Tales from Ancient Trumania

Here's the link to this week's Index column, which relates some of the more entertaining stories I found in an extensive, idiosyncratic history of Truman written by former Pres. Walter H. Ryle (who had plenty to say about himself.) By the way, I never used the word "venerable" to describe Truman's history in my draft. The word I remember using was "unique."

Solving the Oxford Comma Problem: A Platonic Dialogue

After reading an excerpt from Gerard Manley Hopkins' "On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue," I was inspired to write a similar dialogue for the TSU Writing Center's blog on the use of the Oxford Comma. And as Hopkins' dialogue takes place at Oxford, what setting could be more fitting for a discussion of that ever so troublesome comma?

Find Your Own Walden

Here's the link to my latest Index column, which discusses the nature of Truman's location and compares Thousand Hills to Walden Pond.

It's Not a Shame to Love a Morning Brew

Here's the link to the first of my weekly-ish columns for the Truman Index.  The web page doesn't seem to have paragraphing at the moment, so if you are on campus, just pick up a hard copy somewhere if you want to read it. This will also allow you to see the somewhat awkward juxtaposition of my silly observations about coffee culture next to a very serious, and I think well done, column on alcohol dependency ... I wasn't aware of that when I was writing my column. Oh well. I suppose you get both light and serious this way.

Noli Timere

Seamus Heaney’s last words to his wife, sent in a text message, were the Latin phrase Noli timere: do not be afraid. I hesitate to stamp a meaning on these words, other than their undulating cadence, their peaceful music, their importance in many Bible passages. In some ways it seems almost immoral not to be afraid today, considering the precarious state of the world. But one of our best lights got as close as the living can come to death and had these words for us. Something to carry around and consider every now and then, like his small, solid poems.

It makes me sad that it is Heaney’s death that will be the thing that finally leads me to read more of his work. I had read his chart-toppers like “Digging,” and could probably recognize one of his poems if they were put in front of me (look for bogs, damp, and short, musical lines), but had never read a mass of his poems. However, based on the several obituaries and remembrances of Heaney that I have read (probably the most I’ve read about a recently-deceased person ever), it seems that this irony might just make him chuckle. My personal favorite essay on his death is from his friend Tom Sleigh, which gives a rare glimpse into a relationship between two practicing writers.

Something that makes Heaney’s last words ring even stronger is their harmony with the English poet John Keat’s last words, which were reimagined in this poem I’ve recently discovered:

Keats

Christopher Howell

When Keats, at last beyond the curtain

of love’s distraction, lay dying in his room

on the Piazza di Spagna, the melody of the Bernini

Fountain “filling him like flowers,”

he held his breath like a coin, looked out

into the moonlight and thought he saw snow.

He did not suppose it was fever or the body’s

weakness turning the mind. He thought, “England!”

and there he was, secretly, for the rest

of his improvidently short life: up to his neck

in sleigh bells and the impossibly English cries

of street vendors, perfect

and affectionate as his soul.

For days the snow and statuary sang him so far

beyond regret that if now you walk rancorless

and alone there, in the piazza, the white shadow

of his last words to Severn, “Don’t be frightened,”

may enter you.

The Virtue of Not Being a Genius

Even though my reading backlog is as clogged as Highway 64 at 5:30 on a Friday, it often happens that I suddenly have a strong desire to read a particular book, totally out of my carefully planned sequence. Today it was George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, his memoir of the Spanish Civil War. He arrived in Barcelona in the besieged region of Catalonia as a journalist, but soon found himself joining the local socialist militia to fight against Franco’s fascist army, because “at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do.” The memoir recounts Orwell's evolving understanding of the cold realities of the war alongside the relationships he made with the people he served beside. Lionel Trilling’s introduction to the book intersects pleasantly with a discussion we've been having in my creative nonfiction workshop at Truman about essays. This excerpt sketches pretty succinctly what it means to be an essayist, and why we are drawn to read their work:

“If we ask what it is that [Orwell] stands for, what he is the figure of, the answer is: the virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more than one’s simple, direct, undeceived intelligence, and a respect for the powers one does have, and the work one undertakes to do. We admire geniuses, we love them, but they discourage us. They are great concentrations of intellect and emotion, we feel that they have soaked up all the available power, monopolizing it and leaving none for us. We feel that if we cannot be as they, we can be nothing. Beside them we are so plain, so hopelessly threadbare. How they glitter, and with what an imperious way they seem to deal with circumstance, even when they are wrong. Lacking their patents of nobility, we might as well quit. This is what democracy has done to us, alas—told us that genius is available to anyone, that the grace of ultimate prestige may be had by anyone, that we may all be princes and potentates, or saints and visionaries and holy martyrs of the heart and mind. And then when it turns out that we are no such thing, it permits us to think that we aren’t much of anything at all. In contrast with this cozening trick of democracy, how pleasant seems the old reactionary Anglican phrase that used to drive people of democratic leanings quite wild with rage—'My station and its duties.'

            

Orwell would very likely have loathed that phrase, but in a way he exemplifies its meaning. … [His works] seem to become what they are chiefly by reason of the very plainness of Orwell’s mind, his simple ability to look at things in a downright, undeceived way. … He is not a genius—what a relief! What an encouragement. For he communicates to us the sense that what he has done, any one of us could do.

           

Or could do if we but made up our minds to do it…”