Composing with notes

 Jillian Hess, a scholar who is interested in notes and notetaking, says that Susan Sontag used notebooks to compose in two ways.

First, Sontag used her notebooks to compose her essays. She collected and sorted materials on subjects that intrigued her. She collected pages of quotations she wanted to use and lists of points she wanted to make. She had lists of words to use and avoid. (Some writers pay more attention to diction than others.) By the time she sat down at the typewriter, her materials were in hand. At that point, she was almost making a collage.

Second, Sontag used her notebooks to compose herself, to make the personality she wanted to be. Hess says Sontag wanted to be the person who was interested in everything. I think some of us are generalists by temperament. We couldn’t specialize in any one field without doing violence to our psyches.

Sontag liked to read the notes of other writers. In 1949, when she was a student, she noted that reading André Gide’s Journals helped her compose herself.

 

They affect me in the same magical way; for immersion into an order and a discipline is the only thing that can soothe me….

 

Immersing yourself into someone else’s order and discipline is immersing yourself in another person’s mind. I love to do that, tramping around in the mind of someone whose order and disciplines of thinking are not like mine. Like Sontag, I like reading other people’s journals, notebooks, diaries and blogs.

• Source: Jillian Hess’s “Susan Sontag's Playground of Ideas” is in her Noted on Substack, March 2, 2026. It’s here:

https://jillianhess.substack.com/p/susan-sontags-playground-of-ideas?utm_medium=email

A sense of home

 Returning from South Georgia, we went to Arabia Mountain to see if the elf-orpine plants had painted the granite outcrops red.

They had.

These primitive little plants, which had been green the last time we saw them, change colors in February or March. It’s one of the signs of early spring.

Knowing that, the Wise Woman and I made it a point to get out of the house and look. Without saying much about it, both of us came in from the hike with a little firmer sense that this place is indeed home.

Millions of years ago, Diamorpha smallii adapted to live on the granite. As the little plants die and decay, layers of soil build up in the crevices of the rock. Lichens and mosses appear. Larger flowering plants follow. Eventually, you might see trees.

Biologists call this concept “succession.” I’m fascinated and am prone to go on about it.

Among the blooming plants at Arabia Mountain:

• Dimpled trout lily, Erythronium umbilicatum.

• Wooly ragwort, Packera dubia.

• Yellow jessamine,  Gelsemium sempervirens.

• Violets, Viola sororia.

Soon, it’ll be time for cross vine, Bignonia capreolata. The yellow and maroon flowers remind me of Indian blankets of Texas. I’ll be watching.

Blip, a conjugation

 I blip, you blip, he, she and it blips.

Chris Wright, energy secretary, said that after the United States and Israel struck Iran last year, markets stayed steady. His words:

 

Oil prices blipped up and then went back down.

 

This time, the average price of gasoline in Georgia has gone from $2.78 to $3.22.

I am blipped, you are blipped, we are blipped — all of us.

Orchard country

 The trip to Albany took us into a part of Georgia we hadn’t seen. It’s orchard country.

People know about Georgia peaches, but there are as many pecans as peaches. The orchards tend to alternate — perhaps 20 acres of pecans and then 30 acres of peaches.

A few varieties of peaches were blooming. Most were not. I was surprised that in some orchards the trees had been heavily pruned — almost espaliers. When I asked a native, she patiently explained that sunlight is vital to a ripe peach, so the trees are shaped to let in light.

The native was Sally, who runs Grandeur Farm Retreat, a bed and breakfast in Marshallville. Sally’s farm was set up to raise horses — surrey racers. Grandeur was an early winner. The breakfast was superb, and so was the conversation with Sally and her other guests. The couple we talked to visit repeatedly. The “retreat” in the name is more fact than marketing.

Marshallville doesn’t have enough traffic to have a stoplight. But it does have Massee Lane Gardens, with a collection of a thousand varieties of camellias. It was lovely in early spring, loud with the voices of birds and children.

A few notes on publishing

 Scattershooting, while wondering about the book publishing biz:

• The crowd at the Georgia Indie Book Fair was diverse. We had all races and ages, but we also had diverse interests and tastes: fantasy, mystery, romance, crime. Most of the people I talked to were serious readers. They had developed and refined their own tastes. They were at a fair featuring independent publishers because they wanted something different. People who read a book a week said their genre had become predictable and repetitive. The book they wanted to read hadn’t been written.

• I love the major publishers. I buy their books. But I’ve been writing books because I’ve gotten to that same place as a reader. I wanted to see whether I could write the kind of book I want to read. I haven’t succeeded. I also haven’t given up.

• Small publishers can afford to be more innovative. The larger the company, the costlier the mistake in judgment about what readers want. This is not ideology. It’s just business. The bigger the company, the higher the overheads. Our family business can afford a press run of 40 books. It’s not a windfall if it’s a hit, but it’s not a disaster if it’s a miss. 

• The Wise Woman and I have had a long-running argument. I would like to stay at home and write books. She says we have an obligation to put our work before readers to test it, to see if our judgments about what’s worthwhile resonate with those of others. She retired as an English professor, so she can recite the history of small presses, telling how many innovations in literature came from the little guys. She would win the argument anyway. But it’s nice to hear that history again when I’m schlepping crates of books into the truck. And she’s right, of course. It’s always right to talk to readers, to see what they think.

Writing lessons from Truman Capote

 You can start a story in fewer than 10 words. Here’s the first sentence of Truman Capote’s “Children on Their Birthdays”:

Yesterday afternoon the six-o’clock bus ran over Miss Bobbit.

 

We readers learn quickly that Miss Bobbit was 10 and that, though a child, she behaved like an adult. She took over the town. Everything seemed to revolve around her and her plans.

That’s what we learn quickly. What we learn slowly is how such a commanding personality, a personality so composed, could get lost for a moment. It was a little girl, not an adult, that run across the road without looking both ways.

If you start a story by giving away the ending, you have to show why that the ending seems to have been inevitable, given the character of the characters. I think Capote’s story passes the test.

I can admire the artistry, but the story, to me, has a fatal flaw. The flaw is a lack of artistry in handling an ugly episode of racism. A Black child, Rosalba Cat, is abused by white boys who are showing off. Miss Bobbit rescues Rosalba and declares that they are sisters. The point is that Miss Bobbit has such a forceful character that she changes the ways of the town. What was formerly unthinkable is accepted.

Acts of racism, like most other acts of violence, are gratuitous, so they’re tough to handle in fiction. A scene can be realistic and still be gratuitous. The details of the abuse in this story, which seemed fine to book publishers in 1948, seem gratuitous to me in 2026.

• Source: Truman Capote’s “Children on Their Birthdays” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 59-76.

Ocmulgee Mounds

 When archeologists were excavating the Ocmulgee Mounds during the Great Depression, they uncovered the floor of a council house. Perhaps it’s something that could have happened only during the era of the Works Progress Administration: the archeologists and their laborers reconstructed it.

They reframed the roof, covered the rafters with wattle and mounded earth on top. The entrance is low — you walk through a tunnel, crouching. When you emerge, the high roof makes the chamber feel like a cathedral.

An earthen bench follows the circumference. In the center is a firepit, and the roof is open above the fire.

You can almost see ancient people sitting on those benches, taking counsel.

Arthur Kelly, another Texan who made Georgia his home, led the excavations from 1933 to 1941. The collection of artifacts is on display at a museum.

I’m still trying to piece together the history of the ancient peoples of Georgia. The site on the Ocmulgee River has been occupied for 17,000 years. The mound builders, people of the Mississippian Culture, didn’t arrive until about 800 of the Common Era.

They came from the northwest — you can tell by the pottery. They built a series of mounds, flat-topped and crowned with temples and the homes of chieftains. Like other Mississippian sites, Ocmulgee was near a river and had a plaza and ballfield. The people cultivated immense fields. The main crop was corn.

The Ocmulgee community covered a square mile. It lasted for three centuries.

When the Europeans arrived 400 years later, they found the Muskogee people, whom the English called the Creek Indians. I would love to know more about how one culture emerged from another.

The Ocmulgee Mounds are about 75 miles south of Stone Mountain in Macon. We climbed the Temple Mound, the tallest at 55 feet, and looked at the Ocmulgee River below and the Macon skyline in the distance. It feels like a sacred place.

But this country has treated its heritage with tragic indifference. During the 18^th century, workers cut two railroad lines through the mounds. If you visit the site, at least one of the emotions you might feel is rage.

• Note: For an earlier note on the Mississippian Culture in Georgia, see “Etowah, Oct. 8, 2025. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/search?q=Etowah