Commas

Both Haweis and Mina were among the very earliest to be interested in the work of Gertrude Stein. Haweis had been fascinated with what he had read in manuscript of The Making of Americans. He did however plead for commas. Gertrude Stein said commas were unnecessary, the sense should be intrinsic and not have to be explained by commas and otherwise commas were only a sign that one should pause and take breath but one should know of oneself when one wanted to pause and take breath. However, as she liked Haweis very much and he had given her a delightful painting for a fan, she gave him two commas. It must however be added that on rereading the manuscript she took the commas out.

I am currently reading The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein. It is a fascinating little window into the lives of the painters and writers who were hanging out in Paris in the early 20th Century. It is written in a very conversational style, like you have just sat down with Miss Toklas and she is telling you the story of her life (or maybe more accurately the story of Gertrude Stein’s life through her eyes (or maybe even more accurately, through her eyes as Gertrude Stein thinks Toklas sees it, as it is, after all, written by Miss Stein)) in a somewhat disjointed and haphazard sort of way (much like that last parenthetical remark).

I think it’s probably pretty clear from my few posts on this blog that, like Haweis, I am one who pleads for commas. I’ve never met an Oxford comma that I didn’t like, and there is no end to my delight when I come across a well-crafted relative clause. I have definitely been a member of the camp that holds that commas are a sign that one should pause and take breath. It has been my philosophy that writing is modeled on speech, and therefore we need signs representing the pauses as much as we need the words between the pauses. Even though I disagree (or so far in my life have disagreed) with Stein in this matter, I still prefer a person who has strong opinions about commas to one who has none at all. I was very much pleased to come across this little comma treatise, and I have given it a fair amount of thought over the last several days, assessing and reassessing my own opinions and the nature and purpose of writing in its different forms.

I think Gertrude Stein’s careful use of commas points to a belief that books should be read aloud rather than in one’s head. I say this because I find that her statement above holds true more when one reads aloud than when one reads in one’s head. When you read her sentences out loud, you hear the conversational tone and flow, and you naturally pause where you are meant to pause. You put the “commas” in because otherwise you’d be reading rather monotonously and it would neither make much sense nor be very pleasant to listen to. I think we need punctuation more when we are reading silently because it is harder for us to hear all the sounds and flow the words are meant to have. Maybe it’s a question of laziness. When we read silently, we are taking more of a backseat, being more of a passive observer, and so we need all those little marks to tell us exactly what is going on and what we are supposed to think. When we read out loud, we are in a way joining with the book, becoming its voice, having to make decisions about how something is supposed to sound.

So maybe that is what Miss Stein is doing. She is forcing us to once more become active participants in our books. But also, I think she and her contemporaries were focusing on bringing poetry and lyricism into their prose. And poetry is meant to be read out loud. In The Autobiography, there are a handful of references to Gertrude Stein’s love of well-crafted sentences. I get the impression that she spent a lot of time creating direct and simple and at the same time clever and poetic sentences. One passage that really interested me says, “She also liked then to set a sentence for herself as a sort of tuning fork and metronome and then write to that time and tune.” This comparison of the sentence to music says a lot about what she was trying to accomplish with her writing, or at least the attitude she had when approaching her writing.

I mentioned her contemporaries. On the one hand, I had in mind Fitzgerald. When I read Tender is the Night a couple years ago, I remember not being particularly interested or moved by the story itself, but being quite impressed by the writing, the images, the words, the lyricism. Some of the descriptions really were striking and beautifully done. On the other hand, I do not have much experience with Joyce, but I read this interesting little article the other day about how he influenced Cormac McCarthy to be a punctuation minimalist as well. So, this playing around with punctuation was part of the movement at the time (also thinking about e.e. cummings), but maybe each writer had his or her own reasons for doing the experiments they did. I don’t know. I think I have said enough for now on Gertrude Stein’s commas.

One more little anecdote that came to mind while I was mulling over these things comes from The Confessions of St. Augustine:

When he [Ambrose] was not with them, and this was but a little while, he either refreshed his body with needed food or his mind with reading. When he read, his eyes moved down the pages and his heart sought out their meaning, while his voice and tongue remained silent. Often when we were present — for no one was forbidden to entry, and it was not his custom to have whoever came announced to him — we saw him reading to himself, and never otherwise. After sitting for a long time in silence — who would dare to annoy a man so occupied? — we would go away. We thought that in that short time which he obtained for refreshing his mind, free from the din of other men’s problems, he did not want to be summoned to some other matter. We thought too that perhaps he was afraid, if the author he was reading had expressed things in an obscure manner, then it would be necessary to explain it for some perplexed but eager listener, or to discuss some more difficult questions, and if his time were used up in such tasks, he would be able to read fewer books than he wished to. However, need to save his voice, which easily grew hoarse, was perhaps the more correct reason why he read to himself. But with whatever intention he did it, that man did it for a good purpose.

You Have Got to Feel It So Desperately

“If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.”  – F. Scott Fitzgerald

I came across this on brainpickings.org. I read it and it struck me, so I wanted to share it.

I think writers, artists, and really anyone wanting to do something great and impactful sometimes get caught up in thinking that “there’s nothing new under the sun” or “there’s nothing you can do that can’t be done,” et cetera. (The Bible and The Beatles – it’s not the first time they’ve been quoted together.) And these thoughts lead to self-doubt and a questioning of whether what they are doing is really worthwhile or as revolutionary as they may at first have thought.  But Fitzgerald reminds us – them, I mean 😉 – that it is possible to surprise people, to experience and communicate things in a unique way.

*I am tempted to go on a metaphysical tangent here, but I’ll rein myself in and maybe do it some other time. *

I just wanted to share this quote with you so as to provide some encouragement to all you writers, artists, and world-changers out there.

-L

SEO or Good Writing – Do You Have to Choose?

My main project right now is trying to transition from my “9 to 5” job to becoming a freelance tutor. While the first and most important step is finding students, my second goal is to create an accompanying website that hopefully one day I can use as another source of income. To this end, I’ve been trying to immerse myself in the world of online marketing, reading blogs that purportedly teach you how to “make money online.” I’ve learned some helpful things and I’ve been getting a feel for how it all works. However, I read an article last night that really bugged me, and I feel compelled to complain about it.

It was an article explaining niche websites – what they are and how they work. What bothered me about it was that almost every single sentence contained the term “niche website(s),” and sometimes it even appeared twice in one sentence. Hardly any pronouns were used in its place. Now, I know that search engine optimization (SEO) is a very important part of generating traffic for your blog or website, and I knew in theory that people did things like this, but actually seeing it with my own eyes on an otherwise professional-looking blog was very off-putting. I feel like this kind of “writing” undermines the credibility and casts doubt on the motives of the author. You get the sense that the author wrote the article solely because he thought it would help his blog rank higher on Google, not because he has any real interest in the topic.

But perhaps more sobering is the thought that there are so many of these people out there, using the written word to make a buck and all the time disrespecting the very medium they use. They call themselves writers, but they pay no attention to whether their sentences are well constructed or whether their article flows as it should. They just slap together some third-grade level sentences, stick in as many of their chosen keyword as they can fit, and call it a piece of writing. It’s the blatant disregard for the beauty of good writing that really gets me.

I’m sitting here with my head in my hands, trying to think of a solution. But I can’t. These people will keep doing what they’re doing, and probably nothing I say would stop them. Maybe we can stop letting them refer to themselves as writers, so at least what they are doing can be more easily differentiated from actual writing. The only real solution I have right now is a promise to myself to never become a slave to the tricks of the trade. Sure, there’s nothing wrong with SEO when kept within the proper limits. Do your search engine optimization, but don’t let your writing suffer as a result. And if nothing else, show some respect for the written word and the English language. They deserve it.