tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5375681131276548542.post3910524488856564463..comments2024-02-27T10:53:04.581+01:00Comments on paperpools: Cormac McCarthy & the semi-colonHelen DeWitthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07619602559096610012noreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5375681131276548542.post-85728771371894772972019-01-10T06:35:00.281+01:002019-01-10T06:35:00.281+01:00This was editorial abuse. It's bad enough we h...This was editorial abuse. It's bad enough we have to put up with so much rejection, but when the people who publish our work want to change so much of it... I only got $1250 for my first novel, so I thought the least I could do was get creative control. You were much too polite and when you got the first markup should have just sent it back with the clause from your contract underlined.<br /><br />I loved the all caps and lack of quotation marks in Samurai. <br /><br />But the main thing agents, editor and readers should realize is that novels are one of the few creative endeavors that can be done - and should be done - by a single person. In a world where every job description demands that we be team players, we should be encouraged to stand alone. John Fowles preferred authenticity to perfection, and so should editors.<br /><br />Of course there is the added futility of making changes for editors who soon leave the publisher, or for publishers that go bankrupt.<br /><br />This was a brilliant post, and I enjoyed reading it, though I wish your gift for language and innovation had been appreciated, and I hope that now it is.<br /><br /><br /><br />Mark Schreiberhttp://www.markschreiberbooks.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5375681131276548542.post-8443229417579555452012-04-24T07:18:33.320+00:002012-04-24T07:18:33.320+00:00My copy editor informed me that there were two spe...My copy editor informed me that there were two spelling errors in my book: she wished me to spell "Ecuador" with a "q," and she changed the spelling of my first name to conform with a character's name from a popular television show. Now, offending the people of Ecuador is bad enough, but there is no call to go after my mother.Lorelei Armstronghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07639663436142251951noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5375681131276548542.post-81953121932551871402011-08-31T00:21:23.991+00:002011-08-31T00:21:23.991+00:00I am in love with your mind.
And your writing.
T...I am in love with your mind. <br />And your writing. <br />The Last Samurai blew my mind. <br />It is brilliant--one of the best books I've ever read.<br />I cannot believe the CRAP you had to deal with in getting it published in its intended form. <br />Best,<br />DarlaDarlitahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17307131702522025255noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5375681131276548542.post-62398053426874292682011-01-26T21:47:19.804+00:002011-01-26T21:47:19.804+00:00where can i get a copy of your dissertation?where can i get a copy of your dissertation?adpsmith@bx4bux.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5375681131276548542.post-37666908632385501472008-06-21T03:55:00.000+01:002008-06-21T03:55:00.000+01:00very good.very good.Benjaminhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12539078553577303937noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5375681131276548542.post-26708324398814645432007-08-20T10:56:00.000+00:002007-08-20T10:56:00.000+00:00I have just gone through a similar battle with my ...I have just gone through a similar battle with my publishing house.<BR/><BR/>In the end, my editor, after receiving an illustrated history of my various attempts over a chunk of years to generate a range of pauses while still remaining grammatically "correct" (sometimes one wants the meaning of the semicolon--for example--even if the shorter pause of the comma may sound fine) who basically laughed, gave up, and said that whatever I wanted to do was just fine!<BR/><BR/>Of course by then it was time to argue about the typeface . . . .Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5375681131276548542.post-60816661403804278132007-08-19T05:16:00.000+00:002007-08-19T05:16:00.000+00:00The way I see it is like this:The main function of...The way I see it is like this:<BR/><BR/>The main function of language is communication. Punctuation is a language tool that facilitates language's ability to be as effective as it possibly can. If the punctuation you chose was chosen because you felt it was the best way to punctuate so as to communicate what you wanted to communicate, and more importantly <I>how</I> you wanted it to be communicated, then I say <B>right on</B>.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5375681131276548542.post-12980567499257825172007-08-18T04:15:00.000+00:002007-08-18T04:15:00.000+00:00I'm fond of both the semicolon and McCarthy, thoug...I'm fond of both the semicolon and McCarthy, though both have their weaknesses; not so fond of talk of killing oneself, not after seeing what suicide has done to close friends and family.Leehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13770069472552779217noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5375681131276548542.post-77719254047464572292007-08-17T19:51:00.000+00:002007-08-17T19:51:00.000+00:00You have just given me another reason to dislike C...You have just given me another reason to dislike Cormac McCarthy, I've got a blind spot when it comes to that man (have only read "All the Pretty Horses" which I realize is not his best, but one day when I am really feeling meanspirited I am going to sit down and read a few others and then rant about them to anyone who will listen). I am pretty much obsessed with all this stuff too of course, my most heartfelt condolences! I like the sound of your thesis--did you ever read the chapter in Cary McIntosh's book about the trend of the revisions in Richardson's later editions of "Pamela"? Very interesting.<BR/><BR/>(NB commenter above: there's a great new Oxford World's Classics edition of "Jonathan Wild," though of course that novel is complicated by the fact that there rae two different contenders for best edition to use as copy-text--and the standard scholarly edition made some odd choices in that regard...)<BR/><BR/>foxfire is indeed an excellent example of a novel that makes thoughtful use of EXTREMELY commonsensical and accessible tho non-standard capitalization and punctuation. Helen, I do not understand how you have miraculously gathered here the only group of readers in the world who seem to have read and liked (only with the exception of McCarthy, to whom I am allergic...) exactly the same books I have!<BR/><BR/>Oh, and there are some very comical cleanings-up in the later 19th century editions of Romantics like Keats and Shelley, quite astonishing--I think people in English depts have been investigating these trends, there certainly should be some stuff out there.<BR/><BR/>And finally--the semi-colon has long been my favorite punctuation mark, with the possible exception of the hyphen, which I'm also fond of...Jenny Davidsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02295436498255927522noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5375681131276548542.post-30878021179577779372007-08-17T19:13:00.000+00:002007-08-17T19:13:00.000+00:00wow.i'm not a writer, but as a just-finished lingu...wow.<BR/><BR/>i'm not a writer, but as a just-finished linguistics major (here via languagehat) and aspiring librarian, this made me so mad i could barely see straight....Oreopithecus bamboliihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14085550991026691442noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5375681131276548542.post-48542712992852687392007-08-17T19:03:00.000+00:002007-08-17T19:03:00.000+00:00The person looking for nice Browne might could fin...The person looking for nice Browne might could find some <A HREF="http://penelope.uchicago.edu/" REL="nofollow">here</A>. Some PDF facsimiles, mostly just htmlized web editions, but (& am I no scholar of Browne so can't be certain) they look to be done with care, and certainly the spelling hasn't been modernized.Ben Whttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06887096661154495898noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5375681131276548542.post-51865333445312542742007-08-17T18:03:00.000+00:002007-08-17T18:03:00.000+00:00Mithridates. We can only surmise.Mithridates. We can only surmise.Helen DeWitthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07619602559096610012noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5375681131276548542.post-73189210021716831612007-08-17T17:53:00.000+00:002007-08-17T17:53:00.000+00:00I love craziness too. Gould is a great example. N...I love craziness too. Gould is a great example. Nabokov is another, who hated Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Woolf, Musil, Mann. The list goes on. Tolstoy thought Harriet Beecher Stowe superior to Shakespeare. I know what it's like to get looked at crosseyed after I make my antipathies known. Maybe I'll have a posting about all my totally arbitrary beliefs and preferences.<BR/><BR/>The punctuation question interests me. I think of the Your Average Reader. Take one of my sisters, for example, who tried to read Oates's foxfire - b/c it sounded porny, no doubt - but couldn't get past page 50 because there weren't enough periods (or any, I can't remember and haven't read the book). That seems to be the problem that most readers have in terms of punctuation. Faulkner's impenetrable for any number of reasons, but the fact that periods make less frequent appearances in Absalom, Absalom seems to be the biggest one for some of the people I've talked to. What I'm trying to say is that, except for periods and maybe commas, most average readers - the target audience of most publishing houses - don't seem to care about punctuation, not usually being very aware of it in their own writing themselves. My mother puts book titles in quotation marks, my father doesn't put the comma before and in a list of more than two things, and my sisters use commas like periods. I'm not criticizing them. They're the nonacademic, nonliterary but generally literate people who buy books and read them, and they don't pay much attention to the largely arbitrary rules from Strunk & White that were forced upon me at a young age and from which I've been desperately trying to break free these ladt few years. Now, writers and academics and Thems What Know, spotting "irregularities" in punctuation and mechanics, will probably say to themselves, Well there must be some reason for this, and eventually come up with one if they think the book worth thinking about at all.<BR/><BR/>So my question is, Who are these people that your publishers said will think the book sloppy and unprofessional b/c of its punctuation? The only group I can think of is Other Publishers. And nuns.Mithridateshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09071591560485370221noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5375681131276548542.post-42810893022321112412007-08-17T16:40:00.000+00:002007-08-17T16:40:00.000+00:00Yes - I hate those cleaned-up editions of Dickinso...Yes - I hate those cleaned-up editions of Dickinson. I think one problem is that a lot of people are like Lynne Truss. They are happy to make an exception for writers of genius (if you're James Joyce it's OK to break the rules). The problem is, though, that writers of genius don't walk around with little halos over their heads, enabling us to distinguish the writers of genius from the riffraff. If the only justification for breaking rules is the claim to genius, very few unpublished writers will be allowed to break rules. They are by definition writers who have had no reviews, no critical assessment; the culture at large has not yet endorsed these particular violations of rules. Most writers surely want to make a much more modest claim, which is that the text handed in reflects the sensibility of the person who wrote it. Replacing that sensibility with that of a randomly-chosen stranger should not be the default procedure; it should be done only in exceptional cases, when very compelling reasons can be put forward. As things stand, however, replacing the author's preferences with those of a stranger is the norm; allowing the author's preferences to stand is the exception. Hence, I take it, the dreary sameness of so much that is published.Helen DeWitthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07619602559096610012noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5375681131276548542.post-72878660925719257432007-08-17T16:19:00.000+00:002007-08-17T16:19:00.000+00:00Wow. I found that tale heartbreaking. I remember r...Wow. I found that tale heartbreaking. I remember reading about what happened to the early (posthumous) editions of Emily Dickinson, how punctuation (and even some words) were changed, and thinking, "How fortunate we live in times where we can read decent editions and read about how crappy early editions were."<BR/><BR/>Poetry is seen as kind of a different animal. But still.komfo,amonanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11392368772406076273noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5375681131276548542.post-90019702565072014922007-08-17T15:44:00.000+00:002007-08-17T15:44:00.000+00:00philq -- not sure about Browne. OUP publishes some...philq -- not sure about Browne. OUP publishes some texts with original spelling and punctuation; their edition of Malory's Morte d'Arthur, for instance, hasn't updated the usage for modern readers.Helen DeWitthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07619602559096610012noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5375681131276548542.post-62838158888819046622007-08-17T15:41:00.000+00:002007-08-17T15:41:00.000+00:00Mithridates -- it doesn't bother me if Cormac McCa...Mithridates -- it doesn't bother me if Cormac McCarthy is crazy. Glenn Gould was crazy. Glenn Gould does things with Brahms that I think are completely bonkers. McCarthy's craziness, his blindness to having blind spots, is part of his genius. But I think someone who wants to express artistic temperament in the minutiae of punctuation should write his or her own book, not deploy it on other people's texts. We don't publish books with credits that say: punctuation by Margaret Wolfe.Helen DeWitthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07619602559096610012noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5375681131276548542.post-76538586420110906622007-08-17T15:37:00.000+00:002007-08-17T15:37:00.000+00:00I hate it when editors modernize the spelling & pu...I hate it when editors modernize the spelling & punctuation of old texts, but it seems almost impossibble to find nice unadulterated editions outside of university libraries. The Norton Critical Editions are the only ones I know of that leave all that sweet old-timeyness (if you pardon my technical vocabulary) intact. Do you know of any others? For example, I would LOVE to find a good edition of Thomas Browne, but everything is modernized... <BR/><BR/>Also there seems to be trends in modernization. I bought an old used copy of Jonathan Wild and it's completely wrecked, but a new Penguin edition of Tom Jones seems to have changed only the elongated S's (too lazy to figure out the font for that one). I would love to read a nice 10-page New Yorker spread on these trends!philqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08265153889883377656noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5375681131276548542.post-80449178626226238562007-08-17T15:35:00.000+00:002007-08-17T15:35:00.000+00:00I did think McCarthy's comment was funny -- but th...I did think McCarthy's comment was funny -- but then, he does have a very strong sense of how he thinks a sentence should flow, and perhaps found it hard to imagine that other ways might be characteristic of other writers and therefore something the reader should not be spared. (It was the comment that he had actually rewritten sentences to work with the improved punctuation that I particularly liked.)<BR/><BR/>Anon. Of course, if this happened again, I would bring in my lawyer -- or rather, I would first make a point of sitting down with the copy-editor and working through 20 pages or so to make sure she understood what she was doing, and I would then quote the text of the contract in an e-mail to all concerned to remind everyone of the strict limits it set on alterations to the text. The problem was, I had never had a book published before; with a first book, one is necessarily dependent on the intelligence and good faith of the people publishing it.Helen DeWitthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07619602559096610012noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5375681131276548542.post-13141753791588403072007-08-17T15:22:00.000+00:002007-08-17T15:22:00.000+00:00I thought you would react strongly to this, given ...I thought you would react strongly to this, given your strongly individualistic punctuation--which I've always meant to ask you about, but which I just chose to STEAL from you instead!!!!!!!<BR/><BR/>I actually laughed out loud when CM said this. It reminded me of his comment to a newspaper somewhere that Henry James and Marcel Proust "wasn't writing to me." He says these things as confidently as a religious fanatic would say he saw the face of the Holy Virgin in his morning muffin. I had to replay it to make sure he really said it. That's what I meant when I said that he'd said some odd things. Blottings that ugly up the page: something like that. Astonishing. <BR/><BR/>I had no idea that such a brilliant posting could have been triggered by this. This needs to be sent off as a short story and published INSTANTER. I really mean it.Mithridateshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09071591560485370221noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5375681131276548542.post-87592647170395420502007-08-17T15:03:00.000+00:002007-08-17T15:03:00.000+00:00Next time this happens, you really should focus on...Next time this happens, you really should focus on the terms of your contract. If you had gotten their lawyers involved, I think you would have got your way pretty quickly. (I say this as a lawyer.)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5375681131276548542.post-38447089093401348472007-08-17T14:19:00.000+00:002007-08-17T14:19:00.000+00:00I'm with you on punctuation in old texts--Peter Ac...I'm with you on punctuation in old texts--Peter Ackroyd's definitely got it right, understanding that the punctuation and the spelling are a large part of the joy of old texts. (Imagine <I>The Anatomy of Melancholy</I>, for example, with corrected spelling and punctuation--it'd be a totally different book--and far less fun.)<BR/>McCarthy's position seems at the least ignorant, if not breathtakingly arrogant. <BR/><BR/>But why should one try not to write about King Charles's head? Seems a good enough idea to me . . .Levi Stahlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11094919454842047688noreply@blogger.com