Writing on Roxana-Mălina Chirilă

In the zone/out of the zone

Sun, 29 Dec 2013 17:53:53 +0000

The following paragraphs were written with programmers in mind, but they’re absolutely true for me concerning writing, translating, blogging and everything else, as well. (source)

Here’s the trouble. We all know that knowledge workers work best by getting into „flow”, also known as being „in the zone”, where they are fully concentrated on their work and fully tuned out of their environment. They lose track of time and produce great stuff through absolute concentration. This is when they get all of their productive work done. Writers, programmers, scientists, and even basketball players will tell you about being in the zone.

The trouble is, getting into „the zone” is not easy. When you try to measure it, it looks like it takes an average of 15 minutes to start working at maximum productivity. Sometimes, if you’re tired or have already done a lot of creative work that day, you just can’t get into the zone and you spend the rest of your work day fiddling around, reading the web, playing Tetris.

The other trouble is that it’s so easy to get knocked out of the zone. Noise, phone calls, going out for lunch, having to drive 5 minutes to Starbucks for coffee, and interruptions by coworkers – especially interruptions by coworkers – all knock you out of the zone. If a coworker asks you a question, causing a 1 minute interruption, but this knocks you out of the zone badly enough that it takes you half an hour to get productive again, your overall productivity is in serious trouble.

This is one of the main reasons I get impossibly cranky when interrupted from work. I am capable of spending 10 hours working and feeling okay about it, if everybody else forgets that I exist. After all, I love what I do. It makes me happy.

Also, whoever wrote this is optimistic. I need around 20 minutes to start working at maximum efficiency…or more. Depending on the day. But then, I’m a writer. Not only does the quality of my writing depend on my mood, so does the actual damned plot.

I love swear words

Wed, 31 Jul 2013 11:05:04 +0000

Swear words do this amazing thing in language, that no other category of words does quite as well, or with as much versatility. I’m not referring to insults here (although that’s supposedly their main function), but to the fact that they intensify the meaning.

If something is awesome, then it’s awesome. If something blew your mind and made you feel very enthusiastic about it, it’s fucking awesome. If you’re awed and a bit shocked, then it’s bloody awesome. If you’ve been raised in a very clean (and probably British) environment, it’s ruddy awesome. Or, if you feel like it (and probably American), it’s freaking awesome.

They give you hints about the mood of the speaker as well: „I feel awful” is one thing – it tells you that the speaker is feeling, well, awful. It can be a whine, or a snappish retort – you won’t know. But that’s about it. „I feel bloody awful” suggests the anger/strength of the speaker.

And you can throw some of them just about any-fucking-where. Like in the middle of the word. Abso-bloody-lutely. Can you picture that done with any other word? „She was abso-cool-lutely beautiful” – …not really.

The more common of swear words have a way of migrating from nouns to verbs to adverbs – they can be turned into nearly anything you want them to be. All other words are tidy little things waiting to be used in the right way, but swear words? They’re your bitch. You can do whatever you want with them. They slip below the radar because no proper, snobbish teacher will ever explain that you can’t say ‘Fuck the fucking fuckers’ because it’s stylistically repetitive, or because ‘fuck’ can only be used as a verb. That teacher will be so busy trying to remove the devil from your vocabulary that you can go on abusing the damned word.

Linguistically speaking, these words are one of the most interesting things going on. Versatile, with their original meaning long ignored (is ‘fuck’ even sexual most of the time? Is ‘bloody’ blood-related when used in casual conversation? Has ‘damned’ got anything to do with hell or Christianity?), and with their current meaning shifting around as needed, they’re the wild cards of language, the things you can best use to show (intense) emotion or feeling.

It’s kind of fucking awesome of them and I love the bloody bastards. They get a lot of bad publicity, but they’re fulfilling their part in getting meaning across like no other words do. You’ve gotta give them some credit.

Thoughts around my novel

Thu, 11 Jul 2013 07:17:30 +0000

I’ve finished recording the audio version of the first episode of Flight from Hell and I’ve sent it off to the Big World Network. Meanwhile, I’m writing episode four, which turned a bit surreal on me. Novels do that, I think. Surprise you. You think you have stuff figured out and then there’s this extra bit of richness or of fun lying about, ripe for the writing.

Flight from Hell is the sort of thing you don’t plan on writing. Its setting, its plot, its characters – they were all a side-story in another story, the sort of thing where someone goes „Sara?… Sara was in Hell. And now she’s damaged goods.”

But one night I was bored and I felt like typing a bit of crazy, a bit of oppressive atmosphere, a bit of sharp bitterness against the world. Unkind characters and a hostile universe, things going wrong even when they go right, beauty found in bleeding and in pain. Flight from Hell was meant to amuse me during a sleepless night, but since I liked the idea of publishing I sent it off to the Big World Network, alternately telling myself that it would be the best thing they ever published and the worst and most unfitting story that’s ever been sent to them. Sometimes I feel like I need narcissism to get read, megalomania to withstand the onslaught of criticism, masochism to read suggestions for improvements. Otherwise I’ll only remember that outside of me there are written worlds so beautiful that they make me cry and I’ve never managed to get to that point. The crush would be too great, so I do declare myself brilliant. I must be.

Episode four of Flight from Hell is surreal and I’m letting it carry me around. I know where it must end (perhaps that particular bit will end in episode five, if I can’t squeeze it all in ten pages), but the road there can wind any way it likes. I’m having fun with ideas, alternately putting them on the page and washing them away, remembering what little things need to be in there and editing them in or out, spinning them around until they look like they’ve always belonged. Which they did, I suppose. Stories are marvelous that way. By the time you write them to the end, they will have always been meant to be that way.

What fascinates me is that I’ve always known Sara. She was around long before this novel, doing things, fighting, failing, trying, loving, broken, going on. I know what she thinks, I know who she is. I know what she thinks of Nakir, of this angel she chose for a companion, of Hell, of escaping, of herself. I know her fears and desires and motivations, the whole bit. I thought at first she’d be the one lending her voice to Flight from Hell, but Nakir took over. I’m just getting to know him – and he barely knows anything of Sara, but he’s watching her from behind, guessing, thinking, speculating, judging. I’m writing what I don’t know, against that silly advice of writing what you do know. Where would you be, if you always did that?… Spinning around in circles, that’s where I would be. No, exploration is the best way to go, the way I see it.

I can’t wait to see it published. And I’m curious about what cover they’ll come up with, what little song bit before the audio version of each episode. I have no talent for visual arts, no idea what I’d want as a distinctive sound. I’m waiting to see those to figure out what others think Flight from Hell is like, to see what they see it as.

Ellipses are like kisses of courtesy

Wed, 03 Jul 2013 22:02:59 +0000

Ellipses are exactly like kisses of courtesy. Not because they’re a way to bond with someone else and to be polite and friendly, but because they differ from place to place and the wrong way of doing things can cause you endless trouble.

As far as kisses are concerned, you courtesy-kiss even not-very-close acquaintances on the lips in South Africa (on special occasions, at least; so one of my professors in uni has told us – a peck on the lips). Women friends or opposite-sex friends might often be seen kissing both cheeks in Romania – especially on special occasions; I’m not sure how fond guys are of doing it (I’ll have to admit I never paid careful attention to it). I remember reading an article saying that in a province of France you’re supposed to kiss one cheek-the second cheek-back to the first cheek. Then of course we all know that in the past there was a lot of hand-kissing, which is antiquated, but might still happen today. In some cultures you don’t kiss lightly.

It’s a mess! Try imagining what would happen if somebody left South Africa and went to Japan – where they’d try kissing a teacher at the end of year. Yikes. Trouble.

Ellipses are the same. We’ve got antiquated Victorian ellipses, which are . . . with spaces between each dot.

When I was a proofreader for Project Gutenberg, the standards explicitly said that ellipses were to be separated from words … with spaces on both sides, unless they had extra punctuation near them…. That punctuation would get added (and the ellipsis would be pushed against the preceding word). This happens because ellipses are treated like words there. Well, mostly.

Of course, some would say that if you omitted a sentence, then things would be different. … You’d have that space between sentences. Others say that the omission of a sentence needs greater signalling. […] Like these brackets surrounding the ellipsis. (I agree with that)

In Romania, as far as I can tell, dots stick to words… no matter what. And there’s always only three of them, even at the end of a sentence…

And right now my editor said: „I did notice one instance where you added a space after an ellipsis, which is incorrect. Unless the sentence is trailing off and ending. In this case you were trailing off and continuing the same sentence, so the ellipsis need to be connected to the words around them.”

I went T_T. Yet another standard. And I hadn’t thought of that…at all.

I think …that the only way I haven’t been asked to type them was to push them against …the word after them, instead of the word before them.

On Writing: Stealing ideas from Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 23:56:41 +0000

Gabriel Garcia Marquez has an amazing style, no? So beautiful, so flowing, so thoughtful and clear and enchanting, making you dream of magic and wish to live in another, more beautiful country.

And it’s all done through words. All the magic there is in G.G. Marquez is visible in every single book that he wrote. I could talk about his plots, his world, his whatever – but I actually want to talk about a single aspect of his writing: sentence structure.

Prosaic? Why, yes. But sentence structure is to literature what formulas and circles and gesture use is to magic. It’s what brings things together and makes them work.

So, let’s see! What does Marquez do? And how do you write like Marquez?

1. Long sentences.

No huge secret there. Shakespeare wrote plays and sonnets. Dickens wrote novels. Marquez wrote long sentences. It’s kind of his thing. Even the damned wiki of „The Autumn of the Patriarch” says it: „The book is written in long paragraphs with extended sentences.”

Why long sentences? Because they’re cool. Because your mind reads things aloud inside your head and it adds the right stops and commas wherever they’re needed – and a long-run sentence sounds cursive, as if the narrator didn’t stop from place to place for breath or for a change of idea, but kept going on and on, lost in the story.

Is that all? Heck, no. My textbook on Victorian literature also contained long sentences, but they weren’t really a pleasure to deal with.

2. No returns

Here be a quote from „The Autumn of the Patriarch”:

She had said I’m tired of begging God to overthrow my son, because all this business of living in the presidential palace is like having the lights on all the time, sir, and she had said it with the same naturalness with which on one national holiday she had made her way through the guard of honor with a basket of empty bottles and reached the presidential limousine that was leading the parade of celebration in an uproar of ovations and martial music and storms of flowers and she shoved the basket through the window and shouted to her son that since you’ll be passing right by take advantage and return these bottles to the store on the corner, poor mother.

What I mean by „no returns” is this: in the flow of ideas within one sentence, do not suddenly return to a previous point, to a previous idea, to a previous setting. Keep going on with the narration, not back. Why? Because the reader will have to go back to the previous point as well, breaking his/her flow of the story. Maybe he/she will even be frustrated, because of the need to recall something that has already passed into an image that appeared in the past.

In other words, none of this: „She had said I’m tired of begging God to overthrow my son, because all this business of living in the presidential palace is like having the lights on all the time, sir, and she had said it with the same naturalness with which one speaks of the death of a distant relative, because in her heart God, too, was now dead„. The bold part is my mundane, non-impressive addition. What would this return do? Well, several things. It would round up the sentence and make it seem like a self-contained story. It would underline the idea said before. It would stir the reader into thinking they discovered something to hang on to – and they would hang there, so you would appeal to their mind rather than their dreams, on a certain level.

It would end a part of the story of the woman – and so would disconnect it from the other story, in which she asked her son to return bottles.

Also, returns, coupled with enough mysterious grammar, can create confusion. Sometimes it’s unintentional, sometimes it’s intentional. Check out John Milton’s opening sentence of „Paradise Lost”, which was definitely intentionally obfuscating:

Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed
In the beginning how the heav’ns and earth
Rose out of Chaos; or if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flow’d
Fast by the oracle of God, I thence
Invoke thy aid to my advent’rous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th’ Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.

I know it by heart. Why? Because it was only after reading it for what seemed like a couple hundred times that I could piece it back together into coherence. In case you’re curious about what’s there, but don’t have that much time/inclination, what it basically says is this: Muse, sing about the tree that got humanity kicked out of Eden until Jesus allowed us to get back to Heaven. You’re the one who talked to Moses and [who did other stuff], so I invoke you to help me do things that nobody else tried to do.

The sentence structure comes straight from hell in that one. Intentionally. Which is a situation extremely opposed to that of Marquez – because Milton had other purposes in mind. So, not saying returns are bad in and of themselves, but it really depends what you want to obtain in your writing. What you obtain also depends on…

3. Categories of words used

First of all, all categories here are arbitrary and they represent binaries because that’s more useful when it comes to illustrating my point. Don’t take them very seriously, but try to catch my point.

a. Concreteness vs. Abstraction

The more concrete and world-rooted you are, the more vivid the imagery. The more abstracted and concept-rooted you are, the more you encourage mental associations and the more you tell people to reason rather than feel. I’m not saying „Show, don’t tell” – this contains „Show, don’t tell.”

Marquez „The Autumn of the Patriarch” quote:

Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur.

That’s the opening sentence.

Concrete words and phrases: weekend, vultures, presidential palace, pecking, screens, balcony windows, flapping, wings, stir, stagnant, dawn, Monday, city, awoke, lethargy, breeze, man, dead, rotting.

Abstract words and phrases: time, centuries, great man, grandeur.

And I’m not sure about that divide. It’s not a very strict divide, but the fact is this: even if you look at ‘city’ as abstract for some reason, or consider ‘weekend’ abstract and ’time’ concrete, the general pattern is to have a lot of concrete details interlaced with a few unexpected abstract words. That’s why the audience can picture it so well – lots and lots of concreteness there, even if it’s some sort of metaphor.

Also, part of the concreteness: things are not named through abstraction, by category – but they’re named through specific instances. You can visualize some vultures pecking away at specific screens on certain balcony windows because Marquez implies these are specific objects in the world. Contrast to Hesse below.

After that, he can afford abstract philosophy, because you are already filled with sensation and you transfer it over the things which are nearly not at all concrete:

invulnerable to time, dedicated to the messianic happiness of thinking for us, knowing that we knew that he would not take any decision for us that did not have our measure, for he had not survived everything because of his inconceivable courage or his infinite prudence but because he was the only one among us who knew the real size of our destiny.

Contrast Herman Hesse, who had a much more abstract style:

Let us say that the freedom exists, but it is limited to the one unique act of choosing the profession. Afterward all freedom is over. When he begins his studies at the university, the doctor, lawyer, or engineer is forced into an extremely rigid curriculum which ends with a series of examinations. If he passes them, he receives his license and can thereafter pursue his profession in seeming freedom. But in doing so he becomes the slave of base powers; he is dependent on success, on money, on his ambition, his hunger for fame, on whether or not people like him.

Now, over here we have doctor, lawyer, engineer, curriculum, examinations – which could all be concrete types of words, representing something very specific in the world. But they’re not. They’re talking about generalized categories. It’s not this university, this doctor, this lawyer, this engineer, the Law curriculum. It’s simply ideas. Much less involvement from our senses, much more from our mind. He is telling us, not showing us, as it were. But it’s not a bad thing here, because Herman Hesse aims for entirely different goals than Marquez.

b. Adjectives and Adverbs vs. Nouns and Verbs

I was initially going to say ‘metaphors, comparisons and other such vs. direct description’. But that was a sucky title and not all that true.

When I was in primary school, in Romanian classes we had to learn about these things called „beautiful expressions”, which my mum hated so much that she probably set me forward on my path to becoming a decent writer by telling me to never use them. „Beautiful expressions” were these hackneyed comparisons and metaphors that had the role of ‘beautifying’ the text. I will translate a few I’ve just picked up from the net: (winter-related) „the clouds started sprinkling silver stars”, „snow settled over the land like a dazzling, white coat”, „the silver coat [of winter, aka snow]”, „shining silver flowers settle on the window”, „icy flowers painted on windows”. And so on and so forth. If you’re not native, they might sound interesting. If you’re Romanian you’ve probably heard them or variations thereof about a million times. You’ve been told to use them in stories as a primary school kid, as a homework assignment. Or stuff like that.

Well, guess what? Hackneyed expressions suck even when you’re in first grade. They ruin your creativity and make you think you need to use artifice for literature, which is false. We don’t live in Classicism anymore and even if we did…

Besides, as Marquez proves, you don’t need them to write amazingly beautiful prose. Going back to the quote which began with not wanting to beg God:

on one national holiday she had made her way through the guard of honor with a basket of empty bottles and reached the presidential limousine that was leading the parade of celebration in an uproar of ovations and martial music and storms of flowers and she shoved the basket through the window and shouted to her son

Mundane phrasing is quite alright, as long as the details are interesting and evocative enough: a basket of empty bottles. ‘A lot of empty bottles’ doesn’t cut it, because while we believe it to be true, it doesn’t bring up the same imagery, or it conjures too little. Add the basket and you get more than just a basket: you get a bent arm, or clenched fingers; an emphasis on the emptiness of the bottles, because you can almost hear them clinking as she moves, because we know how empty bottles sound; you get deliberation and the image of a careful, old-style woman. The parade, the ovations and the music are nothing special, wording-wise. But the image remains strong through its very direct, no-nonsense descriptions. It makes you a bit more involved with everything, less likely to be awed because you’re told this is where you get awed, but more likely to picture it and feel.

It’s a pattern Marquez tends to maintain: less flowery, more descriptive. Although it’s not universal (again the Patriarch novel):

the rockets of jubilation and the bells of glory… announced to the world the good news that the uncountable time of eternity had come to an end.

But this is where you need to feel the awe, to take a step back and think of it, understand it abstractedly. Still, it’s brought up after a lot of time of doing the exact opposite of this, therefore increasing its strength, keeping metaphors fresh as a stylistic device, lending you much, much visceral understanding of the world and of what the concepts mean.

What I’m trying to say is: the less you use something, the stronger the use of that thing will become. In a story with barely any dialogue a single line stands out. In a concrete tale, an abstraction built on concreteness stands out.

There are probably other contrasts to be found. And other texts might have others. Binary categories are useful because if you understand what each side of the category produces, you can use that understanding to fuel your own text.

4. Richness and Succinctness

When you have a hell of a lot of exposition and not enough space, do what Marquez does: write the bare minimum and put it in less than a paragraph . This is why those long, long sentences shine for him: they’re full of additional background details, of short stories, of anything and everything. The amazing bulk of background, which gets some people launching into impossibly long (and boring) expositions, is turned into the frosting and decorations on the cake, is slipped in and made short and beautiful and interesting and mysterious.

Here’s a beautiful blend, same Marquez novel, not a whole sentence:

in shadows we saw the annex where government house had been, colored fungi and pale irises among the unresolved briefs whose normal course had been slower than the pace of the driest of lives, in the center of the courtyard we saw the baptismal font where more than five generations had been christened with martial sacraments, in the rear we saw the ancient viceregal stable which had been transformed into a coach house, and among the camellias and butterflies we saw the berlin from stirring days, the wagon from the time of the plague, the coach from the year of the comet, the hearse from progress in order, the sleep-walking limousine of the first century of peace, all in good shape under the dusty cobwebs and all painted with the colors of the flag.”

The bolds are mine. Look at that! How many stories are there? One about 5 generations getting married. One about a stable that used to be grand. One about a plague which a wagon had survived. One about a comet. One about a century of peace. And more! Does it need to say more?… No. Tantalizing bits, or bits referring to past events that the readers know, are already enough to fire up the imagination.

Marquez writes like he fits the whole world on the page by filling in little details where others would place adjectives. It’s not an old wagon, a battered wagon, a wagon falling apart. No. Those are all direct. It’s a wagon from the time of the plague – reference to a huge event in the past, glossed over.

Sometimes to cut things very, very short means to provide richness to your text. To throw the light in such a way as to make it seem that there are many shadows which could hide doors to other worlds and times.

But does this help you write?

That’s enough for today. It’s late and my article is too damned long. But hopefully it’s helpful.

The short answer is: yes. Yes, it might. It helped me. Here’s how: don’t use it in your story. You’ll probably hate it. Instead, open a new file. Try it on. See how it works for you. See if you can get the hang of it. Trust me, after a few hours of practicing this sort of thing it becomes so natural that if you think „I want something that has a nice flow and [this other trait]”, you’ll just do it automatically. No more of this concrete/abstract, no return, mini-stories for richness crap. It’ll just work because you’ll have the hang of it. And, of course, you can turn it on or off.

The humanities are crap at writing

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 23:02:37 +0000

Dear Humanities Peers, This Is iRrAtionaL

A year ago, when I was a Master’s student, I complained to a clever friend (also a web developer) about one of the texts I had to read for university. I told him it was horrible to read, that I could barely understand what the author wanted and I wasn’t entirely sure I got the point.

„Why didn’t the author draw a picture?” he asked me.

I thought, wow, this guy really doesn’t get it. He’s never been in the humanities! So, I set about explaining that this was a Serious Text and the humanities needed no illustrations, that books with pictures were more difficult to make, that the concept was too subtle to be shown through images, that… well, basically, I threw every single reason I could basically come up with at him and as I went through each one I realized that it was absolute crap.

The real answer is this: the humanities are bullshit at writing. And they are crap at explaining.

It’s a paradox. We’re all Men of Letters around here, or People of Culture. Words are the tools of the trade, explanations and debates are what we do. We throw ideas, we juggle concepts and yet we seem to be unable to find a single damned good editor who will cut that 7-line sentence into smaller pieces and make it comprehensible at a first reading. And I’m not talking about people who aren’t good at what they do, either. I’m talking a generalized, pathological issue: the Men of Letters find themselves unable to string together two sentences in such a manner as to allow a lay person to follow their point.

Here’s Some Trees From That Forest We Can’t See

Don’t believe me? Here’s some quotes illustrating the problem. And this isn’t at all about the quality of the ideas in the text, it’s about the insane level of complexity the sentence and paragraph structures reach. I’ll start with my own professors, because I know them and I know their works. They know their stuff, but they’re often close to unreadable.

Second year of undergraduate studies, Victorian Literature. Ioana Zirra’s textbook „Contributions of the 19th Century – the Victorian Age – to the History of Literature and Ideas”:

What J. Hillis Miller identifies as the general starting point for the Victorian writer’s subjective structure of identity, i.e., the painful momentary separation or alienation of one member of the community who will become (apotheotically) reintegrated at the novel’s end into the social system corresponds with Frye’s characterisation of low-mimetic literature as a kind of comedy in which the sharing of the etymological ”comos” is foregrounded; Frye also mentions the new order triumphantly installed at the end of comedy as a qualitatively superior avatar of the same ruling social type which has been only momentarily tested or disturbed (by the, psychoanalytically speaking this time, confrontation of society with its other) only to be reborn in a perfected form (which, speaking in critical theory or ideological Marxist terms, is tantamount to ”the legitimation” of society). (chapter 4)

That is a single sentence, my friends. And it takes a bit of re-reading to understand what it says. I remember re-re-reading it before the exam and thinking, „Wow, I hope she doesn’t ask any punctual questions, because I can barely remember what some terms are.” She did. I didn’t do so well.

Another quote, this time from Sorana Corneanu’s book, „Regimens of the Mind: Boyle, Locke, and the Early Modern Cultura Animi Tradition”, which I’m reading right now. It’s a splendid book and I love the topic, because right now I’m very interested in rationality, but I am honestly having difficulty following her.

Epicurean echoes in this general moral sense can also be detected in Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667), which includes a section on the way experimenting itself is “usefull for the cure of mens minds.” It can be that, Sprat argues, owing to its active nature. The passions of men’s minds (the “violent desires, malicious envies, intemperate joyes, and irregular griefs, by which the lives of most men become miserable, or guilty”) are mainly due to idleness, so that the “medicine” lies in “earnest employments” coupled with “innocent, various, lasting, and even sensible delights.” (page 80)

More humane in sentence structure, but full of quotes from the originals, often in their nigh-original spellings (I say nigh-original because I have the suspicion that the obsolete long S-es were replaced with the normal ’s’ that is still in use today). The book contains long paragraphs, often spanning more than half a page. If you’re not used to reading English from back when ‘useful’ was spelled with a double ’l’, your reading gets difficult, it slows down. Involuntarily, you can find yourself pausing a bit at the quotes as your mind is trying to signal that there’s something different in the text now than there was a second ago.

But are my former professors alone in this disease of complication? Definitely not. Let me quote Ricoeur’s „Oneself as Another”:

This sinister — though not exhaustive — enumeration of the figures of evil in the intersubjective dimension established by solicitude has its counterpart in the series of prescriptions and prohibitions stemming from the Golden Rule in accordance with the various compartments of interaction: you shall not lie, you shall not steal, you shall not kill, you shall not torture.

Yes, you can read it. Fluently? No. And that’s not just me. I’ve run across some goodreads reviews in my search for Ricoeur. One claimed that ‘15 pages per hour are a good pace’. Is it just because his ideas are so hard to get?… No. It’s also the language.

Jacques Derrida is similarly hard to read: he even coined the term différance as a deliberate homophone of différence. Come on, reader, spot the difference! Or maybe I should mention Bourdieu („the habitus is the work product of inculcation and appropriation necessary for those products of collective history that are the objective structures (eg, language, economics, etc..) able to reproduce The form of lasting dispositions in all organisms (which can, if you will, call individuals) permanently subject to the same packaging, then placed in the same material conditions of existence” – I’ve picked a random quote from Google, I don’t even care much where it’s from).

So, here I come and ask: why.

Let me make this clearer: WHY!

Why exactly are we doing this? Why are we, as humanists, accepting this situation in which our most profound texts must be our most obscure? Why do we never draw pictures? Why do we speak in winks and subtleties, in references which everybody should get (but maybe not all do), why do we seldom explain, why do we seldom bother to make our texts readable, pleasant, to let ideas shine through?

The humanities are crap at expressing themselves. We have no easy way to introduce new people into the system. We have few places where our core concepts and trends are explained in a friendly, easy manner. I see communities of programmers easing new people into programming languages, into concepts, into ideas and methods, providing help and support. What do we do? We huddle close together and sniff snobbishly at those below us – or, if we don’t, we just lose ourselves in our ivory towers.

A year ago, when my web developer friend suggested that we’re doing it wrong, I thought he was committing a sort of sacrilege. An academic book in the humanities is Something Special. It’s meant to be complex and hard to read, it’s not for everybody to understand. It wouldn’t stoop so low as to have pictures, or friendly diagrams, or a very comprehensible style. It’s not something you read easily and it shouldn’t be.

Well… Let’s stop there for a second. Why not? How much of the value of our ideas would be destroyed by saying them in a simpler way? Would Derrida’s theory of the infinite chain of signifiers be rendered invalid if I were to say it in a simple sentence? Or, God forbid, write it as computer code?1 If the answer is ‘yes’, something is obviously not right. It means that what we’re doing here is like a strange sort of art, like a Glass Bead Game that is very sophisticated and scholarly and referential and beautiful, but ultimately random and aimless. The theory somebody exposed would matter too little, as long as it held close to our standards of how things are done.

Or maybe the answer is ’no’. Derrida’s theory would still be Derrida’s theory. Ricoeur would still be Ricoeur. The humanities would not tumble and fall. In that case, why do we do it to ourselves? Why do we write impossible books and articles?

Look at science books. Do you know what stands out first? Structure. Clear chapters and subchapters, paragraphs, short sentences. Clarity. It’s funny how clarity in communication is not a staple of people who have to do with philology and books, but of engineers and programmers, of scientists and anybody but us. Heck, if you have wikipedia open to compensate for not knowing enough physics, Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity is easier to read than Derrida or Ricoeur.

At one point I thought this was natural. It’s how the humanities do it. Right now I find it a headache and just a generally wrong direction to be wandering in. Why are we doing this?

Maybe we have a sort of Freudian… erm… phallic envy. Programmers and scientists are so difficult to understand that everybody respects them. Maybe we want to prove that we’re the same. We can be difficult as well! We can be pretty incomprehensible to the layman. It’s not all ease and empty words, it’s hard!

Or maybe we’re so damned high up on our high horses that we can’t take lessons. Screw editors, our egos need to be fed. No word of ours shall be changed, no phrasing can possibly do but our own. We are the rulers here and we take no directions, we let nobody impose anything on us!

A sadder case would be if we can’t act any differently. If indeed many people out there are right and we can’t, in fact, keep our ideas coherent enough in our heads that we can express enumerations as bullet-point lists. Maybe we can’t draw a simple rectangles-and-arrows sort of logical image that would help others understand our theory. Maybe we simply can’t put stuff in a table because our brains are muddled from too little maths. We can’t tell what we’re all talking about, so we’re wandering about in the dark, touching things – and whenever we come across something that seems new, we coin a new word. Or we come up with a new theory. We change the meaning of something. Instead of trying to come closer together and get some sort of general map of the things we deal with, we indulge in strife, in an aspiration for uniqueness which are so blinding that we barely see past our own noses. The world goes on and we wonder why nobody cares, why nobody realizes what amazing treasures our own little corner of knowledge holds.

Or perhaps this is the way it’s always been done? For all of our supposed innovation, we’re sticking to old norms that have always been around. This is the way texts before us have been written and this is how we will write – if we were to write more freely, more simply, more coherently, using smaller words and providing clearer explanations, we might lose our respectability.

But in the end, this is how it is: with just a few rare exceptions (like Linda Hutcheon or some of the fanfiction-theorizing authors I encountered in my reading for my MA paper), we suck at writing. Our heroes suck at writing. Our professors and colleagues and all those around us suck at writing. Instead of seeing this as the handicap it really is, we treat it like a badge of honor. Instead of searching for simplicity and elegance of style, we search for big, pompous words. We hide behind notions invented by bigger names than our own and dodge criticism by becoming obscure.

What we’re actually doing is turning a weakness into a subtle art and we’re either not noticing that we’ve done so, or we’re pretending it’s a quality.

Who’s willing to make the overdue change to readability already?

Footnote 1: I've wanted to do this ever since I understood what Derrida was all about.
There's something about this one theory that reminded me of my high school Turbo Pascal
classes. I could just see the crazy code flying.
So.
-create a Word class, with one variable for spelling and one for pronunciation
-add a pointer variable, which you call Meaning. Have 'Meaning' refer to another Word.
-put in a number of Words and make certain that all their Meaning variables point to other
Words (no NIL references)
-start a while loop, saying that the meaning of the word is equal to Word.Meaning; the meaning
should, of course, be a Word, so it can be referred to by your pointer.
-the end condition for the while loop is 'when Word.Meaning is not a pointer'

Congratulations! You now have a system in which every word's meaning refers to the meaning of
another word, never taking you to any actual, real thing that would be what the word really
means. You can go on forever and ever searching for that meaning.

In other words, yeah. You've got an infinite loop. Welcome to Derrida 1.01.