Black Rock Mountain

 We spent three nights on Black Rock Mountain. We rented a 17-foot trailer and stayed in the state park.

From the mountain, you can see a series of ridges, the Blue Ridge of the Appalachians. I’m pretty sure the last ridge we could see was in North Carolina.

We saw all those ridges after the fog had cleared each day. In the morning, you could see the peaks. They looked like islands in a sea of fog. It’s thick stuff. You get wet walking through it.

It seems to me that the need to see such sights is not just a matter of personality. It’s deeper than that. Some people need to see wild places and get out in them. They sometimes get wet.

Anne Carson and the sublime

 Kant pictured the sublime as something overwhelming. A poetic soul looks at a mountain range and feels awe.

Anne Carson pictured the sublime as a documentary technique. Instead of capturing the grandeur, she liked to capture the detail.

Here are three stanzas of her prose poem on Kant, “Outwardly his life ran smoothly”:

 

Comparative figures: 1784 Kant owned 550 books, Goethe 2300, Herder 7700.

 

Numbering: Kant never ate dinner alone, it exhausts the spirit. Dinner guests, in the opinion of the day, should not number more than the Muses nor less than the Graces. Kant set six places.

 

Sensualism: Kant’s favourite dinner was codfish.

 

Her sublime is like a mosaic. The individual shards of painted glass somehow make a larger picture.

I find that quality in Carson’s work. Some of the things she’s written will send my mind off on a saunter for half a day.

When I heard she’d won the Nobel Prize, I celebrated.

• Source: Anne Carson, Decreation; New York: Vintage Books, 2005, p. 69. For an earlier example of how Carson’s writing can prompt a line of thought, see “Sleep temples and sacred snakes,” Sept. 29, 2023. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2023/09/sleep-temples-and-sacred-snakes.html

A story about a library

 I’m at that age: Younger colleagues ask about retirement.

I think every person should have something he or she wants to do. If you want to write a book, do it. If you want to go to Paris, go. If you don’t have anything you want to do, maybe you ought to hold on to that job.

One of the best projects I’ve heard about was a library in the backyard.

Karen Swallow Prior, a professor of literature, designed it, talked her husband into building it and wrote about it. Her essay gave me a bad case of the daydreams.

I love public libraries, my alma mater. But Professor Prior got the sense of what’s it like to have your own collection.

Her library has a place for the cheap paperback copies of classic novels she read as a teenager. She tells how she counted (roughly) her books and organized them (loosely) into sections.

I retired almost a dozen years ago and have done other things. If I were retiring tomorrow, I think I’d try to imagine a library in the backyard, maybe back in the woodlot.

• Source: Karen Swallow Prior, “My Books Needed a House of Their Own”; Miller’s Book Review, Sept. 19, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.millersbookreview.com/p/my-books-needed-a-house-of-their?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

I learned about the essay because it was mentioned in Julian Girdham’s wonderful newsletter, The Fortnightly.

A newspaper test

 Jane Austen said that a person who read only newspapers couldn’t be a good conversationalist. To be able to contribute to a good conversation, you need to go further in search of ideas. You need to read books, journals, maybe even scientific papers.

I sympathize with that view. But the remark made me want to imagine a better newspaper. I think even the smallest country weekly can convey interesting ideas. I want to read newspapers that have at least one interesting and surprising story in the news columns and at least one interesting idea on the editorial page. Then again, the newspaper folks who are most likely to come up with something good probably read books, journals, maybe even scientific papers.

Meeting minutes and other evidence

 A problem for historians: What to do when evidence is contradictory?

Herodotus wrestled with the problem. Like most historians, he was divided. He had more than one solution.

People who work for newspapers wrestle with the problem every day. If there is no contradictory evidence, seasoned newspaper folks tend to think something is fishy or something’s been overlooked.

But the technology of our age has changed our notion of evidence. Think of the videos recorded by passersby that give the lie to police accounts of arrests. Before that, there were the Watergate tapes, which contradicted the president’s story that he had done nothing wrong and was being persecuted by the press.

Matthew Wills has an interesting summary in JSTOR Daily of David R. Gibson’s study of meeting minutes. Historians and journalists routinely use the minutes of government meetings. Often, the official minutes aren’t reliable. Here’s Wills:

 

Gibson gives the example of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who “exaggerated his importance as an advocate for the temperate approach that brought the crisis to a peaceful resolution” during the heady days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.

The reason we know this is that Kennedy’s brother, President John F. Kennedy, was secretly taping those National Security Council Executive Committee meetings in which the launch of World War III was seriously contemplated. So there is something to compare RFK’s retelling to.

 

That magic phrase: “something to compare.” Two sources, at least. Not one.

Good reporting doesn’t stop with the first account, which often comes from some spokesman for a government telling ordinary people only what those in power want them to believe.

We live in a time when it seems everything is reported — every action, every thought, every event.

The better question is how much of what we consume is reported well — accurately, completely, briefly, honestly. 

I am one of the dinosaurs that still believes that “objective” reporting is a sensible notion, even if objectivity is a goal not achieved. I also think that good reporting is rare and valuable, and that it’s always been that way.

We’re living in a marvelous age of technology. But all our gadgets can’t compensate for failures in something as fundamental as providing another person an honest report.

• Sources: Matthew Wills, “Beware of the Meeting Minutes: What gets lost when spoken conversations become part of the historical record?” JSTOR Daily, Sept. 28, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/27367987?mag=beware-of-the-meeting-minutes

It’s a discussion of David R. Gibson’s “Minutes of History: Talk and Its Written Incarnations”; Social Science History, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Fall 2022), pp. 643-669, Cambridge University Press.

Blake’s paradox

 One of the recurring themes of this online collection of notes is that writing doesn’t start with questions of craft.

It’s a recurring theme because the problem of what comes before craft eludes me. I can see the frozen nut on the bolt. I just can’t get a wrench on it.

I’m kin to those who think of writing as a way of life, rather than a collection of skills or competencies. And I think temperament has more to do with what any one writer does with his or her time. I don’t think we choose our temperament. In a way, we don’t really choose the kinds of things we like to write or read.

Writing, which combines creation and craft, strikes me as a paradox.

William Blake claimed that a lot of his work was not just inspired but dictated by divine voices. He edited with a heavy hand.

A 17th-century kind of book

 Henry Seidel Canby has me thinking about 17^th-century writers and the kinds of books they wrote.

Sir Thomas Browne is a wonder to me, though I have trouble describing his books to friends. I started with Religio Medici, which is allegedly about how the training of physicians influences their religious thought. There are so many digressions, a reader sometimes wonders whether the book has anything to do with medicine, religion or the influence of scientific training on thought.

Canby says Thoreau loved that kind of book and tried to write one in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

The book pretends to be a record of a trip, and perhaps it is. But it’s also a collection of poems and short essays posing as a record of a journey. Canby calls it a library of Thoreau’s shorter works.

The remark made me think of W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, an alleged novel about a walking tour through Suffolk. The narrator, while walking, thinks about Browne, literature, identity and silkworms. You might think of it as an anthology of Sebald’s shorter essays posing as a record of a trip.

I think it takes a peculiar temperament to write a book like that — and also to read it with appreciation.

You don’t choose your temperament. I suspect that if the 17^th-century book appeals to you, you’ll find a lot of classic novels a slog — and vice versa. Maybe there are personalities broad enough to love both, but generally I’m not among them. I’ve found it difficult, as a reader, to serve two masters.

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 272-3.