Why the Chicago Manual of Style rocks my casbah, episode 11

[bronze_ribbons]

From this month's Q&A:

Q. Are poets allowed poetic license to do practically anything with punctuation? I ask this in view of a poem by Emily Dickinson that seems to use the em dash in bewildering and inscrutable ways.

A. Yes, poets are pretty much allowed to do as they please. In my experience, they are sometimes even offended by editing, believing that their misspellings and inconsistencies are inspired, if not intentional. Of course, if poetry is idiosyncratic to the point of being annoying, nobody will want to buy it, so there’s some motivation for restraint in the first place.

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Inkberry also rules: Rachel posted Jack Gilbert's "A Brief for the Defense" at the end of the November newsletter, and I'm going to use it as the meditation poem for the service I'm leading later this month. (Now all I have left to do for it is to find a children's story -- any suggestions, y'all? the theme is "gratitude" -- and practice the hymns and write the sermon...)

The other highlights of the day included reuniting the dog with her stuffed septopus (it started out as a stuffed octopus, but...) and reading a provocative Sandy Kita essay, "From Shadow to Substance: Redefining Ukiyo-e" (in The Floating World of Ukiyo-e, Abrams, 2001) in which she exhorts her readers to "not fall into the old trap of trying to find one feature,one quality, one word that describes the essence of this art" and analyzes the distinctions between "ukiyo" as a common noun vs. its usage as a proper noun. I was also charmed by this bit:

...one term that has often been used for this feature of Ukiyo-e is realism. I have tried to avoid that term because the dictionary definition of realism in art is picturing things or people as they really are. I am not sure that we can ever know anyone as they really are, and maybe not things either.

* "this feature" = the artists' depictions of what they apparently saw before them (as opposed to parody and fantasy)

Comments

[kassrachel.livejournal.com]

Septopus! Hee.

And I do love that Jack Gilbert poem... :-)

[shaoliang.livejournal.com]

Hah! And now you know one of the reasons I detest Emily Dickinson.

I love CMS too. Heh.

[nigita.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link to the Gilbert poem in Inkberry.

I rifled through the kids' bookshelves in search of gratitude-themed books, and found that this does not surface much in our little library. Only one seemed to fit: The Giving Tree by Shel Siverstein.
Reading the Gilbert poem, though, I wonder whether you might be after a book where the theme is appreciation (such as realizing something's value through its loss, and usually, since these are books for kids, its recovery). I saw a few that might fit, depending on how you read them: Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth, Baum's The Wizard of Oz (now there's a truly bizarre member of an utterly oddball series, but my son loves them all), A Christmas Carol (:D), and many, many vignettes within Laura Ingalls Wilder's books.
Now, that brings a children's lit gratitude/epiphany moment: in Farmer Boy, the moment that young Almanzo realized that he had been spared the worst kind of whipping from his parents, to his amazement, because his bossy tattletale older sister whom he until that moment had despised, had covered up for him. Hm, quite a bit comes to mind, thinking about the Wilder books: how the Ingalls family would have lost everything to a prairie fire without the help of neighbors, how their town would have starved to death one winter except that two men from the town risked their lives to get grain, the relationships that result from "Pa" always sticking out his neck to help other folks...I can't wait until my little one is a bit older so I have an excuse to read those again...

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the suggestions, N! "Appreciation" is a good angle, although I'm fishing for more in the way of a picture book or anecdote (since it has to be short). I suspect an afternoon in my library's children's room will net me what I have in mind... ;-)

Though, come to think of it, the Sendak *is* a picture book (it's late and I'm dull). And given the theme of things deserved vs. given, Debi Gliori's No Matter What (one of my favorite of favorites) might do. Hmmmmm....

[nigita.livejournal.com]

Children's room? That's a great way to spend the afternoon. Have fun!

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

Actually, we are outrageously fortunate here in Nashville -- our main library has a children's wing. So, there's what I think of as the children's room, which has the books and carrels and what-all, but there's also a puppet theater (http://www.library.nashville.org/marionettes.htm) and reading area (and that's not counting the YA or A/V collections, which are on other floors).

As someone who grew up in a county with no public library, I'm still in awe of it all every time I visit.

Nice wing! *whistles*

[nigita.livejournal.com]

You shatter my prejudices about Nashville right and left. I am reflexively ungenerous in my thinking about anyplace "South." I know this stems from my ignorance (and my spotty slap-dash reading of American history; the history is ugly all around for folk like me, but particularly heinous in those parts). Oh, yeah, and from recent elections. I have it on my to-do someday list to bring my perceptions closer to reality.

I grew up in a tiny, small-town library (where my mother is still a librarian, so yes I mean in the tiny library, not in the small town), so you can imagine how much I love the children's section of most libraries. Seattle was recently endowed with a sparkler (http://www.spl.org/images/slideshow/NewCentralSlideshow.asp) of her own, which my boys and I love. Glad you're getting a chance to make for lost time in the children's section!

Re: Nice wing! *whistles*

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

*rueful smile* We do have our share of clods this side of the Mason-Dixon line; when I left for college, I'd honestly thought I'd never return. But I do love it here, in spite of its flaws -- there's been race- and religion-related ugliness in every city I've lived in, North and South, and the South has come a long way since the 1970s.

And the weather here truly can't be beat. Do come visit, when the time is right -- my guest room isn't family-sized, I'm sorry to say, but I'm a darn good cook and my liquor cabinet's respectable. ;-) (dichroic could tell you more about how Nashville (and I) actually come across to a non-Southern visitor -- she and her husband opted to spend a vacation here 3-4 years ago, and they seem to have escaped relatively untraumatized (save for my puppy's incessant toe-licking, mayhap). *grin*

[(Anonymous)]

If I ever make it to Nashville, I'll look you up. You're too kind! You're more than welcome to stay at our place if you're ever in Seattle. Our guest quarters are nicer than the rest of the house, thanks to frequent g-parental visits. Don't have a liquor cabinet, alas. Perhaps, when I am ready to grow up and get one, you could give me a few tips on where to start...

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

The first thing to learn is that, like a number of traditional southerners, I sometimes give things grander names than they deserve. In this instance, said "liquor cabinet" is actually three shelves of a bookcase and the left cupboard of our sideboard... *grin*