FLOW is preferred to The Flow, since “the” suggests separateness — “Thingness,” if you will — and as Flow cannot be reliably distinguished from that-which-flows, said usage would upset “the” carefully built phenomenological apple-cart. (And we certainly can’t have that.) Just another attempt at naming the Nameless…without naming it, of course.
“NaSSWriMo!”
TODAY KICKS OFF THE WOULD-BE novelists’ annual motivational event, NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write 1,667 words a day for a total of 50,000 by November 30. (I participated one year, and have a fairly mediocre time-travel novel to show for it.)
But some of us who write aren’t het up on novels so much as, say, short stories about a mercenary cook who used to be a holyman but can’t quite shake his past. Toward that end, I invite you to join in the alternative: NaSSWriMo, an acronym which I just made up and won’t insult your intelligence by defining.
It’s Really Spelled “Hallowe’en”
(TO BE CLEAR, IT’S ACTUALLY a slight abbreviation of the phrase “All Hallow’s Evening,” AKA “All Hallow’s Even,” AKA “Hallows E’en.”)
There’s something to be said about archaic or alternate spellings / renderings. For example, a beloved English teacher once opined that the spelling “grey” instead of “gray” made the word look and feel, well, “greyer.”
Different fonts make the words we read sound different in our minds. Italics (at least for me) convey a more choral mindfeel than does plain text; bold is like a quiet sit-up-and-pay-attention monotone; ALL CAPS evokes shouting; deletion lines are like mumbled static. Put them all together, and one has CONTROLLED CHAOS.
Words To Bring Back: “Patois”
– Definition: n. A type of local dialect.
– Used in a sentence: His discourse was punctuated by a patois rich in “I know, right?” “Wait. What?” and “Yeah, no…”
– Why: It’s a better (and more elegant and less judgey) label than “vulgar tongue.” Besides, I look forward to hearing people pronounce it “p’toyse” (as I did before I understood French usage).
The harder it became, the more I wanted to do it.”
— Female round-the-world sailor, from the film MAIDEN
Temple of the Holy Reruns
HAVE YOU EVER SAT IN a theater after the movie ended so you can see it again? Then you’ll understand Simchat Torah.
Simchat Torah, or “Rejoicing of (the) Teaching,” will be celebrated by the worldwide Jewish community beginning tonight through tomorrow. It marks the end of the yearly Torah-reading cycle and the beginning of a new one. We’ve been doing this for at least (best guess here) 2,569 years; when we reach the last words of Deuteronomy (“Never again did there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses … [with] all the great might and awesome power that Moses displayed before all Israel”) we immediately rewind to “In the beginning of G?d’s creating heaven and earth…” To paraphrase a line from Guys and Dolls, among other things Judaism can be called the oldest established permanent floating book club on Earth.
First Graf: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
ACTUALLY, SINCE T.A.o.S.H. IS THE first published collection of all Sherlock Holmes stories, here is (also) the First Graf of “A Scandal In Bohemia,” being the first of the tales in said collection. It’s unfortunate that Sherlock Holmes has become a bit of cultural cliche and byword, but it can’t be helped — our culture is steeped in such cliches, where what was once seminal now comes off as derivative. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous creation, whom he eventually tired of and tried killing-off only to find that the clamorous 19th-Century reading “publick” would have none of it, stands on his own eternal literary measure. A little taste to whet the appetite, then?