Still stumped on snakeskin

For a couple of months, I have been getting off the  trail to look for a great crested flycatcher’s nest. These birds build in holes in trees. I’ve checked several promising holes without luck.

The telltale sign is snakeskin. More than any other bird in the Georgia Piedmont, great crested flycatchers weave snakeskins into their nests. 

I examined yet another cavity this week. Still no luck. But The New York Times had a story on the phenomenon. The article said researchers at Cornell University had found higher survival rates among birds incubating eggs in nests built with snakeskin.

One theory: small mammals that like eggs don’t like snakes.

• Sources: Kate Goembiewski, “Snakeskin Isn’t Just a Fashion Statement for Birds”; The New York Times, Jan. 25, 2025. It’s here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/science/snakeskin-birds-nests.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
The original note on this quest, “Seek, and maybe you’ll find,” Dec. 5, 2024, is here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2024/12/seek-and-maybe-youll-find.html

The Man without Shoulders

 The Man without Shoulders is in the White House. That’s what I’m going to call him until he leaves.

The phrase is from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Little Boy. There’s a long riff about baseball — especially the joys of baseball. And there is this:

 

and the Man without Shoulders who can’t lift his weight in butterflies is now in charge of the world 

 

For baseball fans, the World Series is a kind of joy. But in Game 5 of the 2019 World Series, the Man without Shoulders was introduced, and the joy evaporated. People booed. The atmosphere got ugly.

I’m tired of hearing how divisive the Man without Shoulders is. That just doesn’t cover it. He’s the kind of guy who can ruin the atmosphere at a World Series game. He’s the kind of guy who can destroy the peace of worshipers in a cathedral.

For those who don’t share his values, the problem is what to do.

If we fly into a rage every time he desecrates a house of worship or violates a baseball game, we are just energizing his fans. They think it’s funny.

If we ignore him, we are missing the fact that some people are dangerously stupid. If the guy in front of you on the highway is drunk, it’s a bad idea to ignore that.

If we watch the Man without Shoulder’s every move, however, we are going to surrender the better part of our lives to something base. I want to be aware of the danger, but I don’t want it to take up all my attention.

Poisonous snakes are in the woods I love. I want to be aware of them, but I’m not staying out of the woods.

I’m also not going to stop enjoying baseball games or thinking about things that are far more useful and worthwhile than the Man without Shoulders.

I like Ferlinghetti’s phrase, perhaps because I use some other phrases about shoulders. Can you imagine standing shoulder to shoulder in a fight with a guy like that? Can you imagine building any kind of legacy on his shoulders?

• Source: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Little Boy; New York: Doubleday, 2019.

The blog A Building Roam has an article on "Baseball in the Works of the Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021)" that started this line of thought. It's here:

https://www.abuildingroam.com/2021/04/baseball-in-works-of-poet-lawrence.html

How J.B. Priestley typed

 I watched a two-and-a-half-minute film of J.B. Priestley hammering at a typewriter in 1944. He used two fingers but didn’t hunt and peck. He blazed away.

He also wrote in a room full of reference books. In the days before the Internet, writers were people who knew how to find things in books. They didn’t sit at a desk. They got up constantly to look things up.

Priestley wrote with a pipe in his mouth. A lot of the old writers I knew smoked.

The short film interested me not because it showed a lost world but because it showed a world I had seen. I went to work at the local newspaper when I was 14. It was a part-time job, taking calls from correspondents from across the region. I’d take down the facts and write three-paragraph items about high school games.

I worked the night shift on game nights: Fridays during football season — Tuesdays and Fridays when basketball started.

The calls started coming in before 8 p.m. We’d take calls until a little after midnight and then hit the last deadline.

Newspapers used hot type in those days. You could hear the clatter of typewriters in the newsroom and the racket of linotypes in the composing room. I didn’t know enough to worry about the fumes of molten metal. I wouldn’t have been able to smell the fumes anyway. When I first cracked the door of the newsroom, clouds of tobacco smoke billowed out.

I was younger than I was supposed to be. The sports editor couldn’t quite believe it when he discovered I was one of his employees. He always covered the big games on Friday nights, so months passed before he finally got his first look at the new guy.

He made sure I got a guild card.

The night shift was mainly sports guys. But sometimes the city hall reporters would come in from late meetings. The crime reporters and photographers were always around. The copy editors worked around the rim of a U-shaped table with the news editor in “the slot.”

It was a strange new world. The only thing that people noticed about me was that I used all 10 fingers to type. People came to watch, as if I were a circus elephant that had been trained to do a trick.

Most of the old guys typed like Priestley. And, like Priestly, they didn’t seem to be able to work without a smoke, but they did know how to look stuff up.

It was a short film. It seems like a lot of memories for such a short film.

• Sources: “Personalities: J.B. Priestley (1944) is available here:

https://youtu.be/_Xf-2zMSp6U?si=Nzz-Gqi8OS2MYFJJ

I saw the clip while reading Robert Messenger’s wonderful blog about typewriters:
https://oztypewriter.blogspot.com/2024/05/vale-paul-auster-1947-2024.html

Another democracy, another president

 José “Pepe” Mujica, 89, once president of Uruguay, is terminally ill and has stopped treatment for cancer. He was known as the philosopher-president because he did things like this:

• He refused to move into the presidential mansion, living instead in a three-room house on a little farm. He and his wife, Lucía Topolansky, grow chrysanthemums.

• He gave 90 percent of his presidential salary to charity.

• He drove a 1987 Volkswagen, valued at $1,800. When he visited Germany, he was put in a Mercedes limo. He said he was ashamed.

• As head of state, he was often accompanied by Manuela, a three-legged dog the couple rescued.

• He said books are humanity’s greatest invention. He said people should read. He also said we would be better off if we put aside our cellphones and spent time with the person inside.

I’m not marveling that one president can be so different from another. I’m marveling that voters in different democracies can have such different ideas when they look for qualified candidates.

Expensive tastes

 A second thought about taste, good, bad and indiscernible: I hadn’t thought of an obvious point — that discussions of taste often involve money, and thus of marketing and branding, in American culture.

Tom Lewis, an English professor at Skidmore College, made that point with a story about the dollar value of paintings by Thomas Cole:

 

In the 20th Century, in the twenties and thirties and forties, you could pick up a Cole painting for a few dollars, and then all of a sudden he was rediscovered and the Hudson River School paintings now go for millions. You can say that taste changed, but that’s hardly a description of the forces that affected these changes.

 

That’s not really the way it works when you’re interested in neglected poets, rather than neglected painters. But when I come across a poem or essay in a battered old book, I want to convey its value. I think I’ve found the poetic equivalent of a Picasso or a Cole. I feel like a million bucks and want to share the wealth.

• Source: “Good taste, bad taste, no taste, why taste?” Salmagundi, Fall-Winter, 2024-2025.

https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/780-good-taste-bad-taste-no-taste-why-taste

A matter of taste

 The little journal Salmagundi had a symposium on taste and published a transcript that, to my taste, captures the fun of philosophical discussions.

I like the topic. Philosophers tend to get in over their heads, and I like those who take on humbler topics. Instead of reading about the concept of justice, I like J.L. Austin’s paper on what we are doing when we make excuses. I thought Philippa Foot’s examination of rudeness was brilliant. Ethics involves human behavior, and to understand human behavior, including rude behavior, you have to account for personality and culture. 

Accounting for taste is difficult because of “the radical disparities of human response” to just about anything, including works of art, as moderator Robert Boyers put it. Images of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center inspired celebrations as well as mourning. The arrival of the Beatles in the United States was greeted with joy and with predictions of the end of civilization. Often, we’re inclined so say that these responses are not just a matter of taste but some kind of moral failure.

I also like the topic because I so often find myself arguing against majority opinion. The poets I need are not the great poets. You’ll find more Charles Reznikoff than Shakespeare in this collection of notes. I’d like to explain that. Is it just a matter of taste?

• Source: “Good taste, bad taste, no taste, why taste?” Salmagundi, Fall-Winter, 2024-2025.

https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/780-good-taste-bad-taste-no-taste-why-taste

Gary Snyder: 'Long Hair'

 Just after Nixon was re-elected in 1972, Gary Snyder appeared at the Brockport Writers Forum and read a poem called “Long Hair.”

In the poem, the deer catch human beings. The hunters eat the deer, but there’s a catch.

 

Then the deer is inside the man. He waits and hides in there, but the man doesn’t know it. When enough deer have occupied enough men, they will strike all at once. … This is called “takeover from the inside.”

 

The scholarly hosts of the program, put on by the State University of New York at Brockport, asked Snyder about his politics. The part of Snyder’s reply that struck me was his call for “intense participation in local politics.” It’s the idea that one person, by getting elected to a city council or a school board, can start working for change from the bottom up. That one coffee-drinking group, by focusing on one local issue, can build credibility with the larger community, open discussions that were presumed closed and change minds.

Or, as Snyder said, “takeover from the inside.”

You’d probably expect an old newspaper editor to say this: I believe that national change starts with community change. Local work is hard work and most people don’t want to do it. I don’t think there’s any way around it.

• Sources and notes: A recording of Gary Snyder at the Brockport Writers Forum is at:

https://youtu.be/EsX9cTDFXKs?si=RzNBm2vlcdr6DQvs

“Long Hair” starts at 6:55. Snyder’s remarks about local politics begin around 12:40.

Michael Leddy’s recent post on “Gary Snyder’s notebooks and journals” led me down the rabbit hole. His post is here:

https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2025/01/gary-snyders-notebooks-and-journals.html

Biblical criticism

 Thomas Paine, a great troubler of American consciences, said readers should be careful about attributing any piece of writing to divine inspiration.

Paine found the proverbs in the Bible inferior to those of the Spaniards and no better than Ben Franklin’s.

I’ve been thinking about what we call “inspiration” since trying to read some of Blake’s prophetic poetry. I’d guess that more professors have taught more classes on Blake than on William Stafford, Norman MacCaig, Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry. But the tables would be turned if I were compiling scriptures — a collection of poems that inspired me. (I would call inspired.) My collection would include a few by Blake but many by poets who seem to me to be ranked as lesser lights.

• Source: Thomas Paine, Collected Writings; New York: The Library of America, 1984, p. 677. The line of thought is from “The Age of Reason,” published in 1794.

Snowed in with ‘Urizen’

 Robert F. Gleckner’s short edition of Blake has no excerpts from “Jerusalem,” “Milton” and “The Four Zoas.” Gleckner, skilled with excerpts, says Blake’s prophetic work “does not lend itself to intelligible fragmentation.”

Alfred Kazin’s collection does include excerpts. Kazin says:

 

The last Prophetic Books are a jungle, but it is possible — if you have nothing else to do — to get through them.

 

Snowed in, I started with “The First Book of Urizen.” I found that I could get through it but not profitably.

I could not get through these works as a young man. Fifty years later, I have a clearer view of my own limits. 

I admire writers who create vast spaces in the imagination. In theory, I should like Blake’s poems, but in fact his sensibilities are alien to me.

In Blake’s vision, humanity went horribly wrong when reason took on too great a role in human life. Socrates and the ancient Greek philosophers took a tragically wrong turn.

I think humanity suffers from a lack — not a glut — of rational thought. The notion that we suffer from an overexposure to reason is an idea that needs another kind of reader.

To say that I don’t share Blake’s sensibilities is no criticism of Blake. I’d say the same thing about Tolkien and many other writers.

I think that’s the way things should be. Many books that I love and admire are not loved by others. I’m content to argue for them.

• Sources and notes: William Blake, Selected Writings, edited by Robert F. Gleckner; New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967, p. 139. The Portable Blake, edited by Alfred Kazin; London: Penguin Books, 1976, p. 49.

Streetscape, winter storm

 The mayor of Atlanta came over the airwaves Tuesday evening, pleading with people to stay indoors during the winter storm. He said emergency crews were fully committed, and it wouldn’t help if citizens were out playing bumper cars. The message struck me as tactless.

Within two hours, 17 abandoned cars were visible from our window.

The snow fell on frozen streets. There is no naturally level ground in the Georgia Piedmont, so cars going up the hill — any hill — slid backward, unless they slid sideways.

I used to contend that the Texas Constitution should prohibit Texans from driving on ice or snow. I find myself thinking more broadly these days.

And, on second thought, I think the mayor put the matter honestly, rather than tactlessly.

The poet as a great reader

 William Blake often read books with outrage. The margins of his books are filled with annotations, which are a good introduction to his thought.

Professor Robert F. Gleckner, who edited a selection of Blake’s writings for the Crofts Classics series, made that point by including samples. Among my favorites:

 

• A note in Francis Bacon’s Essays:

 

Self-evident truth is one thing and truth the result of reasoning is another thing.

 

A child who has never heard of a syllogism sees an animal being treated cruelly and knows that’s wrong.

 

• A note in Bishop Richard Watson’s An Apology for the Bible:

 

Every honest man is a prophet; he utters his opinion both of private and public matters thus: if you go on so, the result is so. He never says, such a thing shall happen let you do what you will. A prophet is a seer, not an arbitrary dictator.

 

Blake’s “prophecy” — at least here — is not mystical or magical. It’s the kind of thing we say to each other all the time: “If you don’t give yourself a break from social media … “

 

• A note in Sir Joshua Reynold’s Discourses:

 

Reynolds thinks that man learns all that he knows. I say on the contrary that man brings all that he has or can have into the world with him. Man is born like a garden already planted & sown. This world is too poor to produce one seed.

 

We come into the world not to eat, drink and be merry but to show what we know to be true: to make art. A garden bears fruit. Humans make art.

Iris Murdoch said something about her own beliefs that I think fits Blake:

 

To be a human being is to know more than one can prove, to conceive of a reality which goes beyond the facts.

 

That’s the part of Blake I like and admire.

• Sources and notes: William Blake, Selected Writings, edited by Robert F. Gleckner; New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967, pp. 141, 140, 171. I think Murdoch’s line is from one of her essays in Existentialists and Mystics, but I can’t find it.

Interests, his and ours

 Before Americans won their independence, Thomas Paine urged them to ditch the idea of monarch, a person who presumed to rule rather than lead, and create a representative government. However, Paine warned that such governments have limits.

Elected representation works only when the elected never forms an interest separate from the electorate.

 

If you started a list of the newly elected’s interests and compared them with those of the electorate’s, you’d be at work on an epic.

• Source: Thomas Paine, Collected Writings; New York: The Library of America, 1984, p. 8. The line is from “Common Sense,” first published in January 1776.

It's been said before

 During World War II, so many Americans crowded into the United Kingdom the place was in danger of sinking. J. Frank Dobie went from Texas to Cambridge to teach.

In 1944, a reporter asked him about the election in Texas.

Dobie predicted that Coke Stevenson would win the governor’s race.

The reporter asked him what he was like.

Dobie replied: “I think he is an uneducated sow’s ear and not fit company for civilized men.”

For some reason, that remark came to mind today.

• Source: Lon Tinkle, J. Frank Dobie: The Makings of an Ample Mind; Austin: The Encino Press, 1968, p. 53.

Cold front, with chores

 The second winter storm arrived Sunday afternoon. The wind was hard, and I was grateful for my coveralls as I put out shelled corn for the deer and sunflower seeds for the birds.

It was freezing before sunset, and the water in the birdbath will stay frozen until Wednesday afternoon, if the forecasters are right.

The Wise Woman put out peanuts for the crows, covered her roses and brought the tenderest plants in from the greenhouse. She wanted me to stack some firewood in the garage, in case the power goes out.

It’s funny how many chores there are to do when a storm’s on the way.

MLK Day, 2025

 Years ago, when the world was full of landlines, I got a call, at home, seeking the views of the head of a minority household. It took a while for me to realize that the person the pollster was looking for was me.

There are all kinds of problems with terms like “head of household” and “race.” But the pollster said it was simple. The census showed three people in the household. Two were African-American. Surely, I didn’t need help figuring out why our home was listed as a minority household. Had we made a mistake on our census form? Was I going to answer the questions or not?

I answered, trying to speak for my family.

I was 12 when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated a few miles from my family’s home. My father taught at what is now the University of Memphis for two years. Black people did not live in the neighborhood by the university.

Progress is so uneven in democracies that many people want to put “progress” in quotation marks, particularly in times when hard-earned progress is being energetically undermined.

But people must speak and write of the things that have proven true in their own lives. We have made progress in this country.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was an eloquent spokesman for the idea that this country could be far more just than it is today. We should all be talking about that idea. That’s not the agenda of a small group. That’s the agenda.

Dr. King pursued justice, and we can follow his example. If we give up on that idea, we’ve lost our minds.

• Note: For a note on a childhood memory, see “Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” Jan. 17, 2022.

‘The Book of Thel’

 In William Blake’s “The Book of Thel,” the daughters of seraphim tend their flocks in the vales of Har — except for the youngest. Thel wonders why all living things must grow old and die. She asks around. 

“Oh little Cloud,” the virgin said, “I charge thee tell to

            me

Why thou complainest not when in one hour thou fade

away:

Then we shall seek thee, but not find. Ah! Thel is like to 

thee:

I pass away: yet I complain, and no one hears my

            voice.

 

The question is wonderfully cast.

The answer is another matter.

I met a fellow named for the poet. Blake convinced me to give the other Blake a try. I loved “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” but I bounced off the prophetic poems without making a dent. I could sense the poet’s vast vision. Somehow, it wasn’t for me.

On and off, I go back to Blake, hoping that something within me has changed that will allow me to better appreciate those poems.

Since making a note on Gerald Murnane, I’ve been thinking about writers who create space in the imagination. Blake deserved another try.

• Sources and notes: William Blake, Selected Writings, edited by Robert F. Gleckner; New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967, pp. 46-52. The Portable Blake, edited by Alfred Kazin; London: Penguin Books, 1976, pp. 279-86. The note on Gerald Murnane was posted Jan. 9.

The Second Enslavement

 Herodotus called it The Second Enslavement: the rule of the Persians over the Greeks of Asia Minor. 

In Herodotus’ telling, all Greeks were free until Croesus conquered the Ionians in Asia Minor. (Many Aegean islanders and the Athenians also considered themselves Ionian.)

When Cyrus the Persian defeated Croesus, the Ionians, certain they could rule themselves without the oversight of a superpower, briefly enjoyed not having a master.

Cyrus was going to subjugate the Ionians again, but revolts broke out in other parts of his empire. Cyrus sent Harpagus, a general, to put an end to the idea that the Ionians could rule themselves.

Each Greek city considered itself distinct from — and independent from — the others. Each guarded that independence jealously, meaning that the Ionians didn’t cooperate in a common defense, ignoring the advice of Bias and Thales.

Harpagus, a patient and methodical fellow, crushed each city, one by one. 

Each community, faced with overwhelming force, reacted in its own way. The Phocaeans loaded their families on ships, abandoned their property and sailed for Sardinia. The Xanthians fought it out to the last man. (Herodotus commented acidly on the people of a later day who claimed to be Xanthians, people who had arrived after the fighting was over and who claimed a name associated with heroism.) The Cnidians, who lived on a peninsula, thought they could cut a channel at the isthmus, making an island for themselves.

No community was safe. Many gave up without a fight.

You can’t really read Herodotus twice, in the same way you can’t step in the same river twice.

I’d read the passage on The Second Enslavement many times, but it means something different to me today, facing a second inauguration.

• Sources and notes: Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Robin Waterfield; Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 74-8.

The art of the obituary

 Michael Dirda says the best obituaries “juxtapose obvious public accomplishments with the sheer strangeness of people’s lives.”

I think he’s right. I think the same is true of stories about fictional people.

Take Sherlock Holmes, for example. Catching criminals is some kind of public accomplishment, but does that make for a good life, an interesting life? It’s hard to say. But if you add that achievement to an eccentric personality, you have something.

Holmes’s crime solving was good, but I kept reading when I learned he kept his correspondence pinned to the mantel with a jackknife and kept his stash of shag tobacco stuffed in a carpet slipper.

Dirda quotes Chekhov’s line that only a god could see the difference between success and failure in life.

It’s one reason we read obituaries. We want to know about the kind of lives other people have led, the experiments other people have tried.

• Michael Dirda, “What reading about dead people tells us about life”; The Washington Post, Jan. 16, 2025. It’s here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/01/16/joy-obituaries-reading-dirda/

Old festivals

 The ancient Athenians loved festivals. One pair was called the Kallynteria and the Plynteria, the tidying-up and the washing festivals.

Once a year, women went to Athena’s temple and swept it out. They took the ancient wooden statue of Athena on a procession to the sea, where they washed it and draped in fresh clothes. The round-trip might have been seven miles.
Young men were allowed to appear in the procession, but they were decorations. Women ran this operation.

I was thinking about the art of cleaning while taking a break from mopping the floors at our place. The Navy discovered I had a talent for swabbing decks more than 50 years ago. You have to wonder about the ways different people think about gender roles. 

The Athenians thought the day was unlucky and risky but celebrated anyway. The statue had a name: Athena, Guardian of the City. When the goddess was busy with her bath, who was protecting the city?

The Leibniz Appreciation Society

 Bertrand Russell, the logician, had a bust of Leibniz, an earlier logician, that he would address. Russell talked logic, of course. He also berated Leibniz for choosing a life at court rather than at a university. 

If you ask me, both were better logicians than philosophers. Interesting the reading public in their best work strikes me as a difficult assignment.

But I enjoyed Anthony Gottlieb’s new essay in The New Yorker. For me, the highlight was not Leibniz’s logic or his philosophy but his letters. He wrote 15,000. He had more than 1,000 correspondents.

Leibniz, like Gottlieb, was a networker: someone interested in circulating interesting ideas, hoping the good ones don’t get lost. 

• Source: Anthony Gottlieb, “He was a genius for the ages. Can we give him a break?” The New Yorker, Jan. 6, 2025.  It’s here:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/01/13/leibniz-in-his-world-the-making-of-a-savant-audrey-borowski-book-review-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds-a-life-of-leibniz-in-seven-pivotal-days-michael-kempe

What to do about sickness

 Herodotus said that the Persians didn’t consult doctors. Herodotus knew that his fellow Greeks would be interested.

It was part of Greek culture that an individual must cultivate excellence. It was assumed that a person would practice a skill if he or she showed natural talent. People who were good at shipbuilding would become ship builders. People who were good at healing would become doctors.

To the Greek mind, excellence was important. It’s best to find an expert. The Persians thought differently — and their thinking was such a departure Herodotus described it.

 

Because they do not consult doctors, when someone is ill they carry him to the main square, where anyone who has personal experience of something similar to what the ill person is suffering from, or who knows someone else who has, comes up to him and offers him advice and suggestions about his illness. They tell him what remedy they found effective in their own case, or what they saw working in someone else’s case, which enabled them to recover from a similar illness. No one is allowed to walk past a sick person in silence, without asking what sort of illness he has.

 

Roy Bedichek used to say that you’re a fool or your own doctor by age 40. I heard a version of that adage often. I grew up among people who didn’t have much faith in the medical profession.

Like the ancient Persians, rural Texans considered the symptoms, recalled cases from history and offered counsel and recipes for cures.

Not having anything to offer was some kind of social failure.

• Sources and notes: Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Robin Waterfield; Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 87.

Thawing out

 Sunlight comes in at a low angle in winter, so you can see the water falling from the trees as the snow melts. The big drops fall like little flecks of lightning and explode like fireworks if they hit a limb on the way down.

That’s the way winter storm released its grip on Stone Mountain.

The storm was a trial for many Georgians. But the power stayed on at our house. The roads were a nightmare, but the Wise Woman is a relentless maker of plans and preparations. We stayed put.

The most astonishing thing about the storm was that 10 pounds of birdseed and suet were consumed by creatures that weigh ounces. Some of the smaller birds needed the food so badly they didn’t fly when I refilled the feeders.

If you’re of a mind to do one small thing that might give you a better connection to the natural world, get a feeder and tend it. Most commercial feeds feature a lot of millet, which isn’t that nutritious. In cold like we just had, the birds like the energy stored in fat-laden seeds. Sunflower seeds are good.

But don’t worry about the technical details. Just put up a small feeder and watch. The watching will inspire you to learn as you go.

Dashiell Hammett on Adak

 I wouldn’t have heard about PAFs — Premature Anti-Fascists — if a friend weren’t interested in Dashiell Hammett.

Hammett set the tone for American crime writing with The Maltese Falcon and other novels and stories. He made, and blew, a bundle in Hollywood in the 1930s.

In World War II, he enlisted as an ordinary soldier, although it took him three tries. He was 48 and in terrible health. He’d been treated for tuberculosis as a soldier in World War I. He drank and smoked constantly.

In 1942, the Army took him again, although it had already paid him disability money.

Hammett was shipped to Adak, Alaska, where he edited the base newspaper. Duty in the Aleutians wasn’t exactly coveted, and the book on Adak was that the Army sometimes sent troublemakers there, including PAFs. These were leftists who’d seen Hitler coming. They were the kind of people who went to Spain to fight.

Hammett was involved in leftist politics and hated fascism. After serving in the Army in both world wars, he would be sent to prison after refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.

• Sources: Peter Porco, “Deadline Adak: Dashing Dashiell Hammett’s Adak newspaper for the troops”; Anchorage Daily News, Jan. 18, 2015.

https://www.adn.com/we-alaskans/article/deadline-adak-dashing-dashiell-hammett-adak-newspaper-troops/2015/01/18/

Herodotus on Persians

 I think I like Herodotus because the space he carves out in a reader’s imagination is vast. His reports on the ancient world can’t be taken as the literal truth. But he helps us imagine what distant people might have been like.

Herodotus says the Persians took education seriously but had only three subjects: horsemanship, archery and honesty.

That’s not literally true. Herodotus later tells us how the Persians bridged the Hellespont, suggesting expertise in mathematics, engineering and logistics.

Still, honesty must have been important to them in a way politically active Americans might find baffling. In his account of the Persians’ religion, Herodotus says that the two chief sins were lies and debt. Lying was the worst. Debt was not in itself a problem, but the Persians thought it led necessarily to lying, which was.

• Sources and notes: Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Robin Waterfield; Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 62-3. The Histories, which Herodotus viewed as nine books, are on my list for 2025.

'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 cut the knees off those who still knelt to say the rosary.

 

I thought, when I first read that sentence, that Claire Keegan is a wonderful writer, although I read it when it was warm. I thought of the sentence again last night, during the winter storm, and wanted to see it again.

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

Winter storm

 The snow began to fall before dawn. I saw the first flakes, big and puffy, falling slowly. By the half-light before dawn, I could see the woodlot filling up with snow. It got heavier and wetter; it fell faster.

I’ve lived in snowbound places. At the time, I’d barely notice a blizzard. But it’s been a while.

I put on my coveralls, brought in firewood and raked the snow off the Wise Woman’s greenhouse. I threw snowballs at and chased the enormous dog, who is dismayed that I can play for minutes, not hours.

One of the joys of the day has been watching the bird feeders, which look like subway platforms at rush hour.

Yellow River, early January

 The wags at the barbershop called it snow-mageddon. Forecasters have been talking about the big winter storm. For the past week, people have been planning to spend a couple of days inside.

As a preemptive strike against cabin fever, we went to the Yellow River before the storm. We had to wait until noon Thursday for the temperature to rise above freezing, but the skies were clear. We walked to the shoals below the bend where the river turns east, a hike of 3.5 miles. Songbirds and squirrels were foraging. My grandfather was among those who believe that the creatures of the woods know when hard weather is coming and “lay by in store.”

The woods were quiet — except for a screaming hawk we never saw. The forest is browner than the landscape in town. Fewer native plants are green now; the green of the gardens that Georgians tend comes mostly from species from other parts of the world. Aside from the pines, most of the green you see along the river comes from mountain laurel, greenbrier, holly and ferns.

The forecasters were right. Just after 6:30 a.m., the snow started falling.

Gerald Murnane and imagination

 Gerald Murnane’s interview in The Paris Review is fascinating.

He lives in a stone blockhouse behind his son’s house in a community of about 200 in Australia. The place is filled with filing cabinets, holding his archives. He sleeps on a folding cot. There’s no room among the filing cabinets for a bed.

You’d expect a writer to keep archives of personal business and writing. But Murnane also has an “Antipodean Archive,” which describes horse-racing in two imaginary countries. The countries have names — New Eden and New Arcady, collectively known as the Antipodes — and maps. The horses have owners and trainers. Stables have racing colors. Murnane plays a complicated game — it reminded me of the kind of game that kids invented with dice to play baseball games using the statistics on the backs of baseball cards — in creating the races.

Murnane said that he crossed the territory of fiction and found the horse-racing archive on the other side.

 

The ordinary, well-meaning person would look at it and say, That’s an imaginary world. But that imaginary world occupies me.

 

He began the archive in 1985. He’s now 85.

 

It’ll cease to expand when I’m dead. I created all this mental space that no one else will ever occupy.

 

Louis Klee, who did the interview, said in his introduction that Murnane dodged questions about his writing routine and methods, and my heart sank. But Murnane wanted to talk about creating space in one’s imagination. I’m glad he did.

• Sources: Louis Klee, “The Art of Fiction No. 266: Gerald Murnane”; The Paris Review, Winter 2024 (250).

Mark Binelli, “Is the Next Nobel Laureate in Literature Tending Bar in a Dusty Australian Town?”; The New York Times, March 27, 2018. It’s here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/magazine/gerald-murnane-next-nobel-laureate-literature-australia.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&tgrp=sty&pvid=8BB253F6-1668-4025-92B3-820C947FBE70

Dustin Illingworth, “After a Five-Decade Run, a Master Hangs Up His Reins”; The New York Times, May 3, 2022. It’s here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/03/books/review/gerald-murnane-last-letter-reader.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&tgrp=sty&pvid=1C56F8ED-A24D-4563-B664-BDD591A649E6

Nuthatches

 The woodlot is full of nuthatches. But I’m looking for a brown-headed nuthatch, and all the nuthatches I’ve seen have been white-breasted.

The Piedmont is the northern limit of the brown-headed nuthatch’s range. I’m interested because they’re tool users. They’ll use a scale of pine bark as a prybar while foraging for insects. They also raise their young with the help of kids from last year’s hatch.

Terry W. Johnson, whose blog about backyard wildlife is a regular stop for me, had a note on a study that shows males consistently outnumber females 5 to 4. The guess is that females are easier targets for snakes as they incubate the eggs.

Nuthatches cling to the trunks of trees like woodpeckers. But they are as likely to go down the tree as up, and it’s fun watching them feed upside down.

I’m enjoying the watching. But still no brown heads.

• Source: Terry W. Johnson’s blog is at https://backyardwildlifeconnection.com/

Back in the woodlot

 Just before Christmas, I twisted my left knee while working in the woodlot. I kept going, thinking I could work through it. But on Dec. 29, I sat in my easy chair and admitted defeat.

It took a week of rest, some home cures and a stiff brace, rustled up by the Wise Woman, but I’m back in the woodlot.

I need, almost every day, a walk in the woods or an hour or two in the woodlot for reasons that I’m curious about but don’t really understand.

I’m clearing brush mostly, but as I go I free the tall trees of English ivy. The ivy runs up the trunks more than 50 feet in places. I cut the vines at the ground and then again, slightly above head high. The vines are so thick they come off the bark in mats. Pulling them off disturbs insects, which scurry for new hiding places.

An Eastern phoebe, a member of the flycatcher tribe, has been following me through the woodlot. I thought at first that I was invading his territory.

But as I pulled ivy off a big pine, I disturbed so many bugs I wondered whether they would be able to hide before the birds found them.

That phoebe was awfully quick.

A story about a notebook

 David Lodge gave a good description of what I’d call a project notebook: 

When I write a novel, I usually keep a notebook for some time, in which I jot down ideas of how I'm going to develop the core idea. I try to think of events and character sketches and things that can go into it. I also write memos to myself about how I see the story developing. 

 

Lodge, who taught at a university, was astonished when he began attending academic conferences and decided to write a comic novel about them. It occurred to him that the search for stardom was like the search for the Holy Grail. So he collected notes on the Arthurian legend for a while. His project took off when he connected his own experiences at academic conferences with the legend.

I like Lodge’s story because I tend to use my notebooks in the same way. When I’m struggling with an idea, connecting it with a larger idea often helps. That’s a good strategy for breaking the logjam. And when I’m really stuck, I write memos to myself, just as Lodge did. 

I sometimes run across lists of things that every kid should learn to do: ride a bike, swim, play a musical instrument. I think every kid should learn to keep a notebook.  

• Sources: Raymond H. Thompson, “Interview with David Lodge,” May 15, 1989, for The Camelot Project, one of the digital projects of the Robbins Library at the University of Rochester. It’s here:

https://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/text/interview-with-david-lodge.html

Lodge died recently. The Guardian’s obituary is here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jan/03/david-lodge-campus-trilogy-novelist-and-academic-dies-aged-89

Looking for strategies

 A couple of days ago, I clumsily manhandled the distinction between literature and how we use it. I would have done better to have followed the lead of Kenneth Burke, who thought about the problem by putting proverbs into categories, based on how people use them.

Some people use proverbs for consolation. Some as a form of vengeance. People sometimes put the same proverb to different uses.

Burke started with perhaps the simplest literary form. But he pointed out that what’s true for the proverb is probably true for all literature.

 

Proverbs are strategies for dealing with situations.

 

I’m no literary theorist. But Burke has his finger on how I use books: as tools to live a better life.

His suggestion also explains to me why some books that I read as revelations as a teenager don’t hold the same punch today. Approaching 70, I have naturally moved on from some situations that seemed crucial at 15.

And his suggestion also explains this: If I thought that life could be reduced to one essential situation, I suppose I’d be looking for one strategy. But I think life is full of situations, and a wise person would do well to have many strategies.

• Source and notes: Kenneth Burke, “Literature as Equipment for Living,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973, pp. 293-304. The essay is here:

https://thefarfield.kscopen.org/literaryanalysis/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/literature-as-equipment-for-living.pdf

Thanks to Michael Leddy of Orange Crate Art for recommending the essay.

A word that addlepated me

 Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day was “addlepated,” a word my father used, often to describe himself.

My father invented words — family conversations were full of his locutions. I was almost grown before I realized that “addlepated,” a description of someone who’s confused, had been around in that sense since the 16^th century. I don’t recall hearing anyone else use the word — a blessing, since I hear the word in my father’s voice.

My father grew up during the Depression. His father, a Tennessee farmer, died young. Times were hard, and my father had no prospects of an education. But when he was 17, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, shaking the United States out of a bad case of isolationism. My father was drafted, survived the war, went to school on the G.I. Bill, and got a master’s degree from Vanderbilt. That degree, and that school, wouldn’t have been imaginable before the war.

My father was interested in local color, especially as it applied to the literature of the South. Few of his professors shared that interest. Some thought it was not a topic for serious scholarship. As my father described the English Department at Vanderbilt in the late 1940s, it was a place perhaps overly fond of the 16^th century.

That’s not the etymology of “addlepated.” It’s my guess about how the word came down to me.

Influential books

 Could you make a distinction between a good book — informative, entertaining, well made or widely revered — and a book, however flawed, that changes your life?

I read two or three “biographies” of Eric Hoffer when I was in college. They weren’t really biographies. They were retellings of Hoffer’s own stories about his life, which were marvelous in spirit though not true in fact. A biography that is not factually accurate fails at the foundations. I’d say it’s not really a biography.

But I came away with this idea: Hoffer earned a living, first as a migrant worker and then as a longshoreman, all the while devoting himself to studying questions that interested him. I was young then, but he seemed to be wealthy in a way I wanted to count wealth.

I was a student, and I knew some graduate assistants who were studying important questions, but they were questions that interested their professors, rather than questions that interested them. I also knew some professors who had interesting questions they wanted to study, but they were mainly grading papers and attending meetings. I didn’t know whether there were any people out there, other than Hoffer, who were studying the questions that interested them. 

I was perhaps easily influenced. But finding a way to study questions that interested me seemed like an important part of a good life.

• Source: I’m not sure this half-baked idea has a source. Many of the notes in this online collection are about influence, including people and books that have influenced me. But I recently picked up Will Schwalbe’s Books for Living; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017, which raises questions about how books influence us.

A poet speaks of being alone

 The poet Robert Francis liked being alone. In my mind he wrote the great poem about people who are like that. It begins: 

His willingness to be alone,

His happiness in being alone,

Was what they never could forgive.

 

Either he loved his loneliness

Too much or loved his friends too little.

And didn’t one imply the other?

 

Of course, the poet’s friends didn’t really want to know where he had been all week and what he had been doing. They did not really want to know what had been on his mind. They wanted him to want to know what was on theirs.

They wanted to know where he’d been all week and what he’d been doing — but not really.

 

As if they hoped and feared to find

That all his secret wealth was both

Within and far beyond their reach.

 

I love the poem because I am one of those people who cannot see how a person can be of any use to anyone else without spending some time alone.

• Source: Robert Francis, “His Wealth”; Poetry Magazine, August 1946, pp. 246-7. It’s here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=68&issue=5&page=10

New Year's Day

 Charles Lamb said:

No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.

 

If you are looking about for a way to mark the day, Lamb offers an example. Many people look to the future. They make resolutions and plans. But Lamb said:

 

I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novelties; new books, new faces, new years, — from some mental twist which makes it difficult for me to face the prospective.

 

Lamb was saying goodbye to 1820 and hello to 1821. He was planning to spend New Year’s Day with his memories.

• Source: Charles Lamb, “New Year’s Eve,” in Essays of Elia; London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., pp. 31-7. The quotations are on p. 32.