Some people have asked if I have a list of topics I want to write about and how I come up with the subject for the day. I don’t have a particular method. I do keep on the ready for topics.
Lynn and I took a course a couple of years ago from Jerry Apps, a former prof at Madison and the author of several books on Wisconsin. The course was about writing one’s memoirs. Jerry said one approach was to think of funny or memorable incidents that happened, make a list of them and write up each. I have such a list. There are 30 incidents on it. I intend to insert some of them in this blog.
I have been charmed by books since getting my first library card at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in downtown Baltimore. At about five years old, my mother made a big deal of finding I could write my name well enough and taking me to the main branch for a card. It was near Bowen and King, the opticians we dealt with all through my childhood. So, in the area south of Pimlico in north Baltimore and in the Irvington library in the west of Baltimore, I spent plenty of time reading this and that.
I am interested in nearly all subjects but only in writers that speak my kind of language. What is that? All the usual adjectives and properties of good writing: imaginative but not too imaginative, clear but not overly simplistic, statements worth reading but too not dense or technical.
As a professor, I found that the approved language for publishable papers gave me a headache. Multi-syllable words, heavy phrasing, and dry constructions were a sign of scholarship and deep thinking. I didn’t buy it. Maybe I was an academic lightweight but I like to speak and write in a clear vernacular, not academese. When I found a book on nearly any subject, I was drawn to it. I usually read it and I tended to remember what it said. Sometimes the writing was so clear, the material just seemed to pour straight into my head. The books of C.S. Lewis and Jacques Barzun, John Kemeny’s “Finite Mathematics”, Eric Temple Bell’s “Men of Mathematics”, and many other books were like that, if they were well in a way to spoke to me. I have held up Ken Macrorie’s “Uptaught” and Timothy Gallwey’s “The Inner Game of Tennis” as the most valuable education books I have found. It’s because they combine a very useful and inspiring message with great language sensitivity. That is what I look for and what inspires me.
