C.S. Peirce gives an account of belief

 One of the great works of philosophy, in my view, was published in 1878 in Popular Science Monthly, a magazine that had a following among people who liked to tinker in backyard sheds.

The work was an article, rather than a book, which counts for it in my view. It was called “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” surely a worthy cause. The author was Charles S. Peirce, a quirky, virtually unemployable polymath who lived in the spirit of backyard tinkerers.

Peirce says we think to form beliefs.

A belief has three features:

• We are aware of it. (A belief is not subconscious.)

• A belief appeases the irritation of doubt. (We form beliefs to assuage doubts.)

• If a belief is established, it’s a rule of action. (If we really have belief about x, when act on it when x comes up. If I believe there are mosquitoes in the backyard, I will act on that belief by applying bug spray.)

I have struggled to come up with an account of belief — to give an adequate notion of what we mean by that word. As you can see, Peirce doesn’t blink.

This pragmatic account has some real advantages. If you’re interested in philosophy as an academic subject, there are new books out about how American pragmatists influenced British thinkers such as Frank Ramsay and Wittgenstein. But the advantage to me, a backyard-shed tinkerer with philosophical concepts, is that it leaves enormous room for having no belief at all.

Curiosity seems to be part of my character. I’m interested in and curious about a great many things. But the older I get, the more I learn about the cosmos, the more I realize that I have failed to scratch the surface. On a great many matters — matters that are obviously important — I simply don’t know enough to have formed any rule of action at all. Or, as Peirce would say, I don’t have any belief at all.

Paine's claim about government and religion

 A footnote to yesterday’s note Thomas Paine, again quoting from Common Sense:

As to religion, I hold it to be the indispensible duty of all government to protect all conscientious professors thereof, and I know of no other business which government hath to do therewith.

What we want is universal protection, for every individual, against the views of others, whatever they might be. At the time, a lot of people were infuriated by the idea that government did not just protect — it promoted the agenda of one particular flavor of religion.

That anger seems quaint today. Some of the same religious groups that once were persecuted by government are now seeking to use government to advance their agendas.

Marking the Days: Chekhov and Paine

 Today’s a two-star date on my calendar of literary heroes. It’s a date that also points to the arbitrariness of time.

Anton Chekhov, patron saint of short-story writers, was born on Jan. 29, 1860 in Taganrog, Russia. That’s the New Style date; the Old Style was Jan. 17. Thomas Paine, patron saint of American pamphleteers, was born on Jan. 29, 1737 in Thetford, England. That’s the Old Style date; it converts to Feb. 9 on the current calendar.

I won’t pretend I can sort that out for you and justify why I’m thinking about them both today. I just am.

There are many reasons for people who love short stories and writing to love Chekhov. Here’s one: I like to imagine that I am a sensitive man who is disposed to treat women well. But I rarely read Chekhov without being convicted of the casual cruelty with which men treat women. I think if boys were required to read Chekhov as part of their education, we might live in a better world.

That’s an important reason to like Chekhov. But, as a former newspaperman, I’d love him just for this:

“The word newspaper-writer means, at the very least, a scoundrel. I am one of them; I work with them: I shake hands with them: I’m even told I’ve begun to look like one. But I shan’t die as one.”

Paine, like many of my heroes, was a horribly flawed human being who did something extraordinary. His pamphlet Common Sense was a pivotal event in the American Revolution.

Those fighting for independence came close to losing the war. Many North Americans were loyal to the crown and mother country. Many honest, intelligent people thought the war was a bad idea.

Paine changed public opinion. His argument then is so far from the prevailing views of the country today it’s hard to grasp. His basic argument was that, if we trusted each other, we Americans could make something better of ourselves.

“Suspicion is the companion of mean souls,” he said. We should trust each other to hold up our ends of the bargain. We should build a constitution to “support the right of every separate part, whether of religion, personal freedom, or property.”

Today, when we are suspicious of experts, all minorities and members of other political parties, and we can find a conspiracy theory to erode trust in every national institution, Paine seems badly out of fashion. But he got his finger on what could make the American people great, and for a brief moment, the American people believed that message, and so believed in themselves.

• Sources: Anton Chekhov, Early Short Stories: 1883-1888; New York: The Modern Library, 1999.

Thomas Paine, Collected Writings; New York: Library of America, 1984.

Sherwood Anderson’s “Paper Pills”

 I made a note recently about Sherwood Anderson, and I can’t move on without mentioning his remarkable story about a country doctor. 

Dr. Reefy wore a linen duster around the office. He put scraps of paper into the huge pockets. The paper gradually rolled into balls — little paper pills — and the doctor would sometimes throw them at his only friend, a nurseryman named John Spaniard.

Reefy had been a lonely sort when a pretty girl who’d inherited a farm suddenly married him. She died within a year, leaving the doctor well off.

This is the story of how the young woman, never named, suddenly had suitors and how she went to the doctor when she got pregnant.

On those scraps of paper that Dr. Reefy put into his pockets were “thoughts, end of thoughts, beginnings of thoughts.” 

“One by one, the mind of Dr. Reefy had made the thoughts.”

Perhaps the young woman should have run for the hills. Instead, she wanted to stay.

An illness ended the pregnancy, and a second illness ended her life.

One of the themes in this story involves the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards of Anderson’s imaginary town of Winesburg, Ohio. These apples aren’t much to look at, but they are sweet.

Marking the day: Mozart

 With respect to St. John, the great revelation for me was Mozart.

He’s one of the musicians who invaded my calendar of literary heroes. He was born on Jan. 27, 1756 in Salzburg, Austria.

There is so much to love. When I was a young man, I listened to his clarinet concerto and horn concertos over and again. Then I listened to the quartets for horn and for clarinet.

I started listening to Mozart’s works for piano later. Jim Svejda, the host of a wonderful program on orchestral music on KUSC-FM in Los Angeles, said the way to get the measure of Mozart is to listen to his piano concertos. You can get a sense of Mozart’s development, starting at the beginning and on to the tragically early end.

I love the slow movement of Piano No. 21. On most days, I’d say that’s my favorite. On others, I’m lost in No. 23. When someone says “European,” the connotation of that word is the slow movement of No. 23.

After the splash

 After the splash, a squirrel scrambled out of the creek and up a 6-foot wall, concrete sculpted to look like the stone of an old Spanish fort. The squirrel was soaking wet after his dip in Zarzamora Creek.

I have spent some time in nature. But I’d never seen that.

I don’t know whether the squirrel dived or fell. I have seen squirrels miss a limb high in a tree and fall to the ground. That’s a tricky philosophical issue: Did that squirrel make a mistake? We’re quick to get into the minds of other species without really knowing much about what kinds of minds they have.

I saw the splash, but not what went before. I was expecting to see a kingfisher rise from the water. I was not expecting the squirrel.

Marking the day: Virginia Woolf

 Yes, of course, Virginia Woof is on the list of literary heroes.

I like her essays. And more than any one essay, I like her notion that, collectively, we common readers — those of us who read for pleasure — have a say in the literature. What we like and argue for counts in some small way. Scholars will keep Shakespeare alive to generations of new students. But there are also common readers who will read lesser-known writers, will love them, and keep their books in print.

If you are looking for a place to start: The Common Reader, published in two series, collects many of her essays on literature. Of her fiction, I like To the Lighthouse.

She was born Jan. 25, 1882, in London.

Sherwood Anderson’s ‘The Untold Lie’

 If there’s magic in fiction, it’s this: Writers can get at notions in fiction that plodding essay writers like me have a hard time reaching.

I think that one of the obvious — and thus overlooked — aspects of being human is a sense of place. Some of us love seashores, while others love the hills. But all of us have some capacity to appreciate a place.

And those who love a place can sometimes be driven a little crazy by it.

Sherwood Anderson’s story “The Untold Lie” is about two farm hands. Hal, who is 22, has gotten his girlfriend pregnant, and suspects something similar happened to Ray, who is about 50. Ray once had dreams of going west as a young man, even going to sea. But he stayed on a farm as a hired hand, supporting his wife and children.

Hal’s blunt question: Is it worth it?

These men have worked side by side without really knowing each other. And then, a moment where honesty is called for — honesty that’s beyond the normal boundaries.

Is it worth it?

Ray, to his surprise, couldn’t tell Hal. He knows what he’s supposed to say, but can’t bring himself to say it.

Later, Ray’s wife sends him into town on an errand. It’s a chance for Ray to meet Hal in town and tell him what’s on his mind.

It was just growing dark and the scene before him was lovely. All the low hills were washed with color and even the little clusters of bushes in the corners by the fences were alive with beauty. The whole world seemed to Ray Pearson to have become alive with something just as he and Hal had suddenly become alive when they stood in the cornfield staring into each other’s eyes.

The beauty of the place made Ray disoriented, just as a moment of unexpected honesty with another human being had made him feel strange, almost lost.

A little parable about how news is made

 The Express-News has been covering a running story about funding for the arts in San Antonio. This is a big deal.

I live on the West Side, in a neighborhood that might be the poorest in the city. But this area is rich in public art, especially murals. Some are publicly funded.

This city, despite its poverty, is beautiful in a way that many wealthier cities are not.

The policy seems to be that about 1 percent of any bond issue goes to art. City voters are being asked to approve another bond issue.

Funding mechanisms are often complicated, and there’s been a move, given the shortage of affordable housing, to exempt housing projects from that 1 percent “tithe.” Fewer art projects would mean that more housing units could be built.

A group of artists spoke against cuts to funding for public art. We’ve had a spirited debate, in print, about the value of art and what it means to the city.

All that public concern is healthy. But there’s a problem with the debate:

As far as I can tell, funding for the arts from the 2017 bond issue amounted to $8.5 million, while funding for the arts from the proposed bond issue should be $13.2 million.

The debate entails a conceptual problem. The idea of a “cut” is not a helpful way of looking at this picture.

There is still room for a productive debate about funding for public art in this community. But it’s not the debate we’re having.

I’m interested because I spent my working life as a newspaper reporter and editor. I was interested in the affairs of my community, far more than in the affairs of this state, the nation or the larger world. And, often, when you begin looking into these problems at a community level you find problems like this.

Honest people misunderstand. They don’t have a clear picture. They think one thing is about to happen, and are simply mistaken. Or the possible consequences are a lot more complicated than anyone on social media has managed to convey.

How you sort out these misunderstandings is vital. If you suggest that one side of the debate is mentally challenged or disturbed, you have different kinds of debates in the future. If you can sort out the misunderstandings and keep people engaged in public affairs without making them feel like fools or enraging them, you can keep a wide spectrum of people with different views involved in the commonweal.

That’s a valuable asset in any community. And, as goes the community, so goes the state, the nation, the world.

The Colton Principle of writing

 If you haven’t heard of it, here it is: “That writer does the most who gives his reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time.”

It’s from Charles Caleb Colton’s Lacon: or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those Who Think, published in 1820.

Colton was an odd duck: a vicar who ran up gambling debts, who won a fortune in France when he was winning but who had to disappear to America for a couple of years when he wasn’t. An odd man, but a sound principle.

It reminds me of Thoreau’s famous Theory of Cost, that the cost of a thing is how much of your life you have to give up laboring to get it.

Scholars who have to read eight hours to get to a bit of useful knowledge might well think they’ve paid too much.

Another similar idea: When Twitter arrived, Umberto Eco remarked that the new technology showed it was possible to ramble in 140 characters.

• Source: James Geary, Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists; New York: Bloomsbury, 2007.

Reading and appreciating the short short

 Yesterday’s note was about Yukio Mishima’s short story “Swaddling Clothes.”

Decades ago, Irving Howe and his wife, Ilana Wiener Howe, put together an anthology after reading it.

One editor told the other about the story. Both agreed it was wonderful. They wondered if they were onto a subgenre of the short story — the short short. They wondered if they could find other specimens of condensed, explosive stories, enough to make a little book.

Their anthology has 38.

Irving Howe, in the introduction to the collection, says the typical short story is 3,000 to 8,000 words.

The typical short short, by contrast, is 1,500 words. At most, it’s 2,500.

I’m a slow reader. But I can get lost in one of these stories and return to the real world in less time than it’d take to watch a TV comedy.

I’m curious what it would be like to read one a day, in lieu of a dose of mindless TV or scrolling.

You might see some more notes on this topic in the next month or so.

• Source: Short Shorts: An Anthology of the Shortest Stories, ed. by Irving Howe and Ilana Wiener Howe; New York: Bantam Books, 1983.

Mishima's haunting masterpiece, 'Swaddling Clothes'

 When I was a teenager, I read newspaper accounts of the ritual suicide of the writer Yukio Mishima after he his bizarre, horrific attempt to overthrow the government of Japan. Later, I read his short story “Swaddling Clothes.”

Warning: If you haven’t read the story and think you might, stop here. This note is full of spoilers.

The story is narrated by Toshiko, a young wife who is put off because she’s been put in a cab by her husband, an actor, after dinner with friends at a restaurant.

This is one of the great early lines in any story: “And yet he must have known how she dreaded going back to their house, unhomely with its Western-style furniture and with the bloodstains still showing on the floor.”

Ah, those bloodstains.

Toshiko’s husband had regaled the table with a story of “the incident.”

The couple had hired a nurse for their son. The woman had squatted on the floor and given birth to a boy.

Toshiko was shocked. Her husband wasn’t. His concern was to save the good carpet.

A doctor was summoned, but the circumstances of the birth were such that the doctor just wrapped the baby in bloody newspapers and went on.

Toshiko was overwhelmed by the sordidness of the event: a child, born out of wedlock, born on a floor, wrapped in newspapers. She couldn’t get it out of her mind that the baby’s birth was shameful, so debasing, that it would ruin his life.

She imagined telling the baby when he grew up and became curious about how he came into the world. But she was so sure his life would end badly she imagined him growing up to be a criminal, the kind who might kill her own son, perhaps even her.

She was the only person who’d seen the child wrapped in newspapers. She quickly wrapped him in flannel.

Toshiko rode toward home in the cab. Though it was 10 p.m., she was upset and got out to walk through a park. She saw a young homeless man sleeping on a bench. She imagined that would be what the unfortunate baby would look like in 20 years.

She was fascinated by the young man and got too close to him. He awoke and grabbed her.

She wasn’t frightened or alarmed. All that was foreseeable. The only surprise was that the 20 years had passed in a flash.

To me, a good story gets at the way human beings think. Sometimes, our thoughts are just bizarre, even horrific.

A poet describes winter in San Antonio

We are bracing for another cold snap, lows in the 20s for two straight days. We’ll cover plants and the washtub “pond,” where the mosquito fish live. I’ll tend the bird feeder before the norther hits. I promise.

It’s possible to work up a sweat while making such preparations. Wednesday’s high was 76 degrees.

The poet Sidney Lanier, seeking relief from consumption, visited San Antonio in the winter of 1872-3. San Antonians named a high school after him, a move that hasn’t worn well. Lanier, a Confederate veteran, was 30 when he came to town. Tuberculosis would kill him before he turned 40.

Lanier came to mind because of his remark about winter in San Antonio: “The thermometer, the barometer, the vane, the hygrometer, oscillate so rapidly, so lawlessly, and through so wide a meteorological range, that the climate is simply indescribable.”

I'm afraid it's true.

More common plants in the public spaces

 Yesterday, I mentioned horseherb, Calyptocarpus vials. Also in the public lawn are:

• Henbit, Lamium amplexicaule. It has a square stem with circular leaves attached directly to it. It looks like a series of plates, stacked on a single stem — reminding me of the kind of tray on which high tea is served. In early spring, when the area suddenly becomes green, you can see its delicate purple flowers poking through the clover. The hunter-gatherers, ancient and New Age, value it for its vitamins and antioxidants. In Texas, this plant is sometimes called deadnettle, although some people insist that common name should be reserved for other species.

• Santa Maria, Parthenium hysterophorus. It’s in the aster family. It grows on the baked, parched caliche when there is no rainfall. The University of Texas has a photo of it growing through asphalt. A lot of people around here call it poverty weed. But another plant, Baccharis neglecta, is known as poverty weed or Roosevelt weed. In late January, the Santa Maria is vigorous, but no pretty white flowers yet.

You can find all three species in parks all over town.

The horticulturists say that San Antonio has 360 growing days a year, meaning that the temperature favors plant growth almost every day. This week, we’re supposed to have two nights where temperatures drop into the 20s. But afternoon highs are reaching 70 some days. Plants trying to bud are burned by frost.

About a month from now, the tug-of-war between hot and cold will be decided, and the ground will become impossibly green, almost overnight, with clover. San Antonio will look like Ireland for a bit.

A vote for the most overlooked species

 If a person were looking at this beautiful stretch of Zarzamora Creek, what would he or she see?

The great white egrets are hard to miss. So are the bald cypress and cattails.

But what species would the observer most likely miss? What would be most likely overlooked?

My guess is horseherb, Calyptocarpus vialis. It’s also known as straggler daisy, hierba del caballo and lawnflower. It’s easy to overlook because it’s everywhere. It’s the groundcover around here. It even grows in the deep shade and caliche of the backyard.

It’s a perennial herb, semi-evergreen, in Asteraceae. It has opposite, simple, deltoid leaves that are serrate. The Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center says the yellow auxiliary flowers bloom March to November — year-round without frost.

I saw the lovely little flowers at Christmas, but not since the frost.

And so, as we walked along the creek, the wind whipping and a norther coming, I was looking at stands of horseherb, wondering how quickly they’d flower after that frost.

The walk along the creek is partly a check on things such as horseherb, but it’s also a check on my psyche — my self, soul, spirit or whatever-it-is. The check is something simple, like checking the dipstick on the truck to see whether it has enough oil.

If I walk along the creek and don’t come home wondering about at least one thing, something’s wrong. And the problem is not with the environment, but with me.

Jim Harrison’s poem “Debtors” was featured on The Writer’s Almanac” the other day. The poem’s a meditation about the notion of “borrowed time.”

We don’t really have time. We have only the moment. The rest is either planning or anxiety or some kind of fidgeting about the future, or memories, which is all we have of the past.

The poet remembered holding the hand of his dying grandfather, and now his grandfather’s four sons are also gone — out of borrowed time. The poet thinks of his own borrowed time — and suddenly this pops up:

What is lovelier than a creek or riverine thicket?
Say it is an unknown benefactor who gave us
birds and Mozart, the mystery of trees and water
and all living things borrowing time.
Would I still love the creek if I lasted forever?

It’s the same idea as my almost-daily check on the fluid levels in my psyche. These walks along the creek won’t last forever, so I try to see what I can while I can. If I come back empty handed, well, it might be time to check my engine.

Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

 I have a small personal footnote on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the national hero who is being honored today.

I was 12, living in Memphis, Tenn., when Dr. King was assassinated. My family had a guest in the house that day. My parents, focused on company, had turned off the radio and TV. They might have unplugged the phone.

The next morning, I saw tanks of the Tennessee National Guard headed down Central Avenue, in front of our house. They were going downtown. I could see smoke on the skyline.

I suspected, as only a 12 year-old-boy can suspect, that the world I had grown up in was not going to be the world I would live in as a man. I understood little then, but I knew that Black people were treated unjustly, and that the injustice was widespread. I didn’t understand what “systemic” meant then, but I could see that racism was evil. I could also see there were no extenuating circumstances, nothing that could make that injustice acceptable. 

Our country has changed since 1968, but not enough.

 

A doubleheader for heroes

 It’s a doubleheader in my pantheon of heroes: Ben Franklin was born on this day in 1706 in Boston, and the poet William Stafford was born in 1914 in Hutchinson, Kansas.

I think Stafford is fascinating. He was a conscientious objector when that was an almost untenable identity. It was the day when the Greatest Generation went off to fight the evil of Nazism. It was a hard time to take a stand against violence of any kind.

Stafford’s voice is against the grain of our culture, which is probably why I think it’s indispensable. In my mind, an anthology of American literature that doesn’t include him is incomplete.

If you’re curious, I have an essay on him at hebertaylor.com.

Ben Franklin would be on my list of heroes if he’d written nothing besides the Autobiography.

My favorite part is the story of how he tried to improve himself as a young man. He made a list of the virtues and concocted a system of self-examinations to hold himself accountable. He made a grid and charted his progress daily.

The whole thing was an experiment on the psyche or self — to see whether by paying attention he could improve himself. Of course, he could not, which makes me feel mildly better about my own failures.

Anyone who reads him will think twice about the whole idea of self-improvement. I think Ben’s a godfather to a lot of people who just like to sit and think.

What happens to hawks when the students are away?

 A red-tail hawk was hunting along the part of Zarzamora Creek that runs by Our Lady of the Lake University. That stretch of the creek is called Elmendorf Lake. Like many lakes in Texas, it’s just a wide spot in a waterway.

The students aren’t back yet. The omicron variant has delayed classes, and students are being taught online. I’ve been wondering what effect the pandemic has on the hawks.

I once talked to a biology professor who said the campus was infested with raptors. They are there because of the rodents, who are there because of the students.

Humans create garbage — even those who are ecologically aware. The campus is remarkably free of litter. But I’ve seen hawks diving into the garbage bins and checking the roofs of dorms.

E.O. Wilson, the biologist who is considered a hero in these notes, used to argue for a broader view of ecology. We consider the nests of hawks and the dens of coyotes part of the natural world. Why not the houses of humans? Why don’t we study cities and suburbs when we study biology? Or university campuses?

Does a disruption in the population of students affect other populations? 

I’ve been trying to think about how a student could get that question into measurable form. But I’ve seen fewer hawks this winter and can’t help but wonder.

Needed: a better tool for studying nature

 Francis Bacon again: “The human understanding, owing to its own peculiar nature, easily supposes more order and regularity in things than it finds.”

I see cypress trees changing colors and shedding needles and want to know what schedule they’re on. But I’ve found individual trees in January that are brown, others that are bare and still others that are green.

I see cardinals quarreling and want to make generalizations about territorial behavior. But one day two males are fighting like Vikings and the next they are sitting quietly on the same limb.

I see ducks that ride deep in the water, like buffleheads, and think that they leave longer wakes than those that ride high in the water, like mallards. Do I imagine that, or is it so?

Bacon keeps pointing out that we comprehend the world with the only instrument we have, and it’s flawed. “And though there be many singular things in nature, yet it (human understanding) devises for them parallels and analogies and relatives which do not exist.”

A better writer on the lesson from the swan

 Here's yesterday’s note on the swan, better stated: “For what a man had rather were true, that he more readily believes.”

That’s Francis Bacon talking. The sentence is from Novum Organum, published in 1620. I’m only 402 years behind on this story.

The swan inspired some creative thought

 The swan that lives on Zarzamora Creek was missing for a couple of days.

The Wise Woman was concerned.

A cold snap had moved through, and I spoke reassuringly about how the swan had denned up in the cattails and rushes to get out of the cold.

I was surprisingly creative. I had all kinds of theories about what could have happened to the swan. My inspiration, I suspect, was the knowledge that a hungry dog — perhaps a hungry human — had found this big tame bird an easy target.

But the swan was back on the creek Wednesday. He was gliding along on still water.

The Wise Woman was happy to see him, and so was I. But I’m a little surprised at how easy it was to think of reasons to believe what I wanted to believe, and how hard it was to consider possibilities I didn’t like.

Reznikoff: ‘By the Well of Living and Seeing’

 I think the poet Charles Reznikoff is a neglected master. There’s a section in Part II of this long poem that reads like scripture to me.

During the war, the poet stopped at a fruit stand in New York. The old Italian shopkeeper’s son had left for the front. The old man was in agony, and the poet tried to comfort him.

After the war, the poet found himself at the same fruit stand. He asked the seller about his son.

The old man said his son had come through just fine. As the fruit seller told the story, he removed a damaged apple from the poet’s sack and replaced it with a good one. He removed a small apple and replaced it with a larger one.

If you’re looking for a writing lesson: It’s sometimes possible to show what can hardly be told.

If you’re looking for an ethics lesson: We never know when we are going to encounter a person who is at the breaking point, a person who will find healing in a small bit of simple, civil conversation.

Collecting items for an imaginary exhibition

 I enjoyed the piece in The New York Times about the Sherlock Homes exhibit at the Grolier Club.

It’s one of those “the story of x in y objects” exhibits: Sherlock Holmes in 221 objects. The Grolier Club is for bibliophiles, so the objects are books, letters, manuscripts — that sort of thing.

In my mind, an even better exhibit would be images of the things that made that character so memorable. The images were all in A. Conan Doyle’s imagination. Now they’re in mine — and perhaps in yours.

For a start, here are three objects for an imaginary exhibition on Sherlock Holmes and His Friend Dr. John Watson:

• A dressing gown. Since I constantly lose pens, notecards, books, paper and phones, a robe with deep pockets has an appeal. Holmes either had several or, more probably, one that kept changing colors, as Doyle couldn’t remember what color he’d mentioned in the last story. Who knows, maybe Holmes had a bunch: blue, purple, mouse-colored.

• A Persian slipper with shag tobacco in the toe. Holmes had tobacco pouches scattered around the mantel. But he apparently kept losing them, and the Persian slipper, which he stuffed in the coalscuttle, was the place to go. Dr. Watson smoked Ship’s and Arcadia brands. I’m not sure about Holmes. Maybe the exhibition will enlighten.

• Dr. Watson’s service revolver. When the situation got tense, Holmes would ask Watson to come along and to put his revolver in his coat pocket. The stories never say what kind of pistol it was. We know that Watson served in the Second Afghan War and that his army career ended with a wound at Maiwand in 1880. Gun aficionados have proposed several options. This is a chance to settle a debate.

I’d also like to know what kind of jackknife Holmes used to pin his unanswered correspondence to the mantel. And I’d like to look at the scrapbooks — also called year-books, portfolios and journals — that held the records of Holmes’s cases. If you want to play along in this imaginary collection, please drop a note in the comments or email me at hebertaylor3@gmail.com.

• Source: The Times article is here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/07/arts/design/sherlock-holmes-exhibition-grolier.html?referringSource=articleShare

A personal word of the year

 I didn’t know I could have my own word of the year: a personal one, one of my own choosing.

You can learn such things from the reading the newspapers.

We’re not talking about the language as a whole or the country or world as a whole. So “vax” and “pandemic” and “immunity” are not what we’re after.

Tara Parker-Pope of The New York Times suggested picking one word that captures your values for the next year:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/06/well/mind/word-of-year-2022.html?referringSource=articleShare

She’s not looking for a resolution, but rather an aspiration.

Mine word is “equanimity.”

If you have one, welcome guest, please leave it in comments. 

The rule of thumb against rules of thumb

I’ve included a few bits of advice on writing, disguised as rules of thumb, in these notes, so I ought to include a word from Russell Edson as an antidote.

Edson, known for his prose poems, said: “The best advice I can give is to ignore advice. Life is just too short to be distracted by the opinions of others. The main thing is to get going with your work however you see it. If you can’t do it on your own, it’s probably something that’s not worth your doing. The beginning writer has only to write to find his art. It’s not a matter of talent. We’re all talented. Desire and patience takes us where we want to go.”

There are two schools of thought: (1) Ignore all advice. (2) Listen to all the advice you can get.

It's a contradiction, of course, but I’m not about to give up on either school.

The best approaches to some of the really good things in life — including writing — involve paradoxes. Or so it seems to me. 

• Source: I found Edson's remark in an interview with Peter Johnson, “The Art of the Prose Poem”; The Prose Poem: An International Journal, Vol. 8, 1999.

Susan Sontag's theory of lists

 I’ve been thinking about lists, so Susan Sontag came to mind.

In January 2019, Emily Temple offered a free self-improvement idea to start the year. Her idea: You could become Susan Sontag. Sontag’s lists were so exhaustive that you could basically read all the books she read, listen to all her music, see all the art she saw, think all her thoughts.

Sontag said that a list is a way of creating or perceiving value. It’s the same impulse we have when taking note (or making a note) of something. It’s the same impulse we have when we collect things. We leave a rock on the ground but pick up an arrowhead. When we show interest, we assert value.

Temple compiled “a list of the lists of a great thinker.” Sontag listed beliefs, things she enjoyed, faults, likes and dislikes, do’s and don’ts. Under her heading “Best Films,” she listed 228 titles. (I found that astonishing. My interest in films would barely generate a list of 10.)

But let’s not lose the main point: Making a list can be a kind of self-improvement. To me, a reading list might be the basic form of self-improvement.

• Source: Emily Temple, “How to Live Like Susan Sontag,” Literary Hub, Jan. 16, 2019

Zora Neale Hurston's "Turpentine"

 Zora Neale Hurston’s essay “Turpentine” is a small wonder.

She went to a turpentine camp in Florida in 1939 when she was working for the Work Projects Administration. She was an anthropologist as well as a writer, and you can hear the voice of a turpentine worker singing on this 5-minute audio clip from the Florida Humanities Audio Archive:

https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/fhc_audio/97/

She recorded workers in the field and wrote descriptions of how the crews went about their work.

The men specialized as chippers, pullers and dippers, and there was a woodchopper along to supply firewood for the still, where the gum from the pines was refined. Chippers notched the trees to let the gum run into pails or cans. The notches dried up after a couple of years, and pullers then notched the trees higher on the trunk. Dippers scraped the gum out of the pails and collected it for the still.

It was rough work, and turpentine camps were known as rough places. Hurston mentions that the men would unwind in a jook, or juke joint. She expanded on that theme in her fiction.

I’m interested in all this because turpentine camps were once all over the woods of East Texas. The camps were rough, and the men who worked them were poor. Few people thought to take note of what their life was like. Fewer still made a record of it. I’m glad Hurston did.

And, yes, this is another date on my list of heroes. Hurston was born on this day, Jan. 7, in 1891 in Notasulga, Ala. It’s west of Auburn and north of Tuskegee.

The poet Mary Oliver's list

As Umberto Eco, the subject of yesterday’s note, pointed out, lists can be important in several ways.

I’ve heard several writers say they are a kind of spiritual exercise. Mary Oliver’s list might be an example.

When she was young, Oliver wanted to be a poet. She knew writers usually don’t make a lot of money. So she made a list of all that she would have to do without. She was, in all probability, looking at a life spent in rented rooms instead of a house, of riding buses instead of driving a car. It was sobering list of things she would probably have to give up. She gave them a last look and said goodbye.

A philosopher might ask what, exactly, she was giving up. Just things? Her desire for things? 

Her account reminds me of the parable in the gospel of Matthew:

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.

You make the list to find out what matters. The list helps you to see the alternatives clearly. But sometimes there is one thing that stands above the others. When your priorities are clear, you know what to do.

For Oliver, the treasure — the thing of real value — was poetry. She took some interesting steps to secure it.

She avoided interesting jobs. She made a clear distinction between her own creative work and what she did to pay the bills. She got up early — 4:30 a.m. seemed to be her hour — and would write until she had to go to work. Her first hours were the best, and she spent them writing. She assured her employers that they always got her second-best effort of the day.

Umberto Eco and the importance of the list

 Long ago, Umberto Eco got me to thinking about the importance of lists.

It’s a basic human activity. Human beings make lists.

In his essay “My Lists,” Eco made a distinction between poetic and practical lists. We all know about practical lists and the satisfaction that comes from checking off the last item at the grocery store. Practical lists are finite. But poetic lists are open. They suggest infinity.

Eco cites Wisława Szymborkska’s poem “Possibilities” as an example:

I prefer movies.

I prefer cats …

I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.

I prefer myself liking people

to myself loving mankind.

It’s close to magic: A finite person has infinite possibilities in terms of personality, and is thus infinitely interesting.

There are famous lists in literature: The catalog of ships in Homer’s Iliad, the genealogies in the Bible.

All this is interesting to a writer because each of us collects items for a list from a point of view. If you want your fictional character to stand out — that is, be distinct — start with a list of his or her preferences.

When I was a boy, my baseball card collection was heavy on Cardinals. My cousin’s favored Giants. It was a small but telling difference in the way we viewed the world.

And of course the things we collect, and therefor list, varies. Some children collect baseball cards. Others collect bugs, and still others collect stories. What the child chooses to include and exclude tells a tale. It’s what interests him. It’s what moves her.

I mentioned (Dec. 31) that I sometimes remember to mark the days of writers and artists who have influenced me. Perhaps you guessed that this note marks the birthday of one my saints.

Umberto Eco was born on Jan. 5, 1932 in Alessandria, Italy. The man who wondered why Homer was considered a creative writer while Plato was not always had interesting things to say.

Those strange coyotes are in the news again

The New York Times ran a story about the coyotes of Galveston Island, some of which have a lot of DNA from red wolves. Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine and The Atlantic ran similar stories a couple of years ago.

The last of the red wolves in Texas disappeared around 1980.

I am thrilled and dismayed to see these hybrid canines in the news.

Thrilled, that the Galveston canines are being studied.

Dismayed, that similar studies haven’t been done on coyotes in other isolated areas.

Decades ago, I walked the woods of East Texas, and I’ve seen big coyotes — bigger than those on Galveston Island — that have red in their coats. Most were near the Upland Island Wilderness, south of Zavalla in Angelina County.

The strange coyotes of Galveston deserve the attention of scientists. But there are stranger specimens still in this state.

How to describe a butterfly migration

 On New Year’s Day, the garden was a filled with butterflies. We are used to seeing butterflies year-round. But in autumn, we stopped often to watch when the Monarchs came through, headed to Mexico.

Yesterday’s note was about Ted Kooser’s Local Wonders. Here’s his description of what it’s like:

Surely nobody really believes these frivolous fliers can make it all the way to the south before the first frost. Their migration is altogether casual. Monarchs stroll in the air. It takes them a whole day to cross one forty-acre field of beans because they go forward and back, up and down, side to side, alighting here and there like the hands of shoppers above a table of sale merchandise, not knowing quite what to touch next.

When the Monarchs come through, headed north, I hope I remember to look that passage up, just to savor it again.

A magnificent book tells what home is like

 I think Ted Kooser’s Local Wonders is a magnificent book.

Jim Harrison, who was a friend of Kooser’s, did too. “The quietest magnificent book I’ve ever read,” Harrison said.

I like a certain kind of book, and this is it. It will never make a best-seller list. It will always be on the verge of being forgotten. But it will always have a few readers who are advocates, who will mention it, argue for it, urge its merits on their friends.

I think Local Wonders is better than anything on the best-seller list. And I think it’s an excellent model for writers. I think almost everyone should write a book like this.

The book’s subtitle is Seasons in the Bohemian Alps. Kooser, a former poet laureate, wrote about his home in southeast Nebraska. The “alps” are foothills, hardly 100 feet high. They area was settled by Czechs, then known as Bohemians, in the 1850s.

The Czechs of Nebraska, like the Czechs of Texas, left an oversize footprint on the culture. Many immigrants were professional or skilled workers who were fleeing the revolutions (and failed revolutions) of the day. Many were well educated. Some were freethinkers. They had to learn to farm.

Kooser wrote a book telling us what his home is like, how the Bohemian Alps came to be settled and what it’s like to live there today.

The book is made up of 121 short essays. The length of each varies considerably. The shortest is a short paragraph. The longest probably tops 2,000 words. The average, to my eye, is a bit over 500 words.

Topics include the ritual of cleaning sheds, putting up Christmas decorations and plowing snow. He writes of the landmarks, including the grave of a young man who died on the prairie, headed west, before the Civil War, and of a single building in a tiny town that is home to a beauty parlor and a taxidermy shop.

As the subtitle suggests, these essays are divided by the seasons. You’ll read about plum blossoms in the section on spring and about deer season in the section on autumn.

The short essay on solitude, a key feature of the alps, points out that Nebraska has only three real cities. “The rest of the state is a vast grassy preserve set aside for those of us who like to be left alone.”

That’s Kooser’s voice, and he’s talking about the place he knows best: home.

If you can awaken

inside the familiar

and discover it now

you need never

leave home.

I wish everyone would write this book, if only for their friends and children.

• Source: Ted Kooser, Local Wonders; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Happy New Year!

 You can’t mark a New Year without thinking about the passage of time. I like to hear what the poets have to say.

In his poem “Heart of the Clock,” Charles Reznikoff says:

Now the sky begins to turn upon its hub—

the sun; each leaf revolves upon its stem;

now the plague of watches and of clocks nicks away

the day—

You can use measurements as great as the constellations and as small as parlor clocks. But however you measure it, time bleeds away, and so

our lives are leaking from the places,

and the day’s brightness dwindles into stars.

That last line was engraved on Reznikoff’s grave.

I like thinking that a man who was so different from me left something behind that I can use. His poems are a little starlight for me, especially on dark nights.

Way back in 2021 (actually last month, on three successive days, Dec. 4-6), I mentioned Reznikoff as a poet worth reading. If I were going to make a list of my Top 10 poets, he’d be there.