Dobie's paradox

 J. Frank Dobie taught a course at the University of Texas on “Life and Literature of the Southwest.” He got his finger on a paradox.

Human beings live in places. Places vary, and a specific human being is not improved by being ignorant of the specific place he lives in. On the other hand, looking at a provincial place with provincial eyes doesn’t improve things. Dobie’s conclusion:

 

Nobody should specialize on provincial writings before he has the perspective that only a good deal of good literature and wide history can give. I think it more important that a dweller in the Southwest read The Trial and Death of Socrates than all the books extant on killings by Billy the Kid.

 

I’m pretty sure you can get lost in either direction. You can read every title on the Great Books Foundation’s list and not know anything about the environment, history and culture of the place you call home. You can know all the plants and animals in the forest behind your house and not know anything about what some of humanity’s best thinkers had to say.

If you’re wondering what all this is about, I’m thinking about some books I want to read in 2025. I suppose I read out of some notion of self-improvement: I believe in education and am still trying to get one.

• Source: J. Frank Dobie, Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest; Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1952, p. 5.

Project Gutenberg has it here:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/314/314-h/314-h.htm

The ends of the year

 Three years ago, I read a review of the best pocket calendars and discovered mine didn’t make the list. Recently I learned that the Letts pocket calendar, the one I carry, was the first.

I knew that John Letts of London had started making them in 1812. What I learned from Roland Allen’s The Notebook was that the idea of a book with a printed grid of the days was new. It instantly caught on, although Letts had to make changes.

Then as now, Letts put each week on two facing pages. His first edition included only six days in each week on the theory that no good person would do business on the Lord’s Day. The next year’s edition made the obvious correction.

It seems to me that people who carry notebooks and pocket calendars tend to be conservative or unreasonably loyal to their brand or just reluctant to change. I’m among them. The faults of the Letts calendar don’t bother me.

I spend some time making changes — mainly pasting poems on the pages of information for international business travelers.

The 2025 edition has arrived, and so I will start fiddling with it. I have a lot of reminders to write in the calendar for the coming year.

I like this time of year — I mean the ends of the year, rather than the holidays. The reading and writing projects that are going to get done in 2024 are done, and I’m thinking about projects for the coming year. After Thanksgiving, I help the Wise Woman address, stamp and mail her holiday letter — just one of the things I do with the ends of the year. Getting the pocket calendar in order is another.

• Sources and notes: Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper; Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2024, pp. 257ff.  For an explanation of my system of keeping a calendar, see “An activity in lieu of making resolutions,” Dec. 31, 2021.

Willa Cather: ‘Old Mrs. Harris’

 “Old Mrs. Harris” is a story about three generations of women under one roof.

Mrs. Harris, the grandmother, gets her energy and identity from being part of the family. Her daughter, Victoria, beautiful and self-centered, loves her children but feels everyone in the house is either disappointing or choking her. Granddaughter Vickie is ignored and underestimated. She shocks everyone by winning a scholarship — and she feels let down when the family can’t help her go to college.

The story is Willa Cather’s mediation on how family’s shape us, limit us, exasperate us. Cather is a master.

Here are three passages that give you the architecture of the story:

• How trouble starts:

 

The Templetons’ troubles began when Mr. Templeton’s aunt died and left him a few thousand dollars, and he got the idea of bettering himself.

 

• How the family, in moving from Tennessee to Colorado, bit off more than it could handle gracefully:

 

Mrs. Harris was no longer living in a feudal society, where there were plenty of landless people glad to render service to the more fortunate, but in a snappy little Western democracy, where every man was as good as his neighbor and out to prove it.

 

• On how Mrs. Harris thought of her identity, her place in the world:

 

But the moment she heard the children running down the uncarpeted back stairs, she forgot to be low. Indeed, she ceased to be an individual, an old woman with aching feet; she became part of a group, became a relationship.

 

It’s a marvelous story. The neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Rosen, are worth the price of admission.

And there is a story underneath the main story about the family cat. As you read, ask yourself: Who does Blue Boy belong to? (And note that the first answer is not the best.) A better question: Who takes responsibility for him? As we treat animals, so we treat people.

• Sources and notes: Willa Cather, Great Short Works of Willa Cather, edited by Robert K. Miller; New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1992. The quotations are on pp. 289, 290 and 292. For a note on another wonderful short story, see “Willa Cather: ‘Neighbor Rosicky,’” Nov. 21, 2022.

‘The Boy Captives’

In 1871, Clinton L. Smith, 11, and his brother, Jeff, 9, were taken by Comanches from the family farm 27 miles west of San Antonio. Native peoples raided the area often. Clint escaped capture five times before he was caught.

We cannot imagine sending children out to herd sheep after so many close scrapes. But the parents of Clint and Jeff Smith couldn’t imagine they had a choice.

I’m not sure what the Comanche people would have said if they’d been asked about choices. They and other Native peoples did not know what to do about the encroaching white people. They raided the settlements, mainly to steal horses, the source of food and wealth. They killed people, taking scalps as trophies. They cut off the arms of victims and hung them in trees as warnings to the intruders. They stole children. All of that was part of what raiding was and had always been.

Contemporary writers have written fiction loosely based on these accounts. I feel I should like these novels.

In my younger days, I went through a phase of reading memoirs and letters from the era when Texas was a frontier, including The Boy Captives, the Smith brothers’ account as told to a newspaperman. I wonder whether reading them immunized me against fiction set in that era, like a flu shot that kept me from getting carried off by something stronger.

Contemporary writers have produced fiction that leaves out no detail. The emotion — the experience of horror and terror — is overwhelming.

By contrast, the Smith brothers’ memoir is an account of one raid after another — almost a list. The boys weren’t old enough to be warriors, but they were taken along to herd the horses seized in the raids. They saw the killing, but in their accounts the emotion is understated, rather than amplified.

One of the few times Clint cries is when his little brother is branded and sold to a group of Apache people.

Here’s Jeff Smith, recalling his life when he was 9:

 

I suppose I was too small to worry much about my situation, but at times there would come a longing for the loved ones at home. One day I was sitting in camp gnawing on a horse rib, and was thinking of my home, my brothers and sisters, and of my father, all so far away, and perhaps I would never see them again. And poor Brother Clint, who was in a condition similar to myself, and my grief became unbearable. I laid my bone down and commenced crying. One old squaw came up and asked me why I was crying. I told her an ant had stung me.

 

I think my problem with the novels I’ve read is this: Contemporary writers want to make sure we readers don’t miss the trauma their characters endured. I’m not sure the Smith brothers saw it that way. That doubt, in my case, is fatal to enjoying the fiction.

• Source: Clinton L. Smith and Jeff D. Smith, The Boy Captives, was published in 1927, when both brothers were old men and appearing at events celebrating the Wild West. The stories were written by J. Marvin Hunter. My copy was printed in 2013 and distributed by Allen and Beth Smith of Camp Wood, Texas. The quotation is on pp. 203-4.

When Willa Cather's life began

 Willa Cather had a maxim: “Life began for me when I ceased to admire and began to remember.”

She liked what the Greeks called anamnesis, which she talked about as the memory of important things, matters of human heritage. 

One example is land. Cather wanted to see “nothing but land: not a country at all, but the materials from which countries are made.”

I do too. I’m interested in how we humans relate to the land and find our place in it, wherever we are. I suppose that’s why I like Cather’s work, especially her stories.

I hope to read one today. It’s her birthday. 

• Source: Dorothy Van Ghent, Willa Cather, which was part of the Minnesota Pamphlet Series published by the University of Minnesota. I found it in Seven American Women Writers of the Twentieth Century, edited by Maureen Howard; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977.  The quotations are on pp. 93 and 96.

Woody Guthrie in Pampa

 One of the best descriptions of a Texas boomtown is by a guy from Oklahoma, Woody Guthrie.

When he was 17, Woody joined his father in Pampa, which is in the Panhandle. His father was managing a rooming house. Woody was to be the handyman.

Oil fields require a lot of workers to develop. Once the wells are running, the workers must move on. Housing isn’t meant to last.

In 1929, most of the town consisted of little shacks, thrown together with old boards and flattened oil barrels. People paid $5 a week for a three-roomer, a one-room shack cut three ways.

 

Women folks worked hard trying to make their little shacks look like something, but with the dry weather, hot sun, high wind, and the dust piling in, they could clean and wipe and mop and scrub their shanty twenty-four hours a day and never get caught up. Their floors was always warped and crooked. The old linoleum rugs had raised six families and put eighteen kids through school. The walls were made out thin boards, one inch thick and covered over with whatever the women could nail on them: old blue wallpaper, wrapping paper from the boxcars along the tracks, once in a while a layer of beaverboard painted with whitewash, or some haywire color ranging from deep-sea blue through all the midnight blues to a blazing red that would drive a Jersey bull crazy.

 

My grandparents left East Texas for the oilfields around Ranger during that era. They lived in a frame cabin with a tent top. They were attracted by the good wages my grandfather could earn. But they decided some things just weren’t worth it.

• Source: Woody Guthrie’s autobiography Bound for Glory was published in 1943.  I have a chapter on his days in Pampa, titled “Boy in Search of Something,” in Unknown Texas, edited by Jonathan Eisen and Harold Straughn; New York: Collier Books, 1988, pp. 199-208. The quotation is on p. 202.

Seek, and maybe you’ll find

 It’s fascinating to me how attention works. We sometimes notice small, wonderful things. Sometimes we are oblivious.

Sometimes we wouldn’t notice things unless some kind soul — a teacher — had told us what to look for.

When I saw an old pine that had come down in the woods south of Stone Mountain, I inspected it, looking for a great crested flycatcher’s nest. These birds build in cavities in trees. Often, they just take over a woodpecker’s old place.

Terry W. Johnson, a backyard wildlife expert, says great crested flycatchers weave snakeskins into their nests.

I knew what to look for but didn’t find it this time. I’ll keep looking.

• Source: Terry Johnson’s blog is here:

https://georgiawildlife.com/out-my-backdoor-great-crested-flycatcher

A reunion of sorts

 I haven’t been to the woods for a while in these notes because I haven’t been to the woods.

In the days before the pandemic, people used to get what they called the flu, which was some kind of virus that wasn’t treatable and just had to be endured. I suppose that’s what I had. I was not sick enough to shirk chores but too sick to have fun.

Then, on a cold day, the big dog and I went to inspect a stand of beeches south of Stone Mountain, and it was almost like a reunion. Here are some lines from Naomi Shihab Nye that get at it better than I can:

 

Out here it’s impossible to be lonely.

The land walking beside you is your oldest friend,

pleasantly silent, like already you’ve told the best stories

and each of you know how much the other made up.

 

• Source: Naomi Shihab Nye, “At the Seven-Mile Ranch, Comstock, Texas” is in Hugging the Jukebox; New York: Dutton, 1982. But I have it in an anthology, Unknown Texas, edited by Jonathan Eisen and Harold Straughn; New York: Collier Books, 1988.

The minister's 'golden notebooks'

 Suppose you work at the newspaper and someone calls saying that 300 people have been laid off at the state university. The caller says the local economy is about to tank. The hardship will be worse than anything since the Great Depression.

What do you do?

The fact that 300 families will be without a paycheck is something the community should know about. The story should be reported in a way that lets people know that some of their neighbors are facing hardship. But if you know that the university has a little more than 10,000 employes and that the legislature routinely cuts funds for higher education, you are likely to see the 3 percent cut as something expected, rather than as a sign of the apocalypse.

Knowing something about community institutions — the names and numbers of administrators, the number of employees, the operating budget and sources of funding — is just a part of knowing the community.

In my earlier days, I thought it was a good idea to update all that basic information annually. The reporters had one more thing to do — collecting data, just the facts and figures, on institutions they covered.

We collected that information into an almanac, which the newspaper published annually. The reporters, after the work was done, liked having the information handy. I was surprised by the number of readers who found the little almanac useful.

I was reminded of that project by Rolland Allen’s account of the “golden notebooks” produced by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the 17^th century minister who dragged France’s finances and administration out of the Middle Ages. The notebooks were pocket sized. Colbert produced one on each of the major institutions of government. The notebook on the French navy ran to 120 pages.

Even people who don’t agree on much can agree on facts. Colbert thought that before you had an argument about whether the navy should get funding for more ships you ought to know how many ships the navy had.

I admire the thinking behind the golden notebooks. I wish they were a common feature of American life.

• Source: Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper; Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2024, pp. 214-5.

Thinking, drawing and writing

 Eric Hoffer put it this way: The grass becomes the cow and not the other way around.

In terms of logical possibilities, it could go either way. A cow could become a big pile of grass. We learn by experience that the grass becomes cow.

That was Hoffer’s metaphor for thinking on paper.

He carried index cards and notebooks in his pocket and would write down ideas as they occurred to him. He’d fill up notebooks as he read. Then he’d go back and work through the notes, comparing an idea he’d had while picking peas as a migrant laborer with an idea he’d found in Montaigne. Gradually, the material would become Hoffer.

I have met people who didn’t absorb the material they were allegedly interested in. I remember preachers who’d managed to memorize large portions of the Bible. If you asked a question, they would recite, rather than think. They could deliver messages, but they couldn’t carry on a conversation.

Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper has a section on how notebooks shape how we think. His story involves artists, rather than writers. People who draw in notebooks change the way they use their brains.

Our instinct, when we first try to draw, is to use the part of our brains that helps with facial recognition. But an artist slowly learns to suppress that instinct and to use the part of the brain that helps us with spatial awareness — the part that keeps us from bumping into the furniture as we walk through a room. Allen provides the moral of the story: 

 

Use it enough, and a notebook will change your brain.

 

I would like to hear an explanation of what happens to people who use notebooks to write, rather than draw. I’m leery of mind-brain conundrums and would be less interested in the neurology than in practical advice on how to absorb the nutrients from books, conversations, observations and other experiences. 

• Source: Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper; Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2024, p. 371.

Plays and other good things to read

 Michael Dirda has an excellent column in The Washington Post about the pleasures of reading plays. Like me, he likes works that can be read in a couple of hours.

I’d love to say we’re on the same wavelength, but I hadn’t heard of half the plays he recommended. (He made George Bernard Shaw’s In Good King Charles’s Golden Days sound intriguing.)

I have been reading plays, though. I set out to read the 33 surviving plays written by the Greek tragedians in 2024. Rhesus was the last one, which raised the question about a project for 2025.

I thought I might look at some Georgia writers. Or I might go back for another look at some Texas writers.

Frank Dobie, who taught a course on the literature of the Southwest, said people ought to know something about the place they call home. But he also thought it was a horrible mistake to study the memoirs of cowboys who rode the range while neglecting the wonders of the world’s literature.

I guess I’m trying to find a balance.

If you have suggestions, please post a comment or drop me a line at hebertaylor3@gmail.com.

• Source: Michael Dirda, “Want to read something different? A play’s the thing”; The Washington Post, Nov. 29, 2024. It’s here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/11/29/reading-plays-pleasure/