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AMY SMITH LINTON

April Already

4/12/2021

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April is National Poetry month.  Ironically enough, the first quote about April that springs eagerly to mind comes from The Waste Land. Grumpy old T.S. Eliot proclaiming "April is the cruellest month."

Kind or cruel, I'm not here to argue the facts; however; isn't it enough truth –– the simple fact of Aprillity? 

T.S. goes on to say why April is the cruelest month: "breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain."  

Buzzkill, dude.

As a green lass, I also read A.E. Housman's The Loveliest of Trees.

It's got the virtue of being short to balance against its general gloom and the inherent math problem of "threescore and ten."

​For those of us who don't calculate in base score, "threescore and ten"  means 70, the average span of human life. 
​
His point is that 50 springs is not enough, no matter how you slice it. Preach it, brother.

I've over-ordered spring plantings, I've pack-ratted a mound of supplies, and as soon as I manage my second vaccination shot, we are heading to the Would-Be Farm. 

Because it's April. Already!
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Would-Be Farm Stones

12/8/2020

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The natural question is, "So, what do you grow at the farm?

​"Do you have cows? Corn? Chickens?"

My smart-alecky (but not untrue) answer is that the principal crops of the Would-Be Farm include burdocks, porcupines, and rocks.  

​Rocks are the only one of those things I've harvested year after year. 

It's a kind of obsession, wanting to shunt small boulders and flat stones hither and yon. 
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Doesn't everyone have this impulse to shuffle chunks of granite or marble or gneiss from one place to another? 

Pull a rock from a garden bed, fit it into the border.

Roll one boulder next to another to make a lookout perch. 

​Set a big flat slab just where you need to step.

Create rock terraces up a slippery slope.

Excavate a tiny pool and line it with mossy cobbles so the spring melt-water will fill and then drizzle musically along its merry way. 

​Florida offers so little in the line of rocks, at least in our sandy neck of the woods.

But the Would-Be Farm contains lifetimes' worth of movable stones just waiting to get picked up and placed elsewhere.
​
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Perhaps the rock-moving thing is in the blood. 

Heaven knows there are stone workers by the shovel-full up the family tree: tin miners in Cornwall, copper miners in Tennessee, the odd silver-miner crushed in freak accident in a Colorado mine.
And after all, I'm not the only one in the family who likes to rearrange the rocky furniture of the world.

I've known my sister to leap from a running car when she spots the stone she needs for her rock-garden.

My own Daddo –– a carpenter and a mason –– showed me to mix cement and set bricks when I was but a wee nipper. 


​The local quarryman who does the heaviest lifting (making driveways, delivering gravel, etc.) at the Would-Be Farm needs only to be briefly reminded that I am Aunt Prudy's niece and he lights UP.
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His reserved "hello" morphs into a grinning, winking welcome. "Oh! If only..." he always ends up sighing. Charming Aunt P makes conquests left and right. 

​I know she had the quarryman and his crew move and readjust rocks over and over and over again until she had her flagstone patio just the way she liked. It's to her credit that the quarryman made it beautiful and remembers her fondly.
Making a stone surface like that is not just a matter of skipping a few stones into leveling sand and calling it good. 

I believe that if you gather five or seven flagstones, there's only going to be one or two "correct" configurations.  

​And a person might have to tidily-wink rocks around and then contemplate the composition for a few days before finding the right arrangement.

Stones have their own logic and preferences.
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​You have to listen to them or learn to live with some half-assed, unbalanced construct. 

What can be more beautiful than an elegant old stone wall?  
​Running mostly straight, like a seam across a landscape -- ooh, ahh.
I'll own the sentiment second-hand.

I'm not proud.

If I hadn't learned to notice and love the ruins of old farms from my mother, I'd have adopted it from Robert Frost.

Though, in all fairness, I think Frost came from Mumsie as well.  

Before google was a verb, we passed one North Country blizzard by pulling "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" –– stanza by sing-song stanza –– from imperfect collective memory. 

I remember the blue light of the overcast sky reflecting ice into the dim living-room. The sinking presence of cold at the glass. And the dozens of running, stumbling starts it took for one of us to finally say the poem complete from start to finish. 

Many years later, reading Frost's "Home Burial," a second time, maybe because my own name was in it –– I inadvertently learned that stories about pain are better than ones that start and end in happiness alone.

Not an original impulse. Never is, under the sun -- so wrote a world-weary Sumerian* 5,000 years ago. 

Although, I remind myself cheerfully, if we each of us waited for a truly original impulse or thought, we would all be mysteries to each other. 

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* My favorite Sumerian quotation is "there is nothing new under the sun." Which, as it turns out when I research the citation, isn't Sumerian at all but Ecclesiastes. Huh.
​
My second favorite Sumerian quote? "What kind of a scribe is a scribe who does not know Sumerian?"
National Park Warning
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Art or Nature?

12/11/2018

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Life is not the only thing out there imitating art.

​Evidently Nature's in on it too. 

According to Edgar Degas, "Art is not what you see, but what you make others see."  And for that I might as well go ahead and apologize.  
Goblin Valley State Park
The naughty bit...of a goblin. Goblin State Park, Utah.
Venus di Mideci buttocks
She doesn't get the same press as David, but the Medici Venus at the Uffizi has got back, baby.
I was thinking about the Alexander Pope quote, which was –– I thought –– Art is but Nature to advantage dressed.  Or, in this case, not dressed. I meant to rift extensively on part about being undressed. Low humor, sure, and possibly dragging in the topic of saggy pants.

But when I checked the quotation (From his Essay on Criticism, which is in strictest truth a poem), Pope actually wrote:
"True wit is Nature to Advantage drest,/What oft was Thought, but ne'er so well Exprest,/Something, whose Truth convince'd at Sight we find,/That gives us back the Image of our Mind."

Oh Alexander Pope, you navel-gazing noodler. 
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Then folk do long to go on pilgrimage*

4/15/2018

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*I love that phrase, which goes something like, "In April...then folk do long to go on pilgrimage," from the opening sentence of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

In the interest of brutal honesty and over-sharing, inside that ellipsis? Those three dots contain an entire universe of wordy wordy words that may have in played a pivotal role in my decision NOT to pursue graduate work in English.
As a young student, I heard the Middle English version of the prelude to The Canterbury Tales  once and was interested –– my word, how German it sounds! And it's almost comprehensible! Wow, 600 years later and the language is so different!

The second time it was quoted at me, I began to find the thing tiresome.
Amy Smith Linton
The third time, I realized quoting the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English was a painful dating stratagem of people in my chosen field of study. The idea being, perhaps, to stupefy and render the object unconscious.  
In case you think I am being over-dramatic, I give you a YouTube video (Go on, I double-dawg dare you!) of the poem.

You can imagine the performance when combined with a certain brand of collegiate earnestness and ardor.
 
PS: Yeah, by the way, "Old English," which is what you might think this guy is speaking? That's what people spoke before 1066 AD.

​Geoffrey Chaucer was writing around 1400 AD. If you were to make this rookie mistake when someone is fervently quoting Chaucer at you at an English department event, you might never escape the lecturing. 
Still, April is a time when folk DO long to hit the road.

Springtime itchy feet.

​Questing for sunny beaches or the last few downhill runs, going for the peak cherry blossoms or those first bulbs poking heads out of the mud. 
Rock Iris
Each trip worth a Tale.
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Sweet April, many a thought is wedded unto thee*

4/6/2018

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National Poetry Month. 
Poems are where word-caterpillars emerge from their cocoons.
​Maybe.

Brithys crini
Brithys crini larvae. Common name: Crinium lily grub or Amaryllis borer.
P-p-pa-poetry? Here, this won'd hurt much:

The Caterpillar by Ogden Nash
​
I find among the poems of Schiller
No mention of the caterpillar
Nor can I find one anywhere
In Petrarch or in Baudelaire
So here I sit in extra session
To give my personal impression.
The caterpillar, as it's called,
Is often hairy, seldom bald;
It looks as if it never shaves;
When it walks, it walks in waves.
And from the cradle to the chrysalis
It's utterly speechless, songless, whistless. 
​
Brithys crini
This batch of B. crini had cute little faces. Seen on Mormon Key, Everglades National Park. February 2018.
Shakespearean butterflies? Sure.

​And where else but Lear? It's a butterfly-ish play**, the madness and the stomping around and all...and for the fastidious, his poetry is a blanker shade of verse than Mr. Nash's. 
This speech comes after King Lear and Cordelia have been captured and Lear is delighting in the company of the one who turned out to be his really good daughter:

Lear: No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out;
And take upon's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,
In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.

*That from "An April Day" by William Wadsworth Longfellow. WWL was a BIG fan of April. 

*Okay, maybe Lear is not SO much butterfly-ish, but Peter S. Beagle's fictional butterfly quotes Lear to great effect in another work; hence they are joined in my mind. 
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Gearing Up to Write

5/16/2017

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When asked, many of the manly American men writers of their day used to claim that writing is easy.  You just open a vein.

(Versions of the quote come from sportswriter Red Smith, sportswriter and novelist Paul Gallico, wordy novelist Thomas Wolfe, and his High-T Manliness Himself –– Ernest Hemingway. Thanks Garson O'Toole for this blog all about it.)

Um, okay, boys. Not for nothing, but bleeding is a lot easier.  
That said, I've been away from my notebook and pen for a stretch. I actually forgot to bring paper on the month-long trip to the farm.

At least
 half-a-dozen things are tugging at my time right now. Any one of them is more pleasant and easeful than working on that novel.    

I face a hefty amount of preparatory coaxing and girding up of the loins, bargaining and carrot-and-sticking, all in the interest of getting words to start flowing.
Which opens the door to the real the question: why write at all.  Why not just not write?  Get the other things on my list done. Retire or whatnot. 

I would, actually, if I could.

So far I have failed to give it up.  I've alluded to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner a time or two; it's  that poem with the old guy pestering people at a wedding, insisting that he tell them HIS story –– that's a pretty good illustration of what goes on over here. 


And yet, despite characters shouting and raising their hands frantically in the back of my skull-duggery room and a good playlist cued up, I am dipping into Reynold Price's wonderful Learning a Trade: A Craftsman's Notebooks 1955-1997. It's an annotated journal that gives me hope: in it, Price writes about his process. He dithers and wonders about his characters' motivations and choices. He revisits and re-considers his own moral position based on the things his characters do –– or what they must do, whether he wants them to do or not.

Price was a young man at start of these notebooks studying and writing in Oxford and then back in North Carolina, before he wrote A Long and Happy Life, his first novel. By the end, he's had a has successful career, including Kate Vaiden, and a dozen other novels, as well as screenplays and short stories, books with a biblical bent, and volumes of memoir. 

Here's a sample from page 77 of Learning a Trade. 


20 January 1957 LONDON
But look, isn't this story in danger of ending with a kind of cheat, that is with no resolution? What is the end going to imply?: simply that she leaves home for Norfolk or wherever? Maybe Wesley had better make some kind of gesture, however small
. 

And page 129:
27 August 1960, DURHAM 
Rosacoke has told Wesley her pregnancy. His only reaction has been silence –– then question: has she known anyone else? Then simply telling her to come on, they must practice. Her own feeling through the revelation is chiefly numbness, tiredness –– though Wesley notices on her face the same look that was there on the November night (which was described then as hate).
 


I haven't read the story in question, and may never do so. Can't say I am want to know about Wesley and Rosacoke.  What's interesting –– and heartening –– is that Price clearly spent a good portion of his waking life playing with his paper dolls, too, imagining an inner life for these imaginary friends, worrying about their actions and what it all means.  

Misery is not the only thing that loves company. 
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"Hope is the Thing with Feathers"

4/28/2016

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White-Breasted Nuthatch
Thank you, Emily Dickinson. Even though that poem is not my favorite of yours (I like the shocking ones like, "Because I would not stop for Death/He kindly stopped for me––").

But still, these are the words that come to me over coffee as I sit watching the birds at the feeder. 

Who doesn't like a bird-feeder? (Answer: don't even tell me. Killjoys.)

There's a nice variety swooping in the first week of April: nuthatches and chickadees, house finches and gold finches, cedar waxwings and juncos. (My sister intones "There's a rumble in the junco!")  Plus flickers and downy woodpeckers, robins and pigeons, red-winged blackbirds, a single determined crow goose-stepping at the perimeter. 

The birds are at war, I think, despite how they sound chipper and some poets might suggest they embody hope. They are always skirmishing over seed at the feeder. Or chasing off potential suitors. Or courting like overcharged sixth-graders.

It's a little like watching the television news. Only a little less bloodless and a lot less duplicitous.
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Something there is that doesn't love a wall*

4/17/2015

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101 years ago, Robert Frost published Mending Wall*, about the mysterious forces that try to dismantle a rock wall. Each spring, the narrator explains, he and his neighbor walk along the fence-line, each on his own side, replacing the fallen stones, while the narrator tries to resist the temptation to making light of the chore (after all, his apple trees aren't going to trespass on the neighbor's pine strand!). 

We have only a few remnant stone walls at the Would-Be Farm, but there are plenty of other chores that will keep me away from the computer for a while. Thank you for checking in –– I'll be back before long.



*Yup, another poem. It's National Poetry Month. 
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So, a Duck Walks into a Bar...

4/14/2015

4 Comments

 
Mallard duck
What makes something humorous? As to be expected, a whole field of scientific inquiry (called "gelotology," not to be confused with gelato-ology) has devoted itself to the subject. Oh, to be on those PhD boards...

The Cliff-notes version of what makes funny funny suggests something like this: humor arises from transgression and surprise. We have expectations of what's normal, so humor involves challenging or overturning those expectations in a way that is mildly alarming and/or absurd.


A duck is not supposed to walk into a bar, in the normal course of affairs. The duck's smart-alecky comment is usually something of a surprise or something patently absurd. <insert sound of canned laugh-track>


Radiolab, the fantastic radio show, also looks at gelotology in this episode.
National Poetry Month -- it's doesn't have to be serious, people.
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The Small Dog Chronicles: Lazarus, Come Back to Tell You All*

4/10/2015

6 Comments

 
Lilly has been 13 years old for some time now. As with many ladies of a certain age, it seems indelicate, not to say unkind, to keep a strict accounting of her years. The small dog is clearly an elder: her little face is white and she moves stiffly most mornings (and afternoons). The exact number of her winters is not important.
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It's not infinite, that number. Of course it's not. I imagine it's part of why dogs crack our hearts wide open: a lucky caretaker will know her dog from goofy puppyhood until it grows old and dies. Luckier yet knows more than one dog... because all that slobber and wagging and joyful frolicking does end. A reminder of how it goes for every one of us...if only we could forget about the mortgages and religious differences and dignity and what-not for a little while.

I've been anticipating the demise of my inherited small dog Lilly nearly since she first came to stay. In my defense, she was old when my mother rescued her and the vet -- who, ironically, has since retired -- did pronounce her to be "on borrowed time" because of her various ailments. Not just the ruptured disks in her back, but a pronounced heart murmur from a leaky heart valve.

So when, after ratcheting her way up the stairs like a slightly under-wound mechanical toy, she stopped in the hallway outside our bedroom, coughed twice and then fell limply to her side, I was pretty sure her timecard had been punched.

"At least it was quick," I thought. "Poor little thing. No emergency room, and she wasn't scared, and that's something."

But her little sides were still moving. I sat and listened to her heart flitter-thumping along. She didn't wiggle under my hand. Her eyes were closed. She didn't seem to be in pain. I sat with her and stroked her bony head and told her that she had been a good dog. As one does. 

Over the course of the night, she didn't move, but she kept breathing. I think my responsibility to this old is to make sure she doesn't suffer. She seemed -- to be fair -- as if she was just sound flat asleep. 

When I got up in the morning and peeped around the corner, she was giving me the especially impatient look she reserves for mealtimes. Her ears pricked and her feet beating a little skittering tattoo.  Then she was trotting ahead of me, trying to lure me toward her bowl, as if I might have something better to do than prepare her delicious breakfast. Right this minute!

"Looks like she cheated Death last night," Jeff said, behind me. "Maybe she zigged when the Angel of Death swooped."

So whether the small dog was sleeping or dodging the inevitable, who can say? All I know is that she stands by my feet just now, grunting vaguely about a snack or about going outside.  It's obvious that life is fleeting and astonishing, and that the end comes before we are ready -- but not this day. 


*That reference not from the Gospel of John, but T.S. Eliot's The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock. 
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