owp05

I Am From

by Terry Varner Benge

June 17, 2005

I am from stories and superstitions
Smorgasbords and potlucks
Vikings and Hillbillies
the Sea
and a valley filled with Water.

I am from drive-in theaters
Ballet class and Blue Birds
Climbing bars and easels
Cone-hat birthday parties
Sally, Dick, and Jane
and backyard dramas.
I am not from Barbie dolls my mother wouldn't buy.

I am from rain and green
Mud puddles, rubber boots
Pulled tight over saddle shoes
Barefoot soles blackened
by summer city pavement.
I am not from white go-go boots my mother wouldn’t buy.

I am from the Beatles
Joan Baez and Bob Dylan
Peace rallies, Earth Day
And we shall overcome.
I am not from The Lawrence Welk Show.

I am from divorce,
mended one year later.
I am from porcelain broken angel wings
Re-attached, just a trace of brown glue
Revealed in the crack.

I am from
a-house-should-look-lived-in
and no-singing-at-the-table.
I’m from "If you sing before breakfast
you’ll cry before nightfall."
I’m from the Carter Family
and the Man in Black.
I am from “Que Sera Sera.”

Concerning the Blog Bog: What technology has done to writing

by Terry Varner Benge

July 2005

blog (noun)

1. An online journal, typically comprising links to current news stories or other Web resources, and/or social and political commentary, and/or a personal diary, sometimes with replies from readers or RSS feeds.

to bog (verb)

Intransitive

1. (often with down) to become mired or stuck (especially in mud).

2. bog off (slang) to go away.

3. to bog up - to make a mess of (col).

Transitive

1. (often with down) to cause to become mired or stuck, especially in mud

bog (noun)

1. An expanse of marshland.

2. (slang) A toilet.

Here I am stuck in the blog bog again.

Words on screen. Lightning-fast I type them. Spelling errors magically correct themselves before my eyes. Zip zip! Writing is faster than thought and thoughts appear bluntly in bleak cruel incomplete incoherence. There it is for all the world to see: My spelling is perfect, but my mind is all wrong! EEEK!

Whatever happened to the privacy of writing?

Think back 200 years:  Writing, what joy! What freedom! Feather plume in hand, dip in ink and take flight! A feather carries lightly on the wind, the thoughts, dreams, fantasies and wild wanderings of the mind. For birds, feathers are hollow for effortless riding of the wind; for writers, hollow to form a reservoir for ink. When the ink line dwindles on the paper, pause briefly to re-dip, then it’s back to the air currents. Splatters and splashes may punctuate the rough draft, but don’t interfere with words spewing forth on vellum like buttons from a jar: Colorful and contrasting, a clattering array of silver, bone, wood, and shell, later to be sorted and organized.

Stop! Enough fantasy! It’s a pretty image, but feathers are meant for bird-flight. In truth, writing with feathers is earth-bound and laborious. Human thought is quicker than a pen governed by gravity. However, the push of pen nib across the paper’s surface has a physical quality to be enjoyed for its own sake, and the writer’s effort has a specific, usually formal, purpose. It ends with the painstaking production of the final document; the artist-writer crafts it with beauty and solemnity, creating a product suitable for viewing. It is as beautiful to behold as it is thought-provoking to read.

The room is still. No TV, no chatter from the radio. The dimness of the room, the golden lamp glow, are comforting, reassuring. There’s no awareness of the missing-ness of TV, radio, record player, CD player, computer or cell phone. You just write.

The twentieth century converts the plume to fountain pen. Fuel stops are greatly reduced. The ink well is relegated to the artist’s shelf, while the writer pauses pen scratches only long enough to change the cartridge. Soon writers have an array of writing tools at their literal fingertips: ballpoint pens, pencils, or a heavy black typewriter.

Imagine you are there, mid-20th century, let’s say, 1952. What are you writing? A journal? A letter? A newspaper article? A poem or story? Why are you writing? To record events or organize domestic needs? To express affection to someone who will receive your message a week or month later? To express an opinion to the community via typeset printing press?

Whatever the case, you know who is going to read this thing you wrote down. You may do some revision later, but your thoughts are coherent as you write, because time is vast, the pace of life in step with the pace of human thought. When you work, it’s between you and the paper. It’s personal. You spend time with it. You live with it; you interact with it in a physical way. This combination of processes mental, corporeal, and spiritual is to writing, as water, earth and sunshine are to growing plants.

Now we have computers in all their incarnations: laptops, palm pilots, digital-this and digital-that. We have illustrations and graphs at our fingertips, at the ready for insertion into our documents. Finally, there are no more ink spatters or scribbles and scratches. Revision takes place during creation. Best of all, everything we write can be shared with the world via weblog, AKA “blog.” This is better, right?

I saw a TV show recently, Dr. Phil or Oprah, where a woman was asking for help. She had too much stuff. She couldn’t throw anything away. She was depressed. The camera panned her home, stacked floor to ceiling with boxes, piles of papers, pathways so narrow they could barely navigate from the living room to the kitchen. The woman was bogged. She couldn’t pull herself out, couldn’t arise or lift even a finger to begin to sort or toss or make any sense of the mountainous gluttonous piles. The reporter picked up a single used sock, and suggested this was a good place to start – toss that in the trash can. “Oh, but I could find a use for that,” the woman said, “I could polish my dishes with it.” This is an actual psychological disorder, called Narcissistic Personality Disorder! A product of too-much-stuff-consumer-culture, an abnormal cell growth, a cancer. Humans survived for centuries on thrift. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a healthy adaptation gone awry.

The blog bog is like that. Write think write thinkwritethinkwritethinkquestion . . . question?  I have a question! I don’t have to wait for the answer!  I don’t even have to get out of my chair, or reach out to the encyclopedia on the shelf next to my computer. Google! Down the Google Path! La la la la-la! What a merry trail I trod, wherever curiosity leads . . . but wait! What was the question? Oh yeah, I’m writing a paper about the blog bog! But it was very interesting to read so many experiences about too much stuff. So . . . copy paste copy paste copy paste . . . now I have a place to put it – so interesting, all this interesting stuff, I really don’t want to forget it, so I copy paste copy paste and it’s safely tucked away in a saved MSWord document called “Saved stuff for paper #4.” Now I feel better. I’ll have it forever – in case I need it – unless  . . .

. . . computer crash, disc malfunction, file overload, mind overload, I forgot where I put it, lost it in an overzealous trash-purge!

But everything is fine, safe, protected. Just make a backup file.  Put it on your thumb drive! Dragging files back and forth, saving saving saving, doubling and saving, backing up and saving – then the dreaded question:

‘This folder already contains a folder named ‘OWP’ If the files in the existing folder have the same name as files in the folder you are moving or copying, they will be replaced. Do you still want to move or copy the folder?’

The wrong answer could be FATAL! Precious files forever vaporized! Eeek! Stress! Fifteen files later, all labeled “OWP” or variations thereof, and I’m beginning to fear for my sanity! Perhaps someone has already named this version of mental illness. Bloggagooglebog Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I am NOT going to search for that. I AM GOING TO FINISH THIS PAPER.

I want to finish all my OWP assignments now, so I can read what everyone else has written. I want to have time to think about what they write, and send them comments. I want to do this before the end of the workshop. Also, I want to go further out into Blog World, travel abroad, read blogs from France, Canada, Africa. It’s like going inside the minds of people from every imaginable corner of the earth. No more wondering what other people are thinking. Now we know – at least the thoughts they want to blog at us.

And so, I’m done. This paper is over. I’m going to post it on the blog. Oh no. That means everyone can read it. EVERYONE. There it is. My crazy mixed up bogged up blogged up mind, exposed for all the world to see. Not to mention my sentence fragments, punctuation errors, and erroneous writing style in 2nd person P.O.V. Or is it 1st person?

Stuck. Wedged. Jammed. Lodged. Trapped. Having difficulties. Blocked. EEEK!  If you’ve read this far, you know it all.

Here goes.

 

Significance of Foreign Language Study in American High Schools: Importance of Student Choice and the Value of French

by Terry Varner Benge
July 2005

There are many compelling reasons that all students should have the opportunity to learn a foreign language. Ideally students should have at least three or four languages from which to choose. Spanish is not the only language of importance to American students. French, as one of the most important world languages, should be high on the list.

 Imagine you are an American high school student forecasting your class schedule for next year. Your counselor told you it’s time to choose a foreign language[1]. She says you’ll need two years of the same language to get into a four-year college.

You’re fourteen years old; how are you supposed to know what you want to do with your life? You’re not sure whether or not you want to go to college, and even if you do, your family may not be able to afford it.

Why take foreign language anyway? Doesn’t everyone in the world speak English? And if they don’t, they certainly should! And you’re not the only one who thinks so. Many in your community – possibly your parents – think so too. If you absolutely must take a foreign language, there’s no doubt what it should be:  Spanish.

Button Collection

by Terry Varner Benge
July 2005

I am a jar of old buttons.
You can see them through the greening glass.
They look alike, don't they --
whitish and difficultly small,
but if you rotate the jar gently in your hand,
look so close,
you'll see some sparkly ones.
I hold some red ones too, and one green,
and a few ugly fakey gold metal ones with anchors.
My buttons came from summer dresses,
men's evening starched shirts,
and heavy woolen coats.
Abalone from turquoise sea
mixed up
with plastic from stinky factories
that polluted a nearby river.
They've been filling up for years.
Sometimes someone reaches in
and takes one out.
I can't find it anymore.
It doesn't really matter.
When the glass gets jarred
I make a jewelly clatter,
clinking
like bangles on a gypsy’s wrist.
Sometime I might just tip over
and then the buttons will splatter forth,
some rolling to the edges of the floor
to remain forever hidden
under the edge of the baseboard.

How Elsie Finally Managed Her Neurosis and Learned to Love

by Terry Varner Benge
June 2005

     Nearly midnight as I left my shift at Denny’s and began to pull my car out of the parking lot, I saw a flicker of white and black fur reflected in the headlights. A tiny kitten flashed and was gone in an instant, swallowed by night-black bushes that lined the creek between the restaurant and the freeway. Carefully, quietly, I opened my car door, “Here kitty kitty!” But she didn’t come out. Evidently this one was too wild and terrified, oblivious to the fact that I was probably the most ardent cat-lover in the whole world, and getting to know me would provide immediate relief from her hunger, cold, and anxiety!
    Sadly, I couldn’t convince her, so I got back into my car and drove home, reflecting on the many cats that had been left to scratch out a living on the greasy pavement behind the restaurant . . .

Seattle 1959 & 1990

by Terry Varner Benge
June  2005

Introduction

In 1990 I returned to see the neighborhood, school, and small rental house where I spent eight traumatic months of my second grade year in 1959-60, when my mother decided to join my father during his sabbatical at the University of Washington. The environment was not similar in any way to my Vancouver home in the same state. The culture clash and my parents’ own struggles to make the arrangement work were sources of conflict I could not sort out as a child. I merely lived it. For many years the memories of that brief period remained etched sharply in my mind. The narrow alleys, the city streets, and the injustices I had faced, replayed in surreal fantasies in my dreams.
    In the 1990’s I began to feel the impact of these memories in a different way. Now I had my own daughter. I pondered the effect of adult decisions on childhood memories. I pondered the effect of childhood memories on the sculpture which eventually becomes adult, the human being, the spirit that continues on, past the events.
    In discussions about this period with my parents, I sense an apologetic response. But I must protest this! In truth, I would not trade away one day of that dark winter in Seattle. These events helped shape who I am, how I think, how I feel, and how I respond to hardships. They made me a better, stronger person.
    Originally I wrote this piece for my sister and my parents, who share these memories from different perspectives. I also wrote it for my daughter who is growing up in completely different world. But more than this, I wrote it for myself, so that I would always remember.

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