This One Looks Good

Fresh Ribbon

Just found an interview with Dennis Baron, author of A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution. Yes, the interview was in Inside Higher Ed, and yes, it has an academic edge. But just look at this portion of the interview:

I’ve always loved writing and its technologies. My earliest memories of writing include typing on an old Remington portable on the floor of the living room when I was 5 or 6. I can still see the ink-clogged e’s and o’s. I also remember my first fountain pen, a marbled-maroon Esterbrook that I got for my 8th birthday. I remember the smell of the ink when I filled the pen (no cartridge refills back then), tangy, metallic, kind of like blood. And my first ball point, a Paper Mate in two-tone green, the same colors as my parents’ 1955 Chevy (I later inherited that car, and while I always hated the colors on the car, on the pen they were magical).

You can read the rest of Serena Golden’s interview with the author here.

Clearly, we need a book club. I hope a few more of you snag a copy of this soon, because this looks like it warrants discussion.

Serving up Freshman

No Telling

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
– Douglas Adams

I won’t pretend to be philosophical tonight. My eyes hurt to much from grading and commenting on my first batch of freshman comp papers. Some of them are quite good. Some could stand another rewrite. A few others make me want to hunt down their previous school districts and have a talk with someone in charge of curriculum.

This is nothing new. Freshman composition is the great levelizer. Students come from subdivisions and trailer parks, farm roads and apartments to push hopefully toward some larger imagining of themselves. They’re scared. They’re pressured. They’re free. Regardless of their previous schooling, they all need to clear the same bar by Christmas.

It’s not an easy thing to go from big ‘ol catfish to minnow in a pond where you can’t quite see the bottom. Sometimes my students write about this transition and I can tell that the act of writing it is part of the larger process of growing. I like those papers. They’re spring from a variety of topics, but all of them center around an awareness of change.

Write your way through it, I tell them, find out where you’re going and the essay will follow you there. Here, try this.

There are other papers, the ones students think they’re supposed to write about topics too distant from their experience. In high school they wrote research papers with titles like “World War II” and received glowing scores. Some only want to write about my Forbidden Topics – cloning, abortion, gay marriage, global warming, any war – because they assume all writing is a large undertaking suitable only for weighty subjects. They want to begin with answers instead of questions.

Some argue that eighteen year-olds don’t have enough personal experiences to write about. It’s true, some don’t. They will, though, and soon enough. In the meantime, we weigh out the miracle and frustration of the everyday.

As I sit here with this half-graded pile of papers, there seems to be a sort of developmental rite of passage either crossed or not. Some are ready for what comes next, others need more time to cook.

For our second paper, I’ll adjust the temperature a bit.

Whistling Past the Graveyard

No Telling


I‘m hot on the trail of a mystery of sorts. Last weekend I went to a lovely wedding in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I’m unfamiliar with the city, having only been there years ago for Advanced Placement Workshops. Pretty place – all Ozarky and such up in the hills. The University of Arkansas in Fayetteville is the Home of the Hogs, in case you’re confused. WooPigSoooey and all that.

The wedding took place just outside of town at a sweet place called Stone Chapel. It’s apparently quite the hotspot for young graduates and other locals to marry off and to each other. The quaint chapel was built ages ago by some moneyed man who wanted the perfect place for his daughter’s wedding. That’s all the story I could get from anyone, and they all seemed satisfied with that being plenty.

Don’t you hate it when someone gives you half a story?

So once I arrived, I poked around a bit. We arrived almost two hours early, so I guess you could say I poked around a lot.

Click on the website and what you won’t see is a jungle-thick acre of land somewhere off to the left of the chapel. Parking was up next to the rusted barbed-wire fence that held it tight and we had to carefully avoid hitting stones as big as lidded cake-plates to squeeze next to the fence.

No big deal. Folks who live out in the country always have an unsightly side of the house. It’s like buying fresh Christmas trees (if anyone does that anymore), they’re always a little wanky and you have to redirect all your tinsel to the good side.

The tinsel at Stone Chapel was a huge, lovely covered reception area. Tables and flowers and toddies and such – it was delightful. So delightful, in fact, that I walked halfway around the overgrown acre without paying a lick of attention to it.

But two hours is a long time, folks.

I talked to just about everyone in and out of the wedding party within an hour, so I began talking to the big security guy who stood like a mountain on the periphery of the jungled fence and watched everyone behave perfectly. Interesting fella, really, but not as interesting as what I finally noticed behind him.

That picture above is, of course, taken with my sorry cell phone camera. You can still make it out, though. There, just beyond the large security man and on the other side of the barbed wire, was a seven-foot headstone. My new friend and I tried like hell to read the name on it, but the inscription was facing the large tree. In fact, it appeared that someone had planted it there on purpose. The tree’s base had grown around the bottom of the headstone in an eternal hug.

Beyond that – and it was mighty thick in there – I saw two more headstones just as tall. That little acre was an old cemetery, right there in the middle of everyone’s wedding and a stone’s toss from the reception toddies.

Now, I wasn’t dressed for giving this acre a proper going-over. Not to mention the barbed-wire business and that friendly but no-nonsense security fella. I don’t worry about my family, they’re used to my little oddnesses, but I didn’t want anyone bailing me out of the pokey on my cousin’s special day.

With about forty-five minutes until marital blast-off, I began stalking the perimeter. Those big rocks we’d avoided when parking? They were ancient unmarked gravestones, worn lopsided and pitted by weather. We had parked, if you can believe it, up against a wall of overhanging limbs sheltering a sort of mini-burial place. The growth was so thick that it took me quite some time to make out ornate iron fencing that marked off a 10′ by 20′ rectangle within the larger acre. I counted nine small headstones, but there could have been more.

A children’s plot. The rusted iron fencing looked for all the world like a discarded crib.

I gathered myself together and went back to my people, stood and sat when I should, smiled for photos, and cried just like everyone else when the young couple made promises to one another. Weddings are hopeful events, and this one was more hopeful than most. Afterward, we all ate and danced and admired the newlyweds.

The seven-foot headstone watched the whole reception from behind the security guard, as I’m sure it does almost every weekend there at Stone Chapel. Wedding after wedding, and no one the wiser.

Note: I’ve contacted the Washington County Genealogical Society and they have no record of the cemetery. No one knew it was there. But they’re looking at it now, and should get back to me soon to tell me the other half of the story.

B.A.R.O.P. vs. University Writing Center

Fresh Ribbon

The Old Remington Quiet-Riter has a new home and a special purpose. The Writing Center at the University of Central Arkansas now has corner dedicated to the Retrotech Arts, complete with a B.A.R.O.P. There’s also a suitable vintage table and chair, courtesy of my good friend Jennifer, whose lot in life is to keep the Writing Center tutors knowledgeable and fresh.

I have it on good authority that the paper roll is full of daily poetry, cryptic messages, and mysterious intrigues. All this despite the fact that not one of the tutors is old enough to remember typing up footnoted term papers on the real clanking deal.

This is the first of many projects planned this year using the manual typewriter/B.A.R.O.P. combination, so stay tuned.

I’ve got a lot more typewriters, a whole box filled with Big-Ass Rolls of Paper, and students who aren’t afraid to use them.

Redneck Tasering and the Razor-wire Rodeo

No Telling


Occasionally I find a ditty in the local paper that requires sharing. Those of you familiar with renegade pigs in the freeway and the survivor story of the swimming-pool hog may not be a bit impressed. Anyone who’s read my picks from the local police blotter might be too jaded at this point. I don’t know. Even News of the Weird may have a difficult time believing this one.

It seems we have a jail escapee. A gentleman who managed to unhitch a primary fence at the local detention center shimmied out, then scaled another fence about 13-feet high, crowned within razor wire. Although in the past hour or so we’re all relieved to hear he finally turned himself in, his story is already the stuff of legend. Little Rock’s KATV Channel 7 gave us this slice of life earlier:

“A theft suspect who was caught after he was swarmed by bees has escaped from the Faulkner County Jail.

Faulkner County sheriff’s deputies say that 46-year-old Ricky Dale Ford peeled back a section of chain-link fence to escape an exercise yard and then scaled a secondary fence Sunday afternoon to get loose.

Area law enforcement said Monday that Faulkner County deputies have not been able to find Ford.

Ford was riding a stolen ATV when he clipped a bee hive at a home on Billy Goat Mountain near Vilonia. He was caught Wednesday in nearby woods, where police found other stolen property.

When Ford struck the hive, the bees swarmed him, stinging him up to 100 times. Ford’s address is on nearby Nanny Goat Lane.

Ford was jailed after hospital treatment.”

There’s so much going on there I scarcely know where to begin. It’s no wonder Ricky Dale was compelled to give himself up considering the description of him published in the Log Cabin Democrat.

“FCSO Chief Deputy Jerry Gross said Ford was barefoot and was wearing black-and-white prison clothes when he escaped.”

And the real clincher,

“A deputy said Ford may still have visible whelps from the bee stings.

Ford is described as a white male about 6 feet tall with dark hair and a ‘mullet’ haircut.”

Why, this fella defines Audacity of Hope. Let’s forget for a moment that he’s a gentleman likely entering his heart-attack years. Nevermind the innumerable bee-stings that tasered him into the detention center in the first place. There’s a whole lot of believing (or something) that gets a man that age up and over a razor-wired fence. Barefooted.

I think someone needs to test the water up on Billy Goat Mountain. It may not explain the mullet, but it might go a long way in deciphering exactly what kind of country boys they’re growing up there.

Special thanks to my good friend Tony, who alerted me to the breaking news. If I wrote down one-tenth of the bizarre stories he tells me, I’d have to quit my day-job and scribble itinerantly.

A Fairy Tale with Teeth: Part Third and Final

No Telling

(A serialized fairy tale in three parts.)

Sliding to the floor like poured milk, she attempted to get under the flying bats. And there were dozens. You see, a roomful of bats is a difficult thing to count accurately, considering all that moving and fluttering and screeching. Let us say then that there were uncountable many.

But the round-eyed woman was all at once thinking, stealthy, and consumed by her biology in ways that eluded the H&P, but that must certainly be easily understood by nesting bats. She crawled first to the comic book bedroom of the sleeping part-time son who, because he feared darknesses we can only imagine or prosecute, left his door wide open for safety. And the round-eyed woman wept as she crawled hand over hand, a moonlit commando for rescue, because she knew that he was old enough to remember the terrifying houseful of bats and would never, never, never forget.

Exactly what the H&P did or thought at this moment as it is unclear. The background music to the rest of evening is an inelegantly strung series of his epithets punctuated by household decor thumping and crashing. For the H&P, it was war.

With the whimpering part-time son clinging to her belly like a like a small blonde pregnancy, and the Tranfsormer quilt over the both of them, the round eyed woman continued her paratrooper crawl down the hall very quickly and in a sing-song voice. This is just quite an adventure, she told the boy, close your eyes and I will tell you the story when it is over and I’ve made a pretty end of it.

And because he did, he did not see the tired fliers fall to the Stainmaster Nine plush carpeting, catching their calcaria in the little twists of orlon that made them fast prisoners difficult to sling out of the way with her still bloodless hands.

The round eyed-woman did not begin to shake until she saw, by the sweetly pink glow of the dim nightlights, the seven brown and rolling bodies each grappling their way toward the thick, dark underneath of the lovely rose quilt; a place warm and holy from the sleepbreaths of the babygirl dreaming swingsets and pristine sandboxes and “E” shaped honey sandwiches.

So she covered the boy with a Transformer swoosh. She flung wide the delightful rose quilt, slinging heinous brown bodies, and she placed the toddling girl between her white satin nightgown and the terror beating through her skin, and tied a quick umbilical knot to hold her.

Then she formed a ragged whisper to all things heinous, unsafe and named them with one word best not repeated here.

Standing, the round-eyed woman attached the quilted boy to her thigh like a large, confused mitten, and they ran very, very quickly down the hall, through the dark rain of innumerable airborne living-room bats, skipping lightly over the trapped and writhing ones, sliding cleanly out the front door of the June-blue house and into the softest September night.

They took the long way around, through the fence picketed and white, beside the trained and twisted curls of the foot-long beans (which gave an audible green sigh of twisting, pushing into tomorrow’s picking) until they were at last, quilted and keyless beside the mountainous door of the ancient and seldom purring late 50s Belair. The round-eyed woman lovingly unknotted the satin, and breathlessly placed the little ones inside where they scooched and snuggled into a small fuzzy pile, all Rose and Transformer, in the cavernous back seat.

From the windows of the Chevy, the round-eyed woman could see the H&P’s heroic attempts to slice through waves of circling bats, as he danced like a fruit-of-the-loomed marionette with strange despotic gestures and stifled sounds of imagined triumph. It was suddenly obvious then that he might be forever swinging at his own carefully constructed evils entirely too late and all alone. She covered close the little frightened things she loved and hummed a wordless, vining song, to smooth the sounds coming from the open door of the lovely June-blue house all circled round in white pickets.

~The End

Epilogue

Yes, the bats did actually happen. They had been nesting in the chimney, and once the bottom and top of it had been sealed, we can assume they became frantic. The path of least resistance was the plywood-sealed fireplace opening.

When all was said and done my husband counted over 170 kills, escapees through the open front door notwithstanding. For days after, we found the odd one here and there behind books in the bookcase, hanging comfortably from ficus tree limbs, and crawling across the kitchen floor.

Thankfully, the children have no memory of the bats. The H&P, I understand, is still swinging at difficulties of his own making.

A Fairy Tale With Teeth: Part Second

No Telling

(A continuation from Part First.)


magine, if you can, the fluttering mother-heart of the round-eyed woman as she crept like a strange midnight ballerina toward what might certainly be a particularly Geraldo scenario complete with masked gunmen and duct tape. The irregular sounds from the living room mixed with the panic throbbing pizzicato in her clenched and stylishly-ringed fingers. With her hair still wild from dreaming and the whiteness of her satin nightgown reflecting moon through the windows, she looked just like the twisted moonflower and passion vines that came up like demonic accidents around the front porch of the June-blue house. An unfortunate camouflage for a woman inopportunely stalking certain ski-masked disaster.

In the living room, she used the tennis racquet’s edge to flip on the light.

There was no one there. She breathlessly leapt to the kitchen, the dining room. Still no darkly-dressed, robber-band infamy.

The irregular thumping came from the unattractively secured and jagged piece of raw plywood used to seal up the underbelly of the chimney. Knowing instantly that the thumping could only be the muffled sound of a trapped bat or two slinging themselves selfishly toward the safety of her children, the round-eyed woman stopped and though a bit.

She thought about heinous, rabid, slobbering, madnesses-incurable waiting in spiky bat teeth. She thought about unendurable abdominal injections in the smooth tummies of the sleeping small ones.

She thought about Old Yeller and became all misty.

For some reason the H&P (Handsome and Powerful husband) found it easier to wake this time, and did not protest at all when asked to climb upon the roof of the June-blue house in the very midnight of a late September. The round-eyed woman kissed the sleeping children’s fuzzy hair softly and with great assurance that their perfect pink bellies would be safe from all that was rabid and rodent-borne.

With the H&P tottering on the steeply pitched roof making repairs (there is another story of him falling from the roof, but he does not die in that one either), the round-eyed woman was at long last able to snuggle into the bed and dream sad Erendira moments of men in lines and things undone.

A few hours later, when the round-eyed woman heard hail gently bouncing and tumbling at the windows, she automatically rose to check the weather. She was accustomed to this, having lived cheerfully many years in a small southern town where the weather enjoys unaccountable changes and whirling tornadic things fall from the sky with regularity.

My lovely beans, she thought as she pulled back the soft sheets, will be beaten down to a fray. And this made her sad, because she adored the natural William Morris-like spirals pristinely curled for morning pickings.

By the time the she understood that the sound was not hail at all, not the rattling pieces of her broken heart, that the hail storm was not outside, but inside the house, the repeated flinging of blinded bat bodies casually slamming themselves into the post-war two-inch metal blinds had risen to a roll thunderous enough to wake even the sleeping H&P.

She turned the bedside light on with a gentle twist…

To be, of course, continued ~

A Fairy Tale With Teeth: Part First

No Telling

(The snake incident and a comment from a friend reminded me of this ditty I wrote some years ago. It’s ridiculous. It’s in three parts. And like all fairy tales, it’s true.)

nce upon a time a lengthy long time ago there lived this round-eyed woman in a mid-sized, downtown (right side of the tracks, but only just) old blue house. It was the color of the this very June sky, just two shades lighter, and had been built at the turn of the century as something better than a diamond ring to attract the unending love of a woman (now dead) who wanted not the house at all, but the ring.

Several owners later, the round-eyed woman moved in with her little toddling girl, one very black dachshund puppy, a part-time son, and a handsome and powerful man (hereafter, the H&P). She planted a garden where she grew broccoli too late and buggy foot-long green beans in matted heavenward spirals. It was very lovely place to be, and the round-eyed woman spent all her free afternoons tape-recording the voices of the young children for posterity while they played on the Wal-Mart swingset (model no. 2345-77-92002). In the evenings they would all gather in the back yard and cook assorted grilled meats to eat with the beans, staying outside until the swallows could no longer tell the difference between the round-eyed woman’s hair and the high wall of bean tendrils. The whole summer passed by sweetly.

One night, late in a September when the sun was still hot as three forgotten hells, the round-eyed woman looked up in evening light to see a new kind of swallow dipping and flailing. It only took one very close fly-by (a wing-breeze, really) for her to understand that the swallows had been replaced by some creepier flying thing.

Bats, she said, and ran into the house with a little one under each arm like floppy laundry, singing “Moon Shadow” (the children’s only lullaby) in an failing attempt to create calm in a sea of bats.

Later that evening, just after the round-eyed woman had snuggled the wiggling children into beds Rose and Transformer, and before she balled up in the tapestry sofa with the excruciating rhythms of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, there came an unusual sound from the fireplace, there, just to her left. It was some highly-placed screaming, almost a whistle.

And then a lone, wayward bat excused himself from the chimney’s esophagus and sailed through the open fireplace, afterward whooshing delicately about the room in uneven elliptical panic.

The woman quietly fell to the ground, Marquez still in hand, plotting in two and one half seconds just how long it would take to get the sleeping children and car keys free from the June-blue house. Before she could move, the reclining H&P deftly took three giant steps across the room (catching, of course, the only forgotten Lego squarely in the arch of his right foot), and as he fell his hand caught tightly one very collectible Billie Jean King wooden tennis racquet. A fortuitous weapon for such a moment.

Twenty or so increasingly violent back-hands and many freshly-strung expletives later, the bat lay in the floor, a flattened, fuzzy/brown, smallish thing. Much smaller, the round-eyed woman thought, than the drooling buzzard it had appeared to be just moments earlier.

To quiet the now frenzied round-eyed woman, the H&P promised to perch his life precariously on the roof the following morning and seal up the gaping and crumbling chimney so as not to let this ever happen again.

I’ll risk my life to save you from the bats, he said to the woman whose round eyes flicked tears of youth and motherhood into the new Stainmaster Series Nine carpeting.

Tomorrow, I promise, he said.

And as the round eyed woman calmly began packing enough clothes, diapers, and He-Man accessories for a week’s stay at her mother’s, the H&P found scrap plywood, gooey glue stuff and a gun-like instrument. He began to seal up the fireplace from the inside, and as a means to cease the packing and the frightening calm of the round-eyed woman, because he was most aware, suddenly, that he had said “tomorrow” perhaps one too many times.

Satisfied, the round eyed woman went to sleep and began lightly dreaming of angel-sized bats with very enormous wings and handsomely drowned and barnacled bats, because Marquez can invade even a June-blue house despite the application of epoxy sealants.

It was the irregular thumping that woke her, sounding for all the world like a madman playing rasta rhythms on the front door. Unable to arouse the sleeping H&P, the round-eyed woman crept a stealthy path down the hall, pausing only to lift the now loosely-strung and somewhat gory Billie Jean racquet from the elegant mahogany hall tree. Taking only the slightest moment to appreciate the contrast between the two, she continued to creep low, fingers bloodless for a two-fisted backhand…

To be continued tomorrow~