NEA Chairman Dana Gioia announces the Longfellow Commemorative Stamp, the 23rd such stamp from the USPS. “Longfellow is not only a great poet, he also did as much as any author or politician of his time to shape the way 19th-century Americans saw themselves, their nation and their past,” said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia.
Maybe Genres Should be Good, Better, Best?
Plenty of literary books are unreadable. Plenty of genre books are unthoughtful. So how do you distinguish the pearls of any theme from the hack work? You argue.
My fear – no, make that prediction – is that literary fiction will be increasingly marginalized as general interest publications focus on “books people actually read.”
J. Peder Zane is exaggerating on what people read, but it does hit close to the mark, doesn’t it? If few people want to read what we call literary fiction, why shouldn’t it be marginalized? If all the really good writing is actually in literary fiction, then it won’t suffer in the long-run and may suffer in the short-run if we continue teach our children not to value good writing.
How Sweet and Awesome Is the Place
How sweet and awe-some is the place
With Christ within the doors,
While everlasting love displays
The choicest of her stores.
…
Pity the nations, O our God!
Constrain the earth to come;
Send Thy victorious Word abroad,
And bring the strangers home.
We long to see Thy churches full,
That all the chosen race
May with one voice, and heart and soul,
Sing Thy redeeming grace.
by Issac Watts
Music Embodied in Words
“The best poems express something that cannot be expressed in other words. Change a word, a syllable, and you’ve changed the expression. If I can read a poem with the same ease and certainty as I do a billboard or newspaper, it’s probably not a poem, though it may be propaganda.”
Thus spoke Anecdotal Evidence, giving us a good reason for accepting difficulty in poetry and persevering to understand it. The fundamental problem with this is that modern readers don’t know if a poem is worth trying to understand. Are there not plenty of poems written by pretentious post-grads who draw inspirations from personal experiences which outside readers cannot possible understand, like Bilbo riddling with the dragon on his adventures outside the Shire? What helps a reader persevere through a poem? For me, it’s the confidence or hope that I’m reading a great poet. So I will work to enjoy Yeats and Eliot, but P.J. Smithe?
Taking Monday off
From blogging, not from work (more’s the pity). I’ll be doing a speaking engagement Monday evening, so there won’t be time to blog.
See you Tuesday evening.
Tar Baby: An Unusable Term?
What do you think about the term ‘tar baby’? In this AP story (link defunct), two presidential hopefuls have said of a difficult–dare we say ‘sticky’–situation that it is or would be a ‘tar baby’ for those involved. Both men apologized for using the term, but I don’t get it. Are the Uncle Remus stories anathema in our sensitive age? Or is this a return of the idiocy that cried out a few years ago when a politician who labeled someone as ‘niggardly’ was rebuked for his racist remark? That’s about as smart as trying to take the ‘hell’ out of ‘hello’ by saying ‘heaveno.’
Deadly Magic Tricks
I must pass on this brief article on magic tricks which appear to defy death. The William Tell trick is incredible!
The Thomas Hardy Twins
Ella exposes the old literary plot to hide the fact that the author know as Thomas Hardy was in fact two men, Tragic and Cherry. She needs to write a novel about this evil hidden truth. I’m sure Raphael worked codes into his paintings to ensure those in the know could remember the truth.
Can I make this title shorter? Part 2
I have more to say about last night’s subject, come to think of it. The importance of fewer words. Like white space in graphics. Like pauses in music.
I know a pastor who’s a very effective preacher, but hopeless with words. He actually has, I think, a phobia about words (like my own phobia about numbers). Faced with a word choice, he grabs the first word that enters his mind and throws it against his meaning to see if it sticks. If it doesn’t, he throws another, and another, in the hope that the aggregate of all those words will be somewhere close to what he wants to communicate. If he weren’t good with gestures and facial expressions, nobody would ever know what he meant. But because he adds a lot of physical clues, he makes it work.
A lot of people try the same sort of thing with writing. They write a sentence and then think, “That’s not exactly what I meant.” So they add another sentence, or a lot of modifiers—adjectives and adverbs. In the end they walk away from the steaming pile of verbiage, hoping the meaning they intended is in there, somewhere.
That’s not readable writing.
I made a reference to Westerns last night. Think of all the Westerns you’ve ever watched. You’ll probably recognize the following scenario.
The bad guys ride into town, yahooing. They ride their horses on the boardwalks and into the saloons. They fire their pistols again and again, indiscriminately. Mothers snatch their babies up and run away, terrified of a stray bullet or ricochet.
Enter the hero. He doesn’t say much. He goes into the saloon and orders his drink. He refuses to talk to the rowdies.
They get angry. They taunt him.
He does nothing but drink his drink.
They shoot at the floor at his feet, to make him “dance.”
He doesn’t take the bait.
Finally they do (or say) something unforgivable.
Suddenly the hero is all action. But it’s limited, deliberate action. He draws his pistol. He may not even be fast with it. But his shooting isn’t indiscriminate. He fires three times. Three men fall, each of them shot dead center.
The hero has his weapon under control. He doesn’t use it more than necessary, but when he uses it he uses it with precision.
The writer’s weapon is his vocabulary. He doesn’t show it off. He doesn’t try to impress the reader with his fancy style. He uses the minimum number of words he needs to, but they’re precisely the words he wants.
(I know there are good writers who use a more flowery style. But even they, I think, need to learn to cut words first, before they can move on to an idiom of their own.)
“But how do I know the precise, right word?” you ask (using a redundancy you’ll need to work on).
There’s no royal road. Do what you need to do to expand your vocabulary. Read thesauri in your spare time. Do word puzzles in the newspaper. Read books above your reading level with a dictionary at your elbow.
Whatever you need to do, do it. Learn more words so you can use fewer of them. These are your tools. If you want to be a master, you need to control them and their uses.
American Thinking on Literature and Humanities
Some provocative questions by Thomas Mallon on American writing and scholarship at The American Scholar. I’ll point out one of them.
How can the contemplative mind survive in the multitasking, ADD-inducing world of digitization? Are we willing to face the downside of this great electronic boon? Do we really want students reading electronic texts of the classics that are festooned with more links than a Wikipedia entry? Aren’t a few moments of quiet bafflement preferable to an endless steeplechase across Web page after Web page?
Well said. We must learn to use our communication/entertainment equipment (PCs, PDAs, phones, TVs, and radios) instead of submitting to them. Do you do anything to help you think deeply or keep the demands of your electronics at bay?