About Richard Bowker

Author of the Portal series, the Last P.I. series, and other novels

Rule 7: Learn all them grammer and spelling rules

Posted on May 19, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Here is some prose Ernest Hemingway scribbled on the envelope of a letter he wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald:

What about The Sun also and the movies? Any chance? I dint put in about the good parts. You know how good they are. You’re write about the book of stories. I wanted to hold it for more. That last one I had in Cosmopolitan would have made it.

(The letter itself is wonderful, and you can read it here.)

I dint put in? You’re write? Of course, Fitzgerald was a notoriously bad speller himself.

If you are as good a writer as Fitzgerald and Hemingway, you can spell however you please. Why are you paying any attention to me? Go back to your novel! But if you’re not, do yourself a favor and learn how to spell. And learn the rules of grammar, even if you choose to break them. Clearly I’m still learning. But this stuff matters. The site I linked to above says of Hemingway:

Whenever his newspaper editors complained about [his poor spelling], he’d retort, “Well, that’s what you’re hired to correct!”

But editors aren’t doing that anymore! The editors didn’t pick up the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Harvard English professor’s misspelling of “Ptolemy.” No one noticed the grammatical errors and the misspelling of “rarefied” in Lisa Randall’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door. I was looking at the résumé for a technical editor a few months ago, and I noticed he had misspelled the name of the college from which he had graduated. “Rutgers” just isn’t that hard to get right! Even when their spelling is OK, some of these editors don’t seem to notice when they use the serial comma in one sentence and don’t use it in the next. Make up your minds already! Microsoft Word helps, but notice that its spellchecker wouldn’t have picked up “dint” or “write” in the Hemingway quote. (It did pick up “Rutgars” though — the “editor” didn’t even bother to spellcheck his own résumé!)

Writers are pretty much on their own nowadays, particularly if they are going the self-publishing route with ebooks. And that means it’s up to them to get the basics right. If they don’t bother, they better hope they are as talented as Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

Yet another brouhaha: Did Shakespeare have a co-author on All’s Well That Ends Well?

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Our previous brouhaha was over how the universe began. But who cares about that? This latest brouhaha is serious.

The venerable Times Literary Supplement recently ran an article proposing that the Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton had a hand in writing the latest Shakespearean play All’s Well That Ends Well. Here is Mr. Middleton:

The TLS version of the article isn’t online, but it’s available from the Centre for Early Modern Studies at Oxford. Based on various kinds of evidence like stage directions and stylistic quirks, the authors state:

A broad-brush summary might look like this. One author knew that the two French lords had names, the other did not. One preferred personal names over types, and drew for many of them on his earlier plays. One used different speech prefixes from his collaborator. One wrote narrative stage directions as explanation to his partner at point of handover. One was more inclined to rhyming couplets and to hypermetric verse. One wrote like William Shakespeare and one wrote like Thomas Middleton.

Publishing a scholarly piece like this in the TLS is a big deal, and the authors’ identification of Middleton as Shakespeare’s co-author made news around the world, from the Huffington Post to the Times of India.

Enter Brian Vickers — not the NASCAR driver, you idiot, but the eminent Elizabethan scholar. Professor Sir Brian Vickers to you, bub. He and a colleague have published a refutation in the TLS, also available separately, that refutes the claim. They come out swinging:

Towards the end of their article claiming to have identified Thomas Middleton as the co-author of All’s Well that Ends Well,1 Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith record that only one previous critic had anticipated them, John Dover Wilson.2 That ought to have given them pause, for to follow the path of the Grand Disintegrator eighty years after his methods have been discredited is to risk a similar fate. When faced with some aspects of a Shakespeare play that he didn’t like or understand Wilson was always ready to postulate some “inferior dramatist” or the relic of “an old play” as the explanation. For All’s Well he suggested a dramatist who also worked on Measure for Measure and “had a passion for sententious couplets and a mind running on sexual disease”, a fiction that conveniently excused Shakespeare of both “faults”. It is rather shocking to find such antiquated attitudes taken seriously, after four decades of scholarship has established authorship attribution as a serious discipline.

They battle the Oxford authors statistic for statistic, and then conclude:

We could extend this rebuttal, but suffice to say that there is absolutely no evidence of another hand in this play. The world media get excited by any attempt, however weak, to take something away from Shakespeare. We hope that they will pay equal attention to this restitution. The Roman definition of justice was “suum cuique tribuere”, render to everyone his due. Whether or not you like the play, All’s Well is all Shakespeare’s.

Great stuff!

Before reading the original TLS article I listened to the Arkangel recording ofAll’s Well on my endless commute. These recordings are great, by the way. The only thing I noticed that might have been slightly anomalous was that there seemed to be a lot of rhyming couplets (an issue that the Oxford authors in fact raised and Vickers refutes). The main thing I noticed was that the play continued to be every bit as unlikeable as I remembered it. (You’ll note that Vickers implies that this is not an uncommon reaction to the play.) The lead male character, Bertram, is an arrogant prick; the lead female, Helena, is a dope because she has fallen for the arrogant prick. It’s not funny, it’s not thought-provoking, it has no memorable lines . . .

But it sure did seem to be by Shakespeare. It has the fairy-tale quality and gnarled syntax of his late romances. It has the bed trick he used in Measure for Measure. It has the long, and somewhat distasteful, gulling of the comic villain he used in Twelfth Night. It has the concluding rebirth tableau he used in A Winter’s Tale.

But that doesn’t mean the play is any good.

Once I finish slogging through Lisa Randall on the Large Hadron Collider I’m going to give Middleton a try. A friend has lent me the pleasant conceited comedy A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, which sounds not bad:

In which Microsoft Word proves that I’m a grammatical idiot

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Writers, of course, have styles; they use some words and grammatical constructions more than others. That’s why, for example, we can do acomputerized linguistic analysis of some text and demonstrate whether Shakespeare wrote it. Even I have a style! Replica (coming soon to an ebook store near you!) is littered with sentences like this one:

Hunt retreated a step, then attacked again.

In reviewing the Microsoft Word file for Replica with grammar-checking turned on, I noticed that Word took offense at the word then in sentences like this one. I appealed my case to the cold-eyed editors where I work, and they affirmed Word’s judgment: “Then” is an adverb, not a conjunction. Or at best, it’s a conjunctive adverb, or an adverbial conjunction, or some damn thing. At any rate, you can’t use the way I was using it. At best, you can say: “Hunt retreated a step; then, he attacked again.” Which is not the effect I wanted at all.

Here’s what one site says (referring to idiots like me derisively as “students”):

Too many students think that then works the same way [as a regular ol’ conjunction]: “Caesar invaded Gaul, then he turned his attention to England.” You can tell the difference between then and a coordinating conjunction by trying to move the word around in the sentence. We can write “he then turned his attention to England”; “he turned his attention, then, to England”; he turned his attention to England then.” The word can move around within the clause. Try that with a conjunction, and you will quickly see that the conjunction cannot move around. “Caesar invaded Gaul, and then he turned his attention to England.” The word and is stuck exactly there and cannot move like then, which is more like an adverbial conjunction (or conjunctive adverb — see below) than a coordinating conjunction. Our original sentence in this paragraph — “Caesar invaded Gaul, then he turned his attention to England” — is a comma splice, a faulty sentence construction in which a comma tries to hold together two independent clauses all by itself: the comma needs a coordinating conjunction to help out, and the word then simply doesn’t work that way.

Of course, Replica had a mainstream publisher (Bantam) and was professionally edited. Why didn’t someone stop me? I feel betrayed.

Readers of the ebook edition will not have to put up with these atrocities. Microsoft Word has taught me the error of my ways, and I fixed all of these errant sentences. Thanks, Microsoft!

Let’s all write an extra book a year!

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Richard Bowker

A recent New York Times article highlights the increasing pressure on successful writers to produce even more content to satisfy their readers’ demands for more stuff.

They are trying to satisfy impatient readers who have become used to downloading any e-book they want at the touch of a button, and the publishers who are nudging them toward greater productivity in the belief that the more their authors’ names are out in public, the bigger stars they will become.

“It used to be that once a year was a big deal,” said Lisa Scottoline, a best-selling author of thrillers. “You could saturate the market. But today the culture is a great big hungry maw, and you have to feed it.”

Writers are even being encouraged to come up with digital-only 99-cent short stories to keep their names before the public.

One word that doesn’t occur in the Times article is quality. This is about writing as business, not writing as art. One writer complains that “You don’t ever want to get into a situation where your worth is being judged by the amount of your productivity.” But what else can it be judged by, if you’re pumping out thousands of words a day?

When I get around to writing up more of my rules for writing, Rule 2 will be “Revise” and Rule 3 will be “Rewrite.” But these two rules assume that quality figures somewhere in your rationale for writing. At a certain level of professionalism, you can create a reasonable novel in a single draft with minimal revisions — especially if you’re working in a formulaic genre like romance. But the resulting product can’t possibly be as good as you can make it. The ability to make a good living off your fiction is in this respect antithetical to the ability to make good fiction. I have never been able to figure out how to make that tradeoff; and that’s why I have a day job.

If you’re going to lie on your resume, why think small?

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Richard Bowker

The CEO of Yahoo, Scott Thompson, has resigned because he overstated his credentials on his résumé. What was the overstatement? Apparently he claimed he had a degree in accounting and computer science from Stonehill College, when in fact his degree was only in accounting. Of course, when this first became public, he tried to blame someone else for the error, but apparently that claim didn’t stand up to scrutiny either. Now he is going to have to find a way to restart his career.

Stonehill is a little Catholic college not far from where I live. A nephew of mine went there, and I’m sure it’s a very fine college. But if you’re going to lie on your résumé, why just tweak your degree? Why not claim a degree from Harvard or a Ph.D. from Oxford? I look at a ton of résumés at my job, and educational experience is important. If you don’t have a degree from a top-notch university, that’s fine — there are plenty of reasons why someone might not go to Harvard or Michigan or Middlebury. But a degree from a prestigious school is a good indicator that you have the intellectual ability we’re looking for. But I’m pretty sure our HR folks don’t verify a candidate’s educational credentials. I’m not sure why they don’t — too time-consuming? too expensive? The thing is, if you lie, you’re likely to get away with it. So why not think big?

Possibly Thompson thought a minor adjustment was less likely to be uncovered than a big whopper. On the other hand, the downside of any kind of lying is so huge that a minor adjustment hardly seems worth the risk.

The strangeness of this guy’s behavior pales in comparison to that of Richard Blumenthal, the new senator from Connecticut, who was in the habit of lying about serving in Vietnam. He wasn’t just exaggerating his college major on a form; he was publicly claiming an accomplishment that was completely untrue:

“We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” Mr. Blumenthal said to the group gathered in Norwalk in March 2008. “And you exemplify it. Whatever we think about the war, whatever we call it — Afghanistan or Iraq — we owe our military men and women unconditional support.”

Blumenthal is a spectacularly accomplished guy — I presume Thompson is as well. Why did they need to do this? I suppose the lies began early, as they started their careers in politics and business, and then they couldn’t find a way to stop. Maybe they didn’t see the need to stop, since no one ever uncovered the lies. And in the end, maybe they kinda sorta started believing their lies. It was all so long ago.

There’s a story here….

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (also, the cutest kitten photos ever!!)

Posted on May 13, 2012 by Richard Bowker

OK, I’m lying about the kitten photos. It’s just that the title of the post seemed a wee bit abstruse without throwing in some kittens.

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes was a bestseller when it was published in 1976. Its thesis, briefly, is that consciousness as we know it arose very recently in human history — around 3000 years ago. Before that, human beings were more like zombies, lacking introspection, and responding to auditory hallucinations coming from the right side of their brains — hallucinations that they typically interpreted as being the voices of gods. This “bicameral mind” started to break down during the second millennium BCE in the face of the stresses of migrations, natural disasters, the development of writing, and so on.

Julian Jaynes

When I read the book, the evidence I found most interesting was Jaynes’s comparison between the Iliad and the Odyssey. None of the characters in the Iliad show any introspection — they are the playthings of the gods. In the Odyssey, on the other hand, Odysseus is supremely introspective; the gods are still integral to the story, but Odysseus is his own master. (Of course, the dating of both epics is pretty conjectural, since they had they origins in oral performance, probably hundreds of years before they were written down.)

Anyway, the book disappeared from my consciousness after I read it, and I never noticed any other books by Jaynes. Was he just another scientific crank like Velikovsky?

The answer, it seems, is (pretty much) no. The first time I encountered a reference to Jaynes in recent years was in a footnote to Dawkins’s The God Delusion, where he says, “It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I’m hedging my bets.” That sounds about right to me. The book does, of course, offer an intriguing explanation of sorts for the origin of religion, but Dawkins just mentions it in passing.

I was more surprised last week when Jaynes came up in a UC Berkeley course I was listening to called “Scientific Approaches to Consciousness.” The professor devoted his final lecture to Jaynes’s theory, without offering any criticism of it — apparently it is worthy of being taught, more or less uncritically, to Berkeley undergrads.

The Wikipedia articles suggest that Jaynes’s theory is not quite in the scientific mainstream, but lots of interesting people (like Daniel Dennett) continue to have good things to say about it. There is a Julian Jaynes Society, the existence of which strikes me as rather culty. Here is a recent critique of the theory. Time to reread the book itself, I guess.

And OK, here is a cute kitten:

Teaching English in Jordan

Posted on May 12, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Another dispatch from the world traveler, who is headed to Egypt today.

Robot vacuum cleaner speaks three languages

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Here is what the future has brought us instead of android replicas — a robot vacuum cleaner that speaks three different languages, controlled via an iPhone app. A mere $1600. Civilization! Progress!

The article calls the vacuum cleaner “adorable.” Do we all agree?

Computers a block long and other hazards of near-future science fiction

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Richard Bowker

If you were paying attention while reading that prolog to Replica that I posted the other day, you’d have figured out that the novel is set in about 2023. I wrote the novel in the late 1980s. A lot has happened since then!

A science fiction novel set in the near future is going to get things wrong. The classic example is the 1950s novels that extrapolated computers a block long — if you think computers are big and powerful now, wait until the year 2000! The movie (and novel) 2001: A Space Odyssey got pretty much everything wrong about 2001, if I remember correctly.

If the novel (or film) is good enough, you’ll forgive its silly predictions. 2001 wasn’t about what real life would be like in 2001, any more than 1984 was a prediction about the actual world situation in 1984. My hope is that Replica will be exciting enough that readers will just smile at the stuff I missed.

Here is the kind of thing that comes up: early in the novel, the lead character, Shana York, is pulled into a limousine against her will while out jogging. The man in the limousine tells her his name, but she doesn’t recognize it, or him. So he orders the driver to pull up beside the next payphone. He then makes Shana get out, call into some database, and search for information about him, which is displayed on the payphone’s screen. (The phonecall costs a dollar.)

This is an attempt to imagine a world in which information is much more available than in the 1980s, and telecommunications technology is much more advanced. Video screens on payphones!

Missed it by a mile.

Not just in the context of Replica, it’s interesting to think about the ways in which the world has turned out differently from what we imagined it would be in the 1980s. Ubiquitous cellphones (particularly smartphones) and the Internet are certainly at the top of the list. Some people might have been thinking about a “clash of civilizations” with Islam, but most of us were still worried about the Soviet Union. I don’t think most of us expected that space travel would just sort of peter out. Replica is about artificial intelligence, which was hot back then, but AI hasn’t fulfilled its promise — certainly not in the way my novel envisaged it. Instead of robots cooking our meals, we have Samuel L. Jackson’s telling Siri on his iPhone to cancel his golf game. Instead of android bank tellers, we have ubiquitous ATM machines.

Is life better or worse than we imagined it? Well, ATMs are pretty useful. And blogs are great! How did we live without blogs in the 80s?

Who are these Beastie Boys whereof you speak?

Posted on May 6, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Between innings at the Red Sox game they showed a video about Fenway Park; the background music was a U2 song that I couldn’t quite place at first. I asked my friend, and he said, “Sorry, I don’t know anything about U2.”

This startled me for a moment, but it shouldn’t have. You pick and choose your life; you can’t pay attention to everything. And why bother? Most of it is junk. Some people reread Jane Austen every year; I wouldn’t do that, but I’d gladly spend a lot more time with Shakespeare than I currently am able to. On the other hand, I have never watched a full episode of Seinfeld or Friends or The Sopranos; I have only the vaguest interest in modern art; ballet leaves me cold…

…And I never heard of Adam Yauch until he died. I’ve heard of the Beastie Boys, but never listened to any of their music; hip hop is something else that leaves me cold. Anyway, here they are, back when their lives were ahead of them: