Fly Melon

This past spring, I spent about a month toting Adorno’s Minima Moralia everywhere with me.  I would get through maybe two paragraphs on a subway ride, which was fine because Adorno’s writings are to literary theory writing what short stories are to fiction.  Small dense gems of insight. Susan Sontag wrote that one Adorno book was worth a whole shelf of other books.  Every time I closed the book, I felt as if my mind had gotten stronger. 

I’ve felt the lack of intellectual stimulation recently.  My studies for the English Lit GRE didn’t allow time for me to linger over fine points, and I certainly didn’t have time to reflect on the material in writing.  Especially in my situation—apart from time spent socializing, the only people I talk to are high school students and the occasional eighth grader—falling out of the writing habit can be damaging. 

For example, this afternoon I drafted an email asking a former professor to recommend me to graduate programs.  My first draft was the driest, most stilted piece of writing I’ve seen in a while, and though I was able to cut out some extraneous words and recalibrate some of the worst bits, the words didn’t sing, or even hum. 

In my exasperation, I turned to Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” which I’d come across in my studies but only skimmed.  It was tonic.  Take this: “This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases…can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.”  And this: “Since you don’t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism?  One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.  If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy.  You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.”

Writing the second draft was painful, but the result was less awful.

I was reading my introduction to theory.  An old man sat down next to me and asked me about the book.  We started talking, I explained that I’m applying to graduate school; he explained that he is a poet.  Samuel Menashe.  On his way to a reading at McNally-Jackson.  He wrote down the time and place of his next reading—Nov 1 at a library—on a piece of an envelope he had in his pocket.   We talked for quite a while–it was a local train.  He couldn’t remember the story about my name, so I told him, and I also told him where I’m from, Nashville to Boston to New York, and he told me about his being published in England and Ireland but not the United States until recently.  He showed me his book from the American Poets Series.  Then he took the piece of envelope back and said he wanted to give one of his poems to me.  Don’t look at it until I’m finished, he said.  I want you to see it all at once.  After he wrote the poem, he signed his name underneath it and made a note, dated, that it was copied out for me, and he wrote out my name.  The poem is two lines long.  It concerns a pot, and it suited the occasion perfectly.  The poet said it has been anthologized a few times.  We came to 14^th Street and I said I’m glad you said hello, and I’ll see you at the next reading.