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Quote of the Day: A Life of Play and Why I Joined Ricochet
I was a boy of vast enthusiasms and a fierce love of play. One entire summer we kids on the block played Monopoly almost every day. I also collected and shot marbles, bowled, shot pool, drew cartoons, collected baseball cards and E.C. comics, and read science fiction. (On the right, that’s me as a kid with my family when we lived near the Coliseum in LA)
Best of all were those afterschool sandlot ball games that went on until it grew too dark to play. I never wanted the play to end.
It never did. I grew up but the play continued; only the games changed. I used to think that Wordsworth’s oft-discussed idea, that “the child is father of the man,” was just more of the Romantic Era’s little-children-are-miniature-philosophers nonsense. But I see now that Wordsworth was exactly right, at least about this one idea. My adult diversions, at least, seem to have grown out of childhood play.
Running marathons as an adult grew out of the sandlot sports I loved as a child. Playing banjo and guitar as an adult grew out of playing trumpet in my junior high band. Inventing a board game to sell grew out of a summer of playing Monopoly. And my 50-year adult obsession, making things out of wood, grew out of the measuring, sawing, and nail pounding I did as a kid in order to make various roller-skate scooters and stick-built forts.
Of course, becoming an adult meant that I had to make a living. But I sure as hell didn’t want a job in which I would actually have to, you know, work. So I became a professor. (I never believed that being a professor was real work. My dad, a roughneck in the Signal Hill oil fields, worked. Teaching a poem by Robert Frost was like the engraving on a fancy rifle. It wouldn’t help you shoot straight, but it was pretty to look at and fun to show to your friends.)
Since reading had always been a pleasure and writing had always been a kind of diversion, the university was an ideal venue for adult play. It’s clear now, as I look back, why I specialized in England’s Neo-Classical Era. All of its major writers —Dryden, Swift, Pope, and Johnson — were satirists.
Even lecturing was always more fun than onerous. (I think of myself as an outgoing introvert.) It was always a fascinating challenge to see if I could figure out how to engage my students in learning and discussion. So I would sit up in my office for hours and try to figure out how to, let’s say, get my students involved with Pope’s Rape of the Lock. Most of my solutions involved, in some way or another, an oblique, droll, or humorous slant to the work in question.
I had a student come up after class one day and say, “Don’t you take anything seriously?“ I think he was implying that I didn’t. And you know, the kid was right.
I spent a lot of time drinking coffee in my corner office on the seventh floor of Faculty Hall. I was the Director of Humanities, so I only had to teach nine hours a week. The other 31 hours was largely up to me. No time card. No schedule outside of a few obligatory hours of office time for students. I had soft-landed in a place where I could play.
In my office, I had a pleasant view of my thickly wooded college town. On the desk in front of me, I had a cage with two hamsters, Swift and Pope, with one of those little wheels they like to run on. I had a fancy coffee maker on my desk and one of those little swinging metal ball things that is supposed to illustrate some kind of scientific principle. I had a giant crossword taped to the wall that took me two years to fill in.
If God is as serious as he usually comes across, I’m in big trouble.
Pretty young things, who returned my eager smiles with haughty disdain when I was a callow youth, now had every reason to be nice to me. I was finally sitting in the catbird seat.
All of this might suggest that I was easy on my students. In fact, I had a reputation as a hard grader, the kind you don’t want to take if you’re in love with your GPA. I once had a student, an older man about my age, come up after my writing class and ask, “How come you’re such a bastard?” I think the question was rhetorical, but he still caught me by surprise so I didn’t have a witty rejoinder. But I did come up with a killer of a comeback a mere hour later. Unhappily, no one has called me a bastard since, so my inspired rejoinder lies dormant — though always ready to spring forth and eviscerate anyone who dares call me a bastard again.
One time I did something that sounded adult and serious. Around 1980, I founded an organization called The Kentucky Philological Association. (I just Googled it and found that it’s still going strong, so it’s now about 40 years old.) But I wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been a lark and an interesting challenge to sit down and see if I could create an organization ex nihilo. Most everything is a game.
I was, however, never able to figure out how to make a game out of grading student papers. Analyzing student prose and writing comments in the margins is a slog, no matter how you slice it.
When I retired, I spent even more time playing. I started making arty jigsaw puzzles, wooden jewelry for women (not a big success), game boards, little humorous statues, and little coffins for one’s cremains. I sold all of these at Saturday Markets in Eugene and Portland. (Actually, I never sold a single one of the little coffins, which were a drag on the little coffin market.) With a steady retirement income, I had the luxury of making only things that pleased me. I’m now out of the business, but if you want to see some of puzzles, go here.
But finally, in my late 70s, even woodworking began to pall. I had finally burned out on making things out of wood — and most everything else. I was growing old.
What was I going to do? I’m an insomniac and I was accustomed to spending a good part of the night hours in my workshop designing and making things.
It was looking as though I would retire not just from my various enthusiasms, but also from life itself. I could see my future, an old man shuffling around the house in worn slippers until Time, that great destroyer, would finally turn me to dust.
Then about two years ago, I discovered Ricochet. Hello! The site was designed, I read, for those in the “middle to right” part of the political spectrum. That was me! Five bucks a month and there would actually be readers to read what I had written. And the readers and I could go back and forth. And I could make witty comments on other writers’ posts, and they would witty me right back.
By now you probably guess that I would turn Ricochet into a game. You were right. And I keep score. I keep track of how many people give me Likes. (My last post was a new PR, 53 Likes. What do you think of that?) I also have categories called Most Responses to a Post, Most Posts Elevated to Main Feed, and How Many Times I Topped Mrs. She in Likes When We Posted Around the Same Time. (Thus far, we’ve only posted around the same time only once. To my dismay, Mrs. She left me languishing on the Member Feed with a miserable six Likes, while she was promoted to the Main Feed with, I don’t know, a whole bunch of Likes. I stopped counting her Likes after she was promoted. So the score is right now is She 1, Forrester 0.)
At my advanced age, my old friends in the meat world were gradually disappearing, as is the nature of things, but I‘ve made new friends — or at least their artfully constructed projections of their real selves. I’ve gotten to know Quinn the quester, RushBabe the relentless, ‘hant the helpful, Mongo the manly, She the sheep lover, and GrannyDude the philosophic Unitarian preacher from Maine. There are more but I‘ve used up all the alliteration that I can think right now. (Actually, I ran out just before I got to GrannyDude.)
So Ricochet is a godsend. I thought that my life would end on a long boring slog. But no, there’s still time to play and Ricochet is my playground, probably my last one.
When I carved a happy face 
into the little box that will someday hold my ashes, I thought I did it on a whim and perhaps an amusement for my grandkids someday. Now I see that that happy face actually sums up my attitude toward life.
If my mom were still alive, I know what she would say: “Wiseacre to the end.“
Published in General
Retic, when interpreting a story, the most important question should be, “What did the author of he story intend?” Otherwise, interpretation is nothing more than readers saying, “Well, I felt this way,” or “I felt that way.” It’s true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but that’s not much of a principle to use when interpreting a story. That way madness lies.
Your point about the story being passed down for years before it was put into print (you did say that, didn’t you?) is an interesting one. Then we have multiple authors, with each adding something of their own to the story I before he passed it on. I suppose the final conveyor of the story before it was put into print should be other called the author.
Thanks for writing such an interesting response.
I dunno if that’s the most important question. Certainly here on Ricochet some stories have taken on a life of their own, so to speak, somewhat different from what the original author intended, and are used for other purposes. At the Reticulator dinner table I have retold stories from Ricochet, making my own point in the process.
Yes, that’s what I said. It’s not the only way it works, but it’s a common way.
Back in the days before copyright and before the current importance placed on original authorship, people didn’t always get so obsessed with tracing the original author and originality. Mark Zacharov’s 1978 musical film, Ordinary Miracle (Обыкновенное чудо) had a little fun with that obsession in a scene in which the famous hunter was paralyzed into inaction (somewhat like writer’s block) because if he killed the bear his critics would say it was the same as his previous efforts and that there was nothing original about the way he did it. There is also more in that film about the concept of authorship. (And I’m not sure if the point was original with Zacharov, or if it came from the play from which he adapted his film.)
But authorship and original intent certainly provide a lot of fodder for academic careers, don’t they?
Yes they do. When I retired, reader response criticism (in which the reader was the paramount figure in the act of interpretation) was all the vogue. I was old-fashioned enough to think it was an abomination.
It is.
Sounds like an abomination to me, too. Isn’t there anyone who prefers story-centric to author-centric or self-centric approaches?
Sure. But the stories don’t always stand up for themselves in the classrooms.
And as any writer knows, the good stories write themselves, and the characters become real and will get themselves in trouble in ways the writer does not expect.
Wait a minute. You’re a Moderator on Ricochet and no has called you a bastard yet? Give it time.
Randy, I must not be doing the job right.