![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.conversiondiary.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/7_quick_takes_sm1.jpg\" "\\"7_quick_takes_sm\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>\u2014 1 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019m in a storytelling mood, after yesterday\u2019s post on a three book introduction to Christianity<\/a>. \u00a0And I\u2019m eagerly waiting to read Francis Spufford\u2019s\u00a0Unapologetic<\/em><\/a>, when it turns up on my kindle this Tuesday. \u00a0In the meantime, I\u2019ve been checking out one of his other works:\u00a0The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading<\/em><\/a>, and I\u2019ve been having some of those moments described in\u00a0The History Boys<\/em><\/a> as:<\/p>\n The best moments in reading are when you come across something \u2013 a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things \u2013 that you\u2019d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you\u2019ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it\u2019s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So, want to check out some quotes and other storytelling related links this week?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 2 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n From Spufford:<\/p>\n Primary schools in Britain now sometimes send home a photocopy of a page of Russian or Arabic to remind parents of that initial stage when writing was a wall of spiky unknowns, an excluding briar hedge. \u00a0By the time I reached\u00a0The Hobbit<\/em>\u2018s last page, though, writing had softened, and lost the outlines of the printed alphabet, and become a transparent liquid, first viscous and sluggish, like a jelly of meaning, then ever thinner and more mobile, flowing faster and faster, until it reached me at the speed of thinking and I could not entirely distinguish the suggestions it was making from my own thoughts. \u00a0I had undergone the acceleration into the written word that you also experience as a change in the medium. \u00a0In fact, writing had ceased to be a thing \u2014 an object in the world \u2014 and\u00a0become<\/em> a medium, a substance you look through.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/a>\u2014 3 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n And one of my much beloved science fiction authors, Ted Chiang, has just released a short story about the internal stories we make of memory. \u00a0It\u2019s hard to pullquote anything from \u201cThe Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling,\u201d<\/a> since part of what makes the story work so well is the way one theme is refracted through different problems and characters (oral vs written memory, normal memory vs video, etc). \u00a0But here\u2019s one teaser:<\/p>\n \u201cVery good. But you need to leave spaces when you write.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI have.\u201d Jijingi pointed at the gap between each row.<\/p>\n \u201cNo, that is not what I mean. Do you see the spaces within each line?\u201d He pointed at his own paper.<\/p>\n Jijingi understood. \u201cYour marks are clumped together, while mine are arranged evenly.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThese are not just clumps of marks. They are\u2026 I do not know what you call them.\u201d He picked up a thin sheaf of paper from his table and flipped through it. \u201cI do not see it here. Where I come from, we call them \u2018words.\u2019 When we write, we leave spaces between the words.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut what are words?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHow can I explain it?\u201d He thought a moment. \u201cIf you speak slowly, you pause very briefly after each word. That\u2019s why we leave a space in those places when we write. Like this: How. Many. Years. Old. Are. You?\u201d He wrote on his paper as he spoke, leaving a space every time he paused: Anyom a ou kuma a me?<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cBut you speak slowly because you\u2019re a foreigner. I\u2019m Tiv, so I don\u2019t pause when I speak. Shouldn\u2019t my writing be the same?\u201d<\/p>\n [\u2026]<\/p>\n It was only many lessons later that Jijingi finally understood where he should leave spaces, and what Moseby meant when he said \u201cword.\u201d You could not find the places where words began and ended by listening. The sounds a person made while speaking were as smooth and unbroken as the hide of a goat\u2019s leg, but the words were like the bones underneath the meat, and the space between them was the joint where you\u2019d cut if you wanted to separate it into pieces. By leaving spaces when he wrote, Moseby was making visible the bones in what he said.<\/p>\n Jijingi realized that, if he thought hard about it, he was now able to identify the words when people spoke in an ordinary conversation. The sounds that came from a person\u2019s mouth hadn\u2019t changed, but he understood them differently; he was aware of the pieces from which the whole was made. He himself had been speaking in words all along. He just hadn\u2019t known it until now.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/a>\u2014 4 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n And now back to Spufford:<\/p>\n I remember there was an intermediate stage when strange words did not yet quite have a definite meaning of their own, but possessed a kind of atmosphere of meaning, which was a compromise between the meanings of all the other words which seemed to come up in conjunction with the unknown one, and which I decided had a bearing on it. \u00a0The holes in the text grew over, like this. \u00a0The empty spaces thickened, took on qualities which at first were not their own, then became known in their own right. \u00a0But it was not a process like scabs growing over cuts. \u00a0That\u2019s too thick, too brown, too fibrous, too\u00a0organic<\/em> a metaphor. \u00a0Writing might flow like thought, but it was still a constructed thing. \u00a0That was part of its appeal to me, that it retained an intricate,\u00a0made<\/em> separateness from bodies, mumps, and families. \u00a0Imagine instead a vast dome built up from countless panels of stained glass. \u00a0Some panels are missing. \u00a0As you gaze at an empty segment of the dome, the space shimmers, and into it are infused, like vibrations in the air, both the fire-opal blue from the panel to the right, and the lemony gold from the panel to the left. \u00a0They harden, and now there is glass there, of a colour somewhere between the two: a citric green perhaps.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/a>\u2014 5 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n I once tried to express\u00a0something<\/em> like the same sentiment in a college lit mag. \u00a0If you\u2019d like to see what happens when I try my hand at poetry, click here<\/a>, and scroll down to \u201cWaiting on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.\u201d \u00a0It\u2019s the one that begins:<\/p>\n If I were bold I might <\/a>\u2014 6 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s been a very wordy quick takes, so, I\u2019ll stop at six this time with a question. \u00a0What\u00a0real<\/em> things were you surprised to learn were not fictional. \u00a0Due to A Wind in the Door<\/em><\/a>, I couldn\u2019t help exclaim \u201cMitochondria are\u00a0real?<\/em>\u201d when we covered them in class. \u00a0And I didn\u2019t expect Narnia\u2019s Turkish Delight to be something you could really eat. \u00a0Do you guys have any similar awakenings?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n
\nmurder certain words
\nstrip them of their
\nsynaesthetic sis-boom-bah and
\npin them, struggling weakly,
\nto clean, crisp Kaplan flash cards.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n