Uskglass and Sunlight

2011.01.24
126 Days Remaining

01. First off, happy belated birthday to my sister-in-law (from Saturday) and preemptive happy birthday to my brother-in-law Iunius (tomorrow). Anyway, I received an email from Selena yesterday asking how I have been, since it has been over a week since last I posted and I've been generally reticent, communication-wise. So, first things first: I'm alive.

02. Thursday last week I drove up to Providence to fill out and file the divorce paperwork using the ($66) transcript of the divorce hearing in December. I had to wait until I had money to pay the remaining $26, and that meant after my paycheck on the 15th, followed by MLK, Jr. Day, and appointments on campus. So I drove up and filled out the Findings of Fact and Settlement Terms dictated by the magistrate. I did this by hand, and went to turn it in. Then I discovered that the forms had to be signed by the magistrate who had presided, which was interesting since no one had mentioned that before, and he wasn't scheduled to be in that day. Then someone tracked him down (so very fortuitous) in the building. So he signed the papers, I was given my copies, and then the clerk said, "You know this isn't the final judgment, right?" I said, "No, I didn't." It turns out that I have to wait 3 more months, after which I can (I'm not making this up) fill out all of the same information on another form, get it signed by the magistrate, and then I'll be divorced. So I have one more trip to Providence after 21 April (I know now to call ahead and make sure this is on a day when the magistrate is present in the building), at which point my marriage will be finally ended.

03. After that process I mailed a copy of the interim form to my exing-wife, then went grocery shopping (Providence has three Whole Foods Markets) and then drove home in the falling darkness. I got home and emotionally curled up inside into a ball. Aside from the lack of any clear guidelines made available by the Family Court in Providence, one benefit that I might have had from doing this via a lawyer would have been being able to avoid the repeated personal trips to and from divorce court, which have each time left me feeling raw and scraped inside. And this is without any complicated property or custody settlements that needed negotiating. I think that, given the frequency of divorce in our society, we could really do a better job of organizing it and running the procedure, both for low-conflict divorces like mine and ones with more issues to settle.

04. So that was why I didn't really communicate much over the weekend. I felt shell-shocked, especially by the news that there is one more step to take before this is finally done. Our society really, really, wants people to be married and not to get divorced, as evidenced by the ease with which one can get married ($35 and ten minutes) versus the difficulty with which one can get divorced (over $300 in fees and 8 months).

05. Anyway, onto other topics. I recently downloaded to iTunes the CDs for an audiobook I picked up several months ago, Susanna Clarke's The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories. Clarke's wonderful novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is one of my favorite books, and the short stories in LoGA are equally elegant and, to me, captivating. This morning as I sat down to work through my inbox and do final tweaks on my syllabi (first day of classes is tomorrow), I played the final story, "John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner," which I have never actually read (the book collects previously published stories, with this final one being written for the collection), and was struck again by the loveliness of language well used (and full credit to the narrator/reader, Simon Prebble - Davina Porter narrates other stories in the audiobook). For any in the know, John Uskglass is the name of the character otherwise called the Raven King in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and this particular short story purports to be a retelling of a medieval story about said character. It is exceptionally well done, and at points made me laugh out loud as I listened to it.

06. I mention the aesthetic pleasures of reading (or, in this case, listening) in part because I recently saw a review of Stanley Fish's newest book on writing, How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One, wherein Fish argues that American prose has been somewhat handicapped by the preeminence of Strunk and White's Elements of Style and the fame of native authors like Hemingway (both the guidebook and the literary author preferred a type of prose that avoids ornament in favor of short, direct language and phrasing). I'm intrigued to read Fish's book, because apparently he argues not for abandoning Strunk & White, but for teaching them as one type of prose, to be mastered along with others. This intrigues me due to an ongoing thinking I've been doing about purported Ebonics, American dialects and idioms, and the grammar of some types of popular music (which can also influence things like spelling and punctuation). Although I am not a classicist in the technical sense (I read Greek and Latin poorly and god help me if I had to produce new work in either language with any rapidity), I have had to learn a fair amount about language, and have actually engaged in discussions (sometimes arguments) about whether there is such a thing as "proper" English against which any one person's individual speech (their idiolect) should be measured. I have come down increasingly against the formalist position that there is some sort of True English (or any other language) and instead see any one "language" as composed of the various idiolects of everyone who speaks it (thus languages can blend into each other at their margins and are only clearly marked off when two people become unable to converse fluently though they may be able to basically understand one another).

07. This has led me to think about the ways to teach language arts, writing, etc. in the classroom (as a former writing tutor and current teacher who works to improve my students' writing abilities, this is a big deal to me). I wonder whether teaching writing and style as dialects (how would one say "X" in formal business prose? In middle-class everyday speech? In a hip-hop song? My wonder is whether that might be a way to avoid the power conflicts that seem to come about with teaching kids that they should speak a specific way, and instead teach them how to do so in order that they could maneuver effectively in different social settings. I got thinking about this years ago when I was doing some research into how creolization works (cultures often work like languages in interesting ways, so I was doing this work while thinking about how two different cultures can influence one another and create something new between them). The example that struck me most forcefully was from British Guyana, where a single individual (interviewed for the article) switched between Creole, Queen's English, and American English with a great deal of facility in the midst of a single event (a wedding). To upper-class guests she spoke Queen's English, to the linguist American English, and to the guests who were misbehaving, she spoke Creole. Sidney Poitier's character alludes to a similar multi-dialectality in To Sir, With Love, where his character is from British Guyana but trained in the US and teaches in the UK. The character spoke very formal English without a British accent as he negotiated his place as a teacher in British society. I wonder if that sort of approach might make it clearer to students that they are not being asked to replace their speech, but to see language as a tool they can master and use on their own (and, I would hope, to enjoy observing how others use it as well, as I do when I read or hear Susanna Clarke's stories).

08. Belisarius commented a while ago that my blog-voice is very similar to my email-voice, and that they are both very similar to my speaking voice. On the other hand, there is very little profanity in my blog-voice, and far fewer digressions (one assumes because I'm not directly interacting with anyone to draw a new topic into the mix, and because I can structure these posts deliberately, though I usually just list topics). My students and I have discussed teachers' self-presentation and speaking styles; I'm very informal nowadays, though I was much more formal when I started. I don't know for sure why I don't seem to change my voice very much, I think it's a sign of comfort with my normal interlocutors (all of you); I'm very likely to be more polite and formal with strangers, though once I get excited I start talking normally again. Hrm.

09. It's sunny out. We had snow again on Friday, though I haven't had any call to go outside since then. I'm doing laundry this afternoon, though, and will need to go outside to the laundry room to do so. Thankfully the sidewalks are shoveled.

10. And that's about it.