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3:14:00 PM EDT
For Vince!
In my last couple of entries I've gotten rather high flown about writing. Time to touch the ground again.
Vince, at To Grow Is To Be Anxious, this one's for you!
Thank you, Vince, for introducing me to Becker's Denial of Death and for sharing your poetry with us. Your poetry teaches us much about what it means to be human. And Becker's is truly a life-changing book. I think Becker would agree with the following quote from Kurt Vonnegut's new book, A Man Without A Country:
"The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You have created something."
I also must include the following quote from Vonnegut's book:
"Here is a lesson in creative writing.
"First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
*Note: I believe I was a senior in college before I fully understood the purpose of a semi-colon. When I told our youngest son the Vonnegut quote, he laughed and then said, "But semi-colons are so cool!" (He is a newly minted senior in college). Semi-colons do abound in essay writing and academic writing. They are used much less often in poetry and fiction. I believe what Vonnegut is proposing is not a hard-and-fast rule, but a break from high fallutin' academic writing. It may be an interesting experiment to pay attention the next time you read a poem or story and see how many semi-colons are used. I think it helps writers to pay attention to things like that, and that's why I included the quote in this entry. I wanted people to think a bit about punctuation and what certain marks of punctuation represent.
(I found, as did our son, that once you figure out what semi-colons are and how to use them, they become addictive.)
I think what Vonnegut would have us ask ourselves is why we are using the semi-colon. If we're using it to show we know how (i.e. I'm a college graduate), then it serves no useful purpose.
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PS:
I never met a semicolon I didn't like.
Poets yes, but never a well placed pause....
Vince on the ohter hand is a poet I get or rather a poet who gets me and thus we are poetic pair. -
18 comments on the semi-colon! (Nineteen now!)
Theresa, you are, as always, an inspiration. -
I am not a college graduate. But I think semi colons are cute; even it I can only legally use them once in a great, great while. They are pretty useless, aren't they?
Jude
http://journals.aol.com/jmorancoyle/MyWay
P.S.: I do use them once in a great, great while. Usually more for effect than for any other reason. -
My favorite definition of this punctuation:
The semi-colon means stop. Read this portion and mull it over; then read the second portion and let it stew.
The colon means go. I wanna make a point, and it's this: cut it out.
I've started Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking." She says she wants to turn all her fixed ideas on death and loss upside down. It seems like a magical book...maybe it will help me prepare for Becker.
Thinking of you
-Beth
4/27/06 9:18 PM
People speak not only in semi-colons, but in commas, colons, parentheses, quotation marks, exclamation points, quarter-colons, eighth-colons, and a million little marks no one's even invented yet.
Written language is not speech. Written language is an approximation of speech. It is an interpretation of speech. It is a code used to record what someone has spoken. Written language is like written music. It can approximate the subtleties of the notes and nuances of the pitches and tunes, but it can never translate to perfection the intent of the spoken stream of thought.
Written language is then read and interpreted, but it can never recreate the nuances uttered by the spoken word.
Not only do people speak in semi-colons, they speak in a million subtle punctuation marks no one's even ever thought to make symbols for.
So for those who think people don't speak in semi-colons - just spend less time reading and more time listening to real people.
SamScrooge