As anyone who has read my work knows, I love American slang and traditional, rhetorical English in almost equal parts. I also love how tricky and elusive that slang can be, as British writers such as Dickens and Trollope discovered when they tried to imitate it in their novels. The dialogue in the American sections of Martin Chuzzlewit is clumsy and embarrassing, so much so that I usually skip those chapters when I reread the novel. Given Dickens's perfect ear for English vernacular speech, I'm intrigued by how tone deaf he was to the rhythm of American constructions, not to mention their metaphorical "logic."

When I came across the following passage about the development of the American idiom (it's from Paul Johnson's The Birth of the Modern: World Society, 1815-1830), I instantly began yearning for Twain.

Cocktail dates from 1806: in 1822 a Kentucky breakfast was defined as "three cocktails and a chaw of terbacker." Barroom came in 1807; mint julep, in 1809; and a long drink, in 1828. There were borrowings from the Dutch, such as boss, and many more from the French, both Canadian and in Louisiana: depot, rapids, prairie, shanty, chute, cache, crevasse. From the Spanish another large crop, including mustang (1808), ranch (1808), sombrero (1823), patio (1827), corral (1829), and lasso (1831). The Americans used obsolete English words like talented, as well as pure neologisms like obligate. The adopted the German word dumm, which became dumb, meaning stupid. They were beginning to adopt Negro words and to coin a good many terms springing from their own political customs--not only caucus but mass meeting, for instance. There were settler's words like lot and squatter. There was also the beginning of a dangerous talent for euphemism: help as the democratic term for servant.

The journals of the great expedition carried out by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in 1804-06, from Saint Louis across the Rockies to the Columbia River and the Pacific, published in 1814, introduced a wide range of terms never before heard in Britain: portage, raccoon, groundhog, grizzly bear, backtrack, medicine man, huckleberry, war party, running time, overnight, overall, rattlesnake, bowery, and moose, as well as adding new variant meanings to old English terms, such as snag, stone, suit, bar, brand, bluff, fix, hump, knob, creek, and settlement. Above all, there was the fertile American capacity to coin phrases and amalgams: It was the Americans, not the English, oddly enough, who invented keep a stiff upper lip (1815), plus fly off the handle (1825), get religion (1826), knock-down (1832), stay on the fence (1828), in cahoots (1829), horse sense (1832), and barking up the wrong tree (1833), plus a variety of less-datable expressions like hold on, let on, take on, cave in, flunk out, and stave off. As early as the 1820s Americans were trying to get the hang of a thing and insisting there's no two ways about it.

I spent some of yesterday trying to dig up reasons to be happy about having one less person living in my house, and the bathroom cupboard was a big help to me. I felt no sentimental pangs about throwing away eight years' worth of orthodontic paraphernalia: wads of brace wax, a set of broken retainers, about a million little toothpicking devices, etc., etc. In a way I feel like I did when J first went to kindergarten: like I've opened a door into my foot. My foot hurts, yes, but the door is open. And I still have a boy at home to distract me from the ache. Four years from now will be a different tale altogether.

So now what will I do? I will go back to work. I've got a manuscript to edit, an anthology to finish printing out for the publisher, a box of tomatoes to can. I've got unmown grass and unwashed sheets and unpickled cucumbers. I've got a stack of western Pennsylvania books, a fat Roth novel I bought at a yard sale, a plethora of weeds, and Henry V downloaded onto my scary new phone in case I get stuck at soccer practice without a book. (This was one of J's last affectionate/ironic gestures before he left for college: "Here, Dawn, I got you something to read." He also decided I should own "Boyz in the Hood," but that's another story.)

First day of school. All of a sudden I have returned to the empty hours of autumn. For the moment I'll sit here at the kitchen table; I'll drink the rest of the coffee in the pot; I'll listen to the washing machine trudge through its cycle. And then I will rise up and work.

People are still reading that post. More than a hundred of them visited this blog yesterday. I am nonplussed, but of course pleased, but of course slightly anxious. At the same time I don't understand how any writer could not comprehend the relationship between the work of the body and the work of the mind. What about those thirty-mile walks that Dickens routinely undertook? What about Plath's furious horseback riding?

But I should stop fretting about this and move on to another subject, such as thanking my handful of regular readers for sticking with me for all these years. Believe it or not, we've managed to pass our fourth anniversary together. You know best what this odd conversation has meant to you, why you keep coming back, whether regularly or intermittently. For me it has become a synthesis of duty, loneliness, chatter, need. It is writing practice, yes, but also a thread thrown into the sea. Who is out there? What will tug back? And will I even be able to feel your pull?

Two days ago I posted an essay that has been, by far, the most heavily read piece I've ever put up on this blog. Although it only garnered five comments here, I heard from many, many people on email and Facebook, people who were quoting it and sharing it with their own friends. Though I expected that at least a few of those responses would be rebuttals, I received nothing of the sort. Moreover, many of the people who responded live in the city, where they have office or teaching jobs. Several were men who place high value on the daily labor they do at home. Several were people who do not define themselves as artists of any kind.

I did not, however, receive any response from the women writers' organization whose Facebook page first led me to Mary Rechner's article. The link I posted there was automatically shunted to an obscure section of the page, where no one will be likely to notice it. This conversational discouragement may be accidental or purposeful; I can't say. Nonetheless, it seems typical of this particular organization's operational style and continues to give me that niggling suspicion that its leaders believe that some women's voices are more equal than others.

The responses I received from you, the people who did read my essay, reinforce that feeling. All of you--male or female, urban or rural, striving artist or not, parents or not--showed me that you take your home tasks very seriously, that these private duties within your private life have an almost ritual importance, that they feed both your inner and outer worlds. They also showed me that you feel defensive about these duties, that you suspect other people of ridiculing or dismissing or sentimentalizing them.

Today my older son leaves for college. A few days ago he was the first responder in a horrible car accident beside our driveway, in which an elderly man lost fingers. Meanwhile, a friend struggles as his thirteen-year-old daughter dies of brain cancer. Our small family swirls with emotion. But last night we sat down and ate dinner together, as we have done for eighteen years. We talked and laughed. Then we washed dishes. For every person around the table--the four of us, plus J's lifelong best friend--this was a sweet and bittersweet ceremony; a familiar, strange, sad happiness. We made no speeches and offered no toasts. All we did was to eat the somewhat ramshackle dinner that a father and a mother had cooked together for their son. But do not tell me that planning and preparing and consuming this dinner was a waste of our artistic time.

James's last supper at home, featuring a disorganized smorgasbord of his favorite summer foods: guacamole with lots of cilantro; London broil marinated in tamari and garlic and cooked over a wood fire; fire-roasted onions and hot peppers; salad of bow-tie macaroni with oven-roasted green beans, hard-boiled eggs, fresh dill, and parsley; salad of fresh tomatoes, basil, garlic, and mozzarella; strawberry-blackberry cobbler with whipped cream; and, I'm sorry to say, cans of Moxie. Ick.

A Response to Mary Rechner

Yesterday I posted a link to Mary Rechner's article "Why I Hate Food: A Polemic," and today I give you my response.

First of all, I want to affirm that I am the last person to stand up for holier-than-thou, my-suburban-child-can't-touch-any-water-that-hasn't-been-triple-filtered, elitist food behaviors. To me, those attitudes are first cousins to "I can't eat that broccoli; it has a bug on it" and "I prefer to eat at McDonald's because the food looks so safe and predictable." Food anxieties take many illogical forms, and at least the McDonald's gull isn't a snob.

Nonetheless, Rechner's polemic does harm, though she has good intentions and does make points that should resonate with all of us who live in the comfortable purviews of take-it-for-granted America. For instance, "It is of the utmost importance to me," she writes, "to resist the earthy lure of urban homesteading. Why shouldn’t I, a writer, mother, and arts administrator living in 2012 who also does most of the shopping and cooking in my family, take advantage of the relative ease of obtaining healthy food at the supermarket? I refuse to accept the moral imperative of growing my own vegetables, butchering the animals I eat, and making my own jam." I agree: there's no reason why she should feel pressured to do these things, living as she does in Portland, Oregon; managing, as are all of you readers, as am I, our First World dilemmas, which have nothing to do with survival. I am not being ironic. Those of us with electricity and running water, who live in forests that are not overrun with guerrillas ready to casually rape and maim us, who live in cities without open sewers and frequent outbreaks of cholera--we can make these choices. That, perhaps, is one simple, if ugly, definition of civilization.

But Rechner goes on to write, "When I see women with their kids (they usually also have a dog or two) weeding their vegetable gardens and tending their flocks of chickens, I fear they have bought the idea that these many labors are the markers of what it means to be a good mother-wife-woman," and here she steps onto rocky ground. What is she saying? That tending a garden alongside one's children and dogs means that a woman has buckled under to the patriarchy? That agricultural labor is a lesser form of human engagement with the world? 

After reading Rechner's article, my friend Marie told me, "Women writers should stop defining which activities limit us, what we should or should not be doing. What personally limits me, for example, has roots much earlier, and more profound, than how I spend my days (which, frankly, I choose because it saves me from what limits me)." I think Marie is exactly right. Moreover, I think that if Rechner had been watching Robert Frost tend his chickens or Wendell Berry train his draft horses, she would not have jumped to the conclusion that they were using these labors to avoid real self-expression. For both these men, agricultural labor was and is their subject matter. Their artistic work is bound to their physical work.

Rechner writes, "If women are spending all of their time planting gardens, tending chickens, and canning (i.e. living our lives in the most laborious ways possible), how are we ever to catch up as writers, visual artists, composers, and directors?" The fact is that hard physical labor, whether rural or urban, has a long history in the making of art. The issue, as I see it, is not that women are wasting their time by canning tomatoes and scrubbing the tub but that the literature of canning tomatoes and scrubbing the tub does not garner the same respect as, say, Hayden Carruth's literature of the hay field. I daresay that farmer-poet Maxine Kumin might have something to say on this matter--and perhaps she, too, would note that, while I quickly listed the names of three very famous male rural writers, I listed the name of a single woman . . . and that's not because she's the only one in existence. The rest of us don't get much press from anyone, including organizations whose central purpose is to promote women writers.

I think it's also an error to conclude that every single thing an aspiring artist undertakes ought to be in direct service to her art. Says Rechner, "A jar of pickles, however beautiful it appears on the windowsill with the sun shining through it, however thoughtfully and sustainably it was made, however good the pickles taste, is still a jar of pickles." But that jar of pickles is also a link to the history of women's work, and why isn't that a good enough reason to treasure it, to replicate it, to teach the skill to our sons and daughters?

For a decade, I managed the exhibition hall at my town's annual Labor Day fair. Our primary exhibitors were women and children (including boys, I should point out), who had spent the summer together making jam, growing vegetables, and knitting sweaters and then excitedly brought them to the fair, where their goods were arranged on tables as items of beauty and importance. Over the course of the weekend I would have myriad conversations with women of all ages about biscuit recipes and quilting techniques. For many of them, it was the only moment in the year when the work they did privately in their homes was brought into public and venerated. So no, those biscuits weren't art. But yes, those biscuits did matter to our human story.

I could talk about economic reasons for gardening and raising chickens: about how committing herself to these tasks might allow a writer to stay home and write rather than spend all day in an office or a classroom and not write. I could talk about the gardeners I know who are artists: who have the ability to create a landscape that has the visual power of a painting yet also shifts with the seasons, the weather, the time of day. But even in its blunt utilitarian tedium, labor has great value. In my memoir Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton, I wrote:

Like a string of beads or a game of cards, a chore has a history. One task follows the next, follows the next. There's pattern and tedium and necessity and skill. You learn exactly how to balance six split logs on your left arm, how to shift your load and flatten your step when you cross a patch of ice, how to tip your armload smoothly into the woodbox. You learn how to talk yourself in and out of laziness. You learn there are some chores you'll never be much good at. You learn you have to do them anyway.

My point, in the memoir, was that writing and labor tap into the same source, require parallel skills and sacrifices and painful self-discoveries, lead us down difficult and unexpected paths. Rechner does me no service by arguing that I should free myself from the shackles of the chores that lie at the root of my vocation. 

And by the way, here's a jar of pickles that is also art. Thank goodness my mom decided to can these beets.

[Photograph by Thomas Birtwistle. For more of Tom's photographs of food, fairs, and rural life, visit thomasbirtwistle.com.]

Last weekend I bought a large and unwieldy tome at a yard sale: Paul Johnson's 1,100-page history The Birth of the Modern: World Society, 1815-1830. This is a literary period that greatly interests me--both the work published during these years (say, Emma) and the work set in the era (say, War and Peace). However, the book itself is a burden, not at all pleasant to prop up on my stomach in bed, hogging all the space in my bag, etc. The situation is comic because, along with this tome, I have also acquired my first-ever real cell phone, onto which my son has downloaded the complete works of Shakespeare and the entire King James Bible. I am glad to know that I will have Othello with me at all times. Nonetheless, I continue to lug around the hardcover behemoth. For some reason, I still cannot be separated from print.

Johnson's prose is not gorgeous, but it is dense with particulars. As I've been reading, I've realized how much I love proper nouns--place names, people's names--not to mention meaty latinate adjectives. Even when I'm sleepy, not quite absorbing the political significance of Andrew Jackson or the Battle of New Orleans, I find myself contentedly repeating: "The young Daniel O'Connell, eight years Jackson's junior, was equally vituperative and bellicose" and "Sadly watching this debacle was Captain Edward Codrington R. N., captain of the fleet under the command of Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, on board HMS Tonnant. Codrington was an uxorious man, devoted to his wife, Jane." Meaty latinate adjectives may be unfashionable among the style-manual police, but they do feel good in the mouth.

And already there are signs that this book might matter to me: for instance: "[I]n 1815 a poet, a scientist and a painter spoke the same language . . . but by 1830 it was increasingly difficult for them to understand each other" and "I have something to say about animals, too, especially those noble creatures, the horse and the dog, and the exotic beasts that were now filling the new zoos." So I will continue lugging it around to soccer games and doctors' offices.

In other news: I read this article, and it put me in a bad mood. Tomorrow I may expatiate on it, but you can take a look at it first.

Our band practices and performances have been difficult lately. Craig's 13-year-old daughter has brain cancer and has been hospitalized for close to a month. He is, to say the least, distracted and in pain. Yet on the rare times we can manage to play together, we seem to have become a far more cohesive ensemble. I think that a winter's worth of drudgery practice has helped us, but just as important, we are all so full of feeling. Sid is Craig's uncle; Brian has been Craig's friend since they were teenagers; my children have grown up alongside his . . . we all feel a deep and helpless distress about the situation, and music is a way to say so. Talking about they feel is not something men tend to do all that easily, but all of these men can sing about how they feel.

The other complication is that no one knows if Craig will be able to show up at a gig, so we've had to get into the habit of creating two set lists: one with him, one without him. This means that I've had to relax and figure out how to just roll with what happens on stage. It's been a good lesson for me, the anxious, note-taking, unconfident improviser. I'm learning all the time: simplify, depend on triads, fill the gaps, let the 48 years I've spent absorbing sound flow through my fingers.

Muscle memory, ear memory, and a sad, sad heart. I can play the blues. I had no idea.