EmiliaA8

To approach a city . . . as if it were [an] . . . architectural problem . . . is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life. . . . The results . . . are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy.

Hi Grandma,

     I'm still thinking about the treasures in your attic and need your help with some school stuff.  I have to do a reflective essay for American History about the methods historians use to interpret the past.  It's due late April.  We have to start from a primary source about an individual we think is representative of something significant in the period. 

     Remember when Mom and I came to visit, and I found some old photos of Nana and some French fashion magazines from the 20's and the 30's?  I'm wondering if you could tell me more about Nana's time in Paris.  The photo I have is of her and a friend standing outside a place called Shakespeare and Company.  In English class we just finished reading The Great Gatsby.  My teacher told us that many writers, including Fitzgerald and Hemingway, used to hang out there.  My history book says that Americans were going to Paris then because they were disillusioned with conservative politics here and too much materialism.  They were attracted to Europe because people there "valued art and culture, and appreciated unrestrained freedom of expression."  Was Nana a lost member of the lost generation?

     Tell Granddad I'm ready to burn some rubber again.

     Xxoo,

\Em

Hey Dad,

     You should be happy!  Villanova really took Duke out last night.  Who are you going to root against now?

     Some of us in my history class have a question for you.  We have to write an essay based on our study of historical methods.  I interviewed Grandma Sunday about Nana, and I'm going to start with her childhood.  Today in class Jeanne asked Mr. Cantor whether it would be alright to use "I" in explaining what we thought in our papers.  One of Cantor's nicknames is Mr. Manysides, and he earned it again.  He went on and on, but it was a classic non-answer — "some say you should and some say you shouldn't, and I think you should use your discretion."  After class a few of us talked it over and decided that the problem with teenagers like us using our discretion is that we haven't been doing so long enough to have much of it.  How's that for Socrates in action?

     Since you and Mom write a lot, I've been delegated to get some info that will help us decide.  Mom wasn't a great help because she says the Village Green and other places she has worked have style sheets giving the publication's answers to this sort of question.  That's exactly what Manysides won't give us.  What's your advice?

     It won't be too long before you come home.  Hooray!  Love,

|Em

Hi Em,

     Villanova did good.  You know I like upsets, but so far it looks like the big programs are dominating.

     As a teacher, Mr. Manysides hit the mark, I'd say.  When your mom and I met Mr. Cantor at parents' night, he impressed us — you are fortunate to have a thoughtful teacher who trusts you to deal with complexities.  You are privileged to be in a school with an excellent program and a very competent staff. 

     So many things are getting spelled out in ridiculous detail through prescriptive instructions.  Take advantage of chances to use your autonomous judgment when you get them.  There are practical reasons for all the different style requirements floating around, like the ones Soph works under and I have to follow when submitting an article to a journal.  Unfortunately, practical reasons have come to rule too much in the world of thought and education.  Style sheets are an efficient way to give the publication a uniform, predictable appearance.  But relying on those style sheets to make our choices doesn't build a sense of purposeful self-confidence in writers.  Your teacher wants you to learn how to come up with your own solutions to the choices writers face.  Go for it!

     Towards that end, be on the lookout for a package from Amazon — if you are starting to ask for advice like this, it is time you had a copy of Garner's American Usage and Style and I'm throwing in some Patti Smith CDs — you may or may not like them.  They are your reward/incentive for taking the long way around on these problems.

     You and your friends are on the right track.  In all things, discretion is what you lack when you need it most.  You get real discretion about the choice of words by reading good writers attentively over time.  Unfortunately good writers have not written much of what you read for school, and even if what you read was good writing, you haven't had time to read enough of it, and what good writing you have read, you probably haven't read attentively enough.  By reading attentively, I don't mean laboriously analyzing something as I had to do for grammar lessons and you may have done in middle school.  You read attentively by letting the language of a text take possession of you so that you are seeing it, hearing it in your inner ear, even feeling it silently in the muscles of your mouth and throat.  Speed reading destroys good writing by teaching people to apply principles of inattention systematically to the texts they read. 

     Why Garner's usage book? It isn't like a set of rules and techniques.  Don't take it to be saying, do this and don't do that.  Usage books can appear as if they are filled with prissy prescriptions, but they rarely prescribe a firm rule.  Instead, they distill accumulated considerations that have occurred to careful readers as they have read attentively.  Garner's book, and others like it, is a way of tapping into what attentive readers have thought in thinking about how the language works.  Use it to heighten your attention to the use of words and how you can put them together to accomplish your purpose. 

     People who write on usage don't all agree — that's not the point.  They do all share in an effort to pay attention to how language works and to find examples of what seems to work well or poorly under different conditions — everyday speech, informal writing, oratory, formal writing, poetry.  Sometimes you go to a dictionary like Garner's with a particular question in mind, for instance, whether and when to use "I" in formal writing.  With a little looking around, you'll get from "I" to a short article on FIRST PERSON, which won't tell you and your friends exactly what to do, but it will help you decide what you are going to do.  Usage books are full of cross-referencing and the fun of them (yes, they are sometimes fun!) often comes in following those references.  FIRST PERSON goes to PASSIVE VOICE and BURIED VERBS and then the ABSTRACTITIS, matters worth your attention. 

     You see, Em, usage books help you decide and that's their value.  They help you stay in control.  You are in strong AP English and History courses where your teachers will recognize the value of your writing, not by rule, but by exercising intelligent judgment.  Hide-bound grammarians decant crap in saying that you have to know the rules before you can break them.  That makes students too docile, which really means too teachable.  And making kids too teachable through their schooling, as it presses on them year after year, makes them too dependent on instruction, habituated to passively following the instructions they get from others.  I think Mr. Cantor wants some lively intelligence from you, some resistance, independence.  Lots and lots of writing is dead and meaningless, composed by people who have never thought like writers.  They are trying to connect dots and to write by rule.  Too many students in my classes have been inured to caution and they want simply to know what they have to do to write a "good" paper.  That is how they have succeeded in the system, but they haven't really learned much. 

     There's an element of instinct in discretion, Emilia, don't forget that.  On the court, you take to pieces those kids who have been over-coached with perfect strokes but no sense of the game.  You play, you don't perform.  Once you told me how you like to talk with really good players about different kinds of situations that come up in a strong match, not to imitate what they do, but to get a feel for how they think, how they react to the situation, what they did or might have done, and why.  It is the same with writing.  You need to know what you want to do, what you want to say, to whom, why.  Then you let the words come, and the beauty of writing is you can revise in a way you can't on the court.

     Remember in September when your Mom and I were so broken up because a writer we admired committed suicide — David Foster Wallace.  He was just a little bit older than Soph and me, and one of the really good writers of our generation, perhaps a great one, a challenging novelist and bracing essayist.  If anyone tries to convince you that usage books are for the nerds, get out his essay on "Authority and American Usage" — it was, after a manner of speaking, a review of Garner's book.  In everything he wrote, Wallace demonstrated the power available to someone who could read attentively.  He inform his talent for language with obsessive interest in what he and others could notice about how it works.  You'll probably find him doubly interesting, Em, because like you he was a very good tennis player at your age.  I remember an essay he wrote in the early 90s about his strengths and limitations as a boy tennis star.  I bet you could get it off the web.

     You and your friends are asking a question that can lead you to think like writers by reading them with full attention — its the way matches against more experienced, stronger players elevates your game.  And the usage books are like lots of good tennis talk and having the chance to experiment with things you pick up and work them into your game.  But here is the simplest and the hardest part, Em — writers have to write; they have to let the words flow, they must make the language sing and the rhythm of the thought drive home. 

     That's the point of the Patti Smith CDs.  When I was a boy Rob liked her music, and when I was becoming a teenager I began to listen to it closely, but that was just when she stopped performing to get married and raise her kids.  She's come back though, partly to reprise her past, but also to make important points now about politics and poetry, and those points need her past reprised.  "Her past," in its largest sense, points to all the different ways in which self-asserted intelligence can push through the self-satisfactions of the given culture.  She came out of nowhere and soaked in cultural currents of real vitality — the beats, Rimbuad, Whitman, Blake, Maplethorpe, working-class rock, both white and black.  She suffered a lot, took risks, had luck, good and bad, and overcame.  May we all find easier ways.  She's taken it all in, absorbed it, and then lets it back out with ingenuous self-possession and artless power.  Her voice isn't great in range or timbre, it's often somewhat nasal, but it serves her thought, through its performance, and moves and mounts in insistent intensity, giving her words, her felt ideas, cumulative force.  Of course, most of the time we don't let loose with poetry and song in such an emotive, unmodulated voice.  We have to speak and write prose controlled by purpose, thought, the discipline of precision, but it is good recurrently, like reading the usage books, to hear the beat of the language, its feel and force with the whole body.  Good listening — its part of reading attentively.

     Love,

\Dad

Hi Grandma,

     My paper on Nana is almost finished.  I'll email you a copy when I've gotten it all cleaned up to turn in.  Thanks for your memories of her.  I liked sleuthing about, trying to fiure out what her experience must have been like.  It makes history something to discover and think about, not simply something to learn.  I wonder how old Nana was when she decided she wanted to leave North Dakota and seek a career in the big city.  Somehow her leaving North Dakota for Paris and then New York seems adventurous to me, but no more extraordinary than what all the immigrants did, and are doing.

     I have to prepare a list of sources for Mr. Cantor with an explanation of where and how I found them.  That way he can get a sense of how resourceful we are as researchers, he says, and if he doubts whether someone really did the work, he gives a little quiz about the sources to make sure no one is faking it or handing in a paper downloaded from the Internet.  It is a good way to keep us all honest.

     Rob (as he now expects me to call him, no more Gramps!) helped me make sense of Plato's Crito.  Thanks for the tip about his web site on ancient Athens.  I've got some new questions to bug him with.

     Love

\Em

Dear Grandma,

Here it is!!!  I thought you and Rob would like a copy.  Once again THANKS so much for your help.  I couldn't have written it without you.  While I was writing about Nana I remembered you spent two years in Paris doing graduate work.  Were you inspired by Nana's example?  Did she encourage you to go?

XXOO,

Em

Attachment: "The Two P's, Polio and Paris"

Dear Em,

     Another budding author in the family!  Thanks!  For Rob and me, reading your essay will be our reward for finishing the semester's grading.

     My short answer to your question — No.  Nana believed in the value of travel.  But she put no great store in Paris.  Once she became a successful business woman, she thought of Paris as the place that provided her with an invaluable professional apprenticeship, and from what I observed, it wielded little influence over other parts of her life.  Having returned to the States, Nana's goal was to make a name for herself on Seventh Avenue, and learning the trade in Paris had given her a competitive edge and hastened that process.  When Nana did speak about those years, which was infrequently, she always referred to them as "the time I worked in Paris."  I can't remember her ever referring to that period as "the time I lived in Paris."  By referring to the years she spent there as "work," I got the impression that Nana perceived her time there as a means to an end — becoming a professional and financial success, but and not an end in itself.  Consequently, she never developed a passion for France like I would.  In fact, even though I was taking French throughout high school, joined the French club, and had a French pen pal, Nana never spoke French at home.  She claimed her French was nothing but vulgar slang picked up from poorly educated seamstresses, but if you ask me, once she established herself, the need to speak French or think about French culture beyond couture no longer interested her.

     Since she rarely talked about her life in Paris, dismissing it as "all that ancient history," the only clues I had to help me envision Nana's time there were the French fashion magazines from the twenties and thirties growing brittle in the attic.  I'd pour over them trying to imagine my mother in a long satin gown drinking vermouth at a slightly seedy demi-mode bistro on the Left Bank, an image that never quite fit her physique!  I did pick up from this or that story that Nana continued to visit Paris on buying trips through the 30s.  Then a lot of dress fabrics came from France and having good fabrics at good prices gave a firm's dress line a real advantage.  I think that was what Nana was really good at, and each year she would go over on one of the big ocean liners for a couple weeks in Paris to choose the fabrics for that year's line. 

     On these trips, she would be on an expense account and it made for a different experience of Paris, an contrary example of success in the Great Depression — living high and working hard.  She would go straight to the fashion shows, observing the latest trends, and try to drive a good bargain on material to ship back to the States, something a buyer could do when sellers were in trouble.  I think she liked being able to stay at top hotels, mostly spending her time with American colleagues, occasionally taking in a museum or venturing out for a sumptuous dinner.  She had favorite stories from these trips, and one in particular about Bordeaux, where passengers and their luggage crowd onto boats called lighters to get between the docks and the liners out in the harbor.  She had stuffed a jeroboam of fine cognac, a really BIG bottle, in her suitcase.  As the lighter left the dock, it became evident the jeroboam had broken,.  With more than a gallon of cognac sloshing around everyone was thoroughly sea-sick from the fumes by the time they got to the ship.  She'd tell these stories to let on the truth — she was really the kid from North Dakota, not the super-sophisticate.  Nothing in her later activities indicated that as a young woman she had lived there.

     Even though Nana didn't overtly encourage my growing obsession with France, on a subtler level she did.  As a strong-willed daughter of a strong-willed mother, I rebelled against her authority by becoming a Francophile.  Her apparent lack of interest in France except for business purposes, her refusal to speak French at home, and her reticence about her experience there, stoked my desire to get to Paris as soon as possible.  Sources other than Nana initially whetted my appetite for France.  I'd like to claim that they were Montaigne's essays, Poussin's paintings, and Debussy's music, but for this teenager those sources were American advertisements and movies.  During the fifties, advertisers made it seem elegance and sophistication were intrinsic qualities of all French products.  It didn't matter if you bought cheese, clothing, wine, or perfume.  If it was made in France, some of the product's elegance and sophistication would rub off on you.  Or so I believed.  Quite a different sensibility from the freedom fry mania Americans succumbed to several years ago.

     As for movies there was Sabrina a film released in 1954 starring Audrey Hepburn, William Holden, and Humphrey Bogart.  At fourteen, I considered Audrey (in my imaginary conversations with her we were on a first name basis) the embodiment of all I aspired to be—elegant, smart, witty, sophisticated, self confident, and gracious.  Her appearance gave me hope that the narrow definition of feminine beauty pervasive during my adolescence — blond, buxom, and bubbly was not the last word on the matter.  For me, Audrey represented an alternate vision of femininity, one that affirmed the possibility of intelligence and beauty inhabiting the same female body.  Sabrina is the typical Hollywood Cinderella story — poor ugly duckling turns into a beautiful swan, prince charming falls in love with her, she becomes princess of the realm.  Sabrina played by Hepburn is the Larrabee's chauffeur's daughter who has been infatuated with David Larrabee since childhood.  As for David, played by William Holden, he barely knows she exists.  Sabrina leaves for Paris to learn to cook and to get David out of her system.  She leaves a lovelorn waif resigned to observing the Larrabee's glittering and sophisticated world from her room over the garage.  Sabrina returns after spending two years in Paris, radiating all the Hepburnesque qualities that will inevitably cause David to become infatuated with her, and she, in turn, becomes a participant in his world and not merely a spectator.  I know, I know, you're probably wondering how I could have been so gullible to believe a stay in Paris could cause such a metamorphosis.  The short answer, at fourteen I wanted to.

     There's lots more to tell.  Throughout high school there were other sources that fed my desire to go to Paris.  But if I continue with my version of A Remembrance of Things Past I'll never start grading.

     To be continued.  A big kiss from us!

Grandma

Dear Grandma,

     It sounds out of character to me!  I can't wait to watch Sabrina and see why it had such a profound effect on you.  But I'm heading towards the end of the school year and dealing with all the craziness it's bringing — SATs, APs, finals.  Audrey will have to wait.  Also, I want to hear more about your time in Paris.  I've been thinking about that city recently.  A lot of college kids take their junior year abroad and I thought about spending mine there.  It's beginning to look like I'd be carrying on a family tradition.  Maybe this family's female members are destined to spend part of their youth in the City of Light.  But I guess Mom didn't.  Once school ends for both of us, I'd love to hear more about what you did and why you thought going was important.  I guess I want to understand how your Paris differed from Nana's.  I wonder how mine would differ from both of yours. 

     Au revoir,

Em