Fourteen

Hello to the upwards of seven loyal Green Room readers. M. Peevie here, for my annual birthday update.

I will be fourteen (fourteen-going-on-twenty-four, according to my mom) on Saturday, and I have invited a bunch of friends to my basement birthday party. The Doctor and Albert Einstein will both be there (in their life-size flat cardboard forms). I am nervous but also happy about my friends coming over. Nervous-but-happy is my near-constant condition, although sometimes I am nervous and cranky, depending on how tired and/or hungry I am.

(BTW, I hate it when I'm annoyed or upset and my mom tells me to eat something or take a nap. Yes, I might be hungry, or I might be tired, or both--but I'm also still legitimately annoyed or upset.)

School is going OK this year, except for the fact that I have one teacher that constantly misuses the English language. On the first day she used the non-word irregardless, and I instantly hated her. My mom has since informed me that irregardless may not be acceptable in Standard English usage, but it is, linguistically, a word. I do not care. It's ignorant. Don't judge me for being judgy.

I have another teacher who manages to make one of my favorite subjects boring. I love math. I read, or tried to read, a book awhile ago called Five Equations that Changed the World. It was really hard for me to read, because I was trying to understand it when I was only ten or eleven--but it presents math in a human context, which makes it more interesting. My teacher, on the other hand, presents math in a deadly dull context, and it's not acceptable.

I joined book club, writing club, and psychology club this year, which pretty much represents the things I love the most. Oh, and math team. Maybe I should start my own blog and write about these things. But who has time, what with Instagram (@MPeevie) and Pinterest, and all of my fangirl commitments.(I still fangirl the same fandoms as last year, but I've added a couple: Homestuck and Welcome to Night Vale.)

Probably the hardest part of my birthday this year is that I don't know how to think about being fourteen since my brother Aidan was fourteen when he died. How can I be the same age as my older brother? Also: I miss him a lot.

I almost forgot to mention that I started taking piano lessons. This is another source of great anxiety to me. I can never seem to practice enough, and everyone is always screaming at me to practice more and play perfectly! JK, no one ever says that. But I still feel nervous about it. I'm learning the Muse song Exogenesis (Part 3)--actually, I'm pretty much done learning it. It's pretty cool if I do say so myself.

Until next year, Internet (or until I start my own blog)...M. Peevie, out.


P.S.: I startted writing this before my birthday, but didn't get it posted. So my birthday was a few days ago, and my party was fun and BONUS: I got lots of presents from my family and friends. I love presents. 

Because my mom is reading this is I will say that my favorite present was this pair of socks.

Hashtag FFWgr, Part Two: The Reading List

In case you missed part one, you can read it here.

I promised to put together a reading list based upon the books and authors I heard cited at the Festival of Faith and Writing 2014. I've organized the list list into four categories: books about writing, works of fiction, books about faith, other non-fiction, and poetry and poets.  The list that follows is only partially annotated because there were SERIOUSLY a LOT of books and authors mentioned. I got tired of annotating and linking. Sorry.

Books about writing

Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction
--This is a college textbook. Interestingly, Amazon only offers an option to rent the book for a semester; it's not available for purchase new. You can buy a used copy on Amazon for $43.98, or on EBay for $52.89.

Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change; A Grammar of Motives.
--the latter work offers the dramatistic pentad, a model for analyzing narratives to understand human motivations and predict behavior. The five rhetorical elements include act, scene, agent, agency (or method or means), and purpose (or motive). 

A]ny complete statement about motives will offer some kind of answer to these five questions: what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose)." -Kenneth Burke

Annie Dillard*
--Mr. Peevie presciently gave me The Writing Life for Christmas, so I will be starting there.

Sol Stein, On Writing
Just reading the description of On Writing from Stein's own website makes me want to drop everything and read it, and while I'm reading it, start revising my novel-in-progress.

Works of fiction

Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman
--I think I need to read more Margaret Atwood.

Raymond Carver*, Cathedral Stories,*, especially the short story A Small Good Thing; What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
--Carver's name was invoked at least three times during FFW.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
--I'm embarrassed that I have not read this yet, and I just downloaded it to my Kindle for zero dollars and zero cents.

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
--If it took Harold Bloom three times to make it all the way through Blood Meridian, I don't hold much hope for my own ability to do so any time in the next century. But it's on the list anyway, because Bloom says McCarthy "has attained genius with that book."

Flannery O'Connor*, the short stories Good Country People and Revelation
--I have the complete short stories downloaded to my Kindle and ready for my summer beach reading; and I just read Good Country People for free here. Read Revelation for free here.

William Faulkner, Barn Burning, A Rose for Emily
Read Barn Burning for free here. Read A Rose for Emily for free here.

Ernest Hemingway, The Short Happy Life of Frances Macomber

Khaleid Hosseini, The Mountains Echoed

Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
--Here's a switch: instead of reading it, listen to it!

Barbara Kingsolver

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Guy de Maupassant, The Necklace
--You probably read this one in high school, but in case you want to refresh your memory, you can read it online here.

John Steinbeck, The Chrysanthemums

Joyce Carol Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

Mark Twain

Anne Tyler, The Beginner's Goodbye

Books about faith

Walter Brueggemann
--There are 68 publications listed on his Wikipedia page; where is a beginner to begin? That's not a rhetorical question, Internet.

George Herbert


--You can (sort of) read The Temple, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations online--but you may need a stronger prescription in your glasses when you're done. It might be worth it. 


Julian of Norwich
--Read the complete Revelations of Divine Love online here, as well as excerpts from the Revelations.

Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism
--From the Amazon book description: Turner "argues that the distinctiveness and contemporary relevance of medieval mysticism lies precisely in its rejection of 'mystical experience,' and locates the mystical firmly within the grasp of the ordinary and the everyday." A quick look tells me I'll need to read it with my dictionary at hand.



Karth Barth

Frederic Buechner

Andrew Krivak, A Long Retreat

C. S. Lewis*, The Screwtape Letters

Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life

Walker Percy*, The Second Coming

Eugene Peterson

Jan Richardson

Teresa of Avila

Other non-fiction

Henry David Thoreau
--I read Thoreau's essay The Last Days of John Brown because FFW speaker James McBride's new book, National Book Award Winner The Good Lord Bird tells John Brown's story from a brand-new perspective. I was delighted to see Thoreau refer to his neighbors as pachydermatous--which he used in reference to the thickness of their heads, not their skin. Awesome.

Mary Karr, Lit, The Liar's Club
--Stephen King wrote this about Mary Karr's writing: "I was stunned by Mary Karr's memoir, The Liar's Club. Not just by its ferocity, its beauty, and by her delightful grasp of the vernacular, but by its totality--she is a woman who remembers everything about her early years."

Verlyn Klinkenborg, The Rural Life
--Interesting. The Rural Life is a weekly column in the New York Times about life on a farm and boots getting stuck in mud and stuff. Some people think it's a little pretentious and condescending.

Michael Perry

Poetry and Poets

Maya Angelou

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Mary Oliver

Ron Padgett, Center of Gravity 

Lucy Shaw, The Crime of Living Cautiously

...

So now we have a reading list for the next two years--until FFW 2016 gives us another one.

Which of these books and authors have you already read? Which are you going to look for the next time you head to Myopic? (Shout out to M. Peevie--that's her favorite bookstore.)

I'm starting with Flannery O'Connor.

Hashtag FFWgr

Ninety-nine percent of you won't know what that title means--which is sort of the epitome of bad communication. Nonetheless, I'm starting there, because I ended there--at #FFWgr. 

#FFWgr, the Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is a biannual conference of writers and readers of faith: about finding faith, leaving faith, and returning to faith; about the connection between faith and writing. I make my pilgrimage there to find inspiration and motivation. I'm completely positive (in the ironic sense of those words) that I will eventually be one of the speakers there, talking to the little people about getting up at four a.m. and sitting down in front of the computer and waiting for God to show up.

Actually--that was James McBride's line. My perspective will be more of a p.m. perspective, because mornings give me hives; and my topic will be Why I Keep Writing Even Though I've Never Been Published; And As A Matter of Fact, Why Would You Even Listen To Me?

I'm going to give you two kinds of #FFWgr candy: motivational and/or interesting quotes from some of the talks I went to; and a reading list. I kept notes as I listened, and wrote down the names of books and authors that the speakers mentioned. I may have missed a few, but I've still got a pretty good list.

So first, the quotes, in order of their appearance:

Daniel Taylor:

"Everyone should write their own apologetics--how do you tell this story of faith to yourself?" This is a riff, he said, on Milton's idea that everyone should write his own theology. I tried to confirm that Milton actually said or wrote something like this, but could not. Internet, could you do me a solid and let me know a) did Milton ever say/write anything like that and b) what's the source?

The topic of Taylor's talk was The Use of Story in Apologetics. He said, "stories defend faith by making it desirable, powerful, winsome. Stories don't just tell truth. Truth can be a sledgehammer. Stories can make faith not just reasonable and believable, but also attractive."

"Stories are convincing; they require us to change, and tell us how to do it."

"Stories don't prove anything, but stories prove everything that's important."

"Don't just tell anecdotes, tell stories. Anecdotes are reduced; they lack personal experience and emotion." I'd like to learn more about this distinction.

"Look for evidence of the divine in the mundane and even in the profane." 

John Suk talked about something called "perspective by incongruity," an idea of Kenneth Burke's which I didn't quite get but will add to my growing list of Things I Want to Know More About.

(Sigh. #FFWgr always leaves me with the existential exhaustion of realizing ever more clearly how much I don't know.)

From James McBride: 

"Most of what I do fails. Learn to fail. Fail--then forget it." I'm not sure I believe this. Maybe it's hyperbole? I would like to know, operationally, what that looks like.

"I wake up at 4 a.m. and just sit there waiting for God to come into the room." Many speakers at the conference mentioned the productivity of the early morning hours, which discourages me a tiny bit.

"Skepticism is good, but cynicism is a killer of dreams." Ooooh, this was good. (And by the way, how do you spell "ooo" that rhymes with "mood" rather than ooooh that rhymes with "road"? Because I was aiming for the oo in mood sound there, but it just didn't look right without the h.)

Shannon Huffman Polson: 

"Grief and loss are lonely, but they connect you to humanity." I think this is why suffering is such a useful tool for an artist, writer, musician. Dammit.

"I wanted to suffer, wanted the pain of grief--because it would keep me closer to those I had lost." This certainly resonated with me, even though I remember when I said it to a friend, she looked at me strangely. I saw other heads nodding--and I was glad to see that this counter-intuitive feeling of wanting to hold on to the pain of grief was not merely a glitch in my otherwise well-adjusted persona, but that it had universal resonance.

"If the grief ebbed, did it mean that the love and connection were not that great? There is a lot of guilt in grief." This, too; both the question and the statement.

Andrew Krivak:

"Take small acts--actions outside of the interior life of grief and loss--and write them into your story." This is actually a paraphrase, but I like the notion that small acts have great value. I think he was making a reference to the book Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity and Ingenuity Can Change the World. 

Peter Marty

Peter Marty (whose appearance reminded me of Dietrich Bonhoeffer):

"If you want to be a better writer, become a deeper person." I wish he had offered Seven Steps to Becoming a Deeper Person.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"We keep on outsourcing our brains--we know and remember less. We externalize our knowledge, our taste, our experience, and our faith. We reference and rely on the faith and experience of others. In Genesis, by chapter three they stop talking with God and start talking about God."

"Is it possible for some people to miss their lives in the way that they miss a plane?"

"Tell me what you love, and I can tell you what you believe." Oof.

"We identify our center through suffering." More on this, please.

Anne Lamott:

"Life and writing are very, very hard. I don't think we're here to figure things out."

"There is perfect healing, but people die anyway. Frankly, if I were God, I would have a completely different system."

"I think if there is a God, he probably looks a lot like Isaac Stern. Or Bette Midler."

"We were taught to stay one step ahead of the abyss. If the abyss opens up at your feet, go to Ikea. Get an area rug."

"It's OK to admit that you're crazy and damaged. All the better people are."

Hugh Cook offered practical advice about writing fiction:

"Your character must desperately want something; but something thwarts her. She must make specific, decisive actions."

"Use dialogue not for narration or description, but to show your characters."

"Reveal your character's age early on."

Brett Lott:

Start a story with what you know, and head into "what if"--what if this happened, or that?"

Suzanne Woods Fisher:

"Answer the call to write; keep the calling at the forefront of your vision all the time."

"Living for the opinions of others is seductive; don't do it. Remember who you are."

I have no quotes from James Vanden Bosch, but his presentation on corpus linguistics was one of my top three sessions. Who knew. I might even sign up for the eight-week MOOC in September.

Miroslav Volf:

"Atheists point to ways that religion and Christians have failed and malfunctioned."

"We must listen to the voices of our brothers and sisters from around the world to penetrate our own self-deception. We must listen to the wisdom of saints and critics."

"We are restless for God; we reach for the transcendent. The orientation of our selves to the Divine is the primary function of faith."

This next quote is from an audience member who might have been quoting someone else, but it struck me as worthy of inclusion: "Christianity has become so sentimental and shallow that we can't even produce good atheists anymore!" This was connected to the part of the interview in which Volf said something to the effect that he'd take Nietzsche over Dawkins any day.

"I don't bemoan the marginalization of the Christian faith. There are strengths in the margins. When Christians were in the center of power we were used, and the faith was abused. Like the band of twelve followers on the outskirts of Jerusalem, we can testify to the beauty of Jesus Christ from the margins."

Rachel Held Evans:

"Every challenge--the challenge of writer's block, distraction, discouragement, fear, lack of ideas--is solved by getting back to work. In writing, that work is paying attention, naming things, telling stories." 

"Remember that God is generous, and grace is scandalous. God has called us to this work. There is no scarcity principle at work in writing--there's plenty of work to do, plenty of stories to tell."

Now, I bet you can't wait until #FFWgr2016! I know I can't.

Stay tuned for Hashtag FFWgr, Part Two: Reading List.

What do Shakespeare and Obama Have in Common?

You'll be excited to learn, as I was, that next week we'll be celebrating National Grammar Day. In honor of this august holiday, I'd like to share a grammar story with you.

"A. Peevie," I said, "don't eat any more of this bacon. The rest is for me and M. Peevie."

"M. Peevie and I," said A. Peevie, wearing his Captain Grammar cape. I gave him a Look.

"What?" he said, with a sly grin. "I'm teaching you English."

The keenly observant among you will immediately note that technically, in terms of standard English grammar, my original construction was correct and A. Peevie's correction was wrong. The phrase "me and M. Peevie" constituted the object of the preposition "for." You wouldn't say "the rest is for I."

But more important, where is he getting the idea that clear, understandable spoken language requires correction? Not from me, I assure you. In fact, he gets quite the opposite from me. We take non-standard grammar and syntax examples and fondly turn them into family slogans, like "What did you said?"

I suspect the nefarious influence of a prescriptive English teacher at school has inculcated the noxious notion that correcting someone's grammar is acceptable and appropriate. I love excellent and precise written and spoken language as much or more as the next guy--but I'm not on board with untrained and unrestrained grammar policing.

The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (SPOGG) is the primary sponsor of National Grammar Day. The society's blog (yes, the SPOGG Blog) comments on celebrity grammar goofs, with recent bi-partisan criticism for both President Bush and Senator Obama; and the blog even nags celebs to use "proper English" in text messages and blogs.

Obama got nailed for using a "they" with a singular antecedent--the same construction that Shakespeare used more than once ("There's not a man I meet but doth salute me/As if I were their well-acquainted friend," in A Comedy of Errors). If it's good enough for Shakespeare, and if it occurs "in the carefully prepared published work of just about all major writers down the centuries" according to Language Log's Geoffrey Pullum, then why isn't it good enough for Grumpy Martha (SPOGG's prescriptive host) and the rest of the grouchy prescriptivists?

My favorite linguists over at Language Log Plaza mildly ridiculed National Grammar Day as potentially mean-spirited--but they did not resort to name-calling, as Grumpy Martha said they did in her reply. I'm in the linguist's camp on this one. I don't think we need more finger-pointing about language, especially when the operational definitions of "correct" and "proper" grammar are dynamic.

And we definitely don't need more correcting and finger-pointing from 10-year-old ill-informed language tyrants.

Freshman Composition 101: Redux

Hi. My name is E. Peevie, and I'm a (recovering) prescriptivist. I come from a long line of unapologetic linguistic prescriptivists. Just a few weeks ago my mom commented on the incorrect usage by a television personality of who versus whom. I suggested that according to common usage by native speakers, the distinction was no longer valid.

"So," said my tiny, white-haired momma with a tinge of hostility and possibly even a mote of self-righteous indignation, "Just because everybody does it, that makes it right?"

"Well, um, yes," I said, "in language it does."

"Hmph," said momma.

I know what she was thinking, and what she would have said if the conversation had continued. She would have asserted that of course common usage doesn't change the rules. She might have even compared it to moral relativism: Just because everybody now thinks __________(fill in the blank) is OK doesn't make it right.

I wonder what she'd think of this post in Language Log about the use of the "singular they" to refer to the next president of the United States. Geoffrey Pullum points out that this usage has occurred for the first time because this is "the first moment in history when there is a genuinely non-trivial amount of doubt about whether the next president will be male or female."

Actually, I know what she'd say. She'd be horrified, and insist that the correct pronoun would be the gender-neutral "he," or she'd grudgingly suggest that even the more politically correct "he or she" would be a more correct choice.

When I was an English major back in the dark ages, my grumpy department head, Dr. William Pixton, was a standard-bearer for standard English. His very own "Some Conventions of Standard Written English" was the required text for the composition classes I taught as a graduate teaching assistant. I made freshmen cry with my red pen bleeding all over their lame essays, filled with p-antes and p-agrees and s/v/a's. I drilled it into their thick Okie skulls that pronouns must have clear antecedents, and the antecedents must agree in number with the pronouns.

(I even edited my little brother's papers with the same hard-line approach, and to this day that high-achieving yet tender-hearted big-shot trembles at the mere mention of a p-ante. This post is dedicated to him.)

But I've switched teams. I believe, like GKP, that the singular "they" is here to stay. And I'm starting not to mind so much.

More importantly, isn't it brilliant how relevant and interesting grammar and linguistics are? I'll bet you had no idea.

Rumor and Innuendo

Some of my favorite blogs are linguistics and language related. I just happened onto another great one, called Mr. Verb.

One thing that Mr. Verb said in a recent post was that our society suffers from a "profound anti-intellectualism." I could not agree more. Things that regularly pass as science and fact are actually rumor, innuendo, superstition, and tradition. My most frequent personal anecdotes illustrating this point involve Diet Coke and linguistics.

Well-meaning friends (you know who you are!) frequently advise me not to drink so much DC because it's carcinogenic. I say, cite your source--but they prefer to stick to the hard science of I-just-know-it-ology.

Well, one of my favorite bloggers, minor celebrity cartoonist Scott Adams (a fellow Diet Coke guzzler) recently posted a link to a study that indicated that there is, in fact, no link between one DC ingredient--aspartame--and cancer. (I tried to find the link, but he's such a prolific blogger that I gave up after a short, feckless search through his archives.)

Mr. Peevie also sent me a link to the National Cancer Institute that supports the same conclusion.

And as far as the English is concerned, some of my family and friends assume that because I love words and language, I also enjoin the alleged rules of English grammar and usage, in particular those which are really only myths and/or wishful thinking. The problem is that many amateur word lovers (the operative word here being "amateur") are language bullies: they want language to be pristine and unchanging so that they can prescribe rules and contemn people who break them. It's a self-esteem thing.

But, as Mr. Verb's descriptive catchphrase indicates, "Language changes. Deal with it. Revel in it."

I am not a linguist, nor do I play one on TV. (There's a pitch for the networks: Chicago Five-Oh: A buttoned-down linguistics professor solves crimes during office hours with her red pen and a penchant for descriptive phonetics! Dun dun dun!) I try not to snark too much about pronunciations, usages, spellings, and syntaxes that fall outside of the E. Peevie Style Guide.

(That being said, there are certainly usages making their way into standard English that do tend to grate like a rake on pavement. But that's a blog post for another time.)

Here are some other language and linguistics-related blogs that I enjoy:

The Language Log
Language Hat
Tenser, said the Tensor

[Update: This post has been edited to incorporate the truly thrilling word-as-link techno-frizzle. (I don't get out much. And I don't even know how to talk about whatever it is that you call this stuff, being techno-impaired. But you know what I mean. And I am indebted to Roger and Mr. Peevie. Thanks, guys.]