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In the U.S., if you come home and you find your neighbor about to bulldoze your prize tulips because he thinks they’re on his side of the property line, your only (legal) recourse for stopping him is to find an attorney and have him or her run to the courthouse and get a temporary restraining order, and then, before the TRO runs out, get in front of a judge with a complaint and a motion for a preliminary injunction, and then go to trial with a request for a permanent injunction.
If only things were as simple as they are on the island of Sark. As I mentioned in a post a few days ago, Sark is one of the Channel Islands and a British Crown dependency. It is also the last feudal state in Europe. They have a tradition dating back to the Middle Ages called clameur de haro in Sercquiais, the language of the island, which is descended from Norman French.
There, if you saw your neighbor bulldozing your tulips, all you would have to do is fall on your knees and yell, “Haro, haro, haro! À mon aide, mon Prince, on me fait tort!” which means, “To my aid, my Prince, someone does me wrong!” I’m not sure about the haro part. You neighbor would have to immediately stop until the matter could be sorted out in court. There are conflicting accounts about the last time it was actually used. If only it worked here.
Incidentally, there are many, many aspects of the Norman French legal system still around today. In English, a tort is a civil wrong for which a person may be sued.
Did you know that there are forty-seven Romance languages according to Wikipedia? I think my favorite is Sercquiais, which is spoken on the island of Sark, one of the Channel Islands and a British Crown dependency, and also the last feudal state in Europe. It looks a lot like French, but it’s not. When the Channel Islands were occupied by the Germans in World War II, the natives spoke Sercquiais as a code because neither the Germans nor their French interpreters could understand them. The same thing happened on the nearby islands of Jersey and Guernsey with their (also Romance) languages, Jèrriais and Dgèrnésiais, respectively.
I find that reading a lot of nonfiction actually helps me in my fiction writing. For instance, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is one of the masterpieces of travel writing. Written by British writer Rebecca West, it chronicles her trip with her husband through Yugoslavia on the eve of World War II. Upon reading it there are two things to keep in mind, however:
- She is very pro-Serb and very anti-Turk.
- She hates Germans.
Because of her biases, you should not make this book your only source of information if you are at all interested in the history of the Balkans, but she does provide a riveting account of the region’s tumultuous past. What amazes me is how easily she is able to integrate the history of each place that she visits into her description of her own present experiences and then relate that bit of history to the overall history of Yugoslavia. Her descriptions are also beautiful, lush, and evocative. She is incredibly adept in capturing a moment in words. You can almost open the book at random and find an example:
So we went our way by the river, widened now into a lake, which held on it’s rain-grey mirror a bright yet blurred image of the pastoral slopes that rose to the dark upland forest, and which seemed, like so much of Bosnia, almost too carefully landscape-gardened. At the end, it split with a flourish into two streams, which were linked together by a village set with flowering trees, its minarets as nicely placed as the flowers on those trees.
The picture is so vivid that it makes me regret never having the opportunity to see Bosnia like that, and it is that kind of emotion that I want to bring to my writing.
The Albanian word for Albania is Shqipëria. I don’t know why I find this fact so fascinating, other than the fact that before I began researching Albania (and Kosovo) for my novel that I knew absolutely nothing about Albania or its people. It just goes to show how narrow our focus can be when it comes to a topic. When we think of European history, we (at least in my experience) think of Henry VIII or the French Revolution or World War II, not anything having to do with Albania, and yet, Albania is as much a part of Europe and its history as England, France, and Germany.
The Albanian name, by the way, means “Land of the Eagles.”
Yesterday, Salon.com published an article entitled Think you know how to read, do you? about books over the last several years that have purported to instruct people on how to read literary fiction. The main thesis of the article was that these books are pointless in a way because, as Virginia Wolf put it, the “only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.”
While I tend to agree with this assessment, I also agree with many of the authors of these books, who decry the current state of our colleges’ English departments, which seem intent on strangling every last bit of joy out of reading. I was a history major in college, but I had my share of run-ins with the English department, none of them pleasant. Without exception, every English professor with whom I interacted was elitist, smug, and condescending and had a political agenda to force onto everyone else.
The absolute worst encounter I had was the semester I took a creative writing class (poetry and short fiction). I had some credit hours to kill and thought it would be fun. Ha! The professor would routinely start the class with the question, “So, how many of you have heard of [insert name of Random Poet Guy]?” When no one spoke up, the universal scoffing sound would rise from the back of her throat. “Well, he’s only the most prominent American poet of the twentieth century,” she would then snot.
Really? So prominent no one has heard of him? More prominent than Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, Carl Sandburg, Robert Penn Warren, Langston Hughes, T. S. Eliot (died British, born American), Robert Frost, and Maya Angelou? Right. I’m convinced that she engaged in this little exercise to make everyone feel ignorant. Most of the time, she barely contained her contempt for us all.
She also once told me that all genre fiction was “junk food,” and that one day I would regret reading it. She was including Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury in that statement. Guess what? Haven’t regretted reading any of them yet.
The thing about it is that her critique of my actual writing was very helpful to me…eventually. At the time, she treated everyone with such snobbish disdain, that I refused to listen to her. Likewise, any time she would actually recommend a writer, I would instantly dismiss that writer as pretetentious, because she was. But by not reading Random Poet Guy, I may have missed out.
Since college, the other serious literary types I have met have exhibited the same characteristics to one degree or another. I once told someone that I liked Edgar Allan Poe, to which she replied, “Oh, you’ll get over it.” Guess what? Haven’t gotten over it yet. Needless to say, I wasn’t too interested in hearing her own reading recommendations after that.
So, here’s the advice for the serious literary types bemoaning the demise of Literature. Maybe more people would listen to you if you were nicer.
Filed under: Random
Name all 192 members of the United Nations in ten minutes.
Link here.
I’d like to thank World Hum for this little time waster. I got 115 before I ran out of time. I left out China. Go figure.
I have a favorite dictionary, and apparently, this makes me a dork, but it’s true. When I’m writing, my American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language is never far from my side. I’m not sure, I like it for what I guess you would call its depth and the scholarship that goes into it. No other dictionary comes close to its thoroughness in studying and cataloguing actual American English usage. And the index of Indo-European roots is pretty nifty.
My wife disagrees. She likes Webster’s, which I find a little too shallow? I’m not sure that make sense, but it’s as close as I can describe my feelings. Se prefers its straightforwardness.
We were arguing over the meaning of a word in front of a friend who was visiting. Finally my wife said, “Okay, go get the dictionary,” to which I responded, “Which one?” Our friend didn’t know what to do with the fact that we owned more than one dictionary. (Actually, we own five or six.) I guess we’re both dorks. And for the record, if you think that arguing over the definition of a word is bad, we once had an argument over the proper role of the Dative case in Latin. Sad, but again true.
I’ve always wanted to write books. Even when I was little, before I could even read, I would draw pictures on pieces of copy paper and staple them together like a book and then dictate the captions for each picture to one of my parents. In school my favorite part of Language Arts/English every year was the creative writing unit. I learned quickly, though, that most people didnt consider “novel writer” a serious answer to the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” So, I came up with other answers. They included architect, computer programmer, civil engineer, teacher, journalist, and (very, very briefly) the ministry.
The whole time, I kept writing, knowing that the more I practiced, the better I would get, but of course, life didn’t stop. Now, at 32 years old, I find myself with an incredibly busy life full of personal and work responsibilities. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t regret any of the decisions I’ve made. My job allows me to pursue some of my other passions, such as food and travel. I also think that law school improved my writing to the point where it’s actually publishable. Now if I could just finish the damned novel!
