Saturday morning
15 April 2017

— The Devil’s Birthday

Good Morning All,

My little brother Norman doesn’t miss much. After I listed the Rebels beginning the Civil War by firing on Fort Sumter, during which Francis Scott Key composed his awful song, he sent this droll note:

Here's an excerpt from a quiz I once saw: 1 August: Art/Culture: Born in Frederick County, MD, in 1779, lawyer, poet, he was during the war of 1812 on a British ship to negotiate a prisoner exchange. The Brits wouldn’t let him off before they began to bomb Fort McHenry in Baltimore. At dawn, the U.S. flag still flying inspired him to write a poem about it: Defense of Fort McHenry. Some fellow set it to music. Hint: Distant cousin to great author.
A. Daniel Decatur Emmett B. Samuel A. Ward C. Stephen Foster D. Francis Scott Key
This may explain, Fred, why you did not get the connection between Fort Sumter and baseball games.  But it does not explain why no one else dropped me a line that included the word knucklehead.

The snippet about symbols I quoted yesterday was from 1001 English Delights, which was subtitled: Everything you didn’t realize you already knew about the English language and its literature. In hardback, it runs 210 pages, broken up into 42 brief reading assignments on various aspects of English. Each one ran four pages to be read Thursday night. My 10th graders could take a full page of notes and use them during the Friday quiz, which I made as bizarre as humanly possible.

 I worked on the book most nights from 2003 to 2006, in part because it gave me something to keep my mind occupied during those first years after Britta’s death, but also because it seemed a good way to help my international kids fill in the gaps in their language/literature skills without exhausting too much class time.

Anyway, here’s a bit more of the stuff on symbol:  Here's another example: Marsha loves Bill, but Bill dumps her. One day, Marsha is visiting Bill's sister Jane in Jane's apartment. She picks up a comb from Jane's dresser and is absently combing her hair. "Gee, this is a beautiful comb, Jane," she says. "Where'd you get it?"
      Jane answers, "Bill gave it to me."
      What does Marsha do next? Throws the comb down and jumps on it? Holds it to her heart? Snaps it in half? Systematically snaps off each tooth while wearing a crazy expression? Continues combing her hair?
Whatever she does, the comb, for a few mystical seconds, becomes Bill. And what she does with it will symbolically reveal how she feels about Bill. Not, maybe, in any definitive sense, since symbols are nothing if not ambiguous, but at least a suggestion of her feelings.

I probably stole the idea for the comb from this brief haiku by Taniguchi Buson:

The piercing chill I feel:

my dead wife’s comb, in our bedroom,

under my heel.

I happened to be alternately looking out our bedroom window and leafing through a book of poetry when that poem snuck up on me. I went into the living room and sat down in the big chair and did damn near nothing for the next hour other than to try to figure out how such sorrow and beauty could coexist in a bunch of squiggles on white paper.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron