Aarrgh!

I love onomatopoeia.

You remember, words that sound like their definition. In writing my book, I needed my character to wail in anguish. I needed a really strong onomatopoeia.

The internet is a wealth of amazing information. Yet, I have to wonder who puts in the countless hours in front of a screen plugging in this drivel--I mean, data. I don’t know who you guys are, but I’m grateful for your time and personal sacrifice.

Here are a couple of interesting websites that helped me this week. First, check out “Written Sound: How to Write the Sound of Things” at http://writtensound.com. You can peruse an alphabetical listing of all the collected “words that imitate sounds.” Or you can search them by topics such as Weather, Music, Explosions, or Gas.

Check it out. These words can be fun. You’ll find the old stand-bys you studied in fifth grade such as buzz, giggle, and hiccup. And a couple I would challenge as onomatopoeia at all, like oops or cliche. (Really? A worn, played-out phrase sounds like cliché? I can’t see it or hear it.)

Gwuf, gwuf

But then there are the unique and intriguing ones like …

           Flibbertigibbet: a flighty, gossipy young woman          
       Gwuf, gwuf, gwuf: footsteps (Can’t you hear them?)
           Kish, kish: ice skates during a hockey game

And, although I’ve never been on a subway during an important announcement, I can imagine the loudspeaker sounds like “thisshig rrrerrk.”

But what about wailing in anguish? I found “argh,” which according to one entry on Urban Dictionary (http://www.urbandictionary.com/), is “the correct version of an expression of frustration or anger.”

The sample sentence given is "No brigette, argh is spelled with an h and not just arg."

You would think someone so concerned about the correct spelling of a word like argh would know to capitalize a proper noun. More than that, as it turns out, the word arg or argh has more spellings than you can possible imagine.

For that, may I direct you to “The Aargh Page” at http://osteele.com/words/aargh#? On that page is an impressive chart of all the possible spellings of aargh, along with how often and where each spelling has been found in print—from argh to (I kid you not) aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!!!

Whoever put this together, I commend you while I urge you in the strongest possible terms to get out more.

As for my story, I had my character cry, “Aarrrrgh,” showing he is obviously in pain without being, you know, too splashy.

Ahem. Anyway, in order to avoid too much babble and blather, descending into gibberish—you know, yadda yadda yadda--I believe I’ll close. 

Pirate Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/earlg/

Eighteenth Century Desperate Housewives

You’re a Christian in eighteenth century Europe. Life becomes so unbearable that you don’t want to live. According to your religious beliefs, however, when you commit suicide, you are damned for all time. What to do?

 

But wait! Not if you murder someone else. You may be hanged for homocide, but you can repent on the gallows, obtain absolution, and spend eternity with Jesus in heaven. Voila!

This was the reasoning of a number of people from around 1612 to 1839. They no longer wanted to live, but in order to avoid an eternity of hellfire, they decided to commit murder instead.

But these were not uncaring people. In their “kindness,” they often killed an innocent child, one whose pure soul would enable him to go straight to heaven himself. (One woman slit a boy’s throat so severely, she said she could “look down into his neck,” in her own words.)

Once the deed was done, they immediately went to the authorities to report their crime, and await execution. A win-win.

I first heard about this convoluted thinking on PBS’s This American Life. Last August, the episode entitled “Loopholes” featured Kathy Stuart of the University of California Davis who has researched this phenomenon known as “suicide by proxy.”

Stuart discovered about 300 of these cases that occurred over 200+ years, usually committed by women. Some, she noted, did not even express regret over what they did. So how did that work? If they were not sorry, how could they be forgiven and escape damnation?

The priests or ministers at the gallows would often ask, “Do you think God can be fooled in this manner? You know that by doing this you actually have committed suicide.”

The perpetrators agreed, according to Kathy Stuart. But the accused merely confessed these crimes as well—and then repented. Problem solved.

Officials were frustrated by this trend and, in 1702, made the executions more painful and shaming. Nope. Didn't work. These people were looking to die; they didn’t care.

In 1767, courts went so far as to take away the very incentive for the horrific crime—they removed the death penalty altogether. That should have stopped the behavior in its tracks. And yet, it continued.

Beyond understanding, the practice did not end until the next century. “It really seems like people didn’t get the memo,” Stuart says.

Sooo, they killed a small child, confessed, repented, and spent their even more miserable lives in some hole of a prison. Obviously, these “desperate housewives” were not as clever as they thought. The "dumb criminals" of yore. 

Book Review: The Great Gatsby





My niece assured me I could read all of The Great Gatsby on my flight from Philadelphia to Columbia, SC. The plane pulled up to the terminal with four pages left to read.



Scene from the 2013 remake

I had seen the 1974 movie starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, but as is often the case, I found the book so much deeper and more profound. First, the lifestyle of the uber-wealthy in the Twenties was set in the first forty-seven pages before we even confronted the mysterious character of Jay Gatsby.

It was clear that despite the massive, beautiful homes, servants, and leisure time, the lives of the rich on Long Island were vacuous and, to me, boring. That explains the draw of neighbor, Gatsby’s, spectacular parties. We learn later through the narrator, Nick Carraway, that the galas were merely a way for Jay Gatsby to find his way back into the life of his first love, Daisy Buchanan (Nick’s cousin).

I won’t give away the story, but suffice it to say, the simple devotion of Jay Gatsby slams into a world where the lifestyle and prestige that money brings has a powerful grip of its own.

One of my fascinations with the book comes from the fact that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote this novel in 1925, in the midst of the “Roaring Twenties.” To me, the lives of the characters exuded emptiness, and it is amazing that Fitzgerald exposed this before the Crash of 1929, while he, his wife, and the rest of America were enmeshed in this lifestyle.

 

On a side note, I was struck by the racism of the day and how we can see remnants of it even now. Tom Buchanan, the husband of Gatsby’s beloved Daisy, says in conversation, “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.” He adds, “It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”

There are disparaging remarks about Jews as well, which are striking when you think the Holocaust is years in the future. It reminded me that eugenics (the “science” that expounds the superiority of some races over others) was embraced during this time, and was not really discredited until after Hitler’s atrocities.

 

All in all, I found the book thought-provoking, with much to say to us now in our materialistic culture.

"A Baby's Venom:" Beloved

The book, Beloved, has a definite chill to it. The story, the characters, the world in which the characters are forced to exist all drew me in. And there I sat, captivated, uneasy, and creeped out. But mostly captivated.

 

Beloved is the story of slaves, in captivity, during escape, and in freedom, spanning from about 1855 to 1873. The images the book draws of the physical, but mainly emotional trauma of life as another man’s chattel are stark and distressing. Written from the slaves’ point of view, Toni Morrison was able to put me into their shoes more completely than I had felt in all my previous readings. Perhaps it is her gift for poetic prose that touched me so deeply.

Aside from the torment of enslavement, Morrison adds a more mystical, other-worldly aspect to the story with the appearance of the protagonist’s dead child, Beloved, now grown and in new flesh, at the family’s door. Ghosts coming to life don’t unnerve me that much, but while this innocent child returning as a young woman should have induced some sympathy in me, I felt none. She creeped me out.

 

The real value of this book, however, are in the deep insights it offers to us as human beings. One that particularly struck me was that those who consider themselves superior debase themselves in their efforts to keep others “in their place.” Morrison wrote, “Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle…” Through the system of slavery or any effort to demean another people, the oppressors become debauched themselves. Morrison writes, “The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin.” While reading this, the History Channel’s “Ku Klux Klan” was on the television, driving this truism home to me in all its horror. It also is evident in research I’ve done on the 18^th century oppression of the Irish peasants.

 

I did find the style and structure of the book to be confusing at first. I had to re-read the initial twenty-five pages before I understood what was what, but I would urge anyone drawn to this book to stick with it. The rewards are bountiful.

Book Review: Moll Flanders

It has always been my contention that while times change and the world does progress (even a sketchy analysis of history tells us that), human nature remains the same. Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, written in 1722, supports that view.

In this novel, Moll (not her real name) tells her own difficult and sordid history that begins with her birth to a convicted thief in Newgate Prison. She becomes a ward of the state and after her early years with some gypsies, she is placed in the care of a kind and humane foster mother. The book follows her highs, which are quite lofty, and lows, which are quite sordid.

Despite her poor beginnings, though, many of her lows came of her own poor judgment. Defoe warns in his introduction not to glorify these choices, and the character herself often rails against her own decisions. Yet, through Moll, Defoe shows a fascination with the darker side of life and an understanding of this woman that fascinates me.

Defoe wrote the book at age sixty-two and had been imprisoned twice by that time, once for indebtedness and once for his politics. I imagine he met and spoke to many women like Moll since I’ve learned prisons in those days were not typically segregated by gender.

Moll Flanders as played by Alex
Kingston

Mainly, the book features a flawed character who nonetheless is admirable for her spunk and determination in a world where all the cards are stacked against her. Not only is she lowborn, but she is a woman. Moll makes clear the yoke she is under two hundred years before women were deemed worthy of the right to vote. She is a person of remarkable insight.

Some examples of Moll’s wisdom include “She is always married too soon who gets a bad husband, and she is never married too late who gets a good one” and “From hence ’tis evident to me, that when once we are hardened to crime, no fear can affect us, no example give us any warning.” That second one explains why theft was rampant in an England where the penalty for the crime was hanging. It also explains why the death penalty today is no real deterrent.

This book has captivated me and I will read it again. The language is a challenge since the wording and syntax are somewhat archaic. It took me a couple of chapters to get used to it and I skimmed some, making sure I at least had the gist of the passages.

This aspect did not keep me from understanding and enjoying the story at all. I highly recommend this classic.

Book Review: The Unfinished Garden

Through The Unfinished Garden, Barbara Claypole White brings an uncommon depth and elegance to a beautiful love story. The protagonist, Tilly, struggles to move past the death of her husband by throwing her energies into her son, Isaac, and her North Carolina gardening business.

When a wealthy and somewhat dashing James Nealy offers an exorbitant fee to landscape his new home, Tilly flatly refuses. But the quirky software developer shows a remarkable persistence, even following her to her childhood home in England when Tilly’s mother becomes ill. There, Tilly reconnects with Sebastian, her first love, who has also returned home.

Both men are attractive and vulnerable. James Nealy is a sweet man who confesses to Tilly his OCD which he hopes gardening can alleviate. Sebastian is struggling to find himself after a nasty divorce, still determined to be a great father to his young children.

When reading this book, I was engrossed by Tilly’s love interests because they were real, flawed human beings striving to overcome their weaknesses. Unlike many other novels in this genre, I was not sure whom Tilly should or would choose. I was sympathetic to both. To me, that’s how real life is. Nothing is ever so cut and dried.

Also, I found both settings—humid, somewhat dangerous North Carolina and the crisp gardens of the English countryside—to be characters of their own. Barbara Claypole White’s descriptions drew me in and have made me hungry for more.

I love this book. It is a tender story that has stayed with me, and has me praying for a sequel. 

Me with author, Barbara Claypole White, at the 2012 South
Carolina Writers Workshop Conference, Myrtle Beach, SC

 

"Un pour tous, tous pour un"

Translation: "All for one, one for all," the famous rallying cry of the three musketeers. Ironically, the phrase was introduced by the one character who was not part of the title trio--D'Artagnan. That's only one of the surprises I got when reading this classic.

A copy of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers had been patiently waiting for well over a year for me to pick it up. I kept reading other books because, let’s face it, it was written in 1844, meaning tediously verbose descriptions that I would have to skim or skip altogether.

Boy, was I thrilled to find instead lots of action and plenty of snappy dialogue—just my style. Even better, the stiff, macho musketeers I anticipated were superior swordsmen to be sure. But they were also flawed and funny players whose eccentricities were thoroughly endearing.

Set in France around 120 years before the story’s publication, the tale pits the soldiers loyal to the king against the guards of the royal advisor, Cardinal Richelieu. There is plenty of dueling—at the slightest provocation, actually—romance, and intrigue within the court of Louis XIII. The plot twists are fast-paced and fascinating, holding my attention all the way through. In fact, I read the entire book (635 pages) in three days.

We all know about a book's cover, but I'd also say you can't tell a book by your stereotypical preconceptions. I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves a great story. And if you’re bothering to read this review, that would likely be you.