A newspaper thing

 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a thing called UATL that I wish more newspaper editors knew about.

I prefer the technical term thing to a “dedicated media brand and digital franchise.” It seems to me that if newspapers create interesting things, they ought to come up with a better way of talking about them.

I like UATL, which is put out by members of the newspaper’s black culture team. One of the standing features is called “Let Me Put U On.” Writers put you on to something that you might overlook. One recent piece was about taking the time to find the liner notes in the age of musical streaming.

This week, a young business reporter named Mirtha Donastorg wrote on the habit or practice of keeping a journal. I’d spent the week thinking about writing and the craft of writing. Having a young person talking about the basics was just right. Her advice:

 

There is no right way to write. Just begin.

 

• Source: Mirtha Donastorg, “Let Me Put U On: How journaling has shaped my life, and can shape yours too”; UATL, Aug. 17, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.uatl.com/news/2026/08/let-me-put-u-on-how-journaling-has-shaped-my-life-and-can-shape-yours-too/

Muscadines

 Muscadines, Vitus rotundifolia, grow throughout Georgia, but they thrive in the Georgia Piedmont. The experts say the wild grapes ripen from July to October. I think August is the peak.

Some varieties of muscadines have made their way into the gardens. Those are the early bearers, or so it seems to me.

Ripe muscadines come in many colors: purple, oxblood, black. There’s a variety of bronze grapes. People call them scuppernongs.

I think just about all the songbirds eat muscadines, as do turkey, quail and ducks. Many mammals, including the bears of North Georgia, love them too. The paths through the woods are covered with half-eaten muscadines.

Terry W. Johnson, a naturalist who keeps a blog, says that some butterflies get drunk on fermenting muscadines. I’ve been watching for two kinds he mentioned — question marks and commas. But I haven’t seen any flying drunk.

• Source: Terry W. Johnson used to write “Out My Backdoor” for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. His column on muscadines appeared here:

http://georgiawildlife.com/out-my-backdoor-wildlife-love-muscadines-too

Since retiring, he posts at the “Backyard Wildlife Connection.” It’s here:

https://backyardwildlifeconnection.com

Fact and value

 U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff called his Republican opponent Mike Collins a “crumbling little bigot.”

That line, reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, was overlooked in national news accounts. This race, of course, is just for Georgia voters, but it’s getting national attention because Ossoff has been scathing in his review of the Current Occupant of the White House. He’s urging voters to purge all enablers.

When I was in school, a crack about “crumbling little bigot” would have been flagged as name calling. But I’m not sure that’s what this is.

Since the time of Hume, philosophers have generally made a firm distinction between fact and value.

But Philippa Foot, one of the great philosophers of my lifetime, punctured the notion that this distinction was some kind of red line. She did that by asking about rudeness. We can all deplore rude behavior. That’s a value judgment. But what is rudeness exactly? Our opposition to rudeness might be a statement of value, but we can’t really talk about whether Joe was rude without getting into the facts of his behavior.

I have been wondering whether Collins is a crumbling little bigot or whether Ossoff was just name calling.

Merrian-Webster says a bigot is

 

a narrow-minded person who obstinately adheres to their own opinions and prejudices

especially : one who strongly and unfairly dislikes or feels hatred toward others based on their group membership. …

 

Collins is a public figure. He’s a member of Congress. Enough of the facts of his life are known to make me think Ossoff’s description is accurate.

I think that voting for Collins would a mistake in some way. In part, this is a question of fact; it is not solely a disagreement about values.

• Source: “Bigot.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bigot. Accessed 18 Aug. 2026.

The unexpected happens

 A line in Henry Seidel Canby’s biography of Thoreau is haunting to me: 

There are no records of intellectual interests of any kind in the Thoreau family before Henry’s generation.

 

Canby was referring to Thoreau’s father’s side of the family. His mother’s side was a little livelier. But the starkness of the sentence reminded me of what a wonder college can be — what an education can be.

Suddenly, the curtain goes up, and a young person begins to think in ways you wouldn’t expect, even if you looked at all the generations that came before.

Canby calls it a flowering of the mind. He said in Thoreau’s case, it happened about halfway through college.

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, p. 15.

The other part of writing

 I have been trying to think about writing — not the craft of writing but the part that comes before it.

E.B. White got at the idea with this line: “Writing is an act of faith not a trick of grammar.”

I think we tend to start projects before we find the foundations. We teach people the craft of writing without spending much time helping them find what it is they have to say.

But this idea is fuzzy. I haven’t been able to get a wrench on it, as my grandfather would say.

The best I can do now is to give a bad example, to cite a case where things went wrong.

The best teller of this tale is Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau’s biographer from an earlier era. In Thoreau’s day, English Composition was a continuing course, rather than something to be endured in your freshman year. The course was heavily weighted. Perhaps the point of college was to learn to express yourself.

When Thoreau went to Harvard, he was taught English Composition by Edward Tyrrell Channing, described by Canby as “a first-rate teacher of rhetoric who made or marred more important writers than any other American professor.”

Channing’s students included Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Edward Everett Hale, Charles Sumner and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Thoreau had good marks at Harvard except in English Composition.

Channing taught the craft of writing as it was practiced. He demanded a logical, orderly exposition. Consider the order and logical structure of Thoreau’s great works and you’ll see the problem. A basic Thoreau story is about a week on the water or a saunter on Cape Cod. He gives us a narrative of an excursion, with insights that seem to grow out of the material naturally, almost as if they were growing out of the landscape. He doesn’t chop the insights up, organize them into topics, and present them in some kind of order. As Canby put it:

 

If any man alive could have taught Thoreau to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, it was Channing, but he failed. 

 

Here’s Canby on the effect on Thoreau:

 

Harvard made a scholar out of him but nearly ruined him as a writer. It took him approximately ten years to put his Harvard rhetoric behind him, and write steadily on his own.

 

Canby does not make Channing the villain. In academia, professors make judgments about grades. In the less real world of journalism, editors make judgments about employment.

I’m not thinking about blame. But something is wrong when Thoreau can’t get near the top of a writing class.

The problem is that our notion of writing is not complete, I suspect. What we say about craft might be logical, but logical systems that don’t account for all the facts aren’t complete and are thus not sound. A wise person doesn’t ignore facts to preserve some system, no matter how elegant that system might be.

To me, the part of writing that is most interesting is the part before you get to the question of craft. I wish I understood it better.

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 53 and 54.

Browsing

 The essayist Alice Bolin, at 13, ran across The Book of Unusual Quotations, compiled by Rudolf Flesch. She read by topic. She was religious, so she read a lot of quotations about “Christianity,” “church” and “belief.”

She said she used the book as an oracle or prayerbook. That is, she read with the attitude that whatever she needed would be given to her. She called it “evidence of the way a mind is built — randomly, piece by piece, working slowly through the dark with the few truths one finds or has been given.”

Bolin is not the first to suggest that we humans form our minds by collecting information, examples and many other things. But it’s hard to beat her account.

Bolin points out that children do that. They know they don’t know everything, are comfortable in not knowing, are delighted when they find something they can use — a piece of the puzzle that helps them see a larger picture.

I am interested in the philosophy of mind and wish that philosophers would pry themselves away from the sizzling topic of artificial intelligence and look at the humble topic of browsing. Some of us love to browse the stacks in the library with no purpose, open to just about anything, following our own interests.

I would love to read a paper on what we’re doing when we browse. Are we doing something similar when we make a collection, as when we collect quotations in a notebook?

• Source: Alice Bolin, “The Methodless Method”; The New Yorker, March 25, 2013. 

The public understanding of religion

 It seems to me that philosophers who are interested in religion usually skip the question of what religion is. The tendency is to start with the concept of God and the attributes of divinity.

I think that’s an unfortunate place to start. I’d like to better understand what religion is and what people are doing when they practice religion.

The Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion has a series of talks called “Why This Text Matters.” In each, a scholar talks about a book that has been a foundation for scholars studying religion.

I’m not sure that’s the best way of getting to a better idea of what religion is. But it is one way.

I started with Professor Richard Miller’s lecture on “Augustine’s Confessions.”

• Source: Professor Miller’s talk is here:

https://martycenter.org/series/why-this-text-matters/augustines-confessions-richard-miller

The Marty Center is part of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. I’m glad some institution is concerned about the public understanding of religion.

How we look at history

 Albert Szent-Györgyi, the subject of yesterday’s note, was a biochemist, but he thought history was the most important subject.

He was not interested in national histories.

 

But what is world history? In its essence it is the story of man, how he rose from his animal status to his present elevation. This is a fascinating story and is linked to a limited number of creative men, its heroes, who created new knowledge, new moral or ethical values, or new beauty. Opposing this positive side of history there is a negative, destructive side linked to the names of kings, barons, generals, and dictators who, with their greed and lust for power, made wars, fought battles, and mostly created misery, destroying what other men had built. These are the heroes of the history we teach at present as world history. Not only is this history negative and lopsided, it is false, too, for it omits the lice, rats, malnutrition, and epidemics which had more to do with the course of things than generals and kings, as Zinsser ably pointed out.

 

We tend to lose our most important stories chasing news about the crackpot of the day. Szent-Györgyi, a Hungarian, saw his country fall under the sway of crackpot strongmen. The first bunch admired Hitler, while the second admired Stalin.

Szent-Györgyi knew the destructive side of history. In the 1930s, he helped Jewish colleagues escape and got out himself.

The reference in the last sentence is to Hans Zinsser, an American bacteriologist who worked on typhus and who wrote Rats, Lice and History.

Zinsser was another of those scientific thinkers that might interest students of literature. Zinsser’s autobiography was As I Remember Him: The Biography of R.S. It’s a third-person account of R.S., his Romantic Self. It’s on the long list of books I want to read.

• Source: Albert Szent-Györgyi, “Teaching and Expanding Knowledge”; Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1965), pp. 24-8. It’s here:

https://fair-use.org/rampart-journal/1965/03/teaching-and-the-expanding-knowledge

A Nobel winner on education

 Albert Szent-Györgyi won a Nobel Prize in 1937 for his work on Vitamin C. But his mind sauntered beyond the fields of biochemistry. He was interested in how people learn, and he thought that education got off to a bad start with its attitude toward books, which he called the main instrument of teaching.

There is a widely spread misconception about the nature of books which contain knowledge. It is thought that such books are something the contents of which have to be crammed into our heads. I think the opposite is closer to the truth. Books are there to keep the knowledge in while we use our heads for something better. Books may also be a better place for such knowledge. In my own head any book-knowledge has a half-life of a few weeks. So I leave knowledge, for safe-keeping, to books and libraries and go fishing, sometimes for fish, sometimes for new knowledge.

 

In my head, the half-life of book knowledge is considerably shorter. But sometimes a book will prompt a chain of thought. Reading E.O. Wilson’s memoire made me think of other scientists who had interesting — and surprising — qualities of mind.

• Source and note: Albert Szent-Györgyi, “Teaching and Expanding Knowledge”; Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1965), pp. 24-8. It’s here:

https://fair-use.org/rampart-journal/1965/03/teaching-and-the-expanding-knowledge

This line of thought began with “Thinking, technique and writing,” Aug. 11, 2026. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2026/08/thinking-technique-and-writing.html

Spittlebugs

 I’ve been pulling gripeweed in the garden — alternately admiring and cussing Phyllanthus urinaria. Among my finds are the lairs of spittlebugs, in subfamily Aphrophorinae.

The subfamily is in Hemiptera, the true bugs. Each has a mouth that looks like a hypodermic needle. These bugs pierce a plant and suck the fluids.

The common name comes from the nymphs, who hide and shelter in a blob that reminds most people of spit. It’s a combination of urine, air bubbles and adhesives. Bugs go through incredible volumes of fluids while feeding and, as you might guess, produce prodigious quantities of liquid waste. The relatively defenseless nymphs use what they have to make shelters.

Adult spittlebugs are not defenseless. They’re called froghoppers, at least in the South. The experts say these bugs can leap 100 times their length, which seems about right to me. The adult froghoppers I’ve seen are less than half an inch long. One might hop 4 feet to escape a bird.

• For more on the aggressive weed, see “On gripeweed, with awe,” June 30, 2026.

Thinking, technique and writing

 Science is a way of thinking.

There are many ways. In ancient Greece, some people who were intrigued by a question consulted oracles. Some listened for whispered voices as the wind rustled the leaves in a sacred grove. Some, like Herodotus and Aristotle, went to look for themselves. They spoke of making inquiries and investigations.

Our sciences grew out of that impulse to observe and make a record of our observations. If you’re a scientist, you subscribe to that way of thinking. You subscribe to certain habits, routines and systems. You look for answers in a certain way because you frame questions in a certain way.

Reading E.O. Wilson’s memoir reminded me of those rare moments in college when my teachers talked — not about a research project, techniques, analytical tools or a discipline — but what it was to be a scientist, what it’s like spending a life thinking in a certain way.

I enjoy the writings of scientists who take a stab at that topic.

Many writers have tried to do something similar for people who write. My list would include Annie Dillard, William and Kim Stafford, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Virginia Woolf and Rainer Maria Rilke.

As in the sciences, technique is vital. But it seems to me that questions about technique and craftsman follow more basic questions. I think it makes sense to talk about an attitude toward writing or an approach to writing — and how approaching things in different ways could lead to different practices of writing.

Craftsmanship is vital. But I don’t think it’s the place to start. We need to go elsewhere to find the first lesson.

A theory of mind

 Embedded in E.O. Wilson’s views on sociobiology is a theory of mind. It’s not specifically his. Other scientists seem to fall into something similar almost as a default position.

Wilson’s starting point: Social behaviors are transmitted by culture, but culture is a product of the brain. Our inherited traits limit what kind of things we can consider — what kinds of things are possible.

Wilson thought that the question of how genetic and cultural evolution interact was one of the great unexplored realms of science. He called it “gene-culture coevolution.”

 

Over the course of a lifetime, the mind of the individual person creates itself by picking among countless fragments of information, value judgements, and available courses of action within the context of a particular culture. More concretely, the individual comes to select certain marital customs, creation myths, ethical precepts, modes of analysis, and so forth, from among those available. We call these competing behaviors and mental abstractions “culturgens.” They are close to what our fellow reductionist Richard Dawkins conceived as “memes.”

 

Philosophy of mind is a thorny specialty, and I enjoyed watching a biologist, rather than a philosopher, tackle of its questions. Saying what a human mind is like is difficult, but I like the ancient metaphor. In some ways, an individual mind is like a collection. What’s in your cabinet of curiosities is different from what’s in mine. We might collect some similar items, and so we could say we have some shared interests. But we can’t assume that everyone else will be interested in the same things.

The activity of collecting is important, I think. It’s the idea behind forming canons in literature and other arts. I think it’s vital that each generation examine its cultural inheritance. It contains fabulous riches but also deadly poisons.

• Source: Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist; Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1994, p. 351.

Start with a circle

 A person who is interested in natural history gradually becomes aware of a cycle of learning and discovery. You can discover the relationship between yellow-billed cuckoos and the tent caterpillars in your neighborhood for yourself. But you can do so only if you’ve learned to identify some birds and bugs.

You have to learn some things from teachers and books to be able to discover things for yourself. Those discoveries might help you learn more things from teachers and books.

E.O. Wilson, the great naturalist, pointed out another element to that cycle. Here’s his description of his sophomore year in college:

 

My resolve to be a biologist was reinforced when I discovered the ideal social environment for developing a scientist — or at least one of several possible ideals. It is the same as for a political revolutionary. Start with a circle of ambitious students who talk and work together and conspire against their elders in order to make their way into a particular discipline. They can be as few as two or as many as five; more than five makes the unit unstable. Give them an exciting new idea that can transform the discipline and with which they can advance their ambitions: let them believe that they own a central truth shared by few others and therefore a piece of the future. Add a distant authority figure, in this case a scientist who has written a revolutionary text, or at least a circle of older revolutionaries who have generated the accepted canon. The farther away these icons are from their acolytes, the better. At midcentury, Europe was best of all.

 

I love that description of a circle of friends learning together. The notion of collegiality in colleges seems endangered to me, though I’m no expert.

Wilson wrote about science as a social activity. If I had another life to live, researching that activity — that cycle of learning and discovering — would be a good way to spend it

• Source: Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist; Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1994, pp. 107-8.

For an explanation of cuckoos and tent caterpillars, see “The case of the missing caterpillars,” July 22, 2026. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-case-of-missing-caterpillars.html

A caterpillar with horns

 Foresters speak of “skeletonized” leaves. If you see an oak with leaves that have been eaten back to the main stem and veins, you’re looking at the work of orange-striped oakworms, Anisota senatoria.

Most of the caterpillars are still in the trees eating, but we were hiking after a storm, which knocked some to the ground.

They were about an inch and a-half long, black with eight yellow stripes. As the common name suggests, some have orange stripes, although the ones we found did not. The caterpillars have two black spines behind the head. I imagined a tiny longhorn.

The moths are about an inch long, reddish brown with a white spot on the forewing. The female lays about 500 eggs — imagine tiny green BBs — on an underside of a leaf. The caterpillars hatch in about a week and start eating.

When they are grown, the caterpillars dig a hole in the ground and pupate, say the entomologists at the University of Georgia. That I have not seen.

Stone Mountain, early August

 The tall goldenrod, Solidago altissima, is suddenly shoulder high. Georgia has about 35 species of goldenrod, and this is the one I can identify. Later this summer, the plants I saw might get to 7 feet.

Height is a rough way to identify a plant. Sorting out the other species is beyond my abilities.

But since I know what a basal leaf is, I can distinguish two groups: clumping and rhizomatous. Clumping goldenrods have basal leaves. Each plant will spread its seeds, of course, but the plant itself will stay put. Rhizomatous species, like S. altissima, also spread by their roots. S. altissima is the most common goldenrod here because one soon becomes many.

The ripe berries on American pokeweed, Phytolacca americana, are mostly gone, picked over by songbirds.

What’s blooming in the woods: Liliturfs, in genus Liriope; pigeonwings, Clitoria mariana; and wild potato vine, Ipomoea pandurate. I saw some Asiatic dayflowers, Commelina communis. They are a lovely blue — the blue in the French flag — but invasive. I also saw one Hibiscus, which escaped someone’s garden and seemed to be thriving in the woods.

On the ground: persimmons, hickory nuts and green muscadines knocked down by the storms.

Lesson learned

 When I was a boy, my grandfather found a wasp’s gall. He cut it off with his pocketknife and put it in his shirt pocket, next to the Prince Albert tin.

He had intended to sit in his easy chair and, with the 8-year-old version of me as an audience, dissect the gall with a spey blade, showing the wasps within.

But he forgot. Grandmother found the gall while sorting the laundry.

In some families, certain offenses require all the women in the family to weigh in. Grandfather had two daughters, one of which was my mother, and I think at least one great-aunt was visiting. Grandfather was thoroughly blessed out. The lesson I learned had nothing to do with the biology of wasps but with the social order within human families.

I thought of that lesson when I was clearing the blackberry vines off the path to the woodlot and came across a gall. It was made by a blackberry knot gall wasp, Diastrophus nebulosus.

The gall was big enough to have several chambers, and I thought that a dissection might reveal at least six little wasps.

But I learned my lesson. The gall is still on the vine, the one still standing by the path.

It's not a trick of grammar

 The Wise Woman, who earned a Ph.D. and taught college English, is skeptical of books about writing.

She saw many students who were terrified of writing. They came to her classes thinking that they were about to confront 10,000 rules, each of which would show them to be wrong about something, possibly in a way that suggested stupidity.

Telling stories is one of the things that makes us human, the Wise Woman said. How did this deeply human activity become so anxiety-ridden?

I had asked about good books on writing because I was thinking about what I’d learned in a lifetime of writing. But there was fire in her voice. I let the matter drop, and we tramped down the trail through the woods quietly.

Along the way, I remembered that one of the writers of one of the rule books had said something on the subject. I had to look it up.

 

Style takes its final shape more from attitudes of mind than from principles of composition, for, as an elderly practitioner once remarked, “Writing is an act of faith not a trick of grammar.” This moral observation would be out of place in a rule book were it not that style is the writer, and therefore what a man is, rather than what he knows, will at last determine his style. If one is to write, one must believe — in the truth and worth of the scrawl, in the ability of the reader to receive and decode the message.

 

• Source: William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White, The Elements of Style; New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc., 1972, p. 77.

Reaching people

 The political ads running in Georgia are designed by consultants and should be good — or at least provocative. But they are irrelevant to most of the people I know.

If someone put me in charge for a day, I’d run spots that showed all kinds of people — all colors, genders and ages — pulling up to the fuel pumps and telling us what they were paying for a gallon of gas. I’d have a note saying that the average price in Georgia was $2.78 before the president decided to start a war. 

If you’re not from Georgia, we’re paying $3.86 on average.

I am not a consultant. The people in charge have other ideas about what ordinary people care about.

Does that depend on understanding?

 I’ve heard thoughtful people say that this country is more divided now than it’s been since the Civil War.

I can’t quite believe that. I grew up during the social upheavals of the 1960s and listened to the debates at family gatherings and public meetings. Eric Hoffer, writing during that era, said:

 

How many and deep are the divisions between human beings! Not only are there divisions between races, nations, classes, and religions but also an almost incomprehension between the sexes, the old and the young, the sick and the healthy. There would be no society if living together depended on understanding each other.

 

Hoffer always makes me think, but I’m not sure I believe that — that we can have a society without understanding each other. I don’t think a society would last if it couldn’t find some common ground. To my mind, deciding that we can go on without trying to reach an understanding is a bit like deciding that the termites in the foundation aren’t that big a problem.

I have the same doubt about our relationship with the natural world. I think this might be the biggest lesson we humans have learned during my lifetime: We’d better get better at understanding the natural world and our place in it. If we don’t, our societies, our cultures and our civilizations are not going to last.

• Source: Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition; New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974, p. 85.

The writer’s responsibility

 James Baldwin said, “The responsibility of the writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.”

So much of the American experience seems unhinged to me. Maybe this is a bad example because it’s obvious and easy, but it’s election season in Georgia, and people are saying things that make no sense. Soon, people will do something important — they will vote — based on thinking that makes no sense.

It’s not just our politics. Our beliefs and attitudes about race, religion, the natural world … it’s a long list, these things that don’t make sense but nevertheless influence us.

There’s nothing glorious about these excavations that writers are called to do. Archeologists excavate latrines to see what ancient peoples were fed. It’s an ugly metaphor, but it’s apt. We Americans, especially, are fed so much stuff that isn’t good for us, isn’t good for anyone.

Each generation needs people who will look at and question what it’s being fed.

Today’s Baldwin’s birthday. He was born in 1924 in Harlem. I think his essays are best.

The quoted remark came from a conversation with Nikki Giovanni. Several were recorded for broadcast and were published as A Dialogue: James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni in 1973.