How to be a morning person

Useful advice, which you can read by clicking here. (Via 43 Folders.)

How to improve writing (no. 10)

From a newspaper editorial:

A decision of food pyramid revision may sound simple to some of us. . . .

Too many nouns clustered together. Better:

Changing the food pyramid may seem simple. . . .

Link » Other How to improve writing posts, via Pinboard

Overheard

Backstage at a high-school musical, two students with senses of humor:

Could I live in your attic? Could I live in your pool?

You can live in my laundry-room closet.

Can I fit a tv in there?

How to improve writing (no. 9 in a series)

From the insert to a concert program, thanking a couple who donated $100,000+:

We thank the [Blanks] for their commitment to the cultural life of this entire region.

As opposed to ... most of the region? a large part of it? There's no need for entire, because big or small, a region is by definition a whole. I'm reminded of reading sentences that begin "Throughout the entire novel": there too there's no need for entire. Better:

We thank the [Blanks] for their commitment to the cultural life of our region.

Or just the region, but the slight extra emphasis on the first-person plural is a nice touch.

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Out of the past

Here's a good exercise in reading: Seek out a crucial book from your childhood. Read it. The greater the distance between the book and you, the more interesting the reading will be.

I've done such reading a number of times, most meaningfully with two formative books. I discovered Clifford Hicks' novel Alvin's Secret Code (1963) in the Boro Park branch of the Brooklyn Public Library in (I think) fourth grade and borrowed it endlessly (thanks, Library!). I bought Jay Bennett's novel Deathman, Do Not Follow Me (1968) in a Scholastic paperback edition in middle school. I never went for the "classics" of children's literature; my choices were all my own.

Clifford Hicks' novel tells the story of Alvin Fernald, who gets interested in codes and ends up cracking a coded message from the Civil War era (which leads to a buried treasure). In Jay Bennett's novel, high-school student Danny Morgan discovers a forged painting in the Brooklyn Museum. A psychologist might say that I was given to reading about characters who were a little older than me and had more interesting lives. I can't argue. Nor can I remember whether it was my boyhood fascination with codes that sparked my interest in Alvin or vice versa.

I got curious about Alvin in 1997 and borrowed a copy from my public library. In 2003 I somehow remembered Deathman and got a copy through interlibrary loan. (I now have my own copies via Advanced Book Exchange.)

What I found remarkable when I went back to Alvin's Secret Code was that while the plot had long disappeared from my memory, words and sentences and details were still vivid and familiar to me:

Alvin Fernald had a warm, tingly feeling smack in the middle of his stomach.

That sentence describes Alvin's anticipation on Friday afternoon before school's out. I liked everything about it when I was a kid, and still do.

Not even the gray clouds that scudded across the sky, low and threatening with the approach of winter, bothered him.

I loved scudded.

SERIOUS MILLY HIDING THURSDAY.

That's part of the coded message that Alvin's best friend Shoie finds crumpled up in the gutter. I knew a Milly in grade school, which might help to explain my fascination with that sentence. "SERIOUS MILLY HIDING THURSDAY" may have been my first exposure to language-poetry.

He hunched his shoulders inside his jacket and jammed his hands into his pockets to keep them warm.

I loved hunched and jammed.

Sitting down on the curb, he dug through his jacket pockets until he found the stub of a pencil.

I loved dug and stub, and I must have wished that my pockets were as deep as Alvin's.

It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that reading and rereading Alvin's Secret Code instilled in me a deep love of language. The only comparable childhood experience I can remember is my fascination with the word apoplexy when I read Treasure Island for school in sixth grade.

Jay Bennett's Deathman, Do Not Follow Me has stuck with me in different ways, not so much in words and phrases but in pieces of dialogue and the novel's wintry, ominous atmosphere. As with Alvin, the plot had vanished, but other things remained. Here's Danny with his friend George:

"Soon be winter," George said.

"It will," Danny nodded.

"Feel a cold one coming on. A real cold one."

Danny thought of the expense of a new overcoat and didn't say anything. He would try to get through this winter with his old one but he was sure his mother wouldn't like it. Even though they needed the money, she wouldn't like it.

"Feel it in my bones," George said.

And when the two race through Prospect Park:

They held up quarters to the lamplight, and the silver coins shone and sparkled and almost laughed aloud.

These passages (and I could add another half-dozen) may not look like great writing in any obvious way, but that they came back to me after so many years says something remarkable about Jay Bennett's ability to be evocative and, well, memorable.

A final thing to do: If the authors of your favorite childhood books are living, write to them (real letters if possible, not email) and tell them what their books meant to you. (Start by looking online and in Contemporary Authors.) I was lucky enough to be able to write to and receive replies from Clifford Hicks (in 1997, when he was in his late seventies) and Jay Bennett (in 2003, when was 91, via his son). Telling these writers what their books meant (and mean) to me was like paying a large and longstanding debt.

Related posts
Clifford B. Hicks (1920–2010)
Clifford Hicks’s new Alvin Fernald novel
Jay Bennett (1912–2009)

Dylan, Ricks, McTell

From "Tangled Up in Bob," David Yaffe's review of four books on Bob Dylan, including Christopher Ricks' Dylan's Visions of Sin:

The section on Dylan's 1983 song "Blind Willie McTell" is as revealing an example as any of how Ricks can get lost in the minutiae of dictionaries and literary and biblical concordances while losing track of what the song is actually about. He discusses William Tell's arrow (since the first line of the song contains the word "arrow"), makes many references to the Psalms (not a bad hunch, since Dylan was still on the tail end of his fire and brimstone mode) and many asides to let you know that the Warren Professor of Humanities at Boston University and this year's choice for Oxford Professor of Poetry is aware of Homer's and Milton's blindness. "William Tell's arrow hit the apple on the head of the apple of his eye, his son. Since Mc means 'son of,' the son of William Tell may be living in another country under another name: William, or Willie, McTell."

Over twenty pages of precious wordplay and meta-Dylan references (to "Gotta Serve Somebody"), Ricks does not even mention that Dylan was not merely summoning up William Tell or adding the "Mc" for any fancy reason, but that McTell was an actual blues musician and the song's true subject. Blind Willie McTell was not blind because of Milton but because he was blind from birth. And the McTell of the song was so named not because of William Tell but, according to legend, because a teacher at a school for the blind had mistakenly changed it from "McTear." Music and history don't exist for Ricks's own metaphorical convenience.

Is it reasonable to wonder whether Ricks knows who Blind Willie McTell was?

[Update: He does, as the rest of the discussion of the song makes clear.]

You can read the entire review by clicking here. (Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

"The classical holy grail"

From The Independent:

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.

The original papyrus documents, discovered in an ancient rubbish dump in central Egypt, are often meaningless to the naked eye--decayed, worm-eaten and blackened by the passage of time. But scientists using the new photographic technique, developed from satellite imaging, are bringing the original writing back into view. Academics have hailed it as a development which could lead to a 20 per cent increase in the number of great Greek and Roman works in existence. Some are even predicting a "second Renaissance."

You can read the entire article by clicking here. (Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Ron Silliman on the New American Poetry

Ron Silliman offers a reading list for anyone interested in the New American Poetry. You can find it by clicking here. 3703 students: If you want to follow some new directions in poetry beyond the work of our course, this list is a good starting point.

Silliman's blog doesn't have links to individual posts. You need to scroll to April 7, 2005, to find the list.

Correction: As RS notes, there are links. You can read the post on the New American Poetry by clicking here.

Kill your television

From Anu Garg at wordsmith.org:

"Why do you have a TV when you never watch it?" our daughter Ananya's friend, our little neighbor, asked us one evening while playing in our house. It was a logical question. Our TV is quiet most of the time. In many houses, people turn on their TVs as soon as they enter the front door. It fills the air like an air-freshener. Many become uncomfortable when the TV is turned off, as if their air supply has been cut off.

You often hear people complaining about how little time they have. A moment later you can hear them discussing characters in the latest vacuous reality show. TV doesn't kill just time. It promotes a sedentary lifestyle leading to obesity and early cancellation of our very own reality show.

Recognizing this growing epidemic, a bunch of enlightened folks organize a TV-Turnoff Week every year: http://tvturnoff.org. It's next week. So what are you going to do with all that time when you turn that TV off? Say: so many books, so little time!

The Opal Petty story

3703 students: When you see what happens to Darl, consider the following:

Opal Petty, whose lawsuit over her 51-year involuntary commitment in Texas mental institutions led to changes in state policy, died on March 10 in San Angelo, Tex. She was 86 and lived in Christoval, Tex.

The cause was pneumonia, said Linda Kauffman, the wife of Ms. Petty's nephew, Clint Denson.

Ms. Kauffman learned by chance at a 1986 reunion of her husband's family that Ms. Petty had been committed by her family to a state hospital in 1934, when she was 16. No one at the reunion knew exactly where she was at the time, Ms. Kauffman said in an interview, only that she was in some facility near where Ms. Kauffman lived.

When she got home to San Angelo, Ms. Kauffman called the institution closest to her home--the San Angelo State School, in Carlsbad--and found that Ms. Petty was indeed confined there.

She began to see Ms. Petty and arranged for her to make visits to the Denson home. The more she got to know Ms. Petty, Ms. Kauffman said, the more nervous and uncooperative school officials became.

Eventually she sought legal advice and was directed to Jim Harrington, director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, who filed suit on Ms. Petty's behalf. Through pretrial discovery, it was learned that she had been given a diagnosis of schizophrenia. But her lawyers argued that at worst she had had a psychotic depression. They also said she had suffered irreparable harm from being held in a "prison-like environment" for so long.

Dr. Jefferson Nelson, an Austin psychiatrist, testified, based on Ms. Petty's records and a personal examination, that she was psychotic when she was admitted, but that her symptoms quickly subsided, and that she should have been released.

He also testified that as a result of being institutionalized, Ms. Petty was afflicted with an "institutional syndrome" that left her withdrawn and unable to express emotion. . . .

Mr. Harrington said: "Being fundamentalist Baptists her family didn't approve of her wanting to go out dancing and such things. A church exorcism didn't work, so the family made the decision to commit her. One of her girl friends said she didn't see anything wrong with her."

After Ms. Kauffman found her, Ms. Petty was furloughed from the state school and lived with Ms. Kauffman and her husband for almost 20 years. She was employed at a workshop for people with mental disabilities, and bought dolls to add to a collection she had started while confined.

"They were her family," Ms. Kauffman said. "When she was buried she was surrounded by her dolls."

You can read the complete New York Times obituary by clicking here.