Beating books...

A bit of serendipity: it was Canadian Jack Cole, already publisher of Coles Notes in Canada, who sold Nebraskan Cliff Hillegass on the idea of creating American study guides similar to Canada's Coles Notes. Bet you never know! On to the subject of our post, the first in which we tackle misunderstandings and misinformations. In an age of the said CliffsNotes, and by analogy, any number of ways of avoiding getting to know the 'thing', whatever it is, really well, it seems laughable to try persuading students that the name of the game is hard work. I hear this kind of discussion among teachers all the time. If I were in the classroom, I'd try telling the tale of the air traffic controller who cheated. How would you like to know that the fellow who has charge of the airplane you're on got his certification by false pretenses? Then there's the woman handling the colonoscope that's peering into your colon, the chap controlling the switches in the nuclear reactor that supplies energy to your town, and so on, and so on... So there's a good case to be made, these days especially, for really knowing what you're supposed to know. That's an important part of teaching: first, how to find the facts, the data, the information, and then how to check those facts, that data, that information. Multiple sources, the journalists would say; triangulate, the researchers would say. In this virtual space, the problem becomes plenty worse! I was disappointed, therefore, when I saw an essay of Eddie Baugh’s in A History of Literature in the Caribbean. (I confess to having a personal interest in this case.) On page 264, Baugh says: "By 1980, however, [Mervyn] Morris and [Pamela] Mordecai edited Jamaica Woman, an anthology of ... fifteen mostly young women poets, whose work demanded serious attention... The flowering of Jamaica Woman had been heralded only a few weeks earlier by the Savacou anthology, New Poets from Jamaica, in which seven of the thirteen poets were women… Neither collection included the talented Rachel Manley, who had already published two slim volumes. Perhaps the admission was purely inadvertent.” I can’t think why Professor Baugh didn’t think to ask the editors, Mordecai and Morris, both well known to him and easily accessible, how come we’d left out Rachel Manley. The thing is, the Preface to Jamaica Woman states (in the first paragraph!) that the poets in the collection are all women who had, up to that time, NOT had a collection of their work published, the idea of the book being to expose the poetry of those women who were writing but whose work was not well known. This is why Rachel Manley (along with other poets like Jean Goulbourne, whose Actors in the Arena Savacou had published in 1977) was not included. So the omission was not inadvertent by any means. (BTW, Jamaica Woman was dedicated to Edna Manley and Louise Bennett. Wat a ting to dedicate de book to Rachel's Granny and lef her out ob it!) The observation also came as a surprise because Professor Baugh was kind enough to comment on the chapter on Literature in Culture and Customs of Jamaica (eds. Martin Mordecai & Pamela Mordecai) in which a note (#12 on page 133) points out that none of the poets in Jamaica Woman had previously published a book of their own. Unhappily, this kind of error has the potential to cause plenty kas-kas, and so much literary writing these days feeds on 'controversy' – manufactured or otherwise. So I thought it important to set things straight. Selah! BTW, ef you doan know, check out what Selah means. Wikipedia says it probably is the most difficult word in the Hebrew Bible to translate. Fascinating.