I’ve been muddling through a small work published in 1909. A collection of newspaper pieces written by G.K. Chesterton. Some of the pieces are hysterically funny; for the language, if nothing else. The pieces were intended to be rather lightweight, so they have a sort of Bertie Wooster flavor. But they caused me to consider again the discipline of writing on a regular schedule and to a deadline. Someone said in a radio interview recently that, if he was told he had to write about South American sea turtles, he could do a whopping great piece in no time, but if he was told he could write about whatever he liked, he floundered around like a beached trout. So, once again, it serves us well to have some boundaries.
Tomorrow is Juvenile Court so the question of boundaries will come up again and again. A judge in a neighboring jurisdiction used to make kids write essays for him as part of their disposition (that’s juvy jargon for sentence). I wonder if requiring the kids to do some serious thinking and writing inside boundaries set for them by the court would be of any use. But then, of course, I would have to read said essays and would probably then feel compelled to correct spelling and grammar and make copious margin notes. That is time consuming enough with the college kids. Perhaps I’m afraid I’ll discover that the Juvenile Court kids write better than the college course kids.
I’m off now to prepare my mind for tomorrow. Juvenile Court “… barring injury, insanity or acts of God.”
