Category: Writing

Last Friday I had the honor of once again being a judge for a citywide spelling bee, hosted at St. James Lutheran School. My competition was in the morning, consisting of fifth through eighth graders from the public schools in Chicago. We started out with 63 spellers and ended up with one winner who will head the the national bee in Washington in June. (The afternoon competition was among the private school students, who will also send a champeen (sp?) to Washington.)

This was probably my fourth time being a judge, and I absolutely love it. (I posted on it last year, if you’d like to read it. I put a lot of cool vocab words in it.) I may have to turn down the assignment in the future, b/c my hearing is just getting too screwy to be relied upon. Luckily I didn’t have to monitor the spelling, just give out the definitions, languages of origin, and sample sentences when asked. Also, it was pretty clear when a student spelled it wrong, usually a transposition or a false assumption that an “f” sound was spelled with an “f”.

What was astounding, however, was how many students spelled things RIGHT! In the first round, out of all 63, I think 4 kids went down. Next round, maybe 3. It was beginning to look like we’d be there all day. Still, it took us 3 hours to finally get a winner. The kids were so poised and so smart, my heart went out to every one of them. They were all great sports, too. While I saw some disappointed faces, there were no tears or anger or frustration when someone missed a word. They were happy to compete (and to have a half-day off school).

Some people argue that spelling bees are a waste of time (count on the Tribune’s Eric Zorn to go off on it this spring). Certainly, the ability to spell is not a measure of intelligence, more like a unique hard-wiring that some people have to a greater or lesser degree. But I think spelling bees are useful at least for the fact that the kids prepare for it and then need the poise and self-assurance to approach the Mike of Doom. And a love of words, how they’re built and what they mean should be something to encourage in this era of glyphs, emoticons and twitter shorthand.

And where else are you going to pronounce and define a word like pickelhaube? You know you want to. (Scroll down for a picture of one, after which you’ll slap your forehead and say, “THAT’S what that’s called?”)

Words from the bee to use in everyday life, for all us vocab fetishists:

Podsnappery: insular complacency and blinkered self-satisfaction. (from the behavior or outlook characteristic of Dickens’s Mr. Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend)

whilom: one-time; former

moiety: one of two (approximately) equal parts

psittacism: speech or writing that appears mechanical or repetitive in the manner of a parrot (from the Latin word psittaci, or parrots!)

And here it is, your moment of Pickelhaube:

I know it’s been a slow news week, but I’ve been impressed with how many column inches have been printed about J.D. Salinger shedding his mortal coil this week. It speaks to the devotion so many people have about his writing, with a little dash of human interest story about the talented artist forced to become a hermit because of the demands of the public.

If I might abuse the cliche, if we didn’t have J.D. Salinger, we’d have to invent him. (In fact, he was reinvented in Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe and the movie “Field of Dreams” in the character of Terence Mann.) He’s the archetype of a pure artist, disgusted by the commercial demands of the marketplace and the slavering adoration of the masses. Whether this is really true of Salinger, we want it to be true. I think that’s why he’s remembered so fondly by so many. In some ways, it’s a penance that readers are paying, a guilt-ridden offering for living in the crass and conniving world and not sacrificing themselves to change it. Because of the deep mark Holden Caulfield made on them in their impressionable youth, readers have been forced to feel a little like “phonies” themselves in their lives, by doing regular things like growing up, getting jobs and raising families. To some, every little compromise in adult life is a betrayal of Holden.

Ah, but as long as Salinger was still alive, living in seclusion and too pure to share his writing with the world, there was still a connection with the hero of The Catcher in the Rye. Someone out there was still fighting the good fight for honesty and integrity and all those good things. Art will triumph over commerce! The pure soul will live on!! This is exemplified well by the legend that he kept writing these past 40 years and kept all his manuscripts in a safe. There certainly are some crazies out there that would break into a person’s house for holy-grail-type manuscripts, but a safe? A walk-in kind like Scrooge McDuck’s, with piles of papers neatly arranged for each novel and short story? Were there alarms on it like Jack Benny’s?

Now that Salinger is dead, who will be the repository of all those adolescent aspirations? Bob Dylan? Sherwood Schwartz? I can’t think of any writer who would fill the bill. We’ll all be sad when Phillip Roth dies, but he won’t be as beloved, both because his prickly personality has resulted in difficult and thorny books, and because he lacked the good sense to go into hiding when his career was taking off.

Salinger never made a big impression on me, though I certainly admired his prose. His characters and their concerns seemed too rarefied for me, too East Coast, too boarding school. His obsession with children and their inner lives also didn’t grab me, and in fact seemed a little creepy. It was all of a package: characters who were too special to survive in this crummy world, and a writer who couldn’t bear to have anyone sell his babies. You want to be left alone, Jerry? Fine by me. I was always more into Kurt Vonnegut anyway.

One big reason I never much liked The Catcher in the Rye is how I was exposed to it. In my Catholic high school in the mid 1970s, the English Department was a little schizophrenic. The younger teachers wanted us exposed to as much new and stimulating literature as possible, while the older guard was wary about getting parents riled up about “objectionable” books (some memories of the church’s official sanctioning of proper books likely stayed in these priests’ minds long past the time when it was a real concern). So for example, we couldn’t officially read Catch-22, but Mr. Witucki highly recommended we read it during Christmas break because we were likely to be discussing it for a week or two after. In this climate, Catcher was one of those objectionable books. Looking back, I can’t really remember what it was (and still sometimes is) that would get the censors into a lather. Did he visit a prostitute? Did he masturbate? I can’t remember–but I do remember members of our class sharing tips on how to get into the local strip club, the El Mocambo, with a fake ID card, and we treated it like no big deal.

We still read Catcher, but no one could take a book home. Father Enright had 30 copies of the book in his room, and we all read it together in class. Out loud. Paragraph by paragraph. You want a surefire formula for sucking the life out of a book? This one worked like a charm.

Henry Louis Gates’ recent dust-up with the police, and today’s historic beer reconciliation (who’ll bring the pretzels and mustard?), have brought to mind the time about 14 years ago when I met Prof. Gates.

He and I had contributed essays to a marvelous collection called HOME: American Writers Remember Rooms of Their Own. Assembled by my friends Steve and Sharon Fiffer, the book was built like a fictional house in which different writers chose a room (mine was “The Work Room”, Gates’ was “The Living Room”) and wrote a reflection on the personal meaning of that space. A portion of the book’s profits were given to homeless charities.

During the book’s launch, a reading was arranged at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York, and somehow I was in town to participate. I met Prof. Gates and a couple of the other writers, whose names escape me now. When my slot came, I read the first three pages of my essay, explaining my new-found appreciation of the wisdom of the Three Stooges that had arisen upon the purchase of my first house.

The reading went pretty well, and when I returned to my seat, Gates leaned over to me with a wide smile on his face and whispered:

“You are one funny motherfucker.”

This was one of the most thrilling asides I’ve ever had in my life. A Harvard professor and international scholar not only thought I was funny, but also that I was cool enough to be called a motherfucker. I’ve often thought of how I could get away with using this endorsement, on a book jacket or play poster or something. Imagine how cool that would look on the back of a book: “James Finn Garner is one funny motherfucker”–Henry Louis Gates.

When Gates said this to me, I asked him to send me a letter with his opinion in writing. He must’ve thought I was kidding, but I really wanted a copy of this, especially on stationery from the chairman of Harvard’s African-American Studies Department. How cool would THAT be? A week or two later, I sent him a letter at the school, hoping I could josh him into it, but I got no response. Apparently the exchange was meant to be private. Well, until now.