Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs.
--David ben Gurion

I was rewarded with the first chapter of the book Writing The Memoir: From Truth To Art, by Judith Barrington. Made me want to buy the book! Arrrggh!

Below is the relevant excerpt:

Sometimes when I teach the memoir, a student will ask: "But how is the memoir different from autobiography?" Certainly some memoirs are booklength and therefore contain as much material as many autobiographies. But a memoir is different, and the difference has to do with the choice of subject matter.

An autobiography is the story of a life: the name implies that the writer will somehow attempt to capture all the essential elements of that life. A writer's autobiography, for example, is not expected to deal merely with the author's growth and career as a writer but also with the facts and emotions connected to family life, education, relationships, sexuality, travels, and inner struggles of all kinds. An autobiography is sometimes limited by dates (as in Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography to 1949 by Doris Lessing), but not obviously by theme.

Memoir, on the other hand, makes no pretense of replicating a whole life. Indeed, one of the important skills of memoir writing is the selection of the theme or themes that will bind the work together. Thus we discover, on setting out to read Patricia Hampl's Virgin Time, that her chosen theme is the Catholicism she grew up with and her later struggle to find a place for it in her adult spiritual life. With a theme such as this laid down, the author resists the temptation to digress into stories that have no immediate bearing on the subject, and indeed Hampl's book tells nothing about many other aspects of her life, although it abounds in good stories. Vivian Gornick's memoir Fierce Attachments sets as its theme the story of the author's relationship with her mother. By setting boundaries, the writer can keep the focus on one aspect of a life and offer the reader an in-depth exploration.

When you select the material for a memoir, you will be keeping other material for later. Most people only ever write one autobiography, but you may write many memoirs over time. Mary Clearman Blew compares this process with the making of a quilt:

Remember that you have all colors to choose from; and while choosing one color means forgoing others, remind yourself that your coffee can of pieces will fill again. There will be another quilt at the back of your mind while you are piecing, quilting, and binding this one, which perhaps you will give to one of your daughters.

Another way of looking at the difference between memoir and autobiography is expressed by Gore Vidal in his memoir Palimpsest. "A memoir is how one remembers one's own life," he says, "while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked." Although some memoirs do, in fact, call for research, the verifiable facts are not generally as important as they are in autobiography, where the author includes much that is beyond the realm of memory.

I always quote when the original writer says it so well, I couldn't hope to do half as well myself.

If you ask me, I'd rather write a memoir than an autobiography -- the latter sounds a lot more work than it's worth. Seems to me I'd have to do loads of research for an autobiography and be meticulous about getting all my facts straight, whilst for a memoir all I need to do is write what I felt and how I saw things. Hey, I can do that! I'm already doing that, in fact. Isn't that what blogs are for? *grin*

Google also turned up the transcript of an interview with Nan Phifer, Associate Director of the Oregon Writing Project at the University of Oregon in the USA.

What's the difference between a memoir and an autobiography?

Autobiographies are usually linear, beginning with birth and continuing to the age of the writer. They include factual data that may, or may not, be interesting.

Memoirs are about the times when our feelings were intense, when we pulsed with caring, or knowing, or not knowing, with wanting, regretting, belonging, not belonging, stumbling, and transcending. Memoirs are about the times when we have been most keenly alive. In writing about those times, the writer often gains surprising insights. On reflection, we often see positive aspects of ourselves that we have failed to appreciate. We observe our intentions, strivings, sacrifice, patience, and the efforts we've made. Autobiographies focus more on events and achievements, life at the surface, while memoirs also reveal our dreams, frustrations, and satisfactions.

Because memoirs do not need to be written chronologically, they don't plod.

So there we have it. I always like having things crystal clear in my own mind; I'm quite disorganised in 'real life' but I prefer my thoughts to be orderly. My mother likes to say that a messy desk is the sign of a messy mind, but I always counter by saying that a clear desk is a sign that no work is getting done!

Was hanging out in Times Bookshop today and now I want these books. Arrrggh arrrggh arrrggh! Why did I go there? Why? Why? WHY?!?!?!

1. Are Men Necessary? by Maureen Dowd
2. Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent
3. Beyond Words by John Humphreys
4. The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker
5. The Life of Language by Sol Steinmetz & Barbara Ann Kipfer

Fortunately, I walked out of the bookstore having made only one purchase: an ultra-compact diary. I needed something very small and slim (about the size of a man's wallet) to fit into the very small bags I like to tote around. Getting a diary is part of my resolution to be more organised and stop double-booking myself for appointments on the same day at the same time but different places. (Once I even managed to triple-book myself! *bangs forehead on wall*)

Believe me, walking out without having made any bookish purchases wasn't an act of self-control on my part; it was an act of broke-ness. Yes, I am broke because my paycheque hasn't cleared yet. For some reason, my bank decided to impose a seven-day float on a house cheque, one issued from an account in the same branch that houses my own account! I'm going to call the bank up tomorrow and raise holy hell, I am.

With the first week of classes over, this is how it went:

Day 1 -- Applied Linguistics
Raised hand in class. Asked what is 'L1' and 'L2'. Lecturer looked horrified. "First language and second language!" Am sure the lecturer wondered what on earth I was doing there if I didn't even know something so basic. Was in complete agreement with her.

Day 2 -- Structure of English
Received my very first assignment, due in March. Out of the four questions, there's one I would particularly love to do... if I only knew what it meant.

English prosodic features are sometimes arbitrary and sometimes obligatory. Discuss.

Why Week Two finds me back for more punishment
Okay, so there were redeeming factors. I'm fascinated by all the different branches of linguistics, and when my lecturers talk about how we learn language, how we make sounds and put them together to form words, how words can carry several meanings, how the same word is pronounced differently when spoken in different corners of the world... I could sit there and listen for hours!

My creative juices have dribbled out of the corners of my mouth, dripped down my chin and soaked into my shirt. I tried wringing them out, but my shirt is made of a particularly absorbent material and the juices had already bonded to it and refused to budge. Can't risk using detergent as I'd never be able to locate the juices in the midst of all those soap suds and I'd likely end up pouring the whole lot down the drain.

What shall I do now?

There is a guy in one of my classes who has either done some mega reading up on the subject, or comes from a linguistics background. He raises his hand in the middle of lectures to ask, "Isn't that Chomsky's theory?" and the lecturer replies, "Well, in a way, because Chomsky said... blah blah blah... but Chomsky also thought that... blah blah blah... which is not really... blah blah blah" and I'm wondering, okay, firstly, who the hell is Chomsky, and how do you spell his name?!?

(In my notes, I wrote it as "Chaumsky" because that's how it sounded like to me. I love Google -- when I went home and typed in chaumsky linguistics, Google asked me, "Did you mean chomsky linguistics?" and I went, "Yes! Yes! That's the one I meant!")

Then I have a classmate who, on the first day of class, had already been to the library to check out the journals and borrow textbooks. I felt so... so... behind! On the first day of class!

Much to my surprise, I in turn managed to freak out another one of my classmates with, of all things, my rather paranoid note-taking. The lady sitting next to me exclaimed, "You're very hard-working -- you write down every word of what the lecturer says!" I laughed and ruefully blamed my journalistic experience.

The thing is, I'm woefully aware that I'm at a disadvantage in this course because I have no linguistics background whatsoever. Plus I'm so used to scribbling down stuff in the fear that if I miss anything, it'll surely turn out to be a crucial point or succulent quote (I can be a bit obsessive-compulsive at times). And I've always had the knack of writing really fast, somehow. All these factors come together in a splendid cocktail during classroom time.

Interesting to see how we are so easily intimidated by others, yet often don't realise that others are equally intimidated by us!

Whenever I get hold of a newspaper, the first thing I turn to isn't the news, sports, TV guide, or business section... it's the comics. I always read the comics first.

This admission is made with a sheepish grin. But really, if I buy the paper for anything, it's for either the comics or the job advertisements.

When I was younger I used to read Brenda Starr religiously -- I thought she was soooooo gorgeous. (Notice that I was shallow. But yes, I wished I could draw like the comic strip's artist.) The storyline was also MUCH better than it is now, what with Brenda's tangled love life and the mysterious Basil popping up every once in a while. Today's Brenda Starr is boring. *yawn*

I sometimes laughingly credit Brenda for instilling in me the desire to be a journalist, but I doubt that's true. For one thing, her world wasn't very real. (Her creator, Dale Messick, is said to have commented, "Authenticity is something I always try to avoid.") For another, I paid more attention to the relationship stuff than I did to the reporting stuff!

I read all the comic strips in the paper, going first to the ones I like the least and working up to the ones I enjoy the most. Occasionally I find gems like these: (click for larger versions)

If you like puns and playing around with words, Graffiti and Frank & Ernest are the two comic strips to keep an eye on.

Came across this proverb years ago as a child and loved it. If you've ever had one of those conversations which degenerates into "I know you know I know you know I know that he robbed the bank", you'll understand why.

He who knows and knows he knows, he is a wise man; seek him.
He who knows and knows not he knows, he is asleep; wake him.
He who knows not and knows he knows not, he is a child; teach him.
He who knows not and knows not he knows not, he is a fool; shun him!

Language is extremely intuitive. I didn't realise this until I started reading a textbook that pointed out how we constantly put together new sentences all the time and understand all the various sentences we read or hear. We learn words, not phrases or sentences, yet we somehow manage to string all those words together to form sentences with meaning. And when others do the same, we actually understand what they are saying.

Even better, we understand sentences that aren't plausible or don't make sense -- like, "The blind man was dazzled by her blonde hair." We know perfectly well what the sentence means, although it makes us scratch our heads and wonder whether the writer was sober when he wrote it.

The idea is that we manage to communicate in this way because we all have some knowledge of grammar. Arrange words in the 'proper' sequence, and the hearer / reader recognises this sequence and gets what the speaker / writer is trying to say.

But I say language is intuitive, because we don't know that we have this grammatical knowledge or that we're putting it to use every single day of our lives. We see no reason to explain why we place certain words in certain places; all we care about is that those words belong there. We compose and decipher sentences without a second thought, taking it for granted that we should understand each other. We don't realise the depth of knowledge that it takes for us to be able to process all these things in our heads.

Likewise, the way we produce sounds and string the various sounds together to form words -- it's all intuitive. We speak without thinking about the way our lips or tongue are moving.

Scientists can't stand this; they want to figure out how sounds are made and speech is born, how words are formed, how we put sentences together. So they try to break everything down to the very basics, and in doing so, create all sorts of terms, which I now have to learn. For instance, when making the 'b' sound, both lips come together, so it's called a 'bilabial' sound. Thank goodness the label makes sense to me, or I would have the hardest time remembering it!

Tonight, I am feeling melancholic for various reasons. Tomorrow, the feeling will have passed.

One shouldn't blog when melancholic, but well... with only three regular readers, I figured it wouldn't be all that embarrassing.

As a teenager, I used to write melancholic letters to friends at 2am in the morning and then re-read the letters the next morning with a sense of horror. The light of day made the words leap out of the page in all their melodramatic, overly emotional, depressive glory.

Unsurprisingly, most of the time those letters ended up unsent.

I still have some of them. They're very diary-like and are the only records I have of what was going on in my heart and mind at that stage of life. I never was one to keep journals or diaries because I figured, what was the point? Nobody would read them! Why write to yourself?

Even now, I don't keep a diary. I write occasional letters to my future husband, infrequent letters to God, and I journal when I read the Bible (I write down my thoughts about the Bible passage and then write down a prayer which is born out of those thoughts). But I don't keep a diary. My personal blog is the closest thing that I have to one.

When I read this post of Alexandra's, I sorely regretted not having kept a diary. On the other hand, I never did talk to myself like that, so maybe my diary entries wouldn't have been half as interesting!

Sometime back I bought The Assassin's Cloak: An Anthology of the World's Greatest Diarists. Here's Jean Cocteau -- French novelist, poet, dramatist, artist and filmmaker -- on August 16, 1953:

If you are reading this diary after my death, you are probably wondering why the paragraphs inexplicably jump from one subject to the next. It is because I am gossiping to myself here; between any two paragraphs I may receive a visit which changes my ideas and orients them in an unexpected direction. Moreover, I advise those who edit these diaries to cut what I jot down for reference and the repetitions which occur, because I don't remember if I've already described the things I've described.

Now that's what I call planning ahead!

Just came back from my cousins' place where we played Boggle and Take Two. I love word games. In my previous office, there was a period of time when all of us colleagues sitting in the same row started playing Yahoo's Text Twist. It's pretty addictive, although after awhile the letter combinations tend to get repeated. After that I moved on to Bookworm.

Take Two is played using Scrabble tiles. You turn all the tiles upside-down and leave them in the middle of a table, then every player takes four to start with. The first one to make a word with the four calls out, "Take two!" and then everybody takes two more tiles and tries to make one or more words that will use up all their six tiles. The first one to use up all his tiles calls out, "Take two!" again and the cycle continues.

The words made have to be connected to each other, as on a Scrabble board or in a crossword puzzle. At any time, you may unscramble all your letters and start from scratch -- it may slow you down a bit, but if you get a 'Z' or 'Q' in the middle of the game, that might be your only hope of using up all the letters. I found it fun.

I'm not that great at Boggle, and likewise not so hot at Text Twist because I can't seem to catch the connections very easily when it comes to unscrambling letters to form words. My cousin turned out to be an ace at Boggle and beat us all flat. Later, it was revealed that she's had lots of practice from playing it online! Not fair!

Talking about online games, I once played Scrabble online with Florence until 4am in the morning.

The website we used added extra spice to the game by getting you to to choose a time limit for each round. The timer runs for individual players, meaning that if you decide on 15 minutes, each player is given 15 minutes in total. When it's my turn to play, my clock starts ticking; once I've made my move, my clock freezes and the other player's clock resumes ticking from where it stopped before. If your time runs out first, you're deemed to have lost even though your score was higher.

This resulted in nail-biting moments because on one hand, I wanted to make the best words to get the highest score; on the other hand, I couldn't spend too long thinking coz then my time would run out and it wouldn't matter that I had scored so high! The adrenaline rush was amazing and I didn't want to stop playing, but eventually we both admitted that we needed to sleep sometime...

When I told a friend about it the next day, I said, "I only went to sleep at 4am this morning coz I was playing Scrabble online. How dorky is that?"

"Very," he replied.

Linguistics is the science of language, and, as in any other field, copious amounts of research is being carried out all the time. The results of that research are published in -- where else? -- linguistics journals.

One of my assignments is to delve into those journals and choose an article to review. I was reading through a few articles tonight when I came across one that discussed how using computers to write has affected the quality of students' essay-writing. For one thing, the student no longer has to worry about making sure his handwriting is legible!

Research apparently points to the fact that students produce better-quality essays when using a computer to write instead of writing by hand. As a writer, this is interesting to me because I used to compose everything in longhand, using pen and paper -- university assignments included. After all, if you're going to have to sit down and write for three hours during the final exam, you might as well get used to it rather than type and print out your assignments.

It was only when I became a journalist that I began to compose on the computer. The transition went without a hitch, and I thought nothing of it. Soon after starting work as a journalist, I began blogging, and that kind of completed my 'conversion'.

Since I never thought anything of making the switch from pen and paper to electronic media, I'm intrigued by the idea that using the computer can result in better essays. Of course the fact that you can move text around pretty easily really helps. I think that's what I love most about using word-processing programs -- no messy scratched-out words and extra words squeezed in the middle of horizontal lines of text. If I write a paragraph and later decide it belongs somewhere towards the end of the essay, I can move the whole thing without any fuss.

Studies have found that editing features provided by computer word-processing programs give students "a sense of liberation", making them feel that written texts are now "infinitely malleable and changeable". Things like grammar-checkers and spell-checkers also make it easier for students to revise what they've written. The result? Better-quality writing.

Moreover, there's some conjecture that the way the computer monitor only displays a limited block of text makes the writer more focussed on particular portions of his writing at any one time. It seems that since you keep staring at that one chunk of text, you tend to pick out mistakes much more easily or pay more attention to grammar, spelling and punctiation. I wouldn't know about this, since writers are usually admonished against writing and editing at the same time. If you start thinking about technicalities in the middle of writing, you tend to get tangled up and impede the creative process. Better to get out whatever you want to say first, and worry about having said it correctly or clearly later. That's what revision and rewriting are for.

Finally, researchers believe that today's students appear to prefer composing on computers due to their familiarity with the medium. They're already used to playing computer games, surfing the internet, chatting on instant messenger, blogging, and goodness knows what else. So the act of using a computer to write makes them feel more confident, because they're familiar with how the thing works and know what it can do. In other words, it helps them approach writing with a positive attitude (as compared to how someone of my parents' generation might be intimidated by the mere idea of going anywhere near a computer, never mind using it to actually write something!).

All this makes me wonder whether the quality of my writing would drop if I were to transfer back to writing the 'traditional' way. Heheh.

A friend of mine who's been away for years and is still residing abroad once asked me, "How is it that you sound so Malaysian when you speak, but don't sound Malaysian when you write?"

Tonight my class discussed how children usually grow up learning a dialect or the colloquial form of a language, coz that's what they hear being spoken all around them. But they do pick up the standard language later, and most grown-ups know both versions, switching between either one depending on the occasion.

Apparently my lecturer's children know she's angry when she turns all formal on them -- like how when my parents were angry, they used to call me by my full name. She also pointed out how we always get very formal-sounding when we're making a complaint, because we want to sound "like we mean business". But when we're talking to friends, or people who are close to us, we get very informal, even rude. To the extent of calling good friends strange names. I once knew someone who called her best friend "Bitch", as in, "Hey Bitch! How are you?"

I noticed that it's true, the environment and situation very much influences my use of language. I'm very proper when I answer the phone at work. All, "May I help you, sir?" and not a 'lah' in sight. But once I get off the phone and turn to speak to my colleagues, I sound like a completely different person.

When conversing with non-Malaysians, though, I usually refrain from getting colloquial, because we Malaysians tend to use a lot of words borrowed from the Chinese dialects as well as Malay. Not to mention all the 'short-cuts', like saying, "Off the light afterwords ah," as we step out of the room, when what we really mean is, "Please turn off the lights when you leave." I figure my conversation partner probably wouldn't be able to fathom what I was saying!

But since this friend of mine -- the one I mentioned in the beginning -- is Malaysian (despite having spent years abroad -- I guess I unconsciously discounted that), I just went all Malaysian on him from the get-go.

It's fascinating; I never did think about this before, how I simply switch from colloquial "Manglish" (Malaysian English) to standard English and back again, all the time. I didn't even realise I spoke two different forms of English. They're just both... English... to me.

You know how some people keep peppering their speech with certain words or phrases? Like "just", "actually", or "well"? They do it unconsciously, but it tends to be pretty obvious to the listener. When I was in high school, we students used to imitate teachers who did that and make fun of them. Now I find out that words used in this way have a name: they're called conversation markers.

A close friend commented tonight that I use the word 'like' a lot when I speak. I'd never noticed. We went on to talk of other things and then it happened. I blurted out the word, and immediately burst into laughter. After I recovered enough to speak, I found myself mentioning the word again, and again dissolved into laughter. My goodness, I really never realised!

Now I'm getting terribly self-conscious when I talk to people... especially that particular friend.

It's intriguing, though, to read on a New Zealand educational website that students who are learning English as a second language start speaking more English fluently once they begin to use these "markers". Is it because that's part of catching the rhythm of the language? Or is it a sign that they're starting to feel comfortable speaking English? Or maybe it's because they've stopped working so hard at following all the rules. I know a lot of people are worried that they'll use the wrong word or phrase things wrongly or make a grammatical mistake, and they're so focused on getting it right that everything comes out stilted and awkward, even disjointed -- and very formal-sounding.

I wonder whether everybody has one or more conversation markers. They're definitely more obvious in some people's speech than in others'. I think I'm going to listen extra closely to the people around me this week. So if I seem to be regarding you with an intense expression on my face as you speak to me, you'll know why. Hehehe.

So all the while I was moaning and groaning about how scientists insist on putting a label to every minor thing, I thought my lecturers were just trying to torture me for the heck of it. Coz, you know, that's what teachers do. *grin*

Then I bumped into a friend who is taking singing lessons. "I keep on mixing up 'V' and 'W'. I pronounce 'W' as 'V' and 'V' as 'W'. My teacher is pulling his hair out and whatever hair remains is turning white!" she said, frustrated.

A lightbulb came on in my head. Hey, I'd just been learning about the way the mouth and tongue ('articulatory organs') move and come together to form various sounds. 'V' and 'W' are produced in completely different ways. Maybe if I could get my friend to see this, she'd have an easier time of it...

You see, when we speak, we string all the sounds together so fast that we don't pay attention to what the articulatory organs are doing. But when you slow down, you realise that for 'V', the upper teeth make contact with the lower lip, then separate; whereas for 'W', the lips and teeth do not make contact at all -- rather, the lips round out to form an 'O' shape.

After explaining this, I suggested to my friend that it's a matter of being a bit more aware of how her tongue and lips are moving when she speaks or sings, and to be more purposeful in the way she articulates certain letters. She found this helpful, and I was amazed that there could actually be practical reasons for learning all this kind of stuff!