Re: Thinking, Teaching, Writing

Spelling matters

Finding something to write about, I tell my students, is a matter of keeping alert for those resonant nuggets that set yr mind wondering and yr imagination wandering. Case in point: A student description of a gentleman she'd met as "hott" set me to thinking about spelling issues, in a train of associations that seemed like the kernel of a meditative essay. (I don't quite understand how this came to be—perhaps I first read it at a particularly formative time in my education— but my structural model for the meditative essay is Wallace Stevens's Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.) After subjecting my initial notes to some judicious (she says confidently) regrouping and reordering, I have sifted out these topics/questions: spelling education, its difficulty in English, its (maybe?) dubious importance, deliberate misspellers, the relation of modern technology, the simplified spelling movement.

The writer's notebook

For my class that starts tonight I decided to resurrect a ritual I've used a few times. It's cornball (remember to check the derivation of that one) but serious in its symbology, like the diploma and medal the Wizard of Oz gives out at the end of the movie. Its inspiration comes from Kim Stafford's book The Muses Among Us:

I make my notebooks two and three-quarters by four and a quarter inches, from two full sheets of paper folded small, slit, and sewn into brown cover stock with black thread flavored with beeswax. The little book is a plain and fragrant object. I fold it open to the next fresh page and slip it into my shirt pocket beside my pen. I make a dozen notebooks at a time, stick my address label on the inside cover of each, and date them as I begin. A stamp decorates the outside cover, usually that old one-cent stamp with the pen and inkwell that proclaims, "The ability to write—a root of democracy." Such a notebook lasts me from a week to a month. Every few months, it's time to sit down with a stack of notebooks and glean the best stories, sayings, and thoughts, and I file these with works in progress according to their particular magentic attractions. Or when I am given a writing task by an editor, instead of staring at a blank page to gather my thoughts, I leaf through the little notebooks to be reminded of many rich beginnings. The question then is not "What shall I write?" but rather "Which, of the many beauties in my notebook, do I wish to carry forward?" The writer thus sits down to a feast every time, and never to an empty bowl.

A few thoughts on punctuation

At the grocery store yesterday, after buying the honey mustard and garlic nibbly things one daughter craves, the vegetarian lasagna another requested, the perennially favorite foot-long Italian sandwich, and TWO gallons of ice cream, which will be gone (except for a moldy rim of chocolate) long before I remember their existence, I thought perhaps I was entitled to buy myself a book. Eats, Shoots and Leaves, the media sensation punctuation manual, caught my eye. I almost put in the carriage, but its pages were just a little too bare, too much white space and too few words, with that crinkly sort of edge to the page that says over-priced to me. (And besides, I was sure I could get it for at least 30% off from Amazon.) But what really reconciled me to putting the book back on its shelf was the thought of Nicholson Baker's "The History of Punctuation," sitting unread on my essay shelf at home.