Grantmaking Blog

Our communications director, Marie Deatherage, has been urging more of the MMT staff to join the 21st century and blog!  I want to get with the program, but honestly find the idea of blogging daunting to say the least.  An experience I had as college English major, at the dawn of the digital age, may have some bearing.
 
One evening I headed to the John D. Rockefeller Library (known at our school as “the Rock”), resolved to write a paper on some aspect of Walt Whitman’s poetry.  In those days, believe it or not, library catalogues consisted of thousands of three-by-five paper cards filed alphabetically in vast ranks of small drawers.  If your library was a fancy new one at an expensive college, the drawers were likely to be crafted of silky, nice-smelling wood that matched other parts of the institutional décor.  You accessed the drawers out by sticking your finger through specially made hardware and pulling!
 
I found the “Whi-” drawer and pulled.  It was quickly evident that every card represented a book or a paper on Walt Whitman.  I pulled out the next drawer – all Walt Whitman.  If memory serves, there were at least two more drawers full of Walt Whitman entries.  Futility!  What could I possibly write about old Walt and his poems that hadn’t already been said a million times, better, and more insightfully?  What would I ever in my life be able to write about Walt Whitman that was worth the paper?  At that moment, it was clear to me that a graduate degree in literature was out of the question.
 
Aside from revealing the shocking extent of my adolescent hubris, this incident belies why I might feel inhibited about joining “the chattering classes” (“masses”?) so many years later.  Time, yours and mine, is precious.  Words are open to interpretation.  Meaning is elusive.  And there’s other work to be done.
 
Self-expression comes naturally to Marie, and thankfully so.  Her willingness to expose her humanity (“Youza it’s cold!) while sharing information important to grant seekers gives MMT an accessible, down-to-earth voice that reassures the timid and disarms the proud.  I absolutely aspire to her ability to put herself out there on the Internet to proffer a genuine “come one, come all” welcome to everyone striving to improve the quality of life in Oregon and Clark County, Washington.  So Marie, I resolve, in 2011, with you as my guide, to join the blog-osphere.  I’ll bet Walt Whitman would have been terrific at it.  After all, his most celebrated poem opens as follows:
 
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you.
 
All best wishes for 2011!

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