Panola Mountain, late May

 The woods are full of wild strawberries. Some are situated to catch the sun, and the berries are deep red. Others are in the shade, and their berries are pale green.

The walnut trees are heavy with nuts in green hulls. I saw fruit on a mulberry — red, but not yet black — and thought of the mulberry tree on the banks of Zarzamora Creek where a vermilion flycatcher used to roost.

We walked three miles under a blue sky, empty except for a half-moon. The midway point is a granite outcrop. I never get tired of seeing it.

Not one thing, but many

 It’s hard to think about Ted Kooser just once. If I think of him, I usually find myself thinking again.

Yesterday’s note made me wonder why I like Kooser’s work so much.

The answer is there’s not just one thing to like but many. 

One is his sense of contentment. All of us are torn by anxiety, fear and anger at times. If we’re not careful, that turmoil can dominate all our conversations. It’s rare to run across someone who expresses a deep sense of satisfaction with life.

Another thing I like is his appreciation for ordinary things. Kooser wonders what to do with old cookie tins. He likes living in rural areas and chuckles that the beauty-shop operator and taxidermist share the same building. He knows where the good cafes are. He marvels that bois d’arc hedges are pig-tight, as good as a fence. (Being from Nebraska, Kooser calls the bois d’arc tree an Osage orange.)

Jim Harrison said Kooser’s Local Wonders was “the quietest magnificent book” he’d ever read.

I’d say that’s accurate, though Harrison was biased. Harrison and Kooser were friends.

When Kooser was treated for cancer, he found himself unable to write. As he began to heal, he found he could write a little, so he made a point of writing a poem each morning. Day by day, he pasted poems on postcards and sent them to his friend. Harrison received 130.

As I say, there are many things to like about Kooser.

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

Voices heard in the tin shed

 The Day After Memorial Day was devoted to cleaning out the tin shed while searching for a cover for the Wise Woman’s car. The cover, last seen in Texas, was found.

Throughout the day I heard two voices.

First, the Wise Woman’s. She recently saw an Eastern brown snake on the trail at Yellow River and was sure the shed was infested. She invested in snake repellant, which the lower-ranking member of the partnership dutifully applied.

The other voice was that of the poet Ted Kooser, whose remarks about cleaning sheds have stuck with me. Kooser said sheds have a mysterious capacity to accumulate, then to encrust, and so become beyond cleaning. That’s why we clean sheds.

A day cleaning a shed should be a day lost to literature. But that was not entirely so. That’s why I read writers like Kooser.

• Source: Ted Kooser, Local Wonders; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002, p. 8. While Kooser is known as a poet, this book is a collection of essays. I’ve mentioned it before: See “A magnificent book tells what home is like,” Jan. 2, 2023.

An interesting part of the universe

 Muriel Rukeyser said:

The universe is made of stories,

not of atoms.

 

That implies that a part of the universe is made up of dog stories.

Montaigne, following Plutarch, tells the story of an Athenian dog that pursued a temple burglar all the way to Cromyon, between the Isthmus of Corinth and Megara. The dog followed the culprit, barking and refusing bribes of food. Plutarch says the guards finally caught up with the culprit by following the stories.

• Sources: Muriel Rukeyser’s poem “The Speed of Darkness” is at the Poetry Foundation’s site:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56287/the-speed-of-darkness

Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 531. The story is in the long essay “An apology for Raymond Sebond.”

Borrowing and creating art

 Montaigne imitated his teachers and borrowed heavily from them. The topic interests me because I think that borrowing is a common, normal, healthy part of creating art.

Antonin Dvořák and Charles Ives were among the many composers who borrowed folk tunes. You can find Internet threads on the best jazz versions of the Rodgers and Hammerstein tune “My Favorite Things.” I’m not sure the concept of hip-hop is viable if you rule out sampling.

I understand that the technological revolution has made theft and plagiarism tragically common. But if we eliminated imitation and borrowing from music, we’d eliminate most of the stuff I find interesting.

Montaigne sometimes wondered whether he’d written anything that wasn’t in Plutarch or Seneca. I enjoy Plutarch and Seneca. But I would choose Montaigne if I could read only one of the three. Similarly, I can become fascinated by what jazz musicians did with marginally interesting pop tunes.

I wish that our thinking would catch up with our technology and that we could find a more honest way of talking about how human beings create art.

One small point about the language we use in our thinking: Before the Internet, the word appropriation was part of my vocabulary. Without thinking about it, I just stopped using it. When I see the word now, I’m suspicious.

Trying to do what Plutarch did

 Montaigne’s Essays are a wonder to me. I would love to know how he wrote such a book.

Some scholars say Montaigne was trying to emulate Plutarch. Montaigne thought he could learn to write by imitating a master, but as he tried to imitate, he found something original.

Humans learn by emulation. That’s the way a baby learns to walk, by watching others and enduring the bumps. We can say that of people, in general. But the idea gets mushy when you consider individuals. Where do these spectacular individuals learn their craft?

I can see a young Mozart learning his scales by imitating his teacher. But that doesn’t explain the evolution of his piano concertos.

In looking at these creative geniuses, I’m stumped.

Incidentally, Montaigne said he had two masters, not one. He said he followed Plutarch and Seneca.

At times, he claimed his teachers’ good teaching was largely wasted.

 

I have fashioned no sustained intercourse with any solid book except Plutarch and Seneca; like the Danaides, I am constantly dipping into them and then pouring out: I spill some of it on to this paper but next to nothing on to me.

 

At times, he thought otherwise.

 

My book … is built entirely out of their spoils.

 

• Source: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, pp. 164, 817.

'This Is the Honey'

 I mentioned the new anthology This Is the Honey, which introduced me to Nicholas Goodly, an interesting young poet.

I think, but am not certain, that Goodly’s “R&B Facts” was my big discovery in this anthology. But there were others:

• Nikki Grimes, “Where I’m From.” The poem begins

I’m from fried okra, catfish and knish,

black-eyed peas, and pickles from the barrel …

If you are a child of a diaspora, you grow up with children of other diasporas.

• Nate Marshall, “Harold’s Chicken Shack #35.” His dad is teaching him the pleasures of fried gizzards with fries. The poem includes the memorable observation that “good sauce is equality/ among fowl.”

• Sharan Strange, “Mule.” The speaker is a 9-year-old girl watching her grandfather die. The poem beautifully contrasts a child’s innocence with the toughness — a virtue, but not a pretty one — that it took to survive Jim Crow.

• Chanda Feldman, “Demonstration.” A schoolgirl goes to the county extension office to watch her mother, a home economics agent, demonstrate the proper way to make preserves. This poem is quietly told. The image is sharp, photographic. The poem is a compressed short story.

The anthology includes famous poets: Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, Rita Dove, Natasha Trethewey, Terrance Hayes. It includes famous poets whose work I particularly like: Yusef Komunyakaa, Toi Derricotte, Cornelius Eady. But the best parts of the anthology are these introductions to new poets. I read, marveled and felt better about the world.

• Source: This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, edited by Kwame Alexander; New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2024.

Reading the poets

 I’ve been reading the poets lately. Ancient ones, contemporary ones, old friends, strangers. I’m not sure I need an excuse. But if I do, here’s Joubert: 

Do you want to know how thought functions, to know its effects? Read the poets. Do you want to know about morality, about politics? Read the poets. What pleases you in them, deepen: it is the truth. 

 

• Source: The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, translated with an introduction by Paul Aster; New York: New York Review of Books, 2005, p. 3.

A fine poet from Georgia

 I know little about the poets of Georgia. But Nicholas Goodly considers Atlanta home, and he’s good.

I admire his poem “R&B Facts.” It’s hard to say what a “fact” is in this poem. It’s best to just consider a sample:

 

One in three black girls learn

to swim by being chased away from

the shallow end of a brown community pool

 

The “facts” range from one to three lines. Some will make you smile, and others are heartbreaking.

 

The ghosts of black slaves are waiting

in one big front room with good music

till their whole families are free

 

The “facts” are not always verifiable. But they’ll make you wonder what is true — and what should be.

• Sources: Nicholas Goodly, “R&B Facts” is in This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, edited by Kwame Alexander; New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2024, pp. 175-8.

For a sample online, see “Crossing the Bridge,” published in the September 2023 edition of Poetry magazine and available at the Poetry Foundation’s site:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/160860/crossing-the-bridge

How we start

 Once upon a time, people began stories with a formula. “Once upon a time” was popular in European circles. N. Scott Momaday says a Kiowa formula was “They were camping.”

I like that. The oldest stories are from oral traditions, and ancient formulas reflect ancient features of a culture. The Kiowa people were nomads, always encamped somewhere.

I wonder if it makes sense to talk of personal formulas. If so, I’m claiming “On a walk through the woods.” I’m always on a tramp. That’s not strictly true, but true enough to be a starting place for many stories.

• Sources and notes: N. Scott Momaday, The Death of Sitting Bear; New York: Harper, 2020, pp. xiv. Several notes lately have been about Momaday. The unorganized series starts with ‘Momaday: ‘The Death of Sitting Bear,’ May 17, 2024.

It doesn't end with the last word

 Here’s a glimpse of N. Scott Momaday’s poetics, his sense of what’s good and beautiful in poetry: 

Story is the marrow of literature. The story does not end with the last word. It goes on in the silence of the mind, in that region in which exists the unknown, the mysterious, and that origin of the word in which all words are contained. 

 

Here’s an example of the story going on in my mind after the last word of a Momaday poem. Momaday’s last collection includes 100 haiku under the title “A Century of Impressions.” Here’s No. 2:

 

summer on the hills

poppies bursting in the sun

five colors rampant

 

You don’t need to be a resident of the Southwest to imagine those red poppies in the sun, which might be yellow in one poem or blood orange in another. But what of the remaining colors, out of just five? Do any of the many colors of the earth count? The blues of the sky? The lazy whites and frenzied grays of the clouds over the desert? And how you see greens and blacks, as in vegetation and in shadows, in that landscape tells the world more about your character than any psychologist could pry out.

• Sources and notes: N. Scott Momaday, The Death of Sitting Bear; New York: Harper, 2020, pp. xiv and 100. Several notes have mentioned this collection, beginning with ‘Momaday: ‘The Death of Sitting Bear,’ May 17, 2024.

He saw himself as a poet

 I’ve been reading M. Scott Momaday’s collection of poems The Death of Sitting Bear and wondering why I had not thought of him primarily as a poet.

Perhaps I had been sidetracked by critics who praised his fiction. Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel House Made of Dawn, and he wrote some fine short stories. But in his preface to The Death of Sitting Bear, he talks about his heritage as a Native American and about his father, a member of the Kiowa tribe. Then he says:

I am a poet. I believe poetry is the highest form of verbal expression. Although I have written in other forms, I find that poems are what I want and need most to read and write. They give life to my mind.

 

That’s clear. I have a new appreciation of Momaday the poet. That seriousness runs through his collection.

Jim Harrison was the same way. Harrison wrote some wonderful — and critically acclaimed — fiction and made a lot of money as a screenwriter. But he considered himself a poet. He valued poetry.

• Sources and notes: N. Scott Momaday, The Death of Sitting Bear; New York: Harper, 2020, p. xiii. For a note on the title poem, see ‘Momaday: ‘The Death of Sitting Bear,’ May 17, 2024.

The Piedmont in May

 The spiderworts are blooming everywhere in the woods around Arabia Mountain. They are in genus Tradescantia and are every shade of purple, from a pale lavender, almost white, to a deep violet, almost blue.

They grow in clumps on the forest floor and are “weakly upright,” meaning they tend to flop. The genus has about 75 species. I don’t know how many are in the Piedmont. When the stem is cut or punctured by an insect, the spiderwort secretes a sticky goo that hardens and then becomes silky, like a bit of spider’s web.

Among the other wonders was Spigelia marilandica, which is either called Indian pink (though it’s not the flower you might think of if you’re from Texas) or woodland pinkroot. I’d call it a small bush. The flowers, about 2 inches long, are red on the outside and yellow inside. The five lobes are pointed and flare at the ends — making a yellow star on what looks like a red flower. The leaves were dark green lances.

At Stone Mountain, oakleaf hydrangea, Hydrangea quercifolia, was just beginning to bloom. It has lovely white flowers that come in clusters. 

At Panola Mountain, the wild blackberries, genus Rubus, are just turning. Most of the berries are green, but a few are turning red and black. Someone said there are about 20 species in Georgia, not all native.

Here are some other things blooming in the Piedmont:

• Skullcaps, in genus Scutellaria, are putting out purple blossoms.

• Narrow-leaved sundrops, Oenothera fruiticosa, have yellow flowers. The North Carolina State University Extension Service says it’s a day-flowering member of the evening primrose family.

• Venus’s looking-glasses, genus Triodanis, has a purple flowers. The petals form a five-pointed star, on a long, spindly stalk. In between and under the petals are spiky sepals that look like little knife blades.

Widespread literacy, quickly

 In the 1820s, literacy rates among Cherokee people in Georgia were higher than those for whites.

It’s a remarkable fact, considering that the written language had just been devised by Sequoyah.

Sequoyah, who was past 50, was talking with other Cherokee men when someone suggested that whites had abilities that Cherokees simply lacked.

Sequoyah said there was nothing magic about those people. Sequoyah’s family had been driven from their lands in East Tennessee. He had such a low opinion of whites that he crossed the Mississippi.

Well, one of the men said, whites had devised a written language. They could communicate using marks on paper.

Anyone could do that, Sequoyah replied.

The men realized that was a verifiable claim; it could be proved or disproved.

Sequoyah, who could not read or write any language, was on the spot. He tried making a symbol for every Cherokee word but quickly realized that would be difficult, something akin to learning Chinese characters. He then played with the Roman alphabet, using a letter to represent each discrete sound or phoneme of spoken Cherokee. But that procedure struck him as hard to use and hard to learn.

He came up with a syllabary instead of an alphabet. Each character stands for syllable, rather than for a phoneme. The word “Cherokee” (tsa-la-gi or ja-la-gi, depending on dialect) has three syllables, so the word is written with three characters.

Sequoyah came up with 86 symbols, one of which has been dropped.

Here’s the interesting thing: If you have a language with thousands of characters, like Chinese, it takes a while to learn to read and write it, even if you’re a native speaker. If you have a language with just 26 letters, like English, it still takes a while to learn to read and write.

But if you have a written language based on syllables, it takes a couple of weeks. Learning to speak Cherokee takes a while. But if you can speak it, you can learn to use the syllabary quickly.

Around 1800, about 15,000 Cherokee lived in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and North Carolina. They were surrounded by a million whites whose record for taking land was not admirable. The Cherokee badly needed a unified nation, and to achieve that unity they needed a written language that most people could learn quickly.

Astonishingly, they got it.

• Sources and notes: Kathleen DuVal, Native Nations; New York: Random House, 2024, pp. 377-9.

Stone Mountain is in what was Creek of Muscogee territory, south of the Cherokee Nation, headquartered at New Echota. Having spent a lifetime in Texas, I know something of its natural history and of the history of its original peoples. In Georgia, I’m an old dog having to learn new things to get my bearings.

Momaday: ‘The Death of Sitting Bear’

 Among the elite societies of the world, the Kaitsenko, a group of warriors among the Kiowa, might have been the elite. Membership was limited to 10.

The poet N. Scott Momaday said each member wore a bandolier with a loop at each end.

The warrior wore one loop around his neck. In time of battle the other loop was secured to the ground by means of a sacred arrow. The Kaitsenko must stand this ground to the death.

Momaday’s poem “The Death of Sitting Bear” tells the story of the group’s leader. The poem has 12 sections, each of eight lines. It reads like a compressed epic.

The poem tells of Sitting Bear’s origins in the north where the hills are black. It tells of the myth that holds that the Kiowa people entered the world by coming out of a hollow log.

The poem tells of the great tragedy of Sitting Bear’s life. His son was killed in a raid in Texas. The grieving father journeyed far to collect the bones and bring them home.

Sitting Bear was captured and held at Fort Sill, Indian Territory. Here’s the old warrior speaking as he was being hauled in chains in a wagon, guarded by outriders. 

Singing my death song, I made strong medicine.

Gnawing my wrists to the bone I slipped my bonds,

Blood beading the bone, the color of watermelon.

Sitting Bear died fighting. In Momaday’s poem Sitting Bear lived consistently. His actions were in accord with the conception of what Kiowa culture held life should be. He lived, as well as a human can, an ideal.

Sitting Bear sang his own death song. In Momaday’s poem, this is how it ended:

I become the being I was at the mouth of the log.

Between birth and death is the way of the warrior,

And there is nothing at either end but a dream.

It’s a wonderful poem. If you don’t read the poets, maybe you should.

• Source: N. Scott Momaday, The Death of Sitting Bear; New York: Harper, 2020. The title poem of the book is on pp. 122-31. The quotations are on pp. 122, 128 and 130.

The powers of observation

 One of the world’s great essays is Guy Davenport’s “Geography of the Imagination.” He says: 

Imagination is the way we shape and use the world, the way we see it.

The essay is on how imagination is used in seeing. Davenport was one of those people who noticed things, who paid attention, who actively used his imagination to find things. The essay includes a section on Grant Wood’s famous painting “American Gothic,” a portrait of a farmer and his wife (if you follow Davenport) or daughter (if you follow the Art Institute of Chicago) in front of their house in Iowa.

Many of us have looked at the painting. Davenport taught me to see it.

Did you notice the Gothic spire in the background? It’s a protestant church steeple.

Did you see trees in the picture? There are seven, the number of columns in King Solomon’s Temple.

The house itself is balloon-frame construction, invented in 1833 by George Washington Snow. Plans for these houses in the Carpenter Gothic style were sold in pattern books. Houses in this style were built across the country. The bamboo curtains were sold through the Sears Roebuck catalog.

The essay speaks of eyeglasses, buttonholes, overalls, cameos and Scots shepherd’s jackets. If you want a lesson in noticing, this is where to start.

I was reminded of the essay by a photograph of a contemporary petroglyph in a Utah canyon. The image is of a young Navaho, posing between a saddlehorse and a pack animal.

E.T. Collinsworth, who has compiled a book on mules, looked at it and gave a description that was worthy of Davenport. Among other things, he said:

• The pack animal is a horse, not a mule. You can tell by the ears.

• The proportions of the saddlehorse were so carefully rendered that the artist must have been proud of it.

• The saddle, from swells to stirrups, is traditional Southwest. It might have been passed down by an elder.

• The Levi 501s are extra-long so they can be turned up and cuffed at just the right length to hang properly in the stirrup.

• The enormous wild rag is not for work on the trail but for attracting female attention. (I thought it was a bandana. But E.T. says a bandana is smaller and kept in the hip- pocket. A wild rag is worn around the neck and has many uses on the trail, including protecting the face from cold and blown dirt and filtering water from a muddy hole.)

• Everything about this fellow in the petroglyph suggests a skilled horseman except the hitches that secure the pack on packhorse. E.T. has said this more than once: “Boy Scouts and sailors tie knots. Packers throw hitches.” The hitches in the petroglyph are not up to the otherwise high standards of the rig and outfit.

Some people like to watch TV or go to movies.

I like to listen to someone observe and comment. It’s an art form.

• Source: Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination; San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981, p. 4.he proportions of the saddlehorse were so carefully rendered that the artist must have been proud of it.

Alice Munro: ‘Amundsen’

 Alice Munro’s “Amundsen” is a love story — if cautionary tales count.

It’s the story of a smart woman who sees that the man she loves doesn’t have much capacity to love. Incident after tiny little incident allows her to see that. But she still wants love, still expects it, still feels that love is something that could come from him.

The Allies are closing in on Berlin. The narrator is a teacher who leaves Toronto to take up a job at a sanitarium for people with tuberculosis. He’s the resident doctor. Perhaps he’s a catch — or should be. But over and again, he shows her what he is and is not capable of. He’s stingy with his time, attention and hospitality.

Readers hope that she will come to her senses and run.

Most love stories are about endless possibilities. Munro’s story is about limits, the sad constraints of human personalities.

“Amundsen” is in Munro’s collection Dear Life. My edition begins with seven pages of blurbs from critics suggesting that Munro was a master of the short story. Her obituary appeared in Tuesday’s papers.

• Alice Munro, Dear Life; London: Penguin, 2012, pp. 31-66.

Toi Derricotte: ‘Tender’

 When I listed recommendations for one-night reads a couple of years ago, I mentioned Toi Derricotte’s Tender. I said it was a long poem, or a series of interlinked shorter poems, about slavery and its awful aftermath.

I can still remember when and where I first read it.

The Wise Woman was attending a three-hour seminar. I was her driver. While she was busy, I ducked into a coffeeshop and started reading a book from the public library.

What I remember is the astonishment, how time passed without my being aware of it.

My notion that I had read a single long poem might surprise the author. But Tender, which is in seven sections, seems like a whole in the way Song of Myself is one poem, not many.

The first section of Tender is about Elmina Castle, where enslaved Africans were held before the crossing to the Americas.

 

Where mothers were held, we walk now

as tourists, looking for cokes, film, the bathroom.

 

She had thought that the African-American tourists might bond with the African guides. She found, instead, a rift: 

 

those were rooms through which our ancestors

had passed, while the Africans’ had not.

 

The poem works out how violence divides and harms. It shows how violence continues, passed from generation to generation, how it routinely continues publicly, through social and political institutions, and how it can continue privately, from parent to child. In the section called “When my father was beating me,” a prose poem, she writes:

 

I beat my dolls for years, pounded and pounded and nobody seemed to notice.

 

The poem talks of hatred and the ways of healing from hatred. There’s much more, but this will give you a sense of what it’s about.

I’ve spent evenings in front of a TV watching things I don’t remember. I remember that evening vividly.

When I go the library, I check the poetry section.

You never know.

• Sources and notes: Toi Derricotte, Tender; University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. For the original note, see “One-night reads: Recommendations 3,” Oct. 31, 2021, pp. 6, 8, 14.

Guy Davenport: ‘Wittgenstein’

The introductions to Wittgenstein’s philosophy are a lot longer than his Philosophical Investigations, the book he hoped would stand for his mature thought. I think Guy Davenport got the main points in a five-page essay:

• Wittgenstein sometimes liked other philosophers’ questions, but he never considered their answers.

• He had no philosophical tradition. “The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas. That’s what makes him a philosopher.”

• Wittgenstein’s central idea is that language is a game we learn to play. If you can imagine an anthropologist from Mars trying to learn the rules of a human language, connecting spoken language to behaviors, you might get an intuition of what language is like. You might also get a sense of what Wittgenstein’s philosophy is like.

• Wittgenstein thought that a healthy intellect would be unaware of itself. Thinking is about some thing, rather than about itself. He also thought that philosophy might be a kind of therapy to direct thought back into healthier channels.

• Wittgenstein, like Heraclitus, wrote in fragments. He left behind an enormous collection of notes.

• For all the difficulties people report in understanding Wittgenstein, he’s not abstruse. His writing his clear.

There you have it: a half dozen observations. I think they would help anyone trying to get the gist of an important thinker.

I’m thinking of Davenport because I recently found myself telling someone about his essays. I then wondered how often I’d done that through the years. Time and again, I’ve run across someone who is working on an interesting line of thought. I find myself thinking that person might be encouraged and aided on his or her own way by something Davenport wrote.

I recommend Davenport often to serious people working on serious ideas. It’s a measure of the value I put on Davenport’s work, I guess.

• Source: Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination; San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. The essay “Wittgenstein” is on pp. 331-35. The quotation is on p. 334. 

A second thought on learning Spanish

A couple of months ago, I ran across a story about how Thomas Jefferson claimed that Spanish was so easy he’d learned it in 19 days on a voyage to Europe.

Jefferson said he’d boarded the ship with Don Quixote and a grammar. Anyone could do it.

Of course, Jefferson was telling a stretcher, as the country folks used to say. (The material being stretched is the truth.)

But, if you’re wondering about yesterday’s note on Juan Goytisolo’s short story La Guardia, I had to try it, even though I knew better.

• Source: For the original note on Jefferson’s claim, “About learning Spanish,’ March 15, 2024.

Goytisolo: 'The Guard'

 Juan Goytisolo's story is about soldiers guarding prisoners in Franco's Spain. Goytisolo didn't like Franco, and the narrator, pulling his first guard duty, does not like Franco's Spain.

The narrator, with a submachine gun on his shoulder, is curious about a prisoner, an eccentric kid who is obsessed by soccer. The kid asks the narrator to bring him some newspapers — the ones with all the scores.

The narrator says almost nothing about himself. Others call him "sergeant." The lieutenant gives him a lecture on how the narrator and his kind — soft university types — have no understanding of what's below the cultured classes. It's ugly. Harsh discipline is needed.

The narrator learns the eccentric kid was a recruit, an ordinary soldier who believed that if he compiled and studied all the statistics, he could predict the winners of soccer games. He didn't embezzle exactly— he just borrowed an advance on his pay from military funds.

The kid placed a big bet and was astonished he lost. He "borrowed" more to recover his losses and make his fortune.

Some people are certain they know how things work: how soccer games are won and lost, and how governments should exercise authority. We human beings do not understand soccer well enough to reliably predict outcomes. We understand even less about just governance. 

The narrator looks at the future and is depressed. Some of us know how he feels.

• Source: Spanish Stories: A Dual-Language Book, ed. by Angel Flores; New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1987, pp. 260-75.

Jim Thompson: ‘The Grifters’

 I think the most interesting parts of Jim Thompson’s novel The Grifters, published in 1963, are about trust.

Thompson is good at showing how predators must have heightened powers of observation to survive. When you don’t trust other people, you don’t really have a capacity to care about them. You see them as prey to exploit or as larger predators to avoid. But while you don’t care about people, you must pay attention to them. If you don’t, you’ll miss a meal or be eaten. It’s the laws of nature at work.

The hero of this story, Roy Dillon, is a grifter. It’s part of his nature — or so it seems to me.

There’s a minor character, a barkeeper named Bert, who comes to see that Roy trusts no one. Roy is missing the faculty or apparatus that makes trust possible. Roy doesn’t trust and therefore can’t be trusted.

Roy doesn’t want to take advantage of Bert and would like to be friendly. But Bert will have none of it. He recognizes there’s something missing in Roy, and that this lack — this missing trait — is not an accident or a mistake but a part of Roy’s nature. It’s something that won’t change.

Hanging with Roy would be like hanging with a tiger who’s not hungry now but will be later.

If you’ve read much in this collection of notes, you might be curious about the sudden interest in classic noire. A friend posed some interesting questions about whether comparisons between Thompson’s book and Greek tragedy would hold up.

I read Thompson’s book, curious and grateful that I have a friend who asks such questions.

Aeschylus believed that when people misbehaved, the cosmos dropped a hammer on them. I think Aeschylus would have liked this story.

• Source and notes: Jim Thompson, The Grifters; New York: Mulholland Books, 2014.

Catching up on the news

 If you read only the national newspapers, you might be surprised by what other papers cover — by what those lesser lights consider news. I recently enjoyed The Stanford Daily’s account of a reading by Mary Ruefle, even though the article was a year old.

I’d somehow managed to get this far without knowing about Ruefle. The student newspaper helped me discover an interesting poet.

From the article I learned:

• That Ruefle wrote a poem called “The Bark,” about a dog barking in response to its echo over a lake. She compares the image to the process of making poetry.

• That Ruefle began her poem “Snow” with the line: “Every time it starts to snow, I would like to have sex.” It made me wonder whether we really need “prompts” for some natural processes, including writing.

• That Louise Glück, a professor at Stanford, introduced Ruefle with this: “One of the great American regionals, Mary Ruefle writes as a spirit newly hatched, without existing convictions or prejudices.” Glück died in October, a few months after the reading.

After reading the article, I read some of Ruefle’s poems. I’m now looking for her collection of prose poems, The Book, published last year.

But the point I’m trying to make is this: If you read only the national newspapers, you might get the impression that contemporary journalism consists of recording whatever Trump does on a given day and then soliciting commentary from a dozen pundits. I’m a great believer in local papers, including student newspapers. I like other perspectives on what’s interesting, what’s news.

• Source: Ellen Abraham, “Pulitzer Prize-Finalist Mary Ruefle enlightens with reading of snow-day inspired poetry”; The Stanford Daily, March 5, 2023. 

Why writers make notes

 Writers give a lot of reasons for keeping journals and notebooks. Thornton Wilder said he started a journal to get better control of his interests and “to harness his notions into paragraphs.”

He said he also wanted to create a habit and a relation between thinking and writing. As you might suspect, that line seems true to me.

This too was interesting: Wilder said he wanted “to collect from these records a reservoir of more codified ideas on which to base the judgments I am so often called upon for in conversation.” Good friends — friends who read and inquire and ask challenging questions — push you toward better habits of thinking.

• Source: The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939-1961; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

About these notes

 I suppose my friend Christopher is right: This collection of online notes is a kind of practice, a habit of daily meditation.

I’d call it “meditation,” except that so many people talk of meditation today as a way of “emptying” the mind, getting away from the endless stream of thoughts. I try to get in the middle of stream and catch at least one a day.

I guess that’s one thing I like about Joubert. He thought that thinking was a natural process. A mind produces ideas, just as a field produces flowers. Rather than suppressing these notions, he examined them. He found some to be useful, interesting, even beautiful.

 

The mind. It loves to produce flowers.

 

• The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, translated with an introduction by Paul Aster; New York: New York Review of Books, 2005, pp. 108.

Talking about writing with Joubert

 Paul Auster translated a collection of items from Joubert’s notebooks, including this one about collections:

Collections, thoughts. The man shows himself in them, if the author does not.

 

Joubert was musing about his own mind. What did the topics that kept coming up in his notebooks say about himself? Auster, in choosing the items for his brief collection from 50 years of notebooks, considered a similar question. What does the collection say about the collector? And what about us, the readers who like Joubert? People who like Joubert like to think about the topics he considered, including writing.

Here are five notes on the topic, written by Joubert, chosen and translated by Auster, admired by me:

 

It is not my words that I polish, but my ideas.

 

Speak for the ear and write for the memory.

 

Everything that is exact is short.

 

A work of genius, whether poetic or didactic, is too long if it cannot be read in one day.

 

When you write easily, you always think you have more talent than you really do.

 

• The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, translated with an introduction by Paul Aster; New York: New York Review of Books, 2005, pp. 91, 102, 122, 99, 9, 101. For a note on Auster’s death, see “Paul Auster: 1947 — 2024,” May 2, 2024.

Medicine for the blues

  Everybody gets the blues. There’s no cure, but I think J.B. Priestley’s little book Delight is medicine.

Here’s the beginning of his essay — he called these short items “reflections” — on “Manly Talk”:

 

Bluff manly talk, with a big background of travel and adventure behind it, like the old Wide World Magazine; and with everybody pretending to be a Kipling character.

 

Priestley thought that the best place for this kind of thing was the smoking room of a small ocean liner. The best place I ever ran across was a cabin on a sawmill pond in East Texas, where a Pulitzer-Prize winner would talk about writing and good books, and his cousin, one of the world’s great storytellers, would turn steaks on the grill. And with everybody pretending to be a Hemingway or Faulkner character.

Priestley listed some of the main topics of manly talk: travels, fishermen, guns, eccentrics and drinking. But he missed bird dogs.

Maybe it’s just because I’m from the uncultivated part of the country, but I don’t see how you can write a piece about manly talk without having a bird dog wander through it.

And that’s why everyone who likes to write should write a version of this book: There are different delights, and different folks have different ways of finding them.

Priestley wrote 110 short pieces. I’m going to give it a try.

• Source: J.B. Priestley, Delight; New York: Harper & Row, 1949, p. 59. I’ve mentioned this book more than once. Last sighting: “J.B. Priestley: ‘Delight,’” April 24, 2024.

Fungi on the forest floor

 The new growth in the forest is spectacular. In places where I could see a quarter mile through the woods in winter, I can’t see 50 feet now. The foliage is dense. The leaves and blossoms, individually, are so delicate and lovely that I forget that collectively they weigh more than an aircraft carrier.

The leaf litter on the forest floor is deep, and I’ve been trying to learn something about basidiomycetes, a phylum of fungus. Many of species have the ability break down lignin and cellulose. 

Fungi have elongated cells, called hyphae, that can get between the cells of downed limbs and fallen leaves. The fungi secrete enzymes to digest and recycle the litter on the forest floor.

Keith Seifert, whose wonderful book is my guide, says that nearly 2,000 miles of hyphae can be found in a teaspoon of soil. I can barely imagine that.

So many of the natural processes that I see are just mystifying. I see evidence of them — but I just barely see, just barely understand. We human beings tend to make confident statements about our place in the universe. I’m constantly reminded how little I know about the place, much less my role and standing in it.

• Source: Keith Seifert, The Hidden Kingdom of Fungi; Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2022, p. 26.

Stone Mountain, early May

 The mountain laurel that was blooming everywhere a couple of weeks ago is fading. A few stands of Kalmia latifolia near the mountain are going strong. Most are past their prime.

The fragrance of honeysuckle is almost overpowering.

If you turn over leaves of lady ferns, genus Athuria, you’ll see orange-brown spots. They’re sori, bundles of spore sacs. The new fronds on the Christmas ferns, Polystichum acrostichoides, are uncoiling.

All the clovers are blooming. I can’t believe I haven’t noticed how many reds and purples are displayed by common red clover, Trifolium pratense. I saw some that I'd call lavender. I like the little fuzzy balls of yellow in hop trefoil, Trifolium campestre.

I found just a couple of blooming spiderworts, genus Tradescantia, in the woods. The ones I saw were on the border of blue and purple.

The showiest blooms are not on the mountain but down by the pond in Wade Walker Park. Virginia sweetspire, Itea virginica, is a shrub that has long spikes of cream-colored flowers. The biologists call them terminal racemes.

Growing by them were some blue toadflax, Nuttallanthus canadensis, which have spindly, grass-like stems that hold small flowers. Despite the common name, the flowers look purple to me. 

Paul Auster: 1947 — 2024

 The obituaries are talking about Paul Auster’s fiction. The notes about Auster in this collection have been about his nonfiction. Most are on his wonderful biography of Stephen Crane. One mentions Winter Journey, Auster’s account of getting old.

Auster did many things. Not least, he introduced me and many others to Joubert.

Auster was interested in lost books — books by writers who weren’t interested in publishing. Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno was written in the 1760s and published in 1939. Joubert, usually described as an aphorist, wrote for himself.

 

Neither a poet nor a novelist, neither a philosopher nor an essayist, Joubert was a man of letters without portfolio whose work consists of a vast series of notebooks in which he wrote down his thoughts every day for forty years.

 

Auster said Joubert (1) observed the world, (2) cultivated friendships and (3) meditated. Joubert’s notebooks became his work, a lab to work out his ideas.

It seems to me that Auster was observing a kindred spirit. Like Joubert, Auster did all those things.

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

Writers talking shop

 I like to read interviews with writers. I have a volume of interviews featuring famous writers published by The Paris Review. I have volumes featuring less famous writers from Texas and New Mexico. I have a collection of interviews given by a single writer, Margaret Atwood, through the years.

I might have a better grasp of the writing processes of William Stafford and Norman MacCaig than I do of my own. I like to listen to writers talk shop. That’s the way some of us learn.

But here’s Lilian Hellman:

 

They’re fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talk about themselves.

 

A point granted to the devil’s advocate: It’s wise to be cautious.

But if I were going to give young writers advice, I would say listen to two poets, Stafford and MacCaig.

• Source: The Writer’s Quotation Book, edited by James Charlton; Wainscott, N.Y.: Pushcart Press, 1991, p. 95.