John McPhee on Writing

Although loyal readers will have noticed that this blogging business came to an abrupt halt not long after opening, I do have an excuse. I was away for a while up on one of the islands among the 30,000-or-so in Georgian Bay. Now that I am back I have to resume posting since, as you know, I am doing this largely for mental exercise and promised to attempt to write a few sentences on a daily basis. And very much like physical exercise, it is very easy to avoid doing it. While trying to think of what kind of exercise activities I will be avoiding I realized I now I also have to come up with subjects about which to write.  While I stall a bit longer I will provide some material so you don’t cancel your subscription. It is from a real writer who talks about how difficult writing can be, even though he has taught the subject for years at Princeton and produced a pile of books and essays. It is a taken from a long interview that is naturally very well done and which will be of special interest to those of you old enough to remember the Senator, Bill Bradley, and of even more interest to those still older who remember Bill Bradley the basketball player.

“It may sound like I’ve got some sort of formula by which I write. Hell, no! You’re out there completely on your own—all you’ve got to do is write. OK, it’s nine in the morning. All I’ve got to do is write. But I go hours before I’m able to write a word. I make tea. I mean, I used to make tea all day long. And exercise, I do that every other day. I sharpened pencils in the old days when pencils were sharpened. I just ran pencils down. Ten, eleven, twelve, one, two, three, four—this is every day. This is damn near every day. It’s four-thirty and I’m beginning to panic. It’s like a coiling spring. I’m really unhappy. I mean, you’re going to lose the day if you keep this up long enough. Five: I start to write. Seven: I go home. That happens over and over and over again. So why don’t I work at a bank and then come in at five and start writing? Because I need those seven hours of gonging around. I’m just not that disciplined. I don’t write in the morning—I just try to write.” Source: "John McPhee, The Art of Nonfiction, No.3, Interview by Peter Hessler, Paris Review, No.192, Spring, 2010.

Mencken on Politics

Although he died over 60 years ago, here is what Mencken has to say about the current mess:

“As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

“...“it seems to me that the shadows [on America] were never darker than they are today, and that we must linger in their blackness a long while before ever they are penetrated by authentic shafts of light.”

As a former citizen of the great state of Maryland I am always glad to mention Mencken and soft-shell crabs. I have to admit, however, that these quotations were not taken directly from him, nor were they borrowed from the literary journal, The Smart Set, which he edited for a while and which was published on paper. They are from the new, online The Smart Set which issues from the state next door, Pennsylvania.

Apart from being a really interesting publication, it also is beautiful. If I knew more about blogging, I would steal their graphics as well and put them in here. It is produced by some interesting people at Drexel University and more specifically by those at the Pennoni Honors College located there. Have a look at it.

The web site for The Smart Set  here: http://thesmartset.com/

The web site for the related blog, which is also excellent: http://thesmartset.com/

Credit here needs to be given to: Paula Marantz Cohen, “Mencken in the Middle: Whatever Side of the Aisle You’re On, H.L. Mencken is as Relevant as Ever,” The Smart Set, July 20, 2016. Read the whole thing.

In the blog you are reading, which is only days old, you already will find some rather snarky comments about campuses and undoubtedly soon there will be more. It is nice to be able to say something nice.

Local Food

Joseph Mitchell

The author in Fairmont, in Robeson County, North Carolina, in the nineteen-fifties.
Courtesy Estate of Joseph Mitchell

I tend to not think much about ‘local food’ since for most of the year here in Ontario, there is not much of it. Resident members of the "100-Mile Diet Club" surely have to travel much farther south than that to find sustenance in the winter and much, much farther to obtain spices during any season. Still, right now we have an abundance of ‘sweet corn’ and fine tomatoes from the garden of my father-in-law.

But, if one did drive all the way to North Carolina, here is an excellent and evocative description of what you might find:

“Some days, in June, July, and August, it would seem to me that the branch was overflowing with things to eat. On such days, I would often take a tin bucket along and pick huckleberries and take them home, and my mother or our cook, a Negro woman named Anna McNair, would make deep-dish huckleberry pies out of them. Or I would pick wild strawberries. Or I would pick wild blackberries—around home, they were called brier berries. Or I would pick a couple of buckets of wild plums—they were called Chickasaw plums—and my mother would make dozens of glasses of wild-plum jelly out of them; it was one of her specialties. She would set the glasses of ruby-red jelly on shelves in one of the kitchen windows and the morning sun hitting the window would transform it into a stained-glass window. Or I would pick a couple of buckets of wild grapes and my mother or Anna would make wild-grape-hull pies out of them, an old country-Southern dessert that, according to one of my grandmothers, originated in the Hard Times—the Reconstruction period after the Civil War. My mother’s grape-hull pies were unusually delectable; she used fox grapes and scuppernong grapes in them, and she used the seeded pulps of the grapes as well as the hulls. In the fall, when the coarse, spongy outer hulls of the black walnuts started turning from green to yellow to black, I would take a bushel bag to the branch every afternoon for a week or so and fill it half to three-quarters full of walnuts (with the hulls still on, they could be quite heavy) and tie a rope to the bag and drag it home and spread the walnuts out on the dirt floor of the cellar to dry. And after the first frost I would go to certain wild-persimmon trees on the hill of the branch whose fruit I knew from experience and pick a bucket of persimmons and my mother would mash them through a colander and mix them with milk and butter and cornmeal and honey and nutmeg and make a pudding out of them, baked persimmon pudding, which was another delectable old country-Southern dessert.”

Obviously this was written many years ago and I am sad to report that the ‘branch’ also, long ago, went the way of many wetlands. These words were taken from a manuscript left by Joseph Mitchell who wrote for (and stopped writing for - another story you probably know) The New Yorker. The title of the story is “Days in the Branch” and the subtitle is “Memories of a North Carolina Boyhood”.  He used to leave his house early in the morning, having heard the warning “Watch Out For the Snakes” and return late in the day after hours  of tree climbing and poking around in the streams. It is even sadder, I think, that the children of today are unlikely to gather such memories or berries. (for the story, see The New Yorker, Dec. 1, 2014).

Facts and Fingers

Galileo’s Middle Finger...

A while back I attempted to indicate that I do worry about the level of our discourse these days (see: It Is Even Worse Than it Looks). I also worry that on an increasing number of campuses, I gather one is not even allowed to have a discourse about some subjects - what we used to call a ‘dialogue’ when we sat in circles on pillows. Given my interest in those issues I thought of another recent article in which a woman made a remark that reminds me of  some of the ones I mentioned in the earlier post.  The remark:   "I very much identify as a liberal feminist," she says. "That said, I get extremely impatient with liberals who want to rail about Republicans who won’t look at facts and then you get people who are making decisions based on identity and not on the facts. To me, that’s just a perversion of liberalism." I reluctantly introduce you to the ‘remarker’ - Alice Dreger.

You should know right away that it is highly likely that Dr. Dreger is a very decent person and fine scholar. My reluctance stems from the fact that: a) her most recent book is about gender and genitalia. I know little about the latter subject and, as a male, I am not allowed to speak about the former one, so I will probably not get around to reading her book for a while; b) I will point you to what you should read which will be better than what I can produce and, c) Dr. Dreger has a blog (actually a couple) and you can decide for yourself. I have, and think she is very much someone to whom attention should be paid.

One of the issues about which she worries is  “whether or not a scholar should be allowed to present evidence for a theory that some find profoundly threatening and deeply offensive.” They should. Here are a couple of other quotes that get at the issues she feels compelled to pursue. Such utterances have not made her life easier.

"Forms of scholarship that deny evidence, that deny truth, that deny the importance of facts, even when performed in the name of good, are dangerous, not only to science and to ethics but to democracy.”

“And questions are raised, chief among them whether certain branches of science have become infected with a pernicious groupthink, the kind that exalts identity and politics over inquiry and evidence — a problem that often occurs, as Dreger puts it, when "liberal hearts bleed so much that brains stop getting enough oxygen."

So there you have it. The quotes are from the very good piece by Tom Bartlett: “Reluctant Crusader: Why Alice Dreger’s Writing on Sex and Science Makes Liberals So Angry,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Mar. 10, 2015

Go to her blog. She is clearly someone we would all like to have as a friend and she has been able to maintain her sense of humor even if her enemies have not. http://alicedreger.com/

We have now covered the Facts. For the Finger see her new book: Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science. For a good review by David Dobbs see the New York Times Book Review, April 17, 2015. Here is how she starts the book:

“Soon enough,” Alice Dreger writes at the beginning of her romp of a book, “I will get to the death threats, the sex charges, the alleged genocides, the epidemics, the alien abductees, the anti-lesbian drug, the unethical ethicists, the fight with Martina Navratilova and, of course, Galileo’s middle finger. But first I have to tell you a little bit about how I got into this mess.”

Although I am somewhat more of an expert on the finger, having given some and received many, I will again simply refer you to a source that is better if you have begun wondering exactly “When Did the Middle Finger Become Offensive?” An article with that title by Daniel Nasaw is found in BBC News Magazine, Feb. 6, 2012. As additional incentive you will also learn about the bras d’honneur.

Expurgations (1) Accident

Although it seems to me that there is an increase in crassness, there is also evidence of a growing sensitivity among us. As an index of such sensitivity one can use the number of pleas made for us to stop using words that are offensive and chart the disappearance of such words. I have noticed recently that many words are simply gone and some are about to go and I thought I should keep you on alert since they do not yet show up in a Dictionary of Archaic and Obsolete Words. Hence Expurgations, which will inform you of the activities of the Bowdlerizers.

By ‘offensive’ words you are probably thinking of ‘naughty’ ones, which used to comprise the largest category, or blasphemous ones which ranked pretty high or, now, any term that remotely relates to race or ethnicity - such as some that are found linked to the names of sports teams. I should add, by the way, that I will tread lightly about this subject, since up here in Canada we have “Hate Laws” and “Human Rights Tribunals” so any offensive word applied to a person is viewed rather harshly. For example, if in a heated moment I exhibited hate by calling you a “Twerp”, I would be sent to prison; if I called you a “Plump Twerp” I would be put to death since a hate crime of that magnitude is a the only one for which there is still a death penalty.

It seems fitting to begin with the letter A, so the soon-to-be-obsolete word-of-the week is ACCIDENT, particularly if used adjacent to “Automobile.”

I kind of expected this one since I have noticed on TV news that no matter how ‘accidental’ a catastrophic incident looks to me,  the focus of the reporter is always on finding out who the culprit was that caused it.

The fact that many are calling for the elimination of the term ‘automobile accidents’ was called to my attention by this article: “It’s No Accident: Advocates Want to Speak of Car ‘Crashes’ Instead,” by Matt Richtel, May 22, 2016, New York Times.

If most car crashes are caused by drunkenness, or texting or driver error or plain stupidity, then it’s not like “God made it happen.” The bureaucrats have become involved (generally not a good thing for language) and those in Nevada just suggested that the a-word be changed to ‘crash’ in such things as police reports. In New York city the Vision Zero Action Plan [?] states that “The City of New York must no longer regard traffic crashes as mere “accidents,” but rather as preventable incidents that can be systematically addressed.” While the Times has not figured out how it will address the problem, the Associated Press already has: “accident, crash – Generally acceptable for automobile and other collisions and wrecks. However, when negligence is claimed or proven, avoid accident, which can be read by some as a term exonerating the person responsible. In such cases, use crash, collision or other terms. See collide, collision.”

As you will see from the use of the word “negligence” above, lawyers are likely to be involved, and linguists, semanticists and philosophers needed. I will leave you here since I am simply alerting you, not attempting to explain to you. About many accidents, my position would not be a particularly sophisticated one and can be summarized in a phrase I would put in Latin, if I could:: S*** Happens.

By the way, there is a new book about the subject of words and it has a very clever title: Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English Usage by Oliver Kamm.

Amazing Accomplishment(s)

A couple of years ago I promised my wife that we were going to visit a very special place during our long road trip back to Ontario from Arizona. It was to be a birthday present for her and a way for me to stall a while longer in the spring. When it was time to make the rather significant detour I had to announce the destination and when the announcement of “Bentonville, Arkansas” failed to elicit much in the way of a positive response I threw in the additional enticing facts that it was the birthplace of both Sam Walton and Walmart and added for safety that it was also near Fayetteville, “Home of the Hogs”. We are still together. My real purpose was for us to visit the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which we both thoroughly enjoyed and, by the way, Fayetteville is a lovely university town.

By now you probably know about Crystal Bridges which is a MAJOR museum nestled in the woods among springs in a structure designed by Moshe Safdie and which is full of American art (among other things). There are deer in the woods among the tulip trees. Apart from the architecture of the museum there is also the Frank Lloyd Wright ‘Bachman-Wilson House’ which was disassembled in New Jersey and put back together in this splendid setting. Go to the website and have a look and then go - or shop online at the very nice store. I would put pictures here, but I am rather a novice at blogging as you know. Keep in mind also that some of the exhibits change. When we visited, one of them consisted of the illustrations of Samuel Kilbourne from Game Fishes of the United States. When I went up to the library (yes, it has a very nice one) a blazered gentlemen pulled a copy from the shelves and left me alone to examine it

And, by the way, much of this is the result of the vision (and of the expenditure of considerable sums) of one woman - Alice Walton. There is a great anecdote about her found in a great story about the whole project. Apparently a committee had decided that a good name for the place would be “The Benton Wood Museum” (which makes sense since it is the name of a senator and the setting is bucolic), but Ms Walton had decided upon the present name. When one of the members suggested that “Crystal Bridges” sounded a trifle “kitschy”, like the name of a “second-rate country singer” her response was “Well, I like it.” For the good story see: Rebecca Mead, “Alice’s Wonderland: A Walmart Heiress Builds a Museum in the Ozarks,” the New Yorker, June 27, 2011.

So, what was the purpose of recounting this tale which, even if better told, happened a while back? Well, apart from letting you know about the place, I wanted you to know that I just learned that a) this is not the first time a wealthy woman has established a museum in the boondocks, nor is it b) the first occasion when some enterprising person has taken apart a Wright house, transported it hundreds of miles and re-built it. Both those things happened. In 1959, Mary Marchand Woods opened the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in the woods of southwestern Pennsylvania. Nearby, one will also find a Frank Lloyd Wright house that was dismantled and moved from a Chicago suburb. In fact, there are a couple of Wright houses as well as his Fallingwater. You can even stay in one of them. For all the details you need to plan your detour see: “In Frank Lloyd Wright Country, Architecture and Apple Pie,” Stephen Heyman, the New York Times, July 27, 2016.

Women Presidential Candidates

Gracie Allen and The Surprise Party

I think it highly likely that we all need a little humour during this U.S.election season and here is some that relates to the current situation in which we find a female fighting for the job. It happened before, in 1940. You may not have heard of Gracie Allen since she died in 1964, but you likely have of her husband George who passed away in 1996, a reversal of the usual actuarial scenario. They were a comedy team and she was the candidate for the “Surprise Party” which  had as a mascot a kangaroo and whose motto was “It’s In the Bag.” She left many funny lines along the campaign trail including  "Everybody knows a woman is better than a man when it comes to introducing bills into the house." There is a book about that campaign - Gracie Allen for President 1940: Vote With the Surprise Party, by William Carroll - but, the cheapest copy I can locate costs $60.00. There is always Wikipedia or visit this blog for a good account.

Russell Baker’s Birthday

A Real Good Ol' Boy

Today, Mr. Baker is 91 years old and will have lived 33, 238 days. I know these things because I have an internet connection. He and I grew up in neighboring states, but we were not particularly close; he lived in the far west of Virginia while I resided on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and he is somewhat older than I. I learned it was his birthday because I thought I would write something about him and figured I had better look him up.

Mr. Baker was a writer and journalist who wrote for many years for the New York Times and that is how I came to know him. You are likely more serious and know that he wrote also for the New York Review of Books and was the host of the PBS show, “Masterpiece Theatre”. When he was offered the armchair he thought it was a joke and was smart enough to realize that he did not want to replace the well-respected and long-tenured Alistair Cooke, but rather the guy who replaced the guy who succeeded Mr. Cooke. In any case, he took the job and I am sure you remember him and, like me, wish him well.

I am doing this simply because I wish to introduce you to something he wrote. It will come at the conclusion of this post after a bit of filler.

He began the “Observer” column for the New York Times in 1962 and the last one appeared on Christmas Day in 1998. It bore the title “A Few Words at the End” and in it he expresses his love for newspapers, a sentiment that seems to be rapidly waning among others. The titles of his columns were often good, as you will see, as were most of his sentences. For example, in the column “Up There in High Dudgeon”, we learn the answer to the frequently raised question of “Why we don’t like lawyers?” - Because “lawyers complicate what is simple and complexify what is merely complicated.”

Here are three samples for you. This one indicates how much things have changed with regards to one formerly august American institution.

“An Ozark Lawyer Studies Wall Street”, March 6, 1955.

   “ If your dream of a Southern Senator is a set of leather lungs wrapped in a frock coat and topped with a silvery mane, J. William Fulbright will come as a gentle awakening. The junior senator from Arkansas, who heads up Congress’ first stock market study in a generation, will yield nothing in polish, shrewdness, wit or intelligence to the men of Wall Street. Spiritually he is as remote from Senator Claghorn as Sir Anthony Eden is from Casey Stengel. Intellectually -- and that is how most people think of him first -- he enriches the Senate with the humanized perspective inherited from his Oxford education.”

This one shows how relevant his writing still can be although it is only now that we are witnessing the “ultimate result”. It was widely syndicated in 1987.

“Reagan the Ultimate Result of TV Game Show Presidency,” March 12, 1987.

     “Television news is being wiped out by game shows. It doesn't mean the audience of the United States is getting dumber. It just means Americans don't look to TV for the serious stuff any more, just for light entertainment.

     This is television as foreseen by Fred Allen - "chewing gum for the eyes" - and it explains why the United States is having this run of inadequate presidents. Presidential politics turned into television long ago, television turned into light entertainment and, inevitably, presidents turned into light entertainers.

We now see the ultimate fruit of the process in poor, bewildered Ronald Reagan , who is light entertainment from toe to pompadour. He is baffled by all the hostility since the discovery that he wasn't much good at governing.

It will probably become even harder to get well-qualified people elected president unless the business of nominating candidates is taken away from television. It is this monstrous process - starting with the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary - that provides the entertainment format for turning an election into a game show.

With the connivance of the press, which ought to know better, television uses these two utterly inconsequential events to create an entire season of game shows.”

Now this last one illustrates again his talent for titles and how little things have changed as well as Baker’s prescience. It is his response when he was deluged with hate mail after he wrote positively about Senator Edward Kennedy and negatively about the N.R.A.

“Sass With Bile,” July 13, 1991:

“One knows that barrels of angry letters will be the punishment for derogatory remarks about the N.R.A. Intemperate mail from supporters of the gun lobby is so inevitable that I rarely beat this drum.” He then notes that: “Guns are out of control in this country, wanton murder is likely to be our lot for decades to come and, like it or not, there isn’t much anybody can do about it.” He concludes:
“I must go back to writing sweeter stuff about how long to boil a three-minute egg and what good-hearted people we Americans are.”

For such material he received a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1979. When his friendly rival (Art Buchwald, remember him?) reported this ‘bad news’ he added that he had heard that Erma Bombeck (remember her?), who was flying at the time, was so upset she ate the airline food. I guess some things have changed; at least the airlines offered food back then.


He also received another Pulitzer in 1983, this one for his autobiography, Growing Up. This is the opening paragraph from that work and the real purpose behind this post; the purpose being simply to present it to you. If you ever see a contest calling for “The Best Opening Paragraph” you can submit it on my (and Mr. Russell’s) behalf:

“At the age of eighty my mother had her last bad fall, and after that her mind wandered free through time. Some days she went to weddings and funerals that had taken place a half a century earlier. On others she presided over family dinners cooked on Sunday afternoons for children who were now gray with age. Through all of this she lay in bed but moved across time, traveling among the dead decades with a speed and ease beyond the gift of physical science.

“Where’s Russell?” she asked one day when I came to visit at the nursing home.

“I’m Russell,” I said.

She gazed at this improbably overgrown figure out of an inconceivable future and promptly dismissed it.

“Russell’s only this big,” she said, holding her hand palm down, two feet from the floor. That day she was a young country wife with chickens in the backyard and a view of hazy blue Virginia mountains behind the apple orchard, and I was a stranger old enough to be her father.”

Over 340 pages later he returns to that room and presents another  moving description, but additional poignant passages are found throughout the book. Here is one more sample:
“On a broiling afternoon when the men were away at work and all the women napped, I moved through majestic depths of silences, silences so immense I could hear the corn growing. Under these silences there was an orchestra of natural music playing music no city child would ever hear. A certain cackle from the henhouse meant we had gained an egg. The creak of a porch swing told of a momentary breeze blowing across my grandmother’s yard. Moving past Liz Virt’s barn as quietly as an Indian, I could hear the swish of a horse’s tail and knew the horseflies were out in strength. As I tiptoed along a mossy bank to surprise a frog, a faint splash told me the quarry had spotted me and slipped into the stream. Wandering among the sleeping houses, I learned that tin roofs crackle under the power of the sun, and when I tired and came back to my grandmother’s house, I padded into her dark cool living room, lay flat on the floor, and listened to the hypnotic beat of her pendulum clock on the wall ticking the meaningless hours away.”

I hope you have enjoyed his work and that he has a fine day.