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The Writer as Professional Eavesdropper
- University of Georgia Press
- Chapter
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THE VN/^/TE^ AT fVopeff/ON/AL ^Av/EfD/LOPPEfL Reading the classified section in Mexico City's Tiempo Libre, I came across the notice for an unusual public service: Hospital of the word: emergencies and preventative attention. Permanent workshop for the defense of the Spanish language ... consultations . . . conferences . . . intensive therapy . . . clarify doubts ...firsttimeassistance. This anonymous writer was nudging me toward a way of seeing my work, giving me a name for my practice. Maybe my notebook is the hospital of the word, and I practice myroving services bybeing what in Spanish is called unfisgon, a listener, eavesdropper, caretaker of gossip . Maybe I am this gatherer of treasure, shepherding words, phrases, and texts of character orphaned by the world's attention to money and fame. How was I first recruited to this cause?As a freewheeling writer of poems andpersonal essays, I hold a darksecret:I wasonce a scholar— a medievalist. I was that awkward figure haunting libraries, poring over glossaries, thumbing myBeowulf md myPearl to rags. I havewritten twenty pages on the use of the feminine pronoun in a single stanza of an obscure poem from the fourteenth century.Working sleepless through nights to dawn, I have heated cold rooms with the sheer stamina of my reading. I have internalized the nuances of suffixes in ancient texts so that my voice can recite what I no longer understand. That was a long and wonderful training for something I don't do now. Now that I write, what do I do with that training? Now that I teach writing, how does my scholarship pertain? For both writing and teaching, I now turn that tireless scholarly attention to the flow of language that surrounds me in the world. I read talk. I annotate conversation . I catalog graffiti. I savor the traveler's fictions in bus stations , the tipsy confessions of the midnight lounge car on the train. I long for the banter of hitchhikers recounting their rides and destinations , the semipublic narratives in the booths of coffee shops. I scribble and studyconversations at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, Molly's at the Market in New Orleans, the twenty-fourhour Elkhorn Cafe inJackson Hole. I record fictions spoken at the Burns Brothers Truck Plaza south from Portland. I take the corner booth, hunch over my coffee, and listen both ways, tuning in to the periphery of myhearing. I revel in speeches flaunted at the Acropolis Diner, in Brooklyn, as I once absorbed the annual publications of the Early English TextSociety. I live in the modern world, but myhabits are older. In the medieval period, books were so rare theywere memorized. Travelers took turns reciting favorite texts. The feast of stories exchanged by the pilgrim band in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales exaggerates a social custom that was actual.For people livingin an oral tradition were poorer in books but richer in stories.Habits of making and sharing stories were different in awayhard to appreciate since Gutenberg. Without books,newspapers , the Internet, junk mail, or radio, everybody lived by spoken stories, from sermons to ballads to jokes to proverbs to the kinds of stories Chaucer's pilgrims exchanged directlywith one another. The first book with pagination didn't appear until the fifteenth century; people knew the books they owned, could saythem word for Writer as Professional Eavesdropper \ 15 [44.222.233.8] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:00 GMT) word. Chaucer's contemporaryJohn Gower apparently had only eight books in his personal library; he had memorized all eight, however, and he wove quotations and adapted sentences from them throughout the three books he composed himself (one in Latin, one in French, and one in English, because no one knew which language might prevail ). But as Socrates had warned his students, once we learn how to read we may forget how to remember. Gutenberg imprisoned literature , and schools maintain the tyranny. How can we join the world again—the ancient permanent human world of literature alive in public life? As I walked past their ditch on a cold day,I overheard a steamfitter down in the earth sayto his partner: "As the world around us grows colder, sincerity and honesty must be the fire to keep us warm." Iwas on mywayto the faculty convocation and paused to jot this worker's sentence in my notebook. But when I reported these words to my colleagues, they refused to believe I had overheard them. "You're a writer," said one. "You made that up...