beginning of this post. These memories are priceless to me, and Retrogaming is not just the key that unlocks the chest where they’re stored, it’s the treasure map I use to find it. I feel like there is power in these memories, though I don’t know precisely what that power is, or how to use it.

I guess I’ll just have to keep playing until I figure it out.