On the last day of February

 Andrew Hui has written a book called The Study, about the development of private libraries during the Renaissance. The reviews say Montaigne plays a role in this tale.

I like the idea of a study as a place of one’s own. For centuries before Montaigne, interesting people had locked themselves in cells and hermitages to worship and meditate. Montaigne had a private chapel for those purposes. But he also wanted to think — to commune with “the learned virgins,” as he called the Muses. So he withdrew to his library, which was hidden away in a tower on his property. You had to climb steep stairs to disturb him. He inscribed this, in Latin, on the wall of his study:

 

At the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out.

 

Montaigne said this about thinking:

 

The greatest of souls make it their vocation. … It is the work of the gods, says Aristotle, from which springs their beatitude and our own.

 

• Source: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 923.

A story about trust

 We humans naturally put up barriers between ourselves and others. We are alert to the wiles of strangers, foreigners and people who don’t look like us. But sometimes we find that we share interests — literature, gardening, birdwatching, dogs. In sharing those interests and loves, we find our own personalities expending. We feel ourselves getting bigger as we let others into our own little world. We make our world bigger when we include them. That growth brings joy.

It takes trust to make that work, and trust is not an easy thing. When trust is betrayed, even in small ways, tears flow.

We all know that on some level, but John Steinbeck’s story “The Chrysanthemums” makes me feel it. I don’t know if it will work for you, but the story hits me, every time.

If you’re a writer, you might look at the story out of purely technical curiosity, if there is such a thing. The story is about Elisa Allen, who lives on a ranch, and a knife-sharpening, pot-repairing peddler who travels in a kind of covered wagon. I’ve been told that short stories must get to the point quickly — and that’s one of the rules of short stories. But we don’t meet Elisa until the fourth paragraph. The beginning is a kind of prose poem about how winter takes hold in the Salinas Valley. It’s probably against the rules, but it’s a pleasure to see a writer like Steinbeck work.

As you might guess, I’m marking a birthday. Steinbeck was born Feb. 27, 1902.

The first tool

 A person can’t step in the same river twice, Heraclitus said. It’s never the same water, never the same person.

Herodotus is that way for me. I don’t reread Herodotus. It’s a new book each time.

Fifty years ago, I read his account of the evil Egyptian King Cheops and his brother Chephren to learn how the pyramids were built. I wanted to know how the stone was quarried and how laborers put stone on stone. I was interested in the tools, especially the wooden machines that moved the enormous stones up the steps.

It now strikes me that the first tool was a social device, not a mechanical one. It was Cheops’s tyranny that made his and his brother’s pyramids possible. Herodotus says Cheops “closed the festivals” — he shut down the traditional pastimes of the people to divert their energies to his pyramid. He usurped their rights and made himself great by enslaving them. His brother followed his example.

Cheops and Chephren thought their legacy would be the pyramids. Visitors would come and marvel and praise them.

Actually, the brothers were so hated that Egyptians in Herodotus’s time wouldn’t say their names. If you asked whose pyramids those were, the Egyptians would say they belonged to Philitis, a shepherd who used to graze flocks on the unspoiled land.

• Sources and notes: Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Robin Waterfield; Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 144-6.

Art of the apology

 Almost 200 years ago, Charles Lamb wrote a letter to Dr. J. Vale Asbury saying that the principle of moderation is best in all things had an obvious exception: liquor.

Lamb made arguments in favor of the enthusiastic consumption alcohol but admitted he could see the other side:

 

But then you will say: What a shocking sight to see a middle-aged gentleman-and-a-half riding a Gentleman’s back up Parson’s Lane at midnight. Exactly the time for that sort of conveyance, when nobody can see him, nobody but Heaven and his own conscience; now Heaven makes fools, and don’t expect much from her own creation; and as for conscience, She and I have long come to a compromise. I have given up false modesty, and she allows me to abate a little of the true.

 

Lamb had been directed by his sister, Mary, to write an apology to the Dr. and his wife for having enjoyed their dinner party entirely too much.

Lamb suggested that if the party hadn’t been so thoroughly enjoyable he wouldn’t have been tempted to enjoy it so thoroughly. It’s an eccentric apology, written by an eccentric personality. It ends with Lamb asking the doctor if he knows a cure for a desperate headache.

When I first read Lamb’s essays, I knew that I’d be reading him for the rest of my life. But his stature rose when I read his letters.

In my mind, Lamb and Roy Bedichek are the great letter writers.

• Source: The Portable Charles Lamb, edited and introduced by John Mason Brown; New York: The Viking Press, 1964, pp. 192-4. The letter to Dr. Asbury is believed to have been written in April 1830.

The Rev. Sydney Smith's motto

 The Rev. Sydney Smith, who appeared in these notes yesterday, was one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review and edited the first number in October 1802. He proposed that the motto of the journal be: 

We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal.

 

The magazine would become famous. But when it was founded, its champions were young, pinched for resources and outside the literary establishment, looking in. They were oatmeal eaters.

Smith’s proposed motto was rejected by his fellows. He was chagrinned that the majority favored a Latin line that was translated:

 

The judge is condemned when the guilty is acquitted.

 

The line is from Publilius Syrus. Smith said he was sure none of the founders of the Edinburgh Review had read him.

Why a note on the Rev. Sydney Smith?

Because I’m reading Ronald Blythe’s Next to Nature, which is filled with casual references to people who must be looked up and gotten acquainted with.

• Source: The 1911 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s entry on the Rev. Sydney Smith, 1771-1845, is here:

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclopædia_Britannica/Smith,_Sydney

A prescription for low spirits

 The Rev. Sydney Smith said he suffered from low spirits. In 1820, he wrote one of the great letters on how to keep your spirits up.

Maybe it’s just the endless display of bad behavior by the tyrant trying to pass as president, but my spirits aren’t exactly soaring. I found Smith’s letter useful.

The letter was a reminder that the world is filled with things that do, in fact, lift my spirits: books, friends, coffee, the natural world.

It’s a reminder that I need to pay more attention to the room where I “commonly sit” — my study. I’m indifferent to décor, but it could be tidier.

I also think Smith is right that low spirits are “always made worse by dignified concealment.”

• “Letter from Rev Sydney Smith to Lady Georgiana Cavendish, daughter of the Duke of Devonshire”; Irish Independent, Oct. 7, 2013. It’s here:

https://www.independent.ie/life/health-wellbeing/letter-from-rev-sydney-smith-to-lady-georgiana-cavendish-daughter-of-the-duke-of-devonshire/29637570.html

The canary in the mineshaft

The Wise Woman sent U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff a token of encouragement the other day.

I am still learning Georgia politics, but I wish him well, especially well. I view him as the canary in the mineshaft that is the Democratic Party in Georgia.

The state sent two new senators to Washington in 2021 — Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. They were the first Democratic senators from Georgia in 20 years. I don’t think their election was a fluke. I think they generally reflect the views of most people in Georgia.

Ossoff is in hot water.

He voted with the Republican majority to support a bill that eliminates due process for immigrants accused of crimes like theft. The vote enraged civil rights activists who have been leaders of the Democratic Party.

Ossoff’s criticism of Israel also created a storm. Some supporters of Israel formed a group that asked Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, to run against Ossoff, promising strong support.

The Republican Party in Georgia is a place where people talk openly about choosing presidential electors who will make the right decisions about which votes to count. It’s a place where people like Marjorie Taylor Green receive ovations.

I think Ossoff is able, intelligent and has a sense of the public good.

I think he is better than any candidate the Republican Party in Georgia is likely to put on the ballot.

I think he probably will win re-election in two years — unless people who have been pillars of the Democratic Party undermine him.

I’m one of countless people who think the current occupant of the White House is a tragedy for the country. I wish people who oppose the administration would put aside their differences — even when they are important — and stand fast in their dissent.

If you’re baffled by the turn this country has taken and are wondering how good people can be ineffective in dissent, you might keep an eye on a canary in a mineshaft in Georgia.

Arabia Mountain, after the storm

 The woods around Arabia Mountain were full of fallen trees. We got out for a 3-mile hike after the winter storm passed through.

What I took for one enormous tree was actually two. A big pine, uprooted, fell onto another, bringing both down.

I was surprised by the damage. I had noticed the cold — temperatures dropped to 18 degrees in Stone Mountain — more than the wind, although the tarp came off my woodpile. I’d noticed the cold because the Wise Woman is a gardener and had been worried about plants in the greenhouse and under wraps.

Daffodils and camellias were blooming around the neighborhood before the hard freeze.

The storm took down a lot of old, dead limbs in the forest. The green in the woods now is mainly laurel greenbriar, Smilax laurifolia, a briar that will climb anything. With so much brown in the forest in late winter, the bright green leaves must have been like grocery ads to ancient peoples, who dug up the rhizomes for food.

A beautiful sight: One greenbriar climbed into a red maple, which was covered in little red flowers. The deep greens and fiery reds were lovely against a blue sky.

Ronald Blythe's sense of place

 I’m back on one of the recurring themes of this collection of notes: books about places and the notion of finding or making a place. I have been thinking of Ronald Blythe, who loved the English countryside.

Blythe, who spent decades at Bottengoms Farm on the border of Suffolk and Essex, would pass a wheatfield and mention that country people were still building bonfires in wheatfields on the Twelfth Night in Kilvert’s time. “In Kilvert’s time” meant something to him. The Rev. Francis Kilvert kept a diary from 1870 until his death in 1879. Not everyone reads it, but Blythe was the kind of writer who did. Blythe also was the kind of writer who thought about how pagan traditions like midwinter fires had been incorporated into Christian traditions that he observed. He saw all that when he looked at a wheatfield in winter in the place he called home.

When Blythe passed through Ovington, population 53, he mentioned that all the schoolboys knew the village had once been home to a murderer. He was referring to Lt. John Felton, who assassinated the hated Duke of Buckingham in 1628.
I am reading Blythe’s Next to Nature with delight. But I also despair that I can’t look at the countryside with that sense of history. I’ve been a student of Texas history and am trying to catch up on the history of Georgia, my new home. But I doubt my sense of history will ever be that deep.

I ought to add that Blythe despised efforts to turn rural life into an amusement park. He ridiculed the idea of charging Londoners steep prices for tours to spots where Constable had painted his pictures. Blythe saw English rural life as a living tradition, rather than something that belonged in a museum.

I’m not sure most Americans would see rural life as a living tradition: something viable, something meaningful.

• Sources: Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside; London: John Murray, 2022, pp. 17 and 39.

Klinkenborg: 'The Rural Life'

 I like books about places and the notion of finding or making a place. Verlyn Klinkenborg, who came up the other day in a discussion of writing, wrote a fine one, The Rural Life.

The book, based on a column by the same name in The New York Times, has a great early line:

A conscientious record keeper is really the natural historian of his own life.

 

That’s close to a religious truth for me. As an example of what that record keeper looks like, Klinkenborg mentioned the Rev. Gilbert White, whose The Natural History of Selborne made me want to be a better student of the natural world.

I grew up among folks who believed, as the old hymn has it, that this earth is not our home. But it is. It seems to me that learning about it, understanding it, perhaps even feeling at home in it, is a worthy quest.

If you’re the kind of person who thinks about place and places, you’ll find good things in this book.

• Source: Verlyn Klinkenborg, The Rural Life; Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2003, p. 4.

Talking writing

 If you’re talking writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg might come up. Several short sentences about writing has a following.

I don’t know how to describe it, so I’ll give an example:

 

Most aspiring writers write too soon.

They think writing is a transitive act instead of an

intransitive one.

Everything they know about writers writing — all those images

of writers writing —

Hastens them to the desk,

Where they sit perched over the keyboard or pen in

hand,

Caught in the anticipatory gesture,

Eyes intent on the possibilities of the screen,

Poised on the brink of thought, but not actually

thinking,

As though by leaning forward a sentence will tip out

of their heads

And onto the page.

 

The example shows what I can’t explain: the odd form of his items (not aphorism and not anecdote) and the odd lines (not prose and not poetry).

This example is meaningful to me. When a news writer is struggling, it’s usually an indication that she hasn’t done enough reporting.

In trying to write short stories, I’ve discovered that if I’m struggling, it’s a symptom that I haven’t done enough thinking about the emotional freight of the situation that I find so interesting. I know the facts of the situation and can report them. I’m interested in the situation but haven’t figured out why.

I made a living writing. But I’m still an aspiring writer: I write too soon.

 • Source: Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several short sentences about writing; New York: Vintage Books, 2012, p. 47.

Anecdotes, a second thought

 Yesterday’s note offered a working definition of an anecdote as a little story that limits what it tries to show: it illustrates a quirk of personality, rather than some universal quality of humanity.

The problem with that suggestion is an anecdote like this:

 

The eighty-year-old Cato surprised his friends by setting himself the task of studying Greek. Asked how he could contemplate such a lengthy course of study at his advanced age, he replied it was the youngest age he had left.

 

That trait — that devotion to learning — is a deeply human quality, rather than an individual quirk. Not everyone has that trait or quality, but my friend Melvin, who was teaching medical students at 90 while taking courses in literature at the community college, did.

People tell anecdotes for different reasons, just as they tell anecdotes for different reasons.

Definitions are tricky, as Wittgenstein pointed out in seeking a definition of “games.” You can see the same problem with defining a “story” by looking at The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis.

• Sources and notes: The Brown, Little Book of Anecdotes, edited by Clifton Fadiman; Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985, p. 108. The anecdote refers to Cato the Censor, 234-149 BCE.

What’s an anecdote?

 An anecdote is a kind of story, limited in a peculiar way. Instead of trying to show the universal humanity of the subject, the anecdote tries to illustrate a quirk of personality. The anecdote is interested in the individuality of the individual, rather than in what the individual can tell us about humanity.

That’s a stab at a working definition. It’s highly provisional. I’m already dubious and will stab again tomorrow.

What’s going on here?

My friend Christopher Cook, hearing I was trying to write a short story, took me on a tour of short fiction. He recalled the short features in Reader’s Digest, such as “Humor in Uniform” and “Life in These United States.” He asked whether such short pieces were really stories.

 

Would they be better called anecdotes, sketches, reminiscences, briefs, impressions, incidents, or the like? In short, what constitutes a story? 

 

It’s a complex question. Since I love anecdotes, I thought I’d peel that topic off and start there. 

My stab at a working definition owes much to Clifton Fadiman, who asked whether the story of van Gogh’s ear could be considered an anecdote. Fadiman said it was “too complex, in a sense too important, to qualify as an anecdote.” 
I’m trying to suggest why that story is too important to qualify. A person’s individual quirks, as interesting as they are, don’t tell us much about a person’s struggle to be human.

• Sources and notes: The Brown, Little Book of Anecdotes, edited by Clifton Fadiman; Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985, p. xv.

Christopher Cook is known for his novel Robbers; New York: Carroll & Graf, 2000. I have three collections of his stories on my shelf: Screen Door Jesus & Other Stories, The Salvage Yard and Tongues of Fire.

Between winter storms

 The Wise Woman, saying I’d been too focused on chores, got us out of the house and into the woods on a chilly day. We walked from Alexander Lake to the South River and back — 3 miles. It was 41 degrees, with a stout north wind.

We were between winter storms. The few blooms we saw were dandelions and henbit.

The prettiest sight was a border, the ragged edge of prairie and forest just north of the river. The tall grasses, as shaggy as old brooms in late winter, are deep brown. Mixed in with them are young pines, which are a lighter green now than you’d imagine. The contrast of colors was gorgeous, but the beauty masks a quarrel: whether that strip of land will be prairie or forest.

Sunday mourning

 I heard a thump on my second-story window and saw a cloud of sparrow down. I found the tiny body below and dug a tiny grave.

In just a few lines

 Brevity is one of the recurring topics in this online collection of notes. Seeing Michael Longley’s obituary reminded me of his experiments with short poems.

I like short poems that capture a strong image. William Carlos Williams, Charles Reznikoff and Lorine Niedecker were masters. How does Longley fit in with this gang? Trying to explain a two- or four-line poem is hopeless, so here’s an example, the whole of “Old Poets”:

 

Old poets regurgitate
Pellets of chewed-up paper
Packed with shrew tails, frog bones,
Beetle wings, wisdom.

 

A suitable epitaph, I think.

• Source: “Old Poets” is on the website Brief Poems, which has a fine collection of Longley’s work: 

https://briefpoems.wordpress.com/2015/11/12/snowfall-brief-poems-by-michael-longley/

Michael Longley, 1939-2025

 Michael Longley was a poet of Ireland. His friend Seamus Heaney described him as a “custodian of griefs and wonders.”

I admire Longley’s poem “Wounds,” which mourns senseless violence. It was written during The Troubles of Northern Ireland.

The poet begins with two pictures of his father. One is of an officer who went over the top at the Somme during World War I. The second is of his father following a chaplain covering corpses.

Later, the poet buries others beside him:

 

            Three teenage soldiers, bellies full of

            Bullets and Irish beer, their flies undone.

 

These three are the “soldiers” of a civil war — a polite term for organized murder. They are buried with the pack of cigarettes and matches that traditionally go into the graves of war dead. But what little ceremonies are appropriate for the dead man in the uniform of a bus conductor, killed beside his carpet-slippers, shot in the head by a shivering boy?

• Source: “Wounds” is available at the Poetry by Heart website:

https://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/wounds

Good advice not taken

I’m fascinated by how writers work, so I rejoiced when I saw Elisabeth Egan’s interview with Anne Tyler. This line set off alarms:

 

You must resist the urge to keep scraps and work them up into something else. Kiss of death.

 

I’m a saver of scraps, found items, spare parts. If I cut material from one piece of writing, I toss it into the salvage yard. I rummage through it occasionally when I’m looking for inspiration and thinking about new projects.

That “kiss of death” stopped me in my tracks. But it didn’t stop me from keeping scraps.

I’m convinced no two writers work alike or could work alike. It’s not possible.

• Source: Elisabeth Egan, “At 83 Anne Tyler Has a New Novel. She’d Rather Talk About Anything Else.” The New York Times, Feb. 10, 2025. It’s here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/books/three-days-in-june-anne-tyler.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

 

Dissenters

 Last year, Rabbi Michael Lerner announced his staff was closing Tikkun, a magazine he founded in 1986. He wrote: 

These are difficult times for anyone seeking a world of love and justice. Yet I continue to believe that within the next hundred years, those who survive the many hurtful human forces and the massive destruction of the environment will be living in a more loving and just world. May those in your life — your children, grandchildren, friends, coworkers, people you meet along the way — learn from you to reject the cynical belief that money and power is what gives people lives of joy and meaning.  

 

It’s that last sentence that’s challenging: to live in such a way that dissent is clear, firm and unequivocal but not violent. Some of the dissent today strikes me as shrill, near hysterical, and so not credible, much less trustworthy.

We need serious dissenters in this country.

• Sources and notes: Rabbi Michael Lerner, “Tikkun is closing”; Tikkun, April 11, 2024,

https://www.tikkun.org/tikkun-is-closing/. The article has a link to the magazine’s archives, which a dissenter might find helpful.

A bluesman for Georgia Day

 Feb. 12 is Georgia Day. In 1733, James Oglethorpe, a general and social reformer, spent the day founding the last of the 13 English colonies.

Georgia began with great ideals: no slavery, no big landowners — a haven for ordinary, independent people. Obviously, that didn’t last.

I’m using the day to educate myself about the history of my new home and its people. And, because my friend Christopher told me about a good documentary, I’ve been thinking about Willie McTell, a bluesman who was still playing on the streets of Atlanta when I was a boy in Texas. Here are a couple of lines from his “Statesboro Blues”:

 

Mama died and left me reckless, Papa died and left me wild,
I ain’t good lookin’, baby, but I’m someone’s sweet angel child.

 

In an age before nationalism had become thoroughly disreputable, Schopenhaur observed that all the countries that claimed greatness pointed to their musicians, artists and writers. The Germans pointed to German artists. The French pointed to French.

Schopenhaur noted the many histories of literature and said he was waiting for a tragic history of literature, accounting for how each nation that claimed to be great had treated its writers, musicians and artists. He said that almost every enlightener of humanity was some kind of martyr.

• Blind Willie’s Blues, a 1997 documentary about the life of Willie McTell, is part of the South Georgia Folklife Collection at Valdosta State University Archives and Special Collections. It’s available here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8iPBtbcJsM&t=2s

Checking the woods for trilliums

 I mentioned the other day that I’m looking for early bloomers among the native species. Some — but not all — plants in genus Trillium bloom early. Last year, I saw some on the forest floor that behaved like ephemerals, blooming early and then fading as the trees put on leaves, shading the forest floor.

The trillium looks straightforward, but it’s tricky. As you’d guess by the name, it’s the plant of threes: three leaves, three sepals, three petals.

But the leaves are really bracts, rising from the rhizome. The stem isn’t really a stem but an extension of the rhizome. The above-ground structure — the part of the plant that we see and that I’m struggling to identify — is called a scape. Here’s the U.S. Forest Service’s explanation:

 

Morphologically, trillium plants produce no true leaves or stems above ground. The “stem” is just an extension of the horizontal rhizome and produces tiny, scale like leaves (cataphylls). The above-ground plant is technically a flowering scape, and the leaf-like structures are bracts subtending the flower. Despite their morphological origins, the bracts have external and internal structure like a leaf, function in photosynthesis, and most authors refer to them as leaves.

 

I would love to hear Mother Nature explain the evolutionary rationale behind these developments.

I think I ought to have a better understanding of these plants because Georgia is prime territory for them. Of the 38 species in the United States, 22 are found in Georgia. I really should be able to identify a few.

• Source: “About Trilliums,” a publication of the U.S. Forest Service, is here: https://www.fs.usda.gov/wildflowers/beauty/trilliums/about.shtml

Charles Lamb at 250

 I started out life as a great fan of short stories. Charles Lamb’s essays punctured my view of the world.

Lamb’s essays weren’t really stories, but they captured me, took me to another place for a while. Astonishingly, essays didn’t even have a plot. I kept reading, even though I wasn’t being kept in suspense. How could spending an hour with an essay be just as engaging as reading a short story?

Lamb’s writing conveys personality. You can’t read a line of his work without getting a sense of the narrator. When Vivian Gornick talks about the persona of a narrator, I think of Lamb.

Lamb is a preoccupation with this online collection of notes. In my earlier days, I’d try to convince people he should be recognized as one of the great English writers. I should have said that I read Lamb with such pleasure that he changed the way I looked at the possibilities of writing.

Lamb was born Feb. 10, 1775, in Inner Temple, London. I’m celebrating his 250^th birthday.

‘Even democracy is turning sour, isn’t it?’

 I looked up an old interview with Colin Dexter, the great writer of mysteries, hoping to get some advice on writing fiction. Instead, I found him worried about democracy.

This was in 2006. The Strand Magazine asked Dexter if he was a pessimist. He replied:

 

I am indeed, yes. I’ve not much faith in the future of the planet and I’m not just thinking about Mr. Bush or global warming. I feel that we’ve lost our way and it looks as if, in so many fields, things are turning sour. Even democracy is turning sour, isn’t it?

 

When the interviewer pressed for details, Dexter said:

 

Yes, I think part of it is that we’ve lost faith in the honour or honourability of our leaders. We read so much about incompetence and corruption in all sorts of places. I’m not just thinking of the United Kingdom and the United States. Almost everywhere there seems to me to be an increase in incompetence and general dishonesty. This is what I mean about democracy — you feel that you’ve got the ability to arrange things and influence matters and it’s not quite so easy as that, I’m afraid.

 

I think what’s going on in the United States is a tragedy.

I also think it’s important not to spend every thought one has on the political crisis. In times of political upheaval, we ought to value our common goods: concerts, baseball, detective stories. We ought not neglect them — or each other.

But even when I’m reading old detective magazines, I run across people who fear for democracy.

• Source and notes: Excerpts from an interview that appeared in The Strand Magazine, Issue 19, June-September, 2006, can be found here:

https://strandmag.com/the-magazine/interviews/colin-dexter/

Dexter, whose characters were featured in the Morse and Lewis television series, died in 2017.

Early blooms

 Dandelions (genus Taraxacum) and birdeye speedwell (Veronica persica) are blooming, the yellows and blues of late winter.

Both these common plants are from Eurasia. I’m still waiting for the native ephemerals, the plants that flower on the forest floor in early spring before the canopy fills in. Plants in genus Trillium are good examples, and I’m on the lookout. The Georgia Native Plant Society says at least 22 species are native to Georgia.

Temperatures are in the mid-70s this week. Three weeks ago, the second big winter storm was on its way, with snow and sleet. Temperatures stayed below freezing for four days. I don’t think we’re done with winter, but I’m interested to see what the natives think.

O’Connor: ‘A Late Encounter with the Enemy’

 If you’re looking for a symbol of the Lost Cause, General Tennessee Flintlock Sash gets my vote.

He’s 104. He wasn’t a general. His uniform came from publicity people who had him pose for pictures at the premiere of a motion “pitcher” in Atlanta. The truth of the matter doesn’t matter because he doesn’t remember what happened. The most genuine thing about him was his love of attention. He especially liked posing for photos with pretty “guls.”

It seems to me that the best scenario for symbols of such traditions is to have them die in public, on stage, and see if anyone notices.

I have always had trouble with Flannery O’Connor. I don’t like Gothic of any kind, but Southern Gothic is the worst, in my book. There are so many things wrong with O’Connor’s view of the world I don’t know where to start. But I think “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is a work of genius and “A Late Encounter with the Enemy” is in the same league.

Thanks, Christopher, for the suggestion.

• Flannery O’Connor, “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” was collected in A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories; New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1955. It’s here: 

https://themes2014.weebly.com/uploads/1/9/7/1/19711205/a_late_encounter_with_the_enemy.pdf

How we look at hills

 Daniel Defoe, touring the Lake District, reported that the hills “had a kind of inhospitable terror in them.”

He saw nothing useful in them. No mines or coal pits — “all barren and wild, of no use or advantage either to man or beast.”

The description reminds me of the U.S. Army’s report on the part of West Texas where I was born. The Army, which explored my native land in the 1850s, did concede that it might make a good place to imprison people.

What strikes us today is how so many tourists see beauty in those hills that Defoe despised. People seem to love the Lake District, just as I love the Piedmont.

It’s striking — how different the approaches to measuring value, measuring wealth.

• Source: Defoe’s lines are from Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, published in three volumes, 1724-7, but I have them in Geoffrey Young’s Country Eye: A Walker’s Guide to Britain’s Traditional Countryside; London: George Philip Limited, 1991, p. 10.

Mobbed

 A dozen crows mobbed a red-tail hawk above the woodlot. The crows drove it east and then somehow turned it and drove it back west, giving me two looks at the magnificent raptor. The big hawk plodded along as the smaller, more agile crows nipped at its heels and screamed.

I knew the spectacle was coming because I heard the distinctive two-syllable calls.

 

Crows give at least three distinguishable assembly caws that are associated with mobbing, scolding, and diving at potential predators. These “two-syllable caws,” “long caws,” and “harsh caws” focus American Crows on the object of the caller’s scorn — usually a stationary cat or owl — in an attempt to drive the creature from the area, alert others to its presence, or perhaps teach family and flock members about dangerous situations.

 

Biologists have a hard time saying how many different calls crows use. One problem is the variation in regional dialects. But if you play a recording of American crows screaming that two-syllable call in France, the local crows come, looking for trouble.

• Source: John M. Marzluff and Tony Angell, In the Company of Crows and Ravens; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005, p. 201.

A story about the 200th

 Some stories can make you think about the scale of tragedy.

During the Depression, a lot of men in New Mexico picked up extra money by serving in the National Guard. The main unit was a cavalry outfit. The Army still had horses in the 1930s. But with world war coming, the Army didn’t need another cavalry outfit. The New Mexicans became the 200^th Coastal Artillery Regiment. Training was heavy on antiaircraft guns, a new concept for coastal protection units.

With Japan bent on empire, the regiment was called to service and shipped to the Philippines.

The fate the American and Filipino forces is well known. They were bottled up on the Bataan Peninsula and forced to surrender in April 1942. The men were marched to a prison camp. More than 16,000 died or were killed along the way.

The scale of the tragedy is so large it’s hard to grasp. But New Mexico, by population, was a small state. The regiment had 1,800 soldiers from all over the state. About 900 died on the Bataan Death March.

After the war, the survivors returned. While some veterans did fine, others struggled with alcoholism and mental illness. Abuse can prompt abuse, and such problems have a way of lingering, passed down from generation to generation. A man with an addiction turns out to be a descendent of a veteran of the 200^th.

It’s fascinating —how different people can experience the same catastrophe and react in different ways. Some are fine. Others are undone. I would love to better understand that.

Piedmont, early February

 Two male cardinals that had shared the feeders all winter without bloodshed were fighting this morning.

I think of February as a sneaky month for winter storms, made worse by the human tendency to plant too early out of a longing for spring. The battle of the cardinals made me a panentheist for an hour. Humans aren’t the only ones who think spring is almost here.

Ruskin: ‘Traffic’

 John Ruskin’s lecture “Traffic” is infuriating, except in places where it’s intriguing.

In 1864, Ruskin was called to Bradford, a city near Leeds, to advise wool merchants on the plan for a new exchange building. His taste in art and architecture was respected.

Ruskin’s theory of art strikes me as dangerous, rather than dubious. His talk of great national architecture comes with talk of great national churches, great national worship, great national character.

I think that’s a proven recipe for bad thinking. Making generalizations about national character tempts us to overlook the fact that some Americans are selfless philanthropists while others are swindlers and murderers, some are research scientists while others are dedicated to keeping science out of public schools. Generalizations that are honest to that much diversity aren’t worth much.

But Ruskin’s essay is full of intriguing lines, so broad I wonder whether they’re true.

 

Taste is not only a part and an index of morality — it is the ONLY morality.

 

Ruskin thought if people told you what they liked, you knew them. The person who liked his gin and a pipe was one kind of person, and everyone in Victorian England knew him. The person who liked her kitchen tidy and her family nearby was another kind of person. Everyone knew her. In Ruskin’s view, to know a person’s taste was to know the person.

 

What we like determines what we are, and is the sign of what we are; and to teach taste is inevitably to form character.

Our sense of taste can identify us in some ways. If you read this collection of notes, you’d have a sense of my interests. You’ll have an idea of what types of judgments and misjudgments I’m prone to. You might have a sense of my character.

But in other ways, taste is just a matter of preferences that have become habits. I don’t think it tells you anything about character.

One of the cafes in Stone Mountain serves collard greens and sweet potatoes every day. It does so because in this part of the world, Democrats like them and so do Republicans. People of many colors and many religions like them. I’d guess that police officers and criminals like them, and that librarians and book banners do too.

If you are looking at taste as a marker of identity, visiting the café won’t help.

• Source and notes: John Ruskin’s lecture “Traffic” was published in The Crown of Wild Olive.   The Victorian Web has it here:

https://victorianweb.org/authors/ruskin/traffic.html

I’ve been thinking about taste since reading “Good taste, bad taste, no taste, why taste?” Salmagundi, Fall-Winter, 2024-2025. My first note was “A matter of taste,” Jan. 26, 2025.

Fear of cows

 T.S. Eliot was afraid of cows. He wrote a poem about it, “The Country Walk.” It begins:

Of all the beasts that God allows 
In England’s green and pleasant land, 
I most of all dislike the Cows: 
Their ways I do not understand.

 

He says that’s a trait that rustics — people like me — would scorn.

 

You may reply, to fear a Cow 
Is Cowardice the rustic scorns; 
But still your reason must allow 
That I am weak, and she has horns.

 

The old cowhands of my grandfather’s generation would never have admitted to a fear of cows, but all of them professed a healthy respect.

I have been kicked, stomped, butted and hooked. Because of my own stupidity and inattention, I was roughed up by a Brahma bull that weighed more than a ton. I imagine that I have encountered cattle-inspired fear in a way Eliot did not. What I can’t understand is the casual, almost charming, way he gives in to it.

I’m trying to imagine what the opposite of this situation would look like. Imagine a rustic, like me, who goes to the big city but is afraid of getting on the subway or into a cab. Because he’s afraid to travel, he doesn’t get out and see the city, doesn’t sample the food, doesn’t meet the natives, doesn’t see the sights that interest them.

Because he gives into fear, he doesn’t see anything but a hotel room. Yet he comes back speaking disparagingly of big cities and city slickers.

I wouldn’t trust that voice.
Maybe that comparison is not fair. But when Eliot speaks, I am skeptical. A lot of Eliot’s poetry has an underlying sensibility that is alien to me.