Wondering about blog traffic

Last night, over at his fine blog Nobody Asked . . . , Winston asks the question I'm pretty sure just about every blogger wonders at one time or another: whether anyone reads his blog besides a few faithful commenters. This seems to have been on his mind the past few days, seeing as he alludes to it in his comment on my post here noting the 6,000th visitor to my site since I posted a counter. But I'm not picking on him for wondering. I myself STILL wonder.

What follows here is a pretty rambling meditation on whether or not to count and, if you do choose to, just what exactly is being counted.

By way of beginning, I've chosen to compare/contrast the blog-traffic philosophies of two bloggers whom I've linked to and whom I very much admire, then I'll get around to discussing my own take on all this.

Some bloggers, the most prominent I know of being Jeremy Freese, adamantly refuse to put counters on their sites. Freese would argue, I suspect, that he doesn't want to know just how many people visit his site. Not wanting to know, by the way, is rather different from not caring. And Freese DOES care, some, as evidenced by the fact that he has a Frappr map for his blog and provides a Blogroll link for those who care to add his blog to their blogrolls. But he doesn't do those things that bloggers do to try and drive traffic their way, like joining blog rings or listing their blogs in directories. If people link to his stuff and others find their way via the links, then fine by him. Whether they keep returning or never ever return, he'll be none the wiser. He clearly enjoys blogging, but expanding and keeping an audience is not what drives his blogging, as nearly as I can tell.

A representative of the other end of this continuum is "SB" of Watermark. I don't know of another blog with this many links to other blogs, memberships in blog rings, listings in directories, etc. It's really a bit overwhelming to contemplate how she manages to keep up with all this. But then again, she is a real advocate of promoting other people's blogs, too; it's from Watermark, as I've mentioned before, that I got the idea for encouraging others to visit and link to some of the "insignificant microbes" of the blogosphere. So, sure: SB cares a lot about traffic and has done all she can to draw some to Watermark, but she also tries to send some out. Other blogs, and I'm sure we've all seen them, are only about themselves in the end.

Now to me. I look at that number "6000" (which, by the way, is a count of "unique visitors"--both first-time and returning visitors) and to me it seems an impressive number at first, given the kind of blog I have. But then I think about who/what is represented by that number, and it soon begins to appear a whole lot less impressive.

I mentioned in the thank-you post that a lot--well over a hundred--of those numbers indicate my own visits to my site via other computers. My Statcounter tells me that 75 of my last 100 "visitors" stayed less than 5 seconds--so extrapolate that ratio out over a few thousand visits. Although I'm thankful that the members of Blog Advance are such avid surfers, their visits are less about visiting my blog and more about earning credits. Most of them have stayed only the requisite 30 seconds. For a few glorious days back in October, a couple hundred people were drawn here because this post showed up in Technorati searches. Where are those folks now? And how long did they stay in the first place? Once that particular 15 minutes was past, they went elsewhere to spend another 15 minutes.

I know all this stuff because I have counters that keep track of such things. There ARE counters out there that only keep track of hits, and there are times when I have to admit that the chef advantage of the absolute, unbreakdownable number is precisely that it's unbreakdownable. It's hard to become obsessive about a simple number. But I like knowing how people find their way here and what they read when they do get here. I like knowing that I have between a dozen and 20 regular visitors. I'm pleased that the posts people read the most are, by and large, the ones I would choose as my favorites. I'm also pleased that, of late, I've been getting more return visitors per day, and my visitors have tended to stay longer (it used to be that well over 80 of every 100 visitors stayed less than 5 seconds). I wouldn't know any of this if it weren't for the counters. And I don't think knowing it has changed what I write about and how I write about it.

This will never be a high-traffic blog because it doesn't have rapidly-changing content (see the more prominent political blogs), it isn't about technology or sex; indeed, it's not focused on much of anything. But I enjoy keeping it up, and--thanks in large measure to others who have linked to it--it is finding and growing an audience. While I don't need to have counters to accomplish all that, I'd be less aware that that is happening and grateful to those who have helped make it happen.

Technorati tags:
Weblogs, Blogs, Website counters

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In which the Meridian makes a brief foray into the writing of poetry

"Seen Over Emerald City, McConnell AFB"

A tightly-curved con-trail:
A "Surrender Dorothy" swoop.

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Thanks

At some point yesterday, someone stumbled on to good old Blog Meridian and was counted as the (give or take) 6000th visit since I've had a counter. Some of those--many, in fact--are accidents of Google searches; many of them are visits from blog-surfers; some of them are visits from Yours Truly from other computers. But a substantial number of them, especially lately, are return visitors, and/or they have found their way here via other blogs who have done me the favor of linking to me. Even more amazingly, they have tended not to recoil in horror or revulsion once they get here; instead, they hang around and read other stuff here. That is gratifying, especially since this blog doesn't exactly have a topical fixation.

All this is a long way of saying Thanks, especially to those of you who keep coming back.

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"What else can I do?"

The sentiment behind the statement on the marquee of the Lutheran church I drive by on the way to work is true enough: Witnessing is indeed something to be lived and not just mouthed. And that statement is true in a secular sense as well: whenever you speak in defense of (and live in accordance with) something in which you place a great deal of importance and value, you are witnessing to it.

But that "something to be lived" part seemed, just at that moment the other day when I read it, a bit fuzzy, for just that morning I had heard this interview on NPR with a member of Christian Peacemakers, a group who works on behalf of non-violent solutions to conflict in war zones and other volatile areas. Back in November, four members of this group were kidnapped in Iraq and were last heard from in December. In Baghdad, they live outside the Green Zone, unprotected and unarmed. They do not proselytize--the sort of witnessing that comes to the mind of most people, Christian or not. They witness through their actions: seeking information about detainees, working to obtain reparations from the military for civilians affected by military operations, etc.

The point of this post is not to make anyone feel guilty about his/her commitment to anyone or anything. It's simply to remind myself, if no one else, that the answer to the question, "What else can I do?" is "There is always more."

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A stretch of river VIII: Diesel fumes as madeleine; or, Blurred borders

It does not happen very often, but when it does, it's on our morning walk, when the air is the most humid, and it's always when crossing one of the bridges: Scruffy and I will come along a couple of minutes after a truck or bus has passed, I'll catch a whiff of its exhaust, still trapped in the damp air there, and I'm instantly reminded of the morning odor on Calle Mexico in Colonia Guadalupe¹, the neighborhood I lived in 20 years ago (?!?!) in Durango, the capital of the Mexican state of the same name (the city is located in the south-central part of the state). All that's missing from that smell, here, is the smell from the tortilleria that was around the corner from my house that would commingle with the diesel.

Good old Proust:

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. (from "Overture," Swann's Way)

This from a man who had such terrible respiratory troubles that he had to live in a cork-lined, fumigated room for much of his adult life. A whiff of diesel fumes might have done him in, denying me the opportunity to quote him here as a way of conveying the power of just those fumes to reawaken in me memories of a place.

Anyway.

It happened again, in a different way, this past Saturday morning when I listened to this story on NPR about the popularity of "musica duranguense" in this country, especially in Chicago. Music that is closely identified with a place, we know, provides a sort of condensed social archeology of that place, and the NPR story does a marvelous job of doing the excavation for those norteamericanos who have never even heard of the state, much less the city. Durango, rarely a destination but always on the way to someplace else (usually Mazatlan), is one of Mexico's fly-over states.

I looked online for well over half an hour for a detailed map of the city before finding the one I linked to. Though the search was frustrating, it also seems appropriate that this place is (still) difficult to locate, even in the blogosphere. Something the NPR story asks the listener to think about is, in effect, "Where is Durango?" (or, for that matter, "Where is Chicago?") That is, how does one draw cultural boundaries?

When I moved to Durango in May of 1985, two weeks after I graduated from college, one thing that immediately struck me was how many Duranguenos told me they had been to Chicago or had relatives who lived in Chicago. Not "the Valley" (the Brownsville and McAllen area of South Texas) or San Antonio or Houston or Los Angeles or any place needing migrant farm workers, the usual destinations for Mexican immigrants legal and otherwise. Chicago. It was almost as though every other destination was a fall-back option. Back then, I didn't enquire further--there was still the business of finding a job and wandering the city (read: I was simultaneously terrified by and reveling in my newly-acquired freedom as a college grad). It was not until hearing the NPR story that that strong link between Durango and Chicago got explained for me: over 100 years ago, after the big railroad-building boom in Mexico just before the Revolution of 1910, workers from Durango travelled to the Midwest, specifically to the Chicago area, to build railroads there. The workers and their families and THEIR families maintained those links, built not by railroads but by the work of establishing new lives, between the two places. "Durango, Illinios," indeed. And, for that matter, "Chicago, Durango."

Mexican music, too, is a sort of madeleine, as I learned when I lived in Durango and which the NPR story notes. I quickly realized that, much more so than in this country, the kind of popular music one listened to was a kind of class marker. But such distinctions would magically fall away when someone played a ranchera or a son. Everyone, regardless of age or class, knows those songs and, especially after a few drinks, would sing them as loud as possible. But such moments are not about drunken performance; instead, such music is very much part and parcel of lived, daily experience. It is the equivalent of our folk music, which, relatively speaking, almost no one remembers. In Mexico, the old songs aren't heard much on the radio, but they are much closer to the surface, and when the singing commences, the chill that comes is not from the beauty of the singing (which, to be frank, was often more like bellowing) but from the beauty of being in the presence of the expression of collectively-held memory.

One memory of mine about that Mexican distinction between performance and self-expression, and then I'll close this post, because after all this writing I realize I'm no closer now to answering the questions about boundaries than I was when I first posed them:


It is midnight on a Wednesday at Movieland Disco, strangely-named but, nevertheless, then THE popular place to go dancing in Durango. Wednesday is "Noche Mexicana," which means that all the music played was of Mexican or Latin American origin. A mariachi group has arrived, one larger than the one in this picture--the one that night had a couple more trumpet players and some violinists to boot. The singer has a mic; otherwise, it's an acoustic performance. I am enthralled by good mariachi bands,² and this is an especially good one, the singer being in very good voice and none of the other players needing mics for their instruments. This is Performance, I am thinking: the club has hired these players, they'll play a few songs, then the DJ will spin records again. But they are not even through the first verse of the first song when something happens: the singer's mic suddenly goes dead. The thought flashes through my mind that he'll realize what has happened, signal the band to stop playing, and they'll try to fix it then start up again. Isn't that what Performers do? But instead, he keeps singing and the band keeps playing. His voice actually seems to grow in strength. The audience (easily a couple hundred people) immediately begins to cheer him on as though he's a matador, and he sings over all THAT. He has the biggest, broadest grin on his face as he's doing so; he throws his arms wide, as if to embrace not just the audience but the entirety of the moment, up to and including the mic failure. For that is what not just the song but the a priori assumptions of mariachi require him to do: to embody Triumph over Adversity. It is pure bravado, which, far from being about Performance, is at the very core of what mariachi is about. To have stopped singing would have meant that he failed not only the song but mariachi itself.

Dear dirty, dusty, diesel-fumed Durango. May the memory of your smell continue to bear unflinchingly for me the vast structure of recollection.
__________
¹Maps show so little, really. Durango is a city of half a million people whose tallest building is still the cathedral downtown. Colonia Guadalupe is a (very) dusty working-class neighborhood about a mile north of there, close to the train station and freight yard. I lived with a family who spoke almost no English. Ours was one of the better-off families on the street; we had one of two telephones on the block; one house next door to us literally had dirt floors and only one real door. Everyone in the colonia worked who was old enough to; to make extra money, some would cook and sell hamburgers on the street. I have never eaten better-tasting hamburgers. And I have never known a friendlier or safer neighborhood--which is why, whenever I traveled elsewhere in Mexico and told people where I lived, I was puzzled when they told me that Duranguenos were cold.

²A word of warning to you: if you and I are in the presence of a good mariachi band, I WILL sing very loud (if I know the words--and if I don't, I'll request a song that I DO know the words to) and WILL throw in a couple of gritos (the high-pitched ay-ay-ay's you hear during instrumental breaks), whether you're there or not. I just don't care. I do not need to have been drinking for this to happen, either. And as I write this, I realize that I have either sealed or wrecked whatever friendship I may have with Rene, who lives in Mexico City.

Technorati tags:
Mexico, Durango, Mexico, Music, Mariachi, Memory

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In which the Meridian submits to a candid world his 5 weird habits

Over at Bittersweet Life, Ariel appears to be laboring under the impression that your humble blogger is "highly eccentric." Being a teacher, I long ago gained the facility of humoring deluded people, at least for a little while; so, with the help of Mrs. Meridian (because, you see, I have so few that are immediately obvious to ME), I've come up with a list of 5 habits that someone, somewhere, might think "weird." I can't decide, incidentally, whether it's a) serendipitous or b) unnerving that at just about the time Ariel tagged me, I was reading in The Intuitionist where a black character says something to the effect that "eccentric" is a word used to describe white people who are going crazy but won't get locked up because they're white.

Well: I list (and I'm white, in case you were wondering); you decide.

1) When I arrive at my workplace, I feel compelled to hum tunelessly as I walk down the (long, high-ceilinged) hallway. I think it's because of the acoustics. A specific tune would have the effect of setting a sort of agenda or world view for the day; tuneless humming suggests a sort of openness to whatever might come.

2) Mrs. Meridian says that I lick my upper lip when I'm about to say something important. I have no explanation for this; indeed, I wasn't even aware I did it until she mentioned it . . . which would seem to place this particular one in the category of "tics," no? Eccentricities, I'd think, would be those behaviors that one is not only conscious of but can rationalize in some way. So: make that "4 1/2 Weird Habits."

3) When I turn the page of a book, I run my thumb down the center three times. I don't see this as eccentric but practical: it helps keep the book open. But Mrs. M. says this behavior is one of the first things about me that endeared me to her.

4) When I walk Scruffy early in the mornings, I often hum/sing, sotto voce, either side one or side two (more often side two) of Close to the Edge by Yes. Longer songs work better on walks than do shorter ones because, after all, the walk is only one walk, one unit of time. The soundtrack should reflect that as much as possible. And why Yes? I think it's because it's almost but not quite true that every Yes song contains the word "river," and my walk takes me along a river, so . . .

5) (Another walking-the-dog one) We ALWAYS go counter-clockwise on our route. Well, okay: almost always. Because once, when another walker leading a Rottweiler approached from the direction we usually go, I decided to go the other way (Scruffy is about the most gregarious dog I've ever been around . . . which sometimes gets him into trouble with dogs (and/or their owners) who are less inclined that way). To go the other way was exceedingly disorienting. It was as though I'd never been on that path before. You'd think I'd like such a thing, but no. I couldn't notice anything, because I was noticing EVERYthing. So, it was back to the safe, the predictable, the routine. I'll be sure to let you know if I ever have to break up any dog fights.

Jeez, I'm dull. THAT is what I should be locked up for.

Now: whom to tag . . .

Dejavaboom at Musement Park
D-Day at Saucebox
Fearful Syzygy at Delights for the Ingenious
Erin at Mannequin Hands
and Nancy at Sine.qua.non.

Technorati tag:
Memes

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In which the Meridian asks his reader(s) . . .

Do you get William Shatner?

Please consider the Comments section your chance to offer definitive answers to the above question, to dispute the answers of others, etc.

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.

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The Meridian's (not quite) Mid-week Miscellany #2

The new semester has begun and so I must prepare to meet it. Thus, posting will probably be light(er than usual) until that gets done and I actually begin setting these classes into motion. In the meantime, I thought I'd offer you some links to various outposts in the blogosphere that I've recently stumbled across and that you might like to visit:

Lovers of the art of centuries-old illustrated books and illuminated manuscripts will love BibliOdyssey. This site won the Cliopatria award for best new history blog. The template is plain because the show is the images.

3 Quarks Daily is the place to go if you're curious about a great many things and have LOTS of reading time on your hands. This "filter blog" links to long articles on such topics as whether laughter predates humor, biological insights yielded by the study of deer antlers, contemporary architecture, whether there is a "beauty instinct" in the same way that, as Steven Pinker argues, there is a "language instinct" . . . you get the idea. Go there.

This one isn't a new find, but he's worthy of your attention anyway. If there is a smarter, more thoughtful, "big picture" political blogger than Mark Schmitt, I have yet to find him/her.

Ross Douthat runs The American Scene, a right-leaning blog about politics and culture. Douthat calls himself a theocon, but let's just say he doesn't fit that stereotype. To rewrite a bit a line from A River Runs Through It, Douthat is a theocon who can read.

Some new (to me) bloggers you should know about:

Camille at 327 Market blogs about art and living in the Bay Area and other stuff. Careful prose, engaging photos.

A colleague of mine, "Dejavaboom," has just opened Musement Park for your reading pleasure. It's new; he hasn't installed many rides yet. He and I are colleagues, but his blog is worthy of your visits anyway.

And finally, 3 bloggers who work the typical blogosphere terrain but who work it smartly, thus making it yield something more nutritious than do others:
Epiphatic Exhaustion
Nobody Asked . . .
and
Infinite Regression.

Enjoy. I'll be back in a few days.

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The metaphysics of the elevator

Partly for fun, partly for my book project, I've just finished reading Colson Whitehead's debut novel, The Intuitionist (1999). Its style reminds me of DeLillo, with a dash of Ben Marcus's Notable American Women thrown in. In terms of what it's up to, though, it is similar to, though smaller (in scale) compared to, Ralph Ellison's examination of inter- and intra-racial politics in his magnificent novel, Invisible Man. All of which is to say, The Intuitionist is worth your time.

The novel's world is that of elevator inspectors who work in a never-identified city that is, nevertheless, New York City all over. Below the fold, I've included a longish passage from the novel in which the subject is something like, "If an elevator opens on a floor and no one is there to meet it, does it really arrive there?"

The scene, you should know, takes place in an class for elevator inspectors during a discussion of a book by James Fulton called Theoretical Elevators that the novel's heroine, Lila Mae Watson, is attending. You didn't know this--and neither did I before I read this novel--but once upon a time elevator inspectors divided themselves into two camps with regard to their methods: Empiricists, who closely examined gears, pulleys, cables, motors, etc.; and Intuitionists, who simply rode in the cars and, by listening and feeling, could determine its mechanical shortcomings.
The instructor has just asked, "What is the Dilemma of the Phantom Passenger?"

Morton [. . .] stated, "The Dilemma of the Phantom Passenger asks what happens when the passenger who has engaged the call button departs, whether he changed his mind and took the stairs or caught an up-tending car when he wanted to go down because he did not feel like waiting. It asks what happened to the elevator he summoned."

Professor McKean said, "That's right. Fulton asks this question and leaves it to the reader, abruptly proceeding to the psychology of the Door Close button. How do you think Fulton would answer his question?"

"Obviously," Gorse said, "the elevator arrives, the doors stand for the standard loading time, and then the doors close. That's it."

Johnson [. . .] ignored Gorse and offered in his stumbling voice, "I think that Fulton would say that the elevator arrives but the doors do not open. If there's no need for the doors to open, then the vertical imperative does not apply."

Professor McKean nodded. "Any other theories?"

Bernard [. . .] said, "for one thing, the vertical imperative applies to the elevator's will, and doesn't apply to passengers. I think what Fulton was referring to in this section was the 'index of being'--where the elevator is when it is not in service. If, as the index of being tells us, the elevator does not exist when there is no freight, human or otherwise, then I think in this case the doors open and the elevator exists, but only for the loading time. Once the doors close, the elevator returns to nonbeing--'the eternal quiescence'--until called into service again." Bernard sat back in his metal chair, satisfied.

Professor McKean said simply, "That's good. Anyone else?"

Lila Mae waited for someone to give her an answer. No one did. Lila Mae cleared her throat and said in a thin voice, "Fulton is trying to trick the reader. An elevator doesn't exist without its freight. If there's no one to get on, the elevator remains in quiescence. The elevator and the passenger need each other."

Professor McKean nodded quickly and then inquired of his pupil, "And what if we set up a film camera in the hallway to see what would happen, what would we see when we developed the film, Watson?"

Lila Mae met his eyes. "By leaving the camera there, you've created what Fulton calls 'the expectation of freight.' The camera is a passenger who declines to get on the elevator, not a phantom passenger. The film would record that the doors open, the elevator waits, and then the doors close."

"Very good," Professor McKean approved.

Gorse [. . .] was unable to contain his contempt. Spat, "Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there!" and slammed a fat fist onto the table. The fundamental battle.

Professor McKean frowned. He pushed his chair from the conference table until it hit the wall with a dull bang. With his right hand, he unpinned his war medal from his sleeve. His jacket sleeve, unhinged, swayed back and forth pendulously. "Gorse," Professor McKean said, "Is my arm here or not here?"

"It's . . . not there," Gorse responded timidly.

"What's in this sleeve?"

"Nothing," Gorse answered.

"That's the funny thing," Professor McKean said, smiling now. "My arm is gone, but sometimes it's there." He looked down at his empty sleeve. He flicked at the sleeve with his remaining hand and they watched the fabric sway. (101-102)

Technorati tags:
Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist, Don DeLillo, Ben Marcus, Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, American literature

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You might like to know . . .

(Hat tip: Watermark)
I have been wondering whether to tell my reader(s) these things for some time now. But you know how the Internets are; word gets out. So, what follows is a list of things that you most likely would have found out about me anyway.

Besides: I feel confident now that you like me for me.

Ten Top Trivia Tips about John B.!

1. If you toss John B. 10000 times, he will not land heads 5000 times, but more like 4950, because his head weighs more and thus ends up on the bottom.


2. The Church of Scientology was founded in 1953, at Washington D.C., by John B.!


3. Early thermometers were filled with John B. instead of mercury!


4. In the kingdom of Bhutan, all citizens officially become John B. on New Year's Day.


5. John B. was banned from Finland because of not wearing pants.


6. A lump of John B. the size of a matchbox can be flattened into a sheet the size of a tennis court!


7. In Ancient Egypt, people wore glittery eyeshadow made from the crushed shells of John B.!


8. John B. can live for up to a week without a head.


9. The average human spends about 30 days during their life in John B.!


10. New Zealand was the first place to allow John B. to vote.

I am interested in - do tell me about
herhimitthem

Update:
I have done further, extensive research on my readership and have posted the results on my Frapprmap. The careful reader will note that s/he actually has a few things in common with me.

Surely that thing in Finland has blown over by now--statute of limitations and all.

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Boring dream #2

I noted a few days ago that, compared to those of my lovely wife, my dreams are a real snooze. In what threatens to be a regular feature here at good old Blog Meridian, I offer you further proof of this.

The only part I remember of this one, which I had a couple of nights ago, was that I was watching an installment of American Idol (a show, by the way, that I've never watched even 5 minutes of before). Not even trying out for it, much less winning a recording contract. I was watching it. And not in person, either. I was watching it on TV in my living room.

Technorati tag:
Dreams

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Some comments on The Fathers

As part of my reading for my book project, I recently finished reading The Fathers, the only novel by the Fugitive writer Allen Tate, published in 1938 (the Wikipedia article contains a link to the article on the Fugitives, for those curious about them and their views). The Fathers is not exactly canonical literature these days, even among scholars of Southern literature--the last online reference I found to an article on it was from the early '90s. As to its quality, it's not Faulkner, though it treats, with startling and intriguing similarity, the same themes Faulkner raised in Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and would raise in Go Down, Moses (1940). But it's not a badly-written novel, either--just emotionally distant in a way that Faulkner, in those novels, never is.

First, a quick summary of the plot: The Fathers is set in Alexandria, Virginia, in the months immediately preceding and up to the first Battle of Bull Run. Its narrator, Lacy Buchan, relates the story of two families. The Buchan family is, to use an anachronistic term, "old money." They proudly trace their roots back to the founding of the nation and thus, though they own slaves, the family patriarch, Lewis Buchan, is anti-secession. The family code of honor as exhibited by its loyalty to principle is such that, when Lacy's brother Semmes announces he is in favor of secession and will join the Confederate army, Lewis disowns him. The other family is the (again borrowing a phrase) "nouveau riche" Posey family, embodied most prominently in the novel by George Posey. Posey is a landed slaveholder as well, but he is much more pragmatic in his way of thinking about the world. He (rightly) sees the coming war as a war about something even larger than slavery, large as that matter is--it is about the way Southerners live their lives. Thus, he raises money and acquires equipment and munitions for a Virginia brigade. The emotional force of the plot lies in Posey's marrying Lacy's sister and Lacy's own conflicted feelings for both George and his own father. George, in fact, becomes a kind of father figure to Lacy; hence the novel's title.

Below the fold, I want to talk for a bit about why I'm saying anything at all about this novel on my blog: the treatment of the Poseys' mulatto slave, Yellow Jim. Yellow Jim, it happens, is also George Posey's half-brother.

It also happens that that George and Jim's father isn't alive, and so this novel doesn't have quite the sort of dynamic of Absalom, Absalom!, whose central plot also revolves around a father with two sons, one of mixed race and one white. But Tate's novel does preserve, though in a convoluted way, Faulkner's novel's tensions between the two brothers, up to and including the killing of Yellow Jim.

That murder scene is too complicated a moment to work through in a single blog post, but here I wanted to talk about something a critic says with regard to the cause of the Buchan and Posey families' respective collapses into what Lacy calls "the abyss." In his 1980 book A Southern Renaissance, Richard H. King writes,

George's sale of his half-brother, "Yellow Jim," illuminates Tate's version of the family romance. What is "wrong" in the transaction is not the enslavement and sale of a human being. Rather the violation lies in the separation of the slave from his black family and friends and, behind that, his separation from his white family. All of this is arranged by George, his brother. Family relationships should take precedence over commercial or abstract moral concerns. It is this one deed which brings on the destruction of the entire Buchan family. (108)

Note: As revenge for his being sold, Jim rapes Susan Buchan, who is George's wife. It's this act that causes Semmes to shoot and kill Jim; George, in retaliation, kills Semmes. I told you it was complicated.

Tate's novel is obsessed with familial titles: when he names them, Lacy prefaces their names with their relationship to him. Once he marries Susan, George becomes "Brother George." Even "Yellow" as Jim's title indicates his mixed-race origin, if not precisely his relation to George. That relationship, by the way, gets stated only obliquely in the novel; but the reason for that apparent avoidance of the matter could be that it was common knowledge in the area and, as Lacy says on another matter, his job is to relate to us some things without being able to explain them. Significantly, it is Jim who will say, by way of explaining why he has returned to the area after running off from his new owners, "Blood is thicker than water."

At the conclusion of his reading of The Fathers, King picks up on the idea of family being at the center of antebellum Southern culture, at least in this novel:

The Fathers finally firmly in the tradition of the family romance. Culture and civilization are seen as literally and symbolically of the father. Without an actual father--as is the case with George Posey--or the symbolically present culture of the fathers, society collapses into privatized anarchy, and the aberrant becomes the rule. The disruption of the family, most importantly the loss of the father, signals the destruction of an ordered world. Unlike some of the other Agrarians, Tate never blamed the loss of the world of the fathers on the North per se. The fatal flaw was there from the beginning, one which a Southerner such as George Posey could exploit. The Fathers, like Absalom, Absalom!, achieves the status of dialectic, not rhetoric.
***
Perhaps then The Fathers was a fitting climax to the Agrarian enterprise. The Southern past had proven much more complex and more divided against itself than Tate or the others had initially thought. [It was c]aught between the static image of the Virginia ideal . . ., the unchanneled energies of the expansionist energies of the lower South; and beyond that yearning for the fully traditional and ordered synthesis of medieval Europe, but never finding what . . . was plausible[.] (110-111)

I don't want to go on and on here, but I will conclude by saying that it is to Tate's credit that he understood the South's downfall to be in large measure its own doing, but that the problem for Tate, as King notes was more philosophical in nature thasn anything else (Tate once noted elsewhere that Robert E. Lee's one weakness was that he went to war for a land and not an idea). What will be of interest to me for my project is how Faulkner will take this same material and reveal such philosophizing as nonsense when the very foundations of that system rest on the enslavement of human beings even as that same system both symbolically and literally makes those beings "family."

Technorati tags:
American literature, Southern literature, Slavery, Allen Tate, William Faulkner, Miscegenation

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Some pictures from the Wichita Art Museum

Dale Chihuly, Wichita Art Museum Confetti Chandelier (2003).

We Meridians received a digital camera for Christmas, and so we've had some fun learning how to use it. So, you good people from time to time will be subjected to my learning experiences with said camera. This image here and those below the fold are your first exposures to my first exposures from the local art museum.

Last Saturday was the penultimate day at the Wichita Art Museum for an exhibit called "Tiffany by Design;" I hadn't seen it yet, so I walked over to have a look. Alas, no pictures allowed of items not owned by the museum, so no pics of the Tiffany pieces; but we know what those look like anyway. But the museum has some noteworthy things in its own collection, beginning with the Chihuly chandelier which hangs in the foyer, and so here are some of them--that is, the ones that turned out decently.

I'll just say at the outset that, because I'm still getting used to using the camera, I found it hard to get good pictures. I make no claims as to the quality of these pictures, but at least they don't horribly misrepresent the things themselves.
Tom Otterness, Dreamers Awake (1995). Apologies for the trepanning--but, given the title and the piece's pieces, maybe it's not so inappropriate a Freudian slip after all. This piece stands in front of the museum. The standing figure is about 15' tall; sitting and standing on the pieces of his limbs and, at lower-right, carrying away one extremity, are small humanoid figures.

Winslow Homer, In the Mowing (1874). Nice frame, huh? This is a favorite painting of my students who have gone to the museum and reported back, and I share in their opinion. Its colors are a bit brighter than this pic would indicate. Its light is a golden, early-dusk; it exudes nostalgia for not even childhood but for a way of living in the world.

Edward Hopper, Sunlight on Brownstones (1956). The museum has two very nice Hoppers and a third that doesn't impress me as much; this is one of the nice ones currently on view. Hopper's much-noted air of loneliness is much in evidence here, created by the stark juxtaposition of the (very) urban brownstones with the (very) solid mass of trees dominating the right side of the painting.

Paul R. Meltsner, Martha Graham Dance Class (ca. 1939). This is a favorite of many museum-goers, in large measure because the original is not quite as orange as my picture of it turned out.

Technorati tags:
Art, Paintings, Dale Chihuly, Tom Otterness, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Paul R. Meltsner

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A stretch of river VII: On the indeterminacy of the sign

The crows have begun their winter flocking now, as I reported to you good people 13 months ago today. Then, they flew to I knew not where. Today, I know where: here! Or, more precisely, the park across the river. Tens of thousands of crows. As nearly as i can tell, they perch in bare-limbed trees and caw at each other, then move to another tree not far away and commence to cawing again. The Canada geese, meanwhile, stand on the ground underneath the trees, looking up at them.

It's not mating season; that comes in the spring. No one seems to know exactly why crows do this in the winter. This is not exactly secretive behavior they're engaged in.

Crows can count up to 4.

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, it is a crow (or raven) that Utnampishtim releases from his boat that, when it does not return, signifies that land (or trees, at least) is emerging from the floodwaters. Some see this as the Sumerians' recognition, 10,000 years ago, of the crow's intelligence.*

But. Fascinated as I am by the reading about crows I've done today, it's actually something man-made that initially prompted this post, something that suddenly appeared this morning on "my" side of the river: a small, wooden Roman cross.

It was not there yesterday when Scruffy and I went walking at late dusk. It is a couple of feet off the footpath on the slope down to the water. It is not quite 3 feet tall, made of old, unpainted 2x4s with caked mud on them. But it is carefully, skilfully made: the upright and the horizontal piece are notched and fitted together in such a way that, apart from the edges that show it's made of two pieces, no gaps show in the join.

It has no name on it, no flowers or other mementos at its base. Whoever left it, though, also left the rocks/he used to pound it into the ground.

What does it signify? What are we passersby meant to think or do as we look at it? A cross asks us to remember either the sacrifice of Christ or that of someone whose grave or death-site it marks. I do not know what the maker of this particular cross asks me to remember.
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*Speaking of intelligence, ponder this, from the Wikipedia article on the New Caledonian crow:

It is one of a small group of animals now accepted in scientific study to be not only a tool-user, but a tool-maker. The New Caledonian Crow is also the only non-human species currently known to spontaneously make tools out of materials it does not encounter in the wild. It takes a very wide range of food items including many types of insects and other invertebrates (some caught in flight with some agility, including night-flying insects which it catches at dusk), eggs and nestlings, snails (which it drops from a height onto hard stones), and various nuts and seeds. It is known for using plant material to manufacture hooks or barbs for extracting grubs from inside logs and branches. It shows great ingenuity in the search for food.

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Blogger Limelight: What is a "Person"? Part I: The problem

What follows here is NOT my answer to the question I posed below but, rather, a sketching out of the terrain that an answer has to traverse. If anything essential to the sketching out is missing or if something is incorrect, I hope someone will (politely) let me know in comments.

I should also say that, though I personally support a woman's right to choose, I'm NOT initiating this conversation to set out to justify my position (which, I admit from the outset, is fraught with moral quandries of many sorts). It should go without saying that this discussion also has profound bearing on how to think about end-of-life issues as well (see: Terri Schiavo). But neither do I think that not thinking about the meaning of the word does anyone any favors, either, no matter one's politics or beliefs. So: as I said earlier, the goal here is to encourage those of us who wish to engage in some serious thinking about this question.

The law. Black's Law Dictionary defines "person" thus:

In general usage, a human being (i.e. natural person), though by statue term may include a firm, labor organizations, partnerships, associations, corporations, legal representatives, trustees, trustees in bankruptcy, or receivers.

Of course, this is the very problem, no? No one argues that the genetic material resulting from the union of sperm and egg is human, but at what point does that material, from a legal standpoint, become a human being?

Biology. As nearly as I can tell, biology in and of itself isn't interested in the question of "personhood" but in stages of development. To some, descriptions of those stages, as they pertain to viability, will be of concern (witness Roe v. Wade's severe restricting on abortions after the end of the 2nd trimester of pregnancy. To others, though (see below), viability is officially a non-issue.

Religion. Christian theology teaches that a soul is created at the moment of conception, and we are familiar with the statement "Life begins at conception." Many are inclined to argue that that statement is tantamount to claiming that the zygote should be considered a person as well.

I'm certain other theologians take up this issue, but I've had time, just now, only to consider Aquinas' definition, which he offers as a correction of Boethius' definition:

I answer that, Although the universal and particular exist in every genus, nevertheless, in a certain special way, the individual belongs to the genus of substance. For substance is individualized by itself; whereas the accidents are individualized by the subject, which is the substance; since this particular whiteness is called "this," because it exists in this particular subject. And so it is reasonable that the individuals of the genus substance should have a special name of their own; for they are called "hypostases," or first substances.

Further still, in a more special and perfect way, the particular and the individual are found in the rational substances which have dominion over their own actions; and which are not only made to act, like others; but which can act of themselves; for actions belong to singulars. Therefore also the individuals of the rational nature have a special name even among other substances; and this name is "person."

Thus the term "individual substance" is placed in the definition of person, as signifying the singular in the genus of substance; and the term "rational nature" is added, as signifying the singular in rational substances. (Summa Theologica, emphasis added)

This is as far as I've gotten. In later posts, I plan to see what, if anything, emerges from the Venn diagram formed by these three disciplines.

Technorati tags:
Personhood, Law, Biology, Theology, Aquinas

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"And your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams."

Sorry, to disappoint you, Joel, I said to myself as I woke up at two this morning, but for some time now I've been feeling just a mite cheated in the dream/vision department.

My wife has the most spectacularly strange dreams of anyone I know personally. This one, which she dreamed a few days before Christmas, is typical: She is in a room fighting off crack-addicted, flying cockroaches with faces like Emmett Kelly's.

When your Significant Other is in the midst of dreaming such things, you should know, do NOT reach out to touch him/her in an affectionate manner.

What dream did I awaken from this morning, you might possibly be wondering? One in which I'm in an auto-body shop, talking with someone about having repairs done to the right front corner of my car.

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Dreams

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Blogger Limelight: What is a "Person"?

Recently, Ariel of Bittersweet Life extended the invitation to his regular readers to initiate Limelight discussions if we so chose (click on the button to go to Ariel's post explaining this). As readers of good ol' Blog Meridian know, I've participated in a couple of these in the past, and something I ran across a couple of days ago has raised a question in my mind that begs for a broader discussion: At the intersection of the very different realms of biology, theology and law, what might the definition of "person" look like?

Some background:

A few days ago on his blog, Andrew Sullivan, a practicing Catholic who is opposed to Roe v. Wade on constitutional grounds but whose opinion on legal access to abortion I don't know, posted a request for factual information on death rates by natural causes for fertilized zygotes. He wanted no arguments, he said, but he got one anyway, ironically caused by his own request that no one else send him more information (it's a short post--read the whole thing, as they say). What follows are, in order, posts written by Sullivan and two guest bloggers responding to each other and even to bloggers elsewhere entering into the fray (N.B.: Some of these are quite long, not to mention closely argued):
1
2
3
4
5
6

I need to reread these posts and do some more outside reading and thinking myself before I reply even tentatively. But I do think that engaging in the work of defining terms, while it might not solve anything in the short term , at least has the advantage of clarifying our thinking about this complicated but quite literally essential issue.

I'll be posting something more substantial soon.

Technorati tags:
Personhood, Law, Theology, Biology

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Writing workshop: The Personal Statement

Only "writing is writing," according to E. L. Doctorow, whose birthday is today (scroll down for the Doctorow stuff, but don't miss the Simic poem). And he's right. I like the work of writing, which is a good thing, since the teaching of it is how I pay for things around here. But I've been reminded these past few days that one sort of writing task is, to me, the graphological equivalent of confession under a slow, incrementally-increasing torture: the Personal Statement. I have told my students this many times, but I consider myself unspeakably blessed not to have had to write one, or even think seriously about how to write them, for some years now.

Then I had to go and marry a woman who aspires to be a law student.

As I've noted here a few times (most recently here), Mrs. Meridian is in the midst of making application to law schools. Most of these schools ask applicants to submit a Personal Statement, and the request seems easy enough to satisfy at first glance. A typically-worded request (this one from the University of Mississippi School of Law) follows:

The personal statement provides you with an opportunity to point out noteworthy academic achievements, extracurricular activities, and business or civic experiences. The statement also enables you to demonstrate the ways in which you can contribute your talents and experiences to the School of Law. Successful applicants have also elaborated on meaningful personal and intellectual interests, and challenges or disadvantages met and overcome.

Easy, right? How very generous of Ole Miss--and, it goes without saying, all those other equally-fine institutions to which Mrs. M. is making application--to want to hear this from HER, and not just her resume and transcripts and LSAT score. Heck. How hard is it to represent oneself in the best possible light? We do it all the time in conversation; this is just the same thing, but in writing.

Except. As those of us who have written them know, what makes these things so hard to write is that the writer is missing the piece of knowledge that, were she to have it, would make them considerably less anxiety-attenuating: knowledge of her audience's criteria and prejudices, the very things we tell our Comp I students they need to take into account as they draft their papers. So, then, the writer can't merely write to an audience; she has to INVENT that audience even as she is trying to figure out just what to say to that audience.

We have, of course, had discussions about these statements' contents. But last night, as we were talking about one of her paragraphs, Mrs. M. turned to me and said, "I like to write sentences with dependent clauses followed by independent clauses."

"Hmn?"

"In this paragraph, 4 sentences follow that pattern. There are 6 sentences in the paragraph."

She has noted her excessive use (to her mind) of prepositional phrases. I have noted her tendency (to my mind) toward redundancy and passive voice constructions. She has noted that my suggestions (to her mind) occasionally head off in directions other than the Task at Hand. In studiously avoiding sounding as though she is just writing these as though she is checking off a list of requirements asked for, she is nevertheless hyper-aware of those requirements. The standard length for a personal statement appears to be 2 pages; Mrs. M.'s basic one runs not quite 2 1/2 pages. Should I cut? What to cut? How to cut? Each of us has taken small offense at the other for not seeming to be listening. I have, maybe a few too many times, said, "It's your statement, not mine," which causes her to wonder if that means that I think it's badly written (it doesn't, and it's not).

It's hard work, besides being stress-laden, forcing us writers as it does to look at what we write and HOW we write as few of us ever have to do on anything like a regular basis. I'd rather write a dissertation. Really. I do not envy her her task.

Would that the task of writing the Personal Statement were only the same as that of Montaigne's as he understood it:

At least I have one thing according to the rules: that no man ever treated a subject he knew and understood better than I do the subject I have undertaken; and in this I am the most learned man alive. . . . To accomplish it, I need only to bring it to fidelity; and that is in it, as sincere and pure as can be found. . . . It cannot happen here as I see it happening often, that the craftsman and his work contradict each other: "Has a man whose conversation is so good written such a stupid book?" or "Have such learned writings come from a man whose conversation is so feeble?" ("Of Repentance")

It is precisely that which Montaigne sees as a strength--that his skill as a thinker, such as it is, is reflected accurately in his writing--that makes the Personal Statement such a fearsome beast to contemplate. Montaigne of course was read by others, but his public pose in the Essais, so far as I can tell, is that he is ultimately his own audience: a brave pose in those days of the Counter-Reformation, and I don't in any way mean to trivialize Montaigne's intellectual courage. But the writer of the Personal Essay actively courts the approval of others through her writing: This is (part of) who I say I am, the Personal Statement radiates to the Admissions Committee. Accept me! And more: as she writes, she is compelled to imagine what in her writing will make the Committee smile in approval, what will make them drop it into the circular file* (or, worse, a Wait List).

We soldier on. It's my job today to edit out that 1/2 page without losing content. Wish us luck. Soon, if all goes well, we can substitute the torture of waiting for replies for the torture of writing Personal Statements.
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*Amazing that this Wikipedia entry as about as long as the one on Montaigne.

Technorati tags:
Writing, Personal statements, Law school, Montaigne

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I'm so (Sau)ssure . . .

Via Blogometer today, this post by someone named Lushlush in which the writer photographs a self-referential sign.

The signifier IS become the signified.

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In which the Meridian devotes a post to a subdued display of great pleasure.

"We didn't get no respect. But nobody gave us 12-0"--Vince Young.
Today's Austin American-Statesman. 'Nuff said.

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The Meridian's Mid-week Miscellany/La miscelanea del miercoles del Meridiano

Today is, of course, Rose Bowl Wednesday and, of course, all right-minded people will be wearing burnt orange and/or thinking burnt-orange thoughts. I am whatever that sort of fan is who is not an alum of a school but, because of confluences of space and time (I was born in Austin and came into football consciousness during the Darrell Royal years), I have no choice but to pull for the University of Texas and (I admit it) loathe Oklahoma with all the irrationality I can muster.

Q: Why doesn't Texas slip into the Gulf of Mexico?
A: Because Oklahoma sucks.

As you can see from the above, I am incapable of intelligent discourse today, so filled am I with anticipation for tonight's game with USC. I do not think the Trojans will succeed in offering up the Longhorns as a hecatomb to whatever gods determine the winning of national championships (the 'Horns' defense will be the difference in this game of otherwise equally-matched teams), but I'm not so deluded a fan as to think it won't be close. So I will be watching the skies for bird-signs, and then the game as well.

So: I have little else on my mind today, but the same is not true of my blogging brethren. Thus, in the spirit of Nancy's "blog slums" at Sine qua non, I present below the fold the first in an occasional series called Mid-week Miscellany. I hope you'll enjoy some of these.

Over at Delights for the Ingenious, Fearful Syzygy has a short meditation on Baudelaire, Foucault, and blogging.

Mimi in New York meditates on the sexual politics implicit in the story of Scheherazade.

And speaking of story-telling, over at Teoria del caos, Rene offers (in Spanish) a fable reminiscent of Borges' "Borges and I," in which life imitates literature imitates life.

The writer of Sunshine State briefly chronicles her own New Year's Day melancholy.

Over at Sauce Box, D-Day declares that she'll be participating in a Livejournal community's challenge to read 50 books (20,000 pages) this year. A worthy ambition.

I've also spent some time today mucking about in the blogosphere's primordial soup that is The Truth Laid Bear's list of Insignificant Microbes. I found two blogs there that, for very different reasons, caught my attention and that I've linked to.

Because Mrs. Meridian is immersed these days in the stressful business of applying to law schools, we both have become interested readers of blogs about lawyering and/or the law (or "blawgs," as some call them). Those of you who have perused the right ditch of this page have noticed that I've linked to a few of them. The newest one is A Frolic of Her Own. It originally caught my eye because it alters for gender purposes the title of the William Gaddis novel. But it's ostensibly, though not exclusively, a law blog; hence, it appears in the Unblogrollable section. It features long, intelligent posts written in a style conducive to lingering. I look forward to lingering there more.

As for The Budgie Research Blog, I will be frank: I cannot tell whether it is a joke in the vein of the brilliantly-funny Why Cats Paint, or whether it is deadly serious. It is for good reason, therefore, that I've put a link to it in Curiosities and Obsessions. I link; you decide. And seeing as I have yet to decide, I'll be visiting there again.

Hook 'em.

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On judging barks by their covers

As you ponder this image, consider what my father-in-law recently said about this species of tree, which grows in profusion on his place: "How can something called a honey locust have thorns like that?"

What prompted that comment was that, before this Christmas, he had known that tree only as a "locust." But then we gave him the Audubon Field Guide to North American Trees: Eastern Region, and he just about disappeared into it for the next few hours. Success.

Trees have been much on my mind of late. I'm still getting used to the fact that I live in an area where, except for cottonwoods and the occasional "cedar" (actually, a kind of juniper), I recognize almost no trees here as being common to where I grew up in Central Texas. I have mentioned before that my in-laws now live on a heavily-wooded (for Kansas) piece of land with a rather bizarre mixture of indigenous and transplanted species--hence the tree-identification book. But it's taken Raminagrobis's two most-recent posts, tangentially about trees, to prompt this post.

Incidentally: What to call someone whom one has never "met" in the traditional way or exchanged even a phone call with but, because of the wonders of the internets, one still feels as close to as one's own flesh and blood acquaintances? The best I can do this morning is "blogo-friend," but that almost sounds like something to be cleared from the sinuses upon rising in the morning. No matter, I suppose: I have known Raminagrobis in this way for almost three years now; and should he ever find his way across the pond to Wichita, he'd be just as welcome here at tea-time (or any time) as my colleagues from school would be.

Anyway. Grobie needs to post more because he's so damned smart and, thus, always worth reading when he does, as in his most recent one, the self-deprecatingly-titled "Rambling On". You can (and should) read it yourself, of course. But the part I want to dwell on a bit is this, his response to something he read in Suzane Langer's book, Philosophy in a New Key:

If the passage from visual perception to mental image is not a straight line, not a simple case of copying (and it is now widely acknowledged, of course, that the notion of pure perception, a pre-conscious seeing uncoloured by individual experience and expectation, is a fiction), but a much more delicately calibrated process in which metaphorical associations play a primary role that is spontaneous and concept-forming, then aesthetic experience is something absolutely fundamental to language and to how the human mind works. It is something irreducibly complex and inaccessible to definition in language, but at the same time it is something real and true. And I suppose it is possible that not knowing what trees look like might actually enrich that experience rather than diminish it, because it opens up new vistas of thought ungrounded in concrete sense experience, by establishing new and unique neural sub-networks for thinking with. And I suppose that shaping of thought in turn might colour our perception of trees when we do finally encounter them in reality, so that our experience of walking through a wood becomes not a seeing of shapes and forms and colours but an act of intertextual reading of the great Book of Nature.

Incidentally, the Latin word for 'book', liber, is also the word for 'bark' [of a tree].

What a trigger to thought. Two thoughts, actually.

Grobie's phrase "Book of Nature" reminded me of Jonathan Edwards, specifically this passage from his book Images or Shadows of Divine Things:

The book of Scripture is the interpreter of the book of nature two ways, viz., by declaring to us those spiritual mysteries that are indeed signified and typified in the constitution of the natural world; and secondly, in actually making application of the signs and types in the book of nature as representations of those spiritual mysteries in many instances.

While Edwards makes clear here that it is the Bible which interprets Nature, there is no doubt that those phenomena had to exist in nature before they could be read (and recorded in the Bible) as "signs and types"--that, thus, Nature helps us interpret the Bible. Surely this is an instance of the imagination's leading the observer of nature to some deeper understanding of the Divine.

The other thought I had is one that has been lingering for a few weeks now. These are the leaves and fruit of what appears to be the most abundant tree on my in-laws' property. Here in this part of Kansas, I've only heard people call them "hedge apples," and a drive into the country will soon show you why: farmers often planted these trees close together along the boundaries of fields to form windbreaks (N.B.: Those fruit are the size of softballs and twice as heavy. It is risky to be under these trees in late autumn when the fruit are falling, as Mrs. Meridian can attest). So, while I was trying to find a suitable tree book for my father-in-law, I used this tree as a test of the books' ease of use. The Audubon won out because it provides various regional names for species in addition to their more common name. In the case of this tree, I learned that its more common name is "osage orange" (and is actually a member of the mulberry family). Another regional name for it is "bowdarc," not only a transcription of the French bois d'arc but also a recognition that the wood of this tree was prized for bow-making.

I find myself pondering whether calling these trees "osage orange" or "hedge apple" makes me see them and their landscape differently. The former is a sort of nod to the presence of indigenous peoples on this land; the latter conjures images of the settling and domestification of the same land. I know I cannot push this idea too far--both names are settlers' names, after all. But at the very least I am glad to know these names, for it is with names that the writing of history begins. They both serve as reminders of this place's history as surely as any historical marker and, in their proliferation, a far better reminder of the general truths of that history than the precise particulars of those "on this spot" markers. What we make of this tree's book will depend on what we call its bark. The more names we have for that bark, the larger the library, the deeper our reading.

Technorati tags:
Trees, Reading, Philosophy, Imagination, History, Nature

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In which the Meridian notes with pleasure that the new year has begun quietly but auspiciously . . .

. . . with the brewing of two pretty darned good pots of coffee: yesterday's being Eight O'Clock Coffee's Ground 100% Colombian (which I'd not used before, hence some initial apprehension); this morning's being some Williams-Sonoma Trattoria Blend Coffee, the beans of which were roasted over an oakwood fire. La-di-da. But very good, nonetheless.

So maybe I should overlook a certain melancholy I'm feeling just now.

To be sure, I appear to be in good company as regards that feeling (Hat tip: Belgravia Dispatch). And melancholy is not a bad thing. But is it odd to feel melancholic about the FUTURE? Or are those future things I find myself feeling melancholic about--my mother's aging, my older daughter's entrance into puberty, Mrs. Meridian's applying to law schools and the very real possibility that we will have to live apart at least for that first year--really just disguised reflections on the past?

Well, no matter: being human, we should, we have no choice but to, seek out and embrace change; stasis produces nothing, no learning, no growing. And so it is that this melancholy I feel isn't something to fear but to listen to.

The very happiest of new years to you all.

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