A Walker in the Suburbs

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.

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!

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.