By: Greg Leitich Smith,
on 3/23/2013
By: Greg Leitich Smith,
on 3/14/2013
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| Daspletosaurus, Field Museum |
Another column, another orange book. I know—I'm a broken aesthetic record. But David Orr's ode to poetry and Peter Elbow's Vernacular Eloquence have little in common besides their complexion. Orr exemplifies journalistic brevity, while Elbow, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, expounds heartily and at length in the best collegiate tradition.
Stuffed with citations, long gray sidebars, and subheads that run to multiple lines, Vernacular Eloquence may seem daunting if you have only one or two academic degrees to your credit (and none from Oxford). Brave it out, though, and you'll be handsomely rewarded with a fascinating explanation of how everyday speech and writing differ—and why we ought to bridge the divide not by striving for more formality in how we talk, but by taking a more conversational approach to how we write.
"Just because we know enough to do something well doesn't make it easy," the author notes in his empathetic introduction. In fact, writing well is so hard that it scares many aspiring wordsmiths, even those who would happily—and skillfully—chat for hours. Arguing that "spoken language is more coherent than written language," Elbow points out that for inexpert writers, the final draft of a piece often makes less sense than the first. Why? Because we fret, overthink, and recast in an attempt to mold our simple, clear arguments into the complex set of standards associated with "good" writing.
That's not to say we should never make revisions or follow basic rules; I shudder to think. But when we worry too much about correctness as we try to express ourselves, we may wind up curbing our voices for the worse. Even if you're not an Oxonian, Elbow suggests you steal a page from the famous school's playbook and try reading each draft out loud: You'll spot errors more easily and improve the fluidity of your writing. If we apply the confidence of what we say to what we put on the page, we might manage to achieve a kind of (dare I say it?) eloquence.
I had three reasons for opting to review David Orr's recent book that have nothing to do with the words inside it. First, the title: Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry. How freaking fantastic is that? I'd read almost anything called Beautiful & Pointless—a YA novel with a tragic ending, a hipster design magazine, a religious tract.
Reason number two, also title related: Ampersands are my favorite punctuation mark. Yes, I have a favorite (and several runners-up). Think what you will—I feel no shame about this. Several years ago, a coworker made me a fuzzy red ampersand ornament during the holidays; another drew a picture of me sitting on a giant ampersand for a greeting card. Proclaim your idiosyncrasies from the rooftops, friends. You might get some killer homemade gifts out of it.
Third reason: The cover is a delicious shade of mandarin orange. Visit my kitchen sometime, and you'll understand. I realized I had a problem when I came home from a shopping trip one afternoon with a giant orange spatula.
And now, having read the book from clever title to orange back cover, I need to add a fourth reason: Orr's disarmingly smart, funny, and engaging prose. As the author notes at the outset, he has chosen to write about "an art form that currently occupies a position in the popular consciousness somewhere between lute playing and crewel embroidery." Moreover, this art form is "enormous and perplexing, and at least half of it is interesting only to scholars and the certifiably disturbed."
It's a minor miracle, then, that Orr manages to take the unpopular, unwieldy mass of modern verse and make it not only relevant but exciting. He compares most readers' "puzzled interest" in poetry to the mindset of a traveler heading to Belgium for the first time: It makes sense to know a bit about the place before you land, but there's no need to learn fluent Flemish or commit a map of Brussels to memory. Poems, Orr posits, are far more approachable than we imagine. We just need to stop worrying so much about whether or not we're reading them correctly.Having cast aside the confusion and dread that tend to go with unfamiliar literary territory, we're free to enjoy poetry and to understand why it matters. And with this guide, we do, thanks to Orr's empathetic way of explaining it to us. There's not a drop of condescension involved. Beautiful & Pointless fosters appreciation of an art form that rarely gets its cultural due nowadays, and the book is worth your time for that reason alone.
But hey, you could always pick it up it for the title—or because it looks so pretty. I won't say a thing.
By: Rebecca,
on 9/9/2009
David W. Orr is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College. His new book, Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse, is an eloquent
assessment of climate destabilization and an urgent call to action. In the excerpt below we learn about one challenge our government will need to address.
…the hardest tests for our Constitution and democracy are just ahead and have to do with the relationship between governance, politics, and the dramatic changes in Earth systems now under way. Human actions have set in motion a radical disruption of the biophysical systems of the planet that will undermine the human prospect, perhaps for centuries. The crucial issues will be decided by how and how well we conduct the public business in the decades and centuries ahead, and now on a planetary scale. Of the hard realities of governance ahead, five stand out.
The first challenge is that posed by climate change driven by the combustion of fossil fuels and changes in land management. The Fourth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007), the Stern Review (Stern, 2007), the research on the effects of global change on the United States carried out by the National Science and Technology Council (2008), and other scientific evidence indicate that our future will be characterized by:
Given our past emission of heat-trapping gases, much of this is simply unavoidable. Regardless of what we do now, the Earth will warm by another half to a full degree centigrade by midcentury bringing us uncomfortably close to what many scientists believe to be the threshold of disaster. The climate system has roughly a 30-year thermal lag between the release of heat-trapping gasses and the climate-driven weather events that we experiences. Hurricane Katrina, for example, grew from a Class I storm to a Class 5 event quite possibly because of the warming effects of carbon released in the late 1970s. Similarly, the causes behind the weather headlines of the future will likely include the use of fossil fuels and land abuses decades before. We are already committed to a substantial warming of the Earth, by as much as 1.8 degrees C above pre-industrial levels.
Many credible scientists believe that we still have time to avert the worst, but not a minute to waste. No one knows for certain what a “safe” threshold of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere might be. For hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of years, the level of carbon dioxide did not go above ~280 parts per million (ppm), compared to the present level of 387 ppm, with another ~2+ ppm added each year. Climate scientist James Hansen has recently proposed 350 ppm CO2 as the upper boundary of safety.
We are clearly in uncharted territory. Further delay in stabilizing and reducing levels of CO2 poses what economist Nicholas Stern calls a “procrastination penalty” that will grow steadily until we eventually cross a point of no return. In other words, it will be far cheaper to act now than at some later date when effective action may no longer be possible. If the warming should occur abruptly “like the ones that are so abundant in the paleoclimate record,” we will have no time to adapt before the catastrophe strikes. And there is good reason to believe that the climate system is indeed highly sensitive to small changes: “Earth’s climate is extremely sensitive: it is capable of taking inputs that seem small to us and transforming them into outputs that seems large.”
No matter what our personal preferences, politics, or beliefs may be, as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere, temperatures will continue to rise until the Earth reaches a new equilibrium. Even were we to stop emission of CO2 today, sea levels from the thermal expansion of water and increasing mass from the melting glaciers and ice caps would change coast lines for perhaps the next thousand years. If the rate of melting is rapid or sudden, the migration inland will create hundreds of thousands, or more likely millions, of refugees-like Katrina but on a much larger scale. Unless we chose to build dikes and can afford to do so, many coastal cities will be flooded possibly within decades or by the end of the century. A majority of the millions of people who live along the Gulf Coast and eastern seaboard will have to move inland to higher ground. But we have neither the money necessary to relocate millions of people nor the infrastructure to accommodate them once moved.
The warming of the northern latitudes and oceans means many things, among which is the possibility of triggering positive feedbacks that will cause the release of large amounts of methane from permafrost and the ocean floor. As with other possible tipping points, a large release of methane to the atmosphere is a wildcard in the deck that hopefully will never be brought into play. But again the scientific evidence does not permit us to predict accurately. It is clear, however, that the government is ill prepared to handle the social, economic, and political disruption to which we are now committed, to say nothing of the effects of more rapid changes…
