[Hobbs]

What did you think of The Name of the Wind, Medz? I loved it. The author seems to be completely in the grips of writer's block on the sequel though.

I'm looking forward to the new GG Kay one too. His last couple haven't been up to his earlier standards, but they were still good.

[Medz]

I really enjoyed Name of the Wind. Some sections dragged a bit, but overall it was excellent and it has a ton of potential. I read that Rothfuss finally finished his latest script and the publisher has set a date of March, 2011 for release.

Kay's latest book is supposed to be the best one he's written. I guess it's set in an Asian/Chinese setting, which I haven't seen much in fantasy (or rather fantastical historical fiction) so I'm looking forward to it. The reviews are all stellar.

[Dave Bing]

Coehlo and Greene shouldn't even appear in the same post.

[JMab]

I've read Alchemist.

I'd agree it was Oprah-esque clap-trappery.

[Medz]

Words | The New York Review of Books

Words
Tony Judt

I was raised on words. They tumbled off the kitchen table onto the floor where I sat: grandfather, uncles, and refugees flung Russian, Polish, Yiddish, French, and what passed for English at one another in a competitive cascade of assertion and interrogation. Sententious flotsam from the Edwardian-era Socialist Party of Great Britain hung around our kitchen promoting the True Cause. I spent long, happy hours listening to Central European autodidacts arguing deep into the night: Marxismus, Zionismus, Socialismus. Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence. I have never lost that sense.

In my turn—and to find my place—I too talked. For party pieces I would remember words, perform them, translate them. “Ooh, he’ll be a lawyer,” they’d say. “He’ll charm the birds off the trees”: something I attempted fruitlessly in parks for a while before applying the admonition in its Cockney usage to no greater effect during my adolescent years. By then I had graduated from the intensity of polyglot exchanges to the cooler elegance of BBC English.

The 1950s—when I attended elementary school—were a rule-bound age in the teaching and use of the English language. We were instructed in the unacceptability of even the most minor syntactical transgression. “Good” English was at its peak. Thanks to BBC radio and cinema newsreels, there were nationally accepted norms for proper speech; the authority of class and region determined not just how you said things but the kind of things it was appropriate to say. “Accents” abounded (my own included), but were ranked according to respectability: typically a function of social standing and geographical distance from London.

I was seduced by the sheen of English prose at its evanescent apogee. This was the age of mass literacy whose decline Richard Hoggart anticipated in his elegiac essay The Uses of Literacy (1957). A literature of protest and revolt was rising through the culture. From Lucky Jim through Look Back in Anger, and on to the “kitchen sink” dramas of the end of the decade, the class-bound frontiers of suffocating respectability and “proper” speech were under attack. But the barbarians themselves, in their assaults on the heritage, resorted to the perfected cadences of received English: it never occurred to me, reading them, that in order to rebel one must dispense with good form.

By the time I reached college, words were my “thing.” As one teacher equivocally observed, I had the talents of a “silver-tongued orator”—combining (as I fondly assured myself) the inherited confidence of the milieu with the critical edge of the outsider. Oxbridge tutorials reward the verbally felicitous student: the neo-Socratic style (“why did you write this?” “what did you mean by it?”) invites the solitary recipient to explain himself at length, while implicitly disadvantaging the shy, reflective undergraduate who would prefer to retreat to the back of a seminar. My self-serving faith in articulacy was reinforced: not merely evidence of intelligence but intelligence itself.

Did it occur to me that the silence of the teacher in this pedagogical setting was crucial? Certainly silence was something at which I was never adept, whether as student or teacher. Some of my most impressive colleagues over the years have been withdrawn to the point of inarticulacy in debates and even conversation, thinking with deliberation before committing themselves. I have envied them this self-restraint.

[Medz]

Articulacy is typically regarded as an aggressive talent. But for me its functions were substantively defensive: rhetorical flexibility allows for a certain feigned closeness—conveying proximity while maintaining distance. That is what actors do—but the world is not -really a stage and there is something artificial in the exercise: one sees it in the current US president. I too have marshaled language to fend off intimacy—which perhaps explains a romantic penchant for Protestants and Native Americans, reticent cultures both.

In matters of language, of course, outsiders are frequently deceived: I recall a senior American partner at the consulting firm McKinsey once explaining to me that in the early days of their recruitment in England he found it nearly impossible to choose young associates—everyone seemed so articulate, the analyses tripping off their pens. How could you tell who was smart and who was merely polished?

Words may deceive—mischievous and untrustworthy. I remember being spellbound by the fantasy history of the Soviet Union woven in his Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge by the elderly Trotskyist Isaac Deutscher (published in 1967 under the title The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917–1967). The form so elegantly transcended the content that we accepted the latter on trust: detoxification took a while. Sheer rhetorical facility, whatever its appeal, need not denote originality and depth of content.

All the same, inarticulacy surely suggests a shortcoming of thought. This idea will sound odd to a generation praised for what they are trying to say rather than the thing said. Articulacy itself became an object of suspicion in the 1970s: the retreat from “form” favored uncritical approbation of mere “self-expression,” above all in the classroom. But it is one thing to encourage students to express their opinions freely and to take care not to crush these under the weight of prematurely imposed authority. It is quite another for teachers to retreat from formal criticism in the hope that the freedom thereby accorded will favor independent thought: “Don’t worry how you say it, it’s the ideas that count.”

Forty years on from the 1960s, there are not many instructors left with the self-confidence (or the training) to pounce on infelicitous expression and explain clearly just why it inhibits intelligent reflection. The revolution of my generation played an important role in this unraveling: the priority accorded the autonomous individual in every sphere of life should not be underestimated—”doing your own thing” took protean form.

Today “natural” expression—in language as in art—is preferred to artifice. We unreflectively suppose that truth no less than beauty is conveyed more effectively thereby. Alexander Pope knew better. (“True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest, / What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest.” —Essay on Criticism, 1711) For many centuries in the Western tradition, how well you expressed a position corresponded closely to the credibility of your argument. Rhetorical styles might vary from the spartan to the baroque, but style itself was never a matter of indifference. And “style” was not just a well-turned sentence: poor expression belied poor thought. Confused words suggested confused ideas at best, dissimulation at worst.

The “professionalization” of academic writing—and the self-conscious grasping of humanists for the security of “theory” and “methodology”—favors obscurantism. This has encouraged the rise of a counterfeit currency of glib “popular” articulacy: in the discipline of history this is exemplified by the ascent of the “television don,” whose appeal lies precisely in his claim to attract a mass audience in an age when fellow scholars have lost interest in communication. But whereas an earlier generation of popular scholarship distilled authorial authority into plain text, today’s “accessible” writers protrude un-comfortably into the audience’s consciousness. It is the performer, rather than the subject, to whom the audience’s attention is drawn.

Cultural insecurity begets its linguistic doppelgänger. The same is true of technical advance. In a world of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter (not to mention texting), pithy allusion substitutes for exposition. Where once the Internet seemed an opportunity for unrestricted communication, the increasingly commercial bias of the medium—”I am what I buy”—brings impoverishment of its own. My children observe of their own generation that the communicative shorthand of their hardware has begun to seep into communication itself: “people talk like texts.”

This ought to worry us. When words lose their integrity so do the ideas they express. If we privilege personal expression over formal convention, then we are privatizing language no less than we have privatized so much else. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” Alice was right: the outcome is anarchy.

In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell castigated contemporaries for using language to mystify rather than inform. His critique was directed at bad faith: people wrote poorly because they were trying to say something unclear or else deliberately prevaricating. Our problem, it seems to me, is different. Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don’t feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously (“It’s only my opinion…”). Rather than suffering from the onset of “newspeak,” we risk the rise of “nospeak.”

I am more conscious of these considerations now than at any time in the past. In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them. They still form with impeccable discipline and unreduced range in the silence of my thoughts—the view from inside is as rich as ever—but I can no longer convey them with ease. Vowel sounds and sibilant consonants slide out of my mouth, shapeless and inchoate even to my close collaborator. The vocal muscle, for sixty years my reliable alter ego, is failing. Communication, performance, assertion: these are now my weakest assets. Translating being into thought, thought into words, and words into communication will soon be beyond me and I shall be confined to the rhetorical landscape of my interior reflections.

Though I am now more sympathetic to those constrained to silence I remain contemptuous of garbled language. No longer free to exercise it myself, I appreciate more than ever how vital communication is to the republic: not just the means by which we live together but part of what living together means. The wealth of words in which I was raised were a public space in their own right—and properly preserved public spaces are what we so lack today. If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have.

[hack]

Artful in its ability to obscure the topic, bury the lead, blather on, and still have me reading. Probably did that because nobody wants to read another ``the Internet is killing grammar'' story, so he didn't admit that's what it was until the end. Well executed.

That said, I disagree with Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don’t feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously (“It’s only my opinion…”). Rather than suffering from the onset of “newspeak,” we risk the rise of “nospeak.” I consider myself a verbose person and good at it, my spouse does not. Doesn't make her less confident in her opinions, but simply less able to spit them out quickly. In reality, IMO shoddy prose comes from shoddy teaching and a shoddy value system. Especially in the U.S., we enjoy it when a class clown winds up the nerdy kid.

[Fool]

Originally Posted by hack

especially in the u.s., we enjoy it when a class clown winds up the nerdy kid.

Originally Posted by jeff hause

poor hack.

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[Dave Bing]

These aren't books but prepare to be sucked in. Best magazine articles ever in English. Any one will just suck you in. I just read Gay Talese on Sinatra and Gene Weingarten on parents who negligently kill their children in hot cars. Both amazing writing. Totally different, obviously.

Cool Tools: The Best Magazine Articles Ever

[Fool]

The Phone Phreak one is great and I'm only half-way done with it.

[hack]

Originally Posted by Dave Bing

These aren't books but prepare to be sucked in. Best magazine articles ever in English. Any one will just suck you in. I just read Gay Talese on Sinatra and Gene Weingarten on parents who negligently kill their children in hot cars. Both amazing writing. Totally different, obviously.

Cool Tools: The Best Magazine Articles Ever

I just found that too. Made me decide to buy the Kindle.

[Medz]

That essay on diamonds is pretty incredible.

[hack]

Just read a chunk of the Ramayana, the Hindu epic, on a long flight. Especially for those of you who lean sci-fi, the translation by Ashok Banker is excellent. Ripped through 400 pages in about 10 hours. If you're like me and have trouble getting past antiquated writing, like one might find in other classics, this is a good solution. It's a rather aggressively modern translation.

[hack]

Reviews Of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, By Leon Wieseltier | The New Republic

Wieseltier on the importance of negative criticism, after backlash from TNR's critical take on Freedom. Lots of grist for Money's mill here, both serious and non and both in the essay and in the comments...

[Fool]

Book reviewers claiming to be defending the country's higher ideals seem to me like journalists claiming to be defending the truth. Maybe that's what got you into the recruiters office, but you are no longer on the front lines of that war.

[hack]

Hard to know about book reviewers, though that doesn't negate the author's point. But I certainly agree that journalism as it is practiced today is far less able to make those lofty claims than it once was.

That doesn't mean there aren't individual journalists out there trying. There are many journos out there who still fight even though the recruiter lied. Especially in small communities there are people underpaid and in working conditions exponentially shittier than when they began their careers who are keeping newspapers alive in places where there's nothing else available to perform that task. The loss of small-town papers is far more impactful than if, say, CNN disappeared tomorrow.

[Fool]

Yes yes, just like there are still some good teachers out there, or mortgage agents who didn't funnel their clients into sub-prime loans, or stock brokers who really do care about their clients, or athletes who still care about the game, or politicians not in it just for themselves, etc etc etc.

No one's denying that honesty or integrity still exist.

[Money23]

Originally Posted by hack

Reviews Of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, By Leon Wieseltier | The New Republic

Wieseltier on the importance of negative criticism, after backlash from TNR's critical take on Freedom. Lots of grist for Money's mill here, both serious and non and both in the essay and in the comments...

Well, interesting read. I agree that acrimony may contribute to keenness of mind. But for the love of God, paragraph formatting only takes a few minutes.

Also appreciate that you posted the link despite the McCartney props of achieving emotional impact and painting a moving picture in a three minute pop song with 3 verses and a killer hook.

[hack]

I think the parts about the Beatles lacking some Elvis in their pelvis were an incidental inclusion, but I'm glad you appreciated my highlighting them.

[whoDean]

Finally coming in July!

[Medz]

About damn time. At least the HBO series is starting soon enough to hold us over. The latest trailer looks incredible:

The best 'Game of Thrones' trailer yet -- EXCLUSIVE | Inside TV | EW.com

[Lou Stefanic]

Word is that HBO is going to show the first two episodes on April 17.

[Medz]

They denied that, but they are showing a 15 min preview April 3rd I believe.

[Kstat]

Can't wait for tomorrow.

[*JD*]

Why? What book comes out?

[Medz]

....................

[Dave Bing]

I'm starting book 2.

[Lou Stefanic]

What did you think of Book #1, Bing? IMO, I liked the second book a little bit better.

[Dave Bing]

I enjoyed it. I had already seen the series, and so I was not surprised by the story. It's a little slow moving. But a fun read and I am curious at what comes next. The prose is solid. Not Nabokov but solid. The story is compelling and fun. Tyrion is obviously a fantastic character, as is Littlefinger. Danyris has all of a sudden become interesting as well. And I assume that we are on track to see warrior Arya in this book or next.

[Lou Stefanic]

Well, you may have to wait awhile for that.

I have not yet had the time to read A Feast for Crows. So I can't bring myself to get too excited for A Dance with Dragons just yet.

[Big Jerm]

I'm about 200 pages into Dragons now. It's really nice to get back to some of my favorite characters after missing them in Feast.

[El Axe]

So, I finally start to read a Game of Thrones. I recognize the good writing and the intricate story lines, but it sure takes its sweet time getting to compelling reading.

I mean, the first action sequences of the book consist of the casual killing of young children, and those take place over the first few hundred pages. I had to put the book down and convince myself to give it a second, third and fourth chance.

I'm now in the sequence where Tyrion is travelling with/been kidnapped by Catelyn. It's been picking up, so I'll keep going. Tyrion is the main reason I'm reading so far.

I'm looking more forward to the July 26th release of Ghost Story, the new Dresden book. It's my favorite series. Too bad that the TV show was so bad.

[Dave Bing]

Book two is really good. Far better than book one. Maybe I am more emotionally invested in the characters but the level of actionis higher, the intensity of the turn-arounds more evocative. I'm about 80% through and am really enjoying it. The mystical elements more powerful. Going to be tough to make into a series though. The battle scenes are too important to gloss. The mysteries of the wolves, dragons and the north too fundamental to incorporate by reference. They had better come up with some serious money to fund the sequal...

[Medz]

Glad you're enjoying it. Since you brought up book 2, these are the actors who have been cast in the new major roles:

Melisandre and Stannis



Davos:



Brienne:



The actor playing Stannis had a great role as Thomas Jefferson in the John Adams mini series on HBO. I think he'll do a good job with the role.

[Medz]

I also finished the 5th book last week. I won't spoil anything since people are still reading, but I thought it was significantly better than the 4th book, although still nowhere near as good as the 3rd. As of now, I would probably rank them:

3 > 1 > 2 = 5 > 4

The 5th book seems like it's a set up for something really special in book 6, similar to how the 2nd book set up the amazing 3rd book. Let's just hope it doesn't take him another 5 years to get there.

[whoDean]

Visually this casting continues the outstanding job they did in season 1.

I'm half way through DwD, so far it feels like Martin is primarily moving characters where they need to for what comes next, with little true conflict or resolution. I'm having a hard time keeping up with the geography on the other continent.

[Dave Bing]

I'm actually on book three now. It has been so long since I read fiction at all. And these are good stories. I do wonder how HBO will do justice to the battle for Kings Landing at the end.

Seem to be fine casting choices. It being TV, they have to cast women who are more comely in real life than in the books. Brienne, Osha, even Arya, are supposed to be pretty ugly. Osha is messy looking but not hideous. Brienne, they emphasize over and over looks horrible. And Arya is adorable in the show but supposed to look like a mini-Ned.

[Dave Bing]

The Kindle Whisper-sync is a great invention. Whatever device I have, the iPhone, iPad or the Kindle, I can always kill time with a book instead of just playing Homerun Derby.

[whoDean]

Some Book3 in Season 2

Like TRUE BLOOD before it, the GAME OF THRONES television series will utilize story elements from later in the book franchise.

The Daily Blam talked with Showrunner David Benioff who confirmed that events from the third novel will be intertwined into season two's plot.

Daily Blam points out that some reorganization has already taken place like with season one's scene where Catelyn Stark (Michelle Fairly) confronts prisoner Jamie Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) which actually comes from book two of A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE.

Said Benioff of season two:

"It’s a lot of journeys. Jon Snow is wandering north of the wall with the Night’s Watch to find out what’s going on up there, and Theon Greyjoy is traveling to his ancestral homeland."

[Lou Stefanic]

If I recall correctly, there's not a lot of Jaime Lannister page time in Book 2. Makes sense to shoehorn in some of Book 3.

[Dave Bing]

I just signed up for ebookfling. Seems a pretty good concept. It's essentially a swapmeet for ebook. You lend out what you have in your kindle or nook in exchange for a two week rental for whatever is on someone else's kindle or nook. And if you have no takers for your book, you can rent for 2 dollars. They seem to have a ton of good titles as well.