Blog

The Courage to Be Wrong: In Defense of Prescription

I.
I teach in a graduate writing program where to suggest we ought to be prescriptive (i.e. start with first principles to apply to the work at hand) in our workshop comments or revision suggestions would be like insisting we ought to admit few to no black students, or queer ones. It’s taken in faith as wrong. That second position is indefensible. I’m here to see how I might defend the first.

II.
Definitions may help. The OED’s got this for prescribe: “To write or lay down as a rule or direction to be followed; to impose authoritatively; to ordain, decree; to assign.” No wonder we hate it. Good writing rarely if ever comes from following rules or directions, or from imposed authority. But there’s more: “To limit, restrict, restrain, circumscribe; to confine within bounds.” This is interesting; half the writers I know—students or otherwise—feel creatively charged by imposed constrictions and restraints. There’s a whole school of literature founded on same. We have the medical definition (“To advise or order the use of [a medicine, remedy, treatment, etc.], esp. by a written prescription”) we could adopt metaphorically, because it’s softer, and more accurately gets at what we teachers of writing do in the classroom.

And then we can get literal: “To write first or beforehand; to describe in writing beforehand; to write [something] in front.” To pre-scribe. To see prescriptive grammar, or prescriptive guidelines for writing, as maps sketched by elder frontierspeople. Where be monsters? “I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs,” prescribes Stephen King, “and I will shout it from the rooftops.”
Continue reading The Courage to Be Wrong: In Defense of Prescription

I Don’t Know What BEA is Like but I Want to Know

Post-AWP, blogs are getting filled with post-AWP entries. AWP stands, originally, for Associated Writing Programs. It’s like MLA for writers. Or the APA. Or whatever it is historians have. The organization throws an annual conference where, originally, other writers in the academy would hold panels on writing and the teaching of writing.

AWP now stands for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, so’s to open up its membership to writers not affiliated with a university. This was a sound decision financially, I imagine. Maybe also it helped drain the moat a bit surrounding the ivory tower. But when it comes to books and writing, literature or commerce, it’s not as though the ivory tower has ever had some kind of tight, enviable purchase. Publishers having the business models they now have, the academy’s become the way the US subsidizes its writers, but if you are a reader and not a writer, odds are you read the work of writers not affiliated with universities. You read the work of writers who don’t have teaching salaries to fall back on, and thus have to produce a book every year or two to pay the bills.

In terms of sales and reviews, it might be an enviable position. In terms of health insurance and retirement accounts, I imagine not.

What I’m saying is that the only way I in nine years of attending this conference have found a way to make it palatable is to remember that this is an academic conference organized by and for academics. It’s not a place to find an agent, or to network. There’s a whole bookfair, filled mostly with tables of small journals that make nobody any money, and while stopping by such tables will give you a sense of the very real people who publish writing, it’s not going to launch your career.

Because it’s not Book Expo America. It’s not the Frankfurter Buchmesse.[1] In the post-AWP blog posts I’ve read, the absence of Big Publishing has been lamented. Strategies for networking have been shared. They’re symptoms of a confused conference with a confusing acronym. Inviting writers like Don DeLillo to speak doesn’t help clarify matters. You can comment below if your experience of AWP is otherwise, but for me the conference is a chance to talk with other teaching writers about the teaching of writing. It’s a weekend for me to catch up with the writing friends I made while in a graduate writing program together. It’s a place to subscribe to the journals (academic in form and feel if not strictly in content) I’ve meant to subscribe to, while putting faces and voices to people who’ve previously been just names on a masthead.

But of course, George Saunders was there.[2] And, weirdly but delightfully, Mike Birbiglia. Ditto a lot of teaching writers with heavy Twitter followings. It gets people excited, the proximity to seeming fame and success. Or maybe it gets prose writers so excited. If you go to AWP, and you don’t have a list of old gradschool friends to drink with, go with and spend time with poets. The finest ten minutes of my entire weekend in Boston had to’ve been watching my friend Mathias read his poems to a room full of rapt people in the back room of an Irish bar in Somerville. I was proud and swoony. I was made to laugh and feel. Mathias killed, stole the whole evening of 13 readers. It will do nothing for his career, is what this whole post is trying to come to terms with, but I’ll get to hold those ten minutes close for the rest of my life.

Thanks, Mathias.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. I know this reeks of pretension, but I argue that because it looks like The Frankfurt Book Mess this reads better than writing it in English.↵
  2. Not that I saw him. This fact was reported to me in the form of a complaint that he shouldn’t get to walk through the bookfair for the traffic jams his open presence was causing.↵

Changing the Conversation

Critics of nonfiction need to stop making the same bad choice, the same wrong presumptions. In the New York Times, Morris Dickstein (a new playground taunt I’m eager to try out) :

The personal essay has always been a stepchild of serious literature, seemingly formless, hard to classify. Lacking the tight construction of a short story or the narrative arc of a novel or memoir, such essays have given readers pleasure without winning cultural respect. Written in a minor key, they could be slight and superficial, but their drawbacks could also be strengths. The style of the first-person essay tends to be conversational, tentative — in tune with our postmodern skepticism about absolutes, the trust we place in multiple perspectives. Few writers have pursued this more resourcefully than Phillip Lopate, who started out as a novelist and poet but gained traction when he began writing lively first-person essays in the late 1970s, later editing a landmark anthology, “The Art of the Personal Essay” (1994).

In this blog, I consider the essay:

The personal essay is among our oldest forms of literature, freely individualistic, resistant to simple classification. Eschewing the lockstep construction of a short story or the length of a novel or memoir, such essays have given readers pleasure while also landing in our major anthologies. Written in a minor key, they are taught in virtually every English or writing classroom, but—like with every genre—the essay’s strengths come with some limitations. The style of the first-person essay, as written by its long-standing practitioners, tends to lead to absolutes and blowhardiness. Few writers have pursued this more careeristically than Phillip Lopate, who started out as a novelist and poet but gained traction when he began writing lively first-person essays in the late 1970s, later editing a landmark anthology, “The Art of the Personal Essay” (1994).

Any arguments against the latter I’m happy to turn against the former. But regardless of where you stand vis-a-vis Lopate (he’s not all bad, I’m only trying to make a point), critics should no longer be taken seriously after insisting that the essay—personal or otherwise, always older than newspapers themselves—is some kind of denigrated form.

Taxidermy in Trouble, Part 3

I.
A moral conviction, in taxidermy or other matters, leads more often to orthodoxy than clarity.

From that Cleveland Plain Dealer article on one boutique’s taxidermy class, mentioned in Part 1:

“Having a young designer doing taxidermy made me think of the cute mice in the movie ‘Dinner for Schmucks’ and not animals hunted for the purpose of stuffing them,” [shop owner] Squire said. “That does not appeal to me in any way.”

Squire’s giving voice to a recurrent bit of sanctimony among new, urban taxidermists: that one’s material come from “ethically sourced” animals (i.e., roadkill, deceased pets, pets killed at the vet’s, pets frozen into food for other pets). It’s like buying meat at Whole Foods, and it’s about reassurance. Taxidermy isn’t about dominion necessarily, but it’s a display of our dominion over the animal kingdom. Like it or not, animals have yet to find a way to skin us and pose us in zoomorphic tableaux. It’s icky and gross, this realization, but not half as gross as working rhetorically hard to convince yourself otherwise.

From that Jezebel article also mentioned:

If you ever taxidermized a thing before, you know where the “X-eyes” of death in cartoons come from, and you’re familiar with that feeling you have by time you actually get to them, when you poke around the socket and squeeze them out and replace them with a bead or pushpin or other tiny human-created nugget, which is that you actually feel like you’re doing the thing a favor because it looks approximately one thousand percent less dead, and then you realize you’ve just landed in the Venn Diagram overlap of funeral home embalmers and serial killers. Oops!

Cheers to her proper verbing. Jeers to “approximately one thousand percent.” And neither cheers nor jeers to her warmly embraced act of dominion here. It’s very hard to argue that any animal is done a favor by being skinned and posed for our visual pleasure. Trust me, I tried. But it’s an available lie to tell ourselves as a way to justify the work we do as taxidermists, and so let’s all repeat it: taxidermy is a way to honor a dead animal.
Continue reading Taxidermy in Trouble, Part 3

Taxidermy in Trouble, Part 2

I.
AMC’s Immortalized is the competitive taxidermy show I’ve all been waiting for. Nothing reveals taxidermy’s artistry more clearly than watching four taxidermists with clipboards peer point blank into the eye of a wood duck. There’s as much pawing at the goods as at an AKC dog show. What I learned from spending three days at the World Taxidermy Championships is that, while I was drawn to the enormous displays of megafauna posed with backdrops and dioramic elements, to a taxidermy judge, size does not matter.

How peculiar, then, to find that the theme for the premiere episode of Immortalized was “Size Matters”.

The show’s Iron Chef with dead animals. Swap out Iron Chefs for “Immortalizers” (two of whom are rogue taxidermists, one of whom will not be mentioned by name in these posts), the “secret ingredient” for the “theme”, and rather than watch taxidermists do their work within an hour, “send” them home to do their work while a camera crew records it. There are three judges. One is Paul Rhymer, former (alas) head taxidermist at the Smithsonian, and a man so tall I had to lift my chin upward to look him in the eye. Another is Catherine “The Diva of Death” Coan, a non-founding member of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists—an organization only nominally Minnesotan that helps promote the work of rogues around the world. The third is comedian Brian Posehn.

Why is it Brian Posehn? Why a comedian? The show’s host, Zach Selwyn, has released four comedy albums, the latest of which is titled Moose Knuckle. Comedian Blaine Capatch is listed as a “creative consultant”. I laughed exactly twice during the premiere. First was in surprise when Posehn was introduced. Second was during the judges’ critique, when Posehn lauded the work of the challenger—a man who poses insects in fancy tableaux (more on this in a bit)—by saying, “How crazy it is, having a guy being tied down by bugs. It reminds me of a party at Andy Dick’s house.”

This is the show’s only moment of intended humor. Taxidermy is too often a laughable enterprise (see yesterday’s array of crappy taxidermy blogs), and those of us interested in it sometimes need to work to make it appear as something interesting and honorable. Immortalized does this with a deathful seriousness (Do low strings play furiously à la Survivor‘s tribal council before the judges’ verdict is spoken? Absolutely. Is that decision delayed by multiple quick closeups? Yes.) that becomes laughable and drains from taxidermy all of its fun and joy.
Continue reading Taxidermy in Trouble, Part 2

Taxidermy in Trouble, Part 1

I.
You know taxidermy’s past whatever moment it had when a man who wrote a book about the subject no longer wants to pay close attention.

Most people who bother with the matter at all would never admit that taxidermy is in a bad way. After shows on Animal Planet and [the] History [Network], we’ve now got one on the Mad Men/Breaking Bad network (about which more to come), and Rachel Poliquin’s book on taxidermy and longing was part of the New York Times‘s 2012 Holiday Gift Guide. The Taxidermy Moment—which I’ll argue began around April 2007 (with articles in both New York and the New York Times on the rise of trophy-head decor) and hit its apex with Chuck Testa in fall 2011—we’re still, it seems, in the heat of.

The trouble is that shitwork has taken center stage, and nobody’s calling it out for the shitwork that it is.

II.
I got excited when I first discovered rogue taxidermy, from a supermarket tabloid article a grad-school friend handed me in the halls back in 2006. I was (as is my gift) able immediately to see the obvious: by calling attention to the very tools and techniques of taxidermic practice, rogue taxidermists were the modern painters to traditional taxidermists’ 19th-century academy-style representationalists. Why work so hard to make an animal look lifelike when everyone knew it wasn’t alive? Why dissolve your artistry into something naturalist and invisible?

Then I wrote the book and learned two things:

  1. How to read the artistry in a traditional museum-style piece.
  2. How taxidermy can honor—and dishonor—a dead animal.

I guess my interests got recalibrated. To use an apt metaphor for it, I’d need to be a far better writer. If I’d be allowed a clunky metaphor, it was that the push my brain got from rogue taxidermy was like being in a wagon on a snowy field. Whereas the push I got from traditional taxidermy was a set of skis on a steep, slick slope. Traditional taxidermy told me a lot about our relationship with animals and nature. Rogue taxidermy told me a lot about our relationship with taxidermy. I took the grander subject and I ran with it.
Continue reading Taxidermy in Trouble, Part 1

1990 episode of MTV’s Half-Hour Comedy Hour

I love everything about this relic:

I love that Bill Hicks is still alive, and that Carlin gets interviewed with some amazing TV production effects. I love that the animated bumps make fun of hack comics as though hack comics aren’t part of the actual show (Elon Gold, I’m looking in your 1990 direction). Gold’s kind of interesting as a hack impressionist in that he opens his set with impressions of other better-known comics. Which seems like hackwork to a new unhacky degree?

BUT: can anyone who watches this identify the second comic he impersonates (around 2:20) after Ed Grimley and before Bobcat Goldthwait?

ALSO: Watch this for the commercials, if anything. There’s an AMAZING Scientology commercial at 09:10 (after a promo for MTV’s radio station giveaway you might remember) and a great AT&T commercial starring David Duchovny and I think Uncle Phil from Fresh Prince of Bel Air that starts around 20:45.

I’d go down on “perky Martha Quinn” to nab a complete set of episodes….

Very Good Paragraphs

From this piece in the Guardian on the joys of anthropological writing, written by Will Self, who is becoming every time I read or read about him my total literary crush.

I probably reread Lopez’s book about every couple of years. Arctic Dreams is a more or less perfect example of a tendency in my reading towards what can only be described as “comfort savagery”. Lying abed, in the heart of a great, pulsing, auto-cannibalising conurbation, the supply chain of which girdles the earth like the monstrous tail of some effluent-belching comet, I find descriptions of how I myself might have lived before the great grainy surplus of the agricultural revolution curiously heartening. After all, what does any kind of reading provide for us if not the opportunity to exercise imaginative sympathy? Others may prefer to will themselves into James Bond’s dinner jacket and Aston Martin DB4, but I’d rather slip into a !Kung hunter’s penis sheath and heft his hunting spear.

High Praise

Here’s Lionel Trilling on Walker Evans’s, from his review of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:

Evans’ [sic] pictures are photographic in the sense that people mean when they say “merely photographic.”

I’m being sincere about my post title. Trilling means this as praise, and it’s the exact sort of thing I would swoon to hear about my nonfiction.

New Adventures in Bm7

ef=”http://archive.davemadden.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/bm7-webpic.jpg”>I.
I taught myself the guitar in the spring of 1995.

II.
A dominant seventh chord is a regular triad with an extra note added to it. This note is the seventh on the scale, diminished by a half-step for reasons I’ll explain. So: a C seventh chord (C7) would go from C, the first note, up through D, E, F, G, and A to B, the seventh. But, like I said, it’s diminished by a half-step. In our case: our B becomes a B-flat (Bb). Why this weirdness? Well, a B is already a half-step away from a C. On a piano, those keys aren’t separated by a black key. This causes dissonance. But a Bb is enough removed from the C (the “tonic”) that it sounds like we want to resolve to the tonic without feeling too dissonant.

Actually, a C7 wants to resolve to an F major chord. That I’m having such a hard time explaining why this is the case makes me angry and then relieved that I’m not a music teacher. Let me try.

The C major triad consists of the notes C, E, and G. Remember the scale: C D E F G A B C. The F major triad consists of the notes F, A, and C. Its scale: F G A Bb C D E F. (You’ll see that a major triad is the first, third, and fifth notes of the scale.) You’ll see that C E G Bb (the C7 chord’s notes) are notes that are tonically close to F A C.[1] E’s just a half-step away from F. Bb’s just a half-step away from A.

Everything about music theory makes sense in the hearing. This is its magic. If, , writing about music is like dancing about architecture, writing about music theory is like texting about blueprints. Come at me with an open hour and I’ll bring the drinks and the keyboard to show you what I mean.

III.
B7 is a B dominant seventh chord (B, D#, F#, A). Bmaj7 is a B major seventh chord (B, D#, F#, A#). Bm7 is a B minor seventh chord, which follows the dominant model (B, D, F#, A).

IV.
I don’t remember the first song I learned with a Bm7 in it, but the first song I ever learned—either Camper Van Beethoven’s “Come on Darkness” or Camper Van Beethoven’s “All Her Favorite Fruit”—had a Bm in it. I knew how to make a Bm into a Bm7 the way I knew how to hide from my friends and classmates the private attentions I paid to the bodies of my male classmates. Here’s how I did it.

V.
The strings of a guitar go, vertically, from bottommost nearest your heel to topmost nearest your chin like this:

e
B
G
D
A
E

The lowercase e string is two octaves higher than the uppercase E. Here’s how I’ve played a Bm chord from 1995 until ten minutes ago. The numbers refer to which fret my finger hits the string on:

e-2- 
B-3-
G-2-
D-4-
A-2-
E-2-

Those in the know w/r/t guitars will see this as an Am7 chord barred up two frets.

VI.
Did you know this is also a Bm7 (B, D, F#, A)?

e-2-
B-0-
G-2-
D-0-
A-2-
E-x-

This guy doesn’t seem to know. Nor this guy. It’s not like I’ve been to the top of a mountain, but it is like I’ve only known the 2nd-fret barred A7 shape for B7 and have just tonight learned

e-2-
B-0-
G-2-
D-1-
A-2-
E-x-

VII.
I miss my boyfriend and I miss my friends I can talk music theory with.

[[]]I can type “you’ll see” but I shouldn’t assume this is see-able. (Does it help with this dumb post to know that Adam Peterson is my target audience for it?) So, alphabetically, you’ve got C E G Bb and C F A. I hope it’s clear that these are near triads, compared to, say C E G and F# A# C#. Near meaning non-dissonant and closely resolveable. That G and Bb work together to kinda hug on the A. It sounds dull, but you’d hear it like crazy were we in a music room.[[]]

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. ef=”http://archive.davemadden.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/bm7-webpic.jpg”>I.
    I taught myself the guitar in the spring of 1995.

    II.
    A dominant seventh chord is a regular triad with an extra note added to it. This note is the seventh on the scale, diminished by a half-step for reasons I’ll explain. So: a C seventh chord (C7) would go from C, the first note, up through D, E, F, G, and A to B, the seventh. But, like I said, it’s diminished by a half-step. In our case: our B becomes a B-flat (Bb). Why this weirdness? Well, a B is already a half-step away from a C. On a piano, those keys aren’t separated by a black key. This causes dissonance. But a Bb is enough removed from the C (the “tonic”) that it sounds like we want to resolve to the tonic without feeling too dissonant.

    Actually, a C7 wants to resolve to an F major chord. That I’m having such a hard time explaining why this is the case makes me angry and then relieved that I’m not a music teacher. Let me try.

    The C major triad consists of the notes C, E, and G. Remember the scale: C D E F G A B C. The F major triad consists of the notes F, A, and C. Its scale: F G A Bb C D E F. (You’ll see that a major triad is the first, third, and fifth notes of the scale.) You’ll see that C E G Bb (the C7 chord’s notes) are notes that are tonically close to F A C.{{1}} E’s just a half-step away from F. Bb’s just a half-step away from A.

    Everything about music theory makes sense in the hearing. This is its magic. If, , writing about music is like dancing about architecture, writing about music theory is like texting about blueprints. Come at me with an open hour and I’ll bring the drinks and the keyboard to show you what I mean.

    III.
    B7 is a B dominant seventh chord (B, D#, F#, A). Bmaj7 is a B major seventh chord (B, D#, F#, A#). Bm7 is a B minor seventh chord, which follows the dominant model (B, D, F#, A).

    IV.
    I don’t remember the first song I learned with a Bm7 in it, but the first song I ever learned—either Camper Van Beethoven’s “Come on Darkness” or Camper Van Beethoven’s “All Her Favorite Fruit”—had a Bm in it. I knew how to make a Bm into a Bm7 the way I knew how to hide from my friends and classmates the private attentions I paid to the bodies of my male classmates. Here’s how I did it.

    V.
    The strings of a guitar go, vertically, from bottommost nearest your heel to topmost nearest your chin like this:

    e
B
G
D
A
E

    The lowercase e string is two octaves higher than the uppercase E. Here’s how I’ve played a Bm chord from 1995 until ten minutes ago. The numbers refer to which fret my finger hits the string on:

    e-2- 
B-3-
G-2-
D-4-
A-2-
E-2-

    Those in the know w/r/t guitars will see this as an Am7 chord barred up two frets.

    VI.
    Did you know this is also a Bm7 (B, D, F#, A)?

    e-2-
B-0-
G-2-
D-0-
A-2-
E-x-

    This guy doesn’t seem to know. Nor this guy. It’s not like I’ve been to the top of a mountain, but it is like I’ve only known the 2nd-fret barred A7 shape for B7 and have just tonight learned

    e-2-
B-0-
G-2-
D-1-
A-2-
E-x-

    VII.
    I miss my boyfriend and I miss my friends I can talk music theory with.

    [[]]I can type “you’ll see” but I shouldn’t assume this is see-able. (Does it help with this dumb post to know that Adam Peterson is my target audience for it?) So, alphabetically, you’ve got C E G Bb and C F A. I hope it’s clear that these are near triads, compared to, say C E G and F# A# C#. Near meaning non-dissonant and closely resolveable. That G and Bb work together to kinda hug on the A. It sounds dull, but you’d hear it like crazy were we in a music room↵

Very Good Paragraphs

From Parul Sehgal’s New York Times review of , among others’:

Susan Sontag suffers from the same hamartia [as Julie Taymor, whose Spider-Man musical was a success, Mendelsohn apparently argues, not despite her own aesthetic betrayal, but because of it], according to Mendelsohn, who is endlessly fascinated by how the lack of self-knowledge makes self-betrayal inevitable. She belonged to the 19th century, he writes, which explains the “aspirations that were at odds with her temperament and her talent.” She insisted she be known as a storyteller, when the very qualities that made her so exciting a critic — the self-consciousness and “inability to resist any opportunity to interpret” — made her a clunky and banal novelist. The self, to Mendelsohn’s trained classicist’s eye, is gloriously rived. Forget reconciling its contradictions — the self can scarcely see them.

What makes it a good paragraph is the way it articulates what I’ve always felt but never been able to so well articulate: the limitations of my own fiction writing. It’s had its successes, but the truth of the matter is that all my instincts as a writer are toward obliterating mystery, not sustaining it. Much less creating it on a blank page. Ditto the bit about resisting interpretation. It’s a daring but in the end accurate charge to make against the author of “Against Interpretation”, but there Mendelsohn is, making it.

Unclear whose ideas I’m working with here, but I see my novelist banalities less as a innate scourge than as a momentary handicap. Like: I hope one day to be more interested in mystery. In the meantime, there’s NF to write.

I’m fully aware that people under the age of 60 write novels, and that many of them are actually very good. But how to do so when this perplexing world needs so much solving and sorting just to know how to get out of bed every morning remains a mystery to me. One maybe I could write a novel about.

Then again, I’m deluding myself if I think things are getting less perplexing as I age. Moral of this blog post: finish that damn novel.

An Amazing Thing Said Less Amazingly

From Gazzaniga et al.’s Psychological Sciences:

When memories for past events are retrieved, those memories can be affected by new circumstances, so that the newly reconsolidated memories may differ from their original versions.

This happens, or can happen, chemically. Remembering a thing or event is done via the same neurons that captured and consolidated that memory in the first place. What of your memories is from that initial firing and what is from subsequent recollection-directed refirings is difficult if not impossible to discern.

!!!

Very Good Bad Paragraphs – Pedagogue Edition

From this psychology textbook I’m waist deep in right now[1], itself citing Bransford, J.D. and Johnson, M.K.’s 1972 paper on contextual prerequisites for understanding:

The procedure is actually quite simple. First arrange things into different bundles depending on makeup. Don’t do too much at once. In the short run this may not seem important, however, complications easily arise. A mistake can be costly. Next, find facilities. Some people must go elsewhere for them. Manipulation of appropriate mechanisms should be self-explanatory. Remember to include all other necessary supplies. Initially the routine will overwhelm you, but soon it will become just another facet of life. Finally, rearrange everything into their initial groups. Return these to their usual places. Eventually they will be used again. Then the whole cycle will have to be repeated.

It’s inscrutable, right? I read it twice and was unable to see or understand anything from it. Then I kept reading and was told it was a description for the process of washing clothes.

Suddenly everything made sense. It doesn’t become a paragraph of good writing once the context is known, but it becomes a paragraph I as a reader can make sense of. This textbook’s authors present this as a case of the influence schemas provide on meaning-making (fundamental in the formation and long-term retrieval potential of new memories), but I like it as a writing lesson. How often do we see such grafs (if not whole drafts) from beginning writers, where some vital contextual element has been occluded or outright withheld from the reader such that nothing ever ties together? How often do we sit in conferences and get told, say, “Oh that one’s about my first pet,” and some aha bulbs light up and suddenly we have to change our whole suggested approach to revision?

For some beginning writers, particularly those encouraged in NF or comp classes to write about their pasts, the idea that If It’s Not On The Page It Won’t Be In The Reader’s Mind is hard to get at first. And hard to keep in mind when writing. So paragraphs like Bransford & Johnson’s are what result. Showing students what such writing can look like, leading them through their own aha moments, might help reinforce that it can be dangerous to presume some understanding or familiarity that the writer hasn’t worked to establish.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. If I’m going to keep telling people and students that essays in specific and nonfiction in general show you a mind at work it’s high time I start understanding what all that work entails. Join me, fellow nonfictioners.↵

“I Wish I Meant More to You” – The Field Mice

No clue which record this is off of. My mixtape pal put it on a mixtape for me. You could get away with playing this whole thing on just the b string, but there’s chords behind those droning notes, too.

Capo on 2

INTRO: B 

VERSE:
B
I find myself hoping 
For love from which you endure
           E
That seems real 
         A
Does mean more
             Am       E
And I'm almost sure it does

B
I want us to be more than
More than the friends we are
              E
Could we ever be
          A
More than friends?
      Am            E
I don't think so, I don't

CHORUS:
A                      Am
I wish I meant more to you
               E         
I wish I meant more to you
That we were more than friends 
A                     Am
I wish I meant more to you
               E
I wish I meant more to you
To you

F# E F# 

VERSE:
If I were to say something
This friendship wouldn't change 
For the better
Once you knew
It wouldn't be "I love you too"
I just know it wouldn't

It is more than unlikely
The way that you feel for me
Is as I for you
I for you
As I for you
For you

CHORUS:
I wish I meant more to you
I wish I meant more to you
That we were more than friends 

I wish I meant more to you
I wish I meant more to you
To you

F# E F# E (repeat)

End on B

Improvements of My Education

From my 10th-grade creative writing class journal:

When I’m a teacher, I’ll be sure that my students get something out of everything we do. I will be sure to put variety in my teachings, and my kids will never be bored.

Also, from my obituary (d: Feb 29, 2052), in the same notebook: “Angry at the new taxes, he refused to do them and was forced to leave the country.”

“Jet Plane in a Rocking Chair” — Richard and Linda Thompson

Incredible. I don’t have much else to say about this song except how good it is. Also, capo on 3.

INTRO:
G

VERSE:
NC             G
Jet plane in a rocking chair
               C
Roller coaster roll nowhere
Em       D        C
Deaf and dumb old dancing bear
     G
I'll change this heart of mine
     C          D
This time, this time

(repeat)
Sea cruise in a diving bell
Run a mile in a wishing well
Soft soap and none to sell
I'll change this heart of mine
This time, this time

CHORUS:
C
Here comes the real thing
          F  C     F   C  G 
I've been waiting, for so long
F   C  G
For so long
          C                    D
I've been looking for a love like you.

VERSE:
Crossed-line on the telephone
Crossed eyes and a canny moan
Cross fingers and head for home
I'll change this heart of mine
This time, this time

Play sick in a feather bed
Act cool when you're stone dead
I'm a fool with a size one head
I'll change this heart of mine
This time, this time

CHORUS:
Here comes the real thing
I've been waiting, for so long
For so long
I’ve been looking for a love like you

VERSE/OUTRO:
G
Jet plane in a rocking chair
               C
Roller coaster roll nowhere
Em       D        C
Deaf and dumb old dancing bear
     G                  
I’ll change this heart of mine
     C          D
This time, this time
C               D     
This time, this time
c               D
This time, this time

End on D, awesomely.