Gerhard Venter's Blog
June 13, 2020
Roll Your Rock
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May 25, 2020
Treasures of the mind
April 18, 2020
Bobbejaan van Jesu Progress Update
May 30, 2019
Kindles, Page Numbers, Editions, and Professors
This is a re-publication of an article I posted on June 7, 2015
About a year ago I found out that I could not carry half a tree worth of paper to class anymore. There’s just so much of it: if it’s not I writing and printing it and carrying it to the professor, it’s the professors writing and printing it — and giving it to me to carry. I addition, there are numerous books, especially in theology, that were written centuries ago, and consequently have no copyright on them, so they’re freely available in electronic format. Prime Kindle food! So I invested painfully heavily in a Kindle DX, a format in which I can carry the equivalent of several sets of Encyclopedia Britannica around in 8.2 ounces. Financial pain in exchange for physical pain — trust me, that’s always a bargain. But the Britannica is only a hackneyed phrase for equating a number of words with physical weight: what’s more important, is that I could carry around the famous Harvard Classics — the Harvard five feet of shelf space — in my one hand. Now, in the humanities, that’s something! There is one drawback, though, and it has to do with citing from Kindle-based documents while writing papers. There’s a debate going on about the lack of page numbers on Kindles and in other electronic book formats. Here’s what’s happening: professors, when grading papers (I assume) look at the page number cited in the student’s paper, take up the corresponding book, and check the reference. Calvin says on p. 384 of the Institutions that faith is like a box of chocolates. Mmm. I’m pretty sure Gerhard has been at the Amarula again — Calvin said no such thing! If Gerhard had been citing from a Kindle, he’d have to give a location number, and if it was a website, it would be worse: the accepted method of citing from a website is not to give an indication of the exact location at all — after all, web pages don’t have pages, right? Now people get passionate over this. Some professors insist on page numbers, and in many cases I get their point completely.In seminar-type classes, for instance, you really want to have everyone on the same page during discussions — pun fully intended. But the world is moving on, and page numbers are fading away into the past, and we have nothing with which to replace them yet. We better find something, though.
Page numbers are arbitrary
I bin thinkin’ about this. Paper page numbers are not perfect. First, page numbers are arbitrary. Even though the words of an author may be identical in three or four different editions of his or her book, the page number for the the place where the text “Sally put on her new plastic boots” occurs may be different in each edition. In database technology, we would call the page number a key to the piece of text, and it wouldn’t matter if the format of the key were arbitrary, as long as the relationship was not — in other words, the same page number, even if it’s WJ82394WWK27834, must always lead you to the same piece of text. But my analogy is bad, because one page number contains many different word combinations.
Kindle locations could theoretically migrate to paper books. In fact, they already have . . .
The Kindle location number system fully solves the reference problem. Picture this (Sicily 1922): you have three editions of the same bad novel. Through the Kindle system, location number 144 has been allocated to the phrase “Sally put on her new plastic boots.” In fiction on paper, the location range could be printed at the top or bottom of every page, and if you knew the snippet about the boots was numbered 144, you could find it anytime as fast as via a page number. Why? Because it works almost exactly like a dictionary, except that you¬† don’t have to remember the alphabetical sequence of letters. But where it gets really exciting is in ancient, very technical, or seriously literary texts: there one could have the location numbers printed down the margin or even inside the text to make locating a particular phrase a snap. Come to think of it, we have one rather popular book where that has already been done — it’s called the Bible. And who would have authority to allocate these numbers? Well, just number the darned paragraphs sequentially! Start at 1 and stop at n., which is where you fall off the far edge of the book. In fact, I’m making the case that the invention of page numbers can be regarded as an unhappy accident that has caused many more problems than it has solved. Just think, in textual criticism, how much it would have helped if the spot where Descartes was worrying about an evil spirit fooling him into thinking he was sitting at his warm little stove was known as paragraph 291? Whether you have Barnes & Noble’s little 4 inch classics pocket book or Monsieur Descartes’ handwritten manuscript, in which he laboriously numbered his immortal paragraphs, that passage would be numbered the same. I could call up a friend and say: “Descartes 291!” And the friend would say: “Yes, I’m worrying about a deceiving spirit too today.” I defy you to do that with page numbers.
Quote of the Day: Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer. –Dave Barry
While writing this, I was listening to “The Words That Maketh Murder” by PJ Harvey
May 5, 2019
Writing A Novel Can Be As Technical As Writing Code
I don’t think any writer starts off with the intention of writing a complex book. In fact, smart authors will do their utmost to write a simple book. Like Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
I didn’t even want to write this book. Initially. I was tinkering with a short story, and it ran away with me. By the time I started organizing things, I discovered that the book was intricate as hell. One does not want that to show. The principle is “write hard, read easy.” A reader must not even think about technicalities. My slogan is, “the prose mustn’t be easy to understand. It must be impossible to misunderstand.”
Let me just demonstrate how tricky things can get. Forgive me for mentioning Solzhenitsyn in my humble company, but my book is, time and tense-wise, similar to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
The entire story is told by my protagonist, an 18-year-old Maasai boy, to a white toy heron who sits in his small woodcarving workshop, which is part of the prison in which he is not only incarcerated, but also on death row. How did this situation come about? It’s a long story. I’m not kidding.
Now as Koyati tells his story, he uses the past tense (As a small cattle herder I had to go out after the herd at five in the mornings), but also the present (Miss Heron, my secret weapon is Tung oil–it shows up the wood’s beautiful grain.) There are also recent events (Last night the Brute gave me two punches in the stomach). I must keep Koyati’s POV (point of view) in view (haha) every moment.
But then, towards the end of the book, Koyati runs out of true past tense, because the events he tells to Miss Heron, the plastic heron with a voice recorder under her wing, catches up to the present moment. Aha, I thought. Now I can tell the story blow-by-blow in the present tense. Man, will this create immediacy and action and drama!
Not so fast, dumbass. It’s still past tense. Miss Heron (his voice recorder) is still sitting on the top shelf in his tiny woodcarving workshop (which is nothing but a paint storage closet). Isidora (his young but brilliant lawyer) still comes by every Friday to download his narration to her laptop, looking for anything she can use in her hopeless effort to save him from the gallows.
So, even though we’re now dealing with current events, they are still narrated in the past tense, because Koyati has to wait until the next work day before he can tell Miss Heron about them: Yesterday in court Judge Zaidi swore he would rid the United Republic of Tanzania from a scourge like me.
This is how crazy it got sometimes: Koyati is working on a sculpture in his prison workshop (strict present tense: I am sanding the prodigal son) while at the same time telling how he worked on another carving project in the past: (Elder Nuru laughed at the way I attacked the stick with my pocket knife). At the same time he will mention the almost-present-tense of his current circumstances (Sparrow says they might bring back the death penalty), or recent past, (Shomari grabbed me by the shirt this morning and warned me not to try anything.)
Continuity was a nightmare. Koyati loves wood more than he loves people. He can identify tens of species of carving wood by appearance, weight, sound, smell, and taste. If he sits down in a chair he first examines the arm rests to see from what type of wood it is made. For that reason I decided to tell the readers the species of wood he used for every single project he carved. There is no such thing as ‘I carved a fearsome lion.’ There is ‘I took my best bubinga blank and carved a fearsome red lion.’ (Koyati’s constant struggle to find good carving wood is a theme in the book.)
So I needed to remember after couple of hundred pages which wood Koyati used to carve a tiny lion as part of his Maasai rosary. Eventually I had to create a database for Koyati’s various carvings and sculptures and the wood varieties he used for each.
There is one more modality: the little baboon story. While Koyati carves and chisels and sands in his little workshop, he hums and sings his own made-up story about how the High God created a small, furry baboon right in the beginning, in the garden. Little Baboon’s story is given in a formal font, deeply indented as a block quote. Almost like a Bible story. He follows Yesu Kristo from his birth to that awful moment when Little Baboon falls down in a swoon at the foot of the cross and tries to bury his little head in the bloody mud. The block quoted text is a full story in its own right.
That is how crazy it got, and part of the reason why the book took me eight years to complete. But the final test of this book has nothing to do with how hard it was to write, and everything with how easy it is to read.
Writing A Novel Can Be As Technical As Writing Code
… the final test of this book has nothing to do with how hard it was to write, and everything with how easy it is to read.
The post Writing A Novel Can Be As Technical As Writing Code appeared first on Gerhard Venter.
April 12, 2018
If You Want to Write, You Need To Blog
Whether you’re self-publishing or in the power of a publishing company, Bob Dylan’s lyric “You gotta serve somebody” applies. It’s even worse if you are working for yourself. Then your boss is a jerk.
That means, in my case, that I WILL blog regularly because my boss said so. It’s not so hard. I rather enjoy throwing out a few lines now and then. Blogging is to a writer what finger-exercises are to a pianist.
My novel, Yesu’s Baboon, is at 130,000 words. I’m looking forward to mercilessly cutting them by around 50%. If you cut all the crap and redundancy out of a novel you’re already pretty proud of, you get an even better book, right? That’s how I’m going to force Hemingway’s 80% of the iceberg underwater. There’s already a lot of stuff under the waterline.
The combat phase is almost over. I’ve got three or four scenes to finish, then the revisions begin. Towards the end, the timeline gets really complex. The court case concludes, Isidora escapes, she’s got business to attend to at the law office, Koyati experiences a riot and conducts a funeral — lots of stuff.These events must occur in exactly the right sequence. That gets tricky. I use a professional-grade timeline sequencing app called Aeon Timeline. Now if you think that detailed timeline planning is going to make the book hard to read — it’s just the opposite. The principle is straightforward: Write hard, read easy. Or like Steven Taylor said: “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” Or, “A writer is someone for whom writing is harder than for other people.”
Anyway, stay tuned. I’ll be keeping you up to date.
