on getting it right

[bronze_ribbons]

Susan Cooper, in Dreams and Wishes:

Professionalism is . . . a matter of acquiring the right assumptions, like the one that considers writing clean prose as much a part of good manners as knowing how to eat with a knife and fork. Professionalism is an assumption of hard work, of taking endless pains. The professional goes to ridiculous lengths to satisfy his artistic conscience. He may spend a morning rewriting a sentence six times. He may read three months' work one day, dislike it, throw it out and start all over again. He may study some large boring tome for three solid days, to make one paragraph of notes which will back up a tiny reference in his new novel which nobody will notice.

For instance. . .one of these ghostly people came into my head as a woman dressed in a white robe, wearing round her neck a string of bright blue beads. I must have checked through at least a dozen reference books before I could make sure that I could keep her. Eventually I found that yes, textiles and weaving and bleaching techniques were sufficiently advanced at that point in the Bronze Age for the woman to be wearing a white robe. And yes, blue faience beads of the Egyptian type were found in burial mounds in Britain, dating from 1550 B.C. onwards, so she could have her string of blue beads. It was all pretty unnecessary, I suppose; I could have let the picture from my imagination go, without checking its basis. It really wasn't terribly likely that even the brightest thirteen-year-old reader would stop, cry "Aha!", and rush to the Encyclopedia Britannica to check up on Bronze Age beads, instead of getting on with the story. But all the same it did matter, because I knew.

An interesting book, on the whole. I found myself reaching for the salt shaker for some of Cooper's other pronouncements, though -- too many sentences beginning with "everyone" and "we all have." (Rechecking the book this morning, they don't seem nearly so frequent or irritating, but last night I just kept muttering, "Everyone? Really everyone?" But my background is quite different from Cooper's, particularly in one fundamental aspect: Nashville is the first place I've lived where I've somehow truly unbent enough to start thinking of it happily and possessively as home (I definitely didn't belong anywhere I lived before the age of seventeen; I loved - love - Chicago, where I went to college, but there was never a realistic hope that I would stay there beyond graduation; and Michigan never quite felt enough like home even though I lived there for almost nine years).)

Anyhow, the plus side includes the mentions of TDIR scattered throughout (I find I am specifically a TDIR fan rather than of Cooper in general), and it was nifty coming across mentions of Come Hither and Very Far Away From Anywhere Else, and the fact that Cooper witnessed Roger Bannister running his sub-4 mile and wrote in her college diary about enjoying Professor Tolkien's new epic, LotR ("It was a new epic in 1954; we were waiting for the last volume to come out").


From the Easily Amused department, Dave's observation on taste had me cackling:

Belle and Sebastian are one of those bands that have roughly the same effect on your ears as pickles/gerkins have on people's taste buds - you either love them or you hurl them as far away from your burger as possible and let seagulls gag on them instead.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This book disappointed me. I love Susan Cooper's books -- well, most of them -- but a lot of the generalities she made rang false to me, and she didn't seem to know who or what she was excluding with them.