RLS on influential books

 Robert Louis Stevenson’s tastes in literature are interesting. I read his essay “Books which have Influenced Me” not because I wanted to know about books that I should read but because I wanted some insight into his quirky mind

Here’s his main argument:

 

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction.  They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards unlearn.  They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change — that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out.  To be so, they must be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work that is so serves the turn of instruction. 

 

Stevenson loved Shakespeare’s characters above all others. And outside Shakespeare his most beloved character was Alexander Dumas’s D’Artagnan, the older guy in Vicomte de Bragelonne.

I don’t share Stevenson’s sensibilities. But I was pleased that we share a love of Montaigne’s Essays. Stevenson said it’s “a book not easily outlived.” I like that line.

• Source: Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays on the Art of Writing; London: Chatto & Windus, 1905. Project Gutenberg’s edition is here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10761

After the cold snap

 Hard freezes before Thanksgiving seem early to me, but I’m a newcomer to the Piedmont.

The only blooms I’ve seen in the woods are small asters. In the garden, some Mexican marigolds came through. With few flowers, most of the pollinators have disappeared.

While trying to find bees, wasps and yellowjackets, I’ve found red-femured spotted orbweavers everywhere.Neoscona domiciliorum is a common, beautiful spider. The first segment of each leg is red. The lower leg has alternating bands of gray and black.

I don’t know if this population explosion is seasonal, something purely local or observer bias. (I suspect these spiders have always been here, and I have been too dense to notice.) These spiders prefer the woodlands of the Southeast. They like to build webs around houses, especially under the eaves. They sure like Stone Mountain, a village in the woods.

The nearest pond is covered with pollen.

Most of the leaves in the forest are gone. But while we were visiting the pond, a gust of wind hit a big maple, and the falling leaves reminded me of the kind of heavy snowfall you see around the Great Lakes. Everything came down at once.

Robert Louis Stevenson said this:

 

Day by day we perfect ourselves in the art of seeing nature more favourably.

 

I wonder if that’s true. And I can hear the voice of my old professor, warning of observer bias.

• Source: The quotation is from “On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places” in Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by William Lyon Phelps; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906. Project Gutenberg’s edition is here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10761

Capturing 'the youthful soul'

 Maybe it was yesterday’s note on a 15-year-old farmer in England that made me think of Denis Johnson, who liked stories that “speak to the experience of the youthful soul.”

Maybe it was because I grew up in the Navy, but it seems to me that most young men tell stories about themselves. The stories get larger, as if bigger, better stories could create a bigger, better man. Eventually, the subject of the autobiographical stories is no longer a human being but a fictional character. As Johnson put it:

 

It started out being almost pure reminiscence and then it became lying, and if you put it between covers a lie becomes a work of fiction.

 

Johnson’s early stories are between the covers of Jesus’ Son.

• Source: Janet Steen, “Lying Down in the Dirt: An Interview with Denis Johnson”; Longreads, Feb. 28, 2018. It’s here:

https://longreads.com/2018/02/28/lying-down-in-the-dirt-an-interview-with-denis-johnson/

Portrait of a farmer at 15

 Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield is a strange book, sometimes called a novel. If you could imagine James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men set in East Anglia, you’d be in the neighborhood. Blythe started life as a farmhand. Village life was disappearing in the 1960s, when Blythe was interviewing and writing. The characters are fictional, he said. They are also based on real people.

One of my favorites is Terry Lloyd, a 21-year-old pig farmer.

When Lloyd turned 15, his father gave him 4 acres and an old barn. The lad didn’t have a car, so he rode a bicycle to a nearby farm, where he worked for wages. Lloyd saved his money and started with a few pigs. He sold them and put his money into breeding stock. At 21, he had a car and all the pigs he could tend to.

Blythe points out the trends that made a 4-acre farm impractical. But he adds:

 

… the truth is that the almost sensuous contentment of doing what you like on your own bit of land persists as strongly now as it ever did.

 

Akenfield is a book about village life, which was once largely a story about the families of farmworkers. Like much of this country, East Anglia was once populated by such folk. 

The book is not about the many individual characters who tell this tale. It’s about a place — and a way of life that no longer exists. But I wish another writer would take a crack at Terry Lloyd as a fictional character. Some people can’t be coached, trained or advised by the time they’re 15. I think they make good stories.

• Source: Ronald Blythe, Akenfield; New York: New York Review Books, 2015, p. 261.

Shaping opinions on books

 Gerald Howard said this about Malcolm Cowley: 

Cowley stood in relation to books in the ’30s much the way Pauline Kael did to films in The New Yorker in the ’70s: It was a requirement in intellectual circles that you have an opinion about his opinion.

 

That much influence in one voice seems unhealthy to me. To me, criticism is best when there are  a lot of different opinions.

But I am interested in how the public’s tastes are formed. I’d love to understand how some writers become part of the canon and others remain outside.

At one time there was such a person as a woman or man of letters, whose talk about literature helped a lot of people find their next book. (I would think of Virginia Woolf before I’d think of Cowley.) It’s an interesting role.

• Source: The quotation is from Dwight Garner’s “American Literature Owes a Great Debt to This 20^th-Century ‘Insider’”; The New York Times, Nov. 10, 2025. It’s a review of Gerald Howard’s The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature; London: Penguin, 2025

Paul Goodman’s way of thinking

 In the 1960s, Paul Goodman proposed remaking New York City’s public schools.

The school system had something like a million students and 50,000 teachers. The typical class had one teacher and almost 30 students.

Goodman didn’t want to think in terms of classes. He wanted tiny schools of 25 students. Each school would have four teachers: a licensed teacher, a college kid with no license, a parent and a teenager who might have graduated from high school.

Goodman claimed that the new system wouldn’t cost any more than the old one.

The proposal gets to the quality of Goodman’s thought that I admire. We humans do things collectively that promote the common good — like educating the young. How we do that is a choice. Goodman was good at making us, the commoners, see that we have a choice and that our current choice might not be the best one.

I’m a dinosaur, but I always hope to find that quality of thought when I look at a newspaper’s editorial page. I want to see imagination.

Every community has problems, and I read editorial pages because I hope to see somebody taking a stab at solutions. It helps if that stab is intelligent, inspired, imaginative. Discussions start.

• “Paul Goodman Changed My Life,” a documentary film directed by Jonathan Lee and released in 2011, is available here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XimPXYMsIY

The discussion about public education begins around the 40-minute mark.

‘A Young Pacifist’

 When Mathew Ready Goodman died at 20, his father wrote: 

Matty was essentially an unpolitical person; his absorbing intellectual interest was in sciences — in which he had gifts, and he wanted to live and let live in a community of friends — at which he remarkably succeeded. Nevertheless, he was continually engaged in political actions, against war and irrational authority.

 

Matty’s father, Paul Goodman, was part of the counterculture of the 1960s. Paul Goodman had a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He was also openly bisexual and an anarchist. He had problems holding academic positions. After spending most of his life on the margins, Paul Goodman wrote an influential book, Growing up Absurd. When someone asked him about why so many young people were becoming “delinquents” in the 1950s, Goodman suggested that it was the society that was off, not the young people. The system the kids were expected to conform to was the problem — not the kids.

Matty died in 1967 while climbing a mountain in New England. Paul Goodman said his son refused to register for the draft at 18. Matty lived his adult life illegally because he thought he had an obligation to resist “irrational authority.” Matty knew that, when the authorities came knocking, he was headed to prison or to Canada.

I find that phrase “irrational authority” haunting, given the failures of the current administration.

Authority that is not rational cannot be legitimate. That, in a nutshell, was the point that the authors of the Declaration of Independence were trying to get the authorities to see.

When a rogue government intrudes on the lives of its own people, it often does the most damage to the young.

• Source: Paul Goodman’s essay “A Young Pacifist” is in War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar & Peace Writing; New York: Library of America, 2016, pp. 432-43. The quotation is on p. 433. It’s here:

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

A riddle about writing fiction

 I ran across one of Claire Keegan’s koans about writing fiction: 

A short story begins after what happens happens.

 

In the way of koans, I ran across one possible meaning before running across the koan. The illumination arrived with the Story of the Week from Library of America. This is from one of Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, “Now I Lay Me.”

 

I had different ways of occupying myself while I lay awake. I

would think of a trout stream I had fished along when I was a

boy and fish its whole length very carefully in my mind; fishing

very carefully under all the logs, all the turns of the bank, the

deep holes and the clear shallow stretches, sometimes catching

trout and sometimes losing them. I would stop fishing at noon

to eat my lunch; sometimes on a log over the stream; some-

times on a high bank under a tree, and I always ate my lunch

very slowly and watched the stream below me while I ate. 

 

The story begins after what happened. What happened was that a soldier was wounded. The story is about what he does when he can’t sleep.

• Source: Ernest Hemingway story “Now I Lay Me” is available at Library of America’s Story of the Week site:

https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2025/07/now-i-lay-me.html

A poet’s inventiveness

 Someone said that poems should offer the reader little surprises along the way. Perhaps you could say the same for books of poetry.

Kim Stafford’s books often have sections of poems on recurring themes: the wonders of the natural world, the influence of family, the corrosiveness of American politics. But his books also have poems that surprise, as in “What is this doing here?”

Here are six examples from Singer Come from Afar:

• “New House Rules” — It’s a list of phrases politicians use when they don’t want to hear what constituents are saying while pretending that they do.

• “Practicing the Complex Yes” — Since saying “no” cuts off conversation, here are phrases you can use to say “yes” (kind of).

• “All My Relations” — Almost every book has an acknowledgments section. This is the poetic version.

• “Poetry Doctor” — A physician is asking a poem what’s wrong. The exam involves a checklist. “Does your heart ever skip?”

• “Ostracon” — This is a series of phrases and fragments you might find scratched into pottery shards, which ancient Athenians used as ballots and notepads. “Pain is a substance, a stain.”

• “Stories from Dr. Zeus” — Imagine that we had tales of the Greek heroes told in the style of Dr. Seuss. Can you imagine Agamemnon as a toddler?

If someone asked me how to be happy, today I’d say: Buy Kim Stafford’s books and read them.

• Source: Kim Stafford, Singer Come from Afar; Pasadena, Calif.: Red Hen Press, 2021.

Stafford: ‘Enough’

 It was cold, but we had been cooped up in the house for two days. So we bundled up and walked along the Yellow River. Most of the leaves in the woods had fallen. You couldn’t see the trail. Everything was covered in a blanket of leaves.

There’s a stand of beech trees on a bluff over the river, and the autumn light seemed to go through the leaves, rather than reflect off them. Beech leaves don’t fall in autumn, but they get thinner as they lose their chlorophyl, becoming almost translucent. Looking up, you could see sunlight more than leaves, but the leaves were green, yellow, gold, tan, brown.

We stopped and stared and lost track of the time.

Nan Shepherd said that people keep going into wild places because they can’t bring back the memories. You go out and see something spectacular. You remember how it made you feel. But you can’t keep the details — the colors, the smells — in memory. So you go out again.

Kim Stafford’s poem “Enough” is the best I’ve found at describing that feeling. Stafford saw a small dun bird running a rapids, “bobbing and trilling.” He could barely believe it:

 

and I felt — enough, that’s enough this life

has been, coming to this.

 

I can understand that: not wanting a single thing more, having seen enough for a lifetime. That gratitude is sincere. The fire is cozy. It’s too cold to go out. And yet …

• Source: Kim Stafford, Singer Come from Afar; Pasadena, Calif.: Red Hen Press, 2021, p. 70.

Cold snap with yellowjackets

 The forecasters were right: It was cold, 34 degrees, so I donned the bee suit and poured 5 gallons of soapy water down the entrance of a yellowjacket den in the woodlot.

These yellowjackets are burrow dwellers. There might have been thousands inside. I’d seen dozens hovering at the entrance before the cold snap.

The Wise Woman bought the bee suit without asking and insisted I wear it. She was right. Despite the cold, I was met by a dozen sentries.

I don’t like killing — not even rattlesnakes, scorpions and black widows. But I also have a sense of myself as an animal with family members who are less murderous, and thus more vulnerable, than I am. I accept that some animals can’t live next to others.

I have had friends who’d be outraged. They’d tell me I was in the yellowjackets’ habitat.

I’m not sure that’s true. I’d say the yellowjackets and I are in disputed territory — not theirs, not mine.

They won Round 1. I took Round 2.

A note on Veterans Day

 During the 1930s, Stalin purged the Red Army. He got rid of every officer he thought was not personally loyal to him. He got rid of people whose thinking struck him as suspicious — and he was suspicious of people who could solve problems that were beyond his own abilities.

A lot of talented, capable officers disappeared. 

The Soviet Union was a big country and shouldn’t have been pushed around by Nazi Germany. But the Nazis came close to subjugating a bigger, stronger opponent in part because the Soviets lacked competent commanders.

You’d think that kind of stupidity would be rare in history, but it’s not. The Athenians were winning the war against the Spartans until they started executing their own generals and replacing them with people appointed by demagogues.

I think the Current Occupant of the White House is a despicable human being who has done a lot to make this a weaker, more vulnerable county. He has weakened our military by running off officers who rose to the top because of their competence, expertise and leadership.

The U.S. military deserves better.

Getting through it

 It was 72 degrees Sunday afternoon as we covered plants in the garden and put insulation around the drip irrigation lines.

It’s supposed to be 34 this morning and 26 tomorrow.

I filled the bird feeders, thinking of Kim Stafford’s poem about a sparrow, giving itself instructions, worried about the eggs.

 

Use your body to be the tent over tender pebbles,

lopsided moons. Then wait, warm, alert, still

through wind and rain, hawk-shadow, owl night.

 

Stafford says that when we humans are enduring hawk-shadow and owl night, we ought to learn from the sparrow. Use instinct, thought and wisdom, the poet says. Get through it.

Before bedtime, I put logs and kindling in the fireplace, ready for morning.

• Source: Kim Stafford, Singer Come from Afar; Pasadena, Calif.: Red Hen Press, 2021, p. 18.

The find at Aguada Fénix

 I have spent the past 50 years thinking that the civilizations of Mesoamerica built up gradually. I thought that local chieftains built mounds with temples and tombs. As the civilizations got more sophisticated, with larger populations and better organization, larger monuments were possible.

I’ve visited Teotihuacán near Mexico City twice. I sat on the pyramids, which were built between 100 BCE and 550 CE, thinking I was sitting, if not on the apex of Mesoamerican civilization, at least on one of the peaks of the range. I’d grown up on stories that the pyramids in Egypt were built by myriad people enslaved or coerced by an absolute ruler with a sophisticated bureaucracy. I’d absorbed the idea that something similar had happened with the succeeding civilizations in Mesoamerica. I’d thought that works on the scale of Teotihuacán weren’t possible without the hierarchy.

This past week, we learned that an earlier people built a bigger monument at Aguada Fénix near the Guatemalan border. The complex — a series of nesting crosses with a long plateau and a series of canals — was built between 1050 and 700 BCE. The axes are 9 by 7.5 kilometers.

Researchers haven’t found evidence that this was the work of a great ruler. It seems that Aguada Fénix was built in a pattern that represented a common understanding of the cosmos. The possibility that the workers who built it weren’t coerced — that they came because they wanted to help build the monument and to live near it — is exciting.

To me, this is news. It’s also humbling —yet another case in which my basic understanding of the world has proven wrong.

• Source: Tekeshi Inomata, Daniela Triadan, et. al., “Landscape-wide cosmogram built by the early community of Aguada Fénix in southeastern Mesoamerican; ScienceAdvances, Vol. 11, No. 45, 5 Nov. 2025. It’s here:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aea2037

Tony Harrison, 1937-2025

 Tony Harrison, the British poet, died at 88. I can still remember reading a section his poem “V.,” alternately horrified and fascinated.

When a version was aired on television in the 1980s, people were outraged. The poem includes all the naughty words, as well as racial and gender slurs.

The passage that gripped me begins in a graveyard that is subsiding because it is over a worked-out coalmine. The poet, a scholar making a visit to his parents’ graves, sees listing tombstones painted with profanities.

Soccer hooligans and skinheads have been cutting through the cemetery with spray paint, taking their aggression out on the dead. The vandals are supporters of the local football club, Leeds United.

The poet thinks the “United” on his parents’ graves hints of oracle, but most of the vandals aren’t sages. They are sick with hatred.

The poet gradually reads the significance of v. It starts as Leeds United v. some rival football club. Then it is v.whatever racial or ethnic group comes to mind. Finally it is just v. — the mark of person who is against everything.

Harrison was born in Leeds to a working-class family. He went to the University of Leeds, where he studied classics. Some of his poems feature dialogs between himself, the poet-scholar he was, and the working-class guy he might have been.

Election in Georgia

  In Georgia, the statewide ballot had two races. Two incumbents on the Public Service Commission, which regulates public utilities, were seeking re-election. Republicans held all seven seats, but both incumbents lost to Democrats.

Percentage of the vote for Incumbent No. 1: 37.

Percentage of the vote for Incumbent No. 2: 37.

Approval rating of the Current Occupant of the White House: 37.

Republican leaders in Georgia said the election has nothing to do with dissatisfaction with the Current Occupant. They insisted he was not on the ballot.

If the Republican Party were not a wholly owned subsidiary of the Current Occupant, some of us would have considered voting for a Republican candidate. Like it or not, the Party of Lincoln has been rebranded.

A muddle with maples

 The prettiest tree in the forest was a scraggly little maple, hardly bigger than a redbud. But it was a picture of the progression of autumn. Its top was flame red, and as your eyes came down the tree you could see oranges, yellows and then greens. From top to bottom, you could see a thousand shades. 

I had to go stand next to it, though the Wise Woman, concerned about snakes, fussed at me for getting off the trail.

I’m half convinced that the gorgeous little tree was a bigtooth maple, Acer grandidentatum.

But I’m not a botanist. And if it and its kin really are western sugar maples, they are a long way from home.

You see Acer grandidentatum in Central Texas, which is part of my range. The field guide says you can see those lovely trees in spots along an arc through New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Idaho.

Bigtooth maples grow west of the Mississippi, but Georgia is full of gardeners, and I suspect that some ornamental trees have escaped. You see all kinds of maples, many from Japan, around here.

I’m muddled, and the only cure is to become more familiar with the natives.

If you’re curious, the common natives are red maple, A. rubrum, and Southern sugar maple, A. floridanum. We also have chalkbark maple, A. leucoderme, and sugar maple, A. saccharum.

Yellow River, early November

 Along the Yellow River, I saw a cluster of red berries on a trailing vine. The berries of Nephroia carolina are bright, and one of its common names is Carolina coralbead, which describes it.

Other common names are Carolina snailseed and Carolina moonseed. The seeds inside the berries remind some folks of snail shells and others of halfmoons.

In Texas, people call it Margil’s vine, after Father Antonio Margil, the Franciscan missionary who helped set up the missions in East Texas in the early 1700s. He also was a founder of Mission San José in San Antonio.

The river was rising. Along the banks, beggarticks and camphorweed were still blooming.

Questions from Galeano

 On second thought, a better explanation of the kind of book Eduardo Galeano wrote in The Book of Embraces: 

I mentioned that the margins of my copy are filled with notes, most of which are questions. They are not questions about material in the book. They are questions for me. I’m not sure if I asked them or if Galeano did.

In the first of two items about the poet Pablo Neruda, Galeano tells of visiting one of the homes of the dead poet. People cannot ask the sage for advice, so they leave notes on the fence outside. In the second, Galeano tells of another house where Neruda lived. The house was boarded up when people heard a creepy noise inside. Investigating, they inexplicably found an eagle.

What kind of stories do we tell ourselves when our heroes die? What kind of stories do we tell ourselves in grief?

Did Galeano ask those questions? Or did I, reading his book, do the asking?

Sometimes, when you have a good conversation, it’s like that. This book is like that.

• Source: Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces, translated by Cedric Belfrage; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991. “Neruda/1 and Neruda/2” are on pp. 38-9.

‘The Book of Embraces’

 Eduardo Galeano was this kind of writer: He made collections, cabinets that contained curiosities.

The Book of Embraces is a collection of 197 items: short stories, anecdotes, maxims, questions.

One of my favorites is “Chronicle of the City of Havana,” which is about Nelson Valdez, whose parents fled Cuba. Nelson went to Havana. Each day he took the bus to the library to learn about the place his parents loved and hated.

One day, the driver saw a magnificent woman and stopped the bus to introduce himself. The riders applauded and encouraged him — until he disappeared with the woman into an ice cream parlor. When he dallied, the passengers hit the horn. But the driver was lost. So one passenger took the wheel and drove on, stop at each stop, until she reached hers. She turned the wheel over to the next passenger, who drove to the next stop. …

The moral: You can’t learn Cuba in the library.

The embraces in this book are shared memories — things we all know in some way, things that seem to be part of human experience, not just personal experience. We exchange them, back and forth. The book is like that intimate exchange. It’s like a good conversation.

Galeano’s book is wonderful — but only if you, the reader, jump into the conversation.

As I look at the notes that have accumulated in the margins, I don’t see discoveries or insights. I see questions.

• Source: Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces, translated by Cedric Belfrage; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991. “Chronicle of the City of Havana” is on pp. 54-5. Galeano’s meditation on embraces is in “Chronicle of the City of Montevideo,” pp. 248-9.

Kindred spirits

 Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan essayist, was talking with Juan Gelman, the Argentine poet, about contemporaries. The poet asked, “Who are my contemporaries?”

Gelman became a citizen of Mexico after the collapse of democracy in Argentina in the 1970s. The autocratic government — as the thugs were called — murdered Gelman’s son and daughter-in-law.

Gelman said wherever he went in the world — Buenos Aires, Paris, wherever — he ran into people who smelled of fear. They didn’t seem like contemporaries. Perhaps the word suggests some kind of camaraderie that just wasn’t there for Gelman.

However, Gelman did not feel that he was alone. Galeano’s account:

 

But there is a Chinese, who, thousands of years ago, wrote a poem about a goatherd who is far from his beloved, and yet can hear in the middle of the night, in the middle of the snow, the sound of her comb running through her hair. And reading this distant poem, Juan finds that yes, these people — the poet, the goatherd and the woman — are truly his contemporaries.

 

I would love to better understand how we connect with art and artists — and with their fictional characters.

If I were to list my comrades — the people I feel closest too — I’d include people I never met and characters who existed only in stories.

I can imagine a biography that includes a list of characters from fiction who were beloved by the subject of the biography. I’m sure this person’s choice of contemporaries would be telling.

• Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces, translated by Cedric Belfrage; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991, p. 244. 

On not writing what I read

 I read a lot of poetry. I don’t write poems.

When I turn on the tap, remarks about simple observations come out. No poetry. No fiction.

• Note: For the truly curious, see “The remark as a literary form,” July 4, 2022.