for thinking people
October 31, 2022
Another “Authors Talk” post. You can think of it as an author interview and, indeed, that is the name of the blog category. However, I prefer to see it as a friendly chat between fellow authors. Today I’m having this virtual discussion with Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt, author of the Pride’s Children Series. A list of useful links to Alicia’s work can be found at the end of this post.
October 24, 2022
The original title of Alberto Moravia’s novel is La Noia, which means “Boredom”. For some unfathomable reason, there are many English translations referring to the book as The Empty Canvas. In this review of Boredom, self-evidently, I stick to the more direct translation of the title.
Alberto Moravia was an Italian author who produced plenty of interesting texts in the decades right after World War II. He did write (and publish) earlier, too, but his most intriguing texts came after the war. Boredom is certainly one of them.
If I had to pick just one word to describe it, it would be… No, not “boredom”. In Moravia’s novel, as his protagonist explicitly clarifies, boredom isn’t what you think it is. Perhaps the word I’d pick, the one arguably coming closer to the protagonist’s predicament, is absurdity.
October 17, 2022
As it’s often said, if you want to discover a typo in your text, simply publish it; it will make itself visible immediately. The truth is, typos and other errors in writing are inevitable. They are a necessary evil. Should we fix them? Yes. Should we worry? No.
I see this with many processes. In photography, you get people agonizing over the sharpness of their lenses – going as far as wasting their time photographing diagrams. The miracle that is language – a living organism – has produced a fantastic word for such people: measurebator.
Also in music, there are people who worry over the most minute details – their strings, their pickups, and whether the fretboard is of this or that wood.
Do these matter?
Allow me to reply with my standard example: Slash sounds better with a Gibson Les Paul and a proper amp than with a Hello Kitty guitar and a toy amp. But not having a Gibson Les Paul is not the reason why I don’t sound like Slash.
Again: Yes, we should fix typos when we see them. But there are far more important things to worry about.
