Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781621060116 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Microcosm Publishing |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2014 |
| Series: | Real World Series |
| Pages: | 160 |
| Sales rank: | 718,245 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Either You Have It Or You Don't
After my father died, I moved back home with my mother, and during the five years that I stayed there, our little family slowly shifted around his not being there anymore, like grass growing in on an empty lot where a house used to be. Even the physical space around us altered, bit by bit, to reflect my mother's taste and not his. Outside of the fantastic pumpkin color on the dining room walls that only he knew would turn out right, there wasn't a whole lot of evidence that he had ever existed.
But I still remember this one thing that hung around for a while, and kept popping up to surprise me. When my sister was in high school she went to Disneyland with her friends, and she brought back the same gift for each of us: big coffee mugs with Disney characters on them, each personifying a different word, which was scribbled loudly all over it in different crazy fonts. My mom's word was lovely, mine was vivacious, and my dad's was pizzazz. I remember being struck at the time by the dual unlikelinesses of both stupid Disney and my very quiet sister — who is so nonverbal that she didn't even really start talking until she was 5 — having come up with such a perfect word to describe him. My dad, who kept his father's fedora in his office because he knew it was cool, even if no one else did. Who stood in the laundry room, his sweaty clothes stained with green grass juice after every maniacal "aerobic gardening" session, and pulled off layer after layer of them while my mom bitched at him to get upstairs if he was gonna get undressed. Who explained to me one day when I was around nine why Buster Keaton was both funnier and sadder than Charlie Chaplin — "but maybe it's toss-up," he concluded by the end. Who let me shine up his giant hard black work shoes with this special shoe polishing kit every morning before work, even though he usually didn't have time and leather shoes, as I now know, do not need to be covered in fresh shoeblack every day to stay looking nice. The kit was a wooden box with a foot-shaped foot rest nailed to the top at an angle. Inside the box, which opened on a hinge and fastened shut with a latch, was a rag, a brush with black bristles and a couple of round tins of polish. When you opened the box it smelled tangy and toxic — I can almost taste it, remembering it now — and no one else's dad had one just like it.
As I say, after he died my mom gave away, threw away, or packed away almost all of his things. But for some reason that fucking mug stayed in the kitchen, right in the cabinet we used the most. No one could use it; no one could even touch it. But every so often in the post-dishwasher shuffle it got pushed to the front and when I'd come down in the morning and open up the cabinet while I was still groggy and in need of coffee, I'd accidentally grab it and get this quick, deep pang of yearning in my middle, the kind you get when you're stopped in your tracks at the sound of your ex's voice coming out of the answering machine.
It's that word. It's just so perfect. That's why it killed me, every single time.
Its first appearance during the glamorous 1930s. Its origin unknown. Its made-up sound, like it could be the name of a spice — an unusual one that you couldn't spell with confidence, not one you'd keep on hand but would have to go out and get special because the recipe called for it.
Those two sets of z's. What kind of word is so sure of itself that it expects you to spell it with four z's? One with pizzazz, that's for sure.
But it's a difficult word in this day and age. You can't use it very often; it's too flamboyant, too old-fashioned, too absurd. You choose it with care and use it only because it's just the right word for what you want to say. There are other words like that, of course, but none of them leap to mind.
But they wouldn't, would they?
CHAPTER 2It's All A Diary
You're probably embarrassed by it, but I love your handwriting. It's a part of your body, your self, and even if I'd never met you I could get a good feeling for your physical presence by reading the words you wrote in your own hand, rather than with a machine.
You know Lynda Barry, right? The comics artist? She's put out a few unusual books in the last few years, these large not-really-comics books called Picture This, What It Is, and Blabber Blabber Blabber. In them, she talks about her relationship to art and the imagination. Rather than panels of comic strips, each page is a large painting or collage, and many of the pages stand alone as beautiful, strange paintings. Read the books as a whole, though, and you'll see a narrative take shape. This is Barry's story of how she became an artist. She talks about how her imagination works best, what she does when she's in a bad place with her work, things like that. And at one point in Picture This she writes that although she'd often used brushes to paint, she had never tried using them to write words. She was writing a novel on her computer, typing and deleting things over and over until she felt hopelessly stuck, and it occurred to her to try writing the book with a paintbrush, one word at a time. This she found meditative and effective, and the words began to come more easily. She says: "It took a long time to realize that I didn't need to be in the mood to move my brush before I picked it up. All I needed to do was move the brush and my mood would follow the trail."
This felt true and important to me when I read it, because I have experienced something similar, and similarly exciting, myself. I have composed articles, essays, and poems in different ways: by hand in notebooks, on typewriters, and on a computer keyboard. When I've written things by hand or on the computer it's usually out of convenience or necessity. I find it easier to jot down ideas in a small notebook that I can carry in my bag than to lug around my laptop everywhere I go, but I find it easier to compose longer pieces at my computer because it's faster and I've become accustomed to doing it this way over the years. The typewriter I've used as an experiment or for the aesthetic, because I like the jangly, messier way it can look better than the polished sameness of all computer print-outs everywhere. But what's been interesting to me is the way the words come to me differently when I use these different tools. It takes me longer to write by hand, which seems to coax forth different words altogether, and the sentences form in a different way than they would if I were using a keyboard, which allows my hands to nearly keep up with my brain. I end up saying something different when I write in different ways.
My interest in handwriting predates this discovery, and it has more to do with other people than with myself. I have saved almost every note and letter that's ever been sent to me. They fill and overflow several cardboard boxes in my hall closet, and it is because they were written or signed by people who care about me that they are worth so much to me. I even have a plastic pencil case from the seventh or eighth grade that is stuffed with little notes that were passed to me in class, all of them decorated with different colored highlighters and folded into tight thick triangles. Some of those notes are more than 20 years old, and I don't plan on getting rid of them anytime soon. When I take them out of their case and unfold and reread them, it's like I'm there again: The kids' handwriting is personal and quirky, immediate and visceral, and it paves a way into memories that still live in my mind but that I don't always have access to. Looking at her bubbly, round writing in pink and purple pen brings me Mandy, in all her fanciful loneliness, her brushed-smooth but still-lank long brown hair. I can see her. When I look at the notes from Jane, which she wrote in her grown-up, attractive, skritchy, old-fashioned cursive, I can see her in the schoolyard, talking to me quietly and seriously as we sit against the brick wall of the firehouse next door, our legs stretched out in front of us. Green-plaid skirts and navy blue knee socks, not pulled up to our knees but scrunched down around our ankles, the "cool" way. I can see the boys getting red in the face as they play kickball and box-ball and eventually roof one of the balls so they have to ask the skinny custodian, Jim Rooney, to go up on the ladder and retrieve it. I can feel myself, sitting on a hard wooden chair in a stuffy room staring at the blackboard for what seemed like forever, forever ago.
Yes, it's possible I've romanticized all this a little. Old classroom things, artifacts from my own childhood, they are fetish objects to me, it's true. But that doesn't mean they don't also have real value.
Not long ago a young curator asked me to participate in a group art show she was putting on in Philadelphia, and I decided I wanted to make something that related to handwriting. I ended up making an interactive exhibit that encouraged people to sit down and write something, anything. I didn't care what they wrote about, I just wanted to see their handwriting. I hung a bulletin board with quotations about handwriting and set up two old school desks with notebooks on them, trying my hardest to create a classroom atmosphere on a tiny budget and in the confines of the decrepit and largely- disused building where the exhibit was held.
The experiment worked pretty well. All through the show's opening I watched people stand in line to sit at one of the awkward little desks and answer one of the writing prompts I'd carefully written in a couple of cheap drugstore notebooks. A few weeks later when the show came down, I went and collected the books and got a big kick out of those stories — not just reading them, but looking at them too. Being able to see the hand a story was written in gave it another dimension, made it less perfect and, somehow, more precious.
I'm not the only one interested in the subject of handwriting right now. I've got a Google alert on it and it seems like once a week someone writes an article or think piece about it. I think the reason people are talking about it is that things are changing. The world is changing, and it's caused our own behavior to change. Of all the people who do written work of any kind, the vast majority now do it on a keyboard instead of paper. I believe that these kinds of changes aren't entirely good or entirely bad. I just find it interesting to look at them, and see how they affect our lives.
A short essay posted in the New Yorker's books blog in August 2011 reported confidently that "cursive [is] no longer mandatory in most public schools," though anecdotally I've heard a variety of reports about penmanship in school. Some schools require it and some don't; some teachers like it, others think it's a waste of time. Still, there's no denying that learning and using cursive handwriting isn't considered as important as it once was. A New York Times article from April, 2011 reported on high school and college-age kids who don't really know how to write in cursive and — more worryingly (and actually kind of freaky, to me at least) — have a hard time reading it, too. A Wall Street Journal article published in October, 2010 discussed a link between writing by hand (not just cursive, but any kind of writing) and brain functioning. Apparently some scientists think that performing the actions involved in writing by hand helps us to imagine and remember them better than the action of hitting keys on a keyboard does. The article paraphrased a psychology professor as saying that "pictures of the brain have illustrated that sequential finger movements activated massive regions involved in thinking, language, and working memory — the system for temporarily storing and managing information." Hey hey Lynda Barry, whaddaya know?
I'm also interested in a certain fetishization of handwriting that has starting to take place in mainstream American culture. In 2011, a magazine called Good organized a thirty-day "live better" challenge and encouraged its readers to participate by answering the questions it posed on Facebook or Twitter. On one of the thirty days the editors asked: "How often do you write by hand?" Here are some of the answers they received and posted on their website: Only on post-it notes and thank you cards.
Every day. I wish cursive writing wasn't such a dying art.
Every day, I journal.
I love to write letters — it makes people so happy and often surprises them and that is good!
Do whiteboards count? We have them all over the place at my office.
It's funny to think of using a stylus to make markings symbolic of language as an example of "living better," but I think I understand it. As digital becomes the default medium, people treat writing by hand as a hobby, a luxury, or even an art.
Some of the articles I've read report specifically on the decline of the use of cursive in favor of block printing, but when I talk about writing by hand I'm not referring to cursive writing exclusively. I don't care about whether or not people learn to write script in school, really. I'm just into seeing the scratches people make by hand — on paper, white board, bus stop walls, bathroom stalls. I get excited by personal stories and by people's attempts to communicate with each other. Glamorizing old shit just because it's old may be silly, but that doesn't mean I don't find it sad when people abandon things of real value just because a newer version has come along. Believing you have to choose one over the other is just more of that boring old false dichotomy: books vs. the Internet, digital vs. print. You don't have to choose. You can have both. I do.
A few years ago when I was poking around on ancestry.com, I found scans of several handwritten census reports from my grandparents' childhoods. All the information about the houses on these blocks and the people who lived in them was written in the beautiful and flowery but totally legible script of the person who had visited them there. In a row- house in an old Philadelphia neighborhood on the Delaware River, a census taker sat down in my great-grandparents' living room and took notes on who was there that year: my grandpop, age 7, his parents, a couple of relatives from Germany, two older sisters and an older brother and the littlest brother, Herbie, who was only 3 and would be dead two years later from scarlet fever. When I searched for this information I didn't expect to find a scan of the actual report, and watching those ornate, quirky markings load up and fill my computer screen was really moving. It felt sad to think of all those people who are dead and gone now, and the emotion was stirred in me largely because I was able to see evidence of that humanity in the census taker's handwriting. For just a moment, in my mind, they came back to bright life again.
There's something about standing on the edge of a changing era that makes us want to look more closely at the things we used to consider essential. There's a museum about 20 miles outside of Philadelphia called the Mercer Museum. It's housed in a tall cement "castle" built by a rich man named Henry Mercer in the 1870s, and it is a truly eccentric place. Mercer's idea was that the world was changing, and that many of the tools and methods that were the standard ways of making and doing things during his lifetime were soon to become obsolete. He made it his mission to collect them and put them on display in a museum, the true home of their near future — not to desperately try to keep the change from happening, but to record it. When you visit the museum, you walk along staircases that are the opposite of steep; they wind slowly around and go gently up the perimeter of the cylindrical building, and set into the walls for you to peer into are small rooms crammed with all this pre-industrial stuff. There are thousands of instruments for things like threshing, tin smithing, engraving, and leather working. A wooden whaleboat hangs from the ceiling. Up on the top floor, which feels like an attic but has a higher ceiling, is the bigger, creepier stuff: a horse-and-buggy hearse, a prisoner's block, a gallows. It's claustrophobic up there.
I studied linguistics in college, and one thing we were told again and again was that the written language is not the language. Our professors told us this repeatedly because we kept forgetting it, kept conflating the text we saw on the page with the language itself, when actually it is merely a representation of the real thing. Studying linguistics helped me learn to understand alphabets as an artifact, text as an object. I like finding shopping lists and other notes people have left behind in stores or dropped on the ground. I like knowing who a handwritten letter is from before I even see the person's name. I like it when a book I've checked out of the library is covered in marginalia, those personal notes people write to themselves (and maybe also to an accidental, occasional kind of audience, like putting graffiti on your own bathroom wall). I like that the software program I composed this essay in has an ink pot and quill as its icon. It's like the way a tiny picture of an old-fashioned phone, with its two round cups for talking into and listening out of, can be found on the "talk" button of a cell phone, which itself, of course, looks nothing like a "real" phone. Have you ever written with an ink and quill? I haven't. I've talked on those old phones, the ones with a handset and a cradle that are attached to the wall by a cord, but that was a long time ago now.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Slip of the Tongue"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Katie Haegele.
Excerpted by permission of Microcosm Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Intro,
Section 1: Essays,
1. Either You Have It or You Don't,
2. It's All a Diary,
3. Invisible Weaver,
4. The Bobo Way,
5. Dear Friend,
6. The Prick with the Stick,
7. On the Word Slut,
8. Another Word for Lonely,
9. Completely Human Nonsense,
10. Blood and Thunder,
11. On the Words Hussy, Harlot, and Madam,,
12. The Literal Worst,
13. Heavenly Bodies,
14. To Name Something is To Own It,
15. What Do You Do?,
16. Who Gives a Fuck About an Oxford Comma?,
17. Obsolete,
Section 2: Journalism,
18. No Rooftop Was Safe: The History of Graffiti in Philadelphia,
19. Ye is Ye Olde The,
20. The Words Go Round and Round and They Come Out Here,
21. A Life Less Ornery,
22. Talking the Talk,
23. Dictionary in Reverse,
24. The Way We Read Now,
25. Genderswap the Patriarchy,
26. The La-La Theory,
27. How to Become the Media,
Epilogue,