I was trying to find out what was growing in a vacant lot when I saw a flash of magenta. The color was so bright that I thought it must be a candy wrapper. But it was a flower. When I looked, I saw more flowers.
It was Mirabilis jalapa, marvel-of-Peru. It’s from Peru, Central America and Mexico. But it’s the familiar story: Gardeners love a plant and carry it all over the world. And there are many ways for seeds to jump garden fences and get into improbable places.
I need a specific kind of lectionary of usage. I’m thinking of terms that mean philosophical trouble.
The words brain and mind are examples. Brain gets us into an enormously complicated topic, but it’s relatively benign philosophically. Mind, on the other hand, is a source of confusion, mischief and grief.
You would have a good start to the kind of lectionary I’m talking about with a list of words that describe so-called “mental” states and activities: intentions, memories, instincts and their kin.
J.L. Austin used to start his philosophical inquiries with a dictionary. That’s still good advice.
But my experience is that dictionaries tend to let me down precisely on these philosophically notorious words. General dictionaries tend to define one word in terms of another, which is fine for general usage. But the distinctions philosophers have made are lost.
Dictionaries of usage are sometimes more helpful. Fowler’s article on “essence and substance” is helpful.
The essence of a triangle is three straight lines meeting at three angles.
Butter is a substance.
With those two examples, you can see why we could conduct scientific experiments on butter and why it would make no sense to start collecting empirical data on triangles.
But if the idea occurred to you to compare a troublesome word — essence — with a less troublesome word — gist — you’d be disappointed.
What’s the difference between a term that is philosophically dangerous and one that’s not? Scholars with backgrounds as varied as chemistry and psychology have written about the problem of consciousness, which might be the most dangerous word of our times. As my fried Christopher often reminds me, awareness avoids at least some of the problems that make consciousness a swamp. Why is that so?
Austin proposed that philosophers do research — a novel idea.
Admittedly, the idea of collecting definitions of notoriously hard-to-define terms (like philosophy) is perverse. But collecting specimens of usage would be interesting.
• Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Second Edition; Oxford University Press, 1965.
Roger Deakin’s Notes from Walnut Tree Farm is a collection of notes or jottings — 411 by my fallible count.
Some notes run for a few pages. Some are a sentence.
The items are mostly about the natural history of Mellis, a village in Suffolk. But there are also notes on conversations with interesting friends and investigations into the history and culture of the place. Deakin takes trips to other spots in England. He talks of books, music, architecture and manners. He speaks of cats (mostly adoringly) and dogs (mostly not).
He talks a lot about trees and about swimming in wild places. He wrote books on both topics.
Since most of the items are about natural history, the 411 notes were organized under the 12 months, connecting his observations to the seasons. I counted 49 notes in July and 20 in December.
The jottings are not connected, and if you expect to get into a long narrative, you’ll be disappointed. If you focus on any single note, you are missing something larger. Each note or jotting is like a shard or fragment in a mosaic.
The larger picture: If you read long enough, you get a sense of an unusual mind.
It’s the kind of book I wish all my friends would write.
• Sources and notes: Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm; London: Penguin Books, 2009.
My intermittent series of notes on Roger Deakin began with a remark about his preference for jottings — spontaneous notes written without any thought to the craft of writing (“The overlooked genre of jottings,” Sept. 14, 2023). This is the tenth item in the series.
Incidentally, Deakin did not compile this book. His friends did, after he died in 2006 at 63. They carved a book out of his enormous collection of notebooks. I hope my writing friends will start compiling their own book now and not let this job fall to their literary executors.
My little lexicon is a lighthearted attempt to help an American reader connect with a English author. But most lexicons are serious business.
We’d be in the dark about many things in the ancient world were it not for the lexicon compiled by Hesychius (Hay-SOO-key-oss) of Alexandria, a Greek grammarian.
The culture produced people like Herodotus, who was intensely curious about all kinds of people and cultures. Herodotus and those of kindred mind came back with strange words describing the food, religious beliefs, clothes and customs of people who have disappeared.
My lexicon for baffled Americans has perhaps 100 entries. Hesychius’s has more than 50,000.
Roger Deakin’s sense of place is grounded in the natural world. But it also includes bits of history and culture.
He gets a stiff neck staring at the beams of church ceilings with medieval carvings of angels. He gets down on his knees to inspect the undersides of the folding seats in choir stalls, where ancient craftsmen left carvings, sometimes sublime, sometimes obscene, where no one was likely to look.
On one such expedition, Deakin and a friend were rummaging in the choir stalls and found “sweet papers” from the choir children underneath the cushions.
Sweet papers?
Briefly, I imagined it was an idiom for “love notes.”
“Candy wrappers,” more likely.
Maybe I’d be a better compiler of odd lexicons if I were a better crossword puzzler.
• Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm; London: Penguin Books, 2009.
I began reading Roger Deakin’s Notes from Walnut Tree Farm because I’m interested in how places shape us.
But I’ve also become interested in Deakin’s diction. My lectionary of baffling words just jumped to another page in my notebook.
Most of the puzzlement is related to place. Deakin lived in a place where cowslips are common wildflowers and a kittiwake is what people call a kind of gull.
He had a whole specialized vocabulary for pollarding trees. It’s an ancient practice in which limbs are removed to prevent storm damage and to encourage certain kinds of growth. In the places Deakin wrote about, people spent time pleaching, intertwining branches of two rows of trees to make an arch.
Pollarding and the related arts are common in England but seem zany to me.
In most cases, we share common experiences underneath superficial differences in language. Deakin’s reports from the pightle sound like the happenings I recall from grandfather’s barnyard.
But the differences in our language are sometimes telling.
Deakin says the people who built his place in the 1500s were graziers, people who grazed livestock. My folks would have said they were ranchers or farmers, focusing on the land, rather than on the activity.
But that difference is important.
Deakin lived on an ancient farm next to a common. The people who built that farmhouse might not have had enough land to graze cattle, but they had grazing rights on the common. The farmhouse and barn were surrounded by a moat. The cattle came home at night, enclosed and protected.
My ancestors’ language focused on farm and ranch because when they talked of land, ownership came to mind. That was the relationship between humans and place.
There are other ways of organizing things — and those different ways are reflected in different kinds of language.
Wittgenstein liked to say that imagining another language was to imagine another way of life. Talking about graziers and ranchers is one small example of what he was talking about.
The Georgia Piedmont is full of interesting plants and animals. But today is trash day. If you are walking through the neighborhood, what you see is waste.
Every household, including ours, puts a big bin — I’d guess 50 gallons — of garbage on the curb. It’s a symptom that something is horribly wrong with our economy.
My grandparents were among the last of the small farmers. When I got to college, I heard the phrase “subsistence farm,” a term that gets to the disadvantages of the business and the way of life it supports.
But when the economy is based on a household, rather than on something much larger, there’s remarkably little waste. Almost everything on that farm that wore out was reused before it went to the dump.
A canning jar, cracked but not broken, was relegated from the kitchen to the barn as a container for nuts and bolts. When the jar finally broke, the shards went into a trash bin, which had once been a 55-gallon oil drum. The drum was about the same size as the bins my neighbors and I put on the curb.
We do it once a week. My grandfather filled his bin two or three times a year.
He had a different way of thinking about waste.
Tulip trees are at the top of the canopy in the Georgia Piedmont. We often visit a 185-foot giant in Deepdene Park. The tops of the big ones are so far above the canopy, it’s hard to get a good look at the lovely leaves that are turning gold.
There’s a big tulip tree near the playground at Wade Walker Park, though, and so I went to get a better view. Some of the leaves on the lower branches were green, while those at the top were yellow, close to the color of a school bus.
I was thinking about a scientific article about how leaves fall when a gust of wind hit the treetops, and maybe a hundred of those big yellow leaves flew off into a clear blue sky.
Most people speak of arts and sciences as distinct. But I confuse one with the other when I’m in the field.
Joseph Brodsky said: “The real history of consciousness starts with one’s first lie.”
The line is from his essay “Less Than One,” a strange and wonderful meditation on how consciousness and identity are formed or how memory shapes and is shaped by identity.
Brodsky said he remembered his first lie. He told a librarian he couldn’t remember his “nationality,” meaning that he was Jewish. He was applying for membership at a school library and knew that his “nationality” would have disqualified him. He was 7.
Brodsky told the story not to make a point about anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. He was trying to make the more fundamental point his first lie involved identity.
If you change the word “lie” to “fiction,” you have a look at the writer’s work.
Some characters — Brodsky was one of them — are so astonishing you just have to tell stories about them. You try to tell stories that show that these marvelous characters are human beings, just like the rest of us, but you also try to show their individuality, to contrast the one against the many.
Brodsky’s pointed out that some societies are so poisonous that the individual isn’t really one against the many. The individual is less than one.
• Source: Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays; New York: Farrar Straus Girous, 1986. The title essay is on pp. 3-33. It’s online here:
https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/media/0305/Brodsky%252520Less%252520Than%252520One.pdf
A footnote on yesterday’s footnote: Grandmother had a simple tool that helped her remember dates in the family chronology.
On the wall, hanging from a loop of maroon thread, was a perpetual calendar, 12 sheets of heavy stock, one for each month, with a tiny color picture at the top of each page. Below each photo was a list of numbers for the days of the month: 31 for January, 28 for February.
Grandmother was a great one for remembering birthdays. Beside Aug. 1, written in pencil, was my father’s name and 1924, the year he was born. Grandmother kept track of birthdays, marriage anniversaries and deaths. Sometimes, I think, there were other notes, perhaps the dates when entire families moved across the country or when people went to the hospital.
Grandmother had fixed points in her memory. The notes on that simple calendar refreshed her memory. That was how she kept track of the family's complicated chronology.
A footnote to yesterday’s note on phenology, which is a kind of recurring chronology: Grandmother was the undisputed authority on the chronology of our family.
Grandfather would be telling a story about Cousin Bob, who made a great success of himself, and he would pause to ask Grandmother: What year was it Cousin Bob moved away to the big city?
Grandmother would begin a calculation. Cousin Bob’s mother, Thelma, married George in 1928, and Bob was born three years later, which would be 1931. Bob was too young to serve in the war. But the Army got his older brother, Ralph, who fought in the Philippines and Okinawa and who didn’t come home until 1946. Cousin Bob left two years later to go to college. So he left in 1948.
Grandfather would consider these facts, nod, and continue his story.
Sometimes Grandmother’s calculations would go on for 10 minutes.
As a boy, it seemed to me that the digression was an outrage against the narrative flow of the story.
As a codger, I’m fascinated.
This was long before the days of computers and immediate access to information. Grandmother had fixed points in the calendar in her memory. She could calculate from there.
I took a dozen courses in biology without hearing much about phenology. The Merriam-Webster dictionary says it’s “a branch of science dealing with the relations between climate and periodic biological phenomena (such as bird migration or plant flowering).”
But a lot of these notes involve phenology. They’re reminders of when different species of plants are likely to put on leaves or flower. I last saw a hummingbird two weeks ago. I hope the birds that were fighting over the feeder made the migration safely.
My sense of phenology extends to human beings in general and to my household in particular. I made a note that I put a fire in the fireplace — the first of the season — on Oct. 8.
At some point, I’ll switch to long johns. And seeing on a calendar when I might expect to make that change somehow makes me feel more a part of this new place that I call home.
When I hear talk of how the capitalist system is exploiting humanity or failing humanity, I wonder if it isn’t time to dust off the ancient concept of commons.
The people who came as colonists to Georgia had a tradition of property held in common. Every village back in England had a common, a piece of land that the wealthy didn’t own. That land belonged to the people. One of the things that made you a commoner was that you had a right to graze a cow on the common. You might have some rights to grow a garden on an allotment there. Maybe you could cut some hay and firewood.
Through the years, the idea of common property expanded. Public high schools were not, in my case, a huge success. But public libraries were.
We’ve had some interesting experiments involving common privileges and common responsibilities. The G.I. Bill changed my family’s history.
What would happen if we put x percent of our gross national product into expanding our commons? What if, for example, would happen if, when someone died, the government paid his or her heirs for the property?
I could see more wild areas available to the public. I could imagine housing becoming more affordable.
I think it’s possible to make changes that would offer common folks like me an opportunity live a better life. I think we could do that without causing a revolution.
Yesterday’s note on guidebooks should have included an example: a piece of writing that gives a reader a sense of a place. Roger Deakin made a trip to Laugharne, Wales to see Dylan Thomas’s writing shed. Here are highlights:
Thomas mostly wrote not in the boathouse, but in its wooden garage. So, like garage music, his was garage poetry. I see straight away that it has the optimum dimensions for a writing shed: fourteen by nine, with a whitewashed boarded ceiling over a pair of pine cross-beams a foot above head height.
Deakin had several writing sheds and was opinionated about what made a good one. Deakin was interested in the pin-ups that Thomas had tacked to the wall — Yeats, Lawrence and Joyce — and in the portrait of Thomas painted by Augustus John. But he was annoyed that the “heritage industry” was trying too hard. Thomas’s shed had been staged to make it appear the poet had just stepped out for a minute. Balled up bits of paper littered the floor. An exercise book, open to the manuscript of a poem, showed he’d been crossing out a lot of what he’d written.
The shed, or garage, has a wood-stove on one wall, wooden kitchen table by the window that faces south out on to the estuary and miles of mud flats, and two simple slat-backed wooden chairs, one with the poet’s jacket half slung over it.
Deakin could hear a heron out on the flats. Through the window, he could see the tide was running out, leaving boats to settle in the mud.
Dylan Thomas put himself on the edge of the known world, in this minimal space, looking out across the estuary, about as far away from human civilization as possible.
I like the piece because Deakin, without saying a word, is thinking about his own need for solitude, his own move from London to Walnut Tree Farm. It’s a moving piece for readers who know that they also need solitude.
• Source: Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm; London: Penguin Books, 2009, pp. 142-4.
I’ve been trying to find a good guidebook on Santa Fe, N.M., where my friend Alvin lives. I want to travel by book: that is, I want to learn about the place my friend talks about without leaving my library.
I’m looking for a guidebook that gives a sense of the place — that tells what it’s like to live there.
It’s surprising how few guidebooks try.
The world is full of books that say something like this: You can’t possibly understand what this place is like unless you eat this particular dish at that particular taco stand and stay at this particular hotel before visiting that particular museum.
The concept is that you can experience a place only if you rush from spot to spot and sample what’s been tasted and seen before and judged excellent. This concept holds that experiencing a place involves checking items off a list.
I think the concept is flawed. I think that repairing broken concepts is the work of philosophy. And so I’m wishing there were a few more guidebook writers who were also philosophers.
If you took a course called Introduction to Philosophy, odds are you began with Plato’s account of Socrates.
If I were asked to teach that course, I think I’d begin Alexander John Ellis’s coat. Ellis, 1814-1890, was one of those polymaths that appeared like wildflowers during Victoria’s reign. He’s best known for his work in phonetics and musicology, but he tromped around in other fields.
He had an overcoat, which he named Dreadnought and wore constantly except in summer. Dreadnought had 28 pockets. The pockets held things that were useful in his work or in emergencies.
The pockets held manuscripts, tuning forks, string, a corkscrew, a knife sharpener and other wonders. It would never occur to me to carry most of them around all day.
It’s not his eccentricity that interests me. Rather, it’s the cast of mind that works on concepts. What’s useful in your work? What’s useful in emergencies? Ellis thought those questions through, and came up with Dreadnought as a practical response for aligning his life with his thinking.
Philosophy is a bit like that, I think. We collect concepts and use them as tools in our work and in emergencies. Occasionally, philosophers realize they need to ditch an old tool and put a new one in their pocket. Occasionally, they realize they need new pockets.
A year ago, fresh from Texas, I noticed the wind in the canopy of the forest. We get squalls in the Piedmont this time of year. The sound of wind rushing through a gazillion leaves is still lovely.
Now I notice the color of the leaves in the beech forests. It’s a peculiar shade of green. I’m reminded of the emerald trees in children’s picture books. It’s the bright color used in the kind of illustrations where the leaves are just circles, rather than shaped like leaves. Beech trees spend the summer in the shade of the taller tulip trees. But many of the tulip tree’s yellow leaves already are on the ground. Sunlight is coming through the canopy in a way that just wasn’t possible a month ago. The beeches are having a moment.
Among the fall bloomers:
• Camphorweed, Heterotheca subaxillaris, with bright yellow flowers. I’d paint my truck that color if the Wise Woman would allow it.
• Crownbeard, in genus Verbesina, another yellow flower, but this one with long, drooping petals.
• Bluecurls, Trichostema dichotomum, with light purple flowers that have curled stamens. The stamens on the flower I examined formed a circle.
Our lives are becoming increasingly public, and so it makes sense to find ways to cultivate an intimate, private voice and to learn to listen to other intimate, private voices. Poetry is that intimate voice.
Louise Glück said that — or rather, that’s as close as I can get to a summary of her Nobel Prize lecture.
The newspapers have the sad duty of carrying her obituary today. The only thing I’d add is that she’s the kind of poet who rewards her readers.
• Notes: For other notes on Louise Glück, see “The intimate voice of poetry,” Aug. 4, 2022 and “Louise Glück’s Parable of the Swans,” Aug. 5, 2022.
If you are a newspaper person, you write several items for publication each day. That’s what you do if you are writing news. A person who wants to spend months polishing the perfect story about the breaking news of a presidential assassination is not thinking clearly.
Some stories must be told immediately. But other kinds of stories require time, much in the way that the making of wine requires time. A batch of instant wine is a bad idea.
Nothing about this is profound. But writing can be a matter of habit, and some of us have a hard time breaking habits.
I’ve devised a home cure for myself. If you think it might help you, here’s the recipe:
I’ve started a story that I don’t plan to write for a while. In fact, I’m not planning. I might write a draft next year.
The story exists in my head mostly and, to a lesser extent, on some index cards.
I started with one character and added another. Those fictional characters are in my imagination. They spend most of the day lurking beneath the level of consciousness. They pop up sometimes when I’m stuck in traffic or am running the vacuum cleaner.
When they do, I take a five-minute break to write a snatch of dialog on an index card.
Sometimes I make notes on a scene that runs over several notecards.
A lifetime of habit tells me I must write a draft.
My sense as a reader is that I’m not wasting time letting these characters age a bit. That is, I’m not wasting my time by letting these characters become clearer to me.
Roger Deakin’s Notes from Walnut Tree Farm pays attention to sheds.
You can find all kinds of books about the ambience of great houses. But most books about sheds tell you how to build them, rather what it’s like to be in a good one. This is more like it:
There are many of us for whom the shed is a natural habitat.
The writer Robert Macfarlane, a friend of Deakin’s, said Deakin put sheds and an old railway wagon on his land. He’d write and sleep in some of them. In Notes, Deakin reported that he’d been afield, “inspecting sheds and their cobwebby contents.”
His main shed held his woodworking tools. Theatrical lights were strung from the ceiling. A pair of anglepoise lamps focused on the lathe.
He once spent part of a day in one shed, which held a collection of molding and architraves, beams that fit between pillars or posts.
I love it in the shed. Half the tin roof has rusted through and caved in, but, instead of mending it, which would have meant cutting down some brambles to get round the back, I simply moved all the architraves and mouldings into another part of the shed away from the drips.
That seems to me an essential feature of the psychology of shed ownership: the ability to overlook needed repairs.
Deakin’s sheds include at least one photograph of a famed woodworker, a legless Windsor smoking chair and a stained-glass window. Do all sheds need decor? I think so.
There’s a peculiar kind of luxury that sets off fantasies in men who ought to know better: Rolex watches, Corvette cars, Montblanc pens. I’m immune to all that but daydream of sheds.
• Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm; London: Penguin Books, 2009, pp., 36, 22 and 39-40.
One of the best notes in Roger Deakin’s Notes from Walnut Tree Farm is at the front of the book. It’s about the need for a walk on a bitterly cold day.
Since there’s a need, Deakin goes down to the pub in a neighboring place to meet a friend for lunch. Fueled with cod and halves of Guinness, they brave the weather, just for the pleasure of seeing the landscape and exchanging what they know about the history of a lane running through a place called Ager Fen. You get some social history and some insight into the walker’s different sensibilities.
A book like Deakin’s masterpiece includes some good conversations.
• Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm; London: Penguin Books, 2009, pp. 2-3.
Roger Deakin was a creature of place.
When he was still in his 20s, he bought a 16th-century farmhouse that was mostly a ruin. The fireplace was solid, though, and he camped out there and gradually rebuilt the place. The house had a spring-fed moat, and Deakin was a great swimmer, even in winter.
If you are a creature of place, you don’t just live in a house. You live in a community that has roads and roadsides that must be walked. The roadside ditches contain plants that must be identified. The habits of the living things that make up the place can’t be a continual mystery — not if you live there, not if you are more than a tourist.
Deakin strikes me as the kind of person who must know the creatures of the place — the plants, the animals, the people. To not know the place and is to be out of place.
His collection of notes is about what it’s like to live in Suffolk. He tells us what the birds are like, what walks on brutally cold mornings are like and what it’s like to realize that a bit of overlooked landscape you’ve passed every day for years was an ancient farm with a moat.
As a narrative, the notes don’t lead anywhere. They are bits in a mosaic. Each piece contributes to the larger picture. The picture is a mainly of a place in Suffolk and of the peculiar cast of Deakin’s mind.
• Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm; London: Penguin Books, 2009.
On a tramp along the Yellow River, I saw a spider with beautiful markings. Her body was perhaps 2 inches long. Her legs were blue-black, with gold bands at the joints. Her body was light gray with lemon yellow stripes. A splash of magenta-red was on her underside — but the marking was indistinct, a smear of lipstick.
I learned later I was looking at a Joro spider, Trichonephilia clavate. Had my discovery been 10 years earlier, it would have been news.
The first Joro spiders came to Georgia from Asia — probably in a shipping container — about 10 years ago. There are millions now. They are thriving here and are spreading to other states. They spin webs that act as balloons, carrying them on the wind.
I saw at least one story saying the invasive spiders are terrifying Georgians. I have not seen any evidence of mass terror. Entomologists say Joro spiders are harmless, and the one I saw was shy.
Years ago, when I first read haiku, I noticed some Japanese poets spoke about the spiders that shared their huts almost as if they were pets. I grew up among people who killed spiders and snakes on principle and was impressed that some people could come to like spiders. I can better understand that sensibility today.
We spent a few days on the Blue Ridge in Northern Georgia.
I hope that it becomes the other place I know — not the place where I live, but the place I visit so often I don’t have to ask people if they could direct me to a good place to eat.
We stayed in a cabin in Sautee Nacoochee and spent our days driving and hiking. I started to say “driving the backroads,” but the roads are called highways. I’d just say that some roads will scare you at 45 mph and a few will terrify you at 25.
The Appalachian Trail runs through these woods, and we got on a section of it. We also found a section of the Bartram Trail. You’ll be in deep woods and then you’ll come to an overlook, and the view seems to go on forever.
A blue haze hangs above the ridges and seems to follow their contours. You sometimes have to look closely to see that you’re not just looking at a ridge, but at a series of ridges, some more eroded than others and so at different heights. Each has a name — the local folks were diligent about that. Each is a slightly different shade of blue.
We saw the towns of Helen, Blairsville, Young Harris, Hiawassee and Clayton, but we came to see the country.
I love Tallulah Gorge because I like to see and hear water run a canyon. The north rim features a straight drop — no slope. I’d make a long trip to see it.
Warwoman Dell is much more subtle but to my liking. If you visit, you’ll see Warwoman Shear, a fault line as distinct as Balcones Fault in Central Texas. It’s beautiful, uncrowded, quiet. It’s a couple of miles east of Clayton, if you’re interested. And if you’re looking for a good place to eat, the Universal Joint on N. Main Street in Clayton is fine and friendly.
• Notes: For more, see “Up in the mountains,” Sept. 9, 2023, and “The other place you know,” Sept. 18, 2023.
In some books, a reader can wander around in the writer’s mind. Montaigne’s Essays and Seneca’s Letters are like that. Sir Thomas Browne’s books are too.
I think Roger Deakin’s Notes from Walnut Tree Farm is going to be one of those books, although I’ve just started.
If you’re looking for narrative, you’ll be disappointed. The book is a series of notes, a bit like the collection you’re reading now.
Deakin begins one note with a remark about how towers are perceived as refuges for writers. Montaigne had one, and Deakin shared one for a while in the 1960s. He and some flatmates from London rented an old gamekeeper’s cottage near Beccles in Suffolk. They fled there on weekends.
They’d ride the train to Beccles. They collectively kept an old Austin Champ — Deakin claimed it looked like a military jeep and got 4 miles to the gallon — in the parking lot of the train station. The keys stayed in the switch.
The cottage had no electricity. Candles were essential. When you burned wood, you were expected to collect more than you used.
The paperback library was under the stairs. The novels of Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male in particular, were the prized.
The modest scale of the cottage, the large number of us and the informal proximity of beds and copious intoxicants created a dormitory atmosphere, and there was much talking after lights-out.
You get the picture. The tower was outside the cottage. You had to go out in the garden and up a spiral staircase. The people who rented the cottage were young and intoxicated by life — but some of them did some writing up there.
• Source: Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm; London: Penguin Books, 2009, p. 21.
For more on Deakin, see “The Overlooked genre of jottings,” Sept. 14, 2023, and “A jotter speaks of daydreaming,” Sept. 15, 2023.
Recent notes mentioned Roy Bearden-White, a professor at South Plains College in Texas who loved chapbooks.
He was a member of LibraryThing, an app used by book lovers to catalog their libraries. In a note about his own library, Professor Bearden-White said that when the Vatican Library was built under Pope Sixtus IV in 1473, Bartolomeo Platina listed 2,527 volumes.
Bearden-White said he hoped to exceed that number.
I hope not to exceed it. I have been trying to whittle down my collection but have demonstrated a shocking lack of discipline when it comes to books. Some friends said 1,000 would be a good number. One puritan (who is still a friend) said 100.
So this bit of history was refreshing: 2,527 seems like a reasonable number to me.
Source: https://www.librarything.com/profile/roybeardenwhite
The praying mantis hanging around the hummingbird feeder was a native, Stagmomantis Carolina. So I’m told by people who can tell the natives from Tendoera sinensis, a species from China.
Mantises prey on small birds. In this part of the world, most of the reported victims are Ruby-throated hummingbirds.
In two days, I evicted two mantises from the feeder. Neither went without a tussle.
The world is full of things that can drag you into police actions. I never dreamed that hanging a hummingbird feeder was one of them.
• Source: Martin Nyffeler, Michael R. Maxwell, J.V. Remsen, “Bird Predation By Praying Mantises: A Global Perspective,” The Wilson Journal of Ornithology, 129(2), 331-334 (2017).
Yesterday’s note included a reference to an essay on chapbooks by Roy Bearden-White. He asked: If you get away from questions about labels — about whether a piece of work is a tract, brochure, pamphlet or chapbook — what would you call a 24-page story?
The answer: A short story.
Professor Bearden-White, who taught English at South Plains College in Texas, pointed out that some critics, looking at German chapbooks in the early 19th century, have had second thoughts about the origins of the short story.
Bearden-White pointed out that novels and essays were originally people’s literature, writing that appealed to the lower classes. In the early days, novels were the kind of things that were looked down upon.
Bearden-White was interested in these twin questions:
• Can people put good writing into humble forms?
• To what extent do people actually do so?
He was an English scholar who was fascinated by ghost stories and pulp fiction of earlier eras. He was interested in the comic books and graphic novels of our day.
• Sources: Roy Bearden-White, “A History of Guilty Pleasure: Chapbooks and the Lemoines”; The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 103(3), September 2009, pp. 284-318.
I thought I recognized a kindred spirit and looked for his address at the college in hopes of sending him a note. I found, instead, his obituary:
https://www.krestridgefuneralhometx.com/obituaries/roy-bearden-white
I love one-night reads and so love pamphlets and their cousins, chapbooks.
Poets seem to have taken over chapbooks — Poets House in New York has a collection of 11,000 — but that wasn’t always the case.
The small books were simply called small books or “merriments” or worse until the word chapbook came into use in 1798. A chapman was a peddler, selling things at reasonable prices — cheap, a word that came from chap.
Chapbooks were the kind of books that peddlers sold. They were cheap because they were little. A typical format was 5½ by 4¼, and 24 pages was a good size.
They were the books of the people who were not rich. Publishers often aimed at what they thought was a lower-class market.
Chapbooks might be about anything: legends, biblical tales, heroes, saints, ballads, notorious crimes, ghosts, fairy tales. There were serious poems — Coleridge liked the chapbook — and there were plays and almanacs. Some chapbooks contained news. The smallest books, which cost copper money, as opposed to silver or gold, might be 4 or 8 pages and contain something like an encyclopedia article.
Printing formats involve sociology. Today chapbooks, which once contained all kinds of things, belong to poets. Tracts, once as varied as chapbooks, now are associated with religious subjects, although politicians occasionally slip into the sanctuary. Articles printed in newspapers and magazines are vulgar, until they are reprinted as essays in books.
The question of whether you can prejudge a piece of writing by its printed format is fascinating. Some people have taken a perverse pleasure in taking a printing format that’s widely regarded as a sow’s ear and trying to make something of it.
Or, as an old editor once put it: Journalism could be a low-rent art form.
Incidentally, I was told a couple of years ago that all blogs are garbage and that the short age of the blog was already over.
• Sources: Roy Bearden-White, “A History of Guilty Pleasure: Chapbooks and the Lemoines”; The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 103(3), September 2009, pp. 284-318.
There are a lot of good introductions to the chapbook, but I sense a kindred spirit in Professor Bearden-White.
John Ashton, Chap-Books of the Eighteenth Century; London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1882. The Internet Archive has a version here:
https://archive.org/details/chapbooksofeight00asht/mode/2up
This book contains facsimiles and notes on the chapbook’s Golden Age.
I’m just now finding the poet Bernadette Mayer’s list of journal ideas and writing experiments.
If someone professes to have a better way to patch drywall, I watch and listen. It’s the same with writing. Here’s a sample from Mayer’s list:
• Rewrite someone else’s writing. Maybe someone formidable.
• Explore possibilities of lists, puzzles, riddles, dictionaries, almanacs for language use.
• Typing vs. longhand experiments as recording/creating devices/modes.
• Write a work that intersperses love with landlords.
I think the first is most interesting. Scott Newstok wrote a dazzling book, How to Think like Shakespeare, that shows why you can learn to think like Shakespeare — or any other writer you admire — if you study his sentences and try to write in his style. That practice used to be common in education.
The second reminded me of Paul Auster’s list of his father’s traits. It’s just a list. It’s also a good portrait.
The third was interesting because I go back and forth between and typing and writing with a pen or pencil. I’ve got my own experiment going with pencils and index cards. The jury is out.
And the last is so zany I might just try it.
• Sources: The University of Pennsylvania’s Electronic Poetry Center has Bernadette Mayer’s List of Journal Ideas and Writing Experiments here:
https://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Mayer-Bernadette_Experiments.html
The University of Pennsylvania’s Electronic Poetry Center has Bernadette Mayer’s List of Journal Ideas and Writing Experiments here:
https://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Mayer-Bernadette_Experiments.html
If you look closely at the bottom, you’ll find a link to a list of experiments by Bernadette Mayer and the members of the St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project Writing Workshop, 1971-1975, published in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Vol. 1, No. 3, June 1978. It’s here:
http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/LANGUAGEn3/Language3.pdf
Scott Newstok, How to Think like Shakespeare; Princeton University Press, 2020. This is the eighth note that mentions his excellent book. If you’re looking for summary, see “Habits that shape the mind,” June 28, 2022.
Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude; London: Faber and Faber, 1988.
It was no big deal that a bat was hanging around on our front porch. The big deal was that the Wise Woman discovered it.
The Wise woman does not like bats, snakes, spiders, ticks, millipedes and many other creatures that interest me.
Worse, instead of being ready to leap to her defense and evict the bat, I was lollygagging around, miles away. I objected that being in the dentist’s chair shouldn’t count as lazing around with my feet propped up.
But defending myself was pointless. She was not soothed.
I said lamely that bats are primarily nocturnal feeders and that as soon as the sun began to set the bat would fly away.
The Wise Woman was not convinced.
She called a wildlife rescue service. A young woman said that bats are primarily nocturnal feeders and that as soon as the sun began to set the bat would fly away.
The young woman sounded authoritative. The Wise Woman was impressed and tried to make a donation.
Perhaps, as they say in Washington, I need to work on my messaging.
Still, at dusk, my credibility had recovered to the extent that I was assigned the important job of checking the porch to make sure that the bat had indeed flown.
It had.
All’s well in our world. May it by so in yours.
