Category: History

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Lifestyle Critique

“Robbers of the world, they have exhausted the land and now scour the sea. If their victims are rich, they despoil them; if they are poor, they subjugate them; and neither East nor West can satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal greed both poverty and riches. To robbery, murder, and pillage they give the false name of empire, and when they make a desolation, they call it peace.”

–Part of a speech attributed to the Caledonian chieftain Galgacus in Tacitus’s history “Agricola,” vol. 32, p. 29. Quoted in Gray Brechin’s “Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin.”

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Annals of American Music: Stephen Foster

A ditty found in a recently discovered notebook kept by the beloved 19th century American composer:

Poop’s in the dirt patch,
‘Possum pot pie,
Mammy’s in the nuthatch
My oh my.

Popular music scholars say it’s from Foster’s “formative” period–possibly from the time he spent peddling Bibles by subscription across the South during his late teen years.

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Today’s Top Find: ‘Man and the Future’

Here’s a nugget that Kate unearthed while digging through an accumulation of papers. It’s a column-filling blurb from a 1976 issue of The New Yorker. Here’s the item in its entirety:

THE CLOUDED CRYSTAL BALL
[“Man and the World Community the Century Ahead,” by Arthur Larson, in “Man and the Future,” University Press of Kansas, 1968]

I suppose the area outside of the physical sciences where the authentic scientific approach has been most successfully applied is that of economics, particularly in the prevention of severe recessions and the reconciling of free enterprise with orderly growth. One reason is that economists now have an impressive array of reliable current facts on which to act, in the form of economic indicators, touching investment, savings and spending, income, sales, inventories, employment, prices, and dozens of other categories of facts and data. Careful study of past experience now enables economists to watch these dials, notice the need for some adjustment, turn a knob here, tighten a valve there, on discount rates, taxes, government purchase policies, social insurance, fiscal measures, and the trouble is righted.

Thanks to the the miracle of the World Wide Web, which has made the world an even more rational place than Larson found it, here’s the Google Books link to the volume (and here’s a copy for sale on eBay). And the knob-turning, valve tightening Arthur Larson? He was a well-known moderate Republican legal scholar who served in both the FDR and Eisenhower administrations. Here’s an obituary, from 1993.

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‘Land Logic’

When I turned 18, one of the birthday presents I got was a book-length poem called “The Donner Party.” I sold the book during a no-income period in my mid-20s, but as soon as I had some cash I went back to the used-book store that had taken it off my hands. It was still on the shelves, along with another book I’d sold, a picture biography of Yeats. I bought them back, though I was unable to find a third book I’d parted with–“Twenty Years A-Growing,” by Maurice O’Sullivan, which my Uncle Dick had given me. I found a copy of that eventually, but not mine. I still look for it.

Back to “The Donner Party,” which is right here beside me. It’s a retelling of a story of which everyone knows the shorthand version: pioneers, wagons, mountains, snow, death, cannibals. The book’s by a California poet named George Keithley, who taught (maybe still teaches) up at Chico State. The poetry is mostly blank-verse. It feels plain and authentic and sounds like it was transcribed by firelight.

Here’s one passage that has always stayed with me from a chapter called “Land Logic.” It takes place after the party’s disastrous crossing of Utah, with all of Nevada to cross before the ascent of the Sierra Nevada and hoped-for arrival in California’s Sacramento Valley

We wanted only to rest, at this juncture.
Seeing the snows, no one wished to look back
on our bad luck or talk of it anymore.

Reflection only led us to deplore
the sudden end of summer and lament
the time we wasted in this trap. Whole days

spent unloading. Stupid disputes. Delays
caused by the cattle roaming or Hastings’ wrong
advice … We were warned that to survive

we must lay up grass and water for a dry drive
of two days. Which means at worst we might
travel a day and a night—where we instead

wandered a week in the desert and left dead
a third of our herd of cattle. Add a third
of the wagons abandoned, still it doesn’t explain

all the destruction done. We could never regain
the time taken, or our goods or livestock left
on the salt. But this was not the only cost.

There is a land logic which we lost …
A sense of the likelihood of new terrain
to sustain us. The same logic that lives

in our blood, telling us that bottomland gives
promise for planting. Or for example
the simple certainty that we would find

spring water among rocks when the sun reclined
on green slopes gleaming like good pasture.
But we hurried out only to discover

a prickly patch of greasewood growing over
the dry soil, white with alkali…
Nothing in nature was what it might seem!

The promise of finding forage by a stream
proved false as well—both banks were bare
although the current there cut swift and deep.

We lost the last advantage which could keep
our company from harm. It was this sense
of the land that had departed in a dream
while we went on like souls that are still asleep.

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Guest Observation: Edward Thomas

We went up to see our friends Larry and Ursula up in Fair Oaks on Saturday night and participate in their quarterly poem-reading evening. We read poems out of books, not our own poems. I brought nothing to read, but Larry has a whole shelf of poetry books, including several anthologies. I happened across a short poem in a collection of “modern” poets, a poem called “The Owl,” by an Englishman named Edward Thomas, and read it aloud. Here it is:

The Owl

Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved;

Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof

Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest

Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.

Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,

Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.

All of the night was quite barred out except

An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry

Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,

No merry note, nor cause of merriment,

But one telling me plain what I escaped

And others could not, that night, as in I went.

And salted was my food, and my repose,

Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice

Speaking for all who lay under the stars,

Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.

And for good measure, here’s Dylan Thomas reading “The Owl.”

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California Water: ‘The Way of Seizure and Exploitation’

A snippet from “American Places,” a 1981 book of essays by Wallace Stegner, novelist and chronicler of the West, and his like-styled son, Page. This is from a chapter Page Stegner wrote called “Here It Is: Take It.” It describes how Los Angeles siphoned off a rich, remote supply of water from the Owens Valley and details the valley’s ongoing disputes with the city. (The chapter title is taken from the words spoken in 1913 by William Mulholland, the principal architect of the Los Angeles water system, when he opened the valve that brought the first Owens Valley water to the L.A.) I can’t help but think of the current court and legislative disputes over California water when I read this. s

“…The American Way of seizure and exploitation has a long history but a dubious future. It has produced ghost towns before this when the resource ran out and the frenzy cooled and the fortune-hunters drifted away. Without suggesting that Los Angeles will become a ghost town, one knows that in the arid West there are many communities whose growth is strictly limited by the available water. To promote the growth of any community beyond its legitimate and predictable water resources is to risk one of two things: eventual slowdown or collapse and retrenchment to more realistic levels, or a continuing and often piratical engrossment of the water of other communities, at the expense of their prosperity and perhaps life.

Man, the great creator and destroyer of environments, is also part of what he creates or destroys, and rises and falls with it. In the West, water is life. From the very beginning, when people killed each other with shovels over the flow of a primitive ditch, down to the present, when cities kill each other for precisely the same reasons and with the same self-justification, water is the basis for western growth, western industry, western communities, Eventually, some larger authority, state or federal will have to play Solomon in these disputes. …”

We’ve got a Solomon of sorts–at least one of them–working on the problem now: U.S. District Court Judge Oliver Wanger of Fresno. But more on that later.

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California Water: ‘The Master Condition’

“The master condition not only of any future developments in the West but of the maintenance and safeguarding of what exists there now, is the development and conservation of water production. Water, which is rigidly limited by the geography and climate, is incomparably more important than all other natural resources in the West put together.”

–Bernard de Voto, quoted in “American Places,” by Wallace Stegner

As elegant a statement as you can find to explain what all the ruckus is about.

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Guest Observation: The Comma

A portrait of Gertrude Stein posing with the United States flag as a backdrop.
Gertrude Stein, 1935. (Carl Van Vechten, Van Vechten Collection, Library of Congress.)

A friend passes these on:

“And what does a comma do, a comma does nothing but make easy a thing that if you like it enough is easy enough without the comma. A long complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make you know yourself knowing it and the comma, well at the most a comma is a poor period that lets you stop and take a breath but if you want to take a breath you ought to know yourself that you want to take a breath. It is not like stopping altogether has something to do with going on, but taking a breath well you are always taking a breath and why emphasize one breath rather than another breath. Anyway that is the way I felt about it and I felt that about it very very strongly. And so I almost never used a comma. The longer, the more complicated the sentence the greater the number of the same kinds of words I had following one after another, the more the very more I had of them the more I felt the passionate need of their taking care of themselves by themselves and not helping them, and thereby enfeebling them by putting in a comma.

“So that is the way I felt about punctuation in prose, in poetry it is a little different but more so …”

— Gertrude Stein

And Oscar Wilde has this to say on the subject:

“I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.”

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Guest Observation: Henry David Thoreau

“The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well ? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man, — you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind, — I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that.One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.”