Well, just like the next guy I enjoy a bit of praise, a modicum of flattery, a smattering of applause. So imagine my delight when an English Teacher from a district in one of our more plush, up-market suburbs begged me for a copy of one of my essays.
I was doubly delighted because, for one thing, her call finally proved that my audience was more just a figment of my imagination---Oh yeah, plus that man from the NRA who recently berated me for denigrating the sport of Rounders (think Baseball in the state it was in before you guys tried to claim that it was you who invented it rather than those usual culprits, the mediaeval English and you'll see why Britain's National Rounders Association can be a bit touchy); and for the other, the piece in question was From the Very Heart and Soul of... which probed the depths of Time and Truth that lie behind such memos, and one I am quite partial to myself.
I was, I admit, a bit surprised that she didn't ask for a recording of it but instead wanted it in hardcopy.
We arranged a time for her to come and collect her copy and I waited for her arrival with a certain amount of excitement. After our introductions and a bit of the old tea ceremony came my utter, shattering disappointment: she wanted to use my piece for one of her classes, to demonstrate to the students certain ... writing techniques. Writing techniques!
I was devastated: after all the trouble I had taken too. You see she had put us in exactly the same relationship as those two great and contemporary painters, Turner and Constable. The is told that some time in the early nineteenth century Constable was painting away merrily on Hampstead Heath (actually he was painting away in a quiet, surly fashion as you will see in a moment) when the sublime Turner---the world's greatest painter and the man who single-handedly made the entire Impressionist and Expressionist movements ho-hummish---came sauntering by. He paused for a moment in his walk, as people will when they see a painter, and stepped aside to observe what the younger man was doing, after a moment's pause the impressed Turner declared: "Sir that is inspiration!!" to which the unimpressed Constable replied "Sir, I had intended it to be painting."
And here we were at it again 200 or so years later "Sir that is writing!!", "Madam, I had intended it to be speaking." Oh dear I'm probably confusing you, you see there is a vast difference between spoken language and written language: it is a profound and probably unbridgeable gap (look at where people who can write to each other need not necessarily be able to talk to each other at all) but it is glossed over in our system of writing, causing all sorts of confusion and misdirected effort over things like trying to maintain similar grammars between spoken and written language. Now I go to great lengths to make my commentaries spoken pieces rather than written pieces which I later read:
You see under normal circumstances I actually start off with something which is actual speech, I mean that I actually dictate out loud to myself on my Mac and damn the neighbours (and then, occasionally, I develop it, and make it blossom in that most fluid medium the word processor). The word processor, indeed, makes it easy to use a lot of devices I have pinched from what we like to call oral literature, and from old works like Beowulf & the Iliad which are close to a spoken past. For example I use formulae (phrases which are generally the same each time they appear and which perform the same function, Oh, I dunnow ... announcing "I am about to change subject" or whatever), and repetition of important or new information, and all manner of other subtle, carefully thought out tricks to make my stuff like speech and not at all like literature. So you see, although I am most (or at least almost) flattered to find one of my Commentaries accepted as literature, I had rather hoped that it wouldn't be.
Actually I had hoped that she wanted it for a public speaking class.
Cheerio for now from Richard Howland-Bolton.
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