Notes transferred (in Stanley Fish's words)

I think these are the words of Stanley Fish, from his book on how to write sentences (and appreciate the gems).

In college I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page.

[To me] these were a handful of words artfully arranged to stop time, to conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimension.

From James Joyce's Araby:

The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.

The sentence is measured, unguarded, direct and at the same time transcendent. It distills a precise mood; radiates with meaning, yet sensibility is discreet. The best sentences orient us, like stars in the sky, like landmarks on a trail.

Only certain sentences breathe and shift about like live matter in a soil.

Not sure who wrote the following:

The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in grammatical relation to one another, is the most basic, ongoing impulse in my life.

On days when I am troubled, when I am grieved, when I am at a loss for words, the mechanics of formulating sentences, and of stockpiling them in a vault, is the only thing that centers me again.

Contrasting a sentence is the equivalent of taking a Polaroid snapshot: Press the button, wait for something to emerge.

Writing

Verlyn Kilnkenborg addresses some misconceptions about the "source" of the perfect sentence and about writing in general:

There’s no magic here. Practice these things, and you’ll stop fearing what happens when it’s time to make sentences worth inscribing. You’ll no longer feel as though a sentence is a glandular secretion from some cranial inkwell that’s always on the verge of drying up. You won’t be able to say precisely where sentences come from — there is no where there — but you’ll know how to wait patiently as they emerge and untangle themselves. You’ll discover the most important thing your education left out: how to trust and value your own thinking. And you’ll also discover one of things writing is for: pleasure.

Globalization gives me the creeps...

Now that I know that "globalization" is a "zombie" noun, I feel like I expose myself to the undead whenever I put down in a cover letter the following sentence: "I specialize in literature and globalization."

"Zombie" nouns, according to Helen Sword, an Auckland-based academic, are results of nominalization, a process via which new nouns are formed from other parts of speech (from an adjective, an active verb or another noun). 

Why "zombie"? 

Because they cannibalize active verbs, suck the lifeblood from adjectives and substitute abstract entities for human beings.

Zombie nouns are used mostly by academics, lawyers, bureaucrats and business writers (who have no business using zombie nouns).

I confess I have used many a zombie noun in my academic essays. I've always found it difficult to express abstract and cerebral concepts in concrete terms. I take Ms. Sword's advice and will try to write of complex thoughts in "language [that] remains firmly anchored in the physical world."

Movies with quirky plots

The New York Film Forum is well-known for selecting interesting movies.

But the stories of two particular films stand out for me for being quantum-quirky:

Silent Chrysanthemum, a 1958 Japanese flick directed by Mitsudo Tanaka tells the story of Yukio, a sensitive girl from a small mountain village. She spends her time gazing out from the terrace, dreaming that her father will someday allow her into the living room. While harvesting mud for a dinner party, Yukio meets a stranger who gifts her with an enchanted form-fitted kimono that transforms her into the most beautiful woman in the world--although he warns her not to sit down, lest she cut off circulation to her brain. Hearing of her beauty Samurai come from far and wide to ogle at her. They also make obscene gestures at her with the handles of their swords. Distraught, Yukio renounces love and flees to Hokkaido, where she embarks on a successful career as a bamboo room divider.

I was left imagining as to why Yukio wasn't allowed into her father's living room. The rest I could understand, including the bit about a tight dress that can cut off circulation if stretched to the limit.

A Frolic in the Hay, is a 1956 Swedish film directed by Sven Ingersoll. The film abounds in existential questions like "How is it that the god who created love also created dandruff?" The hero is one banker, Victor Flynderhorst, who is struggling to reconcile his fear of death with his fondness for open mine shafts. He takes his three grown children in a barn, where they become so engrossed with philosophical questions that they fail to appreciate what is right in front of them--specifically, the fact that the barn is on fire. Unable to cope with the contradictions of ontology, Victor goes mad, and he spends the remainder of the film vainly chasing the English subtitles with a butterfly net.

I really like the question posed above--sears the fact of god's ability to create both the abstractedly beautiful and the tangibly common--in an eloquent sentence!

Haven't seen any of these films, so if you ask me how I came to know of the stories, the answer lies here.