And as we did the hand dance to the infectious chorus, I realized that I knew this song. The chorus comes from Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Paradise:
i said a hip hop the hippie the hippie
to the hip hip hop, a you don’t stop
the rock it to the bang bang boogie say up jumped the boogie
to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat
And is, in fact a Spanglishization of the lyrics, creating nonsense:
Aserejé ja de je de jebe
tu de jebere seibiunouva majavi
an de bugui an de güididípi
This is a perfect example of the trans-cultural Mondegreen. Read more »
“Should students still be taught cursive writing?” This is the title of a piece I came across recently in, of all places, The Costco Connection magazine. Proponents for both sides of the issue state their opinions, the yes-ers arguing that cursive helps students with hand-eye coordination, improves their ability to “chunk” letter sounds (-ing endings, for instance) which leads to better reading comprehension and spelling, and that cursive is an important part of our cultural heritage. The naysayers counter that time spent teaching cursive should be devoted to other, more important, subjects, that good handwriting is no indicator of intelligence or success (insert predictable joke about doctors’ illegible scrawls here), and that in this electronic age, the need for tidy penmanship is on its way out.
Frankly, I was surprised that anyone is even talking about this, but a quick Google search revealed that a lot of people are. I’ve never given cursive much thought, because I never learned it. I was in elementary school in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and we learned a script-print hybrid called Duvall, which I abandoned a long time ago for a makeshift printing style that deteriorates a little more each year. Of course, this is because I seem to type exponentially more each year; when I write, unless it’s a note or a list or a birthday card, I do it at my keyboard.
But the piece made me curious about how other writers work, and if the way we write actually matters. What kind of penmanship did you learn in school? What’s your weapon of choice when you’re writing? Pen and paper? Computer? Butcher paper and crayon (as visiting writer Sallie Tisdale suggested in a workshop last year)? Does what you write with change what you write?
If I told someone I had consumption, I’d expect they’d be simultaneously puzzled and concerned. They’d be puzzled because they probably wouldn’t know what consumption is, yet the name alone would likely give them some idea that consumption, whatever it is, isn’t exactly desirable.
When on occasion I mention to people that I’m a poet, I get a similar reaction. First, there’s the look of puzzlement. Most people don’t really know what poets do, or even that there are adult poets at all. I have a sneaking suspicion that many folks equate poets and poetry with rather marginalized art forms such as miming, and God forbid, clowns. Tim Pawlenty, my state’s governor, summed this up notion when he vetoed a bill to create a Minnesota Poet Laureate.
When we say we want to write Organically, what does that really mean when nature is so patterned and ruled by math? I get that organic = shuffling meter off the mortal coil, but I suspect we may not be saying what we think we are.
A facebook site says, Keep it natural. Ok, what about fractals? (It’s a beefy math-tastic formula in which you plug a number and get an answer, then plug in that answer for another answer. The Mandlebrot set is the Mother of these dudes, and when you plot the points on a graph it looks like this:
The important thing is that when you zoom in, the image keeps repeating itself. Scientists are using the Mandlebrot set to make calculations in nature that weren’t previously calculable. Measuring shorelines and estimating oxygen production in forests. So is writing organically might be writing in a structure that repeats itself on a sliding scale. Then what?
Another site gets wispy and teary about an arboreal metaphor: “Be the soil that your writing grows from…” Ack. I’m just saying that nature is much more patterned, mathematical, and precise than we remember at times. Nature’s got its bits under control—tight control.
31. Our job, then, is two-fold: to focus on our own failings as writers. But also to speak more forcefully as advocates for literature. Books are a powerful antidote for loneliness, for the moral purposelessness of the leisure class. It’s our job to convince the 95 percent of people who don’t read books, who instead medicate themselves in front of screens, that literary art isn’t some esoteric tradition, but a direct path to meaning, to an understanding of the terror that lives beneath our consumptive ennui. It’s hard to make this case, though, if all we do is squabble with each other and lament our obscurity.
I’m busy figuring out how in the fuck to use Twitter and trying to get my voice back for fall quarter after reading so much Anthony Powell the last few months (I can be a bit of an imitator, and believe me – brandishing wordy, pseudo-British-Twentieth-Century elevated language in an essay/memoir in which one huffs nail polish remover preceding a three-way at 10:30 in the morning on Labor Day just doesn’t work), so I’ll leave you with Glen David Gold and Alice Sebold talking about fear of success in writing, a topic that seems to have popped up in one capacity or other over the weekend on Bark. I’ll be back in a week, quite possibly on the topic of regaining your voice after reading one so drastically different from your own, though I’ll try to think of something cooler, like this. Rock the Casbah, y’all.
Reunited with Dad After My Sister and I Returned to Seattle from North Dakota
A couple days ago while I was in the library, I noticed I’d missed a call from my dad. I listened to his message as I walked through the reference area. The beginning of the message made me nervous—was he really pissed? By the time I sat down at a computer to look up some titles, my eyes were tear-full. This is what he said:
“Shira, I just want to tell you I’m kind of pissed off because I feel that you’ve taken unfair advantage of our relationship. I think that for you to use your black magic powers against me was unexpected to say the least. But I’ll just let you know how it turned out. I started with my new principal and she said all writing teachers have to become writers. It was the first thing she said, and I thought, Oh shit, Shira did this. So anyhow I’ve got my writer’s notebook, wrote a short story, I mean just a real rough draft for a classroom thing, but it was kind of fun. Anyhow, I’m not happy with you yet. Unless this really turns out to be something good, then I’ll thank you.” Read more »
I’m writing from the motherland this week. In preparation for the long flights required to get here, I loaded my netbook with works in progress to work on during my gadget’s long battery life. I then spent the longest plane ride catching up on movies and TV shows through the video on demand system and slept on the shorter legs because I’d watched too much crap instead of calibrating my bio-clock to minimize jetlag. I told myself there would be plenty of downtime at my parents’ house and I would get lots of writing done there. I’m very good at lying to myself.
There has been loads of time during my first week here that could be used for writing, but the same thing that always happens when I visit happened again. Spending my days speaking Swedish means I can’t put English worth a crap on the page. My sentences are all wrong. I reverse the noun-verb order and can’t find a synonym to save my soul. My sentence structure becomes super simple and my work read like a first graders’ “What I did this Summer” essay. Read more »
I meant to write my first post a long time ago. A long, long time ago. Like the first week of July. But, there were so many reasons-slash-excuses not to. At first, I’d just finished my thesis, and I was tired. Both my weary brain and my laptop’s overworked cooling system needed to take it easy. Then I went on vacation, and when I got back, I was too busy catching up on work. Then I had some freelance assignments to finish. And so on for the next two months—procrastination at its finest.
Even now, after the things on my official to-do-first list have all been checked off, I am still only writing this post because I forced myself to.
I am not one of those writers who “has” to write. I write because I make myself. Sure, I love it, kinda: writing helps me understand myself and other people, it gives me a voice and an audience, it takes me into pockets of the world I would never have explored otherwise. It makes the gears in my head start turning.
It also sucks. We all know this. As Dorothy Parker said, “I hate writing; I love having written.”
Continued! So, last time I was about to physically begin arranging my essay. I did, indeed, print out my essay, the strands in different colors, and I cut them up and laid them out on my floor. I initially had two strands. I added a third strand which I’m not positive about—it’s someone else’s point of view, someone who was involved in the other strands.
Loose ends? Noooooo!
I like the way it gives more insight into my own story, plus insight as to what was really going on. It sort of validates some of it, maybe. That certainly isn’t necessary, but for some reason it jumped out at me, so even if it doesn’t make it to the next draft, the third strand is there for now.
0 Comments 
