The Death of Justina (Cover)

Sometimes in a day that's going in too many directions at once, filled with a strong feeling that surges out of the shallow waters of intellect and can only find its depth in music, I want to hear a certain song. Lately it's been Jimi Hendrix's live cover of "Like a Rolling Stone." And sometimes it's enough to just imagine the music coming from me, me becoming Hendrix, calling the drummer Bob Dylan's grandmother, banging out the first chords. "Yeah hear what I say now—"

But other times that's not enough—sometimes you have to hold whatever instrument it is that you play and try to play what you want to hear. I've got a violin. Violins and guitars are different creatures, but it doesn't stop me from trying. It doesn’t matter what it might sound like to others—if I can get the barest scrape to how it’s supposed to sound, it’s usually enough.

And still other times, the music I want to hear is words. Sometimes just reading the words is enough, imagining myself reading them, the author reading them—myself as the author. 

But other times I've got to actually write the words, with my own hands hitting the chords and plucking out the riffs. Because so help me God it gets more and more preposterous, it corresponds less and less to what I remember and what I expect as if the force of life were centrifugal and threw one further and further away from one's purest memories and ambitions; and I can barely recall the old house where I was raised, where in midwinter Parma violets bloomed in a cold frame near the kitchen door, and down the long corridor, past the seven views of Rome—up two steps and down three—one entered the library, where all the books were in order and the lamps were bright. Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing.

I think that's why for so long schoolchildren were taught to get Bible verses and poems to heart, and why to John Cheever, in one story no words of his own would do, why the old durable words came through him with the irresistible force of a song we all know:

"Do, he wrote, or you'll be dead. I felt very tired. I put another piece of paper into the machine and wrote: The Lord is my shepherd, therefore can I lack nothing. He shall feed me in a green pasture and lead me forth beside the waters of comfort. He shall convert my soul and bring me forth in the paths of righteousness for his Name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff comfort me. Thou shalt prepare a table before me in the presence of them that trouble me; thou hast anointed my head with oil and my cup shall be full. Surely thy loving-kindness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever. I gave this to Ralphie and went home."

A Word: Why Do We Call Dollars 'Dollars'?

Happy Spring! It still doesn't feel too much like spring in Kirksville, though we are seeing some early monocot flower buds push blade-like leaves through the topsoil. I've got a few essay-like ideas putting down roots right now. While these are developing secondary xylem and solidifying their grasp on the soil, here's a short linguistic-historical tale I wrote, once again for the Writing Center blog, on the creation of the word 'dollar.' It was the result of a journey through several entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, a voyage only possible with a sturdy magnifying glass.

A Word: Why Do We Call Dollars 'Dollars'?

Ah, the ubiquitous crumpled dollar—that small greenish rectangle of linen that purchases our chewing gum, under-tips the wait staff at restaurants, and refuses to be inserted into vending machines. But where does that word dollar actually come from?

Dollar, just like Dvorák, RENT, Pilsener, a lengthy pseudo-operatic rock song from the 1970s, and Ántonia Shimerda, comes to us from Bohemia, which is now part of the Czech Republic. In 1516, in the town of Jáchymov, situated near the German border and called by the nearby Germans Joachimsthal (literally “Joachim’s valley”), a new silver mine opened. Three years later, Count Hieronymus Schlick, a nobleman wishing to extend his coolness even beyond being a Bohemian count named Hieronymous Schlick, decided to start minting his own money from the silver mined in Joachimsthal, and called his large coins Joachimsthalers. (Note that in German, ‘th’ is pronounced as a hard ‘t,’ and that the ‘a’ in Joachimsthalers is pronounced like ‘a’ in English ‘what.’) As this coin gained use throughout Bohemia and Germany, burghers chose to shorten this unwieldy name to just thaler, which became the currency in many German states until German unification under Otto von Bismarck, when the Goldmark became the imperial currency. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the 16th century the thaler spread from High and Low German to Dutch, the language of the great sea-traders who spread their dalars all over the world, and from thence at last to England, where it was Anglicized into daler, daller, and finally dollar. Moral: next time you go to buy a bag of Cheetos from the vending machine in the laundry room, thank Count Schlick for not naming his coins Hieronyms or Schlicks.