Learning about belief

 Robert Frost argued that poetry is central to an education. Thinking is learning to manage metaphors, and that’s best learned by reading poetry, he said.

He also said that the student of poetry will learn about belief. There are several species. Love-belief is belief in someone else. The relationship between lover and beloved is believed into something real.

That line is enlightening to me. A lot of love poetry has a peculiar sense of yearning. The poet wants something to be true or real and is writing as if it were. Regardless of how the poem is written, I tend to hear it in the subjunctive.

Frost’s take on self-belief is fascinating. He says that when a person is young, he knows more about himself than he can prove. His knowledge isn’t accepted by other people, especially adults. The young person believes that self into existence.

I’m not a teacher, but if I were, I’d want to talk about Frost.

• Sources: Frost’s essay “Education by Poetry” is in The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, edited by Mark Richardson; Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard, 2007. The parts of his essay discussed here on are on pp. 109-10.

For an earlier note on this essay, see Frost: ‘Education by Poetry,’ June 5, 2024. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2024/06/frost-education-by-poetry.html

The raid in Georgia

 If you’re trying to make sense of the FBI raid on the Fulton County elections office in Atlanta and the seizure of 2020 ballots, it’s not about the 2020 election. It’s about this year’s midterms and 2028.

The 2020 ballots have been counted three times. Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in Georgia. Everyone in Georgia knows about Trump’s calls to the state’s Republican leaders, ordering them to find the votes to make him the winner. He was rebuffed by the governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and secretary of state.

However, the State Election Board, which is allied with Trump, is seeking to take over elections in Fulton County, which is overwhelmingly Democratic. Just about everyone here believes the raid was staged to find a pretext for declaring that the Fulton County election office is “underperforming,” so that Trump loyalists can decide which ballots are counted.

An interesting detail: The head of the FBI’s office in Atlanta, Paul W. Brown, apparently left the agency shortly before the raid, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

News of an earlier day

 As a young reporter, I once spent 24 hours in a van with my friend and boss Phil Latham. We were parked at a motel at the busiest crossroads in Lufkin, Texas, a couple hours north of Houston.

Phil had wondered what kinds of things came through town on the tanker trucks that filled up at the refineries and chemical plants on the coast. Many of the trucks headed toward Chicago and the Midwest, meaning they came our way.

How many trucks came through town each day? What were they carrying?

We consulted state agencies. We asked the fire department, which was in charge whenever there was an accident involving a spill. When we asked how many tankers came through town, no one knew.

So Phil and I spent 24 hours in a van, armed with binoculars, reading the tags on the tankers that told emergency crews what they were dealing with. Each tag had a 4-digit code. We tried to stay awake so we could get two sets of eyes on each tag.

Hundreds of tankers came through. As you’d expect, most were carrying gasoline. But a surprising number were carrying industrial chemicals. Some were so specialized and so toxic the fire department was not equipped to deal with them. In a couple of cases, emergency officials hadn’t heard of the chemicals. These extremely hazardous chemicals were passing neighborhoods and schools.

I suppose you could call it a stakeout, although the word conjures up a sense of excitement that was absent. Staying alert for 24 hours involves a lot of coffee, sandwiches and cookies. It warps your sense of time. Toward the end, you’re looking at your watch every 3 minutes, wondering whether a half hour had passed.

It seems to me that our sense of space also can become warped. We imagine that dangers and threats — or just the things that should concern us — are somewhere else, somewhere distant. 

Supply and demand

 The British novelist Lee Child got his education through the public library. Here’s a recollection from his childhood: 

We moved the next year to Birmingham, where the library system let you take two books at once, which was great, except with weekly visits two wasn’t really enough, so I instituted a Chicago voter-fraud system at our house. All visitors were signed up for library tickets. Deceased relatives were encouraged to apply. Soon, I could get six books a week, a pace I have kept up all my life.

 

I like the suggestion that things in limited supply take on great value. And of course he’s right. Two a week is not enough.

• Source: Lee Child, “Lee Child: Books let me escape my dull, grey Sixties childhood”; The Sunday Times, Jan. 17, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/get-britain-reading/article/lee-child-author-prison-literacy-interview-x6nb88890

Hayden: ‘Ice Storm’

 I read Robert Hayden’s “Ice Storm” in wonder. How much can be said in 62 words.

The poem describes trees — bound in ice, battered, bent and broken — and dissolves into a prayer:

 

The trees themselves, as in winters past,

will survive their burdening,

broken thrive. And am I less to You,

my God, than they?

 

The poem was written in the days when corrupt governments brutalized and intimidated law-abiding citizens who were African American.

The poem was read (by me) during the big ice storm, when a corrupt government was brutalizing and intimidating law-abiding citizens in Minnesota.

A story of pioneers

 One of the minor masterpieces in American literature is a false biography of two early residents of Chase County, Kansas — he and she.

The short piece is not exactly fact or fiction. William Least Heat-Moon assembled it.

Least Heat-Moon was working on what he called a deep map of a county in the middle of the country and found an old marker in Elk Cemetery. He couldn’t make out the name or names. The lack, if that’s what it was, bothered him and eventually disturbed his dreams.

Least Heat-Moon finally got out the four-volume oral history of the county and began to assemble a story — an anecdote here, a detail there — making the two pioneers. He and she settled when the Kansas or Kaw Indians still passed through. The gaps between the logs of the pioneers’ cabin were wide enough to throw a cat through.

 

sometimes the Kaw passed by and stopped to look through the gaps and once to make friends she held a mirror up to a gap and scared tarnation out of a painted brave and then there was a laughter like you wouldn’t believe and they took turns gaping into it and admired and chortled and thereafter when passing always stopping to use the mirror …

 

sometimes the whole night she’d hear the Kaws up on the hill where their dead lay buried wailing and moaning and that was the worst sound on the prairie and one spring she realized she hadn’t heard them that year and she never did again …

 

I love the diction. The gap wide enough to throw a cat through will be recognized as a standard measure by people who grew up among country folks.

I also love the way the story handles the most important news of the era — the disappearance of an entire people from their homeland. It seems to me that most of the important stories are recognized in reflection, rather than in the breathless accounts of the day.

• Source: William Least Heat-Moon, PrairyErth; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991, pp. 433-38. The quotations are on p. 434 and p. 436.

Glimpses of an ice storm

 What the weatherwoman said: High over the Georgia Piedmont, warm, moist air came up from the Gulf and collided with the cold front coming in from the Rockies. Temperatures on the ground were much lower — around 20 degrees. The water was warm when it started falling but was ice by the time it hit.

What it looked like:

• The trees, coated, were bright.

• Icicles hung from the roofs of the birdfeeders, which were as crowded as a diner. The birds looked as if they were poking their heads through the bars of a jail.

• The canvas cover over the woodpile was once as soft as a blanket. When I fetched firewood, it was like lifting the hood of a car.

A writer’s process

 The poet William Stafford liked to get up early before the house started to stir. He’d sit with pen and paper. Pretty soon he’d be thinking. Here’s Stafford describing the process: 

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had started to say them. That is, he does not draw on a reservoir; instead, he engages in an activity that brings to him a whole succession of unforeseen stories, poems, essays, plays, laws, philosophies, religions …

 

One implication is the importance of just plain receptivity. When I write, I like to have an interval before me when I am not likely to be interrupted. For me, this means usually the early morning, before others are awake. I get pen and paper, take a glance out of the window (often it is dark out there), and wait. It is like fishing. But I do not wait very long, for there is always a nibble — and this is where receptivity comes in. To get started I will accept anything that occurs to me. Something always occurs, or course, to any of us. We can’t help from thinking.

 

Stafford appears often in this collection of notes. Like him, I love to get up in the morning before the house starts stirring. I sit and think, pen and notebook in hand. I don’t do that because I think I should or out of some sense of obligation or duty. I do it because it’s one of the great pleasures of life.

• Source: William Stafford’s “On the Writing of Poetry” is in The Rag and Bone Shop of The Heart, a poetry anthology edited by Robert Bly, James Hillman, and Michael Meade; New York: HarperPerennial, 1993, p. 181.

A coming storm

 A big winter storm is dangerous, and so the first thought of right-thinking people should be about safety. But I’m a contrarian. I think the storm might be a refreshing reminder that we humans are still a part of nature. We shouldn’t get bent out of shape if we have to admit it occasionally and behave accordingly. 

In Georgia, the governor declared a disaster several days in advance, and we’ve been getting constant messages that strike me as heavy on anxiety and fear. Power outages may be widespread. We forget that the original people bundled up and stayed by the fire eons before anyone had heard of a power grid.

I’m not discounting the danger, but I think it should be the second thought, not the first.

The supplies are in. We’re staying put. Driving on ice is risky in the North, but it’s pure terror in the South. If I get out to see the beauty of the storm, it will be on foot.

I’m looking forward to a couple of days by the fire with a good book. I’m going to see what the poets have to say.

Open inquiry

 Ilana Redstone, a sociologist at the University of Illinois, mentions three features of an atmosphere of open inquiry:

• Any claim can be questioned.

• Questioning something doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

• Exploring an idea doesn’t mean you endorse it.

Professor Redstone studies viewpoint diversity. It’s a topic that has some appeal if you were ever a newspaper editor, and at times she sounds like one.

 

We can’t have a world where there is a diversity of viewpoints, pluralism, and communication across differences, and also have a world where nobody gets offended or upset by what somebody says. At the end of the day, you have to pick one.

 

The newspaper I used to work for would run pages of letters from readers about the major stories of the week. I’d have to request extra space to run them. But the letters were an indicator of the health of the newspaper and of the community that supported it.

When some challenge arose, readers wanted to express their views about the best course of action. They wanted to criticize policies they thought harmed the community. They did that because they cared about the community. And because the newspaper let everyone have a voice, people cared about what was in the paper.

I spent part of my working days trying to convince editors at other papers to open the doors to public commentary. It was a tough sell. For all the talk of freedom of the press, editors in small towns leaned toward self-censorship. In every small town, there is a Grand Moose Club, though it goes by different names. The views expressed by club members are safe commentary. The opposing views are dangerous. Printing them can get an editor fired.

But it’s precisely that uniformity of opinion — by giving voice only to “respectable” people and not publishing material from the dissenters — that makes a newspaper as dull as the meetings of the Moose Club. Every community has its share of dissenters, dissidents and malcontents. And if you didn’t seem signs of them in the village newspaper, you knew that it’s the house organ of the Moose Club. It represents a part of the community, not the whole.

I think that democracy is sound only in communities that have public discussions about public affairs. And, like Professor Redstone, I don’t think you can have discussions about any substantive topic without offending people.

Some of the most painful moments of my life were spent talking to people who had been wounded by the public discussion. They included African Americans, Jews, Muslims and gay people, but it was a long list. These people had done nothing wrong. They didn’t think it was fair for the newspaper to publish prejudiced views.

A prejudiced view is easier to identify in principle than in practice. It is OK to oppose affirmative action, Title IX, a policy of the state of Israel, a law regulating same-sex marriage?

I think it’s better to have discussions about our public life in public. I also think we need rules for what people can and can’t say.

Most people agreed that letter writers shouldn’t be allowed to encourage violence against political opponents. But it came as a shock to some people that they couldn’t accuse their opponents of crimes without evidence of a conviction. People complained endlessly that the paper wouldn’t publish anonymous letters.

People said the newspaper was putting itself out of business because people would just publish their factually challenged, anonymous rants online.

People are free to do that.

But if that’s the state of our public discourse, we’re in trouble.

I think we have a better discourse if we have rules and follow them. And while it’s the style today to mock the idea of gatekeepers, I also think we need a referee. Some poor soul must make the individual calls, knowing only some of them will be as wise and fair and just as he or she would hope. The system works best when that same person must face the wounded and the outraged on the following day.

It’s a terrible system — except when you compare it to the others.

• Sources: Greg Berman, “’A Healthy Democracy Requires Social Trust’: A Conversation with Ilana Redstone”; Harry Frank Gugenheim Foundation, Sept. 9, 2024. It’s here:

http://www.hfg.org/conversations/a-healthy-democracy-requires-social-trust-ilana-redstone-090924/

Evan Madery, “They Wanted a University Without Cancel Culture. Then Dissenters Were Ousted”; Politico Magazine, Jan. 16, 2026. It's here:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/01/16/civil-war-university-of-austin-bari-weiss-00729688

Budbill: ‘Winter Is the Best Time’

 I found David Budbill’s lovely poem about winter copied into an old notebook.

It’s so short, I don’t see a way of giving you a sense of it with an excerpt. So here it is:

 

Winter is the best time
to find out who you are.

Quiet, contemplation time,
away from the rushing world,

cold time, dark time, holed-up
pulled-in time and space

to see that inner landscape,
that place hidden and within.

 

I hope Budbill, who died in 2016, would forgive me for reproducing the whole thing. By way of atonement, I’ll spread the word that a new edition of his book Judevine is coming out in April.

A good friend and I have been exchanging notes about the nature of time and about how it can be measured objectively and yet experienced in many subjective ways. I’m partial to “holed-up pulled-in time and space.”

• Sources and notes: “Winter is the Best Time” appeared in While We’ve Still Got Feet; Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 2005. I found a copy at Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. It’s here:

https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2012%252F01%252F28.html

If you’d like to hear Budbill’s voice, you can find a recording of him singing “What Issa Heard” at his website:

https://www.davidbudbill.com

For a note on a conversation with the poet, see “The brief wonders of David Budbill,” Nov. 11, 2021. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-brief-wonders-of-david-budbill.html

Keeping the old game alive

 Because I’m a baseball fan, I lurk around blogs that follow the St. Louis Cardinals.

The blog I follow most closely is filled with young guys who love analyzing statistics. They collect stats on everything — from launch angles to exit velocities — and discuss the latest ways of mining meaning from arcane details.

I lurk because I’m lost. When I was a boy in West Texas, my father and I would listen to KMOX, the voice of St. Louis. We were thrilled when Stan the Man Musial came to the plate. We cheered at the emergence of a young outfielder named Lou Brock. If those topics come up at all on the blogs, the discussion is about what grandfathers once said.

The young guys talk about all kinds of new things, and I’ve had to explore to understand their tastes in music, books, film and food. These guys were born into a world that included the Internet and social media, and so I was surprised by a long thread — interrupting discussion of the Cardinals’ prospects in the coming season — that denounced Meta, X, Google and the gang.

One guy argued that the ethical collapse of the bigger and better tools makes it important to keep “the old blogosphere alive.” If you have a trusted URL, maintain it, he said.

I was surprised by the call to see value in the old and out-of-date.

Writing, vocation and earning a living

 Yesterday’s note that included a quote from Jim Harrison’s memoir reminded me that Off to the Side is a strange book.

Some of it seems deliberately perverse. I’ve seen a sailor go into a bar not to get a drink but to get into a fight, and Harrison has some of that in him. But I find his reflections on the writing life interesting. Here are two remarks on vocation and the problem of making a living:

 

A poet is technically supposed to be a “thief of fire,” but as easily as anyone else he becomes a working stiff who drinks too much on late Friday afternoons.

 

The most obvious economic lesson of all becomes obvious: survival work requires your entire life.

 

Harrison’s title, incidentally, refers to the role of a writer as an observer, one who stands apart from the fray to see clearly and to report.

• Source: Jim Harrison, Off to the Side; New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002, pp 143 and 144.

‘You cannot bury good’

 If you were wondering what the holiday was like in Atlanta, you can get a suggestion of it from a remark Raphael Warnock made at Ebenezer Baptist Church. Warnock is senior pastor of the church where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached. Warnock is also a U.S. senator. He said:

I’m inspired this morning by our neighbors, by ordinary citizens who are standing up in this moment in Minneapolis and all across the country. Renee Good could’ve stayed in her house. But in the best of the civil rights struggle, she literally put her body on the line, and she paid a high price for it. Now they’re trying to malign her name, but you cannot bury good. Truth crushed to earth shall rise again.

 

• Source: Jason Armesto, “At MLK celebration, Warnock channels King’s legacy to decry ICE raids”; The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jan. 19, 2026.

Before the storm

 Before the storm hit the East, we took a hike to see a gorgeous stand of beech in the woods up in Tucker. I’ve been thinking about why I feel a need to get outdoors, into natural areas. Everyone must feel that to some extent, but it’s almost like hunger to me. I’m afraid I’m not much fun to be around if I don’t get out outside regularly.

Jim Harrison said that the wild can

 

draw away your poisons to the point that your natural curiosity takes over and ‘you,’ the accumulation of wounds and concomitant despair, no longer exist. The immediate world for hours at a time becomes quite beyond self-consciousness.

 

Maybe that’s it. I just needed to get outdoors.

The snow fell south of us. It covered Columbus, where generations of infantrymen trained; Macon, where the mound builders and the Allman Brothers hung out; and Milledgeville, where Flannery O’Connor tended chickens and peacocks. At Stone Mountain, it was cold but dry. 

• Source: Jim Harrison, Off to the Side; New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002, p. 20.

A stab at poetic interpretation

 Yesterday’s note on William Stafford’s poem “The Animal That Drank Up Sound” should have included an admission: I imagine a giant, arrogant, garish animal that drinks up attention. All of it.

Many people in this country who were paying attention to their lives no longer do. People all over the world no longer do.

This animal is like a rattlesnake. You need to keep an eye on him.

But he’s also like the hideous animal in Stafford’s poem. I think we make a mistake when we let him soak up all our attention.

While I’m going to keep an eye on this animal, I’m not going to let him steal attention from the things that make life worth living.

I’m not inviting him into my mind.

If there’s a couch in my mind, he’s not sleeping on it. Taking up residence is out of the question.

• Source: William Stafford, The Way It Is; Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 1998, pp. 118-19.

‘The Animal That Drank Up Sound’

 The poet William Stafford told about an animal that needed sound. Instead of making some, he took it away. No more rustling leaves. No more splash of fish. And when he had drunk in all the sound, he began to starve.

After he died a cricket emerged and chirped —

 

                        and back like a river

            from that one act flowed the kind of world we know,

            first whisperings, then moves in the grass and leaves;

the water splashed, and the big night bird screamed.

 

Sometimes the moon, cold, waits for the animal to return.

 

            But somewhere the cricket waits.

            It listens now, and practices at night.

 

This started as a story around a campfire and grew into a children’s book. The adult version — this poem — has different meanings for different people.

At a reading in Iran, people told Stafford they could not believe the poem about state censorship had been published. People there were sure they knew what the poem was about, although the idea that the poem was about state censorship had not occurred to the poet.

Since I first read the poem, it’s taken on a new meaning. 

• Source and notes: William Stafford, The Way It Is; Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 1998, pp. 118-19. 

I’m marking a birthday. Stafford was born on Jan. 17, 2014, in Hutchinson, Kansas. He and one of his sons, the poet Kim Stafford, are mentioned often in this collection of notes.

Emerson's 'Monadnoc'

 You’d think that I’d have known Emerson’s “Monadnoc,” since I live near one. But I came to the poem through Robert Frost’s essay.

Like Frost, I like these lines:

 

Yet, will you learn our ancient speech,
These the masters who can teach,
Fourscore or a hundred words
All their vocal muse affords,
These they turn in other fashion
Than the writer or the parson.
I can spare the college-bell,
And the learned lecture well.
Spare the clergy and libraries,
Institutes and dictionaries,
For the hardy English root
Thrives here unvalued underfoot.

 

I learned what I know of our ancient speech by listening to my grandfather and other Old Timers in Texas. The lexicon was limited by education but also by choice. The storytellers despised fancy words and used plain ones in inventive ways.

Frost said he used to climb aboard a wagonload of shooks just for the pleasure of hearing the driver’s usage.

• Sources: Frost’s essay “Emerson” is in The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, edited by Mark Richardson; Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard, 2007.

I found Emerson’s “Monadnoc” here:

https://emersoncentral.com/texts/poems/monadnoc/

A poet's debt to Emerson

 After he’d spent years reading Emerson’s “Brahma,” Robert Frost said: “I can now understand every line in it but one or two.”

The poem has 16 lines, and Frost found the last two murky. In particular, the Christian tone of the phrase “meek lover of the good” bothered him.

 

I don’t like obscurity and obfuscation, but I do like dark sayings I must leave the clearing of to time.

 

Frost’s sensibilities are not mine, which is why I find him interesting. When I think of Emerson, I think of essays. Frost thought of poems such as “Ode (Sung in the Town Hall, Concord, July 4, 1857)” “Give All to Love” and “Monadnoc.” He said:

 

I owe more to Emerson than anyone else for troubled thoughts about freedom.

 

• Sources: The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, edited by Mark Richardson; Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard, 2007, p. 202.

The Poetry Foundation has Emerson’s “Brahma” here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45868/brahma-56d225936127b

Marking the day: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

 The Bhagavad Gita says: 

If you want to see the brave, look at those who can forgive.

If you want to see the heroic, look at those who can love in return for hatred.

 

I know what a rogue federal law-enforcement agency is doing to law-abiding people in Minnesota. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was young, Black men would be dragged off the streets, accused of minor crimes, jailed and then forced to work on chain gangs. The supervisors of these rogue law-enforcement units were often Klansmen.

We make a mistake when we think the atrocities of our times are worse than those endured by those who came before us. We also err when we think our indignation — no matter how righteous — is going to change things by itself. The escalating cycle of indignation, outrage and violence is not the way.

Martin Luther King Jr. had reason to be outraged. His response was to persuade, rather than harm.

• Note: Dr. King was born on Jan. 15, 1929, and I’m marking his birthday. The holiday is Monday. 

What dwells in you

 Had I not seen the squirrel, frozen to the limb of a tree, I’d never have known to look up. I’d have missed the magnificent red-tailed hawk circling above.

If you make a practice of walking in the woods, you see things you once would have missed. I wondered why the enormous dog, who is normally good on a leash, was so willful until I remembered that the coyotes have started mating. I’m oblivious to the messaging of female coyotes, but he isn’t.

Years ago, a friend who was an Episcopal priest would ask: And what dwells in you this day?

He didn’t want a throwaway answer. He wanted an account of the climatology inside my head — the dark storms as well as the sunny skies.

My friend is gone. But if I had to answer that question today, I’d have to admit that the Current Occupant of the White House has been taking up too much space. The Current Occupant merits a watchful eye. He doesn’t deserve to take up residence.

My grandfather used to speak of going out and looking at the things God made — as opposed to the messes that people had made. He usually said that while lacing up his boots.

It was a good walk in the woods along the Yellow River. It was a bit cool. The sky was cloudless, and you could hear the river singing in the shoals.

Stone Mountain, January

 We had a stretch of spring in midwinter, with highs reaching the 70s. Then the hard freezes returned, with lows in the 20s.

On the warm days you expect to see dandelion blooming and maybe some hardy violets. The surprise was an Indian azalea, deep in the woods. It put out a single magenta bloom.

The variation in temperature is hard on plants. You can see the stress clearly in the garden, where the camelia bush put out a million buds, a couple of which bloomed during the warm snap. After the freeze, there were a half million buds on the ground.

A person of religious mind

 One of the recurring themes in this collection of notes is that philosophers, in discussing religion, tend to leap into arguments for the existence of God. The place to start is with a discussion of what religion is.

The most recent note in the series was about Kwame Anthony Appiah, who proposed that “religion” is a logical category, rather than a natural kind of thing (like a tree) or a social kind of thing (like a marriage). I like the philosopher’s view. But I also came across this from Thornton Wilder:

 

A man of religious mind believes the human race is correctable.

 

I also like the storyteller’s view.

Incidentally, Wilder implied that the least religious writers were Molière and Jane Austen. Neither would entertain the idea that people are correctable.

• Source and notes: I found the letter in The American Reader’s Day in Letters feature: “December 11 (1962): Thornton Wilder to Catherine Coffin.” It’s here:

https://theamericanreader.com/december-11-1962-thornton-wilder-to-catherine-coffin/

For the note on Kwame Anthony Appiah, see “Religion — what it is,” Dec. 22, 2025. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2025/12/religion-what-it-is.html

A modest proposal

 The Texas Legislature’s attempts to tell teachers what they can teach is being ridiculed around the world. The latest episode involves a philosophy professor at Texas A&M who was informed he could not teach Plato.

The ridicule is justified, deserved and entertaining. But the Texas Legislature has been doing this kind of thing since before I was born. I think Texas needs a plan to avoid this recurring embarrassment that takes a longer view.

If the legislature is going to meddle in education, we ought to have an inquiry about what level of educational institution the legislature is competent to meddle in.

The world is convinced that you can’t really have a philosophy department in states where it’s illegal to teach Plato. Many Texas legislators would be willing to bulldoze all the philosophy departments, but there’s a catch: An institution can’t really call itself a university if doesn’t teach philosophy.

The university designation is the problem. But note that there are no philosophy requirements at trade schools. As far as I can tell, not a single professor who’s a specialist in Plato is employed at one of the schools that teach people how to repair cars or install air conditioners.

I think some public-minded representative should submit a bill to rename the state’s universities, starting with the Trade School of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M Trade School at College Station.

While it might be jarring for alumni to learn they might no longer have a university degree, the change would come closer to the spirt of the law that seeks to bring education into line with whatever it is that politicians can tolerate.

I think the debate on the bill would bring clarity to our thinking, even if we can’t grasp the logic taught in philosophy departments. What’s more important: public education or the kinds of things that might offend politicians?

Another place

 Here’s a fabulous place in a closely studied place: the Emma Chase Café in Chase County, Kansas. The county is the subject of William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth, which the author described as a deep map. 

In 1984, the café was run by Linda Thurston, who had a Ph.D. in child psychology. She decided to return to her home in Cottonwood Falls, which was barely big enough to support a café. But people wanted a place to eat and meet. Merchants in what was left of downtown bought the building and leased it to Thurston on favorable terms. Volunteers helped with the restoration.

Thurston and her twin sister thought women were overlooked in Kansas, so they wanted to find a way to honor a woman that history had forgotten. While the café was being renovated, they announced the new place would be called the Emma Chase. She was not the wife, sister or daughter of Salmon P. Chase, for whom the county was named. She was her own woman.

 

Soon, newspaper ads for the café printed Emma’s chocolate chip cookie recipe, and they asked townspeople to search their attic trunks for information about her. One day Whitt Laughridge came in with a large, framed portrait of an unidentified woman he’d found in the historical society vault. Thurston said, Yes! At last we’ve got Emma!

 

The café was named for an important historical character who was completely imaginary. It was that kind of place.

Conventional wisdom says that a dwindling community will stay alive as long as it has a post office and a school.

My experience is that a community needs a café or coffeeshop. If a small town is the kind of place where everyone goes home and watches TV at night, it’s in trouble. If it has a place where people can go and talk, exchange ideas and plan joint ventures, there’s hope.

• Source: William Least Heat-Moon, PrairyErth; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991, p. 124.

Portrait of a place

 Places are a preoccupation in this collection of notes.

Here’s a description of Darla’s, a place in Chase County, Kansas. Chase County is itself an interesting, place. It had about 3,000 residents when William Least Heat-Moon visited in the 1980s. Here’s what he found at Darla’s, a 10-stool bar:

 

Near my stool is an empty number-ten green bean can used as a spittoon, and at my elbow the cue-chalk jug holds a twenty dollar bill a customer has left for a pool stick when the salesman next comes around. In various places are gallon jars of brined things — turkey gizzards, sausages, eggs, dill pickles, jalapeño peppers — and there’s a large bottle of Tabasco; after five o’clock, other than the corner grocery and the quick-stop that hasn’t yet opened, these jars hold the only food for sale in town. I’ve been in the cold wind most of the day, and I’m happy enough to order a paper towel of pickled gizzards, which I slice with my pocketknife.

 

I would have made a meal of the peppers, but that’s a matter of taste.

I like the description because I recognize it. I’ve seen places where people in rural communities go when they have nowhere else to go. I’ve seen how the atmosphere in such places rises and falls in predictable ways, almost as if it were following some law of nature: how early in the evening everyone is joking, shyly or with false bravado, and how later darker currents sometimes come up — toxic mixtures of bigotry, racism and rage.

• Source: William Least Heat-Moon, PrairyErth; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991, p. 208.

 

Chickweed

 Yesterday’s note about Eloise Butler was prompted by a question about common chickweed.

Q. When did Stellaria media, a native of Eurasia and North Africa, arrive in North America?

A. It was reported in New England in 1672.

European immigrants brought seeds from their farms, and where you have grain seed you have weed seed.

Chickweed thrives in winter in the Georgia Piedmont. You see it everywhere: lawns, rights of way, deep woods.

I’m not sure when, if ever, an invasive species stops being an invasive species. But it seems to me that chickweed has crossed some kind of threshold.

• Source: Information from the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden in Minneapolis is here:

https://friendsofeloisebutler.org/pages/plants/commonchickweed.html

The reference to a journal in 1672 was in other sources. But I was impressed by the effort of the Minnesotans to educate people about a plant that is so common it’s often overlooked.

Eloise Butler's collection

 The Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden in Minneapolis is the oldest in the United States. Every community should have one. People should have a place where they can learn to identify the native plants and learn about natural history.

Ms. Butler, a native of Maine, moved to Minneapolis in 1874 to teach high school. She taught mostly botany. She kept learning, attending classes at the University of Minnesota. She was interested in freshwater algae and identified new species.

By the 1880s, people could see habitat disappearing in the Twin Cities. People — most of the work was done by women’s clubs — advocated for a Wild Botanical Garden, a preserve for native species.

Ms. Butler was a driving force, and in 1907 three acres were set aside in a city park. Volunteers worked on the garden, adding native plants to the collection. In 1911 Ms. Butler was appointed curator, with a monthly salary of $50.

She was tireless. She collected native plants for the garden, which expanded to 13 acres. She gave talks. She wrote articles for journals and newspapers. She encouraged people to learn.

In my view, a preserve is an important public institution, like the public library. It’s a resource that can make ordinary citizens better people.

• Source: The Friends of the Wildflower Garden have information on Eloise Butler here:

https://friendsofeloisebutler.org/pages/eloisebutler.html

Word of the day: intromisión

 If you read Mexican newspapers with a dictionary in hand, you might run across this word. It means “meddling.”

Of course, Spanish-speaking journalists in the Americas are not using the word to describe the kidnapping of President Maduro of Venezuela and the killing of his defenders in violation of international law. That is beyond meddling.

They are using the word in long pieces about the history of how the United States has treated its neighbors. These articles are long because the history is long. It’s not a story of loving thy neighbor as thyself.

An old idea

 Jim Hightower was the Texas agriculture commissioner from 1983 to 1991. Texas was notoriously conservative. Hightower was progressive, rather than liberal.

People couldn’t understand how Hightower could win statewide election in a state like that. At one time or another, Hightower said something like this to every newspaper reporter who would listen:

 

The political spectrum is not right to left but top to bottom.

 

In the early 1980s, the Texas economy was like the national economy today. Texas was a great place to be if you were fabulously wealthy. If you weren’t, you tended to think about wages, the cost of living, and the economic policies pushed by people who didn’t worry about either. Hightower argued that the people at the top believed strongly, but erroneously, that the gap between the top and bottom wasn’t nearly wide enough. People voted for him because they could see his point.

It’s an election year. I’m open to new ideas and hope to hear a few. But I would love to hear a new voice on that old script.

The three-line rule

 Naomi Shihab Nye used to tell young poets they should write three lines a day. It’s not, she said, a huge investment of time. 

What it will give you back is enormous in terms of the way you start noticing things. Writers simply get in the habit of noticing things better.

 

I think she’s right. If you know that you are going to sit down with a pencil and a notebook for a few minutes every day, you start looking for things that might just work in three lines. You pay a little more attention. You notice what people say and how they say it. You notice a slight gesture you had missed before. Instead of walking down the same old street thinking about an irritating colleague, you look at the neighborhood with the eye of a street photographer.

The practice of writing will change you.

The astonishing thing about the change is that it’s fun. 

• Sources: Conversations with Texas Writers, edited by Frances Leonard and Ramona Cearley; Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005, p. 268.

For more on the poet, see “Marking the day: Nye,” March 12, 2022. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2022/03/marking-day-nye.html

Neither Bolívar nor Lincoln

 Reading a Mexican newspaper, just to get the views of neighbors, I ran across this from Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the former president of Mexico: 

Neither Bolívar nor Lincoln would have accepted the United States acting as a global tyranny.

 

No one loves a dictator. No one loves a vigilante either.

Watch out for the rhetoric and brass bands

 My great-great grandfather Pappy Henderson celebrated the Fourth of July by building a bonfire on his place in Texas. It was often 100 degrees.

Calvin Henderson was a teenager when the Civil War started. Carried away by the rhetoric and brass bands, he signed up in a cavalry regiment. He was captured in a disastrous battle in Indian Territory and spent a winter in a prison camp in Ohio.

The prisoners, mostly Texans, lacked food and firewood. Even as an old man Pappy remembered the cold.

One night, he told a prison guard that he was walking out of the camp and would walk to Texas if the guard didn’t shoot him. He said that he was done with war, done with government, done with glorious causes. He said he’d rather be shot than freeze to death. Pappy promised himself that if he got home, he’d build a bonfire every year on the Fourth of July to remember the cold.

If Pappy were still around today, he’d tell you to watch out for the rhetoric and brass bands.

If the 20^th century proved anything, it’s that war works about as often as a lottery ticket does.

A writing lesson from Horton Foote

 Horton Foote set out to be an actor. He said, a bit sadly, that his plays and screenplays got better reviews than he did.

He won Academy Awards for To Kill a Mockingbird, based on Harper Lee’s novel, and for Tender Mercies. He won a Pulitzer for The Young Man from Atlanta.

Asked what qualities a writers should try to develop, he said:

 

When I say writing, I don’t mean taking pencil to paper or going to the typewriter; I mean thinking about writing some part of every day. A lot of writing is thinking and meditating and not grabbing at the first idea that comes to you, but letting it take shape and form.

 

That’s a recurring theme in this collection of online notes. I’d say that’s the first lesson in writing.

Foote was from Wharton, Texas. He died in 2009 at age 92 while working on a cycle of plays.

That might be the second lesson in writing: Don’t give up before Horton.

• Source: Conversations with Texas Writers, edited by Frances Leonard and Ramona Cearley; Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005, p. 92.

'Mozart and the Gray Steward'

 Thornton Wilder experimented with “three-minute plays.” He wrote a bunch of them in college.

After The Bridge of San Luis Rey, publishers were eager to see more of his work. In 1928, Wilder collected 16 short plays in The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays. The longest is “Mozart and the Gray Steward,” which is about the commission for the Requiem.

The Gray Steward has this line about grief:

 

Only through the intercession of great love, and of great art which is love, can that despairing cry be eased. 

I first read Wilder in high school. I can’t say that I love his work, but I do find a lot of it interesting. I would like to see more of Wilder’s letters and more of his short plays.

• Source: “Mozart and the Gray Steward” is in Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays & Writings on Theater; Library of America, 2007, pp. 43–47. Library of America has included the play in its wonder Story of the Week catalog, which is free. It’s here:

https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2025/04/mozart-and-gray-steward.html

Indigenous people

 Vine Deloria Jr. gave a working definition of indigenous. He used the word in the sense of people who “live properly with the land.”

This country destroyed many of its original indigenous populations. Could it create another, at least in Deloria’s sense?

A rugged individualist can’t really be indigenous. A person or a family is indigenous by being part of a community.

People of Old-World ancestry have been here long enough to come to terms with the place. Some individuals know how to live properly with the land. Some families live properly with the land. But as a community, as a country, we don’t have that down. Even today, we choose representatives who favor exploitation and destruction, rather than conservation.

One of the recurring themes of this collection of online notes is place. What kind of place would this country be if it had an indigenous people, a people who lived properly with the land?

• Source: Vine Deloria Jr.’s essay “Reflection and Revelation: Knowing Land, Places and Ourselves” is in The Power of Place, edited by James A. Swan; Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books, 1993, p. 40.