In the Words of Aldous Huxley: Vocabulary from Brave New World

Here we go again, round two! A panoply of fresh and funky vocabulary from our favorite intellectuals. Last week, it was Jack Kerouac On the Road. This week, Aldous Huxley Brave New World. Take a breath now, this list is long: 22 words. Yikes!

As a side note, I’ve actually decided that Huxley looks a heck of a lot like my great great grandpa. Check this out: My elder on the left, Huxley on the right. Resemblance?

Am I related to Huxley?

Anyway, as stated vocabulary is the key to, at the very least, sounding like a great writer. So, here’s this week’s list:

Callow

Effusive

Derision

Squalid

Indignant

Implore

Satiety

Scrupulous

Inexorable

Jaunty

Boisterous

Recapitulate

Ignominy

Obliquity

Sonorous

Venerable

Languor

Heretical

Subversive

Clandestine

Odious

Surreptitious

Vocabulary Improvement Practices

You can do it! Here’s the very simple procedure:

1. Make flashcards and study, study, study!

2. Take Quiz #2 here. Remember, you have to pass Level 1 to move on the Level 2. Also keep in mind that we are building here 10 words at a time. So, this quiz incorporates some of the word list from last week as well.

3. Write a short story incorporating the words. Another note: this story can be as mundane or outlandish as you want. The idea is to go where ever your mind goes. Let the words flow.

Here’s mine: Over the Hills of May

Behind the venerable Hills of May, squalid back banks housed broken down ships abandoned in surreptitious night crawls made by sea captains who had entirely—at one point or another—lost their minds. The ocean has a way of doing that to people: once scrupulous, the tide turns them, the current rocks them, the wind and sun and salt dry out their inexorable, yet sinking idiosyncrasies, and then they wash up on shore looking for their land legs. For those boisterous sailors who crawled across the Hills of May, the ignominy of being on one’s knees was insurmountable and unable to be recapitulated. Something indignant on those hills above the back banks was buried in clandestine ceremony.

At the Red Hook, whenever a sailor cried, which was often, bartenders implored them to find their legs elsewhere, the usual Friday night crowd satiated with their sonorous pleas to bring up the boats.

“But they’re still down there,” shouted Lawrence T.K. Aldrich in effusive gasps. He often stumbled through the doors of the Red Hook to make indignant claims and with a heretical shifting of weight, everyone looked the other way. “They’re still down there!”

He was not the only one who heard the voices of lost seamen shouting out over the Hills of May.

Ernest Bulk heard them too, but he was a quiet man not akin the subversive nature of sailors. When bar guests began the jaunty dances of midnight, Ernest Bulk scoffed at their callow movements—the reaching for each other, the stumbling, the intoxicated sways—and headed home with his journal in hand. They looked to him more shipwrecked than the ghosts that haunted the harbor. On his way past the hills and the harbor he heard the ghosts’ odious derision.

“Fools! Bring us back!”

They did not know they had docked long ago. That the war had ended. That the Hills of May, satiated by battle, expressed languor the years of fighting by letting their cries roll off the back banks and echo through town, through the Red Hook, though Ernest Bulk’s dreams.

Lawrence T.K. Aldrich heard them, but his cries on their behalf at the Red Hook were ignored as obliquity. Only Ernest paid attention to him, but he remained quiet. Had Lawrence T.K. Aldrich not disappeared at sea 200 years ago, perhaps he’d have spoken for him and for the other lost souls of the back bay. But that was not the case.

Lessons from Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Brave New World: a fiction piece commonly referenced in popular culture, which makes it a must-read. My thoughts: Aldous Huxley must have chosen the red pill that morning when he sat down to write. Brave New World took me down the rabbit hole and Huxley showed me just how far it goes.

Beside the cultural cue in, I’d recommend this book to understand a few things about writing. It’s also a smart book because it’s an easy read, yet embedded with rich commentary about society.

The All-Knowing Author

In Brave New World, Huxley employs the third person omniscient, or the all-knowing voice. He shifts between multiple character perspectives, so we see not only action but also how everyone responds to it. In this story, you’re dealing with themes of isolationism, aversion of feeling, and avoidance of the human condition. Yet, you get to know the characters as individuals and understand why they do what they do and how they really feel. The reader sees the play on stage, but remains behind the curtain, seeing everything that goes on behind the scenes. In that sense, utopia isn’t actually a place of ideal perfection.

On Mechanics

I love Huxley’s use of punctuation. His pages are littered with semi colons, dashes, parenthesis, all kinds of varied tools to break up sentences versus the staccato like prose of say Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, or Cormac McCarthy, which go heavy handed on full stop periods forming pithy sentences. Huxley’s writing feels rhythmic. You may have a few short sentences, but they are preludes to long-form prose, and then it’s all interwoven with dialogue. Here’s an example:

“Obviously, no use at all. But Podsnap’s Technique had immensely accelerated the process of ripening. They could make sure of at least a hundred and fifty mature eggs within two years. Fertilize and bokanovskify—in other words, multiply by seventy-two—and you get an average of nearly eleven thousand brothers and sisters in a hundred and fifty batches of identical twins, all within two years of the same age,” pg. 5.

Here, the sentences grow longer. Don’t be afraid of tools! Use them.

Quote Analysis from Brave New World

The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory,” pg. 1.

Double word play? Delicious! I love when authors employ a word that could be read as meaning two things at the same time. In this case: cold for all the summer beyond the panes. Panes? Pains? You decide.

… In the scarcely breathing silence, the absent minded, soliloquizing hum or whistle, of absorbed concentration,” pg. 4.

Okay truth, Stephen King would probably want to kill Huxley for his overuse of adverbs (If you have ever read On Writing by Stephen King, you would agree. If you haven’t, read it). In this case, however, there are a few key writing techniques to discuss. First, the rhetorical device personification: characterizing inanimate objects as having human attributes. i.e. form, character, feeling, action, behavior. Here, Huxley writes about the “scarcely breathing silence.” The object: silence. The action: breathing.

Second, as I mentioned in my analysis of On The Road by Jack Kerouac, making a noun into a verb. Here, soliloquy becomes soliloquizing. True, this is an intransitive verb because it does not have a direct object receiving the action, but I most commonly see the word soliloquy expressed as a noun.

“Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness: It depends on the force of the current, the height, and the strength of the barrier,” pg. 43.

In this quote, another rhetorical device: anastrophe, or hyperbaton. Simply put, it’s just reversing the order of words to make the sentence more compelling. Normal: He walked down the street. Using anastrophe: Down the street, he walked. Object first then verb. I also really really enjoy the repetition in threes. Notice “the flood … the flood … the flood” and “the current, the height, and the strength.”

“One of the principle functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder symbolic form) the punishments that we should like but are unable to inflict upon our enemies,” pg. 179.

Nothing so much to note here about style, grammar, or mechanics. I just thought this was a compelling thing to say.

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery and of course stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability,” pg. 221.

Same here.

Mother, monogamy, romance. High spurts the fountain; fierce and foamy the wild jet. The urge has but a single outlet. My love, my baby. No wonder those poor pre-moderns were mad and wicked and miserable. Their world didn’t allow them to take things easily, didn’t allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy. What with mothers and lovers, what with the prohibitions they were not conditioned to obey, what with the temptations and the lonely remorses, what with all the diseases and the endless isolating pain, what with the uncertainties and the poverty—they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation), how could they be stable?” Chapter 3.

Wow, honestly all I have to say is that in this example you really see how well-versed Huxley is in Shakespeare. And to get a true understanding of his writing I recommend anyone verse themselves in Shakespeare as well. So poetic.

The Fundamentals of Social Media with Greg Cargill

Recently, I discussed the measures of online influence. In these terms, I learned it’s important to form relationships with influential figures online by providing them with content that impacts them. That’s how we move on to this: the rules of engagement.

At the Social Media World Forum, I attended a lecture by Blitz founder Greg Cargill who talked about the fundamentals of social media. Just to address this first, I’m sure you’re wondering how all this social media stuff is relevant to writing. You may be asking yourself, “Dude, she is writing about becoming a better writer, so why all the huff about marketing?” Two simple answers: First, honestly I’m just trying to get up to speed with the 21st century. I spent about a year and a half living in a Quonset hut in middle-of-nowhere Argentina where I only used email once a week. Second, you want to sell what you write correct? Social media is marketing, we just are using different tools today than before. Tim Ferriss for example, author of 4-Hour Workweek, sent sale records through the roof for his books. Why? Because he knows very well how to leverage tools available to create a brand identity people love, support, and share. So, to be a writer today is not only about being a good writer it’s also about learning how to get seen. We are only as good as the readers who make us.

That aside, these are the things I learned from Greg Cargill during his presentation.

1. People do not buy what you do, they buy why you do it. Create something that gives value. For more information on this, Greg recommended Simon Sinek’s TED talk: How Great Leaders Inspire Action, which is awesome sauce.

2. Don’t be afraid to start up conversations with people online. Approach someone on Twitter and ask, “Hey, I saw you wrote/blogged about this … why?”

3. Aim small. For writers, become an expert in a topic with a defined following. For inventors, create something that addresses a specific problem within a community and answers it. I believe it was Tim Ferriss who said pick your target market first and then create something for them. As an aside, I would add, make sure it’s something that interests you that you care about.

4. Stay active. It’s not only about providing quality content to a well-defined niche but also forming relationships and staying up to speed. As Greg said, “Write a novel of conversation.”

Thanks Greg! I feel inspired.

Upcoming NYC Events in Social Media, Writing, and Inspiration

I can’t say it enough: events, events, events. The most cost effective way to learn a new skill and meet amazing people. I’ve combed the inter webs looking for what’s up next, and these are some of the saucy prospects I anticipate … and you should come too!

Events in Social Media and Tech

November 4: Mashable Media Summit: The Mashable Media Summit 2011 will spotlight how technology is reinventing journalism, advancing the relationship between news organizations and their communities, reinvigorating advertising and creating new business models. And there will be some big names attending.

November 8 – 10: Ad:Tech NYC An event for digital marketing with speakers from Google, Facebook, and LivingSocial. Topics include social media, mobile, innovation, brand marketing and the media agency.

November 17: Raise Cache, A Celebration of NY Tech and a Benefit for hackNY presented by Raptor Ventures Bringing together more than 1,000 members of New York tech, fashion, media, and arts under the roof to foster the next generation of New York innovators. Mixer, fashion show, after-party? Heck yes!

November 29: New York Tech Meetup: The Demos and Drinks soiree is always a blast. Tickets are usually only $10. It’s a good way to get up to speed on “the next big thing” and connect with fellow entrepreneurs and geeks about their adventures in creation.

December 7 – 9: Seth Godin: The Medicine Ball Session Discovering how to unlock the revolutionary opportunity from one of marketing’s essential Linchpins? If you can front the cost, it will be worth every dime.

February 13 – 17, 2012: Social Media Week Keep your pocket change, this event is free.99! All the essential players will be there Hearst, The New York Times, Google … Check it out. Oh, and it’s taking place around the world so look for the event in your area.

Events in Journalism and Writing

As I stated, often universities, city colleges, and bookstores offer a slew of free (or cheap) events open to the public. This is a great way to network with high profile people and continue our quest in learning to be a good writer. Here’s a few that caught my eye.

November 8: Columbia University School of Journalism Panel: Hearst Changing Media Landscape 2011 A look at the journalism revolution with journalism and media experts. For other events, check out the J-School’s calendar of events to see what you’re into.

November and December: at NYU Journalism Insitute There’s almost too many great opportunities on this list for me to name individually. From a visit from the Village Voice to talks with writers at the New Yorker.

November 14: Adam Gopnik at The Strand Prominent essayist, best known as a columnist at the New Yorker, I first fell for Adam Gopnik via his book Paris to the Moon. Technically events at The Strand are free, but they encourage you to either purchase a $10 gift card or the speaker’s book.

November 29: Francesco Clemente and Salman Rushdie at The Strand Yes, yes, and double yes. The chance to talk with two fantastic authors about one of the countries in the world I am currently most fascinated by? Absolutely.

November and December: McNally Jackson Bookstore Events Hang out in a hip and happenin’ spot on the Lower East Side. They have events almost everyday and there’s also book clubs and story times! Boo ya.

Events in Inspiration

November 8: Travel Massive  A global initiative to connect people in the travel industry locally, bringing together travel bloggers, brands, startups and socially engaged travelers. Share drinks and travel stories with fellow vagabonds!

November 17: Alexis Ohanian, Making Something People Love This course will provide guidelines for creating an enthusiastic following, examining the cult-like obsession with brands like Apple, as well as cases and examples from Alexis Ohanian’s experience growing reddit (one of the largest online communities) hipmunk (what a wild first year it’s been!) and breadpig (we sell geeky things and our fans do the rest!). Plus Alexis is just freaking cool.

November 18: TEDxEast Salon with guest curator Rives If you’re not already a TEDster, become one! TEDxEast holds an amazing, inspiring big event each year, but to follow it up they are putting on smaller-scale meetups called Salons. You meet so many “movers and shakers” at these events and leave feeling so refreshed and enlivened….or, at least I do.

Always check out what’s going on at Skill Share, Brooklyn Brainery, and Meetup.com to see what’s cooking. Again, the list I just put up is obviously result only those things I’ve tilled up. I am sure there are tons of other great things going on around the city, let me know what I’m missing!!

Top 6 Articles on the Future of Journalism: Outlook Optimistic

Fellow journalists, the sky is not falling. Overcoming challenges is only a matter of becoming more creative, adapting. Human ingenuity invites us to adapt to current trends and become more innovative than ever before. I believe the outlook seems … challenging, fun, and exciting. Things are becoming more interactive and more visual. Sigh, oh the digital era!

While I still refuse to burn my books and buy a Kindle, I’m trying right now to learn what it means to be a writer 2.0. That means not only improving prose but also becoming versatile. I’ve talked about vocabulary improvement and made writing style observations, both topics that build a solid foundation. Mastering the fundamentals of writing in general I believe is important, but it’s also important to anticipate where we are headed with all this. Hence, a look into the future.

Here are six articles on the future of journalism that have been extremely helpful (Click on the titles to follow the link through)

Fortune Magazine: The Future of Reading 

Mashable: 8 Must-Have Traits of Tomorrow’s Journalist 

Mashable: The Future Journalist: Thoughts from Two Generations 

The Washington Post: Five Myths about the Future Journalism 

Time Business: Can Computer Nerds Save Journalism? 

Online Classes.org: 40 Important Lectures for Journalism Students

Destination Digital

How else am I learning what I am learning without the cushy, yet expensive, safety net of grad school? Crashing parties and events!

Say what? Yes. Awkward and terrifying as it may be, the goal is to seek out the people you want to be like and hang out with them. Even if you end up being the quiet girl with nothing to add to the conversation because you don’t understand, this has allowed me to absorb terminology and lingo, get quickly up to speed with trends, and make cool friends. By hanging out with techies and social media peeps it’s not that I want to become a master in any one industry, just well versed enough to be in the know. For now, at least.

So, I encourage you to go to mixers and get to know people who know stuff about the stuff you want to know about. Risk humiliating yourself in front of knowledgable people. At a social media conference, I said out loud, “What is a hash tag?” Everyone turned and gawked at me, some poor soul took pity on my ignorance and showed me with a roll of his eyes. Whoops. By making a mistake it took me five seconds to learn something new and the embarrassment made it so that I never forgot.

Five Lessons from Kerouac’s On the Road

Jack Kerouac, you had me at “the road.”

You said, “The road is life;” As a traveler I couldn’t agree more. While I didn’t love everything about this reading — there were actually large sections of the text I breezed through because they went on and on — a lot of times, Kerouac captivated me with creative aphorisms that thrilled my imagination and spirit.

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes,  “Awww…”

Later in this post, I will share the other quotes from this book I jotted down. For now, here are five observations I made while reading this …

1. Word flow. Spontaneous prose. This read helped me in my struggle against perfectionism. I easily get hung up on sentences, punctuation, and the constant asking-of-myself, “Does this sound good?” Sometimes, you just have to write, get on with it, and edit it later. Don’t take yourself so seriously, even if you know already it sounds like crap. Move on knowing it will later get sent to the chopping block. One caveat: don’t completely lose your head. Sometimes I felt Kerouac’s writing was so manic I wondered if he was on speed while writing it. Hence why I would skim a few pages here and there just to move forward.

2. This book attracts men on New York City subways. It’s uncanny, really. I used to spend my hour-long commute from Prospect Heights, Brooklyn into Manhattan reading (I now live in the city, which is bittersweet because I miss those times). Never was there ever an attention-grabbing title like this one; all by men oddly. People usually don’t interrupt me as I tag Post-it Notes to pages and underline words and make notes in margins. But ladies, if you’re looking for some intellectual male attention, I suggest carrying this book around and seeing what happens.

3. Hipsters also love it. If you want to be part of this movement, which Kerouac described as “a new beat generation that I was slowly joining” I might also suggest other independent-thinking, counter-culture titles like Catcher in the Rye or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The narrators of these two kind of take on that same voice.

4. Caffe Reggio, a cool place to hang and write. It’s that bright-green building on MacDougal between W 3rd and Bleecker; trust me, you wont miss it. This is actually where Jack Kerouac used to hang out and it’s also famed for being the first caffe to serve cappuccinos in America. It’s pretty cozy. Get a table, a cup of joe, and observe all the saucy intellects that swing by.

5. Kerouac is boss at creating action. His punctuation choices sail me across the page. To master this, he either connects short sentences that begin with present tense verbs or he eliminates the period all together and opts for long, connecting dashes. For example, “The most fantastic parking lot attendant in the world, he can back a car forty miles an hour into a tight squeeze and stop at the wall, jump out, race among fenders, leap into another car, circle it fifty miles an hour in a narrow space, back swiftly into a tight spot; hump, snap the car with the emergency so that you see it bounce as he flies out; then clear to the ticket shack, sprinting like a track star, hand a ticket …” Pg. 6. This tactic is what makes his writing feel at times frenzied or mad as he calls it.

Notable Quotes: Take Aways from On the Road

To others, this part may seem tedious, but honestly I love what authors say so much that when I stumble upon something that really gets me for one reason or another, I will bookmark it and then painstakingly go back through and write it down verbatim. Perhaps you could use your judgment here as to why you like it or suggest other quotes that you like better.

“Carlo Marx and I once sat down together, knee to knee, in two chairs, facing, and I told him a dream I had about a strange Arabian figure that was pursuing me across the desert; that I tried to avoid; that finally overtook me just before I reached the protective city … It was myself wearing a shroud. Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven … Death will overtake us before heaven. The one thing that we yearn for in our living days that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die?” Pg. 123 – 4

I find this poetically written, especially the beginning. Were the chairs facing? The knees? The people?

“I had nothing to offer anyone else but my own confusion.” Pg. 126

I call this method the surprising word technique. It’s something that makes writing punchy because it catches people off guard. For example, offering someone confusion. In the Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon pulls a similar tactic. He writes, “But the truth is that Landsman has only two moods: working and dead.” Did you jump a little bit? Try it out. The empty box was filled with guilt: a reminder that Megan had just eaten her way to the bottom, alone.

“It was three children of the earth trying to decide something in the night and having all the weight of the past centuries ballooning in the dark before them.” Pg. 134

Using a noun as a verb is also one of my creative favorites. Take an object and add -ing or -ed to the end and see how it sounds. Megan pizza boxed down Fifth Avenue, took up the majority of the sidewalk in a ridiculous, cardboard-like leather jacket too stiff to ply easily passed the moving crowd, smelled stale and waxy in her hip New York threads that fit neither her style nor her body in a natural way.

“We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.” Pg. 134

Another style element, word/phrase repetition.

“Marylou was watching Dean … with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his head and hide it in her closet, an envious and rueful love of him so amazingly himself, all raging and sniffy and crazy-wayed, a smile of tender dotage but also sinister envy that frightened me about her, a love she knew would never bear fruit because when she looked at his hang jawed bony face with its male self-containment and absentmindedness and she knew he was too mad.” Pg. 163

Some alliteration here, “with sullen, sad air, as though.” But honestly I really love the characterization. What a way to describe someone right?

“The people who were in that all-night movie were the end. Beat Negroes who’d come up from Alabama to work in car factories on a rumor; old white bums; young long-haired hipsters who’d reached the end of the road and were drinking wine; whores, ordinary couples, and housewives with nothing to do, nowhere to go, nobody to believe in. If you sifted all Detroit in a wire basket the beater solid core of dregs wouldn’t be better gathered.” Pg. 245

And again, just some more loved description.

The end.

The First Step in Self-Improvement: Evaluation

Snapshot from my journal

The first thing I thought when I wrote this post: is self improvement hyphenated? The answer: yes. As a general hyphenation rule, words compounded with self as a prefix are hyphenated. Self-improvement.

Then I thought, wow, I am a nerd. I think I’ve always been; I’ve just never dropped the gate to geekdom.

Anyway, we begin here with a quickie evaluation. I have found so far what really sets my writing apart from the best of the best is this:

My vocabulary sucks.

Note my choice in language here, obviously using the word sucks on a blog about writing reflects major shortcomings. I have, however, discovered that I have a problem with an easy fix–memorize more words. Thus far, it has felt like learning a new language. Every time I read a book, I underline the words I don’t recognize, note them in a journal, look them up, write down the definition, make flashcards, and then memorize ten new words a week. True, I could just use SAT study guides to memorize vocabulary. But when I extract the words from current reading, it reinforces what I’m learning. Plus, I’m seeking out gems like moiré, panoply, compunction, and exophthalmic.

Because I began my plight to become a better writer a few months ago, I’ve already learned over 100 new words. I’ll show you how. The greatest reward has been recognizing them in different contexts like movies, conversations, and other readings. Someone says a crowd was boisterous and I think, “Thank you Aldous Huxley for writing Brave New World and teaching me that boisterous means rowdy.” Other times, I mistakenly try to use words like –sarconic in conversation with English teachers. Then I find out that I made it up because it’s actually —sardonic. But alas, we keep on learning, if only by error.