a conlang is born!

At long last, I’ve completed the first working specifications for my first conlang – constructed language. It’s my first step into a big, big world.

Why invent a language? To quote myself from the specs' introduction:

The reasons for indulging what Tolkien famously called his “secret vice” are hardly unique; to explore the mechanics of language and, quite simply, to have fun. My discovery of conlangs – constructed languages – began when I first took a stab at learning Spanish. As a language related to French, Spanish bears essentially the same grammar and verb conjugations – that is, the same fragrantly irrational grammar and verb conjugations. This led me to Esperanto, the famous “interlang” (international language) created by Dr Ludwig L Zamenhof in 1887, but not to finding a language that makes as much sense as I’d like. Esperanto did, however, lead the way to the wonderful world of conlangs, which comprises everything from well-known conlangs like Klingon to not-so-well-known languages developed by private individuals for their own amusement.

And so comes my first attempt at creating a conlong: Asesulu, which originally began life under the name Amu’ipalo’i. To give you a brief taste, here’s a snippet from Genesis 11 1:9, the infamous Babel text:

English:
11:1 The entire earth had one language with uniform words.
11:2 When [the people] migrated from the east, they found a valley in the land of Shinar, and they settled there.

Asesulu:
11:1 Eto’uku a’ovofe’ele a’otama’oki o’ate u lajaja’uku o’avumu’ele.
11:2 Avena pesonukula o’atusi’oki o’ate de e’asa, ube a’oliki’oki ele Sinar ele vili’uku. Ube o’aliki’oki.

Literal Translation:
11:1 The whole earth possessed a homogenous language.
11:2 When the people migrated from the east, they found in Shimar a valley. They settled.

Beyond the cerebral fun to be had in creating a language (I categorically refuse to use the word geeky), I am planning to put Asesulu to use as a fictional language, namely, as the language for a series of stories, ultimately forming a novel, set in an artistic utopia called the County of Imagination where crimes are investigated by the Department of Forensic Poetry. I have two stories written; before I go on, though, I’m going to edit the existing stories to include Asesulu.

If you want to read more, you’ll find the specs here. And for more on conlangs, check out langmaker.com, a site chock-full of conlanging goodness.

minor pet peeve about deconstruction

Every so often, I'll hear someone use the word "deconstruction" in a sentence. While it doesn't make me cringe per se, it does tend to be a mild irritant if only because there's more to the word than being synonymous with analysis. (Literally, to de-construct, to take apart in order to understand it better, thus to analyze.) The word is simply used in too cavalier a fashion, methinks.

In his Letter to a Japanese Friend, Derrida put it starkly: "All sentences of the type 'deconstruction is X' or 'deconstruction is not X' a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false." If this is a bit cryptic, the entry on Derrida at Wikipedia isn't necessarily more helpful, in that it mentions, in response to the popularity of deconstruction in literary studies, "Derrida's claims that deconstruction is an 'event' within a text, not a method of reading it."

But perhaps there is some clarity to be found in Derrida's lecture "Signature, Event, Context," (click here for the original French) in which he said:

Deconstruction cannot limit itself or proceed immediately to a neutralization: it must, by means of a double gesture, a double science, a double writing, practice an overturning of the classical opposition and a general displacement of the system. It is only on this condition that deconstruction will provide itself the means with which to intervene in the field of oppositions that it criticizes, which is also a field of nondiscursive forces. Each concept, moreover, belongs to a systematic chain, and itself constitutes a system of predicates. There is no metaphysical concept in and of itself. There is a work - metaphysical or not - on conceptual systems. Deconstruction does not consist in passing from one concept to another, but in overturning and displacing a conceptual order, as well as the nonconceptual order with which the conceptual order is articulated.

The question, then, is how this displacement occurs as an event within a text, while keeping in mind the"someone" that "performs" (or rather inhabits, that is, witnesses) the event of deconstruction. To offer an answer; more reading.

access...denied!

So my story, Unarmed Men, has been rejected for publication by a prominent (I assume) fantasy magazine. The form letter says that the following may or may not be reasons for the rejection: old ideas, poor grammar/composition, or a failure to "stand out."

Since there's nothing wrong with the grammar/composition, it's not an old idea (at worse, it may bear a kinship to The Prisoner episode Living in Harmony, even an allegorical sympathy but a kinship is hardly a photocopy), and those who've read it have not described it as run of the mill. Why was it rejected, then?

I won't indulge any woe-is-me blather, because while I've submitted stories in the past that, in hindsight, were not my best work and were understandably rejected, I've come along way since then with stories like Unarmed Men. It could just be that the story wasn't their speed. It's not, strictly speaking, a fantasy, although it is clearly not realistic. As an allegory, it takes on decidedly surreal qualities. Or, maybe the fact that the assistant editor mentioned errors in formatting the manuscript (it's apparently important to indent the first line of paragraphs and not have extra lines between paragraphs) means that they didn't read it. Unsanctioned formatting as a means of weeding out one of hundreds of stories received - one less to read.

I might reformat the story and send it again. Perhaps I'll see if there's another publication more suitable, although Unarmed Men really is hard to classify - western? science fiction? fantasy? It's an allegorical western.

But I confess that getting something published is the most unpleasant part of being a writer, especially given how subjective editors are in choosing pieces to publish and hard it is to get meaningful feedback on why a piece was not published. That's the way it goes, though. If at first you don't succeed, try and try again.

nihilism and the horror genre - part 3

To wrap up my posts on nihilism and the horror genre, I’ll answer a rather obvious question: what does any of that have to with (my) writing? To begin with, I want to deal with the impression that I’m dismissing an entire genre. I am, of course, but on the plus side I’m always open to being surprised. That’s why I’m enjoying writing book reviews for Morbid Outlook, because many of the books I’ve received are horror-themed and give me an opportunity to challenge my normal reading tastes. (In fact, I just finished reading Clive Barker’s new book, Mister B. Gone, and – surprise of surprises –I liked it!) But what about actually writing a horror story?

As it happens, I am thinking about writing a “horror” story. But for me to think it worthwhile writing, it has to adhere to the following guidelines.

• Put villains under the same moral scrutiny as the heroes. We examine how heroes hold up, or fail, under duress…but how do villains hold up when perpetrating their villainy?
• Just as there shouldn’t be unstoppable good guys – that’s boring drama – there shouldn’t be unstoppable bad guys. Unless Ma Nature is involved, villains shouldn’t be indestructible.
• No violence for the sake of violence. Also, no grotesqueries for the sake of grotesqueries. It’s easy to come up with twisted stuff, and if it isn’t, the Marquis de Sade, Hentai, or anything involving the Nazis and other genocidal maniacs will provide enough material. But it’s all exploitation if it comes without a good story and worthwhile characters to give it a meaningful context. Rule: never spill a bucket of blood when a pinprick will do.
• Don’t manipulate readers. Just don’t do it.

So far, I’ve figured out, but not developed, the two main characters (the heroine and a science-loving goth) and the general structure of the plot (ghost story, mystery). All I say about the plot is that it’s a take-off on the film “The Messengers,” which is itself a take-off on just about every haunted house story every told. My approach will be more along the lines of science-fiction than fantasy, however. Still left to figure out is the nature of the haunting and the motivations behind it, whether or not to bring in another concept that could make the story be part of a larger series, and what other characters are necessary to tell the story.

I still have some work to do before I get to writing it, not to mention other stories to write. Before all of that, however, I just finished another science-fiction story I need to polish and prep to send out into the world.

nihilism and the horror genre - part 2

In regards to the graphic novel underlying the just-released movie “20 Days of Night” director David Slade says in an interview with SCI FI WIRE, “It's actually a hard, bleak, nihilistic story.”

Nihilistic - a word I’ve often come across in the description of films that don’t have happy “Hollywood” endings, that is, stories in which good fails to triumph over evil. Sometimes the word is just used in an imprecise, colloquial way. “I'd have flagged it as pointless if it had not been so nihilistic,” writes an IMDB user about that French horror film Inside. “It's not like the recent "torture movies" of late, which tends to have some kind of happy ending.” Sometimes, the word is better used, like in this discussion of Chinatown. (My take on Chinatown: Polanski’s nihilism has all the dishonesty that comes with the arbitrary in terms of plot but ultimately director-controlled flight path of a bullet.)

However, the philosopher in me bristles at the misunderstanding of the term, an abuse that cheaply equates nihilism with the active destruction of values and sometimes even celebrates that destruction. There’s a paradox involved in this petty bourgeois kind of nihilism, though. To explain, it helps to understand what nihilism as a philosophical position is. The entry on nihilism in Wikipedia is a useful primer (given how long it’s been since I took philosophy classes, I certainly found it useful, at least, and close to what I remember).

In essence, however, nihilism can take on various flavours:

• the denial of all values
• the denial of existing things (ontological)
• the denial of truth and knowledge (epistemological)
• the denial of ethics

Without getting into an academic discussion (and fully realizing that these few paragraphs are enough to get me into trouble), my own view is that nihilism doesn’t make sense from ontological or epistemological standpoints. But it does make sense when defined to say that life, existence, everything, does not have meaning or value. This is the abyss that terrifies; that there is neither objective meaning nor divine order to create meaning for us. Yet, clearly, the nihilist who fully embodies this nihilism would, to be consistent, actually have to be dead. When alive, however, meaninglessness is not a sustainable state. Whether it’s Will to Power, the nature of consciousness, a simple desire to live, or something else, nihilism is, in my interpretation of it, both the recognition of objective meaningless and the subjective response to overcome that meaninglessness. (Bring in the existentialists!) In other words, the nihilist’s task is to overcome his or her own nihilism – through an act of creation. It should even be said that all meaning is essentially self-created, even those meanings and values we attribute to outside entities like deities because, ultimately, those entities do not exist.

So before I drift too far afield, here’s the point. Horror movies are not truly nihilistic because – and this assumes that horror writers actually have reasons to end stories the way they do – while asserting the fallibility and weakness of good in the face of evil, they also evoke a feeling of horror and despair. In other words, the incapacity for good to triumph translates to the futility of good trying to overcome evil (because evil will win out in the end), which translates to meaninglessness, which in turn is negatively valued as something horrible, frightening, and bleak. Negative values are thus not nihilism, but a mere fatalistic reversal of positive values; petty bourgeois nihilism.

To be truly nihilistic, however, it would have to be the case that the actions of evil are just as meaningless as the actions of good. This means there is no more value to the monster’s killings than to the hero’s failures. There is as much futility to committing evil acts and resisting good as there it to committing good acts and resisting evil. The question is: why bother do anything?

To call a horror story nihilistic, then, when the genre is really about those things that frighten us is to lend it a philosophical imprimatur it doesn’t quite deserve. Sometimes, a bad ending is just a bad ending. Of course, sometimes a bad ending is just a setup for a sequel.