Things you stumble across while you're looking for nothing ...

Here in Fort Worth, we have biking and walking paths along the Trinity River, up and down the river for a total of 27 miles.

I was out with my camera one day - probably ten years ago now, and came across this ... moment ... as I passed along the river trail under the Main Street viaduct.  There was a bench by the side of the river, with a dopp bag and a yellow rose waiting on one end of the bench seat.  The rose had begun to wither at that point - clearly it was Summer or close to it - and the dopp bag was empty. Nothing else anywhere near but a petal that had blown off the rose.  One or the other, and it would've been easy to imagine one tidy scenario or another.  An empty dopp bag or maybe a small cosmetics bag and a single rose.  What was their connection and what brought them to that place?

No telling.  An individual? A couple? Forgetfulness? Frustration? Someone with a very old story or maybe someone with some baggage they felt it was time to let go of ... not a clue.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but these words are a puzzle.

Janis Ian's haunting "At Seventeen"

Fifteen True Things About Writing, From Fifteen True Writers

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.” 
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” 
― Madeleine L'Engle

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” 
― Stephen King

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.” 
― William Faulkner

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” 
― Kurt Vonnegut

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” 
― Ernest Hemingway

“Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.” 
― Neil Gaiman

“You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.” 
― Ray Bradbury

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” 
― Thomas Mann

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.” 
― Carl Sagan

“Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.” 
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.” 
― Margaret Atwood

“Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.” 
― Flannery O'Connor

“Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone.” 
― Alan W. Watts

“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.” 
― Dorothy Parker

Frank O'Hara reading his own poems, 1966

Yeats reading "Innisfree" and others in the 1930s

I'm always fascinated by the differences in how I perceive a poem inside my head and in my own voice and how it comes from the author's own head and verse.

To Kill an Icon with a Watchman?

Fifty-five years after it was published, To Kill A Mockingbird is still both a much-beloved and a very annoying book, depending on who you listen to. Set A Watchman’s impending debut brings it back into sharper focus.  Folks are arguing afresh about how a) transformational it was for them and b) how maudlin and overstated the virtue of Atticus was.

I think most of the debate swings between these two poles:
 * Atticus is a wise and benevolent icon of virtue;
 * Atticus is a paternalistic pawn of the status quo.

I’ll be fair. I think both poles are have some truth, but miss the mark. Except he’s not just a saint or just a pawn. He’s a relatively decent guy most concerned about his own integrity, and managing to feed his orphaned children during the depression.

Maudie Atkinson summed up most of Atticus for me in saying, “I simply want to tell you that there are some men in this world who were born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father’s one of them.” I’ve never seen that as an enormous compliment. Sometimes that means leadership and doing the hard things they don’t want to do. Sometimes it means being opportunistic and doing the dirty things they don’t want to do. Moses did unpleasant work in leading the Israelites. On the other hand, Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano did unpleasant work as a Mafia hitman. Atticus is definitely not Sammy the Bull, but he also isn’t exactly Moses.

Let’s be honest. Atticus was somewhere in the middle. He had no problem with the deeply racially stratified Maycomb culture. His folks were on one side, their folks were on another, and Atticus felt bound by personal character and Southern decorum to treat everyone with respect if at all possible. He could, at one and the same time, treat Bob Ewell and Tom Robinson with the same level of respect. He treated the lynch mob that came for Tom with respect. Mostly, he had a problem with people acting outside the rule of law. Justice wasn’t his bottom line. His bottom line was a lot closer to “be decent” and “don’t make waves.” If he lost sleep at night, it was over those things and not whether Southern society offered an equitable place to persons of color.

Granted, in explaining to Scout why he took the case, Atticus says, “This case, Tom Robinson’s case, is something that goes to the essence of a man’s conscience-Scout, I couldn’t go to church and worship God if I didn’t try to help that man.” That’s great for him to say, but we have to keep in mind that he wasn’t driven by conscience to petition the court to be allowed to help Tom Robinson. He waited on his porch for the judge to come to him and request his services. Maybe he was already planning on going down in the morning and putting himself forward. We don’t know that. We only know that he felt bound by conscience to accept the judge’s desire to appoint him. He could’ve said no, and the judge would’ve appointed someone else. But the judge knew nobody else in Maycomb was going to give Tom fair representation. This was also a unique case. Atticus didn’t have a standing reputation as the lawyer whose conscience compelled him to volunteer to represent wrongly accused black men. His reputation was that of a lawyer who could be counted on to write an airtight will. Paperwork, not leading crusades, was Atticus’ forte.

I say all of that so that I can say this:

Mockingbird was never about Atticus for me. I remember first encountering it at the very blurry age of five and it has always been about Scout, Jem, and Boo Radley. Atticus is really just part of the background pseudo-Greek chorus that helps maintain the themes.

Facing down the mob at the Jail? Scout and Jem did ten times as much as Atticus. Sure, he shot the rabid dog, but Heck Tate had to talk him into it. Jem and eventually Boo were on hand to save Scout when she was attacked by Bob Ewell. When it came time to reckon with the death of Ewell, Scout and Jem and Heck and Boo were right and on the side of justice. Atticus was wrong. He fixated on order and propriety and was too blind to see where the evidence lead until the sheriff left him no escape.

Scout and Jem and in a different way, Boo, were my heroes. They were empowered by, if nothing else, the fact that they didn’t “know better.” People who don’t know how to behave in the waveless way are my heroes. They splash in, whether stumbling or diving, and make waves.  Atticus was a nice old man who was too old to play football for the Methodists. He’s not entirely diminished with me, however. He’s dedicated to his children, and aside from a blind-spot or two, is irrevocably dedicated to them being themselves, and asserting that self-hood.

To Atticus’ credit, his children were not being raised to be Atticus, but to be their own agents. That, I think, was his most heroic action – helping his children to be greater than himself, even if he couldn’t fully appreciate it.  

What little I know of Watchman prior to its release underscores that principle.  Scout left Maycomb as a country Jean Louise and has come home as a more cosmopolitan Jean Louise.  The more-fully challenged and matured Jean Louise hits crisis points upon her return and struggles with the gap between the unchanging Maycomb that Scout the little girl belonged to and Jean Louise the self-defined woman.  She also grapples with the difference between hagiographic Atticus and aged, embittered Atticus, which doubtless has to be the greater struggle, by far.

Compounding the difficulty, she has to do all of this without Jem, who we found out “dropped dead in his tracks one day.”  
Jean Louise at the center of her own story in Go Set a Watchman, just as she was in To Kill a Mockingbird.  I’ve had a Jitney Jungle full of reservations about this first-second novel by our much-loved Miss Nelle.  I’m starting to think I discounted her Watchman too soon.

Donald Trump has been an asshole for decades. Decent people have always seen it.

Who comes late to the party? Cowardly corporations and gutless politicians. Pathetic sycophants who "accommodate" his "unique personality" and "colorful positions."

Donald Trump is rich white trash who stays rich because "powerful" people stand in line and drop to their knees to blow him for an endorsement, a loan, or a slice of a deal.

Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame on all of them.  

E. E. Cummings, read by E. E. Cummings (yes, with the caps) - Recordings from the Unterberg Poetry Center

A bit of a revelation to me - 

I've always heard his poems inside my head at a faster pace, in a more conversational tone, and sans British accent.