Commas

Because it's best to have a sense of humor about these things:

And an opinion on the Oxford comma (also called the Harvard comma, the serial comma, or the series comma, used in lists of three or more):

 

Now, just as a word to the wise, the Oxford comma is actually optional. Technically, you can omit it if you wish. But with this illustration in my head, I generally use it!

The Glories of Professorship and University Life

A few weeks ago I sent out a request asking for reading recommendations for the summer. While the Barnes & Noble in Manchester is sadly inadequate, it did have one book on the long list I received: Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl (Thanks for the suggestion, Marisa Wolfe). I'm only 60 pages in, so I'm reserving judgement, but so far there have already been a number of passages that made me wish I had a pen or pencil on me. Here's one of them for you. The father of the main character is a university professor, and very much in love with his job, as the following passage indicates:

"I'm serious. Is there anything more glorious than a professor? Forget about his molding the minds, the future of a nation -- a dubious assertion; there's little you can do when they tend to emerge from the womb predestined for Grand Theft Auto Vice City. No. What I mean is, a professor is the only person on earth with the power to put a veritable frame around life -- not the whole thing, God no -- simply a fragment of it, a small wedge. He organizes the unorganizable. Nimbly partitions it into modern and postmodern, renaissance, baroque, primitivism, imperialism and so on. Splice that up with Research Papers, Vacation, Midterms. All that order -- simply divine. The symmetry of a semester course. Consider the words themselves: the seminar, the tutorial, the advanced whatever workshop accessible only to seniors, to graduate fellows, to doctoral candidates, the practicum -- what a marvelous word: practicum! You think me crazy. Consider a Kandinsky. Utterly muddled, put a frame around it, voila -- looks rather quaint above the fireplace. And so it is with the curriculum. That celestial, sweet set of instructions, culminating in the scary wonder of the Final Exam. And what is the Final Exam? A test of one's deepest understanding of giant concepts. No wonder so many adults long to return to university, to all those deadlines -- ahhh, that structure! Scaffolding to which we may cling! Even if it is arbitrary, without it, we're lost, wholly incapable of separating the Romantic from the Victorian in our sad, bewildering lives..." (11-12)

Besides the fact of his being entirely correct about us needing order and structure (I confess, I'm a little bewildered at the thought that if indeed I am successful in getting a job as a book editor, I'll no longer live within the context of a "school year"), I think he's hitting on something deeper. What astounds me about atheism is the courage that it has to take. I would be absolutely terrified if I thought there was no higher being than myself. Sure, I'm responsible for a lot, but there's someone up there infinitely more intelligent and powerful who has things under control. Not that professors are God or anything, but weren't there certain teachers or professors you've had that you could sit and listen to all day long, whose store of knowledge and experience and understanding of the world was monumentally impressive? Humans like having a reliable authority, someone they can go to for the answers, someone they can always trust to explain what's going on. I remember my mother telling me once, "I have no advice to give you. You already know everything I would say." I was horrified! Outraged! Really, really scared. I experienced a similar feeling of shock when I went to an old professor of mine saying, "I've just finished Wise Blood, and I need help understanding what's going on here." He responded, "I've never read it, but I've seen the movie." Well, I was dumbfounded. He's supposed to know EVERYTHING. He's supposed to have read everything. Luckily, based on his knowledge of Flannery O'Connor and the movie, he was still able to help. So, like the speaker above says, professors can't frame all of life for us -- though we might view them as deities at times, they are only minor ones, each with their own sphere of knowledge. But if you have a good university, guess what? All spheres will be covered! And it will be organized and neat and tidy, and the constant evaluations would keep you on your toes, help you understand the world, and, ultimately be a superior form of yourself. Life would be better. So, the conclusion? EVERYONE SHOULD GO TO GRAD SCHOOL!!! Who's paying?

"Whom"

Forgive the brevity of today's post. I'm going to plead wrapping up my job, moving, and enjoying three days of wedding festivities (congratulations, Deirdre and John!) to excuse my shocking lack of reading and literary conversation over the last week. With that apology...

I don't know how many of you are familiar with the Liturgy of the Hours. If you aren't, it is, very much in brief, Catholic monks and nuns chanting the psalms and doing scripture readings at particular hours of each day. Of course, you don't have to be in a religious order to pray the psalms like that -- us ordinary folk get to do it, too. I've never done them all regularly, but in college I did routinely chant Compline, the nighttime prayer, with a group of friends. Long story short, one of my favorite verses came up yesterday, but in a translation to make any English teacher ridiculously excited: Be sober and watch, because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, goeth about seeking whom he may devour. Whom resist ye, strong in faith; (1 Peter 5:9)

Now, because I've heard other like-minded people correct those sinners among us who say "who" when they ought  to be saying "whom", I imagine I'm not alone in reading that verse and saying, "Hey hey!! Yes! Whom resist ye! Cool!" Anyway, hope you appreciate it, too.

And for one final bit of silliness on a very serious grammatical issue threatening the stability of modern society, please note the angry eyebrows of the second owl.

The Word "Nice"

Last night I had a discussion with some friends about what I had thought to be an innocuous word: nice. I actually like it, but I was surprised by the vehemence with which most of the room condemned it as bland, and even insulting in that if you can't say something legitimately good about a person (presumably because they either have a bad personality or none at all), you call them "nice" and leave it at that. It covers a multitude of faults, but in a way that alerts its hearers to the unspoken presence of those faults in the person it describes. Or, at least, I found last night that this is what most people think when they hear it. My first inkling that I might have an unusual appreciation for the word was in my senior year of high school. I remember trying to compliment a Polish class mate of mine, in the midst of a round of less-than-friendly jokes, by saying that all of the Polish people I had met were really nice. Let's just say he wasn't very nice in his reception of the compliment. Well, gee, I thought, I'm sorry. I've always used it as a legitimate compliment, and when, during the discussion last night, I gave an example of how I might use it, everyone granted me leave to continue in my albeit naive and somewhat singular appreciation of the word. Phew.

Anyway, thinking back to a college class from which I remember that it once used to mean someone overly prim and proper, I decided to look it up this morning and find out how the meaning of this word went astray. Can I just say, etymologies are awesome. From the Online Etymology Dictionary (emphasis added):

nice

late 13c., "foolish, stupid, senseless," from O.Fr. nice "silly, foolish," from L. nescius "ignorant," lit. "not-knowing," from ne- "not" (see un-) + stem of scire "to know." "The sense development has been extraordinary, even for an adj." [Weekley] -- from "timid" (pre-1300); to "fussy, fastidious" (late 14c.); to "dainty, delicate" (c.1400); to "precise, careful" (1500s, preserved in such terms as a nice distinction and nice and early); to "agreeable, delightful" (1769); to "kind, thoughtful" (1830). In 16c.-17c. it is often difficult to determine exactly what is meant when a writer uses this word. By 1926, it was pronounced "too great a favorite with the ladies, who have charmed out of it all its individuality and converted it into a mere diffuser of vague and mild agreeableness." [Fowler]

Of course, always unfailing, Jane Austen has a few words to say on the subject as well:

"I am sure," cried Catherine, "I did not mean to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should I not call it so?" "Very true," said Henry, "and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk; and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! It does for everything." (Northanger Abbey)

 And, while we're on the subject, it's time for one of my personal favorites: The English Are So Nice, by D. H. Lawrence:

The English are so nice
so awfully nice
they are the nicest people in the world.

And what's more, they're very nice about being nice
about your being nice as well!
If you're not nice they soon make you feel it.

Americans and French and Germans and so on
they're all very well
but they're not really nice, you know.
They're not nice in our sense of the word, are they now?

That's why one doesn't have to take them seriously.
We must be nice to them, of course,
of course, naturally.
But it doesn't really matter what you say to them,
they don't really understand
you can just say anything to them:
be nice, you know, just nice
but you must never take them seriously, they wouldn't understand,
just be nice, you know! Oh, fairly nice,
not too nice of course, they take advantage
but nice enough, just nice enough
to let them feel they're not quite as nice as they might be.

Amazing, right? "Just nice enough / to let them feel they're not quite as nice as they might be." Ouch. Anyway, I suppose this poem does of course deftly and elegantly derail any reasoning behind my fond attachment to "nice", but, of course, based on the remarkably evolutionary etymology of the word, who knows? Maybe my use of it will rise to the top in connotation and eventually become the primary meaning of it over the next hundred years. Ah, language...

PS. I am well aware of the geekiness of this post.

 

Suffering and Human Restlessness

I recently found out that one of my students is very sick, and while I won't go into details, I have been very confused and stricken on his behalf, thinking of the hard road that lies ahead of him. I watched him struggling today, and was so sad for him, and so overwhelmed by the seeming senselessness of what he will have to handle. One of my friends is also going through a really awful time, and also in a way that I can't understand or help. Over the weekend I heard of 3 more people whom I know personally who are having severe and debilitating struggles with health. When I came home from work today, one of the girls I'm staying with (I moved out of my apartment last week) told me an awfully sad story. She is also a teacher, but at a different school. One of her students, a 16 year old boy, just hung himself. I just don't understand. None of this is happening directly to me, and yet I feel entirely undone, entirely unable to handle it or help with any of it. We read so much about suffering and pain, and we hear that prayer helps all things, and I suppose it will eventually, but I don't understand. I just don't get it. I know I'm not the first one to feel angry and powerless about it, and I don't have anything profound to say to make it make any sense or be any better. All of the theological explanations and philosophical justifications that might make it seem logically more sensible don't help with the fact that ultimately, when it comes down to the actual experience of it, it's awful and horrible and nothing we say or do makes us like it, or, worse yet, makes us like watching others go through it.

Sonnet on Human Restlessness

I stopped, when I began to be at peace.

The reason known but distantly, I raged

And cursed at our flightly human ease,

Always, only, ever, or merely staged.

I know, each hour I see another sink

To a fury of despair and sorrow,

This incensed soul is not the first to think

On unrest waiting for your Good Morrow

To quiet this lacerated longing

Of all your weary creatures. Fled from your

Gentle love, though to it still belonging,

We despise, ache, for entry of that door.

And will this restless strain be here, always,

And life seem more than a transient phase?

From a letter I received recently: " 'Be kind, for everyone you know is fighting a great battle.' I find it amazing, and beautiful, that behind the eyes of the hundreds of people we may meet every day, behind the windshield of every car we pass on the highway, and on the other side of every window of every office building, there is a human person with his own family and his own history and his own consciousness, who may be rejoicing, or suffering deeply, and if we aren't sensitive and receptive we may never know it."

Dylan Thomas' Poetic Manifesto

During my junior year of college, several of my classmates started a creative writing group. While I was delighted to join in the bi-weekly critical sessions (it felt like we were the next generation Inklings), I must confess that I thought the name of the chapbook we put out each semester was a little pretentious: The Irving Renaissance: Do Not Go Gentle. The inspiration for the name is Dylan Thomas' villanelle in which the speaker vehemently urges his father not to fade quietly away without putting up a good fight. Dylan Thomas was then, for obvious reasons, subconsciously very present to me, as I realized after having a vivid dream about wandering the misty, cold moors of Great Britain, being invited by the poet himself to come in out of the damp, and sitting before a warm fire in deep wing chairs while he smoked a pipe, I drank hot tea, and we talked for hours about writing and poetry. I was a little confused when I woke up, and thought, "Huh, Dylan Thomas, eh? Never really gave him much thought before..." I'm a firm believer in the importance of dreams, so I dutifully went to the bookstore and bought his biography and some of his poetry. I am sorry to say I ended up being disgusted by his personal life, and deeming him entirely mediocre, not at all measuring up to his dream-self.

All of that being said, I still love some of what he says. The following is excerpted from his responses to five questions that a student asked him while he was on tour in the United States. It was recorded and published posthumously under the name Poetic Manifesto. While this is not complete, it not only gives great insight to what Dylan Thomas thought of poetry, but is representative of the thoughts of many poets and scholars. Many, but not all, as I'm sure there are some who disagree with the almost reckless passion with which he throws away the meanings of words for the sake of their sounds. Beyond this introduction, I'll let you all form your own opinions of what he has to say. I've italicized my favorite parts, if you just want to read the quick version. Enjoy!

You want to know why and how I first began to write poetry, and which poets or kind of poetry I was first moved and influenced by. 

To answer the first part of this question, I should say I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words...What the words stood for, symbolised, or meant, was of very secondary importance; what mattered was the sound of them as I heard them for the first time on the lips of the remote and incomprehensible grown-ups who seemed, for some reason, to be living in my world. And these words were, to me, as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments, the noises of wind, sea, and rain, the rattle of milkcarts, the clopping of hooves on cobbles, the fingering of branches on a window pane, might be to someone, deaf from birth, who has miraculously found his hearing. I did not care what the words said, overmuch, nor what happened to Jack & Jill & the Mother Goose rest of them; I cared for the shapes of sound that their names, and the words describing their actions, made in my ears; I cared for the colours the words cast on my eyes...I fell in love – that is the only expression I can think of – at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behaviour very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy... There they were, seemingly lifeless, made only of black and white, but out of their own being, came love and terror and pity and pain and wonder and all the other vague abstractions that make our ephemeral lives dangerous, great and bearable. Out of them came the gusts and grunts and hiccups and heehaws of the common fun of the earth; and though what the words meant was, in its own way, often deliciously funny enough, so much funnier seemed to me, at that almost forgotten time, the shape and shade and size and noise of the words as they hummed, strummed, jigged and galloped along... And as I read more and more, and it was not all verse, by any means, my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always. I knew, in fact, that I must be a writer of words and nothing else... I knew I had to know them most intimately in all their forms and moods, their ups and downs, their chops and changes, their needs and demands. (Here, I am afraid, I am beginning to talk too vaguely. I do not like writing about words, because then I often use bad and wrong and stale and wooly words. What I like to do is to treat words as a craftsman does his wood or stone or what-have-you, to hew, carve, mould, coil, polish and plane them into patterns, sequences, sculptures, fugues of sound expressing some lyrical impulse, some spiritual doubt or conviction, some dimly realized truth I must try to reach and realize.) It was when I was very young...I wrote endless imitations, though I never thought them to be imitations but, rather, wonderfully original things, like eggs laid by tigers. They were imitations of anything I happened to be reading at the time...

The writers, then, who influenced my earliest poems and stories were, quite simply, and truthfully, all the writers I was reading at the time...They ranged from writers of school-boy adventure yarns to incomparable and inimitable masters like Blake. That is, when I began, bad writing had as much influence on my stuff as good. The bad influences I tried to remove and renounce bit by bit, shadow by shadow, echo by echo, through trial and error, thought delight and disgust and misgiving, as I came to love word more and to hate the heavy hands that knocked them about, the thick tongues that had not feel for their multitudinous tastes, the dull and botching hacks who flattened them out into a colourless and insipid paste, the pedants who made them moribund and pompous as themselves. Let me say that the things that first made me love language and want to work in it and for it were nursery rhymes and folk tales, the Scottish Ballads, a few lines of hymns, the most famous Bible stories and the rhythms of the Bible, Blake's Songs of Innocence, and the quite incomprehensible magical majesty and nonsense of Shakespeare heard, read, and near-murdered in the first forms of my school....

To your third question – Do I deliberately utilise devices of rhyme, rhythm, and word-formation in my writing – I must, of course, answer with an immediate, Yes. I am a painstaking, conscientious, involved and devious craftsman in all words, however unsuccessful the result so often appears, and to whatever wrong uses I may apply my technical paraphernalia, I use everything and anything to make my poems work and move in the directions I want them to: old tricks, new tricks, puns, portmanteau-words, paradox, allusion, paranomasia, paragram, catachresis, slang, assonantal rhymes, vowel rhymes, sprung rhythm. Every device there is in language is there to be used if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.

Your next question asks whether my use of combinations of words to create something new, 'in the Surrealist way', is according to a set formula or is spontaneous.... [ I profoundly disagree with the Credo of the Surrealists ]. I do not mind from where the images of a poem are dragged up: drag them up, if you like, from the nethermost sea of the hidden self; but before they reach paper, they must go through all the rational processes of the intellect. The Surrealists, on the other hand, put their words down together on paper exactly as they emerge from chaos; they do not shape these words or put them in order; to them, chaos is the shape and order. This seems to me to be exceedingly presumptuous; the Surrealists imagine that whatever the dredge from their subconscious selves and put down in paint or in words must, essentially, be of some interest or value. I deny this. One of the arts of the poet is to make comprehensible and articulate what might emerge from subconscious sources; one of the great main uses of the intellect is to select from the amorphous mass of subconscious images, those that will best further his imaginative purpose, which is to write the best poem he can.

And question five is, God help us, what is my definition of poetry?

I, myself, do not read poetry for anything but pleasure. I read only the poems I like. This means, of course, that I have to read a lot of poems I don't like before I find the ones I do, but, when I do find the one I do, then all I can say is “Here they are”, and read them to myself for pleasure. Read the poems you like reading. Don't bother whether they're important or if they'll live. What does it matter what poetry is, after all? If you want a definition of poetry, say: “Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing”, and let it go at that...

You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick, and say to yourself, when the works are laid out before you, the vowels, the consonants, the rhymes or rhythms, “Yes, this is it. This is why the poem moves me so. It is because of the craftsmanship.”... You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in. 

 

The joy and function of poetry is, and was, the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God.

To Lucasta, Going to the Wars

Given that yesterday was Memorial Day, this seems like an appropriate time to share with all of you one of my all-time favorite poems. If you are already poetry readers, I imagine you know and love this one well, and, if not, prepare yourself for beauty, courtesy of Richard Lovelace:.

Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind,

That from the nunnery

Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind

To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,

the first foe in the field;

And with a stronger faith embrace

A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such

As thou too shalt adore;

I could not love thee, Dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

This is one of very few poems I actually have committed, in its entirety, to memory (I have a deplorable memory, and I'm also shamefully bad at spelling. Ok, good -- it's out in the open now, so everyone can just relax already, alright?). It helps, of course, that it is so short, but really it is the last line that does it for me, that makes it so worth the remembering. When I read A Tale of Two Cities with my sophomores last year, a surprising number of them were critical of Charles Darnay when, facing almost certain death, he returned to France to save a man who was only in danger because he had served as custodian of Charles' property in France. What about his wife and child, they all protested. How could he leave them behind? He was being irresponsible, and should have stayed at home and taken care of them. Perhaps I'm wrong on this, and my students' initial convictions lead me to believe I might have been, but I thought it was obvious that he should go. A Tale of Two Cities aside, let's look at Lucasta.

The rebuke of the speaker in the first line is undeniable, and yet so tender and mild, perhaps more understanding than the Lady's words have merited. He wouldn't be asking her not to be unkind if she hadn't already said some awful things to him, and the direct imperative with which the poem begins leaves us in no doubt of the firmness of the speaker's position on the subject. Next, the contrast of lines 2 and 3 with line 4 is striking; words like chaste, nunnery, quiet, when held in juxtaposition with flying off to war and arms, help us to understand the change he's about to undergo, and how little this lady he loves can understand and relate to a world that is about to take her place in enveloping him.

The idea of his being enveloped is an image further intensified with the words arms, embrace, mistress, chase, and his clear analogy of moving from the close physical union of one woman to the personified "woman" of the battlefield. No wonder Lucasta is angry! She's being replaced in his affections, and he's going to embrace not only a sword, but even a horse rather than her!

Luckily for her, she has it all wrong, as her valiant warrior soon makes clear. When he uses the word inconstancy, he is not saying what he actually thinks (this is my interpretation -- feel free to argue this point with me): he is using a word that he has heard Lucasta use, a word that this woman he loves has used unkindly against him. He is not running in pursuit of a new mistress, the enemy of the battlefield, because he is unhappy and restless at home, or because he is shiftless and trying to come up with a good rationale for shirking his manly responsibilities on the home front. He is running because he loves her: I could not love thee, Dear, so much, loved I not Honour more. Ultimately, if he did not go where he was in honor bound to go, he would not be capable of giving her all the love that he wants to give her. Putting honor first makes him enough of a man that he is not only capable, but eligible and worthy of loving his Dear. If Lucasta's warrior was instead a chap who would sit at home and not go to the war when the country needed defending, when duty and honor called him, I imagine she would soon find herself regretting she had ever become attached to such a sorry fellow. Ultimately, the speaker's pursuit of honor is not in competition with his love of Lucasta. Rather, the former enables the latter -- the man's love of honor allows him to love the woman.

So yes, Charles Darnay should have gone to France, as he did, and Lucie, his wife, being the paragon of virtue that she is, would, I am sure, have reprimanded him justly and severely if he had left his custodian to fend for himself. 

My wonderful big brother, Lt Philip Turner, USMC, and his beautiful wife, Rosie

Pray for God's blessing on all of our veterans, and on everyone currently serving in the military. And God bless their families, too. Being Lucasta isn't easy.