Two interesting notes from my Shakespeare professor:
1) Today she told us that a Manhattan cocktail is named after the brown tap water of the City.
2) An assistant professor was drunk and playing “Never Have I” at a faculty party. He confesses to never having read Hamlet. The next day he was fired.
That’s hard core.
Lately there has been this visiting scholar who comes and sits in the office to read his newspaper and drink his coffee. He is from England and when we first met he told me that my name was a palindrome.
Too hot to hoot, I said.
He then told me that he was surprised that I knew what a palindrome was. Because I was American. He said it with such sincerity that I felt no anger towards him. He’s probably right, and I’m fairly sure that if I hadn’t been told my entire life that my name was a palindrome I probably wouldn’t know what a palindrome was either. My mom used to call me a “hannahgram” because I think she thought the word for palindrome was anagram.
Either way, this even compelled me to write out some of my favorite cyclical sentences:
“Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?”
“Dogma: I Am God”
“Sums are not set as a test on Erasmus.”
“Reviled did I live,” said I, as evil I did deliver.
“Lived on decaf, I faced no devil.”
And then a little piece of uncanny symmetry for you science, kids:
111,111,111 * 111,111,111 = 12345678987654321
A blog is a performance.
The first sentence of this blog: a blog is a performance. Thus, whatever I set out to do here is written with the idea that someone is going to read, witness, judge, and move on. However, I’ve told myself for a long time that I need to get off my ass and start typing things out and if the only way I can take steps forward is to imagine it for the sake of the crowd on the sidelines, then so be it.
In high school, a teacher asked me to give the graduation speech. After that, all I would envision was the end result, my closing sentence over and over again. People would cheer. People would sing. Babies would come bursting out of wombs as new life sprung from new inspiration.
But then I got all high and mighty and decided to be self-righteous. I told my teachers:
“I shouldn’t write the speech, because I don’t care about the speech, all I care about is the applause at the end.”
Thus ensuring a continued applause from all those in life I could later say that very sentence to. What I had done was not take a step towards betterment, instead I had found a more back-handed way to receive the applause continually. Marvel at my reflective lens.
Maggie, the ten year old, has ten short stories in progress. She has written the opening paragraph for each. The latest:
“Emil! I caught one!” Lora said as she held the glass jar over the small dragon. “Meh, not big enough. But, it’s some thing, put it with Geogeo.” Emil was eleven but far too short for his age. Lora was younger, but only by a year. Emil had a reputation for dragon catching but his sister was an explorer she never left one nook or cranny undiscovered, once she found an emerald cave only big enough for a mouse but never told any one. Emil had bold orange freckles and a short orange bob. Lora was so different you wouldn’t think they were related, she had shoulder length brown hair ”
And that’s where it stops. I doubt she’ll every pick it up again, but she might. Her other stories all start with conversations amongst children, they are all on the cusp of an adventure. I’m glad that Maggie’s got the point. She’s not writing for the sake of an ending, she writes to experience a beginning. Then she gets bored, or loses interest, or feels that the magic of potential has left her words.
I wonder if this foreshadows her romantic policy later on in life.
Back to performance.
It being a blog about writing, there’s a lot of obligation on my part to make sure every word and sentence combine to form syntactic wonder. But this is a self-imposed expectation. That I’m going to shirk right now. If I’m stumble upon prose-etic glory, then good for me, but for the most part I hope you can enjoy the things I enjoy.
And with that disclaimer, I’ll begin.
