Lopez: “Apologia”

 Barry Lopez’s “Apologia” is one of his shorter and stranger essays.

Lopez makes it a practice to remove animals killed by cars off the road. He stops a lot. His list is appalling: deer, raccoon, rabbits, birds. He stops to removes butterflies and bees from the car’s grill.

This was a long trip, from his home in Oregon to a friend’s house in Indiana. As I said, he made a lot of stops, hence the words to his host on arriving later than he’d planned. I’d assumed the title would lead to another kind of apology.

In a way, the essay is an explanation for the way Lopez lived his life. Most philosophers I’ve read would take the idea of a private religion to be like that of a private language, a contradiction. But it seems to me that Lopez’s practice is what theory says doesn’t work.

I’ve never read a more moving account of the damage we humans are doing. And I stand convicted: I drive because I think this horrible slaughter is somehow justified.

• Source: Barry Lopez, About This Life; New York: Vintage Books, 1998. “Apologia” is on pp. 113-18.

Bernstein: ‘On Election Day’

 If you’re worried about politics, you might try Charles Bernstein’s poem “On Election Day.” It begins: 

I hear democracy weep, on election day. The streets are filled with

brokered promise on election day. The miscreant’s vote the same

as saint’s, on election day. …

 

It’s a list of all that is and could be wrong about elections. It’s a gloomy list, but I felt better after reading it. It was as if I’d entered a room with a hundred worrying chairs — but all the seats were taken.

Unable to roost, I moved on.

• Sources: The poem originally was published in Prairie Schooner; University of Nebraska Press, Vol. 83, No. 3, Fall 2009, pp. 159-160. It’s online here:

https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/article/361641/pdf

And here’s the poet, reading his poem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QouGGPxbjI

Cats and their migrations

 Eva-Marie Geigl, a paleontologist with the French National Research Center, has been studying the DNA of cats found at archeological sites.

Domestic cats, Felis catus, evolved from the wildcats of Southwest Asia and North Africa, F. sylvestris lybica.

By studying the maternal DNA, Geigl and her colleagues have traced two waves of migration involving the domestic cat.

The first occurred after cats were tamed in the Near East around 7000 BCE. As agriculture developed in the Fertile Crescent, cats proved useful at keeping mice out of the grain. The concept of barn cats spread from there.

The second wave occurred as cats moved out of Egypt during Classical Antiquity. As Herodotus observed, the Egyptians had a thing about cats that was almost creepy. By 500 BCE, ships loaded with grain were doing business all over the Mediterranean. Ship’s cats were in demand.

One cat with Egyptian genetic markers ended up at a Viking site in Germany. Even in ancient times, cats got around.

• Source: Geigl has a story about her work here:

https://communities.springernature.com/posts/of-cats-and-men

‘Pangur Bán’

 The anonymous love poem “Western Wind” was a revelation to me in college. It’s a simple, direct expression of an emotion that must be near universal.

“Pangur Bán” is that kind of poem. It was written by an anonymous monk in Irish in the 9^th century about his white cat, Pangur. Each is absorbed in his own business: Pangur in the hunt for mice and the scholar in the hunt for insight. Since they don’t get in each other’s way, they are happy being alone together.

It’s that simple.

Lucas, the pound cat adopted by the Wise Woman years ago, is 17 and his business has turned into sleeping. He sleeps on my right side when I’m reading in bed. When it’s time for lights out, he moves to my left side, so he’ll wake up if I roll out of bed to get a midnight snack. (His rule is that snacks must be shared.) When I work in the morning, he sleeps at my feet. Since we don’t interfere with each other in conducting our business, it works just fine.

I thought of the poem because Lucas slept so soundly in my study I had to go get him and carry him to his spot on the bed when it was time to settle down for the night. It was a reminder that life is short, and that the lives of other creatures contribute to our happiness.

• Sources: You can find translations that strike me as wildly different by W.H. Auden, Seamus Heaney, Robin Flower, Paul Muldoon and Eavan Boland. I prefer Auden’s for the wrong reason: It was the text used by Samuel Barber in “The Monk and His Cat,” No. 8 in his “Hermit Songs.”

Auden: https://forreadingaddicts.co.uk/news/9th-century-irish-monks-poem-about-his-beloved-cat-discovered-in-manuscript/

Heaney: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/48267/pangur-ban

Flower: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/personal/pangur-ban.html

Muldoon: https://frombooksofpoems.blogspot.com/2007/11/two-translations-of-pangur-ban-anon.html

Boland: https://preferreading.wordpress.com/2016/02/13/sunday-poetry-pangur-ban/

And here’s Barber’s song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R940uNHVpy8

Copyediting and Aristotle's cat

 Suppose you were a young copyeditor and came across this sentence:

Biologists have been interested in cats since the days of Aristotle, who had a tabby named Moderation.

 

One of my many failings as a newspaper editor was my inability to interest some of my younger colleagues in sentences like this. We trained editors to work on the writing, that is, the English. We didn’t say enough about other kinds of problems.

Writing in newspapers should be improved. But the editors who get a first crack at the copy ought to see or smell problems that have nothing to do with the writing.

Aristotle wrote a lot about animals but said little about cats, other than to remark that they seemed lecherous. (A sexist, he blamed the females.) Although he preached moderation in all things, there’s no record of an Aristotelian cat by that name. Aside from the problem with the name, there's no record of Aristotle having a cat. Aristotle said nothing about having a cat. Aristotle’s enemies, who never missed a chance to parody him, also were silent.

The ancient Greeks, who talked the world’s ears off about many things, didn’t say much about cats. Cats appeared on coins in Greek communities in Sicily in the 5^th century BCE. They were known, but we don't know whether they were common. At least some people relied on weasels to discourage rodents. Herodotus reported on the Egyptians’ love of cats as if his fellow Greeks might have found the notion unusual, perhaps excessive.

That’s a bit of the history that a good copyeditor might bring to this sentence. The biology is even more problematic. Geneticists studying the evolution of domestic cats have concluded that the tabby markings on the coats of some cats emerged in medieval times. Tabby cats didn’t exist in Classical Greece.

The main problem with our original sentence about Aristotle’s cat is that it’s not true. Before we get to the problems with the writing, we ought to think about how we can keep sentences like that out of the paper.

If we could get better at keeping ordinary falsehoods out of print, we might do better with the political  varieties.

On being 3

 At least a couple of times, I’ve wondered what this collection of notes is. If it must be labeled, I think it is a concatenation, rather than a blog. Whatever it is, it’s three years old today.

• Note: The truly curious might want to see “The trail of the mind,” July 28, 2023, and “Lytton Strachey's diction,” Feb. 16, 2023.

A poet's eye on behavior

 I love Charles Reznikoff’s short poems that reminded Paul Auster of photographs taken precisely — framed exactly at exactly the right moment.

But Reznikoff did other things. He wrote long poems based on legal records.

He also wrote poems about behavior. I’d call them moral poems, if a label is required. My favorite is about catching your wind after wrapping up the day job so you can work on you own stuff:

 

After I had worked all day at what I earn my living, 
I was tired. Now my own work has lost another day, 
I thought, but began slowly, 
and slowly my strength came back to me. 
Surely, the tide comes in twice a day.

 

I also love this one about silence:

 

I am afraid
because of the foolishness
I have spoken.
I must diet
on silence;
strengthen myself
with quiet.

 

If you can snag a copy of Reznikoff’s poems, you will find many wonders.

• Sources: Poems 1918-1975, The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff, edited by Seamus Cooney; Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1996. The quotations are from Vol. 1, p. 73 and Vol. 2, p. 28.

Paul Auster mentioned “I am afraid” in his essay “The Decisive Moment,” published in The Art of Hunger and Other Essays; London: Menard Press, 1982, and available at the Allen Ginsberg Project:

https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/reznikoff/decisivemoment.html

Auster on Reznikoff

 Paul Auster, a writer I admire, wrote an essay on Charles Reznikoff, a poet I admire.

The essay is called “The Decisive Moment,” a reference to the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Auster thought that the feeling you get from one of Reznikoff’s short poems is like the feeling you get from looking at a photograph.

Consider the poem “Moonlit Night”:

The trees’ shadows lie in black pools in the lawns.

 

Auster says the poet was trying to see and record, to get a visual image. Reznikoff wandered the streets of New York as Cartier-Bresson wandered the streets of Paris, looking for images.

I knew that Reznikoff was a great walker. I did not know that he would walk 10 to 20 miles a day, from Brooklyn to Riverdale and back. And I did not know that Reznikoff had a dream of walking across the country, “stopping at synagogues along the way to give reading of his work in exchange for food and lodging,” a detail Auster provides in parentheses.

• Sources and notes: Paul Auster’s essay “The Decisive Moment” appears in The Art of Hunger and Other Essays; London: Menard Press, 1982. I found it at the Allen Ginsberg Project here:

https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/reznikoff/decisivemoment.html

I’m a Reznikoff fan, and there are many notes on the poet at this site, including “The case for Charles Reznikoff,” Dec. 10, 2022.

Kent Haruf’s ‘Benediction’

 An interviewer asked Kent Haruf if forgiveness was one of the main themes of his novel Benediction.

Haruf was interested in the question, but he replied that he wrote out of experience and intuition.

 

I envision these characters, I know what they are going to do and I don’t at all want to think about themes or central principles.

 

That exchange might be the best explanation I could give for why I admire Haruf’s fiction.

His characters are ordinary people who live in the fictional town of Holt on the high plains in eastern Colorado. They don’t do extraordinary things. There are no murders, drug deals or high-speed chases in the novel.

The characters do ordinary things. They get bad diagnoses. They get into arguments with people they love. They grieve. They sometimes try to mend fences.

In the opening scene of Benediction, the owner of the town’s hardware store, a fellow everyone calls ‘Dad,’ gets a bad diagnosis. He tries to settle accounts. In his dreams, he sees people he’s known and sometimes hurt. One, who knew what Dad used to think of homosexuals, asks what he thinks now.

 

I’m too ignorant. I don’t know nothing about it. I told you, I come off a farm in Kansas. That’s all I knew where I come from. It took all I had to get this far, a little plans town, with a store on Main Street.

You did all right, Dad. You’ve come a long way.

Not far enough.

No. That’s true. Not yet you haven’t.

 

It’s not a high-speed car chase. But you can find a lot of those. It’s harder to find a passage about what dying might be like.

• Sources: Kent Haruf, Benediction; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. The quotation is on p. 230.

The quotation from the interview is from Mark Stevens, “Q&A With Kent Haruf — ‘Benediction,’”; originally published March 6, 2013 in Telluride Inside … And Out. It’s on Stevens’s blog Don’t Need a Diagram:

https://markhstevens.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/q-a-with-kent-haruf-benediction/

For another note on this author, see “Kent Haruf’s ‘Our Souls at Night,’” Feb. 23, 2023.

Lesson 1, with lemons

 I don’t think about schools I should have attended or degrees I should have earned. I do think about teachers I should have had.

Kenneth Lash, who wrote an essay on Borges I admire, might have been one of those teachers.

He taught at several schools. At the University of Northern Iowa, he headed the art department and later the humanities program. Introductory students didn’t take a course in “art appreciation.” Instead, the course was “learning how to see.”

At the first class, Lash gave each student a lemon with instructions to get to know it well.

At the next class, the lemons went into a pile, and students were asked to retrieve theirs.

Many of the notes in this online collection are about observation — noticing things. I always think of Guy Davenport’s essay about hunting for arrowheads, a story about how he learned to notice things and how, later, he realized that many people go through life without noticing much at all.

That lesson, learned with arrowheads or with lemons, changes everything. 

Years ago, I went walking through the woods with a group. So many things were happening in that ecosystem that I didn’t understand, I was shaken when the walk ended. My spirit had been moved, as my grandmother would say. When we got out of the forest, one of the fellows it was a shame we hadn’t seen anything interesting. He said he hoped we’d have better luck next time.

• Sources: The story about Lash’s lesson with lemons is in the University of Northern Iowa’s obituary:

https://scua.library.uni.edu/university-archives/biographies/kenneth-lash

His essay “Borges and I” was the topic of yesterday’s note.

Guy Davenport’s essay “Finding” has been mentioned several times in these notes, including “Davenport’s search for arrowheads” on March 15, 2022. It’s in The Geography of the Imagination; San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981.

A portrait of Borges

 Kenneth Lash met Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires in the winter of 1954-55. Lash, a Navy veteran of World War II, had done interesting things as editor of The Mexico Quarterly and was on a tour of Latin America funded by The Rockefeller Foundation. His instructions were to meet artists and writers.

Borges suffered under the Perón regime but was the only member of his circle not to have been imprisoned. After Borges signed a democratic manifesto, Perón promoted him to the exalted political post of inspector of poultry and rabbits at the municipal market.

Perón knew how to harass as well as persecute. For Borges, it was harassment of the kind that made a decent wage impossible. Borges, almost blind, was living in a tiny apartment with his elderly mother.

Lash said Borges never talked about his own work but could get carried away talking about Emerson.

Lash mentioned the famous demands that Borges made on his readers and then said this:

 

He requires a good reader, and company. But what he wants is what all people in the arts want: to find their own voice and have it responded to. What they’re talking about is secondary. They talk about whatever it is that excites them enough to get them talking.

 

That line struck me like an oracle when I read Lash’s essay 40 years ago. It still strikes me, although now I wonder whether it’s true: whether all artists could be said to want the same thing, whether that desire to communicate is what art is.

• Source: Kenneth Lash, “Borges and I”; The Iowa Review, 14(3), 1984, pp. 121-127. The quotation is on p. 126.

August in the Piedmont

 The goldenrods, genus Solidago, started blooming. I saw my first batch at Arabia Mountain on Aug. 3.

Many people are allergic to them. Some friends who suffer from hay fever are sure the goldenrods are blooming earlier each year. I couldn’t say. I’m just learning about the natural history of Georgia. But it made me wonder about seasonal changes.

It seems to me that sourwood, Oxydendrum arboretum, might be an early marker of fall. It’s a smaller tree in the understory. I’ve seen a few red leaves on an otherwise green tree, and I’ve seen entire branches of red leaves. The color change is not caused by drought. We had 14 inches of rain in July.

Among the wonders in the woods:

• Late boneset, Eupatorium serotinum, is putting out bunches of tiny white flowers. If you are wondering about the common name, this plant was used as a poultice when native peoples set a broken bone.

• St. John’s wort in genus Hypericum puts out yellow flowers.

• Partridge pea, in genus Chamaecrista, is everywhere. The flowers are the color of school buses.

• Jumpseed, Persicaria virginiana, is putting out white flowers on long stalks. It’s low running plant, about 2 feet tall, that tolerates the shade under the canopy. The common name come become the seeds jump when seedpods burst.

• The orange flowers are jewelweed, impatiens capensis, which bloom all summer. Jewelweed also throws its seeds — the biologists call the adaption “explosive dehiscence.” Jewelweed is sometimes called touch-me-not.

Dialog for kindred spirits

 Sometimes, in wandering the woods, I get lost in the natural world and forget that people are a part of it. I was surprised when I came to the dam on a pond on Barbashela Creek and saw another human being, a fisherman.

“Catching anything?” I asked.

“Nothing but a little peace of mind,” he said.

Stephen Leacock’s ideal college

 Stephen Leacock, the essayist, said that if someone gave him two dozen old elm trees and 50 acres he could set up a college that would put the big universities of his day in the shade.

Leacock was writing in the 1930s, and parts of his vision about what makes a good college are painfully wrong. He thought colleges were wonderful institutions for men and women — but not together. The kind of study that goes on at the best colleges has a single-minded quality that tends to be less single-minded when genders mingle, Leacock said.

That thought made me wince 50 years ago. But parts of his essay on the ideal college still make me wish such a place existed.

Leacock’s college would offer no business courses. He also thought medicine and engineering should be taught in schools, not colleges. College is for something else.

Leacock’s college would have no newspaper, no student government, no sports teams. Students could play games whenever they wanted. But the teams wouldn’t be advertising vehicles and revenue generators for the college.

Money wouldn’t be a consideration in anything the college did.

 

Money ruins life: I mean, to have to think of it, to take account of it, to know that it is there.

 

People involved in exploration don’t think of money while they’re on expeditions, Leacock said. College should such an expedition — an opportunity for a student to get absorbed in exploration.

Leacock’s college is a place where professors don’t keep office hours and don’t attend committee meetings. (Committees are banned at Leacock’s college.)

 

Men of thought have no business in an office.

 

The professors’ job would be to study and learn about a subject and communicate what it’s like to be interested in something — or better, to be beyond interested, absorbed, almost consumed. Professor should be so absorbed they’re contagious.

That’s what the college would be about: to give students a sense of what that kind of fascination with a subject is like. After college, a student could pursue her own interests on her own.

That’s the gist of Leacock’s college. I never attended such a place. The only university that would give me a degree was an enormous state institution with a famous football team — the very kind of place Leacock was writing against.

But decades later, I’m still thinking about his ideal.

• Stephen Leacock’s “On the Need for a Quiet College” is in Moral Memoirs; New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1938, pp. 169-177. The quotations are on pp. 172 and 170.

The Flynn Effect and tools for thinking

 Daniel Dennett was interested in the Flynn Effect, the long-range increase in IQ scores. An average score was and is 100, but the 100 on the test that grandfather took would be a lower score today.

Dennett, like many others, thought the improvement probably was due to our tools for thinking. The use of new and better tools — such as numbers, maps and diagrams — is filtering out through society, at least in the developed countries. The average person can solve problems that our ancestors couldn’t.

These tools are powerful because they are shared.

If the brains of animals were smart phones, we could marvel at the capacity each gadget had, but the wonders would begin when the tools were joined in a network and someone thought of sharing apps. The ability of humans to trust each other, form networks, cooperate and share information has changed the world and changed us.

Ironically, those changes are so profound they’re difficult to imagine. A Martian anthropologist visiting the planet 10,000 years ago would have had to search for human beings. From her spaceship, she would have had to search for evidence of our isolated camps and dwellings. Today we humans are hard to miss.

Consciousness and Daniel Dennett

 How do zillions of chemical reactions in your brain produce what we experience as vision, emotions, memories — musings about consciousness? 

What is consciousness? If I try to take the whole question at once, I get into a muddle. Daniel Dennett’s insight into a way to look at part of the question was helpful.

When I was a student, I wondered what processes went on inside the brains of other animals and what we could say about their minds.

The usual answer was a rhetorical question: How could we ever know what’s in the minds of animals, since they lack language?

Dennett was the kind of philosopher who tried to challenge every rhetorical question. In the case of the minds of other animals, we have some clues.

If you invite a bunch of people to gather in a lecture hall for a talk on how consciousness works, they will gather peacefully to consider the question. If you try to collect a bunch of chimpanzees, our close biological relatives, into the same lecture hall, there will be anxiety, fear and bloodshed.

Human and chimpanzee brains are similar. If they were computers, the key differences would involve the ability of the human brain to run some apps that allow us to trust each other, to meet in the same lecture hall without being overcome by fear and to restrain ourselves from reacting violently.

That self-control is a kind of freedom. It allows us, rather than reacting mindlessly to our emotions, to build a sense of trust and to cooperate in discussing ways to solve common problems mindfully. That ability to inquire about problems and even solve some of them would be impossible without that underlying trust.

If I were to try to define consciousness, I might start with the formula: humans – chimpanzees = consciousness. When we are talking about brains, we are talking about the hardware used by chimpanzees and humans. When we are talking about minds, we aren’t talking about social apps that allow us to get beyond the stimulus and response of seeing others, becoming fearful and reacting violently. Our ability to inquire into questions together is an important part of being human. That’s the part of cognition that interests me and I think it’s the part that I’m talking about when we talk of consciousness.

Incidentally, Dennett points out that our joint inquiries, particularly our ability to investigate questions scientifically, is based on the capacity to trust each other. I wish we humans had a better understanding of the importance of that public trust and could see that people who work relentlessly to undermine it are dangerous.

Lopez: ‘Learning to see’

 Barry Lopez believed in the community of artists. He read certain poets and found their poems healing. He suspected he shared sensibilities with them.

He looked at the photographs of Robert Adams and suspected, before they struck up a friendship, that they shared sensibilities. Adams and Lopez met when the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth had a show of Adams’s work. The show’s coordinator asked Adams if he’d like her to ask anyone to speak about his work on his behalf. Adams replied that Lopez might be good. Adamas didn’t know Lopez but had read Lopez’s writing and thought they shared sensibilities.

Lopez tells the story in “Learning to see,” a penetrating essay on photography, seeing, noticing, paying attention.

Before he became known as a writer, Lopez was a landscape photographer. He gets his finger on an aspect of photography that’s fascinating to me.

Humans have a peculiar view of wildlife because of the images we routinely see. We see photographs of animals looking serene, inquisitive, nurturing or regal. We forget that the published photographs we see have been through editors. We rarely see photographs of animals mating or eviscerating prey. The overall picture we have of wildlife is skewed by what is missing.

In his essay, Lopez asks about the same kind of bias in the family photo album. We collect images that nudge memory. But it’s not a complete record of a life. And the images are missing context. We often have trouble establishing something as basic as sequence. It’s a record stripped of the “spine of narrative,” as Lopez puts it.

Photographs are an interesting, but risky, way to tell a story. A writer who tells a story as a series of sharp images runs similar risks, I think. 

• Source: Barry Lopez, About This Life; New York: Vintage Books, 1998. “Learning to see” is on pp. 223-39.

Euripides: ‘The Trojan Women’

 The chorus in Euripides’s The Trojan Women is made up of women who are waiting to be allotted to the captors. They wonder whether they are facing a life of drudgery or of breeding children for enslavers.

Hecuba, the queen of the fallen city, must watch as the fate of her daughters is decided. Her sons are dead.

• Cassandra, the virgin-priestess of Apollo, is to be given to King Agamemnon and has lost her mind.

• Polyxena is fated to keep Achilles’ tomb. We learn later what that means: Her throat will be cut over the grave.

• Andromache, Hecuba’s daughter-in-law, is to be another “spear-wife.” Astuanax, her little boy by Hecuba’s son Hector, is to be murdered by the Greeks. Hecuba must bury the child.

In the middle of this cruelty, the Greek King Menelaus comes to claim Helen. He plans to take her back to Greece and execute her. Helen defends herself in something like a trial, with Hecuba prosecuting, blaming the lust of one woman for the catastrophic fall of a city and its people.

Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the Greek tragedies, points out that we receive news of each new cruelty from a herald. The cruelty comes not in dramatic fashion — with conflict between characters, between the oppressors and their victims — but by bureaucratic announcement. The cruelty arrives almost banally.

The prolog is crucial to understanding the play. It’s a dialog between Athena, once champion of the Greeks, and Poseidon, who loved the Trojans. Athena is sick of the Greeks’ hubris and asks Poseidon to whip up a storm to destroy the Greek fleet on its way home.

The men who are dealing out all this cruelty so casually are doomed.

This play is the third part of a trilogy. The first play, Alexandros, is about Hecuba’s son Paris, whose attachment to Helen brought the Greeks to Troy, seeking blood. When Paris (who was also called Alexander) was a baby, his parents were told he would destroy the Trojans if he were allowed to grow to manhood. They were expected to kill him but couldn’t quite do it. The second play, Palamedes, is about the wisest man among of Greeks and how he was tried and executed at the instigation of the second-wisest, Odysseus.

These two plays, now lost, explain what comes in the third: unrelenting cruelty. The Trojan Women is the account of the consequences.

Euripides’ trilogy placed second in 415 B.C.E., when the Athenians, once champions of humanity, were executing allies and neutral people in the Peloponnesian War. By this stage in the war, when the Athenians captured a city, they killed the men and enslaved the women and children.

Richmond Lattimore, in his introduction to the play, says the mystery is not that the trilogy placed second, but that the Athenians allowed Euripides to stage it.

The play has many wonders, including a tirade against the gods that is worthy of a lightning strike and a meditation on when a decision to die is better than a decision to live. This line, spoken by Hecuba, is famous:

 

Of all who walk in bliss

call not one happy yet, until the man is dead.

 

I like a duet between Hecuba and Andromache, where the women are correcting and finishing each other’s phrases:

 

H: O my children

A:        Once. No longer

H: Lost, lost, Troy our dominion

A:        unhappy

H: and my children

A:        Gone, alas!

H: They were mine

A:        Sorrows only.

 

I think of it as the “Death Rules Duet” of The Trojan Women, as memorable as the “Flower Duet” of Lakmé.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on The Trojan Women is on pp. 218-22.

The Trojan Women, translated by Richmond Lattimore, is in Euripides III in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 123-75. The quotations are on p. 145 and 149-50.

A manila folder

 When I was a reporter, I used to keep a manila folder or two on top of my desk.

I started life at one of the smallest daily newspapers in Texas. It was, to my mind, a great job, a chance to learn about people. I would go to city council meetings, race to robberies and attend speeches at civic clubs. Those things had to be done. I did them as quickly and as briefly as I could.

The file folders reflected a different kind of reporting. Sometimes, questions would come up about our town that I couldn’t answer. I’d get a folder and start collecting information.

When the legislature began to discuss the possibility of reforming the property tax code, a former mayor became unhinged. He spoke of creeping socialism and outright communism. He urged local governments to spend public money on lobbyists to oppose the proposed reforms.

Curious, I put a folder on my desk. It was a reminder of a question that was, in my mind, open.

In between checking on a car crash and covering a school board meeting, I dropped by the courthouse and looked at the county tax rolls. I found that the former mayor’s mansion was on the rolls at about the same value as the shotgun shacks on the other side of tracks.

A note went into the folder, but the story wasn’t ripe. I searched the tax rolls for other prominent figures and discovered that some people apparently received preferential treatment while and some apparently were being punished. More notes went into the folder.

I called professors at the state’s universities and asked for a layman’s explanation of how the system worked. Business professors and political science professors sometimes had different views. Some of the experts suggested I compare sales figures to appraisal figures. Some properties were on the appraisal rolls at full market value. Others were on at less than 10 percent.

I tracked down legislators in other parts of the state who favored reforming the system.

I fed the manila folder for a week or two. One day, a story was there.

An attempt to define propaganda

 In the 1930s, Americans worried about propaganda, but different people worried about different things. Some people worried that home-grown propagandists were amplifying the messages of the Nazis in Germany. Others worried about the messages of the communists in the Soviet Union.

In 1949, Harold Lasswell, a political science professor, proposed a series of tests for identifying propaganda. One was a correspondence test. If the content of your favorite news commentator’s broadcast corresponded with the content of a known propaganda channel — say the newsletter for a political party — that’s evidence that you have tuned into propaganda, not news.

On this line of reasoning, Father Coughlin’s broadcasts were not news commentary, but Nazi propaganda. Pravda was not a newspaper but Soviet propaganda. When people ask me about Fox News, I say it’s a profitable business but I can’t see it as a news organization. Can you?

Propaganda and those who analyze it

 I am concerned that a dictator in Europe, Vladimir Putin, is using propaganda to influence an American election. I am concerned that his messages are being amplified by home-grown propagandists claiming to be news commentators. I am wondering whether the deluge of propaganda is interfering with our ability to think clearly.

In 1937, a group of people with similar concerns founded the Institute for Propaganda Analysis. These folks were concerned that a dictator in Europe, Adolf Hitler, was using propaganda to influence American voters in ways that would favor the Nazi regime. They were concerned that these messages were being amplified by home-grown propagandists claiming to be news commentators.

The institute was backed by businessman Edward Filene and included scholars from various universities and people involved in mass media. 

The institute published bulletins that analyzed propaganda, including the radio shows of Father Charles Coughlin, notorious for his bigotry, his advocacy of dictators and his disdain for democratic processes.

I always thought Coughlin set the standard for propaganda techniques. 

But in 2007, a group of scholars used the institute’s tools to analyze the Bill O’Reilly show. I only thought Coughlin was unbeatable.

• Sources: Mike Conway, Maria Elizabeth Grabe, and Kevin Grieves, “Villains, victims and the virtuous in Bill O’Reilly’s ‘no-spin zone’: Revisiting world war propaganda techniques”; Journalism Studies, 2007, 8, 197-223.

I found a reference to the article in Mira Sotirovic’s excellent “Propaganda and Journalism,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies, edited by Henrik Ornebring; Oxford University Press, 2019. A copy of her article is here:

https://app.box.com/s/j9njfmaz3smums8m6ocyo9tb4rvvu7ks

Blankets of blooms in the woods

 Clematis terniflora is blooming in the forest near Stone Mountain. It’s a perennial vine that puts out white flowers — each with four petals. The blooms are so dense it looks like someone draped laundry over bushes in the woods.

It’s a beautiful plant that escaped from the garden. Clematis terniflora is from China and Japan, so it’s invasive. It’s also poisonous. 

I wondered what it might be competing with in the underbrush beneath the canopy. I found Beefsteak plant, Perilla frutenscens, an annual with heart-shaped leaves that are used in salads. It’s also from Asia: Japan, Korea, China and Indochina. I also found some witch hazel, Hamamelis virginiana, a native that is part of our folklore.

Atlanta prides itself as being a city built in forest. The area around Atlanta has something like 6 million people, including many gardeners. It’s striking how much of the garden is now in the forest.

A bit of writing advice

 Natalie Goldberg tells the story of a Zen poet who wrote a haiku, perhaps a good one. But he didn’t think about that. When he was finished, he put the poem in a bottle and tossed it in the river.

Maybe that’s why some of us old writers read books on writing. Sometimes it helps to hear someone else say something you already know.

I’ve been working on a piece of writing, and it’s about time to let go.

•  Source: Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones; Boulder: Shambhala, 2016. She teaches writing at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, N.M., p. 130.

A good book on writing

 When experienced writers talk to students, one topic almost always comes up: supplies.

I don’t know why that surprises me — I’m particular about my own supplies — but it does. 

Natalie Goldberg, who appeared in yesterday’s note, writes in spiral notebooks. She usually goes through one a month and is always making and revising rules for using her notebook.

John R. Trimble, who taught at the University of Texas, advised writing on 5-by-8 slips of paper, about half the size of a standard sheet. They are less intimidating when you’re starting and they’re easier to flip through when you’re done, he said.

Trimble, who was teaching students how to write essays, recommended that you begin by writing questions that interest you at the top of each sheet and then use the rest of the sheet to jot down whatever ideas occur to you. If you know your material and ask good questions, you’ll probably find a good place to start just by flipping through those slips.

Writers who write books about writing try to do different things. Some get into the details of usage. Others talk of plots in novels. Still others talk of dialog in screenplays. But for a general introduction to what people used to call composition, Trimble’s little book is hard to beat.

• John R. Trimble, Writing with Style; Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975.

Books on writing

 I read books about writing. At some point, you’d think a person would stop. 

Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones told me why I keep reading. She says writers — even old, experienced ones — have to come at their work with a “beginner’s mind,” an open mind, the mind of a new student.

You might detect a hint of Zen there. Goldberg’s book grew out of her practice of Zen. One day, her teacher asked her why she came to the Zen center to do sitting practice. Why don’t you make writing your practice? he asked.

Goldberg thinks of writing as a practice. I do too, but while she speaks of the practice of Zen, I think of the practice of running or weight training or playing a musical instrument. Her different perspective allowed me to see some things in new light, the light of a new student.

• Source: Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones; Boulder: Shambhala, 2016. She teaches writing at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, N.M.

The Rothschild List

 Charles Rothschild, a London banker, was an avid naturalist. He met his wife while hunting butterflies, but, though an amateur, he was an expert on fleas. But I’d say his most important contribution was a list.

In 1912, he founded the Society for the Promotion of Nature Preserves. He then led an effort to conduct a survey of local natural history groups in Britain and Ireland with the view of compiling a list of areas worth preserving. Newspaper readers, informed of the effort, contributed their own ideas.

The Rothschild List identified 289 places that should be preserved for the benefit of wildlife. The idea was to buy the land, fence it and leave it to nature and the National Trust.

I admire the effort. The results have been a mixed bag. One bog that naturalists loved was turned into a landfill. Other important habitats were bulldozed for development.

But many of those wonderful places were preserved.

Good things rarely happen by accident. Good things happen because someone or some group makes them happen. 

I wish I’d learned this story as a boy, and I wish similar stories were part of the lore in this country.

Source: The Wildlife Trusts, a descendent of the preservation society Rothschild founded, has information on the list here: https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/about-us/rothschilds-list.

The mystery of a flea's jump

 One of the great mysteries of nature that was cleared up in my lifetime was the flea’s jump.

Imagine that I am kneeling on the goal line of a football feel. I jump, using my impressive muscles, 300 feet into the air — as high as the football field is long — and end up beyond the opposite endzone, 120 yards away.

To scale, that’s what a flea does. It jumps upward 50 times its length and goes downfield 60 times its length. Physiologists who examined the flea’s leg muscles said they were more impressive than mine but not that impressive. What was going on?

Fleas were once flying insects. Flight muscles are enormous. If human beings had them, they would extend 6 feet out from our shoulders. More than 160 million years ago, fleas converted that relatively big reservoir of muscle that controlled their wings into a jumping mechanism. (That reservoir, filled with an interesting protein that acts like a spring, is inside the exoskeleton.)

The change in physiology occurred with a change in diet. Fleas once ate plants. If your new food is mammal blood and your strategy for getting it to bushwhack your victim as it passes through dense vegetation, jumping is more efficient than flying. The vegetation provides too many obstacles to flight.

I did not know, until I read Erica McAlister and Adrian Washbourne’s account, that Miriam Rothschild had done so much in sorting the mystery out. She was carrying on the work of her father, Charles Rothschild, a London banker who managed to identify 500 new species of fleas before his death in 1923.

It’s fascinating what can catch the interest of a person’s mind.

• Source: Erica McAlister with Adrian Washbourne, Metamorphosis: How Insects Are Changing Our World; Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2024.

Butterfly peas in bloom

 Butterfly pea, Centrosema virginianum, is putting out lavender blooms in the shape that reminds some people of butterfly wings. The flowers remind me of eyeglasses or 8s.

It’s a vine that crawls along the ground and runs up trees. The vine lacks tendrils, so it twines.

The roots are extensive. Bacteria form nodules on the roots that fix atmospheric nitrogen into the soil.

The blooms are among the most beautiful I’ve seen the Georgia Piedmont. I see them along Yellow River and at Arabia Mountain — always with pleasure. I was surprised to learn that the flowers last only half a day.

• Source: The North Carolina Extension Service’s article is here:

https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/plants/centrosema-virginianum/

A stand of beggarticks

I’ve been watching a stand of beggarticks, in genus Bidens, near the Yellow River. I gather that B. alba is no longer considered a separate species from B. pilosa. But I’m not a good enough taxonomist to have understood the distinction, real or imagined.

Ironically, some people think that B. alba is native to Georgia, while B. pilosa is an invader from South America. The plant has some interesting chemistry that is being studied by medical researchers.

Bidens means two-toothed. (Picture Poseidon’s trident with a missing tooth.) The seedpod is a little two-pronged pitchfork that sticks to your clothes and to animal fur. The idiom “sticks like a tick” gives the plant its common name.

Beggarticks bloom year-round — white ray petals around yellow centers.

The plants in the stand I’ve been watching are head high. I heard the stand before I saw it. Bees and butterflies swarm it. If you are looking for plants that attract pollinators, beggarticks would be hard to beat.

A crape myrtle on the Yellow River

 In the back of my mind, I knew that crape myrtles, genus Lagerstroemia, were blooming. But the crepe myrtle in the woods along the Yellow River surprised me. It made me realize — finally — that while I’d thought I’d seen crepe myrtles everywhere I hadn’t seen many in deep woods.

The many species of crepe myrtles are natives of China, Korea, Japan and the Philippines. A French botanist brought some to North America in 1790.

I don’t think it’s helpful to talk about crape myrtles being invasive at this point. The better question is whether native birds have adapted to these naturalized immigrants.

I was pleased to see that Gary Graves, an ornithologist with the National Museum of Natural History, was studying it. He noticed that goldfinches, juncos and house finches were eating the seeds of the crape myrtle in his yard.

To me, it’s interesting research, and I hope to follow it. Some research requires a lab stocked with expensive gear. This research required only a good question and observant eyes.

• John Barrat, “Crape myrtle trees aren’t native to the U.S., but hungry native birds still find them tasty; Smithsonian, Sept. 26, 2018. 

'Schott's Original Miscellany'

 The host of the B&B had a copy of Schott’s Original Miscellany on the shelf. 

I was tired, cranky and sore of back — too out of sorts for serious thinking. But I was charmed.

I learned that in Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple novels, poisoning was the most frequent method of murder. There were seven cases of poisoning and just five each of gunshots and strangling.

I also learned that a “nip” of beer is a measure — a quarter-pint.

I read the book by consulting the index, where Lord John Campbell is quoted, threatening to introduce legislation to fine anyone who publishes a book without one. Under “Last words, famous,” I found that Dylan Thomas said: “I’ve had 18 straight whiskies. I think that’s as record.” 

When you are worn out and in temporary lodgings, you need a book you can skim, rather than dive into. At least I do.

If I were younger, I’d start an organization like the Gideons with the view of putting a copy in each hotel room on the planet for the good of mankind.

• Sources: Ben Schott, Schott’s Original Miscellany; London: Bloomsbury, 2002. Schott gives an account of his little book at his site: https://www.benschott.com/miscellanies.

For an earlier stab at this topic, see “Books for a guest room,” Jan. 14, 2023.

A lesson in three words

 Had he lived, my father, Heber Taylor II, would have been 100 today.

When I was 14, he was a tenured professor at a state university. He also was adviser to the student newspaper. It was the end of the ’60s, and the student editors were covering protests and writing editorials about the Vietnam War. A university regent launched a public campaign to get my father fired.

My father hadn’t had the money for a college education. But he was drafted as a teenager, fought with the Third Army in Europe and survived the Battle of the Bulge. He got a Ph.D. on the G.I. Bill and became a Fulbright Scholar. 

When the regent campaigned against him, my father didn’t respond, other than say that he would support the student journalists and their right to free speech.

I asked him what it took.

I didn’t frame the question well, but he understood it and said: “Equanimity and magnanimity.”

That was it.

Maybe that brief lesson is still sinking in.

I was lucky in many ways. Today is going to be a quiet day.