told

"I am disgusted to see Dos [Passos] said that writers should not write now. If a writer has any guts he should write all the time, and the lousier the world the harder a writer should work. For if he can do nothing positive, to make the world more liveable or less cruel or stupid, he can at least record truly, and that is something no one else will do, and it a job that must be done. It is the only revenge that all the bastardized people will ever get: that somebody writes down clearly what happened to them." - Martha Gellhorn, 1941.

here's a prose poem for you

More and more studies indicate that nearly as many men as women are the victims of physical and emotional domestic abuse. If you're a man and being domestically abused, the times are changing: there are more and more resources for you. You don't have to stay in an abusive relationship.

paddling with the president

The day I began writing a book about rivers, w/ naturalist and installation artist Brian Collier (white paddle), president and founder of the Society for a Re-Natural Environment, Kaw Point, Kansas, departing for St. Louis, June 12 2009, confluence of the Kaw and the Missouri, Kansas City Missouri skyline, behind us. Clark and Lewis camped here june 26-28 1804.

"This past summer, BD Collier & Prof. Gabriel Gudding undertook a major expedition of the Lower Missouri River. In addition to exploring the re-natural state of this severely human-altered waterway, the expedition marked the initial field work for the new SRNE project On the Impact of Flying Carp. Unfortunately, severe weather and dangerous flooding cut the expedition short. Collier and Gudding will continue exploring waterways of the Mississippi River Basin to document the invasion of carp and other anthropogenic effects on this transformed ecosystem." - Newsletter, Society for a Re-Natural Environment, 10/21/09

the arc of christianity

Father Louis Hennepin's first few days among the Illinois, January 1680, showing the progression of his perceptions and patience, near what is now Peoria, as found in his A New Discovery of a Large Country in America, published in English 1698, probably, acc to one editor, with Hennepin himself as co-translator

...though we are large and Haiti is small; though we are strong and Haiti is weak; though we are a continent and Haiti is bounded on all sides by the sea, there may come a time when even in the weakness of Haiti there may be strength to the United States.

-FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Dedication Ceremonies, World's Fair

Lecture on Haiti

Jackson Park, Chicago, January 2, 1893

"It is one of the most beautiful and important cultures ever born onto the face of this earth, and it is in danger."

-Tracy Kidder, interview, Rachel Maddow Show, January 14 2010

[interview starts 4:30 into clip]

happy birthday william james january 11 1842 august 26 1910

Experiences come on an enormous scale, and if we take them all together, they come in a chaos of incommensurable relations that we can not straighten out. We have to abstract different groups of them, and handle these separately if we are to talk of them at all. But how the experiences ever get themselves made, or why their characters and relations are just such as they appear, we can not begin to understand. .... [T]hen we have to confess that ... 'a feeling only is as it is felt,' there is still nothing absurd in the notion of its being felt in two different ways at once, as yours, namely, and as mine. It is, indeed, 'mine' only as it is felt as mine, and 'yours' only as it is felt as yours. But it is felt as neither by itself, but only when 'owned' by our two several remembering experiences, just as one undivided estate is owned by several heirs.

from The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition, page 231, ed. McDermott

what wrote the illinois

animals arrived Ayars bank barges Beardstown Black Hawk boat Bogardus building cabin calumet camp canal canoes Captain Elder Captain Levering Cartwright Cavelier Chicago chief corn council Crevecoeur Douglas Eads east exploration Father feet fish forest four France French Frenchmen friends Frontenac fur trade Gomo Governor Edwards Griffon Havana Henri de Tonty horses hundred hunting Iliniwek Illinois country Illinois Indians Illinois River Illinois Waterway Indian villages Iroquois island Jacques Marquette Jesuit Joliet Marquette journey Kaskaskias killed Lake Michigan land later Lincoln living loaded lock Louis Lovejoy Mark Rose Miamis miles Mississippi River mouth moved murders Naples night Ottawa paddled passed passengers peace Peoria Peoria Lake pilothouse pirogues Pontiac Potawatomis prairies Recollet Recollet friars returned de Salle de Salle's Schoolcraft settlers shore de la Sieur steamboat told Tonty towboat trees tribes valley voyage warriors Wierman woods wrote

living near or far away

Nice article but I agree with Temple Grandin that the degree to which we choose to treat an animal humanely should not depend on the prospective intelligence of the creature, but on its capacity to have an emotional life, which she suggests is startlingly universal among creatures -- and in fact I go Grandin even one better and suggest that it's emotionally and ecologically beneficial to human beings to carry a loving mind toward all creatures, whether smart or dumb, emotionally similar to us or emotionally dissimilar to us, whether small or large, near or far, hard or soft, aggressive or lovey dovey.

"[And What, Friends, is Called a Road]," found here in French, the prologue to Rhode Island Notebook, will be included in the 2010 Best American Poetry (Scribner) anthology, which is good news, maybe.