If you teach writing for a living, you tread that fine line between prescriptivism and descriptivism. A prescriptivist (which, sadly, I lean toward) is one who harrumphs over a misplaced apostrophe (even when meaning is quite clear) and tells people how language ought to be used according to her strict interpretations of the language’s rules of the road. Think William Safire.
A descriptivist views language as it is written, as it develops, without the harrumph, harrumph. She systematically studies linguistic change and records it without comment.
I raise the issue — to harrumph or not to harrumph — because I recently harrumphed … a lot. One of my graduates, who is distinguishing himself in his first newspaper job, is tweeting his stories at light speed to promote them.
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by Andrea Breemer Frantz
“It is one thing to adore a painting…but it is quite another thing to learn from a painted narrative what to adore.” - Clifford Geertz, cultural anthropologist, Local Knowledge
For most of my childhood, my mother’s father was primarily two things to me: 1) a magician with uncanny ability to conjure quarters from my ears and candy from nearly anywhere; and 2) a poet whose artful word craftsmanship I did not inherit. Full story »
Otavalo, Ecuador: Camera stolen in the early morning haze of travel, either on the bus or in the bus terminal, literally snatched from a bag I was carrying, that I never even set down beside me or had away from my view. Do I remember when it happened? No. Perhaps the girl behind me leaving the bus? Nothing out of the ordinary, not even a hint of being pressed against too closely. I had no idea it was gone until hours later, when I searched my bag frantically, and even then I held the unreal hope I had left my camera behind in the hotel.
And now gone are all the snapshots of rustic campesino life. The farewell shots with my host family and me, proud, work-weary, wholesome farmers and an itinerant gringa. Gone these images of dedicated mountainside farmers, the close-knit family and their American visitor. Gone these images of farmland and cows interspersed with Andean cloud forest, gone the picture with the cow who wandered right in the middle of the lush cloud forest. The waterfall, the luscious over-sized leaves, the overlapping shades of green, the idyllic, natural, dense beauty of this scene. The view of the village of Cuellaje taken from the mountainside, various shots of me on these mountain trails, with the splendor of the Andean background.
Gone are all the pictures of the goods the family had reaped: tomates del arbol, coffee beans, bushels of plant fiber, hanging banana branches, plantains, seeds left to dry out for planting, seedlings prepped for planting on their farm.
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