A coming storm

 A big winter storm is dangerous, and so the first thought of right-thinking people should be about safety. But I’m a contrarian. I think the storm might be a refreshing reminder that we humans are still a part of nature. We shouldn’t get bent out of shape if we have to admit it occasionally and behave accordingly. 

In Georgia, the governor declared a disaster several days in advance, and we’ve been getting constant messages that strike me as heavy on anxiety and fear. Power outages may be widespread. We forget that the original people bundled up and stayed by the fire eons before anyone had heard of a power grid.

I’m not discounting the danger, but I think it should be the second thought, not the first.

The supplies are in. We’re staying put. Driving on ice is risky in the North, but it’s pure terror in the South. If I get out to see the beauty of the storm, it will be on foot.

I’m looking forward to a couple of days by the fire with a good book. I’m going to see what the poets have to say.

Open inquiry

 Ilana Redstone, a sociologist at the University of Illinois, mentions three features of an atmosphere of open inquiry:

• Any claim can be questioned.

• Questioning something doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

• Exploring an idea doesn’t mean you endorse it.

Professor Redstone studies viewpoint diversity. It’s a topic that has some appeal if you were ever a newspaper editor, and at times she sounds like one.

 

We can’t have a world where there is a diversity of viewpoints, pluralism, and communication across differences, and also have a world where nobody gets offended or upset by what somebody says. At the end of the day, you have to pick one.

 

The newspaper I used to work for would run pages of letters from readers about the major stories of the week. I’d have to request extra space to run them. But the letters were an indicator of the health of the newspaper and of the community that supported it.

When some challenge arose, readers wanted to express their views about the best course of action. They wanted to criticize policies they thought harmed the community. They did that because they cared about the community. And because the newspaper let everyone have a voice, people cared about what was in the paper.

I spent part of my working days trying to convince editors at other papers to open the doors to public commentary. It was a tough sell. For all the talk of freedom of the press, editors in small towns leaned toward self-censorship. In every small town, there is a Grand Moose Club, though it goes by different names. The views expressed by club members are safe commentary. The opposing views are dangerous. Printing them can get an editor fired.

But it’s precisely that uniformity of opinion — by giving voice only to “respectable” people and not publishing material from the dissenters — that makes a newspaper as dull as the meetings of the Moose Club. Every community has its share of dissenters, dissidents and malcontents. And if you didn’t seem signs of them in the village newspaper, you knew that it’s the house organ of the Moose Club. It represents a part of the community, not the whole.

I think that democracy is sound only in communities that have public discussions about public affairs. And, like Professor Redstone, I don’t think you can have discussions about any substantive topic without offending people.

Some of the most painful moments of my life were spent talking to people who had been wounded by the public discussion. They included African Americans, Jews, Muslims and gay people, but it was a long list. These people had done nothing wrong. They didn’t think it was fair for the newspaper to publish prejudiced views.

A prejudiced view is easier to identify in principle than in practice. It is OK to oppose affirmative action, Title IX, a policy of the state of Israel, a law regulating same-sex marriage?

I think it’s better to have discussions about our public life in public. I also think we need rules for what people can and can’t say.

Most people agreed that letter writers shouldn’t be allowed to encourage violence against political opponents. But it came as a shock to some people that they couldn’t accuse their opponents of crimes without evidence of a conviction. People complained endlessly that the paper wouldn’t publish anonymous letters.

People said the newspaper was putting itself out of business because people would just publish their factually challenged, anonymous rants online.

People are free to do that.

But if that’s the state of our public discourse, we’re in trouble.

I think we have a better discourse if we have rules and follow them. And while it’s the style today to mock the idea of gatekeepers, I also think we need a referee. Some poor soul must make the individual calls, knowing only some of them will be as wise and fair and just as he or she would hope. The system works best when that same person must face the wounded and the outraged on the following day.

It’s a terrible system — except when you compare it to the others.

• Sources: Greg Berman, “’A Healthy Democracy Requires Social Trust’: A Conversation with Ilana Redstone”; Harry Frank Gugenheim Foundation, Sept. 9, 2024. It’s here:

http://www.hfg.org/conversations/a-healthy-democracy-requires-social-trust-ilana-redstone-090924/

Evan Madery, “They Wanted a University Without Cancel Culture. Then Dissenters Were Ousted”; Politico Magazine, Jan. 16, 2026. It's here:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/01/16/civil-war-university-of-austin-bari-weiss-00729688

Budbill: ‘Winter Is the Best Time’

 I found David Budbill’s lovely poem about winter copied into an old notebook.

It’s so short, I don’t see a way of giving you a sense of it with an excerpt. So here it is:

 

Winter is the best time
to find out who you are.

Quiet, contemplation time,
away from the rushing world,

cold time, dark time, holed-up
pulled-in time and space

to see that inner landscape,
that place hidden and within.

 

I hope Budbill, who died in 2016, would forgive me for reproducing the whole thing. By way of atonement, I’ll spread the word that a new edition of his book Judevine is coming out in April.

A good friend and I have been exchanging notes about the nature of time and about how it can be measured objectively and yet experienced in many subjective ways. I’m partial to “holed-up pulled-in time and space.”

• Sources and notes: “Winter is the Best Time” appeared in While We’ve Still Got Feet; Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 2005. I found a copy at Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. It’s here:

https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2012%252F01%252F28.html

If you’d like to hear Budbill’s voice, you can find a recording of him singing “What Issa Heard” at his website:

https://www.davidbudbill.com

For a note on a conversation with the poet, see “The brief wonders of David Budbill,” Nov. 11, 2021. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-brief-wonders-of-david-budbill.html

Keeping the old game alive

 Because I’m a baseball fan, I lurk around blogs that follow the St. Louis Cardinals.

The blog I follow most closely is filled with young guys who love analyzing statistics. They collect stats on everything — from launch angles to exit velocities — and discuss the latest ways of mining meaning from arcane details.

I lurk because I’m lost. When I was a boy in West Texas, my father and I would listen to KMOX, the voice of St. Louis. We were thrilled when Stan the Man Musial came to the plate. We cheered at the emergence of a young outfielder named Lou Brock. If those topics come up at all on the blogs, the discussion is about what grandfathers once said.

The young guys talk about all kinds of new things, and I’ve had to explore to understand their tastes in music, books, film and food. These guys were born into a world that included the Internet and social media, and so I was surprised by a long thread — interrupting discussion of the Cardinals’ prospects in the coming season — that denounced Meta, X, Google and the gang.

One guy argued that the ethical collapse of the bigger and better tools makes it important to keep “the old blogosphere alive.” If you have a trusted URL, maintain it, he said.

I was surprised by the call to see value in the old and out-of-date.

Writing, vocation and earning a living

 Yesterday’s note that included a quote from Jim Harrison’s memoir reminded me that Off to the Side is a strange book.

Some of it seems deliberately perverse. I’ve seen a sailor go into a bar not to get a drink but to get into a fight, and Harrison has some of that in him. But I find his reflections on the writing life interesting. Here are two remarks on vocation and the problem of making a living:

 

A poet is technically supposed to be a “thief of fire,” but as easily as anyone else he becomes a working stiff who drinks too much on late Friday afternoons.

 

The most obvious economic lesson of all becomes obvious: survival work requires your entire life.

 

Harrison’s title, incidentally, refers to the role of a writer as an observer, one who stands apart from the fray to see clearly and to report.

• Source: Jim Harrison, Off to the Side; New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002, pp 143 and 144.

‘You cannot bury good’

 If you were wondering what the holiday was like in Atlanta, you can get a suggestion of it from a remark Raphael Warnock made at Ebenezer Baptist Church. Warnock is senior pastor of the church where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached. Warnock is also a U.S. senator. He said:

I’m inspired this morning by our neighbors, by ordinary citizens who are standing up in this moment in Minneapolis and all across the country. Renee Good could’ve stayed in her house. But in the best of the civil rights struggle, she literally put her body on the line, and she paid a high price for it. Now they’re trying to malign her name, but you cannot bury good. Truth crushed to earth shall rise again.

 

• Source: Jason Armesto, “At MLK celebration, Warnock channels King’s legacy to decry ICE raids”; The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jan. 19, 2026.

Before the storm

 Before the storm hit the East, we took a hike to see a gorgeous stand of beech in the woods up in Tucker. I’ve been thinking about why I feel a need to get outdoors, into natural areas. Everyone must feel that to some extent, but it’s almost like hunger to me. I’m afraid I’m not much fun to be around if I don’t get out outside regularly.

Jim Harrison said that the wild can

 

draw away your poisons to the point that your natural curiosity takes over and ‘you,’ the accumulation of wounds and concomitant despair, no longer exist. The immediate world for hours at a time becomes quite beyond self-consciousness.

 

Maybe that’s it. I just needed to get outdoors.

The snow fell south of us. It covered Columbus, where generations of infantrymen trained; Macon, where the mound builders and the Allman Brothers hung out; and Milledgeville, where Flannery O’Connor tended chickens and peacocks. At Stone Mountain, it was cold but dry. 

• Source: Jim Harrison, Off to the Side; New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002, p. 20.