Well, we've moved on to October, haven't we.

Wednesday, September 25, 2002 Link

I received an e-mail this morning from Carolyn, one of my former writing students, the same Carolyn who in February 2001 let me post an extraordinarily fine sample of her work in these pages.

She and her husband live in a small town near Abilene (itself a small town) where he enjoys his retirement by waiting for his tomatoes to ripen, and she runs a small ice cream parlor while bouncing her grandchildren from knee to knee.

She wrote to let me know that she had submitted a few occasional pieces to her town's weekly rag, and that the editor had asked for more. Carolyn attached a copy of her column for this week, an upbeat Erma Bombecky bit of fluff about shopping for toilet paper that ends with a Farmer's Almanac postscript about the arrival of fall's herald, the wooly bear caterpillar.

Although her piece shows that I failed to drill the your/you're error out of her, the column is light, fun, balanced, unified, and entirely appropriate to the casual readers in her audience.

I'm pleased for you, Carolyn, and I hope yule have fun in your new sideline. Aisle (isle?) look forward to seeing more of your work.
08:15 a.m. CDT (GMT -5)

Tuesday, September 24, 2002 Link

I have been away (at home, but away from the Web) for a few days because I was weary of the sophomoric, strident rancor I had been reading in both the poliblogs and the mainstream news sources on various sides of the Saddam issue, and, well, I just needed to step back lest I myself rant and snipe as many others are doing--and as I, alas, have done.

I know that it's a fundamental rule of writing (okay, one of my fundamental rules) that writers should not save their best stuff for some imagined best moment. Because that ideal moment may never come, writers should serve up their best stuff and then work to whip up their next batch of the best stuff.

Perhaps, however, this rule should be bent when a writer's best stuff is gratuitous sarcasm. Maybe that particular variety of best stuff should be held in reserve when the times call desperately for more thoughtful discussions.

Cheapshots, however, are irresistible apparently, and because they're so abundant lately, I need not link them in this mini-rant.

This weekend I read only a few journals and blogs that I could depend on to remain thoughtful, apolitical, or unupdated. (Yeah, Pafessor Pavlov, because I take some comfort in knowing that some of my imagined journaling and blogging companions are still out there online, I click'em even when I think it unlikely that they've updated recently.)

This time off the Web gave me some time to help move four heaping yards of topsoil from the driveway to the backyard. Once moved, that soil had to be spread, leveled, seeded, and rolled as we worked to replace a portion of the yard that over the years has suffered too much wear from kids and (until a few years ago) a seventy-pound collie.

And then there was a ton or two of limestone boulders (I tell you they were boulders!) to remove from a flower bed that will be rebuilt when my hands regain their shape and the ability to grasp. Some younger man (yours truly) had once placed those stones effortlessly (he imagines), but this wheezing geezer can barely type after the damage those stones have done to his hands.
09:20 a.m. CDT (GMT -5)

Tuesday, September 17, 2002 Link

A few decades back, it was photography. After buying my first 35 mm camera, I immersed myself in the lore of photography, reading anything I could find by or about Adams, Evans, Eisenstaedt, Parks, Sontag, Steichen, and Stieglitz, and far too many Time-Life books. A whale after krill, I'd read the slick monthly magazines down to the last dark syllable in the 47th Street Photo ad, and then I'd ache until the new issues hit the stand or the mailbox.

A decade later, I did the same thing with golf: Henry Longhurst, Robert Trent Jones, Harvey Penick, anthologies of golf writing, anything--the magazines, history, advice, ads for Nevada Bob's.

Last decade it was gardening: Jeff Cox, Penelope Hobhouse, Gertrude Jekyll, Roger Swain, Vita Sackville-West, Rosemary Verey, square-foot gardening, raised-bed gardening, Horticulture, Fine Gardening, Organic Gardening.

Now the target of my obsession is Kansas City. I've browsed the coffee-table photo books, and now I'm working my way through the city via memoir and roadmap: Calvin Trillin, Messages from My Father (a fine remembrance, but one that looks inward on the family more than it glances outward onto the city); Richard Rhodes, A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood (again, more inward-looking, focused as much of it is on the abuse he suffered as a child); and the best of them for my (ill-defined) purposes, Praying for Base Hits: An American Boyhood (that subtitle again) by Bruce Clayton, set on the city's (then) working-class northeast side near Little Italy. (Trillin's is set in the more fashionable middle-class suburbs surrounding Southwest High, also the setting for Evan Connell's Mrs. Bridge.)

A fine first novel by Kansas City writer Whitney Terrell has prompted my Kansas City reading. Although the critics and booksellers class the The Huntsman as a murder mystery, the book's mystery is thin and easily solved. Instead, The Huntsman, offers a sense of place (Kansas City and environs) that is more characteristic (so the common wisdom goes) of Southern writers than it is of Midwestern writers, and it renders in its characters a sense of history that is as malleable as the characters' morality. The Huntsman is more a tale of expiation than of mystery, but I won't say more about the book now because I mention Terrell's work here only to explain my current obsessive reading about Kansas City.

And today I mention my obsessive reading to explain the otherwise scant production in these pages.
07:30 a.m. CDT (GMT -5)

Sunday, September 15, 2002 Link

This past week deserved every bit of the silence I offered up here, probably more. For a better teleological ramble than I can currently muster, see this from the Sole Proprietor.

On a brighter note, last weekend this household became (and shall forevermore remain) an iguana-free zone, when we found a home for Boris with a pet-shop girl and boy.
08:15 a.m. CDT (GMT -5)

Saturday, September 7, 2002 Link

I would really, really like one of these (a Mini Cooper--yellow with a white top, maybe?) or one of these (a VW New Beetle, the ragtop Cabriolet that's coming out soon), but my thinking that I would indulge myself in either of these toys when my austere little Mighty Metro starts and runs reliably (Consumer-Report speak), costs me so little in maintenance, taxes, and insurance, and delivers 50+ mpg when driven at speeds under the maximum highway limits, is so very naive, as naive as the remarks in yesterday's post in which I expressed my amusement at politicians behaving as politicians do.

Anyway, I was daydreaming about cars this morning.
07:00 a.m. CDT (GMT -5)

Friday, September 6, 2002 Link

Department of Pots and Kettles:

From AP writer Jesse Holland (Sep 5 in the Washington Post), "Senate Committee Rejects Nominee":

Since Bush took office, the Senate has confirmed 73 of his judicial nominees, 13 of them for appeals court seats and 60 as federal district judges. But 40 of Bush's nominees have yet to get a hearing before the Judiciary Committee.

And of course, Senator Lott, ever forgetful of his own history, whines foul.

From CNN (July 23), "New GOP group promotes judicial nominees":

In May, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy said that in the 10 months of Democratic leadership in the Senate, that body confirmed 56 judges. That was more than were confirmed during each of the 12 months in the years 1996 through 2000, when Republicans controlled the Senate and Clinton was in the White House, said Leahy, D-Vermont.

While it's true that in Clinton's first two years in office more of his nominees were approved, it's also true that as soon as the Republicans gained control of the Senate, those approvals nearly halted. Mr. Lott was Senate Majority Leader during that later period.

Additionally, of the eighty-one current vacancies in the federal judiciary as of September 3, 2002, thirty-two of them have existed since before January 2001 when Bush took office, twenty-eight of those thirty-two remain unfilled since before the November 2000 Presidential election, and seventeen of those remain unfilled from the period from '94 through '99.

With his legal knowledge (and exposures), surely Clinton didn't fail to recognize the importance of judicial appointments.

There's a hair out of place, Senator.

An heir, too. (Har!)

Forgive me. It's
04:00 a.m. CDT (GMT -5)

Monday, September 2, 2002 Link

This holiday weekend is passing in input, not output. I've been reading Jeremy Rifkin's 1992 beef with beef (Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture) and coursing through some Damon Runyon and several histories of Kansas City.

When not reading, I've spent several hours this weekend walking and pedaling around town to work off the homemade pizza I indulged in Saturday night and bemoaning the end of summer (silently, of course, but my lips probably moved more than once).
07:30 a.m. CDT (GMT -5)