Curious

In a letter to William Dean Howells, Henry James described his early work Washington Square as “a tale truly American.” After spotting Washington Square on M.’s shelf Easter morning, I eagerly “borrowed” it with James’s own sentiment in mind. I find it less disappointing than James did in retrospective moments.

Instead its transparent, if reductive, vision of American culture proved a stimulating surprise. WS boils American culture down to a handful of shamefully naked parts: a minimalist backdrop, a dull set of four principal characters, and the customary, even cliched, plot most often associated with a comedy of manners.¹ Yet James employs these innocuous elements in order to powerfully illustrate the American mentalité within a subtle, psychological novel.

Washington Square was a setting that James would have found familiar. James consciously constructed this community around sleepy drawing rooms, genteel architecture, and idyllic walkways.² Washington Square’s facades, like most of the characters within the novel, are scarred by a particularly American pretense. Nevertheless, James’s confined backdrop falls in step with the psychological undercurrent in his novel. This constricted setting mirrors the American mentalité with which James took exception. Continue Reading »

Twitter is a mixed bag. You have to applaud the way in which it shrewdly draws on Facebook, SMS, and social networking. If you have ever yearned to feel connected to the actions and thoughts of others at any or all moments in time, your prayer has been heard. Through Twitter’s interface, communication has simultaneously become more personal, concise, and accessible. Even if its attraction is far from native for you, there are at least a dozen other reasons to pay attention to Twitter, but you won’t find them catalogued here.

In this post, I wish to protest the measuring out of life with little coffee spoons. Continue Reading »

‘Sign the screen and push enter.’ The DMV employee barked the order without even looking up. I complied only to catch a scowl as the signature flashed onto the woman’s monitor screen. With a snort, she pointed to the stylus. ‘I said sign it. Give me your signature.’

My confusion increased. ‘But that is my signature.’

‘You kids don’t even know cursive, do you? Do they even teach you how to write?’

First of all, it’s never worth your time to argue with the DMV. So I didn’t, even though Ms. DMV’s inference about my self-worth was quite clear (and misguided, I’d like to think). I don’t recall much about the genesis or evolution of my handwriting. Legend has it that I learned three systems of handwriting by the age of ten before adopting italic handwriting. (My recantation of traditional North American cursive is largely blamed on a grade-school teacher who, despite the fact that I was a left-handed student, forced me to angle my paper to the left just as the right-handed students did.)

Be that as it may, Ms. DMV wasn’t far off: it seems that kids, “these days,” don’t universally learn cursive. And the arguments surrounding this growing trend reveal that handwriting is still alive and well as a form of social signalling.* Continue Reading »

I have to bite my tongue whenever someone argues that fiction is inherently harmful. Often, he or she employs a sprinkling of anecdotes to argue that literature, television, and movies weaken humanity’s collective “grasp” on reality or that readers rely on these forms of fiction for escape from reality. That isn’t to say that discussing fiction’s merit (or demerit) is a vain way to spend an hour, yet I’d contend most of these conversations introduce more heat than light. Powerful fiction, I’d argue, matures its audience.

When art poses a threat to viewers, it is often because they recognize that some part of their worldview is being challenged or undermined. Ironically, in most cases, discomfort is essential for further maturation. Nowhere is this discomfort more acute than within a text, when one character’s presuppositions clash with another’s. The writers of NBC’s The Office thrive on characterization and conflict, but in season five, episode 18, they really outdid themselves. Continue Reading »

I would be the first to admit it: my rote memory skills are abysmal. As Achilles’ heels go, this may seem a trivial defect. Nonetheless, my inept memory forms a tripwire, stretching across every scholastic threshold I long to cross.

In the literary context, I chaff against that tripwire when I attempt to apply the technique of scansion to poetry. No exaggeration; the penciled meter markings floating above the verses in my college anthology embody mis-scansion. On the best of days, I could identify the iambic, anapestic, trochaic, and dactylic. But if you would have asked me to tell a cretic from a amphibrach, the game was up.

As a remedy, I bought Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (1965). Continue Reading »