Trumpery is a Synonym for Tawdry

This morning, e-mail from a California friend, someone I have been pals with since seventh grade. After college, marriage, and two children, she attended law school at night, earned her law degree, and later was appointed a judge to a California court, and served on the bench until her retirement. Then Sue dove into the art world and has created arresting works in fabric, with her creations garnering prizes and hanging in noteworthy places. I mention Sue because of what she shared with me. She reads my blog and few do. No matter.  I write this blog because I love literature and the English language.

The e-mail Sue sent me was from a blog she’d read, which was borrowed from another blogger. (Truly I dislike this word. No matter # 2). Sue wrote of the rabbit hole she fell into related to me. Recently, I spent weeks writing about William from Old Miss. The blog my friend read   mentioned Faulkner. Thus, the conjunction with me and why my old friend sent e-mail today.

The blogger Sue referenced asked readers if it was important to read Faulker. 

The writer then admitted dislike of him and said William was not going to make you a better person. Next the writer moved into her blog’s intent. If the larger world “wants you to be optimized, productive, monetized” then sitting around and reading a work of art is a rebellious act that insists, “I am a human being and not a cog, not a good little worker, not a cozy girl eating the slop… fed to me.” This declaration ended by calling such a stance of doing difficult things like reading, “a beautiful act of rebellion.”

I smiled while reading this phrase, remembering when I and other junior high girls like Sue, somehow secured a copy of the tawdry Peyton Place and passed it around. Yet I remember no time when I felt the rebel while reading a book. I kept Gone with the Wind in my desk at school in fourth grade and felt sneaky, not rebellious. From the day I read The Yearling in third grade, I found in literature a way to wander in unknown worlds. Since then, my literary search has not ended for seventy-three years.

Yet if the “commercial internet is the capture and commodification of life,” as Rebecca Solnit writes “In the Shadow of Silicon Valley” (London Review of Books, 8 February 2024 ), then in this sense, I am a rebel bound to books in print, books that I hold in my hands, that I underline with a pen, that I return to often for another voyage.  Didn’t Emily Dickinson claim there is no frigate like a book?  So yes, I rebel in our brummagem times and keep reading fine literature.

Next week… what was promised last week -😊

A Few Thoughts in a Free Write

Your signature, your handwriting is a sign of identity: It authenticates you.  What does it mean to not teach cursive to youth today? It means to ignore a history of research on mind and hand, as if the pen or pencil you hold and which you move, is not connected to the mind and central nervous system.

I think of those who had to sign with an X, who were kept from being taught to read.  Ishmael asks in Moby Dick, “Who ain’t a slave?”  And the famous Russian physician & writer I so love, claimed it takes a lifetime to squeeze the slave out of oneself. Both Melville and Chekhov ask us a real question.

I know from personal experience that the personal essay requires reverie and asks a writer to “live in the layers, not the litter,” as poet, Stanley Kunitz wrote. Or as Virginia Woolf wrote, “Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”  They won’t come your way if you’re not there to receive them. Make writing a habit.  Simon and Garfunkel sang, “Slow down, you move too fast, you’ve got to make the non-stop last.” They sang “morning,” but the same is true for free writing!  Just move that pen or pencil in your hand.  Give the rudder over to the current, allow yourself to drift in open ocean or a wide bay. And remember that “memories are by their nature, fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary, as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows.” I wish I had written this and apologize to the person who penned this sentence… for not noting his or her name.

I disliked essays in both high school and college. Blue books, timed tests. As a literature major, I was supposed to know (before reading the question) what I was going to say, then write as quickly and clearly as possible, sans re-vision unless I wanted to make a mess of the blue book. I never heard of writing as a process until the Bay Area Writing Project at U.C. Berkeley in the late 1970s. I remember the forbidden use of “I” while in high school and writing five paragraph essays with a thesis statement, pretending to know something I did not understand. Now I know and honor words from a medieval mystic, Meister Eckhart, who died in 1326 in France. Please note I have taken liberty with Eckhart’s use of men and substituted, humans.

“That I am, this I share with other humans. That I see and hear and that I eat and drink is what all animals do likewise. But that I am I is only mine and belongs to me and to no one else; to no other human, not an angel, not to God, except in as much as I am one with God.”

Last week the noiseless spider. 

Next week a tiny flower (Impatiens) between a rock and a hard place.

American poet Walt Whitman in 1891

wrote Song of Myself, V… one year before his death. The following words from this poem are,

“I believe in you my soul/ the other I am… must not abase itself to you.”

What timely words for today, when a man who personifies abasement has wedged himself into our heads for what has the feel (at least in mine) of an endless decade. In no way is this man abashed by who he is and what he has done throughout life. Not ashamed, remorseful, conscience-stricken, mortified, humiliated, humbled or discomfited. He is, however, red-faced; but that is cosmetic like the orange-hair, and not from being shamefaced.

I am led to poetry when the world is too much with me; and this dispirited feeling led me to Whitman by happenchance. I thought of Walt when I stared out the kitchen window last Wednesday afternoon. Looking through the glass and, in light perfectly cast outside in the garden, I saw a spider web. It was suspended out many feet from a tall Pampas grass, a plant whose many fronds reach skyward, ready to wave in any wind. ”Not the best location for a web, Charlotte,” I said.

E.B. White

(The famous essayist & author E.B. White was on my mind for Thursday’s second class on the Personal Essay.)  

Although I could see the web and its nearby spider, any filament did not seem to be connected to anything other than the large Pampas. I went outside for a closer look. There I saw a filament attached to a knock-out rose bush. Yet outside in different light, I could not see the web. I only knew it was there because of one trapped insect of unidentified means.

One thing and another led me to “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” a Walt Whitman poem in the public domain.

A noiseless patient spider,

I mark’d where on the little promontory it stood isolated,

Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the sphere to connect them,

Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Next week:  The mystery of creativity as our connective web