Cursive

When we were little, and had just learned to print (with pencils so large that, as one comedian has described them, they needed to rest on our shoulders), we forged our first, enormous letters out of silky textured, fragrant graphite that positively slid across the page. I remember the distinctive sound of those thick pencils, traveling up and down the sheet, traversing the dotted blue lines suspended between the solid blue top lines and the solid blue bottom lines of each row of first-grade narrative, leaving graphite trails in their wake. I remember navigating around the little chunks of wood that pockmarked the pulp of our yellow writing tablet, threatening to snag the moving hand, causing an accordion-pleat rip in the vulnerable page. And during all these heady but challenging days of our entry into the world of text literacy, I dreamed the dream of the day when we would finally learn cursive.

My sister Ellen, three years older than myself, taught me how to read before I entered kindergarten (much to my teachers’ chagrin), and told me about the wonderful world of “Cursive”.

“Cursive”. The word sounded so elegant and adult. “Cursive”. Something one would be initiated into when one was older, something fluid and sensuous, totally unlike the clunky block letters of primary grade print. “Cursive”. A first grader’s equivalent of “Paris” or “jazz” or “martinis”.

When the day finally came, I was in for a rude disappointment. My cursive hand was as terrible as my print hand. I consistently got D’s and F’s in handwriting. My horrible scrawl has tormented me (and anyone else who has tried to read it) for most of my life.

In high school I bought expensive pens with fancy nibs and costly inks, and forced myself to learn italics in the hope that this new slant would increase my writing’s legibility. I entirely forgot my Palmer Method cursive hand, but my hard-earned italic script was every bit as unreadable.

My handwriting has continued to devolve into its current state of what looks like an irritable line with a bad case of colic. As a result, my Month-at-Glance calendar has achieved minor infamy in local circles. Several artists have expressed interest in owning a copy of my appointment book, which is covered with scribbles that remind them of paintings by Cy Twombly or Jackson Pollock or the visual equivalent of the squalls of an alley cat being eviscerated with a blunt knife.

And I am not the only arts educator with a history of being handwriting-challenged. Amy Rasmussen, the Executive Director of the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE), has unpleasant childhood memories of being forced to give up recess to take “straight line class”, taught by the school secretary, in order to improve her writing. She is now the proud owner of a wonderful painting by the Chicago-based artist Juan Carlos Perez – an abstract version of that very same yellow manuscript paper with the dotted blue lines we all grew up with (an Ed Ruscha gone grade school) – that serves as a kind of revenge for all of those lost hours on the playground.

And I am getting my own bit of revenge. Cursive (also known as “joined-up writing” in England and “running script” in Australia) is on the wane.

Cursive used to have legal significance. Here’s wikipedia:

“In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before the development of the typewriter, professional correspondence was written in cursive. This was called a "fair hand", meaning it looked good.”

My cursive never looked good- and neither did my typewriting. Who remembers all those little correct-o-type sheets one had to slip under typewriter ribbons to make chalky impressions over letters hit by accident? My layered typing looked more like a collage than a manuscript, giving new meaning to the word “pentimento” (the painting over of mistakes, derived from the Italian for repentance). I repented over my typing. Bitterly.

After high school I joined up with the Chicago based, New York influenced Yellow Press poets (inheritors of the beat poetry scene and precursors to the spoken word poetry scene). I plunged with them into the world of “press letters” (clear plastic sheets with letters that can be rubbed off onto various surfaces), and became delirious with pleasure before the wide range of typefaces available. A little bit too delirious. I overused this cornucopia of fonts to publish an early ‘zine, calling my operation Never Again Press.

There was only one issue.

And then came the word processor. My cursed cursive, my unintelligible italics were redeemed at last.

What is lost when the printed word replaces the human hand? A lot. Whenever one technology replaces another there are inevitably both gains and losses. Gutenburg print democratized literacy, but also killed off the illuminated manuscript.

So what have I lost? I am glad to have lost my shame over my hopeless handwriting.
And what have I gained? I have become an adult who has indulged in silky textured, fragrant martinis (so tart! and so cold!) with friends and colleagues in Hemingway’s favorite bar in Paris, while jazz swirled all around us. We made all the arrangements by email, without a loop of cursive in sight.

Arnold Aprill
Founding and Creative Director
Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education
www.capeweb.org