When I was a kid, my mom and I would played “The Alphabet Game.” We’d pick a theme and then try to come up with words for each letter of the alphabet. My eight-year-old and I have started our own alphabet game, only we use it to make dada-ish nonsense poems together in the pool. (I jot them down in my waterproof notebook.)
“How did you become you?”
This afternoon I had a bowl of cereal and drew Cheryl Strayed interviewing Andrew Sean Greer about his marvelous novel, Less. (One of my favorite books I read in 2019.)
You can watch the interview on Instagram. Here’s a closer look at my pages:
“Prescriptive rules are among the least interesting things about language,” writes Christopher Johnson in Microstyle: The Art of Writing Little. “They remind me of a scene from the Disney/Pixar animated film Ratatouille, about Remy, a gifted rat who longs to be a gourmet chef.”
His father, who neither understands nor appreciates his aspirations, puts him to work as the rat colony’s official poison sniffer. Though Remy has an uncanny ability to identify subtle ingredients in complex dishes, his job is to detect the mere presence or absence of poison in scraps of scavenged food. His work helps the rat colony but provides none of the joy he gets from cooking.
Johnson says “prescriptivists” or “Cute Curmudgeons” — people who are interested in only policing usage and grammar rules — are “linguistic poison sniffers.” They turn language into “a source of potential embarrassment rather than pleasure.”
Johnson sees his job as getting people to love and appreciate language by being curious about and paying attention to “what makes language delicious.”
This reminded of Olivia Laing’s distinction between identifying poison and finding nourishment.
Everywhere you look these days, there are lots of poison sniffers, but very few cooking a delicious meal…
When I don’t know what to write in my diary I copy a poem by hand or with the typewriter. (I like copying prose by hand, but I like typing out poems so I can see how the lines play out cleanly on the page.)
After I’ve copied the poem, I get out my paper dictionary, and I pick the poem apart, word by word, looking up all the words I don’t know, but especially the words I sort of know, or think I know, as these words are sometimes the trickiest. You’re rarely aware of all a word’s various meanings or its origins. A word you think you know is often a word you don’t really know at all.
This activity almost always gives me something new to write about — in this case, the idea of “stealing near,” or getting close to something, stealthily.
My August pick for our Read Like an Artist book club is Tamara Shopsin’s Arbitrary Stupid Goal. To get the book in time to join our discussion next month, sign up now.
Here’s my intro:
This is a wonderful illustrated memoir of writer and illustrator Tamara Shopsin’s childhood in 1970s Greenwich Village, growing up with her brothers and sisters in their parents’ grocery store and restaurant, Shopsin’s. The “arbitrary stupid goal” of the title is a bit of the unconventional practice and wisdom of her father (the legendary Kenny Shopsin), which is sprinkled throughout the book. Like almost all memoirs by artists, it is partly the story of how the author became an artist. I love the way this book is written with pictures and words. Reading a Shopsin book gives me the same jolt I get when I read something like Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions: “I didn’t know a book could do this!”
Shopsin is quite simply one of my favorite creative people around, and I’ve written about her work several times on this blog. Really excited for people to fall in love with this book, and I’m even more excited for her first novel, LaserWriter II, which comes out in October.
To join our discussion, sign up for the club!
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