Comma Dot Comma

A few posts ago I bestowed some of my writing advice upon you without your specifically asking for it (except Mike, he asked for it). Therefore, I have compiled a list of advice that other people give me about my own writing. My genre of choice is poetry, and the stark incontrovertible reality of the poetry world is that almost no one in it reaches a wide audience and absolutely no one makes any money off of it. The best you can hope for is an occasional pat on the back and, eventually, with the gradual accumulation of publication credits and prizes, an office with a window at a liberal arts school.

All of this is preamble to say that there are well-meaning people out there who wish me more success than I wish for myself. They persevere in trying out different ideas on me to get me to turn from the Path of Doom. They also try to help me identify what I might be doing wrong. Or they enjoy a letter I’ve written or a story I’ve told and hope for more of the same. My general reaction to such tips is to feel grateful for the motive behind them and then giggle while I compile them into a list. I might get tired of poetry some day, but that day is far off. Without further ado, the list:

• Write children’s books now, while you still remember what it’s like to be a child.
• Write policy journalism, such as for the Atlantic Monthly.
• Write a screenplay and option it for some quick money.
• Write humor like Erma Bombeck.
• Rejection slips are a sign that it is time to change direction.
• You should be a travel writer.
• All the best writing comes easily.
• You have the science of writing down, now work on the art.
• Poetry may be a high art form but no one reads it.
• You should use your gifts for the Kingdom of God.
• I’ll say one thing– you’re honest.
• Narrow your focus.
• Try to pick subjects that are accessible to a wide audience.
• Market yourself.

The first time the Mister and I kissed (11 years ago or so), my nose started to bleed. Right onto his face.

First, quote of the day, from an office-wide email:

“There is a bag of cheese curds in each of the 2 refridgerators in the 4th floor pantry….please feel free to help yourselves.”

(Should I make cheese one of the regular themes of this blog? It keeps coming up.)

And now, the Things I Love to Hate.

1. Quips on Church Marquees. Recently spotted: SIGN BROKEN. COME INSIDE FOR MESSAGE. I’m an old-fashioned marquee girl. I like them to list the service times, the name of the pastors, any special events. When did pithy statements take over? And yet I keep my eye out for new ones, awaiting the frisson of recognition, the subsequent groan.
2. Use of quote marks for emphasis. As in, “Fresh,” “Delicious” Sandwiches. In my mind, such quote marks indicate insincerety, as if the writer could not stand behind the words and thus attributed them to some unspecific Other. There are many things those sandwiches could be, and Fresh and Delicious are not among them. I relish the “possibilities.”
3. Red Twizzlers. This product is not candy. It is a soft plastic upon which someone spilled their strawberry KoolAid. If there is an open package next to me, I keep pulling pieces out and biting them off. Is it still true? Is this substance still masquerading as a food? Why yes, this bite tastes exactly the same as the last! But the next one is bound to be different! I shall try again!
4. The Female Leads in Cary Grant Romantic Comedies. These women have it all– brains, beauty, guts, fashion sense. Best of all, they see right through Cary Grant’s charm to his wrinkled, caddish heart, and they let him know it. He’s loose or drunk or selfish or bad with money or, most often, an unrepentant shyster. Yay girls! And Cary Grant doesn’t deny it, or change a whit. So why do they keep falling for him by the end of the film?
5. Spin-Offs from Baltimore City’s Believe Campaign. So there are these black signs and bumper stickers all around Baltimore. They say BELIEVE in white letters. The proliferation of variations is just too cute! Let’s play spot-the-clever-substitution: We have BEHAVE, BEEHIVE, BE LOVE. Hey you bumper sticker people! It would BEHOOVE you to get a new idea. (Ooh, that one felt good. BEHOOVE, get it?)
6. Burger King Commercials. They don’t seem designed to make you want to eat the food, so I love to hate them. The creepy mascot, the giant pile of female dancers forming a Whopper, and now the father and son duo (”Dad, if you’d just get your head out of your bun!”). How does one convince a comfort food corporation to go “edgy”?
7. Baggy Basketball Uniforms. This year’s versions have truly entered The Culotte Zone. How can those boys even run? I love to watch floppy shorts impede progress down the court as they ripple around the boys’ shins. It seems you have to wear more servicable shorts under your uniform shorts. And how lucky are the players that the material is silky? Otherwise, they’d wad up in the crotch area more and more as you ran– nobody wants THAT. (Image from http://www.taylorcointl.com/basketball/)

So all this grammar talk has got me thinking about rules and memorization and how cool they are. I’m hoping it’s so passe to assert such a thing, that it is cutting edge again. My mom landed a job teaching junior high history recently, and she asked me what I remembered most fondly from my own history class days. “Memorizing things,” I told her. She gasped in a surely-you-jest manner; she is the queen of multisensory, integrated, project-based learning. Maybe if I had gotten to make cheese and debate the Indian Situation and map out exploratory journeys like her students get to do, I would have said that instead.

But no, what I loved most was memorizing the Preamble to 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 the Gettysburg Address (… our forefathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure). We also memorized the Preamble to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

I can’t recite any of them wholly, yet their flotsam and jetsam knock against my thoughts as I scrub an elbow in the shower or walk at a certain iambic pace down the sidewalk. I remember my dad’s nonsense versions of pop songs better than the real lyrics, as well as other silly verses he’d recite (Ladies and gentlemen, hoboes and tramps, cross-eyed mosquitos and bow-legged ants…) plus the poem our class memorized in sixth grade (Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows…). Shel Silverstein contributes a fair amount, too (Sarah Sylvia Cynthia Stout would not take the garbage out…).

We did all the things kids usually do in Catechism class at church, including singing songs and staging nativity plays and cutting things out of construction paper and talking about life choices that made Jesus happy; and yet I am most grateful for the many prayers we memorized (light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, one in being with the Father, through him all things were made), and the familar phrases of the Mass itself (on the night he was betrayed he took the cup…).

In my late teens, memorizing scriptures carried me through the darkest and most sightless months of depression (do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…), and just the other day I relished singing along with Sinead O’Connor on the radio, from first verse to last (Went to the doctor and guess what he told me, guess what he told me, he said girl you better try and have fun no matter what you do, well he’s a fool, ’cause nothing compares to you…) and Shakespeare’s sonnets often come to mind for no reason (if snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; if hair be wires, then black wires grow upon her head…). These days ee cummings gets me out of bed (i thank You God for most this amazing day, the leaping greenly spirits of trees, the true blue dream of sky…)

This motley collection of words and phrases creates a visceral connection to the history of my nation, my family, my faith, my own rites of passage. I could look any of them up on the internet should I be so moved; but memorized, the words take on a special separate life. They come to me unbidden, out of context, or at just the right moment. They are the voices of my people. It’s only recently that we humans have learned to preserve our most precious words in writing; our bodies are still designed to learn them by heart.

Well, I got a lot of random things I could post. Might as well touch on on all of them before getting to the main one.

1. A few people, after reading my writing “rules,” expressed concern that perhaps I was reading their blogs in light of them. Rest assured, I only read your blog if I enjoy it, so if you know me as a faithful reader, you’re in the clear. I also pay much closer attention to the mechanics of student writing than those of friend writing. I should also point out that rules are made to be broken– I always think of my college art class in which we studied Picasso’s representational, detailed sketches of a bull (hair, muscles, teeth) that he gradually transformed into a cubist line drawing. You gotta get expert at the rules, and then break them with confidence.

2. Jon Stewart of the Daily Show had a great idea for a NASA science project. He mentioned it the other night and I keep thinking about it: put a werewolf on the moon. Does he get more werewolfy? Does he stay in wolf form year round?

Oops, look at the time. To Be Continued.

As a proud Auntie, I enthusiastically present Judah Stephen, born on Monday, 8 lb 2 oz, 20 inches long.  Hey there, Judah!  Congrats to you and your mom on your safe passage.  I think you, like your older brother, have inherited your dad’s nice cheekbones, lucky you!  When you get a little bigger I will teach you all kinds of mischief.  For now, I welcome you from a distance.

When I teach creative non-fiction, I try to get my pet peeves out in the open right at the beginning. I act as bossy as possible and exaggerate to make my point. For lack of anything interesting to say, I here present my bossy writing tips, exactly as I share them with students. Of course, none of them apply to you, my most admirable fellow bloggers. And there is no reason you should listen to me, either. But it might be fun to think about how lucky you are not to be my student.

[UPDATE: I have decided to put the Mister’s comment in the body of this post because it deftly breaks every single rule in a mere 36 words. Good job decimating the language, Mister! Extra credit to other readers: Can you spot all the egregiousness in his comment?

“Seemingly, its just very corroborated that your a very nice, savvy and judicious preceptor whose students are very much luckier then there ever likely to infer. And thats why you should always listen to your elders.” ]

1. Excessive Use of Big Vocabulary Words: I know it’s tempting. But don’t do it! Multi-syllabic words do not contribute to an impression of intelligence when they are not the right words. They can obscure your meaning, prevent a reader from connecting with your work, or even mislead. Intelligent writing is, above all things, precise. Compare:

“To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.” — Bertrand Russell.

Now, my thesaurus version:

“To aggress and magnificently triumph over hysteria is the genesis and commencement of what has been heretofore known, and will henceforth be known, as sagaciousness.”

Which one sounds smarter? You’re right — the first one. Which one is more accurate? You’re right again– the first one. Keep things simple when you can.

2. Moralizing. Opening and/or closing paragraphs do not need to contain a moral lesson, such as “hard work pays off” or “keep trying even if you fail at first” or “family relationships are important.” For an essay to be worthy of existing, all it needs is to be interesting. Of course, interesting essays often contain life lessons. However, those lessons are part of the fabric of the essay, revealed in details and events, rather than tacked on at the end. Instead of using a moral assertion to end your work, try using an image that seems significant– you will likely find that the moral comes through elegantly without being stated.

3. Overwriting. Sentences which are full of repetition and piled-up adjectives suffer from overwriting. These characteristics indicate that you don’t trust your reader to be smart enough to figure it out. Readers resent this. They think, “I got the idea in the first three words, why does the author keep going on and on? I’m not stupid!” This admonishment is a little tricky, because I am always after students to add more detail to essays; but the key is to choose appropriate details. In many cases, less is more.

Example of overwriting: The tears that came welling up from her big, round, blue eyes were like beautiful pearls cascading from her eyes.

Better: Her tears shone in the lamplight.

4. Padding sentences. Avoid the following words, which add little to a sentence: just, really, very, nice, so, a lot, practically, seemingly. Most of these words are used to add intensity; try to replace them with more specific nouns, verbs, and adjectives.

Example of padded sentence: I was just so happy to get a really nice present; it was really big and very exciting, a lot more than I had expected.

Better: I couldn’t stop clapping when I got the present. It was the size of a washing machine and wrapped in fluorescent green paper.

5. Basic Grammar and Spelling Errors. Get your facts straight on your/you’re, their/there/they’re, then/than, its/it’s.

Correct usage of each:

Eat your peas.

I hear you’re the King of Spain.

We took their breakfast cereal when they weren’t looking.

He’s headed to the landfill? Why would he want to go there?

They’re full of big ideas.

I ate my pomegranate and then I went to the water park.

You have much bigger hair than I do.

We annoyed the dog when we combed its fur.

I’m going out because it’s Saturday night.

March Madness: Does momentum exist? Can it be quantified? These guys say yes (at least within the confines of a single game) and they have the research to prove it.

It seems I will never be among those who live precise, well-ordered lives. Tangles, lost keys, and refrigerators containing mainly condiments just don’t bother me enough. They do bother me.

The sky has put on its palest face today, vague and distracted. It would turn away from us if it could.

KAPOW! SHAZAM! AAAARRRRRGGHHH! KAPLOOEY! Whoa, Nelly.

What do you call a crate full of ducks? A box of quackers.

Vowel exercise: Loose. Lease. Less. Loss. Louse.
Consonant exercise: Loose. cool. stoop. crouton.

Keep it loose, the lease is cool; we’ll sign for less and the stoop’s ours to sit on, no loss unless that louse renegs. That crusty old crouton.

Easy Reader, that’s my name. Uhn, Uhn, Uhn.

Thomas Jefferson, evangelicals, separation of church and state, and a giant cheese. Who knew! (Via Arts and Letters Daily).

Well, Kelsey is off to Sudan. London first, apparently. Goodbye, Kelsey. One day when you are sitting there in the Darfur region and the generator is broken and you’re so hot you can’t imagine getting up out of your chair except maybe to buy a warm coke, but you can’t buy a warm coke because there is not enough money in circulation to make change for your raggedy small-denomination bill, and you could maybe try to find some more expats but lately everytime you’re together all everyone does is complain, and you could maybe visit the neighbor ladies but you don’t really speak their language yet and plus they are off somewhere really busy despite the heat, and you feel like the only living person for miles: you are not forgotten. You are loved. There are many people who keep a little “Kelsey” corner in their souls. We pray for you from far off. Go in peace to love and serve the Lord. Keep out of trouble, and if you do have to get into trouble, pick really worthwhile trouble to get into.

Like everyone else in Baltimore, I have been stricken by a series of sicknesses: cold, flu, allergies.  It is hard to tell where one ends and the next begins.  The cold and flu aisle at every store is decimated!  But one thing about going to the store at midnight is that you get first shot at the recently restocked dry goods.

So when I showed up there last night I knew it was time to break down and purchase some allergy medicine,  an activity I dread.  The longer I stand in that aisle, perusing the brightly colored brand-named packaging and the white generic packaging, the more of a sense of responsibility I feel, the decision taking on the heft of a moral choice with far-reaching consequences.  Behold!  This red package has three ingredients attacking six separate symptoms!  The white one is three dollars cheaper but it has the ingredients in a different percentage!  Wait, is this for night?  Will it make me drowsy?  Will the daytime stuff make me high?  Don’t forget that day at work last spring when I giggled through four hours for no particular reason.   Do I have a responsibility to consider the whole aisle section by section before making a purchase?  The rows of colored boxes extend fifty feet long and reach seven feet high! There’s got to be something here that is just. exactly. perfect. for my malady.

It is my duty as an informed consumer to put in the time, to find that perfect allergy medicine.  If the medicine I purchase doesn’t solve all my problems, it is I who have failed, not the drug manufacturers.  In the same way it is my duty to find the perfect spaghetti sauce, bottled watter, and cheddar cheese.   If I am a good person I will spend hours examining options.
Ah, the illusion of choice, of there existing somewhere in the rows the exact match for my age and station.   The promise that someone somewhere has studied people just like me and tested products on them, and subsequently invented a perfect antitode to my problem, a perfect fulfillment to my momentary desire for thick-but-not-too-thick ranch dressing or crisp turkey bacon.  And they have done so without relying on substandard wages or undue mistreatment of animals.

Thinking of all this last night in the cold and flu aisle I did something I had never done before:  the grab and go!  There was this red box with some pills in it, it said “Allergy Relief” on the front, and it had a bunch of bullet points.  I threw it right into the basket without even checking for a generic version.  Today, my nose is a little swollen but less runny, I’m a space cadet but not ridiculously high, and my eyes don’t itch.  Not perfect,  but about as good as usual.

I miss shopping in Africa, where the marche mama gives you whatever can of vegetables she has that day and you take it, and she throws in a few cubes of boullion as a gesture of goodwill, and you smile and go away.