Margaret Atwood’s “Letter to America”

On March 27, 2003, one week after the United States-led invasion of Iraq began, The Nation published Margaret Atwood’s “Letter to America.” It begins, “This is a difficult letter to write, because I’m no longer sure who you are. Some of you may be having the same trouble.” And the closing paragaphs:

If you proceed much further down the slippery slope, people around the world will stop admiring the good things about you. They’ll decide that your city upon the hill is a slum and your democracy is a sham, and therefore you have no business trying to impose your sullied vision on them. They’ll think you’ve abandoned the rule of law. They’ll think you’ve fouled your own nest.

The British used to have a myth about King Arthur. He wasn’t dead, but sleeping in a cave, it was said; and in the country’s hour of greatest peril, he would return. You too have great spirits of the past you may call upon: men and women of courage, of conscience, of prescience. Summon them now, to stand with you, to inspire you, to defend the best in you. You need them.

“Oh, Jesus — God — no —”

The Washington Post reports that the Beach Boys will be headlining an inaugural ball — when even a Bruce Springsteen cover band has stepped away from a Jersey-themed inaugural event. Way to go, Mike and Bruce. Or just Mike, really.

A related post
Caroline, no!

[Post title with thanks to Benjamin Braddock.]

A misspelling in the news

In Maryland, Frederick County Public Schools (FCPS, motto: “Expecting Excellence Everywhere”) has fired Katie Nash, a “web experience coordinator,” apparently for a reply to a student on Twitter. The exchange, from January 5, followed a forecast of a winter storm:

Student: close school tammarow PLEASE

Nash, writing as @FCPSMaryland: but then how would you learn how to spell "tomorrow"? :)

The student’s comment on Nash’s response, tweeted the next day: “i didn't take it like personaly.”

I have four thoughts:

1. Students are always hoping that school (or classes, if they’re in college) will be canceled. That’s a fact of educational life. I think it’s safe to say that a tweeted request to a school system to close up for the day is a cheeky, joking gesture. Replying with a degree of cheek is not necessarily inappropriate.

2. Nash’s response was meant to be cheeky and joking, not mean-spirited. The smiley makes that clear. Twitter is a medium that lends itself to jokes and banter (and, of course, to much else). Whether jokes and banter are appropriate in a school system’s communication with students is a good question. Tone can be tricky. Perhaps FCPS should develop guidelines (or clearer guidelines) for its use of social media.

3. Nash could have responded without acknowledging the misspelling. Using tamarrow or tacitly correcting the misspelling by writing tomorrow might itself have seemed sarcastic or mean-spirited. Instead, Nash corrected the mistake and offered a gentle reminder about the value of school: there are reasons to show up, kid; there’s stuff that you need to learn. The correction serves as a reminder, too, about how words represent a writer in social media.

4. Whatever one thinks about Nash’s response, it certainly doesn’t merit firing. A more reasonable response: “Ms. Nash meant no harm by her tweet. FCPS will be working to develop clear guidelines for our future use of social media.” End of story. Instead, Nash is the focus of two hashtags, #FreeKatie and #KatieFromFCPS.

Related reading
All OCA misspelling posts (Pinboard)

The tiny-house reach

We were idly watching a few minutes of Tiny House Hunters a show our daughter Rachel recommended to us as a trove of unwitting comedy. We especially like the lingo: “cabin aesthetic,” “coastal look,” “cottage feel,” “eclectic,” “great for entertaining,” and other bits of harmless fun.

Last night a fellow inspecting a house exclaimed, “It makes me feel like I can reach from the toilet to the fridge!” Was he celebrating, or complaining? It wasn’t clear at first. But he was complaining. A recurring theme of the show: people want a small house, but not that small.

[Post title inspired by the expression boardinghouse reach. One of my grandfathers encouraged that reach at the table. And yes, the show’s title should really be Tiny-House Hunters. It’s not the people who are small.]

W(h)ither grammar

David Mulroy, a classicist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, asked students in large mythology classes to paraphrase the opening sentence of the Declaration of Independence:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Mulroy offered the opportunity to paraphrase as an extra-credit option on an exam: two points for a “good-faith effort,” five points for an excellent paraphrase. About half the students took up the challenge. Sample results:

When dealing with events in life, one should drop preconceived knowings and assume that everything that happens, happens for a reason, and basically life goes on.

Cut your earthly bonds and wear the mantle of Nature and God. Wield the power and declare justly your ascension from man’s law. Then all shall bow before your might.

When man loses all political structure and is reverted back to tribal and instinctive nature, man should figure out what happened, so it won’t happen again.

It doesn’t matter where you came from. In the end we are all human beings. Humans are at the top of the food chain, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t respect nature. Because we have one earth, learn to preserve it.

David Mulroy, The War Against Grammar (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003).

For Mulroy, such responses (which I’ve chosen as representative from the fourteen responses he cites) suggest “a kind of higher illiteracy,” that of students who speak proficiently and express themselves adequately in writing but who cannot work out the complexities of other people’s sentences:

This kind of illiteracy boils down to an ignorance of grammar. If a student interprets the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence as an exhortation to “preserve the earth,” then how can you demonstrate the error? There is no way to do so that does not involve grammatical analysis: the subject of the main clause is respect to the opinions of mankind, the main verb is requires, and so forth.

I’d add: a grasp of the sentence’s sense requires a recognition that its first fifty words form one long dependent clause.

How many problems in reading stem from an ignorance of basic grammar? I think back to a poem I often taught, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” and a difficult sentence that I always unpacked for students (lines 17–23). “It” is a piece of soot fluttering on a fireplace grate:

Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling
    Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.

I realize now that what I was explaining to students was not just diction (methinks) and pronoun reference (whose) but the very grammar of the sentence: It seems to me that its motion, &c.

And how many problems in writing stem from an ignorance of basic grammar? A writer who doesn’t know the difference between a clause and a phrase, between an independent clause and a dependent clause, cannot reliably tell a sentence from a sentence fragment or understand what it means to subordinate one clause to another. And making sentences that are not merely adequate but that serve one’s purposes in writing depends at least in part on some understanding of grammar. See, for instance, Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style (2006).

I used to ask students in writing classes: What does it mean to go through twelve or more years of schooling and not be able to recognize a sentence in your language? There’s something rather crazy about that, no? I added (always) that the students themselves were not to blame. Mulroy’s book is especially useful in showing the background to this state of affairs: the educational theorizing (complete with “studies”) that cast instruction in grammar as harmful, as something contrary to the improvement of student writing.

My English teachers in middle school and high school must have not gotten the message: every year began with a review of basic grammar: parts of speech, phrases, clauses, kinds of conjunctions, on and on. We even diagrammed sentences. It was tiresome stuff. But so is any effort to lay a foundation.

Related reading
All OCA grammar posts (Pinboard)

[A 2008 statement from the National Council of Teachers of English acknowledges the importance of grammar instruction: “Teaching grammar will not make writing errors go away. . . . But knowing basic grammatical terminology does provide students with a tool for thinking about and discussing sentences.” The NCTE still stands by a 1985 resolution urging “the discontinuance of testing practices that encourage the teaching of grammar rather than English language arts instruction.” Notice that the resolution casts grammar as distinct from “English language arts.”]

Words from Edward G. Robinson

Edward G. Robinson, speaking at an event to honor his hundred-and-first film appearance, in Soylent Green (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1973):

“To work, to create, to grow, and to give of yourself: that is one of the chief aims in life. To have experienced it once: that is a great experience. To do it a hundred and one times, well, that’s really a small miracle.”

Soylent Green was Robinson’s last film. (He died before its release.) In it, he plays Sol Roth, once a full professor, now a ”book,” a police analyst: ”You know, I was a teacher once, a full professor, a respected man.” With his beard, beret, worn jacket, and Phi Beta Kappa key, Roth looks like a teacher of, say, art history, or comparative literature.

[My punctuation, following the speaker’s pace.]

MLK

From “Where Do We Go from Here?,” Martin Luther King’s last presidential address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, August 16, 1967:

When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929.

Book battles

From The Wall Street Journal: “When Couples Fight Over Books.” A claim therein: “If you and your partner haven’t bickered about books, you’re probably not readers.” A related matter: 積ん読 [tsundoku].

Our household’s book situation has become pleasantly complicated by the formation of our two-person reading club. The copies of books we’ve yet to read sit together on a couple of shelves for new stuff. But once we’ve read a book, the two copies go their separate ways.

Bellerby & Co., Globemakers

Sean at Contrapuntalism passed on the link to a short film about Bellerby & Co., Globemakers: The Whole World Is in Their Hands (Great Big Story). See also the Bellerby website, which includes an origin story.

A sardine tin in the news

You might think that the headline says it all: “‘It all seems a bit fishy’: Audacious theft of sardine tin costume from Lamb pub sparks appeal for its return before Surbiton’s Seething Festival” (Your Local Guardian). But that’s not all: there are photographs. And this description of the Seething Festival: “The surreal procession last year saw children dressed as cheese and guinea pigs led through the streets by the legendary ‘goat boy.’”

I hope there wasn’t a wicker man.

And now that I’m free-associating: I knew some college students, years ago, who had a band called Goatboy. The name came from not from Surbiton’s procession (and not from the Spiritus Mundi) but from the toddler son of a band member. Another member was in a class with me and wrote what I still remember as one my favorite student evaluations: “Beats the shit out of any speech-comm class I could have taken.” He was a speech-comm major, and an honest sort. Too bad I couldn’t include that evaluation in my tenure portfolio.

Related reading
All OCA sardines posts (Pinboard)

[I’ve corrected the headline’s typo of Surbtion, which did seem like a strange name for a town. The headline needs a hyphen: sardine tin costume should read sardine-tin costume. A Facebook page explains the purpose of the Seething Festival: “to remember Lefi the Goatboy of Mount Seething who drove the giant away through the power of making cheese.”]