An activity in lieu of making resolutions

Most people are making resolutions today. I’m fiddling with a new pocket calendar. It’s one of the few ways I know to get a handle on time.

Wirecutter, The New York Times’ site, had an article on “Our Favorite Paper Planners” on Dec. 10. My calendar, made by Letts, didn’t make the list. It’s a traditionalist calendar. The company says John Letts started making these in 1812.

It doesn’t have any of the new features mentioned by Wirecutter. It does have some things I like:

• It has two “year planners,” one for 2022 and one for ’23. These are just headings for each month with a list of dates below. I use the 2023 planner as list for birthdays and other days I want to mark, including the Winter Solstice. My grandmother kept such a calendar on a nail at the old farmhouse. It had the birthdates of friends, relatives and ancestors. My own list includes Greater and Lesser Saints. The Greater are the living loved ones. I hope I can remember to send each a note this year. The Lesser are my heroes, living and dead. They are writers, musicians, artists who have influenced me. Umberto Eco, who was born on Jan. 5, is up first. He’d be on my list if he had written nothing more than The Infinity of Lists.

• The calendar has a bunch of pages that I don’t need. A lot of Letts’s customers apparently need hotel and restaurant information for Zurich and Hong Kong. I do not. But I need those pages because I paste short poems in my calendar — things to read when I’m stuck in line at the grocery store. I just made a copy of Kim Stafford’s “Citizen of Dark Times.” I’m looking for my stick of glue. If you have a recommendation for a notebook poem, please let me know.

• The pocket calendar is just the right size to hold a few index cards. The yellow ones are for notes on things I want to think and write about. The red ones are for chores. (The Wise Woman is shockingly good at recommendations.) The blue ones are for shopping lists. The green ones are for things I want to do: a book I’d like to read, a new café I’d like to try, an exhibit at the museum I’d like to see.

I am marking the new year, thinking about the passage of time. I have a lot I want to do — too much for one day, maybe too much for one lifetime. But keeping the little calendar helps.

I only thought I knew what they were doing

 Yesterday's note was about the difficulty in making general statements about trees. Today, a note on animals.

Last spring, I saw two male cardinals, one pursuing the other, branch to branch, relentlessly. I saw them outbound on the walk up the creek. They were still at it, 10 minutes later, when we returned down the creek on the way back to the truck.

The quarrel seemed to be about one tree. I was ready to write about territorial behavior and started collecting material in my notebook. The next day when we passed the disputed tree, we saw two male cardinals, sitting calmly five feet apart.

Roy Bedichek, the wonderful Texas naturalist, didn’t understand birders who looked at birds only to identify them. Bedichek always asked: What is that particular bird doing?

When I look now, I ask. Most often, I just don’t know. What to say of those two cardinals? Perhaps they were engaged in relentless instinctual behavior but were required to take 10 minute breaks each hour. Something about union rules.

When do cypress trees change color?

 I would like to be able to tell you when the needles on the cypress trees change color and when they fall.

It would show a certain woodsy wisdom on my part, don’t you think?

But cypress trees are individuals. They seem to like to defy generalizations.

Last year in January, we walked around Woodlawn Lake. Some cypresses had some green needles. It was remarkable because most the cypresses along Elmendorf Lake were brown.

I looked for an environmental explanation. But Woodlawn Lake is 2.5 miles north of Elmendorf Lake. It’s not more sheltered from the cold fronts. 

It was only when I looked more carefully that I began to notice how much variation there was among individual trees. One was still green. One had some two-tone leaves, green and yellow. One was brown, with some shedding. One was almost bare, with brown needles deep on the ground.

What’s the meaningful generalization in all that?

The more I walk along the creek, the more I am aware of how my mind wants to devise rules to make order out of the bewildering variety of life. But the world is made of individuals, and they don’t always follow the rules.

How can a cypress tree have so many colors?

 Wittgenstein said that philosophy is an attempt to get rid of a particular kind of puzzlement, the puzzlement of language. For example, he said, the concept of the color wheel allows us to talk of greenish blue, but not of greenish red.

I know what he means, of course. And still, still, I think of that remark every day on the creek, as we a pass the cypress trees, which are riotous combinations of greens, reds, rusts, maroons and almost-purples.

It’s hard to imagine how a natural thing can be so many shades of red and so many shades of green at the same time. No Christmas decoration can match them.

The change in color has been going on for months. A reader reminded me that it’s been a while since he’d seen a report from the creek.

So here goes.

Zarzamora Creek is on the edge of two regions: the brush country of South Texas and the Hill Country of Central Texas. The weather patterns are predictable. Warm, moist air creeps up from the Gulf of Mexico, about 150 miles away. Then a front of cold, dry air will move south from the Great Plains, chase the fog off and wring the moisture out of the air in a quick downpour. It’ll be cold and clear for a few days until the warm, moist air starts creeping back again.

Such is winter along Zarzamora Creek.

The air from the Gulf of Mexico has been winning the tug of war recently. Through the holidays, the highs mostly have been in the 70s, and lows in the 60s. It was 83 on Christmas Day.

Gunter, the German shepherd, gets us to the creek almost every day. Twice a day, when he’s rambunctious.

I should have reported that the shovelers have arrived and are rounding up the minnows and small fish in the creek. These lovely ducks form a circle, and swim in one direction, gradually tightening the circle around a school of fish.

More scaups have arrived, along with mallards and a few goldeneyes. They mix in with the domestic ducks and geese that live on the lake year-round. One kingfisher is hanging out at the upper end of the lake but won’t let me get a close look. I’ve seen several Great blue herons.

A single swan appeared on the lake a couple of months ago. We’d seen a couple of swans on Woodlawn Lake, 2.5 miles north. I’m guessing one flew south for the winter. He’s tame and comes when people bring bread to feed the ducks and geese.

But the real show on the creek has been the cypress trees. 

New England and the North Woods have their autumn leaves. I’ve seen and admired them. But if you like color, look for the cypress trees along a Texas creek.

E.O. Wilson, a biologist who wrote about learning

E.O. Wilson, arguably the most important biologist of the day, died Sunday. He helped us to understand how social structures influence the development of species, including our own.

I’m enormously interested in his work on biology, but my interest goes beyond that. Wilson wrote some more personal essays about how we humans learn.

He said we learn by following our own interests.

Wilson, who taught at Harvard, started with a boyhood interest in ants. He wondered why some insects are so highly developed socially while others are not. He followed that interest his entire life.

A basic interest in insects led him to other interests in other disciplines. You can make a hobby of collecting insects. But to really understand them requires an understanding of biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics. 

Wilson has argued that the proper course in education is to encourage that initial interest. Let a kid who’s interested in ants learn about ants. Let that interest grow naturally into and across the disciplines.

The wrong thing to do is what we in fact usually do: tell the aspiring scientists that they cannot study insects until they have mastered the prerequisites.

Wilson studied advanced math because he wanted better tools to help him to understand ants.

We learn when we are driven to learn, not when we mindlessly follow the abstract demands of a curriculum. And that driving force is interest. It’s individual, quirky, eccentric.

• Source: E.O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence; New York: Liveright, 2015.

One fine essayist sizes up another

 The best assessment I’ve seen of Joan Didion, a wonderful essayist, was by Hilton Als, another wonderful essayist.

Als’s main point: An artist’s job is to question the values that went into making this place, whatever place you call home. We all inherit a textus recuptus, the book that tells us the way things are. It’s the received tradition that tells us why this place is as it is, and we absorb it, whether we want to or not, as children.

The writer’s job is to question how it got to be that way and to ask: What happens if you disrupt it?

Source: Hilton Als, “An Awful and Beautiful Light,” The New York Review of Books, Dec. 17, 2020, Vol. LXVII, No. 20.

 

Joan Didion, keeper of a notebook

Joan Didion, who died right before Christmas, wrote essays and kept a notebook.

Essays and notebooks are two of my preoccupations.

Her essay “On Keeping a Notebook” should be part of a writer’s education.

Recording accurate information is not exactly the point of keeping one, she said. 

“How it felt to be me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook.”

You keep a notebook to remember what it was like to be you.

You change. You grow. You have trouble recalling what, exactly, you were thinking.

I’m one of those people who have a hard time distinguishing life from awareness.

It seems to me that a complete biography would be a record of what a person was paying attention to. And so it seems to me that a good keeper of notebooks — a Thoreau, a Kierkegaard, a Virginia Woolf — always produces something that is a little better than the best biography.

Merry Christmas to all

 The best Christmas story I know is about a friend who is Jewish.

Decades ago, I asked him why he celebrated Christmas.

If you have kids, you more or less have to, he said. He helped me understand what going to school after the annual toy-giving frenzy must be like for a child who is not Christian.

And so my friend celebrated Christmas, not as a religious holiday, but as a holiday.

One year, after his own kids were grown and gone, my friend was in Wal-Mart, buying batteries, I think. It was just before Christmas. He noticed parents — mostly just mothers, shopping alone — going through the aisles of toys. 

Some were in worn clothes. My friend noticed holes in shoes, gloves and coats. He noticed they went through the toys slowly.

The next day, my friend went to the bank and got some $100 bills. He went back to Wal-Mart the next evening. He studied the shoppers. He just knew when it was the right time to approach a stranger, say “Merry Christmas,” hand him or her a bill with Ben Franklin’s smile on it, and disappear.

He’s been doing that for years.

Did Thomas Edison improve the nap?

 The Scientific American recently had an article on Thomas Edison’s “napping technique,” a way the inventor harnessed his creative powers.

Edison thought sleep was a waste of time. When he rested, he held a ball in each hand. If he drifted off, the balls would drop, waking him.

The Scientific American was reporting on a new study, inspired by Edison, that suggests there’s something to the notion that we have heightened powers just before we drift off.

I’m interested in neuroscience. If it’s possible to get to that metaphorical place of heightened creativity, I’d like to know the details.

But the whole idea made me want to start a group lobbying for the preservation of the traditional nap.

Maybe I’m just a contrarian.

• Source: Bret Stetka, “Spark Creativity with Thomas Edison’s Napping Technique”; Scientific American, Dec. 9, 2021.

Bolaño's 'Last Evenings on Earth'

Yesterday’s note was on a writing tip from Roberto Bolaño. I should mention at least one of his stories.

I found “Last Evenings on Earth” astonishing. Literature is full of stories about how parents influence children. This is one, but it’s not what I expected.

The story is about a couple of Chileans living in Mexico City: B, a student, and his father. The boy is reading French surrealist poetry, is taken with the minor poet Gui Rosey, and is convinced by the poetry that something bad is going to happen.

The father, a manly ex-boxer, is looking for action, meaning alcohol and sex.

The vacation is a tug of war about what kind of man the boy will become. B avoids his father’s revels on the first night, but is trapped on the second.

The boy’s father starts playing cards and wins a lot of money. The father doesn’t seem to care who he angers. Women tell B to get his father out of the club, but the game goes on.

Finally, B’s father pays the bill. As father and son leave, two men block the door.

B thinks of poor, doomed Gui Rosey, but his father, without flinching, leads the way.

“And then the fight begins.” 

It’s one of the great last lines of literature.

What happens? Does father, son or both die, as the title suggests? What would happen if father and son won the fight? Is the death figurative — a poet dies to be reborn as a tough guy who beats up bouncers when he has to? And what would happen if they survived and returned home, to mom and the family?

It’s an astonishing place to end an astonishing story.

A writing tip from Roberto Bolaño

 Roberto Bolaño, who was about as good as it gets, said writers who like short stories should read Chekhov and Carver. One of the two, he said, had to be the best writer of the 20^th century.

I can’t see how Willa Cather isn’t on even the shortest list. But that’s the problem with looking for the best or the greatest. Each reader stands alone as judge.

Bolaño wrote “Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories,” most of which is facetious, rather than helpful.

But he contended that reading is more important than writing. Writers learn by reading and by hearing stories told.

His rules of thumb:

• Read a lot.

• Learn from the good writers.

• Avoid the bad.

I found “Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories” in Roberto Balaño, Between Parentheses; New York: New Directions, 2011.

When Saki formed a dinner club

Yesterday’s note was about Saki, Hector Hugh Munro.

He was one of the great short story writers — and undoubtedly the greatest to have been killed by a sniper.

Munroe died on Nov. 14, 1916, while serving with the 22d Royal Fusiliers. He was 45.

One of his fellow soldiers said his last words were a shout: “Put that bloody cigarette out!” He had a reputation for looking out for the younger men.

Munro was too old for war, but it brought something out in him. He turned down commissions twice. He liked being close to the troops as a sergeant.

The spring before he died, he formed The Back Kitchen Club after seeing a pig killed. He and his comrades bought pork and found an old woman who had a grocery with a kitchen in back. She did the cooking. Munro wrote the club rules on the back of a Chocolat-Menier advertising card.

Membership was limited to nine. Attendance at dinner was mandatory, with the call of duty the only excused absence. The members looked after each other. Perhaps because they did, they made it a point to behave well. They expected nothing but the best from each other.

Camaraderie is an intriguing topic. Munro had a gift for it.

Christopher Morley says that Saki’s sister, Edith, wrote an 80-page biography of her brother that ends: “He had a tremendous sympathy for young men struggling to get on, and in practical ways helped many a lame dog.”

Saki's wonderful story 'Dusk'

In general, I prefer short stories to novels. I have a fatal attraction to both Saki and O. Henry.

I hear people mention O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” as if it were a universally known parable. I don’t hear much about Saki’s story “Dusk.”

Warning: The following summary is to refresh your memory. If you haven’t read the story, stop here.

The story is set on a bench in Hyde Park. Norman Gortsby sits down at dusk.

“The scene pleased Gortsby and harmonized with his present mood. Dusk, to his mind, was the hour of the defeated.” We can hide our wounds, our dashed hopes and shabby clothes in the twilight.

“On the bench by his side was an elderly gentleman with a drooping air of defiance that was probably the remaining vestige of self-respect in an individual who had ceased to defy successfully anybody or anything.” Gortsby pictures him in “some bleak lodging where his ability to pay a weekly bill was the beginning and end of the interest he inspired.”

The old guy leaves, and a nicely dressed young man sits down and tells Gortsby he can’t find his hotel. His usual hotel had been torn down. A cabby recommended another. The young man said he stepped out to buy a cake of soap — he hates hotel soap — and he had a drink. Now he can’t remember the name of the hotel or the street.

The story is headed in the direction of a loan for cab fare, possibly more.

Is it improbable?

Not at all, Gortsby reassures the young man. Gortsby says the same thing happened to him in a foreign capital. He remembered the hotel was near a canal, found the canal and followed it to the hotel.

Of course, Gortsby tells the young man, the weak point in your story is that you can’t produce the soap.

The young man checks his pockets, mutters and runs. Gortsby ponders the irony. The soap was the one convincing line in the story, yet it brought the young man to grief.

Gortsby gets up to leave and sees a cake of soap on the ground.

Gortsby finally finds the young man in a crowd. He lends him money and returns his soap. It’s a lesson, Gortsby tells himself, about judging people harshly when we know only circumstances, not the facts.

Gortsby returns through the park and sees the old guy searching around the bench they had shared. The old guy was looking for his lost soap.

We think we are good at reading the motives of other people, and that thought can be poisonous. Saki’s masterpiece is the antidote.

I could go on about how Saki handles irony: his characters go from savoring irony to being flustered and back again. But Christopher Morley, who edited Saki’s stories, wrote a line that cuts off any more sermonizing.

He wrote: “There is no greater compliment to be paid the right kind of friend than to hand him Saki, without comment.”

Auster talks 'The Red Badge of Courage'

I am still less than one-third of the way through Paul Auster’s book on Stephen Crane. I’m reading slowly, savoring it. It’s that good.

I think this would be a fair summary of Auster’s views on The Red Badge of Courage.

• It’s the Great American War Novel. It’s certainly the best novel about the Civil War. And the novel captured war in a way that novels about later wars didn’t. (Could you name the novel about World War II?)

• America’s great war novel is not about war. It’s about what fear does to one character.

• If you doubt that, look at what’s missing: There are no references to President Lincoln or to slavery. The novel is superficially about the Battle of Chancellorsville, a fascinating test of tactics, but the generals aren’t named and there’s nothing on their strategy. The story is not about that battle but about the battle Pvt. Henry Fleming fights with himself.

• Henry cares more about the opinions of others than what he thinks of himself. He wants to be seen as brave, but he’s afraid that he might run. He does, in fact, run. Cowardice is not a test of will. Fear overwhelms intelligence. Later we find that bravery can overwhelm intelligence too.

• Here is the heart of the novella: Henry lies to cover his own cowardice and failure. He’s willing to manipulate — that is, do violence to — a friend to maintain the lie. He not only lies, he believes his own lie. He’s dishonest with himself. Auster observes that’s a state of mind that Kierkegaard called the “sickness unto death.”

• Henry remembers some of his failures but forgets — or doesn’t face — others. He’s haunted that he abandoned a mortally wounded soldier. But he can’t admit that he ran from the fighting or that his claim that his wound was caused by an enemy bullet is a lie. The guilt is unbearable, so he just doesn’t bear it.

Crane’s novella was required reading when I was a schoolboy. It opened my mind in the mysterious way that a good book can. I probably got a glimpse of most of the insights that Auster outlines clearly.

When I had my first class in American literature in high school, I became a friend of the essayists and memoirists. Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson talked to me in a way fiction writers didn’t.

Crane opened the door to fiction for me.

Hemingway said modern American literature, meaning fiction, began with Mark Twain. The critic Carl Van Doren said it began with Crane. I’m with Van Doren.

• Source: Paul Auster, Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane; New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2021.

Thinking of Galveston

 When I went to Galveston as a young newspaperman, I was told that islanders knew the history of the place. If I didn’t want to be laughed out of town, I’d better learn something of it myself. It was good advice.

Though I’m an old man and no longer live on the there, I can’t break the habit of collecting notes on things that happened in Galveston. Did you know Oscar Wilde visited Galveston in 1882?

He was 27, young, famous and full of himself. He gave a lecture at the Electric Pavilion, famous for its electric lights. Of course the power went out.

Wilde attracted hecklers with his attire and manners. But he liked Galveston. The also liked San Antonio, where he stayed at the Menger Hotel. He said less about Houston.

He observed that Texas men apparently are unable to go an hour between beers. 

Jane Kenyon's advice to writers

 Jane Kenyon’s poem, mentioned in yesterday’s note, reminded me of her advice to writers.

• Be a good steward of your gifts.

• Protect your time.

• Feed your inner life.

• Avoid too much noise.

• Read good books. Have some good sentences in your ears.

• Be by yourself as often as you can.

• Walk.

• Take the phone off the hook.

• Work regular hours.

Her gentle advice is, to me, more useful than the Ten Commandments.

A riff on the holiday blues

 A friend was talking about the holiday blues — the peculiar combination of sadness and anxiety that somehow comes inevitably when you can’t escape songs about “the happiest time of the year.”

I thought of some lines from the poem “Let Evening Come.”

Let it come as it will, and don’t

be afraid. God does not leave us

comfortless, so let evening come.

The poem was written by Jane Kenyon, who died of leukemia at 47. It strikes some people as a religious poem. But the note that strikes me is the notion of comfort. Even when I’m most prone to whine, I am, when I think about it a bit, not comfortless.

I’ve said this before (Dec. 10), but I think this is an example of why poetry can be important in a certain kind of life.

Sometimes we need help finding language for the things we are feeling or thinking or experiencing. We have to borrow it. And, as we borrow, we sometimes find new ways of saying difficult things to ourselves.

It’s a good reason to read the poets.

The introduction came from a pamphleteer

If you’ve been wondering why there have been so many notes on Willa Cather, it’s because I think some of her work is wonderful. I wish that her short story “Paul’s Case,” covered Dec. 10, was better known.

How did I come to read her?

What education I have comes from the public library. I met her there.

Years ago, I discovered that the University of Minnesota published the Minnesota Pamphlet Series. Each pamphlet contained an essay on an American writer. I could skim through one and decide whether a writer was likely to interest me.

I was young then. There were so many writers I didn’t know. And I didn’t know which to try to read first.

The pamphlets gave me a place to start. I am grateful to the unknown librarian who insisted on acquiring the complete set.

Dorothy Van Ghent wrote “Willa Cather” for the series. I found it republished in Seven American Women Writers of the Twentieth Century, edited by Maureen Howard; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. 

Van Ghent’s essay captures the Cather I love. Cather advised aspiring writers to forget about literary devices. She believed that when we humans find our material, we tell our story intuitively, instinctively. The form we make fits the material.

As Cather put it: “We come to rely on the thing by which our feet find the road home on a dark night.”

Van Ghent’s view: At her best, Willa Cather brings us the world of the senses, not of great themes or worldviews.

If you’re thinking about trying a Willa Cather story, Van Ghent recommends “Neighbor Rosicky” and “Old Mrs. Harris.”

I think “Neighbor Rosicky” was Cather’s masterpiece. 

A good pamphlet, if you’re looking for one

One of the preoccupations of this collection of notes is the subject of pamphlets.

I like them because I like brevity. I’d rather re-read a pamphlet to refresh my memory of a writer’s views than read his 15-volume masterpiece.

You can usually get through a pamphlet in one evening, and so I am more likely to reread Thomas Paine’s Common Sense than start in on Samuel Morison’s History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. I’ve read a lot of Morison’s History, But I have never began with Volume 1 determined to read until I finished Volume 15. On the other hand, I read Common Sense occasionally, just so see if my common sense is still working.

On my last reading, a couple of things struck me as fresh insights. It’s as if Paine had written this yesterday, rather than in early 1776:

• Paine quotes Milton as saying “never can true reconciliation grow where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep.” It reminds me of the political divisions today. But do you think that it’s true — that real reconciliation is impossible? This country has endured periods of “deadly hate” before, including a civil war. 

• Paine held that elected representation works only when the elected don’t form a separate interest from the electors. We have allowed too much money, especially corporate money, to influence our representatives. We have lost them. It’s obvious that, as a group, they have their own interests, which pay handsomely, and we electors are an afterthought. I think Paine’s maxim is vital. If we want a better democracy, this is the place to start.

• Paine lived in an age when people spread conspiracy theories and attacked the reputations of learned people who tried to address problems with reason. I tend to forget that conspiracy theories were widespread before the invention of social media. Perhaps you do too. Here was Paine’s verdict about those who challenge the champions of research and of impartial inquiry: “Suspicion is the companion of mean souls.”

Vivian Gornick's view of nonfiction

 Vivian Gornick, who always has interesting things to say about writing, has a piece in The Yale Review that argues that memoir and other forms of narrative are supplanting fiction. It’s a running theme for her. She says there are many reasons and gives two:

First, Modernism, the prevailing movement behind the novel, is fading. The prevailing theme is that of the individual being alienated from her culture. Many people just don’t see that in their own lives, she says.

Second, the Holocaust inspired countless voices to give testimony about what had happened to them, and the truth couldn’t be improved on with imagination. Gornick says all movements of liberation (of women, racial minorities, etc.) are similar: the nonfiction is as gripping as anything the imagination could create in a work of fiction. The women’s movement, she says, has produced many good memoirs and essays, but few good novels and plays.

If Gornick wrote a grocery list, I’d read it, expecting, somehow, to be provoked. I don’t read her because I agree with her.

In general, I prefer essays and memoirs to fiction. But I don’t connect that preference to world movements, catastrophic tragedies, historic events. My instinct tells me that personal preferences are about a person or personality.

• Source: Vivian Gornick, “The Power of Testimony,” The Yale Review, Dec. 1, 2021. If you’re interested in her views on writing, look for The Situation and the Story; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.

Stephen Crane reports on road rage

Here’s a good rule that I’m about to break: Never talk about a book until you’ve finished reading it.

Paul Auster’s Burning Boy, his new biography of Stephen Crane, is delicious. But I’m disposed to love this book. I like Auster — especially his essays, but also his screenplay for Smoke, a movie that didn’t capture the hearts of millions but that struck me as genius. And Crane was one of the idols of my youth. I remember reading “The Open Boat” as a teenager and deciding that I would write short stories.

Auster’s book is more than 700 pages — a long book for a short life. (Crane died before he was 30.) I’m a plodding reader, and I’m a long way from the end.

But I love this:

When Crane was about 20 he witnessed a case of road rage in New York City.

It was around 1891. A wheel came off a moving van drawn by four horses, clogging a narrow street. As happens in New York, the traffic backed up. But back then drivers rang bells, beat on gongs and whipped the dashboard with car-hooks to express displeasure. Expressions of colorful language were not impeded by windshields, an invention which became common later.

More traffic backed up. Urchins, seeing opportunity in adversity, brought out buckets of beer to sell. Their efforts, while profitable, didn’t do much to solve the problem.

I love this scene because we tend to think that all the great inventions of man, good and bad, occurred within our lifetime. We talk of “social media” as if none existed before the Internet. We can’t imagine road rage before the Model T. But here it is. 

Alvin Sallee talks about his next book

 My friend Alvin Sallee has written several books. The latest is Sea Stories: Galveston & Beyond with Michael J. Leahy Jr. His next one is about two relationships that shaped his life. Here are highlights of a conversation about the coming book.

 

Q. How did you decide to write a book on your grandfather?

A. As a new grandpa, I had a perfect role model, to me the world's best Grandpa: Charlie Midert, the father of my birthmother, Joy, who died when I was 5 years old. After telling Grandpa Midert stories after I became a grandpa, people were genuinely interested in my musing memories. Friends told me I should write a book about Grandpa and my adoptive Mother, Carol. Both had strong personalities shaped by different events in their lives, yet they formed a surprising smooth team. They shared the love of travel and family. This book includes the stories that formed who I became and what I believe. 

 

Q. I’m sure each of them — your Grandpa and Mother — influenced you in many ways. Could you give us one example of influence from each?

A. One probably needs years on the couch to fully understand how an adoptive Mother and birth Grandpa influenced one’s being. Without that benefit, here goes: 

Grandpa's persona comes through in my never meeting a stranger — his use of humor, a sort of a hyper Groucho Marx. Mother’s negation skills with Grandpa were demonstrated in debates around the dinner table. More than one person has said, “Alvin can argue either side of any decision."

As Grandpa never talked politics or sports, I don't see how there was anything that rubbed off on me — Mother more than made up for that. An FDR and sports fan, social justice oozed from her entire life. College events were the highpoint of her life. Given I spent 40 years in the university environment as a social work professor, Mother was the influence for sure.

 

Q. I’ve got to ask. What’s an example of hyper Groucho Marx?

A. Groucho Marx, the famous movie and TV star from the 1920s through the 1960s, would pause for a moment, play with his cigar, raise his eyebrows and then deliver the impromptu punch line. He’s pregnant pauses would allow the guests to hang themselves. I don't do “wait” well. A bit hyper, I just jump in with my punch line — probably so I won’t forget it. Timing is everything in jokes, and Grandpa had it down perfect. 

 

Q. What was the relationship like between him and Carol?

A. Mother was very precise, planning each activity with MBA detail. For four years, she planned the month-long trip to the New York World’s Fair; yet when it came to Grandpa, she went with his course.

Making an appointment was not a driving force for him; it was what was in front of him — a project, a visit with someone or a roadside attraction. We only knew within about a two-week window when he would show up in Albuquerque.

Mother realized she needed to keep him busy or he would be off again in a day or two. So, over the months before his arrival she developed “Charlie’s list” — on an actual piece of paper. “Fix the drip under the sink (Dad was only a big project guy; e.g., he built a concrete block garage), fix the squeaking door, paint the trim on the newly built den," etc.

Once the list was all checked off, off went Grandpa and Grandma on another adventure — when in the summer with (brother) David and me, fighting all the way in the backseat.

David summed it up perfectly: “Grandpa inspired creativity; Mom inspired hard work and motivation to reach for all A’s (success). Grandpa was almost always fun and adventure; Mom was good ol’ protestant work ethic and morals.  I wonder if Grandpa reminded Mom of one of her more colorful uncles.  I agree she probably bit her lip about  Grandpa's behavior, which to her was wild and excessive, because of her love of Joy and Grandma.”  

Mother ran the house through lists, which organized everything. Her job as associate dean of woman, which included setting up large dorms, was perfect training for running a house with four boys. Lists guided dinners, chores, books to be outlined, events, parties, etc. A marked difference with Grandpa’s becoming lost in whatever project he was involved.

Mother didn’t allow vagueness in any other part of her life, but she worked around it with Grandpa. The experience of Grandpa allowing us to shop for ourselves, spending his $10 at will in the K-Mart, was difficult for Mother, who grew up in the Depression, yet it was allowed.

Christmas presents are a perfect example. Mother began buying items on sale months before Christmas from a detailed list. Each was wrapped weeks in advance in used Christmas wrapping paper from the year before. When we boys unwrapped a present, you didn't rip it off; first you read off who it was from. Once Mother had written it down, you could carefully undo the tape at each spot, turning the present over to bring it out without even a minor tear in the corner of the paper. The paper was carefully folded and put in a box for use next year. Then you double-checked that Mother wrote down who it was from and what it was. The next day you were handed your list and a box of cards — bought 11 months ago — to begin writing thank you notes. We still joke about her regimen each Christmas. 

By contrast, Grandpa used recycled (before it was cool) brown paper bags for his homemade presents, sometimes taping two bags together. You simply tore off the top of the bag and lifted out the usually handmade treasure. There was never any doubt whom the presents were from! 

When asked about why Mother handled Grandpa the way she did, this articulate woman could only allow that she really liked Joy, as she did Grandma. My guess is that Joy didn’t save Christmas wrapping paper. 

The things you'll learn if you read 'Sea Stories'

 This note is about a friend’s book: Alvin L. Sallee has, with Michael J. Leahy Jr., published Sea Stories: Galveston & Beyond.

Alvin and I met in Galveston when I was editor of The Daily News. He wrote a series of columns about the port. For Alvin, the columns were a license to learn. He went to the port, talked to about their work and reported what he learned. Many readers who had lived in Galveston all their lives told me they had learned things they’d never known.

I’ve always thought that newspapers should help you learn things — small things, overlooked things, important things — about the place you call home. 

The new book as an extension of that idea. It has short chapters about the history of the island and its port. It has tales of the cruise ships that sail from the port.

The two authors did most of the work, but there are other contributors. Bill Cherry, another friend, told the tale of the Selma, the old tanker that was scuttled after World War I. Did you know that Americans, faced with metal shortages, built tankers of concrete? You can see the wreck of the Selma from the ferry that runs between Galveston and Port Bolivar. But if you don’t know the inside story, you really ought to read Bill’s account.

As you can gather from earlier notes on this blog, I like books that aren’t designed for a mass market. I like those small things, overlooked things, important things.

This book is full of them.

One example: The USS Stewart is a destroyer escort that served in World War II and is now an exhibit at the island’s naval museum.  The book includes a story about how the Stewart, on convoy duty in April 1945, raced to a burning tanker that had been torpedoed.

It’s a story about men who saw a fire on the horizon and rushed to help, knowing German submarines were nearby. They fished half-frozen survivors out of the sea and brought fire hoses alongside the burning tanker, so close that the Stewart’s paint blistered. The sailors worried about the ammunition they had on board but stayed at it.

The actions of the Stewart’s crew didn’t turn the tide of the war. It was just a story about ordinary men who did their jobs. Thanks to this book, it’s a story I know.

• How to get a copy: Sea Stories: Galveston & Beyond is available on Amazon. Kindle versions are available by searching “Sallee Sea Stories.” Copies are also available through the Galveston Naval Museum’s online store. 

 

Willa Cather's "Paul's Case"

 If anyone were to make a case for Willa Cather as the great American writer, it would involve her story “Paul’s Case.”

Warning: This note will be loaded with spoilers. If you plan to read the story, reader, pass by.

It’s the story of a young man who hates his life on Cordelia Street in Pittsburgh and is only alive when he’s at the theater or concert hall. The first part of the story, told from the point of view of his teachers, is about how he was expelled from school. 

In the second part, Paul decides that a short life well lived is better than a long, unbearable one. He leaves work with the company’s deposit, pockets the cash, takes a train to New York and lives at the Waldorf until the jig is up. He jumps in front of a train — but only after he’s lived the best life he can imagine.

For writers raised on the dictate “show, don’t tell,” Cather is liberating.

The best way to get at Cather’s ability to tell a story is to give samples as she considers elements of Paul’s “case.” (It sounds clinical, doesn’t it?)

• Physical description: “Paul was tall for his age and very thin, with high, cramped shoulders and a narrow chest. His eyes were remarkable for a certain hysterical brilliancy, and he continually used them in a conscious, theatrical sort of way, peculiarly offensive in a boy.”

• Character: “It was at the theatre and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived; the rest was but a sleep and forgetting.”

• Psychological description: “Perhaps it was because, in Paul’s world, the natural nearly always wore the guise of ugliness that a certain element of artificiality seemed to him necessary in beauty. Perhaps it was because his experience of life elsewhere was so full of Sabbath-school picnics, petty economies, wholesome advice as to how to succeed in life, and the inescapable odors of cooking, that he found this existence so alluring, these smartly-clad men and women so attractive, that he was so moved by those starry apple orchards that bloomed perennially under the limelight.”

• Life: “His golden days went by without a shadow, and he made each day as perfect as he could.”

• Values: “ … he knew now that money was everything, the wall that stood between all he loathed and all he wanted.”

• Self: “He saw everything clearly now. He had a feeling he had made the best of it, that he had lived the sort of life he was meant to live, and for about half an hour he sat staring at the revolver. But he told himself that was not the way …”

• Death: “Then, because the picture taking mechanism was crushed, the disturbing visions flashed into black, and Paul dropped back into the immense design of things.”

In telling a story, rather than showing it, Cather didn’t abandon detail. She included the details in the telling. After the suspension hearing, Paul left school whistling “The Soldier’s Chorus” from Charles Gounod’s Faust, a ditty about how men should die.

What would Willa Cather say?

 Dec. 7 was observed as the 80^th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. It was also Willa Cather’s birthday. I missed commemorating her in some way, and that miss feels like a missed opportunity. This note, I hope, will make amends.

Several notes in this blog have been about writing, and Cather was good at making writers think about their craft.

It’s been the fashion for a generation or two to “show, not tell.” That is, a writer is supposed to give such a detailed description of a scene that the readers can see it for themselves. The writer shouldn’t tell the reader that the young, starving artists are poor. He should describe their garret and detail their dinner.

That’s been the fashion for a long time.

But, before I was born, Cather was having none of that. She wrote: “The novel, for a long while, has been overfurnished. The property-man has been so busy on its pages, the importance of material objects and their vivid presentation have been so stressed, that we take it for granted whoever can observe, and can write the English language, can write a novel. Often the latter qualification is considered unnecessary.”

She said that Balzac had tried to recreate Paris on paper, “a stupendous ambition — but, after all, unworthy of an artist.”

Cather had different taste. She wanted the writer to get to the heart of the drama, the conflict between people, and to leave off the elaborate setting. She liked to see a room left “as bare as the stage of a Greek theater.”

The reader could use her imagination.

Much of what Cather despised is the kind of thing I like. 

“If the novel is a form of imaginative art, it cannot be at the same time a vivid and brilliant form or journalism,” she wrote. But that’s exactly the kind of thing I like, the kind of thing I would aim at.

Cather died long before W.G. Sebald wrote The Rings of Saturn. But I’m afraid she would have given a blistering review to a book I admire. That’s one reason to read her. She makes you think again about what you’ve assumed to be true.

• Source: The quotations are from the essay “The Novel Demoublé,” which is in Willa Cather, On Writing; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949. 

The philosophy of aches and pains

 Repairing and maintaining a little house is a job. Then I played three rounds of golf in a week after a layoff. If you’re doing things you enjoy, you can’t complain about the aches and pains that follow.

I did some chores this morning — not complaining, but moving carefully.

Montaigne liked Seneca’s remark about the ancient Romans: They taught boys nothing which had to be learned sitting down.

The lesson: If you can choose, choose an active life.  Choose as much as activity you can stand.

A biologist looks at the human mind

 Sooner or later in a conversation, I’ll mention the biologist E.O. Wilson.

Some scientists roll their eyes at him. What kind of scientist would write a book called The Meaning of Human Existence?

That’s exactly why I like Wilson. I think it’s an important book.

Wilson’s biggest point: Natural selection works on at least two competing levels: individuals compete and cooperate for resources within a group, and competition-cooperation also exists between groups.

Individual selection is within a group. Natural selection favors the strongest — the guy who looks like a linebacker. Other group members (women and children, for example) defer to the alpha male, who gets the lion’s share of food and other resources. However, competition also occurs between groups. Consider a group that has no linebacker but instead exchanges ideas and strategies and comes up with the bow and arrow. Five skinny guys shoot at the linebacker, who has only a club, when he comes on a raid.

Wilson says natural selection favors the expression of genes on two levels: the “selfish” gene that wants resources for the self and the “altruistic” gene that thinks in terms of the wellbeing of the whole group, not just the individual — what we think of as moral behavior.

He’s arguing that this is part of the DNA — the behaviors are passed down genetically (part of our instinctual behavior) — and it’s part of the human condition. It’s why we’re “conflicted.” These competing impulses are inside us. It’s just the way we are.

In Wilson’s view, that’s what the human mind is. It’s not some soul floating over the human body, disconnected, but a survival mechanism that works in conflicting ways.

It constantly feeds information to us about the group. We love gossip because our survival depends on reading other people. We put the information in context by replaying memories to look for matches and by imagining countless possible scenarios to see which one fits best with the current situation. This constant mental activity is not a sign of sickness — it’s a survival mechanism for a highly socialized animal.  It’s the way the mind works.

I’m intrigued but the notion, but I’m dubious about tying things like cooperation, altruism and selfishness to DNA. I think genes can have physical expressions that promote survival. But what does the gene for “cooperation” look like?

I’m intrigued but not sold.

• Source: Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence; New York: Liveright Publishing, 2014

When the poets are tough guys

Many cultures, including those in the Ancient Near East, have taunt songs. You can find a few in the Bible. Isaiah 14:3-23 is an example .

If enemy lines are opposing each other across no man’s land, one will break out in song, describing how the opponent will be drubbed. After the battle, another taunt song will describe the drubbing.

Charles Reznikoff did a take on the genre in “I will write songs against you.”

But instead of breaking the teeth and scattering the bones of the enemies, the poet pelts them with dandelion seeds. How’s this for a threat?

            I will marshal against you

            The fireflies of the dusk.

I suppose you could get through life without reading Reznikoff. But why would you want to?

Charles Reznikoff’s 'About an excavation'

If Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is not the great Objectivist poem, this one is. And, like Pound’s poem, it’s too short to summarize:

About an excavation

a flock of bright red lanterns.

This is a simile poem comparing a concrete object to another concrete object with the barest suggestion. A “flock” of lanterns has settled around the construction site like … what? A flock of ducks settling on a pond?

It’s by Charles Reznikoff, the star of yesterday’s note. 

I’m a fan of the Objectivist poets of the 1930s. They liked concrete images, and so do I.

Reznikoff, 1894-1976, was arguably the oddest in a flock of odd ducks. He was

born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn and, hoping to become a writer, entered the University of Missouri School of Journalism. It was not a match made in heaven. Reznikoff fled, after a year, back to New York and became a lawyer.

He published some of his own poems. He worked as a hat salesman in his family’s firm and as a freelance writer. When the family business failed in the Depression, he got a job summarizing legal cases of injustice and tragedy.

He married Marie Syrkin, a high school teacher, in 1930. In the late ‘20s, he met George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky, kindred spirits, and was in the February 1931 issue of Poetry magazine, the Objectivist issue.

The Objectivist Press published several works, including Testimony, a prose collection based on law cases. The same technique was used for Holocaust in 1975. The book mined legal records to document Nazi atrocities.

With respect to the famous poets, I love the neglected ones. Every now and then I pick up Reznikoff's  poems and start reading. I’m always struck by the same thought: This voice could only be his. 

For poets and artists who have a day job

 During my working years, I used to recite a short poem by a neglected poet. I would come home, exhausted by the day, and these lines by Charles Reznikoff would come to me: 

After I had worked all day at what I earn my living, 
I was tired. Now my own work has lost another day, 
I thought, but began slowly, 
and slowly my strength came back to me. 
Surely, the tide comes in twice a day.

It’s a poem that beautifully expresses the divided nature of life for many artists: they earn a living, and then they work at their art.

Chief among the treasures of this poem is its brevity: five lines. Reznikoff uses few modifiers, but he uses one twice: “slowly.” He begins slowly. Slowly his strength comes back. 

The poem is a meditation on “slowly” in artistry and creation. Or, as the poet Robert Francis liked to say: “Poems may be coaxed but not commanded.”

• Source: Poems 1918-1975, The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff, edited by Seamus Cooney; Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1996, p. 73.

A life changed by reading

 Alan Swallow is a good example of a life influenced by reading.

He grew up in Wyoming. As a boy, he was interested in cars and motorcycles and hoped to be an engineer. When he was 16, about the time the Depression was setting in, he got a job at a gas station at the north end of Yellowstone Park. He was busy in bursts but would then have 30 minutes without a customer. He discovered the Haldeman-Julius Blue Books, published in the small town of Girard, Kansas.

Emanuel and Marcet Heldeman-Julius published cheap paperbacks, small enough to put in a pocket, that were designed to give working-class people access to what educated people were reading. The series included classics — essays by Thoreau, stories by Maupassant, and “Hamlet” by Shakespeare. Will Durant’s series of little books on philosophers was republished as The Story of Philosophy.

To the teenaged Swallow, the selling point was that he could buy 20 for a dollar.

All that reading changed him. America lost a mechanic or automotive engineer but gained a literature professor and small publisher.

Swallow preferred “little publisher.”

 “The term ‘little,’ of course, refers to an attitude, not to size,” he wrote. “The analogy is that book publishing should be informed by the same noncommercial dedication as characterized by at least the best of the little magazines.”

He sometimes used the word “idealism” in a personal sense, in the same way religious people talk of their faith. Swallow believed that good literature should be available and inexpensive. He set up his first small press in 1939 when he was a graduate student at Louisiana State University. He borrowed $100 from his father and bought a hand press. He went to the library to learn how to use it. He envisioned selling pamphlets for 25 cents.

He wrote that he was born on the frontier, and believed he’d inherited a tendency of frontier life. “That tendency is to act on one’s beliefs and ideas. I value this inheritance probably more than any other. Translated to the situation in 1940 when I had finished two jobs with my hand press, it meant that I would be compelled by my own character to act, that is, that I would do what I felt should be done, and those things that I felt should be done were informed by the idealism that I have mentioned.”

• Source: Swallow’s essay originally appeared in New Mexico Quarterly, XXXVL, 4 (Winter, 1966-1967), pp. 301-324. I found it as “Story of a Publisher” in The Publish-It-Yourself Handbook: Literary Tradition & How-To, edited by Bill Henderson, The Pushcart Press and Harper & Row, Publishers, 1980.

 

A lesson on priorities

 Alan Swallow tells a delicious story about how he learned to sort out priorities.

He grew up in Wyoming between the world wars and learned to work at an early age. The world of goods — tempting things to buy — came to him through the Montgomery Ward catalog. 

“I would translate the dollar amounts into the number of hours of labor that I would have to put out in work to acquire the wanted possession,” he wrote. 

Swallow later founded a small press, publishing works that wouldn’t have otherwise been published. He did all the work by hand: set type, operated the 5-by-8 press, bound the pamphlets and books.

He could publish a manuscript he liked with almost no out-of-pocket expenses. But it took a lot of work. As Swallow read through manuscripts submitted by writers, he calculated the many hours of work it would take to turn the manuscript into a book.

He wanted to publish them all but couldn’t. And so he tested his critical judgment against the required labor. He said he couldn’t think of a better test.

No one gets to into the psyche of a little publisher better than Alan Swallow.

I started to say “small,” but Swallow liked the title “little publisher.” He grew up in a golden age of “little magazines.” Some of the most interesting work was published in magazines supported by a few subscribers. These readers were loyal. They argued for pieces they liked, pushed them on friends, developed a following for neglected writers. Sometimes they built audiences that interested major publishers.

Swallow wanted to do the same thing for books.

• Source: Swallow’s essay originally appeared in New Mexico Quarterly, XXXVL, 4 (Winter, 1966-1967), pp. 301-324. I found it as “Story of a Publisher” in The Publish-It-Yourself Handbook: Literary Tradition & How-To, edited by Bill Henderson, The Pushcart Press and Harper & Row, Publishers, 1980.

The Hogarth Press's plan for selling books

A friend who is an author was talking about selling books. It’s a subject I know nothing about.

My friend has talked to consultants who offer services for marketing books through social media. 

The discussion reminded me of The Publish-It-Yourself Handbook: Literary Tradition & How-To, edited by Bill Henderson, founder of Pushcart Press. It was published in 1980. It is a reminder that the story that self-publishing got started with the Internet isn’t entirely true.

Henderson traces a long line of self-publishers: Blake, Shelley, Byron, Poe, Whitman, Twain, Crane, Joyce. You have to wonder what literature courses would be like if they featured only the writers who got their start with major publishers.

The book has a couple of dozen accounts of people who set up small presses.

One of my favorites is an essay by Leonard Woolf about how he and his famous wife, Virginia, set up Hogarth Press in their dining room in 1917.

They began with Two Stories — one by Leonard and one by Virginia — in a 32-page pamphlet. They set type by hand. They stitched the pamphlets together by hand. That first pamphlet included an advertisement for the new publishing company, which proposed to print material that hadn’t a prayer of being published anywhere else.

In the next few years, Hogarth Press published Poems by T.S. Elliott, Story of the Siren by E.M. Forster and a translation of Reminiscences of Tolstoi by Maxim Gorky.

Leonard Woolf’s essay, extracted from his book Beginning Again, makes two points for self-publishers.

• “I have often heard it said by professional publishers and others who know the book producing and book selling business far better than I do that it would be impossible today to do what we did in 1917 to 1927 …” I think people in the business say the same thing decade after decade. The reasons change with the technology.

• “One reason the Press survived was because for many years our object was, not to expand, but to keep it small.” Sales of those now-famous titles generally ran around 150 books.

The lesson Leonard Woolf learned: keep your overhead low and publish what you want.

The lesson I learned involves that number, 150. If you think you have a story to tell, start small. Print 150 copies — not 5,000. Give them to friends. Send them to newspapers. Word will either spread or it won’t. Readers will do that, not the author.