Tag Archives: ontario

Literary Devices from A to Z – Brought to you by the letter L

graphic from http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com

is for Lyric

A lyric is a song-like poem meant to express the thoughts and feelings of a person. Shakespeare’s sonnets are a form of lyric poetry.

In the short story “Aliens’ Waltz”, Josef Scheliemann describes his alien sighting using lyric prose:

Slowly move, quick box step, twirling round, open, turn. One-two-three, two-two-three. Shoulders rise. Fall again. Moving on single plain, tall and completely poised. Triangular faces showcase ovular eyes. Smoky and luminous in celestial moonlight. Fabric of dress gowns shine twinkling in the night. One-two-three, two-two-three, weightlessly promenade. Steam buoys from the wheat stalks forming nebulous mist. Feet barely skim farmland in a spiraling glide.

Though admittedly not perfect, the prose in this passage is meant to sound like a waltz. Effort was made to ensure stressed and unstressed symbols and pauses approximate the one-two-three-one-two-three time of a waltz. Ideally, because it is lyric, it should sound as if it were meant to be paired with music, such as (my favourite) “The Blue Danube Waltz”.

What do you think? Does it sound like a waltz when read out loud, or am I asking too much of the reader? Have you ever tried something similar? Was it as mind-numbingly difficult to execute as my sample lyric text?

Rob Ford needs a speech writer

I was never one to go out for politics. As a young adult, I never voted, primarily because I had no idea what was going on. Politics were boring and I never cared to pay attention. Politics—Canadian politics in particular—w ere, quite frankly, never worth following.

Until recently.

Before I continue, it must be said that I don’t live in Toronto. As a citizen of Vaughan—and by extension, Ontario—and as Toronto is the capital of Ontario, Toronto politics nevertheless affect me. In addition, all of the local media I monitor is Toronto based. And the Toronto-based media (as well as some American-based) has recently been abuzz with the antics of Toronto mayor Rob Ford. Has, in fact, been saturated with it this past week.

For those of you who are unaware, Rob Ford has been the centre of much controversy in the past year, with accusations ranging from misappropriating a Toronto Transit Commission bus on the city dollar to shelter the high school football team he coached, to inappropriate use of funds in his campaign, to appearing in public drunk and disorderly, making inappropriate and unwanted sexual passes at partygoers. As the icing on this week’s cake, a video has surfaced, purporting to document Mr. Ford smoking crack cocaine with drug dealers. The owners of the video want $200,000 for the file. They showed it to The Toronto Star who declined to purchase it as they do not pay for news stories. The gossip tabloid website Gawker.com is currently in the process of raising the money for the purchase.

After spending a week in which he remained mum to the media, Mr. Ford finally spoke today in a forty-some-odd second speech in which he made the following statements: “I do not use crack cocaine, nor am I an addict of crack cocaine…I cannot comment on a video that I have never seen or that does not exist. It is most unfortunate, very unfortunate, that my colleagues and the great people of this city have been exposed to the fact that I have been judged by the media without evidence” (Gillis).

Within a half an hour after broadcasting Mayor Ford’s speech on CBC Radio One, a spokesperson from Gawker was interviewed in which he argued that Mr. Ford did not deny any of the allegations. He accused him of pussyfooting around the accusations. His reasoning goes something like this:

1. “I do not use crack cocaine” means he does not currently use crack cocaine. It does not address his use of the substance in the past six months.

2. “nor am I an addict of crack cocaine” means he is not currently an addict because he does not currently use it. Heavy emphasis on the word “currently”.

3. “I cannot comment on a video that I have never seen” does not refute the existence of such a video.

4. “or that does not exist” leaves the possibility open that a video may exist, but not one that Mr. Ford has ever seen.

The spokesperson went on to insist both he and two Toronto Star reporters confirmed the identification of Mr. Ford as the subject of the video.

I did some research on Mr. Ford. Wikipedia reports he completed one year of post-secondary education at Carleton University (Rob). Because I know there is a question about the validity of Wikipedia, I searched other sources as well. The Star reports he quit two credits short of a degree (Rider). Macleans reports the only thing known for sure about Mr. Ford’s post-secondary education is that he attended Carleton between 1989 and 1990 and later attended York University, taking courses through distance education from 1990 to 1991 (Jerema). The implication in all online sources is that he listed his years in attendance at a post-secondary institution on his mayoral application as if to gloss over the fact that he didn’t graduate.

I mention this because I don’t think Mayor Ford’s speech today was a way for him to dance around the subject of whether or not he had a drug problem, or whether, as his recently fired chief of staff, Mark Towhey apparently suggested, he needed to “go away and get help” (Strashin). I think his speech was a denial of accusations written by a man under a great deal of stress who, pressed by the media and his staff to make a statement, neglected to hire himself a proof-reader before reading his statement.

Speaking as a teacher of English who just came from a half-hour discussion in which she tried to explain to a student the nuances between explaining evidence and giving its significance, many people, untrained in writing a series of cohesive paragraphs, neglect to proofread to ensure a connection is made between the point they are trying to prove and their thesis. Consider the following statements:

1. “I do not use crack cocaine nor am I an addict of crack cocaine” – how can you be an addict of crack cocaine if you do not use crack cocaine? This statement suffers from redundant phrases bordering on circular reasoning. “I am not an addict of crack cocaine, nor have I ever used crack cocaine” would put an immediate end to the speculation.

2. “I cannot comment on a video that I have never seen or that does not exist” should have been worded “I cannot comment on a video that I have never seen and that does not exist.” The use of “or” instead of “and”, confusion of conjunctions, is a common mistake in writers who have not studied the English language.

3. “It is most unfortunate, very unfortunate, that my colleagues and the great people of this city have been exposed to the fact that I have been judged by the media without evidence.” This, to me, is further proof that the only thing Mr. Ford is guilty of is scribbling out his assignment the night before it is due without leaving himself enough time to proofread it. What he means, I think, is “It is most unfortunate that my colleagues and the people of this great city have been forced to endure my being judged in the media, considering the media’s lack of evidence.”

Mr. Ford is not trying to hem and haw his way through this accusation as the media contends he did when reporting his educational background. Instead, he rushed his speech, writing it himself without stopping to give it to a professional for editing, and wound up striking the blow that broke the lock on his personal Pandora’s box.

Works Cited

Jerema, Carson. Rob Ford dropped out of university. How dare he? Macleans On Campus. 22 December 2010. <oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2010/12/22/rob-ford-dropped-out-of-university-how-dare-he/> 24 May 2013.

Rider, David. Rob Ford’s confusing university life. The Star. 21 December 2010. <www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2010/12/21/rob_fords_confusing_university_life.html> 24 May 2013.

Rob Ford. Wikipedia. 22 May 2013. <en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Ford> 24 May 2013.

Strashin, Jamie. Rob Ford fired chief of staff for telling mayor to ‘get help’. CBC News: Toronto. 23 May 2013. <www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/story/2013/05/23/toronto-ford-towhey.html> 24 May 2013.

Gillis, Wendy, Paul Moloney, Daniel Dale. Rob Ford’s video scandal: ‘I do not use crack cocaine,’ mayor says. 24 May 2013. <read.thestar/#!/article/519f793e8e492dd36c1a1-rob-ford-s-video-scandal-i-do-not-use-crack-cocaine-mayor-says> 24 May 2013.

Graphic from http://hcp2010.physics.utoronto.ca/toronto_night_skyline.jpg

About the Author

Elise Abram, English teacher and former archaeologist, has been writing for as long as she can remember, but it wasn’t until she was asked to teach Writer’s Craft in 2001 that she began to write seriously. Her first novel, THE GUARDIAN was partially published as a Twitter novel a few summers back (and may be accessed at @RKLOGYprof). Nearly ten years after its inception Abram decided it was time to stop shopping around with traditional publication houses and publish PHASE SHIFT on her own.

Download PHASE SHIFT for the price of a tweet. Visit http://www.eliseabram.com, click on the button, tweet or Facebook about my novel and download it for FREE!

Inconsitencies I have known.

Consistency.

It’s something writers strive for in their work, especially with respect to setting and character descriptions. For many, an error in consistency can break the narrative flow, reminding the reader s/he is immersed in a construct of reality and not the real thing.

On film, errors in consistency are typically referred to as bloopers. And though they can be fun to spot, if you’re like me, and the gaffes are serious enough, they can also be maddening. Minor consistency problems are artifacts of the way television and movies are filmed, a result of the final product being an amalgam of various takes and camera angles. This is the shirt that mysteriously buttons and unbuttons or the strand of hair that magically tucks and untucks itself from behind an actress’ ear as the scene plays out. In a recent episode of Cult, it was the level of water in Skye’s bottle that randomly rises and falls.

Errors like these are more amusing than annoying. The inconsistencies prompting me to write this blog are much more serious than that. The ones I’m talking about are due to errors in the writing and/or interpretation of the script, errors that should have been caught and edited out long before production began. Take, for example, the Once Upon A Time episode in which Mr. Gold/Rumplestiltskin is led to believe August is his son. This correlates with an hour of my yelling at the screen that August couldn’t possibility be Baelfire because August has blue eyes and Bae has brown. And while it turned out August wasn’t Bae, I don’t know how I noticed this and the boy’s own father didn’t.

Another issue arose watching this week’s Hannibal. The police assert that their murderer was killing girls of the same age, height, weight and with the same hair and eye colour as his daughter. They show a series of victim photos, and I swear the last girl has brown eyes. Trouble is, when they show the daughter in the next scene, her eyes are decidedly blue.

Perhaps the biggest gaffe I’ve noticed was in this week’s Orphan Black. I remember being told via subtitle in the premiere episode that the story takes place in New York. Wikipedia observes the police used NYPD coffee mugs and drove NYPD cars in that episode. But this week they drove to a building I recognize as being on the U of T campus driving cars with Ontario plates. To make matters worse, Sarah/Beth drove through Chinatown to get to a Kensington Avenue address and walked into The Waverly Hotel (it said so on the door as she entered). While I love that shows (like Rookie Blue or Bomb Girls) use Toronto as a backdrop for stories told in Toronto, I need a show to pick a location and stick to it so that I forget I’m watching a construct and not actual people’s lives.

In other words, do the viewers a favour and make the effort to remain consistent.

graphic from:http://escapepod.org/2013/04/02/tv-review-orphan-black/

About the Author

Download PHASE SHIFT for the price of a tweet. Visit http://www.eliseabram.com, click on the button, tweet or Facebook about my novel and download it for FREE!

(Former) Archaeologist’s Lament

Zero Hour, another adventure/thriller television series with archaeological roots was cancelled last week after only three episodes. The pilot episode saw Anthony Edwards (of ER fame) as the editor of a sceptics magazine whose wife is kidnapped after she purchases a historic clock. When he takes the clock apart, Edwards finds a diamond upon which a map has been etched. He follows the map to a buried German submarine in the arctic, where he is pursued by a man who was somehow genetically engineered by Nazi scientists.

Though all of this sounds spectacularly interesting as a series concept, the idea was poorly executed as it suffered from less than believable dialogue and unusual casting. In spite of this, though Zero Hour had potential, it was more than likely doomed by its affiliation with archaeology.

Movies with archaeological ties generally do well at the box office. Consider Stargate, Indiana Jones,Tomb Raider, The Mummy, and National Treasure. The same cannot be said for television shows of the same genre which are few and far between. Two of these are Veritas: the Quest, and the British Bonekickers. In Veritas, a team of people search the globe for artifacts that piece together Earth’s great mystery, though what that may be is not revealed in the show’s short run. All that is known is that it somehow involves the group’s leader, and his son and deceased wife. In Bonekickers, archaeologists participate in episodic digs, some with ties to popular legends or high profile historical eras. The only other archaeology-types around are those on Bones, and that’s more forensic anthropology than archaeology per se. I dreamed of seeing the Primeval cast hunker down to an archaeological dig when they found modern artifacts in a dinosaurian era, or modern people digging up the remains of the Terra Nova settlement (though that apparently took place in a different timeline than ours) but, alas, that was never to come to pass.

Many play fast and loose with the term “archaeology”, such as in “Antique Archaeology”, the shop ran by the American Pickers, for example. Even worse is the Savage Family Diggers/ American Diggers franchise which sees ex-wrestler Rick Savage knock on people’s doors asking to dig on their properties for a percentage of the profit. While they may “save” artifacts from being destroyed or remaining forever buried and decomposing, they are, in effect, destroying archaeological sites. And while I readily acknowledge that laws in The States differ from those in Canada, the fact that they do they painstaking research to find the sites then do nothing to save the subtleties of the sites’ historic occupation, does little to elevate them from pot-hunting status. Yet they have been awarded their own series of shows which creates the illusion that what they are doing is lucrative and not at all deplete of morals.

Archaeology as a discipline is in danger of extinction. Even when I practiced it, the threat of satellite imagery and ground penetrating radar to document sites threatened to render those of us who saw it as a noble pursuit, obsolete. In his article entitled “Archaeology Is Not a Strong Brand”, Martin Rundkvist takes the profusion of available archaeology-named domains to indicate that the word no longer packs significant punch. He avers that the “little regional bits of the past and archaeological practice” have rendered the word, and the discipline by default, unexciting. I maintain the reason for this could be the dearth of local archaeological projects in North America (certainly in central Ontario). I got out of the discipline because, though I loved it dearly and could imagine doing nothing else with my life, I could not make a living at it. I began my career making enough money to live comfortably, had the position remained opened twelve months of the year. Each year I returned to the field being offered fewer and fewer dollars per hour until I was earning little more than minimum wage 6 months a year (if I were lucky) and UIC was breathing down my back to get re-trained in order to dump my hard-earned degree and get a year-round office job. I chose, instead, to go back to school and complete teacher training. It took some time, but I have come to terms with perpetuating archaeology through my writing. I always fancied returning to the discipline in retirement, but I doubt I will be able to tote buckets of wet dirt at that advanced age. No, I must remain content with fanaticizing about fantastical archaeology, rather than practicing actual archaeology, barring my winning the lottery, that is.

About the Author

Download PHASE SHIFT for the price of a tweet. Visit http://www.eliseabram.com, click on the button, tweet or Facebook about my novel and download it for FREE!

Works Cited

Rundkvist, Martin. Archaeology Is Not a Strong Brand. Aardvarchaeology. 2 Mar 2013. < http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/2013/03/02/archaeology-is-not-a-strong-brand/>. 12 Mar 13.