{"id":1088,"date":"2017-05-15T12:23:12","date_gmt":"2017-05-15T16:23:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/?p=1088"},"modified":"2017-05-15T13:26:16","modified_gmt":"2017-05-15T17:26:16","slug":"monday-missive-may-15-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/blog\/2017\/05\/15\/monday-missive-may-15-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday Missive – May 15, 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Margaret Farrer<\/p><\/div>\n

Playing with Words<\/strong> — My wife, Nancy, always starts her day by working the New York Times <\/em>crossword puzzle in ink.\u00a0 A few days ago, she mentioned to me that President Bill Clinton created that day’s puzzle.\u00a0 I asked her if there was any particular reason that the New York Times <\/em>published a puzzle by President Clinton, and she informed me that it was part of the paper’s celebration of the 75th anniversary of featuring crosswords.<\/p>\n

Nancy is much better at working crossword puzzles than I am, but I still appreciate the pleasure that comes from playing with words.\u00a0 Many years ago, I tried my hand at creating my own crossword puzzles.\u00a0 They all focused on authors.\u00a0 I even had one of them published in a newspaper called In These Times. \u00a0<\/em>My published puzzle focused on the American writer Theodore Dreiser. \u00a0 I enjoyed the process of trying to come up with actual words or phrases that interconnected with the other words I wanted to include in the puzzle.\u00a0 I ended up scanning the dictionary trying to find words that ended with odd combinations of letters.\u00a0 Why would this be fun?\u00a0 I don’t know why, but I had fun doing it.<\/p>\n

Of course, wordplay involves much more than crossword puzzles.\u00a0 Two of our colleagues have delved into the ways in which authors and poets engage in word play in their publications.\u00a0 Ralf Thiede is doing research on how Dr. Seuss’s creation of words reflects a deep understanding of the inner workings of language and the development of children’s language skills.\u00a0 Sarah Minslow is interested in how Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll used wordplay to make fun of authority figures.<\/p>\n

As I see it, taking pleasure in playing with words is one of the ways in which humans celebrate the amazing malleability of language.<\/p>\n

Hearing Voices<\/strong> — In our teaching and scholarship, we often refer to a writer’s voice, but in the case of Maya Socolovsky’s\u00a0Trauma in Literature class (Engl 4050) her students literally experienced the\u00a0voice of an author. \u00a0 On the last day of class, Maya Skyped in one of the authors covered in the class during the semester–Himilce Novas, author of\u00a0Princess Papaya<\/em>.\u00a0 She talked with the students for over an hour, asking them questions, encouraging them to speak about their own creative writing process, and answering questions about her novel that they studied. As Maya told me, “It was a great opportunity to have the author’s input on a difficult and understudied novel.”<\/p>\n

Kudos<\/strong>\u00a0— As you know, I like to use my\u00a0Monday\u00a0Missives\u00a0to share news about recent accomplishments by members of our department.\u00a0 Here is the latest news:<\/p>\n

Jen Munroe<\/strong> recently posted a new blog titled “Depending on the Season” on the Recipes Project website. \u00a0Here is the link to her latest blog post:\u00a0http:\/\/recipes.hypotheses.org\/9303<\/a><\/p>\n

Maya Socolovsky<\/strong>\u00a0presented a paper titled “Resisting the Call to Hate (Again): Borderland Ethics and the Polity of Belonging in 21st Century Chicano Picture Books” at MIT, as part of the 2017 Society for Multi Ethnic Literatures of the United States (MELUS) annual conference.<\/p>\n

Quirky Quiz Question<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 Margaret Farrer was the first New York Times <\/em>crossword editor.\u00a0 Does anybody know the name of the paper’s current crossword editor?<\/p>\n

Last week’s answer: Carlo Collodi<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Does anybody know who wrote<\/span> Pinocchio?<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Playing with Words — My wife, Nancy, always starts her day by working the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink.\u00a0 A few days ago, she mentioned to me that President Bill Clinton created that day’s puzzle.\u00a0 I asked her if there was any particular reason that the New York Times published a puzzle by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monday-missive"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1088"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1091,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088\/revisions\/1091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}