Owner: The Truth About Lies URL:http://jim-murdoch.blogspot.com Join Date: Sun, 07 Oct 2007 10:44:52 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: Scottish author Jim Murdoch muses over writing, other writers and the perversity of the English language. Site statistics:Click here
BlogRush 2007-09-17 09:52:00 I’ve just signed up to BlogRush and I’m not sure. I think I’ve done it right; the widget (if that’s the right term for the wee interface) is squatting unobtrusively at the bottom of my side panel and seems to be working okay. Now all I have to do is sit back and wait.Understandably I’m nervous. This is the first of my websites to get pushed out into the world – the rest are still under construction – but I suppose this is the most important one. The thing is, the reason this site exists is to direct/attract people to my writing when I finally get my main website out there and there’s this horrible issue that I find myself continually struggling with: how much does/should the reader really need to know about me before deciding to take a chance on whether I can string a story together or not?Personally I’d rather back right out of the picture. My books/stories/poems are far better than any blog entry I’ll ever make and yet that’s what most people will judge me on, s
Two minutes and twelve seconds 2007-09-14 12:39:00 Word count: 442 wordsThis will take you 2 minutes
and 12 seconds to read. Approximately.I had to go to the doctor’s yesterday. I was there a week ago and he gave me some medication which, to say the very least, did not agree with me. To say a little more, it was like being dragged, kicking and screaming back to one of those weeks when you were a kid and sick and just starting to realise how much the human body can hurt itself if you disrespect it too much. It had been a long time since I had felt so miserable and what hurt – though way down the bottom of the list of the things that really really hurt – was that the root cause was taking something to make me feel better.Anyway, that sets the scene. I went armed with a history of my miscellaneous aches and ailments hoping, once looked at together, an underlying cause might manifest itself. Of course, when the list came out of my bag the doctor’s hands went up – physically I think though it might just have been metaphorically
Twenty-seven dictionaries 2007-09-08 15:42:00 I’ve always known that I owned a lot of dictionaries but until today I’ve never actually sat down and counted them. In total I have 27 including the 2 thesauri and my wife has another dozen of her own. That’s a lot of dictionaries.Neither my father nor my mother to the best of my knowledge ever owned or even read a novel. My mother in the years leading up to her death would pick up the odd woman’s magazine from a second-hand shop but even those she only skimmed. My father bought books by mail order, self-help books mainly but we also ended up with four sets of encyclopaedias, The New Universal Dictionary and Hartrampf’s Vocabulary Builder and I owe a great deal to both of these two excellent books which I sat and read like novels. It puzzles me that it took so many years for it to dawn on me that I was a writer; words always fascinated me. I remember seeing a copy of the complete Oxford English Dictionary at school (all twenty volumes of it) once locked away where no one woul
French computer sex 2007-09-03 17:36:00 I have a question to which I am confident there is an answer but one for which I don’t want to know the answer: In French
who decides what gender something is? Before the 1940s the expression ‘computer’ existed but it referred to someone who performed calculations, not to a machine, so, when the term ‘computer’ was finally assimilated into our daily lives who in France decided if its computers were male or female? The French for ‘the computer’ is l’ordinateur which, because the French drop off the vowel in le and la when it precedes a noun beginning with a vowel, doesn’t help; is it le ordinateur (male) or la ordinateur (female)?I could look it up but I like the mystery. I like the idea of some Département de l'attribution du genre aux objets neuters (Department of the Assignation of Gender to Neutral Objects), in a little dusty office off the Rue de le something-or-other inhabited by a secret society of ancient Gauls sitting around trying to determine whether a cam
The miracle of language 2007-08-30 17:44:00 I don’t get language
. I know a lot of words though I’m always a little wary of dropping most of the big ones into conversation not out of any lack of confidence but because they don’t belong in conversational English. Take a word like borborygmia for example (the sound of wind moving through your digestive tract), it’s a lovely word but what’s the point in using it if you have to explain it?I was having a quiet spot at work today and, as I do, I was pondering why we use the term ‘paragraph’ to describe a distinct division of text. The ‘graph’ bit I got – from graphein “to write” – but what did the prefix ‘para’ mean? I thought about parachute, paramount, paraplegic, Paraguay – okay maybe not Paraguay – but I couldn’t figure it out and I didn’t have a computer to hand.Now I see it comes from the Greek paragraphos, "short stroke in the margin marking a break in sense," and that makes sense, some sense. Maybe one day I’ll look up the history of the Read more:miracle
Why we read 2007-08-23 14:46:00 I picked up a book today for the first time since God alone knows when, a fiction book that is. All I seem to have been reading of late have been textbooks – how to write HTML, how to blog, the ins and outs of web marketing – it can wear you down.The book, not that it matters too much, is On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan. I’ve not read anything by him since The Cement Garden despite the fact we have practically all of his books in the house. The attraction was its size. Best to break oneself in gently.I have mixed feelings about reading which I could put down to my age but it’s not the case because I’ve always had them. Do I like reading is perhaps the first question that deserves an answer and the answer is, no.Let me clarify. I don’t particularly enjoy the physical act of reading – I can never get comfortable, my eyes start to itch, I get sleepy – unless (and it is a BIG unless) the author manages to captivate me, entrance me – call it what you will. We use the term
Good reads 2007-08-20 05:28:00 I’ve joined a new site by the name of Goodreads whose purpose is to provide a home for a pile of book reviewers to store and share information. (Note to self: there must be a better collective noun for book reviewers. Maybe ‘column’? A column of book reviewers).The chore, which is where I am at the moment is entering all the books, or at least a good whack of the books, you’ve read. (Hm is ‘a good whack of’ a proper collective noun?) As a writer you might imagine I’ve read a ton of books (and would that be Avoirdupois or Troy) but I don’t own many of them. (Actually, if I’ve read a ton of books I probably own about 7 or 8 hundredweight of what I’ve read – I still have quite a lot of books).The thing I’m finding is that there are books on my shelves that I know I’ve read and yet I can’t remember a damn thing about them. I even remember enjoying them at the time. Now, the question is, does this reflect badly on me or the author? I suppose a bit of both. The th
Thirteen 2007-08-16 19:56:00 I was playing around with keyword checking websites yesterday, trying to get a feel for them. Meta tags were so much easier. I started with the kinds of keywords I thought might work for my site but didn’t come away much the wiser. So, I thought, let’s have a go with some words where I know what to expect so I tried “transformers” and lo and behold hardly anyone was searching for that word until a couple of months ago, now 100,000 people a day are investigating them. Cool.Okay I said, let’s try something that women will search for. Assuming men were more interested in the contents than the containers I typed in “bra” but I was so wrong: only 60% of all searches were by males. I told my wife and she said to look up “breasts” which I obediently did and the results were also a bit of a surprise: a mere 67% of males. To be honest I expected more but I was forgetting about breast cancer and implants.Then I took a closer look at what breasts were being looked at. Jessica Al Read more:Thirteen
Jeanette and Richard 2007-08-14 07:22:00 I love Jeanette Winterson in much the same way I love Richard
Brautigan. I think she’s beautiful and it delights me no end when I rediscover – because I never remember – that we’re the same age; he’s handsome in a way that only my wife will ever see me and it pleases me, again for no logical reason, that we both had daughters even if he did give his an odd name (Ianthe). But that’s not why I love them.My wife owns every book Jeanette has ever written. She even has a DVD of her screenplay. I have virtually everything Richard ever wrote though I doubt I’ll ever have the money to afford some of the early poetry books. I’ve not read all of Jeanette’s books nor am I in a rush to buy the last couple of Richard’s novels that I’ve not got to (The Hawkline Monster and Dreaming of Babylon). The reason is the same: I’ve read everything Samuel Beckett ever wrote.I own a copy of every piece of fiction that Beckett ever wrote. I have DVDs of all his stage plays, CDs of all hi
Imaginary buddies 2007-08-10 19:37:00 I just read an article called The Buddy List: The Fifteen Most Dynamic Duos in Pop Culture History.I have to admit to being pleased to see Vladimir and Estragon there (albeit at #6). There were some glaring omissions, Batman and Robin was the first that jumped to my mind but, on checking the criteria the compilers imposed upon themselves, I could see why they weren't there. I was less convinced that Mulder and Scully should be excluded because they wound up as a couple but what the heck.I was also sorry to see George and Lenny from Of Mice and Men were not on the list. You couldn't call Lenny a sidekick but they’re definitely not on an equal footing. Of course I became aware of the notion of George and Lenny long before I read the book. The pairing of the big dumb bloke with the little street-wise guy was a regular feature in the American cartoons I watched as a child and perhaps it is there that the origins of my own literary creations dates back.What puzzles me more is that basic Read more:Imaginary
The guy in the corner 2007-08-08 13:52:00 I’ve been looking through some social networking sites for writers, Storylink, Readerville and Writing.Com. I’m trying to get a feel for them, to understand where they fit into the mix these days but I’m not quite there yet. I used to be involved with Zoetrope a few years back but it consumed so much of my time I quit and wrote a couple of novels instead.Things have changed. The lingo for one. And the mentality. Now don’t get me wrong, I spend hours online as does my wife. I still own all my reference books – I have a shelf full of dictionaries – but I rarely need to get off my backside to check one. And that’s a good thing. I believe that’s a good thing. Between us we own five computers and have totally embraced this new technology but only up to a point. And that point for me was about ten years ago. I haven’t moved on not because my experience with Zoetrope was bad because it was anything but.Now I’m told I need an author website, a blog, a MySpace page and somet Read more:corner
Fuzzy truths 2007-08-07 14:23:00 So what’s with the title? I suppose I should’ve made this the first blog but I didn’t. The quote is from a poem I wrote some time ago. It’s a line of thought I’ve been absorbed with for most of my life.I was brought up to believe that one day I would get to know the truth and that knowledge would in some way free me (John 8:32) but the problem was I couldn’t tell. I was presented with things and told they were true but I pretty much only had people’s words for it. I didn’t feel freed. In the main, of course, it was the bigger issues, the existence of a personal god and the meaning of life. Their truths were not without proofs but, for the most part, what was needed was a leap of faith to believe the truth.Beliefs are another thing completely. They don’t need to be true. In some cases it’s not even essential that the individual believe that they’re true. In those cases it’s a matter of going through the motions because doing something, feeling something is perce Read more:Fuzzy
Death and heroes 2007-08-06 14:51:00 Ingmar Bergman is dead. He died a few days ago but I only just found out. I'd watched two documentaries about him on BBC4 a couple of weeks ago and, for the first time, the early film, Sawdust and Tinsel. I immediately went into the living room and told my wife. "That's sad," she replied and I tried to remember the last person whose death I took note of but I couldn't. It was an actor, of that I was confident, who had died but I couldn't think of his name. Now I've had time to think about it I realise it was the comedian-turned-actor Mike Reid.It would be in the 1970s that I became aware of both men. It is quite possible that I had run across a Bergman film before that but I would no doubt have found it boring and it would have gone over my head. Reid, of course, was one of the original stars of The Comedians, a TV show featuring a host of stand-up comics. There was nothing subtle about his humour.The first Bergman film I remember seeing - and it is still, sentimentally perhaps, m Read more:heroes
Warning: this blog is not inspired 2007-10-25 12:10:00 Whilst working on my entry for Nothing Binding one of the fields asked for my sources of inspiration. There's no easy answer. It's not that I haven’t thought about it before, why one piece of writing is only okay while another one rocks. It's nothing to do with intelligence or ability. They're factors in the equation, more constants than variables. The critical issue is often to do with inspiration, but we'll come back to that.First of all, what is writing, I mean beyond scribbling words down on scraps of paper? Why do I have to write? Why is writing the answer the thing I naturally gravitate towards when something affects me? Why don't I curl up in fœtal position or simply bang my head against a wall?Okay, let's have a stab at it: Creative writing: NOUN, a delayed sympathetic reaction following an emotional response to specific external stimuli expressed in words.Not perfect but not bad. (Please feel free to have a go yourself.) In others words, a red rag gets a bull's dand
And your point is, caller? 2007-10-22 03:30:00 The following was, for a long time, the opening paragraph to my fifth novel. I clung on to it for dear life but it simply refused to fit with the tone of the book. I had to scrap it – along with the next 9830 words. Ouch! The thing is, I still like the point
it has to make.Write about what you know. It’s the most patently obvious piece of advice budding authors get presented with, more often enough by non-writers. Sage advice it is, too, up to a point. It’s like recommending that an art student draw only what they can see and best start with something that keeps relatively still – how about a nice bowl of fruit? I really shouldn’t pass judgment on anyone who feels moved to toss any beginner a scrap or two of encouragement; advice is free which is why it’s so easy to turn ones nose up at it and that is the voice of experience talking here, believe you me. That said, being without a single solitary artistic bone in my body, I can honestly say, hand on heart, that I have no pr
Ants in the wind 2007-10-28 10:00:00 I read an article a wee while back Why Blog Post Frequency Does Not Matter Anymore, and it made me think. Actually everything makes me think, but not everything I think about is something I necessarily want to write about. Trust me, not everything needs to be written about.With the rise of the internet there are more people committing their thoughts to "paper" than at any other time in history. This should be a writer's utopia. Why then do I get the distinct feeling that there's trouble in paradise?The first thing I discovered when I dived headfirst into the wonderful world of the World Wide Web was that there were people all over the globe that were exactly like me (and some were even female which was fantastic). Suddenly I wasn't alone, there were others who did this writing thingy and considered it not only perfectly acceptable to drop whatever you were doing to get those words down on a paper, it was expected. There was just one word came to my mind: home. That was twelve years
A dung beetle's guide to the universe 2007-11-01 04:12:00 One of the things that has concerned me for a while is the fact that very little of my work is easily classifiable. It certainly isn’t mainstream, but neither does it fit neatly into the big genres of, say, science fiction or crime fiction or even romantic fiction. My wife – lovely woman – suggested my work was slipstream fiction. It sounds cooler than cross-genre and not as pompous as fabulation.It's becoming more and more popular in music: fusion, cross-over artists. I suppose they have a similar problem, if it's not this and it's not that then what is it?The term slipstream (something of a play on mainstream) was coined by cyberpunk (Now would that be a sub-genre?) author Bruce Sterling in an article originally published in SF Eye in July 1989. He wrote: "...this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility." The complete article is available here.I li
Why is writing not just talking written down? 2007-11-07 03:50:00 I think Woody Allen writes wonderful banter. I can watch his films over and over again, like a kid who knows what's coming and delights in the fact that it does. The fact that a wee old Jewish man spent ages scribbling it all down on yellow legal pads whilst lying on his bed in a posh Manhattan apartment doesn't really come through. And that's why the banter is so brilliant, because it's not off-the-cuff; it's been mulled over, taken out, put back in, reworded, fiddled with and, only then, does it feel like a throw-away remark. The same goes for all those wonderful period dramas the BBC churns out.I do make a habit of reading what I've written
out loud. To my mind, and I'm not the only author to think this, if it doesn’t work when read aloud then it simply doesn't work. This is where I struggle with a lot of E. E. Cummings' poetry; I don't know how to read it most of the time. There are exceptions like the beautiful poem about the rain having small hands, somewhere i have n Read more:writing
Raking in the ashes 2007-11-04 08:20:00 On November 5th it's Guy Fawkes Night here in the UK. When I was a kid it was something we used to get very excited about. Every community had their own bonfire. Ours used to be on a site behind Third Avenue before they built the industrial estate there; in fact my earliest memory is my dad come looking for me there while it was being constructed and it was safe for a four-year-old to wander the streets on his own. Nowadays, unless you live in Sussex, all that has stopped. Some of the local councils do fireworks displays but the whole community thing has died a death.It's another Bonfire I remember fondly. It didn't have nearly as long a life but it burned bright and left a beautiful corpse.It was a literary journal that wouldn't publish poetry without commentary. The reason? To try and provide some insight into the writing process, to help younger poets who were simply dumping raw emotions onto a page and thinking they were poems just because they said they were. There should be m Read more:ashes
X-Factor for authors anyone? 2007-11-12 04:22:00 The Times, the UK's newspaper of record (at least that's what Wikipedia calls it), published an article on Friday, Jeanette Winterson on the cult of personality, to which I responded. I have a lot of time for Winterson. I don't always get her writing but I enjoy not getting it. It's a good article, as you would expect, well-written and humorous and worth a read, as is the response I posted yesterday but which only went online today.You can read both here. Read more:authors
Practice, practice, practice 2007-11-10 05:55:00 This is a response to A Recipe for Creative People.Practice is great. I'm all for practice. But, if you're doing things wrong in the first place all the practice in the world isn't going to help much. It's simply going to ingrain bad habits. Sure, sometimes by doing something over and over again you start to realise that your method isn't necessarily working and you start to investigate other ways of working, but I think that's the exception rather than the norm.When I used to weight train back in my twenties I followed a fairly strict regime. First you eat, and you eat well, then you let the food digest, then you exercise, then you rest. If you trained every day, which I did, you never worked the same set of muscles two days in a row. And, on top of all of that, I read everything I could about new food supplements (I found it hard to eat 3000 calories a day) and improved methods of training.The most important thing was that, before I started, I studied how to do the kind of weig
The quest for the perfect sentence 2007-11-17 09:34:00 I read an interesting article a while back by Wendy Keller called The desire not to write, a part of which goes:The reason writers don't write is because we simply know that language cannot begin to convey accurately the words in our hearts, minds and spirits.She has a point.As I may have mentioned I have a fondness for the work of the Irish writer Samuel Beckett. Well, not all of it. I own all of it and I've read all of it but some of his early prose goes right over my head. As a young man, a young intellectual, his work was deliberately esoteric and referenced now quite obscure classical literature, heroes of his like Dante and Racine, but over the years he moved farther and farther from his origins towards, to use his expression, "a literature of the unword". In fact he waged a lifelong battle with words and suffered frequently from bouts of crippling writer's block. He was rarely satisfied with his efforts and always self-deprecatory when presenting new works. His final text, a
The 10-20-30-40-50 meme 2007-11-14 04:34:00 Fifty years ago: 1958 (minus two years old)There were no books in the house in which I was born. Probably a bible. Possibly a dictionary. God alone knows how they produced a reader, let alone a writer. I never saw either of my parents pick up a work of fiction other than to read a story to one of the children.Forty years ago: 1968 (eight years old) I used to cycle down to the local library every Saturday morning. I was regularly first in the queue. The librarian, whom I remember as the big-bosomed, twin-set and pearls variety of librarian who smelled of eau de cologne, was a bit of a tartar (and probably had nowhere near as pneumatic a bosom as my memory has ascribed to her) who would only let me take out books from the pitiful children's section though I could wander freely throughout the place as long as I didn't get under anyone's feet. Her husband was a local councillor or something of that ilk and the woman, as far as I could see, pretty much looked down her nose at everyone.On
If ain't broke don't fix it. In fact, if it's broke don't fix it either. 2007-11-20 19:33:00 CHANGELINGIt is true that everyseven years we change.Turning fourteen I startedthinking poetry.I am now twenty-nine andsafe for six more years.15 December 1988A romantic notion exists which states that our bodies renew themselves every seven years. I first heard this from my father and of course everything our dads tell us is the truth. I never questioned this growing up even though I could see flaws in the logic. I've since heard that some of our body parts do exactly this only not always every seven years. I've also heard that it's bunkum.Personally I don't care but it did start me thinking about what exactly might change every seven years. Certainly people do change as they grow older. Much of that has to do with their upbringings and experiences but I wondered if the seven year rule might affect me in ways other than refreshing my spleen. What if the change subtly altered who I was?I cannot explain what it is like to think in poetry. There are people who suffer from a condition Read more:broke
, either
Guess what reading is 2007-11-25 03:24:00 This is reading. You've just done it. You've read. You're still reading and the odds are you will continue to read till the end of this sentence at least. We do it every day. We look at this word, then that one and then the next. Or block of words. Most people, it seems, read a whole chunk at a time because the meaning of words is so often dependent on context. But that's only a part of it.Here's a clever man's definition of reading:Reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game. It involves an interaction between thought and language. Efficient reading does not result from precise perception and identification of all elements, but from skill in selecting the fewest, most productive cues necessary to produce guesses which are right the first time. The ability to anticipate that which has not been seen, of course, is vital in reading, just as the ability to anticipate what has not yet been heard is vital in listening. - Kenneth Goodman in Journal of the Reading Specialist (1967)A not Read more:Guess
Reasoning rhymes 2007-11-23 02:47:00 Andrew Philip has just posted the latest in a long series of blogs about rhyme on his site Tonguefire to which I've just added a comment. It is a fascinating and involved discussion and one every poet should have a look at. We need more writers like this. Read more:Reasoning
Thinking outside the box 2007-12-01 18:01:00 Question: Would you rather see a child read a comic than not read? I'd be disappointed with anyone who suggested the latter. I'd rather see them reading the back of a milk carton than not read.Not everyone out there is like you or I. Not everyone gets excited by words like we do. Not everyone cares about reading. Books are for steadying table legs. That's about the only way they'll ever change the world.I'm not going to debate whether books are a luxury or a necessity. Certainly Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs doesn't list reading amongst its baseline physiological needs. But for an organism to develop, to be all it can be, its cognitive and aesthetic needs must be satisfied. And that's where comics come in. Let me tell you about The Comic Book Project:The Comic Book Project is an arts-based literacy and learning initiative hosted by Teachers College, Columbia University with materials published by Dark Horse Comics.The goal of the project is to help children forge alternative path
Basic Engly Twentyfido 2007-11-28 05:43:00 I take language seriously – spelling, punctuation, grammar, the whole kit and caboodle. I think about what I'm going to say before I say it and that goes doubly for whatever I commit to paper and triply for anything I'm having published. Of course one can't be serious all the time. At least this particular one can't. Language can – and should – be fun.The humour I appreciate most in this life is typified by someone like Ronnie (Fork Handles) Barker whose writing revolves around wordplay, especially puns. Or Steven (What's another word for Thesaurus?) Wright. I agree with Nabokov that the pun is mightier than the word (not his precise words). People who don't know how to play with words and enjoy playing with them cannot properly work with them.But there is one man who only has to open his mouth and I start to smile, a man who will be forever remembered for talking the most entertaining nonsense in the world, "Professor" Stanley Unwin.Unwin was the inventor and finest expone Read more:Basic
The perfect fork 2007-12-09 09:33:00 My parents used to get annoyed with me as a child for leaving food on my plate. I was reminded – and not infrequently – of those starving children in Africa. It didn't stop me not liking Brussels sprouts though. Or cabbage. Or spinach. I've just read through Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize acceptance speech in which she recalls her childhood in Africa and laments that children in Zimbabwe are starving for knowledge. I could understand hungering for food when I was a kid, not that I ever did, but hungering for knowledge? If I wanted to know something I just asked my dad.There were books in the house where I grew up, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, self-help books, but no fiction apart from children's storybooks, mainly by Enid Blyton who probably deserves a whole blog to herself one day. It was not my parents' fault. My mother always told us how her sister was the dux of the school whereas she was the dunce; my father had been the school bully and fared no better. After though he set
Best Scottish Poems of 2007 2007-12-06 23:17:00 Poetry Online's entries for the Best ScottishPoems
of 2007 are now up and you should have a wee shuftie as we say here. What I particularly like about the entries is that they contain comments from the poets and the editors, some quite lengthy.If you check out no other please have a read at On My Father's Refusal to Renew his Subscription to The Beijing Review by Willy Maley.
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