May 3rd, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *Date Night*

It was pretty much obvious that I would see Date Night even though the reviews weren’t amazing. I have been a big fan of Tina Fey ever since she and Jimmy Fallon were Weekend Updating–no one has more slang terms for “vagina” in her repetoire and no one says them with more flare.

I always forget why I like Steve Carrell–unlike most humans, I’ve never seen *The Office*–and then I remember *Little Miss Sunshine* (which I rewatched over the holidays and still love). Oh yeah, and he was the *40-Year-Old Virgin* too. Yeah, I like Steve Carrell plenty.

So it’s disappointing to see such stellar comedians struggling to elevate this film above “fine” or “funny enough” or “not a total waste of money.” And it is *slightly* better than those things, but largely on account of their efforts. The script is solidly silly, which is no way to be. There are no risks, there are no non-stock characters (sexy calculating babysitter, foozball playing loser male friend, teary-eyed histrionic female friend, supercompetent superattractive male special ops…should I go on? You can probably guess if you’ve ever seen…any other movie).

The premise is that Claire and Phil Foster’s marriage, bogged down by kids, work and life in the burbs, has lost its spark and, in a reasonably pathetic effort to regain it, Phil proposes to take them to the hottest restaurant in Manhattan on a Friday night without a reservation. Which, sorry, makes Phil look like a moron, when he clearly plays the character as a reasonably bright guy.

There are a *lot* of slipups like that in the script–some far worse. On Phil and Claire’s first depicted date night, Claire mentions that the next evening they have bookclub. At bookclub, she mentions that the evening after that, they have a date. Who has a date every other evening, especially with two small childrens and another excursion on the intervening evening (she says with a touch of envy?) Also, Phil is later described as a “tax lawyer” though the shot of him at work shows him explaining a modest tax refund to his dumbass clients–something *accountants* and their assistants do. Oh, and that poster showing Carrell wearing lipstick and Fey with a kissprint on her face? Inexplicable, because that scene doesn’t happen in the movie.

I’m harping–this is minor stuff, but indicative of a film made with a minimum of care. So Claire and Phil steal an unclaimed reservation at the restaurant by impersonating the reservationees, only to find themselves help to account for those folks’ attempt at blackmail. The best part of the whole movie is when they are dragged out into the alley midmeal by evil henchmen. Claire, thinking they’re just in trouble for the reservation hijinx, takes her bowl of expensive and fabulous rissotto with her. When one of the thugs knocks it out of her hand, she cries, “Great, now I’m going to have to pick that rissotto up of the ground to eat it!” Ha!

Should I get into the plot thickeners? I should not get into those, for those are dumb. They go to a spooky boathouse in Central Park, they break into a realty firm, they steal a car and crash it into a cab that gets stuck on the grill, they are forced to pose as strippers…blah blah blah. It’s all highly unlikely yet utterly predictable, and hard to even care–obviously, for such likeable people, things are going to work out just fine.

But they are so nice, so charming and funny and self-effacing, so clearly much smarter than whoever wrote the script…it’s a pleasure to watch these two work. Apparently, bits of the show were improvised, and it’s pretty easy to tell which ones–the ones with funny voices, assumed characters, a measure of confidence completely out of keeping with the domestic schlubs these two are supposed to be.

On their dates, Claire and Phil play a game where they spy on people in the restaurant and try to guess what their life stories are. These stories are fairly funny, and supposed to convey, I suppose, Claire and Phil’s lifelong committment and intimacy. But that doesn’t work–Fey and Carrell don’t have that sort of chemistry (they don’t kiss until the very end of the movie, and that one is totally a joke). They do *have* chemistry, but it’s that of two professional comics who respect each other and are happy to riff off each others’ one-liners. The restaurant brain-storming sessions are funny because they’re the actors trying to top each other.

Who is supposed to be the target market for this movie? I’m worried it’s actually me–30somethings who want to cling to the delusion that, just because we haven’t bought minivans yet, we are still somehow cool. No, wait, maybe it’s 30somethings who want to be convinced that even thought they *have* bought minivans, they are still cool enough to solve crimes.

Well, it doesn’t matter, because once you are in your 30s, you aren’t cool unless you own a bomber jet, so we can all give it up to the next generation: my students who went to see *Kickass*. I almost went to see it too, but I heard the violence was gratuitous so I didn’t. Uncool!

But I was pretty excited to hear Tina Fey’s latest slang term for vagina. That counts as immature, right? Anyway, I was not disappointed.

RR

May 1st, 2010

Workshop #9: Empathy

Workshop #9 was about many things, in truth, and the largest part of the class was given over the peer editing. This actually went better than usual, because I gave them detailed questionnaires to fill out about the stories–no matter how many times I told them “Really great!” was not a constructive comment, they were insisting on using it before. In fact, although none of the questions I asked on the sheet could grammatically be answered with “Really great!” some of them persisted in putting it anyway, in response to things like “What part of the story did you like best?” and “What parts did you find confusing?”

Anyway, it went well (I made them erase all the “Really greats!”s that I saw) and I think a lot of the kids got a lot out of it. But maybe you can tell from the above that I’m having a bit of a tough time this semester, and I don’t at all think the whippersnappers are at fault. I think they don’t want to write stories, most of’em, and heaven help us, that is a defensible position.

So part of Thursday’s class was spent brainstorming how story-writing works as a transferable skill–how learning to write a short story full of characters and problems and settings and emotions–could help them in a job that would (I don’t know why I didn’t guess this would be a high priority in a low-income area) pay them a living wage.

It is the luxury of the middle-class to go to school hoping to expand one’s mind and interests and range of friends and readings. Kids in precarious financial situations want the value-add, the curriculum correlation, the job skill in their lessons, because the need to get that damn job looms large. And they don’t necessarily see the use in learning to write fiction. In fact, one of my students actually announced this in class–a low point for me.

I like to write stories because I like to write stories–full stop. It’s fun for me, and every now and then I get a little bit of attention or praise or money for doing it, and that’s enough for me. But I actually think writing helps me in every other facet of my life, too, and I was eager to tell them that–I thought they might really not know.

It seemed, though, as soon as I asked the question, that everyone *did* know how stories could help them. They brainstormed the following list:

teacher
editor
journalist
police officer (every class mentioned this one)
doctor
lawyer
social worker

They also put secretary, which I didn’t get, but whatever–it’s a really good list.

They were a bit weaker when I asked “Why do these people need to know how to tell a story?” The three are obvious (how is a teacher or an editor going to recognize good work if she/he can’t create good work, and journos do pretty much the same thing as fictos, only with the truth). What else? I asked. “They gotta write reports,” was the answer.

Absolutely, of course–being able to write a coherent narrative of events or issues, not a list or a sketch, is so important in many roles, persuasive or otherwise.

But I think one of the reasons that so many of the jobs listed are so-called “caring” professions–because it if you are going to work with people, you need to be able to make a good solid leap towards understanding other people’s points of view. What use is a doctor who cannot guess how a patient is feeling when in pain and be sensitive, or how someone will react to bad news. How can a social worker help kids or families in trouble if she or he can’t imagine what they are going through?

I think too much emphasis on imaginary people could be a problem, sure, but too little attempt to imagine how it feels to be someone not-me, to get out of my own upbringing and situation and likes and dislikes and education and tolerances, can make it really hard to relate to anyone. Empathy helps life go on, and in many many jobs, a lack of it means you can’t do you work.

Obviously, I could stand to improve this facility even more–to have known earlier in the semester that the kids wouldn’t automatically see the links and extensions from my lessons, that I would have to *tell* them that I wasn’t trying to train them to be writers but rather to train them to be people who could see a story from any angle, and find a story anywhere.

Someone complimented me recently on a story recently, and I said I greatly appreciated the compliment (I did!) because the piece had been very very hard to work on. He said of course, because it was so technically complex.

I was startled for a moment–I had meant that the emotions and events in the story were hard to deal with, and was about to say so, when I realized that we meant the same thing. There is only one way to express emotions, or anything else, in writing, and that is with words on a page, rhetorical devices, pacing and vocabulary, foreshadowing and description, all the skills I’ve been trying to teach the youngins. The story’s emotion doesn’t exist separate from my ability to tell it–just like so much of what doctors and teachers and advertisers tell us exists only in their words. So we’d better make it good.

I am really going to miss my smarty-pants students, though I doubt they’ll miss me. A kid I like, who has been really alienated lately, was staring at the wall when I described how the last class would be organized. I could have sworn he wasn’t listening at all, but when I asked if there were questions, he raised his hand and asked, “Did you say *cookies*?” I said yes, I plan to bake cookies for the last class, and he grinned.

I was pleased, not only because he’d was pleased, but because if he’d caught the word “cookies” buried in all that other stuff, he might have actually *heard* some of the other stuff. But I don’t know–in truth, I have no idea what he was thinking.

RR

April 30th, 2010

Good/bad

Fred just reminded me of our every-five-years-or-so project, 1000 Things We Like (I guess since we’ve done it twice now, it’s thus far 2000 Things We Like and Counting). If you want in on the action, meet me back here in 2012, but in the meantime, this list reflects that today is a fairly well-balanced day, but I wish it were more 1000 Thingsy:

Good: Kashi Raspberry Chocolate Granola Bars

Bad: Realizing the fridge you’ve been storing your lunch in does not work, and is basically a well-sealed cupboard.

Good: Catsitting, and ensuing cheerfully one-sided conversations about weather, snacks, and people who are jerks.

Bad: Looking down during yoga class and realizing your black pants are covered in white kitty fur.

Good: Nice weather.

Bad: Short attention span.

Good: Gorgeous fountain pen in the mail.

Bad: Attempting to listen to instructions on how to fill fountain pen over the phone, shortly followed by realization that one is soon to be covered in ink and/or very embarrassed at a high-end stationers.

Good: K’s birthday.

Bad: K far away in England, unavailable for celebration/cake/hug. In fact, all of the most ardent supports of 1000 Things are unavailable for hugging or any close-at-hand celebrations.

Good: Literary Salon at the glammy-glam Spoke club on Tuesday night.

Bad: Being too old to go out during the week without being sad the next morning.

Good: The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams

Bad: Adams still dead.

Good: When I get home, cat will be there.

Bad: Now worry constantly when I am out that cat will eat plants and get sick.

Good: Internet for random useless but friendly and entertaining yammer.

Bad: Useless URLs.

Good: Well, it’d be better with a “b”, in my opinion…

RR

April 28th, 2010

Insane conversation in my hallway just now

From beyond my apartment door: incessant meowing

April 27th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *Killarnoe* by Sonnet L’Abbé

I knew I wanted to read something by Sonnet L’Abbé because I’ve seen her do a few readings over the last year or so and they were amazing. I totally believe that the best way to sell a book is to have the person who likes it most (usually the author, one would imagine) read a little bit of it to you. A few distainful readers notwithstanding, this would be the ideal selling technique if only more people went to readings. I am one who does, and thus buy a lot of books, though in truth *Killarnoe* was a gift (a requested one!)

*Anyway*, I loved L’Abbé’s readings , and I was pretty sure I would love the poems on paper too. I was right. Killarnoe is a book rich in play, in sex, in sound, in self-deprecation, in jokes and juxtopositions and alliterations and *rhymes* (the rarer it gets, the more I like it). It is joyful, thought-provoking reading.

The poems I heard at the readings were, I think, largely from the second section in the book, “Instrumental.” Each is a meditation or exploration of a sound, which gives the poems titles like the thoughtful “Ah”, catchy “I” or the sexy “Ungh.” These pieces are full of life, though I suspect highly theorized at their base. Breaking language down to sound memes (AMT, am I using that word right?) is not a simple task, but the poet manages a light touch nonetheless: “noteworthy / the pure ooh / of boo /of moo // the poor ooh / of few / of zoo.”

I was surprised to find I didn’t much like a section of political poems called “Z: Ghazals for Zahra Kazemi.” In a reading, I had been quite astounded by the weird sad fear and humour of “My Osama bin Laden T-shirt” (which appears in the book in the section after Z). Upon rereading, that piece held up, but the other topical stuff left me cold.

One reason could be is that ghazals are a highly complex, very structured form with which I’m not really familiar. There’s a lot of repetition (a L’Abbé trademark, I’m told) and not much room for narrative. To put it more bluntly, I didn’t understand these. Then I found the notes in the back of the book and I *did* understand–at least who Zahra Kazemi is, and some of the other people mentioned in the work–but I still didn’t really “get” the poems. I couldn’t go inside them–they required me to bring with me a certain amount of info, or at least insight, that I don’t have.

That’s ok–some poetry is always going to shoot over someone’s head, and writing for the rather large subset of the population that reads th newspaper is not a crazy idea. Most of L’abbé’s work is so multilayered, so open and accessible that though I nearly always suspected there was more to it than I had understood, there was plenty for me to savour.

Like a poem towards the end of the book, “Third Breast,” which was decidedly creepy and bizarre and I really like it. But I have the strong impression there it obliquely references a tri-breasted creature somewhere in mythology that I’m forgetting about…do you know? I’m sure L’Abbé knows, and I don’t, but it doesn’t matter. I will think about that poem for a long time anyway, which really, is the point.

I once had a wonderful English prof–this might have even been in high school–who drew a diagram about layers of meaning. Literal, metaphor, allusion, symbol, allegory, etc. Then s/he (I actually have no idea who this was, sorry) said that a story poem that was only surface would be pretty simple and dull, but that work that only existed on the deeper levels would also be dreadful, because the reader would have no point of entry or reference, no simple enjoyment or identification before the heavier work began.

I think about this when I read a book like *Killarnoe*, which operates on so many levels and seems open to having the reader on any or all of them, or wherever you would like to go.

RR

April 26th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews 4lbs of strawberries for $5 at Metro

I consider a good price for a one-pound (454 gram) clamshell of California strawberries to be $2.99–higher in the dead of winter. So when I saw two 907 gram clamshells for $5 at Metro, I was awed (I believe you could also replace one of the boxes with a honeydew melon, but I don’t own knives sharp enough to cut honeydew rind, so I stayed away from that).

My grocery-shopping escort declined a box, claiming he could not eat 2 pounds of strawberries before they went off. I scoffed at this, but quailed at the prospect of 4 pounds, so I just got the one. As it turned out, they still charged me the sale price even though I didn’t buy the sale amount (this is one of Metro’s usual, and nicer, policies)–so my 907 grams cost $2.50. Score!

Unlike much sale-priced produce, my berries aren’t underripe. They are nice and dark and, for imported berries, fairly soft. That’s still not *very* soft–Cali berries always have a bizarro crunch factor that is completely absent in lovely delicate local berries. But the local berries won’t be ready for, minimum, another month, and one of the stranger aspects of globalization is the taste it creates for out-of-season fruits. I want berries *always*, not just the six weeks you can pick them in southern Ontario. So Cali berries it is.

These are, I think, the best of their kind I’ve seen. They are nice and sweet (most of them, anyway) and very few off berries (just one in the box so far, and even that was likely edible). I am very impressed. And what’s more, it was not my box–I looked at the others stacked up and the Yonge & College Metro (can’t vouch for any others) and they looked uniformly dark red and healthy. Yum.

Running into this sale was fortitous for a Sunday when I skipped lunch in favour of a poetry vending machine launch and wound up eating a giant burrito at 4pm, because a big fistful of berries plus cereal made a really great supper around 8 that evening. Life is good…but I can’t wait for Ontario berries.

RR

April 25th, 2010

The Toronto Poetry Vendors

This is Toronto poet, and one of the Toronto Poetry Vendosr, Carey Toane (the other is Elisabeth de Mariaffi), giving me a sneak peak inside the city’s first (that I know of) poetry vending machine, now installed and activated inside This Ain’t the Rosedale Library.

Slip in a twoonie (wow, I never write that word–is that how you spell it?) and you’ll get a tiny brightly coloured broadside featuring a poem. The Toronto Poetry Vendors offer poems by 10 Toronto poets–here’s the gang, if you are curious:

Kevin Connolly
Dani Couture
Elisabeth de Mariaffi
Andrew Faulkner
Jacob McArthur Mooney
Stuart Ross
Jenny Sampirisi
Meaghan Strimas
Carey Toane
Paul Vermeersch

April 24th, 2010

On Nostalgia and Homogeniety

AMT wrote a wistful post on nostalgia, which fit in perfectly with the current theme of my days lately, which is trying to remember what it feels like to be a teenager.

I keep thinking I do–all eager and nervous and twitchy and stuff–and then I realize that’s me now. It is so hard to recall how you felt/acted/thought back when you were a different person, particularly if you don’t think that person was all that different than your present day self.

But we are–I am pretty sure, though hazy, on this: people change more than they realize, and the parts of themselves they forget tend to be the ones that differ the most from the present day. This impression comes from having talked to a wide variety of people over the years, none of whom can recall being on top in high school. Everyone was teased, persecuted, trod upon, lonely and alone. I have rarely met anyone who says they were more or less fine in high school, and never to having been the sort of jerk that is more than fine and makes others feel bad about it–or wings French fries at their heads. Apparently, that’s the sort of thing you rinse out of your consciousness when you hit your 20s.

So I’m going to come right and make this bold pronouncement, nearly damning for a writer: I was ok with high school. It was not the best 5 years of my life, but I had some fun, some good friends, some good teachers, learned some stuff. I vaguely recall being teased in grade 9 for wearing a ballet top I bought at the Bay (I still have it) and I certainly never got invited to the coolest parties, but…so? It would’ve been weird if kids I didn’t know invited me to their parties, and anyway, I lived way out in the country and my dad would never have driven me. I hung around with folks I liked, ate lunch with them in the hall by the auto shops, edited the yearbook, and was left largely alone by everyone else.

I seriously worry this makes me a less interesting person to some people, which in itself is such a high school thought.

I am trying to get these memories back because I want to be able to “get” what is going on with my students. One of the hardest things to remember is conformity. It has been a very long time since I worried seriously about the ways I deviate from the status quo. I am not much of a rebel–I think I’m naturally a lot like the status quo–but not entirely, and who cares?

One of the great perks of one’s twenties as that there are so many different things to do and ways to live that it’s very hard to even *find* a standard to try to conform to. I know people who stayed in school for a decade straight after graduating high school, people who found jobs first and went to school when they could afford it, who dropped out immediately and those who never studied formally again after high school grad. I know people who married immediately after high school, after college, after travelling through Europe, after 6 or 10 or 2 years of dating, or barely any time at all. I know people who are politically opposed to marriage, who were fervently delighted when Canada legalized same-sex marriage, and those for whom the whole institution seems irrelevant. Friends my own age have kids in school, kids in diapers, kids in utero, cats, dogs, houseplants and (only one) guinea pig. People are cheerfully devoted to their jobs, wrathfully alienated from their jobs, climbing the corporate ladder, unemployed, underemployed, fascinated by their work or terrified of it. I know homeowners, couchsurfers (ok, we’re getting a little old for that), rooming-housers, apartment dwellers, parental-home dwellers, and perpetual travellers. I know people who think of poverty as only one car, and people who think of wealth as ordering dessert.

How am I supposed to conform to that? I can’t, so I don’t worry about it (and feel happy I have such interesting friends). What makes conformity an issue in high school, I think, is that by nature of the age you have a certain amount of it. Almost everyone lives with their parents, has to be at school at a certain time, takes basically the same classes, and, due to how neighbourhoods tend to work, has basically the same amount of money. They are limited in who they meet beyond their families and classmates, and exposed to a tonne of marketing about music, movies, and fashion, not to mention fastfood, cosmetics, etc.

Even when I was a weird kid, I had basically the same sort of shoes as everyone else–not exactly, and believe me everyone knew it, but I did in fact like a lot of what everyone else liked. There was not much else available to like–not that I knew of, anyway–and those Birkenstocky sandals *were* very nice.

It is actually not that hard to recall that perfectly natural assimilatory instinct–I want clothes I see people wearing on the bus all the time. But it is harder to transer that into the classroom, where kids are reluctant to raise their hands, share their ideas, read their work, or even admit to liking something, if they do not already have pre-approval from their peers. In some ways, me being really impressed with a particular student’s work is no joy for them, because it singles them out. There’s nothing more depressing than realizing that your too-loud compliment is being met with a glare, and you might not be seeing any more of this student’s so-good work. Argh.

This does seem to fade with the older kids–they’re happier to talk about what makes them/their work unique. They’re closer to their twenties, and the point in your life where it is not only acceptable, but desirable (positively ravenously so, at certain university parties) to be a touch odd.

Another weird part of my nostalgia is wondering if the decade without a status quo is coming to an end. I wonder because this nostalgic thinking led me check the Facebook profiles of a bunch of people I knew in high school (oh, what did we do with our creepy stalker tendencies before Facebook?) It’s actually really hard to tell what people are up to with the standard privacy settings, but two things I can tell you are popular are getting married and having babies–almost everyone’s profile picture was a wedding shot/ultrasound/baby pic. Intense.

The difference between grown-upitude and high school, of course, is that people care less what others do–both because they are more tolerant and openminded, and because they don’t have a lot of time to invest in writing a mean little song about some other adult’s lack of real estate savvy or whatever. But I’m trying to experiment with feeling a little bad about the ways I’m weird anyway–I thought it might bring me closer to my students.

April 20th, 2010

Linkages

I am mainly recovered from last week’s slump, and have various good things to suggest, report, and share:

–If you missed Sunday afternoon’s lovely Draft Reading Series 5.2 Salon des Refuses(you poor thing), you can recapture some of the magic by reading Mark’s essay on rejection (from the Draft magazine) or looking at AJ’s pictures.

–If you are still in hot pursuit of poetic pleasures to celebrate Poetry Month, why not go see the Toronto Poetry Vendors launch their big bright green poetry machine (I have no idea if it’s actually green, but it’s called Spearmint…), this Sunday at This Ain’t the Rosedale Library.

–Another poetic option would be to read my one and only published poem, originally from echolocation, now reposted on Pickle Me This. I am pretty proud that Kerry considered this piece–called “Dead Boyfriend Disco”–worthy of inclusion in her Poetic April. I write perhaps three poems a year, mainly lame ones, so I’m pretty proud that DBD exists, period. Warning: it’s really long, probably because I wanted it to be a story.

And yes, I am still reading tomorrow evening, 7pm, at the Free Times Cafe with fine folks like Adrienne Gruber and Andrew Daley. I am looking forward to it because it’s going to be fun; you might be looking forward to it being over so I’ll stop mentioning it every day!

RR

April 19th, 2010

Workshop #7: Grammar

Workshop #7 was actually mainly about Images and Imagist poems, as I think I mentioned somewhere earlier, but we actually covered lots of other ground. Although it is really outside of my purview as the creative-writing person, I snuck in a grammar lesson. I really really want them to stop smudging stellar work with dumb grammar mistakes. I also want to put my foot down with the kids who say they are not “good” at grammar.

I think so many of these rules are like learning the multiplication tables or the provincial capitals–either you had a good teacher in grade 3 who made you memorize them, or you didn’t… The teacher I’m working with certainly does give some excellent grammar lessons, but the kids seem to have a deficit of years. You can get by in conversation a lot of the time–maybe always, depending on what career you choose–just by listening to how others talk and emmulating them, without knowing most of the rules of grammar. But it is much much harder to get written grammar in this way, especially for kids who don’t read except one forced. Lovely as it is to get self-righteous and say that reading for pleasure is a gift and parents just have to show kids blah blah blah, it doesn’t always happen. This is also an issue for kids who grow in homes where English is not the first language. They might hear tonnes of very erudite conversation, read books and watch high-end tv (or they might not), but if it’s not in English, it’s not helping them with their grammar.

So schools don’t teach grammar (I guess I can’t generalize, but mine certainly didn’t and I don’t know anyone else who learned English grammar in a systematic manner–do you?), and kids don’t always have the opportunity to pick it up elsewhere, and I end up with bright, engaged, insightful students who write things like, “She weared her prettiest dress,” and were genuinely startled to find out the past tense of “to lie down” is “to lay down.”

I am into good grammar, but I’m not fanatical about it–I roll my eyes when the grocer advertises “fresh” fish, but c’mon, do I know how to fillet a pickerel? He has his knowledge base and I have mine, and as long as we can understand each other, I don’t see myself as being in the position to make further demands. Chefs can’t make me stop putting barbeque sauce on my salad, and personal trainers can’t stop me from over-emphasizing cardio in my workouts, and fashion designers can’t make me stop wearing those turquoise fishnets I bought for $3 and which don’t fit…we can’t all be experts in everything, and sometimes, we don’t even want to be.

I am in favour of good grammar the way I am in favour of good etiquette–not as an end in itself, or as a stick to beat people with, but as a means of facilitating clear communication and conveying respect to the reader/person you are speaking to. Setting the table neatly shows care for your dinner guest’s ease and pleasure of dining. Yes, he could probably have gone and found a fork in the kitchen, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and yes, you do know what I mean when I say “I teared it open”, but it’s just that much more confusing, difficult, and less fun.

In class last week, I told the kids, “No one ever won a Nobel Prize for grammar”: it’s just a tool to get your point across. But they really need to get the tool–it makes their (good) work so inaccessible when I have to puzzle over when it takes place because the tenses are inconsistent, or who did what because the pronouns don’t match. I told them also that grammar is *not* a smart/dumb issue–if you’ve had less exposure to it, you know less, and it’s annoying that you have to make up for that, but all they need to do is sit down and memorize this stuff. Unfortunately, if they don’t bother, they will *look* dumb–I hope it wasn’t inappropriate to use that phrase with my students. Grammatical errors, being mainly simple and easily avoided if you just memorize the rules, look like they are made by dumb people when, in fact, they are mainly made by lazy people.

And then we did a bunch of conjugations and they had to copy things down off the board and everything–it was way old school. I hope it helped. I really think that good grammar will make their lives a lot easier–on resumes and cover letters, on school papers, work emails–people respect good grammar, because reading it is a lot easier than reading garbled stuff, and clean writing conveys respect for the reader.

All that said, in my little heart, I love language rules and am always eager to learn a new one, and to discuss and debate their usefulness and implications. I could talk your ear off about transitive and intransitive verbs, a topic very few people know about and yet very few people get it wrong in everyday writings. I don’t get to be smug, despite my copyediting classes and fervent adherence to the Chicago Manual of Style–I make tonnes of sloppy mistakes on this blog (as you likely well know) and in many other scarier places. The trick is not to just know a lot of stuff about grammar, but to know enough grammar to make clear all the other stuff you know.

RR