The other one

 One day, I would love to see a story in the newspaper about the other Trump, the famous one, the one whose portrait is in the Tate Gallery.

He was a dog, loved by William Hogarth, who painted him repeatedly.

I would like to see a story about the pug because I think it might be significant, and a lot of stories that appear about the other Trump have a significance that is ... well, not obvious to me. I don’t think every bark the famous Trump emitted was significant, nor do I think that everything the other Trump emits is significant.

I wish newspaper editors would do a better job of protecting their readers. Some of the emissions that are like greenhouse gasses. If we could control them, we would change the environment for the better.

Christian Wiman, who edited Poetry magazine for a decade, said he learned to choose poems, not poets. Famous poets submit bad poems for publication. An editor who publishes them isn’t doing readers a favor. It’s a celebration of celebrity over significance.

One day, I’m going to see a headline about the famous Trump and I’m going to enjoy it. I love a good dog story.

Copypaper

 One of the first things I learned about newspapers was that there was such a thing as copypaper. It was the cheapest paper imaginable: newsprint cut to letter size. You threaded the stuff into a manual typewriter and blazed away.

If you saw that you were writing something that couldn’t possibly be edited, you ripped it out and tossed it. You started again. It was only copypaper.

I was 14 and had been hired to take scores from high school football games over the phone. I was to write three-paragraph stories — three grafs — by formula. I might write 25 a night. The paper tried to include items on all the games in the region. I was to understand that the value of the work was in its accuracy and completeness— the more games I could take before deadline the better. People wanted to know that the lowly Tigers in a small town 100 miles to the south had beaten a top-rated team. That’s why people were reading. They were not interested in my immortal prose.

So I learned to get something down on paper quickly. My copy went to the copydesk. The work of the editors made it more valuable, and the work of the compositors and printers made it more valuable still. Proof came back to the newsroom on a higher grade of paper.

Somewhere in there is a lesson about first drafts. The first job is to get it down and then let the editing process, whatever it is, work. You can’t edit a plank page.

I’ve heard of people who work on fine paper in leatherbound notebooks, and if that works for them that’s a fine way to work. I still use cheap stuff — the closest thing to copypaper I can find.

Words that change hearts

 A line in the obituary of Lewis Lapham, a remarkable magazine editor, stayed with me for days. I finally looked it up and copied it into my notebook. This is Lapham:

The hope of social or political change stems from language that induces a change of heart. That’s the power of words, and that’s a different power than the power of the internet.

 

I thought that Lapham, best known as editor of Harper’s, was talking about the way mass media work. The version I learned was a metaphor: a pebble tossed into a pond makes concentric rings. As a young reporter, working at a newspaper in a small town, I wrote an article that influenced people who didn’t read the paper — the mayor, for example.

The words didn’t get his attention as much as the facts, which showed astonishing adjustments on the tax rolls for some of his friends and insiders. People who supported him but were appalled by the facts told him about the articles in the paper — those concentric rings at work.

But the Lapham quotation stayed in mind because it fits a different dynamic. During the Depression and again in World War II, people were paralyzed by fear. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was not a great administrator, but he was a good communicator. He didn’t have to pretend to like people. He really did, and he talked to them confidently, intimately, honestly.

He told them that they could overcome the greatest challenges that the country had faced if they would make some sacrifices and work together.

It was not the facts, but his tone, one that communicated reasonable hope instead of fear. Those were the concentric rings that rippled across the pond.

If you ask me what happened to the presidential campaign since Kamala Harris jumped in, I’d say it’s thoseconcentric rings. 

• Source: John Otis, “Lewis Lapham, editor who revived Harper’s magazine, dies at 89”; The Washington Post, July 24, 2024. It’s here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/07/24/lewis-lapham-harpers-dead/

Writing lesson: Where to start

 Henry David Thoreau said: 

Whatever sentence will bear to be read twice, we may be sure was thought twice.

 

You don’t start to write by sitting down in front of blank sheet of paper or an empty computer screen. You start by thinking about something.

If you sit down at the computer without having done any thinking, you might be in trouble. Thinking can include reading, reporting, observation and research. If I haven’t done any of that, I stay away from the blank page, the empty screen.

Amor Towles says he begins a “design book” about four years before he begins a novel. He used a notebook to collect information on the Soviet Union in the 1920s and ’30s for A Gentleman in Moscow. Towles consulted old guidebooks and encyclopedias. He was able to picture the details — how his characters would move around in the setting — before he started typing.

In my mind, Towles was writing during the four years of keeping that design book. I’d say he was writing long before he started on the first draft. To me, that’s not a separate process. It’s an essential part of writing.

• Sources: The Quotable Thoreau, edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011, p. 195.

John Williams, “Book Tour: At Home with Amor Towles”; The Washington Post, May 18, 2024. It’s here: https://wapo.st/3LAbcRk

Consulting 'the insides'

 Patricia Hampl has something called “insides,” places inside certain books that she often goes. She goes to see Becky Sharp throw Dr. Johnson’s dictionary out the window, rather than re-read the whole of Vanity Fair.

Most of her examples came from poetry: Blake’s grain of sand and Pound’s petals on a wet, black bough were among her favorites.

Poetry might have an advantage in this game. Lines of poetry are meant to be memorable.

My own insides? I was surprised how many short passages came from essays, letters, journals and collections of aphorisms. Montaigne, Thoreau and Woolf were among the essayists and journal writers. Among the letter writers: Roy Bedichek.

• Source: Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day; New York: Viking, 2018, p. 160.

Marilynne Robinson: “Humanism”

 Marilynne Robinson’s voice is one I expect to argue against. And so I’m surprised by points of agreement.

Here are a couple from her essay “Humanism.”

I like the Greek word psyche, despite problems. Here’s Robinson:

 

I find the soul a valuable concept, a statement of the dignity of a human life and of the unutterable gravity of human action and experience.

 

I also think that one of the appalling features of our common life is its corporate culture. If I were young again, I’d wonder what I, friends, taxpayers and idealistic teachers were doing to prepare the next generation for a life that could be described as “full.” Here’s Robinson:

 

In any case, the spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency, many of us preparing ourselves and our children to be means to inscrutable ends that are utterly not our own. In such an environment the humanities do see to have little place. They are poor preparation for economic servitude. 

• Source: Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things; New York; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, pp. 9 and 4.

A problem with classic books

 I like looking at lists of classic books, which people are free to take or leave, although the lists tend to turn into syllabi on college campuses and become serious instead of fun.

The lists make me wonder. Why are some enduring books, let’s say Joyce’s Ulysses, loved by some readers and hated by others?

Here is the poet Christian Wiman:

 

The greatness of James Joyce’s Ulysses is partly in the way it reveals the interior chaos of a single mind during a single day, and partly in the way it makes that idiosyncratic clamor universal. However different the textures of our own lives may be, Bloom’s mind is our mind; the welter of impressions he suffers and savors is a storm we all know. And that is the book’s horror too: some form of this same fury of trivia is going on in the mind of every sentient person on the planet.

 

If that torrent of consciousness is something we all experience, why do some of us hate the book?

I had a friend who was a teacher of transcendental meditation. He tried to shut down that stream of impressions. He sought to quiet his mind, to let it be empty. To him, thoughts were intrusive, the cause of anxiety. He saw meditation as a kind of therapy.

My friend hated Ulysses, a book I like. 

I like the stream of impressions. I like to fish items out from the stream. I share some of them in this collection of notes.

I think the answer to the question about lists of classic books is that humanity is an elusive form. Individual humans are just too diverse to fit into it. 

• Source: Christian Wiman, “Hive of Nerves”; The American Scholar, June 1, 2010. It’s here:

https://theamericanscholar.org/hive-of-nerves/

Pundits, poets and perspective

 I’ve been trying to follow what the pundits are saying about Kamala Harris and her chances of becoming President. But I keep thinking of some lines by Nicholas Goodly, a young poet from Atlanta: 

If we planted a tree for every word

against women, the ground

would lose sight of the sun.

 

One in three black girls learn

to swim by being chased away from

the shallow end of a brown community pool.

 

I prefer poets to pundits. They are often better guides to uncharted territory.

• Source: The lines are from Nicholas Goodly’s poem “R&B Facts” in This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, edited by Kwame Alexander; New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2024.

What Montaigne said about aging

 Montaigne said that those of us who are lucky to live a long time should curb our expectations for going on. In other words, we should retire.

He thought the right age was 40.

Montaigne thought a person’s capacity for judgement was formed by 20. It followed that he thought most minimum age limits were silly. He poked fun at Augustus, who ruled the Roman Empire at 19, for thinking magistrates should be at least 30.

Montaigne also said this:

 

But it seems to me that our souls are subject in old age to ills and imperfections more insolent than those of youth. … age sets more wrinkles in our minds than our faces.

 

Sadly, that rings true to me.

• Source: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993. His general views on aging are in “On the length of life,” pp. 366-7. The quotation is from “On repenting,” p.  921.

Being human first

 In reading the political news, I found myself wondering whether some people think they will be exempt from the diminishments of aging. The decline of one human being is not tragic because it’s inevitable. It happens to us all.

But it seems to me that human beings should have compassion for the common condition of humanity, some spirit that runs deeper than the spirit of politics. Henry David Thoreau put it this way:

 

I would remind my countrymen, that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour.

 

• Source: The Quotable Thoreau, edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011, p. 389. It’s a line from the essay “Slavery in Massachusetts.”

Schrödinger: ‘Metaphysics in general’

 Erwin Schrödinger said the physics of a book involves the consideration of thin sheets of wood pulp and black markings. If you want to get into the significance of those markings, you have to go beyond that. Physics is wood pulp and black markings. Metaphysics is everything else.

Leave it to a physicist, rather than a metaphysician, to get his finger on it.

Schrödinger says there are different ways of looking at metaphysics. It might be like scaffolding — it’s not the house, but the scaffolding that allows the carpenters to build the house. The scaffolding is then dismantled, but only those who are unfamiliar with the process would say it was unnecessary.

That’s one way to see it. But I like this:

 

Perhaps we may even be permitted to say: metaphysics turns into physics in the course of its development — but not of course in the sense in which it might have seemed to do so before Kant. Never, that is, by a gradual establishing of initially uncertain opinions, but always through a clarification of, and change in, the philosophical point of view.

 

I think the “hard problem of consciousness” is an example of what Schrödinger is talking about. The problem is not going to be solved with better physics and chemistry. It’s a philosophical problem. The confusion will dissipate when we clarify and change some concepts that are so basic to our thinking that we hardly notice them. 

• Source: Erwin Schrödinger, My View of the World, translated by Cecily Hastings; Cambridge at the University Press, 1964. The essays in My View of the World are short, usually two or three pages. “Metaphysics in General” is the starting point.

Schrödinger's view

Erwin Schrödinger, one of the great physicists, wrote a little book called My View of the World. In a way, it’s a model for the kind of book everyone should write. It’s not a record of degrees achieved, awards won, jobs worked or committees joined. It’s a record of what an active mind thought of the world.

The foreword has the finest apology for this kind of book I’ve seen:

 

I do not know whether it is presumptuous of me to suppose that readers will be interested in ‘my’ view of the world. The critics, not myself, will decide on this. But a gesture of decorous modesty is usually in fact a disguise for arrogance. I should prefer not to be guilty of this. Anyway, the total (I have counted) is about twenty-eight to twenty-nine thousand words. Not an excessive size for a view of the world.

 

I wish some of my friends would write their version of this universal book. And I admire the brevity.

• Source: Erwin Schrödinger, My View of the World, translated by Cecily Hastings; Cambridge at the University Press, 1964. 

Aphorisms, quotations and scripture

 I have been thinking about scriptures, proverbs, aphorisms and sayings because I’ve been reading The Quotable Thoreau.

Reading Thoreau in short bites is like reading scripture. Jeffrey S. Cramer collected his quotable lines — I’d call them aphorisms — and collected them by topic. Here are two specimens:

 

Friends

They cherish each other’s hopes. They are kind to each other’s dreams.

 

Thinking

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.

 

I think we use certain writings in a peculiar way — like some people use their scriptures.

If you asked whether two people were friends or just acquaintances, Thoreau might ask how they treat each other’s hopes and dreams.

If it’s been a while since you’ve had a good conversation, that line on thinking might help. You’d just have to use it. Act on it.

• Source: The Quotable Thoreau, edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011, pp. 110 and 316.

Jones: ‘Bad Neighbors’

 Edward P. Jones’s “Bad Neighbors” is a wonder: so many surprises in a short story.

I thought it was going to be about the sociology of a Black middle-class neighborhood in Washington, D.C. The story opens when the Benningtons, renters, move into a neighborhood of homeowners. Had they been white, the Benningtons might have been the Joads. Some people have trouble finding a place where they’re welcome.

But the story surprises. Like the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the story is about how difficult it is for us to love our neighbor — and how difficult it is to see who loves us. The thing that that should be the most obvious is the very thing that escapes us.

One of the kids in the neighborhood, Sharon, is a high school student who is just discovering her magical ability to buckle the knees of boys.

Her family considers what a good catch might look like. The question of each suitor’s capacity to love, and what that might look like — well, that’s a different question. Jones is good at showing why that question is worth asking.

I’m going to look for more of Edward P. Jones. And thanks, Christopher, for the recommendation.

• Source: Edward P. Jones, “Bad Neighbors”; The New Yorker, July 30, 2006. It’s here:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/08/07/bad-neighbors

On the trail to Tribble Mill

 Near the ruins of Tribble Mill is an impressive stand of Joe Pye weed, genus Eutrochium.

The Greek means something like “good wheels.” The long, skinny leaves are whorled. Five or six leaves radiate from the same point on the stalk, like spokes on a wheel. The plants I saw were more than 7 feet tall. The stalks and stems have some purple in them, like rhubarb. The leaves at the bottom were more than a foot long. The length of the leaves in the whorls gets shorter toward the top, so the shape of a Joe Pye weed might remind you of a Christmas tree.

They were just putting out whisps of purple flowers.

Among the blooms of July: dayflowers, Commelina communis, beautiful but invasive; tickseed, in genus Coreopsis; white beggarticks, Bidens alba; wild petunia, Ruellia caroliniensis; and bear’s foot, Smallanthus uvedalia.

The Georgia Piedmont is full of old mills. Tribble Mill, now part of a park in neighboring Gwinnett County, was built in the 1830s at a falls. It’s more of a water slide than a falls, I’d say, though the current was strong enough to move a 100-pound dog who loves water.

• Note: I’d like to know more about Joe Pye. The Adirondack Almanack says he was Joseph Shauquethqueat, a Native American herbalist who lived in the late 1700s and early 1800s in Massachusetts and New York. The almanack’s article is here:

https://www.adirondackalmanack.com/2020/06/whats-in-a-name-joe-pye-weed.html#:~:text=For%20years%2C%20it%20was%20unknown,(2017).

Scriptures, aphorisms, proverbs, sayings

 I grew up on scriptures, bite-sized bits of the Bible that people memorized and quoted.

The form of those short sayings is important, I think. The sayings are short enough to stick in memory. Some people use them as guideposts or street signs. They tend to pop up in my memory when I’m lost, even just briefly.

The biblical book of Proverbs is a collection of these sayings. But they’re everywhere.

After a long day, if the Wise Woman has one more chore for me, I do not say that I’m tired and need to rest. I say, hearing my father’s voice instead of my own:

 

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

 

When I was a boy, the people around me quoted scripture. Later I discovered writers known for their aphorisms and maxims. I discovered that people who were not religious or were opposed to religion compiled short thoughts that seemed to me to be in scripture form. The idea that this form of literature, wisdom literature, was older than the Bible and was as varied as human culture struck me was wonderful.

All this to get to one point: I think it’s interesting how we use these sayings.

The great ethical systems taught by the philosophers — Aristotle, Kant, Mill — strike me as intensely interesting but not often useful. Even as a student, I just couldn’t believe that anyone really made a moral decision about giving spare change to a beggar by doing some kind of calculation involving the greatest possible good for the greatest number of people.

We occasionally agonize over decisions for days. But when an adult is beating a child in the grocery store, we sometimes don’t react rationally — we just react. We are barely conscious of what impels us to intervene or turn away.

In between, it seems to me, are the vast number of cases where we face a moral question. We are lost — not profoundly, but temporarily. We need a street sign, rather than treatise on how to live our lives. We just need to get our bearings. Those aphorisms and proverbs come to mind.

The way we use those bits of literature is interesting to me. I wish more scholars would get interested in that topic.

A public good

 Henry David Thoreau said: 

Each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest of five hundred or a thousand acres, where a stick should not be cut for fuel, a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation. We have cow-common and ministerial lots, but we want men-commons and lay lots, inalienable forever.

 

I wish the country would act on Thoreau’s advice. One of the joys of living in Stone Mountain is the forest to the south of the mountain. The forest is protected in a state park. But there’s a foot trail leading into the park that begins almost at the village square.

I’ve heard people say that the practice of spending an hour in the gym or out running three times a week changed their life. I always wonder how they’d feel if they got out into the woods. 

• Source: The note is from Thoreau’s Journal, Oct. 15, 1859. I have it in the delightful The Quotable Thoreau, edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011, p. 52. 

‘Sail, sail thy best ship’

 Brooding over the election, I wondered whether anyone else was thinking of these lines: 

Sail, sail thy best ship, ship of Democracy,

Of value is thy freight …

 

That’s Whitman, and he assumes that just about everything good in the world is onboard the ship — not just the present, but also the past — not just the best of the Western world, but of the whole.

 

Earth’s résumé entire floats on they keel O ship …

 

Maybe we could dismiss it as just one more specimen of overwrought American exceptionalism. But I like the metaphor. I hope the crew, a mixed batch from many antecedent nations, minds the ship.

 

Steer then with good strong hand and wary eye O helmsman,

Thou carriest great companions …

• Source: Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass; New York: New American Library, 1958, p. 352. These lines are in Section 4 of “Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood.”

A conversation no one's having

I had a conversation with a fellow who said he was still thinking about the election.

When I asked, he said that he feared putting the country in the hands of someone who is obviously fading. He told of taking the car keys away from an elderly relative. There was real emotion in his voice. I listened and heard things I had not considered.

When he asked, I said I thought Trump was dangerous.

I said I thought anyone who had tried to overturn an election was not qualified to hold office. And anyone who continued to talk about dictatorial measures after trying to overturn the will of the voters was doubly unqualified.

But those are opinions, I said. As a matter of principle, I think a felony conviction disqualifies anyone from running for president.

The fellow said a lot of people thought the trial was political, a witch hunt.

I said I’d spent years as a newspaper reporter covering courthouses. Countless cases — many involving murder and one involving cattle rustling. I sat through more trials than most lawyers I know.

I’ve seen juries make mistakes. I’m pretty sure Texas executed an innocent man whose trial I covered decades ago.

But juries usually get it right. Twelve ordinary citizens somehow feel the weight of responsibility as jurors.

While juries sometimes get it wrong, the fact that 12 citizens found Trump guilty of crimes should disqualify him as a candidate. A convicted criminal doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt while the appeals are heard.

I’ve seen enough of the jury system to have some respect for it. I couldn’t support a political party that thought otherwise.

That’s where we left it.

I've been thinking about that conversation because I read an article by a pundit who said there were no real conversations about the election at this point. I suspect the pundit is wrong.

A bit of career counseling

 “How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book?”

Henry David Thoreau asked that question in Walden. Reading that book was a new era in the life of the 16-year-old version of me. Maybe people treat teenagers differently now. But then, when people asked me what I wanted to do with my life, they expected to talk about a career, a profession, some line of work tied to a salary.

Thoreau suggested this:

 

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.

 

• Sources and notes: Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971. The question is on p 107, and the quotation is on pp. 14-15. Thoreau was born on this day in 1817 in Concord, Mass.

Henry James on notes

 Patricia Hampl quotes, more than once, Henry James on note-taking:

If one was to undertake to tell tales and report the truth on the human scene, it could but be because notes had been from the cradle the ineluctable consequence of one’s greatest inner energy … to take them was as natural as to look, to think, to feel, to recognize, to remember.

 

What I like: That James thought about note-taking. I think some concepts — consciousness, for example — are so vast we mortals tend to lose our way. The business of note-taking, on the other hand, is a common activity, something we all do. I think paying attention to the practices of ordinary people can tell us more about the way we think than treatises on consciousness.

What I don’t like: his way of putting it. I’d have said, “Note-taking is natural.” But I’m not Henry James.

I think he’s right about this: If you’re not taking notes and keeping a notebook, you’re going to have a hard time telling tales and reporting the truth on the human scene.

• Source: Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day; New York: Viking, 2018, p. 46.

A second thought on talks

 As I mentioned the other day, I like talks. One of the subspecies of talks that I love is the one-actor play.

Richard Thomas brought Thomas Paine to life for me back the ‘80s. Hal Holbrook did the same for Mark Twain.

Patricia Hampl said the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minn., puts on dramatic readings to highlight characters from history. The scripts are taken from letters and other writings. I’d enjoy that kind of talk.

I’ve mentioned this before, but the person I’d most like to see on stage is Richard Wright. I would love to see an actor portray him well. I’d love to spend an hour just listening to Wright talk.

• Note: For an earlier note on this topic, see “The one-actor play,” Dec. 17, 2022.

Talks

 I have been thinking about talks.

The public library in Galveston used to have them. People came, because there’s something satisfying about learning something in an hour — or an hour and a half, if you allow for questions.

The talks I have in mind are just talks. They are not lectures, written out and read, although I once heard an excellent one delivered that way by the great historian Peter Brown, an expert on Augustine of Hippo. The talks I have in mind are not delivered by someone consulting notes or fiddling with a computer projecting images onto a screen.

They are just talks — someone talking about a subject she knows well.

The person giving the talk has written the talk. The text could be published as an essay. But the person giving the talk is not consulting the text. She has the material in mind. And she has more material than she can deliver in an hour, and so she’s following cues from the audience. When she senses interest, she gives more detail. When she sees a puzzled face, she fills in context. When she senses interest is flagging, she moves on.

The text, which has been left in the speaker’s luggage, has a fixed length.

People who speak clearly tend to speak at about 150 words per minute. (I grew up in the day when reporters wrote for print and broadcast. I’m pretty sure the stylebooks included that guideline: 150 words per minute of broadcast time.)

The talks I’m imagining last about an hour. If you cut it off at 50 minutes, that’s 7,500 words, just 6,750 if you stop at 45. If you just an hour and want to include questions, a 30-minute talk is 4,500 words.

I’m suggesting a range: 4,500 to 7,500 words. I think that’s a good mark to aim for.

Oxford University Press has a laudable series of Very Short Introductions. My only quibble is that some introductions should be shorter.

Professor Barbara Lounsberry, an English professor whose work I admire, used to give talks on Virginia Woolf, Iowa, creative nonfiction and “The Charm of Diaries.”

I wish the Internet were full of such talks. Life is short, and such introductions are a good way to find a new interest that might surprise you, prompting further reading, further study.

But I also wish that libraries and other public institutions would sponsor them.

Just as churches, synagogues and mosques offer weekly services, I wish library offered weekly talks.

It seems to me that if ordinary citizens met regularly to learn together, something good might come of it.

‘The Art of the Wasted Day’

 Patricia Hampl’s book is a defense of the quiet life: daydreaming, self-examination, reflection, loafing, mediation, prayer. She uses the phrase “the life of the mind,” which I heard often as a boy, but rarely now.

Human beings can get lost in thought. But we also can get lost in the pursuit of things, including the pursuit of happiness, business, careers, wealth, fame.

We make lists. We get anxious about productivity. We tie ourselves in knots.

Hampl argues for getting lost in thought.

I like the language she uses to describe what “the life of the mind” is like.

Interviewers and reviewers have notices her distinction between “what happened,” a narrative, and “what has happened,” an attempt at understanding. I’m still thinking about that one.

More to my liking are her remarks about notes and why we make them — and why we think of them as having no form. She notices that we English speakers had to borrow words for some forms. Do English speakers tend to see essais, vignettes and memoirs as formless?

Here’s a simple description of a note:

 

Details, tossed into the shoebox of the mind, fragments.

 

I admire her remark. And doing that sounds like a good way to spend a day.

• Source: Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day; New York: Viking, 2018, p. 97.

One way of looking at style

 Joyce, asked about style, said he favored “scrupulous meanness.” He was talking about economy.

The story “Counterparts” is a series of images involving the man at the center of the story. We see the world from his point of view. Other characters call the man Farrington, but the narrator doesn’t name him.

It’s that kind of economy Joyce was talking about, I think. Joyce gives us images of the man sabotaging himself at the office, pawning his watch, hitting the bars with companions and spending up the money. Joyce gives us enough to see a larger picture. He doesn’t give us any extras.

What we see is a man trying to escape the frustration and rage that causes him to sabotage himself and not succeeding, which explains, in a twisted way, why the man does inexplicable things when he finally gets home to the family.

• James Joyce, Dubliners; New York: Bantam Books, 1990. “Counterparts” is on pp. 65-75. 

Learning to write

 My education is spotty, but my notebooks are full of remarks by writers who have talked about wrestling with their own work. I seem to learn that way.

Here are a few examples of things writers have said that have helped me:

Flannery O’Connor said this about the education of a short-story writer:

 

The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then to try to discover what you have done. The time to think of technique is when you’ve actually got the story is front of you.

 

Claire Keegan’s stories seem fated or destined — like Sophocles’ plays. She said this to some students who were interested in what makes a story work:

 

Good stories for me end inevitably: after they finish you feel there is only one thing that could have happened, and that is the thing that happened.

 

After reading Arthur Conan Doyle as a boy, I gravitated toward a different kind of story — one that had less suspense, less adventure, less action, less plot. I found that hard to explain until I ran across this observation from William Trevor:

 

You don’t have to have a plot in a short story but you do have to have a point.

 

I started with Flannery O’Connor’s helpful remark on the education of a writer. Roberto Bolaño, considering the same topic, said this:

 

Reading is always more important than writing.

 

• Sources: Alas, the only source I’m sure of is Claire Keegan’s remark, which is from a transcript given of a talk to students at St. Columba’s College, Dublin, Ireland. It’s headed “Claire Keegan and ‘Foster’” and is here:

http://www.sccenglish.ie/2014/03/claire-keegan-and-foster.html

I found it through The Fortnightly, a site and newsletter by a remarkable teacher named Julian Girdham. It’s here:

https://www.juliangirdham.com

I’d guess the Flannery O’Connor quote comes from her essay “Writing Short Stories” but have not had time to check. That quotation, like those from Trevor and Bolaño, are from an old notebook.

Thinking

 Every morning has a small ritual. The Wise Woman, rising, asks: What are you doing?

I reply: Thinking.

This has gone on for decades. I get up in the morning before the house stirs and make coffee.

Many experts say this is an excellent opportunity to be productive. I resist that temptation.

I don’t do anything, except drink coffee and make a few notes in a composition book.

There’s so much to think about: what the woods are like, a remark in a friend’s letter, a bit of good conversation, a surprising fact in an interesting book, what it’s like to celebrate Independence Day in 2024.

Patricia Hampl, a fine essayist, explains it like this:

 

This isn’t sloth, it isn’t laziness. It isn’t even exhaustion. It is a late arriving awareness of consciousness existing for its own purpose, rippling with contentment and curiosity. One’s own idiosyncrasy reveals itself as a pleasure, without other value — but golden, amusing integrity hard-won and now at its leisure. Hand on heart, this life of the mind, lolling — tending to life’s real business.

 

I especially like the word “contentment.” If I won the lottery and could do anything I wanted to do, I would get up early, make coffee and think.

• Source: Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day; New York: Viking, 2018, p. 24.

Independence Day 1827

 On July 4, 1827, representatives of the Cherokee people, meeting in northern Georgia, adopted a constitution. The idea, explicitly stated, was to promote the common good of the people.

In the early 1800s, something like 15,000 Cherokee people were surrounded by a million people of European descent. About the only thing the new immigrants had in common was a desire for land.

The Cherokee constitution permitted the sale of Cherokee land only to Cherokee people.

By 1826, Andrew Jackson and his supporters had made it clear that they wanted the Cherokee land for people of European descent. They wanted all Native Americans to move west of the Mississippi. Jackson had traveled Georgia, pressuring Cherokee people to give up their lands. The constitution of 1827 was, in part, a response.

The constitution set up a republic much like that of the United States. The Cherokee wanted to be independent. They wanted their rights to be respected. They united and organized becaue they feared being run over.

Their fears were realized in 1829 when Jackson was elected president of the United States. When he left the White House eight years later, the Cherokee people had largely been driven out of Georgia.

Independence and republics are things that can be lost.

• Source: Kathleen DuVal, Native Nations; New York: Random House, 2024.

Anatomy of a one-night read

 I’d deny that I’m obsessed with one-night reads, short books that will absorb you for a single evening. I admit that this is my 20^th note on that subject. But I just wanted to say that Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is a one-night read that works so well, I’ve been trying to figure out how it works.

It’s got several things going for it:

• Length: The site How Long to Read estimates it at 38,272 words, which strikes me as too precise to be an estimate and which I can’t quite buy. I’d guess 24,000. I’m not a great movie watcher. But there is something nice about being able to absorb a story in about the time it takes to watch a film.

• Pace: Although Keegan’s story is short, she takes her time. The protagonist, Furlong, confronts the situation he must resolve on page 61 of a 114-page story. I had to go back and reread the story to see how many times and in how many ways Keegan had foreshadowed the moral tension at the heart of the story. By the time Furlong sees the situation he must face, we already have a sense that people generally fail moral challenges because they’re just trying to conform, just trying to get along with everyone else.

• Substories: There’s a story within this story involving a jigsaw puzzle. When Furlong was a boy, he wrote Santa a letter asking for one. The story — what happened then and what happened when Furlong told one of his daughters about it — is worth price of admission.

• Diction: You might know that a Baby Power is Powers whiskey in a miniature bottle. I had to look some things up. I was delighted to learn that a puckaun is a Billy goat. I’d never heard drunkard who is slurring his speech called stotious.

• Puzzles: Keegan’s writing is clear. But she left me, at least, with a puzzle or two — things I’m still thinking about days after finishing the story. There are omens in the book — and one curse, an ancient one involving River Barrow. I’m trying to sort out the crows. They are numerous, noisy and loaded with symbolism. I suspect both symbols and crows are tricky.

• Sources and notes: Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These; New York: Grove Press, 2017.

How Long to Read’s estimate is here:

https://howlongtoread.com/books/17047811/Small-Things-Like-These

The search feature on the archives says this really is the 20^th note on one-night reads. The first was “The notion of one-night reads at 20,” Oct. 28, 2021.

Claire Keegan: 'Small Things Like These'

 Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is my kind of book: short in length, big in scope.

It’s about an Irish fellow named Furlong, a coal and firewood merchant who just wants to live a quiet life and provide for his wife and five daughters. But he witnesses an injustice. If he gets involved, it means trouble — the kind of social trouble you can’t avoid and have to pay for.

If you grew up wondering how so many people could accede to a racist, apartheid social order, this book might be for you. If you are still wondering how a wealthy, self-satisfied country can accept such inequality in the treatment of its residents, this book might be for you. It’s short, but the questions at its foundation are substantial.

If you’re a writer or an aspiring writer, allow Ms. Keegan to give you a writing lesson. I copied 10 sentences into my notebook. Here’s one from the beginning, setting the scene in New Ross, a small city in Ireland, around Christmas 1985:

 

And then the nights came on and the frosts took hold again, and blades of cold slid under the doors and cut the knees off those who still knelt to say the rosary.

 

I think I’m going to try to read everything Claire Keegan has written.

• Source: Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These; New York: Grove Press, 2017, p. 2.

Hearing, and having to guess which artist

 I stopped in the woods twice this week to try to find the source of sounds I don’t hear every day. The first, at Stone Mountain, sounded like a tropical bird, or perhaps a couple of chimpanzees arguing. The second, at Arabia Mountain, I mistook for a whining dog.

I never saw a thing. But I’m pretty sure both sounds were made by a Yellow-billed cuckoo, Coccyzus americanus. They are common in the Piedmont, but shy. The first call was the cuckoo’s signature chatter, hoot, rattle and trill. The whining dog was its “coo song.”

You can hear both tunes at the Audubon Society’s website:

https://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/yellow-billed-cuckoo

Summertime, and the shade is impressive

It was an overcast day, and the woods were dark. If you were taking a photograph, you’d think about using artificial light. I have lived here for more than a year and I just can’t get used to the density of the canopy.

I grew up in the days when boys who were learning to take photographs carried light meters. I wish I still had one and could tell you just how dark it was. But the evidence of deep shade is on the forest floor. The ephemeral wildflowers that bloomed before the canopy got dense are gone. It would be hard to find a bloom now, though you see meadow beauties, genus Rhexia, at the forest’s edge.