The hard wiring of story

Our narrative engines

Neuroscientist John Bickle and philosophy of science student Sean Keating describe how the brain's narrative machine works.

State-of-the-art neuro-imaging and cognitive neuropsychology both uphold the idea that we create our "selves" through narrative. Based on a half-century's research on "split-brain" patients, neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga argues that the human brain's left hemisphere is specialised for intelligent behaviour and hypothesis formation.

It also possesses the unique capacity to interpret - that is, narrate - behaviours and emotional states initiated by either hemisphere. Not surprisingly, the left hemisphere is also the language hemisphere, with specialised cortical regions for producing, interpreting and understanding speech. It is also the hemisphere that produces narratives.

Gazzaniga also thinks that this left-hemisphere "interpreter" creates the unified feeling of an autobiographical, personal, unique self. "The interpreter sustains a running narrative of our actions, emotions, thoughts, and dreams. The interpreter is the glue that keeps our story unified, and creates our sense of being a coherent, rational agent. To our bag of individual instincts it brings theories about our lives. These narratives of our past behaviour seep into our awareness and give us an autobiography," he writes.

The language areas of the left hemisphere are well placed to carry out these tasks. They draw on information in memory (amygdalo-hippocampal circuits, dorsolateral prefrontal cortices) and planning regions (orbitofrontal cortices). As neurologist Jeffrey Saver has shown, damage to these regions disrupts narration in a variety of ways, ranging from unbounded narration, in which a person generates narratives unconstrained by reality, to denarration, the inability to generate any narratives, external or internal.

One compelling study used PET imaging to watch what is going on in the brain during inner speech. As expected, this showed activity in the classic speech production area known as Broca's area. But also active was Wernicke's area, the brain region for language comprehension, suggesting that not only do the brain's speech areas produce silent inner speech, but that our inner voice is understood and interpreted by the comprehension areas. The result of all this activity, I suggested, is the narrative self.

More at the link.

Mark Twain's thoughts on Thanksgiving

Mark Twain's 70th birthday party

In November of 1905, the month he turned seventy, Macy Halford writes in The New Yorker, Mark Twain was exceedingly famous; the nation was a-tingle with affection for its most humorous and most American American treasure, and all the more so because his birthday that year fell on the most American of holidays: Thursday, November 30th, Thanksgiving day. 

 

In the first volume of his autobiography, Twain describes the efforts of his editor, George Harvey to plan a celebration: 

It arrived on the 30th of November, but Colonel Harvey was not able to celebrate it on that date because that date had been preempted by the President to be used as Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for—annually, not oftener—if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors the Indians. 

Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man's side, consequently on the Lord's side, consequently it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments. The original reason for a Thanksgiving Day has long ago ceased to exist—the Indians have long ago been comprehensively and satisfactorily exterminated and the account closed with Heaven, with the thanks due. 

But, from old habit, Thanksgiving Day has remained with us, and every year the President of the United States and the Governors of all the several States and the territories set themselves the task, every November, to advertise for something to be thankful for, and then they put those thanks into a few crisp and reverent phrases, in the form of a Proclamation, and this is read from all the pulpits in the land, the national conscience is wiped clean with one swipe, and sin is resumed at the old stand. 

Twain, Halford writes, by this time had travelled a long way—from the banks of the Mississippi to a mansion on Fifth Avenue—and had become, as New Yorkers will, unrelenting in his agendas, and brilliantly so:

Harvey went to Washington to try to get the President to select another day for the national Thanksgiving, and I furnished him with arguments to use which I thought persuasive and convincing, arguments which ought to persude him even to put off Thanksgiving Day a whole year—on the ground that nothing had happened during the previous twelvemonth except several vicious and inexcusable wars, and King Leopold of Belgium's usual annual slaughters and robberies in the Congo State, together with the Insurance revelations in New York, which seemed to establish the fact that if there was an honest man left in the United States, there was only one, and we wanted to celebrate his seventieth birthday. 

Happy Birthday, Mr. Clemens.

RIP: James J. Kilpatrick

We lost four noted men of words in 2010, as Ben Zimmer writes in The New York Times. One was James J. Kilpatrick, a newspaper columnist. Zimmer:

James J. Kilpatrick (b. 1920) had a distaste for pompous and hackneyed language, and he never shied away from expressing his opinion vociferously — no surprise to anyone who read his prickly political commentary or saw his rants in the “60 Minutes” debate segment “Point-Counterpoint.”

“When I conclude that a particular usage is execrable, I can execrate at the top of my lungs,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1984 The Writer’s Art, also the title of his long-running syndicated column.


The usage guru Bryan A. Garner told me that he long admired Kilpatrick’s pugnaciousness and iconoclasm. After Garner published the first edition of his Dictionary of Modern American Usage in 1998, the two men found that they were kindred spirits in language matters.

But they didn’t see eye to eye on everything: they had an ongoing debate over beginning sentences with “and” or “but” (Garner was in favor of the practice; Kilpatrick dead-set against it). Ultimately, as befits the author of “The Writer’s Art,” Kilpatrick’s appreciation of language was an aesthetic one. In his waning years, he gave Garner this advice on ending a column: “End it on an accented syllable, preferably with a long vowel.” In other words, not with a whimper but a bang.

Some words never die

Thanks to the unearthing of a 17th-century text, we can now learn the sorts of word-sounds heard on the streets of London by the likes of John Milton, Andrew Marvell and probably even Shakespeare himself, Alexander Theroux writes in The Wall Street Journal.

This was the first book dedicated to English slang words, the lingo of sharpsters, shills and vagabonds. Originally printed as A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, it has been newly released as The First English Dictionary of Slang, 1699.

Drinking and its effects are heavily represented. A drunk ("pot-valiant") might be described as "cup shot" or "half seas over" and labeled a "swill-belly" or "Malmesey-nose." A "fuddle" is an "excellent tipple." As for "rum," it was once an adjective with a positive meaning, as in "rum-bluffer" (a jolly host) and "rum-bung" (a full purse). The late 17th century was not an age for delicacy. The Dutch were derisively called "butter-boxes." A "foul Jade" was an ordinary coarse woman. A phrase for women in general was "mutton-in-long-coats." The colorful words for prostitute could make up a dictionary in itself.

There are hundreds of words here that have rarely been used since, although this dictionary keeps them brightly alive: "tarum" (for milk) and "fubbs" (a fond word for children). But many old words have kept their meanings to this day: "shop-lift" and "hen-peckt," for instance, and "grinders" for teeth.

"Slang," Theroux writes, "is eternal."

Do you have a chrestomathy?

chrestomathy / kreh-STAH-muh-thee / noun

a selection of passages used to help learn a language
a volume of selected passages or stories of an author

Merriam-Webster: the Greeks had the usefulness of knowledge in mind when they created "chrestomathy" from their adjective "chrēstos," which means "useful," and the verb "manthanein," which means "to learn."

How John McPhee became a writer

John McPhee has published more than thirty books, work that first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1963. He has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World, his comprehensive survey of North American geology. His work has inspired generations of nonfiction writers, and he has distinguished himself especially as a teacher of literary journalism.

How did he become a writer? From an interview with Peter Hessler in The Paris Review:

When did you first start to think about devoting yourself to writing? 

There weren’t any very early signs. My biggest preoccupation in childhood was sports, mostly sports you could play with a ball. My father was a doctor of sports medicine, and Princeton was his employer. As I was growing up, we lived very close to the campus, and in the afternoons I would go with him to the university sports practices—football, basketball, baseball. I hung around a lot of football players who were ten or fifteen years older than I was. After a while they made a Princeton shirt for me with orange and black stripes on it, just like the big guys had. I was number thirty-three.

One miserable November day I was down there on the sideline, wet, cold. And I looked up to the top of the stadium, and there was the press box. Shelter! I knew they had heaters in there with them, and these people were sitting there in complete comfort while we’re miserable down here on the field. They’re writing, they’re typing, and they’re warm. Then and there I decided to become a writer.

Now that story, which I have often told, is about three to five percent apocryphal. The rest of it is absolutely true.

Your call is very important to us

Right.

The Economist's language blog, Johnson, has an amusing look at this all too familiar phrase.

NEAL WHITMAN of Literal-Minded:

“Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line and your call will be answered in the order it was received.”
I stayed on the line, cleaning up the kitchen one-handed while I waited. By the time I was speaking to a real person, I had listened long enough to have heard the message at least five more times... It was really starting to get to me …

Did you get what was starting to get to Mr Whitman?  I'd have said the absurd lie that "your call is very important to us" repeated over and over while you are inconvenienced by being kept on hold. But he noticed something else that I missed the first time:

You’re missing the final in!, I kept thinking... you have more than one option for what to do with the in. You can leave it stranded at the end, the same way as you’d leave it at the end of the house I grew up in. Or you can take the in along with order, and put them both at the front of the relative clause.

But you shouldn't just abandon it. This phenomenon was noticed as far back as Ernest Gowers, the usage-book writer who called it preposition "cannibalism" in 1954. Mr Whitman notices that the preposition is more likely to get cannibalised by its exact likeness: the in in "in the order" eats the in that should be found in "in which it was received". It sounds wrong to our ears, it seems, to hear in twice so close together, so much so that some people don't notice the preposition sitting there cleaning its teeth after devouring its twin.

Everyday expressions

(Thanks, Lainey)

Everyone's writing a novel. Why?

Novelist Alix Christie figures it this way:

A quarter of a million new novels are published annually across the globe, 100,000 of them in English. This represents, in turn, a quarter, maybe, of the manuscripts that agents try to hawk. Agents, as all writers know, take only a small proportion of the work they’re sent, perhaps a tenth. Ten million scribes in search of a reader may not be so tall a tale.

So what keeps her going?

I have been helped by a lesson I learned years ago, apprenticed in a printer’s shop (a subject I returned to for my second novel, about the birth of printing and medieval guilds). I’ve come to see how helpful it can be to see ourselves as striving toward some mastery in craftsmen’s terms. The guilds have always known that it takes years to become skilled at a craft. The standard term was seven, split into years of formal training and then the “wander years”. Learning from mistakes has always been an inevitable part of the education.

What helps keep me going, though, is literature itself. With its heft, its moral purpose and its beauty, it is a counterweight to our increasingly flighty and commercial world. And in this, I’m very far from all alone. Most writers gird themselves with courage from like-minded souls. My writers’ group, my agent and the fellow writers I share work with all provide more than an eagle eye. They offer succour and seriousness of purpose, and a shared sense that writing is the most intense and most important brainwork that we do.

I have never forgotten a comment made at a workshop by Karen Joy Fowler, a wonderful, successful writer. “I was neither the most talented nor the most clever writer in my writing group,” she told us. “But I was the one who stuck with it.” When things feel especially bleak, this becomes my mantra.

"It is an act of faith," she writes. "Each day we legions of the unknown, we ten million, rise and face the blankness of the page. And in the painful act of making worlds, we make ourselves."

Christie was a semi-finalist in the 2008 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and a finalist in Southwest Review's 2010 Meyerson Fiction Prize. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Other Voices, "For Sale, Baby Shoes, Never Worn" (from Foolscap Press) and Southwest Review.)

You can't refudiate the dictionary

The guardians of usage at the New Oxford American Dictionary have awarded the Sarah Palin the high-brow distinction of coining 2010's "word of the year" — "refudiate" — via her Twitter account.

The former governor used the word in a Twitter message last summer, calling on "peaceful Muslims" to "refudiate" a planned mosque near the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York. When critics pounced on the made-up verb, Palin deleted the Tweet and replaced it with one that called on Muslims to "refute" the site — even though that usage made no sense, either, since to refute is to prove something to be untrue.

But in a release today, the New Oxford American Dictionary defended Palin's use of the word. "From a strictly lexical interpretation of the different contexts in which Palin has used 'refudiate,' we have concluded that neither 'refute' nor 'repudiate' seems consistently precise, and that 'refudiate' more or less stands on its own, suggesting a general sense of 'reject,' " the New Oxford American Dictionary said in a press release.

Lest you think the New Oxford editors were only hailing "refudiate" as a publicity stunt, let the record show that Palin's coinage was also named to the honor roll of the Global Language Monitor project — together with terms such as "spillcam" and "vuvuzela."

In a followup tweet, Palin said : "Refudiate," "misunderestimate," "wee-wee'd up." English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!

Albert Einstein: imagination

"Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions."

-- Albert Einstein

Finding a name for the web

Tim Berners-Lee

Ben Zimmer describes the origin of web to refer to the World Wide Web in an interesting piece in The New York Times.

Tim Berners-Lee, a British software programmer at the CERN physics-research laboratory outside Geneva, came up with the term, but not without some juggling.

In 1990, writing a second proposal for his concept, he came up with the name Mesh, “but it sounded a little too much like mess.”  

Mine of Information might seem “too egocentric” when treated as an acronym, MOI, French for “me.” The Information Mine could be seen as “even more egocentric” based on its acronym: TIM, Berners-Lee’s first name.

Finally, Berners-Lee came up with a three-word name that suitably described the global reach of the system they were envisioning: World Wide Web.

He and a colleague considered it temporary and planned to find something better. They never did.

In the original title, the three words were run together as WorldWideWeb, but they would soon separate it into World Wide Web (despite the fact that worldwide is best treated as a single word), underscoring the alliteration.

How to abbreviate the name was problematic from the beginning. “Friends at CERN gave me a hard time, saying it would never take off,” Berners-­Lee wrote in his memoir, “especially since it yielded an acronym that was nine syllables long when spoken”: double-u, double-u, double-u.

“The W3 worldview is of documents referring to each other by links,” Berners-Lee and his colleague wrote. “For its likeness to a spider’s construction, this world is called the Web.” 

That single spidery word, capitalized or uncapitalized, would bear countless offspring. The online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary catalogs some of the most common web compounds, like web address, web browser, webcam, webcast, web crawler, web developer, web design, webinar, weblog, webmaster, webmistress, web page, web publisher, web server, web site, web surfer and webzine.

Next time you fret about a writing feed, consider: Berners-Lee declined all opportunities to profit from his immensely valuable innovation.

Writing online is different

Marc Ambinder, the politics editor of The Atlantic, is giving up blogging after five years. Here are his observations on writing for a blog and writing for print.

Really good print journalism is ego-free.  By that I do not mean that the writer has no skin in the game, or that the writer lacks a perspective, or even that the writer does not write from a perspective.  What I mean is that the writer is able to let the story and the reporting process, to the highest possible extent, unfold without a reporter's insecurities or parochial concerns intervening.

Blogging is an ego-intensive process. Even in straight news stories, the format always requires you to put yourself into narrative. You are expected to not only have a point of view and reveal it, but be confident that it is the correct point of view. There is nothing wrong with this.

As much as a writer can fabricate a detachment, or a "view from nowhere," as Jay Rosen has put it, the writer can also also fabricate a view from somewhere. You can't really be a reporter without it. I don't care whether people know how I feel about particular political issues; it's no secret where I stand on gay marriage, or on the science of climate change, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

What I hope I will find refreshing about the change of formats is that I will no longer be compelled to turn every piece of prose into a personal, conclusive argument, to try and fit it into a coherent framework that belongs to a web-based personality called "Marc Ambinder" that people read because it's "Marc Ambinder," rather than because it's good or interesting.

Never too late to write

Timothy Egan, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, looks at writers who were still going in their later years.

For every J.D. Salinger, who published “The Catcher in the Rye” when he was 32, there is a Mark Twain, who brought out “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” at 49. “Huck Finn,” Hemingway said, is the foundation for all modern American fiction, and I agree.

Alan Furst, the literary spy writer who produces atmospheric thrillers every other year or so, is at the top of his game at 69. When he moved to France in 1987 he had yet to make a mark. “I was going to be the best failed novelist in Paris,” he told John Marshall in a Daily Beast piece last year.

Nobody was a better American essayist in the 1970s and 80s than Joan Didion. But the writerly sprint culminating in her late-years memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking” was breathtaking. She finished the book just days after her 70th birthday.

My favorite septuagenarian inspiration is Norman Maclean, who published the most beautiful,
word-perfect novel of the American West, “A River Runs Through It,” when he was 74. And then he had a second book in him, “Young Men and Fire,” published after his death at 87. Old, seemingly doomed, and brilliant — a role model for all second-act aces.

T.S. Eliot: the art of self-promotion

T.S. Eliot

Joseph Epstein has an interesting essay on T.S. Eliot in Commentary, in which he notes that, "The fame Eliot achieved in his lifetime is unfathomable for a poet, or indeed any American or English writer, in our day."

Far from its being accidental, Eliot’s fame was planned for, carefully cultivated, and nurtured once it arrived. From the first volume of Eliot’s letters, newly revised and just released in Great Britain, we learn that, in 1919, when he was 31, he wrote to J.H. Woods, his philosophy teacher at Harvard: “There are only two ways in which a writer can become important—to write a great deal, and have his writings appear everywhere, or to write very little.”

He chose the latter: to write very little but always to dazzle. “My reputation in London is built upon a small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year,” he wrote. “The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event.” 

Eliot worked at Lloyd’s Bank between 1917 and 1925 as the head of a small department stationed in the basement. He felt that, as he put it, he could “influence London opinion and English literature in a better way” by remaining slightly outside of things. The bank, moreover, with its distance from the standard literary life, lent him, as he noted, “aura.”

He wrote to his mother in 1919: “I really think that I have far more influence on English letters than any other American has ever had unless it be Henry James. I know a great many people, but there are many more who would like to know me, and [working in the bank] I can also remain isolated and detached.”

Those are the words of a man carefully but decidedly on the make.

Stephen King and ebooks

Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg interviewed King for The Wall Street Journal. Here are some excerpts.

Do we get the same reading experience with e-books?
Stephen King: I don't know. I think it changes the reading experience, that it's a little more ephemeral. And it's tougher if you misplace a character. But I downloaded one 700-page book onto my Kindle that I was using for research. It didn't have an index, but I was able to search by key words. And that's something no physical book can do.

What about people who love physical books?
I'm one of them. I have thousands of books in my house. In a weird way, it's embarrassing. I recently downloaded Ken Follett's "Fall of Giants," but I also bought a copy to put on the shelf. I want books as objects. It's crazy, but there are people who collect stamps, too.

Is the future of publishing all digital?
It's a hard subject to get a handle on. People like myself who grew up with books have a prejudice towards them. I think a lot of critics would argue that the Kindle is the right place for a lot of books that are disposable, books that are read on the plane. That might include my own books, if not all, then some.

How much time do you spend reading digitally?
It's approaching half of what I read. I recently bought a print edition of Henning Mankell's "Faceless Killers" and the type was too small. A paper book is an object with a nice cover. You can swat flies with it, you can put it on the shelf. Do you remember the days when people got up to manually turn the channels on their TVs? Nobody does that any more, and nobody would want to go back. This is just something that is going to happen.

What's going to happen to bookstores?
The bookstores are empty. It's sad. I remember a time when Fifth Avenue was lousy with bookstores. They're all gone.

Metaphor Alert!

"Somewhere along the way, the apostle of change became its target, engulfed by the same currents that swept him to the White House two years ago. Now, President Obama must find a way to recalibrate with nothing less than his presidency on the line. The verdict delivered by voters on Tuesday effectively put an end to his transformational ambitions and left him searching for a way forward with a more circumscribed horizon of possibilities."--New York Times, Nov. 3

-- Best of The Web Today

Learn to trust yourself

Peter Bregman, a management consultant, was preparing a speech recently, when he came to a realization about himself. It applies to any kind of writing.

Each time I created a new version, I sent it out to trusted friends — smart, generous, insightful people — and asked for their advice and direction. Was it interesting enough? Clear enough? Creative enough? Funny enough?

Yet each time they came back with their valuable, thoughtful feedback, I became a little more lost. A little less sure of my message. My ideas. Myself.

He was too quick too eager to accept changes, too eager to please.

Many of us have spent our lives listening to our parents, our teachers, our managers, and our leaders. Choosing what we are told to choose. Being told gently who we are. Molding ourselves to the feedback of others. Seeking approval. Reaching for recognition.

There is good reason to learn from the wisdom of others. But there is also a cost: as we shape ourselves to the desires, preferences, and expectations of others, we risk losing ourselves. We can become frozen without their direction, unable to make our own choices, lacking trust in our own insights.

Just stop asking other people for their opinions!

Instead, take the time, and the quiet, to decide what you think. That is how we find the part of ourselves we gave up. That is how we become powerful, clever, creative, and insightful. That is how we gain our sight. 

It allowed him to focus on what he alone could offer. And he saw that he was relying on others to do his work for him.

Once I decided to stop asking others what they thought about what I thought, I noticed something interesting: I try harder when I'm not relying on others. I fix things I might otherwise leave for others to fix. I work more diligently to ensure my perspective holds together.

In the past, when I sent someone an article for comments, knowing it needed some work, I was being lazy. And my laziness, enabled by the generosity of others, had the side effect of reducing my faith in my abilities to work through the places I got stuck.

Bregman doesn't make the final point, but I will: he's just as smart and capable, if not more so, than those whose advice he sought. So are you.

If I agreed with you we'd both be wrong

The word is odd, but the concept is fun.

paraprosdokian / pæ-rê-prahz-dok-i-ên / noun


Dr. Goodword enlightens us: A paraprosdokian is a phrase or sentence that leads us down the garden path to an unexpected ending. It sets us up to expect one thing but ends on a surprising semantic twist. For example, commenting on the progressive ideas of Labor Party member Sir Stafford Cripps (1889-1952), Winston Churchill once quipped: "There but for the grace of God—goes God."

Though many writers were good at creating paraprosdokians, few excelled Winston Churchill and Groucho Marx. Churchill once said, "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing—after they have tried everything else." One of Groucho's many paraprosdokians is: "I had a wonderful evening—but this wasn't it." Of course, we should not forget W. C. Fields, who once quipped, " "Philadelphia, wonderful town, spent a week there one night. Still not enough paraprosdokians?

Paraprosdokian, Dr. Goodword says, is immediately composed of Greek para "beyond" and prosdokia "expectation". Prosdokia comprises pro and the root of dokein "to think, imagine, expect".The same root gave us the Greek words dogma and paradox, another word referring to something beyond our expectations. In Latin the same root emerged as docere "to teach" (cause to think) and went into the making of the word borrowed by English as doctor "the highest university degree". 

Here are some examples.

• Two wrongs don't make a right—but three lefts do.
• Now, you take my wife . . . PLEASE! —Henny Youngman
• Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
• If I agreed with you we'd both be wrong.
• War does not determine who is right—only who is left.
• The early bird gets the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese.
• I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn't work that way, so I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness.
• Do not argue with an idiot: he will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.
• I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather, not screaming and yelling like the passengers in his car.

Got gobbledygook?

Someone has created a tool to test your writing for gobbledygook. Here it is. I tried it out on my previous post -- Don't be a sketchoid -- and learned that it was written at a 12th grade level and contained only one gobbledygook "word" -- USP, letters in the word suspicious. So I think I'll protest my score of 97 out of 100.