PARVUM OPUS

 

Number 147

______________________________________________

 

NEED A DEADLINE?

 

I picked up a book called No Plot? No Problem!, A Low-Stress, High Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days, by Chris Baty. Baty founded National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in 1999, in which participants write a novel in a month, as you might have guessed. That month is November. You are challenged to write a 50,000 word novel starting November 1 and ending at midnight November 30. It doesn't have to be good, of course. Everybody who finishes on time wins, and you'd be surprised at how many people have started, and even finished. A few have even had their NaNoWriMo novels published.

 

Baty says, "NaNoWriMo is all about the magical power of deadlines. Give someone a goal and a goal-minded community and miracles are bound to happen. Pies will be eaten at amazing rates. Alfalfa will be harvested like never before. And novels will be written in a month."

 

NaNoWriMo is growing to the point of carrying out charitable literacy projects, like funding a library in Laos. Check out the web site for the regional forum. If you're in a book discussion group, why not make it a book writing group for a month? (Although Baty says this cannot be a group project.) When I started writing fiction, I was surprised at how differently I read other people's fiction. You notice different things.

 

The web site also has a radio podcast, and other goodies like downloadable flyers, one of which is "for coffeeshop owners, librarians, restaurateurs, cruise ship captains, and anyone else who would like to encourage NaNoWriMo participants to come work on their novels in their fine establishments." I used to work on my first novel (still unpublished, but finished!) in a little Greek restaurant in Kansas. I'd go in and order tea and pita bread and scribble for an hour. Somehow it seemed easier than trying to write at home. However, although I never went during their busy hours, they must have gotten tired of my cheap self and after they told me they ran out of tea a couple of times, I stopped going. A friend said they should have paid me to sit their and write, and I ought to advertise my services: "Atmosphere done dirt cheap."

 

Writing your one-month novel would be a good way to ignore the first month of winter, and give you great conversation material for the rest of the winter.

 

THE ETHNIC CORNER

 

English Travelers

The "Cooper Clan of English Travelers" were arrested for pretending to be Hurricane Kristina evacuees in order to obtain free hotel rooms, paid for by FEMA. This odd designation, plus photos of the family, parents and daughter, made me think they might be Gypsies. Research led me to The Patrin Web Journal: Romani Culture and History, which lists the word "travelers" in its glossary: "Travelers (or Travellers). Itinerant peoples speaking a variety of argots, frequently confused by gadje [non-Gypsies] as Roma."

 

This brief glossary has no Romani words that are common in English, which is surprising because so many English words have been borrowed from other languages. Perhaps there are some, but not in this list.

 

How could this unfamiliar phrase, "Cooper Clan of English Travelers," push me off into this direction? One develops a bit of an instinct for words. I knew it's an unusual way for people to refer to themselves, and it's certainly not something the police dreamed up.

 

How do you search "English travelers" on the Internet? A search for "English travelers" produces pages about phrase books and writers such as Boswell. When I combined "travelers" with "itinerant in united states," sure enough, something turned up in The Gypsy Lore Society. It's just a matter of asking the right question.

 

English Travelers: Fairly amorphous group, possibly formed along same lines as Roaders (see below), but taking shape already in England before their emigration to the US starting in early 1880s. Associate mainly with Romnichels. Boundaries and numbers uncertain.

 

Go to the Web page for definitions of Roaders and Romnichels.

 

Melungeons

Have you heard of the Melungeons? These are people of unknown origin living in Appalachia, who are presumed to be of mixed white, black, and Indian descent, or possibly of Turkish descent pretending to be French, or something far away and exotic.

 

Wikipedia says of the word itself:

 

Even the origin of the term "Melungeon" is highly controversial. Some argue that it originates from the Turkish "Meluncan" (deriving from the Arabic "melun jinn") which means "cursed soul" or "lost soul." Another theory is that it derives from the French "Mélangien," meaning a person produced by a mélange, or mixture. A third theory traces the word to "malungu," a Luso-African root from Angola meaning "shipmate." However, "melungeon" is also an archaic English word meaning scoundrel.

 

(If the paragraph above doesn't look quite right in your e-mail, it's because the French diacritical marks do not translate.)

 

Heroes

At a small-town busker* fest we went to this summer, someone walked by with a T-shirt message that I could only partly see: "My heroes have always killed..."

 

How would you fill in that blank? The man wearing it had long black hair, so I thought, cowboys and Indians. I guessed the rest of the message before I found it. A little Internet search turned up "My heroes have always killed cowboys" as a CD, the title of an interview with Yaqui "earth warrior and animal liberationist" Ron Coronado, and T-shirts.

 

I still prefer Willie Nelson's song, "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys":

 

Sadly in search of but one step in back of

Themselves and their slow-movin' dreams.

 

But I can't help but feel for the poor fellow who wandered through this little festival wearing his bitter heart on his shirt.

 

* A busker is a street entertainer.

 

WRITING

 

An uncle of mine who used to teach high-school English once mentioned writing classes to my grandmother, who was born in 1895. When she agreed that good handwriting was important, my uncle laughed at her (yes, at her, not with her) and said that's not what he meant, as typewriters are used for anything important now. (This was before the computer age.) My grandmother had been taught a beautiful cursive script, and even the next generation was taught to write a beautiful hand.

 

Graphologists supposedly can analyze character traits from a person's handwriting. I wonder if you can alter some of those traits by consciously altering your handwriting. I hope so, because once I told a co-worker that he could. He wrote absolutely the tiniest, tightest little script I've ever seen. I've read lots of handwritten stuff from hundreds of students over the years, of varying legibility, and there's very little I can't decipher. This man's writing was legible, but only with a magnifying glass, and this was before I started wearing reading glasses. He had attended a military high school, and no doubt it influenced his neat, microscopic writing. I suggested he try writing larger, since no one could read his stuff, and it might loosen him up a bit in other ways. I wonder how he's doing now.

 

 

 

 

Retreat: The Essence of Christian Mysticism

Bernadette Roberts

I am organizing a workshop with Bernadette Roberts, a remarkable Christian contemplative and author of three books:

The Path to No-Self: Life at the Center

The Experience of No-Self: A Contemplative Journey

What is Self? : A Study of the Spiritual Journey in Terms of Consciousness

This retreat, called The Essence of Christian Mysticism, will be held on the weekend of May 5-7, 2006, in Loveland, Ohio. For more information, go to Bernadette Roberts Retreat (www.keithops.us/brretreat.htm). The site may be updated from time to time.

 

 

 

Link here to look for books on Amazon.com!

 

 

 

 

 

NEED A SIMPLE WEB PAGE? NEED SOMEONE TO ORGANIZE A MEETING OR CONFERENCE? CALL KEITHOPS.

 

Go to Babelfish to translate this page into Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish!

 

Parvum Opus is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Back issues may be found at http://www.keithops.us/. Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries.

 

If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please reply with "unsubscribe," "quit," "enough," or something like that in the subject line, and I'll take you off the mailing list.

 

Copyright Rhonda Keith 2005. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but it is permissible to forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.