Jay got interested in photography as art in the late Sixties (the nineteen sixties, thank you), and joined the actual fray as a photographic artist around 1970. That turned out to be a short-lived, ill fated venture, but he pleads youth and naïveté. Okay, youth and stupidity, but the multitudinous disasters had little to do with photographic or artistic considerations and a whole lot to do with crooked real estate agents, greedy banks, nincompoop insurance companies, and heavy handed Southern politics so crooked they call it "North Carolina" politics. Anyway, photography-as-art still beguiles, and Jay yields to the Muse's call whenever possible, reason and common sense and even old age notwithstanding. Jay's exhibited many of his photographs in the Midlands of South Carolina within smelling distance of the very seat of state government and within cannonball-shooting distance of the capitolith itself. The art shows provided opportunities to show off, even though Jay had to brave appearing in actual person at the openings. Now he maintains a continuous online art show, where sales of prints are enabled worldwide: RedBubble

Jay's not noted for conformity and doesn't fit well into any categories. "Mainly, I get bored easy." So, the body of his work cuts across a variety of styles, schools, techniques, subjects, and display media. Some are old and traditional, and some new and misunderstood. Some work, and some don't. The viewer decides which is which.

Often printing images in more than one way, Jay alters them as necessary to adjust to the medium. Other works are traditional photographs printed by technologically impressive means onto non-traditional (for photography) surfaces such as artists' canvas, watercolor paper, and metallic foil.

Jay especially likes images in plain ol' photographic gelatin-silver created in the dark. However, the allure of electronic output, with the color permanence of giglée prints, keeps his kitchen smelling more like food than fixer. Oh, and that's another thing. Jay's respiratory functions are extremely sensitive to photographic chemicals, owing to the years he spent in the color photo lab business.

People are usually Jay's favorite subjects, including nudes. He also likes the surreal, and creating abstractions that start as photographs of people, nude or otherwise, and metamorphize into something indistinct, but reminiscent of reality in some curious way.

Computer technologies have booted up an infinite palette of possibilities for manipulating the camera's imagery, and Jay delights in exploring those complexities with works that cut across both traditional and digital photographic technologies. Many of his favorite works are digital abstractions, which he greatly enjoys doing and looking at, ever since 'way back in the Seventies - the Nineteen Seventies.

As an artist and a photographer, Jay's completely self-taught. "Outsider," is the current term. He learns best by doing, anyway, and Jay's always felt that doing something - even doing it wrong - was a better way of figuring out how to do it than being told. Besides, there have always been plenty of books on the subjects, and Jay definitely relates to books. In fact, he'll miss them when they're replaced by electronic versions. But moving to his present apartment was complicated by the fact that his books filled up more than half of the rent-a-truck and consumed immense amounts of time to pack and unpack. A few dozen CD-Roms would have held them all.

Jay's not an enthusiastic headline writer, so you take the good with the bad here. Headlines sometimes pop into the brain and literally write themselves. Good ones, even. Bad ones, alas, can take much agonizing time to concoct while the Muse laughs and cackles. There are people who have a natural talent with headlines, and Jay's met lots of them, but doesn't count himself among their number. When it comes to headlines, he works for everything he gets, and often gets little for his work.

The same is true of poetry. Jay's Muse came for a stay a few decades ago and dropped pithy lines all over the place, trusting Jay to gather and record them. He did that, troubling the Muse on occasion for a completion to something well begun, but never achieved the stardom as a poet that some people enjoy without even working up a sweat. It's all there, the vocabulary, the imagery, the finely honed appreciation of the nuances of language. But it doesn't come without the Muse's inspiration, and Jay can't even force it to work, as he usually can with prose. His entire poetic output is but a thin sheaf of lines that he hasn't incremented or polished, or even looked through in years. Indeed, the few people he permitted to look at his work were all in agreement that it was, on the whole, worthless. Exit Muse, stage left.

But this week, again, deadlines loom, so have to do with a picture to tide over till another time. A little abstraction this time. Jay particularly likes abstract images that are something to begin with - abstracted ways of looking at reality, perhaps odd angles, extreme closeups, or lit in some unusual way. This picture starts off as a simple picture of a green plastic float, floating in the swimming pool here at the apartment complex during the annual pool party last week. The apartment management puts on the party to celebrate summer with hot dogs, burgers, and humidity. A good time was had by all. To bring out the plastic floatness of the plastic float, Jay added some Photoshop filters. It's a shot taken with his pointy shooty aim-and-mash-button pocketable camera, and the odd natural light gave it the alien look you see here. It didn't need much color correction. He applied a tonemapping filter that enhanced the midtone contrast, plus an Orton effect that emphasized the pillowy look of the float's folds. To the small version for this blog he added several whacks of unsharp masking to accentuate the texture. If none of this technospeak means anything to you, you're fortunate. Just enjoy the picture. Click it for a bigger view on RedBubble.com.

Jay's favorite vocation and avocation is photography. Photos gratia artis. He started young, encouraged by his father who at family events proudly took the current-model Kodak box camera off its high shelf in the closet. The old man set everybody blinking with the flash from huge bulbs, even in outdoor sunlight, and after weeks of waiting gleefully showed off curly edged glossy prints, square and sharp, many of them color. Yet, Jay's family album contains very little that survived the internal combustion of his dysfunctional family, so most of what's extant is stuff Jay shot in recent times.

Photographically, Jay started by recording his grandmother's flower beds with his father's Kodak. When the prints came back, an interminable wait later, the flowers were all black and white. Not beautiful, hand printed black and white, but bleached out "drugstore" prints - which is of course what they were.

Jay gave up in despair, unaware that changing the film would have brought color prints. Several years later, Jay received a new Polaroid Land Camera - freshly invented - with a kit of accessories. It was a gift from his father. The camera required some finagling with exposures, but Jay managed to figure out the EV system and went about recording absolutely everything for posterity - the cat, the house, and any relatives who'd put up with the hassle. None of these great images survives, so posterity, the Smithsonian (and the dumpster) are out of luck. After the new wore off, and the cute little Wink Light died for the second time and couldn't be repaired, Jay moved on to other enthusiasms, not to say obsessions, and parked the Polaroid.

Years passed, as years are wont to do. While at the university of South Carolina in Aiken, studying journalism, Jay snagged part time employment as a newspaper correspondent. His Sainted Grandmother bought him a 35mm camera, and a new interest was re-born. Again with the black and white. Only this time the prints got individualized attention from the newspaper's photo lab and even appeared in print.

In addition to Miss Bobo, Jay's teacher Hall of Fame (He also has a Teachers' Hall of Infamy, but is sparing you that for now) includes the late William T. Slaughter. An accomplished organist respected for his technically superb and musically inspired renditions of Bach fugues, Mr. Slaughter taught band instruments in all six (!) grades at Aiken Junior and High schools. He was a one-person staff - no assistant teachers back then - ably assisted at the High School by a student staff that included (ta-da!) Jay.

Mr. Slaughter taught all the instruments. Reeds, flutes, percussion and brass. Glockenspiel and timpani, oboe, clarinet and saxophone. French horn and trombone. Maybe he knew and played stringed instruments, too, but he didn't teach them, referring interested students to teachers in nearby Augusta, Georgia.

He gave private lessons in a back room of his house in downtown Aiken, and Jay, who stuck with band from Seventh to Twelfth grades, was one of his students, a half-decent one in his later years. Jay played cornet, the "symphonic" version of the trumpet. At the outset of band class in the Seventh Grade, Mr. Slaughter examined the facial structure of each new student in turn and recommended an instrument that suited them. He probably skewed the choices to what instrumentation the high school band would need three years into the future, but he never let on. Jay's choices were cornet or French horn, the latter of which, Mr. Slaughter warned, was quite difficult to play.

Easy choice, really. Jay took the path of least resistance, with blessings from his father, who disliked music in general except for the military bugle call "Taps." After an impressively inauspicious start, Jay caught on to getting a sound out of the instrument, moved up to shaky scales and the occasional arpeggio, and kept at it, even practicing occasionally as whim and necessity dictated. When Mr. Slaughter recommended private lessons, Jay's parents footed the bill, and Jay's father even sprung for a silver Conn Connstellation cornet, the stuff of dreams for a cornetist then and now. He'd already bought a baby grand piano that took up much of the livingroom.

Jay's hero list took on new musical entries. Harry James, of course, because he was still the rage in the early Sixties. And Bourbon Streeter Al Hirt, who had popular tunes in the Top Forty of the day. Good ones.

Jay's love affair with music started even earlier, as his Sainted Mother insisted he have piano lessons. She so wanted to be able to play the piano herself, but didn't take lessons. Instead, she dutifully pursued a mailorder self-study course in which the middle piano keys were numbered on a cardboard overlay. The course ignored basics and moved right into songs. Eventually, she learned to play her favorite piece, "The Merry Widow Waltz," quite well, but after that she stopped studying.

On the other hand, Jay flopped at piano. He learned to read music and count rhythms, but never got the knack of reading both treble and bass clef lines at the same time. When he figured out that he could improvise the music by reading only the treble clef, that was the end of piano studies. After exhausting only two piano teachers, the first being one of his cousins, he got stuck on "Flow Gently Sweet Afton," and gave up, turning his attention to the cornet, which only entailed one clef at a time. He took up piano many years later and learned to play a few of his favorite classical pieces - long after giving up all hopes of professional musicianship.

Jay played first chair cornet in the Aiken High School Bands and helped organize the Pep Band at the University of South Carolinia (slash) Aiken. That was pretty much the end of his career, however - although at the urging of a colleague, an accordion player at the newspaper where he worked, he played hymns and carols with the Salvation Army Band on Main Street a few times. Decades later (see the picture and don't laugh at the hot pink hat), Jay again had delusions of musical adequacy and relearned the cornet, but that episode was cut woefully short by health and other troubles.

Jay’s never been one to limit himself to a single obsession at a time, so the heroic Clark Kent shared Jay’s fancies with other personages of fact or pulp or electron beam. Not that Clark was ever really out there into obsession territory, mind you. Jay splurged extraordinarily conservative percentages of his meager allowance on a few Superman comics, expensive at mere dimes a pop back then, plus a few spinoffs like Superboy and Krypto the Superdog, but he didn’t bother with other heros' trappings in the high-tech-marketing-challenged Fifties. Neither did Jay-dimes land on those paradigms of herohood Batman, Spiderman, and the their ilk. Jay’s favorite comics were Little Henry and Dennis the Menace, heavier emphasis on the former.

The Jay Library and Archives, if one could ever exist, would contain few dog-eared dime wasters, because Jay’s other, dearer heroes didn’t have comic books to their credit. Something about the none-too-marvelous marketing potential of Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, Jackie Gleason, and W.C. Fields comic books, although they richly deserve such grandiosity.

Independent of his scandalous carryings-on in France, Benjamin Franklin was one of Jay's mild-mannered heroes. Franklin's start as a mere printer's apprentice interested Jay, who performed printer's apprentice tasks early on. But really, apprentice isn't quite descriptive of Franklin’s station in life. Franklin was a "printer's devil." That's the person in the print shop who returns metal type (now way obsolete) to the sorting cases after a job is printed.

Holy Gutenberg, Batman! Hand typesetting comprised sets, called "fonts," of single characters cast onto blobs of lead-and-tin alloy about an inch high. These were sorted letterwise in broad, compartmented trays, the famed “California Job Case” among them. To "set" type, a typesetter person (now also way obsolete) picked up each letter in turn and arranged them in word order, adding spaces, ruled lines, whatever, in a metal “composing stick,” a two-sided hand-holdable brass tray, there to be accumulated into a “galley,” a larger, three-sided steel tray that often wasn’t very hand-holdable, owing to the weight of its charge of heavy type, rules and spaces. Eventually, these "forms" were wedged into "chases," four-sided iron frames, placed in the printing press, inked and printed onto (at last!) actual paper.

It took considerable time to set type, so printers often kept intact any jobs that they expected to be reprinted. The rest of the “forms” were re-distributed to the typecases to be used again. The people assigned to the re-distribution task occupied a position somewhat lower than office cat: the printer's devils. If you worked really hard, put in extra long hours, and studiously kissed the correct cans, you could start as a printer's devil and end up as a typositor, or a printer, or something even fancier like ambassador to France, as it was with ol' Ben.

By all accounts, Ben's ambassadorship didn't result from his labors in the print shop, however. It was more the reward for his artistry with the stuff of type before type is set: namely, words. And that’s not to even mention the revolutionary ideas behind them. That if nothing else qualified him for Jay-hero-hood. Benjamin fought with words battles that might’ve otherwise been relegated to flying lead - and not the kind from which type is made. He was inquisitive and inventive, notwithstanding being somewhat sight-impaired (Jay relates, as he’s worn thick glasses since Third Grade), and also self-made, wise, and witty. Jay heard about Benjamin’s better deeds at school, of course, churning out the requisite book reports, bio’s and essays.

Ben’s shadier doings were conveniently skipped in the schoolbooks, so Jay learned of these on his own. Ben’s hero status remained, nonetheless, unimpaired. If anything, he earned Jay’s additional respect for doing as he pleased at a time when nonconformity in matters moral was rewarded with a chunk of rope formed into a final necklace.

All around, Ben’s easy to like as a hero, and so is Thomas Jefferson. Tom, however, tainted lofty principles with tacky travesty, and practiced different preaching from what he treatised. Indeed, Tom let Jay down, bad. The more Jay’s learned about the real Thomas, the less Jay’s inclined to reserve him any space in emulationville. Thomas carried on something awful about ending slavery right at the outset of these United States. Yet, the man kept slaves. Kept them, even though he could’ve easily afforded to free them, setting an example for others to follow.

Maybe in Virginia it was just “done,” and you could argue (feebly) that freed slaves in a slave-holding society would've put them at great risk. However, such was hardly the case in France while the French were annoying themselves and the rest of the world with their own confused revolution. Two-faced Thomas didn’t seem to notice, though his slaveholding rightfully ruffled French feathers.

The public didn’t seem to notice Tom’s indiscretions in the White House, either, but that was before television, and CNN et al weren’t there for obsessive-compulsive blow-by-blow instant-replay descriptions, either. The supremely homophobic Tom is therefore way far off his original pedestal in Jay’s mind, respected only grudgingly for the beauty of his buildings. The rest of it was arrogant puffery, flowery prose that meant nothing to himself, inspiring as some of it was to others. The man should’ve stuck to architecture, and left idealism to those with conviction.

Jay’s far from a literary scholar, or even a learned one, but he got it honest. He’s not from a literary family, really, and certainly not from a family of journalists, though he’s always loved newspapers and periodicals, as well as books. Jay’s father, orphaned at nine or so, didn’t make it past Rochester’s Fifth Grade. Jay’s Sainted Mother was educated in South Carolina, as was Jay, which says a whole lot right there without dwelling too much on the nitty gritty of the matter. She trudged miles from her parents’ farm to Windsor, South Carolina, when school was only eleven grades. She graduated - the first in her family to hold a high school diploma - and packed off to Columbia, the state’s capital, to attend secretarial school.

Throughout Jay’s childhood, if you could call it that, the household contained maybe two dozen books, all bibles, biblical

storybooks, and other trappings of Southern Baptistness. A relative had handed down a ten-volume set of baby raising books, not one of which, on Jay’s meticulous inspection when such matters became of interest, contained any reference to how babies were occasioned in the first place.

Along about Elementary School time, Jay’s parents wisely sprung for a set of World Book Encyclopedia when the salesman came to call. When Jay became interested in non-biblical literature along about Junior High School, they subscribed to Life, Look, the Reader’s Digest Books and the Book-of-the-month club. Nice as they were, none of those volumes contained...  Well, you know.

Jay discovered fiction in junior high school. They call that “middle school” now, not necessarily complimentarily. He read voraciously, though sporadically, establishing a tradition of reading absolutely everything by a given author and then moving on to someone else. Among Jay’s favorites were Arthur Conan Doyle, Earle Stanley Gardner, and Agatha Christie (sensing a theme here?). Though Aiken had a decent library, Jay always preferred to buy books, and keep them for later reference after devouring them. Enough with the third person. Just let Jay tell it.

Actually, I was never entirely comfortable in libraries, with all the shushing and the necessity of treading lightly on squeaky floors so as not to incur frowns from imperious librarians. The real problem was, however, that once I returned the books I didn’t have them anymore, in case I wanted to reread some passage I’d enjoyed. Oh, and that other problem: the librarians would know what I was interested in, and reading, and not necessarily approve, and potentially cause a stink if they didn’t. Not so with store clerks, who were much younger and didn’t look at anything but the cover price to ring up the sale.

My collection grew, and I printed a bunch of Ex Libris plates (on my own letterpress printing press, a story for later chapters) to distinguish treasured volumes. I accumulated books for decades, in spite of disasters that wiped out my collection several times. Although I again have lots of books, with Internet searching at my fingertips I rarely need to look up anything on actual paper. But I like having them.

Here's another one, adapted from Jay's stellar endeavors as editor of Verbatim, the newsletter of the Midlands Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. This tale is about his favorite High School English teacher. She's why you won't read certain... "phrases" in this tome. Okay, here's Jay.

Impeccably prim, our wool-suited English teacher strode in from the hallway. Sensible heels, tick, on the cheap tile floor. She dropped her gradebook onto the desk, set the battered wooden lectern aside and stood laser-level straight, pine-tree tall at the greenboards in front of the class. “B O B O,” she lettered in yellow chalk. Her bony hand made deliberate, precise strokes easily readable from the farthest reaches of the room. Perfect.

Miss Bobo was, herself, exactly that.  Perfect, unerring, unforgiving - and easily readable from the back row of seats.  She had certain “requirements” - demands, really - that had to be met, and she set them out methodically in stern tones on the first day of classes, emphasizing her points by stabbing her index finger toward the ceiling and lowering her gaze to peer over her dark-rimmed reading glasses after each one. Ominous, intimidating, intriguing.

Think and be

“Cogito ergo sum,” she began. Gaze. “Ergo, people who do not think do not exist. Therefore, in my class do not ever not think.” Meaning: don’t think you’ll pass Senior English at Aiken High. Miss Bobo’s cogito corollary was her dearest pet peeve, her biggest booboo, a Rubicon you did not cross. You did not answer her question about Chaucer’s Wife of Bath with “I don’t think she was a slut.” You could say “I think she wasn’t a slut,” or even “I don’t know.” However, mere utterance of the forbidden “I don’t think” got you a brooding frown and a red mark in her grade book. Sometimes even a sarcasm. But really, she had a point. Think not, be not; think and be. Be or be not, Shakespeare wrote, but think and at least be graduated, and then not-think your way through English 101 if you can.

Miss Bobo’s classes were advanced, “college prep.” All of her students would matriculate at some college, even me. It was her duty, her mission-from-the-diety, she explained, to make sure that we not only did not not-think, but also could indeed think. Cogito with the best of ‘em and communicate the fact verbally or in ink, without blinking an eye, and never omitting the dot over one, either. She warned us first thing, and reiterated her warnings anytime someone slipped up. She explained that she considered not not-thinking to be her personal goal for every class. I don’t think she ever failed.

Miss Bobo started every class with a short discussion of the material that her students, whom she insisted be seated in alphabetical order, should have read from the textbook or other resource. Her lectures were excruciatingly grammatical, meticulously organized, and beautifully incisive. “Every character has a flaw,” she orated on Chaucer’s Canterbury rimes. “The Wife of Bath, debatably, is promiscuous; the cook is dirty; the Miller, well, you’ll have to see for yourself.” Wicked wink. "If you dare."

Why: a favorite question

For testing, Miss Bobo didn’t think in terms of true/false or multiple guess. She thought essays - well organized, well thought out, and skillfully argued. “Compare the... with those from...” and “discuss why....” Keyword “why,” a favorite question of hers, and often a difficult one for which there is no simple, or even correct, answer. Stick close to the subject, organize thoroughly before you set pen to paper or tongue to teeth, answer the question directly, and whatever you do, don’t make any Bobo booboos when you write. Or when you speak, even exemporaneously.

In addition to not not-thinking, she had a sizeable list of no-nos. Here are some that have stuck with me after more than forty years. Some are here for entertainment, and some for admonishments. Some are way obsolete, now, and some still ring true. You’re on your own as to which is which. However, as with all of Miss Bobo’s booboos, you can’t be faulted for following them, though in some cases you can for breaking them.

Miss Bobo’s booboo list

> And what kind of sort is that?  In Miss Bobo's class there was never a sort of anger, nor a kind of repression. Miss Bobo despised the terms. She was quite binary about most things. Are you mad or not? You're either repressed or you're not, or maybe you could try to get a 'somewhat' past her if you must qualify. Well, are you or not, she still would have asked. And to which sort of repression do you refer, exactly? Is "somewhat" a disease or a degree? A fruit, perhaps?  Kind of funny, eh? Well, you sort of get her point. Don't you?

> “Not only” is not the only part of the construction, which not only won’t stand alone, but also won’t do with only “but” on the other side. In other words, if you start with “not only,” you absolutely must have “but also,” not just “but.” As in: “I think the Miller’s tale not only raises eyebrows, but also blazes trails in low-brow humor.” Moreover, the connected parts must not only be related, but also be parallel. Perfectly parallel, not just somewhat close. Sentence structure, tense, gender, number, and the tint of the spots on its underwear. Parallel to the max. “Everyone has a ‘but,’” she explicated-admonished-adjured with a smirk. “Cover yours with an ‘also,’ and your grade will reflect your effort.”

> Don’t divide. To split an infinitive was to incur Miss Bobo’s ire. There was no reason, no excuse to humanly err, and little probability for Bobo to divinely forgive.

> Don’t start. If you’re going to do a thing, just do it. Don’t begin or start something. This was a major biggie with her, and she was right. In the South we love to fix to do something. Like, “I’m fixin’ to start the turnips a-boilin’.” Best not speak that abomination in Boboland. Best not read much literature, either, or this one will start to bother you, too. Authors, even famous ones, sin often.

> Waste if you must, but never want. Not many emcees would pass Bobo’s class: “I want to welcome you all....” Nor Oscar winners: “I want to thank my mother....” Unless you’re not going to, she urged, don’t want to do something, just do it.

> Don’t partialize. Whether spoken or written, English sentences have subjects and verbs, at least one of each. If your sentence fragment had two or fewer words, and if you could defend it as contextually sound without sweating, you might have a chance to get one over. Otherwise, no.

> Precisely write precise words. For example, don’t use “less” if you need “fewer.” Less is quantity; few is number: less flour, but fewer cups of sugar. Further is conceptual, farther is space. Subtle, but true. Precision, precision!
> She preferred and encouraged the correct use of “more than” instead of “over” when “over” is just plain lazy, which most of the time it is. You could write “over the fence” but “more than fifty yards,” not “over.” Picky, but correct, in her Chaucer’s Knight’s way. The Knight’s character flaw, she explained, spewing and obviously relishing self criticism, was a perfectionist.

>This and that won’t stand for everything. Picture a paragraph of action, sentence after sentence, after which the sumup “this” can’t stand for all of that and keep on going, like:  “Smith threw rocks at me, and this made me mad.” The word “this” must be specific, like “this action” or “this situation.” Otherwise Smith will keep on with the rocks, gleefully assisted by Miss Bobo.

In addition to her peeves list, she invoked the usual forbidden constructions like passive voice, verbs to be, lazy adjectives and adverbs, run-on sentences, and such. However, she was willing to cut some slack on most of these if you could argue persuasively that the context justified the infraction. The class was creative writing and literature. She took “creative” creatively, and encouraged breaking conventional rules. Except hers.

Forbidden reading

Miss Bobo cleverly “assigned” extracurricular reading that was prohibited by the benighted Aiken, South Carolina, school district’s vigilant thought police. Chaucer’s infamously bawdy Miller’s tale, for example. Although printed unexpurgated in the course’s textbook, it was forbidden reading. She explained, simply, that the county’s all-knowing censors did not, repeat not, permit her to assign us to read the tale, because of its racy content, and she would not dare defy them. If we did want to read it, however, she was not in a position to stop us, and felt no obligation to prohibit speaking or writing about it in class. Indeed, she kept a little list. 

The same prohibitions applied to certain works of Huxley, Orwell and others – a list of which, she said with a smirk, she had dutifully mimeographed while off of school property and would distribute after class outside the walls of her room. She had just enough copies for every one of the thirty-eight students. The purple-lettered page was entitled “Forbidden Reading List.” In keeping with the rules with which she did not agree but was obligated to follow, she suggested we not check out any of the offensive literature from the county’s public library according to  Dewey’s decimals printed on the sheet.

The school’s own library didn’t have them so don’t bother looking, but the county library maintained multiple copies of each on hand. Neither should the banned books be purchased in paperback from local bookstores or from the book sections of the local dimestores, most of which carried them in stock. Nuff said. In a short time the entire class, including both preachers’ sons and the Jewish kid, could expertly discuss the offending volumes. Miss Bobo did not assign them for reading. She didn’t have to.

Rules and booboos notwithstanding, Miss Bobo strongly encouraged creativity, especially if you could creatively break a rule and defend it (vigorously) as essential to the context. Ask “why” if you wish, but prepare for an extended hairsplitting explanation that delved into reams of thought far beyond high school. I loved every minute of her class. However, I waited till I got to college to break any of her rules.