'There are things we can't do'

 A Republican politician in Georgia made national news by calling the treatment of Palestinians a genocide.

If you think Marjorie Taylor Green has had a change of mind, you’re thinking wishfully. She’s merely reading the room. What’s changing in Georgia is the opinion of a lot of people who think Israel plays a role in divine plans but who have trouble seeing divine plans while looking at images of children being starved.

Sometimes, but not always, I like American culture. I hate the fact that this is the place that bred the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow. I love the fact that this is the place that gave the world baseball, ragtime, bebop and San Antonio squash.

On most days, I like American culture. But I tend to despair when I think of what the American nation stands for, particular in times when it falls into the hands of mobs led by despots.

I’m no expert on Isreal, but the late George Steiner knew something about the place, and he said this:

 

I’ve tried at personal and professional cost to warn against nationalism in Israel and the treatment of Palestinians; to say that because of what we are, there are things we can’t do.

 

I wish those of us who live in this country could grasp that idea.

• Maya Jaggi, “George and his dragons”; The Guardian, March 17, 2001. It’s here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/mar/17/arts.highereducation

Pigeonwings and butterfly peas

 Two trailing vines with beautiful purple flowers are in bloom.

I’ve heard Clitoria mariana called pigeonwings and Centrosema virginianum called butterfly pea. Both are in the pea family, Fabaceae, although they are not in the same genus.

Both are trailing vines. They lack tendrils, so they twine around other plants to climb.

One distinguishing trait: Centrosema has a spur at the base of the petals that Clitoria lacks.

Common names for plants can be confusing, and some people call both plants butterfly peas — plain and spurred. I leave the common names to better-rooted Georgians.

I have mainly been admiring the flowers. But there’s also this: Frequently, the more I learn about the natural history of this new place I call home, the less certain I am of my identifications, my judgments, my conclusions.

Nan Shepherd said one of the advantages of getting to know a place is that it’s a “corrective of glib assessment.” We humans want to know everything immediately. Places are hard to learn. You can spend a lifetime trying.

• Sources: The Extension Service at North Carolina State University is a good source. Centrosema virginianum is here:

https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/plants/centrosema-virginianum/

Clitoria mariana is here:

https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/plants/clitoria-mariana/

This site has a discussion about distinguishing the two:

https://journal.uswildflowers.com/2013/10/wildflower-identification-clitoria-mariana-vs-centrosema-virginianum/

Some clues on form

 In David Markson’s novel Reader’s Block, Reader is thinking about writing — or at least thinking about a character called Protagonist.

But is what Reader is imagining a novel? Reader’s mind is wandering among the remarkable facts, legends and myths of literature, music, art and history. Reader’s mind is having trouble focusing on a setting, much less on a plot. Reader, musing, makes these remarks:

 

A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel?

 

Also in part a commonplace book?

 

Also in part a cento, as Burton surely would put it.

 

Robert Burton set out to collect everything that had been writing about melancholy and thought of a book consisting entirely of quotations. Reader isn’t sure what he has in mind is in the form of a cento. Reader remarks: 

 

We have too many things and not enough forms, Flaubert said.

 

Much of Reader’s Block could be in the form of a reference for the writers of crossword clues.

An odd form, but a good clue in a puzzle is like a good clue in a mystery novel: interesting.

• Source and notes: David Markson, Reader’s Block; Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996. The first three remarks on p. 61 and the remark on Flaubert is on p. 68.

A fiction made of remarks

 I have started David Markson’s Reader’s Choice and am wondering whether it makes sense to think of it as a fiction made up of remarks.

I find the book intriguing. A couple of specimens will probably help more than a stab at a summary:

 

The eulogy at Puccini’s funeral was delivered by Mussolini.

 

Bertrand Russell, re having contemplated suicide at sixteen:

I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more about mathematics.

 

The book has hints about a possible protagonist in a possible novel, but I’m in it for these remarks about literature, music and art. I’m reading because I’m interested in getting a sense of what’s on the narrator’s mind.

I have friends who would hate this book. (My old friend Melvyn’s review would be scathing.)

But I like remarks. I was fascinated by Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet and by Evan S. Connell’s Points for a Compass Rose and Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel. Connell’s books were usually sold as books of poetry, but I think Connell resisted calling the books poems.

I’d say all these books have a family resemblance.

• Source and notes: David Markson, Reader’s Block; Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996, pp. 28 and 45.

For earlier notes on a similar point, see “He wrote remarks,” July 26, 2025, and “Give me fiction, but hold the novel,” Nov. 5, 2022.

Yellowjackets

 The Wise Woman and I were walking through the park when the enormous dog disturbed an underground nest of southern yellowjackets, Vespula squamosa.

I was on the other end of the leash and saw the swarm rise. I’d been stung by yellowjackets before but had never seen a swarm rise. The density of insects coming out of an inch-wide hole in the ground is hard to describe.

Researchers at Texas A&M University say nests can contain 4,000 workers.

The Wise Woman escaped, and my efforts to get the yellowjackets off the dog were mostly successful. He came out better than I did. I think I was stung 18 times. I’m taking it easy for a day or two.

He wrote remarks

 One of the things I like about Wittgenstein was that his writings are in the form of remarks. He wrote remarks.

That sounds odd because we don’t think of remarks as a literary form, although we occasionally come close when talking about aphorisms. But an aphorism seems to me to be a polished thing, while a remark is a quick observation made in the heat of an investigation.

I’ll admit that I’ve never heard a crowd clamoring for the recognition of the remark as a literary form. But I did run across this from W.H. Auden:

 

A poem must be a closed system, but there is something, in my opinion, lifeless, even false, in systematic criticism. In going over my critical pieces, I have reduced them, when possible, to sets of notes because, as a reader, I prefer a critic’s notebooks to his treatises.

 

It’s remarkable to me that Auden rewrote critical essays into the form of “sets of notes,” which I’d call remarks. I think it was a good call. But I think the remark is a literary form.

• Source: W.H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand; New York: Vintage International, 1989, p. xii. For an earlier note on the same idea, see “The remark as a literary form,” July 4, 2022.

'How beautiful this is'

 Joanna Macy, an interesting thinker who died at 96, had a beautiful saying on our standing in relation to the cosmos: 

We don’t want to die not knowing how beautiful this is.

 

I take that to heart. I try to get outside regularly just to see.

I think this is the same idea in different clothing:

 

This is, in the end, the only courage required of us. The courage to meet what is strangest and most awesome.

 

The cosmos is mysterious in many ways, and the mystery strikes different people in different ways. I think she was right: As individuals, we grow by facing the things that most baffle us.

• Sources: “Joanna Macy, In Memoriam”; On Being with Krista Tippett, July 22, 2025. It’s here:

https://onbeing.org/programs/joanna-macy-and-anita-barrows-what-a-world-youve-got-inside-you/

The quotations above both come from this conversation after the 40-minute mark.

Trip Gabriel, “Joanna Macy, Who Found a Way to Transcend ‘Eco-Anxiety,’ Dies at 96; The New York Times, July 23, 2025. It’s here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/climate/joanna-macy-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Being still

 Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the 20^th century was the drive to form questions within a scientific framework. Humanity made such progress in understanding the physical world that we tend to think the scientific paradigm when we talk of “understanding.”

But there are remarkable people who strike us in a completely different way. We are aware of their goodness or nobility of character. It’s a mysterious quality that doesn’t fit into a scientific framework, so perhaps we don’t understand them or their remarkable qualities in the way we usually speak of understanding.

But they impress us. Sometimes we are so impressed we want to be like them, to follow their example.

Here is the poet Kim Stafford, describing a person whose sense of peace spreads outward — is almost contagious:

 

To be so still, others are called

From strife to listen.

 

I have known a peacemaker like that. No scientific test would explain him.

• Source: Kim Stafford, Wild Honey, Tough Salt; Pasadena, Calif.: Red Hen Press, 2019. The line is from “Peace Warrior,” p. 40. For more on these remarkable personalities, see “The presence of a noble nature,” July 13, 2025.

'My Iron Catastrophe'

 W.H. Auden said he appreciated it when people told him about good poets he might not have heard of or overlooked. If you are of like mind, try Kim Stafford.

His poem “My Iron Catastrophe” begins:

 

Everything was going to hell.

 

We all have times like that. A death in the family, a divorce, anguishing loss.

The poet goes for a walk with a friend, who asks him what he wants — and he keeps pushing past the things we usually say when a friend asks such a question. We want things for our children — for others. If we are writers, we want good words.

But what do we want for ourselves — for our own character? What trait would we most want to find?

I’m beyond blue at the catastrophic turn in this country’s politics.

I want to find something within myself that is a reply to the Iron Catastrophe.

Kim Stafford has written part of the liturgy that helps in that search.

• Sources: Kim Stafford, Wild Honey, Tough Salt; Pasadena, Calif.: Red Hen Press, 2019. “My Iron Catastrophe” is on p. 16.

His website is at https://www.kimstaffordpoet.com.

The undeservedly forgotten

 W.H. Auden observed that, while bad art is always with us, we don’t have to do anything about it. It dies on its own.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

 

The problem is the undeservedly forgotten. It’s astonishing to me how little attention the poems of Charles Reznikoff and Lorine Niedecker received. I can’t quite believe that the work of the 17^th century poet Thomas Traherne was not always part of English literature. The poems were unknown until they were rescued from a trunk in someone’s attic and published just before World War I.

Auden, in his essay “Reading,” points out six useful things that critics can do. Helping readers with insight into known works is beyond me. But I like talking about poets whose work is, by my lights, unjustly neglected.

• Source: W.H. Auden’s essay “Reading” is The Dyer’s Hand; New York: Vintage International, 1989, p. 10.

The pursuit of a good life

 How would you give an account of Wittgenstein’s religion?

You’d begin by giving an account of the way he used the word. Wittgenstein wanted to live a good life, an ethical life. When he used the word “religion,” that’s what he was talking about. A person’s religion was the pursuit of a good life, the best life that person could lead.

In Wittgenstein’s use, religion was a private quest, not something done in community. Wittgenstein thought that the idea of God as a being outside ourselves but infinitely more powerful was incoherent. When Wittgenstein talked about religion, he was talking about something that most religious people wouldn’t recognize.

Neverthelss, Wittgenstein talked about religion with Maurice O’Connor Drury, a student who became a friend and who kept notes on their conversations. Drury went to Cambridge planning to be a clergyman. After studying with Wittgenstein, he trained as a physician. Drury recorded this remark:

 

I believe it is right to try experiments in religion. To find out, by trying, what helps one and what doesn’t. … It seems to me that your religion will always take the form of desiring something you haven’t yet found.

 

Wittgenstein’s life wasn’t religious in the conventional sense. He was intensely interested in living a good life.

• Source and notes: M. O’C. Drury’s two memoirs, “Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein” and “Conversations with Wittgenstein” are in Recollections of Wittgenstein, edited by Rush Rhees; Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 76-96 and pp. 97-171. The quotation is from the second memoir, pp. 164-5.

For an early note on these conversations, see “Dr. Drury’s talks with Wittgenstein,” June 13, 2025.

Ethics and eccentricity

 Wittgenstein was eccentric, and the eccentricities are usually reported without conclusion.

But the eccentric way he lived is important to understanding him.

Wittgenstein said, over and again, that we can’t talk about ethical and religious ideas. We can only live values. Whereof we cannot speak we can put into practice.

Wittgenstein held that making judgments about a person’s ethical pronouncements was pointless. But if you look at a person’s life, you can get a sense of whether you’d want to live that way.

One remarkable feature of Wittgenstein’s life was his simplicity and frugality. When the American philosopher Norman Malcolm visited him in Cambridge, he found him living in college rooms.

 

Wittgenstein’s rooms in Whewell’s Court were austerely furnished. There was no easy chair or reading lamp. There were no ornaments, paintings, or photographs. The walls were bare. In his living-room were two canvas chairs and a plain wooden chair, and in his bedroom a canvas cot. An old-fashioned iron heating stove was in the centre of the living-room. There were some flowers in a window box, and one or two flower pots in the room. There was a metal safe in which he kept his manuscripts, and a card table on which he did his writing. The rooms were always scrupulously clean.

 

Wittgenstein grew up in one of the wealthiest families in Europe. The house was a mansion if not a palace. Servants were everywhere, bumping into the powerful and famous people who visited. Brahms came to dinner. Klimt painted a portrait of Wittgenstein’s sister.

It’s quite a contrast: the place where Wittgenstein grew up vs. the place where he chose to live. It’s quite a contrast in values.

This frugality or simplicity was not Wittgenstein’s religion or his way of life. It was one of many features of his life, just one example of the way he lived.

The way he went about living reflected his values. That gave his life a kind of integrity that’s not common.

• Source and notes: Norman Malcolm: Wittgenstein: A Memoir; Oxford University Press, 1977. Malcolm’s description of Wittgenstein’s rooms is on page 25.  For a note on the book, see “Malcolm: ‘Wittgenstein: A Memoir,’” April 26, 2023.

Blythe: ‘Field Work’

 When Ronald Blythe was a young farm worker, he used to find buttons from the Victorian era in the cultivated fields of East Anglia.

It took him a while to discover that the village ancestors used trash as manure. All the waste bins of the village were spread on the fields. Bones from crowded churchyards in London were sometimes collected, carted off, ground up and spread on the crops.

Blythe, who died a couple of years ago at 100, spent a lifetime puzzling over his place, gradually growing in his understanding of it. He was what he called a “long stayer.” He tended to stay in a house for at least 20 years. When he moved, he didn’t go far. His lifetime fit with a radius of 30 miles.

He came from a family that had worked the land forever. He thought of farming as the original occupation.

But it was not his occupation. He became a writer, and I like his work because it pays attention to place. Places have bits of history whose meaning must be discovered. Those bits include old buttons in the middle of grain fields.

Life changes even in ancient places, and so each generation must confront the old ways. We sometimes find that old ways are no longer tenable and can’t be done without.
When he was 85, Blythe saw 36 of his essays collected in Field Work. The book begins with “Remedial Scenes,” an essay about how landscape can influence a person. The remaining essays are in sections that reflect his interests:

• His own connection to his place, East Anglia.

• Farming.

• How and where writers work.

• Pictures, paintings and artists.

• Visited places that somehow became a part of him.

• Books that were more than good reads — books that changed him.

I like autobiographies in the form of essays. This one is excellent.

• Source: Ronald Blythe, Field Work; Norwich: Black Dog Books, 2007.

Paulette Jiles on the news

 Paulette Jiles’s News of the World has many wonderful passages. I’m partial to this one: 

Maybe life is just about carrying news. Surviving to carry the news. Maybe we have just one message, and it is delivered to us when we are born and we are never sure what it says; it may have nothing to do with us personally but it must be carried by hand through a life, all the way, and at the end handed over, sealed.

 

That’s her character Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd talking. After the Civil War, he made his living giving readings from newspapers on the frontier, the original news desert. 

I saw Paulette Jiles once, just long enough to tell her I thought her novel was one of the best books ever written about Texas, just long enough for her to sign my copy.

• Sources: Paulette Jiles, News of the World; New York: William Morris, 2016, p. 121.

Miguel Salazar, “Paulette Jiles, 82, Dies; Novelist Evoked the West in ‘News of the World’”; The New York Times, July 16, 2025. It’s here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/books/paulette-jiles-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

The key to the Bastille

 When the Bastille fell in 1789, the Marquis de Lafayette sent the key of the notorious prison to George Washington, saying the Americans had started a worldwide revolution against monarchy and tyranny.

The key used to be displayed at Mount Vernon, and perhaps still is, even in the headlong rush to Make America Subservient Again. It’s hard to imagine how people can support the destruction of democratic institutions their ancestors built as a defense against autocratic rule.

I came across the little story of the key of the Bastille in an old interview with the historian Gordon Wood, who also said this:

 

People who read history tend to get a negative view of their past.

 

The group story tends to be all about heroism and noble motives. When you dig into it, a story is about people. And that story is always more nuanced.

• Scott Porch, “The Pamphleteers”; The Los Angeles Review of Books, Sept. 24, 2015. It’s here:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-pamphleteers

A passion for collecting

 It’s a question the philosophers ask: What is art?

It seems to me that, whatever you say about art, the notion of collecting must be a part of it. Making a grocery list is one thing. But choosing things that are meaningful to you and collecting them in memory is something else.

I suspect that process — the choosing, selecting and collecting — is the first turn we make when we make art. Artists make things — including paintings, poems and short stories — from details they collect in memory.

I went down a rabbit hole after reading a newspaper article about Museo Anahacalli, which holds Diego Rivera’s collection of ancient art. Rivera collected more than 50,000 pieces from Mexico’s many indigenous cultures.

In making his collection public, Rivera said: “I am returning to the people what I was able to rescue from the artistic heritage of their ancestors.”

It seems to me that statement might apply to almost any work of art, perhaps especially to works in the literary arts.

• Source: Kevin Aragón, “¿Cómo es y dónde visitar la colección de arte prehispánico de Diego Rivera?”; El Sol de Mexico, 15 de Julio de 2025.

A naturalist looks at his journal

 Richard Mabey suggested that Gilbert White thought of his journal as his “intellectual ledger, where he took stock of his understanding of the physical world.”

In his journal, White, 1720-1793, wasn’t really writing — it was more thinking. Mabey lists some of the usual things that writers do that White omitted: literary illusions, self-examination, searches for meaning.

The writing came later. White turned the journal entries into a series of letters, published as The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne in 1789. Mabey edited the Penguin Classics edition.

I’m interested in Mabey’s remark because I’m interested in journals and people who keep them. I sometimes think this concatenation of notes online is a kind of journal. Like White — or Mabey’s perceptive view of White — I think of it as thinking more than writing.

• Source: Ronald Blythe’s essay “Richard Mabey at Selborne” was collected in Field Work; Norwich: Black Dog Books, 2007, pp. 264-8. The quotation is on p. 266.

Conformity

 Researchers using new modeling tools have some interesting things to say about how political attitudes shape our identity.

The researchers’ first claim is obvious: If you know a person’s opinion about one political issue, you can often guess that person’s opinions on other issues. If you know whether your neighbor supports restrictions on gun control, you could probably guess whether he supports restrictions or abortion.

Those networks of opinions are what we are talking about when we use the terms “liberal” and “conservative.”

The researchers’ second claim is that conformity within identity groups based on political attitudes can be measured. Democrats have higher levels of conformity than Republicans.

Individual Republicans are more likely to disagree with the party line on gay marriage and abortion. Democrats are more likely to conform. They also tend toward more extreme positions.

“Extreme” is a loaded term, so let’s proceed carefully. Here, “extreme” is a statistical, not a moral, term. An extreme position is simply one that relatively few people support.

You can frame questions about the rights of transgender people in many ways, but if you ask whether it’s fair to allow volleyball players who were born male to compete against female players, most Americans say no.

I think defending the rights of transgender people is a moral responsibility — it’s nonnegotiable. But I don’t think it’s fair for players who were born male to compete against women who were born female. I don’t think they have a right to compete for spots on women’s teams and to compete for athletic scholarships.

I see a tension between those views about the rights of transgender people — not a contradiction.

The researchers’ paper is provocative. I was reminded of the internal tension within any democracy.

By definition, a democracy is a government of the people, and it must take seriously the rights of individual people, no matter how small the minority. We have a moral obligation to defend those rights.

A democracy, by definition, is also the rule of the majority. No matter how high your ideals might be, those ideals become law only if you can persuade your neighbors.

I lived most of my life in Texas. I don’t know what it’s like to be in the majority politically. As one with some experience of being in the minority, I’d suggest two things:

• Dissent is important.

• The way we dissent is equally important. We should not cut off contact with people we disagree with.

As a rule, I’d say we dissenters could do with a less conformity and a less puritanism. We could tone down our sense of rightness and righteousness, which sometimes strikes our neighbors as self-righteousness.

• Source and notes: Adrian Lüders, Dino Carpentras and Michael Quayle, “Attitude networks as intergroup realities: Using network-modelling to research attitude-identity relationships in polarized political contexts”; British Journal of Social Psychology, 11 July 2023. I found it here:

https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/bjso.12665

I found the article because David Brooks mentioned it in a column about the decline of the novel (“When Novels Mattered”; The New York Times, July 10, 2025).

'The presence of a noble nature'

 To my mind, no philosopher was clearer than Wittgenstein on why a science of ethics is impossible — why talking of ethics as if it were a feature of the natural world is nonsense.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

 

A science of ethics, a calculus of ethics, a logical system of ethics is nonsense, and Wittgenstein said not a word. However, our experience of ethical behavior is not nonsense at all. Those experiences might be the most serious things we humans encounter, and Wittgenstein said a lot about that.

If you’ve read the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, it might surprise you that Wittgenstein gave copies of Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations to friends. He urged his students to read Tolstoy’s Twenty-Three Tales and questioned them to see if they’d grasped the stories.

The praised Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. He loved to talk about the character Father Zosima. Such people really exist in the world, Wittgenstein said. He hailed Dostoevsky as a master for capturing this natural — but almost miraculous — personality.

To me, George Eliot was even clearer in Middlemarch:

 

The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us; we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.

 

And this:

 

There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having a sort of baptism and consecration: they bind us over to rectitude and purity by their pure belief about us.

 

Such people do walk the earth.

• Sources: The first quotation is the last proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. The quotations from George Eliot’s Middlemarch are from Chapters LXXVI and LXXVII.

What we plant on public land

 I found a lovely seedpod, about the size of a rabbit’s foot. It was tan, made of three leaf-like panels. Inside were green seeds that looked like small marbles.

The pods are from Koelreuteria paniculata, a goldenrain tree. It’s a lovely tree. It’s one of the trees the ancient Chinese planted beside the graves of scholars. In spring, the goldenrain tree will be covered with little yellow flowers on long panicles. To some poetic soul, the sight looked like sheets of golden rainwater running off dark foliage.

Gardeners can’t resist goldenrain trees. They brought them from China to Japan in the Middle Ages and to Europe before 1750. They brought them to the colonies before the American revolution.

Some gardener planted the tree I was looking at on public land — in the landscaped area of a park. Before long, the seeds will go from the landscaped area into the natural forest within the park’s boundaries.

I think it’s hopeless to try to prevent private citizens from planting non-native species. I don’t think the country is in the mood for garden police. But when I saw that beautiful seedpod I wondered whether we could hope to change the policy about what we plant on public lands.

Finding your interests

 I think it must be a natural law that every family of educators must have someone like me: a person who has a talent for dropping out.

I know nothing about education, but I think this is true: We do well when we try to help children — and those who inquire like children — find their own interests. We do less well when we think it’s our duty to help them find a “career,” meaning a way to sort out questions about money.

A.S. Neill, who was an educational reformer when I was a child, had a similar idea:

 

I hold that the aim of life is to find happiness, which means to find interest. Education should be a preparation for life.

 

I think that helping children find their interests is a good thing to do — but I also think that old people can seek like children and that those who do are happier.

When people who are considering retirement query me about it, I ask: “Is there anything you are interested in — anything you want to learn?”

• Source: A.S. Neill, Sumerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing; New York, Hart Publishing, 1960, pp. 24. The Internet Archive has it here:

https://archive.org/details/Summerhill-English-A.S.Neill/mode/2up

In search of something small

 Mary Russell Mitford, the English writer, liked to walk through natural places. She knew when violets bloomed and where to find them. When the time came, she had to get outdoors. 

What a renewal of heart and mind! To inhabit such a scene of peace and sweetness is again to be fearless, gay, and gentle as a child. Then it is that thought becomes poetry, and feeling religion.

 

• Source: Mary Russell Mitford’s essay “Violeting” is in Our Village; London: The Macmillan Company, 1893. Project Gutenberg has it here:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2496/2496-h/2496-h.htm

Two brothers argue about place

 Julian Tennyson, at 23, walked and cycled around Suffolk.

It was 1938, and the great-grandson of the famous poet was hoping to write a guidebook about rural county that was not overrun by tourists. He had a strong sense of place and looked at all aspects of it: the natural history, of course, but also the towns, farms, churches, language and fairs.

His Suffolk Scenes was published in 1939, the year the war broke out, breaking off his literary career.

Capt. Tennyson eventually was shipped to the Far East, where he had a wonderful argument with his younger brother Hallam. Here’s Ronald Blythe’s account:

 

When he (Julian) was stationed in India he was urged by his brother Hallam to try and drop is English attitudes and ‘to read Kalidasa, to study the Vedanta, and to do anything that might help him to understand the soul of the country he was in,” but, says Hallam, ‘He replied very briefly … saying that he was fully taken up with thinking and reading about the things he loved at home, that he had no interest whatever in the East and did not want to go any further East than East Anglia in the future.

 

One brother wanted to understand the world and the other wanted to understand the shire.

They seem to me to be kindred spirits. Both were concerned with a sense of place. They differed on whether the broad view or the deep view of place is best.

Both are essential, so I don’t think one view could be best. Whichever you choose, it would be deficient in a way.

But over a long life, I have wanted to see the world and have wanted to know the county. I’d have loved to have heard that argument.

• Ronald Blythe’s essay “Julian Tennyson and Suffolk Scene” was collected in Field Work; Norwich: Black Dog Books, 2007, pp. 140-3. The quotation is on p. 141. 

Deer ticks and preferred habitat

 I saw a photograph of workers dragging large pieces of cloth — picture a ragged shirt or coat — through stands of Japanese barberry. The workers were collecting deer ticks for the Minnesota Department of Agriculture.

Researchers have found high concentrations of deer ticks in stands of Japanese barberry.

Ironically, deer don’t eat Japanese barberry, deterred by the plant’s sharp spines. The plant is a recent arrival in North America. Gardeners planted it as an ornamental. It has been thriving in the wild for at least 40 years.

Why are deer ticks attracted to Japanese barberry?

It roots from its stems, forming thickets, which shelter mice from predators. The theory is that the ticks follow the mice.

I wish I could interest scientists in the question of what other plants — particularly those in the Georgia Piedmont — attract ticks.

I think ticks prefer blackberry canes. My hypothesis is that they have evolved a preference for a plant that berry-eating animals, including me, will eventually blunder through, looking for a snack.

Of course, it could be observer’s bias. It could be that I see more ticks on blackberry canes because I love blackberries. But I’ve gotten interested in the question and have been looking for ticks on other plants on the forest floor. I think the question is worth testing.

Perhaps the research has been done, and I just can’t find it in the literature. Were I in charge of a couple of graduate students, you know what we’d be doing.

A law to revive the Good Old Days

 In the Middle Ages, the wool trade made parts of England rich. Flocks filled the fields. Many houses had looms. The fabulous wool churches were built with the wealth.

But commercial goods tend to run in cycles. Bust follows boom, and by the reign of Charles II people looked back on a Golden Age.

In 1666, political leaders decided to Make England Great Again by promoting the wool trade. Parliament passed laws requiring that the dead be buried in woolen shrouds.

The original law had to be amended a couple of times — it was hoped that terrifying fines would force unenthusiastic shroud consumers to comply.

The law was dumb and ineffective. 

The laws being passed today in the United States are dumb. We can marvel at the transcendental levels of stupidity at play.  But we can’t pretend dumb laws are a new thing. This kind of thing has a long history.

The writer’s jump start

 Lydia Davis discusses John Ashbery’s notion of the poetic jump start in an article in Harper’s.

Davis’s article is about why writers write, and she says some intriguing things about why she writes. But her remarks on Ashbery’s notion of needing an occasional jump start stole the show for me.

Ashbery had poets he turned to when his batteries were low. These poets were not necessarily major influences on his work. They were helpful because Ashbery could see what each was trying to do. He could see how each had tried to achieve his or her aims. When Ashbery looked at what each of these poets had done, he found it easier to get back to his own work.

That’s the poetic jump start. Is there something similar for those of us who don’t write poetry?

Here are a few examples of stories and books that interest me:

• Guy Davenport and Bernard Malamud wrote some stories about historical characters. The stories are so deeply researched it’s hard to tell where fact ends and fiction begins. Davenport’s story “John Charles Tapner” is an astonishing example.

• Montaigne’s Essays are an attempt by one writer to figure out what he really thought about things. It was an investigation into what was on his mind.

• Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer is an example of what can happen if a writer doggedly investigates a question that interests him. Hoffer started with the question of how mass movements begin. He kept researching as new questions arose. Hoffer would have been fascinated by the mass movements that are undermining this country today.

• The Rev. Gilbert White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne is an example of a book about a place. Many other writers — including Nan Shepherd, Aldo Leopold, David George Haskell, Ronald Blythe, Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin — have written books about places that I admire.

I could go on. But the point is that when I have an idea that interests me, it sometimes helps to have a model.

I’ve heard musicians say that they listen to music, not looking for something to imitate, but looking for something they might want to sample or riff on. It’s a similar idea.

The moral of the story: When you find kindred spirits, keep up with their work.

• Source: Lydia Davis, “Demanding Pleasures: On the art of observation”; Harper’s, July 2025. It’s here:

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/07/demanding-pleasures-lydia-davis-observation/

‘The technique by which the god is sought’

 The phrase is Nan Shepherd’s. Since it makes sense to me, I suppose I’m a theist in some way I don’t understand.

My problem is this: I make it a practice to walk in natural places. I walked through the pine forests of East Texas, along the marshes of Galveston Island and beside the creeks of the Hill Country. When we moved to Georgia, I got settled by getting into the woods, rather than joining the Newcomer’s Club.

Recently, I found myself recommending walks through the woods to a friend. As I was talking, it struck me that I really do believe this: Walking in the woods or in a marsh or in a desert is healing, although I don’t understand how that could be.

I know exercise is good for you. I know that seeing beautiful plants and wildlife can lift your mood. But that’s not what I was talking about when I recommended a walk through the forest to my friend. It wasn’t what Nan Shepherd was after in her countless treks through the Cairngorms. Here’s what she said:

 

I believe that I now understand in some small measure why the Buddhist goes on pilgrimages to a mountain. The journey is itself part of the technique by which the god is sought. It is a journey into Being; for as I penetrate more deeply into the mountain’s life, I penetrate also into my own.

 

• Source: Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain; New York: Scribner, 2025, p. 108.

Thinking ahead to the 250th

 It appears we are going ahead with plans for the 250^th anniversary of the country, despite the campaign to undermine the country itself.

Perhaps in planning next year’s celebrations we could use a quotation from H.L. Mencken as our motto:

 

Liberty, if it means anything at all, means that body of rights which the citizen reserves to himself, even as against the government. … Thus a conflict is set up between the rights of the citizen and the power and security of the government. In so far as the citizen prevails the government is weak, and in so far as the government prevails the citizen is not a citizen at all, but a subject.

 

The powers claimed by the current occupant of the White House reduce citizens to something less.

• Source: The quotation is from an article H.L. Mencken wrote for The Chicago Sunday Tribune in 1926. I found it mentioned in notes in Library of America’s “Story of the Week.”

https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2010/09/nature-of-liberty.html

Failure to grieve

 Elise Boulding, a sociologist and Quaker activist, got her finger on the country’s central problem: a “failure to grieve over its shortcomings.”

It’s a country that exterminated the indigenous people and stole the land; kidnapped and enslaved Africans because it wanted an exploitable source of labor; asked people of Japanese descent to fight in World War II while imprisoning their families in camps. The list of shortcomings is long — if you pay attention. Boulding is right that most Americans simply don’t.

It’s the Fourth of July, and instead of a celebratory day, I’m thinking of a somber day, a day to grieve over failures. I think, given the circumstances, that’s the place to start.

A few things about Thomas A. Clark

 Gavin Goodwin, who teaches at Aberystwyth University in Wales, says the poetry of Thomas A. Clark is similar to the work of Objectivist poets such as Charles Reznikoff and Lorine Niedecker.

I’ve mentioned Reznikoff and Niedecker many times. Goodwin’s observations helped me think about the things I like about Clark and his poetry. Here’s the short list:

• Clark’s poems have sharp images drawn from the natural world and often appear as fragments. Each fragment is the recording of an image — something like a snapshot. Clark’s longer poems are collections of these short items.

• Clark goes his own way. He left school at 15 and supported himself by working at unskilled jobs in factories and warehouses. He’s self-educated.

• Clark came to literature through music. From popular music he discovered jazz and jazz lovers. He read Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and started writing.

• Clark is interested in getting poetry outside of its traditional channels. In 1973, Clark and his wife, Laurie, a visual artist, founded Moschatel Press. They publish short poems with illustrations on cards and in booklets. They’ve printed some poems on kites and bags.

• Clark’s poems sometimes are reflections, rather than an image. The reflections work with the images. For example, Clark often walks through the landscape, and his poetry is full of images of stone, water, snow, lichens. Occasionally, you get a line that suggests why he keeps walking:

 

Attention to detail revives the sense of scale.

 

That short poem, untitled, was written in 2016.

• Source: Gavin Goodwin, “Beyond the Page: The formal possibilities of Thomas A. Clark”; Writing in Practice, 5 (2019). The article is on the site of the National Association of Writers in Education:

https://www.nawe.co.uk/DB/wip-editions/articles/beyond-the-page-the-formal-possibilities-of-thomas-a.-clark.html

‘In Praise of Walking’

 I do not know the poet Thomas A. Clark of Pittenweem, Scotland. But if I met him, I think I’d like him. People with shared sensibilities find it easy to get along.

He’s a walker and thinks walkers’ thoughts. His poem “In Praise of Walking” is a series of 40 items: propositions, aphorisms, adages, and a rhetorical question.

The answer to the question that ends the poem is: No, there’s nothing better than to be outside. 

I like Clark and his poems because I can respond to his interests in a way that I can’t to those of other poets. I love to walk in natural places. I get the sense he does too.

I once was chastised by a fan of Samuel Johnson’s who thought I failed to appreciate the great man’s gifts as an observer of nature. That might be true, but even when Johnson was enjoying the wilds of Scotland, he seemed to be a man who wanted to get back to London. Or so it seemed to me.

Clark does not seem that way. Here are items No. 3 and 4 of his poem:

 

That something exists outside ourselves and our preoccupations, so near, so readily available, is our greatest blessing.

 

Walking is the human way of getting about.

 

And this congregation of one replies: Amen.

• Source: Thomas A. Clark’s site is here:

https://thomasaclarkblog.blogspot.com

Clark: ‘Poor Poetry’

 Thomas A. Clark imagines a common or poor poetry: 

a poetry without glory, using plain diction, withdrawn

from ambition, lacking in rhetorical skill, a spare poetry,

not given by the culture but passed from hand to hand.

 

The Scottish Poetry Library says Clark’s poetry pays attention “to the experience of walking in landscape,” which is why I tracked him down.

I’d like to think this kind of poetry is possible: the kind that’s passed down hand to hand, with the noise that dominates the culture not having much to do with it.

• Thomas A. Clark’s “Poor Poetry” is available at the Scottish Poetry Library:

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/poor-poetry/