Casual
Epstein, Joseph
Casual PENMAN An article in a recent issue of the Women's Quarterly bemoans the absence of the teaching of handwriting in schools, pointing out that this is especially a hardship on young boys....
...Mildly precocious in learning to print letters, I adopted, as a child of three or four, a grip on the pencil in which the top of my pencil slanted off to the left, causing many people to take me for a lefty...
...The boys in my class in the Daniel Boone School in Chicago were certainly much worse penmen than the girls...
...Her obvious insanity brought light comic relief to the general boredom of the subject...
...I have been working on my handwriting for better than half a century, making little alterations but with no real success...
...We had workbooks, much wider than they were tall, with lines ruled like music paper...
...I try to remind myself to cross my t's in the upper middle rather than at the very top and to make my l's, h's, and b's higher than my t's, k's, and f's...
...This made for the smallest possible manuscripts, all the better for smuggling out of the country...
...The general effect is rather like a hobo wearing an ascot...
...Instruction entailed making cursive letters, lower case and caps, twice or thrice the size of normal handwriting...
...What can be detected in my handwriting is a certain yearning for elegance that distinctly doesn't come off...
...Over the years, I have changed the capital A's, G's, and S's in my script...
...My handwriting always seems, somehow, out of uniform, even slightly unsober...
...When alone, though, I stayed with the Cobra Twist, which seemed to serve me well enough...
...Lessons in penmanship took place daily...
...I don't think I had the worst handwriting in the room, but mine was close to the bottom...
...I, meanwhile, struggle for mere legibility...
...Once a woman, sent by the workbook's publisher, arrived to demonstrate how certain letters were made...
...The Palmer method was taught...
...Erik Satie took as much as twenty minutes to write a six-line postcard, sometimes more than half an hour to address a letter, but then he aimed at calligraphic works of art...
...I have added a flourish to n's that end words...
...I have bought expensive fountain pens and raffiné inks to aid me in this effort...
...Elegant penmanship might even have put in doubt one's masculinity...
...With ballpoint pens, I have always felt as if I were driving a car with bad tires and unreliable brakes, and, as would be the case in such a car, my handwriting was all over the road...
...Might it be that I do not take sufficient pains...
...For a girl in fifth or sixth grade to have a poor handwriting was, somehow, a judgment upon her...
...it was not done, unthinkable, impermissible...
...Handwriting apparently comes less easily for boys than it does for girls...
...JOSEPH EPSTEIN...
...So, in our own day, does Tom Wolfe, whose letters are not only amusing to read but pleasing to gaze upon...
...I can still read my own handwriting, but am not always certain others are able to do so...
...But my writing never really attained the fluency that the Palmer method promised...
...She was large and zealous, and I can remember her doing the capital S over and over, singing out, with each perfect S she formed, "Swat, swat, swat [and then as she ended her stroke], swat that skeeter...
...I don't remember any girls having a bad handwriting...
...I admire people whose carefully measured penmanship suggests an orderly character...
...The highest most could hope to attain was a merely passable handwriting...
...I'm not entirely sure what old Palmer's method was, except endless repetition of the construction of letters from models, and then the joining and spacing of these letters...
...I didn't have any difficulty with this rococo grip, but I knew my teacher would, and so, when she walked down my aisle during penmanship lessons, I changed to the conventional grip...
...A girl with a wretched handwriting, during the ancien régime under which I grew up, was practically a slut...
...As for grip itself, it resembled nothing quite so much as the Cobra Twist, a combination half-nelson and leg lock, the coup de grâce hold of a handsome South American wrestler who went by the name of Cyclone Anaya...
...Boys are graphologically challenged," the article reports...
...While still in the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn is said to have written his books in the most astonishingly minute yet perfectly legible handwriting, leaving no margins whatsoever on the page...
...Being slobs and brutes, boys were also permitted to be wildly errant penmen...
...I should have swatted lots more of those flamin' skeeters...
...A deteriorating handwriting is often one of the signs of aging, yet I remember getting longhand letters in the most perfect penmanship written well into his eighties from the philosopher Sidney Hook...
...a professor of special education at the University of Maryland named Steve Graham adds that boys being poorer at penmanship than girls "is one of the better established facts in the literature...
...try as I might, I could never quite achieve the old Palmer flow, and haven't to this day...
Vol. 7 • December 2001 • No. 16
