My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity 👻
~ George Bernard Shaw 

Ed Hobbs: You’ve got a gift, Roy… But it’s not enough—you’ve got to develop yourself. If you rely too much on your own gift… Then… You’ll fail 🏀
~The Natural (a movie starring Robert Redford) 

Oh—once in your life you find someone,
Who will turn your world around,
Bring you up when you’re feelin’ down 💝
~ Bryan Adams (Lyrics from Heaven) 

I do everything in my power to make my writing not look like writing 👍
~ Elmore Leonard, in David Geherin, Elmore Leonard (New York: Continuum, 1989), p 310

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.
~ Plato (428 BC – 348 BC)

Courage is as often the outcome of despair as of hope; in the one case we have nothing to lose, in the other, everything to gain.
~ Diane de Pointiers (1499 – 1566)

First and foremost, start cultivating the belief that you have something to offer to the world. You have the perfect right to ask, Why should I believe you? I’m glad you asked, because the answer is simplicity itself: I know that you have something to offer to the world. The simple fact that you’re a human is plenty right there to convince me that you’ve been endowed with what it takes to offer something to the world ⛩

Remember, you will want to truly believe the same, at least to the same degree that I believe in you: Yes, it’s never too early—or too late—to start cultivating a rock-solid belief in the trueness of what you’re writing; after all, your writing is what you’ll be offering to the world.

No doubt there’s some work to be done to get there; all of us have to pay our dues. So what do you need to do to get there? It is simply this: Through your proverbial “blood, sweat, and tears”, elevate your writing to its zenith; climb your own Pantheon 🗻

Writing is not about making money; if it were, that’s news at least to your blogger. Writing is about passion; it’s all about busting your guts in the telling of the stories that you have to tell 👽

But what if we want to write about basket-weaving? Um, uh, so let’s see 💤

So I may not be much help in that area, fine and noble though such endeavors may well be, but let’s look at it this way: Why don’t we find a topic that you’re passionate about, and then we take it from there? Yes, yes? 💥

Great. I’m glad you asked. The rest of this essay is about exactly that, plus a bunch of related themes to help you grow as a writer. Read on.

2. Don’t Listen To Yourself 🙉

Whoah, wait up, dear Reader. Wait up! I mean, hold your horses 🐎

I beg of you to imagine how Charles Dickens—now he sure was a dickens of a writer—would have fared had he been pelted with a question like the following one from a potential publisher on first submitting his historical novel A Tale of Two Cities:

• Publisher: “Mr. Dickens, you really should make up your mind. Now was it the best of times or was it the worst of times? Surely it couldn’t have been both.” 😾
• Charles Dickens: “Excuse me. Yo, what did you just say?” 😼

See, I told you so; there is a method to my madness. What I did above—I might as well spill the beans now—was to appeal to your finer sensibilities by hauling writing greatness into the fray: Mr. Dickens himself, yes, the dickens of a writer that he was. Look, if Dickens can speak of two seemingly opposite ideas in the same breath—kind of like how the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that Schrödinger’s cat can be simultaneously alive and dead—then surely a lesser writer like your blogger can do the same. 🐱 Can I, please? Pretty please—with sugar on top—just this one time? 🍯

Now if only Dickens could’ve stopped short of bringing weirdos like Miss Havisham into the mix of his novel. Oh well, let’s put this all in perspective: other artists have committed far worst atrocities when they got carried away. I mean, wasn’t there the famous artist—that Van Gogh dude, methinks—who cut off his own ear? 👂 ✂

Oh. My. God.

One piece of advice: Don’t do anything even remotely like that, please don’t!

Again, may I suggest that you all, you aspiring writers, maintain lifestyles that are, um, slightly more staid—in the beginning at least—and stay away from bizarre stuff like that. Once you’re rich and famous, of course, all bets are off 👻

So you see, my essays—loony though they may appear on first blush—aren’t that  loony after all, especially when compared with what you read above; what I proposed, come to think of it, is what I would like to think of as falling within the rubric of “dialectic wisdom“, and that, too in the realm of “dialectic wisdom”—well, I grant you that it’s not that much of a dazzling display of dialectic brilliance, but still…

Come on, you’ve got to give your blogger a break sometimes, guys and gals 👍

Just sayin’, just sayin’ 😗

3. Intend For Others 🙋

But how, you may well be wondering, could one ever intend for others when—with our ever-attendant and all-too-human foibles—we more often than not have trouble intending things for ourselves, let alone intending for others 🙈

I mean, aren’t we turning solipsism on its head here? Would we not be thereby turning the micro-cosmic into the macro-cosmic? Are we perhaps blazing anew the path shown to us by the legendary physicist Richard Feynman when he enlightened the world on the eerie phenomenon of electrons tunneling backward in time? Allow me to clarify—what I mean by “Intend For Others” is simply this:

When you write, always treat others—after all, you’re presumably writing not only for yourself, but also for others—as though they were already the selves that you wish for them to be. Yes, as if they’ve already attained that selfhood 😇

Again, a little clarification, I think, will help clear up the matter in tying this advice back to how it can inform your daily writing journeys:

Always write—just as you behave—as if you readers already are the way you would wish for them to be: their best selves. Do that, and the rest will naturally follow.

4. Extend Yourself 🏃

How Writing Really Works

Work hard. Really, really hard. When you think you’ve written enough for the evening, write some more. Write until you are transported into the throes of fatigue and on the verge of collapsing into sleep right there at your keyboard, or next to your writing pad if you prefer the time-honored—and eminently sensible—way of writing in longhand; I’ll have something to say about exactly that in a bit.

Where others may be tired and ready to call it a day, you’re just warming up—so if ever you entertained a thought otherwise, I invite you to think again. Yes, if you think that your day’s worth of writing is done when you’re merely tired, please think again. That isn’t how writing works 🍒

This is how writing works ⛏

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
~ Thomas Mann

As I revised this section—more on the crucial topic of “revision” later—something cool happened, as in: Oh. My. God.

So as I looked up online the quotation above—I had merely recalled it from memory and needed to make sure I was quoting it with integrity—my search randomly turned up an article by Joan Erakit: Being a Writer Is Hard. Joan’s article is clearly written from the heart, and I’ve bookmarked it for later re-reading!

Here’s the thing: Much as I told you earlier in this essay, I didn’t consult any resources—online, or in book form, or otherwise—to see what advice others had given on the subject of writing and stuff like that. But what do you do when marvelous advice (such as the one Joan has to offer in her Huffington Post article) lands on your lap? 🐱

Sing Your Life With Your Words

What I say here can be taken literally as much as can be taken metaphorically. How you choose to view it is fully in your purview; the choice is yours to make.

But first, shall we quickly check out some haunting lyrics from a classic Roberta Flack song? It goes like so

I heard he sang a good song
I heard he had a style
And so I came to see him
To listen for a while
And there he was this young boy
A stranger to my eyes 

Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song
Killing me softly with his song
Telling my whole life with his words
Killing me softly with his song 

I felt all flushed with fever
Embarassed by the crowd
I felt he found my letters
And read each one out loud
I prayed that he would finish
But he just kept right on
~ Roberta Flack (Lyrics from Killing Me Softly With His Song)

If you can do with your prose what the “young boy” in Roberta Flack’s song—the one who was “Singing my life with his words“—did with his singing, then you know you’ve got a shot at it.

Meanwhile, the advice we’re talking about here (i.e. “Extend Yourself”) is so crucial that I’ll now devote a good chunk of this essay to it: In other words, even if you don’t take away anything else from this essay—and while I’d like to think that there at least a handful of points that you could take away—if you garner a single piece of advice, please make it this one:

Always remember that you were born to create great art. You, and you alone—you’ll know this in your heart of hearts—are destined to create the art of prose that nobody else ever can.

Let me try to explain what I mean: So I rely on my readers to keep me educated. I try to avoid wallowing in my ignorance as often and as much as I can. In fact, this is as good a time to encourage you to feel free and contact me—I’m very approachable—thorough your comments, through Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

Creating Great Art

Having got that out of the way, let’s see if we can get a grip on what it means to create great art; and I’m not talking about Rembrandt or Van Gogh. Writing is—to my mind at least—as much an art as any other you care to name. So that, I would like to think, leads us to wonder what great writing looks like: Is there a litmus test—I offer profuse apologies for bringing up this topic to anyone who has reviled the study of Chemistry and deemed it a sordid mess—in which to dip a piece of writing and get the result out, yay or nay, something like the Harry Potter hat? I’m afraid not; at least there wasn’t one the last time I checked. And I’m not holding my breath for it either…

My two cents’ worth on this is that you’ll know that you’re on to writing good prose when what you write moves you. Once that happens, you know you’ve got something good going. At that point, do everything in your power to propel it forward till you reach the stars. Yes, this sounds nebulous, especially since you have an engineer and computer scientist—all rolled into one—serving this advice… My point is that you have to take that leap of faith when you arrive at your springboard. When that happens, the need for the fabled litmus test—I offer profuse apologies for bringing up this topic a second time to anyone who has reviled the study of Chemistry and deemed it a sordid mess—that’ll be your calculus for deciding whether what you’ve got in your hands is great or just so-so.

The Pyramid Of Writers

During literally the past 48 hours, I’ve had the pleasure of discovering a remarkable book by Stephen King: On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft. Folks who know me may have been surprised—and possibly startled—to hear me mention the name of the maven of the horror genre. I never was into that genre, and am still not drawn to horror books in the least. But I have every reason to believe—and I say this based on the great things I’ve heard about King’s books—that he is a great writer.

And while I’ve merely skimmed through a few sections of King’s On Writing, I can already vouch for its stellar quality. Closer at hand, there’s an amazingly apt section in that book that I’ll now briefly share with you. King notes how

People don’t just arrive at this out of nowhere. It takes years of cultivation.

Noblesse Oblige

Or maybe there are a few writers, a rare breed to be sure, who can bypass the whole process—somehow short-circuiting the seemingly unavoidable and admittedly arduous processes that writers of all stripes undergo in their training, maturation, refinement, and elevation of their prose into art form—and rely simply on the artfully-linguistic (or perhaps linguistically-artful) primordial soup that brews unbidden in their brains. If you’re one of those, thank your lucky stars and know that you have to share your art with the world; and there are no ifs, ands, or buts here; and no, I’m not beguiling you by leading you down the alley of noblesse oblige—a French phrase that literally means “nobility obligates”—I assuredly am not. For one thing, I wasn’t born into nobility or anything even remotely like that 🎭

But yes, I’ve written those exact words—the phrase noblesse oblige—on a green board with a white chalk that I had ferreted out of a drawer in a table near which I happened to be seated, all alone in a classroom, in-between classes one afternoon as an undergraduate in Houston. I still haven’t quite fathomed why I did that. All I recall is that I had to pick up the chalk and write that phrase; was this my way of getting it out of my system? I was at that time—and remain to this day—an unabashed geek who revels in the joy of learning and helping others learn. So with my mental accelerator wired to the floor, as always, what I reflexively did that afternoon was perhaps the ideational equivalent of a tic, a reflexive and unbidden act of creativity, an ode that had to see the light of day. But whatever it was, I still haven’t unraveled the ball of yarn that beckoned me that afternoon. All I recall—and it’s one of my clearest memories ever, just as if it took place yesterday, not on an afternoon a couple of decades ago—I distinctly recall doing so, unbidden.

We Joke Around Here And Such

Dear reader, you know me well, always joking and stuff, you know. Yeah, relax. After all, this is the playground of ideas which we have—as the years have rolled by—come to know as Programming Digressions central. You can always come here and bask in the sunshine of comfort, camaraderie, collegiality, kinship, and, most of all, for the unencumbered exchange of ideas. We’re pretty much all geeks and nerds hanging out here in these quarters. Okay, so as the impresario here, I’ll never allow this place to become seedy; if you wish to plant the seeds of fertile ideas, though, I’ll take you by the hand and encourage you like you’ve never known encouragement before.

You trust me, and I trust you—you all are simply the best. I couldn’t have asked for a better set of readers. Period. And to that end, to serve you as best as I humanly can—I consider that my top priority as I write every single sentence, every single word—I try my best to be forthright and express myself candidly. If ever I find even the slightest trace of deceit or deception make the faintest of inroads into what I write, I know that my writing life is done; as much as honesty is a salve, deception is poison.

A Solemn Note

I’ve got something solemn to share—So yes, I’m always joking in my essays and stuff like that; we’re all a relaxed bunch here. But a time arrives one is compelled to make a statement, and when your heart is in the throes of breaching self-disclosure; this is such a time, and I feel compelled to engage in some self-disclosure.

I. Am. Dead. Serious 💀

As you read what I’m about to say, please keep these two points in mind and you’ll be good: Self-disclosure. Allegory. To that I’ll add a third: Parable.

Okay, for the sake of accuracy, let’s quickly revise what we just read: Please keep the three points
above—Self-disclosure; Allegory; and Parable—in mind and you’ll be good 👌

Beholding A Spectacle

But first, you need to know something… No matter what happens, no matter where we all end up—closer still to one another or perhaps farther away—please keep what I’m about to say close to your heart. I will, as ever, remain forthright and candid in all matters except one this one, and to which I happen to be privy: I’ve intimately known someone who can tap into the artfully-linguistic—or linguistically-artful if you will—primordial soup that brews in unbroken cycles, unbeknownst and unbidden even to them. I was in awe as my eyes beheld the creation of art of the highest order.

I suspect that I’m not doing a good job at all of describing the experience of witnessing someone in the midst of the act of effortlessly producing art, hammering out prose just as fast as they could type, and doing all that with effortless ease. I was in awe. I felt like when I was a little boy, gazing heavenward at the billions and billions of shining stars, lighting up our elegant universe.

I said above, and you probably noted as much when I said it—that they were “doing all that with effortless ease”—and it still rings true with me. Could it be that they were like the proverbial duck, paddling… I doubt it, though the duck metaphor did cross my mind so, for what it’s worth, I wished to run it by you. We’re talking full disclosure here, anyway, right?

Trying To Describe An Artist At Work

But whatever words I could conceivably choose with which to paint a half-decent picture of a true artist at work, I already know that the effort is futile; I will invariably fail at describing it adequately enough. What I’m trying to describe borders on the outer boundaries of reason, entering the realm of ESP… and stuff.. Bromberg said about that book. It holds between its covers… But I have seen it with more than my eyes, I’ve felt it with my sense. So while I can’t say that I’ve seen it in action, I can say with utmost confidence that I’ve witnessed it in action; like when you wake up from a dream and know what you’ve witnessed and yet you’re unable to fully retrace the steps through which all that happened.

The mere realization of something so subtle and yet blindingly obvious taking place before my eyes nearly made me faint. I may even have gone into a syncope. It’s a blur, but when I came to, I realized that I had witnessed true art being created before my eyes. I was in awe, and I wanted to tell them—I wanted to shout at the top of my lungs—that they truly had the rarest-of-rare quality in having what it takes to write words that drip with gold, verses that shimmer with the sheen of silver. But I couldn’t. Somehow it all eluded me. I’m sorry, I really am 😔

A Promise

But you have my word: When I meet them again another time—and I sure hope I do so because it was a deeply moving honor unlike any I’ve known in my life—I just might have better luck. Then again, I might not. But I’ll give it my best shot; I’ll try my best to let them know that our world needs to know about their art. They can make spirits sing and they can make hearts weep. They have what it takes. And yes, they have the moral responsibility to share their art—their prose—with the world and lift it above the humdrum of the noise of everyday life. When that happens, we’ll no longer need to live lives of quiet desperation. I look forward to the dawn of such a day, a day that’ll be its usual selfsame self and yet find itself tinged with dripping gold and bathed in shimmering silver 👑

Okay, you all can breathe easy now and, in turn, so can I. Whew, was that intense or what? I don’t know about you, but I was mostly holding my breath all the while I wrote the couple of paragraphs above. And truth be told, I even debated a few times in the first place whether I should even divulge what I just did. But of course I’ve gone ahead and done exactly that. And you know what, at the end of the day, we’re all in this together; if we don’t share our experiences freely with one another in sincere acts of helping one another grow, then much will have been lost, or even worse, never even gained, though what was never gained can perhaps be regained.

Yes, there are those rare souls who truly have what it takes of tap into phenomenal powers of creativity and commune with their fertile imaginations where most of the rest of us would simply fall flat on our faces, tripping all over ourselves in our zeal.

Mere Mortals

And then there are the rest of us. We, mere mortals. I know this all to well because I’ve fallen and bruised my face from lack of dexterity in weaving words into strands of gold that might have captivated my own heart; that is a first, essential step; but if I can’t quite take that step yet, then I know that I have a long way to go still. But that’s okay. I take heart in the wise Chinese saying that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And indeed it does.

So not to worry even one bit; we’re in this together. We’ll help one another create absolutely the best art that we’re capable of creating, just you and I—be it be the loveliest prose you could set your eyes on or be it code of breathtaking beautiful that make your heart skip on beholding it. You have my word. If anyone asks who told you so, would you please tell them that Akram did, and on good authority, too? Thank you.

Sprezzatura

Let me close this thought with an example with which I was recently enlightened by a reader—a reader of these essays who just happens to also be a most highly esteemed friend—about the nature of great art. They enlightened me on how

The Italians have a word for it: sprezzatura. Making something difficult look easy is the mark of a truly gifted performer or writer.

Then I got to thinking that I have a good friend (based in Canada for many years now) who is originally from Italy. Who better to get insight into an Italian word than someone who grew up speaking Italian. So that’s where I went next. On reaching out to my Italian friend, I got a gracious and detailed response. For reasons of confidentiality, I can’t share the entire response (personal communication). But here is a part—intact, including the tears-of-joy emoticon—of what my friend wrote back to me:

Ah, if only I could set my sights that high 🔭

5. Write For Yourself 🎧

You all know me well as the software craftsman that I am, to which credentials I’d like to add—with obvious pride—that I’m also a nerd, and a technologist whose imagination has recently been given a pair of wings through the aegis of a book that goes by the name of Plato and the Nerd (The MIT Press), and I’m a programming languages enthusiast, too. But gosh, surely I’m not a writer—remember everything we read earlier about how I sometimes suspect that you all would rather have my essays towed away, and at my expense, too? Or something like that, right? Or can somebody actually convince me that I am a, gulp, bona fide’ writer?

But hey, I take heart in what Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation when he had memorably advised to

Hitch your wagon to a star

That, surely is a dream floating far away from me, ever so elusively; like the butterfly which hasn’t alighted, yet, on the flower on which it was destined to alight. Ah, if only I could be that kind of a writer. But wait, maybe I am one, already and just don’t know it?

You see, I tried my hand at rhyming verse in an earlier essay—and folks haven’t pelted me with tomatoes, so far, anyway—so maybe I could take that as a sign that I’m a poet and I just didn’t know it? Hmm…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one
~ John Lennon (Imagine)

Yeah, this is precisely what happens anytime I entertain discursive forays into solipsism and stuff like that; cool though it surely is, it also makes me think back to my undergraduate days taking a class in Philosophy… As a side note, I came first in my class—goodness, come to think of it, the enrollment in the Philosophy class that semester was quite massive; I had at least 150 classmates. I don’t quite recall whether that class was oversubscribed just that semester or something, but I distinctly recall the auditorium in which I used to sit—my classmates and I, packed like sardines in a cavernous auditorium—taking in each word of my professor with rapt attention. Indeed, your blogger is just plain nuts.

Hey, methinks I doth digress. Nevermore. Quoth the Raven ✈

(Okay, okay—hey, you wise guy snickering there in the back row—I do know my raven from my airplane, okay? It’s just that I can’t find the emoticon for a bird, let alone a raven, in the palette available to me. Your artist has come up short; can you, like, live with that, for crying out loud?)

6. Write For The World 🌝

Question your assumptions and open your heart; when you do, your writing will open unto you. And that happens—when your writing opens unto you—you will know that it’s time to open your writing to the world in which we live.

Allow plans larger than you own to fold.

And be patient. Miracles will take place before your very eyes.

7. Get To Know Yourself 🌱

Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.
~Oscar Wilde 

Solitude is a good place to visit but a poor place to stay.
~ Josh Billings (1818 – 1885)

To Your Own Self Be True

I was tempted to call this section “Believe In Yourself” but that sounded too Tony Robbins. So there.

Of course, there will be times—for writers and everyone else—when you’ll be compelled to seek growth; it’s an all-too-natural process. Just as a snake sheds its skin, we humans, too, outgrow our old selves and need to shed them; indeed, to grow into new states of being. So should you wish to change, not to worry a bit. I found some advice on exactly that, too:

To change one’s life:
1. Start immediately.
2. Do it flamboyantly.
3. No exceptions.
~ William James

Wow, did you notice that James had his stuff down as a list, did you now? Pretty impressive, I would say. I mean, we nerds actually could’ve made an engineer out of James, what with our propensity for list-making at the drop of a hat?

Just imagine: William James the resident engineer. Hmm… Um, while good for us all who dwell in the realm of technology, and should such a happenstance ever have transpired—i.e. William James having a change of heart and devoting his life to the pursuit of engineering—all that may not have gone over too well with the Psychology department at Harvard University. I mean, who would’ve gone on to write The Principles of Psychology with which to put legions of future students in the ivy-lined classrooms to sound sleep? 😴

[I meant, ivy on the outside, not inside, or at least that’s how I hope things there were and are]
[Pics from my tour from ages ago (undergraduate days) of Cambridge: Harvard / MIT, plus Amherst / Etc. go here…]

8. Read A Lot To Write Well 📬

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
~ Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973) 

I have nothing but confidence in you. And very little of that.
~ Groucho Marx

Hopefully, this piece of advice is descriptive enough, so I won’t elaborate beyond what I’ve said above 📣

9. Diversify 🐙

Training is everything….Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
~ Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson 

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.
~ Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519)

Read widely; do not limit yourself.

Broaden your horizons; the sky truly is the limit.

Reach for the stars.

(I owe the genesis of this piece of advice to my friend, the late John Vlissides of IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center—the “V” in “GHJV” (Gamma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides), the inimitable Gang of Four (GoF)—who enlightened the world with gifts that I have seen in rare, few others. Vlissides remains one of all-time programming heroes of all time, right up there with Guy Steele, who, by the way, is widely regarded as the father of Common Lisp, and just happens to be the lead author of the Java Language Specification).

10. Commit Professor Trimble’s Book To Memory 🎓

11. Read Anything By Philip Bromberg 🎭

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
~ Maya Angelou (1928 – 2014)

Sublime Prose on Display

Should you wish to see examples of truly sublime prose on display—and while YMMV, I encourage you to try the strategy of learning-from-examples—look no further than the work of Philip M. Bromberg. His writing is replete with honesty, humor, and thoughtfulness. I’ve written about Bromberg’s work in several of my earlier essays; for example, you can check out this essay which explores the nexus between beautiful computer code and beautiful prose.

And since we are—and will be—seeing Dickinson’s genius on display (in this essay) by way of her verses of poetry, it’s only fair that you have the chance, too, to briefly check out the work of Bromberg, a more-contemporary genius; though he may not not quite be in the league of Dickinson, surely he isn’t too far behind either. Interestingly enough, Bromberg has written quite a bit of and about Dickinson, for example. On top of that, as if this wasn’t a barrel of monkeys already, for crying out loud, yet another individual, a professor at UPenn (Max Cavitch), decided to join the fray—in “meta” or “recursive” fashion—and written about his (i.e. Bromberg’s) writing about her (i.e. Dickinson’s) work. Fancy that! 🐵 🐵 🐵

An Example

In my book, Bromberg is the master of crafting seamless prose, which is something that I’ve tried to explain in an essay elsewhere, and which was in the context of chatting about his book entitled Awakening the Dreamer 😴

Hmm… “Voldemort In Reverse”?! What in the world could be going on here. Here’s what…

So we had got to talking some about that holothurian critter above, whose name, by the way, sounds right up there—actually right down there since we’re speaking of ocean-dwelling critters—with another equally-hideous-sounding name: coelacanth. What are those marine biologist guys and gals thinking when they cook up such outlandish names? 

Just look at what those marine biologists have already thrown at us simple folks—holothurian, coelacanth, elasipodida, pelagothuriidae—I mean, sheesh… Where does this all stop, if ever it does? Next, we’ll be hearing about critters with names such as Arabor, Dor-lómin, Mithrin, Elrond, and stuff like that. Good grief, Charlie Brown 🐶

Marine Biologists: Please Meet Bilbo Baggins

I mean, why can’t they use honest-to-goodness names that we folks—all of the rest of us who live on Main Street—can relate to as well? How about Bilbo, or Baggins? Better yet, let’s have our esteemed marine biologists name the next creature they discover… Yes! That’s it: Bilbo Baggins. Maybe even Gollum. I mean, is that memorable or what? 🐉

Now try remembering a name like holothurian, coelacanth, elasipodida, pelagothuriidae. Exactly, that’s all I’m saying—just sayin’, if anybody would only listen. Sigh 😞

He Who Must Not Be Named

Anyhow, speaking of the holothurian, doesn’t it’s philosophy of life remind you of “he who must not be named“? You know who I’m talking about here, don’t you? In case you’ve been living under a rock and somehow managed to evade exposure to the phenomena that is the Harry Potter series, here’s what’s up…

Okay, so I will toss caution to the wind and somewhat grudgingly divulge the name—notwithstanding the dire warnings of doing exactly that—of “he who must not be named“: Voldemort, pestiferous dimwit if ever there was one. I mean, think about it this way: 

• Voldemort—proactive baddy that he was— was kind of like a holothurian in reverse action, having planned ahead by splitting and stashing. You know, grisly stuff like that.
• Any given holothurian out there (that gelatinous sea creature) is sort of a reactive Voldemort, splitting itself into smithereens when it finds itself in mortal danger.

You know, something like that… 😑

A Poem That Rocks

Ah, and let’s not forget that Szymborska’s poem (“Autotomy”) goes like this

They say that revision is the heart and soul of writing
(Personal communication with author, I mean, blogger; the two are the same, though, right?)

It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly.
~ C. J. Cherryh 

The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951)