Imagining another form of life

 Robert Kanigel’s book on Milman Parry and the oral transmission of epic poems has many wonders, including a short section on Ernest Renan’s view of “primitive” literature.

Renan said we can’t understand it “unless we enter the personal and moral life of the people who made it; unless we place ourselves at the point of humanity which was theirs, so that we see and feel as they saw and felt; unless we watch them live, or better, unless for a moment we live with them.”

Compare this with two of Wittgenstein’s famous remarks:

• “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”

• “And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.”

Today we have a form of life in which writers write. What they make is their property. Taking the work of others without attribution is plagiarism.

Other peoples in other times and places have had a form of life in which poets sing songs. The myths they sing of are common goods. Each singer is free to interpret the common legends — within the bounds of that form of life.

One example of boundaries: The Greeks did not think of their gods as moral examples. The gods murdered, raped, connived, gossiped and did other despicable things. But if you look at statues and paintings of Athena, you will never find a hint of violent emotion on her face. There could not be any rage or horror in the countenance of a goddess whose essence was balanced and rational.

Individual emotion is essence of personality in the art and literature of our form of life.

In the ancient Greeks’ form of life, that just wasn’t within the realm of possibility for some of the characters in their stories.

• Sources: Robert Kanigel, Hearing Homer’s Song; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021, p. 101. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations; Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, N.D. The first quotation is in Part II, p. 223. The second is in Part I, paragraph 19.

The script changes as it's handed down

 One of the things that Milman Parry and his colleagues found in investigating the oral transmission of poems is that the poems change with each telling. Sometimes the change is barely discernible. Sometimes it’s dramatic.

In one telling, a singer might abbreviate an entire scene to a single line. Or, inspiration taking hold, he might expand a single line into a long section.

In one sense, an orally transmitted poem is the property of an entire people, a national epic. But while the singer is performing, the poem is all his.

The versions of these epics are countless.

Before the printing press, changes also occurred in the transmission of written texts. A lot of the changes were simple errors made by tired scribes.

Imagine you are a medieval monk, a native speaker of English, charged with copying an ancient Greek text. Two lines end in the same word. It’s easy to skip a line and end up with gibberish, especially if you are tired and are copying by candlelight.

I used to think that you could best see the problems by looking at the text of the New Testament. The reason is that we have so many manuscripts of it. Whereas some works of classical Greek literature might rest on a manuscript or two, we have dozens of important manuscripts with at least parts of the Greek gospels.

When you look at the problem of establishing the earliest — and presumably the most authoritative — text, you have to look at the fragments of manuscripts from all over the ancient world: Rome, Alexandria, Syria, Jerusalem. There are thousands, and some of the variations are intriguing, telling us something about the local communities that produced them and the way they saw what is now a well known story.

If you put religious notions aside, you can learn something about how texts evolve as they were passed down, generation to generation.

• Source: Robert Kanigel, Hearing Homer’s Song; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.

Kanigel: 'Hearing Homer's Song'

 Robert Kanigel’s Hearing Homer’s Song tells the story of Milman Parry, who was to Homeric studies what Darwin was to biology. Or so they say.

Before Parry it was possible to talk about Homer as a writer. Homer was a genius, of course. But he inexplicably wrote some things that wouldn’t pass anyone’s definition of genius. His famous list of ships has never been described as riveting.

After Parry, it was understood that Homer was not a writer of genius because he hadn’t written anything. The great poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were composed orally, before writing was common. The poems were transmitted orally, largely by illiterate singers. These singers changed them as they handed them down from generation to generation.

The so-called Homeric epithets put Parry on to his thesis. Athena appears almost always as “gray-eyed Athena,” and the sea is reliably “the wine-blue sea.”

As Kanigel puts it, repetition, stereotype and cliché are to be avoided in writing. But if you are reciting a poem — or listening to one — repeated lines, stereotypes and clichés help. They help both the singer and the listeners find their way.

A singer could drop in a “gray-eyed Athena” to fill out a line of dactylic hexameter. Where “Athena” or “the goddess” wouldn’t do, “gray-eyed Athena” worked.

Parry spent most of the last year of his short life in Yugoslavia, making recordings on aluminum disks of singers in isolated places. Like the singers of ancient Greece, the singers of the Balkans recited, created or re-created epic poems using memory and inspiration.

Parry’s work gets at what it is to compose. That’s interesting to me, whether we’re talking about composing an English sentence or a line of epic poetry.

I’m interested in how we know certain things about writing.

I’d say I know that Parry’s account of how the Homeric poems were composed is the correct one, although I wasn’t there. It’s possible there was person, as opposed to legend, who wrote, instead of recited, poems. It’s possible the traditional version of Homer existed, but I don’t believe it.

I think I can claim to know that Parry’s account is the correct one.

I think I can claim to know other things about writing, even though my claims are prone to error.

Consider these two sentences:

• John said the sky was blue.

• The sky was blue, John said.

In the second, the comma before the attribution isn’t optional. I’ve known writers who cannot, no matter how hard they try, see why that comma is needed when it’s not in the first sentence.

If you were, as I was, an editor in a newsroom, you could, by looking at a piece of writing, tell who wrote it. You didn’t need a byline. You could tell just by looking at the language. The language shows signs of use. And some people use language less gently than others.

My knowledge wasn’t perfect. I’d make mistakes. But I’d guess that an average editor would “guess” correctly 90 percent of the time, and an observant editor would do better. You wouldn’t want bet against those odds.

I’m interested in what we can claim to know by looking at writing. And the things that you can learn from ancient Greek texts have fascinated me since a patient professor taught me the rudiments almost 50 years ago.

And thanks to Alvin Sallee for turning me on to this book.

• Source: Robert Kanigel, Hearing Homer’s Song; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.

End of the winter storm

 We had a dusting of snow just after midnight early Tuesday morning. Somehow the Enormous Dog knew and got me up to let him out to romp.

Four days of freezing weather took out the wild asters (Genus Symphyotrichum) that had bloomed in the woods almost until Christmas. Pokeweed, phytolacca americana, still thrives.

Just before the storm hit, the Wise Woman decreed that two bird feeders would be erected and provisioned. Carolina wrens, chickadees, tufted titmice and a couple of cardinals have found the buffet.

Four deer — all female — were in the woods behind the house this morning. I watched one doze within 35 feet of the back door as the snow melted. No sign of the three-legged buck.

What writing is like

 For years, I’ve carried around a quotation from Doris Lessing that gets at the heart of what writing is like, at least for me.

The version in my notebook was a mess: at least a couple of quotes fused together, with unmarked ellipses. 

The source turned out to be  an interview with Harvey Blume, who did pieces for the Ideas section of The Boston Globe. He interviewed Lessing when she was 88.

Blume asked her how someone who became famous for The Golden Notebook could then write The Cleft, which imagines the calamitous arrival of males into a world composed solely of women.

Lessing replied:

Listen, I feel — I'm sure I've said this before but I'll say it again — there's a kind of problem between critics and writers. A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away. A critic looks at the finished product and ignores the rush of a river that went into the writing, which has nothing to do with the kind of temperate thoughts you have about it.

If you can imagine the sheer bloody pleasure of having an idea and taking it! It's one of the great pleasures in my life. My god, an idea!

For some people, having an idea and working it out is just a wonderful thing to do.

That is writing.

I’ve always been astonished that some people think that writing is sitting in front of a keyboard with a vague notion that they’d like to publish something.

That kind of thing might lead to typing. But I don’t see how it could lead to sheer bloody pleasure.

• Source: Harvey Blume, “Q&A: Doris Lessing”;  The Boston Globe, Aug. 5, 2007.

http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/qa_doris_lessing/#:~:text=If%20you%20can%20imagine%20the,My%20god%2C%20an%20idea!

The influence of gown on town

 I read Russell Jacoby’s essay “The Takeover,” wondering how two people could see the world in such different ways.

The subhead on his essay tells his story: “Self-righteous professors have spawned self-righteous students and unleashed them into the public square.”

Jacoby and many others are convinced that political ideas hatched in academia are poisoning the country.

My side of the story is that university towns need more involvement from the scholars, not less. In my experience, the real influence of university folks is more like this:

In the 1800s, Galveston, Texas was periodically ravaged by outbreaks of tropical disease. When Yellow Fever hit in 1867, about a quarter of the island’s population abandoned their homes and fled. About 15 percent of those who remained died. Can you imagine that kind of terror today?

Galveston is the home to the University of Texas’s first medical school. The professors used the emerging knowledge in their fields to improve life on the island.

For example, the scientists at the medical school were the first to understand the connection between cholera and contaminated water. They argued the controversial point that houses in the poorest and most segregated parts of town should be connected to the public sewer lines. They pointed out that sewage could go only so many places on an island and that infectious microbes really couldn’t be expected to stay in one part of town.

The professors had other suggestions for controlling other kinds of diseases. You could see those suggestions as expensive or intrusive. You could see them, I suppose, as self-righteous, a case of the learned putting ordinary folks to the outrageous public expense of extending sewer lines.

On the other hand, it’s been a long time since 15 percent of the residents died in an epidemic.

I think that a lot of smart, capable people work in our universities. But universities have become vertical institutions — silos. Typically the scholars are so focused on their work and the workings of the institutional hierarchy that they don’t get out into the broader community and apply their learning to address our common problems.

Everyone who lives in a college town — professors, retailers, folks in the trades — benefits from common goods: good schools, good management of public finances, good police work. How do you get those things?

It’s hard. But it doesn’t help if you keep some of your most gifted citizens locked in  ivory towers.

• Source: Russell Jacoby, “The Takeover”; Tablet, Dec. 19, 2022.

The plot to snow Santa

 The old man telling the story lived in an age when kids tacked stockings to the mantel, hoping for some nuts and perhaps an orange.

One Christmas Eve, this young fellow and his brother devised a scheme. Each brother tacked up his stocking — and then tacked up several others, hoping to fool Santa.

On Christmas Day, the boys found nuts and oranges in two stockings. The rest were filled with soot and switches. The brothers disposed of the switches before their parents awoke.

The Texas I grew up in had a raw sense of justice. It was primitive, almost unthinkable now, yet it was imparted to children in many ways.

George Oppen looks at deer

 Before the storm hit, the Wise Woman made me put on my coveralls and take some feed and a salt block into the woods. She’s worried about Tripod, the three-legged deer.

We watched him for hours Sunday morning. When deer eat, they sometimes nibble. But they sometimes tear into the grass, and then

The roots of it

Dangle from their mouths

Scattering earth in the strange woods.

That image is from George Oppen’s “Psalm.” Oppen, like Charles Reznikoff, is usually considered one of the Objectivist poets.

I should have thought about Oppen when I saw that magnificent buck in the woods. But I thought of Oppen when Michael Leddy, who writes at Orange Crate Art, reminded me of him, one more bit of evidence that our minds — the collection of thinking that we think we do — is more collective than we realize.

I admire the sharp images you can find in of those lines. And I admire the Objectivists for looking for those images.

Does such poetry change your life? Well, instead of thinking about the burden of lugging corn and sunflower seeds through heavy brush, I noticed that the path that Tripod and his kin had made had been trodden — but also nibbled. It was just as Oppen said as he followed

their paths

Nibbled thru the fields… .

Poetry makes a small difference in the way I see the world. A tiny difference maybe, but still a difference.

• Source: I’m still looking for a book that includes a section of George Oppen’s poems, which I hope was not lost in the move. You can find “Psalm” here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/29449/psalm-56d212ff620c5

 

George Dyer and the art of being absent

 Charles Lamb loved eccentrics. He had some remarkable friends.

One quality he marveled at was the capacity to be absent, to be so caught up in a line of thought that you are without a sense of self. It seems to me that this sense of absence has been largely lost as our notions of psychology have developed, but we still think of the absent-minded professor.

Lamb’s life was scarred by family tragedy. When he was at his lowest, he was helped by his friendship with George Dyer, a classics scholar at Cambridge. Lamb would sometimes see him in London, walking down a busy street, a Latin text in hand, oblivious to the crowds.

Here is a sketch of Dyer from Eric. G. Wilson’s biography of Lamb, quoting their contemporaries:

Dyer was once “seen in Fleet Street without his stockings, and he took off his inexpressibles to give them to a poor man who was wretchedly clad.” At a party he “took up a coal-scuttle instead of his hat, and its contents fell into his neck and down his back.” At “his own table (he) put his fingers into the mustard-pot, mistaking it for the sugar basin.” Dyer was halfway home from a dinner at Leigh Hunt’s when he realized he was only wearing one shoe. He returned to the Hunts’ after midnight to retrieve the other. He found it under the dinner table and went on his way. 

I read and take heart.

So what was Dyer thinking about when he should have been thinking of socks, shoes, hats and sugar basins? He edited a 143-volume collection of Latin classics. He wrote a biography of the religious dissenter Robert Robinson and a history of Cambridge University. He had other things on his mind.

As Lamb himself put it: “For with G.D. — to be absent from the body is sometimes (not to speak it profanely) is to be present with the Lord.”

• Sources: Eric G. Wilson, Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb; Yale University Press, 2022, p. 147. There have been several notes on this wonderful book, beginning with “A new biography of Charles Lamb,” Aug. 20, 2022. Lamb’s account of Dyer is in “Oxford in the Vacation,” Essays of Elia; New York: Dutton, Everyman’s Library, 1978, pp. 8-14.

A sketch of Coleridge, lost in thought

 I have a friend who is a spellbinding talker. He’s a professor. I’ve heard him give lectures, citing the details of several scientific papers, with no notes.

Occasionally, he closes his eyes as he talks. He moves one hand back and forth, a kind of metronome that governs the rhythm of his sentences.

Coleridge did the same thing, according to Eric G. Wilson’s biography of Charles Lamb, the English essayist.

Lamb said Coleridge once waylaid him on a  street in London, buttonholed him into the entryway of a garden and started describing a train of thought he’d been working on. Coleridge got caught up in the topic, closed his eyes and moved one hand rhythmically, keeping the other on a button on Lamb's coat.

It was fascinating, but Lamb had to get to work.

As a church bell chimed the hour, Lamb panicked, cut the button off his coat with a penknife and ran, leaving Coleridge in his reverie. Lamb claimed that he returned five hours later and found Coleridge in the same entryway, eyes closed, one hand grasping the button and the other moving rhythmically, aiding the thoughts as they came forth into the world.

A tall tale? Of course.

Lamb told it for the same reason I’m repeating it: He liked to think and he admired people who could lose themselves in thought.

• Sources: Eric G. Wilson, Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb; Yale University Press, 2022, p. 69. For more, see “A new biography of Charles Lamb,” Aug. 20, 2022.

Polgar: ‘Theory of the Café Central’

 In the recent notes on coffeehouses, I should have mentioned Alfred Polgar’s essay “Theory of the Café Central.” The café in the heart of Vienna is one of the famous coffeehouses of Europe.

Polgar was a journalist who loved the theater. He was a regular at the café before World War I brought down the Habsburg Empire. He kept up the conversation there until the Nazis forced him to flee to Prague, then Paris and finally Hollywood.

His tongue-in-cheek thesis is that the atmosphere of a real coffeehouse appeals to those who are unfit for life — people for whom daydreaming, conversing, reading and chess-playing are far greater goods than real work.

The only person who partakes of the most essential charm of this splendid coffeehouse is he who wants nothing there but to be there. Purposelessness sanctifies the stay.

Some people will read his essay and see themselves there. I’m at one of the quieter tables in back.

• Source: “Theorie des 'Cafe Central,’” 1926. The original text was in Alfred Polgar, Kleine Schriften, 4:254-59. I found it through the University of Washington’s site on Vienna:

https://depts.washington.edu/vienna/documents/Polgar/Polgar_Cafe.htm

Sunday morning, with Tripod

 Before we moved in, son Michael told us about the three-footed deer who was in the woods behind our house in Stone Mountain.

But I hadn’t seen him until Sunday. I watched him all morning.

The buck is missing his right back foot. But he’s in good shape, sleek and well nourished.  He had eaten, I think, and was bedded down in deep ivy just behind the new wooden fence, built to keep the enormous dog out of the woods.

From the second-floor windows, I can look over the fence. The buck was about 40 feet away.

It was below freezing last night, but the sky was clear. I watched Tripod groom himself — kind of like a dog checking for fleas. The sun was behind him, so I could see the thick whiskers on his chin, helpful in browsing, I imagine.

His ears rotated endlessly, checking for danger and also checking the jazz. (The Wise Woman was playing Oscar Peterson.) Every once in a while, the buck pointed his nose to the sky, checking the wind.

Listening to Reznikoff and other poets

 It seems that I can still go down the rabbit hole for hours at a time.

I’ve been listening to recordings of Charles Reznikoff reading his poems. And so I’ve been off in another world.

Michael Leddy, whose blog Orange Crate Art was a model for this collection of notes you’re reading, sent me a note about PennSound. I didn’t know the site existed.

It’s a wonder, and I’m still exploring this archive of recordings.

The Reznikoff poems are here:

https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Reznikoff.php

I think the poem Michael suggested to me is the best introduction:

https://media.sas.upenn.edu/Pennsound/authors/Reznikoff/SF-1974/Reznikoff-Charles_54__The-highway-I-was-walking-on__SFState_03-21-74.mp3

It’s about a stray dog. There’s a gap in the recording of several seconds, so don’t give up.

If you want to follow along, the passage is in the section of Reznikoff’s Poems: 1918-1975, that originally was published as By the Well of Living and Seeing and the Fifth Book of the Maccabees, p. 113 of the second section of the complete poems. If By the Well doesn’t ring any bells, it was originally published in an edition of 200 copies. It’s a marvel that we still have Reznikoff. 

I do understand why, especially in a democracy, we need to know the landmarks of our common culture. We need to know something of the major poets, those who have meant something to a lot of our fellow Americans. But I also believe that it’s important to find the voices that seem to speak directly to you.

Charles Reznikoff is one of those voice that speaks to me.

If you have a poet who speaks to you, drop me a note.

Thanks, Michael.

A problem with writing historical fiction

 Toni Morrison, speaking at a big conference, was asked how she would teach her novel Beloved.

A teacher was asking. The teacher pointed out that there were no Cliff Notes.

Morrison replied that maybe she’d ask her classes to make some.

The teacher smiled wanly, as if her question hadn’t been answered, and Morrison went on, wondering about the teacher.

But months later Morrison received a package from the teacher. Three of her classes had taken on the project of producing critical notes.

Morrison said those notes helped her see her own writing in a new light, which is what one hopes for in criticism. All three classes, in criticizing the book, found the frankness of the sex portrayed in the book disturbing.

No one said anything about being disturbed by the horrors of slavery.

The moral of the story: You can question smaller things, but you can’t question the history itself.

That insight is true of other systems of thought. You can question countless problems in mathematics and logic, but you can’t really question the axioms at the base of any of mathematical or logical systems. You have to accept something to be able to proceed.

That observation is one the best things I’ve read on the difficulty of writing historical fiction. I wish I’d read it before I tried my hand at it.

• Source: Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches and Meditations; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. The anecdote is from the title essay.

The one-actor play

 I was thinking last week about major and minor poets, wondering why I invariably prefer the minors to the majors, and then realized I also like some minor art forms.

I like linocuts, prints made from blocks of linoleum, for example. To me, they are like photographs in which all the shades of gray have been removed. There’s an art in finding an image in black and white.

I also like one-actor plays. I saw Richard Thomas in “Citizen Tom Paine” in the 1980s when it was the talk of Washington. I saw Hal Holbrook in “Mark Twain Tonight” twice, catching the show in different decades, different college towns.

There are other kinds of one-actor plays. In some, one actor will take on 20 characters. But I like the kind of show in which a character from history comes off the page for an hour and engages my imagination.

The art of those performances astonishes me.

I hope one day to see Richard Wright come to life on a stage.

A candidate with a plan

 Back in my newspaper days, a political candidate came into my office. By way of introduction, he told me that he’d decided to accuse his opponent of inappropriate behavior with a child.

I asked what proof he had.

The candidate appeared shocked. There was no proof, he said. This was just politics.

The candidate explained that he wasn’t nearly as famous as the incumbent and needed to do something dramatic to win. He wanted me to know that he hadn’t come to this decision lightly. He’d decided to make the accusation only after agonizing over what was the right thing to do. It seemed to him that the greater good was served by ousting the incumbent.

The candidate was astonished when I told him that we couldn’t print his accusation. I gave him a nutshell version of the law on libel.

I explained to him that he could make the accusation — there are no laws against prior restraint in the United States — but that he would be legally liable for the consequences. The newspaper would also be liable if it published his accusations.

Libel is defamation, the publication of information that damages reputation. In Texas, truth is an absolute defense against libel. It’s why newspapers report that the person who was arrested was charged with murder, rather than saying that he murdered someone. It’s objectively true that the man was charged. But a judge or jury will decide whether the accused person is a murderer.

And so I explained to the candidate that, since the truth of an accusation is important under the law, the newspaper I was responsible for would not publish his accusation. He’d have to find another outlet.

The candidate was crestfallen. He said he’d have to reconsider his campaign.

This was an extreme case, but not an unusual one. The man was a fringe candidate, although not as fringe as the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan who ran for governor. And even mainstream candidates  try to smear their opponents with last-minute accusations.

I’m telling the story because in all the talk about social media, you hear a lot about freeing information from the tyranny of  gatekeepers.

In my experience, the business of being a gatekeeper is not what most people imagine.

Newspapers and coffee shops

 In a former life, I once told my boss, the newspaper’s new publisher, that I often spent the first hour of my working day at the coffee shop. I told him I thought all editors should do that.

The lifeblood of a newspaper is not what the president or the mayor is saying or doing. It’s not what movie stars, athletes and pop singers are doing. It’s what the ordinary readers are doing and talking about. And one way to learn what the readers are up to than is to go the coffee shop and listen.

I usually had an appointment for an interview. But I’d arrive early. In those days, people in small towns and even fairly large cities knew who the editor of the newspaper was. And so people would stop and talk until my guest would arrive and the official business would begin.

I’d find out about a work slowdown at the wharf and new research at the medical school. I’d be told how a beloved custodian at the school had been fired to open up a job for someone’s brother-in-law. I’d learn that the cranky retiree who everyone thought was half daft had received a patent for a mysterious invention in his garage.

My boss, at first dubious that I was actually working, became a convert. If the paper began to sound self-absorbed, he’d ask if I’d been to the coffee shop lately.

Morning coffee, like a church sermon, can easily get out of hand. So like the parishioners who liked the new vicar’s enthusiasm but found they needed to put a timer on him, I put myself on the clock. I’d be at the office within an hour, usually with three or four ideas for the kind of stories that readers would read, rather than scan.

I’d walk into the newsroom and take inventory. Reporters who were working on interesting ideas were left alone. Reporters who were still looking for ideas got assignments. I remember one exasperated cub reporter saying, too loudly, “Where does he get all those ideas?”

The ideas did not come out of my head. They didn’t come from a committee at the newspaper that decided what people in the community should be talking about.

The ideas came from the coffee shop, from the community itself.

‘The Character of Coffee and Coffeehouses’

 I’m interested in the history of coffeehouses, which is intertwined with the history of newspapers. It seems the civilization that I know and love began there.

In the 1600s, people in Europe began to meet for coffee, but it wasn’t really the coffee they were after. It was the conversation — and the atmosphere that encouraged conversation. People met to exchange ideas and news, creating a market for newspapers.

Jeremy Cliffe has retraced that history in a lovely essay in the New Statesman.

One of the diseases of old newspaper editors is nostalgia, and I was afraid that the essay might descend into a diatribe about social media when I saw the subhead: “How a centuries-old institution can save today’s faltering social media culture.”

Instead, Cliffe provided a corrective.

He mentions a pamphlet “The Character of Coffee and Coffeehouses,” published by John Starkey in 1661, which was a diatribe. The pamphlet complained that the information spread in coffeehouses was outrageous because coffeehouses had “neither moderators nor rules.”

Some complaints about new media are, if not eternal, at least older than you might suspect.

• Source: Jeremy Cliffe, “The restoration of the coffeehouse”; New Statesman, 7 Dec. 2022. You’ll need to register to read: 

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2022/12/social-media-culture-coffeehouse-today

Orwell's imaginary pub

 George Orwell once asked himself whether he could imagine an ideal pub. He could, and he allowed readers to follow him on a tour of The Moon Under Water, his wonderful but imaginary place.

The essay is short — about 1,000 words, a 5-minute read. I recommend it. A day that includes a little Orwell can’t be entirely misspent.

Apparently, the essay has become an assignment for English classes. You can find lists of Orwell’s requirements for an ideal pub online.

The part that caught my attention was his insistence on different rooms within the pub so that readers and conversationalists don’t have to dodge the dart throwers.

I’ve spent more time in coffeehouses than in pubs, but I think he’s right. It’s interesting to watch how human beings share public spaces when they are engaged in different pursuits, some wanting a loud, cheerful game, some wanting a quiet conversation with a friend and others wanting an even quieter place to read.

In most cases, the customers sort things out naturally with courtesy and tolerance. It’s so common, so natural, that you don’t notice the necessity of the courtesy and tolerance unless they’re missing.

• Source: George Orwell, “The Moon Under Water,” Evening Standard, 9 February 1946. It’s available at The Orwell Foundation’s site:

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-moon-under-water/

When a critic says ‘flawless’

 This is a hunch about a small point of usage: When a critic says that a short story is “flawless,” she is saying she could read it again.

I don’t get the same sense of the word from people who write and talk about poetry and novels. Most poems are short. If one line strikes you as off-key, you can still get through the flawed poem quickly. On the other hand, novels are so long no one really expects perfection. Everyone rereads favorite novels despite their flaws.

Short stories require just enough commitment from a reader for some readers to want “flawless,” at least when it comes to making a list of works they'd reread. 

A researcher looks at solitude

I’ve started following the research of Thuy-Vy T. Nguyen who studies solitude.

She’s a psychologist at the University of Durham. Her name is pronounced Twee-vee Nween.

One of the enormous holes in my education is the entire discipline of psychology. I somehow got out of college without a single course. I wish I could have read one of Dr. Nguyen’s papers decades ago. It might have lit a fire under a sleeping student.

My education, such as it is, disposed me to think that solitude is a good thing. Philosophers spend time alone reflecting on problems. Monks and artists spend time alone as part of contemplative or creative processes.

But a good deal of thinking in psychology has focused on unwanted time alone — loneliness. And some psychologists have studied whether an extreme sense of loneliness — social isolation — is a marker of mental illness.

How do you square those perceptions? Is solitude good and valuable or is it something associated with serious health problems?

Part of the confusion is conceptual. If you simply reject the idea that solitude is synonymous with loneliness and social isolation you can study people who have good reasons for being alone.

The research of Dr. Nguyen and her colleagues suggests that some of the benefits of solitude can be measured — an idea that would have astonished the younger, slumbering-student version of me.

One example: Psychologists measure the valence of feelings (positive or negative) and also measure arousal or intensity.

Dr. Nguyen and her colleagues have found that people who spend time in solitude have a kind of buffer when it comes to the intensity of the emotions. They experience feelings, good and bad, but the intensity of those emotions just isn’t as high as it is for people who don’t spend time alone.

People who like solitude and cultivate it tend to have an even keel, as my father would say. My father, incidentally, was a man who liked solitude and cultivated it. He was calm in any storm.

• Sources: Thuy-Vy T. Nguyen, “Time alone (chosen or not) can be a chance to hit the reset button”; Aeon, 8 April 2020.

https://aeon.co/ideas/time-alone-chosen-or-not-can-be-a-chance-to-hit-the-reset-button

A page about Dr. Nguyen with links to her scientific papers can be found here: https://www.solitude-lab.com

The case for Charles Reznikoff

 Do I really think Charles Reznikoff is a major American poet?

I do not think that Reznikoff reached the American masses or even most of the Americans who read of poetry. I imagine it would be hard to find a college course devoted to his poetry. But I do think he had a wonderful and distinctive voice.

I’ve spent more time reading him than I have reading the famous poets.

Do I act like he’s a poet with rare and remarkable gifts?

Actually, I think I do. According to the archives, I’ve mentioned him nine times since December 2021. Rereading these notes, I have to admit I sound like a star-struck fan:

• “For poets and artists who have a day job,” Dec. 4, 2021.

• “Charles Reznikoff’s ‘About an excavation,’” Dec. 5, 2021.

• “When the poets are tough guys,” Dec. 6, 2021.

• “Reznikoff: ‘By the Well of Living and Seeing,’” Jan. 12, 2022.

The music critic Jim Svejda once said that the technical abilities of musicians don’t really move him. A performance doesn’t have to be note-perfect to interest him. Svejda said that what impresses him about an artist is his or her individuality. You hear a voice or an instrument and know that it couldn’t be anyone else — that no one else would do it that way.

That’s part of why I love of Reznikoff’s poetry. He’s a distinctive voice. When you look at the world through his eyes, you’re surprised.

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

Major and minor poets

 When I was a student, I was assured that there are major and minor poets. The difference is talent. The minor poets were almost as good, but not quite. Worth remembering, perhaps, but not worth a semester’s study in college. I could dial back on the veneration.

For a long time, I wondered why I invariably preferred the minors to the majors.

It took a while to realize the obvious: The major poets had reached the majority of literature fans. The minor poets had appealed to a dissenting minority. “Major” and “minor,” at least in that broad sense, was in the eye of the beholder.

If you’re wondering: I’m unpacking and sorting books. I’ve found the poems of Charles Reznikoff, William Stafford and Norman MacCaig, major poets to me.

What's going on in Georgia?

 Yesterday’s note on “Election Day in Georgia” prompted some questions. I think this might help in understanding what’s going on:

• Atlanta and the surrounding suburbs are far more diverse than most people imagine. Dekalb County, my new home, is 54 percent Black. People who identify as non-Hispanic white make up 29 percent of the population. People of all colors are moving into this area. It’s a big county — about 750,000 residents — and it’s growing rapidly. The number of voters of all colors is increasing rapidly. 

• Marjorie Taylor Greene and kindred spirits have made some parts of Georgia infamous as bastions of right-wing populism. Her seat, the 14^th Congressional District, includes 11 counties, at least in part. She won her last election with almost 170,000 votes. By comparison, in the county where I live, Raphael Warnock defeated Herschel Walker by more than 200,000 votes. Warnock’s margin of victory in just one county was more than the total number cast for Greene across her entire district. Greene gets a lot of attention, but those who are paying attention are apt to confuse which force in in state politics is the big dog and which is the tail being wagged.

• I’m new, but it seems to me that the growth of Atlanta and surrounding counties is remarkable for its diversity. William H. Frey, a scholar with The Brookings Institute, recently published a report that suggested we’re seeing a “New Great Migration” of Black Americans to the South. Here’s his nut graf, as they say in the news business:

The reversal of the Great Migration began as a trickle in the 1970s, increased in the 1990s, and turned into a virtual evacuation from many northern areas in subsequent decades. The movement is largely driven by younger, college-educated Black Americans, from northern and western places of origin.

Atlanta is the prime example. I think what we’re seeing is a remarkable social and cultural trend. That trend has political implications, as yesterday’s election showed.

• Source: William H. Frey, “A ‘New Great Migration’ is bringing Black Americans Back to the South”; The Brookings Institute, Sept. 22, 2022.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/a-new-great-migration-is-bringing-black-americans-back-to-the-south/

 

Election Day in Georgia

 When I was a teenager in the Navy, I promised myself that whatever else I did with my life I would be a voter. I became something of a fanatic. No matter how small or insignificant the election, I voted. And so I’ve been voting in elections for school boards, water districts, justices of the peace since 1976.

I thought, in moving to Georgia, I’d broken that streak. We left Texas before early voting began. Election Day in November came before we met residency requirements in Georgia.

We became eligible to vote before yesterday’s runoff election for U.S. Senate, which made national news. So I didn’t miss the election entirely.

This collection of notes is not about politics. But if you’re interested:

• Dekalb County, my new home, has a population of about 750,000. The percentage of residents that identify as Black is 54. The percentage that identify as non-Hispanic white is less than 29.

• The county vote for Raphael Warnock over Herschel Walker was 87 percent to 13. Warnock carried the county by 200,333 votes, 236,448 to 36,115. The statewide margin was 97,597 — 1,817,465 to 1,719,868. Dekalb was one of those big suburban counties that tipped the balance of solidly Republican rural counties that supported Walker.

Marking the day: Willa Cather

 I like reading Willa Cather’s stories. She cuts across the grain of what I was taught to do as a writer.

The style I grew up with was “show, don’t tell.” She was complaining about it before I was born.

This is from her essay “The Novel Demoublé”:

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 takes down Balzac, who tried to recreate Paris on paper: “a stupendous ambition — but, after all, unworthy of an artist.” She wants no stage setting, no lengthy descriptions. If characters are arguing in the drawing room, she wants the writer to “leave the room as bare as the stage of a Greek theater.”

All this is against the grain of what I like in story and in a book.

If the novel is a form of imaginative art, it cannot be at the same time a vivid and brilliant form or journalism.

I don’t want to believe that. And that’s why it’s important for me, especially, to read Cather. We always need to hear the voice of the one who says we don’t have it right at all.

Willa Cather was born Dec. 7, 1873 in Gore, Va., but her family settled in Red Cloud, Neb., when she was a child. She seems like a voice of the Great Plains to me. I’m marking her birthday as a way to honor a writer who influenced me. For more on “Marking the day” see “An activity in lieu of making resolutions,” Dec. 31, 2021.

• Sources: Willa Cather, “The Novel Demoublé,” On Writing; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949. For more on her approach to writing, see “What would Willa Cather say?” Dec. 9, 2021. There are also notes on her stories “Neighbor Rosicky,” Nov. 21, 2022, and “Paul’s Case,” Dec. 10, 2021.

Anne Carson on brevity

 Among the many reasons to love Anne Carson is her brevity.

Asked about it in an interview, Carson pointed to the diary of Emily Tennyson’s grandmother, who married on May 20, 1765. Her entry for her wedding day was: “Finished Antigone, married Bishop.”

Another reason to love Anne Carson is her love of anecdotes— her ability to tell you a little story that makes a point you might remember.

• Source: Kate Kellaway’s interview was published as “Anne Carson: ‘I do not believe in art as therapy’”; The Guardian, 30 Oct. 2016.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/30/anne-carson-do-not-believe-art-therapy-interview-float

The case for unorganized studies

 In my mind universities are among the treasures of civilization. I love them, perhaps unreasonably. I’ve taken detours on trips just to see a campus.

But they are not perfect. One famous critic said this:

Another disadvantage is that in universities studies are organized, and the man who thinks of some original line of research is likely to be discouraged. Academic institutions, therefore, useful as they are, are not adequate guardians of the interests of civilization in a world where everyone outside their walls is too busy for unutilitarian pursuits.

I love “unutilitarian pursuits,” including studies that are interesting but have no immediate, apparent use. But I also love unorganized studies, that is, studies that don’t have a home in an academic department.

• Source: The quote is from Bertrand Russell’s essay “In Praise of Idleness.” The essay was the topic of an entry on June 7, 2020.

One way to keep a notebook

 It is my practice to keep a notebook.

That sounds better than, “I have a habit of taking notes,” which sounds better than “I compulsively take notes.”

I standardized the practice in 1999. The calendar was about to flip over into a new era. I would turn 45 in 2000. I was the editor of a daily newspaper, and I had the sense that my life was slipping by like water through a sieve.

And so I began to wake up a little early — just 15 or 30 minutes at first — and think about what had happened the day before. Even the most ordinary day had its moments: an observation by the Wise Woman, a conversation with a friend, a lovely bloom on a plant I couldn’t identify.

Something had happened during that day. Had I been alert enough to notice?

Some people have spiritual awakenings. I started to keep a notebook.

I am now on No. 113.

The notebooks are Mead Composition Books, the kind with speckled black and white covers that are sold in office supply stores and supermarkets. Each has 100 pages. I leave the first page blank, although I don’t recall the original reasoning.

The first thing I do with a new book is to number the pages, 1-99. The last five pages are an index. It’s the only way I can find ideas that I want to reconsider. And so Page 95 is headed “Index” and has listings for pages 1-20. Each page in the notebook has a line in the index. Subjects are limited to a word or two.

The front of the book has 10 pages of lists under these headings:

• Unfinished business — some notes reminding me of what was going on in the last book that needs to be continued.

• Vows & observances — mainly a list of habits I’d like to cultivate, although it includes some firm resolutions: I will finish writing the essay on x by Dec. 31.

• Prayers of the people — a page of notes to jog my memory about friends, their travels, health problems, family events and our conversations. The title is from The Book of Common Prayer.

• Things I noticed today — a page out of William Carlos Williams’s notebook. It’s just a collection of odd observations, mostly on natural history.

• Research topics — a list of things that interested me enough to search for information.

• Books I’d like to read — a list for my next trip to the library. I’ve learned from experience to leave two pages for this because I read book reviews. I go to the library often, looking for books on this list. If I can find a book, I skim through it to see if I really need to read it.

• Essays in an imaginary book — a list of essays I’d like to write. Some samples of essays that I actually did write are at hebertaylor.com.

• Words and images — a page of notes of words that I have to look up in the dictionary, or unusually sharp, catching images. William Carlos Williams, again, started me on this list.

• String too short to be saved — a reference to Donald Hall’s collection of sketches. In my notebook, it’s usually just a sentence, found somewhere, that stands by itself, without comment. Did you know that Yeats’s father said, “Writing is the social act of a solitary man?” (I’m not sure that he did. But somewhere in my reading I ran across that claim. Do you think it could be true?)

The pages between those standing headings and the index are a journal. Each entry has a date and a subhead. Here are ideas for stories, thoughts stirred up by reading, flashes of insight (or of what passed for insight at one inexplicable point in my life). If you’ve been reading, you have an sample of what’s in those 113 notebooks.

I don’t have any excuses for this behavior. After so many years, this habit or practice is just a fact about me.

If I were to try to justify the practice, I couldn’t do better than Paul Theroux: “Some writers struggle to come up with a new idea. Others keep notebooks.”

‘Messy little attics of the mind’

 That lovely phrase comes from British writer Susie Boyt, who was talking about her notebooks. It came to mind as I was wrestling with a small room in the house at Stone Mountain that is becoming a library or study. It’s a quiet place where I can read, think and write.

More urgent things — gas and electrical service, drivers licenses and such — had to come first. But, if you have a cast of mind like mine, you get to the point where you can’t go on until your books are on shelves and your notebooks are in order.

And so I covered two walls with floating shelves, floor to ceiling, eight shelves on each wall. I used 8-foot boards on the north wall and 6-footers on the south. In total, more than 100 feet of shelves.

My books just fit, with some cheating. Some of my “prettier” books — mostly a collection of books of photographs, heavy on Walker Evans — were deemed worthy of inclusion in a bookcase in the living room.

The notebooks — more than 100 — take up too much space on the bookshelves and so must live in a separate case.

• Source: Philip Horne, Paul Theroux, Susie Boyt and Amit Chaudhuri, “’Messy attics of the mind’: what’s inside a writer’s notebook?”; The Guardian, 6 April 2018.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/06/tales-masters-notebooks-stories-henry-james

A short story or a moral lesson?

 Years ago, I was told a story about two monks on a journey. They’d been let out of the monastery with strict instructions about good behavior.

Early on, the monks encountered a beautiful girl in a fancy gown standing forlornly in front of an enormous mud hole. Without a word, one of the monks picked her up and carried her over the mire so she wouldn’t get her clothes dirty.

The monks went on, following the rule of silence.

At the end of the day, when the monks were allowed to talk, the monk who’d witnessed his colleague touch the girl erupted. He was warming up to the theme of evil and the appearance of evil when his colleague said: “The girl in the gown? I put her down hours ago. Are you still carrying her around?”

Many of us who have a hard time letting go — especially of things such as anger and resentment — found the parable was not only interesting but valuable. It was a popular story. I read it and heard it in so many places I have no idea whom to attribute it to.

It's a moral lesson from the Buddhist tradition. But I think it’s a kind of short story. It’s similar to I.L. Peretz’s story, mentioned in yesterday’s note, and some the stories collected in Tolstoy’s “Twenty-three Tales.” I'd have a hard time saying where the moral lessons end and the works of art begin.

Peretz: ‘If Not Higher’

 Short stories have many uses. One is to act as a kind of contemporary scripture. Tolstoy had something like this in mind when he wrote “What is art?”

I.L. Peretz’s story “If Not Higher” is a good example.

Spoiler alert: If you think you might read this story soon, stop here.

Every Friday morning, the rabbi of Nemirov vanished. There was speculation that the holy man might be in heaven. One doubter scoffed at the idea and spied on the rabbi, hoping to discover the truth.

It was easy to discover. The rabbi simply changed clothes. Dressed as a woodchopper, he went into the forest and cut bundles of firewood. The doubter watched as the rabbi in disguise pressed the firewood on a poor widow at a low rate and then loaned her the money to buy it, assuring her God would provide.

When I was younger, I distrusted feelings. I especially distrusted people who trusted their own feelings as ethical guides. I thought we ought to use our rational faculties to keep a short rein on our emotions.

Decades later, I think it makes sense to use our rational faculties to train our emotions. Some feelings are better than others. Peretz’s simple little story is a reminder that empathy and generosity touch something that is good in humanity.

• Source: Short Shorts: An Anthology of the Shortest Stories, edited by Irving Howe and Ilana Wiener Howe; New York: Bantam Books, 1983, pp. 63-66.