Word After Word

This amazing woman, Debby Li of Singapore, is in my office creating new websites. Debby is my Dreamweaver and Wordpress tutor (and Cubby’s new best friend). I watch her and it’s like watching an artist in super fast forward as she builds a sculpture or a dance or a story. Debby flies across the stage. Then I try a couple of steps. I get stuck immediately. There are a lot of steps. Debby says Click, click. Debby says we’ve done this many times before. Wah.

I have felt, in middle age, my brain resisting new learning—it’s a powerful force to work against. My Curiosity is not an endangered species, yet, but I can see how it could get on that list; I’m thank God I’m nervous and curious about this. Dang learning this new world, this new way of reading and understanding—it’s really hard work. I’m not sure how successful I’m going to be. I do not understand the Overall Picture, how it all fits together, what the hierarchies are. This is the hard edge of learning. We have to fight the urge to Stay With What We Already Know. This isn’t counter intuitive it’s plain counter. Get really really cosy with a truck load of Clueless. Underline your dumbness, now italicize it, now change the color of that font! When you are middle aged, that’s hard, but isn’t it, always?

And Why?

When I came into my building today, I heard a student, talking to her friend, as they walked past me on the sidewalk. They each had their phones out in front of them, peering at little screens. “The article she gave is to read is so long,” the student complained. “It’s just so ridiculously long.” (The friend, staring at her tiny screen, walking, not listening said: “I can’t believe he sent me the same message twice! Twice!” Then she repeated herself.)

I can relate to the “Long Article Hater”. I’m very good at reading long articles. She’s really good at txting. She knows languages I’ll only dabble in, no matter how hard I try and she knows shapes and emotions I’ll never access. My long articles, her instant-esque webworld: it came easily; we practiced a lot; it looks “natural.”

My tutor Debby Li has been a really good teacher for me. She reminds me to take notes. She never makes me feel bad for not knowing. She loves what she does and she’s always laying out more possibilities. She shows but doesn’t show off. This is how I want to be as a teacher. I want to help the “Long Article Fearer” as Debby has helped me. To teach, I think you have to be inside the thing and outside of it at the same time. How else can you bring someone into it? The teacher has to be two places at once and so does the learner. The teacher is agile. The student is stretched and awkward, it’s not that fun. It’s fun later.

My friend Brian sent me to a site the other day, his favorite site. The syntax and visual language on the site implied an emotional world I have never rubbed against. I could not understand the site. (Debby was not around that day.) I did not even understand the cat image. It’s like I’m traveling in Amsterdam again and again I’m not loving it, I’d prefer to be at home with my book in my superbly unwired bungalow, with my tea and my small dog. But I like the required alertness.

My new mantra: What Would Debby Do.

I always feel my students write better when they write just to me, just to their lover, just to their mother, no one else. Otherwise, they tend to write, as we all do, in an automatic voice that feels mass-produced, television-inspired, with none of the hand made qualities one needs when writing on paper. What happens to voice when the writing is on screen, for screen, to stay screened?

I’m thinking about having my spring semester writing students create blogs for their writing instead of or in addition to turning it in to me and their small groups on paper. I wonder: does the blog help you write in your true voice because you have an audience? Or does it make finding and driving down into True Voice even more difficult. With “the vague world” as audience do we tend to write in even broader strokes than usual? Then, I worry about their future employment. Once you put something out there, Amsterdam never gives it back. To make art, they have to be utterly faithful to the truth. Art truth is the exact opposite kind of truth one brings to a job interview. It seems clear: we will always have a dire need for more books.

I took a class this summer with one of my favorite writers, Abigail Thomas, and one of the many great benefits of the stunningly rich course was the reading list she gave us. Anatole Broyard, Jonathan Cott, Lynn Freed. Lynn Freed says in Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home:

“Longing for an audience and therefore guaranteeing none is, perhaps, the great curse of the writer.”

When the subject matter is public property, how do you make it your own? she asks. “I could not find a way to make it my own because it was not my own. And so the stories sank under their own dead weight. The more I tried, the stupider they became. The page will reveal the fake even when the writer is moving herself to tears. ‘Only that which does not teach,’ said Yeats, ‘which does not cry out, which does not persuade, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.’”

Next up? The golden orbweaver. I’m not watching television; I’m watching her make metaphors outside my kitchen window. She’s huge!