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.

'Now October has come again'

 I wonder whether any American writer saw as much as Thomas Wolfe.

Louis L’Amour thought Wolfe’s powers of observation were remarkable and cited a passage in Of Time and the River about the coming of October. It’s long — Chapter 39 in the novel. But these paragraphs will give you a sense of it:

 

Now October has come again which in our land is different from October in the other lands. The ripe, the golden month has come again, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling. Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth turn home again. The country is so big you cannot say the country has the same October. In Maine, the frost comes sharp and quick as driven nails; just for a week or so the woods, all of the bright and bitter leaves, flare up: the maples turn a blazing bitter red, and other leaves turn yellow like a living light, falling about you as you walk the woods, falling about you like small pieces of the sun, so that you cannot say where sunlight shakes and flutters on the ground and where the leaves.

Meanwhile the Palisades are melting in massed molten colours, the season swings along the nation, and a little later in the South dense woodings on the hill begin to glow and soften, and when they smell the burning wood-smoke in Ohio children say: ‘I’ll bet that there’s a forest fire in Michigan.’ And the mountaineer goes hunting down in North Carolina; he stays out late with mournful flop-eared hounds, a rind of moon comes up across the rude lift of the hills: what do his friends say to him when he stays out late? Full of hoarse innocence and laughter, they will say: ‘Mister, yore ole woman’s goin’ to whup ye if ye don’t go home.’”

 

I’m marking the day. Wolfe was born Oct. 3, 1900, in Asheville, N.C., and died Sept. 15, 1937 of miliary tuberculosis.

• Sources: Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935. Project Gutenberg has it here: 

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301021h.html

Chapter 39 begins Book III.

Louis L’Amour’s remark is in Education of a Wandering Man; New York: Bantam Books, 1989, p. 125.

 

L'Amour on short stories

 Maybe the best parts of Louis L’Amour’s book on self-education are the bits on how he learned to write short stories.

He started with the view that he knew how to write them.

He couldn’t understand why so many were rejected. He eventually decided that all those editors couldn’t be wrong. Something was wrong. with his approach.

Baffled, L’Amour decided to study the masters. In his case, that meant O. Henry, Guy de Maupassant, Jack London and Arthur Conan Doyle. Later, he added Maxim Gorky and Robert Louis Stevenson to the faculty.

L’Amour doesn’t say much about the lessons he learned. His main theme about writing is that no writer really helps another. Writing is something you must learn to do by yourself.

But bit by bit, I got a sense of his process:

• If you’re writing historical fiction, immerse yourself in the era. Read diaries, journals, letters and newspaper accounts. Don’t read one diary. Read 50.

• If you read a lot of first-person accounts, you’ll begin to read between the lines. You’ll begin to get a sense of unexpressed, or barely expressed, hopes, doubts and fears. At that point, you’re in business.

• Soak up the place and time, but don’t borrow incidents. Fiction writers should make up their own.

That last point is interesting and probably explains why I usually write essays, rather than stories.

L’Amour said he wrote more than 100 short stories before he wrote his first novel. He liked the short story and had a collection in his library.

• Source: Louis L’Amour, Education of a Wandering Man; New York: Bantam Books, 1989.

A problem of thought

 The vine crops — mostly squashes — are doing well in the fall garden, but some of the vines look as if they’ve been hit by birdshot. The leaves are not so much a latticework as museums of pinprick holes.

If you look, you’ll see the vines are covered with bristly little bugs. If you snipped off small bits of a pipe cleaner and scattered them through the vines, you’d recognize the picture.

The problem with poisons is not so much a problem of chemistry as a problem of thought. We connect the damage to something we value, the squash vine, with something we can see, the visible bugs.

If we made a more serious effort, we’d find that the damage is caused by aphids, which are tiny and hard to see. The bugs we can see are the larvae of ladybugs. Each might eat 400 aphids before it becomes an adult.

Everyone seems to know that ladybugs are beneficial in the garden in some way. Most people don’t seem to know what that looks like. Ironically, some gardeners reach for poisons at the first sight of beneficial insects.

There might be a lesson in this garden story about how we Americans, especially, are trained to reach for solutions to all the problems that confront us.

And a word against

 As much as I like Henry Seidel Canby’s Thoreau, the book is dated. It was published in 1939.

One example: Canby devotes a section to James Russell Lowell’s essay on Thoreau. The essay, originally an untitled review in The North American Review and published as “Thoreau” in My Study Windows, is part appreciation, part takedown.

In Canby’s day, Lowell’s essay was influential. It had to be addressed.

I’m not sure anyone would find it useful today.

Before I dropped out of high school, I was required to read a Lowell essay and was bewildered. I dug myself an early grave in English class by wondering why we were reading it. Was this the best Americans could do in those days?

Ironically, I am one of the last true believers in the canons of literature. I believe we ought to have common reading lists, things we can share, discuss and argue about. Reading the greats, near greats and less greats helped me. Reading some of these books helped me understand things about the culture I would not have figured out on my own. It helped me understand that some of the writers who inspire me don’t do much for other people. It helped me understand that if it’s possible to inspire sympathy in readers, it is also possible to inspire antipathy.

All this is good to know. But at 15, I was just starting. I’d just discovered the wonders of Emerson and Thoreau. I wanted to read them, rather than Lowell, Hawthorn and Poe.

I can’t remember the details of the argument with my English teacher or even the essay we argued about. I have been using the new technological wonders to try to find out which Lowell essays were included in high school textbooks of the early 1970s. I’d like to see if that essay is as bad as I once thought.

Wisdom would say: Let it go.

Maybe I will.

I love Canby’s book. But it’s only fair to warn you that there are sections in it that you’ll probably just have to let go.

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958. The section on Lowell’s essay is on pp. 289-92.