Tuesday, December 31, 2024

Arabia Mountain, year's end

 We went to Arabia Mountain on a glorious day. It was 61 degrees, and we’d spent a couple of weeks by the fireplace. Such days can arrive mid-winter in the Georgia Piedmont. 

It’s been wet, and every spring was flowing. The massive rock surfaces at the edge of the woods were shining. The sunlight comes in low in winter, and the low rays reflecting off wet granite are sparks.

The leaves in the oak-hickory forest are gone, of course. The green you see is mostly from pines and greenbriers. Stevenson’s Creek had little rapids in it. The German shepherd plunged in and nipped the whitecaps.

It was a lovely, quiet day in the woods. It seems like a good way to end the year.

Monday, December 30, 2024

Jimmy Carter, Sunday school teacher

 For years, this was a thing in Georgia: People would drive to Plains to attend the Sunday school class taught by former President Jimmy Carter.

So many people would come to Maranatha Baptist Church that visitors greatly outnumbered regular members. The members welcomed guests and helped sort out problems in the parking lot.

As a new resident of the state, I was interested in this phenomenon. The best explanation I’ve seen came from Jennifer Ayers, a professor at Emory University’s theology school. She pointed out that people don’t routinely overrun churches to hear famous people teach Sunday school. But with Carter, Sunday school wasn’t a gimmick. At Professor Ayers put it:

 

People most likely wanted to be close to someone who had such a spirit of integrity. It’s such a powerful force that makes people want to come, listen and be present.

 

A spirit of integrity is a powerful force, and I wish it were always present in all our public institutions.

• Source: Shelia Poole, “Even after he quit teaching, interest in Jimmy Carter’s Sunday school lessons keeps growing”; Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Dec. 29, 2024. The article is online here:

https://www.macon.com/news/state/georgia/article287184110.html

Sunday, December 29, 2024

The poet of Fort Juniper

 I’m a Robert Francis fan, which is hard to explain.

Robert Frost, a fellow New Englander, called Francis the country’s best neglected poet. To me, Francis is the voice of finding enough: finding what’s essential for you and being content with that.

Francis had a master’s degree from Harvard and should have been set for a career as a teacher, the life he imagined for himself. But Francis found he wasn’t all that good at it, and so he built a small place where he could live frugally.

The house was 20-by-22 feet. It sat on half an acre and cost $1,500. It was just big enough for him — physically, socially and economically. He named it Fort Juniper after the evergreen that the farmers around Amherst, Mass., considered a pest.

He said it was an expression of his way of life. When Francis was asked how much space a person needed, he replied: Not more than you can get clean. He wanted to write, rather than clean house or work at a job he didn’t like so he could afford a better house and a housekeeper.

I find that aesthetic in his poetry: simple and direct, not fancy.

• Source: Robert Francis, The Trouble with Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 1971.

Saturday, December 28, 2024

Robert Francis: ‘Juniper’

 The poet Robert Francis, who spoke for nature’s unloved things, once had a discussion with a farmer about junipers. Francis said that of the common evergreens, the juniper would be the last to break in the wind. The farmer replied that one match could out a juniper, and the poet tried to picture it: a flame-shaped swirl on fire.

Francis said that poets

 

            Are rich in points of view if they are rich

            In anything. The farmer thinks one thing;

            The poet can afford to think all things

            Including what the farmer thinks, thinking

            Around the farmer rather than above him,

            Loving the evergreen the farmer hates,

            And yet not hating him for hating it.

 

The tint of juniper berries is hard to describe. Francis saw the color of metals.

 

            So many colors in so dull a green

            And so many years before I saw them.

 

This is one of the poems I reread. Francis reminds me how little I see when I look around me and how interconnected I am with things I’m quick to view as pests.

• Source: The Voice That is Great Within UsAmerican Poetry of the Twentieth Century, edited by Hayden Carruth; New York: Bantam Classics, 1983. “Juniper” is on pp. 234-5.

Friday, December 27, 2024

The formidable Mrs. Todd

 Almira Todd is an unusual character in American literature. She’s a widow in her 60s and lives in a coastal village in Maine. She gathers herbs in wild places and makes cough syrups, cures and elixirs in a cauldron on the stove. She also makes beer.

She’s the landlady of the unnamed narrator of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs.

Mrs. Todd is not impressed with the abilities of the men she knows. She lets the preacher sail the dory to call on a troubled young woman who lives alone on a remote island. But when he loses control of the boat, Mrs. Todd knocks him out of the way and grabs the sail.

When she gets some women together for an expedition, she says:


we don't want to carry no men folks havin' to be considered every minute an' takin' up all our time.

 

Of a minor character who is otherwise forgettable, she says:

 

he did not make a habit of always opposin', like some men.

 

Males are not at the center of The Country of the Pointed Firs. The book was published in 1896, and I suppose you could think of Ms. Jewett as a feminist who was ahead of her time.

But Mrs. Todd reminds me of my grandmother, a woman of strong character and stout heart.

I’m not sure Mrs. Todd fits in any category. I wish I’d gotten to know her years ago.

• Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1896. I found a copy through Project Gutenberg. The quotations are on pp. 45 and 139.

Thursday, December 26, 2024

The odd thing about the 'best room'

 One of the many things an American literature should do is explain why a family’s “best room” is so much less comfortable than the kitchen. Ironically, welcomed guests are shown to this room, though it’s as uncomfortable for them as for family members.

This is a feature of American life. A literature that reflects American life should get into these kinds of questions about baffling behavior.

Some writers have done it with genius. Here’s Sarah Orne Jewett, whose unnamed narrator is visiting Elijah Tilley, an old fisherman whose wife had died eight years before:

 

The best room seemed to me a much sadder and more empty place than the kitchen; its conventionalities lacked the simple perfection of the humbler room and failed on the side of poor ambition; it was only when one remembered what patient saving, and what high respect for society in the abstract go to such furnishing that the little parlor was interesting at all.

 

Tilley called his late wife “poor dear.” The “best room” had her best tea things, the furniture she’d save for and the family daguerreotypes. The kitchen, on the other hand, had Elijah Tilley’s knitting gear. Tilley, though old, still fished and checked his lobster traps, but he got serious about knitting when January set in.

I think this passage should clarify our thinking about where our guests belong. I also think Ms. Jewett was the best kind of writer — one who rewards readers.

• Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1896. I found a copy through Project Gutenberg. The quotation is on p. 161.

Wednesday, December 25, 2024

A Christmas long ago

 On Christmas 1944, my father, who was 20, was in Luxembourg.

It was during the Battle of the Bulge. Part of the 10th Armored Division was at Bastogne. Part was holding positions at the base of the bulge to the southeast.

It was cold, and Allied troops took shelter where they could. 

On Christmas Eve, a local boy ventured to an American post and asked if there were any French speakers. My father, who’d taken French in high school, talked to the boy. He got permission from the company sergeant. The family had room for two, so my father, a Tennessean, took a friend from the mountains of eastern Kentucky and ate a hot meal among new friends. It was a lovely moment during an ugly war. He remembered it for the rest of his life.

Tuesday, December 24, 2024

In the woodlot

 It’s hard to say why I love working in the woodlot, but there’s this:

A rowdy goose came over low. It was not a flight of geese, just one goose. He was fast and loud. 

The goose went by, and I went back to work. It’s not even a feeling with me. I heard him and didn’t feel connected to the world — I was connected. I don’t recall a sense of a separate me enjoying (having a feeling of enjoyment) at the sound of a goose. There was just the goose.

Monday, December 23, 2024

Coveralls

 Thoreau warned of any enterprise that requires new clothes. The same warning ought to come with projects that make you find old clothes.

The job to clear the overgrown woodlot began with a search for my coveralls. Years ago, when I would feed cattle with my grandfather in winter, we’d put on coveralls and load the pickup truck with baled hay. I’d carry range cubes in the pockets of my coveralls. Mutt, the Brahma bull, would stick his nose into my pockets and help himself.

Coverall pockets are big and deep enough to accommodate the nose of a 2,000-pound bull. They also are deep enough to carry a Thermos bottle of coffee.

My coveralls were made by Roebucks. I’ve had them for decades. They are dark green but have acquired a patina of paint, engine oil and other substances.

When people imagine Texans tending to cattle, they don’t usually think of coveralls. They also don’t usually imagine lace-up boots. Mine are all hooks, no eyes. Our boots were the only expensive items in our outfits. My grandmother ordered them from a mail-order company that catered to farm families.

My grandfather never went outside without his Stetson, but I was never fussy. Soon after the Iron Curtain fell, I bought a felt cap made by Hückel, which has a factory in the Czech Republic. The cap’s warm and shows less wear than I do. 

If you’re curious, this getup works in layers: long johns, flannel shirt, rag sweater, coveralls and a wool scarf knitted by my grandmother. Even on cold days, I shed layers as I work. The woodlot looks like a clothesline by the time I break for lunch.

Does it seem strange to start a new project by examining old memories? Maybe it’s just natural at my age.

Sunday, December 22, 2024

An economist talks about goods

 E.F. Schumacher, the economist, spoke of two kinds of goods: ephemeral and eternal.

Food is vital, but it doesn’t last. On the other hand, nobody worries about depreciation on the Taj Mahal.

Schumacher held that we humans are terrible at analyzing our ephemeral needs. Our needs are modest. But we are prone to confuse wants with needs. We fritter away our time, resources and energy on ephemeral goods.

If we were frugal on the ephemeral side, we would convert some of our resources to the creative work of producing eternal goods.

Schumacher said it was obvious that industrial societies had emphasized the production of ephemeral goods at the expense of eternal goods. Earlier societies had done the opposite. Most of humanity’s cultural heritage predated the industrial revolution, in Schumacher’s view.

In 1975, Schumacher said this:

 

Frugal living in terms of ephemeral goods means a dogged adherence to simplicity, a conscious avoidance of any unnecessary elaborations, and a magnanimous rejection of luxury — puritanism, if you like — on the ephemeral side.

 

Fifty years ago, that was a coherent argument about what people should be doing. You could have based a political platform on that idea.

Today, it seems politics is all about the economy, meaning it’s all about ephemeral consumer goods.

• Source: E.F. Schumacher’s untitled essay is in Voices for Life: Reflections on the Human Condition, edited by Dom Moraes; New York: Praeger Publishers, 1975, pp. 133-40. The quotation is on p. 139. The editor asked 25 thinkers the same question: “What do you see as the quality of life, and what do you think it will become in the future?”

Saturday, December 21, 2024

Winter solstice 2024

 As December began, I went into the woodlot at the back of our property. I went to work. I wasn’t just sightseeing.

We’ve been in Stone Mountain two years, and I’ve had plenty to do around the house and garden. It took me that long to get to this project, but I’ve been in the woodlot just about every day this month.

The place was so overgrown I began by making a path, cutting through saplings, privet, briars and ivy with a chainsaw. I had to follow my saw. The brush was impenetrable.

Some of trees in the lot are taller than 60 feet. But the forest floor is crowded with light-starved saplings. English ivy, an invasive species that’s thicker than kudzu in our part of Georgia, is all over the place.

I came across a coyote den, abandoned when the old occupants took note of the our German shepherd. On one of the few days I didn’t get into the woodlot, I watched two does grazing.

It’s a lovely place, and I want to make some trails and a place to sit. The Wise Woman is thinking about a she-shed.

I have no hope of getting rid of the English ivy, but I want to clear some areas for native plants. Some Christmas ferns might get started this weekend.

It seems like a good time to mention this project. I brought a yule log in from the woodlot, cut from a downed tree. It might be big enough to burn through the long night.

Friday, December 20, 2024

Stevenson: 'Ticonderoga'

 I don’t usually like ghost stories. But I liked Robert Louis Stevenson’s creepy poem “Ticonderoga.”

In Stevenson’s telling of the Scottish legend, a Stewart kills his friend, a Cameron. Coming to his senses, the killer runs to the dead man’s brother and says only that he’s on the run for killing a man and begs protection. The fellow promises to stand by the wanted man.

The promise that seemed noble appears in an eerie light when the ghost shows up and demands justice. The brother says he can’t break an oath.

The ghost pleads, but his brother won’t budge. The ghost says he’ll say no more till they meet at Ticonderoga. The brother has never heard of the place.

The disturbed brother travels the world as a soldier in a Scottish regiment of the British army. British forces were crushed by the French at Ticonderoga, N.Y., in 1758.

I had read some Stevenson without running across “Ticonderoga.” I owe the recommendation to Arthur Conan Doyle, who said it’s one of the best narrative poems in English.

• Source: https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/ticonderoga-legend-west-highlands

Thursday, December 19, 2024

How libraries are built

 Arthur Conan Doyle said that Edinburgh once had a bookstore that kept an egg box full of “volumes in various stages of decay.” Any book in the box could be had for twopence. 

I never passed without diving into this lucky bag, where among heaps of theological literature, obsolete algebras, torn Latin grammars and tables of logarithms, one might occasionally come upon what would repay one.

 

In the days when money was tight, he built his library with classics. I was delighted that he found the Essays of Sir William Temple

Among his finds was a book on international law published in 1642. An inscription says it was acquired by Gulielimi Whyte in 1672. Doyle thought of the previous owner as Willie Whyte, lawyer.

The detail comes from a series of six articles called “Before My Bookcase.” Doyle was recalling his library from afar, offering his views of what was good and what was not.

Some of his views are wonderful. His most battered book was a volume of Macaulay, and he said that Stevenson could “touch that weird, vague note which haunts the imagination.” I’m not sure what more can be said about that fellow.

But a lot of what Doyle said and wrote was beyond eccentric. I take the articles as a kind of antidote, perhaps even as a vaccine. I hope they will keep me from expressing strong views about literature.

• Source: Arthur Conan Doyle, “Before My Bookcase,” was originally published in Great Thoughts magazine between May 5 and June 30, 1894. Five of the six parts are here:  

https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/Before_My_Bookcase.

Wednesday, December 18, 2024

A blog by any other name

 When Eric Hoffer wondered whether he was slipping in old age, he began a journal. 

I wanted to find out if the necessity to write something significant every day would revive my flagging alertness to the first, faint stirrings of new ideas.

 

He recalled the sluice box he’d used as a prospector. What would happen if he searched for ideas instead of for gold?

I have taken several stabs at calling this collection of notes something other than a blog. I’d thought it might be a concatenation. It might be a sluice box.

• Source: Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath; New York: Harper & Row, 1979.

Tuesday, December 17, 2024

Choosing a subject

 Advice to the young: Choose a subject that interests you and make yourself the foremost expert on it.

Max Schuster, the book publisher, used to give new employees that advice. He apparently got to them quickly. Before anyone could tell the new folks where the restrooms and coffee pot were, Schuster told them what they were there for.

Schuster’s advice doesn’t work literally for me. I am not an expert on anything. But the spirit of his counsel is wonderful. It reminds me that there are such things as intellectual pleasures and that they ought to be part of my life.

• Source: Ronald Gross, The Independent Scholar’s Handbook; Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1982, p. xii. If you’re interested in the direct quotation, see ‘One way to welcome the new guy,’ March 14, 2024. As you might guess, I’m still thinking about projects for the coming year.

Monday, December 16, 2024

Reading 100 pages a day

 I read Matthew Walther’s essay “The One Hundred Pages Strategy” with fascination.

Walther, editor of The Lamp, reads 100 pages a day. He describes that as a strategy, rather than a goal. He discusses ways he’s been able to make more time for reading.

I just can’t think that way — although his essay did make me think.

I suppose I see reading as a kind of pleasure: a vital one. But if I decided that the ice cream cone is a vital pleasure, it would not dawn on me to let no day pass without eating five.

For me, something about a real pleasure resists quantification.

• Matthew Walther, “The One Hundred Pages Strategy”; The Lamp, Christmas 2024. It’s here:

https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-26/the-one-hundred-pages-strategy

Sunday, December 15, 2024

'Emancipators of the Human Mind'

 As he got go older, J. Frank Dobie talked more and more about the importance of having a free mind.

It was a departure. He’d spent decades trying to convince students — and ordinary Texans — that they should aspire to having a well stocked mind.

Dobie said he’d like to make — I like that word — a book on Emancipators of the Human Mind. He had in mind Emerson, Jefferson, Thoreau, Paine, Newton, Arnold, Voltaire, Goethe and the gang.

I suppose the political climate of the country is weighing on me, but I wish he’d gotten around to that book.

Dobie wrote a friend:

 

If I were teaching any course now I’d never let my auditors forget the joy of having a liberated mind. Yet, during the period when I was preaching the gospel of the right of a people to its ‘cultural inheritance,’ I must have neglected considerably the liberation of minds … I am aware (now) of a great deal of tawdriness and paltriness and meaninglessness in this alleged ‘cultural inheritance.’”

 

Dobie was an old man then, and I’m an old man now. More and more, I think each generation has a responsibility to get rid of bad ideas. That is, each person has a responsibility to free his or her mind.

• Source: Lon Tinkle, J. Frank Dobie: The Makings of an Ample Mind; Austin: The Encino Press, 1968, p. 7. These words are on Dobie’s grave: “I have come to value liberated minds as the supreme good of life on earth.”

Saturday, December 14, 2024

A writing lesson from Willa Cather

 If you want to know why some people consider Willa Cather a great writer, consider Mr. Rosen, a minor character in “Old Mrs. Harris.”

The story is about three generations of women: Mrs. Harris, her daughter Victoria Templeton and Victoria’s daughter Vickie. These women are observed by their neighbor Mrs. Rosen. Mrs. Harris and her family came to Colorado from Tennessee. They are undergoing a change in culture, something Mrs. Rosen, who spoke with a European accent, can appreciate. But Mrs. Rosen has advantages of education and culture that the women in Mrs. Harris’s family lack. That contrast between the women is interesting. Mrs. Rosen is a crucial character.

Mr. Rosen not. He is just Mrs. Rosen’s husband. He has to listen to his wife talk about Mrs. Harris and the house next door is full of children. Mr. Rosen knows his wife wanted to have children more than anything else in the world, so he listens.

Mr. Rosen appears as unpromising minor character.

 

Mr. Rosen was a reflective, unambitious man, who didn’t mind keeping a clothing-store in a little Western town, so long as he had a great deal of time to read philosophy. He was the only unsuccessful member of a large, rich Jewish family.

 

But you have to watch Willa Cather or she’ll sneak wonderful things by you. When everyone is homesick — even Mrs. Rosen misses the Adirondacks — Mr. Rosen is not.

 

All countries were beautiful to Mr. Rosen. He carried a country of his own in his mind, and was able to unfold it like a tent in any wilderness. 

 

When Mrs. Harris’s granddaughter decides to go to college, Mrs. Rosen is skeptical that Vickie has the ability. Mr. Rosen is encouraging. He doesn’t think education has to be for something — just going to learn is justification enough. He writes out a quotation from Michelet for the young woman: “The end is nothing, the road is all.”

Mrs. Rosen consider the neighbors directionless and doesn’t think any member of that family needs to be told to stop and smell the roses.

 

Moreover, she always called her husband back to earth when he soared a little; though it was exactly for this transcendental quality of mind that she reverenced him in her heart, and thought him so much finer than any of his successful brothers.

 

If you follow Mr. Rosen as he makes his cameo appearances, you are rewarded with suggestions of stories within the story. I’m no expert in the genre of romance, but this strikes me as a fine example.

David Rosen hits me as a fine character. I wanted to read a story about him and wished Cather had written a sequel.

• 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. 272, 283, 305. For more, see “Willa Cather: ‘Old Mrs. Harris,’” Dec. 9, 2024.

Friday, December 13, 2024

Deborah Levy on the novel

 Human beings must live with kindness and intelligence, but they also must live with imagination. That’s why some of us read fiction.

Deborah Levy gets to that point in her new essay on the novel: 

 

During my father’s dying days he summoned me to his sick bed and requested I find a pen and paper. I believed that, at last, he was going to express his wishes for his funeral and its various rituals. In fact, he wanted to dictate a menu for the week. It turned out that he was not satisfied with his meals. For Tuesday he suggested fish curry, Thursday lamb chops, Friday roast chicken. My father was 91, fatally ill and could only swallow liquids. By the time he reached Saturday, I began to admire his bid to be alive for a whole week (unlikely) and to live imaginatively to the very end.

 

I’ve said grumpy things about the novel in this collection of notes. It seems only fair to point out the obvious fact that I’m frequently wrong. 

• Source: Deborah Levy, “Why the Novel Matters”; The New Statesman, Dec. 5, 2024. The article is here:

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2024/12/deborah-levy-on-why-the-novel-matters

For my quarrel with the novel, see “Give me fiction, but hold the novel,” Nov. 5, 2022.

Thursday, December 12, 2024

Seeing it for yourself

 Here’s a question from Jane Eisner’s essay marking the 75th anniversary of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac:

To appreciate Leopold’s legacy, do we have to witness wilderness ourselves?

 

Eisner’s answer is “perhaps.”

I’d say “yes.”

Eisner’s essay, which appeared in The Washington Post, is lovely. Given the state of the news, I’d recommend it to bolster your faith in humanity, the country and newspapers. (It’s part of a newspaper’s role to raise topics about which people can disagree.)

When I was a boy, I watched television ads pushing President Kennedy’s idea that being physically fit was a patriotic responsibility, something you owed your country. A better you, in some small way, made for a better country.

I think we citizens of the world have a responsibility to inspect the natural world and slowly get to know it. Reading Leopold’s book is a wonderful thing to do. But at some point, I think we have to put the book down and lace up our boots.

• Sources and notes: Jane Eisner, “‘A Sand County Almanac’ remains an environmental classic at 75”; The Washington Post, Dec. 7, 2024. It’s here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/12/07/sand-county-almanac-remains-an-environmental-classic-75/

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac; New York: Ballentine Books, 1982.

I’ve mentioned the book several times, including “Reading ‘A Sand County Almanac,’” June 21, 2023.

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

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

Tuesday, December 10, 2024

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.

Monday, December 9, 2024

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.

Sunday, December 8, 2024

‘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.

Saturday, December 7, 2024

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.

Friday, December 6, 2024

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.

Thursday, December 5, 2024

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

Wednesday, December 4, 2024

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.

Tuesday, December 3, 2024

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 17th 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.

Monday, December 2, 2024

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.

Sunday, December 1, 2024

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/

'Blades of cold'

 I’ve mentioned this passage before: And then the nights came on and the frosts took hold again, and blades of cold slid under the doors and...