As felicitous an instance of futile classicism as can well be found, outside of the Far East, is the conventional spelling of the English language. A breach of the proprieties in spelling is extremely annoying and will discredit any writer in the eyes of all persons who are possessed of a developed sense of the true and beautiful. English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of detection. Therefore it is the first and readiest test of reputability in learning, and conformity to its ritual is indispensable to a blameless scholastic life.
Thorstein Veblen
I have only read as much of Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out, Walter Brueggemann's latest (*) book as can be read free online, I'm considering doing something I seldom do, buy the book new at full price so I can read it now. From what I can see it is Brueggemann's prophetic attempt to rattle awake the kind of Christians who have fallen into a sort of middle-class comfortable quietism so as not to make anyone feel uncomfortable with what they are supposed to take as the truth. That truth being the basis of American liberalism, the polite quiescence of such as should be liberal activists is a social and economic and political catastrophe, a vacuum which fascism has eagerly occupied. Quiescence inescapably leads to acquiescence. That's certainly the substance of much of Brueggemann's series of prophetic lectures as can be heard for free on Youtubes and other places, if I posted one a day it would take months to exhaust them.
In other works Brueggemann has pointed out that the entire Bible revolves around the Exodus narrative, in which the Pharaoh's enslaving economy of extraction grows to the point where the Children of Israel, enslaved and oppressed ever more severely, cry out against their oppression. He points out that that crying out is the actual initiation of the story, that God comes into the story in Exodus several pages into it when God hears the cries of the slaves and - using the agency of Moses - God frees them from their slavery. As I pointed out over a course of months a year ago, in his early book The Bible Makes Sense, Brueggemann makes a very good case that literally everything in the Bible revolves around and refers to and comments on that narrative of slaves crying out and become free in speaking out against and struggling against slavery.
A large part of the Bible, such as the tales of the kings and kingdoms that the Mosaic alternative decayed into, is a story of what happens when people forget that they too were slaves in Egypt and in the Prophetic books, the cry of the slaves who started it all, is taken up in protest to the now domestic Pharoah style oppression of the Kings of Israel and Judah. In many of his lectures Walter Brueggemann notes how the Prophets were "non-credentialed poets who have no pedigree", some of them country bumpkins, hillbillies. He notes that they open up space in the imagination so that people, entrenched in a well-established habit of life, as part of a well-established social order, so that they can imagine that life might be better than that, that life can be just, that it can be based in neighborliness and generosity instead of commercial transaction. That is something which you're still far more likley to get from non-credentialed poets, hillbillies, bumpkins, than you're going to get from the college-credentialed, those who have been either staff or feature writers, the kind of writers and scribblers who seem to spend most of their time on talk-shows and giving awards to each other. I think a lot of, especially the First Testament, can be read as a juxtaposition of the official, approved, credentialed, educated classes of people and the unofficial, unapproved, non-credentialed, un-educated classes of people. I will note that when the First Testament is most useful to the enemies of God and morality, it's generally the credentialed, educated writings that are useful to them, not the country-bumpkin and déclassé poet-Prophets.
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You might wonder why I started this with that quote by Thorstein Veblen, one of my favorite quotes from him. I suppose it's a self-indulgence but I wondered how many times various people have complained that I'm not a writer yet I still persist in writing. As if the written form of the language, by right, was the property of some kind of self-defined guild of writers, those who have some kind of proprietary right to write words, or type words, as is the case.
My usual response is that I've never claimed to be "a writer" that is someone who tries to produce piss elegant phrases and clauses and sentences and paragraphs and compositions in official proper style so as to be printed (for so many cents a word) and that might be read through and forgotten by the ever diminishing number of people who read in the electronics polluted world to be talked about by them and have no impact on the wider world. Or that would risk writing the kind of thing that would upset things and risk having an impact on the wider world.
That first one was never my purpose in writing the pieces I post online or in any other part of life, I don't want the respect of people who would be impressed with those kinds of impotent repetitions of the common received POV so as to claim team-fandom (right-left, conservative-lefty, etc.) and find a tiny little but comfortable niche, in reality probably no bigger than their imagination.
Thinking about that last night, I decided I've been giving the wrong answer. A writer is anyone who writes something. Someone who speaks a language has as much right to write it as to say it. So I'm owning up to it, I'm a writer and am proclaiming the right of any other speaker of English to the right of being an English writer if they choose to write something. I mean, they've got as much of a right to do that to their abilities as some bull-shit pop guitar-strummer and intoner has to be a musician.
One of the things I wrote a long time ago, which pissed off a lot of the kinds of nice people who read the blog where I posted it, used Veblen's quote to answer someone who complained that I used a variant spelling for a word, I don't remember which one it was, but which I was able to point out is given in Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. It was a slightly less 1st grade level brawl than the one I instigated when I used the spelling "cooky" here a few months back. I noted that some of the best writers in the English language never much had any use for standardized spelling, some such as Jefferson disdained the novel introduction of standardized spelling, others, like Emily Dickinson, didn't much publish but seem to be either unaware of it or unconcerned in what they did write. I didn't know that ol' Em was one of us till I read some idiot English prof who criticized her spelling in a paper which I wouldn't be surprised if I was one of tens who read it indifferently as opposed to the millions who read and love Dickinson's poetry and letters.
What is the motive of the tireless little meter-maids of the kind who police other peoples' writing? Those who set themselves up as judges of writing and who are always giving out their unasked for and non-authoritative judgments on it?
Is it a demand of silence? Of course it is. It is a demand that people not credentialed (by, them, or someone they choose to acknowledge has that power) not speak, not present their ideas, not express them. To which anyone has a perfect right to ask, who died and made them God?
One of the huge problems with Americans, probably with way too many people in the English speaking people and, no doubt, others, is that they are inhibited from writing their own language by such tin-pot, bullshitting speech police.
I am in favor of people writing every day, for themselves or for posting or publication because writing is such a useful way of taking a good hard look at your own thinking.
One of the best things that could be done with the superfluity of computers that are in the hands of American students would be to set aside twenty minutes or so, every school day to require them to type whatever they thought on whatever topic with whatever spelling and punctuation and requiring them to read it, to themselves or have the teacher read it (maybe they could read one of them a day at random to make sure the brats were doing it). If students did that every day for 180 days a year, I think most of them would come out of the experience more articulate, more critical of their own thinking, more open to changing their thinking, than they'll ever get from writing the kind of dreary compositions in approved form, with approved sentence structure and approved spelling. The written form of language is too important for too many things, learning how to think, inspiring conscience, on whether or not you're being an asshole to let the assholes who want to stop that have their way.
One of the greatest lessons I've found from making my writing public is to find that other people have other lives and even things that I care deeply about, they might not. The world isn't necessarily holding their breath waiting for what opinion I hold. That's clearly something the writing police have yet to learn. Maybe they should write more and read in their own words what assholes they're being. There's the world of difference between speaking up against injustice and just being an asshole. The American left, especially those with college-credentials, has too many of the latter.
* I wouldn't be surprised if Brueggemann, who writes as much as he writes with excellence and, most importantly, relevance , has another one about to come out.
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