Behold an Israelite in whom there is no guile

I'm an innocent. In my online wanderings I used to find these essays all the time, and I guess I assumed, if I assumed anything, that some proud college student put them up for all to read. Only now am I finding out that they're free essays used for cheating. And, having been read the riot act in my composition class, I now believe that those who cheat are infinitely more innocent than I am. After every teacher has made you aware of the plagiarism checker at Turnitin.com, it seems almost a lovable quality in someone to cheat. Such a person cheerfully believes that he's the most trenchant force in his world, refusing to acknowledge that there are those who would inquire into his methods. If the world were made up only of cheating students and suspicious teachers, it would be a refreshing place.

Unfortunately, there are also people like me in the world, possessing neither suspicion nor villainy, and so the world plods the path to destruction. We're not so bad, we innocents, but we're doing murder on the balance.

Non poteram sine miraculo

Latin has made a Watson of me. I sit there, baffled, scrabbling over a sentence until I think I'll lose my mind. Then I turn the page for the translation and say, "How absurdly simple!"

Sometimes the most frustrating things are the ones that are right between your fingers, if only you could manage them.

[Edit: The title is bad Latin. It should be, "Non potero id facere sine miraculo." I think.]

Studeo, Studere

I must be a glutton for punishment. I'd be fine, I really would--relaxed and caught up and everything--if I hadn't decided to be a Classics major. As it is, we're freewheeling through Wheelock's at an alarming speed, and it's hard to study when you can't concentrate. I never can.

But it's interesting how studeo doesn't actually mean study. It means desire. The second meaning came about later. And I really do want this.

I just wish I could focus.

Autem ("however" in Latin, but looks like Autumn in English)

Today I received a suspicion--not a confirmation, but a suspicion--that my character Donovan Din has curly hair. I'd always assumed it was straight, but as a writer you have to keep your antennae up for stuff like that.

So I doodled him with wavy hair, but then he looked not enough like Beethoven and too much like my sister Clair's character Blitzen Coves. And if you were to know Blitzen Coves and Donovan Din, you'd know that they'd work just fine together on a rap collaboration, but on a personal basis not at all.

It being Friday the 13th, we had to read some of Something Wicked This Way Comes, which we began last year and never finished. I wish I was Ray Bradbury. I come close to crying sometimes that I'm not him. And then I thought I'd invented Autumn People when I tried to put them as antagonists in my story, but it turned out that not only had he invented Autumn People, but written them so much scarier than I could ever hope to do that it made me despair. Ye gods, Ray, you dearly-departed writers really rip my skies. And when I think, when we began Something Wicked you were safely on the other side of the grave. Funny how life is.

And with all this happening I have to study for midterms. Cruel world, in it? But with second winds and pumpkin-spice lattes (which are everywhere, Clair says, this time of year) and the shrug of shoulders and the side of Latin that I like (more language and fewer smudges) and the fever of presidential debates in the air and the idea that I might be able to write a little something for NaNoWriMo after all--who knows, maybe turn out some halfway decent Autumn people?--I think I'll make it after all.

Style and Shtick

Sometimes I wonder if my writing's getting too stylistic.

Having a voice is essential, of course, but there's a narcissism in style: saying something, then adjusting it as if you're trying to pick up on your own signal: "Nahh, I wouldn't write that. I'd write it much more cleverly than that."

That was the problem with Pearls Before Swine, which used to be one of my favorite comic strips. Part of its appeal was this rough-and-ready feeling that it had; the drawings were simple, not bad, not inconsistent, but nicely stick-figurey and slapdash. When the zebra ran through the first panel you felt as if the artist had just tossed him off to give him a head start and was drawing the crocodiles real quick to complete the chase scene in the next panel. When the rat, in mid-conversation, pulled out a frying pan and started hitting people with it, it felt almost like an actual impulse instead of the gag he'd been leading up to all along.

Then something terrible happened. The artist developed a style. And now the characters look poised and pretty and stiff as boards. He even applies shading to them, as if they need to be rounded out like plush toys. And when the rat hits people with stuff I wonder if his heart is really in it. It feels as if he's following a script.

I could learn a lesson from that. I'm way too stuck on the internal rhymes and the run-on sentences. Rhymey words are great, but I don't want them to be my shtick, or one day the style might crumble away like so much sugary coating, and I'll find there was nothing underneath it after all.

Disco, discere, didici

Veterans who had been in the form for terms said afterwards that there had been nothing to touch it, in their experience of the orator, since the glorious day when Dunster, that prince of raggers . . . had introduced three lively grass-snakes into the room during a Latin lesson. 

- P.G. Wodehouse, Mike and Psmith 

I'm taking a composition class at college, which feels like a waste of time to me. If there's one thing I truly believe I can do decently, it's slap a paper together. But there's a word the teacher likes to repeat, and I apply it here: kairos, the supreme moment. 

About one week into college, when I was walking around on the grounds, eyeing a metal statue, I realized something, which was that I no longer wished I'd saved the Psmith series for when I was a new student. It wouldn't have been the moment for it. 

I have a weird way of relating books to whatever I do, and I wanted, at college, to find a friend like Psmith. I spent the whole summer in happy daydreams of gaining the sort of companion who would help me toss interlopers out the back windows of studies. Granted, that type died with the English school, but there's always hope.

But the main reason I wanted a Psmith was that Psmith exists to ease a person into Sedleigh, and I was certain that my school would be a Sedleigh--pleasantly, decently dull. (I guess it is, though more on the pleasantly side at the moment. And if wearing loafers around the school grounds doesn't drive that home, nothing does, really.)

Scratch that. I thought the school would start out a Sedleigh and morph, as the nights lengthened, into that bank in Psmith in the City, just an endless drudgery and coldness. It never did. I like it still. Maybe I forgot that Mike, the main character, adjusts quite quickly to such settings, and it's only Psmith who turns his discontent into a disco and dances in it. (No, not really. Disco is deader than Psmith, but you know.)

So college, if you enjoy it, is not necessarily the time to be reading Psmith. I read it exactly when I should have read it, because the time to be reading Psmith is the spring and summer before, when you're anticipating college with a Mike-like groan, not super into the idea and worried it will cut into your cricket-playing time. Or, in my case, my reader time.

I feel almost like I'm violating a certain readerly privacy, writing this post. I love my Kindle, admittedly, and when mine broke again this past week I cradled it like Clara with her injured nutcracker, but I hate all this stuff with the Amazon company tracking your bookmarks and plastering your screen with ads. Used to be you'd duck behind a book and flip the pages if you wanted to go unseen, and now look at me, writing posts about what I read. I was going to do a series of posts detailing my short-lived love affair with the college library. I might even do it now, and have this be the first. 

But even if it isn't the moment for Psmith, and even if I should be putting him aside and studying, I find myself thinking of him and his antics in the middle of my classes and having to stifle a smile. He's the lively grass snakes in my Latin lesson.