When inspiration strikes

 The Rev. Samuel Crossman, a parson who had a grim experience at a country church in the 1660s, wrote a poem called “My song is love unknown.” It’s a meditation on how people can turn on others.

The poem sat around for a couple of centuries until just after the Great War, when The English Hymnal was being compiled. The editor, Geoffrey Shaw, invited the composer John Ireland to lunch and said he needed a tune for a lovely poem. Ireland read the poem, read it again, grabbed a menu and started writing music on the back. Within minutes he said, “Here is your tune."

I’m astonished by people who compose quickly — artists, musicians, poets. The poet Norman MacCaig, asked how long it took to write a poem, said it took about as long as it takes to smoke a cigarette. One cigarette for a short poem — for a longer poem two.

I love stories about how inspiration strikes like lightning, perhaps because they seem barely believable to me.

• Source: I heard the story from Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside; London: John Murray, 2022, p. 114-5.

Among the many recordings of the hymn is this one from King’s College, Cambridge:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMart4wXsI0

The Dunning-Kruger effect

 The Dunning-Kruger effect posits that those who know the least about a specific skill are most likely to overestimate their competence.

Critics of the White House point to the president and his cabinet to illustrate the principle at work. But that’s a joke, rather than a scientific demonstration. The Dunning-Kruger effect isn’t applicable to general competence; the concept involves specific, sharply defined skills.

Academic controversies involving the concept are legion. Some are substantive. A mathematician has argued that the concept is simply wrong.

I’m interested in the basic idea. Self-assessments and measures of objective performance, such as standardized tests, are not the same. You’d expect different scores, and patterns in those scores are interesting.

All tests are imperfect, but problems should not undermine our commitment to testing. You don’t often hear that 90 percent of a surgeon’s patients die on the operating table because methods of assessment are used to weed out people who cannot master certain skills. The Navy’s methods for weeding out people who were not competent at specific skills were once draconian. Perhaps they still are.

I also think that those small competencies add up in some way that is obvious, although perhaps not not measurable. If you can’t  master the basic skills for handling classified information that the lowest ranks are expected to master, you probably shouldn’t be secretary of defense. If you read the Internet constantly and can’t tell science from science fiction, you probably shouldn’t be in charge of public health.

The daily note to mom

 The novelist Isabel Allende wrote daily letters to her mother. The habit influenced the way she lived. As she went about her day, Allende would look for things that were worth mentioning. She paid attention to things she wouldn’t otherwise have noticed. It’s something you do when you want to share a bit of your life with your mother.

For decades, my friend Melvyn made a journal entry in the form of a note to his grandson. Melvyn usually wrote late at night, just before bed. He’d look back over the day for at least one thing — and if one thing didn’t suggest itself, it made him wonder whether he was paying attention.

I’m fascinated by writing routines, but I have friends who avoid them, thinking that getting into a rut is not a good way to nurture creative impulses.

We talk about writing as if it were one thing. It’s not. Different people write in different ways because they are doing different things. Writing a report to inform someone is not the same as writing a novel to entertain someone.

When people tell me they are writing, I start asking questions. There’s no telling what they’re up to. I suppose that’s why I can’t resist reading interviews with writers.

• Source: Gilbert Cruz, “The Interview: Isabel Allende Understands How Fear Changes a Society”; The New York Times, April 26, 2025.

Making soulful noises

 I’ve tried, several times, to say what this concatenation of notes is — to come up with a word or phrase for it.

My friend Christopher sent me a quotation from Alan Furst’s novel Night Soldiers.

 

Sascha Vonets was not meant to be a poet, that’s all one could say. It was just that his stubborn soul had, somehow, got into the habit of making soulful noises, and one had to do something or other about that, so his instinct had always been to chop up the thoughts so that they trickled down the page instead of marching, margin to margin, like a shock battalion.

 

Maybe I’m in “the habit of making soulful noises” even on days when I can’t half think.

• Source: Alan Furst, Night Soldiers; New York: Random House, 2002.

‘The Triumph of Stupidity’

 In 1933, Bertrand Russell wrote an essay deploring the politics of Germany.

Russell’s work in logic had been built on the foundations of Gottlob Frege. Russell said that individual Germans had done more for civilization in the past 150 years than individuals from any other country. But the Nazis were degrading civilization, Russell said. Give them a few years in power, and the Germans would be reduced to the level of the Goths. Here’s Russell’s summary:

 

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are in full doubt.

 

Russell said that what was happening in Germany could happen anywhere. He also said the bright spot in the gloomy picture was America.

The first sentence still rings true.

• Source: Bertrand Russell’s essay “The Triumph of Stupidity” is in Mortals and Others: Bertrand Russell’s American Essays, 1931-1935, edited by Harry Ruja; Routledge, 1998, Vol. 2, pp. 27-8.

The goo that binds them together

 One of the epigraphs of Eric Hoffer’s True Believer is from the biblical story of Tower of Babel: 

And slime had they for mortar.

 

The slime that Hoffer wrote about in his analysis of mass movements is the stuff that oozes out of frustrated personalities — fear, ill will and suspicion. These things act as a “marvelous slime to cement the embittered and disaffected into one compact whole.”

People who are susceptible to mass movements are unhappy. They are not destitute but feel they should have more — usually more of what those people have. (Feel free to insert any of the movement’s scapegoats here.) 

People who are susceptible to mass movements are dissatisfied. They feel they are less than they should be. They feel keenly what’s wrong within themselves and so they are vigilant in looking for what’s wrong with everyone else.

Hoffer says the surprising thing is that this mistrust leads not to dissension but to conformity. In the current mass movement, it’s not good enough to just be a patriot; you must be a great patriot. You not only drink the leader’s Kool-Aid; you buy his merchandise.

 

Strict orthodoxy is as much the result of mutual suspicion as of ardent faith.

 

Democracies and free societies are based on trust. For decades, we’ve had people whispering and then shouting that you can’t trust anything, especially experts. Not those in charge of public health. Not those in charge of national defense. So we have people in charge now who ignore the advice of physicians and who fire competent military officers who want to maintain a diverse force.

Suspicion might be a cohesive force, but it also makes that force weak. It’s not a recipe for being great. It’s a recipe for being easy prey.

• Sources: Eric Hoffer, The True Believer; Time Incorporated, 1963, p. 128. If you know the book by sections, the quotations are from §100. The biblical story is in Genesis, Chapter 11.

The difficulty with conversations

 The nation is struggling because four out of 10 citizens are submerged in a mass movement.

We Americans used to wonder how a great civilization could follow a carnival barker like Hitler to ruin. I’m interested less in the demagogue of the day than in the people who believe and follow him.

Like others who don’t think that the current mass movement is good for the country, I’ve been perplexed that I can’t talk to the believers. It’s like talking to a bot powered by artificial intelligence. If you ask a question, you’ll get an answer of a sort but you’ll see no evidence of thinking.

In his study on the nature of mass movements, Eric Hoffer says: 

 

… the chief preoccupation of an active mass movement is to instill in its followers a facility for united action and self-sacrifice, and that it achieves this facility by stripping each human entity of its distinctness and autonomy and turning it into an anonymous particle with no will and no judgment of its own. The result is not only a compact and fearless following but also a homogenous plastic mass that can be needed at will.

 

I believe in conversation. But when I ask members of the movement a question, I do not get a thoughtful response. I get a slogan from one of the propaganda sites. It’s as if I were not talking with a person.

• Source: Eric Hoffer, The True Believer; Time Incorporated, 1963, p. 87. If you know the book by sections, the quotation is from §60.

How do you stop a mass movement?

 Eric Hoffer thought mass movements were interchangeable.

In the 1930s, the world had Stalin in one country and Hitler in another because of the laws of human nature, Hoffer said. People become susceptible to mass movements when they are so discontented with their lives that they want revolutionary change.

Hoffer was skeptical of mass movements and asked himself how people could be sold a bill of goods by obvious hucksters. He thought people were prone to mass movements when these conditions prevailed:

• People are discontented but not destitute.

• People get a feeling of power from a doctrine, leader or technique.

• People hear messages that offer them extravagant hope in the future.

• People are ignorant of the difficulties involved. (People with experience are a handicap in a mass movement, which explains a lot about the people leading federal departments and agencies in the current mass movement.)

Most people would say there’s a great deal of difference between Stalinism and Nazism, but Hoffer didn’t think so. If certain social conditions prevail, people line up to buy the snake oil. The snake oil may vary from one country to another, but it’s all snake oil.

The view that one brand is pretty much the same as another has a surprising corollary:

 

The problem of stopping a mass movement is often a matter of substituting one movement for another.

 

I’m beyond weary of the mass movement that’s degrading this country and have been trying to imagine what a substitute would look like.

• Source: Eric Hoffer, The True Believer; Time Incorporated, 1963, p. 19. If you know the book by sections, the quotation is from §16.

'Loveliest of Trees'

 A.E. Housman’s short poem about going to see the cherry trees in bloom contains a little math problem:

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

 

It’s the story of a young man making it a point to go outside and see the cherries blossom while he can. 

In East Texas, we had more dogwoods than cherries. I’d go far to see them bloom and would think of Housman’s poem.

My 70 years are just about used up, and my view has changed. I still like to get into the woods and see the blooms. But now I also like to stay home and help with the corn, squash, beans, peas and other plants, which the Wise Woman raised from seed, that are going into the garden.

Fifty years ago, the garden seemed like a chore to escape when the dogwoods were blooming. Now the sights in the garden and the sights in the woods are kindred wonders.

• A.E. Housman, “Loveliest of Trees” can be found here:

https://poets.org/poem/loveliest-trees

‘I am curiously content’

 My friend Melvyn died at 93 in October, but he continues to speak to me through his letters, essays and other writings. He wrote these lines when he was about to turn 70:

I am curiously content. I have what it takes for me to be happy: someone to love, something to do, something to look forward to.

 

Some people doubt the value of leaving behind letters, memoirs and other records of their lives. I’m not among the doubters.

• Note: Melvyn appears many times in these notes. For more, see “Dr. Melvyn Schreiber,” Oct. 8, 2024.

The cure for being out of sorts

 Someone said that John Clare wrote the great poem about being out of sorts. It’s called “I Am!” It begins:

I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?

 

You know the feeling. You are in the dumps, not at your best. You’ve got the blues. Clare says it’s like being tossed into a dream

 

Where there is neither sense of life, nor joys, 

     But the huge shipwreck of my own esteem

And all that’s dear.

 

His cure: a wild place untouched by man and time alone.

His cure is mine.

• Source and notes: John Clare, “I Am!” is available at the Poetry Foundation:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43948/i-am

You can find more than one version. Clare’s manuscripts were eccentric. Various editors have sorted them in various ways.

Finding a good place to write

 I like to read about writing places and routines. I’m interested in how other writers do it. Ronald Blythe reminds me that the furniture and furnishings are not always important. 

The great rural poet John Clare often wrote in hiding, lying low in a field or under a hedge, so that the neighbors could not see a ploughman engaged in matters that were none of his business.

 

Blythe says Clare changed the direction of rural poetry. Before Clare, gentrified folks not much disposed to getting their hands dirty would effuse about the merry peasants working the fields. Clare described working the fields.

I remember taking breaks from cutting bullnettles on Grandfather’s farm. Under a hedge was a good place to be.

• Source: Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside; London: John Murray, 2022, p. 101.

‘Legends of the Fall’

 Jim Harrison’s famous novella is supposed to be about three brothers who leave their home in Montana to fight in World War I.

I think it’s about what grief can do — and what it does do to Tristan, the middle brother. Tristan is capable in many ways, but he’s powerless to do anything about death. The story is about what a person of a certain personality can become in his grief: a person who spreads pain everywhere without intending to, without trying, without understanding why.

Here’s Tristan as a boy:

 

So perhaps Tristan in a genetic lapse had become his own father and would like Cain never take an order from anyone but would build his own fate with gestures so personal that no one in the family ever knew what was on his seemingly thankless mind.

 

And after he is struck by grief:

 

And God knows what Tristan wanted other than to revive the dead: his brain was the remnant of carnage, a burned city or forest, cold scar tissue.

 

Grief is the powerful force least understood by humanity.

• Source: Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall; New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1980, pp. 209 and 245.

Muriel Stark's writing routine

 The novelist Muriel Spark had a routine for writing a novel.

Like many writers, she was fussy about her materials. She had to have spiral notebooks from James Thin, a stationer in Edinburgh. Each had 72 pages. She wrote only on the right-hand pages, reserving the others for revisions.

Usually, five notebooks made a novel.

Unlike many writers, she didn’t rewrite. The BBC has a recording of her explaining the process: you put a title on the first page and your name under it and then you begin with Chapter 1. … It struck me as funny. She wrote the book from front to back, no skipping about. The story ended close to the last page of the fifth notebook. One draft was enough. She didn’t like editing.

All this is astonishing to me. I’m from a different school, if not a different planet.

The part of her method that intrigues me is her use of “character lists.” She had the usual list of characters, but she also had pages on each: appearance, mannerisms, personality traits, quirks. She had an index that showed where each character entered, left and returned to the story.

Before Spark started writing, she had the story in her head — and in the notes in her character lists.

• Sources: Colin McIlroy, “Muriel Spark and the curious art of writing”; National Library of Scotland, Discover magazine, Issue 48, Summer 2023. It’s here:

https://www.nls.uk/discover-stories/muriel-spark/

BBC’s 85-second recording, “How I write, by Muriel Spark” is here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05wgqmr/player

Starting conversations

 Necessary Trouble Georgia stages a weekly demonstration supporting workers at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

People show up with signs supporting people who got into medical research and are now worried about their jobs. The demonstrators say you can see the appreciation in the faces of the workers as they leave the main campus at closing time.

Note the distinction between “demonstration in support of” and “protest against.” Demonstrations in support of beleaguered groups seem like a good way to start conversations.

Being in support of something implies that you are opposed to something else. But the place to start the conversation is with the support of people who deserve it. Battle lines, if they must be drawn, can be drawn later.

A lot of beleaguered people deserve support today. I hear a lot about teachers who are afraid they will be fired if they teach history truthfully.

I can see a demonstration of support in front of a school in three signs:

• We support teachers.

• No rules against truth.

• And the name of the organization putting on the demonstration.

That might start some conversations among people who are likely to vote.

Necessary Trouble

 I dropped in on a meeting of Necessary Trouble Georgia, a grassroots organization opposed to tyranny. The group is being overrun by new members.

It was an overflow crowd in a big room, and it looked like more than half the people there were attending their first meeting. Teachers don’t like being told they can’t teach the truth about the state’s history. People don’t think it’s a good idea to cut research positions at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. No one seemed to think it’s wise to cut medical research just because Elon Musk thinks it’s a good idea. People are angry about a lot of things.

The meeting gave me hope. I’m glad to see people determined to make trouble, rather than go quietly.

The name of the group comes from a line by John Lewis, a courageous civil rights leader and congressman:

 

Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year. It is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.

The tongue-clucking game

 Allen Ginsberg and Marie Syrkin were playing the tongue-clucking game. It’s the game where you mention a poem and your surprise that a poetry student — an advanced student — hadn’t heard of it.

It’s a game that people in academics probably shouldn’t play. But if you’re like me, a person with no academic credentials, you can simply enjoy listening to interesting people talk about what people should read. What I learned:

• Marie Syrkin admired Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven.”

• Syrkin said her husband, Charles Reznikoff, liked Wordsworth, but particularly “Resolution and Independence,” which everyone seems to call “The Leech Gatherer.”

• Adelaide Crapsey’s cinquains were discovered by Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch at Reed College in the late 1940s. The students formed the Adelaide Crapsey and Oswald Spengler Mutual Admiration and Poetaster Society.

The tongue-clucking game sent me to the library. I have a blind spot with Wordsworth. I can see why so many people find his poems remarkable, but they rarely move me. I read or reread Wordsworth and Thompson, hoping that my sensibilities had improved through the years and that I would feel them. It just wasn’t to be. Crapsey’s cinquains, on the other hand, were a delight.

• Source: “Allen Ginsberg with Marie Syrkin on Charles Reznikoff,” recorded July 2, 1987, is part of the Naropa University Digital Archives and is available here: 

http://archives.naropa.edu/digital/collection/p16621coll1/id/2634/

The way it used to be

 Long ago in Galveston, Texas, police officers were paid like waiters. The city provided a starvation wage. The real money came from the owners of businesses and influential residents along the beat.

When I went to work for the newspaper, people still remembered the good old days before the Texas rangers arrived in the late 1950s. The rangers were there because there was just too much corruption in local government, including the police department, to enforce state laws against gambling and prostitution.

If a local cop is employed completely by the public, with good pay and benefits, he or she works for the public. But in Galveston, it was not at all clear who was the boss.

An officer’s paycheck was a fraction of the amount contributed by business owners. What was a cop to do when the owner of a café who paid cops to overlook his slot machines didn’t like the ethnicity, color or politics of a guest and called to say he needed someone beaten up? And what was this cop to do if the café owner got into a squabble with the brothel owner next door? What if both business owners wanted someone roughed up? In those days cops in Galveston did many interesting things that had nothing to do with the law.

The public had given the cop a badge, a gun and some authority. But that authority — because it was influenced by private money — became something other than an instrument of the public’s interest. The public’s interest had been corrupted.

I ran into many old islanders who lamented the end of the good of days. But as I listened to these stories, I heard about how great it was to be able to call a cop or a code enforcement officer and get someone — a bum or an enemy — into real trouble. You could do that — and all for the cost of a “gift.” I also heard from people who didn’t remember anything good about an era when the city was run by gangsters.

Corruption is easier to see in a small city than in a nation.

But it’s corruption when an official charges people a fee to see him on public business. It’s corruption when an official accepts campaign contributions or personal gifts and then rewards the donors with public contracts. That official is using the authority granted him by the public for personal gain. That’s corruption whether the official works at City Hall or in the White House.

A good time for artists

 Asked where his ideas came from, Kurt Vonnegut replied “disgust with civilization.”

That’s the short version of a longer answer — the part I remember. I hope he’s right. If disgust with civilization is the spark for creativity, we’re in for a renaissance.

Hentoff: ‘Living the Bill of Rights’

 Nat Hentoff’s book Living the Bill of Rights is 27 years old, and it needs an update.

It seems to be a Rule of the Cosmos that every generation must come to a new understanding of these rights. People must find that understanding for themselves.

Hentoff says that Justice William Brennan of the Supreme Court told him that the Bill of Rights never gets off the page and into the lives of Americans.

 

“But you’ve got to tell the stories,” Justice Brennan said. “It’s not enough to tell them what their rights and liberties are. They need to know — and this will get them interested — how these American liberties were won, and what it takes to keep them alive.

“And tell them,” Brennan continued, “about the actual people out there now who are not afraid to fight to keep on being free Americans.”

 

I think Hentoff and Brennan were right: People need to hear stories.

In a democracy, the people are in charge of their government — not the other way around. In delegating authority to their representatives, the people don’t surrender their right to know what their representatives are doing. The people don’t surrender their right to disagree and dissent. The people don’t surrender their right to jerk the chain of arrogant usurpers and bring them to heel within the guidelines set by the Constitution.

These fundamental rights come off the page into American life when people, generation after generation, find ways to curb the usurpers.

I think Hentoff’s book needs an update, and I think Anthony Griffin, who appeared in these notes yesterday, would be just the person to do it. 

In the meantime, those of us who have stories about earlier battles should tell them to the younger people who are fighting today. The republic is in heavy seas, but in the younger generation of dissenters, I see real intelligence, real courage. The situation is far from hopeless.

• Source: Nat Hentoff, Living the Bill of Rights: How to Be an Authentic American; New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1998, p. xv.

A stand for civil rights

 In the 1950s, the state of Alabama considered the NAACP to be subversive. The state demanded a list of the NAACP’s members.

In court, the government argued that the NAACP was an organization filled with radicals and agitators and thus a danger to a lawful state. The NAACP argued that government officials wanted to publicize the list and distribute it to law enforcement so discourage citizens from exercising their First Amendment rights.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in NAACP vs. Alabama in 1958 was a landmark of civil rights law.

In 1993, the Texas Human Rights Commission demanded a list of the members of the Ku Klux Klan. Michael Lowe, the grand dragon, appealed to the American Civil Liberties Union. Anthony Griffin, a young lawyer who was winning civil liberties cases, got the brief.

Griffin is African American. He was also legal counsel for the Texas NAACP.

When word got out that Griffin was representing the Klan, the Texas NAACP fired him.

Newspaper people sometimes get into closed-door meetings, and I heard Griffin explain to the board members of the Texas NAACP that he was standing on principle. If the government could take away the First Amendment rights of Klan members today, the government could come for the rights of NAACP members tomorrow, he said. Rights belong to all, not just to the people you like. That’s what makes a right a right — it applies to all.

My story for The Galveston County Daily News was picked up by the Associated Press. Griffin’s stand was news in Texas, and it was news in New York, where Nat Hentoff, a columnist for The Village Voice, was interested.

Hentoff’s account of this story is Chapter 2 in his Living the Bill of Rights: How to Be an Authentic American. Hentoff dedicated his book to Griffin.

Note the subtitle of Hentoff’s book. If you are discouraged by politics today, it might be time for a refresher course on what authentic Americans look like. They stand for the rights of all when the reins of government have fallen into bad hands.

• Source: Nat Hentoff, Living the Bill of Rights: How to Be an Authentic American; New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1998.

Anthony Griffin’s new book is also highly recommended. See “Anthony Griffin: ‘The Water Cries,’” March 13, 2025.

A coyote poem

 I love short poems based on a vivid image. Maxine Hong Kingston has a lovely one:

A coyote on hind legs
at the bird bath. Water
to the brim please.

 

It’s part of a cycle of haiku in Poetry Magazine. In an introduction, Fred Marchant said Kingston had indicated she would like to leave behind a collection of haiku in the manner of Richard Wright. I like Wright’s book and hope Kingston is working on hers.

• Source: Maxine Hong Kingman, “Malu Cycles”; Poetry Foundation, April 1, 2025. It’s here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/1661174/malu-cycles-ma-lu-xun-huan

Theft and influence peddling

 U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, in a speech to the Senate in early March, accused the Trump administration of unprecedented corruption.

Murphy’s argument was that Trump and his friends were trying to normalize corruption of a kind that’s common in oligarchies. Vladimir Putin, who has a salary of $140,000, has banked $200 billion by using his office to steal from the Russian people.

It’s more influence peddling than direct theft. Putin uses the power of government to help billionaire friends, who know how to return the favors.

Murphy’s case that the American White House is now an open market for influence peddling is damning.

His accusations are detailed and documented. If Trump’s defenders in the Senate had arguments rebutting the accusations of corruption, they should have made them.

As it stands, it’s fair to conclude that the accusations are true, and that the U.S. Senate has decided that the theft of public money via influence peddling is OK.

• Source: “Murphy: Six Weeks In, This White House Is On Its Way to Being The Most Corrupt in U.S. History” is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hycoCYenXls

A little bluebird puzzle

 I enjoyed the bluebirds through the winters, and I thought I would see even more in spring as they built nests and raised young. I was wrong.

I still see bluebirds. But there are fewer of them now.

The solution to my bewilderment: We have year-round bluebirds in the Piedmont. But bluebirds that breed in the North winter down here. That is, we have two bluebird populations: year-round Georgians and winter visitors. The visitors have packed and gone.

• Source: Terry W. Johnson’s short notes on “Out My Backdoor” clear up a lot of minor mysteries for me:

https://georgiawildlife.com/out-my-backdoor-bluebird-migration

Make America Poor Again

 The icon for the new regime should be the graph showing the stock market plunging off the charts into the abyss. I think the image of collapse reflects many things:

• The strength of our armed forces, particularly their ability to fend off cyber-attacks.

• The confidence of our allies in our capacity to stand with them.

• The ability of our universities and agencies to conduct research.

• Our net worth, the collective wealth of Americans. We Americans, as a group, are down trillions.

Performance in all these areas is making America poor, rather than great.

America has been poor before. I grew up among people who lived through The Depression and joked  bitterly about squirrel for lunch, possum for supper. That grinding poverty sapped their confidence. They isolated themselves in the 1930s and let dictators take over most of Europe without raising a hand.

A lot of what people like me have been complaining about — the daily erosion of checks against autocracy — is hard to measure. But it is not hard — not hard at all — to measure the damage to the economy.

This is the road to hardship. We have been down it before.

Reading to understand

 My friend Melvyn Schreiber, who died last fall at 93, was known as an excellent doctor and teacher. He was also a perceptive reader.

He read constantly, and his medical students were sometimes surprised to find that he knew writers young enough to be his grandchildren.
He wrote:

 

Reading is not a diversion for me. When I am not at the hospital working, it’s what I do. And that for a lifetime. I do not think I live vicariously in the characters I read about, but my understanding of life and people is certainly informed.

 

Melvyn was only mildly interested in literary criticism, but he was serious about understanding life and people.

Melvyn left some of himself behind for friends. He left four collections of essays. Some of us have letters.

He would be pleased to know that his friends are sharing notes and quotes.

• Notes: For more, see “Dr. Melvyn Schreiber,” Oct. 8, 2023.

The Piedmont, early April

 The dogwoods are blooming in the Georgia Piedmont, reminding me of the woods of East Texas.

The splashes of white blossoms are fun, especially when the dogwoods have invaded a beech grove, where last year’s leaves, bronze and khaki-colored, are still holding on.

The forest is greening. Hickories and sweetgums are putting out leaves. In the coming weeks, 200-yard views through the forest will be cut to 20 feet.

The wild azaleas in genus Rhododendron are lovely. The most spectacular blooms were in a stand of Southern Pinxter azalea. I’d describe this plant as small trees, rather than a bush. The little trees we saw were about 12 feet tall and were in a creek bottom.

The showiest bloomer in the forest might be the black cherry. The biology textbook speaks of white flowers in drooping racemes, which doesn’t do the cherry justice. Imagine a flowering raccoon’s tail.

The forest floor has smaller blossoms that are easy to overlook: brambles, buttercups, bittercresses. Mouse-ear chickweeds, in genus Cerastium, are putting out tiny white flowers here. They are all over North America. Some might be blooming near you.

Beating the bounds

 In some places, people still practice the ancient custom of beating the bounds.

The parish was the basic unit of society in medieval England. Maps were rare, as were people who could read them. But it was important for common people to know where the boundaries were. A parishioner might have the right to graze a cow on the commons of his parish, not on the commons of the parish next door.

So once a year the older folks who had learned the landmarks as children led younger folks around and showed them. The bounds of the parish were kept in living memory.

I like to think I’m doing something similar.

I don’t own any of the land I tromp on. The public does. But as a member of the public, I have a right to walk the land, and it seems to me that I have a balancing obligation to know something about it.

So I’ve been in the woods to see what’s blooming.

Incidentally, the origin of the phrase “beating the bounds” interests me, but I haven’t found anything convincing. I’ve run across articles describing how violence can help imprint memories and so children were taught to beat the boundary stones with switches. In some cases, the adults thrashed the children, allegedly to help them learn. But it seems to me that the beat we’re talking about probably is in the sense of a “regularly traversed round.” The cop patrols her beat, while the reporter covers his.

A writing lesson from Allen Ginsberg

 Allen Ginsberg told the story of his family’s laundry business in Newark, N.J. The family had immigrated from Russia during the pogroms of the 1880s.

The business model required a horse. The clean laundry went out to customers by horse and wagon. When Ginsberg’s grandfather Pincus was young, his job was to carry the laundry from the wagon to the customer’s door.

A horse was a big investment, and the family decided to buy from a fellow immigrant from the old country.

The first horse looked healthy but had epilepsy and died. The second refused to pull the wagon. It would lie down, rather than work.

The family feared ruin when it discovered, after money changed hands, that the third horse was blind. But the blind horse could hold the route in memory. The horse didn’t have to be told when to turn or stop.

Ginsberg’s point in telling the story is that all families have such stories. As they are told, generation after generation, all but the most telling details are lost. The story of a complex life is reduced almost to an abstraction.

Ginsberg thought Charles Reznikoff’s early poems were brilliant examples. Each was a sweeping novel told as a short narrative poem.

Reznikoff’s “She sat by the window,” which is about a woman facing an arranged marriage, is an example. It has setting, manners, character and a dramatic situation within a dozen lines.

Ginsberg recommended this exercise to his students:

• Make a list of 10 stories that were told by family members.

• See if you can turn them into short narratives, remembering William Carlos Williams’s maxim that one vivid phrase is better than pages of inert writing.

• Sources: “Allen Ginsberg with Marie Syrkin on Charles Reznikoff,” recorded July 2, 1987, is part of the Naropa University Digital Archives and is available here: 

http://archives.naropa.edu/digital/collection/p16621coll1/id/2634/

Poems 1918-1975, The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff, edited by Seamus Cooney; Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1996. “She sat by the window” is in Vol. 1, p. 32.  Ginsberg was right. It’s a stunning poem.

Citation needed

 Marie Syrkin, Charles Reznikoff’s wife, was a scholar. Her Wikipedia entry says that when she was in her late 80s, she attended a conference on the Objectivist Movement at the Naropa Institute, “often disagreeing the Allen Ginsberg on the subject of her husband’s poetry.”

That line is flagged with a “citation needed,” but it’s solid. There’s a recording of the exchange.

At the 59:50 mark, Ginsberg has gone on about some lines of Reznikoff’s. Ginsberg admired the lines so much he used them in teaching. He finally asked Syrkin whether she liked them.

She replied, “No.”

Brevity, in response to a long question, can sound definitive.

Syrkin had her own views about what made Reznikoff’s poetry work. And, as you might expect, she didn’t think that everything her husband wrote was good.

• Sources: “Allen Ginsberg with Marie Syrkin on Charles Reznikoff,” recorded July 2, 1987, is part of the Naropa University Digital Archives and is available here: 

http://archives.naropa.edu/digital/collection/p16621coll1/id/2634/

Wikipedia’s article “Marie Syrkin,” updated Feb. 25, 2025, is here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Syrkin