Thoreau and Humor

When I was a newly married teaching assistant long ago at Southwest Missouri State (now Missouri State University), one of my fellow TA's, a good friend of my husband's, hung over and desperate to procure a copy of Walden from which to make illicit copies for his freshman composition class which was to begin in fifteen minutes, borrowed my well-thumbed little paperback edition and promptly lost it, although not before having successfully used it to prep materials for his class.  I regretted its loss, although not so much, perhaps, as Mark regretted the borrowing of it in the long run, for his students gave him a very hard time about the effusive marginalia which which I'd worshipfully inscribed its pages.  I badgered him so mercilessly about the book's return and was so heartbroken at his confession of its loss, that a year later he presented me with a hardback edition in a Victorian replica binding.  On the title page, he'd written, "Walden deserves your love almost as much as a certain lanky redhead does--and like Scott, Walden is not something so much...to live with as to live for.  & now you've an edition that will age no quicker than you will...Forgiven?"

Mark may have been a too often high, irresponsible if well-meaning sot who taught his lesson on Thoreau in a lime green jester suit he'd passed out in the night before, but here's the thing about Mark: he was brilliant, utterly and undeniably brilliant.  And he was right.  Scott, that lanky redhead whom I've now been living with and for during the last twenty-four years?  He has some things in common with Thoreau, including something I've not often heard brought up in relation to dear old Henry David--the propensity to employ a fine, often irreverent bit of humor when making an earnest point. 

One way Thoreau shows off his clever self is through word play.  Writing about a piece of land, he says, "I think I shall not buy greedily, but go round and round it as long as I live and be buried in it first, that it may please me the more at last" (1998).  The word play in this sentence hinges on the word buried, which can mean placed in a grave or to be immersed in some activity.  I can't help but believe that Thoreau here means instead of buying the property, he intends to simply spend a great deal of time there, walking around it and enjoying it--burying himself in it, so to speak.  Using the word immediately after the phrase "as long as I live," however, causes the reader to associate it with the end of life and the burial that occurs as a result. 

Another humor tactic Thoreau uses is through juxtaposition of subject matter that is heady with that which is very down-to-earth, often introducing the latter unexpectedly: "One value even of the smallest well is, that when you look into it you see that earth is not continent but insular.  This is as important as that it keeps butter cool" (1999).  The reader has to grin at herself by the end of that sentence, when she finds herself  surprised to be staring not into the secrets of the earth, but at a tub of butter.  Thoreau sets her up via her own expectations of some deep intellectual insight, and then delivers butter instead.  To be sure, the insight is there, but so is the giggle at the end of it, instead of an opportunity to rub one's forehead, nod sagely and look knowing.

Thoreau isn't above using a bit of snark, either, sassy bits of commentary with a bit of an edge to them.  Of Britain he writes, "The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine" (2033).  Dinner parties also seem to draw his ire, for after reporting that his neighbors enjoy meeting famous people at such gatherings, he says, "The interest and the conversation are about costume and manners chiefly; but a goose is a goose, still, dress it as you will." (2031). Ouch.

Let's not forget exaggeration, either.  One of my favorite lines is (again!) in reference to dinner time, when evidently one was expected to dine in company.  Thoreau's advice for surviving its horrors is nothing short of comic genius: "Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner... Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill" (2005).  (I need to remember that in order to survive the next multi-generational family holiday get-together at which my presence is required.)  Thoreau was not above using absurdity (exaggeration's close cousin), either.  A passage that made me laugh aloud was one addressing the need to strive to fulfill one's potential, regardless of whatever limit that potential might have.  "Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies," asks Thoreau, "and not be the biggest pygmy that he can?" (2029).  Today, I'm sure this qualifies as politically incorrect.  Nevertheless, it is funny simply for the extreme absurdity of the image.  Here we are, tootling along in conversation with one of America's best respected Transcendentalist writers, and he throws pygmies (not a common nineteenth century American subject of conversation for most of his readers, I would assume) into the mix. 

He uses humor for a purpose, of course, does Thoreau.  He knows that most people can only sustain serious mind-bending thought for so long, that we need concrete images to connect to abstract thought in order to process them and remember them best.  And of course, his own Transcendental belief in the need to put foundations beneath our castles in the clouds, to ground our philosophies in earthy reality, taught him to do just that in his writing as well.  The result is that he is not only a more enjoyable read than Emerson, but a more easily understood (and appreciated) writer, as well...at least in my book.

As for that lanky red-head, he's still making me laugh, too, and he does it with all Thoreau's techniques, from the absurdity of pouring salt on my arm during a romantic dinner date ("Well, at least now we know you're not a slug.") to puns and definite snark, he keeps life interesting and lightens the load that responsibility and deep thought too often press upon us.  I'm keeping them both--Great Scott and Thoreau; they give me hope.

Note:  I love Thoreau.  I really do.  That fact does not mean, however, that he is above having a bit of fun poked in his general direction.

Thoreau, Henry David. "Walden". The Heath Anthology of American Literature. 7^th ed.  Ed. Paul Lauter. Vol. B. Boston: Wadsworth, 2014. 1996-2034. Print.

Killing the Writer

Teaching is not conducive to writing. I have come to this conclusion after three years of in-depth research, research that was entirely unnecessary but which, having been completed, bestows on me the authority to say that teaching is most definitely not conducive to writing. A good friend of mine reminded me of this fact last week when he wrote concerning a recent decision I've made: "What do you need an MFA for? You want to teach? Cyril Conelly once said that teaching had killed more writers than alcohol had--no small feat." Alcohol having never really been my thing, I suppose that leaves me with death by teaching, an option that I find entirely plausible, though not preferable. I'm not quite ready for the writer in me to head to that great used book store in the sky. I'm not done with her yet; that's why I've applied to an MFA program.

Part of me says that this scheme is entirely laughable, after all, I'm forty-three and have been out of school for nineteen years, I'm working a full-time job that requires more than full-time hours, and in one more year The Older Daughter will be filling out her own college applications. Nevertheless, there are reasons to try, as well: I have to have a certain number of professional development hours each year to maintain my teaching certification, hours which might as well count toward a degree; an MFA will allow me to teach per course or eventually even full-time at the college level should I ever change my mind about teaching high school; and I feel rusty and definitely lack discipline in my writing habits, so the challenge and accountability of a graduate program will be good. Ever since I have known there was such a thing, the MFA has been the degree I've wanted badly enough to be afraid of, even if it might kill me.

The application has been dispatched. Now I wait. We'll see what kills me first.

Procrastination Aid: Writing Style Analyzer

I'm having a lot of fun playing with this particular procrastination aid. All of the following were results for various samples of the blog writing right here on Quotidian Light.

I write like
Vladimir Nabokov

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I write like
Stephen King

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I write like
James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I write like
George Orwell

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I write like
Douglas Adams

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I write like
J. K. Rowling

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I write like
Margaret Mitchell

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I write like
Edgar Allan Poe

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I write like
Arthur C. Clarke

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Just for giggles, here's the last one I'm posting tonight, although tomorrow I'll probably try running some of my poetry through. First, let me post the text I entered:

"Once upon a time there was a little bunny rabbit who ran out in the road and got squashed. The End.

Once upon a time there lived a tiny flea, and when time fell back because of Daylight Savings time the flea fell into the void. The End."

Now, the result:

I write like
Margaret Atwood

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Writer's Meme

Call it inspiration, call it guilt, but the end result is the same. I've not been writing much of late, so when I read this meme at Stick Poet Super Hero, I knew right away I'd have to try it.

1. What's the last thing you wrote? - A comment on my husband's Facebook status.

2. Is it any good? - Of course.

3. What's the first thing you ever wrote that you still have? – Written down? A long poem chronicling how my siblings and cousins and I were sent to my grandparents' basement every year at Christmas while our parents had a business meeting upstairs with all the food. There are a couple of earlier pieces that I still have memorized, however (poems...of a sort), and my mother has numerous bits of things I scribbled in school.

4. Favorite genre of writing? - Poetry or creative nonfiction. I do more of the former but have been told I'm better at the latter. Both scare me.

5. How often do you get writer's block? - I live in writer's block.

6. How do you fix it? – I don't. I withdraw from it and from writing, more often than not.

7. Do you save everything you write? – I save most of it, yes, since college. I did burn 6 years worth of journals--the first 6 years I kept them. Since then, I have almost everything, and my desk looks like it, too.

8. How do you feel about revision? - Absolutely 100% necessary. I don't trust writers who say they don't revise. Rather, I trust that their writing is probably horrible. I've heard too many people get up in church to read their "straight from the Lord" poems to NOT cringe when someone tells me they never revise.

9. What's your favorite thing that you've written? -- Probably the poems "Night Augur" or "A Second Birthing" or one I'm still revising: "Winter Seduction". Possibly an essay parody of Walden, if you want to talk prose.

10. What's everyone else's favorite thing that you've written? -- This seems to be "Mania," oddly enough.

11. What writing projects are you working on right now?--Theoretically lesson plans. (Ho!) I've got snippets from a fiction piece inspired by my brother that I've been adding to for a few years. There's a CNF essay that I would really like to see where it goes, and "Winter Seduction," which I'm about ready to give in and start sending off. My journal would probably fall under this category, too, since it's a perpetual project of sorts.

12. What's one genre you have never written, and probably never will? - I would be quick to say horror, save that one of my poems was actually nominated for inclusion in a "year's best" horror anthology awhile back, to my surprise, and that Great Scott tells me he finds many of my poems pretty horrifying. Romance is probably the genre I would be least likely to write (as well as being the genre I'm least likely to read). I don't think I would be any good at writing science fiction, either, although I'm a sci-fi fan (Down with the Alliance! Browncoats forever!).

Friday Quote: On Meaning and Escape

"For the true writer...there is some distance, some remove, that allows for the shaping of the work...Every reader can sense the difference between a writer who embodies meaning through the events he describes and the writer who seems simply mired in those events. It is that struggle for meaning that lets the writer escape the tyranny of what really happened..."

---Sue Miller

A Few Minor Changes

I am making a few minor changes to Quotidian Light for the purposes of preserving privacy. I do not think any of my students are interested enough to go looking for me online, but on the off chance that they might become so, I am changing my username and profile picture. Most of my readers know me well enough to not be phased in the least by this. I love you for it.

Perhaps with this added layer of semi-anonymity, blog entries will happen more often. I'm hoping so. I miss the writing and reflection that blogging provided for so long.

Who IS This Person?

Tonight I have been sitting here updating my resumé to include in an application to the Ozark Writing Project's Summer Invitational Institute. When I finished saving the updated file, I raided Great Scott's desk for suitable paper--the really nice stuff--and printed out my creation.

It frightens me. It looks so official and...impressive. Who is this person, and what in the world am I doing impersonating her?!

Language and Listening

For my birthday this year, Great Scott gave me The Best American Essays 2009, which was edited by Mary Oliver. The language in the chosen essays of this volume seems to me richer than that of most contemporary essays. Many of Oliver's choices echo the style of some of her own favorite writers, Victorians such as Emerson and Whitman, whose writing require readers to slow down and immerse themselves deeply in the flow of words rather than skimming merrily over the top of them. The Younger Daughter and I have been reading George MacDonald's Phantastes on weekend mornings and snow days, and here, too, I've been struck by the richness of the words and wording of the Victorians. My students--most of them--would never be able to follow sentences like these, sentences which wind and curl like vines up pillars or large-trunked trees, sprouting side branches and arabesque tendrils before finally growing into comprehensive maturity and blooming gloriously into full, many-petaled meaning.

As I was reading to The Younger Daughter earlier this week, I began wondering if she might be better prepared to read and comprehend such sentences on her own for having heard them read aloud by someone else. The human mind is a great recognizer of patterns. If, when it begins a complex task, it has some basic patterns in place, basic patterns that will aid in the comprehension and execution of the complex task at hand, that task will be accomplished much more easily and with better results. My students have all acquired the skill, the pattern knowledge, of word-calling; however many to most of the students in my classes have not developed an ear for written language. They don't hear the words in their heads as they read. The rhythms and melodies of the written word blow past them like so many dry, leaves; inflection and the subtle meaning it carries is lost. I wish all children were read to aloud. Written words are symbols for our quickened breath passing between tongue and tooth, for living human spirit shaped into transmissible entities leaving our lips. Expecting a child to read well without her having experienced the breath of life blown across the pages of books and into her waiting ear is like handing her a bird from the taxidermist and requiring her to comprehend and demonstrate flight.

Resurfacing

Yes. Second semester finals are over, and Christmas break is here. The school year is halfway complete.

Friday night I staggered out of the car for the house, the sacred laptop and my trusty bag of ungraded papers in tow (we don't have to report final grades until the fifth of January), in a state of shock, weariness, holiday cheer and reckless, heady glee. The Older Daughter was spending the night with a friend; The Younger Daughter had a friend spending the night with us, and ahead stretched two blessed weeks of Christmas break. I was finally going to get enough sleep (no more 16 hour days at school!), be able to leave a pencil or ballpoint pen out on my desk without someone borrowing it interminably, and make headway on the pile of laundry threatening to swallow the cats.

Today I discovered that the washer is broken. I squeezed water out of the clothes and threw them in the dryer, blessing my husband for having brought home a new drying rack this afternoon and wondering if everyone has enough clean underwear to make it until someone can fix the poor washer. Great Scott complimented me on my calm reaction to the discovery that the spin cycle is now nonexistent. Truthfully? That washer has worked well for seventeen years (save for the time it ate a baby sock and got indigestion). It's had fewer breakdowns than I have. It deserves a few days off, too.

I suppose if I need to visit the laundrymat, I can take the opportunity to journal while I'm waiting. Oddly enough, I've not been journaling, although not for lack of material. Like blogging, journaling has been difficult to find the time to actually do. My head has been full of students (I even dream about them or their assignments, often), but many of the things I've observed or experienced or had shared with me, I've hesitated to write down, even in my journals. I struggle with determining what things belong to me to write about and what things should forever belong simply to my students. According to a great many writers I've read, this excludes me from writerhood most absolutely, since writers should supposedly respect no one's experiential privacy when good material is concerned. I do not know if I can go along with that. I suspect I can't. Several times a week I pick up a pen or come here to post, consider the things my students share, the lives they live, the people they are and are becoming, and I lay the pen aside or sigh and delete the half-written post. (Blogging, of course, presents a particularly complicated ethical dilemma, since some of my students know about Quotidian Light and occasionally check in.)

Plenty of quirky things go on everyday that are perfectly bloggable, however; I just need to take the time to write them. Hopefully the break will help. Thanks to those of you who wrote comments or e-mails of encouragement, letting me know Quotidian Light's posts were missed. You were welcome reminders that life outside Mrs. Lawson's classroom still exists.

Hidden Vision

"The virtue of those [respected literary] writers is precisely that they have refused to do what their imitators do so humbly. Each of them has had a vision of the world and has set out to transcribe it, and their work has the forthrightness and vigor of all work that comes from the central core of the personality without deviation or distortion."

--Dorothea Brande
Becoming a Writer

What one has to bring to one's writing, to share with the world, is one's own way of seeing. Especially in my blog writing I usually hide my vision, my way of seeing, rather than drawing my readers into it with me. Instead of honesty, I present a false vision, a substitution, a deceit. It is possible, I suppose, that the masking vision is born of the self that serves most often in my interactions with the outside world. (Ah, the joys of being an INFP, whose deepest convictions and being are most naturally held in reserve!) If so, then the word "deceit" may not be entirely accurate, since my public self is still a genuine, a true representation of my whole. Isn't it?

The other night I began looking over the language arts courses of the online certification program I've begun. I took the quizzes over the various sections, cold, to try to get a sense of where I am in terms of what I'll be expected to know. It's been 18 and a half years since I graduated with my BA, sixteen since I left graduate work. My quiz scores were not as high as I'd hoped. In spite of the fact that my scores had been higher than the average scores of people who take the quizzes after having worked through the courses, I went to bed discouraged and worried, and I woke up feeling worried and overwhelmed.

Out of irritability that morning I scolded The Older Daughter over something inconsequential and caught myself on the verge of tears. Then on the way to school the girls and I were laughing together when a wave of premature nostalgia hit me, choking me up, and I also got sentimental about the terrapins that are beginning to cross the highway, an annual occurrence.

When I realized what was going on and stopped to consider, it struck me that the underlying cause of both the morning's irritability and predisposition to tears was fear. Surprised, I began considering some of the most emotionally volatile periods of my life--high school, college, early marriage, early motherhood. How many of those wild moodswing rides originated from the same material: fear of failure, fear of not measuring up, fear of finding myself utterly unequipped and inadequate for the task at hand?

True vision, it would seem, is not only hidden from others.

How I Got into this Business and Where It Went Thursday

I didn't intend to do anything but start a writing club at our school. In November I was given permission to do so for the Jr. High and high schools provided I find a certified co-sponser on the current staff and that I obtain a substitute teaching certificate myself. I didn't even have to sub. You know the outcome of the substitute certificate (see the last post). Here continues the story of the originally intended writing club.

Thursday was our first meeting. I knew we'd have 9 students or so. I hoped we might get as many as 12-15. Before the afternoon's club schedule I went into the tiny half-room at the back of the library where we were to meet and waited to see who would arrive. To my amazement, 37 kids managed to cram themselves into that little space. The tables were quickly filled. More lined the walls, standing. Others leaned in the doorway or sat in what little floorspace existed. What's more, they are excited not just about starting a club, but about writing itself. They want to compete. They like the idea of running in-house writing contests not just for the Jr. High and high school, but for the elementary students. Mostly, though, they want to workshop papers with each other, to read each others' work and comment, to have feedback and find ways to improve their writing. They listened to our ideas and hopes for the club; they shared their ideas (good ones) and listened to each other and were in agreement about their goals. They wanted to have after school meetings to workshop, and then someone said, "What about over the summer? Can we do something this summer?" and was echoed.

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I was stunned. Stunned and utterly humbled.

Publication: Goblin Fruit

This morning a wonderful email waited impatiently in my inbox to be discovered. The Winter '08 issue of Goblin Fruit (which I wrote about earlier) is out at last, and in it, "Night Augur", a poem of my "own pure brain." To my surprise and deep pleasure, the Editors Who Shall Be Adored have even used it as a prologue to the issue, may-their-names-be-praised-forever.

Seriously, I am very happy and very grateful.

(There's even audio!)

Friday Quote: On Poetic Cultivation

“Travel broadens the mind, but great poetry is often the product of narrow obsession, the neurotic cultivation of a tiny plot.”

--Stephen Moss

Overheard

It must be hard to be the child of two writing oriented parents. One day last weekend The Younger Daughter's evening prayer went in part like this:

"Dear God...please forgive us for our sins and our improper English."

I Just Did WHAT?!

This week I went to the superintendent's office at school and after a meeting with her and the Jr. High principal, took home an application packet for a substitute teaching certificate and position. What's more, when I arrived home, I immediately got online and made an appointment to have fingerprinting done for the required background check. Immediately as in before I could change my mind.

What could possibly drive me to do such a thing? I, who swore I would never teach (especially at the secondary level, not to mention Jr. High) and could not foresee a return to "walking the halls of academia" ever again? I, who cringe at mispronounced words, bad grammar and misplaced commas--my own and everyone else's--and grimly remove myself from the vicinity of mouthy children in public lest I be tempted to "help" their parents? I, who am familiar with the discipline plight of the public schoolteacher, who hear about it and see its result every night when Great Scott arrives home, head bowed, shoulders slumped, dragging his six foot three inch frame over the threshold, his soul nearly sucked from his body? What, indeed could possibly entice me to enter that world, even on an intermittent basis? Especially on an intermittent basis, without the authority a full-time teacher holds over her own classroom?

Passion. Something I don't talk or write about very often or very much. I am passionate about the written word, and I am passionate about helping others find in themselves some good, some hidden potential previously unrecognized. Substitute teaching will very likely NOT give me the opportunity to indulge either of these passions, I realize. However, a substitute teaching certificate will enable me to begin a writing club for the high school and jr. high school in our district. The one condition I was given was that I find a full-time faculty member to help sponsor it, and this afternoon a quick conference with horror writer and H.S. English teacher, Matt Cardin met that condition, may-his-name-be-praised-forever.

We shall see where this goes. I anticipate beginning substitute teaching in early December and beginning Writing Club meetings in January after the break. I am more grateful than I can say to Matt, who is already staying after school several nights a week, and I am both excited and apprehensive about the venture. Wish it luck.

Call for Submissions: Guerrilla Ink Press

Guerrilla Ink Press is currently accepting submissions of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction manuscripts, as well as photography and digital artwork for a new literary, arts, entertainment, news publication, GiP. This magazine allows Guerrilla Ink Press to continue providing dynamic publishing opportunities for new, emerging, and established writers in both electronic and print formats. Deadline is December 10, 2007.

Send Submissions to:
Attn: GiP Magazine
Guerrilla Ink Press, LLC
1956 E. Chestnut Exp.
Springfield, MO 65802-2235

If you have questions or would like more information, please contact GIP@guerrillainkpress.com with the subject ‘Attn. GiP Magazine.’ We look forward to hearing from you soon.

I've known Will LaPage, the founder and executive editor for GiP, for a good many years and can say without reserve that he is one of the most dedicated people I have ever met in terms of commitment to the literary world. He himself has a definite gift for writing, and reading his pieces in workshop has always been an act of appreciation as well as critical review on my part. His input on my own work has been more than notably helpful (those of you who enjoyed "Mania" have him, in part, to thank). What's more, GiP is offering book deals to each of of the contributors to its first issue. You can read more here.

Please pass this information on to other writers who may be interested. I'd love to see GiP flooded with quality work, and I know many of my readers and their acquaintances can make it happen.

In Memoriam: Madeleine L'Engle

November 29, 1918 ---September 6, 2007

A great light has gone out of this world.

Procrastination Aid: Online Magnetic Poetry

Oh, the fun! Magnetic Poetry now offers online composition. What's more, you can pick from ten differently themed collections of words, including "Shakespeare", "Genius" and "Artist" kits. Woo! Woo!

My favorite, though, is the "Inuendo" kit.

The Poser Snarl

I am not a poet. I am not even a writer. What I am is a pen and ink and paper addict, a word addict, someone who scribbles in compulsive spurts and who, honestly, is about as happy to write a letter or a list of random words or to copy out a nice bit of someone else's writing as she is to write her own. Maybe more so. Often, most definitely more so.

Lately pen and paper mock me. I pick them up, and they whisper snide things beneath my pen strokes. What I need is to write utter nonsense, equally snide patter that has little literary value but that is a relief to write just for the sake of its smart-alek-y-ness.

So. Give me topics upon which to snarl, topics about which to be sharply witty and ascerbic. I need the excuse.

Sick

Fever. Chills. Sinus pain. Muscle aches.

I feel so bad my chocolate bunny has not even been licked.

NaPoWriMo efforts on hold.

(On the other hand, lots of great poets have written on drugs. Just think what a bottle of Nyquil might do for one's verse!)