It Really is a Dark and Stormy Night, Isn't It?

As Holmes, who had a nose for danger, quietly fingered the bloody knife and eyed the various body parts strewn along the dark, deserted highway, he placed his ear to the ground and, with his heart in his throat, silently mouthed to his companion, “Arm yourself, Watson, there is an evil hand afoot ahead."

And that's only a runner up!

This year's Bulwer-Lytton Award winners have been announced.

Alot of Monsters

I don't remember where I first saw someone linking to this wonderful post about the dreaded alot, but by now a lot of people have been talking about it. I don't know too much about this creature, but I do know that the local newspaper in the town I grew up in reported on the alot a lot.

Requiem

Lynn asked for a story about alien violins. It got me thinking, so I dashed off this little thing.

Tony cradled the instrument in his arms. It fit as if it had been made to rest there. The ship had docked twenty minutes ago and he had been waiting to see the commissioner since he got on board. He could wait.

Caruthers strode briskly into the room. “Congratulations. I see you've had some success.”

Tony looked at him quizzically.

“They gave you one of their violins. That's got to mean something. And linguistics is thrilled by how much more of the language you've worked out. I was right to send you.”

“They didn't give it to me.”

“Oh? You were still the best team for the job. Husband and wife, xenologist and musician. Just the right people to study these beings.”

Tony looked at the violin. He was sitting, the bow on the table in front of him. Caruthers sat down facing him.

“Look, uh, I'm sorry about Judith. How long ago was the accident?”

“Four months. We had only been here six weeks when it happened.”

“So you've been alone here all that time.”

“Not alone.”

“No, of course, you've been with them, the Londi. What does it mean, by the way, their name for themselves?”

“I'm not sure about the translation. The nearest I can come is 'keeper.'”

“I see,” he said, not sure that he did. “Well then, you've made some good progress on the language. Hoboken was particularly interested in their music. Did Judith learn anything much about that before . . .”

“Before she died. No, not really. It was what we focused on at first. We'd listen to them play for hours. Every musician playing a unique tune, all beautiful in their own way, but all clearly in the same genre. Totally alien, but eerily familiar. We'd listen to their performances, solo and in groups, we'd record and play them back, but Judith could make nothing of them. She said that the musical system they use is completely unfamiliar, and very complex, but for all that it is still moving, still beautiful.

“We worked on it for weeks. I moved ahead with basic linguistics and made cultural observations, but everything seemed to center on what we called the violins. After a while I began to wonder how they are made.” He took up the straw-yellow bow and held it over the deep green violin, as if he were about to play. After a moment he put the bow down on the table again. “I had gone to ask about that very thing when it happened.”

His head was bent down, as if he were staring at the table top. Caruthers wanted to interrupt, wanted to get him back on track, but he didn't.

“She just tripped. On a step. A slip and fall. What's the worst that can happen? A bad bruise? A sprained wrist? A stupid little accident. No sense.” His eyes were filling with tears. “We travel hundreds of light years. We put down on an alien planet, live among a new species, only the eleventh intelligent life-form we've found. Exotic, amazing, exciting. We're the couple on the recruiting poster. 'See the universe, discover new life, be a pioneer.' All that, and she dies in a household accident? Why?”

“I don't know Tony. It doesn't make any sense.”

“No. I didn't understand. But the Londi, they seemed to. They understood my pain. In mourning, we finally had something universal, something we both understood.”

“They understood mourning? That was some key to understanding?”

“Yes. They talked to me. They showed me how they make the violins.”

“Good.”

“Beautiful, isn't it? Notice how the deep color lightens as you move up the fingerboard? Look at the way it's shaped. All curves. No straight lines, not a flat surface or a sharp angle on it. It seems to flow, as if it were in motion, even though it is still.”

“Yes, they look as beautiful as they sound.” Caruthers waited for Tony to continue, but he seemed lost in thought. “So, uh, they showed you how to make them?”

“At first, I thought it was just a funerary rite. When we were on Silaris a tribal elder died. They built a fantastic boat with great gray sails, laid him on the deck, and sent it out during a storm. When we were part of the contact team on Trimania we learned that the dead were boiled in a mild acid, cleaning the bones of all flesh. Once every sixteen days for the rest of the year relatives open the tomb and wash the bones. I thought it was a Londi ceremony, nothing more. I was touched that they grieved with me.

“They helped me bury her. A little more than three feet down, no box, just Judith, in the rich, black soil. We buried her slowly, gently, one handful at a time. And right there, right over her heart, I placed the bulb.

“It was a little violet thing, half the size of my fist. When the all the soil was in place, we watered it. Tears, of course, but more. Her grave was like a mud pie.” He smiled slightly at the thought.

“Some sort of symbolism perhaps? Water of life?”

“I thought the same. Even in mourning, even then, I was still a xenologist. But no, not symbolic. Practical.

“In a few days the plant sprouted. It grew surprisingly fast. In a week it was a meter tall. In two, it began to twist. They showed me how to tend it, how to direct the growth so that it finally grew into the proper shape. This shape.”

“The violin? The instrument is grown? Any craft work? Whittling, cutting, sanding? What about the strings?”

“No. When it reaches it's final shape the stalk is cut, and that's all. The strings grow right where they are. You have to tend it carefully to make sure that they grow where you want them, but they do grow.”

“And they grew it over the grave. Why?”

Tony didn't answer. Not at first. He picked up the violin, the neck in his left hand, the base of it pressed against his chest. He took the bow in his right and drew it across the strings.

He had never been particularly musical. Not like Judith. Judith loved music, and she was good at it. But now he played, and the music was wonderful.

Judith had been a sad and lonely little girl. Alone much of the time with a drunken father and an emotionally distant mother, she had escaped into her studies. In her whole life she had never seen a happy marriage and didn't think they existed. Then she met Tony. Tony brought joy, enthusiasm, and unconditional love into her life. Her adult life was as different from her childhood as a lake is from a desert.

In time she felt that something was missing, something she needed but couldn't name. It was Tony's idea at first. She had never wanted, never dreamed that she would want to bring life into the universe. Now she knew. She wanted to be a mother. She wanted to make a baby with Tony, to have the family that she never had before. It would be soon, they would start right after this mission. They would take a leave to start their family. She loved the child, yet unborn, not yet conceived. The image of it was her great joy.

All this, all this and more, was in the music that came from the violin. Caruthers had only ever met Judith in passing; he barely remembered her, but now he felt all this, her joy, her pain, her dreams, her love, her yearning, hopes, prayers, tears, and desires. It was all there, in the loud, soft, soaring, simple, rich, vibrant music that Tony drew from the violin.

Caruthers thought of himself as a hard man, a tough man. He wasn't used to crying, certainly not in front of other people, but now he did. He looked into Tony's eyes as the music ended and he felt the man's loss.

“The music, it's . . .” He wasn't sure what he was going to say.

“It's their souls. The Londi play the souls of their dead, all their lives, and long after.” For a long minute he held the instrument close to him, then raised the bow and began again.

The Power of Quantum Flux

Interesting article about how a writer used a literary device to improve his science fiction novel. I think I might try something like this next time I get a spot of writer's block.

Note: a variation on this technique could also work for the fantasy genre.

It's Not The Elements of Grammar

I've seen a lot of people linking to this essay about Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. Other than the fun of seeing someone take a shot at a sacred cow, I'm not sure why. It is one of the most pointless things I've read in a while. Geoffrey K. Pullum wastes several paragraphs to tell us that The Elements of Style is a very poor guide to English grammar. This is something like telling us that Robert's Rules of Order is a poor cookbook, or that a thesaurus is not a good dictionary. While it may be true, it misses the point. The Elements of Style is, in fact, a style manual. It lays down basic rules and advice to get novice writers thinking about how style can be the difference between good and bad writing. It is not a grammar.

I get the feeling that Pullum's beef is with bad teachers who mis-use the book or who apply it's rules as if they were all you needed to know about syntax. He tells us that “(d)espite the post-1957 explosion of theoretical linguistics, Elements settled in as the primary vehicle through which grammar was taught to college students and presented to the general public, and the subject was stuck in the doldrums for the rest of the 20th century.” That is surely an overstatement. While I don't doubt that some students were handed Strunk and White and never told about grammar, I do doubt that it was the “primary vehicle” used to teach it. In the classes I've taken and the books I've read I was always told to read a style manual and consult a good grammar. I'm sure that Professor Pullum is correct in saying that Elements has been misused. That might have been an interesting topic for him to have written about.

Instead we get to read Pullum picking nits about alleged contradictions in Elements where Strunk and White violate grammatical precepts that they have laid down. We get to read Pullum showing us dialog written by famous authors that violates Strunk's rules of grammar. Foolishness. In his introduction E.B. White quotes Professor Strunk on the subject of stylistic inflexibility; “It is an old observation,” he wrote, “that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules.” And I repeat, (at the risk of not omitting needless words) that Strunk and White were not giving us rules of grammar. A style book must, of course, deal with grammar, which is sadly a source of confusion for Professor Pullum.

Pullum tells us that his intention is not to criticize the style manual part of this style manual (sort of like saying that you are not going to review the map parts of the atlas) and then goes on to do just that. He has apparently never read an academic paper, because he feels that the advice to “be clear” is unnecessary, and that “do not explain too much” is self-evident. He tells us that Elements is just wrong when it says that a split infinitive can be used to emphasize an adverb. The adverb, he writes, is best emphasized at the end of the sentence. I think a few Star Trek fans can tell him that when we boldly go where no man has gone before, it is the adverb that is the focus of the sentence.

The Elements of Style lays down simple, pithy, easy to understand instructions to help the writer marshal his words in the most effective manner possible. A good writer should know these elements well enough to use them and to know when to go beyond them. Lazy teachers may have misused it as a grammar. I'm sure it has also been misused as a shim to stabilize a wobbly table. Perhaps someone should write an essay on how Strunk and White have thus done a disservice to American carpentry. It would certainly be as valid as Pullum's essay.

Our Great Adventure

We weren't in our usual places. She was at my desk, using the computer. I was was in the front room, on the couch. She was buying fabric and patterns, that sort of thing. I had the laptop propped up on my knees and had just laid down about 750 words of deathless prose. I was trying to get to the end of the chapter. She was having a little trouble with the computer and wanted me to come in to the other room.

“Hold on. I just want to finish this.” She drifted away. “Hey, do you hear that?” I yelled.

“Hear what?” she said, coming back into the room.

“You'll hear it now.”

“It's a truck backing up.”

“Nope,” I said, not looking up from the screen. “It's some kind of alarm.”

“It is?” It was. A few seconds later the building fire alarm sounded.

“Do you smell smoke?” she asked.

“No.” I went into the kitchen. “Yes.” Acrid, like a grease fire. The smell was coming up the stairs.

“Should I get my coat?”

“Yup,” I said, reaching for the cat carrier.

The cat didn't like the look of this. She bolted. I had to move the couch to get her. Getting her into the little carrier wasn't all that easy She's a champion squirmer when she wants to be. It was a two person job.

Out into the hallway the klaxon was really loud. No smoke, just a lot of frightened looking neighbors and and their cats. I sat on a curb, cat carrier on my knees. One guy told us that it wasn't a fire, but that the guy in one of the downstairs apartments had been cooking and had kicked up a lot of smoke. Ah. Well that's better than seeing your apartment burn down. We sat around for a minute or two. The firefighters rolled up and went in where we had just come out. They went into the downstairs apartment, then they put a really powerful fan in the door.

Other than the fact that it was 32 degrees it wasn't such a bad night. We got to talk to the neighbors, which we don't usually do. We got to meet their cats, which we never do. Damn, but that one black and white kitty was a big one. She didn't have a carrier for it. She may have at one time, but it's probably outgrown it. It didn't like being outside one bit, and wanted everyone to know it. After a while it got tired of hearing its own voice and it relaxed, a big cat held by a small woman.

The firefighters where quick, efficient, and polite. The guy from the smoky apartment kept saying how sorry he was as we all filed back into the building, and we said it was okay. Back in the apartment the cat ran around meowing. I took care of the little computer issue, then finished up what I was writing. My friend collapsed onto the couch, saying that she had had her heart attack for the week. The cat began to patrol the apartment, looking skittish.

And that, my friends, is what passes for a great adventure around here.