{"id":126,"date":"2006-10-25T09:21:50","date_gmt":"2006-10-25T14:21:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/weeklyrob.dreamhosters.com\/?p=126"},"modified":"2006-10-25T09:21:50","modified_gmt":"2006-10-25T14:21:50","slug":"read-slower","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=126","title":{"rendered":"Read Slower"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m reading Ragtime<\/a>, by E.L. Doctorow.<\/p>\n

I won’t go into how Ragtime is different from other novels in its delivery or subject-matter, and I won’t detail the sudden and unexpected raunchy moments. But while reading a couple of pages today, I twice stopped to appreciate the writing.<\/p>\n

1. Harry Houdini (yes, the escape artist) is walking through a hospital.<\/p>\n

“Chutes of cheerful morning sun leaned like buttresses from the high dirty windows of the ward.”<\/p>\n

Reading that this morning, in my hurry to get to what happened next, I had mentally translated the sentence into, “sun came in the windows.” Luckily, I caught myself. Slow down. Picture it.<\/p>\n

He didn’t say that the sun came in. Or even that chutes of sun came in. The chutes of sun leaned<\/em> like buttresses. I can see that in my mind. And they didn’t just lean through any old windows, but through the high dirty windows of the ward. And there’s more.<\/p>\n

The chutes weren’t just of sun, but of “cheerful morning sun.” Nice.<\/p>\n

That little sentence, dense with information, paints a remarkably clear picture of the scene, but only as long as the reader is present enough to appreciate it. I may never be a great writer, but at least I can aim to be a good reader.<\/p>\n

2. Doctorow uses an obscure word, without defining it. “Versts.”<\/p>\n

What is a verst? I looked it up in Merriam-Webster’s unabridged: “a Russian unit of distance equal to 500 sagenes or 0.6629 miles.” How can he use an impossible word like that and expect anyone to follow what he’s saying? It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ridiculous.<\/p>\n

But here’s the context:<\/p>\n

An immigrant to the U.S. (from Eastern Europe) is traveling by train. As he looks out the window, he begins to remember the old country:<\/p>\n

“He saw the village of his youth going by now, some versts beyond the meadow.”<\/p>\n

“Versts” is the perfect word here. Yeah, I had to look it up, but no other word would have worked as well. The character thinks about home, and at home, he didn’t think in miles. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s exactly right.<\/p>\n

As I mentioned, the book is called Ragtime; on its opening page Doctorow quotes Scott Joplin:<\/p>\n

“Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m reading Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow. I won’t go into how Ragtime is different from other novels in its delivery or subject-matter, and I won’t detail the sudden and unexpected raunchy moments. But while reading a couple of pages today, I twice stopped to appreciate the writing. 1. Harry Houdini (yes, the escape artist) is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-languagelit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}