Blonking and Read This NOW!

I've been on a one post a week thing lately, which while consistent, it is also a bit on the low side for a blog. So I am posting today (two whole days before the one week mark!) with a posting that what it lacks in having a main thesis or idea, makes it up in having lots and lots of links! That's right - it's time for another blonk.

Today's blonk, in keeping with this blog's overall writing theme and in honor of my own made-up term of "blonking", begins with looking at the beauty of sniglets - which is a made-up word to describe other made-up words that should appear in the dictionary, but don't.

Part of writing is having fun with langauge, and sometimes when you are in the middle of a scene and suddenly you can't think of that word you just need for your sentence, and bits of the word keep floating up in your mind, but when you try to grab them it is like trying to catch dust motes wafting through sunlight - well, then it doesn't seem like much fun. That's the beauty of sniglets - they're just a silly good time. Some of my favorites include:

Arachnidiot (ar ak ni' di ot) - n. A person, who, having wandered into an "invisible" spider web, begins gyrating and flailing about wildly. (The porch off my apartment is a spider resort. Every night I can look out and see them sipping at their dead-fly daquiries, and come the morning when I have to go out and water my plants - the wild flailing inevitably begins.)

Brattled (brat' uld) - adj. The unsettling feeling, at a stoplight, that the busload of kids that just pulled up beside you is making fun of you. (I rode the bus until midway through high school and can actually not remember one incidence of noticing any other cars on the road at all - unless they contained other students that someone knew. Nonetheless, I do still get brattled, probably because I remember those brats on the bus so well...)

Oreosis (awr ee oh' sis) - n. The practice of eating the cream center of an Oreo before eating the cookie outsides. (Okay, this one is more of an "awww" cause my son does this - I think it just must be a human instinct thing.)


My other blonk has to do with the age-old debate over what to call insanely sugary carbonated beverages, and awesomely enough has been captured in map form. Now I grew up in a household and area that were clearly pro-pop. That place is Buffalo, NY and we pronounced the word "pop" like we say most things - through our noses. For some reason in my early college years, I decided it was more cool, mature, and/or cosmopolitan to refer to it as soda, and have continued to do so until this past summer when I was visiting my family and heard my mom ask me, my sisters, my son, my nieces, everyone else about a hundred times if they wanted any pop. And for some reason when I returned home, it stuck in my head, and now when I open my mouth to say soda, the word pop comes out instead. I am sure this says something very revealing about me... but I'm not quite sure what exactly that is.


Okay, that's all of my blonks for today, but I am adding another element to these free-form posts called Read this NOW!

This new section was inspired by my former post of the same name. I was going to call it recommended reading, but that sounds too laid back for the books that I want to talk about which are ones that have grabbed me from the first page and refused to let go until I finished the entire book - sometimes only hours later. These are the type of books that if I got them from the library, I want to own them, so that I can read them again and again. These are also the books I want everyone I meet to read, so they can feel what I feel - just don't expect me to lend you my new copy - I am a book grinch.

The first book in Read this NOW! is an older one - Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt. Talk about grabbing me from the first page - It was probably almost ten years ago, but I can still remember with perfect clarity the exact place I was standing in the bookstore (that is now closed) and the display of paperback books that Angela's Ashes was sitting among. This was at a time when I had no interest in reading anything other than fiction, but when I picked up the book and read the first paragraph I was converted - instantly and irrevocably. Since then the world of non-fiction has opened up to me, and I have a much richer reading life because of it - but Angela's Ashes started it all. If you haven't read it - at least follow the amazon link above and read that first page and see if it hits you as hard as it did me... Read it NOW!

A Purple Prose Problem, Perhaps?

Oops... I have once again neglected my poor blog - is there a term for that? A dead-beat blogger? A procastinogger? Okay, so in trying to coin a new term, those two might not be exactly brilliant - although when Rachel Ray can get in the dictionary for EVOO, one is led to believe that standards for this type of thing are not as high as they should or could be. And speaking of coining words, can someone coin a word for someone who is trying to hard to coin a new word or phrase - like coinnoyance?

Okay, all of this is not just me being an ass, it actually serves as an intro to my blog topic today which centers around language usage, specifically Purple Prose and trying to determine what exactly pushes someone's work into the purple zone.

What got me thinking about this were some reviews I recently read for one of the hot debut novel's of this summer, Andrew Davidson's The Gargoyle. I actually first heard about this week several weeks ago when the Wall Street Journal had an article discussing the original way the author went about securing an agent. Basically he broke every rule that you're supposed to follow in the whole query process, had a book that was then 195,000 words long, and got a request for a full. Ah, but before you start ripping your hair out because life is unfair - that full did lead to a rejection, but as every writer knows if you must get a rejection a personalized one with detailed editing suggestions is the best kind to get, and that is exactly what Andrew Davidson received. He did some editing and cut the book down to around 150,000 and then sent it back with yet another gimmic! He had a single paperback copy of the book printed out and sent it back to the same editor, and this time - Success! The agent fell in love with the book, publisher's fell in love with the book, gigantic checks were written, whole forests were cut down so that book stores all over the country could have glossy hardcover copies stacked by the front door. Sounds like a happily ever after, right? Well... except for one thing - the reviews.

This weekend's Wall Street Journal reviewed the book and while it wasn't scathing, it wasn't loving either. Then there was also a review in my Entertainment Weekly, where they gave it a letter grade of D. Now, this is not a book that I had at any point any intention of reading, the whole porn star who gets horribly burned with overtones of Dante's inferno story, is just not my cup of tea, but still these reviews got me thinking. And the thing that struck me was that both reviews specifically quote the same line from the novel, ''The sibilant sermons of the snake as she discoursed upon the disposition of my sinner's soul seemed ceaseless'' in a less than complimentary way. EW mostly just laughs at it, but WSJ makes a more interesting observation, writing that, "No doubt Mr. Davidson thought he was being witty, but such alliterative displays call attention to the author, not the character."

As a writer all this got me thinking. When is our prose getting too show-offy for our own good? And who makes that call? Obviously, the agent and publisher of this book had no problem with this sentence, and I also found the NY Times review and it was a good review that made no mention of that sentence at all.

Clearly, it is difficult to make a judgment when you take a sentence out of context, but just this once, let's not be fair and impartial. Is it a brilliantly constructed sentence that makes clever use of alliteration or is it a hot mess that deserves every snicker it has found itself on the receiving end of?