Reznikoff's images

 Paul Auster pictured Charles Reznikoff as a poetic version of a street photographer. Reznikoff would wander around New York just looking. He’d sometime walk 20 miles a day, capturing images.

My understanding of the Objectivist Movement is eccentric, but I think this is the great Objectivist poem:

 

About the excavation

a flock of bright red lanterns

has settled.

 

I think of Reznikoff more as a collector of urban images, rather than natural ones. But here are three snapshots of plants that show my thinking needs some adjustments:

 

26

The twigs of our neighbor’s bush are so thin,

I can hardly see the black lines;

the green leaves seem to float in the air.

 

27

The bush with gaudy purple flowers is in the back yard —

Seen only by its mistress, cats, and the white butterflies.

 

47 

I thought for a moment, The bush in the backyard has

blossomed:

it was only the old leaves covered with snow.

 

I admire Auster’s comparison. Reznikoff’s poems are like photographs. But they are also like the images captured by Zen and Taoist poets of old. They are records of observations — records of someone paying attention.

• Sources: Poems 1918-1975, The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff, edited by Seamus Cooney; Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1996, Vol. 1, pp. 113 and 116. The first poem is No. 25 in Reznikoff’s Jerusalem the Gold, published by the Objectivist Press in 1934. The press was Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen and Reznikoff.

Paul Auster’s essay “The Decisive Moment” is in The Art of Hunger and Other Essays; London: Menard Press, 1982, and available at the Allen Ginsberg Project:

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

I’ve mentioned it before: “Auster on Reznikoff,” Aug. 25, 2024.

A poet speaks of refuge

 Charles Reznikoff lived in troubled times. He saw the mass movements of his day and wrote of smoke blowing through the streets, carried by strong, unpredictable winds. 

Against their hurly-burly

I shut the window of my mind,

and the world at the winds’ will,

find myself calm and still.

 

It’s a simple statement about the importance of having a place of refuge.

Reznikoff wrote poems that read like scripture to me. These lines were from Five Groups of Verse, which he published in 1927. He set the type by hand and made 375 copies.

• Sources: Poems 1918-1975, The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff, edited by Seamus Cooney; Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1996, Vol. 1, p. 73. There are many notes on the poet at this site, including “The case for Charles Reznikoff,” Dec. 10, 2022.

People who punish

 I’ve known people who shoot squirrels for getting into the bird feeders and who shoot crows for getting into the corn.

I try to keep squirrels out of the feeders. But I’m not vigilant about prevention and not vengeful when prevention fails.

But I have known people who are obsessed. To me, their obsession undermined their humanity. It invariably undermined my trust in them.

It’s hubris: the idea that the natural order cannot be maintained unless one person remains vigilant to correct pillaging squirrels. And now we have people who think the natural order can’t be maintained unless they correct all the people who have different views about cultural values.

It seems to me that people like that are obviously unsound. I don’t trust them.

My differences with those in power in Washington today go far beyond any political issue. Those differences are so profound I don’t think our arguments are about politics.

Different genres, different talents

 Ronald Blythe was the kind of writer who had friends who wrote letters that made him think, making him a better writer. One sent him one of the Rev. Laurence Sterne’s sermons.

Sterne is better known for The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman than for his sermons. The one Blythe read was awful.

 

The great comic novelist was being dead serious, which wasn’t his style at all.

 

People do different things with words. I can’t picture Montaigne as a novelist, but the world would be a poorer place without his essays.

• Sources: Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside; London: John Murray, 2022, p. 15.

Mineral springs

 The good news is that there’s a thorough account of the mineral springs of Georgia. The bad news is that it was compiled before World War I.

I’m interested in mineral springs because evidence suggests that naturally occurring lithium in spring water protects the neural circuits of the brain. Scientists interested in Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia are investigating.

I wish an agency had timely information on all our mineral springs, which seem like an important natural resource. But the most comprehensive report I found was compiled by S.W. McCallie, the state geologist, in 1913.

It was an era when doctors and geologists were arguing about the therapeutic effects of mineral water. Physicians weren’t required to take much chemistry in those days, and so there were professional arguments. Doctors would talk about therapeutic effects of water from a particular spring, and chemists would report that the mineral content was, in fact, close to nonexistent.

In those days, arsenic, when detected, was considered a good thing in terms of public health.

Obviously, the report is dated. But it still tells us a couple of things.

First, the report shows that lithium occurs naturally in spring water across a region. It’s not limited to one spring or to one property. You don’t need to buy water from a spring owned by any one company.

Second, the report shows that our ancestors were interested in spring water, even if the science of their day was flawed. Some of the photographs in the report show large Victorian buildings at Indian Springs to accommodate the crowds. They’re no longer there. During the Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps built smaller buildings of stone. One is a wellhouse, where the public can fill up jugs. People were in line when we visited in October.

• Sources: S.W. McCallie, A Preliminary Report on the Mineral Springs of Georgia; Atlanta: Chas. P. Byrd, state printer, 1913. This was Bulletin No. 20 in the U.S. Geological Survey. The Digital Library of Georgia has it here:

https://dlg.usg.edu/record/dlg_ggpd_s-ga-bm500-pg4-bb1-bno-p-b20

For an earlier note on Indian Springs, see “Piedmont National Wildlife Refuge,” Oct. 5, 2024.

Wind

 March is a good time to watch the wind.

The first big blow took the blossoms off the Bradford pears. I saw the Wise Woman coming out of her greenhouse, looking at a blizzard of white petals.

The wind made all the birds who dared to fly look like crows — flying as if rowing, rather than flapping. Later, the wind piled pine pollen in small, yellow dunes and lifted the cowlick I’ve been trying to plaster down since grade school.

All that made me think about poets who have written about wind. My memory, adrift, grounded on Anne Carson’s “Hokusai.”

Hokusai was a Japanese artist who at 83 announced that it was time.

He made a lion every morning for 219 days. Winds blew lions out of the snowy pines over his cottage, the lions’ paws

 

            mauling stars

            on the way down.

 

Emotions — like the anger and frustration that can build up when you’re working, even at something you love — are like the wind, blowing one way and then another.

The poet says Hokusai continued to draw, hoping for a peaceful day.

• Anne Carson’s poem “Hokusai” can be found here:

https://elarciniegas.blogspot.com/2013/07/anne-carson-hokusai.html

Bloodroot

 One of the joys of spring is coming across bloodroot, sanguinara canadensis.

The plant, which is in the poppy family, was important in the culture of the ancient peoples. The distinctive red tones used to decorate blankets came from a dye made from bloodroot.

Each stalk has a single leaf. The leaf is wrapped around a single flower bud. As the leaf unfolds, a delicate white flower with a yellow eye is revealed. The flower opens and closes with the sun.

The flower lasts only a few days, and so I feel lucky whenever I see one. But on March 15, I saw a whole bank of them along the Yellow River.

I get overcome thinking about it, as the old Bluesmen used to say.

Sun worship

 My old biology professor wanted us all to be sun worshippers. The capacity of plants to capture the energy of the sun and transmit that energy to the rest of creation seemed miraculous to him.

And though he tried to teach thick-headed country boys the mathematics and chemistry of this transfer of energy, the fact that it happens at all — aside from the fact that it happens routinely, relentlessly — seemed too much to believe.

 

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age. … 

 

My green age is gone, but I love watching the force that makes new leaves and flowers.

Eastern redbuds, Cercis canadensis, are blooming, and yellow jessamine, Gelsemium sempervirens, would make you think that pines can flower like dogwoods.

Red chokeberry, Aronia arbutifolia, more shrub than tree, is putting out clusters for white flowers. A chokeberry is like a wild plum. One plus one makes a thicket.

I’d reported seeing tiny bluet, Houstonia puslia, earlier. But now I see streaks of them, 20-foot purple smudges along the trail. Mixed in are mouse-ear chickweeds in genus Cerastium. They have tiny white blossoms.

Some things are blooming, but many plants are still dormant. Last year’s crop of broomsedge bluestem, Adropogon virginicus, is still standing, tall and brown.

You see the combination of old and new, life and decay, all over the forest. You see the contrast even on the same plant. On a post oak, last year’s leaves were clinging to the lower branches. High above, the brown leaves were gone, and new leaves were unfolding.

• Dylan Thomas’s “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower” is in Collected Poems; New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1971, p. 10.

Reese: ‘Mid-March’

 In early spring, plants respond to the energy of the sun, peeking out at first and then erupting. I’ve mentioned red maples, but here’s a better description by Lizette Woodworth Reese: 

Down the stripped roads the maples start their small, 

Soft, ’wildering fires. 

 

That’s the peek. Here’s the eruption:

 

In deserted garden-walks

The lean bush crouching hints old royalty, 

Feels some June stir in the sharp air and knows 

Soon ’twill leap up and show the world a rose. 

 

Lizette Woodworth Reese, 1856-1935, was a Baltimore high school teacher who wrote lyric poems. Although she was Maryland’s poet laureate, she’s not widely known today.

H.L. Mencken thought she was one of the finest poets of his day.

I’m tempted to argue it both ways:

First, that newspapermen like Mencken (and me) should never say a thing about poetry because we always get it wrong. 

Second, that newspapermen like Mencken (and me) should pay careful attention to the poets, making it a point to remind readers of the those who wrote lines that shouldn’t be forgotten.

Many plants are convinced spring has arrived in Stone Mountain. Maybe I’ll mention a few examples tomorrow.

• Source: Lizette Woodworth Reese’s “Mid-March” is at the Poetry Foundation’s site:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52086/mid-march

Lithium, an argument

 • Lithium occurs naturally in spring water in the Georgia Piedmont. Lithia Springs, about 35 miles west of our front porch, was once famous.

• Lithium is in the water in small amounts, far below the therapeutic levels used to treat people with bipolar disorders.

• Since the levels in spring water are below therapeutic levels, people assumed that the lithium in drinking water had no effect at all.

• If that were true, you would not be able to look at lithium levels in a community’s water supply and make predictions about obvious indicators of mental health, such as suicide rates. But you can.

• Imagine a bizarre game in which players are asked to guess whether the suicide rate in a Texas county is above average or below. Since the game is played in Texas, betting is fierce. But one contestant knows the level of lithium in the water supplies of all 254 Texas counties. She doesn’t win every round, but she wins all the money, night after night. If you are confusing the laws of nature with a game of pure chance, you’re going to lose a lot of money.

• When I was a boy, our understanding of the effects of smoking tobacco was limited. We understood the correlation between smoking cigarettes and all kinds of health problems. But we didn’t understand the mechanism, allowing the tobacco industry to say that there was no proof that smoking caused cancer. We are in a similar situation now in our understanding of lithium: we have correlations, rather than explanations.

• The correlations are strong enough to have sparked interest in lithium as a neuroprotector. You can find scientific literature about its potential as a defense against Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.

• Warning: Lithium has not been served well by the medical profession. High dosages are toxic, a fact that became apparent to doctors in the 1940s when patients started dying. Some forms of lithium sold to consumers cause kidney damage. If this topic interests you, read and think before you act. 

• Lithium, like carbon and oxygen, is an element. That means it can’t be patented by a pharmaceutical company. You can do your own speculating about the implications of that fact on research.

I wouldn’t take a large dose of lithium. But I’m intrigued by the evidence that microdoses of lithium in natural spring water do protect the brain in ways that aren’t understood.

• Sources and notes: If you’re scientifically inclined, I’d try O.V. Forlenza, V.J.R. De-Paula and B.S.O. Diniz, “Neuroprotective Effects of Lithium: Implications for the Treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Neurodegenerative Disorders”; ACS Chemical Neuroscience, April 25, 2014, and available through the National Library of Medicine here:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4063497/

For an article by a psychiatrist in English, see Anna Fels, “Should We All Take a Bit of Lithium?”; The New York Times, Sept. 13, 2014. It’s here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/opinion/sunday/should-we-all-take-a-bit-of-lithium.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Finally, this whole train of thought started when I saw a photo of a soda truck on Michael Leddy’s blog, Orange Crate Art. Lithium used to be in a lot of soft drinks, including 7 Up. Michael’s post is here:

https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2025/03/cheer-up.html

Thanks, Michael.

‘What the Chairman Told Tom’

 Maybe it’s because we live in an age where we can talk about cutting off $400 million to a single university. Or that state universities are cutting programs in the liberal arts. Or that a lot of people think that punishing universities is a good idea.

Maybe it’s just these poisonous times, but I take heart at Basil Bunting’s poem “What the Chairman Told Tom.” You could read this poem almost as if you were telling a joke: A poet walks into a business looking for a job. The chairman says:

 

I want to wash when I meet a poet.

 

They're Reds, addicts, 

all delinquents.

What you write is rot.

 

The chairman rants on. That the poet makes a poem of the rant strikes me as funny. 

Poets can be good or bad, whimsical or serious, grief-stricken or funny. If you’re a person who pursues the arts and the questions we group under the term “humanities,” all kinds of things are possible.

If you’re narrow minded, the possibilities are, by definition, limited. 

• Source and notes: Basil Bunting, The Complete Poems; Bloodaxe Books, 2000. The poem is here:

https://poets.org/poem/what-chairman-told-tom

I think of Bunting, but not as often as I should. For more, see “Bunting: ‘Chomei at Toyama,’ April 19, 2023, and “A bit more on Basil,” April 20, 2023.

Mackay: ‘Popular Delusions’

 My early nomination for Book of the Year was published in 1841.

If you ask me, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds captures the spirit of our times. Charles Mackay set out to survey points in history where entire countries seem to have gone mad.

His first example is the Mississippi Bubble. In 1716, a character named John Law, who might remind readers of Elon Musk, sold gullible souls in the French government on a way to leverage a great unused asset: Louisiana.

The incantation used to sell the scheme was simple: Everyone would get rich. The French word millionaire came into English with the bubble.

Law talked the French into turning over foreign trade to his company — private enterprise can do things more efficiently, you know. The company took over the tax system and other functions of government. It minted money.

Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds was expanded and published in London in 1852. The American businessman and statesman Bernard Baruch urged a Boston publisher to bring out an edition in 1932. Baruch was surveying the wreckage of “The New Economics,” the nonsense that led to the stock market crash of 1929.

Baruch suggested that the only incantation against such mass bewitchment was “two and two still make four.” He conceded it didn’t work.

Financial schemes and the pillaging of governments are just a part of the book. Mackay surveys the popular sport of hunting witches and recalls the days when countless people went in debt to buy tulips. Mackay didn’t include religious delusions. There were just too many. He wrote:

 

Popular delusions began so early, spread so widely, and have lasted so long, that instead of two or three volumes, fifty would scarcely suffice to detail their history. The present may be considered more of a miscellany of delusions than a history — a chapter only in the great and awful book of human folly which yet remains to be written, and which (Richard) Porson once jestingly said he would write in five hundred volumes!

 

Oddly, perhaps perversely, I find those lines comforting.

• Source: Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds; London: Office of the National Illustrated Library, 1852.

Project Gutenberg has it here:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm

The edition with Baruch’s foreword is here:

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.58938/page/n9/mode/2up

Dr. Kahneman’s suicide

 About a year ago, Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel for his work on how people make decisions, died at 90. We now learn that he went to Switzerland to end his own life with medical help.

So now it’s news: The expert on decision making decided to end his own life.

In notes to friends, Dr. Kahneman said he was declining cognitively and physically, but the decline was not catastrophic. He was enjoying life but wanted to go while it was still possible to experience joy. He did not want to descend into a spiral of pain, confusion and frailty. He decided that he’d had enough.

I don’t know anyone who could be trusted to make a more thoughtful decision.

But the news prompted handwringing. Some people who were not consulted think they should have been. The discussion about Dr. Kahneman’s decision strikes me as tribalism at its worst. Here are the most objectional parts:

• The presumption that I can make a better decision involving your future than you can. The Greeks called this kind of arrogance is hubris.

• The lack of respect for the decision maker, which shows a lack of respect for the specific person and of other persons in general.

This is a universal story — we all age and die — so something more than handwringing is required.

The handwringers are assuming that he made some kind of mistake. What’s required to demonstrate that a mistake was made? The critic would have to provide an account of the principles under which it would be appropriate for a person to end his or her own life.

I haven’t seen a shortage of such accounts. I’ve seen an absence of such accounts.

The only part of this story that angers me is that Dr. Kahneman had to go to Switzerland to do as he chose. He had to leave the country because we Americans skip the hard work for thinking and make laws based on the levels of collective handwringing.

Organizing the library

 YouGov reports that 24 percent of Britons own more than 100 books. Of those who do:

• 45 percent don’t organize them.

• 19 percent organize by size.

• 17 percent organize by genre.

• 11 percent organize alphabetically, by author.

Others have other methods. (Those surveyed could choose more than one method, so the percentages don’t add to 100.)

Most libraries use more than one method. All the libraries I’ve visited have a space for oversized books and so do I.

But I’d be among the 17 percent who start with genre.

My collection is loosely organized. I’ve vowed several times to catalog it but failed. There’s something inside me that wants the collection to be a little organized without being regimented.

Maybe that reflects some character flaw, but Ronald Blythe says there’s such a thing as a read-me-first book. It’s the one that you’d forgotten you own and falls off the shelf when you’re looking for something else. Sometimes, it turns out to be the right book for the moment.

• Sources: Dylan Difford, “40% of Britons haven’t read a single book in the last 12 months”; YouGov, March 5, 2025. It’s here:

https://yougov.co.uk/entertainment/articles/51730-40-of-britons-havent-read-a-single-book-in-the-last-12-months

I found out about it by reading Julian Girdham’s The Fortnightly, https://www.juliangirdham.com.

How to be a slow reader

 I’m a slow reader who admires fast readers.

A couple of friends are speed readers, and I marvel at their ability to read a book a day. When I was a young reporter, I was sent to the courthouse to report on a blockbuster lawsuit. The brief was hundreds of pages, with several accordion files of exhibits. I had two hours until deadline.

I never took a course in speed reading, but reporters who are in over their heads learn they must sink or skim. I read the introduction and conclusion of the lawsuit to find out what the Justice Department wanted. I read the first sentence of each paragraph, the topic sentence. I read whole paragraphs selectively.

It’s a brutal way to handle any text: to go at it with the goal of extracting information quickly. But we live in a world full of litigation and government reports that involve the public interest. I’m glad there are people in the world who try to keep the rest of us informed.

But when I talk about reading, that’s not what I’m thinking about. If I invite a friend for coffee and conversation, I want to spend time in his presence, thinking aloud together. I don’t plot to extract information from him with exploitive efficiency. I want to look at the questions we’re considering carefully. I want to notice the language we use in our inquiries. I want us to pace ourselves, to take our time.

I treat my favorite authors as friends. In reading, I tend to dally and linger, rather than rush.

I buy, rather than borrow, books because I annotate them. If you pull a book off the shelf of my library, you’ll see notes in the margins.

Just as speed readers have their techniques, we slow readers have ours. Annotation is the gold standard.

I’m reading Ronald Blythe’s Next to Nature, and the margins are full of Greek lambdas, which I use to note an interesting choice of words. (Lambda is the first letter in logos.) We know what humdrum means, but Blythe implies there are such things as humdrums and lists them. He suggests that humdrums must be interspersed with delights, and he lists those too. A day filled with reading proof and digging up the garden must be balanced by listening to the music of Gerald Fenzi and by discussing Shakespeare with the cat.

I studied his list and then made my own.

It makes for slow reading — almost glacial reading. It’s also memorable reading.

• Sources: Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside; London: John Murray, 2022, p. 113.

On being a verger

 I think of myself as a verger, a person who lives in The Verge, the edge between city and forest.

You can see what I’m talking about at this time of year. The trees in all the gardens say it’s spring. The Atlanta area is covered in white and pink blossoms. The white blooms are Bradford pears, Pyrus calleryana, and the pink flowers are Magnolia liliiflora. Both are from Asia, but every yard in the Atlanta area seems to have at least one.

In the forests, red maple, Acer rubrum, and Eastern redbuds, Cercis canadensis, are blooming, but the hardwoods have yet to put out leaves.

The invasives say spring is here, while the natives say spring is coming.

The natives are pretty, but the invasives are spectacular.

I’m aware of the havoc invasive species can cause on fragile ecosystems. I also find the concept of “invasive” troubling.

When the Mayflower landed in Massachusetts, the pilgrims, an invasive variety of an established species, brought seeds for corn and other things they planned to eat. In those days, “purity” was a casual idea in handling seeds. A lot of English wildflowers came over in sacks of grain.

As invaders, the Englishmen did a lot more damage than the bluebells.

I’m interested in why some invaders thrive while others don’t. The hordes of starlings we see are the descendants of a birds introduced in New York in 1890. But the Eurasian skylark, a bird whose songs are so lovely that all the poets of Europe write about them, just doesn’t do well in North America.

• Note: For an older note, see “Living in The Verge,” Sept. 23, 2024.

Piedmont, ides of March

 I’ve been digging up the front yard, which is on a slope. To prevent erosion, I’ve been cutting into the slope with a spade and laying paving bricks to form terraces.

The Wise Woman likes to garden and needs more room for vegetables and flowers. I do not like mowing lawns. If I have my way, all the Bermuda grass will be gone by year’s end.

The Wise Woman put the first seedlings of lettuce into the new beds March 14. Collards might leave the greenhouse and go into the beds today. Cabbage and brussels sprouts are next. The beans and squash in the greenhouse are getting big, but the soil in the garden is still too cold for them, the Wise Woman says.

I can’t tell. I spent too many years in Texas and am disoriented by four seasons.

In Texas, I watched the old mesquite trees.

In Georgia, I’ve been watching the insects. Although we’re supposed to get close to freezing next week, the bugs think it’s spring. I’ve seen bumblebees, honeybees, stinkbugs and beetles.

But as I’ve been digging, I’ve paid special attention to the red paper wasps. I’m pretty sure they’re in genus Polistes. Two species are common— carolina and rubiginosus —but I’m not planning to get close enough to distinguish them.

The wasps are beautiful, though: red with black wings and just a hint of yellow trim.

The “paper” in the common names refers to the nests. Paper wasps chew wood fiber, mix it with saliva and build papier-mâché nests that look like inverted umbrellas. We don’t use chemicals in the garden, so it’s my job to watch the wasps and shoo them away from the cold frames and greenhouse.

The garden is coming along. The negotiations with the wasps are not going anywhere.

George Mackay Brown

 I’ve mentioned the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig a dozen times in this collection of notes. I’ve just started reading one of MacCaig’s colleagues, George Mackay Brown.

If you don’t know him, you can get a quick taste by reading two short poems, “The Poet” and “The Finished House.” Follow the links below.

In “The Poet,” Brown says that the poet’s true task is “interrogation of silence,” a line to remember. I think “The Finished House,” a short poem about the things that must be done to make a house a home, is a masterpiece. 

After World War II, MacCaig and Hugh McDiarmid used to meet with friends to smoke, drink, recite and argue at the bars on Rose Street in Edinburgh. Milne’s Bar was the most famous, but the poets also met at Abbotsford Bar and Café Royal. The group included Sorley MacLean and Brown.

In 1980, Alexander “Sandy” Moffat painted “Poets Pub,” which shows the poets in action. The setting is a composite of the three pubs.

In the 1950s and ’60s, the informal salon was famous. Milne’s advertised itself as the Poet’s Pub and kept photographs, drawings and other memorabilia on the walls.

But old poets fade away, and corporate office eventually decided to refresh the décor. There was a fuss when the poets’ memorabilia was evicted.

• Sources: George Mackay Brown’s “The Poet” is available at The Poetry Archive:

https://poetryarchive.org/poem/poet/

“The Finished House” is available at the Scottish Poetry Library:

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/finished-house/

The National Galleries of Scotland has an image of Sandy Moffat’s “Poets Pub” here:

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/features/artist-sandy-moffat-reflects-poets-pub

An account of the fracas at Milne’s Bar, see “Anger as pub calls time on old poets,” The Scotsman, Nov. 28, 2009. It’s here:

https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/anger-as-pub-calls-time-on-old-poets-2443146

Anthony Griffin: 'The Water Cries'

 Anthony Griffin set out to answer a couple of simple research questions: How many auction houses sold enslaved people in Galveston, Texas? Where were they?

The result of that search is The Water Cries, a powerful, provocative book.

It convinced me that the systematic enslavement of people was not just a part of Galveston’s economy. It was the basis of Galveston’s economy. The real wealth in Texas’s historic seaport was in enslaved people. Human beings were treated as commodities. They were sold, insured, mortgaged.

The dollar amounts were too big for Texas. Some of the financing came from New York. The wealth based on that awful business was staggering.

Wealth can be influential, and the influence of powerbrokers who made fortunes before the Civil War persisted for generations. Griffin meticulously shows how this story was whitewashed from the history of the city.

I was a newspaperman in Galveston for 25 years. It’s a place I dearly love. I dearly wish that I’d had a part in bringing this story to light. But I’m glad Anthony Griffin persisted and wrote this book.

The Water Cries: Uncovering the Slave Auction Houses of Galveston, Texas will hurt you emotionally. But facing hard truth can be rewarding. I came away with new hope.

I can see steps we could all take toward a more honest account of our shared history. I don’t see reconciliation, atonement or answers to all the country’s problems. But I do see steps forward.

If you’re not from Galveston, you might wonder why this book would interest you. It’s about slavery and the awful history that still poisons this country. Lessons learned in one community apply to the whole country.

• Source: Anthony Paul Griffin, The Water Cries: Uncovering the Slave Auction Houses of Galveston; Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2025.

A clue to a puzzle

 Glancing out the window above the kitchen sink, I thought I saw one of those plastic owls that people hope will scare mice away on the fence. We don’t have a plastic owl.

It was a Cooper’s hawk, magnificent and motionless, 12 feet away from the bird feeders, eerily deserted.

A couple of days ago, I’d seen the remains of a sparrow, no more than a sad puff of feathers, and had been puzzled.

Cooper’s hawks eat birds as well as rodents.

Eudora Welty: ‘Petrified Man’

 One of the least charming features of the culture I grew up in was an obsession with other people. 

Maybe it’s human nature, rather than a feature of a particular culture. But it seems to me that there was an exaggerated tendency in Southern culture to look at other people, not with a view toward helping them, but with an eye toward finding faults and mocking them. Gossip was the national sport, a bit like going to the bullfights in Spain.

Eudora Welty’s story “Petrified Man” gets at this feature of Southern life. The story is set in a beauty parlor. Gossip is the main attraction. People don’t want to talk about their own lives. They don’t want to consider how they might improve themselves. They want to talk about other people, and they worry about what other people might say in return.

In such environments, the “freak show” was news. The Petrified Man in this story was seen at the carnival.

I have known people like the characters in this story. I didn’t like them and so I don’t like the story told about them.

Don’t get me wrong: I admire Welty’s gifts as a storyteller.

But if her characters magically came to life today, I’d avoid them. While they were talking about the freak show when this story was written, today they’d be extolling the charlatans leading religious revivals or political efforts to make America great again.

If there is such a thing called Southern literature, there you have my relationship with it. I don’t really like a lot of the stories written about the South and Southerners. 

• Source: Eudora Welty: Stories, Essays & Memoir; New York: The Library of America, 1992, pp. 23-36. “Petrified Man” is in Library of America’s “Story of the Week” archives:

https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2013/07/petrified-man.html

How humans adapt

 A second thought on yesterday’s note about how human beings would build a shelter in the absence of contemporary technology: Some cultures are more interested in the question than others.

In Japan, experimental archeologists have built more than 1,000 pit houses since World War II. They are trying to get a better understanding of how people adapted to the environment in the days before rice was grown in paddies. One scholar described the building of historically accurate pit houses as a national pastime.

I don’t see that level of interest in the question of human adaptation to the environment in this country.

I think of the question in biological terms: How would humans adapt to the Georgia Piedmont I now call home? How would they adapt to the cold — admitting that this place seems cold because we’ve come from South Texas?

Aldo Leopold sometimes complained about the education of biology students. Memorizing bumps on bones is helpful in understanding some biological questions, he said. But a more fundamental question is whether you can give the student — an ordinary citizen — a better understanding of the natural world.

Outside my window, I’m watching white-tailed deer under some blooming Bradford pears. The deer are native. The pears are from China. Both are wonderfully adapted to this environment. If you consider the adaptation of pears and deer, how could you not think about the adaptation of humans?

The experiments of the experimental archeologists seem like biological inquiries to me.

How to build a house

 In March in the Georgia Piedmont, it seems we prepare ourselves for the “last” freeze two or three times. Plants in pots come and go from the greenhouse. Raised beds are covered on cold nights. All this activity has made me wonder how ancient people made it through the cold.

I would have bet on pit houses — shelters dug into the earth. The average temperature of the earth in the Piedmont is 40 to 50 degrees. If the temperature above our dugout shelter is 20 degrees, we can be warmer simply by going below — even before lighting a fire. Conversely, being below ground is cooler in the scorching summers.

Using the insulation of the earth for shelter makes so much sense I half convinced myself that the ancient people of the Piedmont must have built pit houses. They didn’t.

They did some shallow excavating but didn’t dig nearly as deep as I imagined.

The ancient peoples, known collectively as the Mississippian culture, built wattle-and-daub shelters. Here are the instructions:

• Dig a rectangular trench with rounded corners. (This was a chore with stone tools.)

• Cut saplings and place them upright in the trench at 8- to 12-inch intervals, filling in the trench as you go so the poles remain uprights.

• Bend the saplings at the top and tie them together with fiber cords. Since leather ties are relatively hard to come by, use them sparingly, only on difficult jobs.

• Cut smaller saplings — they’re called wands to distinguish them from the larger poles — and weave them in and out of the upright saplings. Hammer them down until they rest on on top of each other.

• Dig a small pit. Pour earth from the trench into the pit. Add water from the nearest creek and mix in dried grass or straw, which will bind to the clay in the soil. Trample the muddy mixture with your feet. Then pull out blobs of muck and daub them into the wattle walls.

This is a terrible oversimplification, but it might help you picture the process.

It seems to me that we humans are so weighed down by our technology we don’t picture how we would adapt to our environments without it. That seems like a kind of failure to me — a lack of imagination that limits our understanding of the natural world.

I’m interested in the field of experimental archeology, which encourages graduate students to build structures using reconstructions of ancient tools.

I have spent so much time wondering why the ancient peoples didn’t build pit houses here that I’m beginning to wonder if I could build one in the backyard.

• Note: For a sample of what a real experiment looks like, see Cameron Hawkins Lacquement’s How to Build a Mississippian House: A Study of Domestic Architecture in West-Central Alabama, submitted as a master’s thesis at the University of Alabama, 2004. It’s here:

https://rla.unc.edu/Mdvlfiles/ma/Lacquement%202004%20MA.pdf

Objectivity, fact and opinion

 Herodotus says a delegation of Greeks from Elea went to Egypt to ask for a critique of their community’s claim to fame: the Olympics.

The Eleans were sure the Olympics were perfect. Still, Egyptian sages had a reputation for surprising insight. The Eleans traveled far to get their counsel.

The learned Egyptians examined the matter and offered two suggestions:

• If the Eleans wanted to stage great games, they should open them to everyone, not just Greeks.

• However, the Eleans shouldn’t allow their own citizens to compete. The Eleans were judges of the competitions, and it’s hard for judges to be impartial when their own friends and kinfolk are involved. 

The Egyptians were right that inclusivity is important. That’s a point most of us would understand today. But I like the second point. The sages knew that impartiality and objectivity are important, even if they are ideals that can only be aimed at, rather than achieved.

When I started working at newspapers, objectivity wasn’t negotiable. A young writer didn’t express opinions in reporting the news. Reporters who couldn’t distinguish opinion from fact were fired.

The notion of objectivity seems quaint today. Instead of honoring news organizations that try to report objectively, we dismissively say that they all have biases — they’re all the same. You just choose the flavor of “truth” you like.

When we can’t distinguish between fact and opinion, we get the kind of public discourse in which the occupant of the White House says Ukraine started the war with Russia and no one in his political party can contradict him.

We Americans need to rediscover an appreciation for the verifiable fact.

• Source: Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Robin Waterfield; Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 165.

Looking at land, wild and tame

 Aldo Leopold told of two farmers planting tamarack trees, which farmers in Wisconsin had been trying to exterminate for a century. The contrarian farmers, who sound suspiciously like Leopold and his wife, Estella, wanted to establish the tamaracks to recreate a native ecosystem, including sphagnum moss, pitcher plants and other wildflowers. 

These two farmers had learned from experience that the wholly tamed farm offers not only a slender livelihood but a constricted life. They had caught the idea that there is pleasure to be had in raising wild crops as well as tame ones. They propose to devote a little spot of marsh to growing native wildflowers. Perhaps they wish for their land what we all wish for our children — not only a chance to make a living, but also a chance to express and develop a rich and varied assortment of inherent capabilities, both wild and tame. 

 

That last sentence haunts me. I know what it is to “put my mind to work,” to tame my imagination and to hold down a job and apply my mind to it. But I also know what it is to let my imagination wander, to explore those “inherent capabilities” that are more wild than tame.

I like the comparison between untamed land and untamed imagination. I don’t know if that’s an explanation for why I love to walk through wild areas, but I suspect it’s as close as I can get.

• Source and notes: This is from a speech “Natural History, the Forgotten Science” and it can be found in Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation; New York: Library of America, 2013, pp. 411-15. It’s in Library of America’s “Story of the Week” collection here:

https://loa-shared.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Leopold_Natural_History.pdf

Red and white all over

 The rock outcroppings at Panola Mountain appeared to have been stained red since our last hike. Elf-orpine, a primitive little plant that grows on the rock faces, turns from green to red in early spring. Later, the plants will put on white flowers.

These plants are ancient. They are pollinated by ants, having evolved before bees did.

The change in color is one of the signs of spring.

The woods are streaked with red and white. The reds are from the red maples, which are native. The white is from Bradford pears.

Pyrus calleryana is from China, and the roadsides around Atlanta are spectacular with the white blooms. It’s one of the favorite trees of gardeners and landscapers. Birds have taken it into the forest.

Overnight temperatures are still at freezing. You see far more blooms in gardens than in the wild, the natives being slower than the imports. We did see some tiny bluet, Houstonia pulilla, which looks purple, rather than blue, to me. Also some yellow jessamine. The beech stands in the forest are still holding on to last year’s leaves.

Carson McCullers on watermelon

 In an attempt to catch up on the writers of my new home state, I looked up Carson McCullers’s essay “The Great Eaters of Georgia.” I aspire to be one of the greats and read, willing to take instruction.

I’m behind in my study of Georgia writers. But I know the food. Southern cooking is a regional possession. It doesn’t pay much attention to state boundaries. The best part of McCullers’s essay is on the eating of watermelon. 

 

Ideally, it should be opened and eaten on a cool back porch with newspapers on the table. It should be frosty, cold to the touch on fevered summer days. When the man of the family is poised with the knife there should be a hush around the table, a breathless and pleasant anxiety. Then when the knife plunges there should be a faint crack of the splitting fruit, then the anxious craning to see if it is properly ripe.

 

McCullers emphasizes that it’s an occasion, requiring performance from both the carver and the eaters. I think that’s the way it should be, although I’d prefer to hear a “distinct” crack instead of a “faint” one when the melon is cut. If you can imagine the crack of a baseball bat, I’d want to hear a double, rather than a single.

• Source: “The Great Eaters of Georgia” is in Carson McCullers: Stories, Plays, & Other Writings; New York: Library of America, 2016, pp. 457-63. It’s online in Library of America’s Story of the Week collection:
https://loa-shared.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/McCullers_Eaters_Georgia.pdf

The War on Lying Oracles

 Of all the ancient wars, the War on Lying Oracles is my favorite.

It was fought in Egypt by Amasis, a commoner who took over when King Apries, a megalomaniac, melted down. The Egyptians revolted, and Amasis, an unlikely Everyman in Herodotus’s telling, was put in charge.

Amasis was a man of dubious character. He liked to drink and be merry, and before his rise to the throne he funded the good times by theft and fraud.

Outraged citizens would drag him before various oracles. In those days, the gods decided cases in which it was one person’s word against another’s. Amasis won some and lost some. He appeared to be philosophical about it. Actually, he was taking notes.

He’d been guilty in all those cases. When he became king, Amasis cut off funding to all the oracles that had acquitted him. He did his best to rid the country of lying oracles.

• Sources and notes: Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Robin Waterfield; Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 165.

Early March at Stone Mountain

 The living room looks like a nursery. The Wise Woman is a gardener, and hundreds of seedlings are rising under strong lights.

In the next weeks, the seedlings will go outdoors into raised beds that can be covered to protect them on cold nights. Others will go into the greenhouse, which is already getting crowded. Others will go into new beds in the front yard.

Various kinds of flowers and vegetables are hardier than others, and the plans for getting the right plant into the ground at the right time remind me of the schedules for D-Day: one wave after another will hit the beach as the earth warms.

It’s all beyond me. The Wise Woman is in charge.

While I’m not a decision maker, I can be trusted with a shovel, rake and wheelbarrow. I’m pretty sure I cleared enough ground last week for the first wave.

My horoscope says the future includes digging.

Texas Independence Day

 Although I’m in Georgia, chili is on the menu today.

I’m celebrating the culture — a blending of cultures — rather than the history.

In 1836, the wealth of the English-speaking Texians who were clamoring for independence was invested in slaves. The economy of their colonies was based on treating some people as commodities. These commodities were priced, sold, shipped and insured. They were not treated as humans.

The desire for independence was a desire to extend the “way of life” that existed in the Southern United States westward. That was the language used to describe the desire to extend slavery into Mexico, a state that abolished it.

The history is shameful. The question is whether the culture that grew out of that catastrophe has some redemptive value.

I go back and forth. I love a lot of things about the state, including people, food and landscapes. I admire some Texas writers. I’ve spent a lifetime being appalled by Texas politics.

I have more hope than sense, as my grandfather would say. I claim the jury is still out.

A writing lesson from Robert Caro

 When Robert Caro was a young reporter, he covered the story of a deaf man who had become so despondent he tried to kill himself by parking his car on the train tracks.

Reporters are trained to tell what happened. What happened was a story about rescuers and a car parked on the tracks.

But Caro had the instinct to see that the interesting story was not about a car on the tracks but about what had gone on inside a person to bring him to that situation.

Caro was lucky that an old editor helped him see the problem. Caro had collected the information that interested him and that would interest other readers. But he was telling a story about a car and train tracks. That story was far less interesting.

Caro said the experience of working with a good editor was like going to journalism school in a day.

I think every person who writes could tell a similar story.

• Source: Chris Heath, “Rifling Through the Archives With Legendary Historian Robert Caro”; Smithsonian Magazine, March 2025. It’s here:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/rifling-through-archives-legendary-historian-robert-caro-180985956/