Tag Archives: The Humourist

Poor Brentford Gives a Writerly Upbraiding

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“The writer who goes hunting ideas too aggressively usually returns with nothing but metaphors and poison ivy.” — Poor Brentford Lee. Reluctant naturalist and persistent thorn in his writerly side since 1947.

“Phooey!”

I swear on a stack of books yet to be written that’s exactly what Poor Brentford said.

And get this. He had the nerve to say it smack dab in the middle of a conversation with Gary while I was explaining that maybe, just maybe, I’d come up with something to write about while gardening.

“It’s not easy coming up with all these blog ideas.”

“But you seem to have more ideas than there are days.”

“I don’t know about that, but I came up with one right now. You’ll see.”

I wouldn’t be the first writer, of course, looking for something to write about.

I guess, truth be told, we all go hunting for material.

And precisely at that thought I heard:

“Phooey!”

Luckily, Gary did not hear Poor Brentford who was just getting started.

“It goes without saying that you’ll start your catalogue of examples with your Lady.”

“Of course I will. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman was notorious for writing about the people and happenings where she lived. And who, pray tell, knows that better than I?”

“Oh, Lord,” Poor Brentford moaned. “Must I listen one more time to your recitation of local influences in her Pembroke, People of Our Neighborhood, The Debtor …”

“Stop it. Stop it right there. That’s not fair. You know fully well that I don’t think I’ve ever said such a thing about those novels, but I could. She did.”

“What, then, were you going to corner me with?”

“Well, I was simply going to say that Freeman owned up to her literary heists.”

“Right. Sure, she did. Like she owned up to being ten years younger than she really was.”

Poor Brentford, I could tell, was a little more cantankerous than usual, so I decided to shut him up with proof.

“Here’s what she wrote a friend, and I quote, word for word: ‘Monday afternoon, I went a-hunting material too: We went to an old lady’s birthday-party. But …’:

He interrupted me mid-sentence.

“I’ve heard it before. Heard it all before, word by word: ‘… all I saw worth writing about there was a poor old dog who had been chained thirteen years, because he bit a man once, in his puppy-hood.'”

Poor Brentford was right, of course. I’ve written often about that poor puppy and how Freeman gave him a new life as Caesar in her “A New England Nun,” unaware perhaps that his resurrection in that story was linked inextricably and forever to sexual repression.

But was he kind enough to let me do it one more time? Of course not.

“You need to get new examples that will grab your readers’ attention the way that poor puppy grabbed Freeman’s heart.”

Before I could agree or disagree or even ask what writers he had in mind, he gave me a litany that lasted so long I needed a fresh shave. And get this. He had them all neatly organized by categories. It was disgusting. I mean he started off with the obvious, writers like Freeman who really did go looking. The way Henry David Thoreau did in Walden. Or Hemingway as he chased wars and bullfights and deep-sea fishing. Or Joan Didion’s notebooks capturing her fleeting impressions. He even had a list of counterparts across the Pond but before he could bless me with Dickens and his kith and kin, he lost his train of thought and started telling me about writers who made use of strange incidents.

● Frankenstein grew out of a ghost-story contest during a rainy vacation.

● Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland began as an improvised story told to amuse a child on a boat ride.

● The Metamorphosis reportedly sprang from the absurd question: what if a man woke up as an insect?

● The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was inspired by a dream.

I listened attentively, storing up those examples with every intent to use them in something or other one day or another, but I stood up and objected vehemently when he had the nerve to expect me to follow along with his discussion of the intertextual path that some writers had taken as they wrote famous works based on other folks’ famous works. Ulysses parallels The Odyssey. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as a spin off from Hamlet. I had heard enough. More than enough.

“All right, Poor Brentford. Let’s make a truce. Let’s sign a pact. Let’s forget that I ever mentioned my hope of finding a blog idea to write about.”

I paused. He paused. We stared at one another.

“If you do, you’ll be sorry.”

“It won’t be the first time, I’m sure. But if you’ll excuse me, I have to garden so that I’ll find something to write about.”

“You’re wasting your time. When’s the last time that you ever went looking for an idea and found one?”

I started to reply, but he cut me short.

“Did it ever occur to you that you’ve got this writerly thing of yours all reversed?”

“Thing? Writerly thing?” Spit it out. What’s your point?”

“My point,” Poor Brentford said, with the air of a man who has been waiting his entire existence to say exactly this, “is that you didn’t find your ideas. Your ideas found you.”

I opened my mouth.

“Don’t.”

I closed it.

“Take your Lady. Do you honestly believe you went looking for Mary E. Wilkins Freeman? Or did she reach up out of some footnote or bibliography and grab you by the collar in 1973 and simply refuse to let go? Because last time I checked, she still hasn’t.”

I said nothing, which, as Poor Brentford knows perfectly well, is as good as an admission.

“More than fifty years, Brent. Fifty years she has had you. And you have the audacity—the sheer pomposity—to sit there and tell Gary you went looking for something to write about while gardening. How generous of you. How magnanimous. How utterly beside the point.“

“And then there’s Alexander Gordon.”

He said it quietly, exactly the way Poor Brentford delivers his most devastating blows.

“You didn’t find The Humourist. The Humourist found you. He waited. Two hundred and nineteen years, give or take. Sitting in the only complete run of the South-Carolina Gazette in existence—survived earthquakes, fires, wars, and hurricanes, mind you—and then reached up out of a footnote in 1973 and grabbed a graduate student by the collar. And here you are, fifty-some years later, still in his grip. Still writing. Still talking about him at libraries.”

He paused for effect. He has always been insufferably good at pauses.

“They found you, Brent. Both of them. In the same year, no less. And they have never once seen fit to release you. How breathtakingly, magnificently pompous to think that you in your infinite wisdom found them.“

I sat down, flummoxed.

“What on earth am I supposed to do with that? I don’t have all the time in the world, you know, to come up with ideas.”

“Maybe,” Poor Brentford said, “that’s the whole point of this writerly thing I’m trying to help you understand.”

He settled back with an expression I hadn’t seen before. Not smug. Not cantankerous. Almost kind.

“Ideas,” he said, “are not sitting around waiting for you to come find them. They are, if you’ll permit me, already in motion. Floating. Drifting. Looking for the right home. The right mind. The right heart. They pass over some people entirely–perfectly nice people, mind you, and perfectly intelligent people–and move on. Then they find someone like you and they simply settle. Take up residence. Refuse to leave.”

I started to say something.

“Freeman settled in 1973. Gordon settled in 1973. The same year, Brent. Do you think that was your doing?”

I did not.

“Ideas are not hunted. They are not chased down like a rabbit hopping through your briary ravine.”

He folded his hands with great finality.

“They arrive. Always have. Always will. The only question that matters—the only question that ever has—is whether the writer is the kind of person who opens the door and makes a home.”

How a 300-Year-Old Voice Ended Up on a Listserv

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“But this is not the final word on Alexander Gordon. In many ways, it is only the beginning.” —Brent L. Kendrick (b. 1947). Author/editor of Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina (2025).

Sometimes scholarship moves quietly through archives, footnotes, and years of patient reading. And sometimes—if we are very lucky—it suddenly circles back into public conversation after centuries of silence.

Yesterday, I did something that felt equal parts scholarly, hopeful, and just a little audacious: I posted a Call for Papers to the Society of Early Americanists Listserv proposing a conference panel built around The Humourist essays of 1753–54—essays that circulated for nearly three centuries without a known author before I definitively identified Alexander Gordon as the writer behind them in Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina (2025).

The panel proposal grows out of a question that has increasingly occupied my thinking since the book appeared: What happens when a substantial colonial voice—one hidden in plain sight for nearly 300 years—suddenly reenters the conversation?

Not simply the classroom conversation, though that matters too. I mean the larger conversation about early American literary history itself.

The more I have lived with these essays, the more convinced I have become that Gordon’s work has implications extending well beyond a solved literary mystery. The Humourist complicates familiar narratives centered primarily on New England and Philadelphia. It invites fresh consideration of the colonial South as a site of literary sophistication and intellectual exchange. And because Gordon himself moved so fluidly between Scotland, London, antiquarian scholarship, theater, and colonial Charleston, the essays also open intriguing transatlantic questions about literary identity, influence, and cultural circulation in mid-eighteenth-century British America.

Will the idea for the panel succeed? Honestly, I have no idea. Academic conferences are busy ecosystems, deadlines are tight, and assembling a thoughtful interdisciplinary panel in just a few weeks may prove wildly optimistic.

But some ideas are too interesting not to toss into the scholarly waters.

So yesterday, that is exactly what I did. Below is the call that went out to the Society of Early Americanists membership.

Call for Papers | Society of Early Americanists | March 18-20, 2027

Hidden in Plain Sight:

The Humourist and the Rewriting of Early American Literary History 

For nearly three centuries, the essays of The Humourist (1753–54), published in the South-Carolina Gazette, circulated pseudonymously without an author—admired but ultimately unclaimed and unstudied. That silence has now been broken. Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina (2025) definitively establishes Alexander Gordon, Clerk of His Majesty’s Council in South Carolina, as the author of these essays, restoring to early American studies a substantial and long-missing colonial voice.

The implications are considerable.

The Humourist introduces into mid-eighteenth-century colonial literature a voice that is satirical, learned, rhetorically sophisticated, and deeply embedded in the intellectual and political life of Charleston. Written during the same years that Benjamin Franklin was shaping his public literary persona, these essays compel us to reconsider the contours of early American literary culture: its geography, its centers of influence, its relationship to British models, and its internal diversity.

This panel asks what follows from that recognition.

How does the presence of Gordon and The Humourist alter prevailing accounts of early American literary history? What happens to a canon long organized around New England and Philadelphia when a sustained, sophisticated essay tradition emerges from the colonial South? How might these essays reshape our understanding of authorship, anonymity, print culture, and the relationship between colonial and metropolitan literary forms? What new lines of inquiry—literary, historical, and transatlantic—open once this body of work is taken seriously?

At the same time, the recovery of The Humourist raises a second, equally pressing question: how does a newly established body of work move from archive into interpretation, and from interpretation into the classroom?

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  • the implications of Gordon’s authorship for early American literary history
  • The Humourist in relation to Franklin and the periodical essay tradition
  • regional imbalance and the place of the colonial South in the canon
  • transatlantic literary identity and British-American cultural exchange
  • satire, persona, and public discourse in colonial print culture
  • political knowledge and insider perspective in the essays
  • literary, historical, or rhetorical analysis of specific essays
  • future directions for research suggested by the recovery of this corpus
  • the movement from recovery to curriculum: teaching newly established texts

Panelists will be asked to engage with a shared selection of The Humourist essays in order to ground discussion in the texts themselves. The essays are included in Unmasking The Humourist (2025), accessible via Kindle; a PDF of the text can be shared with panel participants.

Please send a 250–300-word abstract and brief bio directly to Professor Brent L. Kendrick at brentlkendrick@gmail.com by May 16, 2026.

Questions and expressions of interest are warmly welcome.

Whether the panel materializes or not, the act of sending the call felt like its own small ceremony. It’s one more way of insisting that this voice, so long unheard, deserves a seat at the table. The deadline for panel submissions is May 16th. The conference is scheduled for March 2027. And Alexander Gordon has already waited nearly three hundred years. Sure, we can give him a little more time.

Carrying the Bags of Colonial America’s Humourist

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“Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth.”

—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Irish playwright, novelist, critic, and a master of wit, paradox, and social satire.

Humor means different things to different people.

Sometimes it appears when something almost goes wrong but doesn’t. The tension releases, and everyone exhales at once.

Sometimes the biggest laughs come when someone names a behavior we all recognize but rarely admit—family habits, social pretenses, small vanities we pretend not to see in ourselves.

Humor lets people say risky things safely. We soften criticism with a joke. We test opinions indirectly. We disagree without declaring war.

Sometimes humor does something even simpler: it lets strangers feel briefly aligned. People who laugh together feel, if only for a moment, that they belong to the same world.

I can relate to all of those kinds of humor.

But lately I’ve been tapping into another kind of humor. Laughing at myself.

Because here I am, at this stage of life, carrying the bags of a Colonial American writer who performed behind his own joke for nearly 275 years.

He wrote in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1753 and 1754 under the pseudonym The Humourist. I eventually identified him as Alexander Gordon—antiquarian, playwright, former operatic tenor, Egyptologist, and Clerk of His Majesty’s Council—and published the essays in my book Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina.

Right now, I’m laughing out loud as I finish typing that last paragraph. It captured all the necessary details in so short a fashion that a reader who doesn’t know about my work might think it was easy.

It wasn’t and that’s no laughing matter.

I started working on these pseudonymous essays in 1973, and it took me decades of on-again-off-again research to solve what was the greatest mystery in all of American literature. Who wrote the essays that were right up there with Benjamin Franklin’s?

I solved the mystery by giving the essays a close reading and by developing a precise profile of the pseudonymous author.

He shows deep classical learning; fluency in music and theater; detailed knowledge of colonial legislative procedure; access to the printing process; and—most strikingly—specialized antiquarian expertise, including repeated, highly technical references to Egyptian mummies.

That last detail matters—hold on to it.

Serendipity helped. While combing the South Carolina Gazette for anything that might name the author outright, I stumbled on an obituary for Alexander Gordon, Clerk of His Majesty’s Council. The obituary didn’t identify him as The Humourist, but as I dug further, Gordon’s life and learning aligned almost point for point with the profile my close reading had built—especially the mummy trail.

Egyptology was not casual learning in colonial Charleston. Yet the essays speak in depth about mummies, and Gordon’s will independently inventories Egyptian paintings and drawings and an unpublished manuscript on Egyptian history. When the essays and the archival record illuminate one another so precisely, alternative candidates disappear. The mask does not merely fit. It belongs—and suddenly the performance comes into focus.

With Gordon restored to authorship, the essays change. They stop being a curiosity and become something far more interesting: a sustained experiment in humor and performance inside the colonial newspaper itself.

Attribution reveals design. What once appeared as scattered satire resolves into a deliberate experiment—using humor, performance, and print itself to create a conversation between writer and public.

Recently, I explored that angle for a talk at the South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in a paper titled “Pleasure, Play, and the Colonial Press: Unmasking The Humourist in Eighteenth-Century Charleston” — I realized something unexpected.

The real story is no longer the mystery.

Now that the mystery has been solved, the authorship established, and the essays restored to print in Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina (2025), readers can finally approach them not as an attribution puzzle but as a serious contribution to colonial American literature — and to eighteenth-century humor itself.

What emerges is humor doing real cultural labor.

Gordon deploys mock-serious moralizing, feigned modesty, fabricated correspondence, and theatrical self-presentation to probe colonial life. He stages debates with himself, parodies authority, and moves constantly between sincerity and self-mockery. Humor here is not decoration or diversion. It becomes a way of negotiating civility, reputation, and power in a city both ambitious and anxious.

Just as important, the humor is local. Charleston is not London or Boston. Gordon writes within a transatlantic essay tradition, yet his satire is tuned to a specific press, a specific readership, and the particular pressures of a provincial colonial capital learning how to see itself.

One of his most sophisticated devices is fabricated correspondence. Figures such as Alice Wish-For’t, Urbanicus, Calx Pot-Ash, and Peter Hemp enter the newspaper as letter writers, each occupying a recognizable social position. Alice Wish-For’t blends patriotic seriousness with playful irony, turning courtship into commerce as she urges Carolina to favor its own “manufactures.” Urbanicus performs civic refinement, respectfully cataloguing Charleston’s dangers until earnest reform quietly becomes satire. Calx Pot-Ash and Peter Hemp speak as commodities seeking settlement, reducing questions of empire and policy to negotiations among trade goods.

Equally telling is where these voices write from — England, Sweden, Russia. Distance lends authority while keeping Charleston firmly at the center. The newspaper becomes a stage upon which local life is judged through transatlantic eyes.

Of course, Gordon writes all the letters himself.

Yet the illusion matters. Humor manufactures sociability, creating the sense of an engaged public responding in real time. The newspaper becomes not a lecture but a space of play, populated by voices entering and exiting as if directed from behind the curtain.

That play extends even further — to authorship itself. Rather than locating comedy only in scenes of leisure, Gordon repeatedly turns writing into the joke. The Humourist exists entirely in print, negotiating with readers, printers, and critics while never stepping outside the role he has invented. Apologies, promises of reform, threats of retirement, and editorial decisions mimic literary authority even as they quietly undermine it. Print culture itself becomes performance.

At moments he turns this playfulness toward authority directly. In a mock proclamation issued by Apollo, styled “King, Ruler, and sole Arbiter of Parnassus,” poetry is regulated like civil law, offending writers condemned in language borrowed from official decrees. The humor lies not simply in exaggeration but in recognition: authority, literary and political alike, depends on performance.

By this point, the pattern becomes unmistakable. The newspaper has become a stage. Voices circulate, authority performs itself, and meaning moves through print while a hidden author directs the scene.

The experiment reaches its height in the Humourist’s carefully managed disappearance. His farewell dramatizes authorship itself, insisting he will never again “enter the Lists of Authorism.” Timing, posture, and voice — the very tools of authority — become part of the joke he appears to control.

Here humor shifts away from events and toward the performance of authorship itself, as the writer gradually becomes part of the joke he has created.

Once we recognize that experiment, we can finally ask a larger question:

“What, exactly, did my scholarly research really recover?”

Not just an author’s name. Not just a solved literary mystery.

What returns is pleasure—yhe pleasure of wit, play, and performance in the colonial press.

These essays can now be read, taught, and argued over not as anonymous artifacts, but as the work of a specific and remarkably complex mind. They invite us to reconsider early American literature not as solemn beginnings, but as lively experimentation — writers testing ideas about society, behavior, and power through laughter.

I keep carrying Gordon’s bags.

From Charleston, where he wrote them. To Deltaville. To Pinehurst. And wherever the conversation goes next.

Because if humor helped him speak safely to his own century, perhaps it can help us hear him clearly in ours and remind us that one of the sharpest, funniest voices in Colonial American literature was never lost.

He was simply waiting for the joke to land.

So I keep carrying the bags—following the voice that once spoke from behind the mask, wherever the road leads.

.

The Long Way a Voice Comes Home

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“The meaning of the past is never finished.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975). From her Between Past and Future (1961), where she argues that history is not closed or complete, but morally alive, awaiting renewed attention, responsibility, and understanding.

Last week, I found my way to a small library tucked behind a hardware store in Deltaville, Virginia. It was the sort of place you might drive past without ever knowing it was there—a quiet, cream-colored building softened by climbing vines and brightened by a mural where hummingbirds hovered and monarchs drifted above a riot of painted flowers. A sailboat logo and a modest white sign announced Middlesex County Public Library — Deltaville Branch, a name that made the place feel both official and intimate at once. Nothing about it was grand, but everything about it felt intentional. Step through the doors, and you are immediately reminded why libraries endure: they do not shout their importance; they simply keep offering it.

I had been invited to speak about Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina, a project that has occupied a surprising amount of my life. But as I stood there, in a room filled with people who had given their afternoon to books, it became clear that what I was really there to talk about was not a colonial essayist at all. It was about the invisible network of librarians, teachers, archivists, and patient institutions that had made that work possible.

Nothing I have written would exist without them. Not the book. Not the essays. Not even the questions that led me to them.

For most of us, research looks solitary. A scholar in a reading room. A book on a desk. A voice speaking from a distant century. But none of that happens without a vast, quiet scaffolding behind it, made up of people who catalog, preserve, teach, fund, and protect the materials that others one day come to use.

Libraries quietly hold information—sometimes for centuries—without knowing who will need it, or when, or why. They preserve voices long after those voices have gone silent, trusting that someday someone will come along prepared to listen carefully.

That afternoon in Deltaville, surrounded by that small but devoted group of Library Friends, I realized I was standing inside the visible tip of something much larger. A chain of care that stretches across generations, linking a colonial newspaper, a Charleston library, a community college system, and a branch library in the heart of the Chesapeake Bay.

My own place in that chain began long before I knew it. When I was a graduate student in the early 1970s, I stumbled across a series of anonymous essays published in the 1750s in The South-Carolina Gazette. A leading scholar, Leo LeMay, had remarked that they were among the finest essays in all of early American literature and had urged that someone edit them, publish them, and identify their author. The challenge sat there for decades, unanswered.

What allowed me to return to it was not individual brilliance, but institutional grace. I spent twenty-five years at the Library of Congress, learning how archives think and how preservation outlasts any single lifetime. Later, the Virginia Community College System gave me something just as precious when I turned fifty: the chance to become an English professor, a dream I had carried since childhood. And then, when I was named Chancellor’s Professor, it gave me a two-year appointment that provided something more precious than funding. It provided time. Time to think. Time to return to unfinished questions. Time to do the kind of slow, careful work that real discovery requires.

That is why educators and educational institutions matter so deeply in this story. They do not just transmit knowledge; at their best, they grant permission. Permission to linger with a problem. Permission to follow a hunch. Permission to trust that careful thinking is worth the investment.

Being in Deltaville also gave me something I had not realized I was missing: the chance to thank Glenn DuBois in person. Glenn was Chancellor during two important turning points of my professional life. He was Chancellor when the Virginia Community College System first welcomed me into the classroom at age fifty, and he was Chancellor again years later when I was named Chancellor’s Professor, the appointment that made this work possible.

We rarely get to look someone in the eye and say, simply and honestly, “You changed my life.” But that afternoon, in a small library behind a hardware store, I did. It was one of those moments when gratitude stops being abstract and becomes something you can actually feel in the room.

The essays I eventually brought back into the light turned out to belong to Alexander Gordon, a Scottish-born scholar and singer who lived in colonial Charleston. But authorship matters because it allows us to place a voice in a life, a mind in a world, and a text in a tradition.

There is a Jewish folk belief that a person dies twice: once when the body stops, and again when their name is spoken for the last time. If that is so, then archives are a kind of moral infrastructure, designed to keep names from slipping into that second death. Every catalog entry, every preserved page, every carefully tended collection is an act of faith in the future.

So is education. When the Virginia Community College System opened its doors to me in midlife, it did not just give me a job. It gave me a second beginning. Without that second chance, the first version of my curiosity would have remained unfinished.

All of this came together for me in that small Deltaville library. A place without marble columns or grand staircases, but full of the same quiet dignity that animates every serious library anywhere. People had gathered not to be dazzled, but to listen. To care. To take part in the long human habit of keeping stories alive.

Today, Gordon’s voice is no longer anonymous. His essays are no longer orphans. A lost body of work has been restored to its author, and a chapter of early American literary history has been set right. That restoration belongs not just to a scholar or a book, but to the institutions that made it possible—to libraries that guard knowledge, to educators who foster discovery, and to communities that believe the past is worth preserving.

All proceeds from my book go to the Virginia Foundation for Community College Education, which feels exactly right. Libraries and community colleges share the same moral instinct: they exist to hold doors open, not to keep people out.

I left Deltaville with a deeper gratitude for the fact that nothing we do alone ever really is. Behind every footnote stands a librarian. Behind every discovery stands a teacher. Behind every second act stands an institution willing to say yes.

And behind every recovered voice stands a chain of quiet, faithful human hands, passing something forward because they believe someone, someday, will need it.

The Humourist Nears the Light

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“To publish is to make knowledge public, to assert its value, and to offer it up to the judgment of the world.”

–—Robert Darnton (b. 1939), American cultural historian of the Enlightenment and former Director of the Harvard University Library; renowned for his work on the history of the book and 18th-century France, including The Literary Underground of the Old Regime and The Case for Books.

Surely, you’ll remember the groundbreaking work I finished earlier this year on one of the greatest literary mysteries in early American history.

The Humourist—a sharp-witted, enigmatic essayist whose satirical columns lit up the front page of The South-Carolina Gazette in 1753 and 1754—had been lost to time, his identity buried beneath centuries of silence.

Through meticulous research—poring over newspapers, historical records, forgotten manuscripts, and overlooked clues—I solved the mystery, unmasking the man behind the essays: Alexander Gordon. His identity, his world, and the forces that led to his disappearance are now fully revealed.

I shared that discovery through this blog, but solving the mystery was only the beginning. The real work—the restoration—was still to come.

Now, after years of refining that research, the book I’ve long envisioned is finally becoming a reality.

Yesterday, I received the first proof of the book’s interior pages. Looking at them is more than a thrill—it is validation. These pages mark the first step toward publication and the return of a long-silenced voice.

Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina is not just a rediscovery. It is a scholarly edition that restores one of the most significant—but overlooked—literary voices of colonial America. The essays appear in full, meticulously annotated and contextualized, accompanied by a critical introduction that explores Gordon’s identity, influences, and legacy.

Why This Book Matters

This is more than the story of a forgotten writer. It’s about:

● The literary landscape of colonial America and its deep connections to the English essay tradition.
● The power of satire to shape public discourse—even in a bustling port city like Charleston.
● The intimate intersection of literature, politics, and history, as seen through the eyes of a writer who was both observer and insider.

For the first time, The Humourist’s essays will step out of the yellowed pages of The South-Carolina Gazette and into the full light of historical and literary analysis.

The Book Will Arrive This Fall

This carefully curated edition will include:

● All of The Humourist’s essays, fully annotated.
● A critical introduction grounded in original scholarship.
● Historical and literary commentary that situates Gordon in both local and transatlantic traditions.
● A call for further scholarly attention to this long-overlooked voice.

Stay Tuned

In the coming months, I’ll be sharing exclusive glimpses into the publication journey, from typesetting to launch. The return of The Humourist is well underway.

The mystery was solved long ago. But this fall, the voice that once stirred Charleston will speak again—with clarity, context, and a proper name.

The Art of Eating Crow

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“A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.”

–Alexander Pope (1688–1744; English poet and satirist, one of the most influential poets of the 18th century, whose wit and keen moral reflections in works like “The Rape of the Lock” and “An Essay on Man” secured his literary legacy.)

Eating crow is never easy. In fact, it’s downright tough, so much so that it takes a lot of willpower and gumption.

Oh, I’m not talking about eating crow as in the genus Corvus, those glossy black birds found in most parts of the world. I’ve never eaten one of them.

I’m talking about eating the kind of crow that we sometimes have to eat when we discover that we’re wrong. That’s a hard discovery to make. Let’s face it: it’s hard to fess up when we’re wrong. But let’s own up to it—sometimes the best thing to do is just eat crow and be done with it.

Take the stubborn husband who swore up and down he could fix the plumbing himself, despite his wife’s warnings. A few YouTube tutorials, a flooded bathroom, and an emergency call to the plumber later, he’s standing there, soaking wet, eating a big plate of crow.

Or the manager who brushed off an employee’s suggestion, only to watch the competition roll out the same idea—successfully. There’s no easy way to walk that one back, but let’s hope the manager at least had the sense to admit, “I should’ve listened.”

Then there’s the friend who mocked TikTok, Wordle, or Air Fryers, scoffing at the hype—until they tried it. And now? They’re sending out their Wordle scores every morning, scrolling TikTok before bed, and raving about how crispy their Brussels sprouts get. Yep. Crow. Served hot and fresh.

People have been “eating crow” since the dawn of human interaction so the list could go on and on, ranging from professional to personal and from funny to frustrating, but I don’t need to continue. Every item in the list captures the same universal realization: Oops … I was wrong. I didn’t understand.

Even though we’ve been eating crow for a long, long time, the phrase itself is surprisingly modern. It first appeared in 1885 in the Magazine of American History:

“‘To eat crow’ means to recant, or to humiliate oneself.”

By 1930, the phrase had taken on a more serious tone:

“I should merely be making an ass of myself if I accused someone and then had to eat crow” (E. Queen, French Powder Mystery).

By 1970, “eating crow” was used in a way that is close to what we all hope for when we use the phrase today:

“I was going to apologize, eat crow, offer to kiss and make up” (New Yorker)

Yep! Sometimes, eating crow comes with extra benefits.

These days, eating crow is firmly on the menu for anyone caught in the wrong. Actually, it was on my menu last week. Two servings of crow. That’s right. Two servings. Mind you, I haven’t been caught in the wrong because I haven’t done anything wrong other than having had some lingering thoughts down through the years about two Mary E. Wilkins Freeman scholars. I’ve now come to realize that I was wrong, or, more accurately, I’ve come to realize that I didn’t understand.

And since I’ve always believed that eating crow is most beneficial if done in public, let me lift the cloche and reveal my double portion.

My first portion is because of thoughts that I’ve had about Thomas Shuler Shaw, a librarian at the Library of Congress, who embarked on an ambitious project to write what would have been the first biography of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. His goal was to illuminate the life and literary contributions of this remarkable author who had died in 1930.

However, fate had other plans. Shaw’s 1931 biography, A Nineteenth Century Puritan, faced rejection from prominent publishers such as Harper & Brothers, Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Saturday Evening Post. I’ve always credited Shaw for persevering, at least enough to find a home for his meticulously curated scrapbooks and the typescript of his unpublished biography in the Rare Book & Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress. Those artifacts provide a rich tapestry of insights into Freeman’s life and work, and they certainly helped me with my edition of The Infant Sphinx: Collected Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (Scarecrow, 1985).

Nonetheless, I wondered then as I do now: why didn’t Shaw continue his efforts to find a publisher? His book would have distinguished itself as the first Freeman biography. What impact might it have had on her literary reputation if the details of her life had been accessible to readers of the 1930s and 1940s?

My second portion of crow relates to another scholar working on a Freeman biography around the same time. Edward Foster wrote his Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: A Biographical and Critical Study in 1934 as his thesis when he was a candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree at Harvard University. The university accepted his thesis, but Foster didn’t complete his Harvard degree. He put aside his Freeman work until 1956 when he revised and published it as Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (Hendricks House).

Foster was direct when he explained the delay:

My thesis was accepted […] also for subsidized publication by Harvard Press. Lacking funds for subsidy and failing to get trade publication, I forgot the thing for nearly twenty years. MWF is only a small part of my career. (Foster to Brent L. Kendrick, ALS, October 24, 1973)

Nonetheless, I wondered then as I do now: why didn’t Foster try to find a publisher sooner than he did? What impact might it have had on her literary reputation if Foster’s details of her life had been accessible to readers of the 1930s and 1940s.

There. I’ve done it. I’ve eaten my two portions of crow. However, I have to do one more thing to help you understand the art of eating crow. To turn eating crow into an art requires divulging what prompted, in my case, not just one portion of crow but two in a single serving. That’s the source of the catharsis. That’s the confession, without which eating crow can never be an art.

Here’s mine.

Yesterday, I uploaded the manuscript of my forthcoming book Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina. My book definitively establishes Gordon (c. 1692–1754)—antiquarian, Egyptologist, scholar, singer, and later Clerk of His Majesty’s Council of South Carolina—as the author of The Humourist essays, restoring his rightful place in literary history.

I hesitate to say this, but the book is a significant scholarly work. It’s meticulously researched, not only unearthing a forgotten literary voice but also redefining our understanding of colonial American literature. While it’s structured with rigor, it remains highly engaging, making complex historical and literary analysis accessible without oversimplification. It’s not just a literary recovery; it’s a reframing of Charleston’s intellectual life, the role of satire in the colonies, and the transatlantic literary tradition. That’s no small feat.

To say that I am ecstatic is an understatement. I am.

But get this. I’ve been working on this book since 1973, when Professor Calhoun Winton of the University of South Carolina suggested that I try to solve this literary mystery. Published in the South-Carolina Gazette, the essays had been largely forgotten, and the identity of their author remained unknown.

At the time, I recognized their brilliance and used them as the foundation for a graduate paper. Then I put the project aside where it remained in my mental storehouse of “one-day, some-day” ideas, waiting for the right time.

Decades later, the Virginia Community College System (VCCS) gave me an extraordinary opportunity to return to that project, to bring these essays into the light, and to finally answer the question that had remained unanswered for centuries: Who wrote them?

As a VCCS Chancellor’s Professor (2012-2014), I answered that question and shared the essays and my ongoing findings with my blog readers right here. Actually, that’s when TheWiredResearcher had its beginning.

Ironically, I delayed publishing my watershed Unmasking The Humourist until now.

You may be wondering about my delays, just as I wondered about Foster’s delays and Shaw’s delays.

I’ve been wondering about my delays, too, and that’s why I’m eating crow.

I could toss out many reasons:

● The Humourist essays seemed too short for a book and too long for a scholarly article.

● I wanted to make certain that my evidence for claiming Alexander Gordon as the author was as compelling as my discussion.

● I wanted to do further research so that my headnotes and endnotes for the essays were comprehensive.

All of those reasons are true.

I won’t toss into that mix other scholarly pursuits that came my way.

I won’t toss into that mix my early career advances as a federal employee or my second career advances as an educator.

I won’t toss into that mix caring for aging parents.

Actually, I won’t toss into that mix anything else because what became obvious to me when I uploaded Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina was something seriously simple. We all lead complex, complicated, and convoluted lives.

● I know that truth firsthand.

● You likely do as well.

● So, too, did Edward Foster.

● So, too, did Thomas Shuler Shaw.

Wondering about their delays caused no harm, but I now see there was no need to wonder at all. I might simply have acknowledged what I’ve come to recognize in my own self-talk about The Humourist:

Life is rich, robust, and mysterious, and it rarely marches forward on a straight path.

As I move forward on my path, I’ll keep that truth in mind as I interact with others—and with myself. And with that heightened awareness, perhaps I really will have mastered the art of eating crow.

A Forgotten Voice, A Solved Mystery—And Soon, A Book

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“What is research but a blind date with knowledge?”
— Will Harvey (b. 1963; computer scientist and entrepreneur known for his contribution to the field of interactive entertainment.)

“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.”
— Samuel Johnson (1709-1784; poet, essayist, moralist, and lexicographer, best known for compiling A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755.)

Years ago, I solved one of the greatest literary mysteries in early American history. The Humourist—a sharp-witted, enigmatic essayist whose work graced the front page of The South-Carolina Gazette in 1753 and 1754—had been lost to time, his identity obscured by history.

Through meticulous research—poring over newspapers, historical records, forgotten manuscripts, and overlooked clues—I solved the mystery, uncovering the man behind the words—his identity, his world, and the forces that led to his disappearance.

I shared my discovery with the world through my copyrighted blog, laying bare the identity of The Humourist. But there was more to be done. Solving the mystery was only the beginning.

Now, after years of refining my research, the book I’ve long envisioned is finally becoming a reality. Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina, will be a available in September. It’s a definitive edition that not only reveals The Humourist’s true identity but also presents his essays in full, with critical commentary, historical context, and meticulous annotations. This is not just a rediscovery; it is a restoration of one of the most significant but overlooked literary voices of Colonial America.

Why This Book Matters

This is more than just the story of an anonymous writer. It’s about:

● Colonial America’s literary landscape and its connections to the great essay traditions of England.

● The power of satire in shaping public discourse—even in a bustling port city like Charleston.

● The intersection of literature, politics, and history, as seen through the eyes of a writer who was both an observer and an insider.

For the first time, The Humourist’s essays will step out of the yellowed pages of The South Carolina Gazette and into the full light of historical and literary analysis.

The Book Will Arrive This Fall

This carefully curated edition will include:
● All of The Humourist’s essays, fully annotated.
● A critical introduction that explores his identity, influences, and legacy.
● A deep dive into the historical and literary significance of his work.
● A call for further scholarly research into this long-forgotten but pivotal writer.

Stay Tuned!

Over the coming months, I’ll be sharing exclusive glimpses into the book’s publication journey, including its official launch. Follow my blog for exclusive updates—you won’t want to miss what’s next!

I solved the mystery years ago. Now—early this fall—the book that brings #The Humourist back to life will be available not only on Amazon but also in a bookstore near you!

Extra! Extra! Read All About It! A Blog Is Born!

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“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”

–Carl Sagan (1934–1996; astronomer and science communicator who inspired millions through his work on Cosmos and popular science writing.)

Tell me to do something, and I probably won’t do it. It smacks too much of being ordered around. No, thank you. Most of the time–though not always–I prefer to do the bossing.

On the other hand, suggest that I do something–maybe even challenge me to do something–and I’ll probably do it. Yes, thank you. I thrive on encouragement.

That’s exactly how today’s post began. One of my followers–my Linden Correspondent (LC)–suggested that the world at large might be revved and ready to know how my wired blog began! I thought LC’s suggestion was splendid, especially since my blog just celebrated its 12th anniversary. What better time than now to share the electrifying backstory.

With a growing readership of 13,782 (and counting!), I like to think my blog has found its niche. My readers value my blog for what it is today: a succession of riveting and captivating creative nonfiction essays that appear magically every Monday morning just in time for that first cup of coffee–that is for early risers who get their brew going early. That’s why I make a point of posting before 7am. While I sip on my coffee and savor what I wrote, I like to think that the entire world is doing the same thing.

Every Monday morning, you’ll find me in my reading chair with Ruby—my 60-pound lapdog—perusing my post while she peruses me. Sometimes, I smile and say aloud for her amusement:

“Wow, Kendrick! That’s a remarkable sentence. If you keep cranking out little gems like that, maybe one day you’ll end up somewhere as someone’s endnote.”

Yep. An endnote. Ironically, I guess that’s where we all end up: Someone’s endnote.

That’s not such a bad thing, you know. An endnote here. An endnote there. It seems to me that achieving a memorable, perhaps quotable phrase here and there is probably far wiser than having the entire canon of my work ricocheting around the world.

Stop and think about it for a minute or three. Look, for example, at what Benjamin Franklin achieved as a writer. Let’s focus on his Poor Richard’s Almanack, published annually from 1732 to 1758—nearly a quarter of a century of wit and wisdom.

Most people today can recall only a handful of Franklin’s most famous sayings, like:

● “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
● “A penny saved is a penny earned.”
● “No gains without pains.”

Please tell me, Dear Reader, that you know those sayings, for if you don’t, you surely won’t know these:

● “Well done is better than well said.”
● “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
● “If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.”

Indeed, Franklin managed to do both: he wrote things worth reading and did things worth writing. And, as I like to say:

“Endnoted.”

But let me take you back to where I began: the beginning of this blog.

I am so sorely tempted to say:

“It was a dark and stormy night …”

And that’s exactly what I would say, but if I said that I would have to note that Edward Bulwer-Lytton opened his 1830 novel, Paul Clifford with those words. As much as I hate to say it, because I am a stickler on documentation, I have grown weary of all the endnoting that I keep noting. Let us then move on to something that requires no noting.

Whew! I don’t know about you, but I feel notably relieved already.

LC must be relieved, too, to see that, at last, I’m getting around to sharing with the world the story behind the birth of my blog. But, as they say, every blog has its story, and mine is no exception.

Here’s what’s fascinating. Today, I am known around the world for my weekly memoir blog posts talking about anything from Aging to Zippers and about everything in between.

But when the idea for my blog came to me in 2012, I had a sharp, narrow, scholarly focus. I was working on my application for the VCCS Chancellor’s Commonwealth Professorship Program. At the heart of my application was the scholarly research that I wanted to do with a remarkable collection of Colonial American essays, songs, poems, and advertisements published pseudonymously under the name of “The Humourist” in the South Carolina Gazette during 1753-1754. The unique essays had never been reprinted, so they remained “hidden” and “undiscovered,” so to speak, in that newspaper. Further, no one knew who wrote the essays. Well, I was 99% certain that I knew, but I needed to do additional research and analysis to confirm my suspicions. In that sense, my project was a literary “whodunit” involving three things.

First, I planned to prepare a critical, annotated edition of the essays.

Second, I planned to develop a convincing case for authorial attribution based on a preponderance of internal evidence as well as on stylometrics.

Third, throughout the process of preparing the critical, annotated edition and developing a case for authorial attribution, I planned to give the essays a “close reading.” I was reminded of a quote by Robert Frost:

“We go to college to be given one more chance to learn to read in case we haven’t learned in high school. Once we have learned to read, the rest can be trusted to add itself unto us.”

I always shared that wisdom with my students. Learning to read—really read—gets to the heart of what we want our students to do, not just in English classes but across the board. When students slow down and give a text a close reading, critical thinking and intellectual discovery follow.

As Frost knew so well, that is what “learning to read” is all about. Further, when students learn how to really read, they can construct their own intellectual inquiries: “the rest can be trusted to add itself unto us.”

I always shared that belief—and approach—with my students without fail. I showed them how to learn to read, class after class, reading assignment after reading assignment, as I gave whatever literary selection we were reading my own close reading and as I made my own discoveries about a text. They were intrigued not only by my process but also by the discoveries that I made simply because of my dogged determination to give a text—any text—a close reading.

In my application, that’s precisely what I proposed to do with “The Humourist” essays. I wanted the opportunity to give the essays such a close reading that I would be able not only to establish a scholarly, annotated edition but also to identify the author.

I was really happy with that part of my application, but I knew that I needed something more. I needed a way to share my scholarly work on a regular basis with my colleagues and my students so that they could benefit, too.

I needed an idea. As I sat there on that January 8th evening, well into the third or fourth or maybe even fifth revision of my application, I started thinking about Daniel Boorstin (1975-1987), twelfth Librarian of Congress. A champion of accessibility, he worked to open the library to the public in symbolic and practical ways. He placed picnic tables and benches on Neptune Plaza, transforming it into a space for community gatherings. He initiated mid-day concerts and famously removed the chains from the majestic bronze doors at the first-floor west entrance leading to the Great Hall of the Jefferson Building. When told it would create a draft, he replied, “Great—that’s just what we need.”  In a bold move, he even stopped the practice of searching visitors.

At that time, I worked at the Library of Congress as an editor of the National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints, and I well remember the occasion when the bronze doors were opened. If I am not mistaken, it was on this occasion that I heard Dr. Boorstin say:

“You never know when an idea is about to be born.“

His comment lingered, and since hearing it, I made a point to keep track of when my own ideas were born.

So it came to be. While thinking about Boorstin, ideas, and my project, I exclaimed to myself:

“Blog it!”

I knew that a blog would allow me to share with the entire world my challenges, discoveries, and joys of research.

I knew that a blog would allow me to share with others this remarkable collection of Colonial American essays, songs, poems, and advertisements. The Encyclopedia of the Essay (ed. Tracy Chevalier, 1997) placed “The Humourist” essays in the tradition of Samuel Johnson’s Rambler essays and observed that they are the only “full-fledged literary” works to have appeared in the South Carolina Gazette. Years earlier, J. A. Leo Lemay (du Pont Winterthur Professor of English at the University of Delaware) had noted in A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Southern Literature (1969) that the essays should be edited, published, and the author identified.

This was hot! I knew that I could make “stuffy” literary research come alive in a blog. Colleagues and students and scholars and the world at large would love it. I knew they would because who wouldn’t love essays on par with Benjamin Franklin’s “Silence Dogood Letters”? Get this, too. Franklin had direct ties to the South Carolina Gazette and possibly to the author of “The Humourist” essays.

I knew, too, that aside from being in the essay tradition itself, a blog would allow me to share my project with faculty and students throughout the Virginia Community College System (VCCS), from the beginning of my work and every step of the way through completion. I realized that a blog would allow me to capture my personal experiences on a regular and ongoing basis: my work, my methods, my discoveries, my challenges and frustrations, and my joys.

I knew that a blog would allow me to do in the virtual world—using a heretofore unstudied literary work—exactly what I did in my classroom with literary works that appear in our textbooks: turn my blog followers on to the beauty of giving a text a close reading and turn them my on to “learning how to read,” showing them that once they learned how to read all else would be given to them.

That same evening, I came up with a working title: The Wired Researcher.  I Googled it and was delighted to discover that no such blog existed.

As I often do, I emailed a former student—a lover of language and words and ideas—to get her take on my blog idea.

She responded immediately:

The word “wired” will catch the attention of …The Young.  They’ll think you are “hip.”

You’ll need a logo.  You’ll need T-shirts with the logo on them.  You need pens that say, “The Wired Researcher.”  “Sold in libraries everywhere.”  “Guaranteed to make study more exciting.” Oh, boy, I see tie-ins!

Clearly my former student was as wired as I was—perhaps that’s why I valued her opinions as highly as I did—but her email response gave affirmation to the title of the blog that had been born.

Here’s where the birth of the blog starts to get really sweet. I was awarded the Chancellor’s Commonwealth Professorship (2012-2014).

My first announcement appeared on October 19, 2012. It was short!

“Welcome to The Wired Researcher! Blog posts will begin on November 26, 2012.”

True to my promise, on November 26, I published “Opportunity Knocks Twice in the Virginia Community College System.” That post included the first of the historical essays that served as the nucleus for my project: “The Humourist” (November 26, 1753). Yep. Choosing to launch my blog on November 26, the same day that the Humourist launched his essays, was deliberate, and if I must say so myself, I think it was a stroke of genius!

And so, The Wired Researcher was born—not just as a blog, but as a way for me to share my love of research with a world eager to learn about my discoveries.

Now you have the inside scoop. If you want to know more, simply go back to the beginning and read all the posts from the start. But whatever you do, please make certain that you read “Colonial Charleston’s Biggest Literary Mystery Is Solved!” Yep. I solved the literary whodunit that captured me in the first place. Then you have to read “Three Special Shout-Outs!” because behind every success story are lots of people who deserve praise and thanks!

Wait! Wait! Don’t go yet. I have one or two more things to share.

When my blog started, I had around 1,750 views a year, representing 33 countries. So far this year, it has soared to an impressive 13,782 views from 152 countries! I must be writing something right!

To each and every one of you, My Dear Readers–then, now, and all along the way–a special shout-out!

To my Linden Correspondent (LC), who tossed out the idea that I share the story behind the blog, I extend a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious thank-you! (As Mary Poppins would say, nothing else captures the exuberance quite right!)

I look forward to a future of Mondays, inspired by the joy of discovery and by the connections that I’m making with all of you.

P. S. The joy of sharing new ideas awaits us all!

Ricocheting Around Inside My Blog!

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I love words. In fact, I’m a word enthusiast. No, actually, I’m a word aficionado. I like the way words look, the way they sound, and the way they require me to rearrange and reposition my tongue and lips and teeth! I like the “mouth feel.”

I love euphonious words, especially: supine, scissors, fantabulous, panacea, disambiguate, luscious, discombobulate, scintilla, tremulous, orbicular, woebegone, sonorous, ethereal, pop, holler, britches, entwine, hullabaloo, phantasmagorical, serendipity, slew, velvety, liminal, dusk, ever, and even meniscus.

I love euphonious phrases, too: thread the needle, rev the engine, a touch ticklish, doplar sonar, sweet and sour, bad’s the best, or one of my own creation–recalled from a dream that I once dreamt–blue-pigeon-feather happy.

However, all of my favorite melodious phrases and words pale in comparison to the phrase considered by many linguists (who study phonaesthetics and know all about the properties of sound) to be the most beautiful word in the English language: cellar door! I was flabbergasted when I made that discovery, but matters of sound are so momentous and so weighty that lengthy debates surround them. For example, many people attribute the coinage of cellar door to fantasy writer J. R. R. Tolkien who used it in his 1955 speech “English and Welsh.” But as American lexicographer Grant Barrett established in his February 11, 2010, New York Times article aptly titled, “Cellar Door,” we must give credit to Shakespearean scholar Cyrus Lauron Hooper who used cellar door in his 1903 novel Gee-Boy.

Sometimes one of these little beauties gets stuck inside my head and manifests a fierce determination not to go away. For example, the melodious word ricochet has been bouncing around in there for an epoch at least—perhaps even longer—and it’s not alone. It’s flourishing there as part of an entire phrase—an entire stanza, actually—from “The Lanyard,” a poem by Billy Collins, former United States Poet Laureate:

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

Mind you: I don’t mind the fact that the stanza from the poem and the word ricochet won’t go away. I love poetry just as much as I love melodious words and phrases. And who doesn’t love Billy Collins?

And it’s easy to understand why this particular stanza from Billy Collins’ poem would linger in my mind. Like the speaker in his poem—presumably Collins himself—I, too, have been ricocheting slowly off the walls of my home library, moving from my cluttered desk with my personal computer (where I carry out my home-style professorial responsibilities) to my even more cluttered farm table with my considerably smaller tablet (where I fulfill whatever it is that I achieve when I write—whatever writing is—and where I first began this blog on November 26, 2012.

And continuing to compare myself to the speaker in Collins’ “The Lanyard” so that I might perhaps stop the word ricochet from ricocheting around in my head, I, too, am moving from my professorial computer to my writerly tablet, from stacks of papers on the former to stacks of books and two envelopes on the latter.

And it is on the two envelopes that my eyes fall even as I type this post. It is on the two envelopes that my eyes have been falling for several years. And it is on the two envelopes that my eyes will forever fall until I muster courage to open them.

My blog followers will perhaps remember those two envelopes, first mentioned in my December 31, 2014, post:

I have in my possession copies of critical Alexander Gordon manuscripts obtained from libraries in Scotland and England. Although I have had the packages for several months, I have not opened them yet because I know that the contents will take my Humourist research to new heights, and I have had neither time nor nerve to make the journey.

However, January 2015 will place me exactly where I need to be in terms of time and nerve to open the packages, review the manuscripts, and share my findings with you, right here in this blog.

So, there! Now you know! Those two envelopes are still on my desk waiting to be opened. I cannot claim that I have not had time, for I have had time aplenty. And I cannot claim that I have not had nerve to open the envelopes because I remain confident that the contents will take my Humourist research to new heights and higher ground.

In reality, I have no more time now than before, and I have no more nerve now than before. But what I do have now is the knowledge that now is the right time to write. Simply put, I have created the space, and I have allowed myself to enter. (Thank you, Natalie Goldberg, for reminding me:

…we never question the feasibility of a football team practicing long hours for one game; yet in writing we rarely give ourselves the space for practice (Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within).

So I am ricocheting slowly off the walls of my library for three reasons and three reasons only.

Ricochet Reason One. I have been away from my blog for so long that the resulting space is galatic, a perfect home for the word ricochet. And as I type, I cannot help but wonder: Is it really the word ricochet that is bouncing off vacuum space? Or is it really guilt? Perhaps both, but, now—on this momentary reflection—I suspect the latter. And that’s perfectly fine because my guilt makes me perfectly American, or, as Ezra Pound said about Robert Frost, “vurry Amur’k’n” (Dear Editor: A History of Poetry in Letters, edited by Joseph Parisi and Stephen Young).

Just by writing what I have written here, I have given rest to reason one. What a blessed relief.

Ricochet Reason Two. I cannot help but wonder about my followers—my blog followers. At one point, they numbered well over 100, and the blog had more than 5,000 visits from people in exactly 100 countries. Not bad for a blog dedicated to the challenges of research, specifically—for now, at least—to the challenge of identifying the author of a group of noteworthy and heretofore pseudonymous Colonial American essays.

Are any of the faithful still with me? I wonder.

And if I post, will they read what I have to say? Will anyone? And if no one reads, will I have written anything at all, really?

It is very much the same as the proverbial old question, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” 

Philosophers have long argued that sound, colour, taste, smell and touch are all secondary qualities which exist only in our minds. We have no basis for our common-sense assumption that these secondary qualities reflect or represent reality as it really is. So, if we interpret the word ‘sound’ to mean a human experience rather than a physical phenomenon, then when there is nobody around there is a sense in which the falling tree makes no sound at all. […] Without a measuring device to record it, there is a sense in which the recognisable properties of quantum particles such as electrons do not exist, just as the falling tree makes no sound at all. (Jim Baggett, Quantum Theory: If a Tree Falls in the Forest …).

Followers, be my measure. If you are out there, measure me with comment.

And if you are not yet following, follow. (I am reminded of the Iowa corn farmer in Field of Dreams and the voice that he heard telling him to build a baseball diamond, “If you build it, he will come.” The farmer built it, and they came. Perhaps in my rebuilding, my followers will come. If you do, measure me with your comments, too.)

Just by writing what I have written here, I have given rest to reason two as well. Again, what a blessed relief.

Ricochet Reason Three. Of the two envelopes waiting to be opened—those two parcels that will take my Humourist research to new heights—which shall I open first? The one from Scotland measuring 14 x 10/16 inches and weighing a hefty 17.21 ounces? (Is bigger better?) Or the one from England, measuring 6 x 3/4 inches and weighing a nearly weightless 1.16 ounce? (Do good things really come in small packages?)

To give rest to reason three—and be thrice blessed—I must open both envelopes. 

Perhaps what I face is like picking petals off a daisy: “I love him. I love him not.” However, in this instance, both envelopes are equally good and the last petal will be an affirmation.

Or, maybe, a more apt comparison would be to Frank Stockton’s famous American short story “The Lady, or the Tiger?” published in The Century magazine in November 1882. In the story, a young man must choose between two doors. Behind one, a beautiful lady. Behind the other, an awful, relentless tiger.

Stockton leaves his readers with an open ending:

And so I leave it with all of you: Which came out of the opened door,—the lady, or the tiger?

For me, both doors—both envelopes, if you will—are equally good and both will be auspicious and bodacious.

Unlike Stockton, however, I will be straightforward and honest. I will let you know what I find not only in the first envelope but also in the second. In fact, I will chronicle each and every detail as I open the envelopes and as I discover the joys that await me.

This I promise: in next week’s post, I will write all, right here.

Three Special Shout-Outs!

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 “True friends are the ones who never leave your heart, even if they leave your life for a while. Even after years apart, you pick up with them right where you left off.”

It occurs to me, on this last day of 2014, that blogs are like true friends:  you can pick right up with them where you left off. Thus, I have absolutely no doubt at all in my mind that you—dear Reader—will recall my last post on June 30: “A Correction to Alexander Gordon’s Canon, 256 Years after a Mistake Was Made.”  How could you not recall the juicy research conundrum that I faced?  It is not often that a scholar has the opportunity to set the record straight so many years after the fact!  But with my own dogged persistence and with the gracious help of Fiona Keates (Archivist, Modern Records, The Royal Society), I did just that.  So what if the document I had considered “the ace up my sleeve” in my present research turned out to have been written not by MY Alexander Gordon but rather by Dr. Alexander Garden, a well-known Scottish physician, botanist, and zoologist who came to South Carolina in 1752 where he collected flora and fauna and sent them to Carolus Linnaeus—the father of modern taxonomy. I was joyed to be able to set the record straight.  Doing so makes research all the more fun and all the more memorable!

In fact, I was so excited by my discovery—so excited by my opportunity to set the record straight—that even though the post was dated June 30, 2014, I totally forgot that the date marked the official end of my 2012-2014 Virginia Community College System’s Chancellor’s Commonwealth Professorship!  (The professorship appointment ran from the start of fiscal 2012 to the end of fiscal 2014.)

I remembered, of course, the very next day, but I decided that even though the “official” professorship was over, nothing at all could keep me from being a “Virtual Chancellor’s Commonwealth Professor,” virtually forever—and so I shall continue to be—just as nothing at all could keep my blog from continuing, virtually forever—and, so, it, too, shall continue to be!

Wait—just wait—until you read my next few posts.  I have in my possession copies of critical Alexander Gordon manuscripts obtained from libraries in Scotland and England.  Although I have had the packages for several months, I have not opened them yet because I know that the contents will take my Humourist research to new heights, and I have had neither time nor nerve to make the journey.

However, January 2015 will place me exactly where I need to be in terms of time and nerve to open the packages, review the manuscripts, and share my findings with you, right here in this blog.

But I digress. If I had realized that June 30 marked the official end of my 2012-2014 Virginia Community College System’s Chancellor’s Commonwealth Professorship, I would have given three special shout-outs!   And so I will seize today, this last day of 2014, as the perfect opportunity to do so. Continue reading →