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I have quite a few books on writing and grammar, but these are the ones I call my favourites.
The Chicago Manual of Style
The University of Chicago Press has published the "Chicago" or" CMS" since 1906, and the style guide is currently in its 15th edition. I use this frequently for work, and often as reference for personal writing too. The CMS is ideal for professional writers, proofreaders, editors, and others who work with documentation. At over 800 pages, it's a hefty tome, but tyou can also register for the online version.
The CMS covers aspects of publishing and documentation from copyright law to typographic concerns, and contains useful sections on grammar and usage as well. But the real meat of the book pertains to scholarly writing; thus, it devotes chapters to topics such as how to use esoteric terms, e.g., mathematics, technology, foreign languages, and quotations; providing citations; using names of places, political offices, and other organizations correctly; how to use elements such as tables, graphs, illustrations, and other elements in a written document; and considerations for electronic media. In other words, the CMS is a mighty and comprehensive resource.
Despite its origins in academia, the CMS is useful for writers and communicators in practically any field. I checked my copy (which was sitting on my desk at work--I'm a technical writer) and noted that while most of the book is well thumbed-through, the chapters that I last marked with sticky notes are Grammar and Usage, Punctuation, Numbers, and Abbreviations.
The Elements of Style - William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White
William Strunk was an editor and academic at Cornell University, and E. B. White (best known today for his classics Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan) his student. Strunk published his Elements of Style privately for many years until his death in the 1940s. Afterward, White updated and revised the book, and it became known as the "Strunk & White".
Because of its background, the Strunk & White is aimed primarily at college/university students, and thus provides standards more appropriate for academic and professional (non-creative) writing than, say, an epic poem in iambic pentameter. Like the CMS, however, its usefulness is not limited to its original readership. The Strunk & White is a slight book, but dense for its size; it contains elementary rules for composition, but as the title suggests, maintaining a good style is at its core.
Style, according to Strunk & White, is not purple prose or writing that proclaims, "Look, I'm writing! Wheee!" A good style is clear, succinct, and correct. Some of the rules and reminders for style might seem obvious, but how often does one actually adhere to them? Take the following reminders (from the final chapter in the book, "An Approach to Style"):
"Write in a way that comes naturally."
In other words, write in your own voice, without imitating another's.
"Write with nouns and verbs."
In school, the parts of a sentence you learn about first are nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs. The rigor of writing comes from its nouns and verbs, not their modifiers.
"Prefer the standard to the offbeat."
That is, don't (over)use jargon, slang, or other catchphrases with a limited shelf-life.
Strunk & White is so enduring that there's even an Illustrated Elements of Style (illustrated by Maira Kalman), as well as a song cycle by avant-garde composer Nico Muhly. Here's an NPR story, with audio samples.
The Deluxe Transitive Vampire - Karen Elizabeth Gordon
Gordon is a pop grammarian, which means that her books (she also wrote The Well-Tempered Sentence and The Disheveled Dictionary) are aimed largely at the language lover rather than the writing professional (not that the two are mutually exclusive!). Strunk & White and the CMS are prescriptive texts--meaning that they codify and enforce rules for grammar and usage. But I find that Deluxe Transitive Vampire (subtitled The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed) is best treated as grammatical dim sum: I don't always want to partake of it, but I know it's delicious, and it's best consumed by the morsel.
Gordon uses mock gothic examples, as well as art, to illustrate grammar rules. Vampires, gargoyles, werewolves, bats, and other nefarious creatures populate the pages of this book. The effect is rather like a schoolmarm by way of Edward Gorey, with a hint of Ann Radcliffe. Here are some of Gordon's examples of past tense:
"She moped in the bedroom. I moped in my boudoir.
I moped for five days straight without touching my gruel.
She fumbled with her string of pearls."
Some might question the point of writing a grammar book in this fashion. Well, Gordon wants to make grammar interesting--entertaining, even. In my eyes, that's a noble endeavour.
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Juliet (Kate Winslet) and Pauline (Melanie Lynskey)
'Tis indeed a miracle, one must feel,
That two such heavenly creatures are real.
Hatred burning bright in the brown eyes, with enemies for fuel;
Icy scorn glitters in the gray eyes, contemptuous and cruel.
Why are men such fools? They will not realise
The wisdom that is hidden behind those strange eyes.
And these wonderful people are you and I.
--poem from Pauline Parker's diary (heard in voiceover in the film)
Before he became world-famous for the Lord of the Rings films, and after he made cult favourite Meet the Feebles, Peter Jackson directed a genre-bending drama called Heavenly Creatures (1994). Starring Melanie Lynskey (best known these days for playing the sympathetic step-sister in Ever After and Rose from Two and a Half Men) and Kate Winslet in their first lead roles, the film draws stylistically from melodrama, romance, fantasy, and documentary conventions to tell the true story about two teenaged girls' doomed friendship. The girls' relationship proves to be too strange and intense for their parents' comfort; when finally forced to separate, they plan and execute a murder in order to stay together.
Living in 1950s New Zealand, fourteen-year-old Pauline Parker (Lynskey) is a social misfit. She is sheltered by her working-class parents--father Herbert (Simon O'Connor) is a fish store manager and mother Honora (Sarah Pierse) is a housewife who rents rooms in their modest house to boarders. But when English girl Juliet Hulme (Winslet) arrives at Christchurch Girls' High School, Pauline finds a kindred spirit. On the surface, the girls are opposites: Pauline is dark, dowdy, and self-conscious; Juliet is rosy-cheeked, willowy, and lively. In contrast to Pauline's upbringing, Juliet has travelled all over the world with her upper-class parents Hilda and Henry Hulme (Diana Kent and Clive Merrison, respectively). Yet the girls share a love for melodrama and fantasy that belies superficial differences. Upon discovering that both were ill in childhood--Juliet had tuberculosis, Pauline had osteomyelitis in her leg--Juliet proclaims cheerily, "All the best people have bad chests and bone diseases. It's all frightfully romantic!"
Sociologically, a girl in Pauline's position is probably more likely to be drawn to crime than one in Juliet's; however, class is less a factor than social and emotional alienation. Juliet says bitterly of her parents, "They sent me off to the Bahamas 'for the good of my health.' They sent me to the Bay of bloody Islands 'for the good of my health.'" And the remote colony of New Zealand must seem even more alien to the intellectual Hulmes. The literal and figurative smallness of 1950s Christchurch--from the quaint travelogue footage that starts off the movie to the provincialism of teachers, doctors, and family members--emphasises their insularity. The girls, with their big dreams, cannot fit in. Even their siblings (Pauline has an older sister and Juliet a younger brother) play almost no part in their lives.
Although Juliet is the (relatively) outgoing one of the pair, both girls live almost wholly internally. The girls' rich internal life is realer than reality; however, they are not depicted as mentally disturbed. Rather, they are intelligent, articulate, and creative. They invent a fantasy kingdom called Borovnia, ruled by a family with dramatic and bodice-ripping tendencies. They make plasticine models, role-play, write novels, and draw pictures about the Borovnian adventures. Pauline and Juliet also claim the existence of a Fourth World, to which only they are privy. This world is a haven for them, especially when they are threatened by external stresses. It is a seeming paradise overseen by "saints" James Cagney, Orson Welles, Mario Lanza, and other Hollywood actors of the day. Yet despite what they seem, these are no ordinary fantasies; the detail and work that the girls put into their fevered fictions are so deep that they soon take to calling each other by their Borovnian names, Gina (Pauline) and Deborah (Juliet). They also seem to believe that they can sell their writings to Hollywood, though maybe their dreams owe more to youthful self-confidence than self-delusion.
Indeed, Pauline and Juliet believe themselves to be misunderstood geniuses (as shown in the poem quoted above), and this feeling of shared specialness strengthens their bond. After all, many adolescents believe, or want to believe, that they are somehow different from their peers, unique in a way that few or no one can understand. Pauline writes in her diary, "How sad it is that no one can appreciate our genius." (A good example of this theme in girl-centric narratives is the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series. Other movies that come to mind are the indie Fun, which situates two girls in the banality of 'senseless' and random suburban crime--as opposed to the passionate crime in Heavenly Creatures)--and Ghost World, which deals with quirky, anti-social behaviour, and growing up.) Unlike these other movies, however, Pauline and Juliet's friendship is dangerous not just because it is intense, but also because they are girls.
Despite Henry Hulme's fears of "unwholesome" or "wayward" goings on, the girls' friendship is akin to a great romance, especially when one considers the burgeoning hormones and sexuality at their age. (Pauline and Juliet are not shown to have a sexual relationship, but they are implied to have sex as a role-play.) Pauline's first visit to Juliet's idyllic mansion is shot with a sweeping zoom-in, the romantic mood underscored with Pauline's longing look and soaring music, and the girls' reunion after a temporary separation is tearful and joyous. Jackson inserts visually remarkable sequences--from the girls frolicking in the Fourth World and Borovnia, to being chased by a leering Orson Welles-- to evoke and externalise the romanticism inherent in the girls' fantasies. When Pauline loses her virginity to a male boarder, she momentarily escapes the experience by imagining herself in Borovnia with Juliet.
Violent or murderous lovers in pop culture and fiction fascinate us. They endure; think Bonnie and Clyde, Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, and even Mickey and Mallory in Natural Born Killers. In Heavenly Creatures, Pauline is the dominant force: she is studied and calm before the murder, writing in her diary that she feels "the night before Christmas-ish", whereas Juliet is fidgety and sweaty. But this places too much blame, as it were, on Pauline's shoulders. As with other similar stories, one may wonder of Pauline and Juliet: What if these two had never met? Their uniqueness, as depicted in the film and in their own minds, assumes that their meeting effected a dark alchemy that, tragically, could not have existed otherwise.*
*This seems to have been the opinion in real life as well. The girls were given relatively light sentences and were forbidden to contact each other again after release. Shared on
I've been quiet on Orble ever since I entered the third trimester of my pregnancy (I'm due in August). But with the exhaustion and lack of time/energy to even watch movies, let alone review them, I thought I'd write about a topic that's close to my heart right now: namely, one of the roles of pregnancy--and by extension, new/young mothers--in genre movies.
Along with the very old and the very young, a pregnant woman can be one of the most vulnerable movie characters. As in real life, she may be in physical and emotional upheaval, and moreover, her child's health and safety depends absolutely on her own situation. Placing the pregnant woman at the centre of a horror, disaster, or scary sci-fi movie increases the movie's ability to disturb.
Note: My discussion below mentions plot points from different movies, but I don't think they are spoilery, i.e., they don't give away too much and/or are common knowledge.
The horror, the horror
What makes us want to see movies with demonic children--is it because of the contradiction between their innocent faces and their evil deeds? Not only are scary children often particularly creepy to viewers, but even pregnancy is often--and perhaps most famously--depicted as a thing of horror.
Parents will always worry that their children won't turn out the way they hope: what if they're sickly? Unhappy? What if they become mean, ungrateful, or cold-hearted adults? Yet such normal parental concerns are nothing compared to what we see in Rosemary's Baby (1968) and The Omen (1976). Both movies deal with (though in very different ways) the spawn of Satan taking the place of a human child. Indeed, their very conceptions are horrific (Rosemary is raped by the devil, and Damien is born from an unnatural union.)
Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby
Poor Rosemary. Her entire pregnancy is watched and controlled by a coven including her husband, extending even to her neighbours and doctor. Supernatural themes aside, the way that people infiltrate Rosemary's daily life is reminiscent of many new mothers' experiences (even mine, unfortunately). Everything, from the choice of doctors to the suspicious chocolate mousse she's given, is thrust upon Rosemary by those who know better: they're older, they've been there before, and often, they're male. This film, more than the others discussed here, is more about the pregnancy rather than the end result. Yet in the end, the baby elicits Rosemary's softer feelings despite her initial resistance and terror. The final moments of the movie shows Rosemary's face softening into a maternal smile, and it is as chilling as the rest of the film.
Though I only mentioned older movies, it looks like the horror baby trope is here to stay. There's a zombie baby in Dawn of the Dead (1978), which was remade recently. B-movie It's Alive (1976), which shares with Rosemary's Baby the maternal instinct to love even the most evil baby, was also recently remade. Although I haven't seen it, I'm aware of a French movie called À l'intérieur (2007), a slasher/horror movie with a very pregnant woman as the protagonist/victim--although the baby isn't the monster.
Of machines and men
Science fiction movies can explore the horror of pregnancy and childbirth in ways not possible in horror movies. Even men and machines can come into the picture. By nature, science fiction narratives can go beyond the limits of most other stories. If dramas and horror movies address the responsibility that comes with parenthood, science fiction can address a more basic issue--the possibility of different conceptions and births.
In Village of the Damned (1960), women and girls of a certain age all over the world become mysteriously pregnant and end up giving birth on the same day. There are, of course, virgin births. It's soon clear that the babies, who grow up to have preternatural powers, are not human. Midwich, the village in which the movie is set, deals with the children scientifically, but other communities are less cautious: some murder the strange offspring, and others still recognise a superiority in the children, allowing them the best in education.
The most alarming thing about these eerie blond children is not their powers or even their seemingly utter lack of human emotions. It's how the women were so easily impregnated with them, without warning or obvious reason, without any hint of whence they came. We fear, yet still understand why the anti-Christ wishes to be reborn. But at the end of the movie, the Midwich children remain a mystery.
Another sci-fi movie, Demon Seed (1977), plays on the fear of technology and artificial intelligence, using pregnancy and (organic) birth as kind of a final frontier: it's the most fundamental thing we can do that advanced machines and computers can't accomplish. It's unlike Terminator or the Matrix series, where AI simply wants to conquer humanity; in Demon Seed, the Proteus IV AI subjects housewife Susan to invasive tests and impregnates her because it wants to be reborn as a human child.
John Hurt as Kane
And then there's Alien, where a baby alien bursts from Kane's torso in what's surely one of cinema's most memorable births and deaths. It's a far cry from Arnold Schwarzenegger being voluntarily pregnant in 1990's sci-fi comedy Junior. Like most of the horror movies and sci-fi movies discussed thus far, where the demonic, monstrous, or replacement child is often the result of rape, Kane is unknowingly impregnated with the baby.
Apocalyptic birth
Disaster movies and apocalyptic movies often depict families trying to find each other, stay together, and above all, stay alive. Off the top of my head, I can think of War of the Worlds, Last Night, The Day After Tomorrow, Last Night, and T2, which all depict families (with or without children) that fit the description above--and sometimes they even try to fight the end of the world. More often than not, they play out their own dramas against the backdrop of the larger catastrophe. However, one of the more interesting apocalyptic movies of late, Children of Men (2006), has the pregnant woman as the ultimate symbol of hope.
A pregnant woman in an earthquake movie might symbolise the inevitability of the 'happy' ending--they wouldn't kill a pregnant woman or her baby, right?--but in Children of Men, Kee, the world's first pregnant woman in twenty years, is always in peril. She and her protector Theo trust no one, from the government to the various groups who would use her as a political gambit. The long journey to a refugee camp is fraught with violence and other dangers, especially because Kee must give birth along the way. (The actual birth is probably the only scene that seems like a conventional disaster/post-apocalyptic movie, with Theo drinking and sterilising with alcohol before delivering the child in highly questionable conditions.)
Theo, Kee, and the baby
Kee and her baby's survival has profound and far-reaching ramifications. The ending of the movie suggests that Kee and the baby are saved, but it's not a question of a 'happy' ending for the mother and child. The significance of pregnancy is actually never more clear than when Theo first glimpses Kee's naked belly: his revulsion turns into something like awe. Indeed, Kee, Theo, and the baby's progress through a refugee slum, amidst gunfire and bombings, is the passage of a miracle. Hands reach out to touch the child, and a lone cry silences the gunfire--at least momentarily.
So how do we get from horror babies to the hope of the future? There's room for both of these interpretations, and more. It's true that sometimes, despite parents' best intentions and efforts, children just turn out rotten. Moreover, pregnancy, with its attendant issues of women's bodies, health, scientific/medical intervention, etc., will always be an important and controversial topic; the recent popularity (or infamy) of movies about unplanned pregnancy attests to that. Whatever happens in the real world, children and childbearing in movies should be interesting to observe, both as a mirror and a comment on reality.
Final notes
A genre that I didn't cover, because I'm not familiar with it, is the pregnancy comedy or comedy-drama. I haven't seen Juno or Knocked Up, or others of that ilk. Any comments on these genres (or anything at all) are welcome! And I do hope to regain my normal energy levels and blog more soon.
As well, if you are interested, check out a review of Children of Men at thoughtsonfilm.com.
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Like most self-respecting word nerds, I have a few favourite punctuation marks: the em dash, parentheses, the semicolon, and the interrobang.
The em dash - Not to be confused with the en dash or the hyphen, the em dash is twice the width of the en dash. People usually type it as two en dashes--like this. If you know the HTML code, you can make it typographically correct—like this. Em dashes are usually used parethetically, and are thus similar—and often interchangeable with—parentheses (which happen to be another favourite of mine
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Keisha Castle-Hughes as Paikea
Whale Rider (2002) is not quite what I expected. I don't think it's supposed to be a children's movie, but it seems like one. Indeed, my son likes the movie more than I do. Ostensibly a criticism of patriarchy in a Maori tribe, the movie relies too much on mystical and fantastic elements to make its point. Still, a solid performance by Keisha Castle-Hughes and some nice cinematography and visual effects make the film a good watch.
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The other day, I went to Starbucks and took a few napkins with my coffee. Here's a picture:
Mystifying Starbuck's napkin
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Rosanna Arquette as Roberta Glass
Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) is notable for many things: it helped launch the careers of stars Rosanna Arquette and Aidan Quinn, it was Madonna's first big film role (and in my opinion, her only good one), and it was the breakthrough for director Susan Seidelman, whose subsequent projects failed to match this movie's success and irreverent tone. Although it's no masterpiece, the film is well-known for its fond depiction of the 1980s New Wave scene in Manhattan (of which Madonna was an important part), and is moreover an entertaining period piece of American pop culture.
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When I was a little girl, I saw billboards advertising some kind of allergy medication all over the city. Its tagline was "[product name] let's you stay alert." Yes, it actually had the incorrect use of an apostrophe amblazoned emblazoned in large print over all its ads. It should be "lets you stay alert", of course. I wish I could remember the product, because it'd be great to see if they ever did correct that error in the ad campaign. (By the way, if you lived in southern Ontario in the mid-to-late 80s, and you actually know what ads I'm talking about, I'd love to hear from you.)
Many of us might notice bad copy in the media, especially the internet, but here are some of the worse (that is, funnier) examples that caught my attention
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Joan Crawford and Zachary Scott in 'Mildred Pierce'
What makes a good mother? If Mildred Pierce (1945) puts forth any opinion on the matter, it's probably that a good mother shouldn’t try to bribe her children for love. Yet the titular character does just that, and for one most undeserving child. What ensues is tragedy in the truest, i.e., Aristotelian, sense: Mildred Pierce has good traits, perhaps, but her actions lead to the downfall of her family and, inevitably, murder. The question is, is Mildred guilty of misguided ambition, or is she simply a bad mother
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This post is pure speculation, but if you don't want to know any potential spoilers for The Dark Knight (just in case), do not read any further. I mean it.
Maggie Gyllenhaal as Rachel Dawes
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Comment by Irene
on My three favourite grammar and style texts
Women In Cinema
Grammar Matters
Tracy, I really love the Strunk & White. It's so small, but so concise and practical.