Restraint

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. --Ernest Hemingway

It may seem ironic for a fan or William Faulkner, but I have always loved restraint in the prose writer. By restraint, I mean the capacity to relay a scene without unnecessary adornment. It is to have faith that the ability to conjure something real from words is miraculous--it does not require verbal pyrotechnics likely to merely distract us from this picture of the truth you've given the reader.

I'm thinking of this right now because it seems a lot of the contemporary fiction I'm reading (perhaps in reaction to a sort of empty minimalism in fiction a few years back) is piling on the adverbs and adjectives, dragging out the thesaurus for the most arcane verb, and offering metaphor where the vehicle adds nothing to the tenor.

Being a largely unpublished writer myself, I won't pick on specific writers who are doing the work and certainly having much more success then I am. But, in my other open Chrome tabs, I have a few passages that seem wholeheartedly willing to sacrifice substance (like Isaac, his sweating chest heaving under his father's dagger) for a showy sentence that weaves and frolics across the page like a ballerina coquettishly luring the spotlight to follow every frolicsome step.

In any case, I speak not as an aspiring writer here, but as a reader. I may never be widely published, but I can still aim to be widely read. And I can applaud what I like.

An ideal example of restrained prose is Ernest Hemingway's classic "Hills Like White Elephants." The story's so-called "Camera Eye" narrator relays a third-person view on events, offering no judgment or insight other then that we can infer from what is spoken and what is left unsaid.

When I teach this to sophomores, many read the initial page or so with some confusion because they're used to having things spelled out for them. Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the story, in which a man and a woman drink at a train station, substituting sniping comments and small talk for the real discussion they need to be having:

‘It tastes like liquorice,’ the girl said and put the glass down.

‘That’s the way with everything.’

‘Yes,’ said the girl. ‘Everything tastes of liquorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe.’

‘Oh, cut it out.’

‘You started it,’ the girl said. ‘I was being amused. I was having a fine time.’

‘Well, let’s try and have a fine time.’

‘All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn’t that bright?’

‘That was bright.’

‘I wanted to try this new drink. That’s all we do, isn’t it – look at things and try new drinks?’

‘I guess so.’

The girl looked across at the hills.

‘They’re lovely hills,’ she said. ‘They don’t really look like white elephants. I just meant the colouring of their skin through the trees.’

‘Should we have another drink?’

Notice a few things:

* There is a complete lack of quote attribution in most cases. First, Hemingway expects the reader to internally alternate the quotes between the characters. Even when attribution is given, it is bare-bones: "the girl said," "she said," "said the girl." There's no need to add "sarcastically" to her comment: "Wasn't that bright?" My 16 year-old students recognize the sarcasm instantly. The word choice and phrasing reflects tone without requiring a nudge from the author

* Every detail matters. "The girl looked across at the hills." Taken on its own, this description of action does not amount to much. But since there is limited description by the narrator, every action is important. The way the two characters look out on the landscape around the station proves to tell us a great deal about their feelings.

* Don't talk if you don't have anything to say. Like a great English soccer announcer, Hemingway's narrator only speaks when there's something worth mentioning. Students sometimes think they are slamming back drinks in this passage, but, inevitably, a few realize that the reason it takes them only a few lines of dialogue between drink orders is that most of their conversation is spent in silence, with the sparse few lines indicating how little they are speaking as they uneasily drink.

I think Hemingway's approach is not only beautiful in its efficiency, it is also very respectful of the reader. It forces (or permits) the reader to fill in the blanks with reasonable inferences based on the limited but sufficient details provided. One of the reasons my students like this story so much is that they have to "figure it out." The focus, then, is on the reader's experience with the material, not the author's capacity to impress.

My brush with fame...

Anyone who has known me for a while has heard me discuss the significant personal impact left by my most cherished brush with fame.

Sure, I've also met Tubby Smith a few times at various charity events he sponsored. I also stood within earshot of Darius Rucker and the rest of the Blowfish and explained to a friend how I thought this awful band was going nowhere. But the moment that sticks most indelibly in my mind is the 1:00AM meeting I had with Ashland, Kentucky's most famous son, Chuck Woolery.

Circa 1993, I stepped out into the chilly night air at the Movies 10 in Ashland, and mentioned to a friend that Chuck Woolery was standing on the corner. As it turned out, he was waiting for his significantly younger Love Connection to exit the cinema.

The friend didn't believe it was him (surely such a luminary wouldn't deign to watch a movie with the great unwashed). So I went up to introduce myself and establish his identity. I created the short film below, which recreates the conversation that followed with 100% accuracy:

I've really never been the same.

Typo Positive

“A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” -- James Joyce

During my now five-day weekend, I've been curled up with many student essay drafts, spilling out the remnants of four pens (two black, one blue, one red) onto their pages. As a grader, I have two things I try to keep in mind:

1) Students tend to wait until the last minute to make changes, so I don't want to write "awk" or "rephrase" or something that will leave them dumbfounded at 2:00AM the night before the final paper is due. So I tend to write quite a bit of explanation on the pages. (In a few instances, I've actually written more words than the student's effort contained.) My hope is to provide a guiding, meaningful voice for those students racing against sleepiness and the morning alarm.

2) I need to keep a notepad or laptop next to me so that I can capture (a) positive or negative examples (transitions, use of evidence, passive voice) for later student instruction and (b) unintentionally funny mistakes for my own enjoyment.

I suspect many English teachers keep such a list, and I'll share a few of my favorites (these are students from long ago, and they are all in their early thirties now). What we called "error analysis" in my old life in software development should illuminate these examples:

The "I've never written that word before" Error

If you are not well-read, it is easy to have a word in your vocabulary that you know only as a sound associated with a concept. Having never seen it in print, you must improvise.

* I had never before been asked to serve as a paw bearer.

The rain lashed down on the mourners, bowed and whimpering at the sight of the huge paw being borne into the small, country church.

* These students from different religions can help their fellow pears understand all cultures and feel more of a community with all people.

Though they try to hide it with their parochialistic bluster, Pears--all to often--feel so alone.

* Mr. Webber has been found guilty of many Mister Meaner crimes.

No commentary necessary.

The Spell Check Error

For those of us who remember the days before it was ubiquitous, spell check is a godsend. But like any great power, it requires great responsibility and caution in its use.

* The purpose of the KIRAS state assessments is to ovulate students and schools.

This from a college student. Thank God those tests were eliminated before I started teaching high school.

* In a multicultural cirrocumuli, students are given the opportunity to study such greets as Maya Angelo, W.E.B. Dubious, and William Falconer

This is really a treasure.

Falconer has always been my favorite author, but I'm not sure why a high altitude, billowy cloud of multiculturalism would be required to read the utterly WASPish literary giant. Nor is it clear how a cultural diversity-endorsing mass of water vapor would promote Mrs. Angelo -- with whom I'm not familiar.

Less confusing is said cloud's desire to advocate the work of Mr. Dubious, who found time amidst his busy career as a super villain to be a momentous figure in the civil rights movement in the early 20th century. He was truly one of the greets.

I'm headed back to the piles of papers, so there are certainly more to come.

Eternal Vigilance

The RedRoom Blog contest for the week has me brainstorming about the concept of freedom. So I'm free(dom) associating and doing my best Toby Keith impersonation. Minus the jingoism and xenophobia.

Freedom is...

=====================================

. ...taken for granted. I recall with clarity the day I learned this fact: the police cracking batons against the door, the screaming as they flung it open, and the hostel keeper telling us to get out of our beds and pull our luggage into the floor.

I was in Edinborough, Scotland, sleeping in a hostel with 50 or so of my closest friends in closely arranged double metal bunk beds with naked mattresses. My eyes burned when the police flipped on the florescent lights and roused everyone. It was 4:00 AM.

I was on a week's vacation from the school where I was studying in London, and though my friends and I arrived early in the evening, we decided (with practicality typical of 20 year-olds) that rooms would be easy to come by, so a better way to spend the dying twilight was to hang out on the parapets of Edinborough Castle.

(Side note: we stopped at a pub and ordered fried fish for dinner, and after 40 minutes, asked the barkeep if it was ready. Stunned, he swore loudly, raced to the kitchen, apologized profusely, and after another 15 minutes, we got a free meal.)

These distractions meant we waited until about 11:30 to find a place to sleep, which (after being told "no vacancy" at many stops) relegated us to a hostel in a fairly impoverished neighborhood. I cocooned myself in the blanket they provided and, despite the crackling sound of the plastic mattress cover, I finally drifted off to sleep until awakened by the clanging on the metal door.

Something had apparently been stolen in the area, so they were going through the hostel, searching everyone's luggage. I walked away from my bunk in a somnambulistic haze. But while their hands unzipping and feeling through my luggage soon jarred me perfectly awake, I felt no less stunned.

One doesn't take one's constitution abroad. Scots law is very clear on the police's right to search you without a warrant if something's gone missing. I moreover realized that we were likely suffering this interrogation in no small part because the hostel was made up of 25% backpacking Americans and 75% poor people with nowhere else to go.

And while it is patently true that abuses like this are more common among the powerless even here in the U.S., that night I assuaged my bitterness with the knowledge that there was at least a piece of paper--a statement of principle--that said individual privacy still meant something back home. If we sadly fall short of it, then thank God we at least have something of which we are falling short.

So when someone tells you that we should go into "high crime" neighborhoods and just search for drugs without real probable cause since "we know they're there" or that "I don't care if the government taps my phone because I've got nothing to hide," remember that we have some profound liberties in the US, written into law by people who were conversant with violations of civil liberty in practical, rather than abstract, terms.

And, most certainly remember that freedoms are rarely taken from our citizens by force. Usually, in the name of security, or patriotism, or religion, or party, the citizens hand them right over.

Know them by their fruits, or alternatively, by their novelty plates.

Standing in line at the Thornton's gas station near my neighborhood, I spied a rack of novelty car plates--the kind you screw to the front of your car to make sure your it professes your religious beliefs or sports team affiliation or desire to waste your presidential vote on the dangerously inexperienced Willie Nelson.

The plates were stacked deeply on the rotating rack, and these were the four I saw:

1) Against a deep purple background, a hot pink script proclaimed the car's occupant "Blessed"

2) On black, the red, slashed lettering let everyone know the driver was "Sucking Gas and Hauling Ass."

3) Three red crosses centered in a white background admitted the car's owner was "Not Perfect--Just forgiven."

4) Another white background, this time with cartoon rhino warning the reader: "Cautious: Extremely Horny."

An open tension between sacred and profane shapes the atmosphere of so many small Kentucky towns. For my money, no literary work captures this as perfectly as Silas House's Clay's Quilt.

While this little rack of novelty plates did not sum up this tension quite as well, it certainly did so more succinctly--in just about the time it takes the old guy in front of the line to finish up his scratch off tickets.

My Thesis Statement

But criticism, real criticism, is essentially the exercise of this very quality; it obeys an instinct prompting it to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world...
-- Matthew Arnold "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (1864)

Not long ago, when I was near UK's campus in Lexington, I swung by the William T Young library, hoping to take a look at something I wrote ten years ago.

On a bookshelf in the basement, I have a version of my Master's Thesis that I preserved in the most resplendent form available to my grad student means: a Kinko's strip binding.

However, I knew that unless the Graduate School took my $80 and bought a seat cushion for Steven Masiello, a leather bound, golden embossed copy of my contribution to English Literature rested somewhere in the tower atop the William T. Young library. After a good discussion with my former committee member, Jonathan Allison, I saddled up to a computer, looking for my manifesto.

Sadly, the as-of-yet-uncorrected misspelling in my Thesis's catalog citation ("The Yankees of Yoknapatawpha: William Faulkner and the Hartless [sic] Yankee Myth") was an inauspicious beginning to my glorious return to the halls of academia. But, having spent a solid year of my life both arriving and departing this building under starry skies, I had little difficulty ascending the steps and finding the appropriate bookshelves.

The Young library's stacks are the space-saving mechanical kind that slide back and forth--the racks compressing and decompressing like an accordion. Having found the right rack and waited for it to groan open, I slid my finger along the spines.

There it was.

No misspelling on the binding, thank God. Jason McKinley Williams in a golden sheen surely commensurate with the glorious revelations within this thin tome.

Unfortunately, when I opened it, the crisp pages crackled like those in a college dropout's Calculus book. It seems neither the world of Faulkner studies nor (shockingly) the public at large had been poring over my analysis of how Faulkner reframed popular turn-of-the-century narratives about "Bloody Reconstruction" in his own treatments of both that historical era and the desegregation struggle that filled him with both immeasurable hope and intense anxiety.

Their loss.

I hardly even looked at it beyond the Acknowledgments page. After all, though eighty pages and ten years in my past, I could probably recite it from memory. I slid it back into the shelf, content.

Then, my fingers crept across the names of old colleagues, and I think about those stacks of books piled up in each of the monastic cells that passed for Teaching Assistant offices (6 TA cubicles in the same space as one professor's office). I think the strain and preparation of sharing our ideas at conferences. I think of literally reams of paper crumpled and marked over--the ideas discussed over turkey sandwich lunches or beers at McCarthy's.

Though you might expect disappointment to be my appropriate response, I assure you this is not a lament. "Terminal Master's students" (as those of us not going on to Doctoral study were known) understood that after our degree comes in the mail, the best end for our scholarship was to end up in someone else's works cited page. But to stand there in those racks was simply a valuable lesson on having perspective in our daily lives. To ponder the wondrous toil and passion of those days, and see it neatly stacked in alphabetical order, resting quietly in endless row of other people's black, gold embossed legacies.

Faulkner, who wrote so prolifically and almost exclusively about the inhabitants of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County once said, "I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it."

Even if the influence of my scholarship remains limited to a few colleagues at UK and the audiences of a couple of sessions at the Twentieth Century Literature Conference, I'm very pleased at my little postage stamp of Faulkner studies. It wasn't specious, it wasn't pretentious, and it will remain my little brick in UK's symbolic tower of knowledge (at least until they clear out the Thesis and Dissertations and turn the tower into sports equipment storage or a Kindle repair shop.)

I can say I learned it, said it, finished it, and, in the end, it was the best I knew and thought.