Blog Posts

Confabulate

1/3/2021

There's a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon that I clipped from the newspaper (they used to print newspapers on paper called "newsprint." So quaint!) and have kept for innumerable moves.

The strip is simple...Hobbes burbles on about the word "smock," while Calvin grows increasingly irritable about it.

But Hobbes speaks truth: some words simply are pleasant to say.

One of my friends adores the word "bumbershoot," and it's surprising how often she manages to work it into conversation.

I often come back at her with parapluie, which I've usually forgotten is French for umbrella.

My language skills go spotty from time to time, rife with spelling oddities and misattributed vocabulary.

I blame an early bout of encephalitis. Still, wrong language or not, I stand by the parapluie; it's far more fun to say than bumbershoot.

Never mind the wonderful world of profanity.

(Profanity as a word, let me remind us, started life as a description of irreligious language. It would mean profaning a deity or a religion. Only as time went by did it come to mean bodily vulgarity.)

So many highly enjoyable ways to express discontent or contempt using those seven or so words...

But as far a favorite words I can use in mixed company, I favor "confabulate." Indeed I do.

It's a mouthful, this Latinate word that sounds a fabulous convict, but no. It came from "tabula," a tale and a table, joined with "com," which means "together," but which gets changed to "con" for ease of speech.

In the original Latin (one original Latin, anyhow), it was "confabulari" and it meant to talk about something or another. Like chatting or chattering or burbling. In a rare Oz moment, American slang shortens the word to "confab." One might say, "We're having a confab, Mom, just leave the snacks at the door."

Then in 1900 or so, the word took up a new job: describing a clinical behavior of making up stuff to fill gaps in memory. A person with dementia is said to confabulate when telling you that he was in the Bolshoi ballet, say, and a spy for the Allies, when you're quite sure he was a dentist in Cincinnati born after the war, with a bum leg to boot.

Confabulation is a coping mechanism for people with failing memory. It works to help patients make sense of the world; they generally do not even know that they are telling a tale. Unlike a garden-variety lie, which assumes intent, confabulation is not a conscious choice.

It's not just the result of brain injuries, btw. Confabulation comes to play when people are striving to make a correct answer. Which is partly the challenge with eye-witness accounts. As a species, we like to be right.

I've been thinking about confabulation as both chatting and bridging a gap in memory, but also as description for how or why we tell stories.

It's a little like people-watching ("Be careful, the man in the gaberdine suit is a spy!"), where the story starts off as a guess –– one that will never be tested as true or false ("Excuse me, sir, is your bowtie really a camera?").

We elaborate on the guess, spinning a yarn from whatever bits of fluff float around in our minds.

How peculiar that thinking about confabulation brings me yet again to Joan Didion. (If you haven't read "We Tell Ourselves Stories To Live," I am sorry for you. Confabulation topic sidebar: What if Joan Didion was THE deity?)

Okay, egg-heading over. I also like the word "spanakopita," but you don't catch me babbling on about it.

Yet more confabulating articles:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01207/full

https://aeon.co/ideas/confabulation-why-telling-ourselves-stories-makes-us-feel-ok

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20190527-can-fiction-really-improve-your-mental-health

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Hysterical Weather

12/29/2020

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I snapped a photo of the television while awaiting landfall of Hurricane Eta. It's not unsurprising that local newscasters, who should certainly know better, position themselves near a body of water and start casting news.

If it's not a weather person suited head to toe in Goretex, announcing that the waves are throwing the yachts around violently (in the background, a tranquil day at a marina, the boats bobbing languidly under an overcast sky), it's some would-be Jim Cantore shouting about the force of the winds when it's, you know, breezy –– but not brutal.

In this photo, I love the cognitive dissonance: this newscaster was talking about how Tampa Bay residents were battening down their hatches and frantically preparing for the storm, while in the background, the usual cast of fishing characters are lounging on the pier, baiting their hooks and hoping for a good bite.

Come on, man.

P.S. This is not to say we don't have anything to worry about. People die from hurricanes, and houses are washed into the sea. But hyperbole is flat out unnecessary.

Tell the story that is, not the story that sounds more exciting. And that's my wish for the new year.

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Hippy Hoppodays.

12/21/2020

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One of my faves.

This time of year, you're apt to overhear a lugubrious but truncated version of "Happy Holidays" around our house.

Not that Andy Williams doesn't already win in those dubious lugubrious stakes, but ugh, I can't stand that song. One of us will start belting it out and then, if it's me, stop and swear briefly. Every year, the third week of December rolls around and somehow, this annoying song gets onto my internal jukebox.

And because that's how I play, the words of the song get a quick change-up, so I'll unwittingly start singing, "Hippy Hoppodays!" only to stop, swear briefly, and try to change the channel.

Without resorting to "The Girl from Ipanema," of course.

For instance, I might try for a sarcastic version of "Here comes Santa Claus" or a full-on 39-and-a-half-foot-pole version of "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch." Thurl Ravenscroft rocks.

Or possibly the most upbeat offering of the season, Bare Naked Ladies' "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen."

May your winter holidays be joyful and full of good noise.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

* 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?"

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Spawn of Frankenscot Lurches Out Once More

12/1/2020

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O Spawn! It's getting to be that time of year again!*

My favorite skipper took a couple of days to locate all the pieces and parts of his Everglades Challenge adventure boat.

He picked a Saturday and made a few phone calls to drum up other WaterTribesfolk.

And if the weather wasn't exactly cooperative, Spawn DID get to shake off the cobwebs and skitter about Tampa Bay last weekend.

They put in maybe 7 hours of sailing, finishing under a lovely full moon.

It was a decent warm-up, as the team remembered (when prompted by text by an alert ground control) to turn on their dang SPOT tracker when they were already halfway down the Bay.

Which is why their track looks like a point-to-point sail rather than the actual circle route that it was.

Fans of the team will be surprised to know that zero major innovations are planned for the 2021 event (starts the first Saturday in March at dawn at Fort Desoto Beach! Bring bagpipes!). Of course three months does leave room for all sorts of shenanigans. We'll see.

Thanks to Dave Helmick, Dave Clement, Andy Hayward, and Nate Villardebo, most excellent WaterTribesmen, who offered help, companionship, and a place to park. Good luck in the most challenging part of the Challenge: getting to the beach.

*Time of year coming up...when armchair adventurers and make-it-real dreamers to prepare to participate in (or just watch) adventure: human powered watercraft (from kayaks to SUPs to catamarans, etc.) take an unsupported 300-mile-long voyage south along Florida's west coast.

The event offers both genuine danger (the waiver spells it out: "You could die") and possibilities within a budget's reach (a couple hundred bucks worth of required equipment, a little boat, ten days of vacation...).

The starting line –– the high tide line on the beach –– offers an astonishing vision of people living their dreams. And alarming, of course.

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Out to Lunch...or Something.

11/19/2020

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It's NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and for every day I don't produce words, I am extending into December.

Possibly January.

I'll try to check in soon, since I have been doing some excellent procrastination, but meanwhile... Cheers!

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Writing Prompt: Tree lives

10/25/2020

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Putting words on the screen and trying not to be too judgy-judgy about whatever my creativity chucks out...

Like sunburned beachgoers storming an ice-cream parlor, the tiny leaf-shaped fires spread a conflagration of color across the woodlot.

Inside the wood, under the bright canopy, the leaf-strewn floor shines brighter yet. Rafts of bronze-backed turkey drift through this orange world. Devilish tuft-eared black squirrels add a Halloween accent, digging with only the barest pause to glare at an intruder.

A pair of leggy yearling deer skitter around a doe. She rarely stops moving, nosing through the leaves for beechnuts, for tender branch-ends, for windfall apples.

Prey animals are changing color from spring chestnut to ashy brown. In a week they will disappear into a stand of dead grass simply by standing still, but just now, in this pumpkin-spice week of peak color, they pop.

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The Would-Be Farm: At Long Last, Apples!

10/11/2020

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Once we discovered the neglected rows of apple trees on the Would-Be Farm and started their rehabilitation, the first question was always, "But what kind of apples?"

And for six years, I've answered (at painful, literal length), "We aren't sure."

Because, long story short, we have had one dang thing after another. Most critically, we've never been on hand when the fruits fully ripened without a late frost that nipped the buds, or that plague of tent caterpillars, or the zombie apocalypse, et cetera.

A few of the different kinds of apples.

But this year --!

First, aside from the considerable matter of a drought, it was a good year for fruit on the Farm. We had the first ripe apples in late August.

And with fruit in hand, it's possible to start identifying them. Not to mention eating them.

To figure out what kind of apple it is, one starts with looking at the size and shape of the fruit, the color and texture of its skin, the quality and color of the flesh, and finally, the flavor and juiciness of the apple. Phew.

I spent a lot of time sitting with a pile of apples, leafing through my reference book. I'm only sure of a few varieties –– but it's a start.

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Reading Lists

9/27/2020

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I was chatting with the owner of a new bookstore (So much hope slipped between the pages of THAT retail choice!) who told me that she reads anything put in front of her nose.

It's the Little Bookstore, btw, and if you are in her part of the world, go buy a book from this young business owner. Oh hell, suit up and go buy a book from any independent bookstore. Yes, a real book. From a real businessperson.

Yay you!

Since it's a summer unlike other summers (unlike ALL other summers, we can only hope) I decided to go a different way.

Instead of reading whatever finds its way to the front of my face, I thought, perhaps make a discipline of it.

Ah, that delicious question: what to read?

I never have gotten over my love of kid's books. Especially novels. So...why not as many Newbery books as might come to hand?

John Newbery was a British bookseller who turned children's literature to profit (he published The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes in 1765.
Not the Adam Ant version).

The American Library Association uses his name (John Newbery, not Adam Ant) to recognize the most "most distinguished contribution to American literature for children."

Each year since the 1920's, a book wins the Newbery Medal. And often there are a couple of runners-up –– Newbery Honor books.

Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, whatever, chosen by a group of American librarians.

Doing the easy math, it's 100 of the best books for younger readers from the past 100 or so years.

I already know a good quarter-century of those book covers from my childhood, but the more recent ones are unexplored territory.

Sidebar: I'm sure it's still going, but reading competitions in grade school ––!

As I remember, any book gave you 1 point, a book with the shiny silver Newbery Honor sticker 2 points, the gold Newbery Medal 3.

Not that it supplied any street cred, but man, I was really good at that game. How I looked forward to those weeks.

Sigh.

I've knocked out a couple of dozen new titles in the past couple of months, and revisited a double-handful of childhood favorites.

I'm formulating a few theories about the trend of Newbery winners.

The earliest winners tended to focus on "exotic" settings, then came a rash of Revolutionary War stories, and a run on historical fiction.

Unexpectedly, many of the older Newbery seem to me to hold their value -- Gay-Neck, the unfortunately titled 1925 winner about a pigeon in India, still speaks to surviving war, while 1973's The Slave Dancer was frankly amazing: a brutal and intimate depiction of the African slave trade from an unexpected viewpoint.

I'm not ending the experiment yet, especially since there doesn't seem to be any equally reliable award for "adult" fiction. And because there are so dang many yet to go.

Here's a short list that I read (or re-read) this summer.

My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craig George
Getting Near to Baby by Audrey Couloumbis
Echo Mountain by Lauren Wolk Hollow by Lauren Wolk
Three Times Lucky by Sheila Turnage
Slave Dancer by Paula Fox
Enchantress from the Stars by Sylvia Louise Engdahl
Abel's Island by William Steig
The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate
Turtle in Paradise by Jennifer Holm
The Crossover by Alexander Kwame
A Long Way from Chicago by Richard Peck
A Year Down Yonder by Richard Peck
Wittington by Alan Armstrong
Lily's Crossing by Patricia Reilly Giff
The Night Diary by Veera Hiranandani
Criss Cross by Lynne by Rae Perkins
The War That Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
The War I Finally Won by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
Hope Was Here by Joan Bauer
One Came Home by Amy Timberlake
The Watsons go to Birmingham, 1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis

Wish they earned some credit for some middle-school reading team...

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