April 2008 Archives

The Last Word

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Something happened today and rather than lose my temper I thought I'd write about it. In a class today, I saw a technical writer present on the distinctions between different kinds of writing. That's a good way to get me riled up. Then she went on in great detail elaborating on how, common wisdom suggests, clear, concise, and logical writing should not be creative. I don't mean to be arrogant; I'm sure the title of this post is ironic. But at the same time, I feel compelled to move the argument in new directions. That this is the last word on grammar shall be a kind of joke between me and whoever reads this blog.

Some of the clearest, most concise writing is creative and unexpected. Writing doesn't need to be lifeless to get a point across. The spaceships hung in the sky in the exact way that bricks don't, Douglas Adams wrote. Does anyone not understand that? The girl's problem is this: She was confusing sloppy grammar, esoteric weirdness, and artsy garbage with genuine creativity. When ideas are expressed in a creative way, we are more likely to remember them. Think of Ben Franklin's witty remarks. (Not just the Poor Richard quotes, but also the serious ones, as in his essay Whistle: When I see a beautiful, sweet-tempered girl married to an ill- natured brute of a husband, What a pity, say I, that she should pay so much for a whistle.)

One of the technical writer's main points was that if someone misreads the directions on a product, they could potentially harm themselves. It reminds me of a misting fountain I once bought at a novelty store. I never read instructions, but this time I did. The Korean technical writer admonished me -- I'll never  forget -- Be warning! If mist too big and wet table, do not touch or electric shock shall harm you! I might not have thought of that if I hadn't read the instructions. And I certainly wouldn't have read the instructions if they weren't... creative. That was three or four years ago.

First, Will Strunk Jr. and E.B. White's thoughts on conciseness (another of the girl's main arguments against creativity in technical writing).

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
So we may safely say that all writing, not just technical writing, should be concise. Or else it will not be vigorous. Fair enough. No one would accuse Ernest Hemingway or Ivan Bunin of not being concise. In fact, they are laconic.

Now, I will offer this question: Why is grammar important?

If grammar were so important and rigid, how could good writers get away with breaking the rules? I am confident grammar matters because without proper grammar, we would not be able to understand what writing says. Errors are distracting, they break the spell of reading, destroy the vivid and continuous dream. But intentional bending of the rules is not distracting. So we need conventions to understand one another. Clarity above all things.

But wait: Why is clarity important? Why clarity above all things?

Because clarity allows communication. It allows a connection between author and reader. It makes the process dynamic.

Therefore, grammar matters only in terms of clarity, which matters only in terms of connecting as human beings.

The End

Ivan Bunin (1870 - 1953)

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Bunin.jpgJust off Harvard Square, we found an underground bookshop with a Russian poster in the window. I can't remember the name and I have lost the receipt. Inside the stacks were lined with piles of dusty books. This is where I bought The Gentleman From San Francisco & Other Stories by Ivan Bunin. That was two weeks ago.

I had no free moments to crack the spine and read a little. School and other projects have kept me busy since I returned from Boston. I was reading Anton Chekhov's short stories first and writing (or grading) papers. But this weekend I finally found time to open the little red book and read the introduction.

Ivan Bunin was a friend of Anton Chekhov. The two became friends when Bunin wrote to the famous writer and asked his opinion on some drafts. In this way, Bunin became the last in a long tradition of Russian literature. His literary influences include Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov, and Gorky. What struck me most about the introduction (to the 1963 edition) is that the author, Thompson Bradley, makes an intricate study of Ivan Bunin's unique and innovative style.

Bunin was trained as a poet. His prose is laconic, concise to the point of mystery, and steeped in what Bradley calls a physical lyricism. The stories are object-based. Bunin possessed an almost "pagan" delight in the physical, especially as concerned with erotic love. Almost all of the emotions in his stories are invoked directly as a sensory experience. "In successive clauses he will experiment with various aspects of a color, for example, as if he were sharpening the focus on a projector lens, until he achieves the desired clarity and exactness."

The obsession for correct words reminds me of Michael Chabon, who has been called "a young American Nabokov." Mr. Nabokov would certainly have  been aware of Ivan Bunin and the rest of the Russian literary traditions (Nabokov himself often translated classic works from the original Russian, such as Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time). The physical lyricism, the focus on objects and their impacts, reminds me very much of Cormac McCarthy's later novels (No Country for Old Men and The Road in particular).

None of Mr. Bunin's stories are longer than a novella. The man himself died in exile in 1953. He lived in Paris and strongly apposed Lenin's 1918 revolution. Despite this, Bradley writes, Bunin is largely unpublished outside the former Soviet Republics. He was the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Still, he has been "apparently doomed to oblivion in the West."

I am confident we have no reason to teach what we cannot do. A professor has no business talking extensively on a subject he or she knows nothing about. Likewise a writing teacher shouldn't be teaching writing if he or she can't put a sentence together.

By the time most instructors finish their master's degrees and set about teaching, each has come up with a style of writing that carried that writer through school. Maybe someone pours a glass of Scotch and sets it on the windowsill with a cigarette. Then she writes all night and won't touch the goodies until she's done 5,000 words. Or maybe the writer writes a draft each day and rewrites every morning, but never on a Sunday. Maybe one writer revises as he writes, or writes it all in a 23-hour marathon.

The point is that most writing teachers have a system. We can do as well as teach. We know how good writing gets written. Especially by the time we are working on advanced degrees.

That said, this assignment in Missouri State's practicum--the "Writing What We Teach" assignment from English 603, practicum--helps and hurts instructors. It helps because it draws attention to the process of writing again, things we have internalized. It turns writing inside out, and gives us empathy for students. But it is also a chore, and it does destroy some of the mysticism about writing.

It takes off, as Hemingway said, "Whatever butterflies have on their wings." It dissects the magic. And although we gain empathy, we are forced to drag out all of our secrets and then use them, somehow, to find a way to teach our students. But don't most of us do that already? Maybe I'm wrong, but I think we do.

I think the problem is this: The assignment didn't force us to do anything differently. Speaking for myself, this is how I teach anyway. I tell my students about how I write, how others have written, and so on. We talk about the messy process--a buzzword for a long time now in composition classrooms--and we revise and rewrite and generally draft together. I write all the time anyway. In a very fundamental way, I am always writing what I teach.

I would guess that there are not a few students who, for example, write textual analyses in their advanced literature classes--Shakespeare and Chaucer, etc. So do we really need to do it again?

If anything, the "Writing What We Teach" assignment in our practicum helps us to be mindful, understanding, and empathetic. Everyone needs to be reminded of a student's plight sometimes. But we live a student's life, too. We lead double lives.

In conclusion, I can't say I will use this assignment when I teach my class. It hasn't modified my views on how to teach, what to lecture on, etc. (my pedagogy). This isn't a reflection on the assignment, of course, but simply an observation. Using my own writing process as an example for students--or as a way to understand students, or whatever--is just a side effect of the way I have always taught.

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Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson
Image Source: http://www.cgu.edu/images/calvin-writing.gif

Boston

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Last weekend I flew to Boston, via Providence and Chicago, and I met Sarah in Rhode Island. Then we took the train across the bay and met my friend Andrew Jackson at the South Station. Drew attends the Boston Conservatory; he's a classical composer. From there it was a mad dash to a community theatre, where Erica Spyres, Drew's girlfriend, was debuting in her first East Coast show. The play was called The Mystery of Edwin Drood, loosely based on the unfinished Charles Dickens novel of the same name. Sarah and I had a wonderful time, we all left together, and we ate Malaysian food at a restaurant near Erica and Drew's apartment.

Boston is an old city. Every building, including the apartment building, seems as if it was built between 1636 and 1942. Cathedrals and graveyards with crumbling headstones are sprinkled among the fast food chains, mega-bookstores, and office buildings. On Saturday we walked. We saw the graves of John Hancock, Ben Franklin's parents, Paul Revere, and Rev. John Winthrop (the true author of The City on the Hill speech). We ate sushi for lunch and walked down to the harbor where the fog was rolling in.

Saturday night we took the green and red trains to Harvard Square. I bought a sweatshirt with the Harvard name and colors. Sarah got a shirt, too. When the rain started in we ducked into a rare bookstore. The basement was stacked with books, and a Russian poster in the window promised potential. Drew spoted a rare autographed photo of a famous Canadian composer ($8,500). The owner of the store was Russian and he said, "It's very rare," when Drew gasped a little. I bought a first edition of The Short Stories of Anton Chekov ($19.95) published by the Modern Library and another book by Chekov's student, the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for literature ($1.95). The second book was called The Gentleman From San Francisco & Other Stories. I couldn't resist! After that we had a wonderful seafood dinner and a beer.

Erica arrived home late from her second performance of Edwin Drood and Drew cooked her a heap of bacon. We were all exhausted from the walking during the day. Sarah and I had to get up early, find a ride to Providence, and fly out at 10:00 am or so. Drew called some of his friends, who pleasantly agreed to drive us up. We were very, very grateful, because it was that or an hour-long cab ride. So the friend, whose name was Matt, drove us into Rhode Island and we flew out. I can't wait to visit again next spring, when Drew and I will present our opera based on the final hours of life Rasputin spent (with his murderers). Maybe we'll run the Boston marathon, too... Maybe.

Jim Whitehead

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Writers will feature stories of writers that you may or may not have heard of. Short, to-the-point articles and biographical information. Sometimes the articles will feature interviews and links to an author's books or official sites.

jimbest.jpgIn 1971, Jim Whitehead released his first and last novel: Joiner. The New York Times praised the novel and Mr. Whitehead himself as one of the Top 10 Southern Novels after Faulkner. Mr. Whitehead was a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and his editor was Bob Gottlieb. He founded the MFA workshop program at the University of Arkansas (Fayetteville).


Although he was a fantastic writer and poet, Jim Whitehead's drafting process was laborious, and he often completed poems much easier than prose. He seems to be both a poet and a novelist, although his novels remain in unfinished draft form in Missouri State's Special Collections (in Meyer Library). The notepads are in pencil; Mr. Whitehead never used a typewriter if he could help it. Eric Sentell, who studied draft after draft of Mr. Whitehead's Coldstream (Joiner's sequel) with Kevin Luebbering, and who transcribed a draft of the first chapter of the book for The Moon City Review, has speculated that the intense drafting process is what kept Mr. Whitehead from ever publishing a second novel. In addition, Mr. Whitehead seems to have been bent on committing his novels to memory, as he often stressed young writers to do with famous works of literature.

Mr. Whitehead confessed in an interview that he would re-write 2,000 words just to fix a single paragraph.

Jim Whitehead was also a fairly heavy drinker, which is common in Southern culture, and some other scholars who helped to sort through his papers have suggested the heavy drinking also played a part in Mr. Whitehead never finishing any of Joiner's sequels. Mr. Whitehead did publish many books of poetry throughout his life.

Mr. Whitehead was a conscientious (and beloved) professor of Creative Writing. He took great care with his students and often helped to turn out award-winning writers from the University of Arkansas. He took great time to prepare for classes, to comment on student work, and to appear professional and helpful to those who came to him for help with their writing. This care may also have cut deeply into his time as a writer. He also raised a large family with his wife, and was very busy with all the responsibilities that implies.

Whatever the reason, this lovable professor, scholar, and poet never did publish another novel. He died in 2003. The papers he left behind fill 13 acid-free cardboard boxes. Most of the writing is on lined paper, white and yellow, covered with concentric coffee-stain circles and some of it illegible.

Those who wish to learn more about Jim Whitehead may do so here.
Next Wednesday I will be reading the first chapter of my novel The Body of Emperor Norton at the Library Center on South Campbell as part of Missouri State's Soul of a Poet series. I haven't decided if I'll read the second chapter, too (I may have time to fill). All I know is that I'm nervous about standing up behind the podium with a captive audience. As far as I can remember, this will be the first reading I've ever given.

I'm hard at work on three new articles for 417 Magazine, all of which will appear in June. The first is a honeymoon/travel piece for 417 Bride detailing the adventures of Jeff and Leah Jenkins in London ("A Druid with a Briefcase"). The second is a personal profile of supermom Elizabeth Farris, who travels with her four kids and husband Eric to all corners of the globe. The last is the chronicle of a motorcycle trip through Germany by Don and Sue Rollins. Again, look for those essays in June.

Besides that I'm focusing on teaching and graduating. I need to start developing my thesis now, studying for comprehensive exams, and I also need to take a test from Modern & Classical Languages in Russian Literature. That is, I need to demonstrate that I can read Russian. It looks like I have a busy spring ahead of me and I'm going to do my best to stay positive, stay happy, and stay on track.


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This page is an archive of entries from April 2008 listed from newest to oldest.

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