Sententiae

As I was out and about this morning, unwisely braving Columbus Day sales and other ravages of American civilization, something (never mind what; unimportant) caught my attention. Momentarily confused, I muttered to myself, “Quid est?” What is it?

It occurred to me in that moment that when I say phrase that out loud, it’s in my voice … but when I think it to myself, I do so in a different voice. I say it in Mrs. Lowe’s voice.

 

Shirley Lowe was my seventh- and eighth-grade Latin teacher. (I never called her, have never called her, and probably will never call her Shirley in person. In print, of course.) “Quid est?” would occasionally appear on some of our Latin homework papers, in red ink, if she didn’t think we’d quite gotten the translation right, or if we wrote an answer that didn’t quite grasp the point of the question. Or, on occasion, if she really genuinely wasn’t sure what we meant but was curious to know.

We liked Mrs. Lowe – after the first six weeks of school, during which time she was the “strictest teacher who ever lived!!” Our frail middle-school selves were hit head-on by what we took to be an almost unreasonably demanding, strict, unyielding teacher. Welcome to junior-high; it’s not quite as cozy and color-inside-the-lines as elementary school was, eh?

It wasn’t until mid-October that we started to glimpse the actual truth, which was: Mrs. Lowe wasn’t just making us work really really hard for her own amusement, but for a larger purpose, and we actually did come to appreciate that she wouldn’t let us get away with slacking off. And somewhere in the dead of that seventh-grade winter, we realized she had a wicked sense of humor. And she liked us (as long as we did our homework!). I’m not sure she was actively obeying the “don’t smile until after Christmas” teacher guideline, but by January, we knew she was one of our favorite teachers.

We learned Latin forms and grammar. We learned vocabulary. We translated textbooks’ ideas of common Latin phrases. I have no idea whether the ancient Romans spent as much time obsessing about agricolae (farmers) and ranae (frogs) as our textbook did, but you will note that the word agricola is perilously close to “agriculture”, and aha! Behold! Eheu! Latin words revealed themselves as the roots, the gateway words to Italian (of course) and Spanish and French (sort of) and German (well, maybe) and English definitely!, and if you know Latin, you can fake your way through reading several other languages, and THAT’S useful! Surely? Yes, dangit, and stop calling me Shirley!

Sorry.

I’m not sure whether anyone has ever described the transition from tadpole to frog as “ranafication”. Or described the transition from frog (smooch) to prince (smooch smooch) as “antiranafication”. But I’ve found that Latin can foster verbal creativity, and certainly, no ancient Romans are around to critique my inventions, so, bleah on them.

We declined nouns and conjugated verbs; we learned that Latin words had genders associated with them (what’s that about?! – rana, ranae, feminine. Did the Roman Empire have male frogs?). We even learned a joke from Mrs. Lowe, about weird advanced verb forms: the Latin word for “to pig out” was “pigo, pigere, squeali, gruntum”. (It’s not, but she got a chuckle out of us.) And when we’d finished our classwork, we were allowed to take the “Asterix and Obelix” graphic novels down from the bookshelves and pass them around. Prize!

More than a prize; a gateway to the other part of Latin class. We learned about ancient Rome, ancient Romans, ancient Roman culture, the Roman Empire, togas, the Roman military machine, catapults (cooool), aqueducts, et cetera. (See? Latin.) I still joke that I survived Latin class in junior high and high school thanks to the stabbings in the Senate and the chariot races and the Coliseum and the gods on Mount Olympus who were as snarky and misbehavior-ridden as they were immortal. But I say that only half-jokingly, I think. What was named on the class syllabus as “Cultural Background” was the portion of that syllabus where I threw myself into high gear. This part of class was what got my snarky little creative mind going, to the point that when I hit high school and discovered that the Latin Club (–there’s a Latin Club!!–) produced an annual classical-mythology-themed musical show that was usually written by students … I knew all that attention I’d paid to Cultural Background was going to finally pay off.

Still though, about those vocabulary words, and forms, and conjugations and declensions, and word order with the verbs at the end of sentences … (…and I was just thinking that it’s a good thing that “The Empire Strikes Back” was released just after I finished junior high, because I couldn’t have stopped myself from informing Mrs. Lowe that Latin word order is suspiciously similar to Yoda Grammar) … many times in my life I’ve heard the question, “what good is Latin as a language?” It’s a dead language. No one speaks it anymore, at least as a language of doing business with the world. Might as well be trying to communicate in Aramaic or Sumerian. If you’re a biologist, Latin is helpful if you want to name a new species, perhaps. Or if you need the aforementioned help with quick decoding of Latin’s descendant languages. But other than that?

Well. Aside from giving one the ability to laugh even harder at some of the jokes in “Monty Python’s Meaning of Life” … a couple of things, perhaps.

 

One thing I remember vividly about my seventh- and eighth-grade Latin classes with Mrs. Lowe was her daily or close-to-daily routine: at the beginning of every class, we were to copy into our notes a famous Latin phrase, listed on the chalkboard at the back of the classroom. Sometimes we recognized the words as vocabulary items we were already familiar with; sometimes the vocab was new to us, but the phrases meant a bit more than just a string of Latin words. They were called “sententiae”.

The dictionary’s (partial) definition of sententiae is: “opinion, view, judgment; … meaning, sense; sentence; maxim.” Another assessment of sententiae that I found is this: “brief aphorisms from ancient sources, quoted without context; popular in the Middle Ages as a form of rhetoric.”

Sometimes they were fairly bland: “ab ovo usque ad mala” (from eggs to apples). Sometimes they were less mysterious and more useful: “ad nauseam” (to the point of sickness or disgust), or “cum grano salis” (with a grain of salt), or “caveat emptor” (buyer beware).

Sometimes they were meant to inspire: “ad astra per aspera” (to the stars through difficulties), or “carpe diem” (seize the day, said Horace), or “pax vobiscum!” (peace be with you), or “possunt quia posse videntur” (they can because they think they can). Sometimes they were Roman history: “veni, vidi, vici” (“I came, I saw, I conquered,” reported Caesar, speaking of his military conquest of Gaul with muscular understatedness; what’s Latin for “you and whose army?”?).

Sometimes they were philosophical: “ars longa, vita brevis” (art is long, life is short). Sometimes they could be taken with us to Social Studies class: “e pluribus unum” (one [country] out of many [states]), or “ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem” (“with the sword she seeks quiet peace under liberty,” the motto of Our Faire Commonwealth of Massachusetts).

Sometimes they were a comment: “non compos mentis” (not in possession of one’s senses). Sometimes they were a subtle (or not) hint: “labor omnia vincit” (work conquers all). Do your homework, kids.

 

Through these little snippets, Mrs. Lowe introduced us to ideas that went beyond vocab quizzes and scale models of Roman architecture. “Divide et impera” meant divide and conquer, and it had more than a little to do with useful techniques for imposing one’s governing will on a large group of less-than-aware people. Speaking of under-educated or ill-informed populations, “timendi causa est nescire” meant “ignorance is the cause of fear,” a quote from the Roman author Seneca that has a little more “war on terror”-ish resonance and relevance now than maybe it did when we were 13 years old.

And part of our Cultural Background studies included, in a sense, watching as the mighty Roman Empire decayed from within and eventually, unthinkably, impossibly, but inevitably, fell. The phrase “bread and circuses” sometimes comes to mind if I stumble onto reality TV. I’m not sure whether “people who ignore history are doomed to repeat it” is a Latin sententiae or not, but it could be, and it ought to be. Some of those people, ignorant of history, are (or wish to be) charged with shaping the immediate and distant future of OUR population, and I suspect they didn’t study Latin with Mrs. Lowe or anybody remotely like her.

Which is their loss. Let us work to make sure that it doesn’t turn, by extension, into ours as well. Labor omnia vincit.

Perspective

The slight delay in blog posting hereabouts has had mostly to do with my month of July, which featured a whole lot of travel, at least half of which had to do with professional development.

First: to New Hampshire, for the New England Band Directors Institute, a three-day affair in which band directors from New England (and elsewhere) gather – with instruments – to attend workshops, to read new band literature, to be conducted by one or more massively influential band conductors, and to have our attitudes (unofficially) adjusted. We’re a relatively small group – people who are pretty passionate about a topic that maybe not a lot of other people may quite understand. If you’ve seen the movies “Mr. Holland’s Opus” or “Drumline”, at least in my opinion, you still might not understand it.

Then: to Gordon College, for a similar gathering of choral directors from Massachusetts. Same idea; same level of “the rest of the world may not quite embrace this subject nearly as tightly as we do”! Off the top of my head I can’t come up with any movies that have been made about choir directors, either. “The Choir”, maybe.

Then to the mid-Atlantic, for some professional development wrapped up in a vacation: my annual pilgrimage to the American Shakespeare Center, in Staunton, VA. Tucked away in the mountains of Virginia, this little theater is modeled after the one in which William Shakespeare his own self put on his, um, skits. And it’s populated by some really fine actors. This year I saw “Hamlet”, which is perhaps a bit less light than the plays I’d seen there previously – “Much Ado About Nothing” (in which the ASC made me forget Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson and Denzel Washington and Kate Beckinsale, and instead remember Sarah Fallon and Rene Thornton, Jr.), and “The Taming of the Shrew”. With all due respect: Shakespeare enthusiasts are passionate but they don’t usually get nearly the attention that Tom Cruise and things blowing up do, on the big screen. Sometimes for good reason: the English Department professor who taught the Shakespearean Lit course that I took during my sophomore year at UMass seemed just plain deranged sometimes – in his view, every single element of a Shakespearean play represented some sort of sexual imagery. (Sometimes, Doc, “the dagger I see before me, the handle towards my hand” is just a dagger!) Anyway, if you tell the average American someone that you adore “Twelfth Night”, they may wonder if you mean some sort of winter holiday celebration.

Most recently: my annual two-week total-immersion course in the art of the drum major, courtesy of the West Chester, PA and UMass-Amherst versions of the George N. Parks Drum Major Academy. Now, talk about a gathering of rather passionate and relatively not-understood people: not only are they what the media would condescendingly call “band geeks”, but these young people will be their bands’ “head band geeks”! And they’ll be taught by people who have made band directing, and also drum major instruction, a large and important part of their lives. A documentary about this activity may not guarantee a major TV network knockout ratings, exactly.

But for 13 summers, I’ve participated in what is, for me, arguably the most professionally and personally enjoyable fortnight of the year. Until this year, I got to work for George N. Parks, who may not have been well-known outside the marching music industry, but inside of it he was the top dog. How lucky I was, for 12 years, to be able to look over and say, “hey, Mr. Parks, how do?” while most of the students and other participants in the West Chester and UMass clinics would see him coming and whisper, “–that’s George Parks!” with a certain amount of hero worship audible in those whispers. He was a genuine Hall-of-Famer, after all. And following his passing this past year, the DMA company took a deep breath, gathered itself and continued on; and during my two weeks of immersion this summer, I got to watch another master teacher, Heidi Sarver, gather up the reins and lead students – and staff – through this experience.

More than once, we DMA staff members have watched the kids go from being slightly bewildered new DMA students to being truly passionate student leaders, and we’ve heard their explosive cheering and nearly-foaming-at-the-mouth reactions to the goings-on, led by Mr. Parks … and we’ve quietly remarked, “it’s a good thing they’re on the good side of the Force.” To an outsider, the exhortations of the staff and the responses of the kids could easily seem right on the edge of, or maybe further into the realm of, a cult. No one is speaking in tongues, mind you; but when 300 or 400 high school students suddenly bellow “Together! In! Out! Frozen! Up! With Pride! With Pride!” and the listener has no idea what any of it means, I can imagine that it can make for some nervous wondering.

(The kids are just describing how various body parts are, in the attention position, but it may not be totally obvious.)

 

It’s occurred to me that I actually belong to a number of groups that fit this description: they … WE … are passionate about a particular topic; we commit a great deal of our personal time to it; we don’t always understand why the outside world doesn’t also treasure that topic; and we get a little miffed when the outside world says things like, “…I don’t get it. It’s weird.”

I will of course list these.

[] Marching band. (As is partly chronicled above; as is surely chronicled in most of the posts in this blog since last September.) This is an activity that can create marvelous sounds and images; and, taught right, it can yield philosophies for life and strategies for dealing with people and events that can be used in a lifelong way. (“Band is a place for everyone.”) Or … it can be the silliest-looking thing on planet Earth. As my DMA colleague Jamie Weaver once said to a roomful of student leaders, “let’s be honest, gang, we’re running around a field playing instruments that shouldn’t be outside, waving flags, and wearing chickens on our heads.”

[] Musical theater. For the love of heaven, please let’s set aside the stereotypes about theater people and their particular orientations. Statistically speaking, most activities in the world feature one person out of every ten who’s not facing the same way as the other nine, and does that excuse abusive behavior? Sorry, no. … Anyway, musical theater: done right, it gives young people the chance to discover the fun of performance, in an environment where they don’t have to decide it’s what they want to do forever, but could! Done wrong, it sounds like the “Whose Line Is It Anyway” activity where two actors play a scene in different styles suggested by the audience: when someone calls out “community theater!”, the actors get stilted and awful and break character and giggle.

[] Curling. An intriguing sport that I don’t play, I just watch, probably for lack of opportunity – and the fact that if I crouch down to play catcher in baseball, at least I’m using two feet; if I go to launch the curling rock and have to slide along the ice, I’m quickly going from one foot to one backside and an elbow, and zero dignity. It’s a sport, but it doesn’t look like the four major spectator sports at all, and I certainly understand why other people might look at someone standing on a sheet of ice with a little broom in their hand and might cry out, as commentator Charlie Pierce has done, “…SPORTS?!!!?”

[] Left-leaning politics. Thanks to my upbringing and my observations during the later years of my public and collegiate education, I see certain issues certain ways. I have to work really hard to read right-leaning political essays and comprehend how anybody could view the same issues in such a different light. (My suspicion, based on some recent historical non-fiction that I’ve read, is that the radical, reactionary right-wing politics currently in vogue are only distantly related to the beliefs put forth as “classic” Republican platform planks.) That said, I have a few friends and colleagues who are Republicans and occasionally they’ve said things and I’ve seen their points. I like those people because sometimes they’re mystified by my politics but we’re still friends anyhow.

[] Star Trek. Enough said. … Although I will say this: in fourth grade, I wore a Captain Kirk shirt on school picture day. I do not do the equivalent thing now. I went to one Trek convention, in Boston in 1992, mainly because it featured Patrick Stewart as the keynote speaker and I’d go to the ends of the earth to listen to that guy improv for an hour. (On the subway, heading into Boston, I sat next to a family of four, also going to the convention … and Mom, Dad, Jimmy and Jane all wore full Starfleet uniforms. I decided it was okay for them and that I was okay where I was.)

So, once in a while you bump into a group of people, enthusiasts regarding a particular topic, who are so passionate that it blinds them to the possibilities that [1] their activity may not be the best thing since sliced bread, and that [2] other people who “don’t get it” should be allowed to “not get it” and not take abuse for it.

For example, I’m a big ol’ fan of “A Prairie Home Companion”, which may be the only remaining weekly variety show left on American radio. Every week, as my dad would have said, “I have my folksy humor batteries fully charged”. Late in the two-hour show, Garrison Keillor largely improvises a twenty-minute monologue purporting to chronicle the recent week’s current events in “the little town that time forgot”, Lake Wobegon, where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above-average – and where all the characters are right on the edge of being stereotypical homespun, myopic and faintly backward Midwesterners. I have heard more marvelous parables acted out by these characters than I can count. The musicians on the program are some of the finest in America. The writing is superb. But plenty of Midwesterners, Lutherans and others have mistaken Keillor’s works for mockery. For every 99 Keillor admirers, there’s one listener that doesn’t get the joke, or doesn’t get that sometimes all it is is a gentle joke.

This summer, I read a book by the marvelous writer Sarah Vowell, called “Radio On”. It’s a diary of a year of listening to the radio. Vowell doesn’t just listen to one station in one city; she listens wherever she goes, to many different stations with different formats, and makes some very astute comments about sounds coming out of her radio and about large issues as illuminated by those sounds. Some of her comments rake NPR over the coals, but manage to avoid whitewashing NPR and its listeners as snooty elitists, while still making some good points about ways in which NPR could probably lighten up a bit. In a couple of chapters, Vowell dumps on Garrison Keillor pretty firmly. I happen not to share her disdain. She may be a little too acerbic and sharp-tongued and smart-ass by nature (which generally works for her) to appreciate Keillor’s act; but I wouldn’t begrudge her the opportunity to be so. I happen to like “Prairie Home” for a lot of reasons besides his observations about humans via his mythical little town, and I wish someone could explain it to Ms. Vowell in a way that would break through her deflectors (hello!; Star Trek nerd reference!) and help her understand what he’s going for. But I get why she and other people might not “get it.”

 

In my first job out of college, I worked in the light-manufacturing department of a biotechnology company. I often would assemble thousands of little plastic pieces, or do equally repetitive things, in a given week. For about three weeks that winter, I was (figuratively, and sort of literally) pinned behind my drill press while another manufacturing department member tried doggedly to get me to join his church. By the time those three weeks had become three weeks, it was borderline harassment. I finally whispered to my department supervisor that if Jacques (not his real name) said one more word to me about how great my life would become if I joined the Houston Church of Christ (not its real name; a singular organization not affiliated with the more well-known Church of Christ denomination) and about why the church I did attend was just not sufficient to ensure my ascent into Heaven at the end of this earthly life … then I was going to march straight into the office of the president of this 40-member company and take up his valuable time asking him to supervise the removal this yahoo from my life.

Astonishing how easy it is to stumble into situations where, inadvertantly, you can poke a nest with a stick – and run afoul of a swarm of True Believers.

So I try to forgive people for not understanding the meaning of “Starred Thoughts™”, or for not agreeing that Jean-Luc Picard became a better starship captain right around the beginning of season three, or for rooting for the Canadiens over the Bruins, or vice-versa. And I hope we can convince more people, someday soon, that if they do accidentally poke the bear, they should at least be left alive – figuratively, literally, whichever. Because if some of the people who populate our nation’s capitol have inadvertantly taught us anything in the past few weeks, it’s this:

A little perspective can only be helpful.

Under the Influence

Lately, happily, I’ve received a number of comments about my posts here that were very kind indeed. Arguably, overly kind! One or two have rendered me speechless (with gratitude and amazement!) – and if you know me at all, or my writing, you know how rare an event that is.

It got me to thinking about where my style of writing came from. Every so often, I’ll write something, just a phrase or a sentence, and read it back to myself, and think, “Well, that was very…” [whichever author I had just emulated or imitated or committed thievery upon]. The advice to writers has always been, “write what you know”; similarly, you can’t write in a style that isn’t yours, or at least you can’t write well in a style you don’t know very well.

So… here’s a page of navel-gazing in the guise of trying to trace my writing’s ancestry, to wit: authors whom I’ve read extensively, or writers whose style has made enough of an impact on me to affect what rebounds back out of my brain after I’ve read their stuff.

First things first: I had to learn to read, and I had to learn that reading was the thing to do. Mom and Dad were steadfast in carrying out their responsibilities: teach the toddler to read. Make sure he shows up to first grade ready to go. So: gigantic poster-paper flash cards, seven inches tall by as much as three feet long, containing various fun words to read.

Next: the teachers who didn’t just assign books to read, they found us fun things to read and then sent us off to find our own.

[] Joan Baird was my first-grade teacher; she put me in a reading group of exactly two people (and herself). We spent time reading the textbook full of stories and just took off. Pretty soon, we were making regular pilgrimages to the school library to find books we wanted to read. For me? Significantly, I think, the first book I remember pulling off the shelf and being intrigued by: “Tom Corbett, Space Cadet”. Insert punchlines here…

[] Barbara Howe was my third- and fourth-grade teacher (she had a weirdo experimental combined third-/fourth-grade class which was about thirteen different shades of awesome), and she was the first teacher who gave me packets of pages with prompts and empty lines upon which to write creatively. I probably have those packets buried in a closet somewhere, and I probably don’t want to read what at the time (at the age of 8) I thought was clever – but it was undoubtedly the moment I figured out that as cool as reading was, it weren’t nothin’ compared to writing my own stuff.

First major literary influence? Interestingly, a comic strip; but not surprisingly, Charles M. Schulz. I acquired curiosity about World War I while reading about Snoopy’s imaginary flying-ace exploits; I got early theological training from Linus Van Pelt; and I remember very clearly reading Peppermint Patty’s dressing-down of Charlie Brown, “C’mon, Chuck!” and trying to pronounce the first word “see, mon!” How much more than just a comic strip was Peanuts?

Summers at the Charles River Creative Arts Program in Dover, Massachusetts ended up cementing my love of musical activity, but they started out with a pretty firm pursuit of writing, creative and otherwise. The arts day camp’s daily newspaper, “The Daily Double,” featured a number of luminaries (who to the outside world probably looked like 14-year-old campers and high-school-/college-aged camp counselors) who already wrote like nobody else I knew. David Zakon introduced me to the voice of the cynic – writing with a perpetually raised eyebrow. Mark Tavares’ writing voice I couldn’t even classify but it was some of the most inventive forms of self-expression I’d bumped into to that point. And Julie Sade represented the voice of cool, calm, collected journalism, with a slight edge of goofy.

And possibly the most ridiculous concept ever, which the CRCAP world perpetrated twice a summer, was the production of a complete musical theater show (from auditions to curtain call) over the course of a three-and-a-half-week camp session. The shows were usually written by the camp’s playwriting class, led by a writing department counselor who would thereafter polish the script. Add musical score, stir and serve. Some of the results were at best “workable”; some of them were very good considering they were the writing equivalent of short-order cooking; and a few were just plain brilliant. David Downing’s script, called “Food For Thought”, was a cautionary tale about nutrition choices, and if that sounds bland as tofu, you haven’t seen the show. On top of which, “Food” features a musical score by Tom Megan that includes a finale so good (with wise lyrics and music that is a hybrid of Dave Brubeck, 70s soft-rock and Claude Debussy) that if you heard it on its own somewhere, you’d be shocked to know it came from a children’s musical.

The other show that you never forgot, if you were involved with it, was called “The Titanic Goes Hawaiian -or- The Great American Disaster Musical.” Talk about a script that swerved crazily from one topical parody to another, from one awful pun to a worse one ten seconds later. Sam Abel was the writer, able to manage wisecrack and wisdom like Joe Torre juggled the various monumental Yankees of the late 1990s. And I learned from his play “Left Out” two summers later that one can write a deadly serious play with very funny lines in it.

Meanwhile… I’ve been thinking of published authors whose material so struck me that the style of their writing made it firmly into my own…

[] Whoever it was who wrote the Marx Brothers movies. The Marx Brothers, probably. As a fourth-grader, I discovered Groucho Marx cracking wise, and it was a discovery that no one else really grasped, in the circles I ran in. So I just walked home from school, put my “Three Hours, Fifty-Nine Minutes and Fifty-Seven Seconds with the Marx Brothers” record on the turntable, and snickered.

[] David Gerrold. Again, my 11-year-old nerd self bought the book that Mr. Gerrold wrote about his 1967 Star Trek episode “The Trouble With Tribbles”, partly because I was (and still am) a nut for anything “behind-the-scenes”. Also because that Star Trek episode was going primarily for laughs, a rare thing indeed. The wry humor contained therein kinda struck me. It also set me up for life with a propensity for writing single-sentence paragraphs for dramatic effect.

That propensity dogs me still.

[] Ogden Nash, most famous for punchy, pun-laden short poetry, e.g. “A wondrous creature is the germ / Though smaller than the pachyderm” and “Why did the Lord give us agility, / If not to evade responsibility?” A couple of years ago I wrote a children’s musical, and some of the lyrics, now that I look back at them, were Nash all the way:

In the ancient of days, back before you were born / Our poor planet was quiet from evening till morn

Not a life form was stirring, not even a germ / Or a virus or fungus or insect or worm

Not a thing there would scurry or amble or crawl / And it wasn’t inspiring; ‘twas nothing at all

Did the Earth wonder to itself, “what’s this about?” / As a thunderstorm gathered and ended the drought?

Then the lightning flashed once and things started to swirl / And we started evolving toward boys and toward girls

Soon the bugs became fishes and lizards and such / And the moment had come, and it didn’t take much

[] Bob Ryan, acerbic sportswriter for the Boston Globe (back when he was pushed to write better, by Globe sports page competition on the order of Peter Gammons and Leigh Montville). His columns about the Boston Celtics of the 1980s never disappointed; his “cleaning out the desk drawer of the mind” quick-hit pieces still stick with me.

[] Garrison Keillor – not so much when he’s spinning tales of Lake Wobegon, but more when he’s quietly laying out political leanings and personal philosophies in something like his book “Homegrown Democrat”. If I get going on topics like inexplicable politicians, or a lack of common sense on display (or my early writing influences), his voice informs mine.

[] An undeniable influence on my writing has been the curious, humorous, theatre-of-the-absurd turns of phrase created by Douglas Adams. As a high-school freshman nerd, I discovered the radio drama version of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and knew I’d found utter perfection: science fiction that was really, really funny. And English. Adams’ work has been called a cross between “Monty Python” and science fiction. I go back and forth: sometimes I agree; sometimes I think it’s too easy to label English humor as strictly “Monty Python”. But if some weird literary catastrophe happened and all that remained of Douglas Adams’ writing was his spectacular adverbial creations (“Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see [the Babel Fish] as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God”), it would be enough.

And then there are a few authors whose writing I would one day like to be able to emulate and incorporate into my writing without being accused of plagiarism!:

[] Molly Ivins, whose Texas drawl came through loud and clear in her political commentary. There are elements of Texan-ness that I have trouble with, but not Ms. Ivins.

[] Harlan Ellison, except I can’t muster up the kind of vitriol he can put into his commentaries when he gets aggrieved (righteously or otherwise); and I can’t invent speculative fiction storylines anywhere near as great as his.

[] Roy Blount, Jr., whose style of writing or speaking I cannot hope to emulate as I am not nearly as Southern as he is (highly recommended is his “Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South”).

[] Bob & Ray‘s quiet lunacy.

[] Raymond Chandler. I’d love to say I can write like he can. I can’t. I’ve tried, and it sounds pale and paltry by comparison. I love the hard-boiled private eye detective fiction sound, but even Garrison Keillor’s “Guy Noir, Private Eye” radio ad libs are better than my finely crafted fake Chandlerisms.

Okay. Navel-gazing over. But if I am to be subjected to compliments about my writing, I must acknowledge the people who helped me get writing, because I must acknowledge that whatever writing style I may have didn’t just spring forth from Zeus’ head. (See, I did retain something from my high school Classical Literature class.)