{"id":383,"date":"2017-01-29T13:46:34","date_gmt":"2017-01-29T18:46:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/?p=383"},"modified":"2017-01-29T14:05:37","modified_gmt":"2017-01-29T19:05:37","slug":"cursive-is-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/cursive-is-back\/","title":{"rendered":"Cursive is Back!"},"content":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Writing used to mean penmanship. Then it became a profession, a conveyor of stories and facts. It has always been a radical act.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Three hundred and fifty years ago, Sor Juana In\u00e9s de la Cruz, Mexico\u2019s first poet, complained bitterly that, inside her convent, decent handwriting was forbidden. A brilliant self-educated woman, portrayed\u00a0in a biography by Octavio Paz<\/a> and in the hefty Canadian novel Hunger Brides<\/a>, Sor Juana became a nun at the age sixteen in order to have freedom to study. Instead, she came up against punishingly restrictive rules.<\/p>\n

\"Sor<\/a>

Source<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cEven making my handwriting somewhat elegant cost me a long and brutal persecution, only because they said that it seemed like a man\u2019s handwriting, and that it was something indecent. With these judgments, they obligated me to make it worse on purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time Mexican novelist Margo Gantz came along in 1930, the tables had turned. Good penmanship in a woman was now an essential signature of good character. She recalls learning the Palmer Method of English penmanship in her Mexico City classroom.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll day long I did exercises with a penholder, a pen, and an inkwell, and those exercises always turned out disastrously. There were always smudges. Anyone who didn\u2019t write well had to write a hundred times:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a dirty little girl, I don\u2019t have good penmanship, I can\u2019t even copy the letter A.<\/em><\/p>\n

Uncertain Futures<\/h3>\n

Margo Glantz\u2019s parents emigrated from the Ukraine. They wanted to settle in the United States, but that country slammed its doors on Jews, so they ended up in Mexico, where her father became close friends with Diego Rivera.<\/p>\n

\"Rosario<\/a>

Source<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

When she was growing up, her only\u00a0literary model\u00a0was\u00a0the Palmer Method, which taught her that, \u201cAll you need to be a good writer is good penmanship. What\u2019s more, good penmanship alone will produce a brilliant writer.\u201d Ergo, without good handwriting, she couldn\u2019t possibly be a good writer.<\/p>\n

Glantz once gave a lecture at Princeton University on the relationship between penmanship and writing by women. She talked about how penmanship and the practice of writing has long divided the sexes and social classes\u2014how the act of writing was\u00a0(and in some places still is) a visible cue by which the entire mental, spiritual, and emotional life of a person is judged.<\/p>\n

Anne Trubek talks about handwriting as social arbiter\u00a0in her book, The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting<\/em><\/a>. Because handwriting was labour\u00a0done by hireling monks and scribes, the wealthy were careful not to be too good at it. \u201cThe more educated and illustrious you were,\u201d she\u00a0writes, \u201cthe worse your handwriting was supposed to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Public Life of Penmanship<\/h3>\n

Rosario Castellanos, the feminist poet, novelist, and essayist who became Mexico\u2019s ambassador to Israel, was estranged from her family when a curandera predicted that one of her mother’s two children would die soon, and her mother screamed out, “Not the boy!” In A\u00a0Woman Who Knows Latin<\/em> (Mujer que sabe Latin<\/a><\/em>), Castellanos talks about the power of learning to write:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Source<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI inhabited a realm before language, one of pure sounds that I later learned could be harmonised into sequences and correspondences. It was then that I learned to recite the alphabet…The rhythm is so even and so gentle that it reminds me of the breathing of a sleeping child. I\u2019m no longer the child that death shunted aside in favour of the other one, the better one, my brother. I\u2019m not the girl left alone by her parents to diligently sob away her grief. No. I\u2019m almost a person. I have the right to exist, to stand before others, to…climb onto a podium draped with tissue paper and recite my verses.<\/p>\n

She writes a poem in her school notebook and the moment she reads it, \u201cI realize that these two lines engendered in the pit of my belly have just severed their umbilical cord, freed themselves from me, and are now staring me in the face: autonomous, absolutely independent, and even more remarkable, like strangers.<\/p>\n

“I don\u2019t recognise them as objects that once belonged to me, but rather as objects that are there, prodding me to acquire a greater, more perfect level of existence: a public existence.”<\/p>\n

Character Studies<\/h3>\n
\"Palmer<\/a>

Source<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

I fell in love with words early. Words like filigree or Dumbo could make me laugh just from the contortions of my lips. I don\u2019t know exactly when my mouth connected to my eyes and I could say the words I saw, but I do remember the first time I held the point of a sharpened pencil to the page and traced that bulbous a. I\u2019d grip my fat red pencil and track the loop and slide until I got it right, then I\u2019d carry on along the line, drawing the letter again and again. I don\u2019t remember when it dawned on me that what I was doing wasn\u2019t drawing, it was writing.<\/p>\n

Suddenly, the alphabet\u00a0wasn\u2019t only in my eyes and my mouth. It was in my arm, my hand, my fingers. In my tongue that stuck out of the corner of my mouth. In my body leaning against the sharp edge of my desk. In my bum that lifted up off the seat. In my toes in their brown Oxfords that didn\u2019t quite touch the floor. My whole body was wrapped up in that a, and in all the words I\u2019ve written since.<\/p>\n

In The Hand: How its Use Shapes the Brain, Language and Human Culture<\/em><\/a>, neurologist Frank R. Wilson gives scientific credence\u00a0to what I felt. Handwriting, he says, stimulates brain activity and helps develop \u201cdeep feelings of confidence and interest in the world-all-together, the essential prerequistes for the emergence of the capable and caring individual.”<\/p>\n

The Reincarnation of Cursive<\/h3>\n

Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Inc., often cited a course in calligraphy as one of his formative experiences. How\u00a0ironic, given that\u00a0computers have pushed penmanship off North American curricula. (We don\u2019t even call it penmanship any more; it\u2019s \u201ccursive.\u201d) Computer script obliterates the\u00a0human character visible in handwriting. There is nothing to decipher. All traces of process disappear.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, computers never smudge. In\u00a0my class, kids with pretty penmanship were considered \u201cgood at school.\u201d Good in general. Now there are no blotted copy-books on which to base such judgments; less to stand in the way of the meaning of the words.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Source<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

But news of the death of penmanship\u00a0may be premature. Not only are scientists discovering the hidden values of cursive\u2014when children compose text by hand, they consistently produce more words more quickly than on a keyboard, and they express more ideas\u2014but a glance at images of the massive protests in recent weeks show that hand-writing writ large on placards and banners expresses outrage more clearly than digital\u00a0printing ever could.<\/p>\n

As Yale psychologist Paul Bloom points out, \u201cWith handwriting, the very act of putting it down forces you to focus on what\u2019s important.\u201d<\/p>\n

Signature Moments<\/h3>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Source<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

\"March<\/a>

Source<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

Last Monday, January 23, was National Handwriting Day in the United States. On that day, Donald Trump put his cursive signature to a presidential memoranda that withdraws federal\u00a0funding from international \u201corganizations or programs that support or participate in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.\u201d<\/p>\n

The memorandum is called, \u201cThe Mexico City Policy.\u201d<\/p>\n

A line in the sand, a stroke of ink on parchment, digital words on a screen, a slash\u00a0of paint on an alley wall, a black marker on a poster. We\u00a0need all the tools we can get our hands on to say what is in our hearts.<\/p>\n

No wonder cursive is back.<\/p>\n

[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1477364431886{padding-top: 10px !important;padding-right: 10px !important;padding-bottom: 10px !important;padding-left: 10px !important;background-color: #ededed !important;background-position: center !important;background-repeat: no-repeat !important;background-size: cover !important;border-radius: 2px !important;}”]<\/p>\n

When was the last time you chose pen and paper over printed words to say something important?<\/h3>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_separator][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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