These are my Important Thoughts as March Ends

- Capitalise random Words (that noun capitalisation is Germanic).

- Pista ice cream: used to hate it but crave it now for its pastel visual qualities. Will probably continue to hate it if I ate it.

- "Today will be Muggy. Followed by Tuggy, Wuggy and Thuggy."* (RIP Pete Shotton)

- My mother calls the flowering shrub caesalpinia by a name with more possibilities - sisylphenia. I imagine somee tireless but hopeless plant creature pushing nutrients up to the very top so they will bloom into flowers, only to have them drop off. No, that doesn't really work, does it? Okay, then - Sisyphus, Sibyl and their sisters walk into a bar...

...Fine. I'll stop.

- Someone is Mountain View, California has just been spending LOTS of time on my blog. This is not a Thought, is it?

- Notice how I said nothing about Important?

- I sleep best in the early morning, but when I am awake before dawn, that's the part of the day I like best.

- My supposedly retentive memory cannot hold a thought from one room to the next. When I return to the first room to retrieve the thought, I have another, freshly-minted one waiting for me.

- I should probably stop thinking aloud in public places.

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*A weather report by John Lennon in their school days. From my unreliable memory of a bit in Pete Shotton's book, The Beatles: In My Life. 

Derek Walcott

RIP. 

Last night on twitter, there was a lot of poetry and quiet celebration, because 87 is a good age and Derek Walcott has left behind poetry that matters. And plays.

Aisha said on twitter that it's impossible to read The Prodigal in pieces and in principle I agree, though I've personally never read it any other way, not having the book.

So here's my favourite portion from it* [from here]:

Reading the extracts from The Prodigal, I'm struck by how lightly Walcott carries off the high tone - that exultant register where it's possible to sustain the use of adjectives and make it seem necessary and just right.

And of course, among the peripatetic wanderings, there's the interrogation of age and what is allowed to oneself and what the testimonies of art amount to - 'no History left, just natural history'. Of this natural world, Walcott turns out to be a masterful historian and maybe the art of being that poet is testimony enough.


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* Since I can't copy paste, I ought to have typed it out but I'm too lazy.

I ought to warn KM though - there are a lot of lizards scattered through these poems, okay?

Letters to a Young Farmer

Via Michael Pollan on twitter, these interviews with some of the authors of an anthology called Letters to a Young Farmer.

One of the major themes in your letter is the idea of pursuing diversity and complex relationships. Why is that important?

One of the reasons farms have gone to mono-speciation and segmentation and segregation is forced simplicity. But as we know, ecology is not simplistic; it’s complex. You can either have simplicity and externalized cost, which are simple in the short term, or you can have complexity and not have externalized costs, which takes a long-term view.
I don’t want to make it sound like if you go to diversity, it’s going to be simpler or better, but in the holistic scheme of things, it is simpler and better. You don’t have to have a refrigerator full of pharmaceuticals; you don’t have to take the pesticide exam and be certified as chemical applicators; you don’t have to have a door on the farm with padlocks on it so nobody will get in there and eat something. When you embrace ecological and financial diversity on your farm, in my view, you’re embracing actually a simpler life than trying to fight against nature every day by being simplistic.

Joel Salatin, whose words quoted above, talks about instant gratification, and says, "You’ve got to give it a go for 10 years. And you can’t Google experience", which is true; but he seems to think only Millennials are susceptible to the lure of having everything at the touch of a button.

I don't know what everyone's beef with Millennials is. Do the rest of us not want things as soon as they appear? Do we not borrow against the future to pay for what's new now? And really, whose fault is this encouragement of instant gratification?

If anything, it's the Milennials who realise they've been bequeathed a world that's an utter disaster. They're perfectly aware that it's down to them to make all the sacrifices their parents and grandparents refused to. And they're the ones going to be left holding the toxic baby they've been handed. If they want an occasional bit of instant gratification so that they know what it used to feel like to have it available all the time, I don't blame them.

I mean, don't confuse millennials with hipsters, okay?

As another contributor, Nancy Vail says, "Embarking on the path of farming is an act of hope in a time when there’s so much that we could despair about". Such an un-hipster life-choice, no?

All that said, I like the idea of combining Rilke with Fukuoka, so I support the idea of this book. If only I could find someone to buy it for me. 

Flummoxed

A character has arrived and I ask him his name. He says I can call him what I like. Insists on it, even.

I am flummoxed. This is so much pressure, this business of naming.

Once I used to have lists, back when there was another male - a real, live one - to be named. Now I have nothing. 

What if I string syllables together and come up with something ludicrous just because this character is only in my head? What do I do with my resistance to ordinary names? How many syllables in a name tip it over into pretentiousness? Do I name this character after I get to know him better? Does that mean people - even not-real ones - ought to grown into their names instead of just being given one, and which they, all their lives long, try to inhabit without awkwardness?

I have so many questions. I should begin making a list. (Of questions; not names).

So far, this character seems unfazed. Will report progress if there is any.