Tag: writing

Season Two: Byzantion

Welcome to Season Two! I hope you like the updated look of the blog.

As I said in Tuesday’s post, I am narrowing the focus of this blog for this season. Over the last couple of months, I have become fascinated by the Byzantine Empire, and as a result I have decided to blog about my research into that period of history.

I will blog about other things, but as often as I can, I’ll discuss what I’m learning about the Byzantines: the eastern Roman Empire, which stood for 1,123 years from the time that the Emperor Constantine move the capitol of the Roman Empire there in 330 AD until the city of Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks on June 4th, 14531.

I offer this disclaimer: I’m new to the field of historical research. I’ll try to be as disciplined as I can, but I will likely make some rookie mistakes. If you, dear reader, are a historian yourself, I’ll appreciate any feedback you can offer on my efforts.

My intention is to both maintain a conversational tone (it’s a blog, after all) and subject any historical writing I do to the best level of academic rigor I can manage within this context. I don’t see much evidence that citing in blogs is done to this standard, but The Chicago Manual seems to me to offer the best solution to these two seemingly conflicting ambitions. I’ll start by using a summary of the 15th ed., as that is what I currently have access to, but will move to the 17th ed. as soon as I can acquire a copy.

Also under the heading of disclaimers, I do realize that there are many people who’ve devoted a lifetime to delving into the incredibly rich history of the Empire. I may or may not have much of interest to show someone like that, especially at first. My enthusiasm comes from the several fascinating things about the period that I’ve learned, beginning with the fact that no one from that period of history thought of themselves as a “Byzantine2“, and my hope to make the case that those eleven hundred years are much more important to the shape of the world as it is today than most people realize.

I’m also nerdy enough to believe that some people think it’s fun to learn new stuff. If you’re willing to follow along, I will try to share my journey to Byzantium in as entertaining a way as I can. My hope is that you’ll find the place as fascinating as I do.

Still, this blog will not be solely focused on doings a thousand years and more ago: I have other interests, and I will write about them here. Think of these posts as letters from your geeky friend Diane. To wit: Your geeky friend Diane has stumbled, via one of her random-ish fits of curiosity, into a topic that is richer and more crucial than she expected. Now she wants to tell you what she’s learning, because she’s excited about it, but doesn’t want to become a bore with only one topic in her head.

Notes

1. Speros Vryonis, Byzantium and Europe (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1970), 189-92

2. Anna Komnene, The Alexiad, trans. E. R. A. Sewter, rev. Peter Frankopan (New York: Penguin Classics, 2009), 5

It Actually Is a Hiatus

Hello, beautiful!

I hope you haven’t missed me too much! I’m sorry to have been away for so long. I was enjoying my Summer, and yes, writing.

This past May and June, I had the rare privilege of hearing Jason Reynolds (who’s winning all the things right now) give two graduation addresses, and they were both very profound, in different ways. One was for Lesley University’s graduate commencement, and the other was at graduation for the semester-after-mine’s graduation ceremony at the MFA program I went to.

The gist of his second second speech at the MFA graduation was that as writers, we are not chosen, we choose to write.

I seem to keep firing up Word. I’ve either been actively writing or thinking about what I’ve been writing this whole summer. I feel like I’m doing the thing. I’m not going to analyze that too deeply right now, but… thing.

And I will be starting up my second season of this blog the first week of October.

Keep watching!

About Englyn Cyrch

This week I am writing Welsh quattrains, one a day for the whole week. The particular Welsh quatrain (four-line poem) form I have decided to focus on is called an englyn cyrch. The best sense I can make from what Google Translate tells me the term means is “attack verse,” or maybe “verse attack,” or even possibly “verse raid.” So, maybe they’re little four-line blitzes.

Englyn Cyrch are very math-y. Each line has seven syllables. The first, second, and last lines must rhyme, and the third line must rhyme with the second, third, or fourth syllable in the last line. I appreciate the strict form as well as the brevity. My challenge is to make them seem somehow natural, or at least musical.

The ones I have written so far this week have not been stellar, but I’m enjoying them as little word puzzles, or language exercises, or little sketches. They’re fun to make on that level. As of this writing, I have produced five (the fifth one went live a half an hour before this post did, the third will appear later in the week) and I think that they are trending towards better as the week goes on, though I liked the one I wrote first best so far.

I hope you find them amusing, and I invite you to try making your own. Happy writing!

Three Month Mark

CHALLENGE: Answer these questions by the time this post goes live: Do I go on hiatus or do I keep doing this? If I keep going, when do I stop? If I stop, how long until I start again?

I have found it difficult lately to meet my self-imposed deadlines here. I think that I may need to keep trying to challenge myself to do these posts for the simple reason that it is difficult.

I mean, that makes sense, right? Oh, good. Another question.

Well, really it’s all the same question: Keep doing this? I think I need to. Pushing through anything that might seem like writer’s block would be a great reason to keep plugging away. The challenge of finding subjects and following whatever research and/or soul-mining paths that are necessary to keep producing blog entries could be seen as an end in and of itself.

What’s been happening lately is that I will start working on an entry and then realize that I’ve taken on a bigger subject than can be handled in a blog entry. I also need to place work elsewhere than here. The fine line I have not found yet is the one around what is appropriate for this blog, and what fits better elsewhere.

Not finding a way to quickly identify the proper place for each new writing impulse means that I have more work to do here.

RESOLVED: Keep going! There will be a new entry here on Tuesday of next week, and for the next several weeks.

A Bit About the American Sentence

This week, I am posting at least one American Sentence per day, and a few extras randomly during the week.

What is an “American Sentence”?

The American Sentence is a poetic form that was invented by Allen Ginsburg, who felt that the English language was not well suited to the 5/7/5 format of Haiku. He proposed eliminating the three lines with the strict syllabic formula and keeping the seventeen syllables. An American Sentence can have as many or as few sentences as will fit in those seventeen syllables.

I have tried my hand at it here and there through the years. I enjoy the challenge of stripping a thought or story down to bare, and sometimes lyrical, essentials. This week, as I have given myself the challenge of making one or more per day, I notice some things about how I work to create these little bullet-point-like poems.

I have started each one so far with about 30 to 50 syllables, and then I whittle them down, going through anywhere from 5 to 12 drafts. The refining of these drafts clarifies and brings into focus what I am trying to capture: the final version of the Sentence has, to this point, consistently been more vivid. It’s like panning for gold.

My standout examples so far, I find, are directly experiential, rather than reflective or philosophical. I’m not entirely convinced that this will be true always, but as I continue to work with the form, I am learning more of what’s possible within it. I am finding that simple language seems to shine brighter in these compact poetic bursts.

Because these little poems are coming directly from my experience, they are snapshots of my environment, shutter clicks from my world view. In my hands, they are truly American sentences.

I invite you to give them a try. You can post your American Sentences here in the comments, if you like.