Topic 49: Chameleons

Carol:

Comma Chameleons

         Fact: chameleons are lizards. They do not change color to camouflage themselves 
         but rather in relation to temperature, light and mood. In other words, chameleons
         are not chameleons.
     

We watched an amazing HBO program the other night called “Brave New Voices 2010,” a broadcast of the July National Poetry Slam team championships. Think of poetry slams as competitive performance art where the term “body language” takes on new meaning; the judges rank the poets both by what they say and how they say it.

I have been to a lot of poetry readings.  The audience waits until the end of a poem to applaud, sometimes mistaking a comma for a period and clapping too early. The performance is in the poet’s voice which adds color and emphasis—to the words. I like to close my eyes so that I can listen better. A great poet can be a lousy reader, and a great reader can make any poetry sing, flow and mesmerize. I sometimes cry.

Slam poetry blows all that away. Slam poets trade the podium for the stage, mic up and shout, whisper, punch, cry, gyrate, and mourn their way through the poems, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups.  The audience shouts, whispers, cries and gyrates right along with them, interacting with the power and emotion of the performance. Slam poetry is raw, rough and real. It is about serious stuff—foster care, immigration, body image, addiction—and it totally blows away any stereotypes we old folks may have about whatever X-Y-Z alphabet generation these mostly teen-agers are with their brave new voices. They made me cry.

Whether you are the audience/reader or performer/writer, loving The Word is all about being a chameleon. Not in the negative way we apply the term to waffly politicians and religious opportunists, but in the way we step out of our own skin of experience and circumstance and shout, whisper, cry and gyrate with Nicholas Nickleby, or Pippi Longstockings or Little Eva or a Brave New Voice:
          

Last words from a brave, old voice, who shape-changed me from a fat-cheeked girl into an adventurous space traveler. And the beauty of his words makes me cry.

Run fast, stand still. This, the lesson from lizards. For all writers. Observe almost any survival creature, you see the same. Jump, run, freeze. In the ability to flick like an eyelash, crack like a whip, vanish like steam, here this instant, gone the next—life teems the earth. And when that life is not rushing to escape, it is playing statues to do the same.. . .What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping. In between the scurries and flights, what? Be a chameleon, ink- blend, chromosome change with the landscape. Be a pet rock, lie with the dust, rest in the rainwater in the filled barrel by the drainspout outside your grandparents' window long ago (Ray Bradbury from Zen in the Art of Writing)

Sources:
“Brave New Voices 2010.”
Ray Bradbury "Run Fast ...," Zen in the Art of Writing, Capra Press (1989).
  Found on Dictionary.com Quotations

Megan:

Chameleons as People

I started to Google Chameleons and one of the suggested phrases that came up was “Chameleons as pets,” which was not what I’m looking for today. I once knew someone in college who had two pet chameleons. They lived in a potted tree in her apartment.  One of them grew bigger than the other, and there was concern that the little one wasn’t getting enough food, so my friend gave them each their own tree. Then the big one died. I don’t know why. I don’t know anything about chameleons, except that they (and other lizards) can be very temperamental. 

Kelly's tattoo, designed by me, 2001.

Which is sort of the opposite way I think of Chameleons as people. I was thinking about my friend Kelly, and how I have never seen her be unfriendly. She has never avoided speaking to someone (except by not answering her phone – when she is  busy), she says hello to everyone. When we were in college, it never seemed like she cared about social status, or was even aware of it. I think her open friendliness comes as a surprise sometimes, but eventually it wins everyone over. She can move from group to group and always seemed welcome and welcoming.  I thought of her when we drew this topic, but I realize now she is the wrong example because she does not change herself to fit in with her surroundings.  Rather, the surroundings seem to adapt to her, like flowers following the light.

So, maybe a better example would be me. I have a habit of picking up the emotional tone and personality quirks of my friends.  I have a few groups of friends and acquaintances that know me pretty well and I’m comfortable with them. I’m still myself, but it’s the self that comes out around them. This is not uncommon, I don’t think.  But if my friends were to intermingle, it’s would be very jarring for me – and I wouldn’t know which self to be.

I’m one of those people that ‘you have to get to know’ – by which  I mean, it takes a while. I’m not very confident in social situations.  In fact, the only way I’m really able to interact with people I don’t know very well is if I am working – then I’ve got my professional hat on and not worrying about whether or not people like me. There was one time I was at work and I took a phone call in front of my library officer. When I got off the phone she asked, “Who was that?”
“My boss. Why?”
“Oh. You sat up straight, your voice changed. I’ve never seen you so professional.”
This was coming from someone who supposedly worked for me. I did the only thing I could at that moment – I stuck out my tongue at her.

Anyway, I wish I was more like Kelly sometimes because she has a gift for making people feel comfortable around her. I stand by quietly and people think I’m stuck up or shy, but as Kelly could tell you, once you get to know me, I basically never shut up.

Essentially a self-portrait (if I was a boy), 2001.

Topic 28: The Shrinking Earth

Carol:

What On Earth Was She Thinking?

I really wanted to write about Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) this morning.  Of all the women writers I have studied, she is one who is most enigmatic to me. I love to read her poetry, hate to teach her work—like pulling a flower apart and trying to put it back together without killing it, impossible. I have created my own scientific theory of the incredible expanding and shrinking world of Emily Dickinson.

Emily ventured out into the world through education at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1847-48, a distance of eleven miles from her home. Mount Holyoke’s curriculum was rigorous with a strong emphasis on laboratory sciences; she wrote to her brother Austin  that she was “all engrossed in sulfuric acid” (source: Emily Dickinson Museum). But, the school also emphasized morality and religion, and Dickinson was not one to “profess” what she did not believe. She left Mount Holyoke after that first year, but so did most young women, higher education being superfluous for young ladies destined for marriage, mission work, or teaching. 

Dickinson’s  most extensive writing years were also those of the upheaval of the Civil War. Between 1855-1865, she wrote and revised hundreds of poems,   Although her physical world had narrowed significantly, she was not a recluse and enjoyed the companionship of her brother’s family, who lived next door, and countless visitors to the homes of both the senior and junior Dickinson families. Extended trips to Boston for the treatment of a painful eye condition would be her last travels before she narrowed her physical universe to the grounds of the family home.

During the later part of her life, she continued to write poetry, much of which were written on scraps of paper.  Significant people during this time were Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Helen Hunt Jackson, author of Ramona. Higginson, a frequent writer for Atlantic Monthly, carried on a lengthy correspondence with Dickinson and  would become the publisher of her posthumous collection of poems.  By the time she died in 1885, she had been in ill health for sometime and was confined to bed for the last 7 months of her life.

Theories have been put forward by Dickinson scholars to account for the increasing reclusivity of “The Belle of Amherst.” Was it her failing eyesight, thwarted love, family tradition (her sister was also a recluse)? My theory is one of light and space. Imagine looking down a hallway towards a window of incredible beauty, an inviting glow attracting you towards it. But, open doors along the hallway and the light emanating from those rooms creates a distracting glare. Wouldn’t it be quite natural to close those doors to concentrate on that one, lovely, intense light at the end? Imagine the infinity of that interior world of light and space that Emily Dickinson chose to explore.

I really wanted to write about Emily Dickinson.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---

Sources:
Emily Dickinson bio 

Emily Dickinson Museum

Megan:

A Shrinking World: the role of the ‘twitter-graph’

That this should be an essay topic in a book first published in 1917 seemed oddly out of place to me, out of time. After all, 80-90 years ago, there were no computers, no Internet, no social networking sites to collapse distance in the way we witness today. The first transcontinental phone call happened only two years before our useful little book of topics was published.
 

So, what was I forgetting? In 1837, Samuel Morse invented the electric telegraph and changed everything. The telegraph was arguably the very first Twitter – transmitting short bursts of information without context: updates, gossip, and news headlines. Writing on the subject of a transatlantic cable, Thoreau wrote in Walden:  “We are eager to … bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news … will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough” (as quoted in Postman, 65).  In his  book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argues that the telegraph changed the way people processed information, which spawned
 

the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve… but may attach merely to it novelty, interest and curiosity. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a “thing” that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses and meaning (65).

According to Postman, the invention of the telegraph inundated people with information that had no direct impact on their daily lives; novelty and scandal became news, headlines scrolling past, quickly replaced with whatever was immediate and ‘up-to-date,’ allowing no time for assimilation or reflection. Does this sound familiar?

And Postman’s book was first published in 1985. 

There’s definitely an argument to be made about social responsibility and cultural awareness, that the “shrinking world” has brought nations together through trade and shared information. One might argue that international news has led to intervention in cases of genocide, led to generous donations in times of natural disasters – but is that really true? The money promised to Haiti from the US has not actually been released. How often has the US intervened except when it directly benefited our country? Can you believe that until I moved to England, I thought WWII had started in 1941?
 

The telegraph Internet may have made the country world  into ‘one neighborhood,’ but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other (67-- strike-though and ammendments mine).

What happens over there doesn’t actually have any impact on our daily lives. We watch the news, read the headlines, spend a moment expressing outrage or sympathy, but rarely take any action. We change the channel or click the next link. The world isn’t any smaller, it just seems that way.


Source: Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Penguin Books. New York, 1985.