Suddenly I felt that kind of out-of-body anger fused with embarrassment and disbelief to be dizzying. I heard myself continuing: “No one even reads the books, and then, instead of just sitting here quietly, you all raise your hands and say some made up thing from Cliff Notes. Why are you even taking this class?” No one responded, so I kept talking. I was so excited and nervous and relieved to be saying all of this aloud that I worked to keep from shaking visibly. “Everyone’s in this class so you can get honors credit but you don’t even like to read.” I ended with what I considered to be the world’s greatest indictment: “Holden would hate all of you.”
Years later, when I was a high school English teacher myself, exhausted, behind on grading and college recommendations, just trying to keep chaos from breaking out on that awful half-day of school before Thanksgiving, I thought of Ms. Gottlieb. She had been young, kind, quiet, smart. I had really liked her, and although at the time I’d thought I was doing her a favor, calling out my classmates so she wouldn’t have to, I realized I’d likely ruined her lesson plan, and likely her day.
But often I feel I’m not the adviser they’re looking for. People want me to bang the grammar gavel and solemnly rule that “irregardless” is not a word, and that it’s wrong to say your team is “versing” another team, and that sports commentators who start sentences with “for mine” must be driven from our towns and cities. (There are lots of complaints about sports commentary.)
So really it’s a segment about language change. And I love language change! Thus, I disappoint the listeners. Change is the thing they revile.
The phenomenon of Einstein misquotation is largely driven by an all-too-human desire for mystification and for authority figures, epitomised by the two words ‘iconic’ and ‘genius’.
Lee’s most ambitious poems are made from the commonest verbal stock. I had a dream while I was preparing to write this review, inspired, no doubt, by Lee’s own artfully pregnable verbal surfaces, where dream and realism, the apple blossoms and the dozing father, coöperate. I was telling a friend about a poem I’d written in which daisies spoke and revealed their sadness to me. “Why do they talk that way?” my friend asked. “The flowers?” I replied. “The poets,” he answered. It’s an ancient question, and Lee’s poems, quarrying their insights from the oldest and deepest sources, pose and answer it anew.
“If a tree is starving, its neighbours will send it food,” observes Farouk, one of the characters in Donal Ryan’s wise and compassionate novel. “No one really knows how this can be, but it is. Nutrients will travel in the tunnel made of fungus from the roots of a healthy tree to its starving neighbour.” Through a series of interlinking monologues, From a Low and Quiet Sea explores the ways in which human beings, too, sustain one another through deep and sometimes hidden connections.