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Walking and Looking

Walking and Looking

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It was a skill I perfected when I lived and walked in New York City: When faced with a pedestrian barreling right at me, I learned to quickly glance down. To keep eye contact meant we’d likely find ourselves in one of those awkward dances where one heads right thinking the other will head left, only he heads right too. Looking down breaks the cycle and avoids collisions.

This behavior would not surprise Alexandra Horowitz. In her book On Looking, which I mentioned a few weeks ago, she describes pedestrian behavior as quick, fluid and fish-like. It depends on three basic rules (alignment, avoidance and following the person in front of you) plus a series of quick calculations made because we pay attention to each other.

Most of the time, people look where they are going. So the gaze is the giveaway. You can even follow someone’s head, because people actually incline in the direction they want to go.

The one type of pedestrian that breaks this rule: the phone talker. “Their conversational habits change the dynamic of the flowing shoal,” Horowitz writes. “No longer is each fish aware, in a deep, old-brain way, of where everyone is around him.”

And this means that my looking-away skill doesn’t work as well anymore.  Which is something I already knew, in my deep, old-brain way.

Typographical Tone of Voice

Typographical Tone of Voice

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If this post goes according to plan, I may insult you several times. That’s because I am, in that old-school, print-based way, using periods at the ends of sentences. (See, I just did it again. And again.)

In Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch brings the term “typographical tone of voice” to my (somewhat luddite) attention. Exhibit A, she says, is considering all caps to be shouting (which is hardly news to anyone, even luddites). But a more subtle expression of typographical tone of voice is what she calls the “sincerity exclamation point.”

Ah yes, I think, this is why I’m using using exclamation points so much despite inwardly chafing at them. This is not due to grammatical sloppiness, but to friendliness and cooperation. When I say “Thanks!” at the end of a business email, I’m merely indicating that, sure, I don’t mind editing this piece quickly. I’m happy to do it (even if I’m not).

Periods are another matter. “For people whose linguistic norms are oriented toward the offline world, the most neutral way of separating one utterance from the next is with a dash or a string of dots,” McCulloch writes. But for someone whose linguistic orientation is more modern, the line break is the most effective way of separating utterances. In that case, then, the period is extraneous, and perhaps holds other meanings. In fact, it could even be considered passive aggressive.

But don’t worry, McCulloch assures us, in formal writing periods are still emotionally neutral. To which she adds this puckish footnote: “Or at least, I sure hope they are, because otherwise you’re halfway through a book where I’ve been passive-aggressive to you the whole time. SORRY.”

Because Internet

Because Internet

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While at times I wanted to shake my fist at Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet, I lapped it up and took scads of notes on it. There will be others like it, maybe there already are, but to me it seems utterly original. To survey how the internet and social media affect the way we communicate is not only useful but necessary.

McCulloch approaches her vast subject with a linguist’s eye, and notices things I’ve noticed but didn’t know others paid attention to (I’m leaving that preposition hanging out there because I know McCulloch would approve). Things like how spellcheck and autocomplete cause writer’s block because they draw our attention to small details when we’re just trying to get the danged words out any way we can. And her observations on typographical tone of voice, which I’ll cover in a separate post.

Where I take exception is McCulloch’s quickness to condemn “book English” (my quotations, not hers) and the stodgy, class-laden thinking she believes goes with it. This makes me defensive, of course, not only because it threatens my profession (do we really need professional writers and editors if “idk, maybeeee we should taaaalk about it … lol” is perfectly acceptable?) but also because she seems to assume that writing well, with grace, is somehow false.

Writing well is not just a matter of following rules but also of breaking them — and breaking them to more brilliant effect when they’re not broken as often. Writing well is putting words together in a way that is fresh, original and utterly you (whoever you are). If striving for subject-verb agreement makes one stodgy … then I’m guilty as charged. In the meantime, though, I’ll be thinking about McCulloch’s points, and maybe loosening up just a tad because of them.

A Windfall

A Windfall

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The Fairfax County Library system has many benefits, chief among them the fact that I can order books online and pick them up at my branch — not a high-tech offering, I’ll admit, but a generous and handy one.

Of course, this means I usually have more books on my nightstand than I can possibly read and must stay on top of a wide array of due dates. It’s a task I’m more than happy to undertake given the pleasures it provides.

Usually I have a little slip plus an email reminder that tells me when the books are due. But this time the email failed to arrive, so I went online to check the due dates. And lo and behold, I found a brand-new catalog and extended deadlines — two weeks longer! — for the three volumes I have.

Though I know the extension is due to the new catalog, it feels more like an early holiday gift for those of us whose reading eyes are bigger than our stomachs. It’s positively a windfall — and I’ll enjoy every (extra) minute of it!

On Looking

On Looking

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In her book On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes, Alexandra Horowitz asks us to look at the world with the wonder of a child and the expertise of geologist, entomologist, illustrator or other professional observer.

Horowitz’s simple and elegant argument: that we cease to really see the world we inhabit because we become so accustomed to it. Through a series of strolls with those trained to see what we do not, Horowitz urges us to “look, look!”

In one of my favorites so far, she ambles with the typographer Paul Shaw. He points out the text on a manhole cover, ghost writing on the sides of buildings, and always and everywhere, the type itself: the thickness of a serif, the placement of a crossbar, and the humanistic qualities of the letters, a “long-legged” R and a”high-waisted” S. After a few hours of this, Horowitz realizes she “had been blithely walking by undiagnosed lettering disasters my whole life.”

But after her stroll with Shaw, she sees not just the words but the letters that compose them. “Walking back to the subway, I glanced down at my feet as I crossed the street. Look was painted on the sidewalk where I stood. I will — but I feel sure that now, my vision changed, the letters will find me.”

Our Only World

Our Only World

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In his essay collection Our Only World, Wendell Berry writes of the “deserted country” that results from farmers displaced by progress, whether it be Big Coal or industrial machinery and chemicals.

The result is an emptiness most modern people think normal because they’ve never known it any other way. But Berry, who is 85, remembers a richer, fuller, more peopled countryside. A countryside that included farmers who “walk don’t run,” Berry writes.

“The gait most congenial to agrarian thought and sensibility is walking. It is the gait best suited to paying attention, most conservative of land and equipment, and most permissive of stopping to look or think. Machines, companies, and politicians ‘run.’ Farmers studying their fields travel at a walk.”

It’s one of the reasons I walk, too, because it is the gait “best suited to paying attention.” And though the remnants of a once-rich countryside lie ruined all around me, suburban neighborhoods named for the farms they’ve displaced, there is a point to walking even here.

Because when we walk, we feel just a little more like we belong. And when we feel just a little more like we belong … we care a lot more about the place we live.

Forward from Here

Forward from Here

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I first began reading Reeve Lindbergh because of her famous mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, whose Gift from the Sea has always been a favorite of mine. Reeve’s memoirs Under a Wing: A Memoir and No More Words: A Journal of My Mother provide the inside stories of her upbringing and her mother’s final years.

Like her mom, Reeve writes with a friendly, accessible style. And because Reeve grew up with a writer (actually two of them; her famous father wrote books too), she learned early on how writing can help make sense of things.

Reeve is an unabashed journal-keeper, and though she laughs about using her journals as an escape from other writing chores, she also says that much of her material comes straight from them.

“To write as honestly as I can in my journals about my everyday life and the thoughts and feelings I have as I go along is an old, tenacious yearning,” she writes. Writing is “comforting and steadying,” she says. It was so even when she underwent brain surgery, which she did while writing Forward From Here, the book I just read and from which I quote.

In a later chapter, she talks about moments of well-being when she’s “suddenly, acutely conscious of being alive: on a spring morning when the first V of wild geese flies over the farm; any time I see one of my children again after a separation; whenever I look out over the hills and pastures, or up at the stars.

“I’m convinced that what we really need most to sustain us as we grow older, more than any drug on the market, is this kind of appreciative awareness, along with compassion, a sense of humor, and simple common sense.”

To which I can only add … amen!

Ambulatory Romance

Ambulatory Romance

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In Elizabeth Gilbert’s new novel City of Girls, a man and woman get to know each other by exploring the streets of New York City.  They walk and talk and fall in love not by touching but by rambling.

There are unique reasons for their unusual relationship, but even putting those aside, they are onto something. Walking frees the soul, and if one soul is strolling with another, confidences are easily shared.

It may be the same process that loosens thoughts in the solitary walker, or it may be that the sheer mechanics of it means you are looking ahead and not at each other. Whatever the explanation, walking invites intimacy, as it did for this couple:

Nobody ever bothered us. … We were often so deep in our conversations that we often didn’t notice our surroundings. Miraculously, the streets kept us safe and the people let us be.  … We were devoted to each other.

Frozen Sea

Frozen Sea

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“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” — Franz Kafka

I came across this quotation a week ago while reading The Second Mountain by David Brooks — and it took my breath away.  In that way that books can seem to be speaking directly to you, I first read these words as a writer, as in, writing a book will free up, if not a frozen sea, then at least a creative block I’ve felt off and on for many years.

I was pretty sure that was not the way Kafka intended his words to be construed, though. Today, I’ve had time to find the larger work of which this is a part. And yes, it is most definitely about the books we read, not the books we write. But it is still powerful, especially when you know it was written by a 20-year-old (!) Kafka, in a letter to a friend. Here it is in context:

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? … We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.

Farewell, Express

Farewell, Express

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Yesterday I picked up the Express newspaper offered to me by our Vienna hawker Bobbie. I don’t always get this abbreviated, tabloid giveaway version of the Washington Post. But when I don’t have the parent paper or something else to read, I pick it up. And I always take it if Bobbie offers it to me. He’s a kind soul whose feelings might be hurt if I did not.

But sometimes when I do have the parent paper and Bobbie holds out the Express, I pick it up … then gently place it on top of the trash can at the entrance to Metro. I don’t throw it away — no one has read it yet! — but I do put it up for adoption.

That’s what I did yesterday, not even glancing at the headline. Then, on the way home, I saw a copy of Express someone had left behind on the bus. “Hope you enjoy your stinking’ phones” said the headline, which caught my eye, then below, the small print: “Add Express to the list of print publications done in by mobile technology. Sadly, this is our final edition.”

As you can tell, I’m not an everyday Express reader, but I’m a common-enough one to mourn its passing. There was an irreverence about it, and it was informative, too. Now, another print publication bites the dust, 20 journalists lose their jobs, and a community culture goes away (because Express hawkers drew commuters together).

I’ll let Express have the last word here. This is from a small item on its inside front cover:

Nation Shocked! Shocked!
Traditional print news product abruptly goes out of business
In news that scandalized a nation, The Washington Post Express abruptly shut down Thursday, citing falling readership and insufficient revenue. Apparently, everyone riding the D.C. Metro now looks at their phones instead of reading print newspapers. Express editors will miss the newspaper and its readers very much. It has been a pleasure and an honor to provide commuters with this daily dose of this odd news.