edrebmann

2022-01-272023-10-21

Words

As I edit this long piece of fiction, I find poorly chosen words and descriptions in my rough, hand-written draft. In both speaking and writing, I am not careful — this morning I wondered whether I needed to use spade or shovel. Spade was the correct choice, although I do not use the word often. Articles such as — Types of Shovels — open up worlds.

I keep dictionaries of landscape, tools, architecture,wild flowers and other guides to the natural and built worlds on my desk. I enjoy studying the words and relations and yet often they are too precise for the character. Knowing what would be correct for this character or for that character requires not just the books of words, but also a careful ear to the way the people characters are built up as they speak of things they do and use.

Building on a thought of Orwells, for some characters recognizing the spring wildflowers are pretty may be enough, but for another, recognizing the specific trillium is a minimum. And leveling descriptions requires a similar discernment.

2022-01-012022-01-01

New Year — 2022

Rain through the night and deep puddles on the walk with the dogs before six a.m. NYD seems to be the true holiday as only two cars out and no lights on in houses. As always a siren out on the highway as we passed that way but, again, few trucks or cars.

Reminded a bit of the second of Rexroth’s new year poems.

Fifty

Rainy slkies, misty mountains,
The old year ended in storms.
The new year starts the same way.
All day, from far out at sea,
Long winged birds soared in the 
Rushing sky. Midnight breaks with
Driving clouds and plunging moon,
Rare vasts of endless stars.
My fiftieth year has come.

Years earlier, Rexroth wrote,

The New Year

        for Helen

I walk on the cold mountain above the city
Through the black eucalyptus plantation.
Only a few of the million lights
Penetrate the leaves and the dripping fog.
I remember the wintery stars
In the bare branches of the maples,
In the branches of the chestnuts that are gone.

2021-12-112022-01-01

Food

Reading Stanley Tucci’s book Taste — My Life Through Food which reinforces what my wife says about growing up in a rich food tradition. “You just know.”

And, I did not grow up in such a tradition be that Mexican, Italian, Vietnamese, Chinese, but rather in the American midwest after World War 2. At home, overdone meat, jello, but, in our family, many kinds of fresh vegetables and, always, fresh salads. The idea of vegetables that were not boiled too much wasn’t known. And lest we forget, casseroles from tuna to green bean.

Celebratory dinners were centered around turkey, roast, ham or chicken all oven cooked. We didn’t eat out much and by the mid-1960s, going out meant a hot dog at A&W or a burger at the Whatever.

I had my first Chinese food in Edinburgh, Scotland; Indian food in London ; real spaghetti in Trentino. And when ethnic foods came to the midwest, I was ready for the glories of Vietnamese, Nepalese, Moroccan, Ethiopian – do I need to go on, or should we talk about eating in Mexico.

In some ways I am luckier than Tucci or my wife – I remember the food made here with love quite well and have moved beyond it.

2021-11-25

Pittsburgh

2021-11-252022-01-01

Genuine

When I took the turkey out of the refrigerator, I noticed the bag proclaimed All Natural suggesting competing turkey brands might not or are not all natural.

The phrase caught my eye a little as I am interested in what advertisers think will pull me to their product over another’s, but more so as those types of phrases were among the first to catch my imagination as language.

Long car rides were a part of growing up. When it was my turn at one of the back seat windows, I devoured the landscape and the signs watching for claims such as Genuine Antiques, Fresh Eggs, Genuine Bologna, Natural Maple Syrup- unprovable, likely true enough, but suggesting the fellow down the road was selling old eggs or adulterated syrup. I would imagine some world where people calculated or held to their honor as they might.

A Genuine Happy Thanksgiving to you.

2021-11-112022-08-10

Eiseley – We Are The Scriveners

We Are The Scriveners

Reading Loren Eiseley recently after a twenty year break and still moved by this poem. Eiseley, an anthropologist, crafted essays and built poems that informed us of his particular views of the world. I think he and Aldo Leopold recovered the American essay for our ecological concerns. More about Eiseley at Eiseley

I have not seen her in forty years.
She is old now, or lies in one of those midwestern
farm cemeteries where
no one remembers for long, because everyone
leaves for the cities. She was young, with freckles
and a wide generous mouth, a good girl to have
loved for a lifetime but the world
always chooses otherwise, or we ourselves
in blindness. I would not remember so clearly save that here
by a prairie slough sprinkled with the leaves of autumn
the drying mud on the shore shows the imprint
of southbound birds. I am too old to travel,
but I suddenly realize how a man in Sumer
half the world and millennia away
saw the same imprint and thought
there is a way of saying upon clay, fire-hardened,
there is a way of saying
“loneliness”
a way of saying
“where are you?” across the centuries
a way of saying
“forgive me”
a way of saying
“We were young. I remember, and this, this clay
imprinted with the feet of birds
will reach you somewhere
somehow
if it take eternity to answer.”
There were men
like this in Sumer, or who wept among the
autumn papyrus leaves in Egypt.
We are the scriveners who with pain
outlasted our bodies.

— Loren Eiseley —
from Another Kind of Autumn

2021-11-05

Content and Content

The layered meanings of words in English are often glided past and yet can be interesting, constructive. So with content (kənˈtent) and content (kän-ˌtent). The former meaning a satisfied or pleased state, the latter referring to the contained or something held within a container a book or tweet, for example.

The two terms arerelated by the idea of containment: that which provides satisfaction within limits on the one hand and then that which fills up the container on the other.

An interesting derivation from a Roman way of looking at the world.

2021-11-02

Downtown – Columbus & Cleveland

2021-10-302023-07-25

Getting It Right

Why do we pursue perfection in sports calls through the reviews of on the field calls. Football bothers me the most as it is already a slow game; the calls often seem arbitrary anyway.

I remember my grandfather and his friends arguing all winter long about the baseball calls they half-remembered from the stands, read about in papers or heard on the radio. It didn’t make any difference, it was the arguing of friends that mattered.

Rage and play on. Argue through the winter. Hold that outrage — don’t just go on to the next game all day long.

“Speaker trapped that ball,” Grandpa would begin.

2021-10-29

Author: edrebmann