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Reading and Learning

Once during my undergraduate days, a professor assigned the class to write an essay about our group, utilizing the collective pronoun “we”. She asked us what attributes the class shared and wrote them on the board. At the time I was reading John Updike’s Rabbit novels, whose main protagonist is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a WASPy, middle class, suburbanite, these attributes being not unlike those of our group. (I had returned to college when my second child was three.) Updike often relied on third-person plural, especially in passages that meditated on the lives of Rabbit’s world. Here’s an example: “We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn’t big enough for all that wanting.”

Many of my fellow students were also mothers (I attended an all-female college.) I opened my essay with sentences that went something like this: “We navigated our way through the stops and starts of carpools. We selected red, foulard ties to go with our husbands’ s grey suits. We rushed to the market before the 3 o’clock bell tolled at our children’s schools.” As mothers, the world shrinks, resulting in hurried wanting but still wanting. Without realizing it, I had learned from Updike.

Poetry: Mouth Pleasure

As a child, fighting off boredom, I would say the word ‘here’ over and over again until the meaning vanished and it became pure sound. At first this phenomenon frightened me; suddenly I was in the world of infancy and its babbling syllables, a foreign place for a child who yearned for tomorrow not yesterday. Not until I read poet Donald Hall’s essay “Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird” later in life was this phenomenon explained. He wrote: “…in poetry it is the deep and primitive pleasure of vowels in the mouth, of assonance and of holds on adjacent long vowels; of consonance, mmmm, and alliteration.” This reminds me of something I overheard a young child say to her father: “Daddy, I’ve got energy in my mouth.”

Is it this return to innocence that one looks to poetry for? The pleasurable gibberish of an infant or toddler? Or does maturation and its accompanying concern for meaning get in the way? Often people (mostly students, of course) ask me what a poem means. In answer, I direct them to what poet John Ciardi believed and wrote about in his book How Does a Poem Mean? That is, one must experience the poem: walk around in it, visit it many times, notice what is happening, things like tonality, vowel sounds, consonance, rhythm, and rhyme (or lack thereof). See what’s going on. Ciardi writes: “I am more interested in ‘How’ the poem means, how it goes about being a performance of itself. An alternative title might have been ‘How to talk about a poem without actually paraphrasing.”

READ FOR IDEAS

All writers know that Ideas are either everywhere or nowhere; state of mind controls which. If I’m in a wondering-state, ideas pour forth seemingly out of the ether, and if I find myself stuck, they simply hide. This is when reading often helps. The other day I was reading the NY Times’s 125th Anniversary issue of the Book Review. In an interview with Colson Whitehead, author of the best-selling The Underground Railroad, he said he was working on a novel about Band-Aids. The mention of Band-Aids resonated with something I had been wondering about as I reapplied them to stitches from Mohs surgery, a procedure to scrape away skin cancer, I had had recently. Each time, I fumbled with getting the Band-Aid opened — the ultra-thin paper is difficult to manipulate. I thought, What happpened to the little red strings? You’d zip open the Band-Aid as effortlessly as breathing. Today I have started a lyric essay about Band-Aids

Even errors can fruit ideas. American poet Elizabeth Bishop once read a misprint in a newspaper; the word mammoth was misspelled as manmoth, which resulted in her poem “Man-Moth”, a dreamy creature who attempts to climb to the moon. I have a running log of my misreadings, which I consult when my idea well runs dry. I misread “kneel’ as “kennel” and came up with the line of a poem: We kenneled our fears, brought them leftover meats and water. Some of the misreadings are downright funny: heart lunch for heart lurch; slacker grammar for slacker glamour; interviewing the farmhouse for interviewing the famous.

Dry Periods

During non-writing days I find myself restless, unable to focus on one thing. I’m reading an Opinion piece in the paper, suddenly stop mid-article to go to the book shelf and grab a gardening book, water bromeliads that probably don’t need it, brew some coffee. Caffeine — that ought to do it Even reading, which usually provides ideas for writing, is affected: I jump from one book to another, finishing none. This state adds to my abiding anxiety. I don’t know where my anxiety comes from for certain, but I do know that it skyrockets when I’m not writing. (I won’t even go into the exponential rise in self-loathing!)

As I write this blog entry, I remind myself that in fact I have been writing—this entry and also an essay. I return to the essay every few days, adding a small paragraph here, cutting and pasting there, and rewording pretty much everywhere. I’m beginning to feel better, one word, one comma, one sentence at a time.


Depression and Writing

Like a black wool hood, depression slips down on me. The blackness precludes thought, and the wool adds to fogginess. Clear thinking becomes addled, a dreadful feeling results in non-action, self- loathing is omnipresent, and any writing is impossible. Melancholia, derived from the Greek phrase melaina chole meaning ‘black bile’, is known as the first description of depression by Hippocrates 24 centuries ago. Black. Black. Black.

When I am grappling with my depression, dread rules my thoughts. Retreating to my bed is the most I can do. There, dread continues, but eventually I sleep. Sleep is a safe haven. A particularly cruel characteristic of depression is its dog-chasing-its-tail cycle: Sleeping and inaction cause self-loathing, which, in turn, aids and abets a withdrawal from the world: more sleeping. Paul Verlaine, 19th century French poet wrote “A vast black sleepfalls over my lifesleep, all hopesleep, all desire.”

A depressive and suicide, Sylvia Plath recorded in a journal: “Very depressed today. Unable to write a thing. Menacing gods. I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness.”

Almost cliche, depressed writers are myriad: Arthur Rimbaud, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, Rainer Marie Rilke, Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace, James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Hardy, Anne Sexton, Emily Dickinson. Yet their depressions were not cliche but dangerously real: Of this list of 15, seven committed suicde.

Before awarding Best Screenplay for a film at the 2014 Oscars ceremony, Robert DeNiro offered his own thoughts: “The mind of a writer can be a truly terrifying thing. Isolated, neurotic, caffeine-addled, crippled by procrastination, consumed by feelings of panic, self-loathing, and soul-crushing inadequacy. And that’s on a good day.”

Many have asked, “Is there a correlation between creativity and depression?” Because of my own experience, I would have to answer ‘no’. Yet there are studies that say ‘yes’. One such study examined data on 1.2 million Swedish citizens over a 40-year period and found that people in creative careers were more likely to be diagnosed with bipolar disorder than those in other professions. They also found that writers were 121% more likely to suffer from depression, and about 50% more likely to take their own lives than the public overall. Then still other findings can only proffer a meek ‘maybe’. Christa Taylor’s paper Creativity and Mood Disorder: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis reports results from a study that comprised three distinct research approaches, all of which suggested that though some correlations appear there is limited empirical data.

Rilke wrote: “If my devils are to leave me, I’m afraid my angels will take flight as well.”

If one can say that there is anything good about depression, then I would propose that when it lifts, gratitude replaces it. And, for me, gratitude’s positivity leads me back to the keyboard. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

READ/MISREAD FOR IDEAS

All writers know that ideas are either everywhere or nowhere; state of mind controls which. If I’m in a wondering-state, ideas pour forth seemingly out of the ether, and if I find myself stuck, they simply hide, which is when reading often helps.

The other day I was reading the NY Times’s 125th Anniversary issue of the Book Review. In an interview with Colson Whitehead, author of the best-selling The Underground Railroad, he said he was working on a novel about Band-Aids. The mention of Band-Aids resonated with something I had been wondering about as I reapplied them to stitches from Mohs surgery, a procedure to scrape away skin cancer, I had had recently. Each time, I fumbled with getting the Band-Aid opened — the ultra-thin paper is difficult to manipulate. I thought, What happpened to the little red strings? Pull on one and the Band-Aid zipped open as effortlessly as breathing. Today I have started a lyric essay about Band-Aids — that’s how it works.

Even errors can fruit ideas. American poet Elizabeth Bishop once read a misprint in a newspaper; the word mammoth was misspelled as manmoth, which resulted in her poem “Man-Moth”, a dreamy creature who attempts to climb to the moon.

I have a running log of my misreadings, which I consult when my idea well is dry. I misread “kneel’ as “kennel” and came up with the line of a poem: We kenneled our fears, brought them leftover meats and water. Some of the misreadings are downright funny: heart lunch for heart lurch; slacker grammar for slacker glamour; interviewing the famous for interviewing the farmhouse. These will yield, I hope, some solid writing!

Zoom: Humanistic or Robotic

The virtual meeting platform Zoom has boomed since the onset of Covid. The Guardian, a British newspaper, states that its revenue has more than doubled from the same time the year before. Many users love the site; others abhor it. Reasons for both opinions abound and often overlap: convenience, no commuting to work, viewing all participants; inconvenience of technology, lack of personal interaction at the water-cooler, viewing all participants.

During a Zoom class about George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the host asked all participants to disable the microphone and video option to lessen the distraction quotient. Who doesn’t check out each other’s Hollywood Squares-ish windows? Wasn’t he wearing that same shirt yesterday? I didn’t know she had blonde hair. All these people look bored and tired. And, of course, we check out our own images. Oh, my God, is that a zit?!

Most participants followed directions and blacked out, but some — probably out of Zoom illiteracy — had not. When only a few videos play on an otherwise darkened screen, those individuals’ head turns, sitting position, eating and drinking, ad nauseam, do indeed distract. Yet sometimes we get a close-up of a life: A man rubs under his dog’s chin. A woman with short grey hair, styled a la Joan of Arc, bows her head, (maybe searching for how to turn off her video) when a blue-jeaned older man shows up behind her, leans over and kisses the top of her head, then moves out of camera’s view. Another person shoos a child from the room.

This summer I had tuned in to a virtual writing workshop, which did not use Zoom but in its stead a platform called Whova. (Anti-ad: Stay away from Whova.) I’m not sure if the poet running the workshop chose to, but we could only see him; once in a while the co-host’s image would pop up when she spoke. For a viewer, this resulted in a very disjointed, impersonal experience, a headless, voiceless one. At least on the Middlemarch Zoom, we could read names and know that a person existed behind the tiny exed-out microphones. During real in-person workshops the human body in all its permutations adds to the writing being discussed. I recall a gifted poet in my graduate program who read his work in a gentle voice and rhythmic cadence; he gesticulated with his right hand, forming a circle with his middle finger and thumb; he paused slightly at each line-break. It was hypnotic yet also liberating, if that makes sense. The rest of us wanted him to read our poems.

Zoom poses some important social questions. Do we secretly love the voyeurs within us? Will Zoom change forever the nature of group communication? How does it affect our focus with its standard forty minute play; is it just another bit of technology that shortens our attention span? And, finally, how does it determine our social personae? These issues need to be examined, because with no end to Covid and its variants in sight, Zoom is here to stay.

Reading as a Writer

Once during my undergraduate days, a professor assigned the class to write an essay about our group, utilizing the collective pronoun “we”. She asked us what attributes the class shared and wrote them on the board. At the time I was reading John Updike’s Rabbit novels, whose main protagonist is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a WASPy, middle class suburbanite, whose attributes were not unlike those of our class. Updike often utilized third-person plural, especially in meditative passages about the lives of those who peopled Rabbit’s world. Here are a couple examples: “We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn’t big enough for all that wanting.” And another from a ruminating section: “How sad, how strange we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.” Both of these quotes are from Rabbit Redux, a sequel to his Rabbit, Run.

Many of my fellow students were also mothers (I attended an all-female college.) I opened my essay with sentences that went something like this: “We navigated our way through the stops and starts of carpools. We selected red, foulard ties to go with our husbands’ s grey suits. We rushed to the market before the 3 o’clock bell tolled at our children’s schools.” Without realizing it, I had learned from Updike.

Francine Prose, novelist and author of Reading Like a Writer, says “After I’ve written an essay in which I’ve quoted at length from great writers, so that I’ve had to copy long passages from their work, I’ve noticed that my own work becomes, however briefly, just a little more fluent.”

Try this for yourself. Take whatever it is you are currently reading (or a book you’ve already read and that you especially like) and underline some passages that struck you as particularly memorable. You can even copy them out, as Prose did. Wait a day. Then reread what you underlined or copied out, several times. The next day write anything for 20 minutes, and assess your work. I’d be surprised if you don’t detect a change in your writing.

Follow the spark.

Whenever an idea, phrase, even just a word, comes to you, write it down. (You would be surprised how even a jotted word brings about a stream of writing.) There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to remember a thought that you didn’t record. Sometimes something comes to me as I am falling asleep, at which point I grab a notebook from my nightstand and mark it down. When I’m out and about, napkins, paper scraps, store receipts suffice. (Careful with the receipts as often they resist writing; I guess they are treated with some kind of preservative!) Most importantly, always have a pen or pencil with you, and if you’re really organized — which I’m not — carry a small notebook.

I recall driving to the beach with my teen-age son and dictating to him some thoughts. Also the recording option on a phone is useful but I prefer actual writing; for me the sound of a pen or the feel of a pencil on paper somehow propels my mind; the manual drives the cerebral. To stir inspiration, William Wordsworth would walk for hours in England’s Lake District. American poet Wallace Stevens, too, found walking an inspiring method. He walked to and fro his job at the Hartford insurance company, using paper scraps he carried in his pockets. Edgar Allan Poe created scrolls for his writing by connecting his pages end-to-end with sealing wax.

Many writers have written inspiration on as many surfaces. Because of his failing eyesight, James Joyce wrote on large pieces of cardboard using a bright red crayon. Famously, at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan, Hemingway scribbled on a napkin his six-word story: For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn. Faulkner outlined one of his books on a wall.

Whether you write on napkins or receipts, don’t let them pile up on your desk or remain in your pocket or purse. Follow the spark.

Modeling

Often I’m reading an article in a magazine or a chapter in a book, and a particularly well-written passage grabs me. Perhaps unconsciously the passage attracts me because it demonstrates a technique that I am teaching to students at the time. But when I do come across something, I go straight to my printer and copy the piece, thus accruing rich fodder for the next time I see my students.  Just yesterday I was reading Kathryn Schultz’s review of Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk [The New Yorker, March 9, 2015] and realized that her elegant and unobtrusive paragraph-to-paragraph transitions would fit the bill for a group of middle school boys I am working with who are eager to learn how to improve their writing in terms of fluidity.

That same issue of The New Yorker offered another piece suitable for these boys, one of John McPhee’s occasional additions to his On Writing series titled “Frame of Reference”.  Widely known as a pioneer of creative non-fiction, McPhee teaches writing courses at Princeton and is the author of many books, including two that were nominated for the National Book Award, and his Annals of the Former World won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999.  The gist of his essay is that writers should be wary about mentioning people, places, situations that only their generation would understand, say, alluding to a certain level of a video game only aficionados of that game would ‘get’. Beware of obscure words and phrases, too, warns McPhee, who occasionally broke this rule. One such example: “With his pure-white hair, his large frame his tetragrammatonic mustache, Lawson personified Higher Authority.”  Lucky for McPhee, his kind editor answered the flurry of querying letters that arrived at the magazine about how he modified mustache.

Please do not think me NYer-centric, as many other magazines and newspapers are troves for teaching and tutoring material.  National Geographic, for example, prints articles that are tailor-made for younger writers, anywhere from fourth to sixth grade.  As lovely as the photographs are, their captions and accompanying articles are mostly written in clear, accessible prose. When I come across prose in other publications that is cloudy and difficult, I use samples of it to model “how not to write”.  I’d rather not reveal which ones consistently provide examples of this type!