My Word's
Worth:

a weekly column by
Marylaine Block
vol. 3 #1, July 4, 1997

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY TO ME



I was more than a little stunned a couple of weeks ago to realize that I was writing columns that would be part of volume 3 of My Word's Worth. That's right, I've been writing this column for two full years now, and all I can think of is John Mellencamp's line,
Seventeen has turned thirty-five--
I'm surprised that I'm still livin'

Because, you know, I wasn't thinking that far ahead when I started doing this. In fact, I wasn't even sure I'd have enough to say to fill out one year. If anything, I must have figured I'd write until I'd said everything I'd been waiting 50 years to have a chance to say, and then quit. When my mind kind of went blank for six weeks while we picked up our entire library and moved it to our new building, I thought that was the beginning of the end.

After I recovered and got a few decent nights' sleep, though, ideas started coming again. Fortunately the world is full of things to keep me amused, intrigued, outraged, or completely mystified. Now, with over 80 columns done, I'm trying to find a publisher, and when it comes down to the hard part--describing what these columns are all about--I'm stumped.
PUBLISHER: And what are your weekly columns ABOUT, Ms. Block?
ME: Er, whatever interests me.
PUBLISHER: I see. Could you be a bit more specific? What IS it that interests you?
ME: Just about everything.


Originally I was the American columnist for a British publication, so what I mostly did in the early days was try to explain some of the oddities of American life to the Brits. This is possibly the only time in my life that my master's in American civilization has come in handy, because it gave me a method of looking at America, a way of standing outside the culture I'm part of, and stripping it down to show its bare bones of attitudes and assumptions. So I've talked about what our favorite television shows say about us, and how baseball novels allow us to explore every single touchy issue in American life. I've talked about how we rush headlong to embrace new technologies--the printing press, television, cars, computers--without a clue about how they will change everything else, from where we live and what we eat to how we think. I've devoted several columns to the ways the internet has changed the way we look for answers to our questions, the way we meet and talk to people, even the way some people fall in love. And I've examined our other media, especially television news and its reporters, and told you why it matters so much when they are wrong, wrong, wrong.

As one whose motto, and need, is "Only connect," I'm especially interested in the issues that tear us apart, that make us start seeing large numbers of fellow Americans as THEM. That's why I've talked so much about race and gender and the politics that thrive on our fears about them--in so many ways, we're still fighting the civil war, but this time I'm afraid the south is winning. I've devoted several columns to women and men--how we could learn from our differences, and take on some of the other gender's virtues. (Along the way I told you guys how to buy presents for us, and how to understand what we want in a man, and you have told me what you want in a woman.) And I've written about the way we talk about politics, about civility and "political correctness" about the lawyering of our discussions, about politicians telling lies for fun and profit. I've talked about the op/ed writers and politicos whose idea of how to deal with societal scars is: you tear off the tender scabs, poke around inside the wound, and start it bleeding again, to raise money and score points. And I've talked about how irrelevant our politics are, because the sideshow they've become obscures the real truth about power in America--that increasingly it lies not with government at all, but with monolithic corporations.

But I am first and foremost a word child. Words are the sea I swim in, my medium, my first love. So I've talked about words and word games, about metaphors and poetry, about names for cats, people, books, and rock groups. I've told you about the people I admire and love because they make magic with their words, whether they are columnists or authors or rock musicians.

At the risk of making your eyes glaze over, I have told you about libraries. Even more, though, I have told you about books. I became a librarian because I wanted to put people together with the books they want and the books they need and maybe don't even know it. For me, books are where ideas and delight live, stories of things that have happened and things that should happen. So I have told you about science fiction and romance novels and the books you need to read to your children. I have told you, and you have told me, about the books we would keep in our hearts to get us through a world grown bleak and desolate. And I have celebrated each new year by telling you about the books I read that past year that changed my ways of thinking.

One of the things I love about the net, of course, is the ease with which my readers can click a button and tell me what they think. A fair amount of you have written to agree with me, argue with me, or tell me things I didn't understand, and I've written about what I've learned from you, so that some of my columns have become as much yours as mine.

When in doubt, I can always tell you about what I'm the world's foremost expert on--me. I've told you about my youth in the sixties, two years ahead of the flower children. If you've stayed with me, you know rather a lot about the people I love, my politics, my cats, my favorite writers, and even my half-hearted housekeeping.

Could it be that there is anything I haven't covered? Is there anything left to say? I guess there must be. I was talking with some friends about Douglas Coupland's Microserfs, where he introduces his characters to us with their seven Jeopardy categories, which is to say, small subject areas they have preposterous amounts of picky, detailed information about, and we were all trying to figure out what our categories were. These are mine:
Surprised? After 80 some columns, you only knew about two of those. So, yes, I guess there are things yet to be explored. I figure I'll be writing columns for at least one more year, anyway. Here's hoping you'll stay with me for them.


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NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

I'll write columns here whenever I really want to share an idea with you and can find time to write them . If you want to be notified when a new one is up, send me an e-mail and include "My Word's Worth" in the subject line.