I had dinner tonight with a friend, who I'll call Lola, which is so not even close to her name. She is highly educated (Ivy League law school, Ivy League college, and a "prep" so exclusive I never actually thought, growing up in Kirkwood, Missouri and reading short stories in The New Yorker, that I would ever actually meet one of that school's graduates). I asked after her son, who has just begun school in what would be called, in the U.S. (they live abroad), the third grade.


"Oh, that's when you learn cursive!" I pointed out happily, remembering the squat, wide, green signs of the alphabet displayed above the chalkboards in grades three and up and my yearning, when I was mere first-grader, to be in a "big kid" class where those swoops and swirls were mandated homework.


"Cursive is so unnecessary," she grumbled, "so obsolete!"


But --

"The whole point of cursive is that it was faster than printing," she went on. "Why, if everyone types now, do kids have to learn it at all?"


Was the whole point of cursive, I wondered, was that it was faster than printing? I hadn't realized that. But - but -- when they had to sharpen quills and dip them in ink -- did they not have to give more thoughtful consideration and craft, to their words, to their compositions? Was there not keener eloquence in their expression? Was there not a specific identity revealed in handwriting? If not, then why do we study original manuscripts? Why do we have handwriting experts to identify various lunatics? Why, in Twelfth Night , does Malvolio, coming across a forged letter, insist that it is the handwriting of his beloved mistress:


By my life, this is my lady's hand: these be her
very C's, her U's and her T's
and thus she makes her great P's.
It is in contempt of question her hand.

Now, I am not suggesting that Lola's young son be compelled to embrace, just now, this bit of dialogue. It is far too raunchy. The innuendo that Malvolio's lady's C, U (fill in the blank) T --makes great a P -- has not changed since Shakespeare's time. But the thought that a "hand" (handwriting) so exciting a lover should be lost? Replaced by texting? Too sad to contemplate. One of the most erotic things ever uttered to me was a boyfriend (a concert pianist) praising a letter I'd written to him, longhand, not even a love letter, but one "so beautifully expressed, so natural, so perfect, flawless! Like Mozart!" He mainly meant that I had crossed nothing out and that perhaps he was enchanted by the flow of my handwriting. Which, sigh. And ... awwww. Anyway, not something you get from an iPhone's XOXO.

"Well, why learn math, when there are calculators?" I countered to Lola. "Why learn anything at all, when there is Wikipedia?"

"I never write cursive," she grumbled, "I print. And my son hates his handwriting homework."


I hated my handwriting homework, too, but that was primarily because I wanted to be writing SOMETHING -- "My dog is white, except where his neck is grey" was my most pressing communication -- and not just making shapes, which shapes -- that is to say, which j's, k's and h's (which in my hand resemble each other) would come back with little red check marks and suggestions -- "make rounder," "close up." (My disinclination to hear criticism of my writing came early, as you can see.)

"And when I write, I like to edit," she continued. "I can't write a sentence without changing it five times. How can you just write?"

I thought of Alice Walker: "The poem that travels down the arm." I believe I even mimed it to her, the brain, the shoulder, the elbow, the hand.

"I just don't see the point," she shrugged. "And his report cards come back with all these comments."


And he could, I agreed, probably understand the concept of an apple from a single-serving container of applesauce from the grocery store, without ever having to venture into an orchard.

posted by Elizabeth at 10:30 PM