Invisible words, written in the ether

My iBook has been in the throes of death for years. First, keys became stuck until their covers were discarded (thankfully, I rarely use "~"). Then Internet pages stopped loading. Finally the screen started to flash and sputter if not set at an exact 40 degree angle.

So I began to eye other Apple laptops on eBay; after a few mornings of watching bids flash by, I grew weary of the whole exercise and, on impulse, probably paid too much for an old MacBook Pro.

Although the MacBook loads Internet pages and offers an unblinking screen,  I have yet to fully adopt it. Four weeks after its purchase, all my writing from the last five years still resides in my iBook.  The writing is already backed up on flash drives and external hard disks, so I know that it can be somewhere else, but I can't bring myself to take it out and transfer it completely to another machine.

Getting rid of one machine for another always feels like a little death to me. I get a sweep of nostalgia when we've had to move to a newer, better computer. But there's something else going on here, I  finally realized. To transfer all my words in one motion through the ether somehow acknowledges that they aren't real, that they are invisible, fragile. It feels like I am ripping them from their home, the place of their birth.

I wonder if other writers feel this way? Maybe it's because I first started to write on typewriters and the words could only exist there, unquestionably tangible. Words written on a computer are more of a verb than a noun, an action frozen. They are written, typed, saved. Even when completed, they still remain more an idea than a thing. Writers who have always written on computers perhaps don't feel this need for a specific home for their words.

(The photo above reveals the one thing I've done on my MacBook--play with its Photobooth feature. Self-portrait, March 2011)

The writer's eternal question

It's the eternal question: do I pay bills, or write a blog post? Leave the dishes in the sink, or write a journal entry? Do laundry, or start a short story?

Sometimes, I choose to ignore all the petty little things that compose a household, and then someone informs me (usually the very morning they need it, like this morning) that they don't have clean socks or clean underwear. Or someone walks into my dusty house and I can almost hear their silent tsk-tsking.

I imagine this is why there were so few female writers in the past, at least among the lower classes, because they had no one to wash their laundry or clean their dishes. Writing used to be a luxury for women; maybe it still is.

I made a joke out of this in a very small magazine, in a special issue called The Lost Poetry of Women (and other people). [The issue was published 15 years ago, so obviously this has been a recurring theme in my life].

In one piece in that issue, Mrs. Gautama Buddha complained,

Buddha

I hear you are growing fat. What else happens to a man

who sits around doing nothing all day?

In another piece, "The Annotated Shopping Lists of J.R. Smith," the housewife Jane Reed Smith's shopping lists from the 1950s were mined for the poetry she scribbled in the margins, such as:

I just know that, sometimes, the dishes be damned, I need to write, or I start to feel an underlying grumpiness that's almost like a bad taste in my mouth. If the days become weeks, I almost feel that I'm going crazy. I've been like this since I was a teenager, when I was stirred to write bad poetry and narcissistic journal entries in the quiet of my room late at night.

I finally recognize and acknowledge that I've got to express myself in written words on a regular basis–talking is never enough. Other forms of creativity can tide me over for a few days, but I always feel an urge to get back to writing, like a need to get back home, to the natural home for my thoughts.

Why a raconteur should never fear consulting a dictionary

As a child, I never heard anyone pronounce the word “ennui.” The rural Southern people I grew up with were too busy to be bored and the moments that might have been dull, they sat and talked. So, from the first time I encountered “ennui” in a book until, years later, when my (sometimes French-speaking) spouse gently corrected me, I pronounced it “N-U.”

Maybe I had looked up “ennui” in a dictionary at one point, but somehow my mind could not grasp how anything with two Ns could not have a strong “n” sound in the middle. And though that dictionary might have told me that “ennui” meant weariness and boredom, in my mind “ennui” sounded like sadness. I’m sure I said more than once in college, “I’m feeling a little ‘N-U’ today” and no one corrected me—perhaps they thought I was speaking of some condition or university they had never heard of.

A similar thing happened with “poignant.” Though I correctly understood its meaning, I pronounced it like someone’s poor attempt at saying “pregnant” with a Jersey accent. This, too, my husband corrected me on, not so gently this time. After years of hearing me mispronouncing it he finally shouted “It’s ‘poi-nyent’ not ‘poigg-nannt’!” Incredulous, I had to have him pronounce it several times before I believed him.

I consider myself somewhat of an autodidact, notwithstanding the efforts of several of my high school teachers who attempted to bring me viewpoints and correct pronunciations from their educated perspectives. But I have been a lazy autodidact because, too often, I forget to consult a dictionary when encountering new words, taking their meaning from their current contexts only.

Consequently, when I arrived at a writing workshop given by my friend, Kim Dana Kupperman, a couple of months ago, I did not heed her advice when she set out a dictionary at the start of a writing exercise and suggested we consult it if we needed clarity on any of the terms she was going to give us. She asked us to write a short description of our first kiss then passed around a paper bag filled with little slips of folded paper and told us to randomly choose a new persona from which to rewrite our descriptions. I pulled out “raconteur.”

“‘Raconteur’ is akin to ‘rake’ and thus is a bawdy retelling of a story,” I told myself, realizing it was another word that I had simply breezed through while reading, on the assumption that I already knew its meaning. But I didn’t want to get up in front of the class and look it up since Kim had introduced me to the class as one of her old college buddies, which in my mind, was someone who should have known what ‘raconteur’ meant. Thus, my innocent and somewhat accidental first kiss became a tale of conquest and bragging.

Kim had us read our revised passages aloud and have the rest of the class guess our persona. “This one will be easy,” I promised my classmates, but no one could guess it and Kim looked puzzled since it didn’t seem to be a persona she had put in the bag. I leaned over and pointed it out on the list of personas on her desk. “It’s that one,” I whispered, thinking she would understand and be able to enlighten the class; when she still looked puzzled, I knew I was in trouble.

In retrospect, it was one of those a-ha moments that everyone needs, both humbling and clarifying. I now intend to consult a dictionary more frequently, especially anytime one is offered to me, and I hope I will not be too arrogant to use it.

Still, I have to admit, I blushed a bit that day, and blush a little now, thinking back to that moment. It all makes me a little poignant with N-U.