Zippers
by Joyce Sutphen

            Something about
the way one side
            needs to fit into
the other––end to end
                      and teeth lined up
just right––
         happens only
                       when I feel good
about the chance
                         that anything
will ever come together.
 
         What I mean is this:
The other day
 
                       in L. L. Bean, trying
on coats from the clearance rack,
         I found
each zipper
         a challenge,
                       and after a while
 
you couldn't stand
         to watch me fail
                        and fail
again
         and so you pulled
me close
         the way one does
                       a child,
                       and for a moment
            everything
came together.
 

“Zippers” by Joyce Sutphen. Used by permission of the poet. (Books by this author)

It was on this day in 1828 that Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language was published (books by this author). Webster put together the dictionary because he wanted Americans to have a national identity that wasn't based on the language and ideas of England. And the problem wasn't just that Americans were looking to England for their language; it was that they could barely communicate with each other because regional dialects differed so drastically.

Noah Webster was schoolteacher in Connecticut. He was dismayed at the state of education in the years just after the Revolution. There wasn't much money for supplies, and students were crowded into small one-room schoolhouses using textbooks from England that talked about the great King George. His students' spelling was atrocious, as was that of the general public; it was assumed that there were several spellings for any word.

So in 1783, he published the first part of his three-part A Grammatical Institute, of the English Language; the first section was eventually retitled The American Spelling Book, but usually called by the nickname "Blue-Backed Speller." The Blue-Backed Speller taught American children the rules of spelling, and it simplified words — it was Webster who took the letter "u" out of English words like colour and honour; he took a "g" out of waggon, a "k" off the end of musick, and switched the order of the "r" and "e" in theatre and centre.

In 1801, he started compiling his dictionary. Part of what he accomplished, much like his textbook, was standardizing spelling. He introduced American words, some of them derived from Native American languages: skunk, squash, wigwam, hickory, opossum, lengthy, and presidential, Congress, and caucus, which were not relevant in England's monarchy.

Webster spent almost 30 years on his project, and finally, on this day in 1828, it was published. But unfortunately, it cost 15 or 20 dollars, which was a huge amount in 1828, and Webster died in 1843 without having sold many copies. The book did help launch Webster as a writer and a proponent of an American national identity. Webster had a canny knack for marketing, traveling around to meet with new publishers and booksellers, publishing ads in the local newspapers for his book wherever he went. He also lobbied for copyright law and served for a time as an adviser to George Washington, and wrote his own edition of the Bible. And his tallies of houses in all major cities led to the first American census.

In his book The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster's Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture Joshua Kendall argued that Noah Webster would today be diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.

It was on this day in 1865, President Abraham Lincoln (books by this author) was shot by John Wilkes Booth in Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., just five days after the surrender of the Civil War's Confederate leader, General Lee. Lincoln died the following morning.

 It's the legal birthday of the modern printing press, which William Bullock patented on this day in 1863 in Baltimore. His invention was the first rotary printing press to self-feed the paper, print on both sides, and count its own progress — meaning that newspapers, which had until then relied on an operator manually feeding individual sheets of paper into a press, could suddenly increase their publication exponentially.

The Cincinnati Times was likely the very first to use a Bullock press, with the New York Sun installing one soon after. Bullock was installing a press for The Philadelphia Press when he kicked at a mechanism; his foot got caught, his leg was crushed, and he died a few days later during surgery to amputate. His press went on to revolutionize the newspaper business.

Today is the birthday of American journalist Tina Rosenberg (books by this author), born in Brooklyn (1960). She is a proponent of what she’s called “solutions journalism” — journalism that doesn’t just report bad news but works to change the world by showing how the problems can be overcome. In 2013, she co-founded the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit that encourages journalists to think outside the usual parameters of their beats.

“The key,” she says, “is that this coverage has to be done not as fluff, or as advocacy, or as PR, but with equal rigor — the same rigor that we use when we cover the problems themselves [...] Many journalists have been doing solutions-focused stories for a long time. I think what’s new is that our organization has put a name on it, has created a teachable system for doing it, has made it into something that people can think about in a category of its own.” The key, she says, is to cover the work that is being done, not simply celebrate it. She contributes to a New York Times column called “Fixes,” in which she explores solutions to major social crises like health care and poverty.

She says: “We know that a steady diet of news about violence and corruption and incompetence does create in people: depression, apathy, learned helplessness, stress, all kinds of things. And it’s really bad for the news business. We are selling a product that people find painful to consume. I think anyone would tell you that that’s not a good business model.”

She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987. She used the fellowship money to move to South America, where she researched and wrote her first book, Children of Cain: Violence and the Violent in Latin America (1991). Her second book, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism (1995), won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

It’s the birthday of graphic novelist Daniel Clowes (books by this author) born in Chicago (1961), whose sympathetic portraits of eccentric, lonely, and disenfranchised people have revolutionized the world of comics and cartooning. He’s best known for his intense graphic novels and comic book series like Lloyd Llewellyn (1986), Ghost World (1997), and David Boring (2000). A critic once referred to him as “Mister Rogers with a black sense of humor.”

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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