Aatish Taseer
I very much appreciate supportive comments. They encourage me to up my game.
I quoted a paragraph from a remembrance of V.S. Naipaul published by Aatish Taseer in the NYTimes:
Taseer is a writer I had not encountered previously. What struck me in his account was the dynamic it expressed between him and his assassinated father. It had resonances of my relationship with my own father, who died a natural death, but whom I too mourn in a complicated way.
Taseer knew Naipaul personally — calls him his “cruel friend” — and seemed to take comfort from Naipaul’s wry advice: Say your father died in, not for, Pakistan. It implied support for a son’s or daughter’s not feeling obligated to buy unconditionally into glib lionizing of a celebrated parent. Somehow, the Yes, yes, yes! in the anecdote gave, for me, just the tilt needed to support the perverse humor and insight behind Naipaul’s targeted mischief with prepositions.
I have a distinct weakness for humor based on parts of speech.
A quotation should be allowed to speak for itself is my working philosophy. It’s quite possible, though, that a little framing of why it speaks to me would not be amiss sometimes. I’ll think seriously about that.
[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]
EthicalDative 
Tale of Two Treatments
Luis de Góngora y Argote by Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Google_Art_Project
I once took a poetry writing seminar conducted by a prominent American poet based at the time in Colby College. She was already an eminence in the early stages of her career and has achieved Olympian status since. I lunched with her several times outside class and was both flattered and dazzled by her attention.
When it was my turn to share my poems with the group she dealt unsparingly with them. Her critique was withering. I deserved it. I had been a cocky participant in the sessions, perhaps inflated by imagining that she had been receptive to my extracurricular flirtations. My work was undistinguished. For a long time I kept the copies of those poems that she had marked up as relics of my abandoned aspirations to be a poet.
Years later I had a friend who was also a recognized poet with a solid body of published work to his credit. He received multiple fellowships to teach poetry in public school districts around the state. In my town he solicited poems to be considered for inclusion in an anthology of local versifiers. It was calculated vanity press, but also flattering and vivifying for the community.
I worked in advertising at the time but, encouraged by the poet, provided several old stabs of my own at creating a poem. He saw a glimmering of merit in one. What he did has stayed with me.
He proceeded to carve out the poem, such as it was, that lurked in my draft. He published it in his anthology, crediting me as its author. It was much improved. He didn’t add or rephrase anything, just selected the words that should survive and discarded the rest. It was a nurturing and generous act of editing (and of teaching).
I doubt that what I submitted for the anthology was any better than what I had submitted for the seminar. The difference was in how it was dealt with. One treatment took the wind out of my sails; the other one gave me a puff. Both approaches helped me.
[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]