After the fire

 The foresters burned what local folks call a prairie between Panola Mountain and the South River. The fire killed the small pines and sweetgums that were growing in the tall grasses, as well as the tall grasses.

The dead and decaying vegetation in grasslands is so thick it makes for hard walking and spectacular fires. What’s coming back after the fire?

I expect to see the tall grasses again, but other plants have a head start. We saw some extensive stands of crownbeards, just putting out buds. Eight species in genus Verbesina are native to Georgia, and the experts were probably hoping to see them. We also saw some impressive stands of Japanese stiltgrass, Microstegium vimineum. This plant often comes up when biologists discuss the most damaging invasive species.

I, an old retiree, can call it an impressive stand of stiltgrass. If I were a government biologist, I’d have to call it an infestation. I’m wondering what the experts will do now.

Finding a place, being content

 I think a sense of place is linked to a sense of contentment.

It’s an ancient idea. Here’s Joseph Joubert taking a stab at that connection:

 

To be in one’s place, to be at one’s post, to be part of the order, to be content. Not to murmur of suffering, to be incapable of being unhappy.

 

I’m interested in place, but I came to this passage in a meandering way. The translator is Paul Auster. I’ve been thinking of Auster because the book reviewers have been tempting me with Siri Hustvedt’s Ghost Stories, a “meditation on grief, memory, and enduring love, written in the aftermath of the death of her husband, Paul Auster.”

• Source: The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, translated with an introduction by Paul Aster; New York: New York Review of Books, 2005, p. 41.

A reporter in Moscow

 A footnote on yesterday’s note on Ramon Adams, a native of Moscow, Texas: When I was a young reporter, I rode the train from Moscow to Camden.

The Moscow, Camden & San Augustin Railroad Co. was chartered in 1898 by W.T. Carter, a timber baron. The line was 6.9 miles long. It connected Carter’s mill in Camden with the Houston East & West Texas line in Moscow.

In the 1890s, besides getting into a war with Spain, Americans were buildings cities, stores and houses everywhere. A lot of the lumber came from East Texas. Timber barons needed railroads to ship their wares, but the state wouldn’t grant charters unless the companies promised to provide general freight and passenger service.

About 45 years ago, I showed up in Moscow as the railroad men were putting together a train and asked if the company still honored its charter and provided passenger service.

It did. I was the only passenger among a gazillion tons of cargo — logs going into the mill and dimensional lumber and plywood coming out.

Carter was a sawmill man, not a railroad man. He bought his first rolling stock as cheaply as he could find it. He found an old locomotive that had been in the Panama Canal Zone. His passenger car — singular, not plural — must have looked like a rolling Christmas ornament: it was red with a green roof, and it had rattan seats. It came off a commuter line on Long Island, N.Y.

The Houston East & West Texas, incidentally, was notorious for its rough ride. As soon as the trainmen painted the HE&WT logo on the railcars, the locals insisted it stood for “Hell, Either Way Taken.”

The missing man

 The Southwest Writers Series was a collection of pamphlets published by the Steck-Vaughn Co. in Austin, Texas, 1967-1971.

A complete set contains 37 pamphlets. But dealers list the set as Nos. 1-33, 35-38.

No. 34 was planned and promoted but never published. The missing pamphlet was supposed to be about Ramon Adams, surely the most famous writer born in Moscow, Texas.

I’m interested in pamphlets in general and this set in particular. I’m also interested in forgotten writers, or nearly forgotten writers. Adams is an odd case — someone that scholars didn’t want to fall into obscurity, but who somehow fell anyway.

Adams, 1889-1976, began life as a musician and headed the violin department at the University of Arkansas for a while. He had an accident while cranking a Model T that ended his career. His wife had a dream of running a candy store, and the couple did well.

Adams’s avocation was writing. He had grown up near a minor cattle trail and had a lifelong habit of talking to cowboys. His first book, Cowboy Lingo, was about the language. He wrote 24 books. Two were published after he died.

His best known might be Burs Under the Saddle, a look at all the stuff that writers get wrong about the history of the West. I heard of Adams by reading A.C. Greene, who admired Adams’s Six-Guns and Saddle Leather: A Bibliography of Books and Pamphlets on Western Outlaws and Gunmen. Greene described him as “a strange sort of man who had facets of personality unlooked for in a historical and bibliographical assembler.”

 

People who knew Ramon well enough to be invited to one of his Sunday afternoon “teas” can tell of some afternoons when Ramon would sit without saying a word for many minutes at a time, the guests obliged to do likewise. His talk, if it began again, was pleasant; he knew and loved the southwestern book world.

 

J. Frank Dobie, the subject of pamphlet No. 1, used to wring his hands about whether there was a literature of the Southwest. (The handwringing was dramatic. He taught a course on the subject at the University of Texas.)

I like the literature of the Southwest. But it seems to me that the best books are neglected, while the popular books often depict a place I don’t recognize.

• Sources: A.C. Greene, The 50+ Best Books on Texas; Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1998, pp. 82-3.

The Texas Archives has a note on the Ramon Adams Collection at the Dallas Public Library here:

https://txarchives.org/dalpub/finding_aids/08206.xml

A lost book

 I’m trying to imagine what Epicurus’s lost book on Rhetoric was like. Diogenes Laertius says that in Rhetoric, Epicurus said that clarity was the only thing the literary arts demanded.

If that’s all there is to it, Rhetoric must have been a wonderfully short book.

Diogenes offers a clue about how Epicurus achieved clarity. The word Diogenes used to describe Epicurus’s language is usually translated “ordinary” or “plain.” In ancient Athens, there were two types of assemblies. The ordinary assembly was for everyday business. The called or summoned assembly was for something special.

As with assemblies, so with language. Epicurus preferred everyday language to the language that is summoned for special occasions.

I think his point is a good guide. But Wittgenstein spent a lifetime trying to untie the knots in ordinary language. I wish it were true that all philosophical problems could be eliminated by the analysis of language, but I am a skeptic. 

• Source: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers; translated by R.D. Hicks; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991, Vol. II, p. 542.

 

The Persian arrangement

 Herodotus didn’t think that individuals, by nature, are evil. It’s the social arrangements — the bargains we make to live in groups — that are wrong.

Herodotus marveled at the Persians and their magnificent empire. But he could not imagine living as a subject, rather than as a citizen. The Persian arrangement seemed to Herodotus to be unnatural. Humans naturally need freedom to do the things that make each individual human. Without that freedom to develop, an individual isn’t fully human.

It follows that each person should be free to have a say in the governing of collective life. You can’t surrender your say to a tyrant and be healthy, whole, human.

Many readers of The Histories have come to that idea. But Ryszard Kapuściński focused that thought beautifully in his Travels with Herodotus. Kapuściński has a digression on why people surrender that part of their nature and follow dictators. He calls the people most susceptible the “superfluous people,” people who have been left behind, without place, position or purpose.

 

All dictatorships take advantage of this idle magma. They don’t even need to maintain an expensive army of full-time policemen. It suffices to reach out to these people searching for some significance in life. Give them the sense that they can be of use, that someone is counting on them for something, that they have been noticed, that they have a purpose.

 

The benefits of this relationship are mutual. The man of the street, serving the dictatorship, starts to feel at one with the authorities, to feel important and meaningful … The dictatorial powers, meantime, have in him an inexpensive — free actually — yet zealous and omnipresent agent-tentacle. Sometimes it is difficult even to call this man an agent; he is merely someone who wants to be recognized, who strives to be visible, seeking to remind the authorities of his existence, who remains always eager to render a service.

 

Kapuściński was thinking of Europe — of the rise of fascism and of the brand of communism that prevailed in the Soviet bloc — rather than of the United States.

The passage might remind you of Eric Hoffer. He called these folks true believers.

• Source: Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus; New York: Vintage International, 2007, pp. 112-3.

Farmers and politics

 When a friend asked about politics and the prospects of Democrats in Georgia, I thought of Jimmy Carter.

Until about 1990, people in rural and urban areas tended to vote alike. Since then, rural areas have voted increasingly Republican. Urban areas have voted increasingly Democratic.

My county is heavily Democratic. But it’s been a while since most people in rural counties thought that the Democratic Party had ideas that were good for them.

That’s sad and ironic. Democrats do have some ideas about how to relieve the suffering of farming communities. Just ending the war would help with the prices of fuel and fertilizer.

I think rural folks would be willing to listen to some new ideas. But when the messages are delivered by … well, pick your favorite Democrats and compare them to Carter. Carter had a kind of credibly among rural voters because he was a farmer. Even people who doubted his politics would give him the benefit of the doubt and listen.

The role Carter played in his community was genuine, rather than theatrical. When he was 95, he was still teaching Sunday school in Plains. People would come from all over to go to Sunday school, even if they weren’t religious, much less Baptist. The newspapers said that about 10 people showed up for the adult Sunday school class — unless Carter was teaching. Then the crowd would jump to 500. People arrived at the church early and tailgated in the parking lot, just to get a seat.

The idea of people tailgating for Sunday school is jarring — especially when you consider that Carter’s politics were unpopular in rural Georgia.

I’m not arguing for going back in time or glorifying old ways. I just wish the Democratic Party could find some candidates who speak rural.