Roy Peter Clark, in his excellent guide to practical writing The Glamour of Grammar, offers the following advice on two of the trickiest homophones in the English language, lie and lay —
Here’s the simplest way to remember the difference: lie means “to recline”; lay means “to place.” As in “I lay the cushions on the floor so I can recline in comfort.” (You can use the vowel sounds as a memory aid: lie/recline; lay/place.)
Confusion sweeps in when we move from the present tense to the past. Alas, the past tense of lie happens to by lay: “When I heard the news, I lay on the bed in disbelief.” And the past tense of lay is laid, as in “The bank robbers laid their weapons on the ground.”
Clark then gives us the following helpful examples that distinguish the principal parts of these tricky irregular verbs —
Lie: Today I lie on the bed. Yesterday I lay on the bed. I have lain on that bed so many times there are holes in the mattress.
Lay: Today I lay my cards on the table. Yesterday I laid my cards on the table. I have laid my cards on the table so many times that I was bound to win.
Significantly, Clark uses lie and lay as part of a larger discussion about how a writer can master irregular verbs. He suggests that learning the principal parts of these verbs and understanding the distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs will help writers to communicate more clearly. (The Glamour of Grammar is a fantastic book, by the way, and would make a vital addition to the libraries of experience and inexperienced writers alike).
So, ready for a quiz? One of our favorite blogs, Ironic Sans, compiled every use and misuse of lay and lie from the first three seasons of Mad Men. You’ll have a moment after hearing a character use or misuse lay or lie to decide if he or she has done so with grammatic fidelity. After that, a graphic (and sound) will let you know if the word has been used correctly. Good luck!
I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
(Via).
“Honoring the Subjunctive,” a very short story by Lydia Davis, from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis —
It invariably precedes, even if it do not altogether supersede, the determination of what is absolutely desirable and just.
Cool post over at Flavorwire on authors’ favorite foods — we like Truman Capote’s baked potato lunch the best:
Though Truman Capote’s writing was mostly occupied with social dealings, he managed to find time to write a forward to Myrna Davis’ The Potato Book, a cookbook penned to raise funds for a Long Island day school. In his brief contribution, Capote offers a recipe for what he describes as “my one and only most delicious ever potato lunch.” In a tribute to the then existing potato fields of Long Island, the recipe called for a baked potato smothered in sour cream and caviar, then paired with a chilled bottle of 80-proof Russian vodka.
Read our list of literary recipes here.
Saucy sex advice sage Dan Savage said, when Obama made an “It Gets Better” vid —
“The president of the United States has the power to do more than assure LGBT kids that it will get better,” Mr. Savage said. “The president of the United States and his administration have the power to make it better.”
“Treasure,” a creepy/fun webcomic by Edgar R. McHerly. From his website The Invisible Hair Suit.
El Guincho’s video for “Bombay” is heroically and emphatically NSFW—
David Mitchell talks about writing his novel Black Swan Green in his 2010 Paris Review interview—
MITCHELL
I’d actually started Black Swan Green years earlier. In 2003, while I was finishing Cloud Atlas, Granta asked for an unpublished story, and all I had were a few sketches about the world I grew up in. I didn’t want to be overly distracted from the end of Cloud Atlas, so I decided to knock one of the sketches into a publishable story. In doing so, I began my next novel.
INTERVIEWER
Did you, like Jason, write poetry under a pseudonym for the parish newsletter?
MITCHELL
I did.
INTERVIEWER
Was your pseudonym the same as Jason’s: Eliot Bolivar?
MITCHELL
James Bolivar—after a character created by an American science-fiction writer, Harry Harrison. I’ve never told anyone that before. You can see why.
INTERVIEWER
And, like Jason, did you go see a speech therapist?
MITCHELL
Just the same, aged about thirteen. Like Jason, I would go, and my stammer would vanish in the presence of the therapist, but come the next day, I’d be stammering again. One very pleasing result of Black Swan Green is that the book now appears on course syllabi for speech therapists in the UK. I hope that the book is useful for anyone wanting to understand an insider’s account of disfluency. For most of my life, the subject was a source of paralyzing shame, scrupulously avoided by family and friends. They were being kind, but to do something about a problem it must be named, discussed, and thought about. After writing the second chapter of Black Swan Green I realized, This is true, real, and liberating. I felt a little like how I imagine a gay man feels when he comes out. Thank God—well, thank me actually—that I don’t have to pretend anymore. Now I’m more able to feel that if people have a problem with my stammer, that problem is theirs and not mine. Almost a militancy. If Jason comes back in a future book, he’ll be an adult speech therapist.
INTERVIEWER
When you were creating Jason Taylor, did you ask yourself, What was David Mitchell like at that age?
MITCHELL
It was largely that, yes. Arguably, the act of memory is an act of fiction—and much in the act of fiction draws on acts of memory. Despite the fact that Jason’s and my pubescent voices are close, his wasn’t the easiest to crack because it had to be both plausible and interesting for adult readers.
INTERVIEWER
It was perverse of you to write a first novel after having written three others.
MITCHELL
When I started out on this head-banging vocation, my own background simply didn’t attract me enough to write about it. An island boy looking for his father in Tokyo; sarin-gas attackers; decayed future civilizations in the middle of the Pacific—these were what attracted me. It took me three books to realize that any subject under the sun is interesting, so long as the writing is good. Chekhov makes muddy, disappointed tedium utterly beguiling.
INTERVIEWER
Black Swan Green is very carefully structured.
MITCHELL
Get the structure wrong and you blow up shortly after takeoff. Get it right and you save yourself an aborted manuscript and months and months of wasted writing. Make your structure original and you may end up with a novel that looks unlike any other. So yes, Black Swan Green is carefully structured—like all halfway decent books—but simply structured too, with one story per month for thirteen months. After Cloud Atlas I wanted a holiday from complexity. I was reading Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and Alice Munro—all three great No Tricks merchants. After doing a half Chinese-box, half Russian-doll sort of a novel, I wanted to see if I could write a compelling book about an outwardly unremarkable boy stuck in an outwardly unremarkable time and place without any jiggery-pokery, without fireworks—just old-school.
WikiLeaks’ recent infodump (available on a DNS mirror here) of over 250,000 US diplomatic cables has raised myriad questions about media responsibility, notably just how open America’s information-drunk society needs to be when private (but not really) communications between members of the intelligence community and governments are open to the public.
And regardless of whether you think the leak is embarrassing (to the US), strategic (for the US making a case against Iran) or triumphant (Assange as Martyr 2.0), the cables themselves actually make for some pretty great stories. Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic has rounded up some of the more finely crafted transmissions, revealing an intelligence corps that often eschews dry, fact-based tones for rich and, in the case below, humorous detail.
This excerpt of a cable from Moscow to DC recounts an oligarch’s wedding in the Caucasus but reads like the plot summary from an episode of Eastbound and Down:
Gadzhi was locked into his role as host. He greeted every guest personally as they entered the hall — failure to do so would cause great insult — and later moved constantly from table to table drinking toasts with everyone. The 120 toasts he estimated he drank would have killed anyone, hardened drinker or not, but Gadzhi had his Afghan waiter Khan following him around to pour his drinks from a special vodka bottle containing water. Still, he was much the worse for wear by evening’s end. At one point we caught up with him dancing with two scantily clad Russian women who looked far from home. One, it turned out was a Moscow poet (later she recited an incomprehensible poem in Gadzhi’s honor) who MOSCOW 00009533 004 OF 005 was in town with a film director to write the screenplay for a film immortalizing Gadzhi’s defense of Dagestan against Shamil Basayev. By 6 p.m. most of the houseguests had returned to Gadzhi’s seaside home for more swimming and more jet-skiing-under-the-influence. But by 8 the summer house’s restaurant was full once more, the food and drink were flowing, the name performers were giving acoustic renditions of the songs they had sung at the reception, and some stupendously fat guests were displaying their lezginkas for the benefit of the two visiting Russian women, who had wandered over from the reception.
While the excerpted cable is 5 pages of hilarity, others leaked are sad accounts of Gitmo detainees starting new lives and judges seeking protection from the US against terrorist assassins. In all of them, we’re reminded us that diplomacy and intelligence activities are driven not by abstract political ideals, but by humans with feelings, desires and perspectives of their own. Cheers to the Atlantic for finding life (and the humor) within the debate.
On October 4th of this year, right in the midst of Franzen-mania (and Franzenfreude), two ballsy Londoners jacked Jonathan Franzen’s signature spectacles during a Hyde Park bookstore launch party for Freedom. They left a ransom note asking for $100,000, but were eventually caught, and the glasses were returned. Now, if only someone could do him a favor and steal his silly leather jacket because, jeez, c’mon.
The best books that we read in 2010 that were published before 2010:
Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño (2008, English translation) — Bolaño’s fake encyclopedia of right-wing writers is a tragicomic crash course in misanthropy, failure, and fated violence. Francisco Goldman’s blurb on the back of the book is spot on–the book is a “key cosmology to Bolaño’s literary universe.” Nazi Literature is like an index for the Bolañoverse–creepy, steeped in dread, deeply, caustically funny, and bitterly poignant.
Butterfly Stories by William T. Vollmann (1993) — Adventures in the Southeast Asian sex trade. Bleakly funny, often depressing, and filled with erudite asides on Nobel prizewinners, transvestites, and the benefits of whiskey and benadryl. Plenty of grotesque sex. Not for everyone. In fact, not for most people.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins (1970) — Higgins throws his audience into the deep end of gritty urban Boston on the wrong side of the sixties in this crime noir classic. There’s little exposition to spell out Coyle’s intricate and fast-paced plot, but there is plenty of machine-gun dialogue, rendered very true and very raw. Higgins trusts the reader to sort out the complex relationships between hustlers and dupes, cops and finks from their conversations alone. The imagery is straight out of a Scorcese film, and like that director, Higgins has a wonderful gift for showing his audience action without getting in the way.
Home Land (2004) and Venus Drive (2000) by Sam Lipsyte — Is there a better stylist working today than Lipsyte? Does anyone write better sentences? Of course, sentences alone don’t matter much if you don’t have a story worth telling, and both Homeland and Venus Drive deliver. They are seething, funny, poignant books, with characters tipped toward some redemption, awful or otherwise, despite their myriad sins.
Steps by Jerzy Kosinski (1968) — One of the many small vignettes that comprise Steps begins with the narrator going to a zoo to see an octopus that is slowly killing itself by consuming its own tentacles. The piece ends with the same narrator discovering that a woman he’s picked up off the street is actually a man. In between, he experiences sexual frustration with a rich married woman. The piece is less than three pages long. You will either hate or love this book.
Cloud Atlas (2004) and Black Swan Green (2006) by David Mitchell — Cloud Atlas is a postmodern puzzle piece of six nested narratives (each a smart take on some kind of genre fiction), informed by Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence; Black Swan Green (which for some reason we forgot to review here) is a funny and heartwarming coming-of-age story of a boy who copes with his terrible stutter and his parents’ crumbling marriage in early 1980’s England. The books have little in common save their brilliance–which seems kinda sorta unfair. It also seems unfair that Mitchell put them out so quickly. Damn him.
Angels by Denis Johnson (1983) — Angels begins as a small book about not very much and ends as a small book about pretty much everything. Johnson has a keen eye and keener ear for the kinds of marginal characters many of us would rather overlook all together, people who live and sweat and suffer in the most wretched, unglamorous, and anti-heroic vistas of a decayed America. The great achievement of the novel (beyond Johnson’s artful sentences) is in staging redemption for a few–not all, but a few–of its hopeless anti-heroes.
Suttree by Cormac McCarthy (1979) — A beautiful, rambling riff on American literature — Suttree picks up on Emerson and Twain, Faulkner and Whitman, and flows into a new, wild territory that is pure McCarthy. Is it his best novel? Could be. Read it.
We always knew that comedian Louis CK was funny, insightful, and daring, but his new show Louie was a revelation, a masterful blend of humor and pathos. Louie eschewed traditional storytelling arcs in favor of vignettes that examined — often quite painfully — some of the harshest realities that comedy traditionally glosses over. The following clip is especially memorable, as a heated but humorous discussion at a poker game tips over into a stunning riff on the etymology of the word “faggot.”
Vodpod videos no longer available.
The following citations are culled from a search of Harper’s Index that used the term “literature.” (If it’s not obvious, the numbers before each datum are the month and year that Harper’s originally published the datum in its Index)–
5/84 Percentage of Americans who say they never read books: 45
Percentage of these who can’t read: 13
12/87 Number of direct-mail solicitations sent to Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond this year: 90
4/87 Copies of Gabriel García Márquez’s new book burned by the Chilean government last November: 15,000
2/88 Exclamation points in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities: 2,343
10/90 Number of years George Bush has been citing Bonfire of the Vanities as an example of his pleasure reading: 2
11/90 Number of Georgia third-graders Representative Newt Gingrich paid $2 for every book they read last summer: 282
3/91 Percentage of American households in which no books were bought last year: 60
12/92 Chances that an attempt to ban or restrict access to school materials or books last’ year was successful: 2 in 5
6/94 Amount Random House lost on the 29 of its books included on the 1993 New York Times Notable Books list: $698,000
11/95 Estimated number of books banned since 1965 in Indonesia: 2,000
3/95 Amount for which a Mississippi man attempted to sue “the Bible” last year, citing it as “oppressive hearsay”: $45,000,000
5/95 Tons of remaindered books destroyed in the United States each year: 250,000
5/95 Number of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays quoted on the Senate floor last year by Robert Byrd: 37
9/95 Percentage of Americans who own at least five Bibles: 27
9/95 Number of California library books of modern American poetry from which pages have been reported stolen this year: 250
1/00 Estimated temperature of Hell, according to two Spanish physicists ‘ interpretation of the Bible: 832° F
Estimated temperature of Heaven: 448°F
3/00 Number of Playboy centerfold models since 1959 whose bios claimed their favorite book was by Ayn Rand: 12
9/00 Ratio of the number of copies of The Great Gatsby sold each month in the U.S. to the number sold in the author’s lifetime: 5:3
9/03 Estimated acres of forest Henry David Thoreau burned down in 1844 trying to cook fish he had caught for dinner: 300
6/04 Minimum number of the brand names mentioned in James Joyce’s Ulysses that are still extant: 28
Number of the brand holders that are sponsoring Dublin’s centennial Bloomsday celebration this month: 2
9/06 Minimum number of books in Harvard’s libraries that are bound in human flesh: 2
Biblioklept 