Editing, the Rant, a Question, and a Proposal

By working like a crazywoman and making myself unavailable to my bored daughter (Charlotte went off to a class on the Enlightenment at Duke and left Lulu alone and feckless) and a crank to my patient husband, I got the food memoir edited exactly on my deadline. When I sent it in, I immediately got back one of those automated email replies that my editor would be out of town until 9 July. I would have had, in other words, another week and a half, had I known.

I'm glad, though. It's done. I can—and need to—work on other things. And I like the work I did: Minus the 16,000 words I cut—and the resultant rearranging I had to do to cut so much—the book is a more successful narrative, as a whole, more integrally a book.

It seems to me that ought be a metaphor for something: that cutting about a tenth of the book's length improved it so much. Like cleaning house, I suppose. Or losing weight. Or weeding. All of which has been going on in my life of late. I haven't lost 10% of my weight yet, but I'm past halfway--thanks to my new habit of running (i.e. jogging) 3 miles every other day. And Kris has cleaned out the garage and the two studies. It is interesting to consider how invigorating loss can be.

In the editing process, I learned that I don't like diatribes and that I am given to them. It is something I can now be alert to, like clichés. It's funny to learn this now, so late in my teaching career. And also to learn it right after having read an interesting book—Lad Tobin's Reading Student Writing—in which the author recommends the "rant" as a legitimate form. I had been thinking I would assign a rant the next time I taught English 1. But then I read aloud a chapter from the food memoir to Lulu—she was sick, so she wanted me to read to her—and found myself getting bored not two paragraphs into it, even before Lulu said anything. Rants, I would argue, are never interesting. As essayist Rebecca Solnit writes in "Locked Horns," "Everyone's encountered bad divorces, noise-obsessed neighbors, monomaniacs who let a grievance take over their lives to the exclusion of everything else, a sort of psychological starvation." A rant is an indulgence in just this sort of monomania, resulting, I would argue, in not only psychological but intellectual starvation—i.e., boredom. One becomes, that is, a bore. And, now that I think of it, students of writing, if they have anything to say at all, don't have to be taught how to rant. Ranting comes naturally to the best of us. So I won't be teaching it.

Tobin's book is worth reading, though. It represents what he refers to as a hybrid of academic and personal writing on the subject of teaching writing—or, well, on one aspect of teaching writing: how to think about and value (but not evaluate, mind you) student writing. It's not a terrifically practical book on teaching writing. In fact, more than anthing else, it is a defense of the hybrid writing he practices. Such a defense is warranted in our field, perhaps, but he sounds defensive in making it, which is unfortunate. I've been getting away with a hybrid of academic writing and personal writing since I was an undergraduate and have been promoting it in the classroom for coming up on thirty years (shudder). I kind of wished, as I read, that he would just do it and get on with it, rather than expend so much effort and, well, ranting on how it's a worthwhile way of writing.

Anyway, currently in the garden: every sort of squash, cucumbers, green beans, peppers, and unripe tomatoes. Now to think about Jesus's parables.

(This post feels more like a typical blog than usual, to me: formless, solipsistic, wandering. I don't think I like it. Verzeiht!)

Oh. One last thing. Two matters of usage interested me in revising my book: One is the question of whether or not to capitalize the first word of a complete sentence that follows a colon (as here), and the other is whether or not the pronounced s of a possessive following an s should be included, as in "Jesus's parables." Both usages—which I was taught and which I, on occasion, also mention in class—seem to be in flux, at the moment. What are your thoughts? Although both rules are still found in usage manuals, Kris, a stickler for correct usage, disputes and never even heard of the sentence capitalization following a colon rule, and every source I find on apostrophe usage, even those that promote the phonologically determined rule I was taught, seems to make an exception for Jesus's. It's all esoteric, as my publisher will have its own rules that will be the final word, but it interests me nonetheless.

One last last thing. I'm about to read another Anita Brookner novel, The Next Big Thing, as soon as I can get it through special order at Barnes & Noble or through interlibrary loan. I also have Marilyn Robinson's Gilead on my bedside table and want to reread Housekeeping—one of my favorite books ever—soon. Anyone want to join me by reading concurrently and exchanging thoughts?