Felicitously Yours

So what exactly is the connection between food and writing? As far back as I can recall, the writing that I’ve really enjoyed–the writing I’ve done at my own prompting and not at that of an assignment sheet or an employer–I’ve done with something to eat or drink nearby, often both. Even now, as I’m starting this post, I’m seated in one of my wonted retreats here in Greenville, sipping a half cup of espresso. By “half cup” I mean literally a half cup–4 ounces. I’ve come here so often, years now, that when it’s not busy, the persons behind the counter start my order as soon as they see me enter. And though I typically order “just a double espresso,” occasionally a triple, they prepare me a quadruple as a matter of course, aware of my fondness for the espresso bean and certain that the extra won’t be wasted. Customer loyalty has its rewards. 

In an earlier pre-coffee dispensation, what typically accompanied my writing was Darjeeling tea and a slice of New York-style cheesecake, topped, of course, with cherry compote. Seated inconspicuously at a corner table of a nearby deli, adequately provisioned with food and drink, I would fold open the greeting card I’d bought–photograph or artwork on the cover, blank potentiality inside–and begin penning some thoughts to a distant friend. With no chance for a second draft, the process was necessarily slow and deliberate. A sip of tea. A little thinking. A small bite of cheesecake. A carefully printed sentence. Another sip of tea. Some more thinking. And so on until all three–the tea, the cheesecake, and the card–were finished. If I was lucky, I had made only two or three crossouts, with the more felicitous phrasings of thought traversing the outcroppings of imprecision like backpackers scrambling up and down a narrow and scabrous trail.

Always at the end, I felt spent but satiated, as if I’d just finished, successfully, a long and arduous game of chess. I’d like to think that the friends who received those cards years ago were delighted by what they found within them. I only know that when I was done, what I had penned, with rare exception, pleased me as I hastily read it over three or four times before sealing it up in the envelope and saying goodbye to it forever. The poet Marianne Moore gives cause for hope in a statement of hers I ran across sometime ago: “Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.”

The espresso is long gone, and, thanks to the blessings of word processing applications, this post, like all the others, is wholly free of crossouts. It leaves a pleasant aftertaste.

A writing activity that I’ve found myself participating in more and more lately is posting responses at online blogs and forums. “Like, duh!” you say. “Isn’t that what you’re doing here?” Well, yes, but I’m speaking of a different type of site, specifically, sites that focus on current news events.

Many newspapers today feature online blogs or forums where readers can respond either to items they’ve read or to the responses of others. The online version of most newspapers’ “Letters to the Editor” section, for instance, now includes an accompanying forum, in which published letters receive immediate, often vehement responses. Brash and abrasive, these webpages are not places that writers typically go to feel good about themselves, although knowing that one was fighting for truth does feel good afterwards when one is licking the wounds to his psyche.

The same is true of online sites dedicated exclusively to blogging about current news events, sites like the Huffington Post, the Daily Kos, and Newsvine. Here someone, the site’s moderator or a registered member, links to a story that has appeared somewhere on the Internet, then composes an initial response. And the thread is off and running, not infrequently in directions far afield from the topic of the original story. Although I’m sure there are current-events blogs somewhere in cyberspace that are predominantly conservative, most of the ones I’ve encountered have been overrun with liberals. Ah, well, more targets to aim at, I suppose.

A recent thread at one such blog was prompted by a photograph showing McCain in 2006 attending an ACORN-sponsored event, the implication being that his current criticism of this community organization (now under investigation nationwide for voter registration fraud) is proof of hypocrisy. Some distance into the thread, several writers wandered from the original topic and began yapping that McCain wasn’t really a war hero. They claimed that his five years in a North Vietnamese prison suggest instead that he was very likely a collaborator (or else he would have been released or killed earlier). Apparently John Kerry is the only kind of war hero these people know. Summing these comments up, though, one writer named ”Anon Emus1″ wrote, “Ok Donald we are being mean. LOL Stop before we make a McCain fan burst into total rage.” My response, more temperate than total in its rage, appears below:

Anon Emus1, you and the other Kool-Aid drinkers give yourselves too much credit for intelligence. In order for a McCain fan to “burst into total rage” at what you’ve written, he or she would first have to consider it substantive or reasoned. All I see when I read these remarks–and I’m more a Palin supporter than a McCain supporter–is the mental equivalent of a group of 4-year-olds mistaking their peevish carping for wit.

As for the notion that McCain’s attendance in March 2006 at an event co-sponsored by ACORN somehow undercuts the sincerity of his criticism of ACORN today (presumably the point of ACORN’s releasing the photograph), I simply question whether it’s reasonable to assume that McCain knew in 2006 how aggressively ACORN was involved in voter fraud. To his credit, he may even have been giving the organization the benefit of the doubt.

Now, though, with investigations of ACORN ongoing in more than 10 states, including one in Nevada by a Democratic Secretary of State, McCain would have to have his head buried in the sand not to smell the stench of corruption emanating from this supposedly “non-partisan community organization.” Not to call this corruption of the electoral process what it is–corruption–would be derelict. By contrast, Obama’s silence on this score speaks volumes. If he visits your house, you’d be wise to count your spoons when he leaves.

Granted, these blogs and forums don’t often elicit thoughtful, reasonable prose. In fact, much that is posted is simply arrogant and loutish. But they are not entirely cul de sacs of vanity. As the point of visiting fitness centers is presumably to prepare oneself for physical challenges that lie elsewhere (i.e., in places where air conditioning and padded benches are unlikely), so the point of visiting current-events blogs, to me anyway, is to prepare oneself intellectually and rhetorically for battlefields of ideas that lie elsewhere, battlefields that we will all eventually–and without the luxury of an anonymous username–face or flee.

The sudden dramatic collapse of the financial markets has gotten me wondering what the chances are of our country’s being abruptly returned to simpler (read “poorer”) times, specifically, to those not-so-long-ago times before computers and word processing programs appeared and we came to believe we’d always be transported in limousine-like luxury to our verbal destinations.

Yes, figuratively speaking, it’s possible to travel on foot. In fact, the few times in my adult life that I’ve done so literally–usually thanks to such unpredictables as flat tires and ice storms–I’ve been surprised at how much of the landscape has come out of hiding. Sights, sounds, smells–where had they all been?

So maybe the same is true of writing “on foot.” Is there something a writer “sees” when writing with just a pencil or pen that he would miss if he were composing in Microsoft Word, with his seatbelt fastened and the pedal to the metal? Perhaps connections that appear between seemingly disparate thoughts separated by galaxies of brain matter, connections that require time for the electric impulses to complete their intergalactic circuit before returning to announce at court the discovery of new thoughts peopled by strange new creatures. Or metaphors that, like crape myrtle, require a longer preparation time before finally coming to bloom, metaphors that are more deliberate and long-lived than those that come like a flood in the rush of spring only to vanish in the blink of an eye. Perhaps we miss these and more. 

And yet old habits die hard. I’ve been composing at computers a long time now, so long that I can’t help thinking that, in the words of a favorite fictional character, “I’m an institutional man.” Going back doesn’t seem an option. Still, I do remember a time–a bright, young time–when all there was was pencil and pen. And it was enough. So maybe, just maybe, if this economy does crash and burn, sucking all of cyberspace into its great conflagration, I would still be able to grab something–a charred stick, a piece of chalk–and scratch my thoughts against a wall. I hope I would. I hope . . .

“The road is now open, and you’ve got the keys.” How utterly felicitous our sentences can sometimes surprisingly be. The highlighted statement that leads off this post was actually the last sentence in an otherwise mundane email telling students that I’d spotted and fixed a glitch in my own blog, one that would have prevented their replying to my posts. And yet almost as soon as I’d typed it out in that email, I liked it. (Like students, where do these rare sentences come from?) It has so much going for it, if I may say so myself.

Unlike the prosaic prose before it, the sentence contains a strong dose of the figurative. The preceding material had discussed certain technical (ho-hum) details related to my blog. Then suddenly, out of the blue, the scene changed metaphorically, and I was tossing the reader the keys to a car. (What kind of car? Why, a Mustang, of course.) But while the keys were part and parcel of the car metaphor, they also unlocked another metaphor that brought the thought back around to the blog by suggesting the keys of a keyboard (i.e., you’ve got the keys found on your keyboard). Neat, vero?

And yet that’s not all. The meter of the sentence is equally felicitous. The two halves that compose it–”The road is now open” and “and you’ve got the keys”–present parallel metrical patterns: an iamb followed by an anapest. The only difference between the two is that in the first clause the anapest is feminine (i.e., it ends with an extra unstressed syllable) while in the second it is masculine, appropriate for bringing the whole sentence–and the whole email–to a close. Also neat, vero?

So while that original message will soon disappear into whatever memory hole it is that swallows our emailed correspondence when we click “Delete,” at least one sentence from it will linger a little longer in this post and, if I’m lucky, dear reader, in your memory as well.

Today I returned the semester’s first set of papers to my two writing classes. As soon as the last student’s essay left my hand–the image from the Sistine Chapel comes to mind, don’t ask me why–the pendulum in that part of the brain that keeps track of my emotional state passed through the center, that lowest point, and began its upward arc into the region known (though not to scientists) as the Manic Mind.

The gravity and friction that mere minutes earlier had made walking across the room a Herculean labor seemed suddenly halved. If the truth be known, I would have sworn, were I a swearing person, that I was gliding on a cushion of air or, like those astronauts of yore (and how yore it’s been!), bounding across the surface of the moon. I was, in short–to borrow a term from the lexicon of the eminent Dr. Scholl–gellin’.

This is such a recurring phenomenon, such a veritable law of nature (at least where nature’s laws govern me), that I have come to look forward to this manic state as not merely the light at the end of the tunnel but the reward of my labor. For be not deceived, Grasshopper: grading papers is indeed labor. If you think you can escape the curse by retreating into a classroom to teach English, think again. With each new crop of students–where do they all come from!–there are thorns and thistles enough to occupy your days (and not a little of your nights). But now, here I am, sounding morose and somber and bleak, me of the Manic Mind. Ah, well, truth, I suppose, will out, even through the euphoria of this manic me.

If you’re reading this post, you’re probably (1) a student taking En 340: Advanced Composition & Rhetoric (or, grad listed, En 680: Teaching Writing–a title which, TMWOT, is much more alluring); (2) someone who knows me or a student in this class; or (3) someone thinking, “Whoa! ‘Composition’? ‘Rhetoric’? How’d I get HERE?!”

Although few audiences we write to are ever as simple as we might wish, for the purposes of this blog, I’m going to assume that the persons I’m addressing are those in the first of these three groups, i.e., students enrolled in En 340 or 680.

That done, let me welcome you all by saying, “Greetings, writers!” What we have here is an experiment, specifically, something intended to replace the journal assignment that I’ve used in this class for–dare I say it?–decades. In class you will find out how exactly you’ll be expected to participate here and how that participation will, through the magic of abstruse mathematical equations and unfathomable computer technology, be translated into a grade that either makes your future a bed of roses or destroys it utterly, “hip and bone, thigh and marrow.” Well, perhaps I exaggerate. 

In any case, welcome to this beginning. What chances to unfold in the weeks ahead we can only guess. Let’s hope that more of it than not teaches, delights, and edifies–is, in a word, felicitous!