Category: Culture

Winston-Salem Journal

I was surprised to read in this morning’s Winston-Salem Journal that the UNC School of the Arts is doing George Bernard Shaw’s play St. Joan. Those of you who are in this area might want to consider going.

As the director says, quoted by the Journal, “Nothing has changed since Joan’s time.” I have read this play a couple of times, but I have never seen it produced. I plan to post in the future on the story of Joan of Arc and why her story matters so much to us moderns.

And by the way, it seems the casting is going to be great. We don’t really know what Joan looked like, but based on references in the historical record and the genetics of the peasants in her part of France, it is safe to assume that she was short and dark-haired. She may not have been very pretty, because the many soldiers she was around seemed to have trouble leaving her alone. But obviously she radiated charisma.

A company named Fridge Fun in Santa Rosa, California, makes magnetic poetry kits for refrigerator doors. One such kit includes 240 words taken from Shakespeare. One arranges the magnetic words to make one’s own poems. I had one of these kits on my refrigerator door in San Francisco, and a friend had written a 15-line poem on the door. When I moved, I couldn’t bring myself to disassemble the poem, so I transferred the magnetic words one by one to a cookie sheet to preserve the poem. I finally got around to typing the poem into the computer.

Refrigerator poem

All errors lost in this world
Hath always love as a stage.
Thus such human sorrow protests
Wicked men who dream
About created women

What torture shall plague it self unto
Brave riddance whence I am damned
For playing love’s rotten pomp
Discretion will own me nothing:
Trouble never toileth too much mercy

Pray thine rose dost kill bad art
‘Tis mad the night’s flesh became
Alas ambition breaks when a new light is made
Fit and true in me
My most strained heart is good for thee.

— James Michael Gregg, San Francisco, 2005

Just for fun, here are the very few words left over from the kit that were not used in this poem: Part, Circumstance, It, Was, The, At, Neither, Philosopher, Nor, Borrower, Lend, Comedy, An, Home.

Reading up on the news this morning, as usual, I read that people by the millions spent much of the afternoon yesterday watching a balloon chase, thinking that a little boy was inside the balloon. Later they learned that there was really no drama at all, and that it might have been a hoax.

I wish that every American had a chance to participate in a sport that English majors take very seriously: Sitting around with other lovers of stories and discussing the question “What is the meaning of this story?”

The boy-in-the-balloon story was never much of a story. It’s even a boring story, and if I had been watching cable TV (I don’t have cable TV) I would have clicked right past it.

Orson Scott Card is one of the few people — or few writers, for that matter — who has a well developed theory of stories. Card believes that stories are a basic human need, that people are constantly hungry for stories. People are so hungry for stories, he believes, that we require stories every day, like food and water. But Card also recognizes that there are good stories and stories that are not so good. If people can’t get good stories, they will consume bad stories.

And so, as stories go, the boy-in-the-balloon story was a junk-food story, high in cable-TV calories but low in nutrition. It contained no meaning. It was pathos. It was merely pathetic.

Meaningless stories about pathos are very different from stories that contain elements of tragedy. Senseless loss of life happens every day. That is always sad, but it is not always tragic. Try as we may, we can’t find much meaning in senseless loss of life. If there is a tragic element (and therefore meaning) in, say, sudden loss of life in a car accident, a large part of the existential element is its very senselessness and meaninglessness. “That’s all? That’s it?” we might ask ourselves.

Some troublemaker in the back of the class pipes up with a question. “What about the senseless death of Princess Diana in a car accident? Did that have any meaning?” He has a smirk on his face as he asks the question, expecting to see his classmates get themselves into knots to try to argue that there was some kind of meaning in Princess Diana’s death.

“No,” says a boy in the front row. “There was no meaning. It was just that she was famous. And pretty.”

But a not-very-pretty girl in glasses, who has read lots of stories about princesses, speaks up. “Princess Diana’s death had pathetic elements, certainly. But it was a tragedy,” she says. “Because her life was a modern fairy tale. She showed millions of people that to be royal had nothing to do with the parents you happened to be born to. To be a princess is about who you are, or what you became. A true princess shines brighter than the dullard prince she married, brighter than the queen. Diana tried to make the world a better place. When she died, it was as though we knew her. She was the people’s princess. When she left us, we were more alone somehow. Her light was so bright that it helped us all to see. Without her, we are on our own now, like children in the woods. We have no princess anymore, unless we can find that princess inside our own selves.”

If you ask Orson Scott Card why a writer would kill off a character that the reader has fallen in love with, this is what he’d say. That in a good story, a beloved character dies so that the reader, missing that character and grieving for that character, will make that character a part of himself or herself. The reader will be changed.

Once upon a time, when I worked on a newspaper copy desk, we actually had serious discussions about where to play a particular story. “People will want to read it,” we might say, “But it’s pure pathos. It has no meaning.” And so we would bury the story.

I don’t think news people have discussions like that very much anymore. On television, and on the web, if it bleeds, it leads.

That’s why I don’t watch the news on television. It isn’t worth the time, because they have too many cameras and pathetic taste in stories.

Mountain Talk, N.C. State University

The Queen Family, N.C. State University

When I reflect on my long relationship with language, it seems odd to me that the schools in these parts never (or at least used to didn’t) actually tell children that they’ve grown up speaking a stigmatized dialect, and that if they want to enter the business, corporate, or professional worlds, they’ll have to learn to speak “standard English” as a second language. (You got tripped up by that “used to didn’t,” didn’t you? Just working in a bit of dialect…)

One could argue over whether the local dialect here in Stokes County is Southern or Appalachian. I would say that in the truly rural areas, the local dialect is Appalachian. Yes, I understand it perfectly, and I love to listen to it. I can still speak it, but I have to pause, think, and flip some sort of switch in my brain, because all my live language circuits have been rewired from years of speaking standard English.

Don’t doubt for a minute that Appalachian English is severely stigmatized. Once, having just told a young man from California in my department at the San Francisco Chronicle that I can speak fluent hillbilly, he said, of course, “Say something in hillbilly.” I thought for a moment, adjusted my mouth, and said something. The look of disgust on his face was genuine and involuntary, as though I’d just pulled a maggoty apple out of a bag.

Even here in North Carolina, Appalachian English is stigmatized. When I was at the Winston-Salem Journal, we had recently hired a young woman from Ashe County who was an experienced clerk and an ultra-fast typist. But she had never learned standard English, and behind her back people made fun of how she talked. This is all the more sad because anyone who can type fast has well-developed language aptitude.

Walt Wolfram, a linguist at N.C. State University, is one of the few people who have ever tried to do something about this stigma. Its human and economic costs are high.

I am no linguist, but I am doubtful that Appalachian English consists mainly of old speech patterns preserved from the British Isles or Ireland. I have traveled some in Scotland, England, Cornwall, Wales and Ireland, and I never heard anything that really reminded me of Appalachian English. The region, at least to my ear, that comes closest is Wales, where English is spoken with a kind of lilting rhythm and cadence, very pleasing to the ear, that sometimes reminds me of the rhythm of Appalachian English.