Tuesdays with Story

“A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.” ~ Charles Peguy

Tuesdays With Story Writer’s Mail, May 20, 2010
By Carol Shay Hornung

Tuesday Night at the Bookstore

Kim – Jerry had a question about style and the capitalization of a certain word. Pat wants to know how many chapters there are, but the main character to her is Ryoko and not the character the book is named after, James Hyde. Millie would just change the name of it because all of the characters are interesting. Kim wants it to be about all of them, but Pat thinks Ryoko is far more interesting and cooler. Nicole thought there was a nice balance between the strong and feminine parts of Ryoko’s character. Alicia had a problem with Ramses – if he killed her mother, why would she hate him one second and fall into his arms the next? Jerry suggested Ryoko’s mission changes at the end of the chapters to trying to find her husband.

Nicole – Millie thought it flowed along nice. Pat thought Angelo was a bad boy. Kim wanted more showing, not telling. Jen liked it overall as well, but was looking for a more active voice. Sam (new guy) liked his reaction to the girl. Pat liked his reaction to the siren. Kim wondered about the uncle and why we never meet him. Nicole says he’s a trucker, but she never told us that. Pat thought she could start the story in the car on the drive to ND. Alicia thought she might try telling the story from Angelo’s POV. What other kind of experiences might he have with the quiet of the night and the large open fields. Jerry thought some scenes begged for expansion.

Alicia – Jerry thought the end was when Lincoln says he doesn’t mind losing this one. Pat thanked her for the epilogue, but wanted her to leave out the qualifiers in the preface. Jerry had a comment about the preface – he was bored and wouldn’t have read the rest of the book if he read that first. Instead, perhaps it could be an end note, so if someone wants to read it they can. Kim doesn’t think she needs it at all. Phrases like, “Find an agent!” and “Don’t self-publish!” reverberate around the table. Pat (and the rest of us) think this could go all the way. Go Alicia!

Jen – Sam (new guy) thinks it’s cool already, and he hasn’t read any of it. Nicole thinks the narrator needs to not switch back and forth between the first and last names of one character because it can make it seem like there are multiple characters. Alicia did some research and discovered “Fringe” was based on “X-Files,” which totally changed her perspective on the story. Making this appealing to people outside of the genre is a hard task. Millie thought this could use a preface and some more backstory.

John – Pat wanted to know the reason for doing a synopsis. John said he wrote a one page synopsis, but someone at a conference suggested it be three to five pages. Everyone agrees that distilling the story down is a hard process. Patrick (other new guy from 2nd and 4th) thought it might be best to think of giving a synopsis over a cup of tea. “Or a beer,” Jerry said. The reader of the synopsis is not the audience. Nicole wanted to know who the story would be marketed to. John thought that would be addressed in the query letter. Kim liked the beginning of the synopsis but by the time it got to the talking squirrel it was hard to keep up. Pat wants more emotional response instead of plot, plot, plot.

Who’s Up Next

May 25 (2nd & 4th)
Jen Wilcher (chapter, And So We Meet Again)
Holly Bonnickson-Jones (Coming Up For Air)
Terry Hoffman (The Journal)
Patrick Tomlinson (short story)
Kim Simmons
Annie Potter (memoir)

June 1st (1st and 3rd)
Amber Boudreau (chapter 14, YA novel)
Greg Spry (novella/part 1, Goodbye, Mars)
Clayton Gill (chapter 12, Fishing Derby)
Kim Simmons (chapters 22-23, James Hyde)
Jerry Peterson (chapter 10, For Want of a Hand)
Cathy Riddle (chapter 7, Beer Crimes)
June 8th (2nd & 4th)
Jack Frieburger (Path to Bray’s Head)

June 15 (1st & 3rd)
Kim Simmons (chapters 29-30, James Hyde)
Jen Wilcher (chapter 1 rewrite, Memories Awakened)
Judith McNeil (radio play, “South to Sunday”)
Nicole Rosario (???)
Millie Mader (chapter 18, Life on Hold)
Patrick Tomlinson (???).

July 6 (1st & 3rd)
Kim Simmons (chapters 31-32, James Hyde)
Jerry Peterson (chapter 11, For Want of a Hand)
Greg Spry (novella/part 2, Goodbye, Mars).

English in a Global Context:
Shanghai Is Trying to Untangle the Mangled English of Chinglish
Jackson Lowen for The New York Times

SHANGHAI — For English speakers with subpar Chinese skills, daily life in China offers a confounding array of choices. At banks, there are machines for “cash withdrawing” and “cash recycling.” The menus of local restaurants might present such delectables as “fried enema,” “monolithic tree mushroom stem squid” and a mysterious thirst-quencher known as “The Jew’s Ear Juice.”

Those who have had a bit too much monolithic tree mushroom stem squid could find themselves requiring roomier attire: extra-large sizes sometimes come in “fatso” or “lard bucket” categories. These and other fashions can be had at the clothing chain known as Scat.

Go ahead and snicker, although by last Saturday’s opening of the Expo 2010 in Shanghai, drawing more than 70 million visitors over its six-month run, these and other uniquely Chinese maladaptations of the English language were supposed to have been largely excised.

Well, that at least is what the Shanghai Commission for the Management of Language Use has been trying to accomplish during the past two years.

Fortified by an army of 600 volunteers and a politburo of adroit English speakers, the commission has fixed more than 10,000 public signs (farewell “Teliot” and “urine district”), rewritten English-language historical placards and helped hundreds of restaurants recast offerings.

The campaign is partly modeled on Beijing’s herculean effort to clean up English signage for the 2008 Summer Olympics, which led to the replacement of 400,000 street signs, 1,300 restaurant menus and such exemplars of impropriety as the Dongda Anus Hospital — now known as the Dongda Proctology Hospital. Gone, too, is Racist Park, a cultural attraction that has since been rechristened Minorities Park.

“The purpose of signage is to be useful, not to be amusing,” said Zhao Huimin, the former Chinese deputy consul general to the United States who, as director general of the capital’s Foreign Affairs Office, has been leading the fight for linguistic standardization and sobriety.

But while the war on mangled English may be considered a signature achievement of government officials, aficionados of what is known as Chinglish are wringing their hands in despair.

Oliver Lutz Radtke, a former German radio reporter who may well be the world’s foremost authority on Chinglish, said he believed that China should embrace the fanciful melding of English and Chinese as the hallmark of a dynamic, living language. As he sees it, Chinglish is an endangered species that deserves preservation.

“If you standardize all these signs, you not only take away the little giggle you get while strolling in the park but you lose a window into the Chinese mind,” said Mr. Radtke, who is the author of a pair of picture books that feature giggle-worthy Chinglish signs in their natural habitat.

Lest anyone think it is all about laughs, Mr. Radtke is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Chinglish at the University of Heidelberg.

Still, the enemies of Chinglish say the laughter it elicits is humiliating. Wang Xiaoming, an English scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, painfully recalls the guffaws that erupted among her foreign-born colleagues as they flipped through a photographic collection of poorly written signs. “They didn’t mean to insult me but I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable,” said Ms. Wang, who has since become one of Beijing’s leading Chinglish slayers.

Those who study the roots of Chinglish say many examples can be traced to laziness and a flawed but wildly popular translation software. Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, said the computerized dictionary, Jinshan Ciba, had led to sexually oriented vulgarities identifying dried produce in Chinese supermarkets and the regrettable “fried enema” menu selection that should have been rendered as “fried sausage.”

Although improved translation software and a growing zeal for grammatically unassailable English has slowed the output of new Chinglishisms, Mr. Mair said he still received about five new examples a day from people who knew he was good at deciphering what went wrong. “If someone would pay me to do it, I’d spend my life studying these things,” he said.

Among those getting paid to wrestle with Chinglish is Jeffrey Yao, an English translator and teacher at the Graduate Institute of Interpretation and Translation at Shanghai International Studies University who is leading the sign exorcism. But even as he eradicates the most egregious examples by government fiat — businesses dare not ignore the commission’s suggested fixes — he has mixed feelings, noting that although some Chinglish phrases sound awkward to Western ears, they can be refreshingly lyrical. “Some of it tends to be expressive, even elegant,” he said, shuffling through an online catalog of signs that were submitted by the volunteers who prowled Shanghai with digital cameras. “They provide a window into how we Chinese think about language.”

He offered the following example: While park signs in the West exhort people to “Keep Off the Grass,” Chinese versions tend to anthropomorphize nature as a way to gently engage the stomping masses. Hence, such admonishments as “The Little Grass Is Sleeping. Please Don’t Disturb It” or “Don’t Hurt Me. I Am Afraid of Pain.”
Mr. Yao read off the Chinese equivalents as if savoring a Shakespearean sonnet. “How lovely,” he said with a sigh.

He pointed out that this linguistic mentality helped create such expressions as “long time no see,” a word-for-word translation of a Chinese expression that became a mainstay of spoken English. But Mr. Yao, who spent nearly two decades working as a translator in Canada, has his limits. He showed a sign from a park designed to provide visitors with the rules for entry, which include prohibitions on washing, “scavenging,” clothes drying and public defecation, all of it rendered in unintelligible — and in the case of the last item — rather salty English. The sign ended with this humdinger: “Because if the tourist does not obey the staff to manage or contrary holds, Does, all consequences are proud.”

Even though he had had the sign corrected recently, Mr. Yao could not help but shake his head in disgust at the memory. And he was irritated to find that a raft of troublesome sign verbiage had slipped past the commission as the expo approached, including a cafeteria sign that read, “The tableware reclaims a place.” (Translation: drop off dirty dishes here.)
“Some Chinglish expressions are nice, but we are not translating literature here,” he said. “I want to see people nodding that they understand the message on these signs. I don’t want to see them laughing.”

Poetry, from “The Writer’s Almanac”

Crossing the Loch
by Kathleen Jamie

Remember how we rowed toward the cottage
on the sickle-shaped bay,
that one night after the pub
loosed us through its swinging doors
and we pushed across the shingle
till water lipped the sides
as though the loch mouthed ‘boat’?

I forgot who rowed. Our jokes hushed.
The oars’ splash, creak, and the spill
of the loch reached long into the night.
Out in the race I was scared:
the cold shawl of breeze,
and hunched hills; what the water held
of deadheads, ticking nuclear hulls.

Who rowed, and who kept their peace?
Who hauled salt-air and stars
deep into their lungs, were not reassured;
and who first noticed the loch’s
phosphorescence, so, like a twittering nest
washed from the rushes, an astonished
small boat of saints, we watched water shine
on our fingers and oars,
the magic dart of our bow wave?
It was surely foolhardy, such a broad loch, a tide,
but we live—and even have children
to women and men we had yet to meet
that night we set out, calling our own
the sky and salt-water, wounded hills
dark-starred by blaeberries, the glimmering anklets
we wore in the shallows
as we shipped oars and jumped,
to draw the boat safe, high at the cottage shore.

“Crossing the Loch” by Kathleen Jamie from Waterlight: Selected Poems.

Writing Contest, from our pals at NaNoWriMo – Name That Fridge!

Dear Wrimos,

On Saturday, May 15, the Office of Letters and Light is moving!

. . . Our new space not only has functioning heating and cooling and hot water, but it also has a fridge. That’s right. We will be the proud owners of a refrigerator with a freezer and ice trays and everything! In honor of our move, we’re running a “Name our Fridge” contest over on the NaNoWriMo Facebook page.

Head on over and put your suggestion in the hat. On May 21, we’ll announce the winner on Facebook. If you win, we’ll make a fridge magnet out of the photo you send us and put it on our fridge. And then we’ll make you a fridge magnet of our fridge with your photo on it that you can put on your fridge!
Confused yet?

To recap, you + awesome name + fridge = magnets.

Without further ado, feast your eyes on this dapper little Hotpoint refrigerator!

(editor’s note: go to the website to see it – the pic was too big and making the newsletter ridiculously large! It is a lovely white fridge, freezer on top, handles on the left)

Looking extra forward to naming this little beauty,
Lindsey

Newsletter duty roster
June – Jen
July – Greg
August – Clayton
We will need someone in September – let me know if you’d like to volunteer!

Fifth Tuesday
Fifth Tuesday is set for Tuesday, June 29th, hosted by the 2nd and 4th at Terry Hoffman’s place. Directions and the writing challenge to follow . . !

The Last Word…Anu Garg Word of the Day

cockaigne

PRONUNCIATION: (kaw-KAYN)

MEANING: noun: An imaginary land of luxury and idleness.

ETYMOLOGY: From Middle French pais de cocaigne (land of plenty), from Middle Low German kokenje, diminutive of koke (cake). Cockaigne was a fabled place of ease and luxury, a land overflowing with milk and honey where food fell into your mouth by itself. It was an imaginary place a medieval peasant could aspire to, a place away from the harsh reality of life.

USAGE: “This was a land of Cockaigne, a place of total self-indulgent enchantment where I sat alone for hours contemplating.”

Christopher Moore; Broad Horizons; The Press (Christchurch, New Zealand); Jan 4, 1999.